THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 A GIFT 
 FROM THE GRAVE
 
 A GIFT 
 FROM THE GRAVE 
 
 BY EDITH WHARTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE GREATER INCLINATION' 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 1900
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
 
 NOTE BY THE PUBLISHER <JT 
 
 THE title of this little book calls for a word of ex- 
 planation from me. 
 
 lu the United States the story appears as The Touch- 
 stone. While it was passing through the press over here, 
 I was informed that a novel under this name was already 
 in circulation. In accordance with the usual rule of 
 courtesy and convenience which is observed in such 
 matters, I decided to alter the title, and wrote at once 
 to the author, asking permission to call her book The 
 Touch of a Vanished Hand. As the author was travelling 
 in Italy, a month elapsed before I received a reply, by 
 telegraph, instructing me to adopt another title which 
 unfortunately has also been forestalled. Meanwhile 
 the sheets had all been printed off, when I was informed 
 that a novel was published in 1889 called The Touch 
 of a Vanished Hand. 
 
 In telegraphing, the author gives me no address, and 
 as a decision has to be made without further delay, I 
 have ventured to give the book the title which it now 
 bears A Gift from the Grave ; and I hope that no other 
 claimant to this will now arise. 
 
 I must ask to be allowed to bear all the responsibility 
 the blame, if there be any of this change ; but the 
 circumstances are peculiar, and may, I hope, plead my 
 excuse. 
 
 JOHN MURRAY. 
 
 June 1900. 
 
 1376509
 
 ( PROFESSOR JOSLIN, who, as our readers are doubtless 
 aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, 
 asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted "to 
 any of the famous novelist's friends who will fur- 
 nish him with information concerning the period 
 previous to her coming to England. Mrs. Aubyn 
 had so few intimate friends, and consequently so 
 few regular correspondents, that letters will be of 
 special value. Professor Joslin's address is 10 
 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to 
 say that he will promptly return any documents 
 intrusted to him." ' 
 
 Glennard dropped the Spectator and 
 sat looking into the fire. The club was 
 filling up, but he still had to himself the 
 small inner room with its darkening out- 
 look down the rain-streaked prospect 
 of Fifth Avenue. It was all dull and
 
 2 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his 
 boredom had been perversely tinged by 
 a sense of resentment at the thought 
 that, as things were going, he might in 
 time have to surrender even the despised 
 privilege of boring himself within those 
 particular four walls. It was not that he 
 cared much for the club, but that the 
 remote contingency of having to give it 
 up stood to him, just then, perhaps by 
 very reason of its insignificance and re- 
 moteness, for the symbol of his increasing 
 abnegations ; of that perpetual paring-off 
 that was gradually reducing existence to 
 the naked business of keeping himself 
 alive. It was the futility of his multi- 
 plied shifts and privations that made 
 them seem unworthy of a high attitude 
 the sense that, however rapidly he 
 eliminated the superfluous, his cleared 
 horizon was likely to offer no nearer view 
 of the one prospect toward which he 
 strained. To give up things in order to 
 marry the woman one loves is easier than
 
 A VANISHED HAND 3 
 
 to give them up without being brought 
 appreciably nearer to such a conclusion. 
 
 Through the open door he saw young 
 Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the 
 ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda 
 and transport his purposeless person to 
 the window. Glennard measured his 
 course with a contemptuous .eye. It 
 was so like Hollingsworth to get up and 
 look out of the window just as it was 
 growing too dark to see anything ! 
 There was a man rich enough to do 
 what he pleased had he been capable 
 of being pleased yet barred from all 
 conceivable achievement by his own im- 
 pervious dulness ; while, a few feet off, 
 Glennard, who wanted only enough to 
 keep a decent coat on his back and a 
 roof over the head of the woman he 
 loved Glennard, who had sweated, 
 toiled, denied himself for the scant 
 measure of opportunity that his zeal 
 would have converted into a kingdom 
 sat wretchedly calculating that, even
 
 4 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 when he had resigned from the club, 
 and knocked off his cigars, and given 
 up his Sundays out of town, he would 
 still be no nearer to attainment. 
 
 The Spectator had slipped to his feet, 
 and as he picked it up his eye fell again 
 on the paragraph addressed to the friends 
 of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read it for the 
 first time with a scarcely perceptible 
 quickening of attention : her name had 
 so long been public property that his eye 
 passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in the 
 street hurries without a glance by some 
 familiar monument. 
 
 ' Information concerning the period 
 previous to her coming to England. . . .' 
 The words were an evocation. He saw 
 her again as she had looked at their first 
 meeting, the poor woman of genius with 
 her long pale face and short-sighted eyes, 
 softened a little by the grace of youth 
 and inexperience, but so incapable even 
 then of any hold upon the pulses. When 
 she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful,
 
 A VANISHED HAND 5 
 
 more wonderful, perhaps, than when later, 
 to Glennard's fancy at least, the conscious- 
 ness of memorable things uttered seemed 
 to take from even her most intimate 
 speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It 
 was in those earliest days, if ever, that he 
 had come near loving her, though even 
 then his sentiment had lived only in the 
 intervals of its expression. Later, when 
 to be loved by her had been a state to 
 touch any man's imagination, the phy- 
 sical reluctance had, inexplicably, so 
 overborne the intellectual attraction, that 
 the last years had been, to both of them, 
 an agony of conflicting impulses. Even 
 now, if, in turning over old papers, his 
 hand lit on her letters, the touch filled 
 him with inarticulate misery. . . . 
 
 * She had so few intimate friends . . . 
 that letters will be of special value.' So 
 few intimate friends ! For years she had 
 had but one ; one who in the last years 
 had requited her wonderful pages, her 
 tragic outpourings of love, humility and
 
 6 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 pardon, with the scant phrases by which a 
 man evades the most vulgar of sentimental 
 importunities. He had been a brute in 
 spite of himself, and sometimes, now that 
 the remembrance of her face had faded, 
 and only her voice and words remained 
 with him, he chafed at his own inade- 
 quacy, his stupid inability to rise to the 
 height of her passion. His egoism was 
 not of a kind to mirror its complacency 
 in the adventure. To have been loved 
 by the most brilliant woman of her day, 
 and to have been incapable of loving her, 
 seemed to him, in looking back, derisive 
 evidence of his limitations ; and his re- 
 morseful tenderness for her memory was 
 complicated with a sense of irritation 
 against her for having given him once 
 for all the measure of his emotional 
 capacity. It was not often, however, 
 that he thus probed the past. The 
 public, in taking possession of Mrs. 
 Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their 
 burden. There was something fatuous
 
 A VANISHED HAND 7 
 
 in an attitude of sentimental apology 
 toward a memory already classic: to 
 reproach one's self for not having loved 
 Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like 
 being disturbed by an inability to admire 
 the Venus of Milo. From her cold niche 
 of fame she looked down ironically enough 
 on his self-flagellations. ... It was only 
 when he came on something' that be- 
 longed to her that he felt a sudden 
 renewal of the old feeling, the strange 
 dual impulse that drew him to her voice 
 but drove him from her hand, so that 
 even now, at sight of anything she had 
 touched, his heart contracted painfully. 
 It happened seldom nowadays. Her 
 little presents, one by one, had dis- 
 appeared from his rooms, and her letters, 
 kept from some unacknowledged puerile 
 vanity in the possession of such treasures, 
 seldom came beneath his hand. . . . 
 
 ' Her letters will be of special value 
 Her letters ! Why, he must have 
 hundreds of them enough to fill a
 
 8 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 volume. Sometimes it used to seem to 
 him that they came with every post 
 he used to avoid looking in his letter- 
 box when he came home to his rooms 
 but her writing seemed to spring out 
 at him as he put his key in the door. 
 
 He stood up and strolled into the 
 other room. Hollingsworth, lounging 
 away from the window, had joined him- 
 self to a languidly convivial group of 
 men, to whom, in phrases as halting as 
 though they struggled to define an 
 ultimate idea, he was expounding the 
 cursed nuisance of living in a hole with 
 such a damned climate that one had to 
 get out of it by February, with the con- 
 tingent difficulty of there being no place 
 to take one's yacht to in winter but that 
 other played-out hole, the Riviera. From 
 the outskirts of this group Glennard 
 wandered to another, where a voice as 
 different as possible from Rollings worth's 
 colourless organ dominated another circle 
 of languid listeners.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 9 
 
 'Come and hear Dinslow talk about 
 his patent: admission free,' one of the 
 men sang out in a tone of mock resigna- 
 tion. 
 
 Dinslow turned to Glennard the con- 
 fident pugnacity of his smile. * Give it 
 another six months and it'll be talking 
 about itself,' he declared. 'It's pretty 
 nearly articulate now.' 
 
 * Can it say papa ? ' some one else in- 
 quired. 
 
 Dinslow's smile broadened. ' You '11 
 be deuced glad to say papa to it a year 
 from now,' he retorted. ' It 11 be able 
 to support even you in affluence. Look 
 here, now, just let me explain to 
 you ' 
 
 Glennard moved away impatiently. 
 The men at the club all but those 
 who were 'in it' were proverbially 
 ' tired ' of Dinslow's patent, and none 
 more so than Glennard, whose know- 
 ledge of its merits made it loom large 
 in the depressing catalogue of lost oppor-
 
 10 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 tunities. The relations between the 
 two men had always been friendly, and 
 Dinslow's urgent offers to 'take him in 
 on the ground floor ' had of late inten- 
 sified Glennard's sense of his own in- 
 ability to meet good luck half-way. 
 Some of the men who had paused to 
 listen were already in evening clothes, 
 others on their way home to dress ; and 
 Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of 
 humiliation, said to himself that if he 
 lingered among them it was in the miser- 
 able hope that one of the number might 
 ask him to dine. Miss Trent had told 
 him that she was to go to the opera 
 that evening with her rich aunt ; and if 
 he should have the luck to pick up a 
 dinner invitation he might join her there 
 without extra outlay. 
 
 He moved about the room, lingering 
 here and there in a tentative affectation 
 of interest ; but though the men greeted 
 him pleasantly, no one asked him to 
 dine. Doubtless they were all engaged,
 
 A VANISHED HAND 11 
 
 these men who could afford to pay for 
 their dinners, who did not have to hunt 
 for invitations as a beggar rummages for 
 a crust in an ash-barrel ! But no as 
 Hollingsworth left the lessening circle 
 about the table, an admiring youth called 
 out, * Holly, stop and dine ! ' 
 
 Hollingsworth turned on him the crude 
 countenance that looked like tjie wrong 
 side of a more finished face. ' Sorry I 
 can't. I 'm in for a beastly banquet.' 
 
 Glennard threw himself into an arm- 
 chair. Why go home in the rain to 
 dress? It was folly to take a cab to 
 the opera, it was worse folly to go 
 there at all. His perpetual meetings 
 with Alexa Trent were as unfair to the 
 girl as they were unnerving to himself. 
 Since he couldn't marry her, it was time 
 to stand aside and give a better man the 
 chance and his thought admitted the 
 ironical implication that in the terms 
 of expediency the phrase might stand 
 for Hollingsworth.
 
 12 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 II 
 
 HE dined alone and walked home to his 
 rooms in the rain. As he turned into 
 Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam 
 of carriages on their way to the opera, 
 and he took the first side street, in a 
 moment of irritation against the petty 
 restrictions that thwarted every impulse. 
 It was ridiculous to give up the opera, 
 not because one might possibly be bored 
 there, but because one must pay for the 
 experiment 
 
 In his sitting-room, the tacit conniv- 
 ance of the inanimate had centred the 
 lamplight on a photograph of Alexa 
 Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver 
 frame, 'just where, as memory officiously 
 reminded him, Margaret Aubyn's picture 
 had long throned in its stead. Miss
 
 A VANISHED HAND 13 
 
 Trent's features cruelly justified the 
 usurpation. She had the kind of beauty 
 that comes of a happy accord of face and 
 spirit. It is not given to many to have 
 the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, 
 and some women go through life behind 
 a mask expressing only their anxiety 
 about the butcher's bill or their inability 
 to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face 
 and mind had the same high serious 
 contour. She looked like a throned 
 Justice by some grave Florentine painter; 
 and it seemed to Glennard that her most 
 salient attribute, or that at least to which 
 her conduct gave most consistent expres- 
 sion, was a kind of passionate justness 
 the intuitive feminine justness that is so 
 much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. 
 Circumstances had tragically combined 
 to develop this instinct into a conscious 
 habit. She had seen more than most 
 girls of the shabby side of life, of the 
 perpetual tendency of want to cramp the 
 noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune
 
 14 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 had overhung her childhood, and she 
 had none of the pretty delusions about 
 life that are supposed to be the crowning 
 grace of girlhood. This very competence, 
 which gave her a touching reasonable- 
 ness, made Glennard's situation more 
 difficult than if he had aspired to a 
 princess. Between them they asked so 
 little they knew so well how to make 
 that little do ; but they understood also, 
 and she especially did not for a moment 
 let him forget, that without that little 
 the future they dreamed of was im- 
 possible. 
 
 The sight of her photograph quickened 
 Glennard's exasperation. He was sick 
 and ashamed of the part he was playing. 
 He had loved her now for two years, 
 with the tranquil tenderness that gathers 
 depth and volume as it nears fulfilment ; 
 he knew that she would wait for him 
 but the certitude was an added pang. 
 There are times when the constancy of 
 the woman one cannot marry is almost as
 
 A VANISHED HAND 15 
 
 trying as that of the woman one does not 
 want to. 
 
 Glennard turned up his reading-lamp 
 and stirred the fire. He had a long even- 
 ing before him, and he wanted to crowd 
 out thought with action. He had brought 
 some papers from his office and he spread 
 them out on his table and squared him- 
 self to the task. . . . 
 
 It must have been an hour later that 
 he found himself automatically fitting a 
 key into a locked drawer. He had no 
 more notion than a somnambulist of the 
 mental process that had led up to this 
 action. He was just dimly aware of 
 having pushed aside the papers and the 
 heavy calf volumes that a moment before 
 had bounded his horizon, and of laying 
 in their place, without a trace of conscious 
 volition, the parcel he had taken from the 
 drawer. 
 
 The letters were tied in packets of 
 thirty or forty. There were a great 
 many packets. On some of the envelopes
 
 16 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the ink was fading ; on others, which 
 bore the English postmark, it was still 
 fresh. She had been dead hardly three 
 years, and she had written, at lengthen- 
 ing intervals, to the last. . . . 
 
 He undid one of the early packets 
 little notes written during their first 
 acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, 
 on leaving college, had begun life in his 
 uncle's law office in the old university 
 town. It was there that, at the house of 
 her father, Professor Forth, he had first 
 met the young lady then chiefly dis- 
 tinguished for having, after two years 
 of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, re- 
 turned to the protection of the paternal 
 roof. 
 
 Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager 
 and somewhat tragic young woman, of 
 complex mind and undeveloped manners, 
 whom her crude experience of matrimony 
 had fitted out with a stock of generalisa- 
 tions that exploded like bombs in the 
 academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice
 
 A VANISHED HAND 17 
 
 of a husband she had been fortunate 
 enough, if the paradox be permitted, to 
 light on one so signally gifted with the 
 faculty of putting himself in the wrong 
 that her leaving him had the dignity of 
 a manifesto made her, as it were, the 
 spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In 
 this light she was cherished by that 
 dominant portion of Hillbridge society 
 which was least indulgent to conjugal 
 differences, and which found a propor- 
 tionate pleasure in being for once able to 
 feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned 
 with the outrageous. So much did this 
 endear Mrs. Aubyn to the university 
 ladies, that they were disposed from the 
 first to allow her more latitude of speech 
 and action than the ill-used wife was 
 generally accorded in Hillbridge, where 
 misfortune was still regarded as a visita- 
 tion designed to put people in their proper 
 place and make them feel the superiority 
 of their neighbours. The young woman 
 so privileged combined with a kind of
 
 18 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 personal shyness an intellectual audacity 
 that was like a deflected impulse of 
 coquetry : one felt that if she had been 
 prettier she would have had emotions 
 instead of ideas. She was in fact even 
 then what she had always remained a 
 genius capable of the acutest generalisa- 
 tions, but curiously undiscerning where 
 her personal susceptibilities were con- 
 cerned. Her psychology failed her just 
 where it serves most women, and one felt 
 that her brains would never be a guide to 
 her heart. Of all this, however, Glen- 
 nard thought little in the first year of 
 their acquaintance. He was at an age 
 when all the gifts and graces are but so 
 much undiscriminated food to the raven- 
 ing egoism of youth. In seeking Mrs. 
 Aubyn's company he was prompted by 
 an intuitive taste for the best as a pledge 
 of his own superiority. The sympathy of 
 the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was 
 balm to his craving for distinction ; it 
 was public confirmation of his secret
 
 A VANISHED HAND 19 
 
 sense that he was cut out for a bigger 
 place. It must not be understood that 
 Glennard was vain. Vanity contents 
 itself with the coarsest diet ; there is no 
 palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. 
 To a youth of Glennard's aspirations 
 the encouragement of a clever woman 
 stood for the symbol of all success. Later, 
 when he had begun to feel his way, to 
 gain a foothold, he would not need such 
 support ; but it served to carry him 
 lightly and easily over what is often a 
 period of insecurity and discouragement. 
 It would be unjust, however, to re- 
 present his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as a 
 matter of calculation. It was as instinc- 
 tive as love, and it missed being love 
 by just such a hair-breadth deflection 
 from the line of beauty as had deter- 
 mined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. 
 When they met she had just published 
 her first novel, and Glennard, who after- 
 ward had an ambitious man's impatience 
 of distinguished women, was young
 
 20 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 enough to be dazzled by the semi- 
 publicity it gave her. It was the kind 
 of book that makes elderly ladies lower 
 their voices and call each other 'my 
 dear ' when they furtively discuss it ; and 
 Glennard exulted in the superior know- 
 ledge of the world that enabled him to 
 take as a matter of course sentiments 
 over which the university shook its head. 
 Still more delightful was it to hear Mrs. 
 Aubyn waken the echoes of academic 
 drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing 
 those of her printed page. Her intel- 
 lectual independence gave a touch of 
 comradeship to their intimacy, prolong- 
 ing the illusion of college friendships 
 based on a joyous interchange of heresies. 
 Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented 
 to each other the augur's wink behind 
 the Hillbridge idol : they walked together 
 in that light of young omniscience from 
 which fate so curiously excludes one's 
 elders. 
 
 Husbands, who are notoriously inop-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 21 
 
 portune, may even die inopportunely, 
 and this was the revenge that Mr. 
 Aubyn, some -two years after her return 
 to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. 
 He died precisely at the moment when 
 Glennard was beginning to criticise her. 
 It was not that she bored him ; she did 
 what was infinitely worse she made him 
 feel his inferiority. The sense x>f mental 
 equality had been gratifying to his raw 
 ambition ; but as his self-knowledge 
 defined itself, his understanding of her 
 also increased ; and if man is at times 
 indirectly flattered by the moral superi- 
 ority of woman, her mental ascendency 
 is extenuated by no such oblique tribute 
 to his powers. The attitude of looking 
 up is a strain on the muscles ; and it was 
 becoming more and more Glennard's 
 opinion that brains, in a woman, should 
 be merely the obverse of beauty. To 
 beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim ; 
 and while she had enough prettiness to 
 exasperate him by her incapacity to make
 
 22 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant 
 of any of the little artifices whereby 
 women contrive to hide their defects and 
 even to turn them into graces. Her 
 dress never seemed a part of her ; all her 
 clothes had an impersonal air, as though 
 they had belonged to some one else and 
 been borrowed in an emergency that 
 had somehow become chronic. She was 
 conscious enough of her deficiencies to 
 try to amend them by rash imitations 
 of the most approved models; but no 
 woman who does not dress well intui- 
 tively will ever do so by the light of 
 reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, 
 to borrow a metaphor of her trade, some- 
 how never seemed to be incorporated 
 with the text. 
 
 Genius is of small use to a woman 
 who does not know how to do her hair. 
 The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with 
 her second book left Glennard's imagi- 
 nation untouched, or had at most the 
 negative effect of removing her still
 
 A VANISHED HAND 23 
 
 further from the circle of his contracting 
 sympathies. We are all the sport of 
 time ; and fate had so perversely ordered 
 the chronology of Margaret Aubyn's 
 romance that when her husband died 
 Glennard felt as though he had lost a 
 friend. 
 
 It was not in his nature to be need- 
 lessly unkind; and though he was in 
 the impregnable position of the man 
 who has given a woman no more defin- 
 able claim on him than that of letting 
 her fancy that he loves her, he would 
 not for the world have accentuated his 
 advantage by any betrayal of indiffer- 
 ence. During the first year of her 
 widowhood their friendship dragged on 
 with halting renewals of sentiment, 
 becoming more and more a banquet of 
 empty dishes from which the covers 
 were never removed ; then Glennard 
 went to New York to live and ex- 
 changed the faded pleasures of inter- 
 course for the comparative novelty of
 
 24 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 correspondence. Her letters, oddly 
 enough, seemed at first to bring her 
 nearer than her presence. She had 
 adopted, and she successfully maintained, 
 a note as affectionately impersonal as 
 his own ; she wrote ardently of her work, 
 she questioned him about his, she even 
 bantered him on the inevitable pretty 
 girl who was certain before long to 
 divert the current of his confidences. 
 To Glennard, who was almost a stranger 
 in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn's 
 writing was like a voice of reassurance 
 in surroundings as yet insufficiently 
 aware of him. His vanity found a 
 retrospective enjoyment in the senti- 
 ment his heart had rejected, and this 
 factitious emotion drove him once or 
 twice to Hillbridge, whence, after scenes 
 of evasive tenderness, he returned dis- 
 satisfied with himself and her. As he 
 made room for himself in New York 
 and peopled the space he had cleared 
 with the sympathies at the disposal of
 
 A VANISHED HAND 25 
 
 agreeable and self-confident young men, 
 it seemed to him natural to infer that 
 Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same 
 manner the void he was not unwilling 
 his departure should have left. But in 
 the dissolution of sentimental partner- 
 ship it is seldom that both associates 
 are able to withdraw their funds at the 
 same time ; and Glennard gradually 
 learned that he stood for ttie venture 
 on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably 
 staked her all. It was not the kind of 
 figure he cared to cut. He had no fancy 
 for leaving havoc in his wake and would 
 have preferred to sow a quick growth of 
 oblivion in the spaces wasted by his 
 unconsidered inroads ; but if he supplied 
 the seed, it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn 's 
 business to see to the raising of the 
 crop. Her attitude seemed indeed to 
 throw his own reasonableness into dis- 
 tincter relief; so that they might have 
 stood for thrift and improvidence in an 
 allegory of the affections.
 
 26 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 It was not that Mrs. Aubyn per- 
 mitted herself to be a pensioner on his 
 bounty. He knew she had no wish to 
 keep herself alive on the small change 
 of sentiment ; she simply fed on her 
 own funded passion, and the luxuries 
 it allowed her made him, even then, 
 dimly aware that she had the secret of 
 an inexhaustible alchemy. 
 
 Their relations remained thus nega- 
 tively tender till she suddenly wrote 
 him of her decision to go abroad to 
 live. Her father had died, she had no 
 near ties in Hillbridge, and London 
 offered more scope than New York to 
 her expanding personality. She was 
 already famous, and her laurels were 
 yet unharvested. 
 
 For a moment the news roused Glen- 
 nard to a jealous sense of lost oppor- 
 tunities. He wanted, at any rate, to 
 reassert his power before she made the 
 final effort of escape. They had not 
 met for over a year, but of course he
 
 A VANISHED HAND 27 
 
 could not let her sail without seeing her. 
 She came to New York the day before 
 her departure, and they spent its last 
 hours together. Glennard had planned 
 no course of action he simply meant to 
 let himself drift. They both drifted, for 
 a long time, down the languid current of 
 reminiscence ; she seemed to sit passive, 
 letting him push his way back through 
 the overgrown channels of the past. At 
 length she reminded him that they must 
 bring their explorations to an end. He 
 rose to leave, and stood looking at her 
 with the same uncertainty in his heart. 
 He was tired of her already he was 
 always tired of her yet he was not sure 
 that he wanted her to go. 
 
 ' I may never see you again,' he said, 
 as though confidently appealing to her 
 compassion. 
 
 Her look enveloped him. 'And I shall 
 see you always always ! ' 
 
 ' Why go then ? ' escaped him. 
 
 'To be nearer you,' she answered; and
 
 28 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the words dismissed him like a closing 
 door. 
 
 The door was never to reopen ; but 
 through its narrow crack Glennard, as 
 the years went on, became more and 
 more conscious of an inextinguishable 
 light directing its small ray toward the 
 past which consumed so little of his 
 own commemorative oil. The reproach 
 was taken from this thought by Mrs. 
 Aubyn's gradual translation into terms 
 of universality. In becoming a person- 
 age she so naturally ceased to be a 
 person that Glennard could almost look 
 back to his explorations of her spirit as 
 on a visit to some famous shrine, immor- 
 talised, but in a sense desecrated, by 
 popular veneration. 
 
 Her letters from London continued 
 to come with the same tender punctu- 
 ality ; but the altered conditions of her 
 life, the vistas of new relationships dis- 
 closed by every phrase, made her com- 
 munications as impersonal as a piece of
 
 A VANISHED HAND 29 
 
 journalism. It was as though the state, 
 the world, indeed, had taken her off his 
 hands, assuming the maintenance of a 
 temperament that had long exhausted 
 his slender store of reciprocity. 
 
 In the retrospective light shed by the 
 letters he was blinded to their specific 
 meaning. He was not a man who con- 
 cerned himself with literature, and they 
 had been to him, at first, simply the 
 extension of her brilliant talk, later the 
 dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity. 
 He knew, of course, that they were won- 
 derful ; that, unlike the authors who give 
 their essence to the public and keep only 
 a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn 
 had stored of her rarest vintage for this 
 hidden sacrament of tenderness. Some- 
 times, indeed, he had been oppressed, 
 humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of 
 her allusions, the wide scope of her 
 interests, her persistence in forcing her 
 superabundance of thought and emotion 
 into the shallow receptacle of his sym-
 
 30 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 pathy ; but he had never thought of the 
 letters objectively, as the production of a 
 distinguished woman ; had never mea- 
 sured the literary significance of her 
 oppressive prodigality. He was almost 
 frightened now at the wealth in his 
 hands; the obligation of her love had 
 never weighed on him like this gift of 
 her imagination : it was as though he 
 had accepted from her something to 
 which even a reciprocal tenderness could 
 not have justified his claim. 
 
 He sat a long time staring at the 
 scattered pages on his desk ; and in the 
 sudden realisation of what they meant 
 he could almost fancy some alchemistic 
 process changing them to gold as he 
 stared. 
 
 He had the sense of not being alone 
 in the room, of the presence of another 
 self observing from without the stirring 
 of sub - conscious impulses that sent 
 flushes of humiliation to his forehead. 
 At length he stood up, and with the
 
 A VANISHED HAND 31 
 
 gesture of a man who wishes to give 
 outward expression to his purpose to 
 establish, as it were, a moral alibi swept 
 the letters into a heap and carried them 
 toward the grate. But it would have 
 taken too long to burn all the packets. 
 He turned back to the table and one by 
 one fitted the pages into their envelopes ; 
 then he tied up the letters and put them 
 back into the locked drawer.
 
 32 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 III 
 
 IT was one of the laws of Glennard's 
 intercourse with Miss Trent that he 
 always went to see her the day after 
 he had resolved to give her up. There 
 was a special charm about the moments 
 thus snatched from the jaws of renuncia- 
 tion ; and his sense of their significance 
 was on this occasion so keen that he 
 hardly noticed the added gravity of her 
 welcome 
 
 His feeling for her had become so vital 
 a part of him that her nearness had the 
 quality of imperceptibly readjusting his 
 point of view, of making the jumbled 
 phenomena of experience fall at once 
 into a rational perspective. In this re- 
 distribution of values the sombre retro- 
 spect of the previous evening shrank to
 
 A VANISHED HAND 33 
 
 a mere cloud on the edge of consciousness. 
 Perhaps the only service an unloved 
 woman can render the man she loves is 
 to enhance and prolong his illusions 
 about her rival. It was the fate of 
 Margaret Aubyn's memory to serve as 
 a foil to Miss Trent's presence, and never 
 had the poor lady thrown her successor 
 into more vivid relief. 
 
 Miss Trent had the charm of still 
 waters that are felt to be renewed by 
 rapid currents. Her attention spread a 
 tranquil surface to the demonstrations of 
 others, and it was only in days of storm 
 that one felt the pressure of the tides. 
 This inscrutable composure was perhaps 
 her chief grace in Glennard's eyes. 
 Reserve, in some natures, implies merely 
 the locking of empty rooms or the dis- 
 simulation of awkward encumbrances ; 
 but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glen- 
 nard like the closed door to the sanctuary, 
 and his certainty of divining the hidden 
 treasure made him content to remain
 
 34 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 outside in the happy expectancy of the 
 neophyte. 
 
 'You didn't come to the opera last 
 night,' she began, in a tone that seemed 
 always rather to record a fact than to 
 offer a reflection on it. 
 
 He answered with a discouraged ges- 
 ture. ' What was the use ? We couldn't 
 have talked.' 
 
 ' Not as well as here,' she assented ; 
 adding, after a meditative pause, 'As 
 you didn't come I talked to Aunt 
 Virginia instead.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' he returned, the fact being 
 hardly striking enough to detach him 
 from the contemplation of her hands, 
 which had fallen, as was their wont, into 
 an attitude full of plastic possibilities. 
 One felt them to be hands that, moving 
 only to some purpose, were capable of 
 intervals of serene inaction. 
 
 * We had a long talk,' Miss Trent went 
 on ; and she waited again before adding, 
 with the increased absence of stress
 
 A VANISHED HAND 35 
 
 that marked her graver communications, 
 ' Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad 
 with her.' 
 
 Glennard looked up with a start. 
 ' Abroad? When?' 
 
 ' Now next month. To be gone two 
 years. ' 
 
 He permitted himself a movement 
 of tender derision. * Does she really ? 
 Well, I want you to go abroad with 
 me for any number of years. Which 
 offer do you accept ? ' 
 
 ' Only one of them seems to require 
 immediate consideration,' she returned 
 with a smile. 
 
 Glennard looked at her again. ' You 're 
 not thinking of it ? ' 
 
 Her gaze dropped and she unclasped 
 her hands. Her movements were so 
 rare that they might have been said to 
 italicise her words. 'Aunt Virginia 
 talked to me very seriously. It will be 
 a great relief to mother and the others 
 to have me provided for in that way for
 
 36 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 two years. I must think of that, you 
 know.' She glanced down at her gown, 
 which, under a renovated surface, dated 
 back to the first days of Glennard's 
 wooing. 'I try not to cost much but 
 I do.' 
 
 * Good Lord ! ' Glennard groaned. 
 
 They sat silent till at length she gently 
 took up the argument. * As the eldest, 
 you know, I 'm bound to consider these 
 things. Women are such a burden. 
 Jim does what he can for mother, but 
 with his own children to provide for, it 
 isn't very much. You see we 're all poor 
 together.' 
 
 'Your aunt isn't. She might help 
 your mother.' 
 
 ' She does in her own way.' 
 
 'Exactly that's the rich relation all 
 over ! You may be miserable in any 
 way you like, but if you 're to be happy 
 you must be so in her way and in her 
 old gowns.' 
 
 ' I could be very happy in Aunt
 
 A VANISHED HAND 37 
 
 Virginia's old gowns,' Miss Trent inter- 
 posed. 
 
 * Abroad, you mean ? ' 
 
 ' I mean wherever I felt that I was 
 helping. And my going abroad will help.' 
 
 'Of course I see that And I see 
 your considerateness in putting its ad- 
 vantages negatively.' 
 
 * Negatively ? ' 
 
 ' In dwelling simply on what the going 
 will take you from, not on what it will 
 bring you to. It means a lot to a 
 woman, of course, to get away from 
 a life like this.' He summed up in a 
 disparaging glance the background of 
 indigent furniture. 'The question is 
 how you '11 like coming back to it.' 
 
 She seemed to accept the full con- 
 sequences of his thought. ' I only know 
 I don't like leaving it.' 
 
 He flung back sombrely, 'You don't 
 even put it conditionally, then ? ' 
 
 Her gaze deepened. ' On what ? ' 
 
 He stood up and walked across the
 
 38 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 room. Then he came back, and paused 
 before her. ' On the alternative of marry- 
 ing me.' 
 
 The slow colour even her blushes 
 seemed deliberate rose to her lower 
 lids ; her lips stirred, but the words re- 
 solved themselves into a smile, and she 
 waited. 
 
 He took another turn, with the 
 thwarted step of the man whose nerv- 
 ous exasperation escapes through his 
 muscles. 
 
 ' And to think that in fifteen years I 
 shall have a big practice ! ' 
 
 Her eyes triumphed for him. * In 
 less ! ' 
 
 ' The cursed irony of it ! What do I 
 care for the man I shall be then ? It 's 
 slaving one's life away for a stranger ! ' 
 He took her hands abruptly. * You 11 
 go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte 
 Carlo ? I heard Hollingsworth say to- 
 day that he meant to take his yacht over 
 to the Mediterranean '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 39 
 
 She released herself. 'If you think 
 that ' 
 
 ' I don't. I almost wish I did. It 
 would be easier, I mean.' He broke off 
 incoherently. ' I believe your Aunt 
 Virginia does, though. She somehow 
 connotes Hollingsworth and the Medi- 
 terranean.' He caught her hands again. 
 * Alexa if we could manage a little hole 
 somewhere out of town ? ' 
 
 ' Could we ? ' she sighed, half yielding. 
 
 ' In one of those places where they 
 make jokes about the mosquitoes,' he 
 pressed her. 'Could you get on with 
 one servant ? ' 
 
 ' Could you get on without varnished 
 boots ? ' 
 
 ' Promise me you won't go, then ! ' 
 
 * What are you thinking of, Stephen ? ' 
 
 'I don't know,' he stammered, the 
 question giving unexpected form to his 
 intention. 'It's all in the air yet, of 
 course ; but I picked up a tip the other 
 day '
 
 40 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' You 're not speculating ? ' she cried, 
 with a kind of superstitious terror. 
 
 * Lord, no ! This is a sure thing I 
 almost wish it wasn't; I mean if I can 
 
 work it ' He had a sudden vision 
 
 of the comprehensiveness of the tempta- 
 tion. If only he had been less sure of 
 Dinslow ! His assurance gave the situa- 
 tion the base element of safety. 
 
 ' I don't understand you,' she faltered. 
 
 ' Trust me, instead ! ' he adjured her 
 with sudden energy ; and turning on her 
 abruptly, ' If you go, you know, you go 
 free,' he concluded. 
 
 She drew back, paling a little. ' Why 
 do you make it harder for me ? ' 
 
 'To make it easier for myself,' he 
 retorted.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 41 
 
 IV 
 
 THE next afternoon Glennard, leaving 
 his office earlier than usual, turned, on 
 his way home, into one of the public 
 libraries. 
 
 He had the place to himself at that 
 closing hour, and the librarian was able 
 to give an undivided attention to his 
 tentative request for letters collections 
 of letters. The librarian suggested 
 Walpole. 
 
 ' I meant women women's letters.' 
 
 The librarian proffered Hannah More 
 and Miss Martineau. 
 
 Glennard cursed his own inarticulate- 
 ness. * I mean letters to to some one 
 person a man ; their husband or ' 
 
 'Ah,' said the inspired librarian, 
 ' Eloise and Abailard.'
 
 42 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' Well something a little nearer, per- 
 haps,' said Glennard, with lightness. 
 ' Didn't Merimee 
 
 * The lady's letters, in that case, were 
 not published.' 
 
 ' Of course not,' said Glennard, vexed 
 at his blunder. 
 
 'There are George Sand's letters to 
 Flaubert.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' Glennard hesitated. ' Was she 
 
 were they ? ' He chafed at his 
 
 own ignorance of the sentimental by- 
 paths of literature. 
 
 ' If you want love-letters, perhaps some 
 of the French eighteenth-century corre- 
 spondences might suit you better Mile. 
 A'isse or Madame de Sabran ' 
 
 But Glennard insisted. * I want some- 
 thing modern English or American. I 
 want to look something up/ he lamely 
 concluded. 
 
 The librarian could only suggest 
 George Eliot. 
 
 ' Well, give me some of the French
 
 A VANISHED HAND 43 
 
 things, then and I '11 have Merimee's 
 letters. It was the woman who pub- 
 lished them, wasn't it ? ' 
 
 He caught up his armful, transferring 
 it, on the doorstep, to a cab which carried 
 him to his rooms. He dined alone, 
 hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, 
 and returned at once to his books. 
 
 Late that night, as he undressed,, he 
 wondered what contemptible impulse had 
 forced from him his last words to Alexa 
 Trent. It was bad enough to interfere 
 with the girl's chances by hanging about 
 her to the obvious exclusion of other 
 men, but it was worse to seem to justify 
 his weakness by dressing up the future 
 in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself 
 sinking from depth to depth of senti- 
 mental cowardice in his reluctance t 
 renounce his hold on her; and it filled 
 him with self-disgust to think that the 
 highest feeling of which he supposed 
 himself capable was blent with such 
 base elements.
 
 44 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 His awakening was hardly cheered by 
 the sight of her writing. He tore her 
 note open and took in the few lines 
 she seldom exceeded the first page 
 with the lucidity of apprehension that 
 is the forerunner of evil. 
 
 * My aunt sails on Saturday and I 
 must give her my answer the day after 
 to-morrow. Please don't come till then 
 I want to think the question over by 
 myself. I know I ought to go. Won't 
 you help me to be reasonable ? ' 
 
 It was settled, then. Well, he would 
 help her to be reasonable ; he wouldn't 
 stand in her way ; he would let her go. 
 For two years he had been living some 
 other, luckier man's life ; the time had 
 come when he must drop back into his 
 own. He no longer tried to look ahead, 
 to grope his way through the endless 
 labyrinth of his material difficulties ; a 
 sense of dull resignation closed in on 
 him like a fog.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 45 
 
 * Hullo, Glennard 1 ' a voice said, as an 
 electric car, late that afternoon, dropped 
 him at an uptown corner. 
 
 He looked up and met the interroga- 
 tive smile of Barton Flamel, who stood 
 on the curbstone watching the retreating 
 car with the eye of a man philosophic 
 enough to remember that it will be 
 followed by another. 
 
 Glennard felt his usual impulse of 
 pleasure at meeting Flamel ; but it was 
 not in this case curtailed by the reaction 
 of contempt that habitually succeeded 
 it. Probably even the few men who 
 had known Flamel since his youth could 
 have given no good reason for the vague 
 mistrust that he inspired. Some people 
 are judged by their actions, others by 
 their ideas ; and perhaps the shortest 
 way of defining Flamel is to say that 
 his well-known leniency of view was 
 vaguely divined to include himself. 
 Simple minds may have resented the 
 discovery that his opinions were based
 
 46 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 on his perceptions ; but there was cer- 
 tainly no more definite charge against 
 him than that implied in the doubt as 
 to how he would behave in an emergency, 
 and his company was looked upon as 
 one of those mildly unwholesome dis- 
 sipations to which the prudent may 
 occasionally yield. It now offered itself 
 to Glennard as an easy escape from the 
 obsession of moral problems, which some- 
 how could no more be worn in Flam el's 
 presence than a surplice in the street. 
 
 * Where are you going ? To the club?' 
 Flamel asked ; adding, as the younger 
 man assented, 'Why not come to my 
 studio instead? You'll see one bore 
 instead of twenty.' 
 
 The apartment which Flamel described 
 as his studio showed, as its one claim 
 to the designation, a perennially empty 
 easel, the rest of its space being filled 
 with the evidences of a comprehensive 
 dilettantism. Against this background, 
 which seemed the visible expression of
 
 A VANISHED HAND 47 
 
 its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows 
 of fine books detached themselves with 
 a prominence showing them to be 
 Flamel's chief care. 
 
 Glennard glanced with the eye of 
 untrained curiosity at the lines of warm- 
 toned morocco, while his host busied 
 himself with the uncorking of Apolli- 
 naris. 
 
 * You Ve got a splendid lot of books,' 
 he said. 
 
 ' They 're fairly decent,' the other 
 assented, in the curt tone of the collector 
 who will not talk of his passion for fear 
 of talking of nothing else ; then, as 
 Glennard, his hands in his pockets, 
 began to stroll perfunctorily down the 
 long line of bookcases ' Some men,' 
 Flamel irresistibly added, think of books 
 merely as tools, others as tooling. I 'm 
 between the two ; there are days when I 
 use them as scenery, other days when I 
 want them as society; so that, as you 
 see, my library represents a makeshift
 
 48 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 compromise between looks and brains, 
 and the collectors look down on me 
 almost as much as the students.' 
 
 Glennard, without answering, was 
 mechanically taking one book after 
 another from the shelves. His hands 
 slipped curiously over the smooth covers 
 and the noiseless subsidence of opening 
 pages. Suddenly he came on a thin 
 volume of faded manuscript. 
 
 ' What 's this ? ' he asked with a listless 
 sense of wonder. 
 
 *Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. 
 I 've been going in for that sort of thing 
 lately.' Flamel came up and looked 
 over his shoulders. 'That's a bit of 
 Stendhal one of the Italian stories 
 and here are some letters of Balzac to 
 Madame Surville.' 
 
 Glennard took the book with sudden 
 eagerness. ' Who was Madame S urville ? ' 
 
 ' His sister.' He was conscious that 
 Flamel was looking at him with the 
 smile that was like an interrogation
 
 A VANISHED HAND 49 
 
 point. ' I didn't know you cared for 
 this kind of thing.' 
 
 ' I don't at least I 've never had the 
 chance. Have you many collections of 
 letters?' 
 
 * Lord, no very few. I 'm just be- 
 ginning, and most of the interesting ones 
 are out of my reach. Here's a queer 
 little collection, though the rarest thing 
 I Ve got half a dozen of Shelley's 
 letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a 
 devil of a time getting them a lot of 
 collectors were after them.' 
 
 Glennard, taking the volume from his 
 hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance 
 at the interleaving of yellow crisscrossed 
 sheets. * She was the one who drowned 
 herself, wasn't she ? ' 
 
 Flamel nodded. ' I suppose that little 
 episode adds about fifty per cent, to their 
 value,' he said meditatively. 
 
 Glennard laid the book down. He 
 wondered why he had joined Flamel. 
 He was in no humour to be amused by 
 
 D
 
 50 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the older man's talk, and a recrudescence 
 of personal misery rose about him like an 
 icy tide. 
 
 * I believe I must take myself off,' he 
 said. * I 'd forgotten an engagement.' 
 
 He turned to go ; but almost at the 
 same moment he was conscious of a 
 duality of intention wherein his apparent 
 wish to leave revealed itself as a last 
 effort of the will against the overmaster- 
 ing desire to stay and unbosom himself 
 to Flamel. 
 
 The older man, as though divining the 
 conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his 
 arm. 
 
 * Won't the engagement keep? Sit 
 down and try one of these cigars. I 
 don't often have the luck of seeing you 
 here.' 
 
 ' I 'm rather driven just now,' said 
 Glenn ard vaguely. He found himself 
 seated again, and Flamel had pushed to 
 his side a low stand holding a bottle of 
 Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 51 
 
 Flamel, thrown back in his capacious 
 arm-chair, surveyed him through a cloud 
 of smoke with the comfortable tolerance 
 of the man to whom no inconsistencies 
 need be explained. Connivance was im- 
 plicit in the air. It was the kind of 
 atmosphere in which the outrageous loses 
 its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relax- 
 ing of his nerves. 
 
 ' I suppose one has to pay a lot for 
 letters like that ? ' he heard himself ask- 
 ing, with a glance in the direction of the 
 volume he had laid aside. 
 
 * Oh, so-so depends on circumstances.' 
 Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. 'Are 
 you thinking of collecting ? ' 
 
 Glennard laughed. ' Lord, no. The 
 other way round. ' 
 
 ' Selling ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking 
 of a poor chap ' 
 
 Flamel filled the pause with a nod 
 of interest. 
 
 'A poor chap I used to know who
 
 52 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 died he died last year and who left me 
 a lot of letters, letters he thought a great 
 deal of he was fond of me and left 'em 
 to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, 
 that they might benefit me somehow 
 I don't know I 'm not much up on such 
 
 things ' He reached his hand to the 
 
 tall glass his host had filled. 
 
 * A collection of autograph letters, eh ? 
 Any big names ? ' 
 
 4 Oh, only one name. They 're all 
 letters written to him by one person, 
 you understand ; a woman, in fact 
 
 ' Oh, a woman,' said Flamel negli- 
 gently. 
 
 Glennard was nettled by his obvious 
 loss of interest. ' I rather think they 'd 
 attract a good deal of notice if they were 
 published.' 
 
 Flamel still looked uninterested. 
 ' Love-letters, I suppose ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, just the letters a woman would 
 write to a man she knew well. They 
 were tremendous friends, he and she.'
 
 A VANISHED HAND 53 
 
 ' And she wrote a clever letter ? ' 
 
 * Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.' 
 A great silence filled the room. It 
 
 seemed to Glennard that the words had 
 burst from him as blood gushes from a 
 wound. 
 
 * Great Scott ! ' said Flamel, sitting up. 
 'A collection of Margaret Aubyn 's 
 letters? Did you say you had them?' 
 
 * They were left me by my friend.' 
 
 ' I see. Was he well, no matter. 
 You 're to be congratulated, at any 
 rate. What are you going to do with 
 them ? ' 
 
 Glennard stood up with a sense of 
 weariness in all his bones. ' Oh, I don't 
 know. I haven't thought much about it. 
 I just happened to see that some fellow 
 was writing her life ' 
 
 ' Joslin ; yes. You didn't think of 
 giving them to him ? ' 
 
 Glennard had lounged across the room 
 and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus 
 who drooped his garlanded head above
 
 54 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the pediment of an Italian cabinet. 
 ' What ought I to do ? You 're just 
 the fellow to advise me.' He felt the 
 blood in his cheek as he spoke. 
 
 Flamel sat with meditative eye. 
 ' What do you want to do with them ? ' 
 he asked. 
 
 * I want to publish them,' said Glen- 
 nard, swinging round with sudden 
 energy ' If I can ' 
 
 * If you can ? They 're yours, you 
 say?' 
 
 ' They 're mine fast enough. There 's 
 no one to prevent I mean there are no 
 
 restrictions ' he was arrested by the 
 
 sense that these accumulated proofs of 
 impunity might precisely stand as the 
 strongest check to his action. 
 
 * And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I 
 believe ? ' 
 
 < No.' 
 
 ' Then I don't see who 's to interfere,' 
 said Flamel, studying his cigar-tip. 
 
 Glennard had turned his unseeing
 
 A VANISHED HAND 55 
 
 stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine 
 framed in tarnished gilding. 
 
 ' It 's just this way,' he began again, 
 with an effort 'When letters are as 
 personal as as these of my friend's. . . . 
 Well, I don't mind telling you that the 
 cash would make a heap of difference 
 to me ; such a lot that it rather obscures 
 my judgment the fact is, if I could lay 
 my hand on a few thousands now I could 
 get into a big thing, and without appre- 
 ciable risk ; and I'd like to know whether 
 you think I 'd be justified under the 
 circumstances. . . .' He paused with a 
 dry throat. It seemed to him at the 
 moment that it would be impossible for 
 him ever to sink lower in his own esti- 
 mation. He was in truth less ashamed 
 of weighing the temptation than of sub- 
 mitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, 
 and affecting to appeal to sentiments of 
 delicacy on the absence of which he 
 had consciously reckoned. But he had 
 reached a point where each word seemed
 
 56 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 to compel another, as each wave in a 
 stream is forced forward by the pressure 
 behind it ; and before Flamel could speak 
 he had faltered out ' You don't think 
 people could say . . . could criticise the 
 man . . . ? ' 
 
 * But the man 's dead, isn't he ? ' 
 
 ' He 's dead yes ; but can I assume 
 the responsibility without 
 
 Flamel hesitated ; and almost immedi- 
 ately Glennard's scruples gave way to 
 irritation. If at this hour Flamel were 
 to affect an inopportune reluctance ! 
 
 The older man's answer reassured him. 
 ' Why need you assume any responsi- 
 bility ? Your name won't appear, of 
 course ; and as to your friend's, I don't 
 see why his should either. He wasn't a 
 celebrity himself, I suppose ? ' 
 
 * No, no.' 
 
 ' Then the letters can be addressed to 
 Mr. Blank. Doesn't that make it all 
 right ? ' 
 
 Glennard's hesitation revived. ' For
 
 A VANISHED HAND 57 
 
 the public, yes. But I don't see 
 that it alters the case for me. The 
 question is, ought I to publish them 
 at all ? ' 
 
 ' Of course you ought to. ' Flamel 
 spoke with invigorating emphasis. * I 
 doubt if you 'd be justified in keeping 
 them back. Anything of Margaret 
 Aubyn's is more or less public pro- 
 perty by this time. She 's too great for 
 any one of us. I was only wondering 
 how you could use them to the best 
 advantage to yourself, I mean. How 
 many are there ? ' 
 
 * Oh, a lot ; perhaps a hundred 
 I haven't counted. There may be 
 more. . . .' 
 
 'Gad! What a haul! When were 
 they written ? ' 
 
 * I don't know that is they corre- 
 sponded for years. What 's the odds ? ' 
 He moved toward his hat with a vague 
 impulse of flight 
 
 * It all counts,' said Flamel imperturb-
 
 58 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ably. ' A long correspondence one, I 
 mean, that covers a great deal of time 
 is obviously worth more than if the same 
 number of letters had been written within 
 a year. At any rate, you won't give 
 them to Joslin? They'd fill a book, 
 wouldn't they ? ' 
 
 'I suppose so. I don't know how 
 much it takes to fill a book.' 
 
 ' Nat love-letters, you say ? ' 
 
 ' Why ? ' flashed from Glennard. 
 
 'Oh, nothing only the big public is 
 sentimental, and if they were why, you 
 could get any money for Margaret 
 Aubyn's love-letters.' 
 
 Glennard was silent. 
 
 'Are the letters interesting in them- 
 selves ? I mean apart from the associa- 
 tion with her name ? ' 
 
 ' I 'm no judge.' Glennard took up 
 his hat and thrust himself into his over- 
 coat 'I daresay I sha'n't do anything 
 about it And, Flamel you won't 
 mention this to any one ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 59 
 
 'Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. 
 You've got a big thing.' Flamel was 
 smiling at him from the hearth. 
 
 Glennard, on the threshold, forced a 
 response to the smile, while he questioned 
 with loitering indifference * Financially, 
 eh?' 
 
 ' Rather ; I should say so.' 
 
 Glennard's hand lingered on the knob. 
 'How much should you say? You 
 know about such things.' 
 
 ' Oh, I should have to see the letters ; 
 but I should say well, if you've got 
 enough to fill a book and they 're fairly 
 readable, and the book is brought out at 
 the right time say ten thousand down 
 from the publisher, and possibly one or 
 two more in royalties. If you got the 
 publishers bidding against each other 
 you might do even better ; but of course 
 I 'm talking in the dark.' 
 
 * Of course,' said Glennard, with sudden 
 dizziness. His hand had slipped from 
 the knob and he stood staring down at
 
 60 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the exotic spirals of the Persian rug 
 beneath his feet. 
 
 * I 'd have to see the letters,' Flamel 
 repeated. 
 
 ' Of course you 'd have to see them 
 . . .' Glennard stammered ; and, without 
 turning, he flung over his shoulder an 
 inarticulate * Good-bye . . .'
 
 A VANISHED HAND 61 
 
 THE little house, as Glennard strolled up 
 to it between the trees, seemed no more 
 than a gay tent pitched against the sun- 
 shine. It had the crispness of a freshly 
 starched summer gown, and the geraniums 
 on the verandah bloomed as simultane- 
 ously as the flowers in a bonnet. The 
 garden was prospering absurdly. Seed 
 they had sown at random amid laughing 
 countercharges of incompetence had 
 shot up in fragrant defiance of their 
 blunders. He smiled to see the clematis 
 unfolding its punctual wing about the 
 porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a 
 shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler 
 mounted to the nursery window of a 
 baby who never cried. A breeze shook 
 the awning above the tea-table, and his
 
 62 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 wife, as he drew near, could be seen 
 bending above a kettle that was just 
 about to boil. So vividly did the whole 
 scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage 
 setting, that it would have been hardly 
 surprising to see her step forward among 
 the flowers and trill out her virtuous 
 happiness from the verandah rail. 
 
 The stale heat of the long day in town, 
 the dusty promiscuity of the suburban 
 train, were now but the requisite foil to 
 an evening of scented breezes and tran- 
 quil talk. They had been married more 
 than a year, and each home-coming still 
 reflected the freshness of their first day 
 together. If, indeed, their happiness 
 had a flaw, it was in resembling too 
 closely the bright impermanence of their 
 surroundings. Their love as yet was but 
 the gay tent of holiday-makers. 
 
 His wife looked up with a smile. The 
 country life suited her, and her beauty had 
 gained depth from a stillness in which 
 certain faces might have grown opaque.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 63 
 
 ' Are you very tired ? ' she asked, 
 pouring his tea. 
 
 'Just enough to enjoy this.' He rose 
 from the chair in which he had thrown 
 himself and bent over the tray for his 
 cream. ' You Ve had a visitor ? ' he 
 commented, noticing a half-empty cup 
 beside her own. 
 
 'Only Mr. Flamel,' she said in- 
 differently. 
 
 ' Flamel ? Again ? ' 
 
 She answered without show of sur- 
 prise. ' He left just now. His yacht 
 is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed 
 a trap of the Dreshams to drive over 
 here.' 
 
 Glennard made no comment, and she 
 went on, leaning her head back against 
 the cushions of her bamboo seat, 'He 
 wants us to go for a sail with him next 
 Sunday.' 
 
 Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. 
 He was trying to think of the most 
 natural and unartificial thing to say,
 
 64 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 and his voice seemed to come from the 
 outside, as though he were speaking 
 behind a marionette. 'Do you want 
 to?' 
 
 'Just as you please,' she said com- 
 pliantly. No affectation of indifference 
 could have been as baffling as her com- 
 pliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning 
 to feel that the surface which, a year ago, 
 he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, 
 might, after all, be a mirror reflecting 
 merely his own conception of what lay 
 behind it. 
 
 'Do you like Flamel?' he suddenly 
 asked ; to which, still engaged with her 
 tea, she returned the feminine answer 
 ' I thought you did.' 
 
 ' I do, of course,' he agreed, vexed at 
 his own incorrigible tendency to magnify 
 Flannel's importance by hovering about 
 the topic. 'A sail would be rather 
 jolly ; let's go.' 
 
 She made no reply, and he drew forth 
 the rolled-up evening papers which he
 
 A VANISHED HAND 65 
 
 had thrust into his pocket on leaving the 
 train. As he smoothed them out, his 
 own countenance seemed to undergo the 
 same process. He ran his eye down the 
 list of stocks, and Flamel's importunate 
 personality receded behind the rows of 
 figures pushing forward into notice like 
 so many bearers of good news. Glen- 
 nard's investments were flowering like 
 his garden : the dryest shares blossomed 
 into dividends and a golden harvest 
 awaited his sickle. 
 
 He glanced at his wife with the tran- 
 quil air of a man who digests good luck 
 as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a 
 shower. * Things are looking uncom- 
 monly well. I believe we shall be able to 
 go to town for two or three months next 
 winter if we can find something cheap.' 
 
 She smiled luxuriously : it was pleasant 
 to be able to say, with an air of balanc- 
 ing relative advantages, ' Really, on the 
 baby's account I shall be almost sorry ; 
 but, if we do go, there 's Kate Erskine's
 
 66 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 house . . . she 11 let us have it for almost 
 nothing. . . . ' 
 
 'Well, write her about it,' he recom- 
 mended, his eye travelling on in search 
 of the weather report. He had turned 
 to the wrong page ; and suddenly a line 
 of black characters leapt out at him as 
 from an ambush. 
 
 ' MARGARET AUBYN'S LETTERS. 
 
 'Two volumes. Out to-day. First Edition of 
 five thousand sold out before leaving the press. 
 Second Edition ready next week. The Book of the 
 Year. 
 
 He looked up stupidly. His wife still 
 sat with her head thrown back, her pure 
 profile detached against the cushions. 
 She was smiling a little over the prospect 
 his last words had opened. Behind her 
 head shivers of sun and shade ran across 
 the striped awning. A row of maples 
 and a privet hedge hid their neighbour's 
 gables, giving them undivided possession 
 of their leafy half-acre ; and life, a 
 moment before, had been like their
 
 A VANISHED HAND 67 
 
 plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from 
 importunities, impenetrably his and hers. 
 Now it seemed to him that every maple- 
 leaf, every privet-bud, was a relentless 
 human gaze, pressing close upon their 
 privacy. It was as though they sat in 
 a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a 
 darkness full of hostile watchers. . . . 
 His wife still smiled ; and her uncon- 
 sciousness of danger seemed in some 
 horrible way to put her beyond the 
 reach of rescue. . . . 
 
 He had not known that it would be 
 like this. After the first odious weeks, 
 spent in preparing the letters for publi- 
 cation, in submitting them to Flamel, 
 and in negotiating with the publishers, 
 the transaction had dropped out of his 
 consciousness into that unvisited limbo 
 to which we relegate the deeds we would 
 rather not have done but have no notion 
 of undoing. From the moment he had 
 obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail 
 with her aunt he had tried to imagine
 
 68 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 himself irrevocably committed. After 
 that, he argued, his first duty was to 
 her she had become his conscience. 
 The sum obtained from the publishers 
 by Flamel's adroit manipulations, and 
 opportunely transferred to Dinslow's 
 successful venture, already yielded a 
 return which, combined with Glennard's 
 professional earnings, took the edge of 
 compulsion from their way of living, 
 making it appear the expression of a 
 graceful preference for simplicity. It 
 was the mitigated poverty which can 
 subscribe to a review or two and have 
 a few flowers on the dinner-table. And 
 already in a small way Glennard was 
 beginning to feel the magnetic quality 
 of prosperity. Clients who had passed 
 his door in the hungry days sought it 
 out now that it bore the name of a 
 successful man. It was understood that 
 a small inheritance, cleverly invested, 
 was the source of his fortune ; and there 
 was a feeling that a man who could do
 
 A VANISHED HAND 69 
 
 so well for himself was likely to know 
 how to turn over other people's money. 
 
 But it was in the more intimate reward 
 of his wife's happiness that Glennard 
 tasted the full flavour of success. Com- 
 ing out of conditions so narrow that 
 those he offered her seemed spacious, she 
 fitted into her new life without any of 
 those manifest efforts at adjustment that 
 are as sore to a husband's pride as the 
 critical rearrangement of the bridal furni- 
 ture. She had given him, instead, the 
 delicate pleasure of watching her expand 
 like a sea-creature restored to its element, 
 stretching out the atrophied tentacles of 
 girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising 
 tide of opportunity. And somehow 
 in the windowless inner cell of his con- 
 sciousness where self-criticism cowered 
 Glennard's course seemed justified by 
 its merely material success. How could 
 such a crop of innocent blessedness have 
 sprung from tainted soil ? . . . 
 
 Now he had the injured sense of a
 
 70 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 man entrapped into a disadvantageous 
 bargain. He had not known it would 
 be like this ; and a dull anger gathered 
 at his heart. Anger against whom ? 
 Against his wife, for not knowing what 
 he suffered ? Against Flamel, for being 
 the unconscious instrument of his wrong- 
 doing? Or against that mute memory 
 to which his own act had suddenly given 
 a voice of accusation ? Yes, that was it ; 
 and his punishment henceforth would be 
 the presence, the unescapable presence, 
 of the woman he had so persistently 
 evaded. She would always be there 
 now. It was as though he had married 
 her instead of the other. It was what she 
 had always wanted to be with him and 
 she had gained her point at last. . . . 
 
 He sprang up, as though in an impulse 
 of flight ... The sudden movement 
 lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in 
 the incurious voice of the woman whose 
 life is enclosed in a magic circle of pro- 
 sperity' Any news ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 71 
 
 'No none ' he said, roused to a 
 
 sense of immediate peril. The papers 
 lay scattered at his feet what if she 
 were to see them ? He stretched his 
 arm to gather them up, but his next 
 thought showed him the futility of such 
 concealment. The same advertisement 
 would appear every day, for weeks to 
 come, in every newspaper ; how could he 
 prevent her seeing it? He could not 
 always be hiding the papers from her. . . . 
 Well, and what if she did see it? It 
 would signify nothing to her; the chances 
 were that she would never even read 
 the book. . . . As she ceased to be an 
 element of fear in his calculations the 
 distance between them seemed to lessen 
 and he took her again, as it were, into 
 the circle of his conjugal protection. . . . 
 Yet a moment before he had almost 
 hated her! . . . He laughed aloud at 
 his senseless terrors. . . . He was off 
 his balance, decidedly. . . . 
 
 ' What are you laughing at ? ' she asked.
 
 72 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 He explained, elaborately, that he was 
 laughing at the recollection of an old 
 woman in the train, an old woman with 
 a lot of bundles, who couldn't find her 
 ticket. . . . But somehow, in the telling, 
 the humour of the story seemed to evapo- 
 rate, and he felt the conventionality of 
 her smile. He glanced at his watch. 
 * Isn't it time to dress ? ' 
 
 She rose with serene reluctance. ' It 's 
 a pity to go in. The garden looks so 
 lovely.' 
 
 They lingered side by side, surveying 
 their domain. There was not space in 
 it, at this hour, for the shadow of the 
 elm-tree in the angle of the hedge : it 
 crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in 
 two, and ran up the side of the house to 
 the nursery window. She bent to flick a 
 caterpillar from the honeysuckle ; then, 
 as they turned indoors, * If we mean to 
 go on the yacht next Sunday,' she sug- 
 gested, ' oughtn't you to let Mr. Flamel 
 know ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 73 
 
 Glennard's exasperation deflected sud- 
 denly. ' Of course I shall let him know. 
 You always seem to imply that I 'm going 
 to do something rude to Flamel.' 
 
 The words reverberated through her 
 silence ; she had a way of thus leaving 
 one space in which to contemplate one's 
 folly at arm's-length. Glennard turned 
 on his heel and went upstairs. As he 
 dropped into a chair before his dressing- 
 table, he said to himself that in the last 
 hour he had sounded the depths of his 
 humiliation, and that the lowest dregs of 
 it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful 
 necessity of having always, as long as the 
 two men lived, to be civil to Barton 
 Flamel.
 
 74 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 VI 
 
 THE week in town had been sultry, and 
 the men, in the Sunday emancipation of 
 white flannel and duck, filled the deck- 
 chairs of the yacht with their outstretched 
 apathy, following, through a mist of cigar- 
 ette smoke, the flitting inconsequences of 
 the women. The party was a small one 
 Flamel had few intimate friends but 
 composed of more heterogeneous atoms 
 than the little pools into which society 
 usually runs. The reaction from the 
 chief episode of his earlier life had bred 
 in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any 
 kind of personal saliency. Cleverness 
 was useful in business ; but in society it 
 seemed to him as futile as the sham 
 cascades formed by a stream that might 
 have been used to drive a mill. He liked
 
 A VANISHED HAND 75 
 
 the collective point of view that goes with 
 the civilised uniformity of dress clothes, 
 and his wife's attitude implied the same 
 preference ; yet they found themselves 
 slipping more and more into Flamel's 
 intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said 
 that she enjoyed meeting clever people ; 
 but her enjoyment took the negative 
 form of a smiling receptivity ; and Glen- 
 nard felt a growing preference for the 
 kind of people who have their thinking 
 done for them by the community. 
 
 Still, the deck of the yacht was a 
 pleasant refuge from the heat on shore, 
 and his wife's profile, serenely projected 
 against the changing blue, lay on his 
 retina like a cool hand on the nerves. 
 He had never been more impressed by 
 the kind of absoluteness that lifted her 
 beauty above the transient effects of 
 other women, making the most harmoni- 
 ous face seem an accidental collocation 
 of features. 
 
 The ladies who directly suggested this
 
 76 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 comparison were of a kind accustomed 
 to take similar risks with more gratifying 
 results. Mrs. Armiger had in fact long 
 been the triumphant alternative of those 
 who couldn't 'see' Alexa Glennard's 
 looks; and Mrs. Touchett's claims to 
 consideration were founded on that 
 distribution of effects which is the 
 wonder of those who admire a highly 
 cultivated country. The third lady of 
 the trio which Glennard's fancy had put 
 to such unflattering uses was bound by 
 circumstances to support the claims of 
 the other two. This was Mrs. Dresham, 
 the wife of the editor of the Radiator. 
 Mrs. Dresham was a lady who had 
 rescued herself from social obscurity by 
 assuming the role of her husband's ex- 
 ponent and interpreter; and Dresham 's 
 leisure being devoted to the cultivation 
 of remarkable women, his wife's attitude 
 committed her to the public celebration 
 of their remarkableness. For the con- 
 ceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dres-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 77 
 
 ham was repaid by the fact that there 
 were people who took her for a remark- 
 able woman ; and who in turn probably 
 purchased similar distinction with the 
 small change of her reflected importance. 
 As to the other ladies of the party, they 
 were simply the wives of some of the 
 men the kind of women who expect to 
 be talked to collectively, and to have 
 their questions left unanswered. 
 
 Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment 
 of Dresham's instinct for the remarkable, 
 was an innocent beauty who for years 
 had distilled dulness among a set of 
 people now self- condemned by their 
 inability to appreciate her. Under Dres- 
 ham's tutelage she had developed into a 
 ' thoughtful woman,' who read his leaders 
 in the Radiator and bought the works 
 he recommended. When a new book 
 appeared, people wanted to know what 
 Mrs. Armiger thought of it ; and a 
 young gentleman who had made a trip 
 in Touraine had recently inscribed to her
 
 78 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the wide-margined result of his explora- 
 tions. 
 
 Glennard, leaning back with his head 
 against the rail and a slit of fugitive blue 
 between his half -closed lids, vaguely 
 wished she wouldn't spoil the afternoon 
 by making people talk ; though he re- 
 duced his annoyance to the minimum by 
 not listening to what was said, there 
 remained a latent irritation against the 
 general futility of words. 
 
 His wife's gift of silence seemed to 
 him the most vivid commentary on the 
 clumsiness of speech as a means of inter- 
 course, and his eyes had turned to her 
 in renewed appreciation of this finer 
 faculty when Mrs. Armiger's voice 
 abruptly brought home to him the 
 underrated potentialities of language. 
 
 'You've read them, of course, Mrs. 
 Glennard ? ' he heard her ask ; and, in 
 reply to Alexa's vague interrogation 
 ' Why, the Aubyn Letters it 's the only 
 book people are talking of this week.'
 
 A VANISHED HAND 79 
 
 Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her 
 advantage. * You haven't read them ? 
 How very extraordinary ! As Mrs. 
 Armiger says, the book's in the air: 
 one breathes it in like the influenza.' 
 
 Glennard sat motionless, watching his 
 wife. 
 
 ' Perhaps it hasn't reached the suburbs 
 yet,' she said with her unruffled smile. 
 
 ' Oh, do let me come to you, then ! ' 
 Mrs. Touchett cried ; * anything for a 
 change of air ! I 'm positively sick of 
 the book and I can't put it down. Can't 
 you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. 
 Flamel ? ' 
 
 Flamel shook his head. ' Not even 
 with this breeze. Literature travels 
 faster than steam nowadays. And the 
 worst of it is that we can't any of us give 
 up reading: it's as insidious as a vice 
 and as tiresome as a virtue.' 
 
 ' I believe it is a vice, almost, to read 
 such a book as the Letters? said Mrs. 
 Touchett. ' It 's the woman's soul, abso-
 
 80 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 lutely torn up by the roots her whole 
 self laid bare ; and to a man who 
 evidently didn't care ; who couldn't have 
 cared. I don't mean to read another 
 line: it's too much like listening at a 
 keyhole.' 
 
 ' But if she wanted it published ? ' 
 
 'Wanted it? How do we know she 
 did?' 
 
 ' Why, I heard she 'd left the letters to 
 the man whoever he is with directions 
 that they should be published after his 
 death ' 
 
 ' I don't believe it,' Mrs. Touchett 
 declared. 
 
 ' He 's dead then, is he ? ' one of the 
 men asked. 
 
 'Why, you don't suppose if he were 
 alive he could ever hold up his head 
 again, with these letters being read by 
 everybody?' Mrs. Touchett protested. 
 ' It must have been horrible enough to 
 know they 'd been written to him ; but 
 to publish them ! No man could have
 
 A VANISHED HAND 81 
 
 done it, and no woman could have told 
 him to 
 
 * Oh, come, come,' Dresham judicially 
 interposed ; ' after all, they 're not love- 
 letters.' 
 
 * No that 's the worst of it ; they 're 
 unloved letters,' Mrs. Touchett retorted. 
 
 'Then, obviously, she needn't have 
 written them ; whereas the man, poor 
 devil, could hardly help receiving them.' 
 
 * Perhaps he counted on the public to 
 save him the trouble of reading them,' 
 said young Hartly, who was in the 
 cynical stage. 
 
 Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful 
 loveliness to Dresham. ' From the way 
 you defend him I believe you know who 
 he is.' 
 
 Every one looked at Dresham, and 
 his wife smiled with the superior air of 
 the woman who is in her husband's pro- 
 fessional secrets. Dresham shrugged his 
 shoulders. 
 
 ' What have I said to defend him ? '
 
 82 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 'You called him a poor devil you 
 pitied him.' 
 
 ' A man who could let Margaret Aubyn 
 write to him in that way ? Of course I 
 pity him.' 
 
 ' Then you must know who he is,' cried 
 Mrs. Armiger with a triumphant air of 
 penetration. 
 
 Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dres- 
 ham shook his head. * No one knows ; 
 not even the publishers ; so they tell me 
 at least.' 
 
 'So they tell you to tell us,' Hartly 
 astutely amended ; and Mrs. Armiger 
 added, with the appearance of carrying 
 the argument a point further, ' But even 
 if he 's dead and she 's dead, somebody 
 must have given the letters to the pub- 
 lishers.' 
 
 ' A little bird, probably,' said Dresham, 
 smiling indulgently on her deduction. 
 
 ' A little bird of prey then a vulture, I 
 should say ' another man interpolated. 
 
 ' Oh, I 'm not with you there,' said
 
 A VANISHED HAND 83 
 
 Dresham easily. ' Those letters belonged 
 to the public.' 
 
 ' How can any letters belong to the 
 public that weren't written to the public?' 
 Mrs. Touchett interposed. 
 
 ' Well, these were, in a sense. A 
 personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's 
 belongs to the world. Such a mind is 
 part of the general fund of thought. It's 
 the penalty of greatness one becomes a 
 monument historique. Posterity pays the 
 cost of keeping one up, but on condition 
 that one is always open to the public.' 
 
 4 1 don't see that that exonerates the 
 man who gives up the keys of the 
 sanctuary, as it were.' 
 
 ' Who was he ? ' another voice in- 
 quired. 
 
 ' Who was he ? Oh, nobody, I fancy 
 the letter-box, the slit in the wall 
 through which the letters passed to 
 posterity. . . .' 
 
 'But she never meant them for pos- 
 terity 1 '
 
 84 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 * A woman shouldn't write such letters 
 if she doesn't mean them to be pub- 
 lished. . . .' 
 
 ' She shouldn't write them to such a 
 man ! ' Mrs. Touchett scornfully cor- 
 rected. 
 
 ' I never keep letters,' said Mrs. 
 Armiger, under the obvious impression 
 that she was contributing a valuable 
 point to the discussion. 
 
 There was a general laugh, and Flamel, 
 who had not spoken, said lazily, ' You 
 women are too incurably subjective. I 
 venture to say that most men would see 
 in those letters merely their immense 
 literary value, their significance as docu- 
 ments. The personal side doesn't count 
 where there 's so much else.' 
 
 'Oh, we all know you haven't any 
 principles,' Mrs. Armiger declared ; and 
 Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent 
 smile, said : * I shall never write you a 
 love-letter, Mr. Flamel.' 
 
 Glennard moved away impatiently.
 
 A VANISHED HAND .85 
 
 Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing 
 of gnats. He wondered why his wife 
 had wanted to drag him on such a sense- 
 less expedition. . . . He hated FlameFs 
 crowd and what business had Flamel 
 himself to interfere in that way, standing 
 up for the publication of the letters as 
 though Glennard needed his defence? . . . 
 Glennard turned his head and saw that 
 Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa's 
 elbow and was speaking to her in a low 
 tone. The other groups had scattered, 
 straying in twos along the deck. It 
 came over Glennard that he should 
 never again be able to see Flamel speak- 
 ing to his wife without the sense of sick 
 mistrust that now loosened his joints. . . . 
 
 Alexa, the next morning, over their 
 early breakfast, surprised her husband 
 by an unexpected request. 
 
 * Will you bring me those letters from 
 town ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' What letters ? ' he said, putting down
 
 86 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 his cup. He felt himself as vulnerable 
 as a man who is lunged at in the dark. 
 
 'Mrs. Aubyn's. The book they were 
 all talking about yesterday.' 
 
 Glennard, carefully measuring his 
 second cup of tea, said with delibera- 
 tion, 'I didn't know you cared about 
 that sort of thing.' 
 
 She was, in fact, not a great reader, 
 and a new book seldom reached her till 
 it was, so to speak, on the home stretch ; 
 but she replied with a gentle tenacity, 
 ' I think it would interest me because I 
 read her life last year.' 
 
 ' Her life ? Where did you get that ? ' 
 
 ' Some one lent it to me when it came 
 out Mr. Flamel, I think.' 
 
 His first impulse was to exclaim, 
 ' Why the devil do you borrow books 
 of Flamel ? I can buy you all you 
 
 want ' but he felt himself irresistibly 
 
 forced into an attitude of smiling com- 
 pliance. ' Flamel always has the newest 
 books going, hasn't he ? You must be
 
 A VANISHED HAND 87 
 
 careful, by the way, about returning 
 what he lends you. He 's rather crotchety 
 about his library.' 
 
 'Oh, I'm always very careful,' she 
 said, with a touch of competence that 
 struck him ; and she added, as he 
 caught up his hat : ' Don't forget the 
 Letters.' 
 
 Why had she asked for the book ? 
 Was her sudden wish to see it the result 
 of some hint of Flamel's ? The thought 
 turned Glennard sick, but he preserved 
 sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a 
 moment later, that his last hope of 
 self-control would be lost if he yielded 
 to the temptation of seeing a hidden 
 purpose in everything she said and did. 
 How much Flamel guessed, he had no 
 means of divining ; nor could he pre- 
 dicate, from what he knew of the man, 
 to what use his inferences might be put. 
 The very qualities that had made Flamel 
 a useful adviser made him the most 
 dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt
 
 88 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 himself agrope among alien forces that 
 his own act had set in motion. . . . 
 
 Alexa was a woman of few require- 
 ments ; but her wishes, even in trifles, 
 had a defmiteness that distinguished 
 them from the fluid impulses of her 
 kind. He knew that, having once asked 
 for the book, she would not forget it; 
 and he put aside, as an ineffectual ex- 
 pedient, his momentary idea of applying 
 for it at the circulating library and 
 telling her that all the copies were out. 
 If the book was to be bought, it had 
 better be bought at once. He left his 
 office earlier than usual and turned in at 
 the first bookshop on his way to the train. 
 The show-window was stacked with con- 
 spicuously lettered volumes. Margaret 
 Aubyn flashed back at him in endless 
 iteration. He plunged into the shop 
 and came on a counter where the name 
 repeated itself on row after row of 
 bindings. It seemed to have driven 
 the rest of literature to the back shelves. 
 He caught up a copy, tossing the money
 
 A VANISHED HAND 89 
 
 to an astonished clerk, who pursued him 
 to the door with the unheeded offer to 
 wrap up the volumes. 
 
 In the street he was seized with a 
 sudden apprehension. What if he were 
 to meet Flamel? The thought was in- 
 tolerable. He called a cab and drove 
 straight to the station, where, amid the 
 palm-leaf fans of a perspiring crowd, he 
 waited a long half-hour for his train to 
 start. 
 
 He had thrust a volume into either 
 pocket, and in the train he dared not 
 draw them out ; but the detested words 
 leaped at him from the folds of the 
 evening paper. The air seemed full of 
 Margaret Aubyn's name ; the motion of 
 the train set it dancing up and down on 
 the page of a magazine that a man in 
 front of him was reading. . . . 
 
 At the door he was told that Mrs. 
 Glennard was still out, and he went 
 upstairs to his room and dragged the 
 books from his pocket. They lay on 
 the table before him like live things
 
 90 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 that he feared to touch. . . . At length 
 he opened the first volume. A familiar 
 letter sprang out at him, each word 
 quickened by its glaring garb of type. 
 The little broken phrases fled across the 
 page like wounded animals in the open. 
 ... It was a horrible sight ... a battue 
 of helpless things driven savagely out 
 of shelter. He had not known it would 
 be like this. . . . 
 
 He understood now that, at the 
 moment of selling the letters, he had 
 viewed the transaction solely as it 
 affected himself: as an unfortunate 
 blemish on an otherwise presentable 
 record. He had scarcely considered the 
 act in relation to Margaret Aubyn ; 
 for death, if it hallows, also makes 
 innocuous. Glennard's God was a god 
 of the living, of the immediate, the 
 actual, the tangible ; all his days he 
 had lived in the presence of that god, 
 heedless of the divinities who, below the 
 surface of our deeds and passions, silently 
 forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 91 
 
 VII 
 
 A KNOCK roused him, and looking up he 
 saw his wife. He met her glance in 
 silence, and she faltered out, ' Are you 
 ill?' 
 
 The words restored his self-possession. 
 '111? Of course not. They told me 
 you were out and I came upstairs.' 
 
 The books lay between them on the 
 table ; he wondered when she would see 
 them. She lingered tentatively on the 
 threshold, with the air of leaving his 
 explanation on his hands. She was not 
 the kind of woman who could be counted 
 on to fortify an excuse by appearing to 
 dispute it. 
 
 ' Where have you been ? ' Glennard 
 asked, moving forward so that he ob- 
 structed her vision of the books.
 
 92 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' I walked over to the Dreshams' for 
 tea,' 
 
 'I can't think what you see in those 
 people,' he said with a shrug ; adding, 
 uncontrollably ' I suppose Flamel was 
 there?' 
 
 ' No ; he left on the yacht this morn- 
 ing.' 
 
 An answer so obstructing to the 
 natural escape of his irritation left Glen- 
 nard with no momentary resource but 
 that of strolling impatiently to the 
 window. As her eyes followed him 
 they lit on the books. 
 
 ' Ah, you 've brought them ! I 'm so 
 glad,' she said. 
 
 He answered over his shoulder, * For a 
 woman who never reads you make the 
 most astounding exceptions ! ' 
 
 Her smile was an exasperating conces- 
 sion to the probability that it had been 
 hot in town or that something had 
 bothered him. 
 
 * Do you mean it 's not nice to want to
 
 A VANISHED HAND 93 
 
 read the book ? ' she asked. ' It was not 
 nice to publish it, certainly ; but after 
 all, I 'm not responsible for that, am I ? ' 
 She paused, and, as he made no answer, 
 went on, still smiling, ' I do read some- 
 times, you know ; and I 'm very fond of 
 Margaret Aubyn's books. I was reading 
 Pomegranate Seed when we first met. 
 Don't you remember ? It was then you 
 told me all about her.' 
 
 Glennard had turned back into the 
 room and stood staring at his wife. ' All 
 about her ? ' he repeated, and with the 
 words remembrance came to him. He 
 had found Miss Trent one afternoon with 
 the novel in her hand, and moved by the 
 lover's fatuous impulse to associate him- 
 self in some way with whatever fills the 
 mind of the beloved, had broken through 
 his habitual silence about the past. Re- 
 warded by the consciousness of figuring 
 impressively in Miss Trent's imagination, 
 he had gone on from one anecdote to 
 another, reviving dormant details of his
 
 94 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his 
 vanity on the eagerness with which she 
 listened to his reminiscences of a being 
 already clothed in the impersonality of 
 greatness. 
 
 The incident had left no trace in his 
 mind ; but it sprang up now like an old 
 enemy, the more dangerous for having 
 been forgotten. The instinct of self- 
 preservation sometimes the most peril- 
 ous that man can exercise made him 
 awkwardly declare : ' Oh, I used to see 
 her at people's houses, that was all'; and 
 her silence as usual leaving room for a 
 multiplication of blunders, he added, with 
 increased indifference, * I simply can't see 
 what you can find to interest you in such 
 a book.' 
 
 She seemed to consider this intently. 
 * You 've read it, then ? ' 
 
 ' I glanced at it I never read such 
 things.' 
 
 * Is it true that she didn't wish the 
 letters to be published ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 95 
 
 Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of 
 the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and 
 with it the sense that he was lost if he 
 looked more than a step ahead. 
 
 ' I 'm sure I don't know,' he said ; then, 
 summoning a smile, he passed his hand 
 through her arm. ' / didn't have tea at 
 the Dreshams', you know ; won't you 
 give me some now ? ' he suggested. 
 
 That evening Glennard, under pretence 
 of work to be done, shut himself into the 
 small study opening off the drawing-room. 
 As he gathered up his papers he said to 
 his wife, ' You 're not going to sit indoors 
 on such a night as this ? I '11 join you 
 presently outside.' 
 
 But she had drawn her arm-chair to 
 the lamp. ' I want to look at my book,' 
 she said, taking up the first volume of 
 the Letters. 
 
 Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into 
 the study. ' I 'm going to shut the door; 
 I want to be quiet,' he explained from
 
 96 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the threshold ; and she nodded without 
 lifting her eyes from the book. 
 
 He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly 
 at the outspread paper. How was he 
 to work, while on the other side of the 
 door she sat with that volume in her 
 hand ? The door did not shut her out 
 he saw her distinctly, felt her close 
 to him in a contact as painful as the 
 pressure on a bruise. 
 
 The sensation was part of the general 
 strangeness that made him feel like a 
 man waking from a long sleep to find 
 himself in an unknown country among 
 people of alien tongue. We live in our 
 own souls as in an unmapped region, a few 
 acres of which we have cleared for our 
 habitation ; while of the nature of those 
 nearest us we know but the boundaries 
 that march with ours. Of the points in 
 his wife's character not in direct contact 
 with his own, Glennard now discerned 
 his ignorance ; and the baffling sense of 
 her remoteness was intensified by the
 
 A VANISHED HAND 97 
 
 discovery that, in one way, she was closer 
 to him than ever before. As one may 
 live for years in happy unconsciousness 
 of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he 
 had lived beside his wife unaware that 
 her individuality had become a part of 
 the texture of his life, ineradicable as 
 some growth on a vital organ ; and he 
 now felt himself at once incapable of 
 forecasting her judgment and powerless 
 to evade its effects. 
 
 To escape, the next morning, the con- 
 fidences of the breakfast- table, he went to 
 town earlier than usual. His wife, who 
 read slowly, was given to talking over 
 what she read, and at present his first 
 object in life was to postpone the inevit- 
 able discussion of the letters. This in- 
 stinct of protection, in the afternoon, on 
 his way up town, guided him to the 
 club in search of a man who might be 
 persuaded to come out to the country to 
 dine. The only man in the club was 
 Flamel.
 
 98 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 Glennard, as he heard himself almost 
 involuntarily pressing Flamel to come 
 and dine, felt the full irony of the situa- 
 tion. To use Flamel as a shield against 
 his wife's scrutiny was only a shade less 
 humiliating than to reckon on his wife 
 as a defence against Flamel. 
 
 He felt a contradictory movement of 
 annoyance at the latter 's ready accept- 
 ance, and the two men drove in silence 
 to the station. As they passed the book- 
 stall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered 
 a moment, and the eyes of both fell on 
 Margaret Aubyn's name, conspicuously 
 displayed above a counter stacked with 
 the familiar volumes. 
 
 'We shall be late, you know,' Glennard 
 remonstrated, pulling out his watch. 
 
 * Go ahead,' said Flamel imperturbably. 
 ' I want to get something ' 
 
 Glennard turned on his heel and 
 walked down the platform. Flamel re- 
 joined him with an innocent - looking 
 magazine in his hand ; but Glennard
 
 A VANISHED HAND 99 
 
 dared not even glance at the cover, lest 
 it should show the syllables he feared. 
 
 The train was full of people they 
 knew, and they were kept apart till it 
 dropped them at the little suburban 
 station. As they strolled up the shaded 
 hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing 
 out the improvements in the neighbour- 
 hood, deploring the threatened approach 
 of an electric railway, and screening him- 
 self by a series of reflex adjustments from 
 the risk of any allusion to the Letters. 
 Flamel suffered his discourse with the 
 bland inattention that we accord to the 
 affairs of some one else's suburb, and 
 they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea- 
 table without a perceptible turn toward 
 the dreaded topic. 
 
 The dinner passed offsafely. Flamel, al- 
 ways at his best in Alexa's presence, gave 
 her the kind of attention which is like 
 a becoming light thrown on the speaker's 
 words : his answers seemed to bring out 
 a latent significance in her phrases, as the
 
 100 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 sculptor draws his statue from the block. 
 Glennard, under his wife's composure, 
 detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, 
 and the discovery was like the lightning- 
 flash across a nocturnal landscape. Thus 
 far these momentary illuminations had 
 served only to reveal the strangeness of 
 the intervening country : each fresh ob- 
 servation seemed to increase the sum- 
 total of his ignorance. Her simplicity of 
 outline was more puzzling than a com- 
 plex surface. One may conceivably work 
 one's way through a labyrinth ; but 
 Alexa's candour was like a snow-covered 
 plain, where, the road once lost, there are 
 no landmarks to travel by. 
 
 Dinner over, they returned to the 
 verandah, where a moon, rising behind 
 the old elm, was combining with that 
 complaisant tree a romantic enlargement 
 of their borders. Glennard had forgotten 
 the cigars. He went to his study to 
 fetch them, and in passing through the 
 drawing-room he saw the second volume
 
 A VANISHED HAND 101 
 
 of the Letters lying open on his wife's 
 table. He picked up the book and 
 looked at the date of the letter she had 
 been reading. It was one of the last . . . 
 he knew the few lines by heart. He 
 dropped the book and leaned against the 
 wall. Why had he included that one 
 among the others ? Or was it possible that 
 now they would all seem like that . . . ? 
 
 Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the 
 dusk. ' May Touchett was right it is 
 like listening at a keyhole. I wish I 
 hadn't read it ! ' 
 
 Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone 
 of the man whose phrases are punctuated 
 by a cigarette, * It seems so to us, per- 
 haps ; but to another generation the 
 book will be a classic.' 
 
 * Then it ought not to have been pub- 
 lished till it had time to become a classic. 
 It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to 
 read the secrets of a woman one might 
 have known.' She added in a lower 
 tone, * Stephen did know her '
 
 102 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' Did he ( ' came from Flamel. 
 
 ' He knew her very well, at Hill- 
 bridge, years ago. The book has made 
 him feel dreadfully ... he wouldn't read 
 it ... he didn't want me to read it. I 
 didn't understand at first, but now 1 
 see how horribly disloyal it must seem 
 to him. It 's so much worse to surprise 
 a friend's secrets than a stranger's.' 
 
 * Oh, Glennard 's such a sensitive chap,' 
 Flamel said easily ; and Alexa almost 
 rebukingly rejoined, * If you 'd known 
 her I 'm sure you 'd feel as he does. . . .' 
 
 Glennard stood motionless, overcome 
 by the singular infelicity with which he 
 had contrived to put Flamel in posses- 
 sion of the two points most damaging to 
 his case : the fact that he had been a 
 friend of Margaret Aubyn's and that he 
 had concealed from Alexa his share in 
 the publication of the letters. To a 
 man of less than Flamel's astuteness it 
 must now be clear to whom the letters 
 were addressed ; and the possibility once
 
 A VANISHED HAND 103 
 
 suggested, nothing could be easier than 
 to confirm it by discreet research. An 
 impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard 
 to the window. Why not anticipate 
 betrayal by telling his wife the truth in 
 Flamel's presence ? If the man had a 
 drop of decent feeling in him, such a 
 course would be the surest means of 
 securing his silence ; and above all, it 
 would rid Glennard of the necessity of 
 defending himself against the perpetual 
 criticism of his wife's belief in him. . . . 
 
 The impulse was strong enough to 
 carry him to the window ; but there a 
 reaction of defiance set in. What had 
 he done, after all, to need defence and 
 explanation ? Both Dresham and Flamel 
 had, in his hearing, declared the publica- 
 tion of the letters to be not only justifi- 
 able but obligatory ; and if the disin- 
 terestedness of Flamel's verdict might 
 be questioned, Dresham's at least repre- 
 sented the impartial view of the man of 
 letters. As to Alexa's words, they were 
 simply the conventional utterance of the
 
 104 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 'nice' woman on a question already 
 decided for her by other ' nice ' women. 
 She had said the proper thing as 
 mechanically as she would have put on 
 the appropriate gown or written the 
 correct form of dinner invitation. Glen- 
 nard had small faith in the abstract 
 judgments of the other sex : he knew 
 that half the women who were horrified 
 by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn's 
 letters would have betrayed her secrets 
 without a scruple. 
 
 The sudden lowering of his emotional 
 pitch brought a proportionate relief. He 
 told himself that now the worst was 
 over and things would fall into perspec- 
 tive again. His wife and Flamel had 
 turned to other topics, and coming out 
 on the veranda, he handed the cigars to 
 Flamel, saying cheerfully and yet he 
 could have sworn they were the last 
 words he meant to utter ! * Look here, 
 old man, before you go down to New- 
 port you must come out and spend a 
 few days with us mustn't he, Alexa ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 105 
 
 VIII 
 
 GLENNARD, perhaps unconsciously, had 
 counted on the continuance of this easier 
 mood. He had always taken pride in a 
 certain robustness of fibre that enabled 
 him to harden himself against the inevit- 
 able, to convert his failures into the 
 building materials of success. Though 
 it did not even now occur to him that 
 what he called the inevitable had hitherto 
 been the alternative he happened to 
 prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that 
 his present difficulty was one not to be 
 conjured by any affectation of indiffer- 
 ence. Some griefs build the soul a 
 spacious house, but in this misery of 
 Glennard's he could not stand upright. 
 It pressed against him at every turn. 
 He told himself that this was because
 
 106 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 there was no escape from the visible 
 evidences of his act. The Letters con- 
 fronted him everywhere. People who 
 had never opened a book discussed them 
 with critical reservations ; to have read 
 them had become a social obligation in 
 circles to which literature never pene- 
 trates except in a personal guise. 
 
 Glennard did himself injustice. It 
 was from the unexpected discovery of 
 his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. 
 Our self-esteem is apt to be based on 
 the hypothetical great act we have never 
 had occasion to perform ; and even the 
 most self-scrutinising modesty credits 
 itself negatively with a high standard of 
 conduct. Glennard had never thought 
 himself a hero ; but he had been certain 
 that he was incapable of baseness. We 
 all like our wrong-doings to have a be- 
 coming cut, to be made to order, as it 
 were; and Glennard found himself sud- 
 denly thrust into a garb of dishonour 
 surely meant for a meaner figure.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 107 
 
 The immediate result of his first weeks 
 of wretchedness was the resolve to go to 
 town for the winter. He knew that 
 such a course was just beyond the limit 
 of prudence ; but it was easy to allay the 
 fears of Alexa, who, scrupulously vigilant 
 in the management of the household, 
 preserved the American wife's usual 
 aloofness from her husband's business 
 cares. Glennard felt that he could not 
 trust himself to a winter's solitude with 
 her. He had an unspeakable dread of 
 her learning the truth about the letters, 
 yet could not be sure of steeling himself 
 against the suicidal impulse of avowal. 
 His very soul was parched for sympathy ; 
 he thirsted for a voice of pity and com- 
 prehension. But would his wife pity ? 
 Would she understand? Again he found 
 himself brought up abruptly against his 
 incredible ignorance of her nature. The 
 fact that he knew well enough how she 
 would behave in the ordinary emergencies 
 of life, that he could count, in such con-
 
 108 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 tingencies, on the kind of high courage 
 and directness he had always divined in 
 her, made him the more hopeless of her 
 entering into the tortuous psychology of 
 an act that he himself could no longer 
 explain or understand. It would have 
 been easier had she been more complex, 
 more feminine if he could have counted 
 on her imaginative sympathy or her 
 moral obtuseness but he was sure of 
 neither. He was sure of nothing but 
 that, for a time, he must avoid her. 
 Glennard could not rid himself of the 
 delusion that by and by his action would 
 cease to make its consequences felt. He 
 would not have cared to own to himself 
 that he counted on the dulling of his 
 sensibilities : he preferred to indulge the 
 vague hypothesis that extraneous cir- 
 cumstances would somehow efface the 
 blot upon his conscience. In his worst 
 moments of self-abasement he tried to 
 find solace in the thought that Flamel 
 had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at
 
 A VANISHED HAND 109 
 
 the outset, must have guessed to whom 
 the letters were addressed; yet neither 
 then nor afterward had he hesitated to 
 advise their publication. This thought 
 drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses 
 of friendliness, from each of which there 
 was a sharper reaction of distrust and 
 aversion. When Flamel was not at the 
 house, he missed the support of his tacit 
 connivance ; when he was there, his pre- 
 sence seemed the assertion of an intoler- 
 able claim. 
 
 Early in the winter the Glennards took 
 possession of the little house that was to 
 cost them almost nothing. The change 
 brought Glennard the relief of seeing less 
 of his wife, and of being protected, in her 
 presence, by the multiplied preoccupa- 
 tions of town life. Alexa, who could 
 never appear hurried, showed the smiling 
 abstraction of a pretty woman to whom 
 the social side of married life has not lost 
 its novelty. Glennard, with the reck- 
 lessness of a man fresh from his first
 
 110 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 financial imprudence, encouraged her in 
 such little extravagances as her good 
 sense at first resisted. Since they had 
 come to town, he argued, they might 
 as well enjoy themselves. He took a 
 sympathetic view of the necessity of 
 new gowns, he gave her a set of furs 
 at Christmas, and before the New Year 
 they had agreed on the necessity of 
 adding a parlour-maid to their small 
 establishment. 
 
 Providence the very next day hastened 
 to justify this measure by placing on 
 Glennard's breakfast-plate an envelope 
 bearing the name of the publishers to 
 whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters. 
 It happened to be the only letter the 
 early post had brought, and he glanced 
 across the table at his wife, who had 
 come down before him, and had probably 
 laid the envelope on his plate. She was 
 not the woman to ask awkward ques- 
 tions, but he felt the conjecture of her 
 glance, and he was debating whether to
 
 A VANISHED HAND 111 
 
 affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, 
 or to pass it off as a business communi- 
 cation that had strayed to his house, 
 when a cheque fell from the envelope. 
 It was the royalty on the first edition 
 of the letters. His first feeling was one 
 of simple satisfaction. The money had 
 come with such infernal opportuneness 
 that he could not help welcoming it. 
 Before long, too, there would be more ; 
 he knew the book was still selling far 
 beyond the publishers' previsions. He 
 put the cheque in his pocket, and left 
 the room without looking at his wife. 
 
 On the way to his office the habitual 
 reaction set in. The money he had 
 received was the first tangible reminder 
 that he was living on the sale of his 
 self-esteem. The thought of material 
 benefit had been overshadowed by his 
 sense of the intrinsic baseness of making 
 the letters known : now he saw what an 
 element of sordidness it added to the 
 situation, and how the fact that he
 
 112 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 needed the money, and must use it, 
 pledged him more irrevocably than ever 
 to the consequences of his act. It 
 seemed to him, in that first hour of 
 misery, that he had betrayed his friend 
 anew. 
 
 When, that afternoon, he reached 
 home earlier than usual, Alexa's drawing- 
 room was full of a gaiety that overflowed 
 to the stairs. Flamel, for a wonder, was 
 not there ; but Dresham and young 
 Hartly, grouped about the tea-table, 
 were receiving with resonant mirth a 
 narrative delivered in the fluttered stac- 
 cato that made Mrs. Armiger's conversa- 
 tion like the ejaculations of a startled 
 aviary. 
 
 She paused as Glennard entered, and 
 he had time to notice that his wife, who 
 was busied about the tea-tray, had not 
 joined in the laughter of the men. 
 
 'Oh, go on, go on,' young Hartly 
 rapturously groaned ; and Mrs. Armiger 
 met Glennard's inquiry with the depre-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 113 
 
 eating cry that really she didn't see what 
 there was to laugh at. ' I 'm sure I feel 
 more like crying. I don't know what I 
 should have done if Alexa hadn't been 
 at home to give me a cup of tea. My 
 nerves are in shreds yes, another, dear, 
 
 please ' and as Glennard looked his 
 
 perplexity, she went on, after pondering 
 on the selection of a second lump of sugar, 
 ' Why, I Ve just come from the reading, 
 you know the reading at the Waldorf.' 
 
 * I haven't been in town long enough 
 to know anything,' said Glennard, taking 
 the cup his wife handed him. ' Who has 
 been reading what ? ' 
 
 'That lovely girl from the South 
 Georgie Georgie What 's-her-name 
 Mrs. Dresham's protegee unless she's 
 yours, Mr. Dresham ! Why, the big- 
 ball-room was packed, and all the women 
 were crying like idiots it was the most 
 haiTowing thing I ever heard 
 
 'What did you hear?' Glennard 
 asked ; and his wife interposed : ' Won't
 
 114 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 you have another bit of cake, Julia ? Or, 
 Stephen, ring for some hot toast, please.' 
 Her tone betrayed a polite weariness of 
 the topic under discussion. Glennard 
 turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger 
 pursued him with her lovely amazement. 
 
 'Why, the Aubyu Letters didn't you 
 know about it ? She read them so beauti- 
 fully that it was quite horrible I should 
 have fainted if there 'd been a man near 
 enough to carry me out.' 
 
 Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham 
 said jovially, ' How like you women to 
 raise a shriek over the book and then 
 do all you can to encourage the blatant 
 publicity of the readings ! ' 
 
 Mrs. Armiger met him more than half- 
 way on a torrent of self-accusal. 'It 
 was horrid ; it was disgraceful. I told 
 your wife we ought all to be ashamed 
 of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa 
 was quite right to refuse to take any 
 tickets even if it was for a charity. ' 
 
 ' Oh,' her hostess murmured indiffer-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 115 
 
 ently, ' with me charity begins at home. 
 I can't afford emotional luxuries.' 
 
 'A charity? A charity?' Hartly 
 exulted. * I hadn't seized the full beauty 
 of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's 
 love-letters at the Waldorf before five 
 hundred people for a charity ! What 
 charity, dear Mrs. Armiger ? ' 
 
 'Why, the Home for Friendless 
 Women ' 
 
 * It was well chosen,' Dresham com- 
 mented ; and Hartly buried his mirth in 
 the sofa cushions. 
 
 When they were alone Glennard, still 
 holding his untouched cup of tea, turned 
 to his wife, who sat silently behind the 
 kettle. ' Who asked you to take a ticket 
 for that reading ? ' 
 
 ' I don't know, really Kate Dresham, 
 I fancy. It was she who got it up.' 
 
 *It's just the sort of damnable 
 vulgarity she's capable of! It's loath- 
 some it 's monstrous '
 
 116 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 His wife, without looking up, answered 
 gravely, * I thought so too. It was for 
 that reason I didn't go. But you must 
 remember that very few people feel 
 about Mrs. Aubyn as you do ' 
 
 Glennard managed to set down his 
 cup with a steady hand, but the room 
 swung round with him and he dropped 
 into the nearest chair. 'As I do ? ' he 
 repeated. 
 
 ' I mean that very few people knew 
 her when she lived in New York. To 
 most of the women who went to the 
 reading she was a mere name, too remote 
 to have any personality. With me, of 
 course, it was different ' 
 
 Glennard gave her a startled look. 
 ' Different ? Why different ? ' 
 
 ' Since you were her friend 
 
 * Her friend ! ' He stood up. ' You 
 speak as if she had had only one the 
 most famous woman of her day ! ' He 
 moved vaguely about the room, bending 
 down to look at some books on the table.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 117 
 
 ' I hope,' he added, ' you didn't give that 
 as a reason ? ' 
 
 * A reason ? ' 
 
 ' For not going. A woman who gives 
 reasons for getting out of social obliga- 
 tions is sure to make herself unpopular 
 or ridiculous.' 
 
 The words were uncalculated ; but in 
 an instant he saw that they had strangely 
 bridged the distance between his wife and 
 himself. He felt her close on him, like a 
 panting foe ; and her answer was a flash 
 that showed her hand on the trigger. 
 
 ' It seems,' she said from the threshold, 
 ' to have done both in giving my reasons 
 to you.' 
 
 The fact that they were dining out 
 that evening made it easy for him to 
 avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in 
 her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett, who was 
 going to the same dinner, had offered to 
 call for her ; and Glennard, refusing a pre- 
 carious seat between the ladies' draperies,
 
 118 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 followed on foot. The evening was in- 
 terminable. The reading at the Waldorf, 
 at which all the women had been present, 
 had revived the discussion of the Aubyn 
 Letters, and Glennard, hearing his wife 
 questioned as to her absence, felt himself 
 miserably wishing that she had gone, 
 rather than that her staying away should 
 have been remarked. He was rapidly 
 losing all sense of proportion where the 
 Letters were concerned. He could no 
 longer hear them mentioned without 
 suspecting a purpose in the allusion ; he 
 even yielded himself for a moment to 
 the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. 
 Dresham, whom he disliked, had organ- 
 ised the reading in the hope of making 
 him betray himself for he was already 
 sure that Dresham had divined his share 
 in the transaction. 
 
 The attempt to keep a smooth surface 
 on this inner tumult was as endless and 
 unavailing as efforts made in a night- 
 mare. He lost all sense of what he was
 
 A VANISHED HAND 119 
 
 saying to his neighbours ; and once when 
 he looked up his wife's glance struck him 
 cold. 
 
 She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's 
 side, and it appeared to Glennard that 
 they had built about themselves one of 
 those airy barriers of talk behind which 
 two people can say what they please. 
 While the reading was discussed they 
 were silent. Their silence seemed to 
 Glennard almost cynical it stripped the 
 last disguise from their complicity. A 
 throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly 
 it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense 
 of relief, that at bottom he no longer 
 cared whether Flamel had told his wife 
 or not. The assumption that Flamel 
 knew about the letters had become a 
 fact to Glennard ; and it now seemed 
 to him better that Alexa should know 
 too. 
 
 He was frightened at first by the dis- 
 covery of his own indifference. The last 
 barriers of his will seemed to be breaking
 
 120 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 down before a flood of moral lassitude. 
 How could he continue to play his part, 
 how keep his front to the enemy, with 
 this poison of indifference stealing through 
 his veins ? He tried to brace himself with 
 the remembrance of his wife's scorn. He 
 had not forgotten the note on which their 
 conversation had closed. If he had ever 
 wondered how she would receive the 
 truth, he wondered no longer she would 
 despise him. But this lent a new insidi- 
 ousness to his temptation, since her con- 
 tempt would be a refuge from his own. 
 He said to himself that, since he no longer 
 cared for the consequences, he could at 
 least acquit himself of speaking in self- 
 defence. What he wanted now was not 
 immunity but castigation : his wife's in- 
 dignation might still reconcile him to 
 himself. Therein lay his one hope of 
 regeneration : her scorn was the moral 
 antiseptic that he needed, her compre- 
 hension the one balm that could heal 
 him. .
 
 A VANISHED HAND 121 
 
 When they left the dinner he was so 
 afraid of speaking that he let her drive 
 home alone, and went to the club with 
 Flamel.
 
 122 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 IX 
 
 HE rose next morning with the resolve 
 to know what Alexa thought of him. 
 It was not anchoring in a haven but 
 lying-to in a storm he felt the need 
 of a temporary lull in the turmoil of 
 his sensations. 
 
 He came home late, for they were 
 dining alone and he knew that they 
 would have the evening together. When 
 he followed her to the drawing-room 
 after dinner he thought himself on the 
 point of speaking; but as she handed 
 him his coffee he said involuntarily: 'I 
 shall have to carry this off to the study ; 
 I 've got a lot of work to-night' 
 
 Alone in the study he cursed his 
 cowardice. What was it that had with- 
 held him ? A certain bright unapproach-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 123 
 
 ableness seemed to keep him at arm's 
 length. She was not the kind of woman 
 whose compassion could be circumvented ; 
 there was no chance of slipping past the 
 outposts he would never take her by 
 surprise. Well why not face her, then ? 
 What he shrank from could be no worse 
 than what he was enduring. He had 
 pushed back his chair and turned to go 
 upstairs when a new expedient presented 
 itself. What if, instead of telling her, 
 he were to let her find out for herself and 
 watch the effect of the discovery before 
 speaking? In this way he made over 
 to chance the burden of the revelation. 
 
 The idea had been suggested by the 
 sight of the formula enclosing the pub- 
 lishers' cheque. He had deposited the 
 money, but the notice accompanying it 
 dropped from his note-case as he cleared 
 his table for work. It was the formula 
 usual in such cases, and revealed clearly 
 enough that he was the recipient of a 
 royalty on Margaret Aubyn's letters. It
 
 124 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 would be impossible for Alexa to read 
 it without understanding at once that the 
 letters had been written to him and that 
 he had sold them. . . . 
 
 He sat downstairs till he heard her 
 ring for the parlour-maid to put out the 
 lights ; then he went up to the drawing- 
 room with a bundle of papers in his 
 hand. Alexa was just rising from her 
 seat, and the lamplight fell on the deep 
 roll of hair that overhung her brow like 
 the eaves of a temple. Her face had 
 often the high secluded look of a shrine ; 
 and it was this touch of awe in her 
 beauty that now made him feel himself 
 on the brink of sacrilege. 
 
 Lest the feeling should control him, 
 he spoke at once. 'I've brought you 
 a piece of work a lot of old bills and 
 things that I want you to sort for me. 
 Some are not worth keeping but you '11 
 be able to judge of that. There may be 
 a letter or two among them nothing of 
 much account ; but I don't like to throw
 
 A VANISHED HAND 125 
 
 away the whole lot without having them 
 looked over, and I haven't time to do it 
 myself. ' 
 
 He held out the papers, and she took 
 them with a smile that seemed to recog- 
 nise in the service he asked the tacit 
 intention of making amends for the 
 incident of the previous day. 
 
 * Are you sure I shall know which to 
 keep?' 
 
 ' Oh, quite sure,' he answered easily ; 
 ' and besides, none are of much import- 
 ance. ' 
 
 The next morning he invented an 
 excuse for leaving the house without 
 seeing her, and when he returned, just 
 before dinner, he found a visitor's hat 
 and stick in the hall. The visitor was 
 Flamel, who was just taking leave. 
 
 He had risen, but Alexa remained 
 seated ; and their attitude gave the 
 impression of a colloquy that had pro- 
 longed itself beyond the limits of speech. 
 Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard,
 
 126 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 and he had the sense of walking into a 
 room grown suddenly empty, as though 
 their thoughts were conspirators dispersed 
 by his approach. He felt the clutch of 
 his old fear. What if his Wife had 
 already sorted the papers and had told 
 Flamel of her discovery ? Well, it was 
 no news to Flamel that Glenn ard was 
 in receipt of a royalty on the Aubyn 
 Letters. . . . 
 
 A sudden resolve to know the worst 
 made him lift his eyes to his wife as the 
 door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had 
 risen also, and bending over her writing- 
 table, with her back to Glennard, was 
 beginning to speak precipitately. 
 
 ' 1 'm dining out to-night you don't 
 mind my deserting you ? Julia Armiger 
 sent me word just now that she had an 
 extra ticket for the last Ambrose con- 
 cert. She told me to say how sorry she 
 was that she hadn't two, but I knew you 
 wouldn't be sorry ! ' She ended with a 
 laugh that had the effect of being a
 
 A VANISHED HAND 127 
 
 strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger's ; and 
 before Glennard could speak she had 
 added, with her hand on the door, ' Mr. 
 Flamel stayed so late that I 've hardly 
 time to dress. The concert begins ridi- 
 culously early, and Julia dines at half- 
 past seven.' 
 
 Glennard stood alone in the empty 
 room that seemed somehow full of an 
 ironical consciousness of what was hap- 
 pening. ' She hates me,' he murmured. 
 ' She hates me. . . .' 
 
 The next day was Sunday, and Glen- 
 nard purposely lingered late in his room. 
 When he came downstairs his wife was 
 already seated at the breakfast-table. 
 She lifted her usual smile to his entrance 
 and they took shelter in the nearest topic, 
 like wayfarers overtaken by a storm. 
 While he listened to her account of the 
 concert he began to think that, after all, 
 she had not yet sorted the papers, and 
 that her agitation of the previous day
 
 128 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 must be ascribed to another cause, in 
 which perhaps he had but an indirect 
 concern. He wondered it had never 
 before occurred to him that Flamel was 
 the kind of man who might very well 
 please a woman at his own expense, 
 without need of fortuitous assistance. 
 If this possibility cleared the outlook 
 it did not brighten it. Glennard merely 
 felt himself left alone with his baseness. 
 
 Alexa left the breakfast-table before 
 him, and when he went up to the draw- 
 ing-room he found her dressed to go 
 out. 
 
 ' Aren't you a little early for church ? ' 
 he asked. 
 
 She replied that, on the way there, 
 she meant to stop a moment at her 
 mother's ; and while she drew on her 
 gloves he fumbled among the knick- 
 knacks on the mantelpiece for a match 
 to light his cigarette. 
 
 ' Well, good-bye,' she said, turning to 
 go ; and from the threshold she added :
 
 A VANISHED HAND 129 
 
 * By the way, 1 Ve sorted the papers you 
 gave me. Those that I thought you 
 would like to keep are on your study 
 table.' She went downstairs and he 
 heard the door close behind her. 
 
 She had sorted the papers she knew, 
 then she must know and she had made 
 no sign ! 
 
 Glennard, he hardly knew how, found 
 himself once more in the study. On the 
 table lay the packet he had given her. 
 It was much smaller she had evidently 
 gone over the papers with care, destroy- 
 ing the greater number. He loosened 
 the elastic band and spread the remaining 
 envelopes on his desk. The publishers' 
 notice was among them.
 
 130 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 X 
 
 His wife knew and she made no sign. 
 Glennard found himself in the case of 
 the seafarer who, closing his eyes at 
 nightfall on a scene he thinks to put 
 leagues behind him before day, wakes 
 to a port-hole framing the same patch 
 of shore. From the kind of exaltation 
 to which his resolve had lifted him he 
 dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His 
 impulse of confession had acted as a 
 drug to self-reproach. He had tried to 
 shift a portion of his burden to his wife's 
 shoulders ; and now that she had tacitly 
 refused to carry it, he felt the load too 
 heavy to be taken up. 
 
 A fortunate interval of hard work 
 brought respite from this phase of sterile 
 misery. He went West to argue an
 
 A VANISHED HAND 131 
 
 important case, won it, and came back 
 to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs 
 were thriving enough to engross him in 
 the pauses of his professional work, and 
 for over two months he had little time 
 to look himself in the face. Not un- 
 naturally for he was as yet unskilled in 
 the subtleties of introspection he mis- 
 took his temporary insensibility for a 
 gradual revival of moral health. 
 
 He told himself that he was recover- 
 ing his sense of proportion, getting to 
 see things in their true light ; and if he 
 now thought of his rash appeal to his 
 wife's sympathy it was as an act of 
 folly from the consequences of which he 
 had been saved by the providence that 
 watches over madmen. He had little 
 leisure to observe Alexa ; but he con- 
 cluded that the common sense momen- 
 tarily denied him had counselled her 
 silent acceptance of the inevitable. If 
 such a quality was a poor substitute for 
 the passionate justness that had once
 
 132 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 seemed to distinguish her, he accepted 
 the alternative as a part of that general 
 lowering of the key that seemed needful 
 to the maintenance of the matrimonial 
 duet. What woman ever retained her 
 abstract sense of justice where another 
 woman was concerned ? Possibly the 
 thought that he had profited by Mrs. 
 Aubyn's tenderness was not wholly dis- 
 agreeable to his wife. 
 
 When the pressure of work began to 
 lessen, and he found himself, in the 
 lengthening afternoons, able to reach 
 home somewhat earlier, he noticed that 
 the little drawing-room was always full, 
 and that he and his wife seldom had an 
 evening alone together. When he was 
 tired, as often happened, she went out 
 alone ; the idea of giving up an engage- 
 ment to remain with him seemed not to 
 occur to her. She had shown, as a girl, 
 little fondness for society, nor had she 
 seemed to regret it during the year they 
 had spent in the country. He reflected,
 
 A VANISHED HAND 133 
 
 however, that he was sharing the common 
 lot of husbands, who proverbially mis- 
 take the early ardours of housekeeping 
 for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, 
 at any rate, was refuting his theory as 
 inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the 
 gardener's expectations. An undefinable 
 change had come over her. In one sense 
 it was a happy one, since she had grown, 
 if not handsomer, at least more vivid 
 and expressive ; her beauty had become 
 more communicable : it was as though 
 she had learned the conscious exercise 
 of intuitive attributes and now used her 
 effects with the discrimination of an 
 artist skilled in values. To a dispas- 
 sionate critic (as Glennard now rated 
 himself) the art may at times have been 
 a little too obvious. Her attempts at 
 lightness lacked spontaneity, and she 
 sometimes rasped him by laughing like 
 Julia Armiger ; but he had enough im- 
 agination to perceive that, in respect of 
 his wife's social arts, a husband neces-
 
 134 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 sarily sees the wrong side of the tapes- 
 try. 
 
 In this ironical estimate of their rela- 
 tion Glennard found himself strangely 
 relieved of all concern as to his wife's 
 feelings for Flamel. From an Olympian 
 pinnacle of indifference he calmly sur- 
 veyed their inoffensive antics. It was 
 surprising how his cheapening of his 
 wife put him at ease with himself. Far 
 as he and she were from each other they 
 yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of 
 complicity. Yes, they were accomplices ; 
 he could no more be jealous of her than 
 she could despise him. The jealousy 
 that once seemed a blur on her whiteness 
 now appeared like a tribute to ideals in 
 which he no longer believed. 
 
 Glennard was little given to exploring 
 the outskirts of literature. He always 
 skipped the 'literary notices' in the 
 papers, and he had small leisure for the 
 intermittent pleasures of the periodical.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 135 
 
 He had therefore no notion of the pro- 
 longed reverberations which the Aubyn 
 Letters had awakened. When the book 
 ceased to be talked about he supposed it 
 had ceased to be read ; and this apparent 
 subsidence of the agitation about it 
 brought the reassuring sense that he 
 had exaggerated its vitality. The con- 
 viction, if it did not ease his conscience, 
 at least offered him the relative relief of 
 obscurity ; he felt like an offender taken 
 down from the pillory and thrust into the 
 soothing darkness of a cell. 
 
 But one evening, when Alexa had left 
 him to go to a dance, he chanced to turn 
 over the magazines on her table, and 
 the copy of the Horoscope to which he 
 settled down with his cigar confronted 
 him, on its first page, with a portrait of 
 Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction 
 of the photograph that had stood so long 
 on his desk. The desiccating air of 
 memory had turned her into the mere 
 abstraction of a woman, and this unex-
 
 136 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 pected evocation seemed to bring her 
 nearer than she had ever been in life. 
 Was it because he understood her better ? 
 He looked long into her eyes ; little 
 personal traits reached out to him like 
 caresses the tired droop of her lids, her 
 quick way of leaning forward as she 
 spoke, the movements of her long 
 expressive hands. All that was feminine 
 in her, the quality he had always missed, 
 stole toward him from her unreproachful 
 gaze ; and now that it was too late, life 
 had developed in him the subtler percep- 
 tions which could detect it in even this 
 poor semblance of herself. For a moment 
 he found consolation in the thought that, 
 at any cost, they had thus been brought 
 together ; then a sense of shame rushed 
 over him. Face to face with her, he felt 
 himself laid bare to the inmost fold of 
 consciousness. The shame was deep, but 
 it was a renovating anguish : he was like 
 a man whom intolerable pain has roused 
 from the creeping lethargy of death. . . .
 
 A VANISHED HAND 137 
 
 He rose next morning to as fresh a 
 sense of life as though his hour of com- 
 munion with Margaret Aubyn had been 
 a more exquisite renewal of their earlier 
 meetings. His waking thought was that 
 he must see her again ; and as conscious- 
 ness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear 
 of losing the sense of her nearness. But 
 she was still close to him : her presence 
 remained the one reality in a world of 
 shadows. All through his working hours 
 he was re-living with incredible minute- 
 ness every incident of their obliterated 
 past : as a man who has mastered the 
 spirit of a foreign tongue turns with 
 renewed wonder to the pages his youth 
 has plodded over. In this lucidity of 
 retrospection the most trivial detail had 
 its meaning, and the joy of recovery was 
 embittered to Glennard by the percep- 
 tion of all that he had missed. He had 
 been pitiably, grotesquely stupid ; and 
 there was irony in the thought that, but 
 for the crisis through which he was
 
 138 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 passing, he might have lived on in com- 
 placent ignorance of his loss. It was as 
 though she had bought him with her 
 blood. . . . 
 
 That evening he and Alexa dined 
 alone. After dinner he followed her to 
 the drawing-room. He no longer felt 
 the need of avoiding her ; he was hardly 
 conscious of her presence. After a few 
 words they lapsed into silence, and he sat 
 smoking with his eyes on the fire. It 
 was not that he was unwilling to talk to 
 her ; he felt a curious desire to be as kind 
 as possible ; but he was always forgetting 
 that she was there. Her full bright 
 presence, through which the currents of 
 life flowed so warmly, had grown as 
 tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far 
 beyond her. 
 
 Presently she rose and began to move 
 about the room. She seemed to be 
 looking for something, and he roused 
 himself to ask what she wanted.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 139 
 
 ' Only the last number of the Horo- 
 scope. I thought I 'd left it on this table. ' 
 He said nothing, and she went on : ' You 
 haven't seen it ? ' 
 
 * No,' he returned coldly. The maga- 
 zine was locked in his desk. 
 
 His wife had moved to the mantel- 
 piece. She stood facing him, and as he 
 looked up he met her tentative gaze. 
 ' I was reading an article in it a review 
 of Mrs. Aubyn's Letters," 1 she added 
 slowly, with her deep deliberate blush. 
 
 Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into 
 the fire. He felt a savage wish that she 
 would not speak the other woman's 
 name ; nothing else seemed to matter. 
 
 ' You seem to do a lot of reading,' he 
 said. 
 
 She still confronted him. 'I was 
 keeping this for you I thought it 
 might interest you,' she said with an 
 air of gentle insistence. 
 
 He stood up and turned away. He 
 was sure she knew that he had taken the
 
 140 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 review, and he felt that he was beginning 
 to hate her again. 
 
 ' I haven't time for such things,' he 
 said indifferently. As he moved to the 
 door he heard her take a hurried step 
 forward ; then she paused, and sank 
 without speaking into the chair from 
 which he had risen.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 141 
 
 XI 
 
 As Glennard, in the raw February sun- 
 light, mounted the road to the cemetery, 
 he felt the beatitude that comes with an 
 abrupt cessation of physical pain. He 
 had reached the point where self-analysis 
 ceases ; the impulse that moved him was 
 purely intuitive. He did not even seek 
 a reason for it, beyond the obvious one 
 that his desire to stand by Margaret 
 Aubyn's grave was prompted by no 
 attempt at a sentimental reparation, but 
 rather by the need to affirm in some way 
 the reality of the tie between them. 
 
 The ironical promiscuity of death had 
 brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the 
 hospitality of her husband's last lodging ; 
 but though Glennard knew she had been 
 buried near New York he had never
 
 142 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 visited her grave. He was oppressed, 
 as he now threaded the long avenues, 
 by a chilling vision of her return. There 
 was no family to follow her hearse ; she 
 had died alone, as she had lived ; and the 
 'distinguished mourners' who had formed 
 the escort of the famous writer knew 
 nothing of the woman they were com- 
 mitting to the grave. Glennard could 
 not even remember at what season she 
 had been buried ; but his mood indulged 
 the fancy that it must have been on 
 some such day of harsh sunlight, the in- 
 cisive February brightness that gives 
 perspicuity without warmth. The white 
 avenues stretched before him intermin- 
 ably, lined with stereotyped emblems of 
 affliction, as though all the platitudes 
 ever uttered had been turned to marble 
 and set up over the unresisting dead. 
 Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or 
 an insipid angel imprisoned some fine- 
 fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words 
 may become the vehicle of rare meanings ;
 
 A VANISHED HAND 143 
 
 but for the most part the endless align- 
 ment of monuments seemed to embody 
 those easy generalisations about death 
 that do not disturb the repose of the 
 living. Glennard's eye, as he followed 
 the way pointed out to him, had instinc- 
 tively sought some low mound with a 
 quiet headstone. He had forgotten that 
 the dead seldom plan their own houses, 
 and with a pang he discovered the name 
 he sought on the cyclopean base of a 
 shaft rearing its aggressive height at the 
 angle of two avenues. 
 
 ' How she would have hated it ! ' he 
 murmured. 
 
 A bench stood near and he seated 
 himself. The monument rose before 
 him like some pretentious uninhabited 
 dwelling: he could not believe that 
 Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a 
 Sunday morning, and black figures moved 
 along the paths, placing flowers on the 
 frost-bound hillocks. Glennard noticed 
 that the neighbouring graves had been
 
 144 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 thus newly dressed, and he fancied a 
 blind stir of expectancy through the sod, 
 as though the bare mounds spread a 
 parched surface to that commemorative 
 rain. He rose presently and walked back 
 to the entrance of the cemetery. Several 
 greenhouses stood near the gates, and 
 turning in at the first he asked for some 
 flowers. 
 
 'Anything in the emblematic line ? ' 
 asked the anaemic man behind the drip- 
 ping counter. 
 
 Glennard shook his head. 
 
 'Just cut flowers? This way then.' 
 The florist unlocked a glass door and 
 led him down a moist green aisle. The 
 hot air was choked with the scent of 
 white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs ; 
 all the flowers were white : they were 
 like a prolongation, a mystic efflorescence, 
 of the long rows of marble tombstones, 
 and their perfume seemed to cover an 
 odour of decay. The rich atmosphere 
 made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in
 
 A VANISHED HAND 145 
 
 the doorway, waiting for the flowers, he 
 had a penetrating sense of Margaret 
 Aubyn's nearness not the imponderable 
 presence of his inner vision, but a life 
 that beat warm in his arms. . . . 
 
 The sharp air caught him as he stepped 
 out into it again. He walked back and 
 scattered the flowers over the grave. 
 The edges of the white petals shrivelled 
 like burnt paper in the cold ; and as he 
 watched them the illusion of her nearness 
 faded, shrank back frozen.
 
 146 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 XII 
 
 THE motive of his visit to the cemetery 
 remained undefined save as a final effort 
 of escape from his wife's inexpressive 
 acceptance of his shame. It seemed to 
 him that as long as he could keep himself 
 alive to that shame he would not wholly 
 have succumbed to its consequences. His 
 chief fear was that he should become the 
 creature of his act. His wife's indiffer- 
 ence degraded him : it seemed to put 
 him on a level with his dishonour. Mar- 
 garet Aubyn would have abhorred the 
 deed in proportion to her pity for the 
 man. The sense of her potential pity 
 drew him back to her. The one woman 
 knew but did not understand ; the other, 
 it sometimes seemed, understood without 
 knowing.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 147 
 
 In its last disguise of retrospective 
 remorse, his self-pity affected a desire 
 for solitude and meditation. He lost 
 himself in morbid musings, in futile 
 visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn 
 might have been. There were moments 
 when, in the strange dislocation of his 
 view, the wrong he had done her seemed 
 a tie between them. 
 
 To indulge these emotions he fell into 
 the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of soli- 
 tary walks prolonged till after dusk. The 
 days were lengthening, there was a touch 
 of spring in the air, and his wanderings 
 now usually led him to the Park and its 
 outlying regions. 
 
 One Sunday, tired of aimless locomo- 
 tion, he took a cab at the Park gates 
 and let it carry him out to the Riverside 
 Drive. It was a grey afternoon streaked 
 with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced 
 slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing 
 with absent intentness at the deserted 
 paths that wound under bare boughs
 
 148 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 between grass banks of premature vivid- 
 ness, his attention was arrested by two 
 figures walking ahead of him. This 
 couple, who had the path to themselves, 
 moved at an uneven pace, as though 
 adapting their gait to a conversation 
 marked by meditative intervals. Now 
 and then they paused, and in one of these 
 pauses the lady, turning toward her com- 
 panion, showed Glennard the outline of 
 his wife's profile. The man was Flamel. 
 
 The blood rushed to Glennard's fore- 
 head. He sat up with a jerk and pushed 
 back the lid in the roof of the hansom ; 
 but when the cabman bent down he 
 dropped into his seat without speaking. 
 Then, becoming conscious of the pro- 
 longed interrogation of the lifted lid, he 
 called out, 'Turn drive back anywhere 
 I 'm in a hurry ' 
 
 As the cab swung round he caught a 
 last glimpse of the two figures. They 
 had not moved ; Alexa, with bent head, 
 stood listening.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 149 
 
 ' My God, my God -' he groaned. 
 
 It was hideous it was abominable 
 he could not understand it. The woman 
 was nothing to him less than nothing 
 yet the blood hummed in his ears and 
 hung a cloud before him. He knew it 
 was only the stirring of the primal in- 
 stinct, that it had no more to do with his 
 reasoning self than any reflex impulse 
 of the body ; but that merely lowered 
 anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust 
 he felt almost a physical nausea. The 
 poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. 
 He was sick, unutterably sick. . . . 
 
 He drove home and went to his room. 
 They were giving a little dinner that 
 night, and when he came down the guests 
 were arriving. He looked at his wife ; 
 her beauty was extraordinary, but it 
 seemed to him the beauty of a smooth 
 sea along an unlit coast. She frightened 
 him. 
 
 He sat late in his study. He heard 
 the parlour-maid lock the front door ;
 
 150 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 then his wife went upstairs and the 
 lights were put out His brain was like 
 some great empty hall with an echo in 
 it : one thought reverberated endlessly. 
 . . . At length he drew his chair to the 
 table, and began to write. He addressed 
 an envelope, and then slowly re-read 
 what he had written. 
 
 * My dear Flamel, 
 
 ' Many apologies for not sending you 
 sooner the enclosed cheque, which represents 
 the customary percentage on the sale of 
 the "Letters" 
 
 f Trusting 1 you will excuse the oversight, 
 ' Yours truly, 
 
 ' Stephen Glennard' 
 
 He let himself out of the darkened 
 house and dropped the letter in the 
 post-box at the corner. 
 
 The next afternoon he was detained 
 late at his office, and as he was preparing
 
 A VANISHED HAND 151 
 
 to leave, he heard some one asking for 
 him in the outer room. He seated him- 
 self again, and Flamel was shown in. 
 
 The two men, as Glennard pushed 
 aside an obstructive chair, had a moment 
 to measure each other ; then Flamel 
 advanced, and drawing out his note-case, 
 laid a slip of paper on the desk. 
 
 * My dear fellow, what on earth does 
 this mean ? ' 
 
 Glennard recognised his cheque. 
 
 ' That I was remiss, simply. It ought 
 to have gone to you before.' 
 
 Flamel's tone had been that of un- 
 affected surprise, but at this his accent 
 changed, and he asked quickly: 'On 
 what ground ? ' 
 
 Glennard had moved away from the 
 desk, and stood leaning against the calf- 
 backed volumes of the bookcase. ' On 
 the ground that you sold Mrs. Aubyn's 
 letters for me, and that I find the inter- 
 mediary in such cases is entitled to a 
 percentage on the sale.'
 
 152 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 Flamel paused before answering. 'You 
 find, you say. It 's a recent discovery ? ' 
 
 * Obviously, from my not sending the 
 cheque sooner. You see I 'm new to the 
 business.' 
 
 ' And since when have you discovered 
 that there was any question of business, 
 as far as I was concerned ? ' 
 
 Glennard flushed, and his voice rose 
 slightly. 'Are you reproaching me for 
 not having remembered it sooner ? ' 
 
 Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid 
 repressed tone of a man on the verge 
 of anger, stared a moment at this and 
 then, in his natural voice, rejoined 
 good-humouredly, 'Upon my soul, I 
 don't understand you ! ' 
 
 The change of key seemed to discon- 
 cert Glennard. ' It 's simple enough,' he 
 muttered. 
 
 ' Simple enough your offering me 
 money in return for a friendly service ? 
 I don't know what your other friends 
 expect ! '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 153 
 
 'Some of my friends wouldn't have 
 undertaken the job. Those who would 
 have done so would probably have ex- 
 pected to be paid.' 
 
 He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the 
 two men looked at each other. Flamel 
 had turned white and his lips stirred, 
 but he held his temperate note. ' If you 
 mean to imply that the job was not a 
 nice one, you lay yourself open to the 
 retort that you proposed it. But for 
 my part I Ve never seen, I never shall 
 see, any reason for not publishing the 
 letters.' 
 
 * That 's just it ! ' 
 What ? ' 
 
 ' The certainty of your not seeing was 
 what made me go to you. When a 
 man's got stolen goods to pawn he 
 doesn't take them to the police station.' 
 
 * Stolen ? ' Flamel echoed. ' The 
 letters were stolen ? ' 
 
 Glennard burst into a laugh. * How 
 much longer do you expect me to keep
 
 154 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 up that pretence about the letters ? You 
 knew well enough they were written to 
 me.' 
 
 Flamel looked at him in silence. 
 ' Were they ? ' he said at length. ' I 
 didn't know it.' 
 
 'And didn't suspect it, I suppose,' 
 Glennard sneered. 
 
 The other was again silent; then he 
 said, * I may remind you that, supposing 
 I had felt any curiosity about the matter, 
 I had no way of finding out that the 
 letters were written to you. You never 
 showed me the originals.' 
 
 ' What does that prove ? There were 
 fifty ways of finding out. It's the kind 
 of thing one can easily do.' 
 
 Flamel glanced at him with contempt. 
 ' Our ideas probably differ as to what a 
 man can easily do. It would not have 
 been easy for me.' 
 
 Glennard's anger vented itself in the 
 words uppermost in his thought. ' It 
 may, then, interest you to hear that my
 
 A VANISHED HAND 155 
 
 wife does know about the letters has 
 known for some months. . . .' 
 
 ' Ah,' said the other, slowly. 
 
 Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch 
 at a weapon, he had seized the one most 
 apt to wound. Flamel's muscles were 
 under control, but his face showed the 
 undefinable change produced by the slow 
 infiltration of poison. Every implication 
 that the words contained had reached 
 its mark; but Glennard felt that their 
 obvious intent was lost in the anguish of 
 what they suggested. He was sure now 
 that Flamel would never have betrayed 
 him ; but the inference only made a wider 
 outlet for his anger. He paused breath- 
 lessly for Flamel to speak. 
 
 ' If she knows, it 's not through me.' 
 It was what Glennard had waited for. 
 
 ' Through you, by God ? Who said 
 it was through you ? Do you suppose I 
 leave it to you, or to anybody else, for 
 that matter, to keep my wife informed of 
 my actions ? I didn't suppose even such
 
 156 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 egregious conceit as yours could delude 
 a man to that degree ! ' Struggling for a 
 foothold in the landslide of his dignity, 
 he added in a steadier tone, 'My wife 
 learned the facts from me.' 
 
 Flamel received this in silence. The 
 other's outbreak seemed to have restored 
 his self-control, and when he spoke it was 
 with a deliberation implying that his 
 course was chosen. ' In that case I 
 understand still less ' 
 
 ' Still less ? ' 
 
 * The meaning of this.' He pointed to 
 the cheque. ' When you began to speak 
 I supposed you had meant it as a bribe ; 
 now I can only infer it was intended as 
 a random insult. In either case, here's 
 my answer.' 
 
 He tore the slip of paper in two and 
 tossed the fragments across the desk to 
 Glennard. Then he turned and walked 
 out of the office. 
 
 Glennard dropped his head on his 
 hands. If he had hoped to restore his
 
 A VANISHED HAND 157 
 
 self-respect by the simple expedient of 
 assailing Flamel's, the result had not 
 justified his expectation. The blow he 
 had struck had blunted the edge of his 
 anger, and the unforeseen extent of the 
 hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that 
 his weapon had broken in his hands. He 
 now saw that his rage against Flamel 
 was only the last projection of a passion- 
 ate self-disgust. This consciousness did 
 not dull his dislike of the man ; it simply 
 made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's un- 
 willingness to quarrel with him was the 
 last stage of his abasement. 
 
 In the light of this final humiliation 
 his assumption of his wife's indifference 
 struck him as hardly so fatuous as the 
 sentimental resuscitation of his past. 
 He had been living in a factitious world 
 wherein his emotions were the sycophants 
 of his vanity, and it was with instinctive 
 relief that he felt its ruins crash about 
 his head. 
 
 It was nearly dark when he left his
 
 158 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 office, and he walked slowly homeward 
 in the complete mental abeyance that 
 follows on such a crisis. He was not 
 aware that he was thinking of his wife ; 
 yet when he reached his own door he 
 found that, in the involuntary readjust- 
 ment of his vision, she had once more 
 become the central point of conscious- 
 ness.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 159 
 
 XIII 
 
 IT had never before occurred to him 
 that she might, after all, have missed 
 the purport of the document he had put 
 in her way. What if, in her hurried 
 inspection of the papers, she had passed 
 it over as related to the private business 
 of some client ? What, for instance, was 
 to prevent her concluding that Glennard 
 was the counsel of the unknown person 
 who had sold the Aubyn Letters ? The 
 subject was one not likely to fix her 
 attention she was not a curious woman. 
 Glennard at this point laid down his 
 fork and glanced at her between the 
 candle-shades. The alternative explana- 
 tion of her indifference was not slow in 
 presenting itself. Her head had the same 
 listening droop as when he had caught
 
 160 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 sight of her the day before in Flamel's 
 company ; the attitude revived the vivid- 
 ness of his impression. It was simple 
 enough, after all. She had ceased to 
 care for him because she cared for some 
 one else. 
 
 As he followed her upstairs he felt a 
 sudden stirring of his dormant anger. 
 His sentiments had lost their artificial 
 complexity. He had already acquitted 
 her of any connivance in his baseness, 
 and he felt only that he loved her and 
 that she had escaped him. This was 
 now, strangely enough, his dominant 
 thought : the sense that he and she had 
 passed through the fusion of love and 
 had emerged from it as incommunicably 
 apart as though the transmutation had 
 never taken place. Every other passion, 
 he mused, left some mark upon the 
 nature ; but love passed like the flight of 
 a ship across the waters. 
 
 She dropped into her usual seat near 
 the lamp, and he leaned against the
 
 A VANISHED HAND 161 
 
 chimney, moving about with an inatten- 
 tive hand the knick-knacks on the mantel. 
 
 Suddenly he caught sight of her reflec- 
 tion in the mirror. She was looking at 
 him. He turned and their eyes met. 
 
 He moved across the room. 
 
 * There's something that I want to say 
 to you,' he began. 
 
 She held his gaze, but her colour 
 deepened. He noticed again, with a 
 jealous pang, how her beauty had gained 
 in warmth and meaning. It was as 
 though a transparent cup had been filled 
 with wine. He looked at her ironically. 
 ' I 've never prevented you seeing your 
 friends here,' he broke out. 'Why do 
 you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way 
 places ? Nothing makes a woman so 
 cheap- 
 She rose abruptly and they faced each 
 other a few feet apart. 
 
 * What do you mean ? ' she asked. 
 
 'I saw you with him last Sunday on 
 the Riverside Drive,' he went on, the
 
 162 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 utterance of the charge reviving his 
 anger. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' she murmured. She sank into 
 her chair again and began to play with a 
 paper-knife that lay on the table at her 
 elbow. 
 
 Her silence exasperated him. 
 
 * Well ? ' he burst out. < Is that all 
 you have to say ? ' 
 
 ' Do you wish me to explain ? ' she 
 asked proudly. 
 
 ' Do you imply I haven't the right to ?' 
 ' I imply nothing. I will tell you what- 
 ever you wish to know. I went for a 
 walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked 
 me to.' 
 
 * I didn't suppose you went uninvited. 
 But there are certain things a sensible 
 woman doesn't do. She doesn't slink 
 about in out-of-the-way streets with men. 
 Why couldn't you have seen him here ? ' 
 
 She hesitated. * Because he wanted to 
 see me alone.' 
 
 'Did he indeed? And may I ask if
 
 A VANISHED HAND 163 
 
 you gratify all his wishes with equal 
 alacrity ? ' 
 
 ' I don't know that he has any others 
 where I am concerned.' She paused 
 again and then continued, in a voice that 
 somehow had an undernote of warning. 
 ' He wished to bid me good-bye. He 's 
 going away.' 
 
 Glennard turned on her a startled 
 glance. ' Going away ? ' 
 
 * He 's going to Europe to-morrow. 
 He goes for a long time. I supposed 
 you knew.' 
 
 The last phrase revived his irritation. 
 * You forget that I depend on you for 
 my information about Flamel. He's 
 your friend and not mine. In fact, I Ve 
 sometimes wondered at your going out of 
 your way to be so civil to him when you 
 must see plainly enough that I don't like 
 him.' 
 
 Her answer to this was not immediate. 
 She seemed to be choosing her words 
 with care, not so much for her own sake
 
 164 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 as for his, and his exasperation was in- 
 creased by the suspicion that she was 
 trying to spare him. 
 
 ' He was your friend before he was 
 mine. I never knew him till I was 
 married. It was you who brought him 
 to the house and who seemed to wish 
 me to like him.' 
 
 Glennard gave a short laugh. The 
 defence was feebler than he had expected : 
 she was certainly not a clever woman. 
 
 * Your deference to my wishes is really 
 beautiful ; but it 's not the first time in 
 history that a man has made a mistake 
 in introducing his friends to his wife. 
 You must, at any rate, have seen since 
 then that my enthusiasm had cooled; 
 but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to 
 oblige me.' 
 
 She met this with a silence that seemed 
 to rob the taunt of half its efficacy. 
 
 * Is that what you imply ? ' he pressed 
 her. 
 
 ' No,' she answered with sudden direct-
 
 A VANISHED HAND 165 
 
 ness. ' I noticed some time ago that 
 you seemed to dislike him, but since 
 then 
 
 * Well since then ? ' 
 
 ' I Ve imagined that you had reasons 
 for still wishing me to be civil to him, 
 as you call it.' 
 
 * Ah,' said Glennard with an effort at 
 lightness; but his irony dropped, for 
 something in her voice made him feel 
 that he and she stood at last in that 
 naked desert of apprehension where 
 meaning skulks vainly behind speech. 
 
 * And why did you imagine this ? ' 
 The blood mounted to his forehead. 
 ' Because he told you that I was under 
 obligations to him ? ' 
 
 She turned pale. ' Under obligations?' 
 
 ' Oh, don't let 's beat about the bush. 
 
 Didn't he tell you it was I who published 
 
 Mrs. Aubyn's letters ? Answer me that.' 
 
 * No,' she said ; and after a moment 
 which seemed given to the weighing of 
 alternatives, she added : ' No one told me.'
 
 166 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' You didn't know, then ? ' 
 She seemed to speak with an effort. 
 ' Not until not until ' 
 
 * Till I gave you those papers to sort?' 
 Her head sank. 
 
 * You understood then ? ' 
 <Yes. 
 
 He looked at her immovable face. 
 ' Had you suspected before ? ' was 
 slowly wrung from him. 
 
 1 At times yes ' Her voice 
 
 dropped to a whisper. 
 
 ' Why ? From anything that was 
 said ? ' 
 
 There was a shade of pity in her 
 glance. * No one said anything no one 
 told me anything.' She looked away 
 from him. ' It was your manner ' 
 
 * My manner ? ' 
 
 'Whenever the book was mentioned. 
 Things you said once or twice your 
 irritation I can't explain.' 
 
 Glennard, unconsciously, had moved 
 nearer. He breathed like a man who
 
 A VANISHED HAND 167 
 
 has been running. ' You knew, then, 
 
 you knew ' he stammered. The 
 
 avowal of her love for Flamel would 
 have hurt him less, would have rendered 
 her less remote. * You knew you 
 knew ' he repeated ; and suddenly 
 his anguish gathered voice. ' My God ! ' 
 he cried, ' you suspected it first, you say 
 and then you knew it this damnable, 
 this accursed thing ; you knew it months 
 ago it 's months since I put that paper 
 in your way and yet you 've done 
 nothing, you 've said nothing, you Ve 
 made no sign, you 've lived alongside of 
 me as if it had made no difference no 
 difference in either of our lives. What are 
 you made of, I wonder ? Don't you see 
 the hideous ignominy of it ? Don't you 
 see how you've shared in my disgrace? 
 Or haven't you any sense of shame ? ' 
 
 He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the 
 words poured from him, to see how fatally 
 they invited her derision ; but something 
 told him they had both passed beyond
 
 168 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 the phase of obvious retaliations, and 
 that if any chord in her responded it 
 would not be that of scorn. 
 
 He was right. She rose slowly and 
 moved toward him. 
 
 ' Haven't you had enough without 
 that ? ' she said in a strange voice of pity. 
 
 He stared at her. ' Enough ? ' 
 
 * Of misery . . .' 
 
 An iron band seemed loosened from 
 his temples. * You saw then . . . ? ' he 
 whispered. 
 
 <0 God! O God !' she sobbed. 
 
 She dropped beside him and hid her 
 anguish against his knees. They clung 
 thus in silence a long time, driven to- 
 gether down the same fierce blast of 
 shame. 
 
 When at length she lifted her face he 
 averted his. Her scorn would have hurt 
 him less than the tears on his hands. 
 
 She spoke languidly, like a child 
 emerging from a passion of weeping. 
 ' It was for the money ? '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 169 
 
 His lips shaped an assent. 
 
 'That was the inheritance that we 
 married on ? ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 She drew back and rose to her feet. 
 He sat watching her as she wandered 
 away from him. 
 
 ' You hate me,' broke from him. 
 
 She made no answer. 
 
 ' Say you hate me ! ' he persisted. 
 
 'That would have been so simple,' 
 she answered with a strange smile. She 
 dropped into a chair near the writing- 
 table and rested a bowed forehead on 
 her hand. 
 
 ' Was it much ? ' she began at 
 
 length. 
 
 ' Much ? ' he returned vaguely. 
 
 'The money.' 
 
 ' The money ? ' That part of it seemed 
 to count so little that for a moment he 
 did not follow her thought. 
 
 ' It must be paid back,' she insisted. 
 ' Can you do it ? '
 
 170 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' Oh, yes,' he returned listlessly. ' I 
 can do it.' 
 
 ' I would make any sacrifice for that ! ' 
 she urged. 
 
 He nodded. * Of course.' He sat 
 staring at her in dry-eyed self- contempt. 
 'Do you count on its making much 
 difference ? ' 
 
 ' Much difference ? ' 
 
 ' In the way I feel or you feel about 
 me?' 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 * It 's the least part of it,' he groaned. 
 
 * It 's the only part we can repair.' 
 
 ' Good heavens ! If there were any 
 
 reparation ' He rose quickly and 
 
 crossed the space that divided them. 
 * Why did you never speak ? ' 
 
 ' Haven't you answered that yourself? ' 
 
 ' Answered it ? ' 
 
 ' Just now when you told me you did 
 it for me.' 
 
 She paused a moment and then went 
 on with a deepening note ' I would
 
 A VANISHED HAND 171 
 
 have spoken if I could have helped 
 you.' 
 
 * But you must have despised me ? ' 
 
 ' I 've told you that would have been 
 simpler. ' 
 
 ' But how could you go on like this 
 hating the money ? ' 
 
 * I knew you 'd speak in time. I 
 wanted you, first, to hate it as I did.' 
 
 He gazed at her with a kind of awe. 
 ' You 're wonderful,' he murmured. ' But 
 you don't yet know the depths I Ve 
 reached. ' 
 
 She raised an entreating hand. *I 
 don't want to ! ' 
 
 * You 're afraid, then, that you '11 hate 
 me?' 
 
 'No but that you'll hate me. Let 
 me understand without your telling me.' 
 
 ' You can't. It 's too base. I thought 
 you didn't care because you loved 
 Flamel.' 
 
 She blushed deeply. 'Don't don't ? 
 
 she warned him.
 
 172 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' I haven't the right to, you mean ? ' 
 
 ' I mean that you '11 be sorry.' 
 
 He stood imploringly before her. ' I 
 want to say something worse something 
 more outrageous. If you don't under- 
 stand this you '11 be perfectly justified in 
 ordering me out of the house.' 
 
 She answered him with a glance of 
 divination. ' I shall understand but 
 you 11 be sorry.' 
 
 ' I must take my chance of that.' He 
 moved away and tossed the books about 
 the table. Then he swung round and 
 faced her. ' Does Flamel care for you ? ' 
 he asked. 
 
 Her flush deepened, but she still 
 looked at him without anger. 'What 
 would be the use ? ' she said with a note 
 of sadness. 
 
 ' Ah, I didn't ask that? he penitently 
 murmured. 
 
 ' Well, then ' 
 
 To this adjuration he made no response 
 beyond that of gazing at her with an eye
 
 A VANISHED HAND 173 
 
 which seemed now to view her as a mere 
 factor in an immense redistribution of 
 meanings. 
 
 ' I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him 
 see that I suspected him of having told 
 you. I hated him because he knew 
 about the letters.' 
 
 He caught the spreading horror of her 
 eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple 
 with the new temptation they lit up. 
 Then he said with an effort ' Don't 
 blame him he 's impeccable. He helped 
 me to get them published ; but I lied to 
 him too ; I pretended they were written 
 to another man ... a man who was 
 dead . . .' 
 
 She raised her arms in a gesture that 
 seemed to ward off his blows. 
 
 ' You do despise me ! ' he insisted. 
 
 'Ah, that poor woman that poor 
 woman -' he heard her murmur. 
 
 ' I spare no one, you see !' he triumphed 
 over her. She kept her face hidden. 
 
 1 You do hate me, you do despise me ! ' 
 he strangely exulted.
 
 174 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 ' Be silent ! ' she commanded him ; but 
 he seemed no longer conscious of any 
 check on his gathering purpose. 
 
 ' He cared for you he cared for you,' 
 he repeated, 'and he never told you of 
 the letters ' 
 
 She sprang to her feet. ' How can 
 you ? ' she flamed. ' How dare you ? 
 That !' 
 
 Glennard was ashy pale. ' It 's a 
 weapon . . . like another . . .' 
 
 ' A scoundrel's ! ' 
 
 He smiled wretchedly. ' I should 
 have used it in his place.' 
 
 'Stephen! Stephen!' she cried, as 
 though to drown the blasphemy on his 
 lips. She swept to him with a rescuing 
 gesture. ' Don't say such things. I 
 forbid you ! It degrades us both.' 
 
 He put her back with trembling hands. 
 ' Nothing that I say of myself can de- 
 grade you. We're on different levels.' 
 
 ' I 'm on yours, whatever it is ! ' 
 
 He lifted his head and their gaze 
 flowed together.
 
 A VANISHED HAND 175 
 
 XIV 
 
 THE great renewals take effect as imper- 
 ceptibly as the first workings of spring. 
 Glennard, though he felt himself brought 
 nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, 
 hardly within speaking distance. He 
 was but laboriously acquiring the rudi- 
 ments of a new language ; and he had to 
 grope for her through the dense fog of 
 his humiliation, the distorting vapour 
 against which his personality loomed 
 grotesque and mean. 
 
 Only the fact that we are unaware how 
 well our nearest know us enables us 
 to live with them. Love is the most 
 impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we 
 hate the eye that reaches to our naked- 
 ness. If Glennard did not hate his wife 
 it was slowly, sufFeringly, that there was
 
 176 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 born in him that profounder passion 
 which made his earlier feeling seem a 
 mere commotion of the blood. He was 
 like a child coming back to the sense of an 
 enveloping presence : her nearness was a 
 breast on which he leaned. 
 
 They did not, at first, talk much to- 
 gether, and each beat a devious track 
 about the outskirts of the subject that 
 lay between them like a haunted wood. 
 But every word, every action, seemed to 
 glance at it, to draw toward it, as though 
 a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned 
 shade. If only they might cut a way 
 through the thicket to that restoring 
 spring ! 
 
 Glennard, watching his wife with the 
 intentness of a wanderer to whom no 
 natural sign is negligible, saw that she 
 had taken temporary refuge in the pur- 
 pose of renouncing the money. If both, 
 theoretically, owned the inefficacy of such 
 amends, the woman's instinctive subjec- 
 tiveness made her find relief in this crude
 
 A VANISHED HAND 177 
 
 form of penance. Glennard saw that she 
 meant to live as frugally as possible till 
 what she deemed their debt was dis- 
 charged ; and he prayed she might not 
 discover how far-reaching, in its merely 
 material sense, was the obligation she 
 thus hoped to acquit. Her mind was 
 fixed on the sum originally paid for the 
 letters, and this he knew he could lay 
 aside in a year or two. He was touched, 
 meanwhile, by the spirit that made her 
 discard the petty luxuries which she re- 
 garded as the sign of their bondage. 
 Their shared renunciations drew her 
 nearer to him, helped, in their evidence 
 of her helplessness, to restore the full 
 protecting stature of his love. And still 
 they did not speak. 
 
 It was several weeks later that, one 
 afternoon by the drawing-room fire, she 
 handed him a letter that she had been 
 reading when he entered. 
 
 ' I Ve heard from Mr. Flamel,' she said.
 
 178 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 It was as though a latent presence had 
 become visible to both. Glennard took 
 the letter mechanically. 
 
 ' It 's from Smyrna,' she said. ' Won't 
 you read it ? ' 
 
 He handed it back. ' You can tell me 
 about it his hand 's so illegible.' He 
 wandered to the other end of the room 
 and then turned and stood before her. 
 ' I've been thinking of writing to Flamel,' 
 he said. 
 
 She looked up. 
 
 ' There 's one point,' he continued 
 slowly, ' that I ought to clear up. I told 
 him you'd known about the letters all 
 along ; for a long time, at least ; and I 
 saw how it hurt him. It was just what 
 I meant to do, of course ; but I can't 
 leave him to that false impression ; I 
 must write him.' 
 
 She received this without outward 
 movement, but he saw that the depths 
 were stirred. At length she returned 
 in a hesitating tone, 'Why do you
 
 A VANISHED HAND 179 
 
 call it a false impression ? I did 
 know.' 
 
 * Yes, but I implied you didn't care.' 
 < Ah ! ' 
 
 He still stood looking down on her. 
 ' Don't you want me to set that right \ ' 
 he pursued. 
 
 She lifted her head and fixed him 
 bravely. * It isn't necessary,' she said. 
 
 Glennard flushed with the shock of 
 the retort ; then, with a gesture of com- 
 prehension, * No,' he said, ' with you it 
 couldn't be ; but I might still set myself 
 right.' 
 
 She looked at him gently. 'Don't I,' 
 she murmured, ' do that ? ' 
 
 * In being yourself merely ? Alas, the 
 rehabilitation 's too complete ! You make 
 me seem to myself even what I 'm not; 
 what I can never be. I can't, at times, 
 defend myself from the delusion ; but I 
 can at least enlighten others.' 
 
 The flood was loosened, and kneeling 
 by her he caught her hands. ' Don't you
 
 180 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 see that it's become an obsession with 
 me ? That if I could strip myself down 
 to the last lie only there 'd always be 
 another one left under it ! and do pen- 
 ance naked in the market-place, I should 
 at least have the relief of easing one 
 anguish by another ? Don't you see that 
 the worst of my torture is the impossi- 
 bility of such amends ? ' 
 
 Her hands lay in his without returning 
 pressure. 'Ah, poor woman, poor woman,' 
 he heard her sigh. 
 
 ' Don't pity her, pity me ! What have 
 I done to her or to you, after all ? You 're 
 both inaccessible ! It was myself I 
 sold.' 
 
 He took an abrupt turn away from 
 her ; then halted before her again. ' How 
 much longer,' he burst out, * do you sup- 
 pose you can stand it ? You 've been 
 magnificent, you've been inspired, but 
 what 's the use ? You can't wipe out 
 the ignominy of it. It's miserable for 
 you, and it does her no good ! '
 
 A VANISHED HAND 181 
 
 She lifted a vivid face. 'That's the 
 thought I can't bear ! ' she cried. 
 
 ' What thought ? ' 
 
 * That it does her no good all you 're 
 feeling, all you 're suffering. Can it be 
 that it makes no difference ? ' 
 
 He avoided her challenging glance. 
 ' What 's done is done,' he muttered. 
 
 ' Is it ever, quite, I wonder ? ' she 
 mused. He made no answer, and they 
 lapsed into one of the pauses that are a 
 subterranean channel of communication. 
 
 It was she who, after a while, began 
 to speak, with a new suffusing diffidence 
 that made him turn a roused eye on her. 
 
 ' Don't they say,' she asked, feeling her 
 way as in a kind of tender apprehensive- 
 ness, 'that the early Christians, instead 
 of pulling down the heathen temples 
 the temples of the unclean gods purified 
 them by turning them to their own uses ? 
 I Ve always thought one might do that 
 with one's actions the actions one 
 loathes but can't undo. One can make,
 
 182 THE TOUCH OF 
 
 I mean, a wrong the door to other 
 wrongs or an impassable wall against 
 them. . . .' Her voice wavered on the 
 word. ' We can't always tear down the 
 temples we 've built to the unclean gods, 
 but we can put good spirits in the house 
 of evil the spirits of mercy and shame 
 and understanding, that might never 
 have come to us if we hadn't been in 
 such great need. . . .' 
 
 She moved over to him and laid a hand 
 on his. His head was bent, and he did 
 not change his attitude. She sat down 
 beside him without speaking ; but their 
 silences now were fertile as rain -clouds 
 they quickened the seeds of under- 
 standing. 
 
 At length he looked up. ' I don't 
 know,' he said, 'what spirits have come 
 to live in the house of evil that I built 
 but you 're there and that 's enough. 
 It's strange,' he went on after another 
 pause, ' she wished the best for me so 
 often, and now, at last, it 's through her
 
 A VANISHED HAND 183 
 
 that it's come to me. But for her I 
 shouldn't have known you it 's through 
 her that I Ve found you. Sometimes 
 do you know ? that makes it hardest 
 makes me most intolerable to myself. 
 Can't you see that it's the worst thing 
 I Ve got to face ? I sometimes think 1 
 could have borne it better if you hadn't 
 understood ! I took everything from her 
 everything even to the poor shelter 
 of loyalty she'd trusted in the only 
 thing I could have left her ! I took 
 everything from her, I deceived her, I 
 despoiled her, I destroyed her and she 's 
 given me you in return ! ' 
 
 His wife's cry caught him up. *It 
 isn't that she's given me to you it is 
 that she 's given you to yourself.' She 
 leaned to him as though swept forward 
 on a wave of pity. ' Don't you see,' she 
 went on, as his eyes hung on her, 'that 
 that 's the gift you can't escape from, the 
 debt you 're pledged to acquit ? Don't 
 you see that you 've never before been
 
 184 A VANISHED HAND 
 
 what she thought you, and that now, so 
 wonderfully, she's made you into the 
 man she loved ? That 's worth suffering 
 for, worth dying for, to a woman that 's 
 the gift she would have wished to give ! ' 
 
 'Ah,' he cried, 'but woe to him by 
 whom it cometh. What did I ever give 
 her?' 
 
 'The happiness of giving,' she said. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 RRTDUMIRt 
 
 JANU 
 UAN151985 
 
 1 3 
 WC'O LD-Ufil 
 
 NON- 
 
 DUE2W 
 
 ENEWABLE 
 
 EB 1 8 2000 
 
 FROM DATE RECEIVED
 
 PS 
 
 3162 
 
 G36