Letty Tressady sat beside the doorway of one of the small red-brick houses that make up the village of Ferth. It was a rainy October afternoon, and through the door she could see the black main street —houses and road alike bedabbled in wet and mire. At one point in the street her eye caught a small standing crowd of women and children, most of them with tattered shawls thrown over their heads to protect them from the weather. She knew what it meant. They were waiting for the daily opening of the soup kitchen, started in the third week of the great strike by the Baptist minister, who, in the language of the Tory paper, was "among the worst firebrands of the district." There was another soup kitchen further down, to which George had begun to subscribe immediately on his return to the place. She had thought it a foolish act on his part thus to help his own men to fight him the better. But—now, as she watched the miserable crowd outside the Baptist chapel, she felt the teasing pressure of those new puzzles of her married life which had so far done little else, it seemed, than take away her gaiety and her power of amusing herself.

Near her sat an oldish woman with an almost toothless mouth, who was chattering to her in a tone that Letty knew to be three parts hypocritical.

"Well, the treuth is the men is that fool 'ardy when they gets a thing into their yeds, there's no taakin wi un. There's plenty as done like the strike, my lady, but they dursent say so—they'd be afeard o' losin the skin off their backs, for soom o' them lads o' Burrows's is a routin rough lot as done keer what they doos to a mon, an yo canna exspeck a quiet body to stan up agen 'em. Now, my son, ee comes in at neet all slamp and downcast, an I says to 'im, 'Is there noa news yet o' the Jint Committee, John?' I ses to un. 'Noa, mither,' ee says, 'they're just keepin ov it on.' An ee do seem so down'earted when ee sees the poor soart ov a supper as is aw I can gie un to 'is stomach. Now, I'm wun o' thoase as wants nuthin. The doctor ses, 'Yo've got no blude in yer, Missus 'Ammersley, what 'ull yer 'ave?' An I says, 'Nuthin! it's sun cut, an it's sun cooked, nuthin!' Noa, I've niver bin on t' parish—an I might—times. An I don't 'old wi strikes. Lor, it is a poor pleace, is ours—ain't it?—an nobbut a bit o' bread an drippin for supper."

The old woman threw her eyes round her kitchen, bringing them back slyly to Letty's face. Letty ended by leaving some money with her, and walking away as dissatisfied with her own charity as she was with its recipient. Perhaps this old body was the only person in the village who would have begged of "Tressady's wife" at this particular moment. Letty, moreover, had some reason to believe that her son was one of the roughest of Burrows's bodyguard; while the old woman was certainly no worse off than any of her neighbours.

Outside, she was disturbed to find as she walked home, that the street was full of people, in spite of the rain—of gaunt men and pinched women, who threw her hostile and sidelong glances as she passed. She hurried through them. How was it that she knew nothing of them—except, perhaps, of the few toadies and parasites among them? How was one to penetrate into this ugly, incomprehensible world of "the people"? The mere idea of trying to do so filled her with distaste and ennui. She was afraid of them. She wished she had not stayed so long with that old gossip, Mrs. Hammersley, and that there were not so many yards of dark road between her and her own gate. Where was George? She knew that he had gone up to the pits that afternoon to consult his manager about some defect in the pumping arrangements. She wished she had secured his escort for the walk home.

But before she left the village she paused irresolutely, then turned down a side street, and went to see Mary Batchelor, George's old nurse, the mother who had lost her only son in his prime.

When, a few minutes later, she came up the lane, she was flatly conscious of having done a virtuous thing—several virtuous things—that afternoon, but certainly without any pleasure in them. She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother—little abated since the spring—in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb. She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady's visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering. Letty believed that, in her inmost heart, the broken woman was offended each time that it was not George who came. Moreover, though she never said a word of it to Tressady's wife, she was known to be passionately on the side of the strikers, and her manner gave the impression that she did not want to be talking with their oppressors. Perhaps it was this feeling that had reconciled her to the loutish lad who lived with her, and had been twice "run in" by the police for stone-throwing at non-union men since the beginning of the strike. At any rate, she took a great deal more notice of him than she had done.

No—they were not very satisfactory, these attempts of Letty's in the village. She thought of them with a kind of inner exasperation as she walked home. She had been going to a few old and sick people, and trying to ignore the strike. But at bottom she felt an angry resentment towards these loafing, troublesome fellows, who filled the village street when they ought to have been down in the pits—who were starving their own children no less than disturbing and curtailing the incomes of their betters. Did they suppose that people were going to run pits for them for nothing? Their drink and their religion seemed to her equally hideous. She hated the two Dissenting ministers of the place only less than Valentine Burrows himself, and delighted to pass their wives with her head high in air.

With these general feelings towards the population in her mind, why these efforts at consolation and almsgiving? Well, the poor old people were not responsible; but she did not see that any good had come of it. She had said nothing about her visits to George, nor did-she suppose that he had noticed them. He had been so incessantly busy since their arrival with conferences and committees that she had seen very little of him. It was generally believed that the strike was nearing its end, and that the men were exhausted; but she did not think that George was very hopeful yet.

Presently, as she neared a dark slope of road, bordered with trees on one side and the high "bank" of the main pit on the other, her thoughts turned back to their natural and abiding subject—herself. Oh, the dulness of life at Ferth during the last three weeks! She thought of her amusements in town, of the country houses where they might now be staying but for George's pride, of Cathedine, even; and a rush of revolt and self-pity filled her mind. George always away, nothing to do in the ugly house, and Lady Tressady coming directly—she said to herself, suffocating, her small hands stiffening, that she felt fit to kill herself.

Half-way down the slope she heard steps behind her in the gathering darkness, and at the same moment something struck her violently on the shoulder. She cried out, and clutched at some wooden railings along the road for support, as the lump of "dirt" from the bank which had been flung at her dropped beside her.

"Letty, is that you?" shouted a voice from the direction of the village—her husband's voice. She heard running. In a few seconds George had reached her and was holding her.

"What is it struck you? I see! Cowards! damned cowards! Has it broken your arm? Try and move it."

Sick with pain she tried to obey him. "No," she said faintly; "it is not broken—I think not."

"Good!" he cried, rejoicing; "probably only a bad bruise. The brute mercifully picked up nothing very hard"—and he pushed the lump with his foot. "Take my scarf, dear; let me sling it. Ah!—what was that? Letty! can you be brave—can you let me go one minute? I sha'n't be out of your sight."

And he pointed excitedly to a dark spot moving among the bushes along the lower edge of the "bank."

Letty nodded. "I can stay here."

George leapt the palings and ran. The dark spot ran too, but in queer leaps and bounds. There was the sound of a scuffle, then George returned, dragging something or someone behind him.

"I knew it," he said, panting, as he came within earshot of his wife; "it was that young ruffian, Mary Batchelor's grandson! Now you stand still, will you? I could hold two of the likes of you with one hand. Madan!"

He had but just parted from his manager on the path which led sideways up the "bank," and waited anxiously to see if his voice would reach the Scotchman's ears. But no one replied. He shouted again; then he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly towards the pit, holding the struggling lad all the time.

At the same moment a couple of heavily built men, evidently colliers, came down the road from the village. George at once called to them from across the palings.

"Here, you there! this young rascal has been throwing a lump of dirt at Lady Tressady, and has hit her badly on the arm. Will you two just walk him up to the police-station for me, while I take my wife home?"

The two men stopped and stared at the lady by the railings and at Sir George holding the boy, whose white but grinning face was just visible in the growing dusk.

"Noa," said one of them at last, "it's noa business ov ourn—is it, Bill?"

"Noa," said the other, stolidly; and on they tramped.

"Oh, you heroes!" George flung after them. "Attacking a woman in the dark is about what you understand!—Madan!"

He whistled again, and this time there was a hurrying from overhead.

"Sir George!"

"Come down here, will you, at once!"

In a few more minutes the boy was being marched up the road to the police-station in charge of the strong-wristed Scotch manager, and George was free to attend to Letty.

He adjusted a sling very fairly, then made her cling to him with her sound arm; and they were soon inside their own gates.

"You can't climb this hill," he said to her anxiously. "Rest at the lodge, and let me go for the brougham."

"I can walk perfectly well—and it will be much quicker."

Involuntarily, he was surprised to find her rather belittling than exaggerating the ill. As they climbed on in the dark, he helping her as much as he could, both could not but think of another accident and another victim. Letty found herself imagining again and again what the scene with Lady Maxwell, after the East End meeting, might have been like; while, as for him, a face drew itself upon the rainy dusk, which the will seemed powerless to blot out. It was a curious and unwelcome coincidence. His secret sense of it made him the more restlessly kind.

"What were you in the village for?" he asked, bending to her; "I did not know you had anything to do there!"

"I had been to see old Bessie Hammersley and Mrs. Batchelor," she said, in a tone that tried to be stiff or indifferent. "Bessie begged, as usual."

"That was very good of you. Have you been doing visiting, then, during all these days I have been away?"

"Yes—a few people."

George groaned.

"What's the use of it—or of anything? They hate us and we them. This strike begins to eat into my very being. And the men will be beaten soon, and the feeling towards the employers will be worse than ever."

"You are sure they will be beaten?"

"Before Christmas, anyway. I daresay there will be some bad times first. To think a woman even can't walk these roads without danger of ill-treatment! How is one to have any dealings with the brutes, or any peace with them?"

His rage and bitterness made her somehow feel her bruises less. She even looked up in protest.

"Well, it was only a boy, and you used to think he wasn't all there."

"Oh! all there!" said George, scornfully. "There'd be half of them in Bedlam if one had to make that excuse for them. There isn't a day passes without some devilry against the non-union men somewhere. It was only this morning I heard of two men being driven into a reservoir near Rilston, and stoned in the water."

"Perhaps we should do the same," she said unwillingly.

"Lean on me more heavily—we shall soon be there. You think we should be brutes too? Probably. We seem to be all brutes for each other—that's the charming way this competitive world is managed. So you have been looking after some of the old people, have you? You must have had a dull time of it this last three weeks—don't think I don't know that!"

He spoke with emotion. He thought he felt her grasp waver a little on his arm, but she did not speak.

"Suppose—when this business was over—I were to cut the whole concern—let the pits and the house, and go right away? I daresay I could."

"Could you?" she said eagerly.

"We shouldn't get so much money, you know, as in the best years. But then it would be certain. What would you say to a thousand a year less?" he asked her, trying to speak lightly.

"Well, it doesn't seem easy to get on with what we have—even if we had it," she said sharply.

He understood the reference to his mother's debts, and was silent.

But evidently the recollection, once introduced, generated the usual heat and irritation in her, for, as they neared the front door, she suddenly said, with an acerbity he had not heard for some weeks:

"Of course, to have a country house, and not to be able to spend a farthing upon it—to ask your friends, or have anything decent—is enough to make anyone sick of it. And, above all, when we needn't have been here at all this October—"

She stopped, shrinking from the rest of the sentence, but not before he had time to think, "She say that!—monstrous!"

Aloud he coldly replied:

"It is difficult to see where I could have been but here, this October."

Then the door opened, and the light showed her to him pale, with lips tight pressed from the pain of her injury. Instantly he forgot everything but his natural pity and chivalry towards women. He led her in, and half carried her upstairs. A little later she was resting on her bed, and he had done everything he could for her till the doctor should come. She seemed to have passed into an eclipse of temper or moodiness, and he got little gratitude.

The evening post brought her a letter which he took up to her himself. He knew the clear, rapid hand, and he knew, too, that Letty had received many such during the preceding month. He stood beside her a moment, almost on the point of asking her to let him see it. But the words died on his lips. And, perceiving that she would not read it while he was there, he went away again.

When he returned, carrying a new book and asking if he should read to her, he found her lying with her cheek on her hand, staring into the fire, and so white and miserable that his heart sank. Had he married her, a girl of twenty-four, only to destroy her chance of happiness altogether? A kind of terror seized him. He had been "good to her," so far as she and his business had allowed him, since their return; there had been very little outward jarring; but no one knew better than he that there had not been one truly frank or reconciling moment.

His own inner life during these weeks had passed in one obscure continuous struggle—a sort of dull fever of the soul. And she had simply held herself aloof from him.

He knelt down beside her, and laid his face against hers.

"Don't look so unhappy!" he said in a whisper, caressing her free hand. She did not answer or make any response till, as he got up again in a kind of despair as to what to do or say next, she hastily asked:

"Has the constable been up here to see you?"

He looked at her in surprise.

"Yes. It is all arranged. The lad will be brought up before the magistrates on Thursday."

She fidgeted, then said abruptly:

"I should like him to be let off."

He hesitated.

"That's very nice of you, but it wouldn't be very good for the district."

She did not press the matter, but as he moved away she said fretfully:

"I wish you'd read to me. The pain's horrid."

Thankful, in his remorse, to do anything for her, he tried to amuse and distract her as he best could. But in the middle of a magazine story she interrupted him:

"Isn't it the day after to-morrow your mother's coming?"

"According to her letter this morning." He put down the book. "But I don't think you'll be at all fit to look after her. Shall I write to-night and suggest that she stays in London a little?"

"No. I shall be all right, the doctor says. I want to tell Esther"—Esther was the housemaid—"not to get the Blue Room ready for her. I looked in to-day, and it seemed damp. The back room over the dining-room is smaller, but it's much warmer."

She turned to look at him with a rather flushed face.

"You know best," he said, smiling. "I am sure it will be all right. But I sha'n't let her come unless you are better."

He went on reading till it grew late, and it seemed to him she was dropping off to sleep. He was stealing off by way of the large dressing-room near by, where he had been installed since their return, when, she said faintly, "Good-night!"

He returned, and felt the drawing of her hot hand. He stooped and kissed her. Then she turned away from him, and seemed to go instantly to sleep.

He went downstairs to his library, and gathered about him some documents he had brought back from the last meeting of the masters' committee, which had to be read. But in reality he spent an hour of random thought. When would she herself tell him anything of her relations to Lady Maxwell, of the nature and causes of that strange subjection which, as he saw quite plainly, had been brought about? She must know that he pined to know; yet she held her secret only the more jealously, no doubt to punish him.

He thought of her visits to the village, half humorously, half sadly; then of her speech about the Blue Room and his mother. They seemed to him signs of some influence at work.

But at last he turned back to his papers with a long impatient sigh. The clear pessimism with which he was wont to see facts that concerned himself maintained that all the surrounding circumstance of the case was as untoward as it could be—this dull house, a troubled district, his money affairs, the perpetual burden of his mother, Letty's own thirst for pleasure, and the dying down in himself of the feelings that might once—possibly—have made up to her for a good deal. The feelings might be simulated. Was the woman likely to be deceived? That she was capable of the fiercest jealousy had been made abundantly plain; and such a temper once roused would find a hundred new provocations, day by day, in the acts and doings of a husband who had ceased to be a lover.

Two days later Lady Tressady arrived, with Justine, and her dogs, and all her paraphernalia. She declared herself better, but she was a mere shadow of the woman who had tormented George with her debts and affectations at Malford House a twelvemonth before. She took Ferth discontentedly, as usual, and was particularly cross with Letty's assignment to her of the back room, instead of the larger spare room to the front of the house.

"Damp?—nonsense!" she said to Justine, who was trying to soothe her on the night she arrived. "I suppose Lady Tressady has some friend of her own coming to stay—that's, of course, what it is. C'est parfaitement clair, je te dis—parfaitement!"

The French maid reminded her that her daughter-in-law had said, on showing her the room, she had only to express a wish to change, and the arrangements should be altered at once.

"I daresay," cried Lady Tressady. "But I shall ask no favours of her—and that, of course, she knew."

"But, miladi, I need only speak to the housemaid."

"Thank you! Then afterwards, whenever I had a pain or a finger-ache, it would be, 'I told you so!' No! she has managed it very cleverly—very cleverly indeed!—and I shall let it alone."

Thenceforward, however, there were constant complaints of everything provided for her—room, food, the dulness of the place, the manners of her daughter-in-law. Whether it was that her illness had now reached a stage when the will could no longer fight against it, and its only effect was demoralising; or whether the strange flash of courage and natural affection struck from the volatile nature by the first threat of death could not in any case have maintained itself, it is hard to say. At any rate, George also found it hard to keep up his new and better ways with her. The fact was, he suffered through Letty. In a few days his sympathies were all with her, and to his amazement he perceived before long that, in spite of occasional sharp speeches and sulky moments that only an angel could have forborne, she was really more patient under his mother's idiosyncrasies than he was. Yet Lady Tressady, even now, was rarely unmanageable in his presence, and could still restrain herself if it was a question of his comfort and repose; whereas, it was clear that she felt a cat-like impulse to torment Letty whenever she saw her.

One recent habit, however, bore with special heaviness on himself. Oddly enough, it was a habit of religious discussion. Lady Tressady in health had never troubled herself in the least as to what the doctors of the soul might have to say, and had generally gaily professed herself a sceptic in religious matters, mostly, as George had often thought, for the sake of escaping all inconvenient restrictions—such as family prayers, or keeping Sunday, or observing Lent—which might have got in the way of her amusements.

But, now, poor lady, she was all curiosity and anxiety about this strange other side of things, and inclined, too, to be rather proud of the originality of her inquiries on the subject. So that night after night she would keep George up, after an exhausting day, till the small hours, while she declared her own views "on God, on Nature, and on Human Life," and endeavoured to extract his. This latter part of the exercise was indeed particularly attractive to her; no doubt because of its difficulty. George had been a singularly reserved person in these respect's all his life, and had no mind now to play the part of a coal-seam for his mother to "pike" at. But "pike" she would incessantly.

"Now, George, look here! what do you really think about a future life? Now don't try and get out of it! And don't just talk nonsense to me because you think I'm ill. I'm not a baby—I really am not. Tell me—seriously—what you think. Do you honestly expect there is a future life?"

"I've told you before, mother, that I have no particular thoughts on that subject. It isn't in my line," George would say, smiling profanely, but uneasily, and wondering how long this bout of it might be going to last.

"Don't be shocking, George! You must have some ideas about it. Now, don't hum and haw—just tell me what you think." And she would lean forward, all urgency and expectation.

A pause, during which George could think only of the ghastly figure on the sofa. She sat upright, generally, against a prop of cushions, dressed in a white French tea-gown, slim enough to begin, with, but far too large now for the shrunk form—a bright spot of rouge on either pinched cheek, and the dyed "fringe" and "coils" covering all the once shapely head. Meanwhile her hand would play impatiently on her knee. The hand was skin and bone; and the rings with which it was laden would often slip off from it to the floor—a diversion of which George was always prompt to avail himself.

"Why don't you talk to Mr. Fearon, mother?" he would say gently at last.
"It's his business to discuss these things."

"Talk to a clergyman! thank you! I hope I have more respect for my own intelligence. What can a priest do for you? What does he know more than anybody else? But I do want to know what my own son thinks. Now, George, just answer me. If there is a future life"—she spread out her hand slowly on her lap—"what do you suppose your father's doing at this moment? That's a thing I often think of, George. I don't think I want a future life if it's to be just like the past. You know—you remember how he used to be—poking about the house, and going down to the pits, and—and—swearing at the servants, and having rows with me about the accounts—and all his dear dreadful little ways? Yet, what else in the world can you imagine him doing? As to singing hymns!"

She raised her hands expressively.

George laughed, and puffed away at his cigarette. But as he still said nothing Lady Tressady began to frown.

"That's the way you always get out of my questions," she said fretfully; "it's so provoking of you."

"I've recommended you to the professional," he said, patting her hand.
"What else could I do?"

Her thin cheek flamed.

"As if we couldn't be certain, anyway," she cried, "that the Christians don't know anything about it. As M. d'Estrelles used to say to me at Monte Carlo, if there's one thing clear, it is that we needn't bother ourselves with their doctrines!"

"Needn't we?" said George. Then he looked at her, smiling. "And you think
M. d'Estrelles was an authority?"

Odd recollections began to run through his mind of this elderly
French admirer of his mother's, whom he had seen occasionally
flitting about their London lodgings when, as a boy, he came up from
Eton for his exeat.

"Oh! don't you scoff, George," said his mother, angrily. "M. d'Estrelles was a very clever man, though he did gamble like a fool. Everybody said his memory was marvellous. He used to quote me pages out of Voltaire and the rest of them on the nights when we walked up and down the gardens at Monte Carlo, after he'd cleared himself out. He always said he didn't see why these things should be kept from women—why men shouldn't tell women exactly what they think. And I know he'd been a Catholic in his youth, so he'd had experience of both. However, I don't care about M. d'Estrelles. I want your opinions. Now, George!"—her voice would begin to break—"how can you be so unkind. You might really compose my mind a little, as the doctors say!"

And through her incorrigible levity he would see for a moment the terror which always possessed her raise its head. Then it would be time for him to go and put his arm round her, and try and coax her to bed.

One night, after he had taken her upstairs, he came down so wearied and irritable that he put all his letters aside, and tried to forget himself in some miscellaneous reading.

His knowledge of literature was no more complete than his character. Certain modern English poets—Rossetti, Morris, Keats, and Shelley—he knew almost by heart. And in travels and biography—mostly of men of action—he had, at one time or another, read voraciously. But "the classics he had not read," as with most of us, would have made a list of lamentable length.

Since his return to Ferth, however, he had browsed a good deal among the books collected by his grandfather, mostly by way of distracting himself at night from the troubles and worries of the day.

On this particular night there were two books lying on his table. One was a volume of Madame de SÉvignÉ, the other St. Augustine's "Confessions." He turned over first one, then the other.

"Au reste, ma fille, une de mes grandes envies, ce serait d'Être dÉvote; je ne suis ni an Dieu, ni an Diable; cet État m'ennuie, quoiqu' entre nous je le trouve le plus naturel du monde. On n'est point an Diable parce qu'on craint Dieu, et qu' an fond on a un principe de religion; on n'est point À Dieu aussi, parce que sa loi paroit dure, et qu' on n'aime point À se dÉtruire soi-mÊme."

"Admirable!" he thought to himself, "admirable! We are all there—my mother and I—three parts of mankind."

But on a page of the other book he had marked these lines—for the beauty of them:

"Beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. Solus enim nullum eorum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari sunt qui non amittitur."

He hung over the fire, pondering the two utterances.

"A marvellous music," he thought of the last. "But I know no more what it means than I know what a symphony of Brahms' means. Yet some say they know. Perhaps of her it might be true."

The weeks ran on. Outside, the strike was at its worst, though George still believed the men would give in before Christmas. There was hideous distress, and some bad rioting in different parts of the country. Various attempts had been made by the employers to use and protect non-union labour, but the crop of outrage they had produced had been too threatening: in spite of the exasperation of the masters they had been perforce let drop. The Press and the public were now intervening in good earnest—"every fool thinks he can do our business for us," as George would put it bitterly to Letty. Burrows was speaking up and down the district with a superhuman energy, varied only by the drinking-bouts to which he occasionally succumbed; and George carried a revolver with him when he went abroad.

The struggle wore him to death; the melancholy of his temperament had never been so marked. At the same time Letty saw a doggedness in him, a toughness like Fontenoy's own, which astonished her. Two men seemed to be fighting in him. He would talk with perfect philosophy of the miners' point of view, and the physical-force sanction by which the lawless among them were determined to support it; but at the same time he belonged to the stiffest set among the masters.

Meanwhile, at home, friction and discomfort were constantly recurring. In the course of three or four weeks Lady Tressady had several attacks of illness, and it was evident that her weakness increased rapidly. And with the weakness, alas! the ugly incessant irritability, that dried up the tenderness of nurses, and made a battleground of the sick-room. Though, indeed, she could never be kept in her room; she resented being left a moment alone. She claimed, in spite of the anxieties of the moment, to be constantly amused; and though George could sometimes distract and quiet her, nothing that Letty did, or said, or wore was ever tolerable to a woman who merely saw in this youth beside her a bitter reminder of her own.

At last, one day early in November, came a worse turn than usual. The doctor was in the house most of the day, but George had gone off before the alarm to a place on the further side of the county, and could not be got at till the evening.

He came in to find Letty waiting for him in the hall. There had been a rally; the doctor had gone his way marvelling, and it was thought there was no immediate danger.

"But oh, the pain!" said Letty, under her breath, pressing her hands together, and shivering. Her eyes were red, her cheeks pale; he saw that she was on the point of exhaustion; and he guessed that she had never seen such a sight before.

He ran up to visit his mother, whom he found almost speechless from weakness, yet waiting, with evident signs of impatience and temper, for her evening food. And while he and Letty were at their melancholy dinner together, Justine came flying downstairs in tears. Miladi would not eat what had been taken to her. She was exciting herself; there would be another attack.

Husband and wife hurried from the room. In the hall they found the butler just receiving a parcel left by the railway delivery-cart.

George passed the box with an exclamation and a shudder. It bore a large label, "From Worth et Cie," and was addressed to Lady Tressady. But Letty stopped short, with a sudden look of pleasure.

"You go to her. I will have this unpacked."

He went up and coaxed his mother like a child to take her soup and champagne. And presently, just as she was revived enough to talk to him, Letty appeared. Her mother-in-law frowned, but Letty came gaily up to the bed.

"There is a parcel from Paris for you," she said, smiling. "I have had it opened. Would you like it brought in?"

Lady Tressady first whimpered, and said it should go back—what did a dying woman want with such things?—then demanded greedily to see it.

Letty brought it in herself. It was a new evening gown of the softest greens and shell-pinks, fit for a bride in her first season. To see the invalid, ashen-grey, stretching out her hand to finger it was almost more than George could stand. But Letty shook out the rustling thing, put on the skirt herself that Lady Tressady might see, and paraded up and down in it, praising every cut and turning with the most ingenious ardour.

"I sha'n't wear it, of course, till after Christmas," said Lady Tressady at last, still looking at it with half-shut covetous eyes. "Isn't it darling the way the lace is put on! Put it away. George!—it's the first I've had from him this year."

She looked up at him appealingly. He stooped and kissed her.

"I am so glad you like it, mother dear. Can't you sleep now?"

"Yes, I think so. Good-night. And good-night, Letty."

Letty came, and Lady Tressady held her hand, while the blue eyes, still bearing the awful impress of suffering, stared at her oddly.

"It was nice of you to put it on, Letty. I didn't think you'd have done it. And I'm glad you think it's pretty. I wish you would have one made like it. Kiss me."

Letty kissed her. Then George slipped his wife's arm in his, and they left the room together. Outside Letty turned suddenly white, and nearly fell. George put his arms round her, and carried her down to his study. He put her on the sofa, and watched her tenderly, rubbing the cold hands.

"How you could," he said at last, in a low voice, when he saw that she was able to talk; "how you could! I shall never forget that little scene."

"You'd have done anything, if you'd seen her this morning," she said, with her eyes still closed.

He sat beside her, silent, thinking over the miseries of the last few weeks. The net result of them—he recognised it with a leap of surprise—seemed to have been the formation of a new and secret bond between himself and Letty. During all the time he had been preparing himself for the worst this strange thing had been going on. How had it been possible for her to be, comparatively, so forbearing? He could see nothing in his past knowledge of her to explain it.

He recalled the effort and gloom with which she had made her first preparations for Lady Tressady. Yet she had made them. Is there really some mystic power, as the Christians say, in every act of self-sacrifice, however imperfect,—a power that represents at once the impelling and the rewarding God,—that generates, moreover, from its own exercise, the force to repeat itself? Personally such a point of view meant little to him, nor did his mind dwell upon it long. All that he knew was that some angel had stirred the pool—that old wounds smarted less—that hope seemed more possible.

Letty knew quite well that he was watching her in a new way, that there was a new clinging in his touch. She, little more than he, understood what was happening to her. From time to time during these weeks of painful tension there had been hours of wild rebellion, when she had hated her surroundings, her mother-in-law, and her general ill-luck as fiercely as ever. Then there had followed strange appeasements, and inflowing calms—moments when she had been able somehow to express herself to one who cared to listen who poured upon her in return a sympathy which braced while it healed.

Suddenly she opened her eyes.

"Do you want to hear about that first time when she came to see me?" she whispered, her look wavering under his.

He flushed and hesitated. Then he kissed her hand.

"No, not now. You are worn out. Another time. But I love you for thinking of telling me."

A feeling of rest and well-being stole over her. Mercifully he made no protestations, and she asked for none, but there was a gentle moving of heart towards heart. And the memory of that hour, that night, made one of the chief barriers between her and despair in the time that followed.

Two days later a painless death, death in her sleep, overtook Lady Tressady. Her delicate face, restored to its true years, and framed in its natural grey hair, seemed for the first time beautiful to George when he saw her in her coffin. He could not remember admiring her, even when he was a boy, and she was reckoned among the handsomest women of her day. Parting with her was like the snapping of a strain that had pulled life out of its true bearings and proportions. An immense, inevitable relief followed. But after her death Letty never said a harsh word of her, and George had a queer, humble feeling that after all he might be found to owe her much.

For as November and December passed away the relation between the husband and wife steadily settled and improved. "We shall rub along," George said to himself in his frank, secret thoughts—"in the end it will be much better perhaps than either of us could have hoped." That no doubt was the utmost that could ever be said; but it was much.

The night after his mother's death, Letty abruptly, violently even, as though worked up to it by an inner excitement, told him the story of her wrestle with Marcella. Then, throwing some letters into his hand she broke into sobbing and ran away from him. When he went to look for her his own eyes were wet. "Who else could have done such a thing?" he said; and Letty made no protest.

The letters gave him food for thought for many a day afterwards. They were little less of a revelation to him than the motives and personality lying behind them had been to Letty. In spite of all that he had felt for the woman who had written them, they still roused in him a secret and abiding astonishment. We use the words "spiritual," "poetic" in relation to human conduct; we talk as though all that the words meant were familiarly understood by us; and yet when the spiritual or the poetic comes actually to walk among us, slips into the forms and functions of our common life, we find it amazing, almost inhuman. It gives us some trouble to take it simply, to believe in it simply.

Yet nothing in truth could be a more inevitable outcome of character and circumstance than these letters of Marcella Maxwell to George Tressady's wife. Marcella had suffered under a strong natural remorse, and to free her heart from the load of it she had thrown herself into an effort of reconciliation and atonement with all the passion, the subtlety, and the resource of her temperament. She had now been wooing Letty Tressady for weeks, nor had the eager contriving ability she had been giving to the process missed its reward. Letty fresh from the new impressions made upon her by Marcella at home, and Marcella as a wife, by a beauty she could no longer hate, and a charm to which she had been forced to yield, had found herself amid the loneliness and dulness of Perth gradually enveloped and possessed anew by the same influence, acting in ways that grew week by week more personal, and more subduing.

What to begin with could be more flattering either to heart or vanity than the persistence with which one of the most famous women of her time—watched, praised, copied, attacked, surrounded, as Letty knew her to be, from morning till night—had devoted herself first to the understanding, then to the capturing, of the smaller, narrower life. The reaction towards a natural reserve, a certain proud, instinctive self-defence, which had governed Marcella's manner during a great part of Letty's visit to the Court, had been in these letters deliberately broken down—at first with effort, then more and more frankly, more and more sweetly. Day after day, as Letty knew, Marcella had taken time from politics, from society, from her most cherished occupations, to write to this far-off girl, from whom she had nothing either to gain or to fear, who had no claims whatever on her friendship, had things gone normally, while thick about the opening of their relation to each other hung the memory of Letty's insults and Letty's violence.

And the letters were written with such abandonment! As a rule Marcella was a hasty or impatient correspondent. She thought letters a waste of time; life was full enough without them. But here, with Letty, she lingered, she took pains. The mistress of Les Rochers writing to her absent, her exacting Pauline, could hardly have been more eager to please. She talked—at leisure—of all that concerned her—husband, child, high politics, the persons she saw, the gaieties she bore with, the books she read, the schemes in which she was busied; then, with greater tenderness, greater minuteness, of the difficulties and tediums of Letty's life at Ferth, as they had been dismally drawn out for her in Letty's own letters. The animation, the eager kindness of it all went for much; the amazing self-surrender, self-offering, implied in every page for much more.

Strange!—as he read the letters George felt his own heart beating. Were they in some hidden way meant for him too?—he seemed to hear in them a secret message—a woman's yearning, a woman's response.

At any rate, the loving, reconciling effort had done its work. Letty could not be insensible to such a flattery, a compliment so unexpected, so bewildering—the heart of a Marcella Maxwell poured out to her for the taking. She neither felt it so profoundly, nor so delicately as hundreds of other women could have felt it. Nevertheless the excitement of it had thrilled and broken up the hardnesses of her own nature. And with each yielding on her part had come new capacity for yielding, new emotions that amazed herself; till she found herself, as it were, groping in a strange world, clinging to Marcella's hand, trying to express feelings that had never visited her before, one moment proud of her new friend with a pride half moral, half selfish, the next, ill at ease with her, and through it all catching dimly the light of new ideals.

One day, as George walked into Letty's sitting-room, to discuss some small business of the afternoon, he saw on her writing-table that same photograph of Lady Maxwell and her boy, whereof an earlier copy had come to such a tragic end in Letty's hands. He walked up to it with an exclamation; Letty was not in the room. Suddenly, however, she came in. He made no attempt whatever to disguise that he had been looking at the photograph; he bent over it indeed a moment longer, deliberately. Then, walking away to the window, he began speaking of the matter which had brought him to look for his wife. Letty answered absently. The colour had rushed to her face. Her hands fidgeted with the books and papers on her table, and her mind was full of fevered remembrance.

Presently George, having settled the little point he came to speak of, fell silent. But he still stood by the window, looking out through the rain-splashed glass to the wintry valley below with its chimneys and straggling village. Letty, who was pretending to write a note, raised her head, looked at him—the quick breath beating through the parted lips, the blue eyes half wild, half miserable. She was not nearly so pretty as she had been a year before. George had often noticed it; it made part of his remorse. But the face was more troubling, infinitely more human; and, in truth, he knew it much better, was more sensitively alive to it, so to speak, than he ever had been in the days of their courtship.

Before he left the room he came back to her, put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her hair. She did not raise her head or say anything. But when he had gone she looked up with a sudden fierce sob, took the photograph from its place, and thrust it angrily into the drawer in front of her. Afterwards she sat for some minutes, motionless, with her handkerchief at her lips, trying to choke down the tears that had seized her. And last of all, with trembling fingers, she took out the picture again, wrapped it in some soft tissue paper that lay near, as though propitiating it, and once more put it out of sight.

What had made her first ask Marcella for it, and then place it on her table where George might, nay, must see it? Some vague wish, no doubt, to "make up"; to punish herself, while touching him. But the recollection of him, bending over the picture, tortured her, gripped her at the heart for many a day afterwards. She let it be seen no more. Yet that week she wrote more fully, more incoherently, more piteously to Marcella than ever before. She talked, not without bitterness and injustice, of her bringing up, asked what she should read, spread out her puzzles with the poor, or with her household—half angrily, as though she were accusing someone. For the first time, as it were, she was seeking a teacher in the art of living. And though the tone was still querulous, she knew, and Marcella presently dared to guess, that the ugly house on the hill had in truth ceased to be in the least dull or burdensome to her. George went in and out of it. And for the woman that has come to hunger for her husband's step, there is no more ennui.

* * * * *

Letty indeed hardly knew the strength of her own position. The reading of Lady Maxwell's letters to his wife had cleared a number of relics and fragments from George's mind. The day of passion was done. Yes!—but to see her frequently, to be brought back into any of the old social or political relations to her and Maxwell, from this his pride shrank no less than his conscience. Yet there was a large party in his constituency, and belonging to it some of the men whose probity and intelligence he had come to rate most highly, who were pressing him hard not to resign in February, and, indeed, not to resign at all. The few public meetings he had so far addressed had been stormy indeed, but on the whole decidedly friendly to him, and it was urged that he must at least present himself for re-election, in which case his expenses should be borne, and he should be left as unpledged as possible. Since the passage of the Bill Fontenoy's reactionary movement had lost ground largely in the constituency; and the position of independent member with a general leaning to the Government was no doubt easily open to George Tressady.

But his whole soul shrank from such a renewal of the effort of politics—probably because of that something in him, that enfeebling, paralysing something, which in all directions made him really prefer the half to the whole, and see barriers in the way of all enthusiasms. Nevertheless, the arguments he had to meet, and the kind persuasions he had to rebut, made these weeks all the more trying to him.

The second week of December came, the beginning of the end so far as the strike was concerned. The men's resources were exhausted; the masters stood unbroken. They had met the men in a joint committee; but they had steadily refused arbitration from outside. At the beginning of this week, rioting broke out in a district where the Union had least strength, caused, no doubt, by the rage of impending failure. By the middle of the following week, men were going in here and there, and the stampede of defeat had begun.

George, passing through the pinched and lowering faces that lined the village, hated the triumph of his class. On the 21st, he rode over to a neighbouring town, where local committees, both of masters and men, were sitting, to see if there was any final news as to the pits of his own valley.

About eight o'clock in the evening Letty heard his horse's hoofs returning. She knew that he was accustomed to ride in the dark, but the rumours of violence and excitement that filled the air had unnerved her, and she had been listening to every sound for some time past.

When the door was open she ran out.

"Yes, I'm late," said George, in answer to her remonstrances; "but it is all right—it was worth waiting for. The thing's over. Some of the men go down to-morrow week, and the rest as we can find room for them."

"On the masters' terms?"

"Of course—or all but."

She clapped her hands.

"Oh, for goodness' sake, don't!" he said, as he hung up his hat, and she, supposing that he was irritable from over-fatigue, managed to overlook the sharpness of his tone.

Their Christmas passed in solitude. George, more and more painfully alive to the disadvantages of Ferth as the home of a young woman with a natural love of gaiety, had tried, in spite of their mourning, to persuade Letty to ask some friends to spend Christmas week with them. She had refused, however, and they were still alone when the end of the strike arrived.

The day before the men were to go back to work, George returned late from a last meeting of the employers. Letty had begun dinner, and when he walked into the dining-room she saw at once that some unusual excitement or strain had befallen him.

"Let me have some food!" was all he would say in answer to her first questions, and she let him alone. When the servants were gone he looked up.

"I have had a shindy with Burrows, dear—rather a bad one. But that's all. I walked down to the station with Ashton"—Ashton was a neighbouring magistrate and coal-owner—"and there we found Valentine Burrows. Two or three friends were in charge of him, and it has been given out lately that he has been suffering from nervous breakdown, owing to his exertions. All that I could see was that he was drunker than usual—no doubt to drown defeat. Anyway, directly he saw me he made a scene—foamed and shouted. According to him, I am at the bottom of the men's defeat. It is all my wild-beast delight in the sight of suffering,—my love of 'fattening on the misery of the collier,'—my charming villanies of all sorts—that are responsible for everything. Altogether he reached a fine flight! Then he got violent—tried to get at me with his knobbed stick. Ashton and I, and the men with him, succeeded in quelling him without bothering the police.—I don't think anything more will come of it."

And he stretched out his hand to some salted almonds, helping himself with particular deliberation.

After dinner, however, he lay down on a sofa in Letty's sitting-room, obliged to confess himself worn out. She made him comfortable, and after she had given him a cushion, she suddenly bent over him from behind and kissed him.

"Come here!" he said, with a smile, throwing up his hand to catch her.
But with an odd blush and conscious look, she eluded him.

When, a little later, she came to sit by him with some needle-work she found him restless and inclined to talk.

"I wonder if we are always to live in this state of war for one's bread and butter!" he said, impatiently throwing down a newspaper he had been reading. "It doesn't tend to make life agreeable—does it? Yet what on earth—"

He threw back his head, with a stiff protesting air, staring across the room.

Letty had the sudden impression that he was not talking to her at all, but to some third person, unseen.

"Either capital gets its fair remuneration"—he went on in an argumentative voice—"and ability its fair wages—or the Marxian state, labour-notes, and the rest of it. There is no half-way house—absolutely none. As for me, I am not going to lend my capital for nothing—nor to give my superintendence for nothing. And I don't ask exorbitant pay for either. It is quite simple. My conscience is quite clear."

"I should think so!" said Letty, resentfully. "I wonder whether Marcella—is all for the men? She has never mentioned the strike in her letters."

As the Christian name slipped out, she flushed, and he was conscious of a curious start. But the breaking through of a long reticence was deliberate on Letty's part.

"Very likely she is all for the men," he said drily, after a pause. "She never could take a strike calmly. Her instinct always was to catch hold of any stick that could beat the employers—Watton and I used often to tease her about it."

He threw himself back against the sofa, with a little laugh that was musical in Letty's ear. It was the first time that Lady Maxwell's name had been mentioned between them in this trivial, ordinary way. The young wife sat alert and straight at her work, her cheek still pink, her eyes bright.

But after a silence, George suddenly sprang up to pace the little room, and she heard him say, under his breath, "But who am I, that I should be coercing them and trampling on them!—men old enough to be my father—driving them down to-morrow—while I sleep—for a dog's wage!"

"George, what is the matter with you?" she cried, looking at him in real anxiety.

"Nothing! nothing!—Darling, who's ill? I saw the old doctor on the road home, and he threw me a word as he passed about having been here—looked quite jolly over it. What's wrong—one of the servants?"

Letty put down her work upon her knee and her hands upon it. She grew red and pale; then she turned away from him, pressing her face into the back of her chair.

He flew to her, and she murmured in his ear.

* * * * *

What she said was by no means all sweetness. There was mingled with it much terror and some anger. Letty was not one of the women who take maternity as a matter of course.

But emotion and natural feeling had their way. George was dissolved in joy. He threw himself at her feet, resting his head against her knee.

"If he doesn't have your eyes and hair I'll disinherit him," he said, with a gaiety which seemed to have effaced all his fatigue.

"I don't want him," was her pettish reply; "but if she has your chin, I'll put her out to nurse. Oh! how I hate the thought of it!" and she shuddered.

He caught her hand, comforting her. Then, putting up both his own, he drew her down to him.

"After all, little woman, it hasn't turned out so badly?" he said in her ear, with sad appeal. Their lips met, trembling. Suddenly Letty broke into passionate weeping. George sprang up, gathered her upon his knee, and they sat for long, in silence, clinging to each other.

At last Letty drew back from him, pushing a hand against his shoulder.

"You know—you didn't care a bit for me—when you married me," she said, half bitter, half crying.

"Didn't I? And you?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Oh! I don't remember!" she said hurriedly, and dropped her face on his coat again.

"Well, we are going to care for each other," he said in a low voice, after a pause. "That's what matters now, isn't it?"

She made no reply, but she put up a hand, and touched his face. He turned his lips to the hand and kissed it tenderly. There was a sore, sad spot in each heart; and neither dared to look forward. But tonight there was a sense of belonging to each other in a new and sacred way, of being drawn apart, separated from the world, husband and wife, together. Through George's mind there wandered half-astonished thoughts about this strange compelling power of marriage,—the deep grip it makes on life—the almost mechanical way in which it bears down resistance, provided only that certain compunctions, certain scruples still remain for it to work on.

George slept lightly, being over-tired. All through the night the vision of the beaten men going down sullenly to their first shift seemed to hold him as though in a nightmare.

Between seven and eight o'clock a sound startled him. He found himself standing by his bed, struggling to wake and collect himself.

A sound that had shaken the house, passing like a dull thud through the valley? A horror seized him. He looked at Letty, who was fast asleep; then he walked noiselessly into his dressing-room, and began to hurry on his clothes.

Five minutes later he was running down the hill at his full speed. It was bitterly cold and still; the first snow lay on the grass, and a raw grey veil hung over the hills. As he came in sight of the distant pit-bank he saw a crowd of women swarming up it; a confused and hideous sound of crying and shrieking came to his ears; and at the same moment a boy, panting and dead-white, ran through the lodge-gates to meet him.

"Where is it, Sprowston?"

"Oh, sir, it's No. 2 pit. The damp's comin up the upcast, and the cage is blown to pieces. But the down shaft's all right, and Mr. Madan and Mr. Macgregor were starting down as I come away. There was eighty-six men and boys went down first shift."

George groaned, and rushed on.