nne
 
 THE LIBRA- 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER
 
 THE NEST
 
 THE NEST 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 THE SUICIDE 
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 MISS JONES AND THE MAS 
 
 TERPIECE 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK 
 
 (MRS. BASIL DE SELINCOURT) 
 
 AUTHOR OF " TANTE," "FRANKLIN WINSLOW KANE," "A FOUNTAIN 
 SEALED," "THE SHADOW OF LIFE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE CENTURY CO.
 
 Copyright, 1902, 1904, 1912, 1913, by 
 
 THE CENTURY Co. 
 Copyright, 1898, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published, January,
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT seemed suitable, when making a selection 
 of short stories for publication in book form, to 
 include my first attempt with my last, and 
 therefore the very juvenile production "Miss 
 Jones and the Masterpiece" finds a place with 
 the others. 
 
 My thanks are due to the Editors of the 
 Century Magazine, Scribners' Magazine, and 
 the English Review, for allowing me to repub- 
 lish the stories that appeared in their pages. 
 
 November, 1912. 
 
 2040463
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE NEST 3 
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA . 79 
 
 THE SUICIDE I4 1 
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 181 
 
 Miss JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE . . . 267
 
 THE NEST
 
 THE NEST 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HE seemed to have had no time for think- 
 ing before he sank into a corner of the 
 railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction 
 under the circumstances perhaps trivial, that 
 he would have it to himself for the swift hour 
 down to the country. Satisfactions of any 
 sort seemed inappropriate, an appanage that 
 he should have left behind him for ever on step- 
 ping from the great specialist's door in Wim- 
 pole Street two hours ago. When a man has 
 but a month at most two months to live, 
 small hopes and fears should drop from him: 
 he should be stripped, as it were, for the last 
 solitary wrestle in the arena of death. 
 
 But the drive, from the doctor's to the city 
 and from there to Paddington, had seemed un- 
 usually full of life's solicitations. The soft, 
 strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing 
 in patience from the shade of dusty blinkers; 
 the dismal degradation of a music-hall poster 
 a funny man with reddened nose and drunken 
 
 3
 
 4 THE NEST 
 
 hat, as appealing in his slavery as the horse; 
 the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the Park 
 on a silvery sky; he had found himself re- 
 sponding to these with pity, repugnance and 
 pleasure as normally as if they meant for him 
 now what they always would have meant. 
 That such impressions were so soon to cease 
 must change all their meaning, at least, so 
 one would have supposed; he began to think 
 of that and to wonder a little over the apparent 
 stoicism of those intervening hours ; but, while 
 the mood had lasted, the fact that he had come 
 to the end of things, that there was a pit dug 
 across his path, had done hardly more than 
 skim on the outskirts of his alert yet calm recep- 
 tivity. He seemed never to have noticed more, 
 never to have been more conscious of the outer 
 world and so little conscious of himself. 
 
 Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith- 
 like in a sudden summer shower, became the 
 background as it sped on either side, and 
 thoughts were in the foreground, thoughts of 
 himself as doomed, and of the life that he had 
 loved and worked in, as measured into one 
 shallow cupful at his lips. Even yet it was 
 almost absurd, the difficulty he found in real- 
 ising it. The doomed figure detached itself, 
 became that of a piteous, a curious alien, whom
 
 THE NEST 5 
 
 one watched respectfully and from a distance. 
 From a safe shore he observed the tossing of 
 the rapidly sinking skiff with its helpless oc- 
 cupant. It required a great pull, push, and 
 effort of his whole being, like that of awaken- 
 ing from a half-dream, in order to see, in or- 
 der to say to himself, really believing it, that 
 he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread 
 or sorrow, was still the paramount feeling, 
 though, oppressively, as if he picked his steps 
 about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning 
 away his eyes, there lurked behind all that he 
 felt the sense of sudden emptiness and dark. 
 
 It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and 
 interesting, this idea of being himself doomed. 
 Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, 
 he still thought more than felt. It was at last 
 credible and indubitable that he was the man, 
 and he was asking himself how he would take 
 it; he was asking himself how he would bear 
 it. He was amused to observe that the 
 pathetic old human vanity, by no means 
 stunned, was pushing its head above the toss- 
 ing surface in order to assure him again and 
 again that he would bear it very well. It 
 should be a graceful and gallant exit. If there 
 were to be dark moments, moments when the 
 cavern sucked him in and had him, if he was
 
 6 THE NEST 
 
 to know horror and despair, no one else, at 
 all events, should know that he knew them ; no 
 one else should share his suffering. Up to the 
 edge of extinction he would keep silence and 
 a stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had prom- 
 ised him that there would be little pain; there 
 would be knowledge only to conceal. 
 
 This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it 
 for all his ironic insight, was not so selfish as 
 it seemed; the next turn of thought led him to 
 this. For no one had a right to share his suf- 
 fering; or perhaps it would be more mag- 
 nanimous to say that the some one of whom 
 he was thinking had a right to be spared the 
 sharing of it. He shared so few of the things 
 that mattered with Kitty that she might well 
 claim immunity. His wife's figure, since the 
 very beginning, had been hovering near his 
 thoughts, not once looked at directly. It 
 might be horribly painful to look at it, but he 
 suspected that it would not be so painful as to 
 look at the other near thing that he must leave 
 behind: his work; the work that with all its 
 grind and routine so hard to harness to at first 
 had now become so much a part of himself. 
 The fact that he might come nearer to despair, 
 nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, 
 when he thought of leaving his work than when
 
 THE NEST v 7 
 
 he thought of leaving his wife, was in itself 
 a pain; but it was an old pain in a new guise. 
 Kitty had for so long been one of the things 
 that counted for less than his work. Vanity 
 even raised its voice high enough to say rue- 
 fully that they might get on badly without him 
 at the Home Office; the country itself might 
 suffer. He smiled; but the dart told; it was 
 perhaps feathered with truth. Yes, everything 
 most essential in him, everything that most 
 counted, was answered, called forth in his 
 work. It was in that that he would most truly 
 die. For, of course, in the many other, the 
 young, the ardent, the foolish hopes, he was 
 dead already. And it was round the figure 
 of his wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, 
 soft, appealing, that those dead hopes seemed 
 to gather, like mist about a flower. 
 
 Poor, lovely little Kitty: the sight of the 
 rain-dimmed meadow-sweet, by the brookside 
 in a passing field, brought her before him in 
 this aspect of innocent disillusioner. For noth- 
 ing essential, nothing that counted in him, was 
 answered or called forth by Kitty except a 
 slightly ironic tenderness. He didn't judge 
 life from his own failure to find splendid 
 mutual enterprise and sacred mutual compre- 
 hension where his lover's blindness had thought
 
 8 THE NEST 
 
 to find it. Nor did he judge Kitty. His own 
 blindness was the fault, if fault there were, 
 and even that blindness he could now see tol- 
 erantly. The dart and pang had gone from his 
 memory of young love ; his smile for it was in- 
 dulgent; he was even glad that the memory 
 was there, glad that he had known the illusion, 
 even if it were at the price of failure in that 
 happy realm of life. Little of the sadness 
 could have been Kitty's ; she had not known the 
 bitterness of his slow awakening; she was 
 easily contented with the tame terms of unillu- 
 mined life. A charming home; a fond hus- 
 band; a pretty, diligent part to play in the 
 political and social life of the countryside; the 
 nicest taste to show in dress and friends; 
 Kitty, he imagined, thought of her life as com- 
 pletely successful. And why not? He him- 
 self saw love as an episode and contentedly ac- 
 cepted the fact that for the flower-like woman 
 and the man who works there can be, eventu- 
 ally, no deeper bond. 
 
 He knew two or three other women who 
 interested him more than Kitty ever could; 
 to them he went when he wanted to talk about 
 anything he cared for. Kitty was sweet to 
 see ; she made him very comfortable ; she rarely 
 irritated him. With friends and Kitty what
 
 THE NEST 9 
 
 did he want of women more? Outside these 
 domestic and drawing-room circles was the 
 world of men and ideas in which he lived, in 
 which his real life had its roots. 
 
 Yet, as the train neared the little country 
 station, as familiar lanes and meadows glided 
 slowly past the windows, he became aware that 
 his thoughts had more and more slid from this 
 outside life, this world of work and reality, and 
 that from thinking of the little part that Kitty 
 played in it he had come to thinking of Kitty 
 and to the thought that he was to see her for 
 the last time. Yes; that crashed in at last. 
 At last something seemed to come to him which, 
 in the pain of it, was completely adequate to 
 the situation. It was the Kitty of six years 
 ago that he saw most clearly, the girl he had 
 fallen in love with, his bride; but there were 
 all the other memories too, the little silent mem- 
 ories, the nothings, the everythings of daily 
 life together; small joys, small sorrows. The 
 breakfast-table, Kitty behind the coffee, read- 
 ing aloud to him some scrap of her morning 
 budget ; the garden, Kitty showing him how a 
 new flower was thriving; Kitty riding beside 
 him in the dew to an early meet ; and, suddenly, 
 among all the trivial memories, the solemn 
 one that hardly seemed to go with Kitty at all,
 
 io THE NEST 
 
 Kitty's face looking up at him, disfigured with 
 grief and pain, as he told her that their child 
 it had died at birth was dead. 
 
 The other women, the interesting ones, the 
 women who, more or less, knew their way 
 about his mind and soul, were forgotten, 
 blotted out completely by the trivial and the 
 solemn memories. He felt no desire to see 
 them, no desire at all to say good-bye to them ; 
 that would be to bring them near. But he did 
 want to see Kitty, at once. She was not near 
 mind or soul ; but she was near as life is near ; 
 near like the pulse of his heart ; and, with all the 
 other things, he felt, suddenly, that Kitty was 
 his child, too, and that paternal yearning was 
 mingled with the crying out of his whole na- 
 ture towards her. For it was crying out ; and, 
 if she was his child, in what deep strange sense 
 was he not her child, too. 
 
 The wide world, the real world, the outside 
 world of work and achievement, collapsed like a 
 crumpled panorama ; he was covering his eyes ; 
 he was shuddering; he was stumbling back to 
 the nest, wounded to death, there to fold him- 
 self in darkness, in oblivion, in love. How 
 near we are to the animal, he thought, smiling, 
 with trembling lips, as he saw the station slide 
 outside the windows at last, saw the face of the
 
 THE NEST ii 
 
 station-master he had never before known 
 that the station-master was such a lovable per- 
 son he seemed so near the nest that he must 
 be lovable saw, beyond the flower-wreathed 
 palings, the dog-cart waiting for him. But his 
 deeper self rebuked the cynical side-glance. 
 The trembling smile, he knew, had more of 
 truth: how near we are to the divine. The 
 pain and ecstasy of this moment of arrival 
 made it one of the most vivid and significant of 
 his life. Almost worth while to know that one 
 is to die in a month if the knowledge brings 
 with it such flashes of beauty of vision. The 
 whole earth seemed transfigured and heavenly. 
 
 Dean, the coachman, gave acquiescent an- 
 swers to his questions on the homeward drive. 
 He heard the sound of his own voice and knew 
 that he was speaking as he wanted to be sure 
 of speaking for these next weeks, with ease and 
 lightness. He would be able to keep up before 
 Kitty. Until the very end she should be 
 spared everything; there was joy in the 
 thought, and no longer any vanity. He would 
 see her, be with her, and she should not know. 
 He would see her happy for their last month to- 
 gether. He clasped the thought of her happi- 
 ness with her to his heart. 
 
 Like all ecstasies, it faded, this rapture of his
 
 12 THE NEST 
 
 return. By the time the house was reached, 
 the lovely little Jacobean house that they had 
 found together, the buoyancy was gone and 
 what was left was a sweetness and a great 
 fatigue. He was to see her; that was well; 
 and here was the nest; that was well, too. 
 But he wanted to fold his wings and sleep. 
 
 Mrs. Holland was not in the house, the but- 
 ler told him, she and Sir Walter had gone down 
 to the river together. Holland felt that he 
 would rather not go after them. He would 
 wait so that he should see Kitty alone when he 
 first saw her. He liked Sir Walter, their 
 friend and neighbour; it would not be difficult 
 to act before him, and he knew that he could 
 begin acting at once ; but, for this first meeting 
 of the new, short epoch, he must see Kitty alone. 
 So he had his tea in the library queer to go on 
 having tea, queer to find one still liked tea 
 and looked over some papers, and saw, outside, 
 the afternoon grow stiller and more golden, and 
 knew that all dreads were in abeyance and that 
 the somnolence, as of a drugged sweetness and 
 fatigue, still kept him safe. 
 
 He was conscious at last of a purely physical 
 chill; the library was cool and he stepped into 
 the sunlight on the lawn, walking up and down 
 among the flowers and, presently, across the
 
 THE NEST 13 
 
 grassy terraces, to the lower groups of trees, 
 vaguely directing his steps to the little sum- 
 mer-house that faced the west and was as full 
 of sunlight at this hour as a fretted shell of 
 warm, lapping sea-water. They could not see 
 him, on their way up from the river, nor he 
 them, from here, and after a half-hour or so 
 of dreamy basking it would be time to dress for 
 dinner, Sir Walter would have gone and Kitty 
 would be at the house again. 
 
 He followed the narrow path, set thickly 
 with young ashes and sycamores, and saw be- 
 yond the trees the roof of the summer-house 
 heaped with illumined festoons of traveller's- 
 joy, and then, when he was near, he heard 
 voices within it, Kitty's voice and Sir Walter's. 
 
 Hesitating, half-turning to go back, it was as 
 if a childish panic of shyness seized him, so that 
 he smiled at himself as he stood there, in the 
 arrested attitude of an involuntary eaves- 
 dropper. But the smile faded. A look of be- 
 wilderment came to his face. Kitty was weep- 
 ing and Sir Walter was pleading with her, and 
 so strange was Sir Walter's voice, so strange 
 what he was saying to Kitty, that all the 
 strangeness of the day found now its culmi- 
 nating moment. 
 
 He walked on, slowly, unwillingly, helplessly,
 
 14 THE NEST 
 
 walked on, as he now knew, into some far other 
 form of suffering than any that had been fore- 
 seen by him that afternoon. 
 
 A rustic seat ran round the summer-house. 
 On the side most hidden he sank down. He 
 did not choose the hidden side. He had no 
 feeling of will or choice; had they come out 
 upon him he would have looked at them with the 
 same bewildered eyes. But, dully, he felt that 
 he must know, know, why Kitty was un- 
 happy. 
 
 Sunken on the seat, among the traveller's- 
 joy, exhausted, yet alert, his head dizzy and his 
 heart stilled, as it were, to listen, it was this 
 amazement and curiosity that Holland felt 
 rather than anger, jealousy, or grief. 
 
 Kitty was unhappy; Sir Walter loved her, 
 and she loved Sir Walter. Sir Walter was im- 
 ploring her to come away with him. "But you 
 do love me," was the phrase that he repeated 
 again and again, the strong protest of fact 
 against her refusal. 
 
 The dizziness lifting, the heart beating more 
 normally, Holland knew more. Kitty was un- 
 happy and loved Sir Walter, but, deeper than 
 that, was the truth that she was happy in her 
 knowledge of his love, deeper than that 
 though this depth was of thankfulness in her
 
 THE NEST 15 
 
 husband's heart was the truth that the love 
 was as yet a beautiful pastime; there was joy 
 for her in her own sadness, drama in her pain ; 
 she was a child with a strange toy in her hand ; 
 it charmed her and she had not learned to 
 dread it. 
 
 Her husband's comprehension of her, of her 
 childishness, her fluidity, her weakness, actually 
 touched with respect his comprehension of Sir 
 Walter; for Sir Walter's strength was rever- 
 ent, even in his recklessness there was dignity. 
 Holland knew that he spoke the truth when he 
 said to Kitty that she might trust him for life. 
 
 It was the real thing with Sir Walter. With 
 Kitty the real thing could be little more than 
 the response to reality in others. There was 
 the danger that her husband steadied himself to 
 look at, as he sat in the sunlight outside the 
 summer-house and listened. 
 
 The dizziness was quite gone. He had never 
 felt a greater mental clarity. He knew that 
 he must be suffering ; but suffering seemed rele- 
 gated to some region of mere physical sensa- 
 tion. He saw and understood so many things 
 that he had never seen or understood before. 
 He felt no jealousy, not a pang of the de- 
 frauded, injured male, not a throb of the 
 broken-hearted lover; yet it was not indiffer-
 
 16 THE NEST 
 
 ence to Kitty that gave him his immunity; he 
 had never cared more for Kitty; it was, per- 
 haps, in a tenderer key, as he cared for the 
 station-master, as he cared, now, for Sir 
 Walter. He was himself soon to die and, as 
 personalities, as related to his own life, people 
 had ceased to count; but as lives that were to 
 go on after he was dead, they counted as they 
 had never done till then ; and Kitty most of all. 
 It was this intense consciousness of her youth, 
 of all the years of life she had to live, that 
 pressed with such clearness and such fear upon 
 him. She had all her life before her and she 
 held in her hands a terrible, a beautiful toy that, 
 suddenly transformed to an engine of destruc- 
 tion, might shatter her. 
 
 Sir Walter was going. He said that he 
 would come again to-morrow. 
 
 "Nicholas will be here," said Kitty. She no 
 longer wept. Her voice, now that the stress of 
 the situation was over, had regained its pensive 
 sweetness. 
 
 "Yes," said Sir Walter, "that's what's so 
 odious, darling; he will always be here and 
 everything will be twisted and horrible. I like 
 your husband." 
 
 "He is a strange man ; I sometimes think that 
 he cares for nothing but his work; he is all
 
 THE NEST 17 
 
 thought and no heart. I don't believe that he 
 would really mind if I were to go away with 
 you. He would smile, sadly and ironically, and 
 say: Toor, silly child.' And then he would 
 turn to his papers. I'm nothing to him but a 
 doll, a convenient, domestic doll. And he 
 doesn't care for playing with dolls except for 
 a little while now and then." Kitty spoke 
 with a sober pathos that did not veil resent- 
 ment. 
 
 "Ah, you can say all that to me and ex- 
 pect me to go on bearing seeing you wasted and 
 thrown away !" Sir Walter broke out. "What 
 stands between us? Why must we go on suf- 
 fering like this?" 
 
 "Isn't it a great joy to know that the other 
 is there, understanding and caring?" 
 
 "A killing sort of joy." 
 
 "How cruel, how wrong you are," Kitty mur- 
 mured ; but her husband knew that for her, in- 
 deed, the joy was deep, and that it was in such 
 moments of power over an emotion she could 
 rouse yet dominate that she had her keenest 
 sense of it. 
 
 "I can't help it," said Sir Walter. "I shall 
 always want you to come away with me." 
 
 "Good-bye: for to-day." 
 
 "It's you who are cruel."
 
 i8 THE NEST 
 
 At that, silence following, Holland knew that 
 Kitty's quiet tears fell again. 
 
 Sir Walter was subjugated. He pleaded for 
 pardon ; promised not to torment her to try not 
 to torment her. A trysting-place was fixed on 
 for next day and Holland felt another chill of 
 fear at Kitty's swift resource and craft in plan- 
 ning it. The child knew how to plot and lie. 
 It thought itself nobly justified, no doubt, and 
 that its fidelity to duty gave it the right to 
 every liberty of conscience. And before Sir 
 Walter went there was a moment of relenting 
 that showed how near was the joy of yielding to 
 the joy of ruthlessness. "For this once, for 
 this once only " Kitty murmured. And Hol- 
 land knew that Sir Walter held her in his arms 
 and kissed her. 
 
 After his departure Kitty sat on for some 
 moments in the summer-house. She sighed 
 deeply once or twice and Holland fancied, from 
 her light movements, that she had leaned her 
 arms on the table and rested her head on them. 
 He heard presently, that she was softly saying 
 a prayer, and at the sound, tears filled his eyes. 
 Then, rising, she collected her basket of flow- 
 ers, her parasol, her books, and walked away 
 with slow steps along the path leading to the 
 house.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 TWO facts stood clear before Holland's 
 eyes. He had been culpably blind and 
 Kitty was in danger. He asked himself if he 
 had not been culpably selfish too, for Kitty's 
 summing up of his attitude towards her would 
 have hurt had he not been beyond such hurts; 
 but, looking back, he could not see that he had 
 ever pushed Kitty aside nor relegated her to 
 the place of plaything. No; the ship of his 
 romance, all its sails set to fairest, sweetest 
 hopes, had been well-ballasted by the most seri- 
 ous, most generous of modern theories as to the 
 right relations of man and wife. And the 
 shock and disillusion had been to find, day by 
 day, that it was, so to speak, only the sails that 
 Kitty cared for. The cargo, the purpose of 
 their voyage, left her prettily, vaguely indiffer- 
 ent. Again and again, he remembered, it had 
 been as if he had led her down into the busy 
 heart of the ship, explained the chart to her, 
 pointed out all the interesting wares. Kitty 
 had shown a graceful interest, but with the 
 
 19
 
 20 THE NEST 
 
 manner of a lovely voyager, brought down from 
 sunny or starlit contemplations on deck to 
 humour the dry tastes of the captain. She 
 didn't care a bit for the cargo, or the purposes ; 
 she didn't care a bit for any of his interests nor 
 wish to share them; his interests, in so far as 
 specialized and unrelated to their romance, 
 were, she intimated, by every retreating grace 
 as of gathered-up skirts and a backward 
 smile for the captain in his prosy room the 
 captain's own particular manly business; her 
 business was to be womanly, that is, to be 
 charming, to feel the breeze in the sails, and 
 to gaze at the stars. And though, now for the 
 first time he saw it, Kitty was not the happy, 
 facilely contented woman he had thought her, 
 it was really as if the ship, with weightier car- 
 goes to carry, more distant ports to reach, had 
 undergone a transformation ; throbbing ' and 
 complicated machinery moved instead of sails, 
 and on its workaday decks Kitty strolled wist- 
 fully, missing the sails, missing the romance, 
 but missing only that. 
 
 He had accepted, helplessly, her interpre- 
 tation of their specialised existences, hoping 
 only that hers might assume the significance 
 that would, perhaps, justify the old-fashioned 
 separation of interests; but no children came
 
 THE NEST 21 
 
 after the first, the child that died at birth, the 
 child that his heart ached over still; and he 
 could not believe that Kitty felt the lack, could 
 hardly believe that she shared his hope for 
 other children. She had suffered terribly in 
 the birth of the one, more, perhaps, than in 
 its death though that had temporarily crushed 
 her and she had been horribly frightened by 
 the cruelties and perils of maternity. So, 
 though he had come to think of her as es- 
 sentially womanly, it was in a rather narrow 
 sense ; the term had by degrees lost many, even, 
 of its warm, instinctive associations, and as he 
 now sat thinking, near the summer-house, it 
 took on its narrowest, if most piteous meaning. 
 Kitty was essentially womanly. She needed 
 some one to be in love with her. Her husband 
 had ceased to be in love though he had not 
 ceased to be a loving husband and she re- 
 sponded helplessly to a lover's appeal. Sir 
 Walter's appeal was very persuasive. A ship 
 of snowy, wing-like sails, a fairy ship, rocked 
 on the waves at the very edge of Kitty's shel- 
 tered life. Only a shutting of the eyes, a 
 holding of the breath, and she would be car- 
 ried across the narrow intervening depth to the 
 deck, to freedom, to safety she would believe 
 to sails trimmed for an immortal romance.
 
 22 THE NEST 
 
 Would Kitty's cowardice, and Kitty's prayers 
 they were interwoven he felt sure keep her 
 for one month from running away with Sir 
 Walter ? In only a month's time she could re- 
 spond and not be shattered: in only a month's 
 time the ship of romance would be really safe, 
 she might walk on board with no shutting of the 
 eyes or holding of the breath. Holland gazed, 
 and the facts became clearer and more ominous. 
 For the lack of a knowledge that was his, Kitty 
 and Sir Walter might wreck their lives. All 
 the motives for the concealment of his secret, 
 the vanity, the bravery, the cherishing tender- 
 ness that had inspired him, were scattered to 
 the winds. The nest was a tattered, wind- 
 pierced ruin. And he, already, was a ghost. 
 Kitty should not lack the knowledge. 
 
 The dew was falling, and he had grown 
 chilly. He walked back quickly to the house 
 that he had left a little while ago so vividly 
 aware of the sweetness that the shallow cup 
 might hold. The cup was empty. Not a drop 
 of self was left to hope or live for. 
 
 He waited till the next day to tell her. He 
 did not feel a tremor, he felt too deep a fatigue. 
 
 Their meeting at dinner was a placid gliding 
 over the depths; two hooded gondolas floating
 
 THE NEST 23 
 
 side by side, each with its shrouded secret. But 
 skill and vigilance were his. Kitty's gondola 
 drifted with the current, knowing no need of 
 skill, secure of secrecy. The eyes she quietly 
 lifted to her husband were unclouded. He 
 guessed the inner drama that held her thoughts, 
 the tragically beautiful role that she herself 
 played in it. It was as a heroine that she saw 
 herself. Why not, indeed. No heroine could 
 have played her part more gracefully and 
 worthily, and a heroine's innocent eyes could 
 not be expected to see as far as his "ironic" 
 ones. 
 
 It was the sense of distance, from her, from 
 everything, that grew upon him during the 
 long intervals of the night when he lay awake 
 and watched the stars slowly cross his open 
 window. He was no longer divided from him- 
 self, no longer groping, as in the train, to find 
 a clue between the doomed man and the 
 watcher. The self that he had found was 
 adrift upon a sea, solitary indeed, and saw 
 pigmy figures moving in the shifting lights and 
 shadows of the shore. His mild pre-occupa- 
 tion was with one figure, light, fluttering, fool- 
 ish: she was walking near the verge of the 
 cliff and her foothold might give way. He in- 
 tended to signal to her and to point out a safe
 
 24 THE NEST 
 
 road through the cornfields, before he turned 
 himself again to loneliness, the sky, and the 
 sea that was soon to engulf him. 
 
 This self-obliterating immensity of mood 
 was contracted and ruffled next morning by the 
 trivial difficulties that stood in the way of his 
 determination. He went to Kitty's boudoir 
 and, in spite of immensities, he knew that his 
 heart beat heavily under the burden of its 
 project, how careful he must be, how delicate 
 to find her interviewing the cook. In the 
 garden, she was talking to the gardener, and 
 afterwards, in her room, she was trying on a 
 tea-gown before the mirror. Actually he felt 
 some irritation. 
 
 "When can I see you, Kitty?" he asked. 
 
 Her eyes in the glass met his with surprise 
 at his tone; but surprise was all. "See me? 
 Here I am. What is it? No, Cecile, the sash 
 must knot, so; tie it more to the side." 
 
 "I want to talk over something with you." 
 
 "I'm rather busy this morning. Will after 
 lunch do? Don't you see, Cecile, like this." 
 
 "No, it won't. I must see you now," said 
 Holland, almost querulously. 
 
 She turned her head to look at him and a
 
 THE NEST 25 
 
 shadow crossed her face. Suddenly, he saw it, 
 she was a little frightened. 
 
 "Of course, directly. I'll come to the li- 
 brary." 
 
 Seeing that fear, and smitten with compunc- 
 tion, a rather silly impulse made him smile at 
 her and say: "Don't bother to hurry. I can 
 wait." But he did want her to hurry. He 
 felt that he could wait no longer. 
 
 He walked up and down the library. The 
 weariness of the day before was gone; the 
 sweetness, of course, was gone, and the inhu- 
 man immensity was gone too. He felt oddly 
 normal and reasonable, detached yet impli- 
 cated ; almost like a friendly family doctor come 
 to break the fatal news to the ignorant wife. 
 It was just the anxiety that the doctor might 
 feel, the grave trouble and the twinge of awk- 
 wardness. 
 
 He had only waited for ten minutes when 
 Kitty appeared in the doorway. 
 
 Kitty Holland was still a young woman and 
 looked younger than her years. The round- 
 ness and blueness and steady gaze of her eyes, 
 the bloom of her cheeks and innocent lustre of 
 her golden hair gave an infantile quality to 
 her loveliness. She was not a vain woman, but 
 she was conscious of these advantages and the
 
 26 THE NEST 
 
 consciousness had touched the child-like can- 
 dour and confidingness with a little artificiality, 
 for long apparent to her husband's kindly but 
 dispassionate eye. To other people Mrs. Hol- 
 land's manner, the whispering vagueness of 
 her voice, the wistful dwelling of her glance, 
 was felt to be artificial only as the gold em- 
 broideries and serrated edges on the robes of 
 a Fra Angelico angel are felt as something 
 added and decorative. Kitty was far too in- 
 telligent to try to look like a Fra Angelico 
 angel; she was picturesque as only the ex- 
 tremely fashionable can be picturesque; but 
 Holland knew she was conscious that she re- 
 minded people of an angel, and of a child, and 
 that she reminded herself continually of all 
 sorts of exquisite things, partly because she 
 was dreamily self-conscious and keenly aware 
 of exquisiteness, and partly because he had, in 
 their first year, the year of sails and breezes, 
 so impressed these things upon her attention. 
 He himself had grown accustomed to per- 
 haps a little tired of the lily poise of the head, 
 the long, gentle hands, the floating step, quite 
 the step of an angel aware of flower-dappled 
 grass beneath its feet and the flutter of em- 
 broidered draperies. But Kitty, though ac- 
 customed to these graces, in herself, had not
 
 THE NEST 27 
 
 grown tired of them, they had, indeed, more 
 and more filled the foreground of her delicate 
 and decorative life, so that he could guess at 
 how much his own indifference had helped to 
 alienate her. 
 
 And now, as he turned to look at her, these 
 half ironic, half affectionate impressions hov- 
 ered as a background, and, sharply drawn upon 
 it, with the biting acid of his new perceptions, 
 he saw something else in Kitty's face that he 
 had never seen before. 
 
 Already he had seen her as a womanly 
 woman, as that in its narrowest sense. He 
 saw her now as a type of the woman who live 
 in and through and for their affections, and 
 this with their sensations rather than with 
 their intelligences. Vividly his memory struck 
 them out; the faces of the satisfied women, 
 taking on, as years pass over them, as experi- 
 ence detaches from the craving, sentimental 
 self, and frees the instincts to push, climb, 
 cling in roots and tendrils for other selves, a 
 vegetable serenity and simplicity; and, more 
 vividly, with discomfort in the memory, the 
 faces of the unsatisfied; the womanly married 
 woman whose romance is over, the spinster who 
 has missed romance ; faces chiselled to subtlety 
 by dreams and frustration.
 
 28 THE NEST 
 
 On Kitty's face he saw it now, that look of a 
 subtlety childlike, innocent, of flesh rather than 
 of spirit, yet, in its very unconsciousness, al- 
 most sinister. For a moment, as the lines of 
 the sharp new perception etched themselves, 
 lines gossamer-like in fineness, floating, trans- 
 forming shadows rather than lines, he was 
 afraid of his wife, afraid of the alien, mysteri- 
 ous force he guessed in her. 
 
 For the delicately sinister subtlety was re- 
 mote from his understanding, was a subtlety 
 that .no man's face can show, capable as it is 
 of a grossness and corruption merely animal 
 by contrast; open and obvious. Kitty's sub- 
 tlety did not make her animal: it made her 
 more than ever like an angel; but an ambigu- 
 ous angel; and to feel that he did not under- 
 stand her made her strange. It was no clue to 
 feel that she did not understand herself ; it was 
 only a further depth of mystery. 
 
 He was ashamed of his own folly in another 
 moment, ashamed of an insight distorted and 
 distorting, so he told himself. Over and above 
 all such morbidities was the fact that Kitty 
 was looking at him with the eyes of a fright- 
 ened child a real child. 
 
 The reaction from his fear, the recognition of 
 her fear, stirred in him a love more personal
 
 THE NEST 29 
 
 than any of the vast benevolences that he had 
 felt. He went to her and led her to the win- 
 dow-seat where, sitting down himself, holding 
 both her hands in his and looking up at her 
 standing before him, he said with the quiet of 
 long-prepared words: "Kitty, dear, I have 
 something that I want to tell you and that will 
 make you, I think, a little sad. We have had 
 happy times together, haven't we? It isn't all 
 regret. You and I are going to part, Kitty." 
 
 She gazed at him and terror widened her 
 eyes. She could not speak. She did not move. 
 Her hands in his hands seemed dead. 
 
 He saw in a moment what the fear was that 
 showed itself in this torpor of apprehension, 
 and he hastened on so that she should not, in 
 her dread, reveal the secret that need never be 
 spoken. 
 
 "I'm going to die, Kitty," he said, "I had my 
 sentence yesterday, from Dr. Farebrother. I 
 never dreamed that it was anything serious, 
 that complaint of mine, you know, never 
 dreamed it even when it began to trouble me 
 a good deal, as it has of late. But it's not 
 what I thought. It's fatal; and it will gallop 
 now. He gives me one month at the very 
 most, two months." He spoke deliberately, 
 though swiftly, and, as he finished, he smiled
 
 30 THE NEST 
 
 up at her, a reassuring smile. His wife's di- 
 lated eyes, fixed on him, made him flush a little 
 in the ensuing pause. He felt that the smile 
 had been inept. He had spoken too much from 
 the height of his detachment, and the placidity 
 of his words might well seem horrible to her. 
 
 She was finding it horrible. She seemed to 
 be breathing the icy air of a vault that he had 
 opened before her ; heavy, slow, painful breaths, 
 those of a sleeper oppressed by nightmare ; the 
 sound of them, the sight of her labouring breast 
 hurt him. He put his arms around her and 
 smiled now, as one smiles at a child to console 
 it. "I've frightened you," he said; "forgive 
 me. You see, one gets used to it, so soon, for 
 oneself. Dear little Kitty, I'm so sorry." 
 
 Still she did not speak. Still it was that 
 torpid terror that gazed at him. And the ter- 
 ror was not for what he had thought it was; 
 it was for what he had said. It was a con- 
 tagious terror. She cared. In some unex- 
 plained, unforeseen way she cared terribly ; and 
 his projects crumbled beneath her gaze; be- 
 wilderment drifted in his mind ; her fear gained 
 him. 
 
 "What is the matter? What is it?" he 
 asked. 
 
 The change and sharpness in his voice
 
 THE NEST 31 
 
 brought them near at last. Kitty seized his 
 hands and lifted them from her ; yet grasping, 
 clinging as she held him off. He would not 
 have thought her face capable of such fierce- 
 ness and demand. She was hardly recog- 
 nisable as she said: "Do you want to die? 
 Don't you mind dying?" 
 
 "Mind? I should rather not, of course. I 
 care for my life. But one must face it; what 
 else is there to do? And, what is it Kitty? 
 What have I done to you ?" 
 
 And now, her head fallen back, her eyes 
 closed, tears ran down her face, as piteously, 
 agonised and stricken, she asked : 
 
 "Don't you love me at all? Don't you mind 
 leaving me at all ?" 
 
 His astonishment was so great that for a mo- 
 ment it bereft him of words. He had risen and 
 was holding her ; her eyes were closed and she 
 sobbed and sobbed, her head fallen back. And 
 her passion of sorrow and despair, her loveli- 
 ness, too, and youth, seized and shook him; so 
 that all the things he had not felt yet, all the 
 hovering, dreadful things, the dark forms of 
 the cavern, encompassed, pressed upon him; 
 despair and longing, the horror of annihila- 
 tion, the agonising sweetness of life. It was 
 as if a hidden wound had been opened and that
 
 32 THE NEST 
 
 his blood was gushing forth, not to peace, but 
 to pain and torment. He felt his own sobs 
 rising ; she cared ; how much she cared. It was 
 as if her caring gave him back the self that 
 yesterday had blotted out ; in her pain he knew 
 his own; in her self he saw and mourned his 
 own doomed and piteous self. His head leaned 
 to hers and his lips sought hers, when, sud- 
 denly, a furious memory came, and indignation 
 suffocated him. 
 
 He thrust her violently away, holding her by 
 the shoulders. "How dare you! how dare 
 you!" he cried. "You don't love me. You 
 don't mind my dying. How dare you torture 
 me like this when it's not real, when I was 
 at peace." 
 
 It was like a wild, impossible dream. Their 
 faces stared at each other; their hands seized 
 each other; they spoke, their voices clashing, 
 and shaken by strangling sobs. 
 
 "How dare you say that to me! You have 
 broken my heart ! You haven't cared for years 
 for years!" Kitty cried. "I've longed 
 longed. It is too horrible. How dare you 
 come and tell me that you are going to die and 
 that it will make me a little sad. Oh! I love 
 you and you are horrible to me." 
 
 "You are lying, Kitty you are lying!"
 
 THE NEST 33 
 
 "That too! You can say that! To me! 
 Tome!" 
 
 "It's true. You know you lie. I haven't 
 loved you as I did. But I've cared good 
 God! I see now how much. It is you who 
 have ceased to care." 
 
 At these words Kitty was transfigured. 
 Joy, joy unmistakable, flamed up in her. It 
 mounted to her eyes and lips, revivifying her 
 ravaged face, beaming forth, inundating him, 
 unfaltering, assured, absolute. "Darling 
 darling you love me? you do love me? Oh, 
 you shan't die I won't let you die. My love 
 will keep you with me. We will forget all 
 these years when we haven't understood 
 when we've forgotten. We will forget every- 
 thing except that we love each other and that 
 that is all there is to live for in the world." 
 
 "And Sir Walter? " he said, simply and 
 helplessly. 
 
 Kitty's arms were about his neck, her trans- 
 figured face was upturned to him. Wor- 
 shipped by those eyes, held in that embrace, his 
 words, in his own ears, were absurd. Yet he 
 hadn't been dreaming yesterday. Kitty might 
 make the words seem absurd; but even Kitty's 
 eyes and Kitty's arms could not conjure away 
 the facts of the sunlit summer-house, the tears,
 
 34 THE NEST 
 
 the parting kiss. What of Sir Walter? 
 What else was there left to say? 
 
 But after he had said them, and stood looking 
 at her, it was as if his words released the last 
 depths of her rapture. She did not flush or 
 falter or show, even, any shock or surprise. 
 Her arms about him, her eyes on his, it was a 
 stiller, a more solemn joy that dwelt on him and 
 enfolded him. 
 
 "You know?" she said. 
 
 "I heard you last evening," Holland an- 
 swered. "I was sitting outside the summer- 
 house. You said you loved him. You let him 
 kiss you." 
 
 "You will forgive me," said Kitty. They 
 were looking at each other like two children. 
 "I thought I loved him, because I was so un- 
 happy, and he is so dear and kind and loves me 
 so much. I must love some one. I must be 
 loved. I was so lonely. And you seemed not 
 to care at all any more. You were only my 
 husband, you weren't my lover. And you 
 don't know all. He doesn't know it. But I 
 know it now. And I must tell you everything 
 all the dreadful weakness you must under- 
 stand it all. Perhaps, if this hadn't come, per- 
 haps, if you hadn't been given back to me like 
 this, I might have gone away with him, Nich-
 
 THE NEST 35 
 
 olas. It wasn't that I had ceased to love you; 
 it was that I had to be loved and was weak be- 
 fore love. It is dreadful ; I believe all women 
 are like that. And I did struggle, oh, I did. 
 Nicholas, you will forgive me?" 
 
 "I knew it, dear, and I forgave you." 
 
 "You knew it ? You loved me so much that 
 you forgave?" 
 
 "That was why I told you, Kitty. I hadn't 
 meant to tell you ; I had meant to keep it from 
 you, this sadness, and to make our last month 
 together a happy one for you. I was coming 
 back to you with such longing, dear. And 
 then I heard; and then I was afraid that you 
 might go away before you would be free." 
 
 "You loved me so much? You did it be- 
 cause you loved me so much? Oh! Nicholas 
 Nicholas!" 
 
 "That was why I said those horrible things. 
 I wanted you to be happy. I didn't think you 
 could be more than a little sad when you knew 
 that you were going to be free. Foolish, dar- 
 ling Kitty you are sure it's me you do love?" 
 
 Again she could not speak, but it was her 
 joy that made her silent. She was no more 
 to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in 
 the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers 
 sprang beneath her footsteps; her smile was
 
 36 THE NEST 
 
 life. And the memory of his own cynical 
 vision of her smote him with a self-reproach 
 that deepened tenderness. She was only 
 subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. 
 She was womanly, meant for love only, and 
 her folly made her the more lovable. Love was 
 all that was left him. One month of love. 
 His hands yielded to her hands; his eyes an- 
 swered her eyes. The fragrance of the flow- 
 ers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly gar- 
 ments. One month of life; but how flat, how 
 mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer 
 world of the last years; how deep the goblet 
 of enchantment that the unambiguous angel 
 held out to him.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THERE were two cups to drink, for he 
 had to put the cup of death to her lips. 
 He told her all as they walked in the garden 
 that afternoon; of the growing gravity of 
 symptoms, the interview with the great special- 
 ist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pro- 
 nounce a final verdict, had sent him. He 
 begged her to spare him further interviews. 
 He was to die, that was evident; and doctors 
 could do nothing for him. If pain came he 
 promised that he would take what relief they 
 had to give. 
 
 She leaned her head against his shoulder, 
 weeping and weeping as they walked. 
 
 They were two lovers again, lovers shut into 
 the straitest, most compassed paradise. On 
 every side the iron walls enclosed them; there 
 were no distances ; there was no horizon. But 
 within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy 
 sweetness; the very sky seemed to have nar- 
 rowed to the roofing of a bower. 
 
 To be in love again ; to feel the whole world 
 
 37
 
 38 THE NEST 
 
 beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to 
 and fro between them. She must weep, and 
 he, with this newly born self, must know to the 
 full the pang and bitterness; but the moments 
 blossomed and smiled over the dread; because 
 the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away 
 like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her 
 husband from the interview with a composure 
 that almost made him laugh. It would have 
 hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and 
 he listened gravely while she told him that Sir 
 Walter, now, was going to accept the big post 
 in India that, for her sake, he had been on the 
 point of refusing. He was going away that 
 very night. She had been perfectly frank with 
 him; she had explained to him "quite simply 
 and gently" said Kitty that she had been very 
 foolish and had let her friendship for him, her 
 fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, 
 she had told him quite simply that he would 
 always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was 
 in love with her husband. 
 
 The poor toy. The child, with placid hands 
 and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the 
 middle and walked away from it. He didn't 
 need her to say it again; he saw that she had 
 ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And 
 weren't you sorry for him at all ?" he asked.
 
 THE NEST 39 
 
 "Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you 
 ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possi- 
 ble. But you know, I can't but feel that he 
 deserved punishment. Oh, I know that I did, 
 too! don't think me hard and self-righteous. 
 But see see, darling, what you have saved 
 me from! Remember what he wanted me 
 to do. Oh it was wrong and cruel of him. 
 I shall never be able to forgive him, just 
 because I was so weak just because I did 
 listen." 
 
 "Ah, do forgive him just because you were 
 so strong that you never let him guess that you 
 were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry 
 for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since 
 he might not smile outwardly, of smiling in- 
 wardly over the ruthlessness of women towards 
 the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished 
 their image in their own eyes. The angel held 
 him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a 
 mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer 
 world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked 
 down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and ac- 
 cepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only 
 to these places of silence, loneliness and con- 
 templation that Kitty did not come. 
 
 She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed 
 too well at the terrors; she would be beside
 
 40 THE NEST 
 
 him, her very heart beating on his, through all 
 the valley of the shadow; he would be able to 
 spare her nothing, and even in death he would 
 not be alone. And she was joy. The years 
 of pining and lassitude, the toying with danger, 
 the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had 
 burned the dross from her soul, all had made 
 another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of 
 six years before. She was joy; she knew how 
 to make it, to give it. She surprised him con- 
 tinually with her inventiveness in rapture. 
 When fear came upon them, she folded it from 
 him with encircling arms. When fear passed, 
 she seemed to lead him out into the dew and 
 sunlight of early morning and to show him new 
 paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All 
 artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the 
 littler charms, dropped from her. She was as 
 candid, as single-minded, as passionate as a 
 newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered 
 with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. 
 There was no forethought or plan in her tri- 
 umph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, 
 she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse 
 that grows from change to change, from beauty 
 to further beauty. Holland, summer-day after 
 summer-day, was conscious only of joy and 
 sorrow; of these, and of the still places where,
 
 THE NEST 41 
 
 sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. 
 The serpent of weariness still slept. 
 
 "Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day how 
 they talked and talked about themselves, re- 
 capturing every mutual memory, analysing 
 long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining 
 themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy 
 of being forgiven "Tell me; you loved me so 
 much that you were willing to give me up to 
 him, to make me happy, and to save me ; but, 
 if you hadn't been going to die oh darling ! 
 then you would have loved me too much to 
 give me up, wouldn't you ?" 
 
 His arm was about her, a book between them 
 unread, it usually was unread and they 
 were sitting in the re-consecrated summer- 
 house; Kitty had insisted on that punishment 
 for herself, had knelt down before her husband 
 there and, despite his protest, had kissed his 
 hands, with tears; the summer-house had be- 
 come their sweetest retreat. 
 
 He answered her now swiftly, and with a 
 little relief for the obvious answer : "But then 
 I couldn't have set you free, dear." 
 
 "No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But would 
 the fear of losing me have made you re-fall in 
 love with me? You know you only re-fell,
 
 42 THE NEST 
 
 darling, only knew how much you cared when 
 you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, 
 in saying that I loved you ; but you would have 
 loved me not in that dreadful, big, inhuman 
 way but loved me, just me loved me enough 
 to fight for me, wouldn't you ?" 
 
 He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes 
 and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. 
 Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? 
 Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her 
 smile ; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable ? 
 And as she fondled him, leaning close and ques- 
 tioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust 
 from the outer world blew into Paradise 
 through an unguarded gate. Well, why should 
 not the dear angel have a little dust on its shin- 
 ing hair ? It was a foolish angel, as he knew ; 
 and it lived for love, as he knew; and women 
 who did that and who didn't get loved enough 
 grew to look subtle he remembered the swift 
 train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, 
 so that there must be no subtlety to make her 
 beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise 
 one forgot the outer world and need not con- 
 sider it again; it was done with him and he 
 with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would 
 have loved you for yourself; I would have 
 fought for you."
 
 THE NEST 43 
 
 "And won me," she murmured, hiding her 
 face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if only it had 
 been sooner, sooner." 
 
 Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; 
 but he remembered it; remembered that the 
 dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, 
 on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the 
 bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the 
 outer world, of his old judgments and values. 
 He would have had to fight for her, of course ; 
 he would have had to save her ; but it wouldn't 
 have been because he had "re-fallen." That 
 was a secret that he kept from Kitty; it be- 
 longed to the contemplative region of thought, 
 where he was alone. And in Paradise, it 
 seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths. 
 
 Their ties with the outer world were all 
 slackened during these days. No one knew 
 the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one 
 or two friends who dropped in upon them for 
 a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing 
 a stage that now and then they agreed to have 
 set up before the bower. These figures, their 
 own relation to them, quickened the sense of 
 secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other 
 past unconscious eyes ; they had lovers' dexter- 
 ities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay 
 little escapades when they would run away for
 
 44 THE NEST 
 
 an hour drifting on the river or wandering in 
 the woods. And the formalities and chatter 
 of social life all these queer people interested 
 in queer things, people who used the present 
 only for the future, who were always planning 
 and looking forward, made the hidden truths 
 the sharper and sweeter. Nothing, for the two 
 lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that 
 made the marionettes so insignificant and that 
 made their love so deep. There was, for them, 
 no looking forward, no adapting of means to 
 ends. There were no ends, or, rather, they 
 were always at the end. And there was noth- 
 ing for them to do except to love each other. 
 
 "I feel sometimes as if we had become a 
 Pierrot and a Pierrette," Holland said to her. 
 "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such 
 an uncanny and charming creature; the fu- 
 ture doesn't exist for him at all." 
 
 Kitty, who had always been a literal person, 
 and whose literalness had now become so beau- 
 tifully appropriate, for what is literalness but 
 a seeing of the fact as standing still? Kitty 
 tried to smile but begged him not to jest about 
 such things. 
 
 "I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing 
 on our strange state. It's like a faiity-tale, the 
 life we lead."
 
 THE NEST 45 
 
 She turned her head, with the pathetic ges- 
 ture grown habitual with her of late, and hid 
 her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she 
 said, "do you hate to leave me !" 
 
 She had felt the moment of detached fancy 
 as separative, and he had now to soothe her 
 passionate weeping. 
 
 He found that there was a certain pendulum- 
 swing of mood in Paradise. Emotion was the 
 being of this mood, and to keep emotion one 
 must swing. 
 
 Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must 
 soothe him, or they must transcend the dark 
 necessities of their case by finding in each other 
 a joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it ob- 
 literated. This pendulum swung spontaneously 
 during those first weeks, it swung as their 
 hearts beat, from need to response. And, at 
 the beginning of the third week, it was not so 
 much a faltering in the need or the response 
 that Holland knew, as a mere lessening of the 
 swing; it didn't go quite so fast or carry him 
 quite so far. He became conscious of an un- 
 equal rhythm; Kitty seemed to swing even 
 faster and further. 
 
 She saw him as dead; that was the urgent 
 vision that lay behind her demonstrations and 
 ministrations; she saw him as more dead with
 
 46 THE NEST 
 
 every day that passed, and every moment of 
 every day was, to her, of passionate signifi- 
 cance. No one had ever been idealised as he 
 was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. 
 The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him 
 was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved 
 for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention 
 was the cutting of something that bled, and 
 clung the closer. Every moment was precious, 
 and any not given to love was a robbery from 
 her dwindling store. As the time grew less 
 her need for significance grew greater. Her 
 'sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense 
 of his, and he must share both. Resignation 
 to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime 
 against their love. Holland by degrees grew 
 conscious of keeping himself up to a mark. 
 
 It was then that the blossoms began to look 
 a little over-blown, the paths to become monot- 
 onous, the bowers to grow oppressive with 
 their heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun 
 beat down changelessly upon them. The dew 
 was gone, and though Kitty remained a prim- 
 itive Eve, he himself knew that in his conscious 
 ardour there hovered the vague presence of 
 something no longer pure, something unwhole- 
 some and enervating. 
 
 She saw him as dead, and the thought of
 
 THE NEST 47 
 
 death, always with her, renewed her pity and 
 her adoration; he knew that his own back- 
 ground lent a charm enthralling and poignant 
 to his every word, look and gesture. But for 
 him this charm and this renewal were lacking. 
 He could not feel such pity, either for her or 
 for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty, 
 and, by degrees, the tragedy would fade and 
 the beauty of their last weeks together would 
 remain with her. There was no cavern yawn- 
 ing behind Kitty's figure; life, inexorably, 
 showed him her smiling future. 
 
 And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to 
 have to die, it was a tragedy one got used to. 
 He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't 
 been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. 
 No : he could keep up ; he could see to it that the 
 pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide 
 from himself that its swing was growing me- 
 chanical. 
 
 By the end of the third week the serpent was 
 awake and walking in Paradise. Holland was 
 tired ; profoundly tired. 
 
 He found his wife's eyes on him one day as 
 they sat with books under the trees on the lawn. 
 He tried to read the books now, though in a 
 casual manner that would offer no offence to 
 Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes. He
 
 48 THE NEST 
 
 wanted very much to read and to forget him- 
 self to forget Kitty for a little while. It 
 was difficult to do this when such a desultory 
 air must be assumed, when he must be ready 
 to answer anything she said at a moment's 
 notice, and must remember to look up and smile 
 at her or to read some passage aloud to her at 
 every few pages. But he had been trying thus 
 to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer 
 interval than usual of the first held him be- 
 guiled, and alertness, when it returned, re- 
 turned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think 
 of the eyes she had gazed with on the day of 
 revelation in the library. They were candid, 
 they were frightened ; the eyes of the real child. 
 Now, as then, they were drinking in some new 
 knowledge; a new fear and an old fear, come 
 close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so 
 tired that he would have liked to look away and 
 to have pretended not to see ; but he was not so 
 tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, 
 as, tilting his hat over his eyes so that they were 
 'shadowed, he asked her what she was thinking 
 of. 
 
 She rose and came to him, kneeling down 
 beside his chair and putting her hands on his 
 shoulders. 
 
 "What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her,
 
 THE NEST 49 
 
 as he had asked on that morning three weeks 
 before. 
 
 "Nicholas Nicholas are you feeling 
 worse ?" she returned. 
 
 Holland was surprised and almost relieved. 
 It was no new demand, it was merely a sharper 
 fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he 
 was feeling worse and the end was approach- 
 ing. If so, any languor would be taken as 
 symptomatic of dissolution and not of indif- 
 ference, and he might relax his hold. Actually 
 a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lap- 
 ping through him. 
 
 "I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing 
 back her hair. "You know, I shall suffer 
 hardly any pain ; but I do feel very tired." 
 
 "In what way tired?" Another alarm was 
 in her voice. 
 
 "Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course, one 
 doesn't die without fading." 
 
 He felt, when he had said it, that the words, 
 in spite of his care, were cruel ; that she would 
 feel them as cruel; he had gone too fast; had 
 tried to grasp at his immunity too hastily. 
 
 "Nicholas!" she gasped. "You speak as if 
 I were accusing you !" 
 
 "Accusing me, darling ! How could you be ! 
 Of what?" 
 
 4
 
 50 THE NEST 
 
 "Oh, Nick," she sobbed, hiding her face on 
 his breast, "Am / tiring you? Do you some- 
 times want me to go away and to leave you 
 more alone?" 
 
 His heart stood still. Over her bowed head 
 he looked at the sunlit trees and flowers, the 
 hazy glory of the summer day, a phantas- 
 magoric setting to this knot of human pain and 
 fear, and he said to himself that unless he were 
 very careful he might hurt her irremediably; 
 he might rob her of the memory that was to 
 beautify everything when he was gone. 
 
 He had found in a moment, he felt sure, just 
 the right quiet tone, expressing a comprehen- 
 sion too deep for the fear of any misunderstand- 
 ing between them. "There would be no me 
 left, Kitty, if you went away. I am you all 
 that there is of me. You are life itself; don't 
 talk of robbing me of any of it ; I have so little 
 left." 
 
 She was silent for a moment, not lifting her 
 face, no longer weeping. Then in a voice cu- 
 riously hushed and controlled she said : "How 
 quiet you are; how peaceful you are how 
 terribly peaceful." 
 
 "You want me to be at peace, don't you, 
 dear?"
 
 THE NEST 51 
 
 "You don't mind leaving life. You don't 
 mind leaving me," she said. 
 
 "Kitty Kitty " 
 
 She interrupted his protest: "I've nothing 
 to give you but love ; I've never had anything to 
 give you but love. And you are tired of that. 
 You are going, you are going for ever. I shall 
 never see you again. And you don't mind! 
 You don't mind!" She broke into dreadful 
 sobs. 
 
 Helpless and tormented he held her, trying 
 to soothe, to reassure, to convince, recovering, 
 even, in the vehemence of his pity, the very 
 tones of passionate love, the personal note that 
 her quick ear had felt fading. She sobbed, and 
 sobbed, but answered him at last, in the pathetic 
 little child language of their first honeymoon 
 that they had revived and enriched with new, 
 sweet follies. But he felt that she was not 
 really comforted, that she tried to delude her- 
 self. 
 
 "You do feel tired in your body only in 
 your body? not in your soul?" she repeated. 
 "It isn't /, it's only you." 
 
 "It's only I who am dying," he almost felt 
 that, with grim irony, he would have liked to 
 answer for her complete reassurance. The
 
 52 THE NEST 
 
 funny, ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him; 
 she would rather have him die than have him 
 cease to love her. 
 
 Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, 
 seemed to gaze from green shadows among 
 branches ; the mocking faces of pucks and elves 
 to tilt and smile in the breeze-shaken flowers; 
 that subtle gaze, that sinister smile, of what 
 did it remind him? All Nature was laughing 
 at him, cruelly laughing; yet all Nature was 
 consoling him. 
 
 His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in 
 death and contradiction. Not affinity, not the 
 growing needs of normal life had brought them 
 together ; only the magic of doom and the crav- 
 ing to be loved. 
 
 Poor Kitty; she did not know. It was his 
 love she loved, his love she clung to and 
 watched for and caressed. She did not know 
 it, but she would rather have him dead than 
 have him loveless. That was the truth that 
 smiled the sinister smile. One might summon 
 one's courage to smile back at it, but one was 
 rather glad to be leaving it and Kitty. 
 
 And, in the days that followed, when from 
 the pretence of passion he could find refuge only 
 in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the 
 weariness, he began to wonder when the pre-
 
 THE NEST 53 
 
 tence would become reality. He began to want 
 to die. 
 
 This weariness, this irritation, this disgust 
 belonged to life rather than to death; it was a 
 sharp longing to escape from consciousness of 
 Kitty Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspi- 
 cion. It was a nostalgic longing for the old, 
 tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests. 
 The month was almost up, and yet he was no 
 worse; was he really going to last for another 
 month ? 
 
 He said to Kitty one morning that he must 
 go up to town. Her face grew ashen. "The 
 doctor! You are going to the doctor, Nich- 
 olas?" 
 
 "No, no; it's only that Collier is passing 
 through. I heard from him this morning. 
 He wants to see me." 
 
 "Why should you bother and think about 
 work now, darling?" 
 
 "Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can 
 until the end." 
 
 He tried to keep lightness in his voice and 
 patience out of it. 
 
 "Let him come down here. I'll write myself 
 and ask him." She, too, was assuming some- 
 thing. She, too, was afraid of him, as he of 
 her.
 
 54 THE NEST 
 
 "He hasn't time. He is on his way to the 
 Continent." 
 
 "It will be bad for you to travel now. And 
 London in August!" Her voice was grave, 
 reproachfully tender. 
 
 "No, dear, I promise you I will run no risk." 
 
 "Promise as much as you will" now, gaily, 
 sweetly, falsely, but how pathetically, she 
 clasped her hands about his arm; "but I 
 couldn't think of letting you go alone: you 
 didn't really believe I'd let you go alone, dar- 
 ling: I'll come too, of course. Won't that be 
 fun ! Oh, Nick, you want me to come ! You 
 don't want to get away!" The falsity broke 
 down and the full anguish of her suspicion was 
 in her voice and eyes. It was this sincerity 
 that pierced him and made him helpless sick 
 and helpless. He was able now to blindfold its 
 dreadful clear-sightedness by swift resource: 
 he acted his delight, his gratitude: he hadn't 
 liked to ask his dearest all the bother for only 
 a day and night ; he had thought it would bore 
 her, for he must be most of the time with Col- 
 lier ; but, yes, they would go together, since she 
 petted him so; they would do a play; he would 
 help her choose a new hat; it would be great 
 fun. 
 
 Yet, while he knotted the handkerchief
 
 THE NEST 55 
 
 around her eyes, turned her about and confused 
 her sense of direction, as if in a merry game, he 
 knew that fear and suspicion lurked for them 
 both in their playing. 
 
 He had, indeed, meant to go to the doctor, 
 but now that must be postponed. The meeting 
 with Collier, his chief at the Home Office, was 
 his only gulp of freedom. At the hotel Kitty 
 waited, and his heart smote him when he found 
 her sitting just as he had left her, mute, white, 
 smiling and enduring. She hadn't even been 
 to her dressmaker's or done any shopping as she 
 had promised him to do. "I know I am absurd ; 
 I know you think me, silly; but I can't I 
 can't do anything think anything but you!" 
 she said, her lips trembling. 
 
 "Absurd, darling, indeed !" he answered, "as 
 if you couldn't think of me and order a new 
 dress at the same time! You know I told you 
 I wanted to see you in a pale blue lawn isn't 
 lawn the pretty stuff? And what of the hat? 
 You do want one? Come, let us go out and 
 I'll help you to choose it." 
 
 But she did not want to go out; she only 
 wanted to sit near him, lean her head against 
 him, have him make up to her for the hours 
 of loneliness. He knew that night at the play 
 that she hardly heard a word, and that when
 
 56 THE NEST 
 
 once or twice, he was lured from his absorption 
 and made to laugh, really forgetting, really 
 amused, his laughter hurt her. She gazed at 
 the stage with wide, vacant eyes. He felt the 
 strain of being in town with this desperate de- 
 votion beside him worse than the strain of being 
 shut up with it in the country; for there Kitty 
 need hide and repress nothing, and his danger 
 of hurting her by forgetfulness was not so 
 great. He was like a prisoner led about by his 
 gaoler, manacles on his wrists and ankles and 
 a yoke on his neck ; there was a certain relief in 
 going back to prison where, at all events, one 
 wasn't so tormented by the sights and sounds 
 of freedom, nor so conscious of chains and the 
 watchful eye upon one. 
 
 "This is the end," he thought, as, in the train, 
 they sat side by side, holding hands and very 
 silent, but that, from time to time, when their 
 eyes met, she would smile her doting, hungry 
 smile and murmur : "Darling." 
 
 After this, the prison again; the high walls 
 and stifling sweetness of Paradise, and then, 
 thank goodness, release. 
 
 How strange a contrast to the journey a 
 month ago, when, stunned, shot through, he 
 had only felt the bliss of home-coming, the 
 longing for the nest. It was all nest now;
 
 THE NEST 57 
 
 there was no space for the fear of death. He 
 was shut in, smothered by this panting breast 
 of love.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 HE knew that evening that Kitty was hor- 
 ribly frightened from the fact that she 
 was horribly careful. She did not once press 
 for assurances or demonstrations of love. She 
 foresaw all his needs, even his need of silence. 
 Delicately assiduous, she pulled his chair near 
 the lamp for him, lit his cigar, cut the pages of 
 his review, even brought a footstool for his feet, 
 saying, when he protested, "You are tired, dar- 
 ling; you must let me wait on you." 
 
 "And won't you read, or sew, or do some- 
 thing, dear?" he asked, as she drew her low 
 chair near his. 
 
 "I only want to sit here quietly, and look at 
 your dear face," she said. 
 
 And she sat there, quietly, not moving, not 
 speaking, only mutely, gently, fiercely watching 
 him. Holland felt his hand tremble as he 
 turned the pages. 
 
 A full hour passed so. Accurately, punc- 
 tually, he turned the pages ; he had not under- 
 
 58
 
 THE NEST 59 
 
 stood one page; and he had not once looked 
 up. 
 
 It was almost a sense of nightmare that grew 
 upon him, as if he were going to sit there for 
 ever, hearing the clock tick, hearing Kitty 
 breathe, knowing that he was watched. Fear, 
 pity, and repulsion filled his soul. 
 
 He longed at last to hear her voice. He did 
 not dare to hear his own ; something in it would 
 have broken and revealed him to her ; but if she 
 would but speak the nightmare might pass. 
 And, with the longing, furtively, involuntarily, 
 he glanced round at her. 
 
 Her eyes were on him, fixed, shining. How 
 horrible; how ridiculous. Their gaze smote 
 upon his heart and shattered something, the 
 nightmare, or the repulsion. An hysterical sob 
 and laugh rose in his throat. He dropped the 
 review, leaning forward, his elbows on his 
 knees, his head in his hands, and the tears ran 
 down his face. 
 
 She was there, of course, poor creature, there, 
 close, holding him, moaning, weeping with him. 
 He could do nothing but yield to her arms, feel 
 his head pillowed on her breast, and mingle his 
 tears with hers; but horribly, ridiculously, he 
 knew that laughter as well as weeping shook 
 him.
 
 60 THE NEST 
 
 And he heard her saying "Oh, my darling 
 my darling is it because you must leave me ?" 
 and heard himself answering "Yes, because 
 I must leave you." 
 
 "You love me so much so much " 
 
 "So much," he echoed. 
 
 And, her voice rising to a cry, he knew how 
 dead, as if sounded from the cavern, his echo 
 had been: "You are not dying! Not now!" 
 And it was again only the echo he could give 
 her: "Not now," it came. Why not now? 
 Why could it not be, mercifully now? When 
 in heaven's name was he going to die? 
 
 A strong suspicion rose in him and seemed 
 to pulse into life with the strong beat of his 
 heart. How strong a beat it was; how faint 
 and far any whispers of the old ill. What if 
 he were not going to die ? What if he were to 
 go on loving Kitty for a lifetime ? 
 
 And at that the mere hysterics conquered 
 the tears; he burst out laughing. There, on 
 Kitty's breast, he laughed and laughed, help- 
 less, cruel and ridiculous. 
 
 Terrified, she tried to still him. When he 
 lifted his face he saw that hers was ashen, set 
 to meet the tragedy of imminent parting. Did 
 she think it the death rattle ? 
 
 He flung his head back from her kisses,
 
 THE NEST 61 
 
 flung himself back from her arms. Still laugh- 
 ing the convulsive laugh he got up and pushed 
 away the chair. 
 
 "I'm tired I'm so tired, Kitty," he said. 
 
 She sat, her hands fallen in her lap, staring 
 at him. 
 
 "You are tired, too," he went on; "it's been 
 a tiring day, hasn't it ? we have been through 
 a lot, haven't we, poor Kitty? Poor Kitty: 
 do go to bed now. Will you go to bed, and 
 leave me here to rest a little?" 
 
 "Nicholas, are you mad what has happened 
 to you ?" she murmured, spellbound, not daring 
 to move. 
 
 "Why, I'm ill, you know; I'm very ill. I'm 
 not mad I'm only so abominably tired. You 
 mustn't ask questions ; I can't stand it, I can't 
 
 stand it " And, leaning his arms on the 
 
 back of the chair, resting his face on them, with 
 tears of sheer fatigue, tears untouched by 
 laughter "I'm so tired. I want to be alone," 
 he sobbed. 
 
 The abominable moments that followed were 
 more full of shame for him than any he had 
 even known: of shame, and of relief. He 
 had torn his way, with his words, out of the 
 nest; he had fallen to the ground. He was 
 ashamed and horrified, yet oh, the joy, the
 
 62 THE NEST 
 
 deep joy of being on the ground, out in the cold, 
 fresh world, out of the nest. 
 
 At last he heard her speak, slowly, softly, 
 with difficulty, as though she were afraid 
 of angering him. "Shall I go away, Nicho- 
 las?" 
 
 His face was still hidden. "Yes, do go to 
 bed," he answered. 
 
 "I can do nothing for you ?" 
 
 "Nothing, dear." 
 
 "You are not dying?" 
 
 "No; I'm not feeling in the least ill." 
 
 "You would send for me if you were 
 dying?" 
 
 "Dear Kitty, of course." 
 
 "And, " she had risen, not daring to 
 
 draw near, he knew that the trembling voice 
 came through tears : "And, you love me ? you 
 love me a little ?" 
 
 "Dear Kitty of course I love you." 
 
 It was over. She was gone. She had not 
 asked for his good-night kiss. It was like a 
 sword between them. 
 
 He drew a long breath, lifting his head. 
 
 Alone. There was ecstasy in the thought. 
 
 He walked out into the garden and looked 
 up at the stars as he walked. There had been 
 no stars in the nest.
 
 THE NEST 63 
 
 He didn't think of death. There had been 
 too much thinking of death; that was one of 
 the things he was tired of. Still less did he 
 want to think of Kitty or of himself. 
 
 He looked at the stars and thought of them, 
 but not in any manner emotional or poetical; 
 he thought of astronomical facts, dry, sound, 
 delightful facts: he looked at the darkened 
 trees and dim flowers and thought of botany: 
 the earth he trod on was full of scientific in- 
 terest; the Pierrots, the fairies and the angels 
 yes, the angels too were vanished. He hun- 
 gered for impersonal interests anci informa- 
 tion. 
 
 Kitty would, indeed, have thought him mad ; 
 after the calming walk he came in, lit a cigar 
 and sat for hours studying. 
 
 Before Kitty was up next morning he was 
 on his way back to London to see the great 
 specialist. 
 
 It was a long visit he paid, an astonishing 
 visit, though the astonishment, really, was not 
 his; life had seemed deeply to have promised 
 something when he had ceased to think of death 
 when he had ceased to want death, even. 
 That strong beating of his heart had been a 
 mute forestalling. The astonishment was the 
 good, great doctor's, and it was reiterated with
 
 64 THE NEST 
 
 an emphasis that showed something of wounded 
 professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, 
 humiliating to have made such a complete mis- 
 take, to have seen only one significance in 
 symptoms that, to far-sightedness clairvoyant 
 enough, should have hinted, at all events, at 
 another, and, as a result, to have doomed to 
 speedy death a man now obviously as far from 
 dying as oneself: "I can't forgive myself for 
 robbing you of a month of life," the doctor said. 
 "A month with death at the end of it can't be 
 called a month of life." 
 
 "Very much of life," said Holland. "So 
 much so that I hardly know yet whether I am 
 glad or sorry that you were mistaken." 
 
 He indeed hardly did know. All the way 
 down in the train he was thinking intently of 
 the new complicated life that had been given 
 back to him, and of what he should do with it. 
 At moments the thought seemed to overwhelm 
 him, to draw him into gulfs deeper than death's 
 had been. 
 
 All through that month life had meant the 
 moment only. The vistas and horizons seemed 
 now to open and flash and make him dizzy. 
 How could he take up again the burden of far 
 ends and tangled purposes? The dust of com-
 
 THE NEST 65 
 
 ing conflicts seemed to rise to his nostrils. Life 
 was perilous and appalling in its fluctuating 
 immensity. 
 
 But, with all the disillusion and irony of his 
 new experience, with all the unwholesome lan- 
 guor that had unstrung his will, some deeper 
 wisdom, also, had been given him. He could 
 turn from the nightmare vision that saw time 
 as eternity. 
 
 The walk in the night had brought a mes- 
 sage. He could not say it, nor see it clearly, 
 but the sense of its presence was like the cool- 
 ness and freshness of wings fanning away 
 fevers and nightmare. Somewhere there it 
 hovered, the significance of the message, some- 
 where in those allied yet contrasted thoughts 
 of eternity and time. 
 
 There had been his mistake, his and Kitty's, 
 the mistake that had meant irony and lassitude 
 and corruption. To heap all time into the 
 moment, to make a false eternity of it, was to 
 arrest something, to stop blood from flowing, 
 thought from growing, was to create a night- 
 mare distortion, a monstrous, ballooned trav- 
 esty of the eternity that, in moving life, 
 could never be more, could never be less, than 
 the ideal life sought unceasingly.
 
 66 THE NEST 
 
 As for Paradise, what more grotesque illu- 
 sion than to see it with walls around it, what 
 more piteous dream than to feel it narrowed to 
 a nest?
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 HE found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, 
 alone, with empty hands and empty, 
 waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and 
 that his departure, only a brief note to break it 
 to her, had added deep indignation to her sor- 
 row. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by 
 the change she felt in him. She had cast aside 
 subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that 
 met him in her eyes. 
 
 He had intended to tell her his news at once 
 and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he 
 entered, a smile, though he did not know this, 
 strangely like that smile of reassurance and 
 consolation that had met her in the library a 
 month ago. 
 
 But she gave him no time for a word. 
 
 Leaping from her chair she faced him, and 
 with a vision still clearer than that which had 
 showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now 
 her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish vio- 
 lence and weakness. "Cruel ! Cruel ! Cruel !" 
 she cried. 
 
 67
 
 68 THE NEST 
 
 He remained standing at a little distance 
 from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. 
 Her words of reproach rushed forth and over- 
 whelmed him like a frenzied torrent. 
 
 "To leave me without a word, after last 
 night ! You treat me like a dog that one kicks 
 aside because it wearies one with its love. 
 You have no heart I've felt it for days and 
 days! No heart! You hate me! You de- 
 spise me! And what have I done to deserve 
 it but love love love you like the poor dog ! 
 But I know I know It is Sir Walter. You 
 can't forgive me that It has poisoned every- 
 thing that ignorant folly of mine. At first 
 you thought you could forgive, and then you 
 grew to hate me. And I I " her voice 
 choked, gasped into sobs; "I have only loved 
 you loved you more and more " 
 
 "Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. 
 "I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It 
 was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw 
 that well; a desperate hope. 
 
 "It's false!" she cried. "You have! You 
 thought at first that you would be magnani- 
 mous and save me, you could be magnani- 
 mous because you were going to die it's easy 
 enough to be magnanimous if you are going 
 to die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad
 
 THE NEST 69 
 
 and to stand there and smile and smile as if you 
 were only sorry for me. But you found out 
 that you were alive enough to be jealous after 
 all, and that you could not really forgive me, 
 and then you hated me." 
 
 "Kitty you know that you do not believe 
 what you are saying." 
 
 "Can you deny that if you had been going 
 to live you would not have forgiven me?" 
 
 "I can. I could have forgiven. But then, 
 as I said to you that day, Kitty, on the lawn, 
 it would have been more difficult to save 
 you." 
 
 "Your love, then, was a pretence to save 
 me!" 
 
 "Nothing was pretence, at first," he an- 
 swered her patiently. "At first I was only 
 glad for your sake that I was going to be out 
 of the way so soon ; and when I found that you 
 could care for me again I was glad that I had 
 still a month to live with you." 
 
 His words smote on her heart like stones. 
 He saw it and yearned over her pain ; but such 
 yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, 
 he knew, the poison in her veins that mad- 
 dened her. 
 
 She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He 
 had not put it into words, but with the abandon-
 
 70 THE NEST 
 
 ment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it. 
 
 "It was, then, because it was only for a 
 month." 
 
 He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was 
 glad?" 
 
 "That you loved me." 
 
 Across the room, in a long silence, they 
 looked at each other. And in the silence an- 
 other truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary. 
 
 "Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because 
 it was only for a month?" 
 
 The shock went as visibly through her as 
 though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at 
 her breast. "You mean you mean " she 
 stammered "Oh you don't believe that I 
 love you You believe that it could pass, 
 with me, as it has with you !" She threw her- 
 self into the chair, casting her arms on the 
 back, burying her face in them. 
 
 Holland, timidly, approached her. He was 
 afraid of the revelation he must make. "I be- 
 lieve that you do love me, Kitty, and that I 
 love you ; but not in the way we thought. We 
 neither of us could go on loving like that; it 
 was because it was only for a month that we 
 thought we could. It wasn't real." 
 
 "Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference 
 the cruel difference. You love me in that ter-
 
 THE NEST 71 
 
 rible way the way that could give me up and 
 not mind; but I am in love with you; that's 
 the dreadful difference. Men get over it; but 
 women are always in love." 
 
 Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. 
 Holland was abashed before the helpless reve- 
 lation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For 
 women the brooding dream ; for men the active 
 dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold 
 of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurd- 
 ity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt 
 that, for her sake, he must draw her away from 
 the contemplation of it. That was one thing 
 he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must 
 manage to fly or fall out of the nest; she 
 must get, in some way, more dust into her life. 
 He had forgotten the news he was to tell her; 
 he had forgotten all but her need. 
 
 "Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; 
 "but isn't it, in a way, that women are merely 
 in love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it 
 is with anybody with me or with Sir Walter ; 
 I mean, anybody who seems to promise more 
 love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. 
 But I wish I could shake you out of being in 
 love. I want you to be more my comrade than 
 you have been. Don't let us think so much 
 of love."
 
 72 THE NEST 
 
 But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a com- 
 rade. I want a lover." 
 
 And, in the silence that followed, lifting her 
 head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him. 
 
 "You talk as if we could be comrades," she 
 said. "You talk as if we were to go on living 
 together. What did the doctor say? I don't 
 believe that you are going to die." 
 
 He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy 
 was there, between them ; but the tragedy upon 
 which all their fictitious romance had been built 
 was to tumble about their ears. 
 
 It was as if he had all along been deceiving, 
 misleading her, acting on false pretences, win- 
 ning her love by his borrowed funereal splen- 
 dour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down 
 and stammering over the silly confession, he 
 said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going 
 to die." 
 
 He did not look at her for some moments. 
 He was sure that she was deaf and breathless 
 with the crash and crumbling. 
 
 Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he 
 found that she was staring at him, curiously, 
 intently. She had found herself: she had 
 found him; and oh yes he saw it he was 
 far from her. The stare, essentially, was one
 
 THE NEST 73 
 
 of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and 
 robbed ; she could not forgive him. 
 
 "Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?" 
 
 Her sombre gaze dwelt on him. 
 
 "Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded. 
 
 She answered him at last : "How dare you 
 ask me that? How dare you ask me whether 
 I am sorry that you are not going to die ? You 
 must know that it is an insult." 
 
 "I mean if I disappointed failed you so " 
 
 "I must wish you dead ? You have a charm- 
 ing idea of me." 
 
 How her voice clashed and clanged with the 
 hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer 
 world. After the hush, the gentleness of Par- 
 adise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and be- 
 wildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a 
 great city. 
 
 "Don't be cruel," he murmured. 
 
 "I? Cruel!" she laughed. 
 
 She got up and walked up and down the room. 
 A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in 
 her. He saw that she did not trust herself 
 to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to her- 
 self and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul. 
 
 He was not to die; he was not her lover; 
 and Kitty was the primitive woman. She
 
 74 THE NEST 
 
 could be in love, but she could not love unless 
 pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion 
 had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos 
 had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. 
 For it was he who had drawn away. She was 
 humiliated to the dust. 
 
 And that she made a great effort upon her- 
 self, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not 
 be betrayed, he guessed presently when, look- 
 ing persistently away from him and out at the 
 garden their garden ! alas ! where a fine rain 
 fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your 
 sorrow is over. I hope that you will find hap- 
 pier things and realler things than you have 
 found in this month. I will remember all that 
 you have said to-day. I think that you have 
 cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again." 
 
 "Kitty ! Kitty !" he breathed out. She hurt 
 him too much, the poor child, arming its empty 
 heart against him. "Don't speak like that. 
 Remember the month has been beautiful." 
 
 The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility 
 did not leave them. "Beautiful ? When it has 
 not been real ?" 
 
 "Can't we remember the beauty make some- 
 thing more real?" he now almost wept. But 
 there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. 
 He was not in love with her. And, like a nest
 
 THE NEST 75 
 
 of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations 
 her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions 
 and withdrawals was awake within her. She 
 smiled, a smile that, seeking magnanimity, 
 found only bitterness. "You must speak for 
 yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, 
 and you have spoiled the beauty." 
 
 The servants came in while she spoke and 
 she moved aside to make way for the placing 
 of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon 
 her yet ; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes 
 sparkled. But she had regained the place she 
 meant to keep. She would own to no discom- 
 fitures deeper than those that were creditable to 
 her. Moving here and there, touching the 
 flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scat- 
 tered on a table, she was even able to smile 
 again at him a smile almost kind, and keep- 
 ing, before him, as well as for the servants, all 
 the advantage of composure. 
 
 That smile would often meet him through- 
 out life, and so he would see her, moving del- 
 icately and gracefully, making order and come- 
 liness about her, for many years. She set the 
 key. It was the key of their future life to- 
 gether, Holland knew, as he heard her say: 
 "Do sit down and rest. You must want your 
 tea after that tiresome journey."
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 THE drama of the drawing-rooms had be- 
 gun years ago, but Owen Stacpole did not 
 come into it until the day on which his cousin 
 Gwendolen, after examining the box of bric-a- 
 brac, remarked, refolding the last pieces of 
 china in their dusty newspapers, that they were 
 rubbish, and silly rubbish, too, of just the sort 
 that Aunt Pickthorne had always unerringly 
 accumulated. The box had arrived that morn- 
 ing, a legacy from this deceased relative; it 
 had been brought up to the drawing-room and 
 placed upon a sheet near the fire, so that Mrs. 
 Conyers might examine its contents in com- 
 fort, and Owen, while he wrote at the black 
 lacquer bureau in the window, had been aware 
 of Gwendolen's gibes and exclamations behind 
 him. Now, when she asserted that she would 
 send the whole futile collection down to Mr. 
 Glazebrook and see if he would give her enough 
 for it to buy a pair of gloves with, Owen rose 
 
 79
 
 80 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 and limped to join her and to look down at 
 the wooden box into which she was thrusting, 
 with some vindictiveness, the dingy parcels. 
 
 "Have you looked at them all ?" he inquired. 
 "I forget was your Aunt Pickthorne a Mrs. or 
 a Miss? And how long has it been since she 
 died?" 
 
 "About six months, poor old thing. And 
 these treasures have evidently never been dusted 
 since. She was a Mrs. Her husband was old 
 Admiral Pickthorne don't you remember? 
 .and they lived, after he retired, at Cheltenham. 
 Two more guileless Philistines I've never 
 known. It used to make me feel quite ill to 
 go and stay with them when I was a girl. I've 
 hardly been at all since then, and that's prob- 
 ably why she selected all the most hideous 
 objects in her drawing-room to leave me. How 
 well I remember that drawing-room! Cro- 
 cheted antimacassars; and a round, mahogany 
 centre-table on which a lamp used to stand in 
 the evening; and the wall-paper of frosted 
 robin's-egg-blue, with stuffed birds in cases, and 
 terracotta plaques framed in ruby plush, hang- 
 ing upon it a perfectly horrible room. Half 
 a dozen of the plaques are in there; the birds 
 she spared me. She had one or two lovely old 
 family things which I'd allowed myself to hope
 
 8i 
 
 for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no; 
 there's nothing worth looking at." 
 
 Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands to- 
 gether, and rose from her knees. She was, 
 at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman; tall, 
 of ample form, and attired with fashionable ease 
 and fluency. Fashion had been a late develop- 
 ment with Gwendolen. In her gaunt and wist- 
 ful girlhood she had worn her hair in droop- 
 ing Rossettian masses, and her throat had been 
 differently bare. Now she was as accurate 
 as she was easy. Her hair was even a little 
 too sophisticatedly distended, and her long pearl 
 ear-rings, though they became the tender violet 
 of her eyes, emphasized, as her former Pre- 
 Raphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a 
 certain genial commonplaceness in the contours 
 of her cheek and chin. But almost fat and de- 
 cisively unpoetical as she had become, it was 
 undeniable that this last phase of dress and, 
 in especial, these widow's weeds, with sinuous 
 lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became 
 her better than any in which Owen remembered 
 to have seen her. 
 
 Gwendolen's drawing-room, too, had under- 
 gone, since the days of her girlhood, as com- 
 plete a metamorphosis as she had. When she 
 had married and left the big house in Kensing-
 
 82 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 ton where Owen had spent many a happy holi- 
 day when she had married crabbed old Mr. 
 Conyers, the Chislebridge dignitary, and gone 
 to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at 
 once expressed themselves luxuriantly in large- 
 patterned wall-papers and deep-cushioned di- 
 vans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantel- 
 piece or cast irrelevantly over carved Indian 
 screens. Her teas had been brought in on trays 
 of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like 
 opening between the front and back drawing- 
 room had been hung with translucent curtains 
 of beaded reeds, through which one had to 
 plunge as though through a sheet of dropping 
 water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and 
 rattle and the perfume of burning Eastern pas- 
 tilles that greeted one when, emerging, one 
 found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the 
 divans and the brasses and the palms. In 
 those days Gwendolen had been draped rather 
 than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of 
 her languid arms and wrists seemed more 
 adapted to a dulcimer than to a tea-pot. But 
 she dispensed excellent tea, and though her eyes 
 were appropriately yearning, her talk was quite 
 as reassuringly commonplace as Owen had al- 
 ways found it. 
 
 It was only in the course of years that the
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 83 
 
 reed curtains and the carved Indian screens and 
 the divans ebbed away; but the change was 
 complete at last, and he found Gwendolen, with 
 undulated hair puffed over a frame, and a small 
 waist, large waists not having then come in, 
 receiving her visitors in the most clear, calm, 
 austere of rooms, with polished floor, Sheraton 
 furniture, and Japanese colour-prints framed in 
 white hanging on pensive spaces of willow-leaf- 
 green wall. Gwendolen talked of Strauss's 
 music and of the New English Art Club, was in- 
 dignant at the prohibition of "Monna Vanna," 
 and to some no longer apt remark of an aspir- 
 ing caller answered that to speak so was surely 
 to Ruskinize. He realized on this occasion that 
 Gwendolen had become the arbiter of taste in 
 Chislebridge. He followed her into several 
 drawing-rooms and observed that she had set 
 the fashion in furniture and wall-paper; that 
 some were pushing their way -toward Japanese 
 prints, and some were even beginning to babble 
 faintly of Manet. Five years had passed since 
 then, and now, on this his first visit to Chisle- 
 bridge since old Mr. Conyers's death, another 
 change had taken place. Gwendolen's hips 
 were compressed, her waist was large once 
 more, though of a carefully calculated large- 
 ness, and only in a fine bit of the old furniture
 
 84 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 here and there did a trace of the former green 
 drawing-room remain. This was certainly the 
 most interesting room that Gwendolen had yet 
 achieved. There had been little character, if 
 much charm, in the green drawing-room; one 
 knew so many like it. With a slight self-dis- 
 cipline, its harmonies were really easy to attain. 
 But it was not easy to attain a mingled richness 
 and austerity; to be recondite, yet lovely; to 
 set such cabinets of rosy old lacquer near such 
 Chinese screens or hang subtle strips of Chinese 
 painting on just the right shade of dim, white 
 wall. It took money, it took time, it took 
 knowledge to find such delicate cane-seated set- 
 tees framed in black lacquer, and to pick up 
 such engraved glass, such white Chinese por- 
 celain and white Italian earthenware. Melt- 
 ing together in their dim splendour and shin- 
 ing softness, they had so enchantingly arrested 
 Owen the night before that, pausing on the 
 threshold, he had said with a whole-hearted- 
 ness she had never yet heard from him, "Well, 
 Gwen, yours is the loveliest room I've ever 
 
 seen." 
 
 It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, 
 examining it more critically by the morning 
 light, he had found slight dissatisfactions. It 
 was perhaps a little too much like an admir-
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 85 
 
 ably sophisticated curiosity-shop. It was an ob- 
 ject to be examined with delight, hardly a sub- 
 ject to be lived with with love. And it almost 
 distressed him to see the touch of genial com- 
 monplaceness expressing itself pervasively in 
 the big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses 
 that burgeoned everywhere. They showed no 
 real sense of what the lacquer and glass and 
 porcelain demanded ; for they demanded surely 
 a more fragile, less obvious flower. And one 
 or two minor ornaments, though evidently 
 selected with scrupulous conscientiousness, 
 seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he had 
 again that morning, before seating himself to 
 write, repeated in all sincerity, "This is really 
 the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from where 
 she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had an- 
 swered, following his eyes, "I am so glad you 
 like it, dear Owen." 
 
 Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her 
 fondness had never been so marked. It was 
 of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He 
 had never felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her 
 drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds 
 became her, and she was, as she had always 
 been, the kindest of creatures. In every sense 
 the house would be a pleasanter one to stay 
 at than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen
 
 86 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 had not liked old Mr. Conyers, who had had too 
 much the air of thinking himself an historical 
 figure and his breakfast historical events, who 
 snubbed his wife and quoted Greek and Latin 
 pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers 
 and duchesses who sometimes sojourned under 
 his roof, with an unctuousness that made more 
 marked the aridity of his manner toward less 
 illustrious guests. The Conyers had come to 
 count in the eyes of Chislebridge and the sur- 
 rounding country as the social figure-heads of 
 the studious old town, and Owen had found 
 himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing 
 cousin, year by year of relatively less impor- 
 tance in the eyes of Gwendolen's husband. 
 Actually, as it happened, he had during those 
 years become almost illustrious himself ; but his 
 austere distinction, such as it was, had been 
 as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left 
 him as gently impersonal as before, and even 
 more impoverished. Negligible-looking as he 
 knew he was, he had sometimes been amused 
 to note old Mr. Conyers's bewilderment when 
 a cabinet minister or a duchess manifested their 
 pleasurable excitement in meeting him. As 
 for Gwendolen, her essential loyalty and kind- 
 ness had always remained the same since the 
 days when she had protected him from the sal-
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 87 
 
 lies of her boisterous brothers and sisters in 
 the Kensington family mansion the same till 
 now. Last night and to-day he had recognised 
 a difference. He wondered whether he was 
 a conceited fool for imagining in Gwendolen a 
 dwelling tenderness, a brooding touch, indeed, 
 of reminiscent wistfulness. Was it to show 
 an unbecoming complacency if he allowed 
 his mind to dwell upon the possibilities that 
 this development in Gwendolen presented to 
 his imagination? He was delicate and poor 
 and, despite a large visiting-list, he was lonely. 
 He was fond of Gwendolen and of her two 
 nice, dull boys. She amused him, it was true, 
 as she had always amused him ; for though her 
 drawing-room had become interesting, though 
 she had developed a sense of humour, or at 
 least the intention of humorousness, though 
 she often attempted playfulness and even irony, 
 she was still at heart as disproportionately 
 earnest as she had been in youth. But Gwen- 
 dolen would make no romantic demands upon 
 him, and she would not expect him to take even 
 red lacquer as seriously as she did, or to fol- 
 low with the same breathlessness the erratic 
 movements of modern aestheticism. She was 
 accustomed to his passive unresponsiveness, 
 and would resent it no more in the husband than 

 
 88 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 in the friend. Altogether, as he sat there writ- 
 ing at Gwendolen's lovely bureau, he knew that 
 a sense of homely magic grew upon him. 
 
 Next morning, wandering about the pleasant 
 streets of the old town, he found himself before 
 the window of Mr. Glazebrook's curiosity-shop 
 a shop well known to more than Chislebridge. 
 He paused to look at the objects disposed with 
 a dignified reticence against a dark background, 
 and his eye was attracted by a very delightful 
 red lacquer box that at once made him think 
 of Gwendolen's drawing-room. Just the thing 
 for her, it was. But as he entered the shop, 
 Mr. Glazebrook leaned from within and took it 
 from its place in the window. He was showing 
 it to another customer. 
 
 Owen now quite vehemently longed to pos- 
 sess the box, which, he saw, as Mr. Glazebrook 
 displayed it, was cunningly fitted with little 
 inner segments, beautifully patterned in gold. 
 Feigning an indifferent survey of the shop, he 
 lingered near, hoping that his rival would re- 
 linquish her opportunity. 
 
 "Five pounds ! O dear, that is too much for 
 me, I'm afraid," he heard her say, and, at the 
 voice, he turned and looked at her. The voice 
 was unusual a rapid, rather husky voice that 
 made him think of muffled bells or snow-bound
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 89 
 
 water, gay in rhythm, yet marred in tone, al- 
 most as though the speaker had cried a great 
 deal. She was an unusual figure, too, though 
 he could not have said why, except that her 
 dress seemed to recall bygone fashions quaintly, 
 though without a hint of dowdiness or affecta- 
 tion. She wore a skirt and jacket of soft gray, 
 with pleated lawn at neck and wrists, and her* 1 
 small gray hat was wreathed with violets. She 
 held the lacquer box, and her face, rosy, crisp, 
 decisive, and showing, like her voice, a marred 
 gaiety, expressed her reluctant relinquishment 
 and her strong desire. Owen had seen a child 
 look at a forbidden fruit with just such an ex- 
 pression and he suddenly wished that he could 
 give the box to her rather than to Gwendolen, 
 to whom five pounds was a matter of small 
 moment. 
 
 "I think I mustn't," she repeated, after a 
 further hesitation, and setting the box down 
 with cherishing care. "Not to-day. And I 
 have so much red lacquer. It's like dram- 
 drinking." 
 
 Mr. Glazebrook smiled affably. He was 
 evidently on old-established terms with his 
 customer. "Perhaps you'd like to look round 
 a bit, Mrs. Waterlow," he suggested. "There 
 are some nice pieces of old glass in the inner
 
 90 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 room, quite cheap, some of them a set of old 
 champagne glasses." Mrs. Waterlow, saying 
 that she wanted some old champagne glasses, 
 moved away. 
 
 "Do you think the lady has given up that 
 box?" Owen asked. "I don't want to buy it 
 if there's a chance of her changing her mind." 
 
 Mr. Glazebrook said that there was no such 
 chance, the lady being one who knew her own 
 mind ; so the box was bought and Owen ordered 
 it to be sent to Gwendolen. He said then that 
 he would like to have a look round, too. He 
 really wanted to have another look at the lady 
 with the rosy face and the small gray hat 
 trimmed with violets. He peered into cabinets 
 ranged thickly with old glass and china, ex- 
 amined the Worcester tea-set disposed upon a 
 table and the case of Chinese tear-bottles and 
 Japanese netzukes, and presently made his way 
 into the smaller, dimmer room at the back. 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Glazebrook," said the lady in gray. 
 She frad heard his step, but had not turned. 
 She was kneeling before an open packing-case 
 and holding an object that she had drawn from 
 it. Owen suddenly recognised the case. It 
 was the one that Gwendolen yesterday had sent 
 down to Mr. Glazebrook. He called this per- 
 son, raising his hat, and the lady looked round
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 91 
 
 at him, too preoccupied to express her recog- 
 nition of her mistake by more than a vague mur- 
 mur of thanks. "Mr. Glazebrook," she said, 
 holding up a whitish object, "may I have this? 
 Is it expensive?" 
 
 "Well, really, I only glanced over the box. A 
 customer sent it down to me to dispose of, and I 
 didn't think there was anything in it worth 
 much. Let me see, Mrs. Waterlow; it's a 
 pagoda, I take it, a Chinese pagoda. We've 
 had them from time to time, in ivory and 
 smaller than this." 
 
 "This is in porcelain," said the lady, "and 
 beautifully moulded." 
 
 "I see, I see," said Mr. Glazebrook, taking 
 the fragile top segment of the disjointed pa- 
 goda in his hand, and rather at a loss ; "and it's 
 slightly damaged." 
 
 The lady in gray evidently was not a shrewd 
 bargainer. "Only a little," she said. "One or 
 two bits have been chipped out of the roofs, 
 and it's lost one or two of its little crystal 
 rings; but I think it's in quite good condition, 
 and I have it all here." She was placing one 
 segment upon the other. "They are all made 
 to fit, you see, with the little openings in each 
 story." 
 
 She had built it up beside her as she knelt
 
 92 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 on the floor, and it stood like a fragile, fantastic 
 ghost, with the upward tilt of its tiled roofs, 
 its embossed patterns, and the crystal rings 
 trembling from each angle of the roofs like 
 raindrops. "What a darling!" said Mrs. 
 Waterlow. "How much do you ask for it, 
 Mr. Glazebrook?" 
 
 Mr. Glazebrook, adjusting his knowledge of 
 the limitations of Mrs. Waterlow's purse to 
 his present appreciation of the pagoda and of 
 her desire for it, said genially, after a moment, 
 that from an old customer like herself he would 
 ask only forty-five shillings. 
 
 "Well, I think it's a great bargain, Mr. 
 Glazebrook," said Mrs. Waterlow. "And I'll 
 have it." 
 
 "Shall I send it round?" Mr. Glazebrook 
 asked. 
 
 "Yes, please; or, no, it isn't heavy," she 
 lifted it with both hands, rising with it and 
 looking like a Saint Barbara holding her 
 tower, "I can manage it to just round the 
 corner. Wrap it up for me, and I'll carry it 
 off myself." 
 
 When Owen saw his cousin again at lunch, 
 the red lacquer box had not yet arrived, and, 
 with a touch of friendly mockery, he said: 
 
 "Well, you have been unlucky, my dear
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 93 
 
 Gwen. There was the most charming piece of 
 old Chinese porcelain in that scorned Chelten- 
 ham box, and I saw Mr. Glazebrook sell it this 
 morning to a lady who wasn't to be put off by 
 dust and newspapers and plush-framed plaques. 
 She carried it off in triumph, saying that it was 
 a great bargain. And so it was ; but she might 
 have had it for half the money if she hadn't 
 informed Mr. Glazebrook of its probable 
 value." 
 
 Gwendolen fixed her mild, violet eyes upon 
 him. "A piece of old Chinese porcelain? Do 
 you mean that silly white pagoda?" 
 
 "You did see it, then?" 
 
 "See it? Haven't I seen it all my life? It 
 stood on a purple worsted mat on a little bam- 
 boo table between the Nottingham lace curtains 
 in one of Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room win- 
 dows, and looked like some piece of childish 
 gimcrackery bought at a bazaar, where, I'll 
 wager, she did buy it." 
 
 "Well, Mrs. Waterlow evidently didn't think 
 it gimcrackery, or, if she did, she didn't mind. 
 It looked to me, I confess, an exquisite thing. 
 But her admiration may have lent it its en- 
 chantment." 
 
 Gwendolen's eyes now fixed themselves more 
 searchingly than before.
 
 94 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 "Mrs. Waterlow? Did Mrs. Waterlow buy 
 it? How did you know it was Mrs. Water- 
 low ? I thought you'd never met her." 
 
 "I haven't; but I heard Mr. Glazebrook call 
 her by her name. She'd wanted to buy a red 
 lacquer box that I spotted in the window and 
 had gone in to get for you, my dear Gwen. It 
 was too expensive for her, so that it is yours, 
 and she went rummaging into the back shop 
 and found your box with the things just as 
 you and Mr. Glazebrook had left them, and in 
 no time she'd disinterred the pagoda." 
 
 Gwendolen apparently was so arrested by his 
 story that she forgot for the moment to thank 
 him for the lacquer box. 
 
 "Do you know her?" he asked. 
 
 "Know her? Know Cicely Waterlow? 
 Why, I've known her since she first came to 
 live here, years ago. She's a very dear friend 
 of mine," Gwendolen said, adding: "How 
 much did she pay for it? That wretched 
 man gave me only fifteen shillings for the lot." 
 
 "He made her pay forty-five shillings for 
 the pagoda. I suspect myself that it's worth 
 ten times as much. Does she care for things, 
 too lacquer and engraved glass?" 
 
 Gwendolen still showed preoccupation and, 
 he fancied, a touch of vexation.
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 95 
 
 "Care for them? Yes; who with any taste 
 doesn't care for them? Cicely has very good 
 taste, too, in her little way. She doesn't know 
 anything, but she picks up ideas and puts them 
 together very cleverly. I can't help thinking 
 that she'd never have given the pagoda a 
 thought if my white porcelain hadn't educated 
 her. I really can't believe that it's good, 
 Owen." 
 
 Owen waived the point. 
 
 "Who is Mr. Waterlow?" he asked. 
 
 "He has been dead for fifteen or sixteen 
 years. He died only a year after their mar- 
 riage. A very delightful man, so people say 
 who knew him. And Cicely lost her little girl, 
 to whom she was passionately devoted, five 
 years ago ; she has never really recovered from 
 that. She used to be so pretty, poor Cicely! 
 She's lost it all now. She cried her very eyes 
 out. She has a little money and lives with her 
 mother-in-law, old Mrs. Waterlow, who is very 
 fond of her. They don't entertain except in 
 the quietest way, or go out much, and I do 
 what I can to give Cicely a good time. I often 
 have her here to tea when I have interesting 
 people staying." 
 
 "Oh, that's good. Do count me as inter- 
 esting enough and ask her while I'm here."
 
 96 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 "Interesting enough, my dear Owen! I 
 don't suppose that Cicely often has a chance 
 of meeting such an interesting man as you. Of 
 course I'll ask her," said Gwendolen. Then, 
 remembering his gift : "It was nice of you to 
 get me a red lacquer box, Owen. I adore red 
 lacquer, and I'm quite sure, whatever you and 
 Cicely Waterlow may say, that it's worth a 
 hundred of your white pagodas." 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow came to tea next afternoon, 
 the last of Owen's stay. The drawing-room 
 was crowded, and Owen, when she was an- 
 nounced, was enjoying a talk with a dismal- 
 looking old philosopher who had plaintive, 
 white hairs on his nose and trousers that bagged 
 irremediably at the knees. 
 
 "Yes, indeed, I know her well," said Profes- 
 sor Selden, as Owen questioned him. "I play 
 chess with her once a week. Her little girl was 
 a great pet of mine. You never saw the little 
 girl?" 
 
 "Never, and I've not yet met Mrs. Water- 
 low. She is most charming-looking." 
 
 "The little girl was so much like her," said 
 Professor Selden, sadly. "Yes, she is a charm- 
 ing woman. Don't let me keep you from meet- 
 ing her. I am going to sit down here while 
 our young friend Dawkins plays. You know
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 97 
 
 Dawkins? Between ourselves, Mrs. Conyers 
 thinks too highly of him." 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow's eyes turned upon him as 
 he limped up to her and Gwendolen, and smil- 
 ing, she said, "Why, I saw you yesterday in 
 Mr. Glazebrook's shop." 
 
 "Yes," said Owen, "and there is the red 
 lacquer box." 
 
 "And you, Cicely, bought my pagoda," said 
 Gwendolen. 
 
 "Your pagoda ?" Mrs. Waterlow questioned, 
 her eyes, that seemed to open with a little diffi- 
 culty, resting on her hostess with some surprise. 
 "Was the pagoda yours?" 
 
 "Yes, mine," said Gwendolen. "It came in 
 a box of rubbish, you saw the kind of rub- 
 bish, a legacy from an old aunt, and I bundled 
 it off to Glazebrook. Owen says it is really 
 good. Is it?" 
 
 "I'm sure I don't know," said Mrs. Water- 
 low. 
 
 "I'm sure it is," said Owen, "and I liked 
 the accuracy with which you fell -in love with it 
 at first sight." 
 
 "I did fall in love with it, good or bad," said 
 Mrs. Waterlow. "Don't tell me that you want 
 it back again, Gwendolen. But if it was a 
 mistake, of course " 
 
 7
 
 98 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 He recognised in her the note of guileless- 
 ness and, with some decision, for he actually 
 perceived an eagerness in Gwendolen's glance, 
 interposed with, "But Gwendolen thinks it 
 gimcrackery, and wouldn't have it at any price. 
 Isn't it so, Gwendolen?" 
 
 Poor Gwendolen was looking a little glum; 
 but she was the most unresentful of creatures. 
 
 "Indeed, it is," she said. "I did think it gim- 
 crackery; but, to tell the truth, I never really 
 saw it at all. I can't believe you'd have seen 
 it, Cicely, standing on its worsted mat in my 
 Aunt Pickthorne's drawing-room. But I 
 wouldn't dream, of course, of taking it back; 
 and if it's really good, I'm more glad than I 
 can say that my loss should be your gain. 
 Now, won't you and Owen sit down here and 
 listen to my wonderful Perceval Dawkins ? Oh, 
 he is going to astonish the world some day." 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow and Owen, in the intervals of 
 the ensuing music, talked together. Seen more 
 closely, he found that her face, though not beau- 
 tiful, was even more singularly delightful than 
 he had thought it. She had eyes merry, yet 
 tired, like those of a sleepy child, and sweet, 
 small, firm lips and a glance and smile at once 
 very frank and very remote. There was about 
 her none of that aroma of sorrow that some
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 99 
 
 women distil from the tragedies of their lives, 
 and wear, even if unconsciously, like an allure- 
 ment. He felt that in Mrs. Waterlow sorrow 
 had been an isolating, a bewildering, a devas- 
 tating experience, making her at once more 
 ready to take refuge in the trivialities of life 
 and more unable to admit an intimacy into the 
 essentials. Yet the spring of vitality and mirth 
 was so strong in her that in all she said he felt 
 a quality restorative, aromatic, fragrant, as if 
 he were walking in spring woods and smelt 
 everywhere the rising sap and the breath of vio- 
 lets. She was remote, blighted, yet buoyant. 
 When she rose to go, he realised with sudden 
 dismay that to-day was his last in Chislebridge 
 and that he should not see her again for who 
 knew how long. 
 
 "Is the pagoda placed ?" he asked her. "Does 
 it fulfil your expectations ?" 
 
 "Yes, indeed," she said. "I spent two hours 
 yesterday in washing and mending it. It is 
 immaculate now, as lovely as a pearl." 
 
 "I wish I could see it," said Owen. 
 
 "Why, pray, then, come and see it. Can 
 you come to tea with me and my mother-in-law 
 to-morrow ?" 
 
 "I'm going away to-morrow," said Owen, 
 dismally. And then he bethought him. "Can't
 
 ioo THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 I walk back with you now? Is it too late? 
 Only five-thirty." 
 
 "Not in the least too late. Mamma will still 
 be having tea, and she loves people to drop in. 
 But ought you to come away?" Mrs. Water- 
 low glanced round the crowded room. 
 
 "I'll not be missed," he assured her with some 
 conscious speciousness. 
 
 Gwendolen, indeed, had time only for a little 
 stare of surprise when he told her that he was 
 going to look at the pagoda with Mrs. Water- 
 low. She was receiving new guests, richly 
 furred and motor-veiled ladies who had come in 
 from the country and were expatiating over the 
 beauties of the red lacquer cabinets, Gwen- 
 dolen's latest acquisitions. 
 
 "That will be delightful," she said; "and 
 now Owen will see that sweet drawing-room 
 of yours, dearest. You have made it so 
 pretty !" 
 
 Owen observed that Mrs. Waterlow, while 
 maintaining all the suavities of intercourse, did 
 not address Gwendolen as dearest. 
 
 It was not far to Mrs. Waterlow's, and he 
 said, in reply to her question, that he liked 
 walking, if she didn't mind going slowly on his 
 account. He found himself telling her, then, 
 about his lameness. A bad fall while skating
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 101 
 
 in boyhood had handicapped him for life. The 
 lamps had just been lighted and the evening 
 of early spring was blurred with mist. Cat- 
 kins hung against a faintly rosy sky, and in 
 the gardens that they passed the crocuses stood 
 thickly. Owen had a sense of adventure poig- 
 nant in its reminiscent magic. Not for years 
 had he so felt the savour of youth. He realised, 
 with a deep happiness, that Mrs. Waterlow 
 liked him; sometimes she laughed at things he 
 said, and once or twice when her eyes turned on 
 him he fancied in them the same expression of 
 happy discovery with which she had looked at 
 the pagoda. Well, he reflected, if she thought 
 him delightful, too, she had had to get 
 through a great many dusty newspapers to find 
 him. 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow lived, away from the 
 gardened houses of Chislebridge, in a small but 
 rather stately house with a Georgian fagade 
 which stood on one of the narrower, older 
 streets. They went up two or three stone steps 
 from the pavement and knocked at a very bright 
 and massive knocker, and the door was opened 
 by a middle-aged Quakerish maid. The draw- 
 ing-room was on the ground floor, and Mrs. 
 Waterlow led him in. 
 
 Owen's astonishment, when he entered,
 
 102 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 prompted him to stand still and to gaze about 
 him; but luckily he could not yield to the im- 
 pulse, for he had to cross to the fire, near which, 
 behind her tea-table, old Mrs. Waterlow sat, 
 and had to be presented to her and to the middle- 
 aged, academic-looking lady who was having 
 tea with her. He was glad of the respite, for 
 he had received a shock. 
 
 Old Mrs. Waterlow had dark, authoritative 
 eyes and white hair much dressed under black 
 lace, and the finest of hands, decorated with 
 old seals and old diamonds. She must, he felt, 
 be a companion at once inspiriting and disquiet- 
 ing, for she had the demeanour of a naughty, 
 haughty child, and, as she held Owen in talk 
 for some moments, he perceived that her con- 
 versation was of a sort to cause alarm and 
 amusement in her listeners. Poor old Profes- 
 sor Selden, who was mentioned, offered her an 
 opportunity for the frankest witticisms, and, 
 when her daughter-in-law protested, "Yes, 
 dear, I know you are fond of him," the old lady 
 replied, "and so am I; but he is, all the same, 
 very like a damp potato that has begun to 
 sprout." 
 
 "Now look at my pagoda, Mr. Stacpole," said 
 young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, 
 not pleased, and turning from the fire where
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 103 
 
 she had been standing with her foot on the 
 fender. 
 
 "Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-a-brac, 
 too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely 
 came home with this last treasure in as much 
 triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. 
 I resent the pagoda because it means that she 
 will go without a spring hat. She is always 
 coming home in triumph and always doing 
 without hats; and I sit here without an atom 
 of taste, and get the credit for hers. Frankly, 
 Sybilla, my dear," she addressed the academic 
 lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps 
 and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cosy 
 with apple-blossoms painted on it. I had such 
 a cosy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely 
 wouldn't let me use it." 
 
 Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. 
 Waterlow, he had seen it in the first astonished 
 glance, had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, 
 been imitating Gwendolen, and his whole con- 
 ception of her was undergoing a reconstruction. 
 He followed her to the table on which the white 
 pagoda stood, glancing about him and taking 
 in deep drafts of disillusion. Red lacquer and 
 Japanese prints, white porcelain and dimly 
 shining jars of old Venetian glass it was a 
 replica, even to its white walls, of Gwendolen's
 
 104 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it 
 were, humbly smiling, with folded hands and 
 no attempt at emulation. And in the midst, 
 beautifully in place on its little black lacquer 
 table, was the pagoda, offering him not a hint 
 of help, but seeming rather, to smile at him with 
 a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was 
 aware, as from the pagoda he brought his eyes 
 back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was 
 dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would 
 not have given the naive derivativeness a 
 thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full 
 of savour and independence? One thing only 
 helped him, beside the effortless atmosphere of 
 the room, and that was the fact he clung to 
 it that the glasses set everywhere among the 
 red and black and white were filled not, thank 
 goodness! with pink roses, but with poppy 
 anemones, white and purple and rose. And 
 the first thing he found to say of the pagoda 
 to Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in 
 here," and then, turning to the nearest bowl of 
 delicate colour, he added, "and how beautifully 
 these flowers go with your room !" 
 
 He wondered, as their eyes met over the 
 anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow guessed his 
 discomfiture. 
 
 When he saw Gwendolen that evening she
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 105 
 
 asked him at once whether he liked old Mrs. 
 Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked 
 young Mrs. Waterlow's drawing-room, and he 
 reflected that this was really very magnanimous 
 of her. 
 
 "She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her 
 daughter-in-law can't be dull with her." 
 
 "She's witty, but I always feel her a little 
 spiteful, too," said Gwendolen. "We never get 
 on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours 
 scored off, and she has such an eye for people's 
 foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite 
 likes it, either; but they are devoted to each 
 other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, 
 I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm 
 really fond of her." 
 
 
 
 HE did not go to Chislebridge for another six 
 months. Gwendolen asked him very pressingly 
 on various occasions, but twice he was engaged 
 and once ill and too depressed and jaded to 
 make the effort. It was the time of all others 
 when Gwendolen and her ministrations would 
 have been most acceptable, but he shrank from 
 submitting himself to their influences, feeling 
 that in his very need he might find too great a 
 compulsion. The thought of Gwendolen and of 
 her possible place in his life must be adjourned
 
 106 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 adjourned until she was well out of her 
 mourning and he was able to meet it more im- 
 partially. 
 
 He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her 
 and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily com- 
 fortable rooms near Manchester Square from 
 which for many years he had not had the ini- 
 tiative to move. There was more potency, he 
 found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the 
 real one. The sight of her brought back viv- 
 idly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, 
 they seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwen- 
 dolen had all the ethical advantages and even, 
 if it came to that, all the aesthetic ones ; yet, am- 
 biguous as the image of the other had become, 
 its charm challenged Gwendolen's virtues and 
 Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that 
 he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed 
 with Gwendolen, when he must see Mrs. Water- 
 low and weigh the possible friendship with her, 
 tarnished though it were, against the comfort- 
 able solutions that Gwendolen held out to him. 
 Again, curiously, he knew that the two could 
 not be combined. 
 
 Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the 
 south of France when he wrote to her in No- 
 vember and asked if he might stop a day and 
 night on his way through Chislebridge to a
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 107 
 
 country week-end. But he had a two-hours' 
 wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, 
 when he found himself on the platform, to go 
 and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow. 
 
 He drove up to the peaceful street where, 
 above the college wall that ran along its upper 
 end, a close tracery of branches showed against 
 the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight 
 shone in the spacious windows of the Georgian 
 house. His dismay, therefore, was the more 
 untempered when the mildly austere maid told 
 him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His 
 pause there on the threshold expressed his 
 condition, and the maid suggested that he might 
 care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow. 
 This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go 
 in at all. So he was led for a second time into 
 the drawing-room. 
 
 He had been obliged on the former visit to 
 conceal astonishment ; but now he found himself 
 alone, and no concealment was needed. And 
 the former astonishment was slight compared 
 with this one. He felt almost giddy as he 
 gazed about him. Nothing was the same. 
 Everything was fantastically, incredibly differ- 
 ent, except his eye caught it with a sharpened 
 pang of wonder the white pagoda; for there, 
 in the centre of the room, upon a round, ma-
 
 io8 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 hogany table, with heavily bowed and richly 
 carven legs, the white pagoda stood, and under 
 it an old bead mat, a mat of faded, old blue 
 beads, his eyes were riveted on the pagoda 
 and its setting, of white and gray and blue 
 beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular 
 intervals, raying out from the centre, books 
 were placed upon the table small, sober books 
 bound in calf. 
 
 So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incred- 
 ible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as 
 right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, 
 as it had been right in the other. It was the 
 one link that joined them, the one thread in the 
 labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, 
 with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to sym- 
 bolize its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, 
 extravagant, elaborate joke that ehe and the 
 pagoda were having together ? 
 
 For the whole room was now a joke. It 
 was furnished with a suite of black satin 
 sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, ex- 
 cruciating backs, all densely buttoned and 
 richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy- 
 chairs were laid antimacassars of finely cro- 
 cheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of 
 mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed 
 drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 109 
 
 the buttoned bodices of mid- Victorian matrons, 
 stood high-handled, white marble urns. An 
 oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, 
 and upon it stood two lustres ringed with prisms 
 of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble, 
 ornamented with two marble doves hovering 
 over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Be- 
 tween the clock and the lustres, on either side, 
 was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a 
 small nosegay of red and white roses. Ma- 
 hogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood 
 before the fire, and upon the walls hung, ex- 
 quisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a 
 whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower- 
 pieces, neatly coloured drawings, as accurate 
 and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labour 
 could make them. 
 
 No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful 
 dream; for, with it all, above it all, how and 
 why he could not say, the room was delightful. 
 It seemed to set one free from some burden 
 of appreciation that all unconsciously one had 
 been carrying and had been finding heavy. 
 One could live in it, laughing at and with it. 
 For it all laughed surely yes; and the elfish 
 chorus was led by the white pagoda, standing 
 like a Chinese Pierrot, at the centre of the 
 revels.
 
 no THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, 
 and her black lace shawl and lace-draped head 
 looked as appropriate in the room as everything 
 else seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with 
 a certain fixity, and in them he seemed to read 
 further significances. They held an intention, 
 gay, precise, such as he had felt in the room; 
 and they held, too, it might be, a touch of 
 light-hearted cruelty. 
 
 "Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he 
 knew that his state of astonishment had spoken 
 from his face. 
 
 He stared round him again, smiling. 
 
 "It makes me feel," he said, "like the old 
 woman in the nursery rhyme whose skirts were 
 cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One 
 says, 'If I be I/ " 
 
 "And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Water- 
 low ; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that 
 you can be assured of your identity. I am 
 really more aware of my own in this room than 
 in any I've lived in for years. It is like 
 one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms 
 weren't so important then as they are now, and 
 the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, 
 were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said 
 the old lady moving to her tea-table and seating 
 herself, "to observe the way in which people
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA in 
 
 are assessed by their tastes and their belong- 
 ings. You say of some one that she is a dull 
 or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and 
 rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such 
 wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, 
 Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you 
 again." 
 
 "But tell me, where is the other room?" 
 Owen asked, drawing his chair to the table, 
 "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?" 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of 
 half-malicious mystery. 
 
 "That is a secret, my own little secret, just 
 as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for 
 my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was fin- 
 ished last week, by the way, and you are the 
 first person to see it. Your cousin is in the 
 south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Water- 
 low, with bland inconsequence. 
 
 "Yes; I'm only passing through. Gwendo- 
 len's been gone for nearly a month." 
 
 "Yes ; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still 
 with the genial blandness. "And as to our 
 little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is 
 in many ways a room of my girlhood. The 
 furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when 
 the idea struck her, had it brought from the 
 garret of my old home, where it has stood in
 
 ii2 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 disgrace for many a year. She has been clever 
 about it, hasn't she ?" 
 
 'It's genius," said Owen. "What made her 
 think of it ?" And then, with a pang, he won- 
 dered whether Gwendolen had thought of it 
 first. Was it imaginable that Gwendolen could 
 have turned away from beauty and plunged 
 herself into such gay austerities of ugliness? 
 
 "Well, things are in the air, you know," said 
 Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out. the tea, "that's 
 what Cicely always says, at all events, re- 
 actions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, 
 she says, a discipline." 
 
 "Things in the air" : had Gwendolen felt them 
 first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? 
 This question of priority became of burning 
 interest for him. 
 
 "The trouble is that one may get too much 
 of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases 
 to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us. 
 How would your daughter like it if all Chisle- 
 bridge took to buttoned black satin and old 
 flower-pieces ? It's as an exception that it has 
 its charm and its meaning. But if it became 
 a commonplace?" 
 
 "Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Water- 
 low. "Will it? It has very much vexed me 
 for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 113 
 
 brains. And I said to her that I wondered 
 whether it would be possible for her to make a 
 room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that 
 she believed she could. If she could achieve ug- 
 liness, she said downright ugliness, she be- 
 lieved they would fall back. The room is a 
 sort of wager between us, for I am not at all 
 convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you 
 know, will leap into the ditch if they see their 
 leader land there." 
 
 Owen's head was whirling. It was as 
 though suddenly the little crystal rings of the 
 pagoda had given out a sportive, significant 
 tinkle. This, then, was what it meant? It 
 was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap. 
 For whom ? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Water- 
 low's lips, could mean only Gwendolen. He did 
 not know quite what he hoped or feared, but 
 he knew that he must conceal from old Mrs. 
 Waterlow his recognition of her meaning. 
 
 "I felt from the first moment that I saw her 
 in the curiosity-shop that Mrs. Waterlow was 
 the sort of person who would always find the 
 white pagodas," he said, smiling above his 
 perturbation; "but I shouldn't have supposed 
 that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let 
 us put it, to realise it, too, and to follow her 
 lead." 
 
 8
 
 ii4 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 "It's not that they realise it," the old lady 
 interpreted, salting her scone; "it's something 
 deeper than realisation. It's instinct the in- 
 stinct of the insignificant for aping the signifi- 
 cant. They would probably be annoyed if they 
 were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly 
 know they do it, I will say that for them, if 
 it's anything to their credit. And then since 
 she is poor and they some of them rich, 
 their copies are seen by a hundred to the one 
 who sees her original, and Cicely, to some 
 people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It 
 has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow re- 
 peated. 
 
 Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconscious- 
 ness, was growing rather angry with Gwendo- 
 len. 
 
 "I don't wonder that it should," he said. 
 "It vexes me to hear about it. Has it gone on 
 for long?" 
 
 "Ever since we came to live here after my 
 son's death. People at that time had draped, 
 crowded drawing-rooms, you remember the 
 dreadful epoch. The more pots and pans 
 and patterns and palms they could squeeze 
 into them, the better they were pleased. 
 Cicely had simple furniture and quiet spaces 
 and plain green wall-paper when no one
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 115 
 
 else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love 
 with Japanese prints in Paris and bought 
 them when no one else in Chislebridge thought 
 of doing so. It's wrong, now, I hear, to 
 like them. Chinese paintings are the cor- 
 rect thing. Chislebridge stared at them and 
 at her empty room, and wondered how she could 
 care for those hideous women. They stared 
 only for a year or two. When they saw that 
 she was quite indifferent to their opinion and 
 intended to remain in the difth, they jumped in 
 after her. I was amused when I first saw 
 Japanese prints on some one else's green walls 
 and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being 
 quoted to Cicely. Then by degrees Cicely got 
 tired of green paper, especially since everybody 
 in Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with 
 her white walls, the red lacquer and the glass 
 and that beautiful old set of cane-seated furni- 
 ture that you saw; and no one else in Chisle- 
 bridge at that time had white walls or a scrap 
 of lacquer. She shifted and rearranged like a 
 bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared 
 again and said that the white walls were like 
 a workhouse; and then they began to look for 
 lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very 
 grouping has been copied, the smallest points 
 of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pur-
 
 n6 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 sued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do 
 it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We 
 must all see the things we like for the first time. 
 But it's not because they like the things that 
 they have them; they have them because some 
 one else likes them. They dress themselves in 
 other people's tastes and make a fine figure as 
 originators." The vexation of years was crys- 
 tallized in the lightness and crispness of her 
 voice. 
 
 Poor, stupid Gwendolen! After all, one 
 must not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. 
 Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to 
 something approaching pitying tolerance. 
 Gwendolen could be stupid in such good faith. 
 There was nothing, when he came to think of 
 it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, 
 nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting 
 Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Gwendolen 
 was so sincerely unaware of having no ideas 
 of her own. He wondered, as he said good-bye 
 to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt 
 convinced that she had at last reached a haven, 
 whether she guessed that she had made him 
 happy rather than unhappy. 
 
 She had made him so happy, with his recov- 
 ered ideal, that as he drove away it was with a 
 definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remem-
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 117 
 
 bered Gwendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. 
 Waterlow. Was it not possible, after all, that 
 she had been indulging in sheer malice at Gwen- 
 dolen's expense? Wasn't it possible that 
 Gwendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had the 
 same inspirations independently? But no two 
 people could stumble at once on such a drawing- 
 room as that he had just left. Horrid thought 
 what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this 
 moment showed just such a singular reversion 
 to ugliness ? After his delicious relief, he could 
 not bear the doubt. 
 
 He drove to Gwendolen's. Yes, the old 
 housekeeper, who knew him, said he could of 
 course go up and look at the red lacquer. The 
 red lacquer! He could almost have embraced 
 her for the joy her words gave him. Gwen- 
 dolen would not have retained red lacquer with 
 a black satin suite. And on the threshold of 
 Gwendolen's drawing-room he received full re- 
 assurance. The lovely room was intact. The 
 blacks and whites and reds and golds were all 
 there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambigu- 
 ous discipline upon them. And in the midst of 
 them all it was not Gwendolen, but Cicely Wa- 
 terlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon 
 him, merry, tired, and tolerant. She had, as it 
 were, demonstrated her claim not only to her
 
 n8 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 present, but to her past. For if she had not 
 copied Gwendolen in the mid- Victorian back- 
 water, why should she have copied her in this ? 
 She had been first in both, and in her back- 
 . water she was now safe. 
 
 * 
 
 MANY months passed before he saw Gwen- 
 dolen's drawing-room again. He was felled 
 early in the winter by a long and dangerous 
 illness. When he was able to crawl about, he 
 ,went to the south of France and stayed there 
 for over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and 
 so weak that, if Gwendolen and the boys hadn't 
 joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused 
 and encouraged him from day to day, he felt 
 that he should probably have died and made an 
 end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. 
 She was at once tender and tactful, and the 
 only claim she made was that of her long- 
 standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, 
 as upon a comfortable, impersonal cushion that 
 she adjusted for his weary head, she invited 
 him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed 
 invalidism and dubious convalescence he did 
 lean. Lapped round by this fundamental kind- 
 ness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's 
 character disappeared. The long pearl ear- 
 rings dangled now over the most delicious
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 119 
 
 beef-teas, which she herself made for him ; the 
 graceful hands could perform efficient tasks. 
 Of how very little importance it was that a 
 woman should not show originality in her draw- 
 ing-room when she could show in taxing daily 
 intercourse such wisdom and resource and 
 sweetness! Life had contracted about them, 
 and on these simple and elementary terms he 
 found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled 
 him. When she at last left him he knew that 
 the bond between them, unspoken as it re- 
 mained, was stronger than it had ever yet been, 
 and that when he next saw her he would proba- 
 bly find it the most natural of things to ask her 
 to marry him, and to take care of him for ever. 
 Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It was with a 
 pensive humility and mirth that he resigned 
 himself to the thought of the bad bargain she 
 would make. 
 
 He came back to England in the spring fol- 
 lowing that in which he had left it, and went 
 at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon 
 when he drove, in a twilight like his own mood 
 of meditative acceptance, to the well-known 
 house. Ample and benignant it stood behind 
 its walls and lawns and trees, and seemed to 
 look upon him with eyes of unresentful pa- 
 tience.
 
 120 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 He limped in and Gwendolen met him in 
 the hall. 
 
 "My dear, dear Owen, how are you ? Yes, I 
 had your wire this morning. Good ; I see that 
 the journey has done you no harm. But you 
 are tired, aren't you ? Will you go to your own 
 room or have tea with me at once? It's just 
 been brought in." 
 
 He said that he would have tea with her. 
 She did not actually help him up the stairs, but 
 as, with skill impaired, he swung himself from 
 step to step, the touch of her tactful and ready 
 hand was upon his arm, a caress rather than a 
 sustainment. Passing the hand through his 
 arm, she led him into the drawing-room. 
 
 Owen looked about him. He stood for a 
 long moment in the door and looked. He then 
 allowed himself a cautious, side-long glance at 
 Gwendolen. Her eyes, unaware in their bland 
 complacency, had followed his and rested upon 
 her room. 
 
 "Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that you hadn't seen 
 my new drawing-room," she said. "We've had 
 great changes." 
 
 Even in his horror, for it was hardly less, he 
 was touched to realize that Gwendolen was 
 thinking far less of her drawing-room than of 
 him. She might have forgotten that it had
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 121 
 
 changed, had he not so helplessly displayed his 
 amazement. 
 
 "Yes, indeed," he said. He limped to the 
 fire and sank heavily into the deep, black satin 
 easy-chair drawn before it. He leaned his 
 elbow on his knee and rested his head on his 
 hand, and as he did so he observed that before 
 the fire stood a mahogany footstool with a bead- 
 worked top. 
 
 "You are tired, dear Owen. Do you feel 
 ill ?" Gwendolen hovered above his chair. 
 
 "I do feel a little giddy," he confessed. "I'm 
 not all right yet, I see." 
 
 He raised his head. It was to face the man- 
 telpiece, with its oval, gilt mirror and crystal 
 lustres and gilt-and-marble clock. No, there 
 were not doves and a nest upon it. This was a 
 finer clock than the one with the doves, and 
 the lustres were larger, and the flowers that 
 stood between were mauve orchids. Gwendo- 
 len always went astray over her flowers. 
 
 "Here is tea," she said, seating herself at a 
 little mahogany table with bowed and decorated 
 legs. "Of course you're bound to feel tired, 
 dear Owen, after your journey. Tea will be 
 the very thing for you." 
 
 He turned now a furtive eye along the wall. 
 Flower-pieces, dim, flat, old flower-pieces and
 
 122 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 arid steel-engravings and tall pieces of mahog- 
 any furniture with marble vases upon them 
 no mistakes had been made here, for if the vases 
 were not urns, they were of marble and in their 
 places. 
 
 "How do you like it in this phase?" Gwen- 
 dolen asked him, tactfully turning from the 
 question of his weakness. "I love it myself, I 
 own, though of course Chislebridge thinks I've 
 lost my wits. To tell you the truth, Owen, I 
 was tired of beauty. One may come to that. 
 One may feel," said Gwendolen, pouring out 
 the tea, "that one needs a discipline. This 
 room is my discipline, and after it I know 
 that I shall find self-indulgence almost vul- 
 gar." 
 
 No ; his mind was working to and fro between 
 the present and the past with the rapidity and 
 accuracy of a shuttle threading an intricate pat- 
 tern no, he had never mentioned to Gwendo- 
 len that late autumnal visit of his to 
 Chislebridge eighteen months ago. Had that 
 been because to mention it and the transforma- 
 tion he had been the first to witness in Mrs. 
 Waterlow's drawing-room would have been, in 
 a sense, to give Gwendolen a warning? And 
 had he not, in his deepening affection for her, 
 conceived her to be above the need of such
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 123 
 
 warnings ? Yes ; for though he had been glad 
 to recover his ideal of young Mrs. Waterlow, 
 though he had been more than willing that 
 Gwendolen should occupy the slightly ridicu- 
 lous and humiliating position that he had im- 
 agined to be Mrs. Waterlow's, he had never 
 for a moment imagined that Gwendolen's disin- 
 genuous docility would go as far as this. So 
 many people might love red lacquer and old 
 glass with a clear conscience, once they had 
 been brought to see them ; but who, with a clear 
 conscience, could love black satin furniture and 
 marble vases? 
 
 "It is a very singular room," he found at 
 last, in comment upon her information. "How 
 and when did you come to think of it?" 
 He heard the hollow sound of his own voice; 
 but Gwendolen remained unaware. The fact 
 )f her stupidity cast a merciful veil of pitifulness 
 over her. 
 
 "I hardly know," she said, handing him his 
 tea and happy in her theme. "These things 
 are in the air at a given time reactions, repul- 
 sions, wearinesses I think. It grew bit by 
 bit; I've brought it to this state only since my 
 return from the Riviera. The idea came to me, 
 oh, long ago long before your illness. Alec 
 Chambers is perfectly entranced with it, and
 
 124 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 vows it is the most beautiful yes, beautiful 
 room in existence. It is witty as well as beau- 
 tiful, he says, and he is going to paint it for 
 the New English Art Club. Rooms have a cu- 
 rious influence upon me, you know, Owen. I 
 really do feel," said Gwendolen busying herself 
 hospitably with his little plate and hot, buttered 
 toast, "that I've grown cleverer since living in 
 this one." 
 
 Owen, while she talked and while he drank 
 his tea, had been more frankly looking about 
 him. Flagrant as was the plagiarism, Gwen- 
 dolen, as before, had protected herself by a more 
 illustrious achievement. It was a stately, not 
 a staid room; it carried the idea higher, and 
 thereby missed it. It was not an amusing 
 room, nor witty, to any one who had seen the 
 original. It was impressive, oppressive, almost 
 forbidding. Gwendolen, for one thing, had 
 had more space to fill. The naivete of mere 
 flower-pieces would not furnish her walls, and 
 she had lapsed into sheer ugliness with the 
 large and admirably accurate steel-engravings. 
 Caution, too, had been mistakenly exercised 
 here and there; the black satin furniture had 
 no antimacassars and the centre-table no orna- 
 ment except a vase of orchids and calf-bound 
 books.
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 125 
 
 Owen felt no indignation; he would always 
 remain too fond of Gwendolen, too tolerant of 
 her folly, to feel indignant with her ; it was with 
 a mild but final irony that he brought his eyes 
 back at last to his unconscious and hapless 
 cousin. And he wondered how far Gwendolen 
 had gone, how far she could be made to go. 
 "There's only one thing that it lacks," he said. 
 "Shall I tell you?" 
 
 "Oh, do," she urged, beaming over her tea. 
 "You know how much I value your taste." 
 
 "Oh, I haven't much taste," said Owen, "I've 
 never gone in for having taste. And doesn't 
 your room prove that taste is a mistake if in- 
 dulged too far? It's more a sense of literary 
 fitness I allude to. Yours is meant to be a 
 soulless room, isn't it ? That's your intention ?" 
 
 "Exactly," said Gwendolen, with eager ap- 
 prehension; "that is just it a soulless room. 
 One is sick of souls, just as one is sick of 
 beauty." 
 
 "Exactly," Owen echoed her. "But, since 
 you have here a travesty of beauty, what you 
 need to complete your idea is a travesty of soul. 
 You need a centre that draws it all into focus. 
 You need something that, alas ! you might have 
 had, and have lost for ever. The white pa- 
 goda, Gwendolen, that Mrs. Waterlow found.
 
 126 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 Your room needs that, and only that, to make 
 it perfect." 
 
 He spoke in his flat, weak invalid's voice, but 
 he was wondering, almost with ardour, if 
 Gwendolen, this touchstone applied, would sus- 
 pect or remember and, from penitence or cau- 
 tion, redeem herself by a confession. For a mo- 
 ment, only a moment, she looked at him very 
 earnestly ; and he was aware that he hoped that 
 she was going to redeem herself hoped it al- 
 most ardently, not for his own sake those 
 sober hopes were dead for ever but for the 
 sake of the past and what it had really held of 
 fondness and sympathy and essential respect. 
 
 Gwendolen looked at him earnestly ; it was as 
 though a dim suspicion crossed her; and then, 
 poor thing ! she put it aside. Yes, he was very 
 sorry for her as he listened to her. 
 
 "Owen, that is clever of you," she said, "but 
 very, very clever. That is precisely what I've 
 been saying to myself ever since the idea came 
 to me. I can't forgive myself for that piece 
 of stupidity my only one, I will say, in regard 
 to such recognitions and perceptions. I may 
 be a stupid woman about a great many things, 
 but I'm not stupid about rooms. The horror 
 of Aunt Pickthorne's room dulled my eyes so 
 that in all truth I can say that I never saw
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 127 
 
 that pagoda. And from the moment I've had 
 my idea I've moaned but literally moaned 
 over having lost it. Of course it is what the 
 room needs, and all that it needs the travesty 
 of a soul standing on that mahogany table." 
 
 "Yes, the centre-table is the place for it," 
 said Owen. 
 
 "It is clever of you to feel it just as I do, 
 Owen, dear," she went on. "The pagoda was 
 meant for this room and for this room only; 
 for, you know, I didn't think Cicely Waterlow 
 at all happily inspired in placing it as she had." 
 
 "As she had?" He rapped the question out 
 with irrepressible quickness. 
 
 "Yes, among all that rather trashy lacquer 
 and glass in that rather gimcrackery little 
 drawing-room of hers. The pagoda looked 
 there, what it had always looked in Aunt Pick- 
 thor.ne's room a gimcrack itself." 
 
 "Looked?" he repeated. "How does it look 
 now? How has she placed it now?" 
 
 And, for the first time in all their intercourse, 
 he saw that Gwendolen was suddenly confused. 
 He had hardly trapped her. She had set the 
 trap herself, and inadvertently had walked into 
 it. A faint colour rose to her cheek. She 
 dropped for a moment her eyes upon the fire. 
 Then, covering her self-consciousness with a
 
 128 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 show of smiling vivacity, she knelt to poke the 
 logs, saying: 
 
 "I don't know, I really don't know, Owen. 
 Cicely is always changing her room, you know. 
 She is very quick at feeling what's in the air 
 as quick as I am really and I haven't seen 
 her for ages. She has gone to live in London 
 oh, yes, didn't you know? Yes, she came 
 into a little money over a year ago, and she and 
 old Mrs. Waterlow have taken a house in 
 Chelsea, and are coming back to Chislebridge 
 only for two or three months in every year. 
 They are very fond of Chislebridge. So I 
 haven't an idea of what her drawing-room is 
 like now." 
 
 "Perhaps it's like yours," Owen suggested. 
 "The one I saw was rather like yours, I re- 
 member." 
 
 Gwendolen opened kind and repudiating eyes. 
 
 "Do you think so, Owen ? Like mine ? Oh, 
 only in one or two superficial little things. She 
 hadn't a Chinese screen or a lacquer cabinet 
 or a piece of Chinese painting to bless herself 
 with, poor little Cicely! No, indeed, Owen; I 
 don't think it would be at all fair to say that 
 Cicely copied me. These things are in the 
 air."
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 129 
 
 BEFORE he left Chislebridge he asked Gwen- 
 dolen for Mrs. Waterlow's London address, 
 and observed that she did not flinch in giving 
 it to him. He inferred from this that Mrs. 
 Waterlow's black satin suite had not left Chisle- 
 bridge and that Gwendolen knew that she had 
 nothing to fear from a London visit. Would 
 she indeed fear anything from any visit ? Her 
 placid self-deception was so profound that it 
 would be difficult to draw a line fairly between 
 skilful fraud and instinctive self-protection. 
 Gwendolen, without doubt, conceived herself 
 completely protected. She would never suspect 
 him of suspecting her. 
 
 He felt, when he got back to London, a cer- 
 tain reluctance in going to see Mrs. Waterlow. 
 It was not only that he shrank from reading in 
 old Mrs. Waterlow's malicious eyes the recogni- 
 tion of his discovery; in regard to young Mrs. 
 Waterlow there was another shrinking that was 
 almost one of shyness. She had been wronged, 
 grossly wronged, by some one to whom he 
 must show the semblance of loyalty, and the 
 consciousness of her wrongs affected him 
 deeply. A fortnight passed before he made 
 his way one afternoon to Chelsea, a fortnight 
 in which the main consciousness that filled his 
 sense of renewal was that of his merciful 
 
 9
 
 130 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 escape. Mrs. Waterlow's house was in St. 
 Leonard's Terrace, one of the narrow, old 
 houses that face the expanse of the Royal Hos- 
 pital Gardens. The spring sun, as he limped 
 along, was shining upon their facades dull, 
 old brick and dim, white paint like slabs of 
 ancient wedding-cake with frosted edging. 
 
 After all the expense of his illness, he was 
 very poor in these days, and had come with 
 difficulty in a 'bus. As he opened the gate and 
 went into the flagged garden, where white tu- 
 lips grew, he glanced up and saw young Mrs. 
 Waterlow standing looking out at the drawing- 
 room window. Her eyes met his in surprise, 
 they had not seen each other for so long a 
 time; then, as lifting his hat he smiled at her, 
 he thought he saw in them a sudden pity and 
 gravity. He did of course look so much more 
 battered than when she had last seen him. 
 The nice, middle-aged maid let him in he was 
 glad of that and, as he followed her up the 
 narrow staircase, with its white, panelled walls, 
 he wondered which drawing-room it was to be, 
 and felt his heart sink strangely at the thought 
 that perhaps, after all, Mrs. Waterlow had 
 transplanted her discipline to London. 
 
 But, no; like a soft gush of sunlight, like 
 bells and clear, running water, the first room
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 131 
 
 greeted him in a medley of untraceable associ- 
 ations. It was the first room, with the delicate 
 cane-seated chairs and settees, the red lacquer 
 and the glass, all looking lovelier than ever 
 against the panelled white, all brighter, sweeter, 
 happier than in the rather dim room on the 
 ground floor in Chislebridge. And touches of 
 green, like tiny flakes of vivid flame, went 
 through it in the leaves of the white azaleas 
 that filled the jars and vases. He saw it all, 
 and he saw, as Mrs. Waterlow came toward 
 him, that the white pagoda stood on its former 
 little black lacquer table in one of the windows. 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow shook his hand and her eyes 
 examined him. 
 
 "You have been ill. I was so sorry to hear," 
 she said. 
 
 "Yes, I've been wretchedly ill; for years now, 
 it seems," he replied. 
 
 They sat down before the fire. Old Mrs. 
 Waterlow, she told him, was away on a visit to 
 Chislebridge, from which she was to return 
 that evening at six o'clock. It was only four. 
 He had two hours before him, and he felt that 
 in them he was to be very happy. They talked 
 and talked. He saw that she liked him and 
 expected him to stay on and talk. All the 
 magic and elation and sense of discovery and
 
 132 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 adventure was with him as on their first en- 
 counter. She knew him, he found, so much 
 better than he could have guessed. She had 
 read everything he had written. She appre- 
 ciated so finely; she even, with a further ad- 
 vance to acknowledged friendship, criticized, 
 with the precision and delicacy expressed in all 
 that she did. And the fact that she liked him 
 so much, that she was already so much his 
 friend, gave him his right to let her see how 
 much he liked her. The two hours were not 
 only happy ; they were the happiest he had ever 
 known. 
 
 The clock had hardly struck six when old 
 Mrs. Waterlow's cab drove up. 
 
 "Don't go; mamma will so like to see you," 
 said Mrs. Waterlow. "She so enjoyed that 
 little visit you paid her over a year ago, you 
 know." 
 
 This was the first reference that had been 
 made to the visit. He wondered if she guessed 
 what it had done for their friendship. 
 
 Old Mrs. Waterlow came in, wearing just 
 such a delightful, flowing black satin cloak 
 and deep black satin bonnet as he would have 
 expected her to wear. And seeing him there 
 with her daughter-in-law, she paused, as if ar- 
 rested, on the threshold. Then, her eyes pass-
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 133 
 
 ing from the tea-table and its intimacy of 
 grouping with the two chairs they had risen 
 from, and resting brightly on her daughter's 
 face, where she must read the reflection of his 
 happiness, Owen saw that she cast off a scruple, 
 came to a decision, and renewed the impulse 
 that had brought her up the stairs, he now 
 realised, at an uncharacteristic speed. 
 
 "My dear Cicely," she exclaimed, after she 
 had greeted him, "you've lost your wager!" 
 
 Cicely Waterlow gazed at her for a moment 
 and then she flushed deeply. 
 
 "Have I, mamma?" she said, busying her- 
 self with the kettle.- "Well, that pleases you, 
 and doesn't displease me. You'll want some 
 tea, won't you?" 
 
 "Yes, indeed, I want some tea. But you'll 
 not put me off with tea, my dear. I want to 
 talk about my wager, too; and Mr. Stacpole 
 will want to hear about it, for it was his wager 
 as well. You did say that you felt convinced 
 that I was safe in my haven, didn't you, Mr. 
 Stacpole? Well, I've lost it, and I'm not at 
 all pleased to have lost it. I'm triumphant, if 
 you will, but savage, too. You'll forgive me, I 
 know, Mr. Stacpole, if I'm savage with your 
 cousin when I tell you that she has been in- 
 spired with a black satin suite and mahogany
 
 134 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 furniture and bead- work since seeing Cicely's 
 new drawing-room in Chislebridge." 
 
 "Mamma!" Cicely protested. 'Two people 
 can perfectly well have the same idea at the 
 same time! There's no reason in the world 
 why Gwendolen shouldn't feel just my fancy 
 for funny, old, ugly things." 
 
 "She didn't show any fancy for them when 
 she saw them a year ago, did she, dear?" said 
 the intractable old lady, seating herself at the 
 tea-table. "She was very guarded, very mute, 
 though very observant. Yes ; people may have 
 the same idea, but they'll hardly have the same 
 black satin furniture and the same beaded foot- 
 stools, will they?" 
 
 Seeing the deep embarrassment in which his 
 friend was plunged, Owen now interposed. 
 
 "Don't try to defend Gwendolen on my ac- 
 count," he said. "She really can't be defended. 
 I know it, for I've seen her drawing-room." 
 
 "You have seen it ? And what do you think 
 of it?" asked old Mrs. Waterlow. 
 
 "I thought, as I told her," said Owen, "that 
 it lacked but one thing, and that was the trav- 
 esty of a soul. It lacked the white pagoda." 
 
 "You told her that? It was what she told 
 me. She told me that she could not forgive 
 herself for having parted with the pagoda, for
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 135 
 
 it was the travesty of a soul that her room still 
 needed. 'You mean/ I said, 'the pagoda placed 
 as Cicely placed it on the centre-table in her 
 new room ?' She gazed at me and laid her hand 
 on my arm and asked: 'But, dear Mrs. Wa- 
 terlow, how had Cicely placed the pagoda? I 
 really don't remember. I really don't remem- 
 ber at all what Cicely's new room was like, 
 except that it was mid-Victorian, and had old 
 water-colours on the walls. Surely you don't 
 think that I've copied Cicely?' 
 
 " 'My dear Mrs. Conyers,' I said to her, 'I 
 don't think, but know, that you've done nothing 
 else since you came to Chislebridge. But in 
 this case you are farther from success than 
 usual, for Cicely's drawing-room is gay, and 
 yours is grand serieux.' ' 
 
 Mrs. Waterlow's bomb seemed to fill the air 
 with a silvery explosion, and, as its echoes died, 
 in the ensuing stillness, the eyes of Cicely and 
 Owen met beneath the triumphant gaze of the 
 merciless old lady. It was from his eyes that 
 hers caught the infection. To remain grave 
 now was to be grand serieux, and helpless 
 gaiety was in the air. Owen broke into peals 
 of laughter. 
 
 "Oh but " Cicely Waterlow protested, 
 laughing, too, but still flushed and almost tear-
 
 136 THE WHITE PAGODA 
 
 ful "it isn't fair. It's as if we had taken her 
 in. She doesn't know she does it, really she 
 doesn't; she is so well-meaning so kind." 
 
 "She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, 
 who remained unsmiling, but with a placidity 
 full of satisfaction; "and she'll hardly be able 
 to forget." 
 
 "I'm quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really 
 believes that she cares for the new drawing- 
 room. People can persuade themselves so 
 easily of new tastes. And why shouldn't they 
 have them ? I believe that Gwendolen does like 
 it." 
 
 "Yes, she does indeed,' 1 said old Mrs. Water- 
 low. "She says so. She says she never cared 
 for any room so much and that she intends to 
 live and die with it. Her only refuge now is 
 to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, 
 buttoned into her black satin for ever !" 
 
 UNTIL now Mrs. Conyers has remained faith- 
 ful, and her consistency is still made good to 
 her; for none of her drawing-rooms has 
 brought her such appreciation. Chislebridge 
 has never dared to emulate it ; Mr. Chambers 
 and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. 
 Waterlow's original, like a gay jest, uttered and
 
 THE WHITE PAGODA 137 
 
 then gone for ever, is no longer in existence 
 to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. 
 Moreover, her own drawing-room no longer 
 lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married 
 Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwen- 
 dolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges 
 behind her, sent them for their wedding-pres- 
 ent her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabi- 
 nets. One stands in the front, and one in the 
 back drawing-room in the little house in St. 
 Leonard's Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on 
 the day they arrived that any wrong of the 
 past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned 
 for. And when they married and went round 
 the world for their wedding-trip, they found in 
 China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more 
 sublimely elegant than the old one. This they 
 brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfalter- 
 ing courage she has placed it upon her mahog- 
 any centre table.
 
 THE SUICIDE
 
 THE SUICIDE 
 
 A COMEDY 
 
 SHE took the bottle from its wrappings and 
 looked at it at its apparent insignificance 
 and the huge significance of the glaring word 
 "Poison" printed across it. She looked reso- 
 lutely, and as resolutely went with it to the other 
 side of the room, and locked it away in the 
 Irawer of her dressing-table. She paused here, 
 and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The ex- 
 pression of her face arrested her attention. Did 
 people who were going to die usually look so 
 calm, so placid ? Really, it was a sort of placid- 
 ity that gazed back at her, so unlike the dis- 
 figured, tear-blinded reflection that had been 
 there that morning when she had read the 
 paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen 
 decision, the nightmare securing of the 
 means of death ( if any one should guess ! stop 
 her!) it was indeed a sort of apathy that 
 drenched her being, as if already the drug had 
 
 141
 
 142 THE SUICIDE 
 
 gone through it. The face in the mirror was 
 very young and very helpless and very charm- 
 ing. It was like the face of a little wind-blown 
 ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, 
 empty, gazing eyes. The sweetness of the 
 wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly 
 smote on the apathy, and tears came. She 
 pressed her hands over her eyes, struggled, and 
 mastered herself again. Her own pathos must 
 not unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must 
 nerve, her. 
 
 She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. 
 Just three. She could give herself ample time 
 for writing the letter ; then she must go and post 
 it. Before five she would be back here locked 
 in her room. Before six 
 
 She went to the writing-table, unlocked a 
 drawer, the key hung on a ribbon around her 
 neck, under her bodice, and took out a thick 
 packet of closely written papers. Sitting there, 
 hesitating a moment, she wondered if she would 
 look back at those records of hope and suffering 
 more than a whole year of beautiful suffer- 
 ing, beautiful hope. The rising of tears again 
 warned her that such a retrospect would make 
 her more unfit for writing the last letter as it 
 must be written with full possession of her 
 best and deepest meaning. She must be her
 
 THE SUICIDE 143 
 
 most courageous self to write now. The writer 
 of those past records seemed a little sister half 
 playing with her grief, beside the self that sat 
 here now, stricken and determined. 
 
 Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote : 
 
 MY DEAREST MY BEST BELOVED: This is the 
 last of the letters. I am going to send them all to 
 you now, so that you may know all. I read this 
 morning in the paper that you were to be married. 
 And now there is nothing left for me but to die. 
 When you read this I shall be dead. 
 
 You must not blame me, or think me too cow- 
 ardly. I am a fragile person, I know, and my life 
 hung on you. Without hope it can't go on ; it's too 
 feeble to find anything else to live for. And you 
 could never, never blame yourself. How could you 
 have helped it ? How could you have dreamed that 
 I loved you? If you had you could have done noth- 
 ing but be sorry and irked. But it comforts me 
 in dying to let you know how I have loved you ; it is 
 like a dying gift I make you, do you see? all the 
 love that I have hidden. If I had lived I could 
 never have made the gift. Had you guessed, or 
 had I told you, it would have been a burden, a 
 ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing 
 that I am dead, my love must come to you as a 
 blessing; you must feel it as something, in its little 
 way beautiful, and care for it; for any love that 
 only gives and makes no claim is beautiful, is it not ?
 
 144 THE SUICIDE 
 
 I think I find dying so much easier than living be- 
 cause in dying I can give you the gift. 
 
 All these letters, written from the first day I met 
 you, almost a year and a half ago, will tell you step 
 by step what I have felt. Don't let the hopes that 
 flickered up sometimes hurt you; the strength of my 
 feeling made the flame, nothing that you ever said 
 or did. 
 
 How I remember that first day, in the country, 
 at the Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the 
 lawn where you were all sitting, and mamma laughed 
 at me for stumbling over a chair and you smiled 
 at me. From the moment I saw you then, I loved 
 you. You were like some dream come true. You 
 never knew what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain 
 was in not being with you) when we walked to- 
 gether and talked ; the letters will tell you that. But 
 to-day it all comes back, even the little things that I 
 hardly knew I was seeing or hearing the late white 
 roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the 
 garden wall (we stopped to look at it, and it sat 
 still, looking at us : I wonder if you remember the 
 robin) ; and the distant song some labourers were 
 singing in the fields far away. 
 
 And here in London, the dinners we met at, the 
 teas you came to, the one or two books you gave me 
 and that we wrote about what I felt about it all, 
 these meteors through my gray life, I have written 
 it all down. Did I not act well ? You could never 
 have guessed, under my composure and cheerful-
 
 THE SUICIDE 145 
 
 ness, could you? I am a little proud of myself 
 when I think of it. 
 
 And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason 
 you will see, too, from the growing hopelessness, 
 of emptiness in the last months, when I have not 
 seen you. In the bottom of my heart I had always 
 the little hope that some day I might give you these 
 myself, that we might read them together, you and 
 I, smiling over my past sorrow. And if I had died, 
 and you had not loved me, you were to have had 
 them, as I told you, for I wanted to give you my 
 love ; I could not bear that it should go out and that 
 you should never know. 
 
 I wish that I could have died, and need not have 
 killed myself; I am so afraid that that may give you 
 pain, though it ought not to, if you think justly of 
 it all. 
 
 Of course you will be sorry for me I am afraid 
 that I want you to be sorry; but don't be too sad. 
 I am so much happier in dying than I could have 
 been in living ; and in loving you I have felt so much, 
 I have lived so much more perhaps than many peo- 
 ple in a whole lifetime. 
 
 See the gift you have given me, dearest one. 
 Good-bye. Good-bye. 
 
 ALLIDA. 
 
 It was over, the last link with life, her last 
 word spoken or written, and the echo of it 
 seemed to come to her already as across a great
 
 146 THE SUICIDE 
 
 abyss that separated her from the world of the 
 living. 
 
 With the signing of her name she had drawn 
 the shroud over her face. 
 
 Only the mechanical things now remained to 
 be done : dying was really over ; she really was 
 dead. 
 
 She wrapped this last letter around all the 
 others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large en- 
 velope; then, putting on her hat and coat and 
 holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left 
 her room and went down the stairs. 
 
 The house was a typically smart, flimsy Lon- 
 don house, of the cheaper Mayf air sort a nar- 
 row box set on end and fitted with chintz and 
 gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's 
 imagination an imagination that no longer 
 shrank from the contemplation of the facts of 
 her life; for they, too, were seen from across 
 that abyss. 
 
 In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, 
 cushions, and swarming bric-a-brac, her mother 
 had flirted and allured unsuccessfully for 
 how many years ? She had felt, since the time 
 when, as a very little girl, she had gone by 
 the room every day coming in from her walk at 
 tea-time with her governess, and heard inside 
 the high, smiling, artificial voice, with its odd
 
 THE SUICIDE 147 
 
 appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the 
 shrinking from her mother and her mother's 
 aims. Later on the aims had been for her, too, 
 and their determination had been partly, Allida 
 felt, hardened by the fact of a grown-up daugh- 
 ter being such a deterrent so in the way of a 
 desperate, fading beauty who had never made 
 the brilliant match she hoped for. That she 
 had never, either, made even a moderate match 
 for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer clos- 
 ing of her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed 
 to him. What might her weakness and her 
 hatred of her home not have urged her into 
 had not that ideal that seen and recognized 
 ideal armed her? The vision of old Captain 
 Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale 
 eyes, rose before her, and the vacuous, unwhole- 
 some countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts. 
 How often had she been dexterously left alone 
 with them in the drawing-room ! Thank God ! 
 all that was far, far behind her. Death was 
 dignified, sweet-smelling in its peace, when she 
 thought of all that the gilt-and-chintz drawing- 
 room stood for in her memories. Death was 
 sweet when life was so ugly. 
 
 Now she was in the street, the door closed 
 behind her, and no servant had seen her. 
 
 It was a foggy afternoon, and the soiled white
 
 148 THE SUICIDE 
 
 houses opposite were dim. A thin, stray cat 
 rubbed against the area railings and mewed as 
 Allida stood, pausing for a moment, on the 
 steps. 
 
 Which was the nearest pillar-box? At the 
 end of the street, just round the corner. The 
 plaintive, nasal cry of the cat caught her at- 
 tention. Poor creature! She ought to spare 
 some poison for it. The irony of the idea al- 
 most made her smile as she stooped and patted 
 the dingy head. The cat, leaning like a ship in 
 a stiff wind, walked to and fro across her 
 dress, looking up at her as it still plaintively, 
 interrogatively mewed. Its appeal put aside 
 for a moment the decision as to which pillar- 
 box. She picked up the cat and returned to 
 the door. The maid answered her ring. 
 
 Allida was a little sorry that she must speak 
 once more, after all, on this mundane plane. 
 The finish of her tragedy seemed slightly 
 marred by this episode. But she heard her 
 calm voice telling the maid to feed the cat 
 "And keep it until you can find a home for it. 
 Cook won't mind, will she?" 
 
 "Oh, no, miss; cook is fond of cats. Poor 
 thing, then," said the maid, who was tender of 
 heart. 
 
 Again the door was shut, and again the
 
 THE SUICIDE 149 
 
 pillar-box was the last act but one of her 
 drama. 
 
 She walked swiftly down the street, think- 
 ing, oddly, more about the cat than about her 
 destination or the letter she held clutched in 
 her pocket. The stripes on the cat's head, its 
 rough, sooty fur, the sharp projection of its 
 backbone and the grotesque grimace of its mew 
 her mind dwelt on these trivial details; and 
 under all was a funny added contentment at 
 this further proof of the mercilessness and ugli- 
 ness of the world she was leaving. 
 
 The corner of the street was reached and 
 turned. There, in the fog, stood the red shaft 
 of the pillar-box. Beyond it a street lamp, al- 
 ready lighted, made a blur of light in the thick 
 air and cast upward a long cone of shadow. 
 
 Allida's heart suddenly shrank and shud- 
 dered. 
 
 The lamp and the pillar-box looked horrible. 
 Death was horrible. To see him no more was 
 horrible. She felt only horror as mechan- 
 ically she took out the letter and dropped it 
 into the box. 
 
 The heavy sound of its fall turned her shud- 
 dering heart to ice. 
 
 She had felt horror, she had been prepared 
 for horror, but not for such horror as this.
 
 150 THE SUICIDE 
 
 It would all be like this now, she knew, until 
 the end. Let her hurry through it, then; let 
 her escape quickly; and, at all events, her own 
 room, her familiar little room, with its fire, its 
 books, its quiet white bed, would be a refuge 
 after this terrible, empty street. She thought 
 only of her room, the thought blotting out 
 what would happen in it, knowing only that 
 she longed to be there, with a longing like a 
 wounded child's for its mother's arms. And 
 yet she still stood staring at the slit in the pillar- 
 box. 
 
 "Miss Eraser," a voice said beside her. 
 
 It was a voice of carefully quiet greeting, 
 guarded interrogation, guarded expostulation. 
 
 She looked up, feeling something shatter in 
 her, fearing that she was going to faint. It 
 was almost like the crash of death and like 
 a swooning into a new consciousness. She 
 only dimly, through the swooning sense of 
 change, recognized the face that looked at her, 
 smiling, but so puzzled, so pained so pained 
 that she guessed that her own face must show 
 some strange terror. 
 
 She had seen the face, in the chintz-and-gilt 
 drawing-room, it had seemed out of place 
 there, she had seen it often ; but memory was 
 blurred. Had he not taken her down to din-
 
 THE SUICIDE 151 
 
 ner somewhere only the other day? Yes; she 
 knew him well; only she was dead, a ghost, 
 and reality, familiar reality, looked different. 
 
 "Mr. Haldicott," she said, putting out her 
 hand. Her voice was normal she heard that ; 
 she felt that she could almost have smiled. 
 Yet something was fearfully shattered, some 
 power in herself that had directed her so reso- 
 lutely till now. The cat had been disconcert- 
 ing, but the appearance of this man, whom she 
 knew quite well, who might talk, might ques- 
 tion her, might walk back beside her, seemed 
 fatally disconcerting. For could she act? 
 Could she still speak on normally ? And further 
 delay, now that every link was broken, now 
 that to all real intents and purposes she was 
 dead, was a torture too fearful to be contem- 
 plated. Yet how evade it? She felt that her 
 hand, which he still held, held very tightly, was 
 trembling. 
 
 "You are ill," he said. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "No; not at all. I only came out for a little 
 walk. And I must go back to tea." 
 
 "Your mother is at home?" 
 
 "No; she is out of town. She doesn't get 
 back till to-morrow." 
 
 "You are going to have tea all alone?"
 
 152 THE SUICIDE 
 
 Allida gazed at him. How should she evade 
 him if he offered to come back? 
 
 "I haven't had my walk yet. I came out 
 for a little walk," she repeated. 
 
 By the blurred light of the street lamp he 
 still looked at her, still held her trembling hand. 
 His face showed his perplexed indecision. 
 Suddenly he drew the hand within his arm. 
 
 "Let us have the little walk, then," he said, 
 "only you must let me come with you. You are 
 in some great trouble. Don't bother to deny it. 
 Don't say anything. Your face showed me 
 that something dreadful was happening to you. 
 Don't speak I saw it as I was passing on 
 the other side of the street. The lamp was 
 just lighted, else I shouldn't have recognised 
 you. Now walk quietly on like this. Don't 
 even think. I'm not a meddling idiot; I know 
 I'm not. You are desperate about something, 
 and anything, any one, even a complete 
 stranger, and I'm not that, who steps in be- 
 tween desperation and an act is justified per- 
 haps a Godsend." 
 
 He was walking beside her, half leading her, 
 talking quickly, as if to give her time to re- 
 cover, and glancing at her stricken, helpless 
 face. 
 
 As they walked they heard behind them the
 
 THE SUICIDE 153 
 
 rattling fall of letters into a postman's bag; 
 the pillar-box had been emptied. 
 
 The youth of the face, its essential childish- 
 ness, the web of soft hair that hung disar- 
 ranged over her cheek, made her look like a 
 very little girl, and was in strange contrast 
 with the look of terror. 
 
 They walked on and on, down streets, across 
 wide, phantasmal squares. 
 
 Haldicott held the hand on his arm, he did 
 not speak, and Allida felt herself moving 
 with him through the fog like an Eurydice led 
 by Orpheus, a shade among the shades. And 
 all the while there hovered before her thoughts 
 the vision of that quiet room, that white bed, 
 still waiting for her. Suddenly she broke into 
 sobs. She stopped. She leaned helplessly 
 against his arm. 
 
 "Good heavens! you will tell me now," 
 Haldicott exclaimed. "Cross the road here. 
 Lean on me. We will go into the park. No 
 one can see you." 
 
 She stumbled on blindly beside him, both 
 hands clutching his arm. 
 
 All she knew was that she had left life be- 
 hind her, and yet that she must go back to 
 that room, and that the room now was more 
 horrible than the pillar-box had been. She
 
 154 THE SUICIDE 
 
 had left life behind her, and yet she still clung 
 to it here beside her. Life ! life ! warm, kind 
 
 In the park he led her into a deserted path. 
 A bench stood beneath a tall, leafless tree, its 
 branches stencilled flatly on the yellow-gray 
 fog. Haldicott and Allida sat down side by 
 side. 
 
 "Now tell me. You can trust me utterly. 
 Tell me everything," said Haldicott. 
 
 His fine face, all competence and mastery, 
 studied hers, its shattered loveliness. She 
 leaned her head back against the bench. Life 
 was there, and a great peace seemed to flow 
 through her as the mere consciousness of its 
 presence filled her. As long as he held her 
 hand she could not be frightened; and since 
 she was only a ghost, since all her past seemed 
 to have dropped from her, she could look at it 
 with him, she could tell him what he asked. 
 As if exhausted, borne along by his will, she 
 said, "I am going to commit suicide." 
 
 Haldicott made no ejaculation and no move- 
 ment. Her eyes were closed, and he studied 
 her face. Its innocent charm almost made 
 him smile at her words ; and yet the expression 
 he had seen from across the street, as she 
 dropped that letter into the box and stood
 
 THE SUICIDE 155 
 
 frozen, had gone too well with such words. 
 He reflected silently. He had long known Al- 
 lida Eraser, never more than slightly; and yet 
 from the frequency of slight knowledge he 
 found that he had accumulated, quite uncon- 
 sciously, an impression of her, distinct, sweet, 
 appealing. He saw her, silent and gentle, in 
 her tawdry mother's tawdry house; he heard 
 her grave quiet voice. He had thought her, 
 not knowing that he thought at all, charming. 
 He had always been glad to talk to her, to make 
 her gravity, the little air of chill composure 
 that he had so understood, and liked, in the 
 daughter of a desperate, faded flirt, warm into 
 confident interest and smiles. Thinking of 
 that quiet voice, that gentle smile, the poise and 
 dignity of all the little personality, he could 
 not connect them with hysterical shallowness. 
 But he had, he now recognized, thought of her 
 as older, more tempered to reality. There was 
 a revelation of desperate youth, and youth's 
 sense of the finality of desperation, on her face ; 
 and, with all the rigid resolve he had seen, he 
 could guess in it youth's essential fluidity. 
 She was resolved, and yet all resolves in a 
 soul so young were only moods, unless cir- 
 cumstances let them stand still, stagnate, and 
 finally freeze. She was not frozen yet. It
 
 156 THE SUICIDE 
 
 was only a mood standing still; shake it, and 
 it would fluctuate into surprising changes. 
 Allida opened her eyes while he reflected, 
 and many moments had gone by since her 
 words. 
 
 "How amazing that I should tell you, 
 calmly tell you, isn't it?" she said. "And yet 
 I can't feel it as amazing. Nothing could 
 amaze me. I seem to have passed beyond any 
 feeling of that sort. But since I am so really 
 dead already, that I can tell you, you must re- 
 spect my confidence in you. You must not try 
 to prevent me. I trust you." 
 
 "I shan't prevent you," said Haldicott. 
 
 Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It 
 is almost a comfort to be able to tell some one. 
 I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. 
 And yet I wish I hadn't met you or I will 
 wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and feel 
 nothing except that you are there, alive, and 
 that I am going to die. But it will be harder 
 to do now. Everything seems so vague, 
 everything seems left behind. The very sor- 
 row that makes me do it seems so far away 
 like a dream. I can't go through all the 
 realization again, and when I do it now, it will 
 seem to be for something unreal." Her voice 
 trailed off.
 
 THE SUICIDE 157 
 
 "Are you sure you are going to do it?" 
 Haldicott asked presently. 
 
 They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, 
 as though a monotony of leisure were about 
 them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of 
 departed spirits, time had ceased. 
 
 "Yes; quite sure. I have bought it the 
 poison I had a doctor's prescription I have 
 thought it all out carefully. It's in the top 
 drawer of my dressing-table." 
 
 She would, he saw, tell him everything. 
 
 Again he paused. 
 
 "Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life 
 impossible, or is it life itself, in general, that 
 you can't go on with ?" 
 
 "Both both," said Allida. 
 
 Again a long, long silence grew; every mo- 
 ment, Haldicott felt, a drop in the deep cup 
 of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drink- 
 ing, that would make the past more and more 
 unreal, until from oblivion she woke into the 
 sane world of struggle and life. 
 
 "Yet you are so young," he said at last, 
 "with everything before you real joys as well 
 as forgive me! realer sorrows; they would 
 balance better if you would live a little longer. 
 You know, if you waited for just one year, 
 let us say, you would look back with wonder
 
 158 THE SUICIDE 
 
 at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't." 
 
 "Perhaps," she said. "Only I don't want to 
 live that year." 
 
 "And when were when are you going to 
 do it?" 
 
 "This evening. I had meant to do it long 
 before this. Mamma is away. There could 
 be no better time. Besides, it must be this 
 evening. I've written." 
 
 "To her? To tell her?" 
 
 "No," Allida answered ; "not to her." And 
 she added, "I don't love her." 
 
 "Your mother?" 
 
 "This is my dying confession, so I will say 
 the truth. No, I don't love her. She has 
 made me so unhappy made life so ugly." 
 
 "Then you wrote to some one whom you do 
 love?" 
 
 "Yes," said Allida, after another pause. 
 Her ,hat had loosened as she leaned her head 
 back, and her disordered hair was about her 
 face; she still kept her eyes closed with her 
 expression of weary abandonment to the peace 
 of confession. 
 
 He looked at her keenly, with most intent 
 interest, most intent pity, and yet with a flicker 
 of amusement in the look. She could do it. 
 He believed her. Yet it would be as absurd as
 
 THE SUICIDE 159 
 
 it would be tragic if she did. It wasn't a face 
 made for tragedy ; it had strayed into it by mis- 
 take. 
 
 "This some one you love," he said gently, 
 "will it not hurt them terribly? Have you 
 thought of that?" 
 
 He saw the tears come. They rolled slowly 
 down her cheeks. She faintly whispered : 
 
 "He doesn't love me." 
 
 Haldicott could feel no amusement now, the 
 pity was too great. He put his other hand on 
 the hand he held. 
 
 "Used he to love you ?" he asked. 
 
 "No," said Allida ; "he never loved me." 
 
 For a moment Haldicott struggled with a 
 half-nervous wish to laugh; relief was in the 
 wish. 
 
 "And he knows that you love him ?" he con- 
 trolled his voice to ask. 
 
 "He will when he gets my letter." 
 
 "Poor devil!" ejaculated Haldicott. 
 
 "Oh, you don't understand!" cried Allida. 
 She opened her eyes and sat upright, drawing 
 her hand from his. "How could you under- 
 stand ? You think it's a sort of vengeance I'm 
 taking for his not loving me. I can't drag 
 myself through explanations, indeed I can't. 
 Of course I see that my tragedy to you must be
 
 160 THE SUICIDE 
 
 almost farce. I must go. Why should I have 
 told you anything? I am desecrating it all, 
 making it all grotesque, by being still alive." 
 
 "No, no; you mustn't go yet," said Haldi- 
 cott, seizing her hand firmly, yet with not too 
 obvious a restraint. "You mustn't go, not at 
 peace with me. You have all the evening still 
 before you, it's not six yet, and it doesn't 
 take long to kill one's self with poison. Trust 
 me. You must trust me. Don't think about 
 its being grotesque ; most things are in certain 
 aspects. I think that we are both behaving 
 very naturally, considering the circumstances. 
 The circumstances, I grant you, are a little gro- 
 tesque not the circumstance of your being still 
 alive, but of your wishing to die. But, indeed, 
 I shall understand, you poor child, poor sweet 
 child, if you will explain." 
 
 Again the mirage sense of compulsion, of 
 peace in yielding to it, of letting this ghost- 
 like consciousness shut out the long past and 
 the short future, crept over her. She sank 
 back again beside him. 
 
 "But how can I explain? Where shall I 
 begin?" 
 
 "Listen to me now, dear Allida we can use 
 Christian names, I think, in a case of last dying 
 confession like this. I am not going to pre-
 
 THE SUICIDE 161 
 
 vent you, or put any constraint upon you; but 
 I want you to explain as clearly and fully as 
 you can, so that, in trying to make me see, you 
 may see yourself, clearly and fully, what you 
 are doing, where you are. Probably you are in 
 a condition of absolutely irrational despair. 
 Let us look at it together. I may be able to 
 show you something else. Begin with him. 
 Who is he?" 
 
 Allida had leaned forward, her elbows on her 
 knees. She dropped her face into her hands as 
 she answered : 
 
 "Oliver Ainslie." 
 
 "Yes; I know him/' 
 
 "Yes; you know him." 
 
 "He is a charming fellow," said Haldicott. 
 
 "I met him over a year ago," said Allida. 
 "I am very miserable at home. I have grown 
 up alone. My mother and I have never been 
 at all sympathetic. I hardly saw her when I 
 was growing up. She only wanted to marry 
 me off as soon as possible, and she hasn't 
 found it easy to marry me off. I haven't 
 money or looks in particular oh, but I can't 
 go into all that ! You know mamma. I have 
 hated my life with her." 
 
 "Yes, yes. I understand." 
 
 "Not that there is any harm in mamma,"
 
 162 THE SUICIDE 
 
 Allida amended, with a weary exactitude; 
 "everybody understands that, too. Only she is 
 so utterly silly, so utterly selfish. This all 
 sounds horrible." 
 
 "I understand." 
 
 "I met him. I had never seen any one so 
 dear, so sympathetic. I seemed to breathe with 
 happiness when he was there. It was like 
 morning sunlight after a hot, glaring ball- 
 room, being with him. He never cared one bit 
 for me ; but the first time I saw him he smiled 
 at me, and he was kind and dear to me, as 
 he would be to any one, and from that first 
 moment I loved him oh, loved him !" 
 
 She paused, a sacred sweetness in the pause. 
 
 Haldicott, sitting beside her in the fog, felt 
 the presence of something radiant and snowy. 
 
 "And I sometimes thought and hoped that 
 he would care for me. I wrote to him all the 
 time, letters I never sent; but I wrote as if 
 he were to see them some day. It's almost 
 strange to me to think that such love didn't 
 bring him to me by its very force and yearn- 
 ing. One hears, you know, of thoughts mak- 
 ing themselves felt becoming realities. I 
 wonder where all those thoughts of mine 
 went!"
 
 THE SUICIDE 163 
 
 He saw them all those white, innocent 
 thoughts flying out like birds, like a flock of 
 white birds, and disappearing in the darkness. 
 How could a soul not have felt them fluttering 
 about it, crying vainly for admittance ? He al- 
 most shared Allida's wonder. 
 
 "And to-day, I sent all the letters with the 
 last one telling of my death. For I saw it 
 this morning he is engaged. So I couldn't 
 go on. I could never love any one else; I 
 shouldn't want to. My heart broke when I 
 read the paper; really it broke. And I ex- 
 plained it all to him, so that it could not hurt 
 him, that I was dying because life had become 
 worthless to me and yet that there was joy 
 in dying because I could, in dying, tell him. 
 There had been beauty and joy in loving him ; 
 he must not be too sorry ; and he must care for 
 my love. It was a gift a gift that I could 
 give him only in going away for ever myself." 
 
 She was silent. The evening was late by 
 now, and the fog about them shut them into a 
 little space, a little island just large enough for 
 their bench, a bit of path, a dim border of rail- 
 ing opposite, and a branch of tree overhead. 
 The muffled sound of cautious traffic was far 
 away. They were wonderfully alone.
 
 164 THE SUICIDE 
 
 Haldicott took one of the hands on which she 
 leaned, and raised it to his lips. 
 
 "Sweet, foolish child !" he said. 
 
 She turned her head and looked at him; it 
 was almost as if she saw him for the first time 
 the man, not only Life's personification. 
 They could still see quite clearly each other's 
 faces, and for a long time, gravely, they looked 
 into each other's eyes. 
 
 "Don't you see that it's all a dream?" said 
 Haldicott. 
 
 "A dream?" Allida repeated. "The reality 
 of a whole year?" 
 
 And yet it was a dream to her; even while 
 she had told him of that year it was as if she 
 told of something far behind her, lived through 
 long, long ages ago, in another, a different life. 
 
 But she struggled to hold the vanishing pain 
 and beauty of it all the reality that, unreal, 
 would make her whole being seem like a little 
 handful of thin cloud dying away into empti- 
 ness. 
 
 "This is a dream," she said, still looking at 
 him, "this, this. What am I doing here?" 
 She rose to her feet, gasping now. "Oh! he 
 will get the letter and I shall not be dead! 
 I must go at once at once !" 
 
 "To save yourself from being ridiculous?
 
 THE SUICIDE 165 
 
 You are going to kill yourself so as to keep 
 a tragic attitude that you've taken before this 
 man who doesn't care for you an attitude 
 that's really disarranged ? Dear pitiful en- 
 chanting little idiot !" said Haldicott. 
 
 He had risen too, and, holding her hands, he 
 still, but not too obviously, kept her near him. 
 
 His words were almost cruel in their light- 
 ness; his voice had a feeling that, more than 
 any words, any supplication or remonstrance, 
 made her past life seem illusory, and she her- 
 self, with it, disappearing into pure nothing- 
 ness. The world rocked with her. Only the 
 feeling in that voice seemed real. 
 
 "Are you sure, are you sure," he said, "that 
 you can never love anybody else? Won't you 
 wait a year to find out? Won't you wait a 
 month? Allida, won't you wait a day?" 
 
 "Why do you try to humiliate me?" she 
 gasped, and the tears fell down her face. He 
 almost feared that he had been brutal, that she 
 was going to faint. 
 
 "I am not trying to humiliate you. I am try- 
 ing to wake you. Perhaps the truth will wake 
 you. Will you wait a day, an hour, Allida, and 
 see?" 
 
 "See what?" 
 
 "That this is a dream; that you wove it out
 
 166 THE SUICIDE 
 
 of nothing to fill the emptiness of your sad life; 
 that it would have gathered round the first 
 'dear sympathetic' person who smiled at you. 
 And after you see that, will you wait and see 
 " he paused. 
 
 "What?" she repeated. 
 
 "How much I can make you love me," said 
 Haldicott. 
 
 "Why do you mock me?" Allida said. 
 "Why, unless you think me mad ?" 
 
 "Well, of course you are mad, in a sense ; any 
 coroner's inquest would say so. But mock you ! 
 I love you, Allida." 
 
 Her face had now as wild, as frozen a look 
 on it as the one he had seen, not three hours 
 before, after she had slipped the letter into the 
 pillar-box; but it was with another wildness 
 of wonder rather than of despair. 
 
 "But how can you ?" she faltered. 
 
 "I can tell you how, but you must wait an 
 hour more than an hour to hear. You will 
 wait Allida?" 
 
 "It is pity, to save me." 
 
 "To save you ? Why, I'd hand you over to 
 the nearest policeman if I only wanted to save 
 you. I do want to save you for myself." 
 
 There drifted through her mind a vision of 
 her little room, where, by this time, she might
 
 THE SUICIDE 167 
 
 have been lying on the bed, the empty bottle 
 of poison near her. And that vision of death 
 was now far away, across an abyss, and she 
 was in life, and life held her, claimed her. 
 
 "But I can't understand. How is it possi- 
 ble?" She closed her eyes. "My letter," she 
 whispered. 
 
 Haldicott put his arm around her and led her 
 down the path. 
 
 "Ainslie is a dear fellow," he said. "We will 
 write him another letter as soon as we get 
 
 in." 
 
 She was hardly aware of the walk back to 
 the little house in Mayfair, back to the door- 
 step where, such aeons ago, she had paused to 
 look at the crying cat. If she had not paused, 
 if she had gone a little earlier to the pillar-box, 
 
 before the lamp was lighted Her mind 
 
 was blurred again. All all was dream, ex- 
 cept that life, near her, was claiming her. 
 
 Now they were in the drawing-room, among 
 the shaded lamps, the gilt, the chintz and bric- 
 a-brac. 
 
 Haldicott sent for wine and made her drink. 
 He said to the maid that Miss Eraser had felt 
 faint during her walk. For a long time Al- 
 lida leaned back in the chair where he had put 
 her, shading her eyes with her hand.
 
 i68 THE SUICIDE 
 
 "Can you write to Ainslie now?" Haldicott 
 asked at last. "We will send your letter by 
 special messenger." 
 
 "Yes, yes; let me write." She drew off her 
 gloves, and Haldicott put paper and pen be- 
 fore her. 
 
 She looked up at him. 
 
 "What shall I say?" she asked. 
 
 This time, uncontrollably, he wanted to 
 laugh; if he did not laugh he must burst out 
 crying; he leaned his elbows on the table as he 
 sat beside her, burying his face on his arms, 
 his shoulders shaking. 
 
 Allida sat with the pen in her hand, gazing 
 at him. The nightmare, after all, was too 
 near for her to share his dubious amusement; 
 but that she saw its point as well as he did was 
 evinced in her next question, asked in still the 
 faltering voice : 
 
 "Shall I say that I've decided to wait a 
 day?" 
 
 Haldicott looked up. 
 
 "Thank Heaven, you have a sense of humour. 
 It was my one anxiety about you all through. 
 Say, dearest Allida, that you are awake." 
 
 She looked at him, and now, though she did 
 not smile, her wan face was touched by a pale, 
 responsive radiance.
 
 THE SUICIDE 169 
 
 "It is so strange to be awake," she mur- 
 mured, bending to her paper. 
 
 But hardly had the first slow line been writ- 
 ten when running steps were heard outside, the 
 door was flung open before the amazed maid 
 could reach it, and Oliver Ainslie, white and 
 distraught, darted into the room. 
 
 HE did not glance at Haldicott. The distrac- 
 tion of his look had only time to break into 
 stupefied thanksgiving before the same rush 
 that had brought him in carried him to Al- 
 lida. He fell on his knees before her. Clasp- 
 ing her round the waist, he hid his face, cry- 
 ing, "Thank God !" 
 
 Allida sat, still holding her pen. She did 
 not look at Ainslie, but across the room at 
 Haldicott, and again, before her look, as of one 
 confronted with her own utter inadequacy to 
 deal with the situation, Haldicott could almost 
 have laughed. But the moment for light in- 
 terpretations had gone. Anything amusing in 
 the present situation was only grimly so for 
 him. The fairy prince had turned up a real 
 fairy prince, for a wonder, and three hours of 
 everyday reality had no chance of counting 
 against a year of fairy-tale with such a last
 
 i;o THE SUICIDE 
 
 chapter. After all, it was very beautiful; he 
 was able to see that, thank goodness ! Yet Al- 
 lida's perfectly blank look held him. She was 
 evidently unable to deal single-handed with her 
 dilemma to explain to her fairy prince why 
 he found her alive rather than dead. Haldi- 
 cott turned to the mantelpiece and moved, un- 
 seeingly, the idiotic silver ornaments upon it, 
 waiting for an opportunity to strike a blow for 
 her deliverance. 
 
 Ainslie had lifted his face to hers. 
 
 "It was a mistake, that announcement: it's 
 my cousin who is to be married; we have the 
 same name. Oh, Allida! darling Allida! if I 
 had not come in time! That I should have 
 found you you! And only just in time !" 
 
 He became now, perhaps from the blankness 
 of her face, aware more fully of Haldicott's 
 unobtrusive presence. 
 
 To the silent query of his eyes she answered : 
 
 "He knows everything." 
 
 "He prevented you! He met you and pre- 
 vented you ! I see it all. Haldicott, it is you, 
 isn't it " 
 
 Haldicott reluctantly turned to him. 
 
 "My dear fellow, can I ever thank you 
 enough ? My dear Haldicott, it's all too aston- 
 ishing. You know? And why she was go-
 
 THE SUICIDE 171 
 
 ing to? The poor, darling child!" He had 
 risen, and, with his arm around Allida's shoul- 
 ders, was gazing at her. 
 
 "I saw Miss Fraser posting her letter to you, 
 and guessed from her expression that some- 
 thing very bad was up," said Haldicott. "I 
 forced her to walk a little with me, and I made 
 her tell me the story; and then I made her see 
 that the truer love for you would be shown in 
 living. She had just recognised that," Hal- 
 dicott smiled at her, "and she was going to 
 write, and see if she couldn't waylay that let- 
 ter spare you the pain of it and, at all events, 
 tell you that she wasn't going to burden you 
 with unfair remorse for the rest of your days. 
 That's about the truth of it all, isn't it?" And 
 he so believed it to be, now, the only essential 
 truth, or, at least, the half-truth that she had 
 better believe in, that his smile had not a touch 
 of bitterness. 
 
 Allida still held her pen and still gazed at 
 him. 
 
 "Ah! thank God for it all for the fact that 
 the letter wasn't waylaid, and for the fact that 
 you were, Allida! When I think of it 
 that gift coming to me your gift, Allida and 
 not too late not too late !" 
 
 The young man, in his rapturous thankful-
 
 172 THE SUICIDE 
 
 ness, indifferent to the guardian presence, 
 raised her hand to his lips, kissing it with a 
 fervour where tears struggled with smiles. 
 
 "I'll go now," Haldicott said gently. "I'm 
 so immensely glad for you both." 
 
 But Allida, at this, started from her helpless 
 apathy. 
 
 "No, no! Don't don't go!" she cried. "I 
 can't think. It's all so impossible. Do you 
 mean," and her eyes now went to Ainslie while 
 she drew her hand from his "do you mean 
 that you love me ?" 
 
 "Love you, darling Allida? Don't you see 
 it?" 
 
 "Because you got the letter," Allida said, as 
 if linking in her mind a chain of evidence. "If 
 you hadn't got it you would not love me 
 now." 
 
 "Forgive me, dearest, for my blindness! I 
 should not have known you if I had not got 
 it." 
 
 Allida still looked at him. 
 
 "You are just as dear even dearer than I 
 thought you ; you are even more worthy of any 
 love than I dreamed," she said. Her face had 
 lost all apathy, all helplessness. It was with the 
 stricken resolution that it could so strangely 
 show that she pushed back her chair and rose,
 
 THE SUICIDE 173 
 
 moving away from the young man, who, en- 
 chantingly a fairy prince, gazed at her with 
 adoring eyes. 
 
 "It was written in a dream," said Allida, 
 clasping her hands and returning his gaze. "It 
 was written in a dream," she repeated. "It was 
 all all the whole year a dream only a 
 dream." 
 
 The trust of his gaze was too deep for under- 
 standing to sink through it. 
 
 "I am awake now," said Allida; "you are 
 dearer than I ever dreamed, but I am awake." 
 
 "When reality comes, the past always seems 
 rather dream-like," Ainslie said. He felt and 
 understood as well, as truly as the other had 
 done. "Darling Allida, I can never be worthy 
 of such a love as yours, but I will try. And 
 now that you are awake, you will find how 
 much better waking is than any dream." 
 
 She gasped at this, and retreated before him. 
 
 "But I am horrid; I am unbelievable. There 
 isn't any reality. There isn't any love to be 
 worthy of," she cried, and covered her face with 
 her hands. 
 
 Ainslie, from her attitude of avowal and 
 abasement, looked his stupefaction at Haldicott, 
 and, for all answer, got a stupefaction as com- 
 plete.
 
 174 THE SUICIDE 
 
 "What does she mean?" the younger man at 
 length inquired. 
 
 "I don't think she knows what she means," 
 Haldicott answered. "I think she is, naturally, 
 overwrought. All feeling, all meaning, is 
 paralyzed. She probably won't mean anything 
 worth listening to for a good while." 
 
 They were speaking quite as if Allida, stand- 
 ing there with her hidden face, were a lunatic, 
 the diagnosis of whose harmless case was as 
 yet impossible in the absence of fresh symp- 
 toms. But a symptom was forthcoming. 
 
 "I mean that," she said. "I don't understand. 
 I can't explain. It's as if something were 
 broken in me. There isn't any love ; there never 
 will be. If you can ever forgive me, please tell 
 me so when you do. It mustn't be more than a 
 dream for you, too a dream only an hour long." 
 
 The two men again exchanged glances, but 
 now with more hesitation. 
 
 "But, Allida," Ainslie spoke with gentle 
 pain "I love you. I am not dreaming. Do 
 you mean to say that you can't love me? Do 
 you mean to say that if I had loved you, with 
 no letter to awaken me, you would have thought 
 your love a dream, merely because it was an- 
 swered?"
 
 THE SUICIDE 175 
 
 "It isn't that. I can't explain. Something 
 broke. You came too late. It's as if I had 
 died and become almost another person. I 
 know it's unbelievable; I don't understand it 
 myself ; but it is true. It is all over, really." 
 
 "All over ?" dazedly Ainslie repeated. "But 
 why? After those letters? After what you 
 were going to do ? Allida !" 
 
 She dropped her hands, and once more her 
 eyes went to Haldicott in that look the appeal 
 of incompetence. But there was more in it: 
 suffering and shame, and a strength that strove 
 to hide them from him. 
 
 "Perhaps, my dear Ainslie, you had better 
 go," said Haldicott, "for the present at least." 
 But, in its wonder, his answering look now ap- 
 pealed and was helpless in its incomprehen- 
 sion. 
 
 Ainslie stared at her. 
 
 "Good-bye," he said at last. 
 
 "Oh, good-bye," said Allida, with a fervor of 
 relief that all her humility and pity could not 
 dissemble. 
 
 "Good-bye," he repeated, holding her hand, 
 "sweet, strange, cruel Allida." 
 
 She put her hand over his and looked clearly 
 at him.
 
 176 THE SUICIDE 
 
 "Remember," she said "remember how 
 absurd I am." 
 
 He was gone. Allida did not turn to Hal- 
 dicott. She remained looking at the door that 
 had closed on the exit of her "best beloved." 
 
 "But why?" said Haldicott. He repeated 
 Ainslie's broken words almost faintly. "When 
 the dream came true why didn't you take it ?" 
 
 She made no reply. 
 
 "I never meant that because it had been a 
 dream it couldn't become a reality," he went 
 on. 
 
 She looked vaguely round the room. In- 
 deed, things swam to her; the nearest support 
 was the mantelpiece. She leaned against it, 
 looking down. 
 
 "It's not anything I said in my efforts to 
 shake you awake ? You were in love with him, 
 you know. Weren't you in love with him, Al- 
 lida?" 
 
 "Yes ; I suppose so. How can I tell you any- 
 thing? All I know is that I was dreaming." 
 
 "But why did the dream go?" 
 
 "You killed it, perhaps," she said in a colour- 
 less voice, leaning her forehead upon her hand, 
 and still looking fixedly down. 
 
 "I / killed it? You mean that any one 
 who had come then would have stopped you
 
 THE SUICIDE 177 
 
 made you see your own folly waked you?" 
 
 "They might have stopped me they might 
 have saved me," she said, and she paused. 
 
 "But only I could wake you? Only I could 
 prevent the coming true of your dream?" 
 Again in his wondering, groping voice was the 
 feeling that, like a torch, had led her up from 
 Tartarus up through blackness to the sweet 
 air again. 
 
 She still hid her eyes, not daring to look or 
 trust. 
 
 "Allida !" he supplicated. 
 
 "Oh," she said in a voice so low that it did 
 not shake it was as if she just dared to let it 
 sound at all "was your dream true, or was it 
 only the rope you threw out to me to drag me 
 on shore with?" 
 
 Haldicott stretched out his hand to her. 
 
 "Do you mean that my three hours of reality 
 count for more than his than his, backed by 
 your whole year of dreaming ? Allida, are you 
 really absurd enough to say that I count for 
 more than Oliver Ainslie ?" 
 
 She put her weary, ashamed head down on 
 the arm that leaned upon the mantelpiece. She 
 did not take his hand. 
 
 "What can I say? Everything I say seems 
 unbelievable. Can anything I say be more
 
 178 THE SUICIDE 
 
 absurd than anything else ? Yes, you do count 
 for more. You count for everything. Did I 
 love him or did I only love love? I don't 
 know. I only know that what you said and 
 are made it all a dream. And now you will 
 think that I am going to kill myself because you 
 don't love me! But my absurdity is over, I 
 promise you. Really, I am awake." 
 
 "Allida, darling," said Haldicott he went to 
 her and took both her hands, so that she must 
 raise her head and look at him "if I've made 
 fun of you when I was feeling horribly fright- 
 ened, and called you ridiculous when I found 
 you as tragic and adorable as you were gro- 
 tesque, that was the rope. Now I will take an 
 hour, or a day, or a whole week, if necessary, 
 to make you believe it; but I could have com- 
 mitted suicide I assure you I could when I 
 saw Oliver Ainslie come into the room."
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MILLY 
 
 IT is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack 
 of response and understanding," said 
 Milly. "It is as if I were always looking at a 
 face that never really saw me or spoke to me. 
 Such a mistake as I have made or as others 
 have made for me is irretrievable. An un- 
 happy marriage seems to ruin everything in 
 you and about you, and you have to go on living 
 among the ruins. You can't go away and leave 
 them behind you, as you can other calamities in 
 life." 
 
 Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone 
 this afternoon in the country-house where 
 they had come really to know each other, and 
 Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, 
 had poured out Mrs. Drent's tea and then 
 her own, leaving it untouched, however, 
 
 181
 
 182 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped 
 together, in her lap, her eyes fived on va- 
 cancy. The contemplation of ruins for the 
 last five years had filled these eyes with a 
 pensive resignation; but they showed no tear- 
 ful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They 
 were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in look- 
 ing at them and at the wan, lovely little face 
 where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, 
 Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the tea- 
 table, grew yet more sombre and more intent 
 
 in its brooding sympathy. "Why did you " 
 
 she began, and then changed the first intention 
 of her question to "Why did you love him?" 
 This was more penetrating than to ask Mrs. 
 Quentyn why she had married him. 
 
 The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice 
 muffled, as it were, its essential harshness ; one 
 felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt 
 effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an 
 eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty 
 years old, six years older than Milly Quentyn. 
 Her skin was swarthy, her eyes, under broad, 
 tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably 
 black. Her features, had they not been so 
 small, so finely finished, would have seemed too 
 emphatic, significant as they were of a race- 
 horse nervousness and of something inflexible
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 183 
 
 in the midst of an expression all flexibility. 
 Her hands were curiously slight and small, and 
 as she now, in looking at her companion and 
 in asking her question, locked them together 
 with a force that made them tremble, they 
 showed the same combination of an excessive 
 strength informing an excessive fragility. 
 
 Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and 
 rested upon her in silence. 
 
 Presently she smiled. 
 
 "How kind you are to care so much, to care 
 at all!" 
 
 "I do care." 
 
 "Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" 
 asked Milly, leaning towards her a little, and the 
 smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like 
 an appealing and grateful kiss. 
 
 "I am your friend ; I will be your friend, al- 
 ways," Mrs. Drent replied, in an even lower 
 tone than before. 
 
 The tears came softly into Milly' s eyes while 
 they looked at each other she gently, Mrs. Drent 
 still sombrely. Then leaning back again with 
 a sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I 
 didn't love him. Isn't that the almost invari- 
 able answer? I was nineteen; I had just left 
 the schoolroom ; I was in love with my own ideal 
 of love you know, you must know, the silly, pa-
 
 184 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 thetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at 
 nineteen; and Mamma said that he was that 
 ideal; and he said nothing; so I believed her! 
 Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and 
 not a bit with himself, and with only enough 
 articulateness to ask me to marry him; and 
 of course he was, and is, very good-looking. 
 You know Mamma. She has married us all 
 off very well, they say; you know how they 
 say it. In her determination to ensconce the 
 family type comfortably she is as careless of 
 the single life as nature itself. In this case 
 what appeared to be a very cosy niche of- 
 fered itself for me and she shoved me into 
 it. I have grown up since then ; that is all my 
 story." 
 
 "They are terrible, terrible, such mar- 
 riages," said Mrs. Drent, looking away. 
 
 Her tone struck Milly, with all her con- 
 sciousness of pathos, as perhaps a little mis- 
 placed. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. 
 I did believe that I loved him. He did love 
 me." 
 
 "You were a child who did not know herself, 
 nor what she was doing." 
 
 "Yes ; that is true." 
 
 "And it is terrible for him if he still loves 
 you."
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 185 
 
 "Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you 
 can call it love. He is rather dismayed by 
 the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off 
 better, as he would express it; jocosely re- 
 signed to what he would call my unkindness 
 and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering; 
 one can't associate such perturbing things 
 with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to re- 
 proach myself with having hurt his life seri- 
 ously, and, Heaven knows! I don't reproach 
 his simplicity and harmlessness for having 
 broken mine. Marriage and a wife were in- 
 cidents incidents only to him, and if they 
 have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has 
 other far more absorbing interests in his life 
 to take his mind off the breakdown of his do- 
 mestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when 
 he cares to avail himself of it, is always there 
 in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I 
 can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his 
 money and his house, I entertain his friends, 
 I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous 
 kiss when he comes back from shooting ani- 
 mals in some savage country. One could 
 hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I 
 bridge the chasm with all the conventional 
 observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is 
 his one great passion, so that he is usually
 
 i86 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 wandering happily in distant jungles and not 
 requiring too many tete-d-tetes at breakfast 
 of me." 
 
 "He is probably very good and kind," said 
 Mrs. Drent, "but it is incredible that such a 
 man should be married to such a woman as 
 you." 
 
 Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of 
 inappropriateness. "You have a very high 
 ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. 
 Mrs. Drent's husband had died five years be- 
 fore, and her baby when it was born. She 
 wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, 
 and, unobtrusively, she was known to be in- 
 consolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered 
 that Gilbert Drent had married her for her 
 money and that, charming person though he 
 had been, she had passionately idealized him. 
 There was, therefore, with these memories at 
 the back of her mind, something painful as 
 well as pathetic to her in the voice in which 
 Mrs. Drent, crimsoning deeply, said: "My 
 own marriage was ideal. I don't understand 
 marriage unless it is ideal." 
 
 There was a silence after that for a moment 
 and then Milly said, "It must be wonderful to 
 have such a memory. All I know is that I 
 wish with all my heart I had never married
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 187 
 
 Dick, and I believe with all my heart that one 
 shouldn't marry unless everything is there." 
 
 "That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything 
 must be there for it to be right; affinity, and 
 understanding, and devotion. Some women 
 can find enough in the mere fact of a home and 
 a shared life to be satisfied without them; but 
 not a woman like you." 
 
 "I think you idealize me," Milly said smiling 
 a little sadly; "but I believe in that too. I 
 don't claim at all any remarkable individuality ; 
 but what I have Dick doesn't understand at 
 all, doesn't even see. He goes blundering about 
 the dullest, most distant parks and preserves 
 of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to 
 the castle, such as it is, of my personality. And 
 he doesn't really care about the castle; it, hardly 
 worries him that he can't find it. There might 
 be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels 
 in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but 
 even if he got inside and were able to see and 
 hear, he wouldn't care a bit about them; he 
 would say: 'Awfully nice/ and look for the 
 smoking-room. And there," said Milly, press- 
 ing her hands together while her eyes filled sud- 
 denly with tears, "there is the little tragedy. 
 For of course every woman thinks that she has 
 pictures and jewels and music and longs oh
 
 i88 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 longs ! to show them to the one, the one person 
 who will love to see and hear. And when she 
 finds that no one sees or hears, or knows, even, 
 that there is anything to look for, then the music 
 dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow 
 dim, and at last everything magical vanishes 
 from life and she sees herself, not as an en- 
 chanted castle, but as a first-class house in May- 
 fair, with all the latest improvements; as 
 much a matter of course, as much a convenience, 
 as unmysterious and as unalluring as the tele- 
 phone, the hot water pipes and the electric light- 
 ing. It is only as if in a dream a far, far 
 dream that she remembers the castle, and 
 feels, sometimes, within her, the ruins, the 
 empty ruins." 
 
 "Oh my dear!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It 
 was as if she couldn't help it, as if, shaken from 
 her passionate reserve, she must show her very 
 heart. She leaned round the table and took one 
 of Milly's hands. "Don't don't let the magic 
 vanish! There's nothing else in life! All the 
 rest is death. It's only when we are in the 
 castle with our music and our pictures and our 
 jewels that we are alive. You know it; you 
 feel it; it's what makes the difference between 
 the real and the unreal people. You are one of 
 the real ones, I saw it at once ; you aren't meant
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 189 
 
 to wither out and to become crisp and shallow. 
 Don't cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, 
 the music. They are there. / see. / hear." 
 
 "How sweet of you !" faltered Milly. 
 
 She was startled, she was touched, she, who 
 rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that 
 this dark, still woman was observing her, and 
 had known, for all the other's reserve, that the 
 observation was not antagonistic. Something 
 in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be 
 easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's 
 miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap 
 of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She 
 was a little ashamed, as though her own reality 
 were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Drent's be- 
 lief in it. There had been something pleasant 
 in the tracing of her little tragedy, something 
 sweet in the thought of that sad castle of her 
 soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchant- 
 ments ; but Mrs. Drent had seen only the trag- 
 edy; and had felt the danger of withering, of 
 becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with 
 an intensity of which she herself was incapa- 
 ble. Such response, such understanding, 
 might well take one's breath away. 
 
 This scene was the beginning of their long 
 friendship. It was a charming friendship. 
 Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her back-
 
 190 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 ground, was a creature of sunshine, of sun- 
 shine in a mist, a creature of endearing 
 fluctuations. Indeed, Christina told her after- 
 wards, when they analyzed the. beginnings, it 
 had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her 
 air as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape 
 (for everybody knew that Dick and Milly Quen- 
 tyn didn't hit it off) it had been these sweet, 
 these doubly pathetic qualities that had first at- 
 tracted her. "I am not easily attracted," said 
 Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint 
 of the femme incomprise about you, any air of 
 self-pity, I should never have so longed to take 
 care of you, to try to help to make you hap- 
 pier. But you were made for happiness and 
 beauty, and if you didn't succeed in keeping 
 them one saw that it would hurt you dreadfully. 
 It was that that so appealed." 
 
 And Milly confessed to Christina that she 
 had been at first a good deal afraid of her, as 
 the distinguished young poetess, and had 
 thought of her as a sombre and humourless 
 little personage, only reassuring in being so en- 
 chantingly well-dressed. 
 
 In Christina Drent's poetry the numbness 
 that had descended upon her after her hus- 
 band's death had found a partial awakening. 
 The poems were not great things, but they
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 191 
 
 were written without a touch of artifice. They 
 were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was 
 as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail 
 or saw across a bleak sky the flight of an un- 
 known bird. In her own little world of fashion 
 they had made her a tolerably famous figure. 
 But it was an echo only of her regrets and 
 longings that Christina was able to put into 
 her poems, all perhaps that she chose to put; 
 they were never intimate or personal. The 
 essence of her was that passionate reserve and, 
 with it, that passionate longing to devote her- 
 self, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized 
 and, inevitably, idealized object. She was full 
 of a fervour of faith, once the reserve was 
 broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal 
 in its well-built temple, was secure henceforth 
 from overthrow. 
 
 Such an idol her husband had been. Such 
 an idol her child would have been. The doors 
 of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the 
 sacred emptiness for ever empty; Christina 
 could never have remarried. But beside it rose 
 a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly 
 enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn. 
 
 Happily Milly was an idol worthy of ideali- 
 zation, perhaps even worthy of temple-building. 
 She was sweet and tender, in friendship most
 
 192 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to 
 see her own tenderness blossom about her in 
 responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but 
 she loved those she cared for to find her ex- 
 quisite, and to show her that they did. Like 
 a frail flower, unvisited by sunlight, she could 
 hardly live without other lives about her, forti- 
 fying, expanding her own. Her disappoint- 
 ment in her husband had turned to something 
 like a wan disgust. His crude appreciations of 
 her, which, in the first girlish trust of her mar- 
 ried life, she had taken as warrant of all the 
 subtle, manifold appreciations that she needed, 
 were now offences. Poor Dick Quentyn blun- 
 dered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of 
 his wife's disdain. His was a boyish, unex- 
 acting nature. He asked for no great things, 
 and the lack of even small mercies left him 
 serene. As he had never thought about him- 
 self at all, it did not surprise him that his 
 wife thought very little of him; he did not, 
 because of it, think less well of himself. Milly's 
 indifference argued in her a difference from 
 most women, facilely contented as they usually 
 seemed. It did not change or harm him or 
 make him either assertive or self-conscious. 
 
 He had soon discovered that the things he 
 cared to talk about wearied her sport, the
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 193 
 
 estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncom- 
 plex books; and after a little while he discov- 
 ered, further, that for him to try to adapt 
 himself to her, to try to talk about the things 
 she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, 
 indeed, with a bleak patience, while he admired, 
 with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, 
 all the wrong pictures at the shows where they 
 went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, 
 dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest 
 in a very jolly book, watered Dumas, as a 
 rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw 
 that she made an effort to care about the big 
 game he shot the hall and dining-room bris- 
 tled with trophies, one walked over them every- 
 where and she looked at pictures of them in 
 the books of travel he eagerly put before her; 
 but it was as pictures that they interested her, 
 remotely, not as animals suitable for shoot- 
 ing. 
 
 Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undiffi- 
 cult wife, could have been a very gracefully 
 affectionate husband; his manners were as 
 charming as his mind was blundering ; but with 
 this chill young nymph any attempt at marital 
 pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and 
 grotesque. With Milly, he soon felt it, the 
 barrier between their minds was inevitably a
 
 194 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 barrier shutting him out from even these mani- 
 festations of tenderness. He was not at all 
 dull in feeling that ; not at all dull in his quick 
 withdrawal before her passive distaste ; not dull 
 in knowing that if he were not to withdraw 
 the distaste would become more than negative. 
 He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized 
 that his marriage was a failure and, as Milly 
 had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant 
 wrench or two when he did show an uncon- 
 trollable grimace of pain, to make very much 
 difference to him. She endured him; she did 
 not dislike him at all at a distance ; and, very 
 gaily, with a debonair manner of perfect trust, 
 he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, 
 and it was rarely that he required her to pour 
 out his tea for him. 
 
 Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight dur- 
 ing Christina's first visit to Chawlton House, 
 the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked 
 forward to meeting her friend's inappropriate 
 husband almost with trembling. She felt that 
 she might be called to the great and happy 
 mission of reconciliation, that Milly might have 
 been mistaken and Dick undervalued. Milly's 
 trust in her and dependence upon her had grown 
 with leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with 
 tact and time she might do much to rebuild
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 195 
 
 the broken life, if there were materials with 
 which to build it. The first glance at Dick 
 showed her the futility of such hopes. He was 
 a dear; that at once was obvious to her; and 
 he was delightful looking; his small head well 
 set on broad shoulders, his short nose expressive 
 of courage and character ; his grey eyes as free 
 from all malice and uncharitableness as they 
 were from introspection. But he was a boy, a 
 kind, good boy, an ingenuous, well-mannered 
 materialist, living, as it were, by automatic 
 functions, and as incapable of spiritual initia- 
 tive as he was of evil. What ground of 
 meeting could there be between him and her 
 Milly, compact as she was of subtleties, pro- 
 fundities and possibilities? No; Dick offered 
 no materials for the building of a shrine, and 
 unless marriage was a shrine Christina could 
 not contemplate it. There had been a deep in- 
 stinct, like one of nature's cruel yet righteous 
 laws, in Milly's withdrawal ; to have consented, 
 to have compromised, would have been to stifle 
 and stultify herself. 
 
 Christina so justified her, and yet it pained 
 her that Milly, in her treatment of her husband, 
 should be almost unbeautiful. The streak of 
 hardness, almost of cruelty, like nature's own, 
 showing itself in her darling, distressed her.
 
 196 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 She did not care so much about Dick's very 
 problematic discomfort. He showed none; he 
 talked with great good spirits, made cheerful, 
 obvious jokes and looked eminently sane, fresh 
 and picturesque in his out-of-door attire. Yet 
 even he must know that every fibre of Milly's 
 face, every tone of her voice, expressed her 
 indifference and her oppression. "Really, dear, 
 you are not kind," Christina protested. Milly 
 opened innocent eyes. "You think I'm wrong 
 about Dick?" 
 
 "Not wrong about him; wrong to him. 
 Surely, just because you are so right in what 
 you feel to be impossibility, you can afford to 
 be kind." 
 
 "You think I behave badly to Dick? Oh, 
 Christina ! you are displeased with me ?" 
 
 They were very sincere with each other, 
 these two, and bared their souls to each other 
 relentlessly. 
 
 "Only because you are so dear to me, Milly." 
 Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked ten- 
 derly at her friend. "Only because I want to 
 see you always right, exquisitely right. You 
 make me uncomfortable when you are not. He 
 has done you no wrong. Why should you treat 
 him as you did this morning, using me as a 
 foil to show him his own stupidity? Not that
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 197 
 
 I do find him stupid, Milly; only very, very 
 simple." 
 
 "I know it ! Oh, I know it !" Milly wailed. 
 "If only he had done me a wrong it would be 
 so much easier! He irritates me so unspeak- 
 ably, and I seem to feel it more, now that I 
 have you. That laboured chaffing of you at 
 breakfast how could you have borne it? I 
 can't pretend amusement, and chaff is his only 
 conception of human intercourse. I know I'm 
 horrid I know it; but it is the long, long ac- 
 cumulations of repressed exasperation that 
 have made me so worse than exasperations. 
 I remember, during the first months of our 
 married life, when I was becoming dreadfully 
 frightened, catching glimpses on every side of 
 my awful mistake I remember once kissing 
 him and saying something playful that hid an 
 appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassur- 
 ance. And do you know, he answered me 
 with a chaffing jest a stupid, stupid jest 
 some piece of would-be gallant folly. It was 
 like a dagger!" 
 
 "Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kiss- 
 ing him, that it made him shy," Christina sug- 
 gested, but Milly said: "Dick shy! Oh no, 
 he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He 
 doesn't feel things at all as you, with your
 
 198 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, 
 and I'm afraid he is sometimes immensely, hid- 
 eously stupid." 
 
 After all, as Christina came to see, Dick's 
 inevitable loss was her own gain. Milly, who 
 could not be her husband's, was hers, almost 
 as a child might have been. Christina, for 
 the first time in her life, knew the intoxicating 
 experience of being sought out and needed. It 
 was Milly who turned to her; Milly who put 
 out appealing hands, like a lonely child; who 
 nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly 
 sighing, as she begged her please, please not 
 to go until she had to and couldn't she, 
 wouldn't she, stay on until the winter? 
 
 Why shouldn't she? Her own life was 
 empty. It ended in her passing most of the 
 winter with Milly in the country after Dick 
 had gone off to India. It was a blissful winter, 
 the happiest, in reality, that Christina had ever 
 known, though she was not aware of this nor 
 aware that it was the first time in her life that 
 she was the recipient of as much devotion as she 
 gave. They read and rode and walked and 
 talked and carried on energetic reforms and 
 charities in the village. Christina was full of 
 ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In 
 spite of her physical delicacy, for she had a
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 199 
 
 weak heart, she showed an enterprise and en- 
 durance that Milly was not capable of. The 
 winter went by and life was full of signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay 
 with her in London for the spring, and so, by 
 degrees, they both came to think of home as 
 the being together. Christina's little house in 
 Sloane Street became a centre of discriminating 
 hospitality; they had an equal talent for se- 
 lection and recognition, and Milly possessed 
 the irradiating attractive qualities that Chris- 
 tina lacked. Together they became something 
 of a touchstone for the finer, more recondite ele- 
 ments in the vortex of the larger London life. 
 All their people seemed to come to them through 
 some pleasant affinity, the people who had done 
 clever things ; the people who, better still, shone 
 only with latent possibilities and were the 
 richer for their reticences; and dear, comfort- 
 able, unexacting people who were not partic- 
 ularly clever, but responsive, appreciative and 
 genuine. 
 
 Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. 
 She and Milly studied and travelled and, in the 
 country, at the proper seasons, rusticated. 
 With all its harmony, their life did not want 
 its more closely knitting times of fear, as when
 
 200 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed 
 her through the long crisis, or when Christina's 
 heart showed alarming symptoms and hurried 
 them away to German specialists. 
 
 There were funny little quarrels, too, funny 
 to look back upon, though very painful at the 
 moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Chris- 
 tina violent in reproach. The swift reconcili- 
 ations atoned for all, when, holding each other's 
 hands, they laughed at each other, each eager 
 to take the blame. Certain defects they came 
 to recognize and to take into account, tolerant, 
 loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affec- 
 tion, seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, 
 had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when 
 nothing seemed to interest her, neither books 
 nor music nor people, not even Christina, and 
 when, sunken in a deep armchair, she would 
 listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her 
 eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. 
 These moods always hurt Christina, Milly 
 herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly 
 was not aware of their hurting, and she hid 
 the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted 
 tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But 
 she did not quite understand; for she never 
 wished to retire into herself and away from 
 Milly.
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 201 
 
 And Milly discovered that Christina could 
 be unreasonable so she tolerantly termed a 
 smouldering element in her friend's nature; 
 Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous. 
 They shared all their friends, many of them 
 dear friends, but dear on a certain level, below 
 the illuminated solitude where they two stood 
 in their precious isolation. And Milly pro- 
 tested to herself that she was the last person to 
 wish that isolation disturbed. No one knew 
 her, understood her, helped and loved her as 
 Christina did; there was no one like Christina, 
 no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. 
 Why then should Christina, like a foolish 
 school-girl, show unmistakably her efforts to 
 hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white- 
 lipped a sombre misery if Milly allowed any- 
 one to absorb her? This really piteous 
 infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not 
 show it at all during the first years of their 
 companionship; it grew with her growing de- 
 votion to Milly. Milly discovered it when she 
 asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with 
 them. Christina, at the proposal, had been all 
 glad, frank acquiescence. Unsuspectingly 
 Milly petted and made much of the girl whose 
 adoration was sweet to her. She went about 
 with her sight-seeing, when Christina said that
 
 202 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 she was tired and did not care to see things, not 
 remembering that when they were alone to- 
 gether Christina had never seemed tired. She 
 laughed and talked till all hours of the night 
 with Joan, when Christina had gone to bed 
 saying that she was sleepy. All had seemed 
 peaceful and normal. Milly was stupefied 
 when, by degrees, a consciousness of a differ- 
 ence in Christina crept upon her. 
 
 Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply re- 
 sponsive ; but ice was in the smile, the response 
 was galvanized. She was suffering the reali- 
 zation rushed upon Milly once her innocent 
 eyes were opened, and all her strength went to 
 hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt 
 a helpless alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon 
 her in the face of this development. She found 
 Christina sobbing in her room one night when 
 she cut short her talk with Joan and came upon 
 her unexpectedly. 
 
 Milly's tender heart rose at a bound over 
 alarm and shyness. But when she ran to her, 
 Christina pushed her fiercely away. "You 
 know ! Of course you know ! Go back to her 
 if you like her better !" 
 
 She was like a frantic child. Milly could 
 have laughed, had not the exhibition in her 
 grave, staunch Christina frightened her too
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 203 
 
 much, made her too terribly sorry and almost 
 ashamed for her. 
 
 Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly 
 at her own folly, yet confessing her own power- 
 lessness before it, put her arms around her neck 
 and begged for forgiveness, Milly in all her 
 soft, humorous reproaches daring now to tease 
 and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery 
 to reckon with. A weight seemed to have come 
 upon her as she realised how much Christina 
 cared. It was as if Christina had confessed 
 that she cared so much more than she, Milly, 
 could ever do. She had not before thought of 
 their friendship as a responsibility. It was too 
 dear, and silly and pathetic in Christina, but 
 it seemed to manacle her. 
 
 She must be very careful to like no Joans too 
 much in the future. Christina protested pas- 
 sionately that she must talk to Joan and love 
 Joan any number of Joans, young or old, male 
 or female, as much as before, more than before, 
 since now her folly was dissipated by confes- 
 sion ; but Milly in her heart knew better than to 
 believe her. She filled Christina's life com- 
 pletely, to the exclusion of any other deep affec- 
 tion, and Christina could never be happy unless 
 her friend's life were equally undivided.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 DICK 
 
 FOUR years passed, and during them Dick 
 Quentyn had wandered about the world, 
 not at all disconsolately. He spent several 
 seasons with friends in India ; he went to Can- 
 ada and to Japan ; when he came home he filled 
 his time largely with shooting and hunting. 
 
 It was almost as a guest that, in the country 
 and in his own house, he passed a few weeks 
 with Milly and Christina and entirely as a 
 guest that he dined now and then with them in 
 London. 
 
 It was a rather ludicrous situation, but he 
 did not seem depressed or abashed by it. 
 Christina always felt that by some boyish in- 
 tuition he recognized in her a friendly sym- 
 pathy, a sympathy which he must certainly see 
 as terribly detached, since it was she who had 
 now fixed definitely Milly's removal from his 
 life, made it permanent and given it a meaning. 
 But it was a sympathy very friendly, even 
 
 slightly humorous. He would catch her dark 
 
 204
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 205 
 
 eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest at her dinner- 
 table (he never took Milly in, all the nega- 
 tions of married life were still his) and in 
 them he saw and responded to an almost affec- 
 tionate playfulness. He evidently saw the joke 
 and it amused him. Christina often reflected 
 that Dick was a dear, in all his impossibility, 
 and that Milly was not nearly nice enough to 
 him. But Milly was nicer than she had been; 
 the new effectiveness and happiness of her own 
 life made it less of an effort to be so. From 
 her illumined temple she smiled at him, a smile 
 that gained in sweetness and lost its chill. She 
 handed on to him a little of the radiance. 
 
 "Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I 
 must say there is no one you could have chosen 
 for a friend that I could have liked so much as 
 Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening 
 in the drawing-room after dinner. They often 
 had an affable chat before the wondering eyes 
 of the world. Milly chatted with great affa- 
 bility. Dick, as Christina so often reminded 
 her, was a dear. No one could have less sug- 
 gested shackles. 
 
 "Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what do 
 you find to like in Christina?" Even in her 
 new tolerance there lurked touches of the old 
 irrepressible disdain.
 
 206 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Dick, twisting his moustache, contemplated 
 her. "Do you mean that I'm not capable of 
 liking anything or anybody that you do?" he 
 inquired. Milly flushed, though the mildness 
 of her husband's tone, one of purely impersonal 
 interest, suggested no conscious laying of a 
 coal of fire upon her head. It was what she 
 had meant. That Dick should like Christina, 
 Christina Dick, was wholly delightful, but that 
 Dick should seem to like what she liked for the 
 same reasons irked her a little. It was rather 
 as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her 
 favourite Brahms Rhapsody. She rather 
 wanted to show him that any idea he might 
 entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. 
 How could Dick like a Brahms Rhapsody, he 
 whose highest, ideals of music were of some- 
 thing sedative after a day's hard riding? And 
 how could Dick really like Christina? If he' 
 really did, and for any of her reasons, there 
 must be between them the link, if ever so small 
 a one, of a community of taste a link that she 
 had never recognized. 
 
 "I think that we could only like the same 
 things in a very different way," she confessed. 
 "Why do you like Christina ?" 
 
 He did not reply at once, and she went on, 
 looking at him, smiling they were sitting side
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 207 
 
 by side on a little sofa; "it isn't her charm, for 
 you think her ugly." 
 
 "Yes; she's ugly certainly," Dick assented, 
 quite as dully as she had hoped he would, 
 "though her figure is rather neat." 
 
 Milly's smile shifted to its habitual kindly 
 irony. "She is subtle and delicate and sensi- 
 tive," she said, rehearsing to herself as much 
 as to him all the reasons why Dick could not 
 really like Christina. "Her truths would never 
 blunder and her silences never bore." "As 
 Dick's did," was in her mind. It was cruel 
 to be so conscious of the contrast when he 
 looked at her with such unconsciousness; to 
 reassure herself with the expression of it was 
 rather like mocking something blind and deaf 
 and trusting. A sudden pity confused her, 
 -and, with a little artificiality of manner which 
 masked the confusion, she went on: "One 
 could never be unhappy without her knowing 
 it, and then one would be glad she did know, 
 for she can sympathise without hurting you 
 with sympathy. She feels everything that is 
 beautiful and rare, everything that is sad and 
 tragic; she feels everything and sees every- 
 thing, and she sees and feels in order to act, 
 to give, to help. Is it all this you like in her?" 
 Milly finished.
 
 208 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Dick Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife. 
 "Yes; I suppose so," he said. 
 
 "You see these things in Christina?" 
 
 "In a different way," he smiled. It was al- 
 most a very clever smile. 
 
 Milly might have felt startled at it had he 
 not gone on very simply: "One sees that she 
 is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal; she 
 would go through thick and thin for anyone 
 she cared about; and so kind, as you say; she 
 would talk as nicely to a dull person as to a 
 clever one; she'd never snub one or make one 
 feel a duffer." 
 
 For a moment Milly was silent. "Do you 
 mean that I used to snub you and make you 
 feel a duffer?" she then asked. 
 
 "Oh, I say, Milly!" Dick, genuinely dis- 
 tressed, looked his negative. "You didn't sup- 
 
 pose ?- 
 
 "I know that I was often horrid." 
 "Well, if you were, you didn't suppose I'd 
 tell you in that roundabout fashion. Besides, 
 all that's done with long ago." He looked 
 away from her now and down at the floor. 
 
 Again Milly was silent. Strangely to her- 
 self, she felt her eyes fill with tears. She 
 waited to conquer them before saying very
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 209 
 
 gently : "Dick, do forgive me for having been 
 so horrid." 
 
 He stared up at her. "Forgive you, Milly?" 
 The request seemed to leave him speechless. 
 
 She was able to smile at him. "You do ?" 
 
 "You never were. It's more to the point for 
 me to ask you to forgive me." 
 
 "For what, pray?" She had to control a 
 quiver in her voice. 
 
 "Oh for everything for being so wrong, 
 so altogether the wrong person, you know," 
 said Dick, smiling too. He again looked away 
 from her, across the room, now, at Christina; 
 and, after a silence, filled for Milly with per- 
 plexing impulses, he added : "But the real rea- 
 son I like her so much is that she is so tremen- 
 dously fond of you." 
 
 Milly had to bring her thoughts back with 
 an effort to Christina ; she must let his remark 
 about being forgiven remain as casual as he 
 had evidently felt it ; and it was something else 
 that he had said which more emphatically held 
 her attention. She thought of it all the even- 
 ing, after he had gone ; and, while her hair was 
 being brushed, she looked at her reflection in 
 the mirror and saw herself in that time, "long 
 
 ago." It was as if Dick had shown her a dead 
 14
 
 210 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 thing, and had turned the key on it with his 
 quiet words of acquiescence. 
 
 She looked in the mirror. Surrounded by 
 the softly falling radiance of her hair, her face 
 was still girlish in tint and outline ; but already 
 her eyes had in them the depth of time lived 
 through, her cheeks and lips were differently 
 sweet; and as the realization of time's swift 
 passage stole upon her, a vague, strong pro- 
 test filled her, a sense of deep, irremediable dis- 
 appointment with life. 
 
 Dick Quentyn went that winter to Africa, 
 and Milly gave her husband a farewell all 
 kindness and composure, when he came to bid 
 Christina and her good-bye. Composure was 
 a habit, and she was unaware of a new dis- 
 content and protest that stirred beneath it, 
 though aware that the kindness she felt for her 
 husband was greater than what her words of 
 farewell expressed. 
 
 Dick always wrote punctually, once a fort- 
 night, to his wife, short bulletins, to which, as 
 accurately and as laconically, she responded. 
 This winter the bulletins were often delayed, 
 sometimes altogether missing. 
 
 Dick had joined an exploring party, and his 
 allusions, by the way, to "Narrow shaves," 
 "Nasty rows with natives," and "A rather
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 211 
 
 beastly fever," explained these irregularities. 
 
 "He really ought to write a book about it. 
 They have evidently been in danger, and had 
 an heroic time of it altogether," Christina said, 
 during a sympathetic perusal of these docu- 
 ments which were always handed on to her, 
 as, for any intimacy they contained, they might 
 have been handed on to anybody. They began 
 "Dear Milly"; and ended "Yours aff'ly, D. 
 Q." The "affectionately" was always abbrevi- 
 ated. 
 
 "I suppose they really are in a good deal 
 of danger," said Milly, nibbling at her toast, 
 they were at breakfast. 
 
 "That, I suppose, was what they went for," 
 Christina replied, her eyes passing over the 
 letter. 
 
 Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, 
 watched and read. "Poor Dick!" she said 
 presently. 
 
 Christina had laid down the letter and was 
 going on with her coffee. 
 
 "Why poor, dear ? It's what he enjoys." 
 
 "If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it 
 would hardly affect us more than the death 
 of any of the men who had tea here yesterday." 
 
 "Milly !" said Christina. She put down her 
 cup.
 
 212 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 "Would it?" Milly insisted. "Would you 
 really mind more?" 
 
 "Your husband my child!" This elder- 
 sister mode of address was often Christina's. 
 
 "Why should a husband one hasn't been able 
 to live with count for as much as a friend one 
 is glad to see?" 
 
 "Because he has counted for so much." 
 
 "But, Christina, you can't deny that you 
 would hardly be sorry, and that you would not 
 expect me to be sorry only solemn." 
 
 "I should expect you to be both." 
 
 "Sorry because a man I have no affection for 
 a man I have almost hated is dead?" 
 
 "Yes; if only for those reasons; and that it 
 should be only for those reasons is what you 
 meant when you said : 'Poor Dick,' " Chris- 
 tina demonstrated with an air of finality that 
 showed her displeased with what she felt to be 
 an unbecoming levity. 
 
 Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed 
 that, though she did not notice how often she 
 returned to the subject of her husband's danger 
 and the irony of her own indifference to it. 
 And Milly's listless moods followed one other 
 so closely this winter as to become almost per- 
 manent. She was evidently bored. More and 
 more frequently, when they were talking over
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 213 
 
 their tete-a-tete tea, the very dearest hour of 
 the day, Christina saw that Milly did not hear 
 her. After these four years of comprehension 
 and mutual forbearance the apparent indif- 
 ference or preoccupation could not, at first, 
 seriously disturb her; hurt her it always did. 
 Picking up a book she would read and cease to 
 talk. The mood always passed the sooner for 
 not being recognised, and Milly would come 
 out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, 
 sweeter, more responsive than before. But 
 this winter she did not come out. That she 
 should be so bored, so apathetic, began to dis- 
 turb as well as to hurt Christina. There came 
 a quick pulsing of fear; did some new attach- 
 ment account for it? Her mind, in a swift, 
 flame-like running around the circle of possi- 
 bilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put 
 the fear away. 
 
 One day, taking Milly's face between her 
 hands, yet feeling, strangely, a sudden shyness 
 that made the complete confession of her alarms 
 too difficult, she asked her if she were un- 
 happy. 
 
 "Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I 
 be?" Milly put an affectionate arm about her 
 friend's neck. 
 
 "But are you ? Is there anything you would
 
 214 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 like to do? Anywhere you would like to go? 
 I am sure that you are frightfully bored," 
 Christina smiled. "Confess that you are." 
 
 "Have I seemed bored ? No. I can't think 
 of anything that would interest me. One 
 comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you 
 know stretches of dull sands. Or is it that 
 I am getting old, Christina?" 
 
 "You old? You, child!" 
 
 "I feel old," said Milly. "Really old and 
 tired." 
 
 Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over 
 a sudden choking in her throat. It was not 
 sympathy for her friend's Weltschmertz; it was 
 the recognition of something in her eyes, her 
 voice something she could not analyze, as if 
 a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, 
 between them, and as if, did she say that it 
 was there, it would change suddenly to stone 
 and perhaps shut her out for ever. 
 
 What was it in Milly that made her afraid 
 that to cry out her fears might make them 
 permanent? She battled with them all the 
 winter. They had arranged to go to Sicily 
 and Greece for the spring, and Christina looked 
 forward to this trip as a definite goal. It would 
 break the spell, turn the difficult corner, for 
 all her fierce idealism she was too wise a woman
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 215 
 
 not to know that every human relation must 
 have corners; and, indeed, in talking over 
 plans, getting up information, burnishing his- 
 torical memories, Milly showed some of her old 
 girlish eagerness. She and Christina even 
 read the Greek tragedies over together, in 
 order, Milly said, that they should steep them- 
 selves in the proper atmosphere. It was there- 
 fore with a shock of bitter surprise and dis- 
 appointment that Christina, only a fortnight 
 before the time fixed for their departure, heard 
 Milly announce, with evident openness, though 
 she flushed slightly, that she thought she would 
 rather put off the trip ; she would rather spend 
 April at Chawlton ; and, at once going on, look- 
 ing clearly at her friend: "You see, dear, I 
 have just had a letter from Dick. He gets 
 back next week and is going down there. He 
 says that he wants to see the primroses after 
 that horrid Africa; quite a poetical touch, 
 isn't it, for Dick! And I think it would be 
 really a little too brutal of me, wouldn't it, if 
 I sailed off without seeing him at all without 
 pouring out his tea for even one week." 
 
 Milly was smiling, really with her own soft 
 gaiety ; the flush had gone. Christina was con- 
 vinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty 
 had called Milly away from pleasure, and she
 
 2i6 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 had feared, for a moment, that her friend would 
 think too much sacrifice to it. 
 
 "Of course, dearest, of course we will put 
 it off," she said. "And of course we will go 
 down to welcome home the wanderer. It is 
 sweet of you to have thought of it." 
 
 Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming 
 quite a virtuous woman," she said. "And it 
 is a pity to miss the primroses." 
 
 The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, 
 servants to be redistributed, Christina saw to 
 all, while Milly, with still her new cheerful- 
 ness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop 
 to shop, decking herself in appropriate butter- 
 fly garments. They were to get to Chawlton 
 only a day or two before Dick's arrival. 
 
 The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were 
 radiant, and Milly, in the environment of 
 jocund revival, shared the radiance. All bar- 
 riers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, 
 full of strange presages, felt the very radiance 
 to make one. 
 
 Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hat- 
 less, her white dress and fair head shining 
 among the young greys and greens. She came 
 in laden with flowers, and the house smiled 
 with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile 
 gaiety. "Isn't the country delicious ?" she said
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 217 
 
 to Christina. "Much nicer than dreary Greece 
 and tiresome ruins, isn't it?" 
 
 "Much," said Christina, who was finding the 
 country, the spring, the sunshine, the very 
 primroses, full of a haunting melancholy. 
 
 "I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness 
 and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, 
 "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the 
 cuckoo, Christina, isn't it a sound that makes 
 one think of tears and happiness !" 
 
 Of tears only, not of happiness, thought 
 Christina; of regret regret for something 
 gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo's cry pierced 
 her all day long. 
 
 Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina 
 did not recall the words definitely when she saw 
 Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his 
 wife at the threshold of the house; but some- 
 thing unformulated echoed in her mind with a 
 deepened sense of presage. 
 
 Milly stretched out both her hands. "Wel- 
 come home, Dick," she said. And she held her 
 cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint 
 or shyness in her eyes. She looked at the 
 bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open 
 and happy a gaze as though he had been an 
 oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new ; but 
 then it was only part of Milly's revival; and
 
 218 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 then, he had been in danger. Christina took 
 comfort, she knew not for what. 
 
 "It is good to be at home again," Dick as- 
 severated more than once during the day ; and, 
 "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he ex- 
 claimed in the long drawing-room. 
 
 Milly, her arm in Christina's, stood beside 
 him. "I gathered them, Dick, all of them, and 
 arranged them, in honour of your return." 
 
 "Oh, come now!" Dick Quentyn ejaculated 
 with humorous incredulity. 
 
 Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she 
 and Christina walked about the grounds. 
 Christina had felt a curious shrinking from 
 joining them, a shrinking, in any normal con- 
 dition of things between husband and wife, so 
 natural that it was only with a shock of amaze- 
 ment that she recognized its monstrousness as 
 applied to the actual one. She leave Milly 
 alone with her husband ! What a revolution in 
 all their relations would such a withdrawal have 
 portended ! To leave them would have been to 
 yield to morbid imaginations, to make them 
 almost real; at all events to make them visible 
 to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. 
 Milly, indeed, seemed to see nothing. 
 
 She still held Christina's hand drawn 
 through her arm while they walked and lis-
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 219 
 
 tened to Dick's laconic and much prompted re- 
 cital of his African adventures. 
 
 "I do hope you won't go off on any more 
 terrible expeditions of this sort for. a very long 
 time, Dick," said Milly. "I expected every 
 morning to read in the newspaper that you'd 
 been eaten by savages." 
 
 "Well, I wasn't among cannibals, you know," 
 literal Dick objected, "and I think I'll have to 
 have another brush at it. Harvey is going out 
 in a month or so." 
 
 "And you are going with him?" 
 
 "Well, I rather think I shall," said Dick. 
 "He is a splendid fellow, and it seems my sort 
 of thing." 
 
 Before dinner, in the drawing-room, he 
 joined Christina, who was sitting alone look- 
 ing out at the evening. "As inseparable as 
 ever, you and Milly, aren't you ?" he said, com- 
 ing and standing over her, his genial eyes upon 
 her. 
 
 "Just as inseparable," she assented, look- 
 ing up at him. She smiled with an emphasis 
 that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor 
 Dick recognized defiance. 
 
 "Milly is looking a little fagged, don't you 
 think," he went on. "Has she been doing too 
 much this winter? You are frightfully busy,
 
 220 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 aren't you? Milly always likes going at a 
 great pace, I know." 
 
 "I should not have thought there was any- 
 thing noticeable," said Christina. "She was 
 a little fagged, perhaps; but the country has 
 already refreshed her wonderfully." 
 
 "London always does pull one down, I hate 
 the beastly place," said Dick. And he went 
 on : "She is being awfully nice to me. I don't 
 remember her ever having been so nice since, 
 I mean, we decided that we couldn't hit it off. 
 One would really say that she rather liked see- 
 ing me !" and Dick smiled, as if the joke were 
 very comical. 
 
 "You have been in such danger. Milly can 
 but feel relief." Her voice was full of an 
 odd repression, discouragement, but Dick was 
 altogether too innocent of any hope to be aware 
 of discouragement or repression. 
 
 "She was worried about me? Really? 
 That was awfully good of her," he said. 
 
 Christina was remembering that Milly had 
 only expressed indifference as to Dick's danger. 
 
 The ensuing evening was, to Christina, un- 
 canny in its unapparent strangeness. She and 
 Dick were both aware of novelty and Milly was 
 aware of none. Her cheerful kindness was as 
 natural and spontaneous as though she had
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 221 
 
 been a girl greeting a long absent brother. 
 She questioned Dick, and, as her questions 
 showed interest interest and a knowledge 
 horribly surprising to Christina Dick talked 
 with unusual fluency. Christina looked at 
 them and listened to them, while Milly, lean- 
 ing an arm on the table, gazed with gravely 
 shining eyes at her husband. The arm, the 
 eyes, the lines of the throat, were very lovely. 
 Christina's mind fixed upon that beauty, and 
 she wished that Milly would not lean so and 
 look so. Milly, again, was unaware. It was 
 Christina who was aware; Christina who was 
 quivering with latent, unformulated con- 
 sciousness. After dinner, Milly and Dick still 
 talked; she still listened. She knew nothing 
 about Africa. 
 
 For three or four days this was the situa- 
 tion ; a reunited brother and sister ; a friend, for 
 the time being, necessarily incidental. Then, 
 suddenly, the presages grew plainly ominous. 
 Was it her own realization of loneliness, of 
 not being needed, that so overwhelmed her? 
 or the sense of some utter change in her dar- 
 ling a change so gradual that until its ac- 
 complishment it had seemed madness to recog- 
 nize it ? The moment of recognition came one 
 day, when, on going into the library, she
 
 222 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 found Dick and Milly sitting side by side at 
 the table, their heads bent over a map ; and 
 they were not looking at the map; they were 
 looking at each other; still like brother and 
 sister, but such fond brother and sister, while 
 they smiled and talked. 
 
 Milly turned her head and saw Christina, 
 and Christina knew that some evident adjust- 
 ment went over her own face, for Milly 
 jumped up, eagerly, too eagerly, and pulled a 
 chair back for her and said; "Sit down, dear- 
 est. Dick is telling me adventures." 
 
 What was it that drove into Christina's 
 heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, 
 eagerly smiled ; and yet she was miles and miles 
 away; had she been in the jungles of Africa 
 with her husband she could not have been 
 further; and she was greeting her as though 
 she were a guest, greeting her with conven- 
 tional warmth and courteous sweetness. 
 Christina was not wanted ; through the warmth 
 and sweetness she felt that. 
 
 Smiling, she said she had come for a book. 
 Going to the book-cases she sought for one ac- 
 curately why she should seek, as though she 
 had come in with the intention of finding it, 
 a volume of frothy eighteenth century French 
 memoirs she could not have told and, smil-
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 223 
 
 ing again upon them with unconstrained light- 
 ness, she left them. She walked steadily to 
 her room, locked the door, and, falling upon 
 her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony 
 of tears. 
 
 The end had come; not of Christina's love, 
 not of her need, but of Milly's. At first her 
 mind refused to face the full realization 
 groped among the omens of the past, would 
 not see in Dick, even now, the cause of all. 
 She could trace the gradual, the dreadful sev- 
 erance; Milly's slow loss of interest in her 
 and in their life together. It was at first only 
 for the fact of loss that she wept, that loss, 
 only, she could look at. But by degrees, as 
 her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to 
 think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desper- 
 ate snatchings at hope, while she crouched by 
 the bed; pushing back her hair from her fore- 
 head ; pressing her hot temples with icy hands. 
 
 Why should Milly lose interest? How 
 could she? How could love and truest sym- 
 pathy, truest understanding how could they 
 fail? 
 
 "Love begets love. Love begets love," she 
 whispered under her breath, not knowing that
 
 224 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 she spoke, and, in this hour of shipwreck, 
 clinging unconsciously to such spars and frag- 
 ments of childish, unreasoning trust as her 
 memory tossed her. No other friendship 
 threatened hers; she was first as friend, ir- 
 revocably, she knew it. First as friend did 
 not mean to Milly, could never mean, the deep- 
 dwelling devotion that it meant to her; but 
 such affinity and attachment as Milly felt 
 could not die without some other cause than 
 mere weariness. And the truth no longer to 
 be evaded broke over her. It was the simplest 
 while the most absurd of truths. Milly was 
 falling in love; Milly was falling in love with 
 Dick; and she was frank and happy because 
 she did not know it; and he did not know it. 
 Like two children with a fresh day of play 
 and sunshine before them, they were engaged 
 in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-be- 
 lieves, no thought of sentiment or emotion in 
 them to account for the new sympathy; but 
 from these games they would return hand in 
 hand, all in all to each other, bound together 
 in the lover's illusion and needing no one else. 
 Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see 
 these things as silly toys, as she did? What 
 could Milly care for such toys? That she 
 should play with them, as if she placed tin
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 225 
 
 soldiers and blew a tin trumpet, showed the 
 fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour 
 only, a moonshine mood of vague restlessness 
 and craving. How dignify by the sacred name 
 of love this sentiment, all made of her weak- 
 ness, her emotionalism, her egotism, that 
 swayed her now so ludicrously towards the 
 man whom, open-eyed, she had rejected and 
 scorned for years? 
 
 Passionate repudiation of the debasement for 
 Milly swept through the stricken friend and 
 mingled with the throes of her anguish for 
 herself. For how was she to live without 
 Milly? How could she live as Milly's formal 
 friend, kept outside the circle of intimate af- 
 fection, the circle where, till now, she had 
 reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly's 
 nature too well ; she saw that with all its sweet- 
 ness it was slight. Love, with her, would ef- 
 face all friendships. Like a delicate, narrow 
 little vase, her heart could hold but one deep 
 feeling. She would come, simply, not to care 
 for Christina at all. Would come? Had she 
 not come already ? In her eyes, her smiles, the 
 empty caressing of her voice, was there not al- 
 ready the most profound indifference? And 
 all the forces of Christina's nature rose in re- 
 bellion. She felt the rebellion like the on-
 
 226 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 slaught of angels of light against powers of 
 darkness; it was the ideal doing battle with 
 some primal, instinctive force. She must 
 fight for Milly and for herself. For she, too, 
 had her claim. She measured herself beside 
 Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life 
 was cheerful, contented, complete; hers with- 
 out Milly would be a warped, a meaningless, 
 a broken life. Strangely, her thoughts, in all 
 their anguish, turned in not one reproach upon 
 her friend; rather, her comprehension, from 
 maternal heights of love, sorrowed over her 
 with infinite tenderness. For, so she told her- 
 self, she could have resigned her, in spite of 
 her own bereavement, to true companionship, 
 true fulfilment. But Milly her Milly made 
 hers by all these years in love with Dick 
 Quentyn! It was a calamity, a disease which 
 had befallen her darling. Asking no heights, 
 this love would lead her down to contented 
 levels, and Milly's life, too, in all true senses, 
 would be warped and meaningless and broken. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the library, Dick said to his 
 wife: "An't I interrupting you? Don't you 
 read or talk or do something with Mrs. Drent 
 at this time of the day?" 
 
 And at the question alone, contentedly alone 
 with him as she was, dimly enlightened, too,
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 227 
 
 by Christina's guarded glance, Milly made a 
 swift, surprised survey of the situation. She 
 did not want to talk to Christina; she wanted 
 to go on talking to Dick. She had not as yet 
 realized that Christina's presence had become 
 an interruption, a burden; Christina's person- 
 ality had seemed blurred, merely, and far away. 
 She was now aware of this, aware, for the first 
 time, of something to hide from Christina, and 
 a sense of awkwardness and almost of con- 
 fusion came upon her. 
 
 "Oh no, you are not interrupting us. Chris- 
 tina and I will have heaps of time for talking 
 and reading when you are gone," she said, smil- 
 ing and blushing faintly. 
 
 Dick, even more unconscious than she of 
 its meaning, gazed at the blush, and then they 
 went on with their talk about crocodiles. 
 
 When Christina saw Milly again that even- 
 ing, it was evident to her that Milly had at last 
 become aware of something changed, and that 
 her own composure urged Milly into a self- 
 protecting overdemonstrativeness. She was 
 completely composed. She stood aside, mild, 
 unemphatic, unaware, seeming not to see, mak- 
 ing no effort to hold; and as her desperate 
 dread thus instinctively armed her, she saw 
 that no other attitude could have been so ef-
 
 228 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 ficacious. When she stood aside, Milly was 
 forced to draw her in; when she pretended to 
 see nothing, Milly must pretend to her and 
 to Dick that there was nothing to see. Milly 
 was afraid of her ; that became apparent to her 
 during the ensuing days, terrible, lovely days 
 of spring, when, as if with drawn breath and 
 cold, measuring eye, she crossed an abyss on 
 a narrow plank laid above the emptiness. 
 Milly was afraid; of her scorn and incredu- 
 lity, perhaps; perhaps only of her pain. Milly 
 was cowardly in her shrinking from giving 
 pain; it would be impossible for her to go to 
 her friend and say: "I have fallen in love with 
 my husband, and you and I must part." In 
 that impossibility for Milly lay her only hope. 
 If Milly and Dick could be held apart, and by 
 Milly's own cowardice rather than by any word 
 or gesture of her own, the wretched interlude 
 might pass and Milly come to look back upon 
 it with shame and amazement and to thank 
 her friend for the strength and control that had 
 made escape possible. 
 
 And the first-fruits of her strategy were 
 soon apparent. Milly saw less and less of Dick. 
 Dick, as of old, made no attempt to seek her 
 out and, obviously, it was now impossible for 
 Milly, with Christina's quiet eyes upon her, to
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 229 
 
 seek him. Milly took up again the idea of 
 Greece and said that, after all, they must go 
 that spring. They would all, she gaily de- 
 clared, go up to London and depart to their 
 different quarters of the globe at the same 
 time, Dick to Africa and she and Christina 
 to Greece. This was said in Dick's pres- 
 ence and he cheerfully acquiesced. Christina 
 wondered if Milly had not hoped for some pro- 
 test or suggestion from him. In Dick's blind- 
 ness lay, she began to see, an even greater hope 
 than in Milly's cowardice. .Milly could not 
 very well come to her and avow her love for 
 Dick when Dick, it was evident, did not dream 
 of avowing his for her. And Milly became 
 aware of this as she did. Her manner towards 
 Dick changed. She rallied him with a touch 
 of irritability; she scored off him as she had 
 used to do, by means of Christina ; she put for- 
 ward Christina and her relation to Christina 
 constantly, and seemed to taunt him, as of old, 
 with his own inadequacy. All her innocent 
 gaiety was gone ; she hid her deep disquiet un- 
 der an air of feverish brightness, and poor 
 stupid Dick, accepting Milly's alteration as he 
 had always accepted things from her, showed 
 no hurt and no reproach; he merely effaced 
 himself, cheerfully, once more.
 
 230 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Christina understood it all and the breath- 
 less subterfuges in which Milly's perturbation 
 concealed itself. She was longing that Dick 
 should see what she could not show, and that 
 he should break through the web with an 
 avowal. She was longing that Christina, if 
 Dick remained blind, should mercifully give 
 Dick and her their chance. Christina knew 
 the horrible risk she ran in remaining blandly 
 unaware, in continuing to take Milly at her 
 word, in keeping there, between her and Dick, 
 where Milly herself placed her. She might 
 part them, but Milly might come to hate 
 her. 
 
 Milly's plan was carried out: they all went 
 up to town together, Milly to her friend's 
 house, Dick to his bachelor's chambers. And 
 it was Christina who asked Dick to come and 
 dine with them the night before he left for 
 Africa. She maintained every appearance. 
 The very air that night was electric with the 
 restraints ready to burst into reverberations 
 which would surprise no one but Dick. Chris- 
 tina herself was aware of a strange little dart 
 of impatience with him. His stupidity helped 
 her as nothing else could have helped; yet, 
 while she blessed it, she could feel for Milly, 
 and actually, while she blessed, resent it. It
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 231 
 
 was true that she read in his eyes a slight shy- 
 ness as they rested upon his wife. He was be- 
 wildered, and it was evident he was not happy. 
 And Milly had dropped her shield of flippancy. 
 She sat silent, absent, absorbed, looking up at 
 her husband now and then, with curious eyes, 
 eyes cold and deep and suffering. Christina 
 saw it all. Should she leave them now, it was 
 inevitable that the revelation would come, and 
 it would come from Milly. Mutely, in their 
 respective unconsciousness and consciousness, 
 they were begging her to go; and she sat on. 
 Her inflexible determination upheld her over 
 the terrible falsity of her position. Milly, now, 
 must know that she knew ; yet she sat on, smil- 
 ing, talking, until the hour was late. 
 
 Then, as Dick rose, it was Milly who went 
 towards the barrier that she herself had raised 
 and showed Dick that it had an unlocked gate. 
 From her deep knowledge of Milly's nature, 
 Christina could gauge, with a dreadful ac- 
 curacy, what the strength of the feeling must 
 be that could nerve her, rising and saunter- 
 ing to the door beside him, to say in a strange, 
 in a nonchalant voice : "How about a walk in 
 the park to-morrow, Dick? You don't go till 
 the evening, do you?" 
 
 Dick stared for a moment. He was pitiably,
 
 232 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 mercifully stupid. His stare might really have 
 been interpreted as one of mere astonishment. 
 Then : 
 
 "Really?" he asked. "Aren't you and Mrs. 
 Drent too busy?" 
 
 "No, indeed. Our arrangements are all 
 made." 
 
 "Shall I come for you here?" 
 
 "Do. At eleven." 
 
 They shook hands, and Dick took Christina's 
 hand. She felt, always, that Dick looked upon 
 her as a friend. His eyes, now, revealed to 
 her his boyish wonder and gladness. She and 
 Milly were left alone. Milly, still with the 
 sauntering step, went to the mantelpiece and 
 touched her hair, looking in the glass. "Dear 
 me, how late !" she said, her eyes turning to the 
 clock. "How dreadful of us to have kept poor 
 Dick up so late. Shall we go to bed, dear- 
 est? I'm dreadfully sleepy." 
 
 "You didn't mean me to come for the walk, 
 too, did you?" Christina asked, in a voice as 
 easy, putting up her hand to hide a yawn. 
 "It's our usual hour; that's why I ask. But 
 you meant him to understand that you wanted 
 it to be a tete-a-tete, didn't you ? It's all right. 
 I can go to Mrs. Pomfret's for my fitting at 
 eleven."
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 233 
 
 "But, dearest, of course you are coming," 
 said Milly instantly. 
 
 Their eyes were on each other now, and 
 their faces armed and masked. Christina 
 measured the depth of estrangement in all that 
 the flexible, disingenuous acquiescence hid of 
 disappointment, bitterness, even hatred. 
 
 "Oh no, no, indeed; I think you ought to 
 have your good-bye walk alone," she insisted. 
 "He will expect it now. I'm sure he thought 
 that you particularly wanted it to be alone." 
 
 "He couldn't have thought anything so un- 
 likely," said Milly. "It is our good-bye walk 
 with you." 
 
 So Christina went with them. She felt her- 
 self still trembling in every nerve from the ap- 
 palling risk she had run, and ran; for which 
 was the greater risk, that Milly should realize 
 her guile and hate her, or that Milly and Dick 
 should come to an understanding? She could 
 not tell; nor where she stood; yet triumph 
 trembled in her fear. She had succeeded. 
 They had not spoken together. In the park she 
 and Milly bade Dick good-bye. Dick's train 
 was to go in the early evening. Milly, when 
 they reached home and she had talked lightly 
 if not gaily in the hansom--said that she had 
 rather a headache. She would have her lunch-
 
 234 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 eon in her room and sleep through the after- 
 noon and be fit and fresh for the play that 
 night. Christina knew in an instant that a last 
 desperate hope cowered beneath the affected 
 languor and lightness; and it watched her, 
 feverishly, like the eyes of a tracked animal 
 creeping in an underbrush past enemies' guns. 
 When she replied, kissing her friend tenderly, 
 that a good rest was the best of cures for a 
 headache and that she herself would do some 
 shopping and go to the tea for which they were 
 engaged, these large, sick eyes of Milly's hope 
 and fear widened and shone with a recovered 
 security. She wanted to be left alone that 
 afternoon. She would not go to Dick; Chris- 
 tina knew her too accurately to believe that 
 possible, and Dick had been too stupid to make 
 it conceivable; but what Milly hoped for was a 
 sudden illumination of Dick's stupidity; some 
 tug of unendurable pain or surmise that would 
 bring him back on the chance of seeing her 
 again. Milly's logic was instinctive, but Chris- 
 tina believed that it was sound. Dick, she, too, 
 felt sure of it, would come. She lunched and 
 then she sat at her writing-table and wrote 
 some notes, looking out at the street, and then, 
 when an hour approached in which a caller 
 might appear, she went out.
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 235 
 
 It was one of the suddenly hot days in May 
 that London sometimes offers. It was so hot 
 that Christina's head, as she walked slowly up 
 Sloane Street, swam and turned, and the lines 
 of cabs and omnibuses and carriages in the 
 roadway, upon which she fixed her eyes, seemed 
 to pulse and float as they went by. Three 
 o'clock had struck. Dick, if he came, must 
 come before five, and she must walk up and 
 down Sloane Street for perhaps nearly two 
 hours. If she lay in wait in the house, Milly, 
 who no doubt was already up and dressed and 
 waiting, would discover her. Milly, too, might 
 be watching from the drawing-room windows. 
 Her peril was desperate, and her safest course 
 was to walk on the side of the street near the 
 house where Milly could not see her. This she 
 did, turning regularly in her little beat, indif- 
 ferent to the odd spectacle she must present, 
 and scanning the passers-by. She had not 
 long to wait. Half-an-hour had not elapsed, 
 when, in an approaching hansom, she saw the 
 broad shoulders and perplexed yet resolute fea- 
 tures of Dick Quentyn. He, too, had come to 
 final decisions on this fateful day. 
 
 Christina walked towards the hansom smil- 
 ing. With her opened parasol and delicate 
 dress of white and black she had the most un-
 
 236 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 alarming and casual air. She seemed to have 
 just stepped from her own doorway. She had 
 held up her hand in signal, and Dick, arresting 
 his cabman, sprang out. Christina greeted 
 him gaily. 
 
 "Well, this is very nice. Can you really stop 
 and speak to me? You're not running a risk 
 of losing your train?" 
 
 Dick hardly smiled in answer. His face 
 showed his uncertainty, his anxiety, his trouble. 
 
 "My train? Oh no; I've over an hour yet. 
 Heaps of time. In fact I was on my way to 
 your house. I thought I'd have a last glimpse 
 of you and Milly. Are you just going out?" 
 
 "Just going out. And as to Milly, it's too 
 bad," said Christina, "but she is getting a little 
 sleep this afternoon and particularly asked that 
 she shouldn't be disturbed. We are going to 
 the play to-night. You'll walk with me for a 
 little way, though, won't you?" 
 
 There was nothing ambiguous in her words 
 or manner. They were certainly in keeping 
 with the situation, and poor Dick Quentyn, al- 
 though he looked almost haggard, turned obe- 
 diently and walked beside her. He walked 
 silently for a little way, while Christina talked, 
 then, as they came out into Knightsbridge, he 
 said, suddenly; "Mrs. Drent, may I ask you
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 237 
 
 about something? Do you mind? Shall we 
 go into the park for a little while?" 
 
 "Of course ; of course," said Christina, kindly 
 and mildly. 
 
 They went into the park and sat down on 
 two chairs that faced the stream of carriages 
 and had rhododendrons behind them. When 
 they sat down, Christina's head swam so giddily 
 that she feared she might be going to faint. 
 She closed her eyes for a moment, mastering 
 her weakness with a desperate effort. Dick 
 did not notice her pallor. "You see," he said, 
 leaning forward and boring small holes in the 
 gravel with the point of his stick "You see, 
 I think I must tell you ask you for your 
 advice because you know Milly so much better 
 than any one else in the world. You can tell 
 me if I'm mistaken or advise me what to do, 
 you know. It's just this: I thought, when I 
 first came home, that Milly had begun to care 
 for me again or, at all events, that she'd got 
 over disliking me." 
 
 "Care for you? Dislike you?" Christina 
 murmured vaguely. "Oh I don't think it was 
 ever that of late years since you'd so tact- 
 fully and charmingly understood and made 
 everything so easy for her." 
 
 "No. Yes; it seemed she'd particularly got
 
 238 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 over it," Dick, rather puzzled, assented. "And 
 I mean, by caring-, that she seemed so happy 
 when I was there at first, happier than I'd 
 ever known her." 
 
 "She can dare to be happy with you now, 
 you see; just because you have made her so 
 secure." 
 
 "So secure?" 
 
 "Yes," Christina met his eyes. "So sure 
 that you'll never ask anything of her, make 
 anything difficult for her again." 
 
 Dick Quentyn grew red. "I never did do 
 that, as far as I remember, after I understood." 
 
 "That is what Milly so deeply appreciates," 
 Christina returned. 
 
 There was a little silence after this and 
 Christina, in it, controlled her breaths from 
 trembling. Then Dick, groping painfully 
 among his impressions, put forward another. 
 "She did mind, very much, my being in danger 
 last winter; you told me that. She was wor- 
 ried, really worried about me ?" 
 
 Like a hurried, jangling bell somewhere in 
 the background of her mind Christina, as she, 
 too, gathered together her impressions and 
 memories, seemed to hear a reiterated "No 
 lies; above all, no lies." But he had put the 
 weapon into her hand, and though she felt as
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 239 
 
 if she held it lifted above some innocent life, 
 it fell relentlessly. 
 
 "Did I say that Milly was worried about 
 you? It was hardly that, I think; though, 
 of course, she was glad to see you out of 
 danger. Of course she was glad; how could 
 anyone so gentle-hearted as Milly not be? But 
 if you ask me what she did feel, I must tell 
 you the truth. You want the truth, don't you ? 
 It is much better for you and for Milly, isn't 
 it, that there should be no misunderstandings ?" 
 Dick nodded his eyes fixed on her. "What 
 Milly said, in the winter, when we had news 
 of your danger, was that it was rather dread- 
 ful to realize that if you were killed it would 
 hardly affect her more than the death of any 
 of the men who had come to tea with us the 
 day before." 
 
 The knife had fallen and her victim, after a 
 moment, turned dazed eyes away from her. 
 "Milly said that? About me?" 
 
 "I was shocked," Christina murmured. She 
 heard, as if from a far distance, the strange, 
 hushed quality of her voice. Her own blood 
 seemed to have been arrested. 
 
 "She wouldn't have minded more than 
 that?" 
 
 "She said, when I reproached her, that I
 
 240 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 could only expect her to be solemn, not sorry, 
 over the death of a man for whom she had no 
 affection, a man she had almost hated. Mr. 
 Quentyn, I am so grieved for you. Of course, 
 she doesn't hate you now ; but I am afraid you 
 have allowed yourself false hopes about Milly." 
 
 Dick, now, had risen to his feet and, facing 
 her as she sat, he gazed over her head at the 
 rhododendrons. "I wonder why she wanted 
 me to come for a walk this morning. Yes, I 
 did have false hopes. I thought that meant 
 something. I've thought that all sorts of little 
 things might mean something." 
 
 "Milly is so sweet and kind when she feels 
 no pressure, no alarm. I thought, for a mo- 
 ment last night, that she meant you to have the 
 walk alone. But as soon as you were gone she 
 insisted on my coming with you. I've tried to 
 help you, Mr. Quentyn. I've given you every 
 chance. But there isn't any chance." It was 
 well to do it thoroughly. 
 
 There was bewilderment and humiliation 
 at last humiliation on Dick's face; but of in- 
 credulity not a trace. "I know how kind 
 you've been," he said. "I've felt it." 
 
 Christina, now, had also risen. A dart of 
 keenest pity, even admiration, went through 
 her, horridly painful. "I am so dreadfully
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 241 
 
 sorry," she murmured. "I had to tell you 
 since you asked me ; I didn't want you to hurt 
 Milly and yourself uselessly." 
 
 "I know. I perfectly understand," said 
 Dick. 
 
 They walked in silence to Albert Gate, and 
 there, as they paused in farewell, Christina 
 suddenly, seizing his arm and speaking in a 
 hurried whisper, said : "You have been splen- 
 did. I can't tell you how I feel it. If I can 
 
 ever at any time do anything " It was 
 
 the truth, yet the falseness of such speech, from 
 her to him, appalled her while she spoke. Her 
 voice trailed off. "Forgive me. Good-bye " 
 she said. 
 
 They grasped each other's hands and Dick, 
 as she broke away, saw that t;he tears were 
 running down her face.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CHRISTINA 
 
 HE was gone. She had triumphed. And 
 only pain and horror, as if for the inno- 
 cent life she had taken, were about her. No 
 joy, no triumph, in having snatched Milly from 
 degradation. 
 
 At the thought of Milly the fear that drove 
 upon her was so intense that it induced a cu- 
 rious lightness of head. She was uplifted and 
 upheld above her own fear. The unnatural 
 buoyancy became almost a lightness of heart. 
 All was over. If she were a criminal she must 
 profit by her crime and shelter herself from 
 suspicion. They would be happy of course 
 they would be happy again she and Milly. 
 "Love begets love. Love begets love." She 
 heard herself muttering the words almost gaily, 
 like an incantation, as she walked down Sloane 
 Street. 
 
 When she crossed the street and looked up 
 
 at the house she saw that Milly was standing at 
 
 242
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 243 
 
 the drawing-room window looking down at her. 
 Something in Milly's attitude there, in her 
 beautiful dress and in her unsmiling gaze, sug- 
 gested to Christina the thought of a captive 
 princess watching the approach of some evil 
 enchantress. Milly her prisoner her vic- 
 tim! Her darling Milly! She beat away the 
 black vision. 
 
 She went slowly upstairs and came slowly 
 into the drawing-room. Milly had turned 
 from the window and, with the same hard, un- 
 smiling gaze, stood and watched her enter. 
 Christina sank into a chair. 
 
 "Well," said Milly after a moment, and in 
 a voice that Christina had never heard from 
 her, "he did not come, you see. I am up and 
 dressed yes you know that I intended to get 
 up and dress as soon as you were gone, I am 
 sure and I have been waiting here for an hour 
 and he has not come. He has not cared 
 enough to come. So there are no roundabout 
 questions for you to ask or evasive answers for 
 you to hear. You have the truth before you." 
 
 Christina was not at all surprised, though 
 there was something so horrible in this un- 
 shrinking frankness from one so reticent, so 
 delicate as Milly. She knew, as she heard her 
 speak, that it was what she had expected. The
 
 244 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 subterfuges of the past weeks lay in ruin about 
 them. She sat, her eyes fallen, drawing off 
 her gloves, and she said gently, "I am sorry, 
 Milly, if you hoped that he would come." 
 
 "No," said Milly, not moving from her place. 
 "You are not sorry, Christina. You are glad. 
 You are sorry that I care and you are glad that 
 he does not care, because you think that it will 
 keep us together. But that is your mistake. 
 It is all impossible now, and you have made it 
 so. I am going away. I am going back to the 
 country. I want to be alone." 
 
 Again Christina was not surprised; this was 
 the fear which she had glanced down at from 
 her haze of uncanny lightness. 
 
 "Have I made it so impossible? What have 
 I done, Milly?" she asked, after a moment. 
 
 Milly sat down in the nearest chair. She 
 had passed beyond fear. There was no mist 
 or illusion in her calmness. "You didn't give 
 us a chance," she said. "Not a chance. You 
 saw how I cared. You saw how I had come to 
 need him. You saw how stupid he was and un- 
 less he were helped he would see nothing. I 
 was afraid to hurt you. Of course I was. Of 
 course I was sorry for you, horribly sorry. 
 And you traded on that. You saw that unless 
 you stood aside I could do nothing."
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 245 
 
 "I thought that I did stand aside, Milly," 
 said Christina after another moment. 
 
 "Never really," said Milly. 
 
 "I don't quite see what you mean by really, 
 Milly," said Christina. "I left you with him 
 whenever you gave me the opportunity for do- 
 ing so. Perhaps you mean that I ought to 
 have committed suicide." 
 
 "No; I don't mean that," Milly returned sul- 
 lenly, with an unaltered hostility. "There are 
 different ways of standing aside. You could 
 have made it possible for me to tell you, openly, 
 what I felt; you could have made me feel that 
 you would be glad to have me happy with him. 
 You need not have made me feel in everything 
 you did and said and didn't do or say that if 
 I went back to Dick I should be going to him 
 over your dead body." 
 
 "I think you mean, Milly," Christina an- 
 swered in her dull and gentle voice, "that I 
 ought not to have loved you. That is my 
 crime, is it not?" 
 
 "Yes ; perhaps that is your crime, if you want 
 to put it so," said Milly. "I don't blame you, 
 you know. You could not help it. But your 
 love has always been a prison. As long as I 
 was contented in the prison you made it a very 
 charming place to live in. But when I wanted
 
 246 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 to be free, to have other, deeper, realler loves, 
 I knew that I had a gaoler to get past, a gaoler 
 who would not kill me, but whom I would have 
 to kill. So that I sat in my cell and did not 
 dare turn the key in the lock for fear of what 
 would happen to you. And it isn't true to say 
 that you left the door open. You pretended to, 
 of course. But when I did make my one effort, 
 when I did try to creep out under your eyes, 
 you turned the key on me quickly enough. 
 The walk this morning. You knew that I 
 hoped for it alone. You knew that it was our 
 last chance." 
 
 While Milly spoke these words to her, Chris- 
 tina sat with her head bent down and her hands 
 pressed tightly together in her lap, and it 
 seemed to her that she was weeping inwardly, 
 tears of blood. It was shame, unutterable 
 shame, that she felt, mixed with the anguish, 
 and weighing her down to the earth. Shame 
 for what she had done in sacrifice to the love 
 she heard thus abused ; shame for the truth, 
 the cruel half-truth, in Milly's words; and 
 shame for Milly that she could find it in her to 
 speak such words to her. Deeper? Realler? 
 Could any love, though tricked out in romantic 
 conventions, be deeper or realler than the love 
 she had for Milly? In the innermost cham-
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 247 
 
 bers of her heart she knew that, in spite of the 
 cruel half-truth, what Milly said was not the 
 whole. She would oh yes, she would have 
 given her up with gladness as a mother 
 gives up her child to a love that she could 
 have recognized as ennobling. It had not 
 been her own selfish clinging, only, that had 
 nerved her. It had been the thought of Milly's 
 truest good. And if she were to say this to 
 Milly, she knew now what withering laughter 
 she would hear. 
 
 The thought of this laughter from Milly's 
 lips, of Milly's cruelty to her, hunted her down 
 the first turning of concealment open to her. 
 "I didn't want to come with you," she said. 
 "You made me come. But I was glad for 
 your sake because it shielded you. You had 
 made it so obvious to him that you wanted it 
 to be alone. I thought that you had made it 
 too obvious." 
 
 Milly drew a long breath and a vivid red 
 mounted to her cheeks. For some moments 
 she sat still, saying nothing. Then, not meet- 
 ing her friend's eyes, for they were now fixed 
 on her, she rose. 
 
 "Yes. I have been unfair," said Milly. "I 
 have been ungrateful and unkind, and unfair. 
 I know that you have thought only of me ; and
 
 248 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 you saw what I've only realised in this last 
 hour. It has hurt so terribly to realise it to 
 realise that I've had my chance of happiness 
 and thrown it away and that now it's too late 
 to get it back again it's hurt so terribly that 
 it has made me cruel. You have been right all 
 along and I have been a fool. But there it is. 
 I love him and I'm broken-hearted, and now all 
 that I can do is to go away and hide myself." 
 
 She was going, actually going. Their life 
 together was over, shattered. The intoler- 
 able realisation crashed down upon Christina's 
 abasement. She stood up, staring at her 
 friend. "You are going to leave me, Milly?" 
 she asked. 
 
 Milly averted her eyes. "Yes, Christina. I 
 want to be alone." 
 
 "But you will come back?" 
 
 "I don't know," said Milly. Still she 
 averted her eyes; but, in the rigid silence that 
 followed, compunction evidently wrought upon 
 her. She glanced round at her suffering 
 friend and Christina's eyes met hers. They 
 hurt her. They were glazed, like the eyes of a 
 deer, waiting for the hunter's final blow. 
 
 "Christina," she said, and her voice showed 
 her pity; "won't you try to learn to live with- 
 out me? Really really it can't come back
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 249 
 
 again, as it was. You must see that. Not 
 after all that we have said, all that has hap- 
 pened. Learn to live without me. Get some 
 nice woman and go to Greece and try to forget 
 me. I can only mean suffering for you now, 
 and I'm not nearly good enough for you." 
 
 At this Christina broke into dreadful sobs. 
 She did not move towards her friend, but she 
 stretched her clasped hands out towards her 
 and said, while her voice, half-strangled, came 
 in gasps: "Milly Milly Have you forgot- 
 ten everything? All the years when we were 
 so happy together? When he was nothing to 
 you? For all these years, Milly nothing 
 nothing. How can you care suddenly like 
 this when you have almost hated him for so 
 long? You know what you said, in the winter, 
 Milly that you would not care if he were to 
 die." 
 
 Milly' s eyes had hardened. She moved to- 
 wards the door. 
 
 "Milly!" Christina's cry arrested her. 
 She had to stop and listen, though her hand 
 was on the door. "Wait! Forgive me! I 
 don't know what I am saying! And it was 
 true! It was! You did not care! Oh don't 
 be cruel to me. I shall die if you leave me. 
 What have I done that you should change so ?"
 
 250 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 "You have done nothing, Christina," said 
 Milly in a voice of schooled forbearance. "It 
 is I who have changed, and been cruel, first to 
 Dick and then to you. I am a shallow, feeble 
 creature, but the shallowness was in thinking 
 that I couldn't love my husband not in lov- 
 ing him now. I don't want the things you and 
 I had together. I only want the stupid, sim- 
 ple things that he could have given me. I 
 want someone to be in love with me. That is 
 it, I think. I am the most usual, common sort 
 of woman, who must have someone in love with 
 her and be in love. And I am in love with 
 Dick. And I am too unhappy to think of any- 
 one but myself." 
 
 Christina stood with her face covered. Con- 
 vulsive sobs shook her. 
 
 "Good-bye," said Milly. 
 
 She did not reply. She moved her head a 
 little, in negation? acquiescence? appeal? 
 Milly did not know. And since Christina still 
 said nothing, she turned the handle softly and 
 left her. 
 
 Milly went down to Chawlton. In the coun- 
 try, alone, she could sit and look at her life and 
 at the wreckage she had made in it without feel-
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 251 
 
 ing that another's eyes were watching her. It 
 pained her, when she could turn her mind from 
 the humiliation of her own misery, to see how 
 completely all love for poor Christina had died 
 from her, to see how the perhaps crude and ele- 
 mental love had killed the delicate, derivative 
 affection. It was even sadder to realise that 
 under the superficial pain lay a deep indiffer- 
 ence. She was very sorry for Christina. She 
 had accepted Christina's life and used it, and 
 now, through the strange compulsion of fate, 
 she must cut herself away from it, even if that 
 were to leave it broken and bleeding. For if 
 she were to remain sorry for Christina, to look 
 back at her with pity and compunction, she 
 must not see her. Words, glances, silences of 
 Christina's rankled in her, and when she 
 thought of them she could not forgive her. 
 Christina had seen too much, understood too 
 much. She was a blight upon her love, a men- 
 ace to her tragic memory of it. Under every- 
 thing, deeper than anything else in her feeling 
 about Christina, was a dim repulsion and dis- 
 like. 
 
 That Christina had submitted showed in her 
 letters, for Milly, before many days had passed, 
 wrote kindly and mildly, in the tone which, for 
 the future, she intended to use towards Chris-
 
 252 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 tina. Milly surprised herself with her own 
 calm ruthlessness. She found that the gentle 
 and the cowardly can, when roused, be more 
 cruel than the harsh and fearless. Her letters 
 to Christina were serene and impersonal. 
 They recognised a bond, but they defined its 
 limits. They might have been letters written 
 to a former governess, with whom her relation 
 had been kindly but not fond. They never 
 mentioned her husband's name, nor alluded, 
 even indirectly, to her mistimed love ; and to ask 
 Christina's forgiveness again for her unjust 
 arraignment of her would have been to allude 
 indirectly to it. 
 
 And Christina's letters made no appeal. 
 They were infrequent, hardly affectionate; 
 amazingly tactful letters. Milly shrank in 
 recognising how tactful. It showed Chris- 
 tina's power that she should be so tactful, 
 should so master herself to a responsive calm. 
 Milly had come to dread Christina's tact, her 
 patience and her reticence, more than all the 
 vehemence and passionate upbraidings of for- 
 mer years. Beneath the careful words she 
 knew that a profound, undying hope lay hid- 
 den; pain, too, profound and undying. The 
 thought of such hope, such pain, made Milly 
 feel at once the pity and the repulsion.
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 253 
 
 In none of Christina's letters was there any 
 mention of her health. Milly knew how 
 fragile was her hold on life and how much had 
 happened of late to tax it; but it was with a 
 shock of something unrealisable, unbeliev- 
 able, that she read one autumn morning, in a 
 blurred and shaking hand: "I am very ill 
 dying, they say. Come to me at once. I must 
 tell you something." 
 
 Christina dying. She had said that it would 
 kill her. And what had she not said to Chris- 
 tina that might not well have killed her? 
 Milly was stricken with dreadful remorse and 
 horror. 
 
 She hastened to London. 
 
 The maid at the door of the little house in 
 Sloane Street told her that Mrs. Drent was 
 rapidly sinking. Milly read reproach in her 
 simple eyes. "I did not know! Why was I 
 not told? Why was I not told?" she re- 
 peated to the nurse who came to meet her. 
 Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not have her 
 sent for, but during these last few days she 
 had become slightly delirious and had spoken 
 of something she wished to tell, had, at last, in- 
 sisted on writing herself. She could hardly 
 live a day longer. Heart-failure had made her 
 illness fatal.
 
 254 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 In the sick room, Milly paused at the door. 
 Was that Christina? That strange face with 
 such phantom eyes? Christina's eyes did not 
 look at her with reproach or with sorrow, but, 
 it seemed, with terror, a wild, infectious ter- 
 ror; Milly felt it seize her as she stood, spell- 
 bound, by the door. Then a rush of immense 
 pity and comprehension shook her through and 
 through. Christina was dying, delirious, and 
 what must she be feeling in her haunted aban- 
 donment and desolation? She ran to the bed 
 weeping. She knelt beside it. Her tears 
 rained upon Christina's hands, as she took her 
 in her arms and kissed her. "Christina! 
 dearest Christina ! Forgive me ! Forgive me ! 
 I did not know! Why did you not let me 
 come and nurse you? I have always nursed 
 you! Why did you not tell me? Oh, Chris- 
 tina!" 
 
 Holding her, kissing her, she could not see 
 clearly the .illumination that, at her words, il- 
 luminated the dying woman's face. Life 
 seemed suddenly to leap to her eyes and lips. 
 The terror vanished like a ghost in the upris- 
 ing of morning sunlight. With a rapture of 
 hope and yearning which resumed all her ebb- 
 ing power, physical and spiritual, she stretched 
 out her arms and clasped them about Milly's
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 255 
 
 neck. "Do you love me again?" she asked. 
 Her voice was like a child's in its ecstasy. 
 
 "My darling Christina! Love you? Who 
 is there in all the world but you !" Milly cried. 
 No affirmation could be too strong, she felt, no 
 atonement too great. 
 
 "Better than you love him ?" 
 
 Milly did not even hesitate. Lies were like 
 obstacles hardly seen as, in the onrush of her 
 remorse and pity, she leaped them. "Yes, 
 Yes. You are everything," she reiterated. 
 "I love you best. It has passed that feeling." 
 
 "It has passed ! I knew that it would pass !" 
 Christina seemed to gasp and smile at once. 
 "You know, now, that it was not right; that 
 it was not you ; that it was an illness ; some- 
 thing that would pass? You see it too, 
 Milly? And you will be happy with me 
 again ?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, dearest Christina/' 
 
 Still smiling, Christina closed her eyes and 
 Milly laid her back upon her pillows. Her 
 fingers closed tightly on Milly's hand. "It has 
 passed," she said. "It could not have been 
 right. You were everything to me. And he 
 could not have seen the pictures, the jewels, 
 Milly; or heard the music." 
 
 "No, dear, no." Milly covered her own
 
 256 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 eyes. Ah ! those cravings to which Christina 
 had responded; now so dead. 
 
 "I shall get better," said Christina. "I feel 
 it now ; I know it. I shall get better and be al- 
 ways with you. My darling. My Milly. My 
 little Milly." Her voice had sunken to a 
 shrouded whisper. 
 
 Held by those cold, clutching fingers, Milly 
 sat sobbing. Christina would not get better; 
 and, with horror at herself, she knew that only 
 at the gates of death could she love Christina 
 and be with her. And, glancing round at the 
 head on the pillow ah! poor head! Chris- 
 tina's wonderful head! more wonderful than 
 ever now, so eager, so doomed, so white, with 
 all its flood of black, black hair glancing at 
 its ebony and marble, she saw that she need 
 have no fear of life. Christina would not get 
 better. 
 
 She spoke again, brokenly. "If you had 
 loved him, you would have hated me. Now 
 you will never hate me." 
 
 "I love you." 
 
 "You will not send for him? You will not 
 see him alone ? You will stay with me ?" 
 
 "I will stay with you." 
 
 "And be glad with me again." 
 
 "With you again, dear Christina."
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 257 
 
 "I shall get better," Christina repeated, turn- 
 ing her head on Milly's arm. But the disar- 
 ray of her mind still whispered on in vague 
 fragments. "It was not useless. I was right. 
 I did not need to tell ; you were mine ; I had 
 not lost you." 
 
 A few hours afterwards, her head still turned 
 on Milly's arm, Christina died. 
 
 Sitting alone on a winter day in the library 
 of Chawlton, Milly heard the sound of a motor 
 outside. Since Christina's death she had shut 
 herself away, refusing to see anyone, and she 
 listened now with apathetic interest, expecting 
 to hear the retreating wheels. But the motor 
 did not move away. Instead, after some delay 
 at the door, steps crossed the hall, familiar, 
 wonderful, dear and terrible. Dick had re- 
 turned. 
 
 All the irony and humiliation of her married 
 life rose before her as she felt herself trem- 
 bling, flushing, with the joy and terror. He 
 had come back ; and so he had not guessed. Or 
 was it that he had guessed and yet was too kind 
 not to come? She had only time to snatch at 
 conjecture, for Dick was before her. 
 
 Dick's demeanour was as unemphatic as she 
 
 *7
 
 258 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 remembered it always to have been. It was al- 
 most as casual as if he had returned from a 
 day's hunting merely. Yet there was differ- 
 ence, too, though what it was her hurrying 
 thoughts could not seize. She felt it as a radi- 
 ance of pity, warm and almost vehement. 
 
 "My dear Milly," he said coming to her and 
 taking her hand; "I only heard yesterday. I 
 only got back yesterday. And I felt' that I 
 must see you. I'm not going to bother you in 
 any way. I've only come down for the after- 
 noon. But I wanted to ask you if I could do 
 anything help you in any way, be of any use." 
 In spite of his schooled voice his longing to see 
 her, his delight in seeing her, showed in his 
 clouded, candid eyes. Milly felt it as the dif- 
 ference, the vague warmth and radiance. 
 
 "How kind of you, dear Dick," she said, and 
 her poor voice groped vainly for firmness. "I 
 am so glad to see you. It was good of you to 
 come. Yes ; it has been dreadful. You know ; 
 Christina our friendship" But how con- 
 fess to Dick her remorse or explain to Dick 
 why she had left Christina ? Her pride broke. 
 With this human kindness near her, she could 
 not maintain the decorum of their tangled rela- 
 tions as man and woman ; the simple human re- 
 lation alone became the most real one; the
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 259 
 
 loneliness and the grief of a child overwhelmed 
 her. She sank, sobbing helplessly, into her 
 chair. 
 
 "Oh Milly!" said poor Dick Quentyn. 
 And the longing to comfort and console effac- 
 ing his diffidence and the memory of her long 
 unkindness towards himself, he knelt down be- 
 side her and took her into his arms. 
 
 Milly then said and did what she could never 
 have believed herself capable of saying and do- 
 ing. No pride could hold her from it, no dig- 
 nity, not even common shame. She could not 
 keep herself from dropping her face on his 
 shoulder and sobbing; "Oh Dick try try 
 to love me again. I am cold and selfish. I 
 have behaved cruelly to everyone who loved 
 me ; but I can't bear it any longer." 
 
 It was a startling moment for Dick Quentyn, 
 the most startling of his life. "Try to love 
 you?" he stammered. He pushed her back to 
 look at her. "What do you mean, Milly?" 
 
 "What I say," Milly gasped. 
 
 "But what does it mean?" Dick repeated. 
 "It isn't for you to ask me to love you. You 
 know I love you. You know there's never 
 been another woman in the world for me but 
 you. It's you who have never loved me, 
 Milly."
 
 2<5o A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Her appeal had been like a diving under 
 deep waters she had not known when or 
 where or how she would come up again. Now 
 she opened her eyes and stared at her husband. 
 She seemed, after that whirlpool moment of 
 abysmal shame, to have come up from the fur- 
 ther reaches of darkness, and it was under new, 
 bewildering skies. Strange stars made her 
 dizzy. 
 
 "Then why didn't you come and say good- 
 bye to me that day in London this spring ?" 
 was all she found to say. 
 
 Dick was not stupid now. The lover's code 
 was at last open between them, and he as well 
 as she could read the significance of seemingly 
 trivial words. 
 
 "Did you expect me ?" he asked. 
 
 "Of course I expected you. I thought you 
 saw how much," said Milly. 
 
 "I didn't think you expected me at all; why 
 should I have thought it? But I did come. 
 Didn't you know it?" said Dick. 
 
 "You did come?" In its extremity her as- 
 tonishment was mild. 
 
 "That is to say I never got there. Mrs. 
 Drent met me. She told me how you'd gone to 
 sleep, you know. She thought you'd gone to 
 sleep, Milly. She didn't know you expected
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 261 
 
 me either, you see. It was in the park we 
 talked, just there by the rhododendrons." 
 
 "She told you I had gone to sleep ? But why 
 did that keep you from coming?" Milly had 
 suddenly risen to her feet. She had grown 
 pale. 
 
 "Why it was obvious you wouldn't want 
 to be disturbed. She said that. And every- 
 thing else. She told me for I confided in her 
 then she'd always been so kind to me; and I 
 thought she might help me but she told me 
 how little you cared for me." 
 
 Milly had grasped his shoulder as she stood 
 above him. "What did Christina tell you? 
 What did she say about me? Let me under- 
 stand." 
 
 "Why, Milly what is it? She told me I 
 didn't blame you, though it hurt, most uncon- 
 scionably because I'd always believed that, in 
 spite of everything, you had some sort of kindly 
 feeling for me as though I'd been a well-in- 
 tentioned dog who didn't mean to get in your 
 way she told me that I mustn't have any 
 hopes. And she told me that that very winter 
 you had said to her that you'd feel my death less 
 than that of any of the men who came to tea 
 with you. Yes, she told me so, Milly and 
 wasn't it true ?"
 
 262 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 Milly now looked away from him and round 
 at the room, stupor on her face. "Yes, it was 
 true I said it," she said in the voice of a sleep- 
 walker. "Yes ; I said it, Dick. But it was so 
 long ago. How did she remember? And I 
 knew when I said it that it wasn't true." 
 
 "But she thought it was true." Dick now 
 had risen, and he, too, very pale, looked at his 
 wife. 
 
 "Yes; then, she may have thought it. I 
 wanted her to think it because I did not want 
 her to guess how much I was getting to care. 
 But, afterwards after you had come back 
 she did not think it then. She knew, then, 
 everything. She knew before I did. It was 
 she who showed it to me. Oh, Dick! She 
 knew that I loved you and she kept you from 
 coming to me !" She was gazing at him now, 
 stupefied, horrified, yet enraptured. It was of 
 him she thought, her lover, her husband, rather 
 than of the unhappy woman who had parted 
 them. But Dick still did not see. 
 
 "What do you mean, Milly ?" he said. "Kept 
 me from coming? But she loved you, Milly? 
 She'd given her life to you. You can't mean 
 what you are saying." 
 
 "Yes," Milly kept her grasp of his shoulder. 
 "It is true. She loved me, but it was a mad-
 
 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 263 
 
 ness of jealousy. Her love was a prison. I 
 told her so. We spoke of it all on that day, 
 when she came back from seeing you and did 
 not tell me that she had seen you. I told her 
 that her love was a prison and that she had 
 kept you from me, and that I was going to 
 leave her. And even then she did not tell me. 
 We parted and I did not see her again until the 
 day she died. She sent for me to come to her. 
 Yes " her eyes, deep with joy and horror, 
 were on him. "That is what she was going to 
 confess to me; and died without confessing. 
 She kept us apart because she knew that we 
 loved each other and she could not bear to give 
 me up." 
 
 They stood in the firelight and he took her 
 hands and they looked at each other as though, 
 after long wanderings, they had found each 
 other at last. There would yet be much to tell 
 and to explain, but Dick saw now what had hap- 
 pened. Only after many moments of grave 
 mutual survey, did he say, gently, with a sud- 
 den acute wonder and pity "Poor thing." 
 
 "Horrible, oh horrible!" said Milly, leaning 
 her head on his shoulder. "You might have 
 died away from me never knowing. I might 
 never have seen you again. Horrible woman ! 
 Horrible love."
 
 264 A FORSAKEN TEMPLE 
 
 "Poor thing," Dick repeated gently. He 
 kissed his wife's forehead and, his arm around 
 her; "I haven't died. She is dead. I do see 
 you again. She doesn't see you. I have got 
 you. She has lost you." 
 
 Milly still shuddered; she still looked down 
 the black precipice, only just escaped. "Yes, 
 she has lost me for ever. I wish I did not feel 
 that I hate her ; but I do. It may be cruel, it is 
 cruel. But all that I can feel for her now is 
 hatred." 
 
 "Ah but she loved you tremendously. And 
 she's dead," said Dick. "All that I can feel is 
 that." 
 
 But Milly only said: "I love you all the 
 more for feeling it."
 
 MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE
 
 MISS JONES AND THE 
 MASTERPIECE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 'AT ANON LESCAUT," Carrington re- 
 JLV-l peated. He did not show any particu- 
 lar enthusiasm. 
 
 "Yes, Manon Lescaut. I see the thing. It 
 would be really superb." 
 
 "You don't mean to say, my dear boy, that 
 you are falling into anecdote? You are not 
 going to degrade your canvas with painted lit- 
 erature?" 
 
 Carrington's voice betrayed some concern, 
 for he took a friendly interest in my career. 
 
 "The title a mere label suggests it. But 
 nothing of the sort. I am going to paint a por- 
 trait of Manon and of her ilk." 
 
 "A portrait?" 
 
 "Yes ; the portrait of a type." 
 
 Carrington smoked on, stretched comfort- 
 267
 
 268 MISS JONES AND 
 
 ably in a chair. His feet were on another 
 chair, and the broad soles of his slippers so dis- 
 played implied ease and intimacy. 
 
 "It will look like the portrait of an actress in 
 character; a costume picture," he said, pres- 
 ently; "the label isn't suggestive to me." 
 
 "There will, I promise you, be no trace of 
 commonplace realism in it. It will be Velas- 
 quez dashed with Watteau. Can you realize 
 the modest flight of my imagination? Seri- 
 ously, Carrington, I intend to paint a master- 
 piece. I intend to paint a woman who would 
 sell her soul for pleasure a conscienceless, 
 fascinating egotist a corrupt charmer saved 
 by a certain naivete. The eighteenth century, 
 in fact, en grisette." 
 
 "Manon rather redeemed herself at the 
 end, if I remember rightly," Carrington ob- 
 served. 
 
 "Or circumstances redeemed her, if you will. 
 She had a heart, perhaps; it never made her 
 uncomfortable. Her love was of the doubtful 
 quality that flies out of the window as want 
 comes in at the door. Oh ! she was a sweet lit- 
 tle scelerate. I shall paint the type the little 
 scelerate." 
 
 "Well, of course, everything would depend 
 on the treatment."
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 269 
 
 "Everything. I am going to astonish you 
 there, Carrington." 
 
 "Oh, I don't know about that," Carrington 
 said, good-humouredly. 
 
 "I see already the golden gray of her dim 
 white boudoir; the satins, the laces, the high- 
 heeled shoes, the rigid little waist, and face of 
 pretty depravity. The face is the thing the 
 key. Where find the face? I think of a trip 
 to Paris on purpose. One sees the glancing 
 creature such as I have in my mind there, 
 now and then. I want a fresh pallor, and gay, 
 lazy eyes light-brown, not too large." 
 
 "I fancy I know of someone," Carrington 
 said, meditatively. "Not that she's dans le 
 caractere," he added: "not at all; anything but 
 depraved. But her face; you could select." 
 Carrington mused. "The line of her cheek is, 
 I remember, mockingly at variance with her 
 staid innocence of look." 
 
 "Who is she? Manon could look innocent, 
 you know was so, after a fashion. I should 
 like a touch of childish insouciance. Who is 
 she, and how can I get her ?" 
 
 "Well," said Carrington, taking his pipe 
 from his lips and contemplating the fine col- 
 ouring of the bowl, "she's a lady, for one 
 thing."
 
 270 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "Oh, the devil!" I ejaculated; "that won't 
 do!" 
 
 "Well, it might." 
 
 "Shouldn't fancy it. Ill at ease on her ac- 
 count, you know. How could one tell a lady 
 that she was out of pose must sit still ? How 
 could one pay her ?" 
 
 "Very simple, if she's the real article." 
 
 "I never tried it," I demurred. 
 
 "Well" Carrington had a soothing way of 
 beginning a sentence "you might see her, at 
 least. Her father is a socialist; a very harm- 
 less and unnecessary one, but that accounts for 
 her posing." 
 
 "Do the paternal unconventionalities coun- 
 tenance posing for the academic? That savors 
 of a really disconcerting latitude." 
 
 "The academic ? Dear me, no! Oh, no; 
 Miss Jones is a model of the proprieties. One 
 indeed can hardly connect her with even such 
 mild nonconformity as her father's socialism. 
 He was a parson; had religious scruples, and 
 took to rather aimless humanitarianism and to 
 very excellent bookbinding in Hampstead. He 
 binds a lot of my books for me; and jolly good 
 designing and tooling, too. You remember 
 that Petrarch of mine. That's really how I 
 came to know him. It was the artist in him
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 271 
 
 that wrestled with and overthrew the parson. 
 He seems a happy old chap ; poor as Job's turkey 
 and absorbed in his work. He has rather long- 
 ish hair wavy, and wears a leather belt and 
 no collar." Carrington added: "That's the 
 first socialistic declaration of independence 
 they fling their collars in the face of conven- 
 tionality. But the belt and the lack of collar 
 are the only noticeable traces socialism seems 
 to have left on Mr. Jones, except that he lets 
 his daughter make money by posing. He must 
 know about the people, of course. She usually 
 sits for women. But I can give you a recom- 
 mendation." 
 
 I felt, to a certain extent, the same lack of 
 enthusiasm that Carrington himself had shown 
 at the announcement of my "label," but I 
 thanked him, and said that I should be glad to 
 see Miss Jones. 
 
 "And her mother was French, too," he 
 added, as a cogent afterthought. "That ac- 
 counts for the rippled cheek-line." Miss 
 Jones's cheek had evidently made an emphatic 
 impression. Indeed, Carrington's enthusiasm 
 seemed to wax on reflection, and, as interpreted 
 by Miss Jones, my Manon became tangible. 
 
 "How's her colouring?" I asked. 
 
 "Pale; her mouth is red, very red; charming
 
 272 MISS JONES AND 
 
 figure, nice hands ; I remember them taking up 
 the books she was dusting the books. I've 
 only seen her once or twice; but I noticed her, 
 and she struck me as a type of something." 
 
 The pale skin and red mouth rather pleased 
 me, and it was arranged that Carrington should 
 see Mr. Jones, and, if possible, make an ap- 
 pointment for Miss Jones to call on Monday 
 afternoon at my studio. 
 
 Carrington had rooms next door, in the little 
 court of artists' quarters in Chelsea. 
 
 Carrington wrote reviews and collected all 
 sorts of expensive things, chiefly old books and 
 Chinese porcelain. He and I had art-for-art 
 sympathies, and, being lucky young men from a 
 monetary point of view, we could indulge our 
 propensities with a happy indifference to suc- 
 cess. 
 
 I had painted now for a good many years, 
 both in Paris and in London, and had a pleas- 
 ant little reputation among people it was worth 
 while to please, and a hearty and encouraging 
 philistine opposition. I had even shocked Mrs. 
 Grundy in an Academy picture which wasn't 
 at all shocking and was very well painted, and 
 I had aroused controversy in the pages of the 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 1 felt Manon Lescaut.
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 273 
 
 This epitome of the soullessness of the eight- 
 eenth century whirled in its satin frivolity 
 through all my waking thoughts. 
 
 On Monday I awaited Miss Jones, fervently 
 hoping that her face would do. 
 
 Punctual to the minute came the young 
 lady's rap at my door. I ushered her in. She 
 was rather small; and self-possessed, very. In 
 the cut of her serge frock and the line of her 
 little hat over her eyebrows I fancied I saw a 
 touch of the mother's nationality. With a 
 most business-like air she removed this hat, 
 carefully replacing the pins in the holes they 
 had already traversed, took off her coat (it was 
 February), and turned to the light. She 
 would do. Evident and delightful fact! I at 
 once informed her of it. She asked if she 
 should sit that morning. I said that, as I had 
 sketches to make before deciding on pose and 
 effect of light, the sooner she would enter upon 
 her professional duties the better. 
 
 The gown I had already discovered a trou- 
 vaille and genuinely of the epoch; an enticing 
 pink silk with glowing shadows. 
 
 Miss Jones made no comment on the exqui- 
 site thing which I laid lovingly on her arm. 
 She retired with a brisk, calm step behind the 
 tall screen in the corner. 
 
 18
 
 274 MISS JONES AND 
 
 When she reappeared in the dress, the old 
 whites of the muslins at elbows and breast fall- 
 ing and folding on a skin like milk, I felt my 
 heart rise in a devout ejaculation of utter con- 
 tentment. The Manon of my dreams stood 
 before me. The expression certainly was 
 wanting; I should have to compass it by anal- 
 ogy. My imagination had grasped it, and I 
 should realize the type by the aid of Miss 
 Jones's pale face, narrowing to a chin the 
 French would call mutin, her curled lips and 
 curiously set eyes, wide apart, and the brows 
 that swept ever so slightly upward. The very 
 way in which her fair hair grew in a little peak 
 on the forehead, and curved silky and unrippled 
 to a small knot placed high, fulfilled my aspira- 
 tions, though the hair must be powdered and in 
 it the vibrating black of a bow. 
 
 Miss Jones stood very well, conscientiously 
 and with intelligence. Pose and effect were 
 soon decided upon, and in a day or two I was 
 regularly at work, delighting in it, and with a 
 sensation of power and certainty I had rarely 
 experienced. 
 
 Carrington came in quite frequently, and, 
 looking from my canvas to Miss Jones, would 
 pronounce the drawing wonderfully felt. 
 
 "Degas wouldn't be ashamed of the line of
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 275 
 
 the neck," he said. 'The turn and lift of her 
 head as she looks sideways in the mirror is 
 really emouvant, life; good idea; in character; 
 centred on herself; not bent on conquest and 
 staring it at you. Manon had not that 
 trait" 
 
 Miss Jones on the stand gazed obediently 
 into the mirror, the dim white of an eighteenth 
 century boudoir about her. She was alto- 
 gether a most posee, well-behaved young per- 
 son. 
 
 One could not call her manner discreet; it 
 was far too self-confident for that. Her 
 silence was natural, not assumed. During the 
 rests she would return to a book. 
 
 I asked her one day what she was reading. 
 She replied, looking up with polite calm : 
 
 " 'Donovan/ " 
 
 "Oh!" was all I could find in comment. It 
 did rather surprise me in a girl whose eyes 
 were set in that most appreciative way and 
 whose father, as a socialistic bookbinder, 
 might have inculcated more advanced literary 
 tastes. Still, she was very young; this fact 
 seemed emphasized by the innocent white the 
 back of her neck presented to me as she re- 
 turned to her reading. 
 
 When I came to painting, I found that my
 
 276 MISS JONES AND 
 
 good luck accompanied me, and that inspiring 
 sense of mastery. Effort, yes; but achieve- 
 ment followed it with a sort of inevitableness. 
 I tasted the joys of the arduous facility which 
 is the fruition of years of toil. 
 
 The limpid grays seemed to me to equal 
 Whistler's; the pinks flaming in shadow, sil- 
 vered in the light suggested Velasquez to my 
 happy young vanity; the warm whites, Chardin 
 would have acknowledged; yet they were all 
 my own, seen through my own eyes, not 
 through the eyes of Chardin, Whistler, or Ve- 
 lasquez. The blacks sung emphatic or soft- 
 ened notes from the impertinent knot in the 
 powdered hair to the bows on skirt and bodice. 
 The rich empdtement was a triumph of supple 
 brush-work. I can praise it impudently for it 
 was my masterpiece, and well, I will keep to 
 the consecutive recital. 
 
 Miss Jones showed no particular fellow-feel- 
 ing for my work, and as, after a fashion, she, 
 too, was responsible for it and had a right to 
 be proud of it, this lack of interest rather irri- 
 tated me. 
 
 Now and then, poised delicately on high 
 heels and in her rustling robes, she would 
 step up to my canvas, give it a pleasant but 
 impassive look, and then turn away, resum-
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 277 
 
 ing her chair and the perusal of her romance. 
 
 It really irked me after a time. However 
 little .value I might set upon her artistic acu- 
 men, this silence in my rose of pride pricked 
 like a thorn. 
 
 Miss Jones's taste in painting might be as 
 philistine as in literature, but her reserve 
 aroused conjecture, and I became really anx- 
 ious for an expression of opinion. 
 
 At last, one day, my curiosity burst forth : 
 
 "How do you like it?" I asked, while she 
 stood contemplating my chef-d'oeuvre with a 
 brightly indifferent gaze. Miss Jones turned 
 upon me her agate eyes the eyelashes curled 
 up at the corners, and it was difficult not to be- 
 lieve the eyes, too, roguish. 
 
 "I should think you had a great deal of tal- 
 ent," she said. "Have you studied long?" 
 
 Studied? It required some effort to adjust 
 my thoughts to the standard implied; but per- 
 ceiving a perhaps lofty conception of artistic 
 attainment beneath the query, I replied : 
 
 "Well, an artist is never done learning, is 
 he ? And in the sense of having much to learn, 
 I am still a student, no doubt." 
 
 "Ah, yes," Miss Jones replied. 
 
 She looked from my picture up at the sky- 
 light, then round at the various studies, en-
 
 278 MISS JONES AND 
 
 gravings, and photographs on the walls. This 
 discursive glance was already familiar to me, 
 and its flitting lightness whetted my curiosity 
 as to possible non-committal depths beneath. 
 
 "Inspiration, now," Miss Jones pursued, sur- 
 prising me a good deal, for she seldom carried 
 on a subject unprompted, "that of course, is not 
 dependent on study." 
 
 I felt in this remark something very deroga- 
 tory to my Manon an inspiration, and in the 
 best sense, if ever anything was. Did Miss 
 Jones not recognize the intellectual triumphs 
 embodied in that presentment of frail woman- 
 hood? I was certainly piqued, though I re- 
 plied very good-humouredly : 
 
 "I had rather flattered myself that my pic- 
 ture could boast of that quality." 
 
 Miss Jones's glance now rested on me rather 
 seriously. 
 
 "An inspired work of art should elevate the 
 mind." 
 
 I could not for the life of me tell whether she 
 was really rather clever or merely very banal 
 and commonplace. 
 
 "I had hoped," I rejoined, politely, "that my 
 picture as a beautiful work of art would 
 also possess that faculty." 
 
 Miss Jones now looked at the clock, and re-
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 279 
 
 marked that it was time to pose. She mounted 
 the low stand and I resumed my palette and 
 brushes, feeling decidedly snubbed. Carring- 
 ton sauntered in shortly after, his forefinger in 
 a book and a pipe between his teeth. He apolo- 
 gized to Miss Jones for the latter, and wished 
 to know if she objected. Miss Jones's smile 
 retained all its unabashed clearness as she re- 
 plied : 
 
 "It is a rather nasty smell, I think." 
 
 Poor Carrington, decidedly disconcerted, 
 knocked out his pipe and laid it down, and Miss 
 Jones, observing him affably while she retained 
 her pose to perfection, added: "I have been 
 brought up to disapprove of smoking, you see; 
 papa doesn't believe in tobacco." 
 
 Miss Jones's aplomb was certainly enough 
 to make any man feel awkward, and Carring- 
 ton looked so as he came up beside me and ex- 
 amined my work. 
 
 "By Jove! Fletcher," he said, "the resem- 
 blance is astonishing and the lack of re- 
 semblance. That's the triumph the material 
 likeness, the spiritual unlikeness." 
 
 Indeed, Miss Jones could lay no claim to the 
 "inspiration" of my work; in intrinsic charac- 
 ter the face of my pretty scelerate was in no 
 way Miss Jones's.
 
 280 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "Charming, charming," and Carrington's eye, 
 passing from my canvas, rested on Miss Jones. 
 
 "Which?" I asked, smiling, and, of course, 
 in an undertone. 
 
 "It depends, my dear boy, on whether you 
 ask me if I prefer Phryne or Priscilla pagan 
 or puritan; both are interesting types, and the 
 contrast can be very effectually studied here in 
 your picture and your model." 
 
 "Yet Priscilla lends herself wonderfully to 
 be interpreted as Phryne." 
 
 "Or, rather, it is wonderful that you should 
 have imagined Manon into that face." 
 
 In the next rest, when Carrington had gone, 
 Miss Jones said: 
 
 "Mr. Carrington walked home with me yes- 
 terday. Papa thinks rather highly of him. It 
 is a pity his life should be so pointless." 
 
 It began to be borne in upon me that Miss 
 Jones had painfully serious ethical convictions. 
 
 "I suppose you mean from the socialistic 
 standpoint," I said. 
 
 "Oh, no not at all; I am not a socialist. 
 Papa and I agree to differ upon that as upon 
 many other questions. Socialism, I think, 
 tends to revolt and license." 
 
 I did not pursue the subject of Carrington's
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 281 
 
 pointlessness nor proffer a plea for socialism. 
 I was beginning to wince rather before Miss 
 Jones's frankness. 
 
 On the following day she again came and 
 stood before my picture. 
 
 "I posed for Mr. Watkins, R.A., last year," 
 she said. "The picture was in the Academy. 
 Did you see it? It was beautiful." 
 
 The mere name of Mr. Watkins ("R.A.") 
 made every drop of aesthetic blood in my body 
 curdle. A conscienceless old prater of the soap 
 and salve school, with not as much idea of 
 drawing or value as a two-year Julianite. 
 
 "I don't quite remember," I said, rather 
 faintly; "what was the picture called?" 
 
 ' 'Faith Conquers Fear,' " said Miss Jones. 
 "I posed as a Christian maiden, you know, tied 
 to a stake in the Roman amphitheatre and wait- 
 ing martyrdom. The maiden was in a white 
 robe, her hair hanging over her shoulders (per- 
 haps you would not recognize me in this cos- 
 tume), looking up, her hands crossed on her 
 breast. Before her stood a jibing Roman. 
 One could see it all; the contrast between the 
 base product of a vicious civilization and the 
 noble maiden. One could read it all in their 
 faces; 'hers supreme aspiration, his brutal ha-
 
 282 MISS JONES AND 
 
 tred. It was superb. It made one want to 
 cry." 
 
 Miss Jones, while speaking, looked so ex- 
 ceedingly beautiful that I almost forgot my 
 dismay at her atrocious taste; for Watkins's 
 "Faith Conquers Fear" had been one of the 
 jokes of the year a lamentably crude, preten- 
 tious presentation of a theatrical subject repro- 
 duced extensively in ladies' papers and fatally 
 popular. 
 
 At the same moment, and as I looked from 
 Miss Jones's gravely enrapt expression to 
 Manon's seductive graces, I experienced a sen- 
 sation of extreme discomfort. 
 
 "I think a picture should have high and noble 
 aims/' Miss Jones pursued, seeing that I re- 
 mained silent, and evidently considering the 
 time come when duty required her to speak and 
 to speak freely. "A picture should leave one 
 better for having seen it." 
 
 I could not ignore the kind but firmly severe 
 criticism implied; I could not but revolt from 
 this Hebraistic onslaught. 
 
 "I don't admit a conscious moral aim in art," 
 I said. "Art need only concern itself with be- 
 ing beautiful and interesting ; the rest will fol- 
 low. But a badly-painted picture certainly 
 makes me feel wicked, and when I go to the
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 283 
 
 National Gallery to have a look at the Velas- 
 quezes and Veroneses I feel the better for it." 
 
 "Velasquez?" Miss Jones repeated. "Ah, 
 well, I prefer the old masters I mean those 
 who painted religious subjects as no one since 
 has painted them. Why did not Velasquez, at 
 least, as he could not rise to the ideal, paint 
 beautiful people? I never have been able to 
 care for mere ugliness, however cleverly 
 copied." 
 
 I felt buffeted by her complacent crudity. 
 
 "Velasquez had no soul," she added. 
 
 "No soul ! Why he paints life, character, 
 soul, everything ! Copied ! What of his splen- 
 did decorativeness, his colour, his atmosphere?" 
 My ejaculations left her calm unruffled. 
 
 "Ah, but all that doesn't make the world any 
 better," she returned, really with an air of hu- 
 mouring a silly materialism; and as she went 
 back to her pose she added, very kindly, for my 
 face probably revealed my injured feelings: 
 
 "You see I have rather serious views of 
 life." 
 
 "Miss Jones really !" I laid down my pal- 
 ette. "I must beg of you to believe that I have, 
 too very serious." 
 
 Gently Miss Jones shook her head, looking", 
 not at me, but down into the mirror. This ef-
 
 284 MISS JONES AND 
 
 feet of duty fulfilled, even in opposition, was 
 most characteristic. 
 
 "I cannot believe it," she said, "else why, 
 when you have facility, talent, and might em- 
 ploy them on a higher subject, do you paint a 
 mere study of a vain young lady?" 
 
 This interpretation of Manon startled me, so 
 lacking was it in comprehension. 
 
 "Manon Lescaut was more than a vain young 
 lady, Miss Jones." 
 
 "Well," Miss Jones lifted her eyes for a mo- 
 ment to smile quietly, soothingly at me. "I am 
 not imputing any wrong to Miss Manon Les- 
 caut; I merely say that she is vain. A harm- 
 less vanity no doubt, but I have posed for other 
 characters, you see !" Her smile was so charm- 
 ing in its very fatuity that the vision of her 
 lovely face, vulgarized and unrecognizable in 
 "Faith Conquers Fear," filled me with re- 
 doubled exasperation. Her misinterpretation 
 of Manon stirred a certain deepening of that 
 touch of discomfort a sickly unpleasantness. 
 I found myself flushing. 
 
 Miss Jones's white hand the hand that held 
 the mirror with such beauty in taper finger- 
 tips and turn of wrist fell to her side, and she 
 fixed her eyes on me with quite a troubled look. 
 
 "I am afraid I have hurt your feelings," she
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 285 
 
 said; "I am very sorry. I always speak my 
 mind out ; I never think that it may hurt. It is 
 very dull in me." 
 
 At these words I felt that unpleasant stir 
 spring suddenly to a guilty misery. I felt, 
 somehow, that I was a shameful hypocrite, and 
 Miss Jones a priggish but most charming and 
 most injured angel. 
 
 "Miss Jones," I said, much confused, "sin- 
 cerity cannot really hurt me, and I always re- 
 spect it. I am sorry, very sorry, that you see 
 no more in my picture. I care for your good 
 opinion" (this was certainly, in a sense, a lie, 
 and yet, for the moment, that guilty conscious- 
 ness upon me, I believed it), "and I hope that 
 though my picture has not gained it, I, person- 
 ally, may never forfeit it." 
 
 Still looking at me gravely, Miss Jones 
 said: 
 
 "I don't think you ever will. That is a very 
 manly, a very noble way of looking at it." 
 
 But the thought of Manon Lescaut now tor- 
 mented me. I had finished the head; my pre- 
 occupation could not harm that ; but this lovely 
 face looking into the mirror, with soulless, 
 happy eyes, seemed to slide a smile at me, a 
 smile of malicious comprehension, a smile of 
 nous nous entendons, a smile that made a butt
 
 286 MISS JONES AND 
 
 of Miss Jones's innocence and laughed with me 
 at the joke. 
 
 I soon found myself rebelling against 
 Manon's intrusion. I wished to assure her 
 that we had nothing in common and that, in 
 Miss Jones's innocence, I found no amusing 
 element. 
 
 That evening Carrington came in. He wore 
 a rather absorbed look, and only glanced at my 
 picture. After absent replies to my desultory 
 remarks, he suddenly said, from his chair : 
 
 "I walked home with Miss Jones this after- 
 noon." Carrington, with his ultra-aesthetic 
 sensibilities, must find Miss Jones even more 
 jarring than I did, and his act implied a very 
 kindly interest. 
 
 "That was nice of you," I observed, though 
 at the mention of Miss Jones that piercing stab 
 of shame again went through me, and my eyes 
 unwillingly, guiltily sought the eyes of my smil- 
 ing Manon. 
 
 "She was rather troubled about something 
 she had said," Carrington pursued, ignoring 
 my approbation, "about the picture. Of course 
 she doesn't know anything about pictures." 
 
 "No," I murmured, "she doesn't." 
 
 "By Jove!" added Carrington, "that's the 
 trouble. She doesn't understand anything !"
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 287 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "Why, I mean that she could never see cer- 
 tain things from our standpoint ; she is as igno- 
 rant and as innocent as a baby. She's never 
 read 'Manon Lescaut' that came out en pas- 
 sant and, by Jove, you know, it does seem a 
 beastly shame! A girl like that! A snow- 
 drop!" 
 
 Carrington cast a look of unmistakable re- 
 sentment at my poor Manon. 
 
 "Well," I said, lamely indeed I felt maimed 
 "how was I to know? And what am I to 
 do?" 
 
 "Why, my dear fellow," and Carrington 
 spoke with some fierceness, "you've nothing to 
 do with it! I'm to blame! I told you about 
 her. Said she had the type! Dull, blunder- 
 ing fool that I was not to have seen the shriek- 
 ing incongruity! The rigidly upright soul of 
 her ! That girl couldn't tell a lie nor look one ; 
 and Manon!" 
 
 Carrington got up abruptly ; evidently his dis- 
 gust could not be borne in a quiescent attitude. 
 
 "You said at the first that her face was in- 
 nocent," I suggested, in a feeble effort to miti- 
 gate this self-scorn; "we neither of us mis- 
 judged the girl for a moment, though we over- 
 looked her ignorance."
 
 288 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "Yes, and her ignorance makes all the differ- 
 ence. Another girl as good, to all intents and 
 purposes might know and not object; but this 
 one ! I really believe it would half kill her !" 
 
 Carrington gave another savage glance at 
 my unlucky picture, and his gaze lingered on it 
 as he added : 
 
 "If it's kept from her, all's well as well as 
 a lie can be." 
 
 And then, if only for a moment, the Greek 
 gained its triumph over this startling exhibi- 
 tion of Hebraism. 
 
 "It is a masterpiece!" said Carrington, 
 slowly, adding abruptly as he went, "Good- 
 night!" 
 
 But my night was very bad. Whatever Miss 
 Jones might say or think, I did take life seri- 
 ously.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 A FEW days followed in which Miss Jones 
 showed herself to me in a sweet and sof- 
 tened mood, the mood that wishes to make 
 amends for salutary harshness. My meekness 
 under reproof had evidently won her approba- 
 tion. In the rests she talked to me. She gave 
 me her opinions upon many subjects, and very 
 admirable they were and very commonplace. 
 One thing about Miss Jones, however, was not 
 commonplace. She would certainly act up to 
 her opinions. Her sense of duty was enor- 
 mous; but she bore it pleasantly, albeit seri- 
 ously. She had a keen flair for responsibilities. 
 I began to suspect that she had assumed my 
 moral well-being as one of them. 
 
 Her priggishness was so unconscious so 
 sincere, if one may say so that it staggered 
 me. Her calmly complacent truisms con- 
 founded any subtleties by marching over them 
 utterly ignoring them. One could not 
 
 argue with her, for she was so sublimely sure of 
 19 289
 
 290 MISS JONES AND 
 
 herself that she made one doubt the divine right 
 of good taste, and wonder if flat-footed stu- 
 pidity were not right after all. 
 
 And, above all, however questionable her 
 mental attributes might be, her moral worth 
 was certainly awe-inspiring. The clear, me- 
 tallic flawlessness of her conscience seemed to 
 glare in one's eyes, and poor every-day man- 
 hood shrunk into itself, painfully aware of spots 
 and fissures. 
 
 "Yes," Miss Jones said, leaning back in her 
 incongruous robes; "yes, the longer I live the 
 more I feel that, as Longfellow says : 
 
 Life is real, life is earnest." 
 
 She emphasized the quotation with sol- 
 emnity: "We can't trifle with our lives; we 
 can't play through them. We must live them. 
 We must make something of them." 
 
 "Each man after his own nature," I sug- 
 gested, feebly, for I felt sure that "we can't 
 paint through them" was implied, and wished 
 to turn from that issue, with which I felt my- 
 self incapable of grappling. 
 
 But Miss Jones was not to be balked of her 
 moral. 
 
 "We build our own characters," she said, 
 and her look held kind warning. "We must
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 291 
 
 not act after our own nature if that nature is 
 base or trivial/' 
 
 "I know," I murmured. 
 
 "It is only by holding firmly to an ideal that 
 we rise, step by step, beyond our lower selves." 
 
 Beyond "Manon Lescaut" to "Faith Con- 
 quers Fear" this might mean. 
 
 "And ideals we must have," she pursued. 
 Then rising, her little air of guide and coun- 
 sellor touched with a smile : "But I must not 
 preach too much, must I ?" 
 
 It was comforting to dwell on the ludi- 
 crous aspects of this mentorship, for, when my 
 thoughts led me to .a contemplation of Miss 
 Jones's ideals, I felt my position to be meanly 
 hypocritical, if not "base." Manon was al- 
 most finished. Ah! it was superb! but even 
 my joy in Manon rankled and had lost its sa- 
 vour. Manon was there under false pretences, 
 her presence a subtle insult to Miss Jones. 
 Miss Jones in her flaming gown took on sym- 
 bolical meanings. An unconscious martyr 
 wearing, did she but know it, the veritable robe 
 of Nessus! A sense of protectorship, tender 
 in its self-reproach, grew upon me a longing 
 for atonement. I had sacrificed Miss Jones to 
 my masterpiece, and its beauty was baleful, 
 vampire-like.
 
 292 MISS JONES AND 
 
 It was indeed a small thing to take Miss 
 Jones's homilies humbly. Indeed, for this hu- 
 mility I could claim no element of expiation, 
 for I really liked to hear her; she looked so 
 pretty when she talked. It was all so touching 
 and so amusing. 
 
 I am not sure that she had read Dante, but 
 if she had she no doubt saw herself something 
 in the guise of a Beatrice stooping from heights 
 of wisdom to support my straying, faltering 
 footsteps. She brought me one day a feeble lit- 
 tle volume of third-rate verse, with a page 
 turned down at a passage she requested me 
 to read. The badly constructed lines, their 
 grandiloquent sentimentality, jarred on me; 
 but in them I perceived a complimentary appli- 
 cation that might imply much encouragement. 
 Miss Jones evidently thought that I was rising 
 step by step, and put this cordial to my lips. 
 I thanked her very earnestly feeling posi- 
 tively shrivelled and then, turning from the 
 subject with a haste I hoped she might impute 
 to modesty and indeed modesty of a certain 
 humiliating kind did form part of it I told 
 her that Manon would only require another sit- 
 ting after that day. 
 
 "Ah! is it finished, then?" 
 
 She went to look at it.
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 293 
 
 "Is my left eye as indistinct as that?" she 
 asked, playfully. "Can't you see my eye- 
 lashes ? That is impressionism, I suppose." I 
 felt my forehead growing hot. 
 
 "The left eye is in shadow," I observed. 
 
 "I am afraid shadows are convenient some- 
 times, aren't they ? I like just a plain, straight- 
 forward telling of the truth, with no green 
 paint over it! You accept a little well-meant 
 teasing, don't you ?" 
 
 I accepted it as I had to accept her various 
 revelations of stupefying obtuseness, and smiled 
 over the sandy mouthful. 
 
 "Yes," she pursued, carefully looking up and 
 down the canvas certainly a new sign of in- 
 terest in me and my work "you will need quite 
 two days to finish it ; the hands especially, they 
 are rather sketchy about the finger-tips." She 
 might have been a genial old professor giving 
 me advice mingled with the good-humored rail- 
 lerie of superiority. The hands were finished; 
 but I kept a cowardly silence. 
 
 "And the dress must be a good bit more dis- 
 tinctly outlined ; I can't see where it goes on this 
 side; and then the details of the background 
 I can hardly tell what those dashes and splashes 
 on the dressing-table are supposed to repre- 
 sent."
 
 294 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "I think you are standing a little too near 
 the canvas," I said, in a voice which I strove to 
 free from a tone of patient long-suffering. "If 
 you go farther away, you will get the effect of 
 the ensemble." 
 
 "No, no !" she laughed ; she evidently thought 
 that her ethical relationship justified an equally 
 frank aesthetic helpfulness, and her air of com- 
 petence was bewildering. "No, we must not 
 run away from the truth! A smudge is a 
 smudge from whatever standpoint one looks at 
 it, and a smear a smear." 
 
 The masterly treatment of porcelains, ivories, 
 and silver on the dressing-table, glimmering 
 and gleaming from the soft shadows, to be 
 qualified in such terms ! 
 
 "You are rather severe," I said. My dis- 
 comfort was apparent, but she naturally took 
 it to be on my own behalf, not, as it was, on 
 hers. 
 
 "Oh! you mustn't think that! I hope I am 
 never unduly severe. You will easily mend mat- 
 ters to-day and to-morrow and polish over that 
 rather careless look. And, as far as that goes, 
 I am at your service as long as you need me." 
 
 "As model and critic," I observed, with a 
 touch of bitterness. 
 
 "As model and critic," she repeated, brightly.
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 295 
 
 "Do you know," she added, mounting the stand, 
 "I found 'Manon Lescaut' on a bookshelf this 
 morning. I didn't know that it was a French 
 book. I am going to read it this evening." 
 
 I was struck dumb. This possibility had 
 never presented itself to me. 
 
 "I shall find the scene you have painted," she 
 continued, looking down at her gown and pat- 
 ting a fold into place; "I shall see whether you 
 have illustrated it conscientiously." 
 
 "The book wouldn't interest you at all ! Not 
 at all!" I burst out, conscious of a feverish 
 intensity in the gaze I bent upon her. "It is 
 it is decidedly dull!" 
 
 "Is it?" said Miss Jones, indifferently. 
 "Now I can't quite believe that. You evidently 
 didn't think it too dull to illustrate. There 
 must be some nice bits in it, and I mean to find 
 the bit where the heroine, in a pink silk gown, 
 looks at herself in a mirror." 
 
 "Well, you'll find no such bit. I haven't illus- 
 trated it!" I strove to keep my voice fairly 
 cool. "I merely took the heroine's name as in- 
 dicative of a class, and chose the epoch as 
 characteristic. The book is dull, old-fash- 
 ioned." 
 
 "Ah, but I might not agree with you there. 
 Is it an historical novel? I like them, even if
 
 296 MISS JONES AND 
 
 they are rather slow. One gets all sorts of 
 ideas about people of another age." 
 
 "It isn't historical." Despite my efforts my 
 voice was growing sharply anxious, and Miss 
 Jones was beginning to notice my anxiety. 
 "And the characters in it are not people you 
 would care to have ideas about. It is merely 
 one of the first attempts to write a psychologi- 
 cal study, in the form of romance, made in 
 France." 
 
 "Oh, but that is exceedingly interesting." 
 
 "You would only find the rather crude analy- 
 sis of a a disagreeable girl." 
 
 "You think / am like a disagreeable girl, 
 then !" said Miss Jones, still laughing. "From 
 the first I have had a bit of a grudge against 
 you for finding me so suitable. I am sure I am 
 not vain." 
 
 "Manon was more than vain. She was 
 heartless, a liar." I felt myself stumbling from 
 bad to worse. "Not in the least like you in 
 anything, except that she was beautiful." My 
 explanation, with this bald piece of tasteless 
 flattery, had hardly helped matters. Indeed, 
 Miss Jones became rather coldly silent. I 
 painted on, my mind in a disturbing whirl of 
 conjecture. I felt convinced that I had merely 
 whetted her curiosity and that she would go
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 297 
 
 straight home to the perusal of "Manon" ; and 
 to expect from her the faintest literary appre- 
 ciation of the distinction and the delicacy of 
 the book was hopeless. She would fasten with 
 horror on the brazen immorality of a character 
 she had been chosen to embody. The blood 
 surged up to my head as I painted. 
 
 As Miss Jones was preparing to go, I held 
 out my hand. 
 
 "Good-bye," I said, feeling very badly. 
 
 "Good-bye ? Am I not coming to-morrow ?" 
 She had paused in the act of neatly folding her 
 umbrella, which had been thoughtfully left open 
 to dry while she posed. It had now stopped 
 raining. 
 
 "Yes yes, of course," I stammered. 
 
 She secured the elastic band, and then looked 
 at me. 
 
 "Miss Jones," I blurted out, abruptly, "don't 
 read 'Manon Lescaut' ; please don't." 
 
 Her glance became severely penetrating: 
 
 "I really don't understand you," she said, 
 and then added: "I most certainly shall read 
 it." 
 
 "Well, if you do" my urgent tone delayed 
 her going "try to judge it from an artistic 
 standpoint, you know. A study a type. 
 Don't apply ah modern standards."
 
 298 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "I shall apply my standards. I know no 
 other method of judging a book." 
 
 "Well, then," my manner was becoming 
 pitiful "remember that the physical resem- 
 blance between you was merely in my imagina- 
 tion." 
 
 "I have always believed the face indicative 
 of the character, and I'm sorry that mine 
 should have suggested to you the character of 
 a liar," said Miss Jones. It was evident that 
 already she was hurt and, disregarding my re- 
 iterated "It did not ! It did not ! upon my hon- 
 our," she opened the door to go. I still de- 
 tained her. 
 
 "Miss Jones," I said, standing before her, "I 
 know that you are going to misjudge me, and 
 that, because you see certain things from an eth- 
 ical and I from a purely aesthetic point of view." 
 
 "I can't admit the division. But no; I hope 
 I shall never misjudge you." She gave me a 
 brief little smile and walked quickly away. 
 
 Carrington did not come in that evening, and 
 I was glad that my mental anguish had no ob- 
 server. 
 
 The next afternoon at two I awaited Miss 
 Jones. My picture, virtually finished, stood 
 regally dominant in the centre of the studio. 
 
 I hated and I adored it. I saw it with Miss
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 299 
 
 Jones's eyes and I saw it with my own ; but her 
 crude ethics had, on the whole, poisoned my 
 aesthetic triumph. 
 
 At two there came the familiar rap. Miss 
 Jones entered. I was sitting before the picture 
 and rose to meet her. Her face was very white 
 and very cold, and from under the tipped brim 
 of the little hat her eyes looked sternly at me. 
 I looked back at her silently. 
 
 "I have read 'Manon Lescaut/" said Miss 
 Jones. I found nothing to say. 
 
 "You will understand that I cannot sit to- 
 day. You will understand that I never should 
 have sat for you at all had I known," Miss 
 Jones pursued. 
 
 I said that I understood. 
 
 "I have come to-day to bring you back the 
 money that I have earned under false pre- 
 tences." 
 
 She laid the little packet down upon the table. 
 I turned white. "And to ask you" here Miss 
 Jones observed me steadily "whether you do 
 not feel that you owe me apologies." 
 
 "Miss Jones," I said, "I have unwittingly, 
 unintentionally, given you great pain; that, 
 with my present knowledge of your exceptional 
 character, I now see to have been inevitable. 
 I humbly beg your pardon for it, but I also beg
 
 300 MISS JONES AND 
 
 you to believe that from the first I never thought 
 of you but with respect and admiration." 
 
 Miss Jones's face took on quite a terrible 
 look. 
 
 "Respect! Admiration! While you were 
 looking from me to that!" She pointed to 
 Manon. "While I was clothing your imagina- 
 tion, personifying to you that vile creature !" 
 
 I tried to stop her with an exclamation of 
 shocked denial, but she went on, with fierce 
 dignity : 
 
 "Exceptional! You call it exceptional to 
 feel debased by that association? Can I ever 
 look at my face again without thinking: 'The 
 face of Manon Lescaut?' Can I ever forget 
 that we were thought of as one? No" she 
 held up her hand "let me speak. Do you 
 suppose I cannot see now the cleverness, yes, 
 the diabolical cleverness, of your picture of me 
 there? The likeness is horrible; and there I 
 shall stand for the world to gaze at as long as 
 the canvas lasts and as long as people look at 
 any pictures. There / shall be, gibbeted in 
 that woman's smile! No, I have not done! 
 There will be no escape possible. Somewhere 
 I shall always feel it like a hot iron searing 
 me somewhere that other I will be all my life 
 long, and when I am dead, and for centuries
 
 THE MASTERPIECE 301 
 
 perhaps, she will smile on, and my image will 
 be looked at as a type of vice ! I see it now," 
 'and with a sort of grandeur of revelation she 
 turned upon Manon, "I see that it is a master- 
 piece !" 
 
 I placed myself between her and it. 
 
 "Miss Jones," I said, "this is rather a su- 
 preme moment for me, more supreme than you 
 will ever understand. I forgot you for my pic- 
 ture; I will not forget my picture for you." 
 The icy fire of her eyes followed me while I 
 went to the table and took up a sharp, long dag- 
 ger which lay beside the little packet of money. 
 I returned to the picture and, giving it one long 
 look, I ripped the canvas from top to bottom. 
 Miss Jones made neither sound nor sign. With 
 dogged despair I pierced the smiling face, I 
 hacked and rent the exquisite thing. The rose- 
 coloured tatters fell forward; in five minutes 
 "Manon Lescaut" was dead, utterly annihi- 
 lated, and Miss Jones surveyed the place where 
 she had been. I turned to her, and I have no 
 doubt that my face expressed my exultant mis- 
 ery. 
 
 "And now !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "Now," said Miss Jones, looking solemnly 
 at me, "you have done right, you have done 
 nobly, and you will be the happier for it."
 
 302 MISS JONES AND 
 
 "Shall I ?" I said, approaching her. "Shall 
 I?" 
 
 "Yes. I can confidently say it. That bad 
 thing would have poisoned your life as it would 
 have poisoned mine." I ignored the misstate- 
 ment. 
 
 "Miss Jones," I said, "for your sake I have 
 destroyed the best thing in my life; may I hope 
 for a better ? I love you." 
 
 Her pale and beautiful face looked very little 
 less calm, but certainly a little dismayed, cer- 
 tainly a little sorry. 
 
 "The best thing has been this act of sacri- 
 fice," she said ; "don't spoil that by any weak re- 
 gret. You have gained my admiration and my 
 respect; but for better things, if better there 
 are, I accepted Mr. Carrington last night." 
 
 Perhaps I don't regret. Though she was a 
 prig, I had loved her in the half hour's exalta- 
 tion. I am certainly not sorry that she married 
 Carrington. They seem to be very happy. 
 But the chivalrous moment was worth while 
 perhaps. However that may be, since then I 
 have never painted anything as good as Manon 
 Lescaut. 
 
 THE END
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK 
 
 XANTE 
 
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 PATHS OF JUDGEMENT 
 
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