



Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Mary Meehan and
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                         THE SECOND FIDDLE

                         BY PHYLLIS BOTTOME

    AUTHOR OF "THE DARK TOWER," "THE DERELICT AND OTHER STORIES," ETC.


    ILLUSTRATED BY
    NORMAN PRICE

    NEW YORK
    THE CENTURY CO.
    1917

    Copyright, 1917, by
    THE CENTURY Co.

    _Published, October, 1917_


                 TO
        MARGUERITE AND LILIAN
    TWO SISTERS WHO, ALIKE IN JOY
       AND SORROW, ARE A LIGHT
          TO THEIR FRIENDS




[Illustration: "Then have the kindness to inform me ... why Marian has
consented to marry me."]




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


PAGE

"Then have the kindness to inform me ... why Marian has consented to
marry me" _Frontispiece_

A proclamation was read by a great person from a bedizened balcony 19

"I'm afraid I don't like big feelings much" 91

"Women like you can't marry logs of wood" 141

"This," Stella thought to herself, "is like a battle" 165

Her voice was unfettered music 189

She tugged and twisted again 265

The most extraordinary figure we had ever seen 295

"Not very clever of you," he murmured, "not to guess why I wanted a
taxi" 349




THE SECOND FIDDLE




CHAPTER I


On the whole, Stella preferred the Cottage Dairy Company to the People's
Restaurant. It was a shade more expensive, but if you ate less and liked
it more, that was your own affair. You were waited on with more
arrogance and less speed, but you made up for that artistically by an
evasion of visible grossness.

Stella had never gone very much further than a ham sandwich in either
place. You knew where you were with a ham sandwich, and you could
disguise it with mustard.

On this occasion she took a cup of tea and made her meal an
amalgamation. She hoped to leave work early, and she would have no time
for tea. She was going to hear Chaliapine.

All London--all the London, that is, which thinks of itself as
London--was raving about Chaliapine; but Stella in general neither knew
nor cared for the ravings of London. They reached her as vaguely as the
sound of breaking surf reaches the denizens of the deeper seas.

It was her sister Eurydice who had brought Chaliapine home to her. She
had said quite plainly, with that intensity which distinguished both her
utterances and her actions, that if she didn't hear Chaliapine she would
die. He was like an ache in her bones.

Eurydice had never discovered that you cannot always do what you want or
have what you very ardently wish to have. She believed that
disappointment was a coincidence or a lack of fervency, and she set
herself before each obstacle to her will like the prophets of Baal
before their deaf god. She cut herself with knives till the blood ran.

Stella hovered anxiously by her side, stanching, whenever she was able,
the flowing of Eurydice's blood. On this occasion she had only to
provide seven shillings and to make, what cost her considerably more, a
request to Mr. Leslie Travers to let her off at five.

Mr. Leslie Travers had eyed her with the surprise of a man who runs a
perfect machine and feels it pause beneath his fingers. He could not
remember that Stella Waring had ever made such a request before.

Her hours were from nine to five daily, but automatically, with the
pressure of her work and the increase of her usefulness, they had
stretched to six or seven.

Mr. Leslie Travers had never intended to have a woman secretary, but
during the illness of a competent clerk he had been obliged to take a
stop-gap. Miss Waring had appeared on a busy morning with excellent
testimonials and a quiet manner. He told her a little shortly that he
did not want a woman in his office. Her fine, humorous eyebrows moved
upward, and her speculative gray eyes rested curiously upon his
irritable brown ones.

"But I am a worker," she said gently. "If I can do your work, it is my
own business whether I am a man or a woman. You shall not notice it."

Mr. Travers felt confused for a moment and as if he had been
impertinent. In the course of a strenuous and successful life he had
never felt impertinent; he believed it to be a quality found only in
underlings. He stared, cleared his throat, read her testimonials, and
temporarily engaged her. That was two years ago.

Miss Waring had kept her promise; she was a worker and not a woman. She
took pleasure in keeping her wits about her, and Mr. Travers used them
as if they were his own. Sometimes he thought they were.

She had many agreeable points besides her wits, but they were the only
point she gave to Mr. Travers to notice. She deliberately suppressed her
charm. She reduced his work by one half; he never had to say, "You ought
to have asked me this," or, "You needn't have brought me that." Her
initiative matched her judgment.

It did not occur to Mr. Travers to praise her for this most unusual
quality, but he paid her the finest tribute of an efficient worker: he
gave her more to do. He woke up to that fact when she tentatively asked
him if he could make it convenient for her to leave at five.

"Five," he said, "is your hour for leaving this office. Of course you
may go then. You ought always to do so."

A vague smile hovered about Stella's lips; she looked at him
consideringly for a moment, her eyes seemed to say, "It must be nice for
you, then, that I never do what I ought." Then she drew her secretarial
manner like a veil over her face.

"You will find the drainage papers for Stafford Street in the second
pigeon-hole on your desk," she said sedately, "with the inspector's
report. I have put the plumber's estimate with it, and added a few
marginal notes where I think their charges might be cut down."

"You had better see them about it yourself," said Mr. Travers; "then
there won't be any unpleasantness."

He did not mean to be polite to Stella; he merely stated a convenient
fact. When Stella saw people on business there was no unpleasantness.

Stella bowed, and left him.

Mr. Travers looked up for a moment after she had gone. "I am not sure,"
he said to himself, "that there are not some things women can do better
than men when they do not know that they are doing them better." He did
not like to think that women had any superior mental qualities to those
of men, but he put them down to mother wit, which does not sound
superior.

Stella went through the outer office on wings. It was full of her
friends; her exits and her entrances were the events the lesser clerks
liked best during the day.

Her smile soothed their feelings, and in her eyes reigned always that
other Stella who lived behind her wits, a gay, serene, and friendly
Stella, who did not know that she was a lady and never forgot that she
was a human being.

Theoretically there is nothing but business in a business office, but
practically in every smallest detail there is the pressure of personal
influence. What gets done or, even more noticeably, what is left undone,
is poised upon an inadmissible principle, the desire to please.

The office watched Stella, tested her, judged her, and once and for all
made up its mind to please her.

Stella knew nothing at all about this probation. She only knew all about
the office boy's mother, and where the girl typists spent their
holidays, and when, if all went well, Mr. Belk would be able to marry
his young lady. Mistakes and panic, telegrams and telephones, slipped
into her hands, and were unraveled with the rapidity with which silk
yields to expert fingers. She always made the stupidest clerk feel that
mistakes, like the bites of a mosquito, might happen to any one even
while she was making him see how to avoid them in future. She had the
touch which takes the sting from small personal defeats. She always saw
the person first and the defeat afterward.

Her day's work was a game of patience and skill, and she played it as
she used to play chess with her father. It was a long game and sometimes
it was a tiring one, but hardly a moment of it was not sheer drama; and
the moment the town hall door swung behind her she forgot her municipal
juggling and started the drama of play.

On Thursday afternoon she stood for a moment considering her course.
There was the Underground, which was always quickest, or there was the
drive above the golden summer dust on the swinging height of a
motor-bus. She decided upon the second alternative, and slipped into
infinity. She was cut off from duty, surrounded by strangers, unmoored
from her niche in the world.

This was the moment of her day which Stella liked best; in it she could
lose her own identity. She let her hands rest on her lap and her eyes on
the soft green of the new-born leaves. She hung balanced on her wooden
seat between earth and sky, on her way to Russian music.

The brief and tragic youth of London trees was at its loveliest.
Kensington Gardens poured past her like a golden flame. The grass was as
fresh as the grass of summer fields, swallows flitted over it, and the
broad-shouldered elms were wrapped delicately in a mist of green.

Hyde Park Corner floated beneath her; the bronze horses of victory,
compact and sturdy, trundled out of a cloudless sky. St George's
Hospital, sun-baked and brown, glowed like an ancient palace of the
Renaissance. The traffic surged down Hamilton Place and along Piccadilly
as close packed as migratory birds. The tower of Westminster Cathedral
dropped its alien height into an Italian blue sky; across the vista of
the green park and all down Piccadilly the clubs flashed past her, vast,
silver spaces of comfort reserved for men, full of men. Stella did not
know very much about men who lived in clubs. Cicely said they were very
wicked and danced the tango and didn't want women to have votes; but
Stella thought they looked as if they had attractions which rivaled
these disabilities.

Probably she would see some of them less kaleidoscopically at the opera
later.

Even men who danced the tango went to hear Chaliapine. It wasn't only
his voice; he was a rage, a prairie fire. All other conversation became
burned stubble at his name.

Piccadilly Circus shot past her like a bed of flowers.

The City was very hot, and all the world was in the streets, expansive
and genial. It was the hour when work draws to an end and night is still
far off. Pleasure had stretched down the scale and included workers.
People who didn't dance the tango bought strawberries and flowers off
barrows for wonderful prices to take home to their children.

In the queue extending half-way down Drury Lane, Eurydice, passionate
and heavy-eyed, was waiting for Stella.

"If you hadn't come soon," she said, drawing Stella's arm through her
own, "something awful would have happened to me. I got a messenger-boy
to stand here for an hour to keep your place. The suspense has been
agony, like waiting for the guillotine."

"But, O Eurydice dear, I do hope you will enjoy it!" Stella pleaded.

"I shall enjoy it, yes," said Eurydice, gloomily, "if I can bear it. I
don't suppose you understand, but when you feel things as poignantly as
I do, almost anything is like the guillotine. It is the death of
something, even if it's only suspense. Besides, he may not be what I
think him. I expect the opening of heaven."

Eurydice usually expected heaven to open, and this is sometimes rather
hard upon the openings of less grandiose places.

A stout woman in purple raised an efficient elbow like an oar and dug it
sharply into Stella's side.

"Oh, Stella, wouldn't it be awful if I fainted before the door opens!"
whispered Eurydice.

"The doors are opening," said Stella. "People have begun to plunge with
umbrellas."

The purple woman renewed her rowing motion; the patient queue expanded
like a fan. Stella moved forward in the throng. She was pushed and
elbowed, lifted and driven, but she never stopped being aware of
delight. She watched the faces sweeping past her like petals on a
stream; she flung down her half-crowns and seized her metal disks,
dashing on and up the narrow stairs, with Eurydice fiercely struggling
behind her like a creature in danger of drowning.

They sprang up and over the back ledges of the gallery on into the first
row, breathless, gasping, and victorious.

"How horrible people are!" gasped Eurydice. "Dozens of brutal men have
stepped on my toe. Your hat's crooked. Is anything worth this dreadful
mingling with a mob?"

"Does one mingle really?" asked Stella, taking off her hat. "Only one's
shoulders. Besides, I think I rather like mobs if they aren't purple and
don't dig. I've just been thinking how dull it must be to walk into a
box having done nothing but pay for it, and knowing, too, you are going
to get it! The lady beside me has been to every opera this season. She
sits on a camp-stool from two o'clock till eight with milk chocolate,
and knows every one's name and all the motives and most of the scores.
She's going to lend me this one. She says the excitement of not knowing
whether she is going to get a front seat or not has never palled."

The great opera house filled slowly. There was splendor in it--the
splendor put on for the occasion in the cheaper seats, and every-day
splendor taking its place later and more expensively because it did not
know how to be anything else but splendid.

Women's dresses that summer were made as much as possible to resemble
underclothes. From the waist upwards filmy specimens of petticoat
bodices appeared; there were wonderful jewels to be seen above them:
immemorial family jewels, collars of rubies and pearls. The older the
woman, the finer the jewels, and the more they looked like ancient
mosaics glimmering archaically in early Roman churches.

The safety curtain was lowered reassuringly before a bored audience that
was not afraid of danger.

Some one on the left of Stella remarked that there was a rumor that the
Crown Prince and Princess of Austria had been assassinated in Serbia. It
did not sound very likely. The Russian music began--fiery melancholy
music, drunk with sorrow. Then the real curtain rose.

Eurydice flung herself forward; she hung over the ledge, poised like an
exultant Fury. She dared life to disappoint her.

Stella leaned back in her seat with a little thrill of excitement.
Everything felt so safe, and sorrow sounded beautiful, and far away.




CHAPTER II


The curtain lifted, and civilization swung back. They were in Russia in
the twelfth century--or any other time. It hardly mattered when; the
music was the perpetual music of the Slav, tragic and insecure. The
people were a restless barbaric crowd, beyond or beneath morality;
religious, incalculably led by sensation. They could be unimaginably
cruel or sweep magnificently up the paths of holiness. The steep ascent
to heaven was in their eyes, and they got drunk to attain it.

The English audience watched them as if they were looking at a
fairy-tale. They were a well-fed, complacent audience. If they got
drunk, it was an accident, and none of them had ever been holy. They had
never been under the heels of tyranny or long without a meal. They took
for granted food, water, light, and fuel. They began to live where the
Russian peasant planted his dreams of heaven. Death was their only
uncertainty, and it was hidden behind the baffling insincerities of
doctors and nurses. It did not take them on the raw.

The crowd upon the stage became suddenly shaken into movement. Fires
were lighted, bells rang, food was carried about in processions.
Cossacks with long knouts struck back the dazzled, scattering people. A
proclamation was read by a great person from a bedizened balcony.

[Illustration: A proclamation was read by a great person from a
bedizened balcony]

Stella knew no Russian; she had no idea that anything worse could happen
to this seriously broken people ruled by knouts. But there was still
something that could happen: this proclamation touched their religion.

It seemed that they actually had a possession that they weren't prepared
to let go. They could let their daughters and sons go, their houses and
their lives; but there was something they held on to and refused to
renounce.

This was enough to irritate any tyrant. The bare existence of anything
that is uncontrollable always annoys a tyrant. There was a power in
these people still unsubdued, so the proclamation said that unless they
gave up their religion and became orthodox they would be killed. Then
Chaliapine entered.

Eurydice gave a long gasp of emotion, and sank silently into her dream;
no more could be expected of her as a companion. Stella endeavored to be
more critical. She felt at once that Chaliapine's power wasn't his
voice. It was a fine, controlled voice, it seemed more resonant and
alive than any other in the company, and vastly easier; but his genius
was behind his voice. It was not merely his acting, though immediately
every one else on the stage appeared to be acting, and Chaliapine alone
was real.

It consisted in that very uncontrollable something that tyrants cannot
kill, that circumstances do not touch, that surmounts every stroke of
fate, and is the residuum which faces death. There was a little more of
it in Chaliapine than there is in most people.

She tried to follow the score of "Boris Goudonoff"; it was not easy
music, and the story hardly seemed to matter.

Chaliapine was the leader of the religious sect that the Czar was going
to stamp out. Everything was against him; was he going to conquer?
The English audience expected him to conquer. It understood conquests.
First, you started all wrong, because you hadn't taken the trouble not
to, because you hadn't measured your antagonist, and because you did not
think that preparation was necessary.

The audience allowed for things going wrong to begin with, and sat
cheerfully expecting the miracle.

The opera went on, and it became apparent to Stella that Chaliapine was
not going to get his people out of their difficulties.

They sank deeper and deeper into them. Tyranny was behind and in front
of them; they were being steadily hemmed in and beaten down. What they
held on to did them no apparent good; it didn't comfort them or relieve
their necessities or hold out a helping hand to them. It did nothing
against their enemies. It simply burned in them like a flame. It didn't
even consume them; it left them to be consumed by the Czar.

The English audience listened breathlessly and a little surprised, but
not troubled, because they felt quite sure that everything would come
out all right in the last act.

Religion would triumph, it always did, even when you took no notice of
it.

You didn't, as a rule, notice the police either, and yet when burglars
broke in to steal your plate, they were caught climbing over the back
fence by a policeman. Religion was there, like the police, to catch your
troubles and restore your spiritual silver plate.

The melancholy minor Russian music couldn't mean that you weren't going
to get anything out of it. It would wake up soon and be triumphant.

In the pauses between the acts Eurydice sat in a trance. Stella amused
herself with picking out the kind of people she would have liked to
know. One in particular in a box to the right of them, she found herself
liking. His frosty-blue eyes had the consciousness of strength in them;
the line of his jaw and the ironic, well-chiseled mouth spoke of a will
that had felt and surmounted shocks. He was still a young man in the
early thirties, but he had made his place in the world. He looked as
secure as royalty. With a strange little thrill that was almost
resentment Stella realized that she knew the woman beside him. Marian
sat there very straight and slim in the guarded radiance of her youth,
as intact as some precious ivory in a museum. She was Stella's greatest
friend; that is to say, she gave to her the greatest amount of pleasure
procurable in her life.

Stella couldn't have told why her heart sprang to meet Marian Young's.
She had nothing in common with her. They had met at a course of lectures
on the Renaissance, and out of a casual meeting had grown a singular,
unequal, relationship.

Marian saw Stella very rarely, but she told her everything. She hadn't,
however, told her of this new man. His strong, clever face had in it
something different, something unnecessarily different, from Marian's
other young men.

He lifted his head, and looked up toward the balconies above him. His
eyes did not meet Stella's, but she took from them the strangest
sensation of her life. A pang of sheer pity shot through her. There was
no reason for pity; he looked aggressively strong and perfectly sure of
himself. He even looked sure of Marian, and not without reason. He was
all the things Marian liked best in a man, courageous, successful,
handsome. Providence had thrown in his brains. That was the unnecessary
quality.

Stella wondered a little wistfully what it must be like to talk to a
really clever man. Her father was very clever, but he was not socially
pliable, and he didn't exactly talk to Stella; he merely expressed in
her presence conclusions at which he had arrived. It clarified his
ideas, but it didn't do anything particular to Stella's.

Sir Richard Verny was taking trouble to talk to Marian; he bent his
powerful head toward the girl and told her about Siberia. He knew
Siberia well; he had often started from there upon important Arctic
explorations. Marian wondered when he was going to propose. Siberia did
as well as anything else till then. She knew he was going to propose;
she didn't know anything at all about Siberia. She did not see Stella;
it had not occurred to her that any one she knew could be sitting in the
gallery.

The curtain rose again, and the last act began.

Chaliapine did not turn defeat into victory; no rabbit rose
triumphantly, to satisfy the British public, out of a top-hat.
Chaliapine led his people into a fire, and they were burned to death.

Some of them were frightened, and he had to comfort them, to hold them,
and sustain them till the end. He had nothing at all to do it with, but
he did sustain them. They all went into the flames, singing their
disheartening music till the smoke covered them. Chaliapine sang
longest, but there was nothing victorious in his last notes. They were
very beautiful and final; then they weakened and were still.

The stillness went on for some time afterward. Everybody had been
killed, and life had been so unendurable that they had faced death
without much effort to avoid it. They could have avoided it if they had
given up their faith. Their faith had vanished off the face of the
earth, but they hadn't given it up.

Stella gave a long sigh of relief; she felt as if she had been saved
from something abominable that might have happened.

Applause broke out all round them, a little uncertainly at first,
because it was difficult for the audience to realize that the heavens
weren't going to shoot open and do something definitely successful about
it; but finally sustained and prolonged applause. Chaliapine had taken
them all by storm. It was not the kind of storm that they were used to,
but it was a storm.

"I love Russians," a lady exclaimed to Stella. "Such delightful people,
don't you think, so full of color and what d' you call it?"

Eurydice shook herself impatiently like a dog after a plunge through
water.

"Hurry! Let's get out of this," she said to Stella, "or I shall be rude
to somebody. Idiots! Idiots! Don't they see that we've been listening to
the defeat of the soul?"

"No, no," whispered Stella half to herself; "we've been listening to how
it can't be defeated, how nothing touches it, not even death, not even
despair, not even flames. The end of something that has never given in
is victory."

They passed behind Marian outside the opera house, but Stella did not
speak to her. She heard Sir Julian saying in a determined, resonant
voice: "Well, of course I'm glad you liked it. Chaliapine is a good
workman, but personally I don't think much of Russian music. It has a
whine in it like a beggar's, sounds too much as if it had knocked under.
My idea, you know, is not to knock under."

And Stella, slipping into the crowd, was aware again of a sharp pang of
pity for him, as if she knew that, after all, his strength would meet
and be consumed by fire.




CHAPTER III


Nothing in No. 9 Redcliffe Square ever got done; it happened, as leaves
drop in autumn, or as dust accumulates, percolating softly and
persistently through doors and windows.

The Warings had reached Redcliffe Square as accidentally as a tramp
takes shelter under a hedge. Professor Waring, whose instinct was to
burrow like a mole, blind and silent, into his researches, failed too
completely to teach what he had discovered; and as he had never made the
discovery that teaching was what he was paid for, his payments gradually
ceased. When he found himself faced with an increasing family and a
decreasing income, he thought of the South Kensington Museum. He thought
of it as an habitual drunkard evicted for not paying his rent, thinks of
the public house.

He brought his family as near to it as he could, dumped them down in a
silent and slatternly street, and disappeared into the museum regularly
every morning at nine. When he came out he wanted only cocoa, a back
room, and the postage necessary for his researches. A Peruvian mummy
went to his head like gin.

Mrs. Waring had been a gentle, dreamy girl with a strong religious
tendency. She had married Professor Waring because he had wide blue eyes
and a stoop and did not look at all coarse.

Professor Waring had married her because he wanted to get married a
little and had noticed her at that time. He was under the impression
that women managed households, meals, and children without bothering
their husbands. Mrs. Waring tried not to bother her husband. She lost
her religion because the professor hadn't any, and she thought at first
he was sure to be right. When she ceased to have this magic certainty,
she sought out fresh religions that told you you had everything you
wanted when you knew you hadn't.

She got through maternity in a desultory way, with a great deal of ill
health and enormous household bills. She did not manage anything, and
when she was very unhappy she said that she was in tune with the
infinite.

From their earliest years her children fended for themselves, Eurydice
with storms of anguish and through a drastic series of childish
epidemics; Cicely with a stolid, cold efficiency; and Stella with an
intuitive gentleness so great as to hide a certain inner force.

About two hundred pounds a year trickled in on them from uncertain
sources. Mrs. Waring never knew quite when to expect it, and when it
came it soaked itself solemnly up on non-essentials. The children never
had proper clothes or a suitable education. They were Egyptologists
before they could spell, and the Koran was an open book to them when
they should have been reading "The Water Babies."

The professor spent what he considered his share of their income upon
hieroglyphics, and Mrs. Waring, never personally extravagant, bought
quantities of little books to teach people how to live, how to develop
the will, how to create a memory, and power through repose. They had one
servant, who had to have wages and insisted every now and then upon a
joint of meat.

There was no waste-paper basket in the house, and a great deal of
linoleum. When Mrs. Waring made up her mind that she must be more
economical, she always went out and bought linoleum. She had been told
it was a great saving. She never tidied anything up or put anything
away. What was lost was never seen again, or seen only when you were
hunting for something else. It was like a gambler's system at Monte
Carlo: you looked for a bootjack, and were rewarded by black treacle; or
you played, as it were, for black treacle, and discovered the bootjack.

Mrs. Waring never finished anything; even her conversations, which began
at breakfast, jogged on throughout the day, and were picked up at much
the same spot in the evening. She had covered a quantity of ground, but
she had invariably escaped her destination. Through long years of
perpetual indecision she had nearly succeeded in outwitting time and
space.

Nobody minded this attitude except Cicely. She fought against chaos from
her youth up. They all dreaded her tongue and clung persistently to
their habits. The professor fled earlier to the museum, sometimes in
carpet slippers. Immediately after breakfast Mrs. Waring retired with a
little book to an untidied bedroom.

Eurydice, dropping manuscripts, hair-ribbons, and defiance, escaped to a
locked attic; and Stella remained as a gentle adjutant to her severer
sister. Cicely did get a few things done. She saw that meals were
cooked, windows opened, beds made, and clocks wound; but nothing
continuous rewarded her efforts. The power of the human will is a small
weapon against consolidated inertia.

For five years Cicely played upon No. 9 Redcliffe Square like an
intermittent searchlight; then she gave it up, and became a student in a
women's hospital. The household breathed a sigh of intense relief at her
departure, and collapsed benevolently into chaos.

Nobody except Stella regretted it. The professor was openly thankful.

"She may become a student," he observed coldly when it was explained to
him where Cicely had gone, "but she will never become a scholar. She
has a superficial hunger for the definite.

"I really do not think it will be necessary for me to take my supper at
a given hour. Stella will know that, whenever I ring my bell, I mean
cocoa."

"Dear Cicely is a pioneer," murmured Mrs. Waring, with a gentle sigh. "I
can always imagine her doing wonderful things in a desert with a
buffalo."

"Now I shall be able to have my friends at the house without their being
insulted," cried Eurydice, triumphantly. "Last time when Mr. Bolt was in
the middle of reading his new poem, 'The Whirl,' a most delicate and
difficult poem set to a secret rhythm, Cicely burst in and asked for the
slop-pail. It looked so lovely! I had covered it with autumn leaves and
placed it half-way up the chimney. It might have been a Grecian urn, but
of course she dragged it out. She drags out everything."

Eurydice had a profession, too. She was a suppressed artist. She felt
that she could have painted like Van Gogh, only perfectly individually.
She saw everything in terms of color and in the shape of cubes. Railway
lines reminded her of a flight of asterisks. Flowers subdivided
themselves before her like a tartan plaid. She saw human beings in
tenuous and disjointed outlines suggestive of a daddy-long-legs. She
could not afford paint and canvas, so she had to leave people to think
that the world looked much as usual.

Eurydice had always felt that she could write out her thoughts as soon
as she and Stella were alone and able to arrange her room in black and
scarlet. When Cicely left, Stella bought black paper and pasted it over
the walls, and dyed a white-wool mat, which had long lost its original
purity, a sinister scarlet.

Eurydice did not want very much, either. None of the Warings wanted very
much. What as a family they failed to understand was, that not having
the money to pay for what they wanted, some more personal contribution
of time and effort was necessary in order to attain it.

Stella grasped this fact when she was about eighteen. She said afterward
that she never would have thought of it if it had not been made plain to
her by Cicely. Still, before Cicely had gone to the hospital Stella was
taking cheap lessons in the City in shorthand and type-writing. None of
the three girls had what is called any "youth." They were as ignorant of
young men as if they had been brought up in a convent. Neither Professor
nor Mrs. Waring had ever supposed that parents ought to provide
occupations or social resources for their children, and the children
themselves had been too busy contributing to the family welfare to
manage any other life. Cicely had read statistics and mastered
physiological facts at fifteen. She was under the impression that she
knew everything and disliked everything except work. Her feeling for men
was singularly like that of a medieval and devout monk toward women. She
had an uncomfortable knowledge of them as a necessary evil, to be evaded
only by truculence or flight. When her work forced her into dealings
with them, she was ferocious and unattractive. She was a pretty girl,
but nobody had ever dared to mention it to her.

Even Stella, who in an unaggressive, flitting way dared most questions,
had avoided telling Cicely that she herself liked men. Stella often
felt that if she could meet a man who was capable of doing all kinds of
dull things for you, very charmingly, and had a pretty wit, it would add
quite enormously to the gaiety of life to put yourself out a little in
order to make him laugh.

The men Stella worked with wouldn't have done at all. They wouldn't have
cared for the kind of jokes Stella wanted to make, and of course Stella
hadn't time to meet any other men. Perhaps she wouldn't have believed
there were any if it hadn't been for Marian. Marian knew them; she knew
them literally in dozens, and they were generally in love with her, and
they always wanted to make her laugh and to do dull things for her.
Stella used to be afraid sometimes that Marian, in an embarrassment of
riches, might overlook her destiny. But Marian knew what she wanted and
was perfectly certain that she would sooner or later get it. Stella had
no such knowledge; she had long ago come to the conclusion that the
simplest way of dealing with her life was to like what she had.

She took a scientific secretaryship at nineteen, and left it only at
twenty-six, when her scientist, who was very stout and nearly sixty,
died inconveniently from curried lobster. He left Stella an interesting
experience, of which she could make no immediate use, and a testimonial
which won her job at the town hall. It was very short. "This young
woman," the learned scientist wrote, "is invaluable. She thinks without
knowing it. I have benefited by this blessed process for seven years."

It did not seem to Stella that she was invaluable. She always saw
herself in the light of the family failure, overlooking the fact that
she was their main financial support.

Cicely was the practical and Eurydice the intellectual genius; but she
was content if she could be the padding on which these jewels
occasionally shone.

Sometimes she met Cicely in a tea-shop and had a real talk, but Eurydice
was her chief companion. Eurydice shared with Stella nearly every
thought that she had. She seized her on the stairs to retail her
inspirations as Stella went up to take her things off. She sat on her
bed late at night, and talked with interminable bitterness about the
sharpness of life. Even while Stella buttoned up her boots and flung
things at the last moment into her despatch-case, Eurydice pelted her
with epigrams. She sometimes quoted Swinburne while Stella was jumping
on the corner bus, till the bus-conductor told her not to let him catch
her at it again. There was only one subject they did not discuss:
neither of them voluntarily mentioned Mr. Bolt. Mr. Bolt was the editor
of a magazine called "Shocks," to which Eurydice with trembling delight
contributed weekly. Mr. Bolt had met her at a meeting of protest against
Reticence, and he had taken to Eurydice at once; and almost at once he
told her that her charm was purely intellectual. Emotionally he was
appealed to only by fair, calm women with ample figures.

Mr. Bolt knew plenty of fair, calm women with ample figures. Eurydice
only knew Mr. Bolt. She made an idol of him, and he used her like a
door-mat. No early-Victorian woman ever bore from a male tyrant what
poor, passionate twentieth-century Eurydice bore from Mr. Bolt, and
Stella could not help her. Stella abhorred Mr. Bolt. She would not
listen to his Delphic oracle utterances upon style and art and life. She
was outraged at his comments upon sex. She was desperately, fiercely
angry with a secret maternal anger that Eurydice should have to listen
to these utterances. It carried her as far as an abortive appeal to her
mother.

"My dear," said Mrs. Waring, placidly, "these things are outworn. They
are stultified thought products; they do not really exist. Sex is like
dust upon the house-tops; a cleansing process will shortly remove it.
Mr. Bolt is a misconception, a floating microcosm. I really should not
bother about Mr. Bolt. He is not nearly so tangible as the butcher, and
I have made up my mind never really again to bother about the butcher.
Perhaps you will see him for me if he calls about his bill to-morrow.

"It seems so strange to me that business men should not understand that
when there is no money bills cannot be paid. Even the minor regions of
fact seem closed to them."

Stella agreed to dip into the minor regions of fact with the butcher,
but she went on bothering about Mr. Bolt. It seemed to Stella that he
was the only real bother that she had.




CHAPTER IV


     Darling:

     Do come Sunday to tea. Mama is out of town, and I must have some
     support. Julian is going to bring his mother to see me for the
     first time. I believe she's rather alarming--awfully blue and
     booky; just your sort. I haven't had time to tell you anything.
     It's so jolly being engaged; but it takes up all one's spare
     moments. I didn't mean to marry Julian; he swept me off my feet. I
     suppose I must be awfully in love with him. You know what explorers
     are. They go away for years and leave you to entertain alone, and
     then people say you don't get on; and of course exploring never
     pays. He has a little place in the country and about L2000 a year.
     It's awfully little, really, but it's wonderful what you can put up
     with when you really care for a man; besides, he's sure to get on.
     Don't fail me Sunday. I shall really be rather nervous. Old ladies
     never have been my forte. Julian is such a dear! You're sure to
     like him. He wants to meet you awfully, but he doesn't think women
     ought to work. He is full of chivalry, and has charming manners. It
     doesn't in the least matter what you wear. Heaps of love.

     MARIAN.

It was this last reflection that gave Stella courage to ring the bell.
She had never been in the Youngs' house before. She had vaguely known
that it was in a very quiet square, with a garden in the middle, quite
near everything that mattered, and quite far away from everything that
didn't. It was the kind of house that looks as if no one was in it
unless they were giving a party. The interior was high, narrow, and
box-like. A great deal of money had been unpretentiously spent on it,
with a certain amount of good-humored, ordinary taste.

The drawing-room ran the whole length of the house, and was pink and
gray, because the Youngs knew that pink and gray go well together, just
as blue and gold do, only that blue fades.

The chairs were very comfortable, the little tables had the right kind
of ornaments, the pictures were a harmless, unenlightening addition to
the gray-satin walls.

The books that lay about were novels. They were often a little improper,
but never seriously so, and they always ended in people getting what
they wanted legally.

It was a clean, comfortable, fresh room and nothing was ever out of
place in it.

Marian was sitting under a high vase of pink canterbury-bells; by some
happy chance her dress was the same pale pink as the bells. She looked,
with her hands in her lap, her throat lifted, and the sun on her hair,
like a flower of the same family. Her manner was a charming mixture of
ease and diffidence.

Stella was late, and Lady Verny and Julian had arrived before her.

Lady Verny was like her son. She was very tall and graceful, and carried
herself as if she had never had to stoop. Her eyes had the steady,
frosty blueness of Julian's, with lightly chiseled edges; her lips were
ironic, curved, and a little thin.

She had piles of white hair drawn back over her forehead. When Marian
introduced her to Stella, she rose and turned away from the tea-table.

"I hope you will come and talk to me a little," she said in a clear,
musical voice. "We can leave Julian and Marian to themselves."

Lady Verny leaned back in the chair she had chosen for herself and
regarded Stella with steady, imperturbable eyes. It struck Stella as a
little alarming that they should all know where they wanted to sit, and
with whom they wanted to talk, without any indecision. She thought that
chairs would walk across the room to Lady Verny if she looked at them,
and kettles boil the moment Julian thought that it was time for tea. But
though she was even more frightened at this calm, unconscious competency
than she had expected to be, she saw it didn't matter about her clothes.
She knew they were all wrong, as cheap clothes always are, particularly
cheap clothes that you've been in a hurry over and not clever enough to
match. Her boots and her gloves weren't good, and her hat was horrid and
probably on the back of her head. Her blue-serge coat and skirt had
indefinite edges. But Stella was aware that Lady Verny, beautifully
dressed as she was, was taking no notice whatever of Stella's clothes.
They might make an extra point against her if she didn't like her.
Stella could hear her saying, "Funny that Marian should make friends
with a sloppy little scarecrow." But if she did like her, she would say
nothing about Stella's clothes. As far as the Vernys were concerned,
the appearances of things were always subsidiary.

"Engagements are such interrupted times," Lady Verny observed, with a
charming smile. "One likes to poke a little opportunity toward the poor
dears when one can."

"Yes," said Stella, eagerly, with her little, rapid flight of words.
"You're always running away when you're engaged, and never getting
there, aren't you? And then, of course, when you're married, you're
there, and can't run away. It's such a pity they can't be more mixed
up."

"Perhaps," said Lady Verny, still smiling. "But marriage is like a
delicate clock; it has to be wound up very carefully, and the less you
take its works to pieces afterward the better. Have you known Marian a
long time?"

"Three years," said Stella; "but when you say 'know,' I am only an
accident. I don't in any real sense belong to Marian's life; I belong
only to Marian. You see, I work." She thought she ought, in common
fairness to Lady Verny, not let her think that she was one of Marian's
real friends.

Lady Verny overlooked this implication.

"And what is your work, may I ask?" she inquired, with her grave, solid
politeness, which reminded Stella of nothing so much as a procession in
a cathedral.

"I was a secretary to Professor Paulson," Stella explained, "the great
naturalist. He was a perfect dear, too,--it wasn't only beetles and
things,--and when he died, I went into a town hall,--I've been there for
two years,--and that's more exciting than you can think. It isn't
theories and experiments, of course, but it's like being a part of the
hub of the universe. Rates and taxes, sanitary inspectors, old-age
pensions, and the health of babies run through my hands like water
through a sieve. You wouldn't believe how entertaining civic laws and
customs are--and such charming people! Of course I miss the other work,
too,--it was like having one's ear against nature,--but this is more
like having one's ear against life."

"I think you must have very catholic tastes," said Lady Verny, gently.
"My son knew Professor Paulson; it will interest him to know that you
worked for him. And Marian--did she take any interest in your scientific
experiences?"

Stella moved warily across this question; she had never spoken to Marian
about her work at all. Marian, as she knew, thought it all very
tiresome.

"You see," she explained, "they weren't my experiences; they were
Professor Paulson's. Marian couldn't very well be thrilled at third
hand; the thrill only got as far as me. Besides, half of what I do as a
secretary is confidential, and the other half sounds dull. Of course it
isn't really. I've been so lucky in that way. I've never had anything
dull to do."

"I can quite imagine that," said Lady Verny, kindly. "Dullness is in the
eye, not in the object. Does Marian like life better than intellect,
too?"

"Ah, Marian's life," said Stella, a little doubtfully, "is so
different!"

They glanced across at the distant tea-table. Julian was leaning toward
Marian with eyes that held her with the closeness of a frame to a
picture.

He was laughing at her a little, with the indulgent, delighted laughter
of a man very deeply in love. She was explaining something to him,
simply and gravely, without undue emphasis. Stella guessed that it was
one of the things Marian wanted, and she did not think that Julian could
get out of giving it to her by laughter.

"Marian's life hasn't got divisions in it like mine," she explained.
"She's just a beautiful human creature. She is equable and strong and
delightful and absolutely honest. She's as honest as crystal; but she
hasn't had to bother about choosing."

"Ah," said Lady Verny, "you think that, do you? But, my dear Miss
Waring, sooner or later we all have to bother about choosing. Beauty and
strength don't save us. Absolute honesty often lets us in, and
sometimes, when the scales weigh against us, we cease to be equable."

"But they won't, you see," Stella said eagerly. "They can't weigh
against her now, Lady Verny. Don't you see? There's your son--it's why
one's so delighted. An engagement to him is like some thumping
insurance which somehow or other prevents one's house being burned."

Lady Verny laughed.

"Let us hope your theory is a correct one," she said, rising from her
seat. "I am going to talk to her now, and you can talk to the insurance
company."

Stella gasped. She wanted to run away, to catch Lady Verny's graceful
scarf and tell her she couldn't really talk to anybody's son. Agreeable,
massive beings who explored continents and lived in clubs oughtn't to
come her way. But Julian crossed the room to her side with the quickness
of a military order. His manners hid his reluctance. He was at her
service in a moment. His keen eyes, harder than his mother's and more
metallic, met hers once and glanced easily away. They said nothing to
Stella except that he was a watchful human being who couldn't be taken
in, and was sometimes perhaps unduly aware that he couldn't be taken in.

"I'm very glad indeed," he said cordially, "to meet Marian's greatest
friend. You must tell me all about her. You see, I'm a new-comer; I've
known her only six weeks, and I've been so busy trying to impress her
with my point of view that I quite feel I may have overlooked some of
hers. Women always understand women, don't they?"

He wasn't going to be difficult to talk to. That unnecessary ingredient
in his composition saved Stella. As long as she had a brain to call to,
and wasn't only to be awed by splendor of appearance and forms as
difficult for her to cross as five-barred gates, she needn't be afraid
of him. It never was people that Stella was afraid of, but the things,
generally the silly things, that separated her from them.

"We do and we don't understand each other," she said swiftly. "I don't
think women can tell what another woman will do; but granted she's done
it, I dare say most could say why."

Julian laughed.

"Then have the kindness to inform me," he said, "why Marian has
consented to marry me. Incidentally, your reply will no doubt throw a
light for me upon her mental processes."

Stella saw he did not want any light thrown anywhere; he was simply
giving his mother time to get to know Marian. Then he was going back to
her; that was his light.

She gave a vague little smile at the sublimated concentration of lovers.
She liked to watch them; she would never have to be one.

It was like seeing some beautiful wild creature of the woods. It
wouldn't be like you at all, and yet it would be exceedingly amusing and
touching to watch, and sometimes it would make you think of what it
would feel like to be wild and in those woods.

She reminded herself sharply, as her eyes turned back to Julian, that it
wouldn't do to let him think she thought him wild. He was behaving very
well, and the least she could do was to let him think so. She gave
herself up to his question.

"You're very strong," she said consideringly. "Marian likes strength.
She's strong herself, you know; probably that's one of her reasons."

"Good," he said cheerfully. "Physically strong, d' you mean, or an iron
will? Iron wills are quite in my line, I assure you. Any other reason?"

"Strong both ways," said Stella; "and you're secure. I mean, what you've
taken you'll keep. I think some women like a man they can be sure of."

"Let us hope they all do," said Sir Julian, laughing. "It would imply a
very bad business instinct if they didn't."

"I do not think I agree with you," said Stella, firmly. "The best
business is often an adventure, a risk. Safe business does not go far;
it goes only as far as safety."

"Well, I'm not sure that I want women to go particularly far," said Sir
Julian. "I like 'em to be safe; let 'em leave the better business with
the risk in it to men. I shall be content if Marian does that."

"I think Marian will," said Stella. "But there are other things, of
course, besides you and Marian: there's life. You can only take all the
risk there is if you take all the life. I see what you would like, Sir
Julian: you want a figurehead guaranteed against collisions.
Unfortunately there's no guarantee against collisions even for a
figurehead. Besides, as I told you before, Marian's strong. Iron wills
don't make good figureheads."

"Ah, you're one of these new women," said Sir Julian, indulgently. "I
don't mind 'em a bit, you know, myself--all steel and ginger,--and quite
on to their jobs. I admit all that. But Marian ain't one of them. Her
strength is the other kind--the kind you get by sitting still, don't you
know; and if I may say so in passing, if I run a ship, I don't collide.
But let's have your third reason. I see you're keeping something back.
She's going to marry me because I'm strong and because I'm sure; I
approve of both of them, sound business reasons. Now, Miss Waring,
what's the third?"

"Ah, the third isn't a reason at all," said Stella; "but it's the only
one that I thoroughly agree with as a motive: she likes you for
yourself."

Sir Julian's eyes suddenly softened; they softened so much that they
looked quite different eyes, almost as if they belonged to a very
pleased little boy.

"Oh," he said, looking back at Marian. "I shouldn't in the least mind
being guaranteed that, you know."

Lady Verny rose and walked toward them.

"I have some other calls to make," she said to her son. "You'll stay, of
course."

Stella joined her as soon as she had given the happiest of her smiles
into Marian's expectant eyes. Lady Verny's face, as they stood together
outside the door, was perfectly expressionless.

Without a word she descended the stairs side by side with Stella. When
she reached the front door she held out her hand to Stella and smiled.

"I hope I shall meet you again some day," she said, with gracious
sincerity. "I enjoyed our little talk together very much."

She said nothing whatever about Marian.




CHAPTER V


It was a very hot morning in July, a morning when work begins slowly,
continues irritably, and is likely to incite human paroxysms of
forgetfulness and temper. It took the form with Mr. Leslie Travers of
his being more definite than usual. He was an extremely intelligent man,
and most of his intelligence consisted in knowing where other people
were wrong. The heat lent an almost unbearable edge to these
inspirations; the office boy, the mayor's secretary, and two typists
withdrew from his sanctum as if they had been in direct contact with a
razor.

Stella wished, as she had often wished before, that the inner office in
which she worked could not be invaded by the manner in which Mr. Travers
conducted his interviews. She respected him as her chief, she even
considered him with a kind of loyal awe augmented by her daily duty. She
pleased him, she catered for him, she never in any circumstances let
him down or confused him by a miscalculation or a mistake.

It is impossible to do this for any man for two years and, if he has
treated you with fairness and respect, not at the end of that time, to
regard him with a certain proprietary affection. This was how Stella
regarded Mr. Travers. He was a clever man, and he never expected any one
under him to work miracles or to give him trouble. He knew what you were
worth, and sometimes he let you see it.

He was handsome in a thin, set, rather dry way, and when he put his
finger-tips together and smiled a little ironic smile he had, and leaned
forward with his shoulders hunched and his eyes unusually bright, as if
they'd been polished like a boot-button, he had an air of intellectual
strength which usually brought terror to an opponent. He always knew
when his adversary was in the wrong. It sometimes seemed to Stella as if
he never knew anything else.

He had reduced life to a kind of game in which you caught the other
fellow out. She got very tired of hearing him say, "You see, Miss
Waring, the weak point of this case is--" or, "I think we may just point
out to him that he renders himself liable to--"

He was a master hand at an interview. To begin with, he always let the
interviewer state his case completely. He never interrupted; he would
sit there smiling a little with his steady, observant eyes fixed on the
man before him, saying in a suave, mild voice, "Yes, yes; I quite see.
Exactly. Your point is--" and Stella, listening, would feel her heart
sink at the dangerous volubility of his opponent. She would have liked
to spring from behind the screen where she was sorting the
correspondence and say, "For Heaven's sake! keep that back! You're
letting yourself in!" As soon as the usually verbose and chaotic
applicant had drawn his final breath, Mr. Leslie Travers gave him back
his case with the points eliminated, and the defenseless places laid out
before him as invertebrate and unmanageable as a jellyfish. It was
hardly necessary for Mr. Leslie Travers to say, with his dry little
smile, "I think you see, my dear fellow, don't you, that it would really
be advisable in your own interests not to go on any further with the
matter? It will be no trouble to us at all if you decide to push it, but
if you take my advice, you will simply go home and think no more about
it." People usually went home, and if their case had been important to
them, they probably thought about it to the end of their lives; but that
didn't affect Mr. Travers. It was his business to safeguard the
interests of the town hall, and the more cases you could drop, the
better. Of course he never dropped a case that could be used against
him; he held on to these until they couldn't. He had to perfection the
legal mind. He never touched what wasn't a safe proposition. A peculiar
idea seized Stella as she listened to him dismissing a worried
rate-payer who had asked for lowered rates, claiming the decreased value
of his property, "We shall act immediately," Mr. Travers said
benevolently. "We receive proof that your property _has_ decreased in
value, but it doesn't do, you know, to come here and tell me the
neighborhood isn't what it was. No neighborhood ever is. Good morning."

What, she asked herself, would Mr. Leslie Travers be without his
impeccable tie, his black coat, and definitely creased gray trousers,
the polish on his boots, the office background, and, above all, the law?
Was he really very awe-inspiring. Wasn't he just a funny little man? It
was curious how she felt this morning, as if she would have liked to see
some one large and lawless face Mr. Travers and show him that his
successes were tricks, his interviews mousetraps, his words delusive
little pieces of very stale cheese. He was too careful of his dignity,
too certain of his top-hat. You couldn't imagine him dirty and oily at
the north pole, putting grit into half-frozen, starving men. You
couldn't, that is to say, imagine him at a disadvantage, making the
disadvantage play his game.

His games were always founded on advantages. He wasn't, in fact, at all
like Julian Verny, nor was there any reason why he should be. But
yesterday Stella had seen Julian Verny, and to-day she saw, and saw as
if for the first time, Mr. Leslie Travers.

"Now, Miss Waring," Mr. Travers said, looking up from his desk, "the
correspondence, please, if you are ready." He always spoke to her,
unless he was in a hurry, as if he were speaking to a good, rather
bright little girl who knew her place, but mustn't be tempted unduly to
forget it. When he was in a hurry he sometimes said, "Look sharp."

Stella brought the correspondence, and they went through it together
with their usual celerity and carefulness, and all the time she was
thinking: "We've worked together every day for two years except Sundays,
and he's afraid to look at me unless we're discussing a definite
question, and he won't risk a joke, and he'd be shocked if I sneezed.
He's just a very intelligent, cultivated, knowing clerk, and he'd be
awfully upset if I told him he had a smut on his collar."

Mr. Leslie Travers put to one side the two or three letters he had
reserved for himself to answer. Stella gathered hers together into an
elastic band; but as she turned to leave him he said:

"Miss Waring, one moment. You came to me on the understanding that your
work here was to be purely temporary. Circumstances have prolonged your
stay with us until it seems to me that we may fairly consider you,
unless you have other plans, a permanent member of our staff!"

"I hope so," said Stella, with a sudden flicker in her eyes, "unless you
think women shouldn't be permanent."

Mr. Leslie Travers permitted himself a very slight smile.

"That disability in your case," he said, "we are prepared to overlook in
view of your value as a worker. As my permanent secretary I should wish
to raise your salary ten pounds yearly. I have put this before our
committee, and they have seen their way to consent to it."

Stella's eyebrows went up. Ten pounds were worth so much to that
muddled, penurious household standing behind her on the verge of utmost
poverty! The man whose place she had taken had been paid three hundred a
year; her rise brought up her salary to one third of this amount.

"It _is_ a disability, Mr. Travers," she said gently, "being a woman. I
see that it is going to cost me two hundred a year."

Mr. Travers looked at her very hard. He knew that she did her work twice
as well as the man she had replaced. That is why she had replaced him.
He thought of her market value as a worker, and he knew that he was
doing a perfectly correct thing. A hundred a year was a fair wage for a
woman secretary. He said:

"You see, Miss Waring, you have not got a family to support."

Stella flushed. She had a family to support, but she did not intend to
admit it to Mr. Travers.. She said:

"I beg your pardon. I had not understood that wages were paid according
to a worker's needs. I had thought the value of the work settled the
rate of payment."

Mr. Travers was astonished. He had never dreamed that Miss Waring would
argue with him. He had looked forward to telling her of this unexpected
windfall; he had expected a flushed and docile gratitude. She was a
little flushed, it is true, but she was neither docile nor grateful, and
he did not quite see his way to continuing her line of argument. She
had, however, put herself in the wrong, and he pointed this out to her.

"I am afraid I cannot see my way to offering you more than the increase
I have suggested," he said; "but as you were apparently satisfied to
accept a permanent post at my original offer, I may hope that an extra
ten pounds will prove no obstacle to our continuing to work together."

"I do not suppose," said Stella, quietly, "that it will be any obstacle
to you that I do not think it fair."

"Really, Miss Waring, really," said Mr. Travers, "I do not think you are
quite yourself this morning. The heat, the disquieting news in the
papers--Perhaps you had better go on with the correspondence. These
questions are not personal ones, you know--they--"

Stella interrupted him.

"All questions that deal with human beings, Mr. Travers," she said, "are
personal questions, and the heat does not affect them."

For one awful moment Mr. Travers thought that Miss Waring was laughing
at him; there was that strange glint in her eyes that he had noticed
before. She had extraordinarily pretty eyes, usually so gentle. It was
most upsetting.

She disappeared with her correspondence before he could think of a
suitable reply. Legally he had been perfectly justified, more than
justified, because he was under no obligation to offer her ten pounds
more.

This is what comes of generosity to women. If he hadn't offered her that
ten pounds she wouldn't have laughed at him, if she really had laughed
at him.

It was a most disquieting thought; it haunted him all day long, even
more than the possibility of a European war. He couldn't help the
European war if it did come off, but he wished very much that he had
been able to prevent Miss Waring's enigmatic laughter.




CHAPTER VI


When anything happened, Julian's first instinct was to happen with it.
He had never been in the rear of a situation in his life. The blow of
the Austrian ultimatum reached him on a yacht in mid-channel. There was
a cabinet minister on board, for whose sake the yacht slewed round to
make her way swiftly back to port. Julian went directly to him.

"Look here," he said, "we've got to go in. You grasp that, don't you?"

Julian had one idea in his head, the cabinet minister had a great many;
every one but Julian was leaving him alone to sort these ideas out.
Julian spent the six hours in which they were flying to port in
eradicating one by one every idea except his own.

The two men stood together, leaning over the ship's side. It was a clear
summer evening, with a bloom upon the waters. The lights of the boats
they passed--green and red and gold--were like glow-worms in a Southern
night. The sea was very easy under them; it had little movement of its
own, and parted like riven gauze to let the ship through.

"We can't let France go under," Julian pleaded. "Look at her,
son--stripped, after 1870. How she's sprung up! But thin, you
know--thin, like a gallant boy.

"Immoral small families? By Gad! how righteous comfortable people are!
How could she help it? Look what she's had to carry--indemnities, cursed
war burdens, and now the three-years service! But she's carried 'em. I
know the French. I've Irish in me, and that helps me to value their
lucidity. Lucidity's sense, you know, it ain't anything dressy or
imaginative, it's horse-sense gone clean as lightning. The French are a
civilized people. Go to Paris,--not the Paris of our luxury-rotted rich,
who have only asked it to be a little private sink of their own,--but to
a Frenchman's Paris. Well, you'll find him there, brain and a heart
under it. And, good Lord, what nerve!

"I tell you we've got to get down to our own nerve. We've fatted it on
the top, but the French haven't. They're like live wire, with no cover
to it. They're the most serious people on earth, fire without smoke. It
'u'd be an unspeakable shame to help set that damned Prussian heel on
them again. When it comes, it'll come as solid as the mountain that
blotted out Messina, as solid and as senseless, and you'll let that
happen because we aren't '_involved_!' Good Heavens, man, don't sop
yourself or your conscience with catchwords! If this war comes, and I
feel in my bones it's on us, any man who isn't involved is a cur."

The cabinet minister interrupted him. He cleared his throat, and said
that he was hopeful steps might be taken.

Julian flung himself upon the phrase.

"Of course they'll be taken," he shouted across the quiet, shadowy sea.
"They're being taken every minute. Are we the only fellows who've got
feet?

"What about strategic railways? Ever studied 'em? What about this
spring's having seen Alsace and Lorraine white with camps? What about
Tirpitz slipping his navy votes through the Reichstag, Socialists and
all? I beg your pardon; it's not your department, of course. We've let a
strip of sea as small as a South American river cut us off from the
plain speech of other nations. What speech? My good sir, the plain
speech of other nations is their acts. But it's no use raking up what
we've slid over. We've the national habit of sliding, it's a gift like
any other, and if you've a good eye for ice, it doesn't let you in. But
what Liberal Government ever had a good eye for the ice in Europe. I'm
speaking bitterly, but I'm a Liberal myself, and I've seen in odd places
of the earth that it's no good going slap through an adverse fact,
smiling. You disarm nothing but yourself."

"We are not," said the cabinet minister, who had a happy disposition and
a strong desire not to be shaken out of it, "really tied up to any
Balkan outbreak--I mean necessarily, of course. Other issues might come
in. But I see no reason, my dear Sir Julian, why we should, in this very
disagreeable crisis, not remind ourselves--and I am, like you, one of
the greatest admirers of the French--that an entente is _not_ an
alliance. Political sympathy can do a great deal to affect these
questions. I can imagine a very strong note--"

"Is an engagement nothing till you've got the ring on?" asked Julian,
savagely. "Are you going to let down France, who's not very often, but
has just lately, trusted us? If we do, let me tell you this: we shall
deserve exactly what we shall get. And make no mistake about it; we
shall get it. The channel ports, taken from a vindictive, broken France,
used, as they ought to be used, dead against us. A little luck and a
dark night, and I wouldn't give _that_ for England."

Julian flung his lighted cigarette into the sea; a faint hiss, and the
spark beneath them was sucked into darkness. Neither of the two men
moved. Julian lit another cigarette, and the cabinet minister gazed down
into the lightless sea. After a pause he said in a different voice:

"Look here, Verny, I've been impressed, devilish impressed, by what
you've said; but have you considered what kind of force we've got?
Picked men, I grant you, but, as you say yourself, when the Germans do
come on, they'll come like half a mountain moving. What's the use of
sending out a handful of grasshoppers to meet half a mountain?"

Julian laughed.

"Are you a great man on dog-fights?" he asked. "I've seen a bulldog,
quite a small chap he was, bring down a Great Dane the size of a calf.
The Dane had got a collie by the throat; friend of my little chap's, I
fancy. He couldn't get at the Dane's throat, for fear of piling his
weight on the collie; so he just stepped forward and took half a leg
between his teeth, and buried his head in it. I heard the bone crack.
The Dane tried to face it out,--he was a plucky fellow and the size of a
house,--but after a bit he felt held down. So he wheeled round and
seized the bull by a piece of back (the collie crawled off, he'd had
enough, poor brute!), but the bull didn't stir. He went on cracking that
bone; he gave the Dane all the back he wanted. Devil a bit _he_ turned
till the whole leg went like a split match, that hurled the Dane over,
and I had to take Chang (that was his name) off, or he'd have finished
him up. He'd just begun to enjoy the fight, with half his back chawed
over!

"We've got a navy that'll do just that to Germany if we hold on long
enough. Don't you forget it. It's pressure that tells against
size--pressure on the right spot, and persistent."

The cabinet minister tried to say to himself that countries weren't like
dogs; but he was a truthful man, and he thought that on the whole they
were.

England rose up suddenly before them out of the darkness. They were
coming into Plymouth Sound. The port lights held them steadily for a
minute, and the steam yacht bustled soberly toward the docks.

"If your little lot sit down under this," said Julian, straightening his
shoulders and holding the other man with his insistent eyes, "by God!
I'll cut my throat and say, 'Here died a Briton whose country had lost
its soul.'"

"Bit of Irish in him of course," murmured the cabinet minister as Julian
swung away from him. "Still, I suppose what I shall say is that on the
whole, taking everything into consideration, I think we should be wiser
to support France."




CHAPTER VII


Julian had spent thirty-two years--his mother included his first--in
seeing what he wanted to do and doing it. He had never consulted anybody
else, because he had always seen his way clearly, but he had made from
time to time reports to his mother. He had been hostile to his father,
who had opposed him weakly and sometimes unfairly till he died. Julian
never felt disheartened or found any opposition in himself to what he
wanted to do. Opposition in others he liked and overcame. Nothing in him
warned him that love demands participation and resents exclusion.

On landing, he hurried to London, and went at once to see an old friend
of his in the War Office.

"Look here, Burton," he said, "you remember 1911, don't you?"

Burton drew on the blotting-paper with a pencil; he was almost
overwhelmingly cautious. If he had not been, many more serious things
than caution would have been overwhelmed.

"I think," he said, "if I remember right, you went abroad."

Julian chuckled.

"I was a German navvy for six months," he said. "I ate like a German, I
drank thirty bottles of beer at one sitting for a bet, and I lost my
head and my temper in German. It seems as if the best thing I can do
just now is to repeat the experiment."

"You did it at your own risk," Burton reminded him. "It was certainly
serviceable, but we limited our communications with you as much as
possible. If it should enter into your mind to do such a thing again, we
should of course have no communication with you whatever. Also, you
would need German papers--birth certificates, registrations. I really do
not know at a time like this what you might not find necessary. The
work, if you came back, would be invaluable."

Julian nodded.

"Don't you bother yourself about papers," he said. "I've been in a
German consular office, and I've got a German birth-certificate. It's
one of the things I do particularly well. As long as they're not
suspicious they won't ram the papers home, and I don't propose to let
them get suspicious. I shall be Caesar's wife. Three years of Heidelberg
have oiled my throat to it. My mother tells me I often speak English in
a hearty German voice. My idea is to go out as soon as possible, through
Belgium. They'll strike there, I feel pretty sure, and I'll come back
the same way--October to November, if I can. You can put about that I 'm
off to the Arctic Ocean. If I'm not back by Christmas, don't expect me.
I shall have no communication with any one until my return."

Burton smiled.

"My dear Julian," he said, "one moment. I have not yet congratulated you
upon your engagement. I do so with all my heart. But do you intend to
tell Miss Young? She may not like the Arctic Ocean or she may expect you
to fight. She will also, no doubt, look for some communication from you;
and, as you very rightly assert, there can be no communication whatever
with anybody until you return."

Julian hunched up his shoulders and whistled.

"She's the pick of women," he said softly. "Leave her to me."

"It's all going to be left to you," said Burton, gravely. "If you live,
you'll get no apparent acknowledgment; if you die, no one will ever know
how. I do not say this to dissuade you,--there are too many things we
want to know,--but when I saw the announcement of your engagement in the
paper, I said, 'Well, we've lost him.'"

Julian rose, and walked to the window. Until that moment he had not
given Marian a thought. He was full of a lover's images of her, but he
had not connected them with what he was going to do. He remembered what
Marian's inconspicuous-looking little friend had said to her, "honest as
crystal, equable, strong."

Then he turned back to his friend.

"You haven't lost me," he said steadily. "After all, if we're up against
anything at all, Burton, we're up against a pretty big thing. I must do
exactly what is most useful. Of course I'd rather fight. One likes
one's name to go down and all that, and I'd like to please Marian; but
the point, both for her and for me, will be the job."

"Ah," said Burton. "Then if you'll just come with me, I'll take you to a
fellow who will let you know what we want particularly just now to find
out. You're quite right as far as we are concerned; but it's not fair to
rush a man into our kind of fight. It's not like any other kind. It's
risks without prizes."

"What you get out of a risk," said Julian, with a certain gravity, "is a
prize."

Burton looked at him curiously; he rested his hand for a moment on his
friend's shoulder.

"That's a jolly good phrase, Julian," he said quietly, "and I think it's
true; but it's not necessarily a personal prize. You pay the piper, and
he plays the tune; but you mightn't be there to listen to the tune."

"Don't be a croaking, weather-beaten, moth-eaten old Scotch raven!"
laughed Julian. "Take my word for it; you get what you want out of life
if you put all you've got into it. That's just at this moment what I
propose to put."

"And that," said Burton, without returning his smile, "is what we
propose to take, Julian."




CHAPTER VIII


Amberley hung upon a cliff of land above the water meadows. Rising high
behind it, fold on fold, were the Sussex Downs, without lines, without
rigidity, as soft as drifting snow.

The village had been the seat of a tremendous castle,--little of these
famous ruins were left,--but the old, yellow stone walls still girdled
Amberley in the shape of a broken crown.

There was only one street, a sleepy, winding, white down road, which ran
between mossy barns and deep-thatched cottages under the Amberley Wall.
The castle was older than Amberley House, yet Amberley House was a
respectable three hundred years, and had been all that time the home of
countless Vernys. It had not retreated into relentless privacy, as most
old English homes have done; it stood, with its wide porch, stoutly upon
the moss-grown cobbles.

But it was better than its promises. If it had no park, there lay behind
its frontage not a park, but a garden--a garden that fitted in with
nature, only to excel it.

Lady Verny loved two things, her garden and her son; but she had been
able to do most with her garden. There were terraces that swung from
point to point above the long, blue valley; there was a lawn hemmed in
by black yew hedges, over which the downs piled themselves, bare and
high, with only the clouds beyond them. There was a sunken rose-garden,
with rough-tiled pathways leading to a lake with swans. Three hundred
years had helped Lady Verny with the lawn, but the herbaceous borders
had been her own affair. Julian, crossing the lawn toward her, was the
same strange mixture of her hand and time; and she had always known that
when she had done all she could for Julian and the garden, she would
have to give both up. With all their difficulties, their beauties, and
their sullen patches, they would pass into the hands of some young and
untried person unchosen by herself.

The person had been chosen now. Marian was already at Amberley for a
week-end, and knowing that Julian was expected, she had left Lady Verny
sitting by the tea-table under the yew hedge and gone up toward the
downs.

Julian would like this; he would not wish his bride to meet him
half-way. He would delight in Marian's aloofness; her deliberate and
delicate coldness would seem to him like the bloom upon a grape. But the
coldness of a future daughter-in-law is not the quality which most
endears her to a mother.

"Julian," Lady Verny said to herself as he approached her, "will make a
very trying lover. If he is absorbed in Marian, he will interfere with
her; and if he is absorbed in anything else, he will ignore her. He
needs a great deal of judicious teasing. Marian takes herself too
seriously to see the fun of Julian; she only sees the fun of sex. She
was quite right to go up to the downs. It'll amuse him to pursue her
now, but it'll bore him later; and in the end he'll find out that she
doesn't keep him off because she's got so much to give, but because
she's so afraid of giving anything."

"Where's Marian?" asked Julian before he kissed her.

"She went up toward the downs," said Lady Verny. "She left no directions
behind her. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, my dear."

Julian laughed.

"She knew I'd follow her," he said; "but I'll have my tea first,
please."

"She has always been followed, I imagine," said Lady Verny, giving him
his tea, "and she has always known it."

Julian looked pleased; this was the kind of wife he wanted, a woman used
to admiration, and who never made the fatal mistake of seeking it. He
had not much knowledge of women, but he had very strong opinions about
them, unshaken by any personal reckoning. One opinion was that nothing
too much can be done for a good woman. She must be protected, cared for,
and served under every ordeal in life. She must be like a precious
jewel; bars, safes, banks, must be constructed to insure her
inaccessibility from all the dangers of the open world.

She must be seen--the East receded from him at this point--and admired;
but she must be immaculate. That is to say, she must at no time in her
career personally handle an experience. She must be a wife and mother
(unmarried women, though often presumably virtuous, were only the shabby
bankrupts of their sex), but, once married and a mother, she must be
kept as far as possible from all the implications of these tremendous
facts.

Bad women were unsexed. That is to say, no law applied to them; they
were as outcast as a man who cheats at cards. The simile was not exact,
as the women were occasionally themselves the cheated; but it was near
enough for Julian. There were of course considerably more female
outcasts than card-sharpers; but this was fortunate, for inadvertently
they protected good women, in a manner in which card-sharpers have not
been known to protect good men. But Julian thought men needed no
protection, only women who were safe, needed it.

Julian was kinder to women than his opinions promised, because, being
strong, he was on the whole gentle toward those who were weak; but his
kindness was a personal idiosyncrasy, not a principle.

Lady Verny looked at him a little helplessly. There was something she
wanted very much to say to him, but she suffered from the disability of
being his mother. There is an unwritten law that mothers should not
touch upon vital matters with their sons. Lady Verny believed that
Julian was a victim of passion. She did not think he had understood
Marian's nature, and she knew that when passion burns itself out, one of
two things is left, comradeship or resentment. She had lived with
resentment for twenty years, and she knew that it was not an easy thing
to live with, and that it would have been worth while had she known more
about it earlier, to have found out if there was comradeship under the
passion before the flames of it had burned her boats.

"I wonder," she said consideringly, gazing into the bottom of her
tea-cup, "if your lovely Marian has a sense of humor?"

"Humor?" said Julian, taking two savory sandwiches and wrapping them in
bread and butter. "What does she want with humor at her age? It's one of
the things people fall back on when they've come croppers. Besides, I
don't believe in comradeship between the sexes. Infernally dull policy;
sort of thing that appeals to a bookworm. What I like is a little
friendly scrapping. Honor's easy! I never have cared much for brains in
a woman."

He smiled at the woman he knew best in the world, who had brains, and
had given him the fruit of them all her life, with kindly tolerance.

Probably she was jealous; but she wouldn't be tiresome if she was, and
he would make things as easy for her as possible.

Lady Verny saw that Julian thought that she was jealous. She looked away
from him to the terrace where he had fallen as a baby and struck his
head against the stone cornice of the sun-dial.

She could never look at the sun-dial without seeing the whole scene
happen again--and the dreadful pause that followed it when the small,
limp figure lay without moving. Julian was the only child she had ever
had. She shivered in the hot summer air and gave up the subject of human
love. There is generally too much to be said about it to make it a good
subject of conversation except for lovers, who only want each other.

She pointed to the newspaper that lay between them; that also was
serious.

"My dear," she said quietly, "this appears to be a very bad business?"

"Yes," Julian acknowledged. "This time there'll be no ducking; there's
nothing to duck under."

"And I dare say," said his mother, without moving the strong, quiet
hands that lay on her lap, "you have been thinking what you are going to
do in it?"

"Oh, yes, I've decided," said Julian. "I shall be off in ten days.
You'll guess where, but no one else must know."

"It was a big risk before, Julian," she said tentatively.

"This time it'll be a bigger one," he answered, meeting her eyes with a
flash of his pleased blue ones. "That's all. It'll need a jolly lot of
thinking out."

"And you've--and Marian has agreed to it?" Lady Verny asked anxiously.

"I haven't told her yet," said Julian, easily. "It didn't occur to me to
mention it to her first any more than to you. I knew you'd both
understand. Obviously it was the one thing I could do. She'll see that,
of course."

"I'm different," said Lady Verny, with a twist of her ironic mouth. "I'm
your mother. A mother takes what is given; a wife expects all there is
to give."

Julian looked a little uncomfortable. Burton, who was a man, and might
therefore be assumed to know better than a woman what a woman felt, had
come to the same conclusion.

Julian was prepared to give everything he had to Marian--Amberley and
all his money and himself. There was something in the marriage service
that put it very well, but didn't, as far as he remembered, say anything
to include plans.

"I hope she likes Amberley?" he ventured.

Lady Verny filled his cup a second time, and answered tranquilly:

"Marian thinks it a charming little place to run down to for week-ends."
Then she added very gently: "This is going to be very hard for Marian,
Julian. You'll remember that, won't you, when you tell her?"

"Damnably hard," said Julian under his breath. "Of course I'll remember.
I wish to Heaven she'd marry me first. By Jove, I'll _make_ her!"

Lady Verny's lips closed tightly. She wasn't going to tell Julian
anything, because she did not believe in telling things to people who
will in the course of time find them out for themselves. She knew that
Marian would not marry him at a moment's notice. She knew that he was
asking Marian already to stand a very serious burden, and she did not
think Marian's was the type of love that cares for very serious and
unexpected burdens. She gazed at the bushes of blue anchusa; the
gardener had planted pink monthly roses a little too thickly among them.
She could alter that; she did not think there was anything else she
could alter.

Julian strode toward the downs full of seriousness, eagerness, and
pride, and in her heart Lady Verny prayed not that God's will might be
done, which seemed to her mind superfluous, but that it might as far as
possible be made to square with Julian's. She was a wise and even a just
woman, but she thought that Providence might be persuaded to stretch a
point or two for Julian.




CHAPTER IX


Julian walked easily and swiftly up the <DW72>s of the downs, whistling
as he went. He knew the point from which he would be sure to see his
flying nymph. The air was full of the songs of larks; beneath his feet
the short grasses and wild thyme sent up a clean and pungent fragrance.

The little, comfortable beauties of the summer's day filled his heart
with gladness. There was no sound in all the sleepy country-side; the
peaceful shining clouds floated over the low green hills as vague as
waking dreams.

The cropping of the sheep upon the downs, the searching, spiral laughter
of the larks, were part of the air itself; and the shadows ran an
interminable race across the long green meadows.

Julian had had experiences of love before, but he had never been in love
as he was now. He compared these earlier efforts in his mind with the
light clouds that melted into the sunshine. Marian was the sunshine;
she thrilled and warmed his whole being. She was like an adventure to
him. He felt very humble in his heart to think the sun had cared to
shine upon him, and very strong to meet its shining.

He noticed little things he had never noticed before: the feathery, fine
stalks of the harebells, and the blue butterflies that moved among them
like traveling flowers. Usually, when he walked, he noticed only the
quickest way to reach his goal. He noticed that now, but he tried not to
crush the small down flowers on his way.

He caught sight of Marian from a ridge of down, sitting motionless and
erect upon the rim of an old chalk-pit. A long, blue veil hung over her
shoulders like the wings of a blue butterfly fluttering before him. She
saw his shadow before he reached her, and threw her head back with a
little gesture that was half a welcome and half a defiance.

He came swiftly across the grass toward her, but it was she who was
breathless when he took her in his arms.

"Trying to run away from me, are you?" he asked, smiling down at her.
"The world's too small here, and it's mine, you know. You shouldn't
have come here if you had wanted to escape me."

"Let me go, Julian," she murmured. "I'm sure there's a shepherd close
by. Sit down and be sensible."

"Shepherds be hanged!" said Julian, kissing her. "Do you suppose
anybody's ever been more sensible than I feel now? Kissing you is the
most sensible thing a man ever did; but don't let anybody else guess
it."

He sat down at her feet and looked up into the beautiful, flushed face
above him. It was as lovely as a lifted flower; but unlike the flower,
it was not very soft. It was even like a slightly sophisticated hothouse
flower; but she had the look of race he loved. Her level, penciled
brows, small, straight nose, curved lips, and chin like a firm, round
apple, were the heritage of generations of handsome lives. Her coloring
was only a stain of pink upon a delicate, clear whiteness; but the eyes
beneath the low, smooth forehead, were disappointing. They were well-cut
hazel eyes, without light in them. They lay in her head a little flat,
like the pieces of a broken mirror.

Just now they were at their tenderest. Her whole face, bending over him,
cool and sweet as the southwest wind and as provocative as the flying
clouds, moved his heart almost unbearably. She was like an English
summer day, and he knew now what it would mean to leave her.

"I couldn't bear to stay down there," she explained. "I was frightened,
not of you, you absurd person, but of being glad. I'm afraid I don't
like big feelings very much. I can't explain exactly, but the papers
frightened me. I wanted to see you too much. Yes, sir, you may keep that
for a prize to your vanity; and I knew that if there should be war--"
She stopped, her lovely lips trembled a little. "I shall have to let you
go so soon!" she whispered.

[Illustration: "I'm afraid I don't like big feelings much"]

He bowed his head over her hand and kissed it passionately.

"If I could spare you this pain," he said, "I'd take a thousand
lives--and lose them to do it!"

"No! no!" she murmured. "Keep one, Julian!"

He lifted his head and looked at her steadily.

"I swear I'll keep it," he said. "I'll keep it, and bring it back to
you, cost what it may."

It did not look as if it were going to cost very much, with the light
clouds passing overhead, and the soft down grasses under them; and their
great citadels of youth and love about them, unmenaced and erect.

"I've a piece of work I've got to do," Julian went on, "and I can't tell
you anything about it. It'll take me three months, I fancy. I can fight
afterward."

She looked at him with eyes in which astonishment turned almost hostile.

"Not fighting?" she said. "But what do you mean, Julian? If we go in,
every one must fight. I know you're not a soldier, but there'll be
volunteers. With all your adventures and experiences, they are sure to
give you a good post. Everybody knows you. What do you mean--a job you
can't tell me about--unless, of course it's something naval?"

Julian turned his face to the wild thyme. He shook his head.

"No, not that," he said. "Can't you trust me, Marian?"

"Trust you!" she said impatiently. "Of course I can trust you, but why
be so mysterious? Mightn't I equally say, 'Why don't you trust me?'"

"It's part of my job," said Julian quietly, "not to trust the ground
we're on or the larks in the sky or the light of my heart,--that's you,
Marian,--and it doesn't happen to be the easiest part of my job."

He waited for her to make it easier for him, but he waited in vain.
Marian expected easy things, but she did not expect to have to make
things easy. These two expectations seldom go together.

"Do you mean to tell me that you are going to be some kind of spy?" she
asked in a tone of frank disgust. "Oh, Julian! I couldn't bear it! It's
so--so--un-English!"

Julian chuckled. He ought not to have chuckled. If a man does not like a
woman with brains, he must learn not to laugh at their absence. Marian
stiffened under his laughter.

"England's got to be awfully un-English in some ways if it wants to win
this war," he explained. "But you mustn't even to yourself put a name
to what I'm going to be. I'm just on a job that'll take me three months,
and I'm afraid, my darling, I can't send you a word. That cuts me all to
bits, but you're so brave, so brave, you'll let me go."

He buried his head in the grass; he was not brave enough to bear to see
the strain he was putting on her courage. Nor was Marian.

"No, Julian," she said, "you mustn't ask such a thing of me. Not to know
where you are, and not to be able to tell any one what you are doing! To
let you go out into the dark at a time like this! It's too much to ask
of me. Promise me you'll give up all idea of it, and try to get a
commission like other people. Surely that's hard enough for me. But I'll
bear that; I will never make it difficult for you by a word or a look; I
wouldn't hold you back a day! You've not settled anything of course?"

He told her that he had settled everything, and that in two days he must
go.

A terrible silence fell between them, a cold silence that was like the
pressure of a stone. Neither of them moved or looked at the other.
Julian took her hand. She did not withdraw it from him, but she left it
in his as unresponsive as a fallen leaf.

"Marian," he whispered, "Marian. Love me a little."

She would not turn her face to him.

"Why do you talk to me of love," she asked bitterly, "when without
consulting me you do something which involves your whole life and mine!"

He caught her in his arms and held her close to him, kissing her cold
lips till they answered him.

"My darling! my darling!" he whispered, "I love you like this and like
this! It's sheer murder to leave you! I feel as if it would break me.
But I've got to go. Don't you see, don't you understand? It's work I do
well, it's important, just now it's more important than fighting; it's
not one man's life that hangs on it, but it's thousands. Believe me,
there's no dishonor in it. Love me or you'll break me, Marian! Don't be
against me. I couldn't stand it. Say you'll let me go, for if I go and
you don't say it, I'll go as a broken man."

She pushed him gently away from her, considering him. She knew her
terrible power. She was very angry with him, and she had hurt him as
much as she meant to hurt him. She had no intention whatever of breaking
him. If he was going to do this kind of work, he must do it well.
Perhaps, after all, it was rather important; but important or not, he
should have asked her first. She laid her small hand over his big one
with a delicate pressure.

"Never settle such a thing again without telling me," she said gravely.

Julian promised quickly that he never would. He saw for the first time
that love was not liberty, and for the moment he preferred love. He had
not felt deeply enough to know that there is a way in which you may
widen liberty and yet keep love.

"I shall let you go," Marian said gently, "and I shall try to bear it as
best I can."

At the thought of how difficult it was going to be to bear, not to be
able to tell anybody anything, she cried a little. Her face was
uncontorted by her tears. They streamed down her blossom- cheeks
like drops of pearly dew. Julian thought her tears were softness, and
he struck at his chance. Now perhaps she would surrender to his hidden
hope.

He pleaded, with her head against his heart, that she would marry him,
marry him now--at once. He could arrange it all in twenty-four hours. He
presented a thousand impetuous arguments. All his wits and his ardor
fought for him against her soft, closed eyes. She was his; she would be
his forever. He would go with that great possession in his heart; he
would go like a man crowned to meet his future.

She opened her eyes at last and moved away from him. At that instant she
would have liked to marry him, she would have liked it very much; but
besides the fact that she had no things, there loomed the blank
uncertainty of the future. Would she be a wife or a widow, and how
should she know which she was? There were more immediate difficulties.
Her parents were in Scotland; hurried weddings were always very awkward;
you couldn't have bridesmaids or wedding presents; and a few hours'
honeymoon, with an indefinite parting ahead of it, would be extremely
painful.

Even if a marriage under all these disabilities was legal--wouldn't it
be worse than illegal--wouldn't it be rather funny?

Julian was sometimes impossible; he had been nearly overwhelming, but he
was quite impossible. He might be a dangerous man to marry in a hurry.
She would have to train him first.

"It's out of the question, Julian," she said firmly. "The whole future
is too uncertain. I should love to--but I can't do it. It wouldn't be
right for me to do it. We must wait till you come back."

Julian returned to his study of the short down grasses. He knew that if
she had loved to--she would have done it. He had a moment that was
bitter with doubt and pain; then his love rose up and swallowed it. He
saw the uncertainty for her.

He wanted her now because he knew that he might never have her. He
wanted her with the fierce hunger of a pirate for a prize; but the very
sharpness of his desire made him see that it was sheer selfishness to
press his point. He overlooked the fact that it would have been
perfectly useless. No pressure would have changed Marian. Pressure had
done what it could for her already: it had moved her to tears. She dried
them now, and suggested that they had stayed on the downs long enough.




CHAPTER X


It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war.
Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then
suddenly out of them flashed the tents in the park, the processions of
soldiers and bands, the grim stir that swept over London like a squall
striking the surface of a summer sea.

The town hall did not collapse, but it shook. It was a place where, as a
rule, the usual things took place, and even unusual things happened
usually; but there were several weeks at the beginning of the war when
all day long strange things happened strangely. Offices were changed,
the routine of years was swept up like dust into a dust-pan, and a new
routine, subject to further waves of change, took its place. Workers
voluntarily offered to do work that they were unaccustomed to do. The
council hall became a recruiting office. No. 8, the peculiar sanctum of
the sanitary inspector, was given up to an army surveyor. Tramps asked
the cashier questions. It was like the first act of "Boris Goudonoff."
Even food was carried about on trays, and as for proclamations, somebody
or other was proclaiming something all day long.

There was no religion and no dancing, but there was the same sense of
brooding, implacable fate; it took the place of music, and seemed,
without hurry and without pause, to be carrying them all along in a
secret rhythm of its own toward an unseen goal.

Mr. Leslie Travers ruled most of the town hall committees, and he
required innumerable statistics to be compiled and ready to be launched
intimidatingly at the first sign of any opposition to his ruling.

Stella, to whom the work of compiling fell, had very little time to
consider the war.

When she got home she usually went to sleep. From time to time she heard
Mrs. Waring announcing that there was no such thing as war and Eurydice
reciting battle-odes to Belgium.

For the first time in her life Eurydice shared a common cause. She was
inclined to believe that England was fighting for liberty. She knew
that France was, partly because France was on the other side of the
channel and partly because of the French Revolution. The destruction of
Louvain settled the question of Belgium. To Eurydice, whatever was
destroyed was holy. Later on she became a violent pacifist because Mr.
Bolt said that we ourselves were Prussian; but for the moment nobody,
not even Mr. Bolt, had traced this evasive parallel.

Professor Waring wrote several letters to the papers, asking what
precautions the Belgians were taking about Sanskrit manuscript. He had a
feeling that King Albert, though doubtless an estimable young man and
useful in the trenches, might, like most kings, have been insufficiently
educated to appreciate the importance of Sanskrit. That men should die
in large numbers to protect their country was an unfortunate incident
frequent in history, but that a Sanskrit manuscript should be destroyed
was a national calamity, for the manuscript could never be replaced.

He made an abortive effort to reach Belgium and see about it himself,
but at the Foreign Office he was stopped by a young man with a single
eyeglass, from whom the professor had demanded a passport. The exact
expression used by this ignorant young person was, "I'm awfully sorry,
sir, but I'm afraid just at present Sanskrit manuscript will have to
rip."

Professor Waring promptly addressed letters of remonstrance and advice
to several German professors upon the subject. They were returned to him
after three weeks, with a brief intimation that he was not to
communicate with the enemy. Professor Waring had considered German
professors to be his natural enemies all his life; this had been his
chief reason for communicating with them. He was fitted, as few
officials in the Foreign Office can ever have been fitted, to point out
to the German professors the joints in their armor.

They had a great deal of armor and very few joints, and it discouraged
Professor Waring to leave these unpierced spots to the perhaps
less-practised hands of neutrals.

But it was not until the destruction of Louvain that he grasped to the
full the reaction of his former antagonists. When Professor Waring read
a signed letter from some of the German professors agreeing to the
destruction of the famous Belgian library he acquiesced in the war. He
stood in front of his wife and woke Stella up in order to make his
declaration.

"Henrietta, there _is_ a war," he announced. "It is useless for you to
assert that there is not. Not only _is_ there a war, but there should be
one; and if I were twenty years younger, though wholly unaccustomed to
the noisy mechanisms of physical destruction, I should join in it. As it
is, I propose to write a treatise upon the German mind. It is not one of
my subjects, and I shall probably have to neglect valuable work in order
to undertake it; still, my researches into the rough Stone Age will no
doubt greatly assist me. Many just parallels have already occurred to
me. I hope that no one in this house will be guilty of so uneducated a
frame of mind as to sympathize with the Teutonic iconoclasts even to the
extent of asserting, as I believe I heard you assert just now,
Henrietta, that none of them exist."

Mrs. Waring murmured gently that she thought an intense hopefulness
might refine degraded natures, but the next day she bought wool and
began to knit a muffler. She had capitulated to the fact of the war.
While she knitted she patiently asserted that there was no life, truth,
intelligence, or force in matter; and Stella, when she came home in the
evening, picked up the dropped stitches.

It was strange to Stella that her only personal link with the war was a
man whom she had seen only once and might never see again. She thought
persistently of Julian. She thought of him for Marian's sake, because
Marian was half frozen with misery. She thought of him because
unconsciously he stood in her mind for England. He was an adventurer,
half-god, half-child, who had the habit of winning without the
application of fear. She thought of him because he was the only young,
good-looking man of her own class with whom she had ever talked.

Marian was afraid that Stella might think she had been unsympathetic to
Julian about his mission. She told Stella, with her usual direct
honesty, how angry she had been with him.

"I know I was nasty to him," she said. "I can't bear to have any one
involve me first and tell me about it afterward."

"Of course you can't," agreed Stella, flaming up with a gust of
annoyance more vivid than Marian's own. "How like him! How exactly like
him to be so high-handed! Fancy whirling you along behind him as if you
were a sack of potatoes! Of course you were annoyed, and I hope you gave
him a good sharp quarrel. One only has to look at Julian to see that he
ought to be quarreled with at regular intervals in an agreeable way for
the rest of his life."

"I don't like quarrels," Marian said slowly. "They don't seem to me to
be at all agreeable; but I don't think Julian will act without
consulting me again."

Stella looked at Marian curiously. What was this power that Marian had,
which moved with every fold of her dress, and stood at guard behind her
quiet eyes? How had she made Julian understand without quarreling that
he must never repeat his independences? Stella was sure Marian _had_
made him understand it. It would be of no use to ask Marian how she had
done it, because Marian would only laugh and say: "Nonsense! It was
perfectly easy." She probably did not know herself what was the secret
of her power; she would merely in every circumstance in life composedly
and effectively use it. Was it perhaps that though Julian had involved
her actions, he had never involved Marian? Was love a game in which the
weakest lover always wins?

"Of course I've never been in love," Stella said slowly, "and I haven't
the slightest idea how it's done or what happens to you; but I fancy
quarreling might be made very agreeable. Love is so tremendous, isn't
it, that there must be room for concealed batteries and cavalry charges;
and yet of course you know all the time that you are loving the person
more and more outrageously, so that nothing gets wasted or destroyed
except the edges you are knocking off for readjustments."

"I don't think I do love Julian outrageously," Marian objected. "I
didn't, you see, do what he wanted: he had a mad idea of getting a
special license and having a whirlwind wedding, leaving me directly
afterward. Of course I couldn't consent to that."

"Couldn't you?" asked Stella, wonderingly. "I don't see that it matters
much, you know, when you give that kind of thing to a person you love.
If you do love them, I suppose it shows you're willing to marry them,
doesn't it? But how, when, or where is like the sound of the
dinner-bell. You don't owe your dinner to the dinner-bell; it's simply
an arrangement for bringing you to the table. Marriage always seems to
me just like that. I should have married Julian in a second if I'd been
you; but I should have made him understand that I wasn't a sack of
potatoes, if I'd had to box his ears regularly every few minutes for
twenty-four hours at a stretch."

"Surely marriage is sacred," said Marian, gravely. Stella's point of
view was so odd that Marian thought it rather coarse.

"But it needn't be long," objected Stella; "you can be short and sacred
simultaneously. In fact, I think I could be more sacred if I was quick
about it; I should only get bored if I was long."

"You have such a funny way of putting things," said Marian, a little
impatiently. "Of course I know what you mean, but I don't like being
hurried. I love Julian dearly, and I will marry him when there is time
for us to do it quietly and properly. Meanwhile it's quite awful not
hearing from him. I have never been so miserable in my life."

Stella sat on the floor at Marian's feet with Marian's misery. She
entered into it so deeply that after a time Marian felt surprised as
well as comforted. She had not thought grief so pictorial. She felt
herself placed on a pinnacle and lifted above the ranks of happier
lovers. She thought it was her love for Julian that held her there; she
did not know that it was Stella's love for her. Stella for a time saw
only Marian--Marian frozen in a vast suspense, Marian racked with
silences and tortured with imagined dangers. She did not see Julian
until Marian had gone, and then suddenly she put her hands to her
throat, as if she could not bear the sharp pulsation of fear that
assailed her. If all this time they were only fearing half enough and
Julian should be dead?

She whispered, "Julian dead!" Then she knew that she was not feeling any
more for Marian. She was feeling for herself. Fortunately, she knew
this didn't matter. Feeling for oneself was sharp and abominable, but it
could be controlled. It did not count; and she could keep this much of
Julian--the fear that he might be dead. It would not interfere with
Marian or with Julian. Hopes interfere: but Stella had no personal
hopes; she did not even envisage them. She claimed only the freedom of
her fears.




CHAPTER XI


It is disconcerting to believe that you are the possessor of one kind of
temper--a cold, deadly, on-the-spot temper--which cuts through the
insignificant flurries of other people like a knife through butter, and
then to find a sloppy explosiveness burst from you unaware.

Mr. Travers had never dreamed that in the town hall itself he could ever
be led to lose a thing he had in such entire control as his temper. He
did not lose it when the blushing Mr. Belk had the audacity to stop him
in mid-career, on his way to his sanctum through No. 7, the outer office
of his assistant clerks, though they were, as a body, strictly forbidden
to address him while passing to and fro. Mr. Belk was so ill advised as
to say:

"If you please, sir, it's four o'clock, and Miss Waring hasn't been out
to lunch yet." Mr. Travers merely ran his eye over Mr. Belk as a
fishmonger runs his eyes over vulnerable portions of cod laid out for
cutting, and brought down his chopper at an expert angle.

"Since when, Mr. Belk," he asked, with weary irony, "has Miss Waring's
lunch been on your list of duties?"

Then he passed swiftly into his office and faced Stella, closing the
door behind him. Temper shook him as a rough wind shakes an
insignificant obstacle. He could not hold it; it was gone. It blew
inside out like a deranged umbrella. He glared at Miss Waring. There was
nothing in her slight, bent figure, with its heavy, brown hair neatly
plaited in a crown about her head, which should have roused any town
clerk to sudden fury.

"It's abominable," Mr. Travers exclaimed, bringing his trembling hand
down with a bang upon Stella's table, "how women behave!"

Stella said out loud, "One hundred pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence,"
and then looked up at her employer. She asked very quietly who had vexed
him. There might have been a fugitive gleam of laughter at the back of
her eyes, but there were shadows under them that made her look too tired
for laughter.

"You, of course," he cried. "How are we ever to get through with our
work if you won't eat? It's so silly! It's so tiresome! It's so uncalled
for! Why are you doing these wretched lists now?"

"Because," said Stella--and now the laughter ran out at him unexpectedly
and tripped him up--"the town clerk has a meeting at five o'clock at
which these statistics must be at hand to justify him in having his own
way!"

"Put them down!" said Mr. Travers savagely. Stella laid down her pen
with the ready obedience which can be made so baffling when it proceeds
from an unconsenting will. "Now go out and get something to eat," he
went on, "while I do the wretched things. And don't let this occur
again. If you have too much to do,--and I know the correspondence gets
more and more every day,--mention it. We must get some help in."

She was gone before he had finished his sentence--gone with that absurd
dimple in the corner of her cheek and the sliding laughter of her eyes.

She had left behind her a curious, restless emptiness, as if the very
room itself waited impatiently for her return. It was half an hour
before she came back. The town clerk had had to answer three telephone
messages and four telegrams. If the outer office had not known that he
was there and Miss Waring wasn't, he would have had more interruptions.
Nevertheless, the figures had helped Mr. Travers to recover his temper.

He was an expert accountant, and you can take figures upon their
face-value. They are not like women; they have no dimples.

Mr. Travers was prepared to be the stern, but just, employer again. He
remained seated, and Stella leaned over his shoulder. He had not
expected that she would do this.

"What have you had to eat?" he asked. It was not at all what he had
intended to say to Stella.

"A cup of tea, two ham sandwiches, and a bun:--such a magnificent spread
for seven-pence!" replied Stella, cheerfully. "You've forgotten to put
in what the insurance will be--there at the bottom of the page."

Mr. Travers rose to his feet. He was taller than Stella, and he
considered that he had a commanding presence. Stella slid back into her
seat.

"You ought to have had," said Mr. Travers, with labored quietness,
"beefsteak and a glass of port."

"Anybody could tell," said Stella, tranquilly, "that you are an
abstemious man, Mr. Travers. Port! Port _and_ steak! You mean porter.
All real drinkers know that port is sacred. Bottles of it covered with
exquisite cobwebs are kept for choice occasions; they are brought in
softly by stately butlers, walking delicately like Agag. It is drunk in
companionable splendor, tenderly ministered to by nothing more solid
than a walnut, and it follows the courses of the sun. There, you did
quite a lot while I was away, and if you don't mind just looking through
those landlords' repairing leases on your desk, I dare say I shall have
finished this before five."

Mr. Travers opened his mouth, shut it again, and returned to his
repairing leases. He was not an employer any more. He was not an icy,
mysterious tyrant ruling over a trembling and docile universe: his own
secretary had literally told him to run away and play!

But it was in the night watches that the worst truth struck him. He had
been furious with Miss Waring for not spending more upon her lunch, he
had upbraided her for it, and she had never turned round and said, "Look
what I earn!" The opportunity was made to her hand. "How can women
secretaries earning a hundred a year eat three-and-sixpenny lunches?"
That ought to have been her answer. Why wasn't it? She hadn't been too
stupid to see it. She had seen it, and she had instantly, before he had
had time to see it himself, covered it up and hidden it under that
uncalled-for eulogy on port. It was not fear. She hadn't been afraid to
stand up to him (uncalled-for eulogies _were_ standing up to him);
besides she had previously called him unfair to his face. It was just
something that Miss Waring _was_--something that made the color spring
into Mr. Traver's face in the dark till his cheeks burned; something
that had made Mr. Belk dare his chief's displeasure to get her lunch;
something that wasn't business.

"She wouldn't take an advantage, because I'd given it to her," he said
to himself. "I thought everybody took an advantage when they had the
sense to see it; but she doesn't, though she has plenty of sense. But
the world couldn't go on like that."

This brilliant idea reassured Mr. Travers; he stopped blushing. He was
relieved to think that the world couldn't go on like Stella; but there
was something in him, a faint contradictory something, that made him
glad that Stella didn't go on like the world.

He went to sleep with these two points unreconciled.




CHAPTER XII


Stella had always known that it would come; she had spent two months
far-seeing it. It had usually taken the form of a telegram falling out
of Mrs. Waring's wool, or Eurydice standing upon the steps,
Cassandra-like, to greet her with a message from Marian. Marian would
come to give her the message, but she wouldn't wait; she would drive
swiftly away in a motor, and leave the broken universe behind her. But
disasters do not come as we have planned their coming.

It was a dull November day, the streets were full of dying leaves, and
at the end of all the cross-roads surrounding the town hall a blue mist
hung like a curtain. Marian, in black velvet and furs, with old Spanish
ear-rings gleaming from her shell-like ears, stood in disgust upon the
steps of the town hall. Her small face was frozen with unexpected pain,
but she could still feel annoyed with the porter. She stood in the
thronged corridor and asked decisively for Miss Waring.

The porter told her that Miss Waring worked in No. 7, or, at any rate,
No. 7 would know where she was working.

Marian stared slightly over the porter's head.

"My good man," she said, "how am I to know where No. 7 is? Go and tell
her to come to me. Here is my card."

All the way to No. 7 the porter concocted brilliant retorts to this
order. He would tell her he was not a footman and that this wasn't
Buckingham Palace. He would say roughly that, if she had eyes in her
head, she could find No. 7 for herself. But he was intimidated by
Marian's ear-rings. A secret fear that she might turn out to be the lord
mayor's daughter drove him to No. 7.

Stella was filing letters when he knocked, and when he saw the card she
knew the messenger had come; but she did not forget to say as usual,
"Oh, thank you, Humphreys."

She finished filing the letters before she looked for Mr. Travers.

He was coming out of the council chamber at the top of a flight of
stairs. She stood there for a moment, holding him with her eyes, her
lips parted. She looked like a bird that has been caught in a room and
despairs of finding the way out.

Her face was strained and eager, and her sensitive eyebrows were drawn
together in a little tortured frown; but she spoke quietly as soon as
her breath came back to her.

"Mr. Travers, a friend of mine is in trouble. May I go to her for the
afternoon? There is still a great deal to do,--I know I ought not to ask
you to let me go,--but Mr. Belk and Miss Flint are so kind that I am
sure they would help me. I--I should be very grateful if you could spare
me."

"Certainly not," said Mr. Travers, sharply. "I mean, of course, you can
go; but I won't have Mr. Belk or Miss Flint near me. I will do the work
myself."

"Oh," she cried, aghast at this magnanimous humility on the part of her
employer, "please don't! Do let me ask them! I'd so much rather--"

Mr. Travers waved her away. He wanted to do the work himself, and he
wanted her to be aghast. He descended the stairs rapidly beside her.

"You may leave immediately, Miss Waring," he said sternly as they
reached No. 7; "and I will make my own arrangements about your work."

Stella fled. Again he felt the sense of wings, as if he had opened a
window, and a bird had flown past him into liberty.

He did not want her to be grateful, but he thought she might have looked
back. She had noticed him only as a barrier unexpectedly fallen. She had
not seen how strange it was that a barrier of so stubborn and erect a
nature as Mr. Travers should have consented to fall.

If any one else had asked him for an afternoon with a friend in trouble,
Mr. Travers knew that he would have said, "Your friends' troubles must
take place outside office-hours." But when he had seen Stella's face he
had forgotten office-hours.

Marian was sitting on a chair in the corridor. Her expression implied
that there was no such thing as a town hall, and that the chair was a
mere concession to unnecessary space. She said, as she saw Stella:

"Please be quick about putting your things on. Yes, it's bad news about
Julian."

Stella was quick. Marian said no more until they were seated together in
the motor; then she gave Stella a letter she had received from Lady
Verny. Lady Verny wrote:

     My dear Marian: You must prepare yourself for a great distress.
     Julian is in England, but he is very much injured. I want you to go
     to him at once. Whenever he is conscious he asks for you. My dear,
     if he recovers,--and they think that if he has an incentive to live
     he will live,--he will be partially paralyzed. I know that he will
     want to free you, and it will be right that you should even now
     feel free; but till then--for a month--will you give him all you
     can? All he needs to live? It is a great deal to ask of you, but I
     think you are good and kind, and that I shall not ask this of you
     in vain. His life is valuable, and will still be so, for his brain
     is not affected. Before he relapsed into unconsciousness he was
     able to give the Government the information he acquired. I think it
     is not wrong to help him to live; but of course I am his mother,
     and it is difficult for me to judge. All this is very terrible for
     you, even the deciding of whether you ought to help him to live or
     not. If I might suggest anything to you, it would be to talk about
     it with that friend of yours, Miss Waring.

     Come to me when you have seen him. Do not think, whatever your
     decision is, that I shall not realize what it costs you, or fail
     to do all in my power to help you to carry it out.

     Yours affectionately,

     HELEN VERNY.

Stella dropped the letter and looked at Marian. Marian sat erect, and
her eyes burned. She was tearless and outraged by sorrow. There are
people who take joy as a personal virtue and sorrow as a personal
insult, and Marian was one of these people. Happiness had softened and
uplifted her; pain struck her down and humiliated her solid sense of
pride.

"Why wasn't he killed?" she asked bitterly, meeting Stella's questioning
eyes. "I could have borne his being killed. Value! What does Lady Verny
mean by value? His career is smashed; his life is to all intents and
purposes over. And mine with it! It is very kind of her to say he will
release me. I do not need his mother to tell me that. She seems to have
overlooked the fact that I have given him my word! Is it likely that I
should fail him or that I could consent to be released? I do not need
any one to tell me my duty. But I hate life! I _hate_ it! I think it all
stupid, vile, senseless! Why did I ever meet him? What good has love
been to me? A few hours' happiness, and then this martyrdom set like a
trap to catch us! And I don't like invalids. I have never seen any one
very ill. I sha'n't know what to say to him."

"Oh, yes, you will, when you see him," said Stella; it was all that for
a while she could say.

She had always believed that Marian had a deep, but close-locked,
nature. Love presumably would be the key.

It was unlocked now. Pain had unlocked it, instead of love, and Stella
shivered at the tearless hardness, the sharp, shallow sense of personal
privation that occupied Marian's heart. She had not yet thought of
Julian.

Stella told herself that Marian's was only the blindness of the
unimaginative. The moment Marian saw Julian it would pass, and yield
before the directer illumination of the heart. Marian's nature was
perhaps one of those that yields very slowly to pain. When she saw
Julian she would forget everything else. She would not think of her
losses and sacrifices any more, or her duties. Stella felt curiously
stung and wasted by Marian's use of the word "duty." Was that all there
was for the woman whom Julian loved? Was that all there was for Julian!

But she could deal only with what Marian had; so, when she spoke again,
Stella said all she could to comfort Marian. She spoke of Julian's
courage; she said no life in Julian could be useless that left his brain
free to act. She suggested that he would find a new career for himself,
and she pictured his future successes. Beneath her lips and her quick
outer mind she thought only of Julian, broken.

They stopped in a large, quiet square, at the door of a private
hospital. There was no sound but the half-notes of birds stirring at
twilight in the small square garden, and far off the muffled murmur of
distant streets.

A nurse opened the door.

"You are Miss Young?" she said to Marian. "Yes, of course, we were
expecting you. Sister would like to see you first."

They stood for a moment in a small neat office. The sister rose from an
old Dutch bureau, one of the traces of the house's former occupants, and
held out her hand to Marian. Her eyes rested with intentness upon the
girl's face.

"Sir Julian is almost certain to know you," she said gently, "but you
mustn't talk much to him. He has been much weakened by exposure. He lay
in a wood for three days without food or water. There is every hope of
his partial recovery, Miss Young; but he needs rest and reassurance. We
can give him the rest here, but we must look to you to help us to bring
back to him the love of life."

Marian stood with her beautiful head raised proudly. She waited for a
moment to control her voice; then she asked quietly:

"Is the paralysis likely to be permanent?"

The sister moved a chair toward her, but Marian shook her head.

"It is a state of partial paralysis. He will be able to get about on
crutches," the sister replied. "Won't you rest for a few moments before
going up to him, Miss Young?"

"No, thank you," said Marian; "I will go up to him at once."

She turned quickly toward the door, and meeting Stella's eyes, she took
and held her arm tightly for a moment, and then, loosing it, walked
quickly toward the stairs. Stella followed her as if she had no being.
She had lost all consciousness of herself. She was a thought that clung
to Julian, an unbodied idea fixed upon the cross of Julian's pain. She
did not see the staircase up which she passed; she walked through the
wood in which Julian had lain three days.

He was in a large, airy room with two other men. Stella did not know
which was Julian until he opened his eyes. There was no color in his
face, and very little substance. The other men were raised in bed and
looked alive, but Julian lay like something made of wax and run into a
mold. Only his eyes lived--lived and flickered, and held on to his
drifting consciousness.

The nurse guided Marian to his bed, and, drawing a chair forward, placed
it close to him. Marian leaned down and kissed his forehead. She had
determined to do that, whatever he looked like; and she did it.

His lips moved. She bent down, and a whisper reached her: "I said I'd
come back to you, and I have." Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing
further to say.

Marian did not cry. After the first moment she did not look at Julian;
she looked away from him out of the window. She did not feel that it was
Julian who lay there like a broken toy. It was her duty. She had
submitted to it; but nothing in her responded to this submission except
her iron will.

The nurse had forgotten to bring a chair for Stella. She leaned against
the door until a red-haired boy with a bandaged arm, on the bed nearest
to her, exclaimed earnestly:

"Do take my chair! You look awfully done."

She was able to take his chair because her hands were less blind than
any other part of her, and she smiled at him because she had the habit
of smiling when she thanked people. Then her eyes went back to Julian.
Her heart had never left him; and she knew now that it never would leave
him again.

She did not know how long or short it was before Marian rose gracefully,
and said in her clear, sweet voice, "I shall come again to-morrow,
Julian."

Marian stopped at each of the other bedsides before she joined Stella.
She said little, friendly, inclusive words to the other two men, which
made them feel as if they would like to sweep the floor under her feet.

"All the same," the red-haired man explained after the door closed, "it
was the untidy little one, piled up against the door, that minded most.
I dare say she was his sister."

He had no need to lower his voice, though he did lower it, for fear of
its reaching Julian.

Julian had been reassured, and now he was resting. Consciousness had
altogether receded from him, perhaps that it might give him a better
chance of resting.




CHAPTER XIII


Julian roused himself with the feeling that he had said only half of
what he had intended to say to Marian. It had been in his mind a long
time. It was while he was lying out under the pine-trees that he had
realized what he had got to say to Marian if he ever got back. There was
a complicated cipher message for the Government, which he had kept quite
clear in his mind, and eventually given to an intelligent doctor to send
off; and there was the message to Marian, which he himself would have to
say when he saw her.

"I've come back, as I promised; but I can't marry you now, of course.
I'm a crock."

The first time he saw Marian he had got through only the first part of
the sentence. There was no hurry about the rest of it. The doctor and
the sister had both assured him that there was no hurry. They had been
very kind, and quite as honest as their profession permitted. They said
Marian would come back, and he could tell her then.

They admitted, when he cross-questioned them with all the sharpness of
which he was capable, that he would be a <DW36>. They did not bother
him with futile commiserations. They gave him quietly and kindly the
facts he asked for. He would never be able to walk again, but he could
get about easily on crutches.

Julian did not want to live very much, but his mother's eyes hurt him
when he tried not to; and then Marian came again, and he got through the
rest of his sentence.

"You see," he explained in a low whisper which sounded in his head like
a gong, "marriage is quite out of the question."

Marian was there with smiles and flowers, just as he had so often
pictured her; but she sat down with a curious solidity, and her voice
sounded clearer than it had sounded in his dreams.

"Nothing alters our engagement, Julian," she said. "Nothing can."

She spoke with a finality that stopped his thinking. He had finished his
sentence, and it seemed hardly fair to be expected to start another on
the spur of the moment. He gave himself up to a feeling of intense
relief: he had got off his cipher to the Government and he had released
Marian.

He had known these were going to be difficult things to do. The cipher
had been the worst. The French doctor had taken some time to understand
that Julian must neither die nor be attended to until he had sent the
cipher off; and now the business about Marian was over, too. He had only
to lie there and look at her day by day coming in with roses. They did
not talk much. Julian never spoke of his symptoms, but they were too
radical to free him. He lay under them like a creature pinned under the
wreckage of a railway accident.

Slowly, day by day, his strength came back to him; and as it came back,
peace receded. His eyes lost their old adoring indulgence; they seemed
to be watching Marian covertly, anxious for some gift that she was
withholding from him. He did not demand this as a right, as the old
Julian would have done, breaking down the barriers of her pride to
reach it. He pleaded for it with shamed eyes that met hers only to
glance away. Something in her that was not cruelty as much as a baffling
desire to escape him made her refuse to give him what his eyes asked.

Julian had loved her for her elusiveness, and the uncaptured does not
yield readily to any appeal from the hunter. The prize is to the strong.

She would not have withstood a spoken wish of his; but there is
something in speechless suffering from which light sympathies shrink
away. Pity lay in Marian a tepid, quickly roused feeling, blowing
neither hot nor cold. She cried easily over sad books, but she had none
of the maternal instinct which seizes upon the faintest indication of
pain with a combative passion for its alleviation. She became
antagonistic when she was personally disturbed by suffering.

She was keeping her word to Julian while her heart was drifting away
from him; and he, while he desired her to be free, instinctively tried
to hold her back. They had both put their theories before their
instincts, and they expected their instincts to stand aside until their
theories had been carried out.

Perhaps if Julian could have told her his experiences he might have
recaptured her imagination; but when she asked him to tell her about
them, he said quickly, "I can't," and turned away his head. He was
afraid to trust himself. He wanted to tell her everything. He was afraid
that if he began, his reticence would break down, and he would tell her
things which must never pass his lips. He longed for her to know that
every day, and nearly every hour, he had fought and conquered intricate
abnormal obstacles. He had slipped across imminent death as a steady
climber grips and passes across the face of a precipice.

He had never faltered. All that he had gone to find he had found, and
more. At each step he had seen a fresh opportunity, and taken it. He had
been like a bicyclist in heavy traffic assailed on every side by
converging vehicles, and yet seeing only the one wavering ribbon of his
way out. And he had won his way out with knowledge that was worth a
king's ransom. He could have borne anything if Marian would realize that
what he had borne had been worth while. But after her first unanswered
question, Marian never referred again to what he had done. She behaved
as if his services had been a regrettable mistake.

She talked with real feeling about the sufferings of those who fought in
the war. Her eyes seemed to tell him what her lips refrained from
uttering, that she could have been more sorry for him if he had been
wounded in a trench, and not shot at and abandoned by a nervous sentry
firing in the dark. He could not remember the exact moment when out of
the vague turmoil of his weakened mind he gripped this cold truth:
Marian was not tender.

When she was not there he could pretend. He could make up all the
beautiful, loving little things she had not said, and sometimes he would
not remember that he had made them up. Those were the best moments of
all. He believed then that she had given him what his heart hungered
for. He was too much ashamed of his ruined strength to feel resentment
at Marian's coldness. It struck him as natural that she should care less
for a broken man.

His mind traveled slowly, knocking against the edges of his old dreams.

He thought perhaps a nursing home wasn't the kind of place in which
people could really understand one another, all mixed up with screens
and medicine bottles, and nurses bringing things in on trays. If he
could see Marian once at Amberley for the last time, so that he could
keep the picture of her moving about the dark wainscoted rooms, or
looking out from the terrace above the water meadows, he would have
something precious to remember for the rest of his life; and she
mightn't mind him so much there, surrounded by the dignity of the old
background of his race. One day he said to her:

"I want to go to Amberley as soon as I can be moved. I want to see it
again with you."

"In December?" asked Marian, with lifted, disapproving brows. "It would
be horribly damp, my dear Julian, all water-meadows and mist. You would
be much more comfortable here."

Julian frowned. He hated the word "comfort" in connection with himself.

"You don't understand," he said, a little impatiently. "I know every
inch of it, and it's quite jolly in the winter. We are above the water.
I want to see the downs. One gets tired of milk-carts and barrel organs,
and the brown tank on the roof across the way. You remember the downs,
Marian?"

His eyes met hers again with that new, curiously weak look of his.
Marian turned her head away. How could Julian bear to speak of the
downs?

She saw for a moment the old Julian springing up the hillside assured
and eager, the fine, strong lover who had taken her heart by storm. She
spoke coldly to this weaker Julian.

"Yes," she said, "I am not likely to forget the downs. I spent the last
happy hours of my life there; but I cannot say I ever wish to see them
again."

Julian's eyes fell, so that she could not see if he had even noticed how
bitterly she remembered Amberley.

The next day she found him sitting up for the first time. He was propped
up by cushions, but it made him look as if he had gained some of his
old incisive strength.

The other two men had been moved, and they had the large, bare room to
themselves.

No sound came from the square beneath them; in the house itself there
were passing footsteps and the occasional persistent buzzing of an
electric bell.

"Look here," said Julian in a queer, dry voice, "I've got an awful lot
to say to you--d'you mind drawing your chair nearer? I meant to say it
at Amberley. I'd have liked it better there. I rather hate this kind of
disinfected, sloppy place for talk. You must loathe it, too. But here or
there it's got to be said. You said something or other when I first put
it to you--about our engagement never being broken. It was awfully good
of you, of course. I couldn't see through it at the time. I wanted to
let things slide. But it's all nonsense my dear girl. Women like you
can't marry logs of wood."

[Illustration: "Women like you can't marry logs of wood"]

He looked at her anxiously. Her eyes were shut to expression. She sat
there, just as lovely, just as sphinx-like as some old smiling portrait.
There was the same unfluctuating, delicate color in her face, and the
same unharassed, straightforward glancing of the eyes. She was not the
least perturbed by what he said; she expected him to say it.

"We should be foolish," she answered quietly, "to try to ignore the
terrible difference in our lives, Julian, and I was sure you would want
to set me free; but you cannot do it. I took the risk of your accident,
unwillingly at first; but, still, eventually I accepted it, and I will
not be set free."

His eyes held hers compellingly, as if he were searching for some inner
truth behind her words, and then slowly reluctant tears gathered across
the keenness of his vision. He leaned his head back on his pillow and
looked away.

"I don't think," he said slowly, "you're glad to have me back. I don't
want to marry you, I couldn't marry you; but I wish to Heaven you'd been
glad! O Marian, I'm a coward and a fool, but if you'd been glad, I'd
have gone down under it! I'd have married you then. I oughtn't to say
this. It's all nonsense, and you're quite right. It's awfully fine of
you to want to keep your word; but, you see, I didn't want your word.
It's your heart I wanted. I used to say out there sometimes, when things
were a bit thick, 'Never mind. If I get through, she'll be glad.'"

Marian drew herself up. This did not seem to her fair of Julian. She had
prayed very earnestly to God for his safe return. Neither God nor he had
been quite fair about it. This was not a safe return.

"I don't know what more I can do, Julian," she said steadily, "than
offer to share my life with you."

"That's just it," said Julian, with that curious look in his eyes which
kept fighting her, and yet appealing to her simultaneously. "You can't
do more. If you could, I'm such a weak hound, I'd lie here and take it.
If you wanted me, Marian,--wanted a broken fragment of a man fit for a
dust-pan,--I'd land you with it. But, 'pon my word, it's too steep when
you don't want it. Out of some curious sense of duty toward the
dust-pan--I'm afraid I'm being uncivil to the universe, but I feel a
little uncivil to it just now. No; you've got to go. I'm sorry. Don't
touch me. Just let me be; but if you could say just where you are
before you go! But it doesn't matter. I shouldn't believe it. I wouldn't
believe the mother that bore me now. I've seen the end of love."

The tears burned themselves away from his eyes; they gazed at her as
sunken and blue as the sea whipped by an east wind. She turned slowly
toward the door.

"I want you to remember, Julian," she said, "that I meant what I said. I
mean it still. I _wish_ to carry out our engagement."

Julian said something in reply that Marian didn't understand. He was
repeating out loud and very slowly the cipher he had sent to the
Government.

After all, it had been easier to send the cipher to the Government than
to release Marian. His mind had sprung back to the easier task.




CHAPTER XIV


It was not often that Stella took anything for herself, least of all
Saturday afternoons. They belonged by a kind of sacred right to
Eurydice, and what was left over from Eurydice was used on the weekly
accounts. Mrs. Waring found it easier to explain to Stella than to any
one else why one and sixpence that was really due to the butcher should
have been expended upon "The Will of God," bound in white and gold for
eighteenpence, an indisputable spiritual bargain, but a poor equivalent
to the butcher.

But this Saturday afternoon Stella hardened her heart against Eurydice
and turned her mind away from the vista of the weekly bills. She wanted
to think about Julian.

Marian had left London the day after her interview with him. She
belonged to that class of people which invariably follows a disagreeable
event by a change of address; but she had found time before she went to
write to Stella. There was something she wanted Stella to send on after
her from the Army and Navy stores. She was really too upset and rushed
to go there herself. Julian had been so extraordinary; he apparently
expected her to be fonder of him now than when he was all right. She had
really made tremendous sacrifices going to that horrid nursing home
every day for a month. Both her parents were delighted that the
engagement was at an end, and of course it was a relief in some ways,
though horribly sad and upsetting, especially as Julian behaved as if
she were to blame. Marian was afraid he wasn't as chivalrous as she had
always thought. She had idealized him. One does when one is in love with
people; but it doesn't last. One wakes up and finds everything
different.

Stella wanted to forget Marian's letter. It seemed to her as cursory and
callous as a newspaper account of a storm in China. It was all so far
off, and drowned Chinamen are so much alike; and yet she had written to
tell Stella about Julian and the end of love. "Many waters cannot quench
love"; it had not taken many waters to quench Marian's. It occurred to
Stella for the first time that the quality of love depends solely upon
the heart that holds it; not even divine fire can burn on an untended
hearth.

It was a mild December day; winter had given itself a few soft hours in
which to brood upon the spring. London, the last of places to feel the
touch of nature and the first to profit by it, had passed into a golden
mist.

Stella left the town hall at two o'clock, and walked down the busy
highway. All the little, lively shops were awake and doing their noisy
business of the week, while farther west all the big, quiet shops, with
other habits, closed on the heels of their departing customers. Stella
slipped away from the eager friendly crowd, glued together in
indissoluble groups upon the pavement. She wanted to be alone and not to
have to keep reminding herself not to think of Julian until she had
finished what she had to do.

She turned down a narrow lane with high brick walls. Silence and
solitude were at the turn of a corner. London fell away from her like a
jangling dream.

She passed an iron-scrolled gateway which led into an old garden. The
low-browed house, with its overhanging eaves, was once the home of a
famous poet. Poetry clung about it still; it was in the air, and met her
like the touch of a friend's hand. A little farther along the lane she
came to an opening in the wall, and saw before her a small, surrounded
field of grass. It was a Quaker burial-ground. This unique and quiet
people, in their enmity with form, had chosen of all forms the most
resilient. They had made in the heart of London a picture, and a place
of peace for death.

There was no sense of desolation in the silent field; only the sunshine,
the old walls, and the green emptiness. It might have been the
grass-grown citadel of Tusculum spread out at Stella's feet, it was a
spot so acquainted with the air, with solitude, and with a nameless
history.

Beyond it lay a maze of old and narrow streets, with quaint, lop-sided
houses, uneven roofs, and winding causeways.

At the end of one of these she came suddenly upon a waste of waters the
color of a moonstone. Stella had never been abroad; but she felt as if
a wall between her mind and space had broken down and shown her Venice.
Drifting slowly down the broad stream were two white swans, and across
the river a green bank stood beneath a row of shining towers.

They were a row of factory chimneys; but rising out of the mist, above
the moonstone flood, they looked like ancient towers. Stella sat upon a
wooden float; it made a luxurious seat for her opposite the drifting
swans. She felt as if all her thoughts at last were free. There was no
one in sight; old and dignified houses leaned toward the water-front:
but for all the life that inhabited them, they might have been the
ghosts of houses. Nothing stirred, but sometimes up the river a
sea-gull, on level wings, with wary eyes, wandered above the watery
highway, challenging the unaccustomed small spaces of the sky.

Stella wished for the first time that Julian were dead. She did not
believe in a capricious or an impatient God, moved by well-timed
petitions; but all her being absorbed itself into an unconscious prayer
for Julian's peace.

She could not have told how long she had been there when she heard the
sound of footsteps, strangely familiar footsteps, direct, regular, and
swift. She looked up, to meet the grave, intent gaze of Mr. Leslie
Travers.

Stella rubbed her eyes as if she had been asleep. Surely in a place of
whispering silences, town clerks did not burst upon you except in
dreams?

Of course Mr. Travers might live in one of these old, quiet houses,
though it did not seem very likely to Stella. She thought he must live
in some place where the houses looked as if they knew more what they
were about, and did not brood over a deserted waterway

    Seeing all their own mischance
      With a glassy countenance,

like that immortal gazer, the _Lady of Shalott_.

Mr. Travers did not pass Stella with his usual air of cutting through
space like a knife. He crossed the float gingerly, and asked firmly, but
with kindness, if he might sit down.

Stella gave a helpless gesture of assent. She could not stop him, but he
was inappropriate. The row of factory chimneys ceased to disguise
themselves as towers; the float looked as if it knew suddenly how
unsuitable it was for a winter afternoon's repose. The swans,
approaching fatally near for the ideal, were very nearly black.

"Do you not find it damp here?" asked Mr. Travers.

Stella said:

"Yes, very"; and then, meeting his surprised eyes, she hastily corrected
herself. "No, not at all." Then gave a little, helpless laugh. "Forgive
me!" she said. "You surprised me so. Has anything gone wrong at the town
hall?"

Mr. Travers did not immediately answer her question. He had never sat on
a float before. Still, it was not this fact which silenced him. He had
not been sure when he approached if Stella was crying or not. There was
still something that looked suspiciously like the pathway of a tear upon
the cheek next him, and though she was laughing now, it had not the
sound of her usual laughter; it stirred in him a sense of tears.

"I think I shall confess at once," he said finally, "that I followed
you. I wanted to talk to you without interruption. I might have called
upon you at your home, of course, but I have not had the pleasure of
meeting your family, and in this instance my business was with you."

Stella gave a faint sigh of relief. She was glad it was business. She
was used to business with Mr. Travers. She was not used to pleasure with
him, and she was not in the mood for new experiences.

"I shall be glad to talk over anything with you about which I can be of
use," she said gently, "and I think this is a beautiful place to do it
in."

"The rents," said Mr. Travers, glancing critically at the silent houses,
"must be very low, necessarily low. I hope you do not often come here,"
he added after a pause. "It is the kind of place in which I should
strongly suspect drains. We might mention it to the sanitary inspector
and ask him for a report upon it."

"Oh, must we?" murmured Stella.

"Not if you would rather not," said Mr. Travers, unexpectedly. "In that
case I would waive the question."

Stella glanced at him in alarm. Was Mr. Travers going mad from
overstrain at the town hall? He must be very nearly mad to come and sit
upon a float with his secretary on Saturday afternoon, and waive a
question of drains.

"But that wouldn't be business," she said gravely.

"Yes, it would," said Mr. Travers, relentlessly. "It is my immediate
business to please you."

Stella's alarm deepened; but it became solely for Mr. Travers. She did
not mind if he was sane or not if only he refrained from saying anything
that he would ultimately regret.

"I don't know whether you realize, Miss Waring," Mr. Travers continued,
"that I am a very lonely man. I have no contemporary relatives. My
father died when I was a young child. I lost my mother two years ago. My
work has not entailed many friendships. I began office work very young,
and it has to a great extent absorbed me. I think I should be afraid to
say it to any one but you,--it would sound laughable,--but my chief
attachment of late years has been to a cat."

It was curious that, though Mr. Travers had often been nervous of his
secretary's humor, he understood that she would not laugh at him about
his cat.

"Oh," she cried, "I hope it loves you as well. They won't sometimes, I
know; you can pour devotion out on them, and they won't turn a hair. But
when they do, it's so wonderfully reassuring. Dogs will love almost any
one, but cats discriminate. I do hope your cat discriminates toward you,
Mr. Travers?"

"I think it was attached to me in its way," said Mr. Travers, clearing
his throat. "It was an old cat, and now it is dead. I merely mention it
in passing."

"Yes, yes," said Stella, quickly. "But I'm so sorry! I hate to think you
had to lose what you loved."

"You would," said Mr. Travers. "But the point I wish to make to you is
that a man whose sole dependence is upon the attachment of a cat does
not know much about human relationships. I fear I am exceedingly
ignorant upon this subject. Until lately this had not particularly
disturbed me. Now I should wish to have given it more consideration."

"But I think you have," said Stella, eagerly; "I mean I think you've
changed lately about relationships. Now I think of it, I'm quite sure
you have. I have always enjoyed my work with you, and you have never
been inconsiderate to me. But I used to think people weren't very real
to you, as if you wanted to hurry through them and stick them on a neat,
tight file, like the letters, according to their alphabetical order. But
now I know you're not like that. Even if you hadn't told me about the
cat I should have known it."

"Thank you," said Mr. Travers. "Thank you very much."

For a while he said nothing at all, and Stella wondered if that was all
he wanted. She hoped it was all he wanted. Then he turned and looked
down at her.

"I have formed an attachment now, Miss Waring," he said, "and I am in a
suitable position to carry it out. You have been the best secretary a
man ever had. Could you undertake to become my wife?"

Stella bowed her head. She had come here to think about Julian, but she
had not been able to think about him for very long. She did not think
about him at all now. She thought only about Mr. Travers. She was so
sorry for him that she could not look at him. What compensation was
there for what she had not got to give him, and in what mad directions
does not pity sometimes drive? For a moment she felt as if she could not
say "No" to him; but to say "Yes" would make nothing any easier, for
after she had said "Yes" she would have nothing more to give.

There is seldom any disastrous situation in which there is not something
that can be saved. Stella saw in a flash what she might still save out
of it. She could save Mr. Travers's pride at the cost of hers. She was a
very proud and a very reticent woman; she would take the deepest thing
in her heart and show it to Mr. Travers that he might not feel ashamed
at having shown her his own.

"I can't," she said quickly, slipping her small, firm hand over his;
"not because it isn't beautiful of you. It is, of course; it's one of
the most beautiful things I've ever known, because you know nothing
about me, and I'm so glad I'm not what you would really like if you did
know me. Remember that afterward."

"Excuse me," interrupted Mr. Travers, dryly; "I am the best judge of
what I like."

"I wonder if you really are," said Stella, with a little gasp, as if she
had been running. "I wonder if I really am myself. But we both think we
are, don't we? We can't help that--and the very same thing has happened
to us both: we've seen and wanted a little--something that wouldn't
do--that wouldn't do at all for either of us ever. If you _had_ to like
somebody that wouldn't do, I think I'm glad you came to me, because, you
see, I know what it feels like. I can be sorry and proud and glad you've
given it to me, and then we need never talk about it any more."

Mr. Travers looked straight in front of him. Stella had not withdrawn
her hand; but Mr. Travers pressed it, and laid it down reverentially
between them. He would never forget that he had held it, but to continue
to hold it until she had accepted him would have seemed to Mr. Travers a
false position.

"There is another point to which I should like to draw your attention,"
he said after a slight pause. "Marriage does not necessarily imply any
feeling of an intense nature by both parties. I wish to offer you
security and companionship. As I told you before, I am a lonely man; I
could be content with very little. I have noticed that when you come
into a room it makes a difference to me."

"Don't make me cry!" said Stella, suddenly, and then she did cry a
little, a nervous flurry of tears that shook her for a brief moment and
left her laughing at the consternation in his face.

"You see how silly I am!" she said. "But however silly, I'm not a cheat.
You offer me everything. I couldn't take it and not offer you everything
back. To me marriage means everything. It isn't only--is it?--a
perpetual companionship, though when you think of it, that's
tremendous,--almost all the other companionships of life are
intermittent, but it's the building up of fresh life out of a single
love."

Mr. Travers looked away. He was surprised that Stella had not shocked
him. The idea of any woman mentioning the existence of a child until she
had a child might have shocked him; but Stella failed to move his sense
of propriety. It even struck him that marriage would be less inclined
to lapse into the sordid and irregular struggles of his experience if it
was based upon so plain a foundation. He looked away because he felt
that now he could not change her.

Stella wished that they were in a house. It struck her that a room would
give more of the advantages of a retreat to Mr. Travers. She was very
anxious to make his retreat easy for him.

"Would you do me a tremendous service?" she asked gently.

He turned quickly to face her.

"That is what I should like to do you," he said. But he looked at her a
little suspiciously, for he was not sure that the service Stella asked
wouldn't, after all, be only some new way of helping him.

"You said the other day," she said, meeting his eyes with unswerving
candor, "that I might have extra help if I wanted it. I do want very
much to find some work for my sister, Eurydice. She is very clever;
cleverer than I am a great deal, only in a different way. She used to
write books, but that did not pay her very well, and when the war came,
she went into the city and worked for a secretarial diploma. I think
she would be of use to you, if you would go slowly with her and make
allowances for her different ways of being clever. Would you like to
help her?"

Mr. Travers hesitated. Then he stood up and held out his hand to her.

"The sun has begun to go," he said; "I assure you it is not healthy for
you to linger here. Of course I will engage your sister."

Stella gave a little sigh of relief. She had found a way out for Mr.
Travers.




CHAPTER XV


After the arrival of Eurydice, Mr. Travers saw very little of Stella. At
certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in
some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from
personal contact. She had been impersonal before, but only in a
businesslike and friendly way. She was impersonal now as if she was not
there.

She could control her attention, but she no longer felt any vitality
behind it. She knew where her life had gone, and she was powerless to
call it back to her. It hovered restlessly about the spirit of Julian.
Stella had never known what it was to repine at her own fate. If there
were many things she wanted that she could not have, she had consoled
herself with driving her desires into what was left to her. But she
could not do this for Julian.

He had had so much farther to fall. She saw his face as she had seen it
first, with its look of human strength; his frosty, blue eyes, his heavy
sledge-hammer chin, and all the alertness, the controlled activity, of
his young figure. She saw him again like something made of wax,
emaciated and helpless, with flickering eyes. He had not believed in
knocking under, and he had felt defeat incredible.

But defeat had met him, a blundering defeat that wrecked his body and
left his unprotected heart to face disaster.

Would he have courage enough for this restricted battle against
adversity? Courage did strange things with pain. It transformed and
utilized it; but courage does not spring readily from a mortally wounded
pride. Marian, with a complete lack of intention, had robbed Julian of
his first weapon. She had dissipated his resources by undermining his
confidence, and left him perilously near to the stultification of
personal bitterness.

Would it be possible for Julian to escape resentment? Or would he pass
down that long lane which has no turning, and ends in the bottomless bog
of self-pity, in which the finest qualities of the human spirit sink
like a stone?

Step by step Stella passed with him, by all the hidden and vivid
obstacles between his soul and victory, between it and defeat.

She could do nothing, but she could not stop her ceaseless watchfulness.
She was like some one who strains his eyes forever down an empty road.
The days began to lengthen into a long cold spring. There were no
outward changes in her life: the drafty town hall, the long bus-rides,
the bad news from France, and at home the pinch and ugliness of poverty.
She had stopped being afraid that people would notice a difference in
her. Nobody noticed any difference. She behaved in the same way and did
the same things. She had gone down under the waters of life without so
much as a splash.

"I suppose," Stella said to herself, "lots of us see ghosts every day
without knowing it." She had a vague feeling that Mr. Travers knew it,
but that he kept it in the back of his mind like an important paper in a
case, which it was no use producing unless you could act upon it.

It was an awful day of snow and wind. Everybody but Stella and the
porter had gone home. She had been stupid over the municipal accounts;
over and over again her flagging mind stuck at the same mistake. At last
she finished. She was still sixpence out; but she might see the sixpence
in a flash the next morning, and there would be no flash in anything she
could see to-night.

When she reached the door she found the gale had become formidable and
chaotic. She staggered out of the town hall into the grip of a fury. All
London shook and quivered; trees were torn down and flung across the
road like broken twigs; taxis were blown into lamp-posts; the icy air
tore and raged and screamed as if the elements had set out to match and
overwhelm the puny internecine struggles of man. "This," Stella thought
to herself, "is like a battle--noise, confusion, senselessness. I must
hold on to whatever keeps stillest, and get home in rushes."

But nothing kept very still. She was doubtful about trembling
lamp-posts, and area-railings twitched and shook under her hands. Her
skirts whipped themselves about her like whom panic was overcoming
fury, "why not send for her? Lizzie, here are two shillings; go out and
see if you can find a taxi."

Stella tried to say what might happen to Lizzie in the search for a
taxi, but the effort to speak finished her strength. When she could
realize what was happening again, Cicely had arrived. She pounced upon
the emergency as a cat upon a mouse.

In a few minutes Stella was tucked up warm and dry, poulticed and eased,
capable of a little very short breath, propped up by pillows. The
professor had retired to his study with a cup of cocoa hotter than he
had known this cheering vegetable to be since Cicely's departure.

Mrs. Waring was breathing very slowly in her bedroom to restore calm to
the household, and Eurydice was crying bitterly into the kitchen sink.
She was quite sure that Stella was going to die, and that Cicely would
save her.

The second of these two calamities took place. Stella was very ill with
pleurisy, and remained very ill for several days. Cicely interfered with
death as drastically as she interfered with everything else. She
dragged Stella reluctantly back into a shaky convalescence.

"Now you're going to get well," she announced to her in a tone of abrupt
reproach. "But what I don't understand is the appalling state of
weakness you're in. You must have been living under some kind of strain.
I don't mean work. Work alone wouldn't have made such a hash of you.
Come, you may as well own up. What was it?"

Stella blinked her eyes, and looked round her like a dazzled stranger.
Usually she was very fond of her room,--it was a small back room, over a
yard full of London cats,--but it struck her now that there were too
many things with which she was familiar. It was the same with Cicely.
She dearly loved and valued Cicely, but she knew the sight and sound of
her extraordinarily well.

"Nothing," said Stella, deprecatingly. "It's no use applying gimlets and
tweezers to my moral sense, Cicely. Not even the Inquisition could deal
with a hole. Heretics were solid. I have a perfect right to be ill from
a cold wind. The world seemed made of it that night, and I swallowed
half the world. It must be rather a strain for a thin person to swallow
half the world on an empty stomach. I'm quite all right now, thanks to
you. I was thinking I ought to get back to the town hall next week.
Only, queerly enough, I had another offer of work. Still, it's so
sketchy, that I couldn't honestly fling up my own job for it, though it
sounds rather attractive."

"Let's see it," said Cicely, succinctly. "You do conceal things,
Stella."

Stella withdrew an envelop from under her pillow. She looked a little
anxious after its surrender. Cicely always made her a little anxious
over a tentative idea. She had a way of materializing a stray thought,
and flinging it back upon Stella as an incontrovertible fact. Stella was
very anxious not to think that what was in the letter she gave to Cicely
was really a fact. It was like some strange dream that hasn't any right
to come true. Cicely read:

     Dear Miss Waring: You will think this a most extraordinary request
     for me to make, and in many ways it is too unformulated to be a
     request. You will have heard from Marian that six months ago her
     engagement with my son came to an end. This was the natural and
     right thing to happen, but it has left him in his invalid condition
     very much without resources.

     You were, I remember your telling me, a secretary to Professor
     Paulson. I am inclined to think that my son might have his mind
     directed to some scientific work if he could meet any one who would
     interest him anew in the subject. Probably you are immersed in
     other work, but if by any possible chance you should be at liberty
     and cared to make the experiment, could you come here for a few
     weeks? You would be conferring a great favor upon us, and if the
     secretaryship developed out of your little visit, we would arrange
     any terms that suited you. I may add that I find my son has no
     remembrance of your association with Marian; indeed, he has
     forgotten the occasion of your meeting.

     He has been so very ill that you will understand and excuse this, I
     feel sure; and in the circumstances I think we had better not refer
     to it. I am very anxious to divert his mind from the past, and I
     have a feeling that if I could count upon your cooperation, we
     might succeed.

     Yours sincerely,

     HELEN VERNY.

"I don't see anything sketchy about it," said Cicely, slowly; "in the
circumstances, I mean. You needn't definitely chuck the town hall.
You'll get a couple of weeks' holiday. They'll give you a fortnight's
extension easily, and if the job comes your way, it would be a suitable
one. Anyway, you must of course accept it provisionally--"

"I don't see why I must of course accept it," said Stella. "You never
see any alternatives, Cicely. Your mind is like one of those sign-posts
that have only one name on it, with fields all round and heaps of other
places to go to. It must be awfully confusing to be as simple as you
are. Why couldn't I go back to the town hall next week?"

"Well, I'll tell you one reason why," said Cicely, grimly. "Simple or
not, your heart's as weak as a toy watch; you very nearly died a week
ago, and in my opinion if you went back to the town hall, you'd be
signing your own death-certificate."

"I couldn't do that," said Stella, gravely; "it's not legal. I'm not the
next of kin to myself. I know much more about death-certificates than
you do. If I go to Lady Verny at Amberley, what's to become of
Eurydice?"

"Eurydice will stay where she is," said Cicely. "If you ever saw to the
end of your nose, you'd know that she is as glued to the town hall as
she used to be to 'Shocks,' only this time, let us hope, more
successfully. Some women have to be married. They contract a fatal
desire for it, like the influenza habit every winter. Eurydice is one of
them. It takes different forms, of course. This time it's Mr. Travers;
the Mr. Bolt attachment was far more dangerous. I have made up my mind
that she will marry Mr. Travers, if it's humanly speaking possible."

"Oh," said Stella, "will she? How clever you are, Cicely! You know
nearly everything. Why do you say 'humanly speaking possible?'"

"Because you've always made him out as cold as a fish and as hard as
iron," said Cicely. "He may be one of the few men who won't yield to
vanity or fancy."

"I see," said Stella. "It's not very nice of you to want Eurydice to
marry an iron fish. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not quite so certain
about Mr. Travers. The iron and the fish are only on the top. I think,
humanly speaking, he's quite possible. I'm going to sleep now. When
you've made up your mind about Amberley you can wake me up."




CHAPTER XVI


There are two winds in March; one comes in like a tight-lipped
school-master set on punishment. It is frequently accompanied by dust,
sunshine, and influenza. It has all the cold of winter, and acts as if
life could be produced solely by formidable harshness.

But there is another wind, a mild, sensitive wind which carries the
secrets of the spring--a wind that wanders and sings on sunless days,
penetrating the hard crust of the earth as softly and as inveterately as
love, a wind that opens while its forceful brother shuts.

It was this wind, calling along the railway lines against the swinging
train, that brought Stella to Amberley. It lifted her out of her
carriage to the small, wayside station, embracing her with its welcome
under shaking trees. The air was full of the earth scents of growing
fields. The sky was wide and very near and without strangeness.

A porter, lurching out of the surrounding darkness, told Stella there
was a car from Amberley House waiting for her. It could only be for her,
because no one else was on the platform.

The station-master himself put her into it. She sank into soft cushions,
and shut her eyes to feel the soundless speed. Stella had been on rare
occasions in a taxi; but this creature that leaped without friction
forward into the darkness, flinging a long road behind it with the ease
with which an orange is peeled, was a wholly new experience. When she
opened her eyes again they became gradually accustomed to the flying
darkness, which was not wholly dark; trees loomed up mysteriously out of
it, and the tender shapes of little hills as soft and vague as clouds.

Stella was sorry when the car stopped; she could not see the doorway of
Amberley House, hidden under a mass of ivy. It opened suddenly before
her into a dusky hall lighted by tall candles in silver candle-sticks.

The hall was full of shadows. There was a fragrance in it of old roses
and lavender, and it was quiet. It was so quiet that Stella held her
breath. She felt as if for centuries it had been still, and as if no one
who had ever lived there had made a noise in it. She was afraid of the
sound of her own voice.

At the farther end of the hall there was a glow of firelight on old oak
panels. A door opened, and Lady Verny came toward her, very tall and
stately, but with the same kind, steady eyes.

Lady Verny came all the way across the long, shadowy room to meet
Stella, and held out both her hands; but when she came near, Stella saw
that only her eyes were the same. Her face was incredibly older. The
firm lines were blurred, the delicate color was gone. The woman who
looked down at her was at the mercy of the years. Grief had forced her
prematurely out of her comfortable upward path. Even her smile had
changed; it carried no serenity.

"I am very glad you have come," Lady Verny said gently. "We will have
tea in my room, I think, and then you must rest. I can see you have been
ill."

She led the way into a room that seemed curiously like her. It was
spacious and convenient, with very few small objects in it. Even the
pictures on the walls had the same quality: they were very definite,
clear- French landscapes, graceful and reticent.

The china, on a low table by the fire, was old and valuable; but it was
used every day. Lady Verny had no special occasions, and nothing that
she possessed was ever too priceless or too important for use.

"I hope you did not have a very tiresome journey," she continued. "I do
not like a change on so short a run, but we have not been able to
arrange to have a train straight through from town. Julian was thinking
of doing something about it some time ago, but the matter has dropped."

Stella noticed that as Lady Verny spoke of Julian her voice hurried a
little. It did not shake; but it passed over his name quickly as if she
were afraid that it might shake.

"Since his illness he has taken less interest in local matters," she
finished tranquilly.

Stella did not dare to ask if Julian was better. She did not like to
speak about his interests; it seemed to her as if almost anything would
be better than to say something stupid to Lady Verny about Julian.

"It was a lovely journey," she said quickly, "and I would have hated not
to change at Horsham. I was so sorry it was nearly dark. Shelley lived
there once, didn't he? I wanted to go and look for the pond where he had
sailed five-pound notes because he hadn't anything else to make boats
with. Amberley came much too soon; and I couldn't see anything but a
bundle of dark clouds. I could only feel it, awfully friendly and kind,
blowing across the fields!"

"Yes," said Lady Verny, consideringly, giving Stella her tea; "I think
it is a kind little place. There is nothing dreadful about it, not even
an ugly chapel, or one of those quite terrible little artist's
houses,--you know the type I mean,--as uncomfortable as a three-cornered
chair. The kind that clever people live in and call cottages. They've
quite spoiled the country round Pulborough; but mercifully the station
is inconvenient here, and a good deal of the land is Julian's. I hope
you will like it,"--she met Stella's eyes with a long, questioning
look,--"because I hope you will stay here for a long time."

"As long as you want me to stay," said Stella, firmly.

"We must not spoil your other opportunities for work," said Lady Verny;
"that would be most unfair. I must confess to you, Miss Waring, that I
am leaving the whole question very much in the air. It would be more
satisfactory to have the arrangement come direct from Julian. If, as I
hope, by your presence the old interest and the old questions come back
to him, he will ask you to stay himself. For the present I have simply
told him that you are my friend and that you have given up your
secretarial work to come here for a much-needed holiday; but we must not
waste your time or do anything against your interests. I could not allow
that."

"It won't take very long, I expect," Stella answered, "because he would
take a dislike so quickly. And if he did that, it wouldn't do, of
course. We should see in a week or two. If he _doesn't_ dislike me; I
can easily talk to him about Professor Paulson. I remember they had an
argument once--about reindeer-moss. Your son said he had discovered it
where Professor Paulson had said it didn't exist. I could bring that up
quite comfortably. The mere mention of a fellow-laborer's effort stings
a man into the wish to prove something or other about it; and once you
start proving, secretaries follow."

"Make them follow," said Lady Verny, smiling. "I don't think he will
dislike you,--we usually dislike the same people,--only Julian always
goes further than I do; he dislikes them more." Then her smile faded.
"You will see him to-night at dinner," she said gravely. She could not
smile again after she had said that; but she took Stella herself through
the dark oak hall and up the broad, winding staircase to a little, old,
square room that looked out over the garden to the flooded
water-meadows.

"I don't know if you like gardens," Lady Verny said a little shyly.
"It's rather a hobby of mine. You'll see it to-morrow."

"I like even my own," said Stella, "though it only holds one plane-tree
and ten cats. At least it doesn't really _hold_ the cats. They spill in
and out of it in showers like the soot, only more noisily; and I
pretend there's a lilac-bush in the corner."

Lady Verny stood by the door for a moment as if she were making up her
mind for an immense advance, an almost dazzling plunge into confidence.

"I have a feeling," she said slowly, "as if you would make a _good_
gardener."

After she had gone, Stella opened the window, and leaned out into the
garden. She could see nothing but the soft darkness, sometimes massed in
the thickness of the yew-hedges, and sometimes tenuous and spread out
over the empty spaces of the lawns.

The air blew fresh upon her face, full of sweetness and the promise of
life. Stella told herself bitterly that nature was cruel; it let strong
young things die, and if that didn't matter (and she sometimes thought
dying didn't), nature did worse: it maimed and held youth down. But
nothing in her responded to the thought that nature was cruel. A tiny
crescent moon shone out between the hurrying clouds, and cast a slim
shadow of silver across the dark waters. "Things are cruel," Stella said
to herself, "but what is behind them is not cruel, and it must come
through. And I'm little and stupid and shy; but some of it is in me for
Julian, and he'll have to have it. I shan't know how to give it to him.
I shall make hideous blunders and muddles, and the more I want to give,
the harder it'll be to do it. Fortunately, it does not depend on me. I
can be as stupid as I like if I'm only thinking of him and only caring
for him and only wanting it to come through me. Nothing can stop it but
minding because I'm stupid. And as for being in love, the more I'm in it
the better. For that's what we're all in really, only we're none of us
in it enough. As long as I'm not in it for anything I can get out of it,
everything will be all right. If I do mind, it doesn't matter if only
what I want gets through to Julian."

She lay down on the bed and listened to the wind in the garden playing
among the tree-tops. She listened for a long time, until she thought
that the garden was upon her side, and then she heard another sound. She
knew in a moment what it was; it struck straight against her heart: it
was the _tap-tap_ along the passage of wooden crutches.




CHAPTER XVII


Lady Verny and Julian were sitting in the hall when Stella joined them.
It wasn't in the least terrible meeting Julian; he had reduced his
physical disabilities to the minimum of trouble for other people. He
swung himself about on his crutches with an extraordinary ease, and he
had taught himself to deal with his straitened powers so that he needed
very little assistance; he had even controlled himself sufficiently to
bear without apparent dislike the occasional help that he was forced to
accept.

It was the Vernys' religion that one shouldn't make a fuss over anything
larger than a broken boot-lace. Temper could be let loose over the
trivial, but it must be kept if there was any grave cause for it.

Julian wished to disembarrass the casual eye of pity, partly because it
was a nuisance to make people feel uncomfortable, and partly because it
infuriated him to be the cause of compassion. Lady Verny had not
pointed this out to Stella; she had left her to draw her own inferences
from her own instincts. Lady Verny did not believe in either warnings or
corrections after the days of infancy were passed.

She smiled across at Stella and said quietly:

"My son--Miss Waring."

Stella was for an instant aware of Julian's eyes dealing sharply and
defensively with hers. He wanted to see if she was going to be such a
fool as to pity him. She wasn't such a fool. Without a protest she let
him swing himself heavily to his feet before he held out his hand to
her. Her eyes met his without shrinking and without emphasis. She knew
she must look rather wooden and stupid, but anything was better than
looking too intelligent or too kind.

She realized that she hadn't made any mistake from the fact that Lady
Verny laid down her embroidery. She would have continued it steadily if
anything had gone wrong.

There was no recognition in Julian's eyes except the recognition that
his mother's new friend looked as if she wasn't going to be a bother.
Stella hadn't mattered when he met her before, and she didn't matter
now. She had the satisfaction of knowing that she owed his oblivion of
her to her own insignificance.

"I'm sure it's awfully good of you," Julian said, "to come down here and
enliven my mother when we've nothing to offer you but some uncommonly
bad weather."

"I find we have one thing," Lady Verny interposed. "Miss Waring is
interested in Horsham. You must motor her over there. She wants to see
Shelley's pond."

"Do you?" asked Julian. "I'll take you with pleasure, but I must admit
that I think Shelley was an uncommonly poor specimen; never been able to
stand all that shrill, woolly prettiness of his. It sets my teeth on
edge. I don't think much of a man, either, who breaks laws, and then
wants his conduct to be swallowed like an angel's. Have you ever watched
a dog that's funked a scrap kick up the earth all round him and bark
himself into thinking he's no end of a fine fellow in spite of it?"

"I don't believe you've read Shelley," cried Stella, stammering with
eagerness. "I mean properly. You've only skimmed the fanciest bits. And
he never saw the sense of laws. They weren't his own; he didn't break
_them_. The laws he broke were only the dreadful, muddled notions of
respectable people who didn't want to be inconvenienced by facts. I dare
say it did make him a little shrill and frightened flying in the face of
the whole world. However stupid a face it has, it's a massive one; but
he didn't, for all the fright and the defiance, funk his fight."

"Let us settle Shelley at the dinner-table," said Lady Verny, drawing
Stella's arm into hers and leaving Julian to follow. "Personally I do
not agree with either of you. I do not think Shelley was a coward, and I
do not think that as a man he was admirable. He has always seemed to me
apart from his species, like his own skylark; 'Bird _thou_ never wert.'
He was an 'unpremeditated art,' a 'clear, keen joyance,' anything you
like; but he hadn't the rudiments of a man in him. He was neither tough
nor tender, and he never looked a fact in the face."

"There are plenty of people to look at facts," objected Stella, "Surely
we can spare one to live in clouds and light and give us, in return for
a few immunities, their elemental spirit."

"People shouldn't expect to be given immunities," said Julian. "They
should take 'em if they want 'em, and then be ready to pay for 'em;
nobody is forced to run with the crowd. What I object to is their taking
to their heels in the opposite direction, and then complaining of
loneliness. Besides, start giving people immunities, and see what it
leads to--a dozen Shelleys without poems and God knows how many
Harriets. What you want in a poet is a man who has something to say and
sticks to the path while he's saying it."

"Oh, you might be talking about bishops!" cried Stella, indignantly.
"How far would you have gone yourself on your Arctic explorations if
you'd stuck to paths? Why should a poet run on a given line, like an
electric tram-car?"

"I think Miss Waring has rather got the better of you, Julian," said
Lady Verny, smiling. "You chose an unfortunate metaphor."

"Not a bit of it," said Julian, with a gleam of amusement. "I chose a
jolly good one, and she's improved it. You can go some distance with a
decent poet, but you can't with your man, Miss Waring. He twiddles up
into the sky before you've got your foot on the step."

"That's a direct challenge," said Lady Verny. "I think after dinner we
must produce something of Shelley's in contradiction. Can you think of
anything solid enough to bear Julian?"

"Yes," said Stella. "All the way here in the train I was thinking of one
of Shelley's poems. Have you read it--'The Ode to the West Wind'?"

"No," said Julian, smiling at her; "but it doesn't sound at all
substantial. You started your argument on a cloud, and you finish off
with wind. The Lord has delivered you into my hand."

"Not yet, Julian," said Lady Verny. "Wait till you've heard the poem."

It did not seem in the least surprising to Stella to find herself, half
an hour later, sitting in a patch of candle-light, on a high-backed oak
chair, saying aloud without effort or self-consciousness Shelley's "Ode
to the West Wind."

Neither Lady Verny nor Julian ever made a guest feel strange. There was
in them both an innate courtesy, which was there to protect the feelings
of others. They did not seem to be protecting Stella. They left her
alone, but in the act of doing so they set her free from criticism. Lady
Verny took up her embroidery, and Julian, sitting in the shadow of an
old oak settle, contentedly smoked a cigarette. He did not appear to be
watching Stella, but neither her movements nor her expressions escaped
him. She was quite different from any one he had seen before. She wore a
curious little black dress, too high to be smart, but low enough to set
in relief her white, slim throat. She carried her head badly, so that it
was difficult to see at first the beauty of the lines from brow to chin.
She had a curious, irregular face, like one of the more playful and less
attentive angels in a group round a Botticelli Madonna. She had no
color, and all the life of her face was concentrated in her gray,
far-seeing eyes. Julian had never seen a pair of eyes in any face so
alert and fiery. They were without hardness, and the fire in them melted
easily into laughter. But they changed with the tones of her voice,
with the rapid words she said, so that to watch them was almost to know
before she spoke what her swift spirit meant. Her voice was unfettered
music, low, with quick changes of tone and intonation.

[Illustration: Her voice was unfettered music]

Stella was absorbed in her desire to give Julian a sense of Shelley. She
wanted to make him see that beyond the world of fact, the ruthless,
hampering world of which he was a victim, there was another, finer
kingdom where no disabilities existed except those that a free spirit
set upon itself.

She was frightened of the sound of her own voice; but after the first
verse, the thought and the wild music steadied her. She lost the sense
of herself, and even the flickering firelight faded; she felt out once
more in the warm, swinging wind, with its call through the senses to the
soul. The first two parts of the poem, with their sustained and
tremendous imagery, said themselves without effort or restraint. It was
while she was in the halcyon third portion of

    "The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
    Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,"

that it shot through Stella's mind how near she was to the tragic
unfolding of a fettered spirit which might be the expression of Julian's
own. She dared not stop; the color rushed over her face. By an enormous
effort she kept her voice steady and flung into it all the
unconsciousness she could muster. He should not dream she thought of
him; and yet as she said:

    "Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
    I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
    A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bowed
    One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud."

it seemed to her that she was the voice of his inner soul stating his
bitter secret to the world. A pulse beat in her throat and struggled
with her breath, her knees shook under her; but the music of her low,
grave voice went on unfalteringly:

    "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.
    What if my leaves are falling, like its own!"

Lady Verny laid down her embroidery. Julian had not moved. There was no
sound left in the world but Stella's voice.

She moved slowly toward the unconquerable end,

            "Oh, Wind,
    If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

All the force of her heart throbbed through Shelley's words. They were
only words, but they had the universe behind them. Nobody spoke when she
had finished.

She herself was the first to move. She gave a quick, impatient sigh, and
threw out her hands with a little gesture of despair.

"I can't give it to you," she said, "but it's _there_. Read it for
yourself! It's worth breaking laws for; I think it's worth being broken
for."

Julian answered her. He spoke carefully and a little stiffly.

"I don't think I agree with you," he said. "Nothing is worth being
broken for."

Stella bowed her head. She was aware of an absolute and appalling sense
of exhaustion and of an inner failure more terrible than any physical
collapse.

It was as if Julian had pushed aside her soul.

"Still, I think you must admit, Julian," Lady Verny said quietly, "that
'The Ode to the West Wind' is an admirable poem. I'm afraid, my dear,
you have tired yourself in saying it for us. I know the poem very well,
but I have never either understood or enjoyed it so much before. Do you
not think you had better go to bed? Julian will excuse us. I find I am a
little tired myself."

Stella rose to her feet uncertainly. She was afraid that Julian would
get up again and light their candles; but for a moment he did not move.
He was looking at her reconsideringly, as if something in his mind was
recognizing something in hers; then he dragged himself up, as she had
feared he would, and punctiliously lighted their candles.

"It's rather absurd not having electric light here, isn't it?" he
observed, handing Stella her candle. "But we can't make up our minds to
it. We like candle-light with old oak. I'm not prepared to give in about
your fellow Shelley; but I confess I like that poem better than the
others I have read. You must put me up to some more another time."

If she had made one of her frightful blunders, he wasn't going to let
her see it. His smile was perfectly kind, perfectly impenetrable. She
felt as if he were treating her like an intrusive child. Lady Verny
said nothing more about the poem; but as she paused outside Stella's
door she leaned over her and very lightly kissed her cheek.

It was as if she said: "Yes, I know you made a mistake; but go on making
them. I can't. I'm too like him; so that the only thing for me to do is
to leave him alone. But perhaps one day one of your mistakes may reach
him; and if they can't, nothing can."

Stella shivered as she stood alone before the firelight. Everything in
the room was beautiful, the chintz covers, the thick, warm carpet, the
gleam of the heavy silver candle-sticks. The furniture was not chosen
because it had been suitable. It was suitable because it had been chosen
long ago. It had grown like its surroundings into a complete harmony,
and all this beauty, all this warm, old, shining polish of inanimate
objects and generations of good manners, covered an ache like a hollow
tooth. Nobody could get down to what was wrong because they were too
well bred; and was it very likely that they were going to let Stella?
She would annoy Julian, she had probably annoyed him to-night; but would
she ever reach him? In her mind she had been able to think of him as
near her; but now that she was in the same house, she felt as if she
were on the other side of unbridged space. He was frightening, too; he
was so much handsomer than she remembered, and so much more alive. It
was inconceivable that he should ever want to work with her.

She sat down before an oval silver mirror and looked at her face. It
seemed to her that she was confronted by an empty little slab without
light. She gave it a wintry smile before she turned away from it.

"I don't suppose he'll ever want anything of you," she said to herself,
"except to go away."




CHAPTER XVIII


Later Stella wrote:

     Eurydice dearest:

     It's the strangest household, or else, perhaps, everybody else's
     is. You never see anybody doing anything, and yet everything gets
     done. It's all ease and velvet and bells; and yet in spite of
     nothing being a minute late, you never notice the slightest hurry.
     It isn't clockwork; it's more like the stars in their courses. I
     always thought being properly waited on made people helpless; it
     would me in ten minutes. I can see myself sinking into a cream-fed
     cushion, but the Vernys sit bolt upright, and no servant they
     possess can do any given thing as well for them as they can do it
     for themselves.

     I have breakfast in my room, with a robin, and the window open--oh,
     open on to the sharpest paradise!

     While I lie in bed I can see an old, moss-covered barn which always
     manages to have a piece of pink sky behind it and a black elm bough
     in front. It's a wonderful barn, as old as any hill, and with all
     the colors of the rainbow subservient to it. That's one window; the
     other two look over the garden.

     There's a terrace, and a lawn out of which little glens and
     valleys wander down the hillside into the water-meadows, and
     there's a lake drowned out by the water, with swans more or less
     kept in it by a hedge of willows.

     The water-meadows are more beautiful than all the little shiny
     clouds that race across the valley. Sometimes they're like a silver
     tray, with green islands and wet brown trees on them; and sometimes
     they are a traveling mist; and then the sun slants out (I haven't
     seen it full yet), and everything's blue--the frailest, pearliest
     blue.

     Yesterday was quite empty, with only its own light, and when
     evening came the water-meadows and the little hills were lost in
     amethyst.

     I haven't said anything about the downs. I can't. We walk on them
     in the afternoon. At least we walk along the lane that goes through
     the village (it's full of mud; but one gets quite fond of mud), and
     then when you feel the short turf under you, and the fields drop
     down, you go up into the sky and float.

     One begins so well, too. At breakfast there's such beautiful china,
     butter in a lordly dish, always honey, and often mushrooms.
     Everything tastes as if it came fresh out of the sky.

     I can do exactly as I like all day. Nobody's plans conflict with
     any one else's. That's partly being rich and partly being sensible;
     it's quite wonderful how easy life is if you're both. There's a
     special room given to me, with a piano and books; and if I want
     Lady Verny, I can find her in the garden.

     I can see her out of my window now; she's wearing a garment that's
     a cross between a bathing-dress and a dressing-gown, enormous
     gauntlets, and one of Sir Julian's old caps. There _are_ gardeners,
     especially one called Potter. (Whenever anything goes wrong Lady
     Verny shakes her head and says, "Ah, that's the Potter's thumb!")
     But you never see them. She's always doing something in the garden.
     Half the time I can't discover what; but she just smiles at me and
     says, "Nature's so untidy," or, "The men need looking after." Both
     Lady Verny and Sir Julian are very serious over their servants. In
     a way they're incredibly nice to them, they seem to have them so
     much on their minds. They're always discussing their relatives or
     their sore throats, and they give very polite, plain orders; but
     then just when you're thinking how heavenly it must be to work for
     them, they say something that chills you to the bone. One of the
     housemaids broke a china bowl yesterday, and came to Lady Verny,
     saying:

     "If you please, m' Lady, I didn't mean to do it."

     "I should hope not," Lady Verny said in a voice like marble. "If
     you had _meant_ to do it, I should hardly keep you in the house;
     but your not having criminal tendencies is not an excuse for
     culpable carelessness."

     Sir Julian's worse because his eyes are harder; he must have caught
     them from one of his icebergs. But the servants stay with them
     forever, and when one of the grooms had pneumonia in the winter,
     Sir Julian sat up with him for three nights because the man was
     afraid of dying, and it quieted him to have his master in the
     room.

     I'm beginning to work in the garden myself, the smells are so nice,
     and the dogs like it. Lady Verny has a spaniel and two
     fox-terriers, and Sir Julian a very fierce, unpleasant Arctic
     monster, with a blunt nose like a Chow, and eyes red with temper
     and a thirst for blood.

     He's always locked up when he isn't with Sir Julian. If he wasn't,
     I'm sure he'd take the other three dogs as hors-d'oeuvre, and
     follow them up with the gardeners.

     I don't know what he does all day. Sir Julian I mean; the Arctic
     dog growls. They never turn up till tea-time; then they disappear
     again, and come back at dinner. At least Sir Julian does. The
     Arctic dog (his name is Ostrog) is not allowed at meals, because he
     thinks everything in the room ought to be killed first.

     After dinner I play chess with Sir Julian. He's been quite
     different to me since he found I could; before he seemed to think I
     was something convenient for his mother, like a
     pocket-handkerchief. He was ready to pick me up and give me back to
     her if I fell about, but I didn't have a life of my own.

     Now he often speaks to me as if I were really there. They're both
     immensely kind and good to everybody in the neighborhood, but they
     see as little of people as possible.

     They're not a bit religious, though they always go to church, and
     Lady Verny reads Montaigne--beautifully bound, like Sir Thomas a
     Kempis--during the sermon. A great deal of the land belongs to
     them, and I suppose they could use a lot of influence if they
     chose. I always dislike people having power over other human
     beings; but the Vernys never use it to their own advantage. In nine
     cases out of ten they don't use it at all. I heard the vicar
     imploring Sir Julian to turn a drunken tenant out of a cottage, as
     his example was bad for the village. But Sir Julian wouldn't even
     agree to speak to him. "I always believe in letting people go to
     the devil in their own way," he said. "If you try to stop 'em, they
     only go to him in yours. Of course I don't mean you, Parson. It's
     your profession to give people a lead. But I couldn't speak about
     his morals to a man who owed me three years' rent."

     I expect I shall have to come back next week to the town hall.
     Thank Mr. Travers so much for saying I may stay on longer, but I
     really couldn't go on taking my salary when I'm bursting with
     health and doing nothing. I'll wait two more days before writing to
     him, but I must confess I'd rather have all my teeth extracted than
     mention Professor Paulson to Sir Julian.

     I haven't seen the slightest desire for work in him; but, then, I
     haven't seen any desire in him at all except a suicidal fancy for
     driving a dangerous mare in a high dog-cart. He never speaks of
     himself or of the war, and he is about as personal as a mahogany
     sideboard.

     Lady Verny isn't much easier to know, though she seems to like
     talking to me. I asked her to call me Stella the other day, and she
     put down her trowel and looked at me, as if she thought it wasn't
     my place to make such a suggestion; then she said, "Well, perhaps
     I will." I wish we'd been taught whose place things are; it would
     be so much simpler when you are with people who have places. But
     Lady Verny doesn't dislike me, because I've seen her with people
     she dislikes. She's much more polite then, and never goes on with
     anything. Last night when I was playing chess with Sir Julian (it
     was an awful fight, for he's rather better than I am, though I
     can't let him know it) she said to him, "I hope you are not tiring
     Stella."

     He looked up sharply, as if he was awfully surprised to hear her
     saying my name, and then he gave me a queer little smile as if he
     were pleased with me. I believe they're fond of each other, but
     I've never seen them show any sign of affection.

     But, O Eurydice, though they're awfully charming and interesting
     and dear, they're terribly unhappy. You feel it all the time--a
     dumb, blind pain that they can't get over or understand, and that
     nothing will ever induce them to show. They aren't a bit like the
     Arctic dog, who is always disagreeable unless he has a bone and Sir
     Julian. You know where you are with the Arctic dog.

     Tell Mr. Travers I'll write directly I have fixed a date for my
     return.

     Your ever-loving, disheveled, enthralled, perturbed, unfinished

     STELLA.

     P.S. I suppose as a family we all talk too much; we over-say
     things, and that makes them seem shallow. If you say very little,
     it comes out in chunks and sounds solid. You remember those
     dreadful old early-Saxon people we read once who never used
     adjectives? I think we ought to look them up.




CHAPTER XIX


Stella found Lady Verny weeding. She drew the weeds up very gracefully
and thoroughly, with a little final shake.

It was a hard, shivering March morning. Next to the bed upon which Lady
Verny was working was a sheet of snowdrops under a dark yew-hedge. They
trembled and shook in the light air like a drift of wind-blown snow.

Stella hovered irresolutely above them; then she said:

"Lady Verny, I am afraid I must go back to the town hall next week. I
haven't been any use."

Lady Verny elaborately coaxed out a low-growing weed, and then, with a
vicious twist, threw it into the basket beside her.

"Why don't you go and talk to Julian?" she asked. "He can't be expected
to jump a five-barred gate if he doesn't know it's there."

Stella hesitated before she spoke; then she said with a little rush:

"What I feel now is that I'm not the person to tell him--to tell him
it's there, I mean. I don't know why I ever thought I was. The person to
tell him that would be some one he could notice like a light, not a
person who behaves like a candle caught in a draft whenever he speaks to
her."

"My dear," said Lady Verny, ruthlessly exposing, and one by one
exterminating, a family of wireworms, "I fear you have no feminine
sense. You have a great many other kinds,--of the mind, and no doubt of
the soul. You should try to please Julian. You don't; you leave him
alone, and in consequence he thinks he's a failure with you. Women with
the feminine sense please a man without appearing to make the effort.
The result is that the man thinks he's pleasing _them_, and a man who
thinks that he has succeeded in pleasing an agreeable woman is not
unaware of her."

"But I'm so afraid of him," pleaded Stella. "I don't believe you know
how frightening he is."

"Yes," said Lady Verny; "he has lost his inner security. That makes a
person very frightening, I know. He has become aggressive because he
feels that something he has always counted on as a weapon has been
withdrawn from him. It's like living on your wits; people who do that
are always hard. I think you can give him the weapon back; but to
succeed you must use all your own. You must go into a room as if it
belonged to you. It's astonishing how this place suits you; but you must
hold your head up, and lay claim to your kingdom."

"But I've never had a kingdom," objected Stella, "and I only want him to
be interested in the idea of writing a book."

"Well, that's what I mean," said Lady Verny, decently interring the
corpses of the worms. "At least it's part of what I mean. The only way
to get Julian to write a book just now is to charm him. Men whose nerves
and hearts are broken don't respond readily to the abstract. You can do
what I can't, because I'm his mother. He's made all the concessions he
could or ought to make to me. He promised not to take his life.
Sometimes in these last few months I've felt like giving him his
promise back. Now are you going to be afraid of trying to please
Julian?"

"O Lady Verny," Stella cried, "you make me hate myself! I'll do anything
in the world to please him; I'd play like a brass band, or cover myself
with bangles like Cleopatra I Don't, _don't_ think I'll ever be a coward
again!"

"You needn't go as far as the bangles," said Lady Verny, smiling grimly.
"Do it your own way, but don't be afraid to let Julian think you like
him. He finds all that kind of thing rather hard to believe just now.

"He's been frozen up. Remember, if he isn't nice to you, that thawing is
always rather a painful process. Now run along, and leave me in peace
with my worms."

It cannot be said that Stella ran, but she went. She passed through the
hall and down a passage; and wondered, if she had been an
early-Christian martyr about to step into the arena, whether she
wouldn't on the whole have preferred a tiger to Julian.

The door opened on a short passage at the end of which was an old oak
doorway heavily studded with nails. She knew this must be Julian's
room, because she heard Ostrog growling ominously from inside it. Julian
presumably threw something at him which hit him, for there was the sound
of a short snap, and then silence.

"Please come in," said Julian in a voice of controlled exasperation.
Stella stepped quickly into the room, closing the door behind her.

It was a long, wide room with a low ceiling. There were several polar
bear-skins on the floor, and a row of stuffed penguins on a shelf behind
Julian's chair. Three of the walls were covered with bookcases; the
fourth was bare except for an extraordinarily vivid French painting of a
girl seated in a cafe. She had red hair and a desperate, laughing face,
and was probably a little drunk. There was a famous artist's signature
beneath her figure, but Stella had a feeling that Julian had known the
girl and had not bought the picture for the sake of the signature.

Ostrog stood in front of her, growling, with every separate hair on his
back erect.

"Keep quite still for a moment," said Julian, quickly. "Ostrog, lie
down!" The dog very slowly settled himself on his haunches, with his
red, savage eyes still fixed on Stella. "Now I think you can pass him
safely," Julian added. "He has a peculiar dislike to human proximity,
especially in this room. You can't write him down as one who loves his
fellow-men, and I fear he carries his unsociability even further in
respect to his fellow-women."

"It must be nice for you," said Stella, "to have some one who expresses
for you what you are too polite to say for yourself."

Julian gave her a quick, challenging look.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Why should you suppose any such thing?"

"I expect because it is true," said Stella, quietly. "Of course you
don't growl or show your teeth, and your eyes aren't red; but nobody
could suppose when you said 'Come in' just now that you wanted anybody
to come in."

"The chances were all in favor of its being somebody that I didn't
want," explained Julian, politely. "For once they misled me. I
apologize."

Stella smiled; her eyes held his for a moment. She did not contradict
him, but she let him see that she didn't believe him. "If he was ever
really sorry," she thought, "he wouldn't apologize. When he's polite,
it's because he isn't anything else."

"I came," she explained, "to ask you to lend me Professor Paulson's book
on reindeer-moss. Will you tell me where it is and let me get it for
myself, if Ostrog doesn't mind?"

To her surprise, Julian allowed her to find it for herself. Ostrog
continued to growl, but without immediate menace. When she had found it,
she took it across to Julian.

"Please don't run away," he said quickly, "unless you want to. Tell me
what you intend to look up about the moss. I had a little tussle with
Paulson over it once. He was an awfully able fellow, but he hadn't the
health to get at his facts at first hand. That was unfortunate;
second-hand accuracy leaks."

Stella sat down near him, and in a minute they were launched into an
eager discussion. She had typed the book herself, and had its facts at
her fingers'-end. She presented a dozen facets to her questions, with a
light on them from her dancing mind.

Julian differed, defended himself, and explained, till he found himself
at length in the middle of an account of his last expedition. He pulled
himself up abruptly.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "what a dark horse you are! Do tell me how you
come to know anything about such a subject. Did you smuggle yourself
into an Arctic expedition as a stowaway, or have you been prospecting
gold at Klondike with a six-shooter and a sleeping-sack? It's amazing
what you know about the North."

"It is not so uncanny as you think," said Stella, quietly. "I was
Professor Paulson's secretary. For five years I studied the fauna and
flora of arctic regions. I used to help him examine the tests brought
back by explorers. He taught me how to understand and check climate and
weather charts. All the collected specimens went through my hands. I did
the drawings for this book, for instance. You know, a secretary is a
kind of second fiddle. Give him a lead, and he catches up the music and
carries it through as thoroughly, though not so loudly, as the first
violin. I like being a second fiddle and I like the North."

"That's odd," said Julian, drawing his heavy eyebrows together. "I had
an idea I had met Professor Paulson's secretary before."

"You are quite right," said Stella; "you did meet her before."

Julian stared at her; his eyes hardened.

"Do you mean that it was you I met at Sir Francis Young's?" he asked
her. "You are Miss Young's great friend, then, are you not?"

Stella turned her eyes away from him. She hated to see him guarding
himself against her.

"I was her friend," she said in a low voice; "but I have not seen her or
heard from her for six months, nor have I written."

Sir Julian still looked at her, but the sternness of his eyes decreased.

She sat meekly beside him, with her drooping head, like the snowdrops
she had brought in with her from the March morning. She did not look
like a woman who could be set, or would set herself, to spy upon him. He
acquitted her of his worst suspicions, but his pride was up in arms
against her knowledge.

"It's too stupid for me," he said, "not to have recognized you
immediately; for I haven't in the least forgotten you or our talk. You
said some charming things, Miss Waring; but fate, a little unkindly, has
proved them not to be true."

Stella turned her eyes back to his. She no longer felt any fear of him.
She was too sorry for him to be afraid.

"No," she said eagerly, "I was perfectly right. I said you were strong.
Things have happened to you,--horrible things,--but you're there; you're
there as well as the things--in control of them. Why, look at what
you've been telling me--the story of your last expedition! It's so
fearfully exciting, and it's all, as you say, first-hand knowledge. You
brought back with you the fruits of experience. Why don't you select and
sort them and give them to the world?"

He looked at her questioningly.

"Do you mean these old arctic scraps?" he said slowly. "They might have
mattered once, but they're all ancient history now. The flood and the
fire have come on us since then. All that's as dead--as dead and useless
as a crippled man. Besides, no one can write a book unless it interests
him. I'm not even interested."

Stella's eyes fell; her breath came quickly.

"But don't you think," she said, "you could be made a little interested
again? You were interested, weren't you, when you were talking to me a
few minutes ago?"

Sir Julian laughed good-naturedly.

"I dare say I was interested talking to you," he said. "You're such a
changeling: you play chess like a wizard and know the North like a
witch. I'm afraid, Miss Waring, that interest in your conversation isn't
in itself sufficient to turn a man into an author."

Stella rose slowly to her feet. She opened her lips as if to speak to
Julian, but he was looking past her out of the window, with a little
bitter smile that took away her hopefulness. Ostrog escorted her,
growling less and less menacingly, to the door. Stella did not look back
at Julian, and she forgot to hold her head up as she went out of the
room. After she had gone Julian discovered that she had dropped two of
her snowdrops on the floor. He picked them up carefully and laid them on
his desk.

"A curious, interesting girl," he said to himself; "an incredible friend
for Marian to have had. I wonder what made my mother take her up?"




CHAPTER XX


Lady Verny finished her weeding. It took her an hour and a half to do
what she wanted to the bed; then she rose from her cramped position, and
went into Julian's library by one of the French windows. She guessed
that Stella had failed.

Julian was lying on a long couch, with his hands behind the back of his
head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Lady Verny knew that, when he
was alone, he was in the habit of lying like this for hours. He had told
her that since his accident it amused him more than anything else.

She came in without speaking, and, drawing off her long gauntlets,
folded them neatly together, and sat down, facing him.

Julian's eyes moved toward her as she entered; but he gave her no
further greeting, and after a speculative glance his eyes returned to
the ceiling.

"It's a pity," said Lady Verny, thoughtfully, "that poor child has to go
back to the town hall next week, a dreadful, drafty place, and be made
love to by a common little town clerk."

Julian's eyes flickered for a moment, but did not change their position.

"Town clerks," he observed, "are, I feel sure, distinguished persons who
confine their passions to rates and taxes."

"That must make it all the more trying," said Lady Verny. "But I don't
mind the town clerk as much as I mind the drafts. Stella had pleurisy
before she came here; and you know what girls who do that kind of work
eat--ghastly little messes, slopped on to marble tables, and tasting
like last week's wash."

"Well, why the devil doesn't she look for another job?" Julian asked
irritably. "She has brains enough for twenty. That's what I dislike
about women: they get stuck anywhere. No dash in 'em, no initiative, no
judgment." It was not what he disliked about women.

"She has tried," said Lady Verny. "The man she hoped to get a job from
wouldn't have her. She tried this morning."

Julian's eyes moved now; they shot like a hawk's on to his mother's,
while his body lay as still as a stone figure on a tomb.

"Then it was a trap," he said coldly. "I wondered. I thought we'd
settled you were going to leave me alone."

"Yes," said Lady Verny in a gentle, even voice, "I know we had, Julian;
but I can't bear it."

Julian's eyes changed and softened. He put his hand on her knee and let
it rest there for a moment.

"I can, if it's only you," he said; "but I can't stand a lot of
sympathetic women. One's a lot."

"You don't like her, then?" his mother asked. "I'm sorry; I always did
from the first day I saw her. I don't know why; she hasn't any
behavior."

"I don't dislike her," said Julian. "I don't think her behavior matters.
She isn't at all a bother. I rather like her being so awfully little a
woman; it's restful. Half the time I don't notice if she's in the room
or not."

"And the other half of the time?" Lady Verny asked, with apparent
carelessness.

"Oh, the other half of the time," said Julian, with a little, twisted
smile, "I quite appreciate the fact that she is. Especially when you've
taken the trouble to dress her as you did last night."

"I had to see what she looked like," Lady Verny explained defensively.

"I think, if you want her to stay in this house," said Julian, dryly,
"you'd better let her look as little like that again as possible. I
might have tolerated a secretary if I had wanted to write a book; but
I'd tolerate no approach to a picture. She can go and be picturesque at
the town hall. My artistic sense has already been satisfied up to the
brim. How did you get her to take the clothes she had on last night?"

"I told her," said Lady Verny, blushing, "that I had the materials by
me, and couldn't possibly use them, as I was too old for light colors,
and Girton could make her a simple little dress. And then I stood over
Girton. As a matter of fact, I _did_ send for the green jade comb and
the shoes and stockings."

"You seem to me," said Julian, "to have entered most light-heartedly
upon a career of crime and deceit unusual at your age. I don't wonder
that you blush for it."

"It wasn't only you, Julian," Lady Verny pleaded. "I did want to help
the girl. I can't bear public offices for gentlewomen. It's so
unsuitable!"

"Most," agreed Julian. "But, my dear mother, this is a world in which
the unsuitable holds an almost perfect sway, a fact which your usual
good sense seldom overlooks."

"You don't know," said Lady Verny, earnestly, "how even a bad patch of
ground facing north _can_ improve with cultivation."

"Do what you like with the north side of the garden," replied Julian,
"do even what you like with the apparently malleable Miss Waring; but
please don't try the gardening habit any more on me."

Lady Verny sighed. Julian looked as inexpressive and immovable as a
stone crusader.

Lady Verny was a patient woman, and she knew that, once seed is dropped,
you must leave it alone.

She had learned to abstain from all the little labors of love which are
its only consolations. From the first she had realized that the things
she longed to do for Julian he preferred to have done for him by a
servant.

She had accepted his preferences as the only outlet of her emotions; but
when she saw he was fast approaching the place where nothing is left but
dislikes, she made an effort to dislodge him. She was not sure, but she
thought that she had failed. Without speaking again, she went back to
the garden and did a little more digging before lunch. The earth was
more malleable than Julian; digging altered it.

If you have never been able to buy any clothes except those which you
could afford, none of them having any direct relation to the other, but
merely replacing garments incapable of further use, to be dressed
exactly as you should be is to obtain a new consciousness. It was not
really Stella who looked with curious eyes at herself in a long mirror
beneath the skilful hands of Girton. It was some hidden creature of
triumphant youth with a curious, heady thirst for admiration. She gazed
at herself with alien eyes.

"It's like an olive-tree," she said dreamily to Girton, "a silvery gray
olive-tree growing in the South."

"I dare say, Miss," said Girton; "but if you was to remember when you
sit down just to bring your skirts a trifle forward, it would sit
better."

"Yes, Girton," said Stella, submissively. But the submission was only
skin-deep. She knew that whatever she did, she couldn't go far wrong;
her dress wouldn't let her. It gave her a freedom beyond the range of
conduct. People whose clothes fit them, as its sheath of green fits a
lily of the valley, become independent of their souls.

Julian's eyes had met hers last night with a perfectly different
expression in them. He was too polite to look surprised, but he looked
as soon as it was convenient, again.

Usually he looked at Stella as if he wanted to be nice to her, but last
night for the first time he had looked as if he wished Stella to think
him nice. She had had to hold her head up because of the jade comb.

It wouldn't matter how either of them looked now, as she was going away
so soon; but she was glad that for once he had noticed her, even if his
notice was inspired only by the green dress.

Julian did not appear at dinner; it was the first time since Stella's
arrival that this had happened.

"He's had a bad day," Lady Verny explained. "He will get about more than
he ought. It's a great strain on him, and then he suffers from fatigue
and misery--not pain, exactly. I don't think he would mind that so much,
but it makes him feel very helpless. He wants his chess though, if you
don't mind going into his library and playing with him."

Julian was sitting up in his arm-chair when Stella joined him. His back
was to the light, and the chess-board in front of him.

His face was gray and haggard, but there was a dogged spark of light in
his eyes, as if he was amused at something.

"Thanks tremendously for coming in to cheer me up," he said quickly.
"You see, I've dispensed with Ostrog for the evening, to prevent further
comparison between us. D'you mind telling me why you didn't let me know
this morning that, if I wrote a book, you'd work for me?"

Stella flushed, and let her jade comb sink beneath its level.

"If you didn't want to write the book," she said, "why should you want a
secretary?"

"It didn't occur to you, I suppose," Sir Julian asked, "that if I wanted
the secretary, I might wish to write the book?"

"What has Lady Verny said to you?" Stella demanded, lifting her head
suddenly, and looking straight across at him.

"Nothing that need make you at all fierce," Julian replied, with
amusement. "She said you were going back to the town hall next week, and
I said I thought it was a pity. You don't seem to me in the least fitted
for a town hall. I've no doubt you can do incredible things with drains,
but I fear I have a selfish preference for your playing chess with me.
My mother added that it was my fault; you were prepared, if I wished to
write a book, to see me through it."

"Yes," said Stella, defensively, "I was prepared, if I thought you
wanted it."

"I suppose you and my mother thought it would be good for me, didn't
you?" asked Julian, suavely. "I have an idea that you had concocted a
treacherous underground plot."

"We--I--well, if you'd _liked_ it, it might have been good for you,"
Stella admitted.

"Most immoral," said Julian, dryly, "to try to do good to me behind my
back, wasn't it? You see, I dislike being done good to; I happen very
particularly to dislike it, and above all things I dislike it being done
without my knowledge."

"Yes," said Stella, humbly. "So do I; I see that now. It was silly and
interfering. Only, if you _had_ been interested--"

"I wasn't in the least interested," said Julian, implacably, "but I'm
glad you agree about your moral obliquity. My mother, of course, was
worse; but there is no criminal so deep seated in her career as a woman
under the sway of the maternal instinct. One allows for that. And now,
Miss Waring, since neither of us likes being done good to, and since
it's bad for you to go back to the town hall, and worse for me to remain
unemployed, shall we pool this shocking state of things and write the
book together?"

"Oh!" cried Stella with a little gasp. "But are you sure you want to?"

Julian laughed.

"I may be politer than Ostrog," he said, "but I assure you that, like
him, unless reduced by force, I never do what I don't want to."

"And you haven't been reduced?" Stella asked a little doubtfully.

"Well," said Julian, beginning to place his chessmen, "I don't think so;
do you? Where was the force?"

Stella could not answer this question, and Lady Verny, who might have
been capable of answering it, was up-stairs.




CHAPTER XXI


Stella found that there were several Julians. The first one she knew
quite well; he only wanted to be left alone. She dealt quite simply with
him, as if he were Mr. Travers before Mr. Travers was human.

She came into his library every morning at ten o'clock, and this Julian,
looking out of the window or at Ostrog or at the ceiling, dictated to
her in a dry voice, slowly and distinctly, the first draft of a chapter.

Julian had never worked with an efficient woman before, and Stella's
promptness and prevision surprised him; but this Julian never showed any
surprise. He did the work he had set himself to do from the notes he had
prepared before she came. If there were any facts of which he was
doubtful, he asked her to look them up, telling her where she would be
likely to find references to them. Stella went to the right bookcase by
a kind of instinct, placed a careful hand on the book, and found the
index with flying fingers. She never asked this Julian questions or
troubled him with her own opinions. She carried off her notes without
comment, and returned them to him carefully typed for his final
inspection next morning. It was like the town hall, only quieter.

The second Julian was almost like a friend. He was a mischievous,
challenging Julian, who wouldn't at any price have an impersonal,
carefully drilled secretary beside him, but who insisted upon Stella's
active cooperation. They discussed the chapter from every point before
they wrote it. This Julian demanded her opinions; he dragged out her
criticisms and fought them. He made their work together a perilous,
inspiriting tug-of-war. The chapters that resulted from this cooperation
were by far the most interesting in the book. They even interested
Julian.

But these were rare days, and what was most curious to Stella was that
Julian, who seemed at least to enjoy them as much as she did, should
appear to want to suppress and curtail them. He was obviously reluctant
to let the second Julian have his fling.

Stella saw the third Julian only in the evenings. He was a polite and
courteous host, stranger to Stella than either of the others. He was
always on his guard, as if he feared that either of the watchful women
who wanted to see him happy might think he was happy or might, more
fatally still, treat him as if he were unhappy.

While Stella and Lady Verny were anxiously watching the transformations
of Julian, spring came to Amberley. It came very quietly, in a cold,
green visibility, clothing the chilly, shivering trees in splendor. The
hedges shone with a green as light as water, and out of their dried
brown grasses the fields sprang into emerald. The streams that ran
through the valley fed myriads of primroses. Stella found them
everywhere, in lonely copses, in high-shouldered lanes, or growing like
pale sunshine underneath the willows.

The spring was young and fugitive at Amberley; it fled before its own
promises, and hid behind a cloak of winter. Dull gray days, cold
showers, and nipping raw down winds defied it, and for weeks the earth
looked as hard as any stone; but still the green leaves unsheathed
themselves, and the birds sang their truculent triumphant songs, certain
of victory.

Lady Verny spent all her time in the garden now, watching against
dangers, preparing for new births, protecting the helpless, and leaving
things alone. The bulbs were up and out already; crocus and daffodil,
hyacinth and narcissus, flooded the glades and glens. Crocuses ran like
a flock of small gold flames under the dark yew-hedges; daffodils
streamed down the hillside to the lakes, looking as if they meant to
overtake the sailing swans. The willows in the valley had apricot and
pale-gold stems. They hung shivering over the lake like a race of
phantom lovers searching for their lost brides.

Stella never saw Julian outdoors. He was always interested and polite
about the garden, but he was never in it. He did not seem to want to see
things grow. She did not know how far he could drag himself upon his
crutches, and it gave her a little shock of surprise to find him one day
in one of her favorite haunts.

It was outside the garden altogether, behind the village street. A sunk
lane under high hedges led to a solitary farm. One of the fields on the
way to it overlooked a sheltered copse of silver birches. Julian was
stretched at full length under the hedge, looking down into the wood;
his crutches lay beside him. Under the silver birches the ground was as
blue as if the sky had sprung up out of the earth. There was no space at
all for anything but bluebells. Far away in the valley a cuckoo called
its first compelling notes.

Julian's face was set. He looked through the silver-and-blue copse as if
it were not there; his eyes held a tortured universe.

Stella would have slipped away from him unseen, but his voice checked
her.

"Is that you, Stella?" he asked quietly. "Won't you come and sit down
here and look at this damned pretty world with me?"

His voice was startlingly bitter; it was the first time that he had used
her name.

She came to him quickly, and sat down beside him, motionless and alert.
She knew that this was yet another Julian, and an instinct told her that
this was probably the real one.

He, too, said nothing for a moment; then he began to speak with little
jerks between his sentences.

"What do you suppose," he said, "is the idea? You know what I mean? You
saw the papers this morning? Have you ever seen a man gassed? I did
once, in Wales--a mine explosion. We got to the fellows. One of them was
dead, and one was mad, and one would have liked to be mad or dead. I
rather gather that about two or three thousand Canadians were gassed
near Ypres. They stood, you know,--stood as long as you can
stand,--gassed. I always thought that phrase, 'died at their posts,'
misleading. There aren't any posts, for one thing, and, then,
dying--well, you don't die quickly from gas. If you're fairly strong,
it's a solid performance, and takes at the least several hours.

"I beg your pardon. I oughtn't to talk to you like that. Please forgive
me for being such a brute. On such a lovely morning, too! Are there any
new bulbs up? I ought to be ashamed of myself."

"Julian--" said Stella.

He turned his head quickly and looked at her.

"Yes," he said; "what is it?"

"You ought to be ashamed _not_ to talk to me," Stella said, with sudden
fierceness. "Doesn't it make any difference to you that we're friends?"

He put his hand over hers.

"Yes," he said, smiling; "but I happen to be rather afraid of
differences."

He took his hand away as quickly as he had touched her.

"Do you know," she asked in a low voice, "what was the saddest thing I
ever saw--the saddest and the most terrible?"

"No," he said, turning his eyes carefully back to the silver birches;
"but I have an idea that it was something that happened to somebody
else."

"Yes," said Stella; "it happened to a sea-gull. It was the only time I
ever went to the sea. Eurydice had been ill, and I went away with her. I
think I was fourteen. I had gone out alone after tea on to the cliffs
when I saw a motionless sea-gull at the very edge. I walked close up to
it. It was as still as a stone, and when I came up, O Julian, one of its
wings was broken! It could not fly again. Its eyes were searching the
sea with such despair in them; it knew it could not fly again. I picked
it up and carried it home. We did everything we could for it, but it
died--like that, without ever changing the despair in its eyes--because
it could not fly."

"Lucky brute to be able to die," said Julian under his breath. Stella
said nothing. "Why did you tell me?" he asked after a pause. "Any lesson
attached to it?"

She shook her head.

"You're not crying?" he asked suspiciously. Then he looked at her. She
was sitting very still, biting her lips to keep her tears back.

"You really mustn't, Stella!" he urged in a queer, soft voice she had
never heard him use before. "I'm not a sea-gull and I'm not dying, and
I'm not even a stone."

"No," she whispered, "but you're just like the sea-gull: you won't share
your pain."

"Look here," said Julian, "I--you--Would you mind sitting on that log
over there,--it's quite dry,--just opposite? Thanks. Now I can talk more
easily. I want you to remember that I'm a million times better off than
most people. What troubles me isn't what the vicar calls my affliction.
I'm rather proud of what I'm able to do with a pair of crutches in six
months. It's being out of it; that's what set me off on those Canadian
chaps. I miss the idea that I might be in that kind of thing, rather.
You see, I feel quite well. I'll settle down to it in time, and I won't
shut you out, if you'll remember not to let me--you're most awfully
innocent, aren't you? D'you mind telling me how old you are?"

"Twenty-eight," said Stella. "But I'm not really innocent. I think I
know all the horrible things."

Julian laughed ruefully. "You wouldn't see them coming though," he said;
"and, besides, the things that aren't innocent are by no means always
horrible. However, that's not what I was going to say. If we're to be
friends at all, and it's not particularly easy even for me to live in
the same house with you and not be friends, you'll have to help me
pretty considerably."

"How shall I help you?" Stella asked eagerly. "I have wanted to, you
know. I mean that I did sometimes think you wanted to be friends--as
Mr. Travers did when he tried to become human because his cat died. I
haven't told you about that; it made him see how important it was. And
when you didn't want to be friendly, I tried not to bother you; I just
went on with the work. That _was_ the best way, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Julian, carefully. "You did the work uncommonly well, my
dear, and you never bothered me in that way. I'm afraid I don't quite
follow Mr. Travers. I suppose he is the town clerk, isn't he? He may
have meant the same thing that I do; but I should have thought it would
have been--well--simpler for him. I don't know how to explain to you
what I mean. You remember Marian?" Stella nodded, "I came a cropper over
Marian," Julian explained. "She behaved extraordinarily well. No one
could possibly blame her; but she wasn't exactly the kind of woman I'd
banked on, and I had banked on her pretty heavily. When I saw my
mistake, I understood that I wasn't fit for marriage, and I became
reconciled to it. I mean I accepted the idea thoroughly. It would be
tying a woman to a log. But I don't want to start feeling just yet--any
kind of feeling. Even nice, mild, pitying friendship like yours stings.
D'you understand?"

"I'm not mild and I'm not pitying," said Stella, quietly. "And you don't
only shut me out; you shut out everybody. Why, you won't even let
yourself go over your old polar bears in the book!"

"I can't afford to let myself go," said Julian, "even to the extent of a
polar bear--with you."

"Just because I'm a woman?" asked Stella, regretfully.

"If you like, you may put it that way," agreed Julian; "and as to the
rest of the world, it's very busy just at present fighting Germans. All
the men I like are either dead or will be soon. What's the use of
getting 'em down here to look at a broken sign-post? I'd rather keep to
myself till I've got going. I will get going again, and you'll help me,
if you'll try to remember what I've just told you."

"Oh, I shall _remember_ it," replied Stella, hurriedly; "only I don't
quite know what it is. Still, I dare say, if I think it over, I shall
find out. At any rate, I'm _very, very_ glad you'll let me help you. Of
course I think you're all wrong about the other men. You think too much
of the outside of things. I dare say it's better than thinking too
little, as we do in our family. Besides, you have such a lovely house
and live so tidily. Still, I think it's a mistake. The men wouldn't see
your crutches half as much as they'd see _you_. The things that matter
most are always behind what anybody sees. Even all this beauty isn't
half as beautiful as what's behind it--the spirit of the life that
creates it, and brings it back again."

"And the ugliness," asked Julian, steadily, "the ugliness we've just
been talking about over there, that long line of it cutting through
France like a mortal wound, drawing the life-blood of Europe,--what's
behind that?"

"Don't you see?" she cried, leaning toward him eagerly. "Exactly the
same thing--life! All this quietness that reproduces what it takes away,
only always more beautifully. Don't you think, while we see here the
passing of the great procession of spring, behind in the invisible,
where their poured-out souls have rushed to, is a greater procession
still, forming for us to join? That even the ugliness is only an awful
way out into untouched beauty, like a winter storm that breaks the
ground up for the seed to grow?"

"I can see that _you_ see it," said Julian, gently. "I can't see
anything else just now. You'd better cut along back to the house; you'll
be late for lunch. Tell my mother I'm not coming--and--and try not to
think I'm horrid if I'm not always friendly with you. I sha'n't be so
unfriendly as I sound."

"I don't believe you know," said Stella, consideringly, "how very nice I
always think you--"

"That," said Julian, "happens to be exactly one of the things you'd
better refrain from telling me. Good-by."




CHAPTER XXII


It is always hard to return in the character of a captive to a scene in
which you have played the part of victor, and Julian had told the truth
to Stella when he said that what stung him most was his new relation to
women. Men knew what he had done; many of them were facing the same
odds. They had a common experience and a common language to fall back
upon. They were his mates, but they did not come near enough to him to
hurt him; they had no wish to understand or help his sufferings. It was
sufficient for them to say, "Hard luck!" and leave that side of it
alone. Women were different: he had pursued women.

Julian had a good average reputation. Very few women attracted him
beyond a certain point; but all his experiences had been successes.

He had loved Marian with the best love his heart had known; but it had
been the love of Marian as a creature to possess. It had not been an
invasion of his personality. He would have given anything to possess
Marian; he had not been for a moment possessed by her. It did not seem
to Julian that a woman could ever do more than charm a man.

She could charm you, if you let her, to distraction; but if you had any
strength, you remained intact. Nothing in you moved to meet her charm.
You simply, not to put too fine a point upon it, took what you could
get. Naturally, if you could no longer let a woman charm you, she
became, if she wasn't merely a nuisance, a menace.

Julian acquiesced in Stella's remaining as his secretary only because he
had a theory that she did not charm him. He could not make head or tail
of her. He recognized that she had a mind, but it was a perplexing and
unchallenging mind, a private enjoyment of her own. She never attempted
to attract Julian by it. If he stirred her, she ran off like a poet or a
bird, upon her subject. She did not, as Julian supposed all women did,
put Julian himself at the other end of her subject.

She had attractions: sympathy, wit, a charming, fugitive smile. She
arranged them no better than she arranged her hair; and it was
lamentable how she arranged her hair.

Julian could not have borne her constant presence if she had not effaced
herself; his bitter self-consciousness would have been up in arms
against an effective personality at his elbow. Nevertheless, he was
obscurely annoyed that Stella made no attempt to impress him. She would
sit there morning after morning without looking at him, without noticing
him, without the lift of an eyelid to make him feel that he was anything
to her but the supply of copy for his chapter. She was as inhuman and
unpretentious as a piece of moss on a wall.

But her voice haunted him; he would catch snatches of her talk with Lady
Verny in the garden. His mother had no scruple against intimacy with
Stella, and Stella was not docile with Lady Verny; she was enchanting.
She had a tantalizing voice full of music, with little gusts of mischief
and revolt in it.

Julian told himself that he must put up with Stella for his mother's
sake. Lady Verny did not make friends easily, and liked bookworms. He
dismissed Stella as a bookworm. She had ways that, he told himself, were
intensely annoying. She came punctually to her work,--probably the poor
town clerk had taught her that much,--but she had no other
punctualities. Bells, meals, the passage of time, had no landmarks for
her. She seemed to drift along the hours like a leaf upon a stream.

She was disorderly: she left things about; books face downward, scraps
of paper, flowers. She was always saying that she had lost her
fountain-pen. She didn't say this to Julian, but he heard her say it to
Ostrog, whom she accused outrageously of having eaten it, to all the
servants, and to his mother. None of them seemed to mind, not even
Ostrog.

Ostrog's growls had ceased. He slept in Stella's presence, uneasily,
with half a red eye upon her; but he slept.

After a few days he chose a position close to her feet and slept
solidly, with snores; finally he took her out for walks. Julian approved
of this, since she would go all over the place by herself, hatless, and
looking like a tramp, it was as well she should be accompanied by
Ostrog.

Ostrog had never before been known to go for walks with any one except
Julian. He took plenty of exercise independently of human control in the
direction of rabbits.

Stella was extremely wasteful with writing-paper. Over and over again
Julian saw her throw half a sheet, white and untouched, into the
waste-paper basket; and she cut string. It was curious how little Julian
felt annoyed by these depredations, considering how much he wished to be
annoyed. He was not by nature economical, but he lashed himself into
imaginary rages with Stella, and told her that she must once for all
turn over a new leaf. She was quite meek about it, and next time she
lost her fountain-pen she went into the village and bought a new one
which wouldn't write. She paid for it with her own money, and Julian
wanted to box her ears. He subsequently found the other one on the rack
where he kept his pipes.

For some time he believed that she was not provocative because she was
negligible. She was one of those clever neutral women who haven't the
wit to be attractive.

Then one day it flashed across him that for all her mild agreement with
his wishes, her spirit never for one instant surrendered to him. It did
not even think of escaping; it was free.

This startled Julian. He liked evasive women, but he had thought Stella
extraordinarily the opposite. She was as frank as a boy. But was this
frankness merely because she was dealing with what was non-essential to
her? He tried to make her talk; he succeeded perfectly.

Stella would talk about anything he liked. She enjoyed talking. She made
Julian enjoy it; and then he found that he had arrived nowhere. She gave
him her talk, as she gave him her attention, exactly as she would have
got up and handed him a book if he had asked for it. There was no more
of herself in it than in the simplest of her services.

Julian was not sure when it was that he discovered that he had a new
feeling about her, which was even more disconcerting than her
independence; it was anxiety.

Perhaps it was during the extremely slow and tiresome week-end on which
Stella paid a visit to her family. She went without her umbrella,--not
that it would have done much good if she had taken it, for Julian found,
to his extreme vexation, that it was full of holes,--the weather was
atrocious, and she came back with a cold.

It might have been gathered that no one at Amberley had ever had a cold
before. As far as Julian was concerned nobody ever had.

Julian possessed a sane imagination, and generally treated the subject
of health with a mixture of common sense and indifference. But this cold
of Stella's!

It was no good Stella's saying it was a slight cold; he forced her to
take a list of remedies suitable for severe bronchitis. He quarreled
with his mother for saying that people had been known to recover from
colds, and finally he sent for the doctor.

The doctor, being a wise man with a poor country practice, agreed with
Julian that you could not be too careful about colds, and thought that
priceless old port taken with her meals would not do Miss Waring any
harm.

Stella disliked port very much, but she drank it submissively for a
week.

"Nobody can call me fussy," Julian announced sternly, "but I will not
have a neglected cold in the house."

He was not contradicted, though everybody knew that for weeks the cook
and two housemaids had been sneezing about the passages.

It was a strange feeling, this sharp compulsion of fear. It taught
Julian something. It taught him that what happened to Stella happened to
himself. He no longer thought of pursuit in connection with her. He had
found her in his heart.

It was an extremely awkward fact, but he accepted it. After all, he had
crushed passions before which had gone against his code. He had iron
self-control, and he thought it would be quite possible to stamp out
this fancy before it got dangerous, even while he retained her presence.

He couldn't remain friendly to her, but he could be civil enough. He
tried this process. For nine days it worked splendidly. Of course Stella
didn't like it, but it worked. She had too much sense to ask him what
was the matter, but she looked wistful. On the tenth she cut her finger
sharpening a pencil, and Julian called her "Darling." Fortunately she
didn't hear him, and he managed to bandage her finger up without losing
his head; but he knew that it had been an uncommonly near shave, and if
she hurt herself again, he wasn't at all sure how he would stand it.

Love flooded him like a rising tide; all his landmarks became submerged.
He could not tell how far the tide would spread. He clung to Stella's
faults with positive vindictiveness despite the fact that he had
surprised himself smiling over them. He dared not let himself think
about her qualities. The one support left to him was her own
unconsciousness. He needn't tell her, and she wouldn't guess; and as
long as she didn't know, he could keep her. If she did know, she would
have to go away; even if she didn't want to go, as she most probably
would, he would have to send her away. He became as watchful of himself
as he had been when his life depended on every word he said; but he
could not help his eyes. When other people were there he did not look at
Stella at all.

It was the first day Stella had been late for her work, and Julian had
prepared to be extremely angry until he saw her face. She came slowly
toward the open window out of the garden, looking oddly drawn and white.
The pain in her eyes hurt Julian intolerably.

"Hullo!" he said quickly, "what's wrong?"

She did not answer at once; her hands trembled. She was holding a
letter, face downward, as if she hated holding it.

"Your mother asked me to tell you myself," she began. "I am afraid to
tell you; but she seemed to think you would rather--"

"Yes," said Julian, quickly. "Are you going away?"

"Oh, no," whispered Stella. "If it was only that!"

Julian said, "Ah!" It was an exclamation that sounded like relief. He
leaned back in his chair, and did nothing further to help her.

Stella moved restlessly about the room. She had curious graceful
movements like a wild creature; she became awkward only when she knew
she was expected to behave properly. Finally she paused, facing a
bookcase, with her back to Julian.

"Well?" asked Julian, encouragingly. "Better get it over, hadn't we?
World come to pieces worse than usual this morning?"

"I don't know how to tell you," she said wretchedly. "For you perhaps it
has--I have heard from Marian."

Julian picked up his pipe, which he had allowed to go out when Stella
came in, relit it, and smiled at the back of her head. He looked
extraordinarily amused and cheerful.

"She hadn't written to me," Stella went on without turning round, "for
ages and ages,--you remember I told you?--and now she has."

"She was always an uncertain correspondent," said Julian, smoothly. "Am
I to see this letter? Message for me, perhaps? Or doesn't she know
you're here?"

"Oh, no!" cried Stella, quickly. "I mean there's nothing in it you
couldn't see, of course. There _is_ a kind of message; still, she didn't
mean you actually to see it. She heard somehow that I was here, and she
wanted me to tell you--" Stella's voice broke, but she picked herself up
and went on, jerking out the cruel words that shook her to the heart,--
"she wanted me to tell you that she's--she's going to be married."

Stella heard a curious sound from Julian incredibly like a chuckle. She
flinched, and held herself away from him. He would not want her to see
how he suffered. There was a long silence.

"Stella," said Julian at last in that singular, soft, new voice of his
that he occasionally used when they were alone together, "the ravages of
pain are now hidden. You can turn round."

She came back to him uncertainly, and sat down by the window at his
feet. He had a tender teasing look that she could not quite understand.
His eyes themselves never wavered as they met hers, but the eagerness in
them wavered; his tenderness seemed to hold it back.

She thought that Julian's eyes had grown curiously friendly lately.
Despite his pain, they were very friendly now.

"Any details?" Julian asked. "Don't be afraid to tell me. I'm not--I
mean I'm quite prepared for it."

"It's to be next month," she said hurriedly. "She didn't want you to see
it first in the papers."

"Awfully considerate of her, wasn't it?" interrupted Julian. "By the
by, tell her when you write that she couldn't have chosen anybody better
to break it to me than you."

"O Julian," Stella pleaded, "please don't laugh at me! Do if it makes
you any easier, of course; only I--I mind so horribly!"

"Do you?" asked Julian, carefully. "I think I'm rather glad you mind,
but you mustn't mind horribly; only as much as a friend should mind for
another friend."

"That is the way I mind," said Stella.

She had a large interpretation of friendship.

"Oh, all right," said Julian, rather crossly. "Go on!"

"She says it's a Captain Edmund Stanley, and he's a D.S.O. They're to be
married very quietly while he's on leave."

"Lucky man!" said Julian. "Any money?"

"Oh, I think so," murmured Stella, anxiously skipping the letter in her
lap. "She says he's fairly well off."

"I think," observed Julian, "that we may take it that if Marian says
Captain Stanley is fairly well off, his means need give us no anxiety.
What?"

"Julian, must you talk like that?" Stella pleaded. "You'll make it so
hard for yourself if you're bitter."

"On the whole, I think I must," replied Julian, reflectively. "If I
talked differently, you mightn't like it; and, anyhow, I daren't run the
risk. I might break down, you know, and you wouldn't like that, would
you? Shall we get to work?"

"Oh, not this morning!" Stella cried. "I'm going out; I knew you
wouldn't want me."

"Did you though?" asked Julian. "But I happen to want you most
particularly. What are you going to do about it?"

She looked at him in surprise. He had a peculiarly teasing expression
which did not seem appropriate to extreme grief.

"I'll stay, of course, if you want me," she said quietly.

"You're a very kind little elf," said Julian, "but I don't think you
must make a precedent of my wanting you, or else--look here, d' you mind
telling me a few things about your--your friendship with Marian?"

Stella's face cleared. She saw now why he wanted her to stay. She turned
her eyes back to the garden.

"I'll tell you anything you like to know," she answered.

"You liked her?" asked Julian.

"She was so different from everybody else in my world," Stella
explained. "I don't think I judged her; I just admired her. She was
awfully good to me. I didn't see her very often, but it was all the
brightness of my life."

"Stella, you've never told me about your life," Julian said
irrelevantly. "Will you some day? I want to know about the town hall and
that town clerk fellow."

"There isn't anything to tell you," said Stella. "I mean about that, and
Marian was never in my life. She couldn't have been, you know; but she
was my special dream. I used to love to hear about all her experiences
and her friends; and then--do you remember the night of Chaliapine's
opera? It was the only opera I ever went to, so of course I remember;
but perhaps you don't. You were there with Marian. I think I knew
then--"

"Knew what?" asked Julian, leaning forward a little. "You seem awfully
interested in that gravel path, Stella?"

"Knew," she said, without turning her head, "what you meant to her."

"Where were you?" Julian inquired. "Looking down from the ceiling or up
from a hole in the ground, where the good people come from? I never saw
you."

"Ah, you wouldn't," said Stella. "I was in the gallery. Do you remember
the music?"

"Russian stuff," Julian said. "Pack of people going into a fire, yes.
Funnily enough, I've thought of it since, more than once, too; but I
didn't know you were there."

"And then when you were hurt," Stella went on in a low voice, "Marian
told me. Julian, she did mind _frightfully_. I always wanted you to know
that she _did_ mind."

"It altered her plans, didn't it," said Julian, "quite considerably?"

"You've no business to talk like that!" said Stella, angrily. "It's not
fair--or kind."

"And does it matter to you whether I'm fair or kind?" Julian asked, with
deadly coolness.

"I beg your pardon," said Stella, quickly. "Of course it has nothing to
do with me. I have no right to--to mind what you say."

"I'm glad you recognize that," said Julian, quietly. "It facilitates our
future intercourse. And you agreed with Marian that she only did her
duty in painstakingly adhering to her given word? Perhaps you encouraged
her to do it? The inspiration sounds quite like yours."

She looked at him now.

"Julian," she said, "am I all wrong? Would you rather that we weren't
friends at all? You are speaking as if you hated me."

"No, I'm not," he said quickly, "you little goose! How could I keep you
here if I hated you? Have a little sense. No, don't put your hand there,
because, if you do, I shall take it, and I'm rather anxious just now not
to. You shall go directly you've answered me this. Did you agree with
Marian's point of view about me? You know what it was, don't you? She
didn't love me any more; she wished I had been killed, and she decided
to stick to me. She thought I'd be grateful. Do you think I ought to
have been grateful?"

"You know I don't! You know I don't!" cried Stella. "But why do you make
me say it? I simply hated it--hated her not seeing, not caring enough
to see, not caring enough to make you see. There! Is that all you wanted
me to say?"

"Practically," said Julian, "but I don't see why you should fly into a
rage over it. In your case, then, if it had been your case, you would
simply have broken off the engagement at once, like a sensible girl?"

"I can't imagine myself in such a situation," said Stella, getting up
indignantly.

"Naturally," interposed Julian smoothly. "But, still, if you had
happened, by some dreadful mischance, to find yourself engaged to me--"

"I should have broken it off directly," said Stella, turning to
go--"directly I found out--"

"Found out what?" asked Julian.

"That you were nothing but a cold-blooded tease!" cried Stella over her
shoulder.

"You perfect darling!" said Julian under his breath. "By Jove! that was
a narrow squeak!"




CHAPTER XXIII


It puzzled Stella extremely that she found herself unable to say, "What
is it that you want, Julian?" She knew that there was something that he
wanted, and there was nothing that she would dream of denying him. What,
therefore, could be simpler than asking him? And yet she did not want to
ask him.

She began by trying hard to understand what it was that he had told her
above the bluebell wood, because she thought if she discovered what he
wanted then, the rest would follow. He had wanted a particular kind of
help from her; that was plain. It had something to do with her being a
woman; that was plainer. But was it to his advantage or to his
disadvantage that she was a woman? Ought she to suppress the fact or
build on it? And how could she build on it or suppress it when she never
felt in the least like anything else but a woman?

Cicely used to say that the only safe way with men was never to be nice
to them; but Stella had always thought any risk was better than such a
surly plan. Besides, Julian couldn't mean that. He liked her to be nice
to him. She saw quite plainly that he liked her to be nice to him.

Unfortunately, Julian had taken for granted in Stella a certain
experience of life, and Stella had never had any such experience. She
had never once recognized fancy in the eyes of any man. As for love, it
belonged solely to her dreams; and the dreams of a woman of
twenty-eight, unharassed by fact, are singularly unreliable. She thought
of Mr. Travers, but he did not count. She had never been able to realize
what he had felt for her. Her relation to him was as formal, despite his
one singular lapse, as that of a passenger to a ticket-collector. She
had nothing to go on but her dreams.

In her very early youth she had selected for heroes two or three
characters from real life. They were Cardinal Newman, Shelley, and
General Gordon. Later, on account of a difference in her religious
opinions, she had replaced the Cardinal by Charles Lamb. None of these
characters was in the least like Julian.

One had apparently no experience of women, the other two had sisters,
and Shelley's expression of love was vague and might be said to be
misleading.

    She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
    That I beheld her not.

Life had unfortunately refused to meet Shelley on the same terms, and
difficulties had ensued, but it was this impracticable side of him that
Stella had accepted. She had skipped Harriet, and landed on
"Epipsychidion." Love was to her "a green and golden immortality." She
was not disturbed by it, because the deepest experiences of life do not
disturb us. What disturbs us is that which calls us away from them.

It made it easier to wait to find out what Julian wanted that he was
happier with her. He was hardly ever impersonal or cold now, and he
sometimes made reasons to be with her that had nothing to do with their
work.

It was June, and the daffodils had gone, but there were harebells and
blue butterflies upon the downs, and in the hedges wild roses and Star
of Bethlehem. Lady Verny spent all her time in the garden. She said the
slugs alone took hours. They were supposed by the uninitiated to be
slow, but express trains could hardly do more damage in less time. So
Stella and Ostrog took their walks alone, and were frequently
intercepted by Julian on their return.

Julian, who ought to have known better, thought that the situation might
go on indefinitely, and Stella did not know that there was any
situation; she knew only that she was in a new world. There was sorrow
outside it, there was sorrow even in her heart for those outside it; but
through all sorrow was this unswerving, direct experience of joy. She
would have liked to share it with Julian, but she thought it was all her
own, and that what he liked about her--since he liked something--was her
ability to live beyond the margin of her personal delight. The color of
it was in her eyes, and the strength of it at her heart; but she never
let it interfere with Julian. She was simply a companion with a hidden
treasure. She sometimes thought that having it made her a better
companion; but even of this she was not sure.

It made her a little nervous taking Ostrog out alone, but she always
took the lead with him, and slipped it on him if a living creature
appeared on the horizon. There were some living creatures he didn't
mind, but you couldn't be sure which.

One evening she was tired and forgot him. There was a wonderful sunset.
She stood to watch it in a hollow of the downs where she was waiting for
Julian. The soft, gray lines rose up on each side of her, immemorial,
inalterable lines of gentle land. The air was as transparently clear as
water, and hushed with evening. Far below her, where the small church
steeple sprang, she saw the swallows cutting V-shaped figures to and fro
above the shining elms.

For a long time she heard no sound, and then, out of the stillness, came
a faint and hollow boom. Far away across the placid shapes of little
hills, over the threatened seas, the guns sounded from France--the dim,
intolerable ghosts of war.

Ostrog, impatient of her stillness, bounded to the edge of the hollow
and challenged the strange murmur to the echo. He was answered
immediately. A sheep-dog shot up over the curve of the down. Ostrog was
at his throat in an instant.

There was a momentary recoil for a fresh onslaught, and then the shrieks
of the preliminary tussle changed into the full-throated growl of
combat. There was every prospect that one or other of them would be dead
before their jaws unlocked.

Stella hovered above them in frantic uncertainty. She was helpless till
she saw that there was no other help. The sheep-dog had had enough; a
sudden scream of pain stung her into action. She seized Ostrog's hind
leg and twisted it sharply from under him.

At the moment she did so she heard Julian's voice:

"Wait! For God's sake, let go!"

But she could not wait; the sheep-dog was having the life squeezed out
of him. She tugged and twisted again. Ostrog's grip slackened, he flung
a snap at her across his shoulder, and then, losing his balance, turned
on her in a flash. She guarded her head, but his teeth struck at her
shoulder. She felt herself thrust back by his weight, saw his red jaws
open for a fresh spring, and then Julian's crutch descended sharply on
Ostrog's head. Ostrog dropped like a stone, the bob-tailed sheep-dog
crawled safely away, and Stella found herself in Julian's arms.

[Illustration: She tugged and twisted again]

"Dearest, sure you're not hurt? Sure?" he implored breathlessly, and
then she knew what his eyes asked her, they were so near her own and so
intent; and while her lips said, "Sure, Julian," she knew her own eyes
answered them.

He drew her close to his heart and kissed her again and again.

The idea of making any resistance to him never occurred to Stella.
Nothing that Julian asked of her could seem strange. She only wondered,
if that was what he wanted, why he had not done it before.

He put her away from him almost roughly.

"There," he said, "I swore I'd never touch you! And I have! I'm a brute
and a blackguard. Try and believe I'll never do it again. Promise you
won't leave me? Promise you'll forgive me? I was scared out of my wits,
and that's a fact. D' you think you can forgive me, Stella?"

"But what have I to forgive?" Stella asked. "I let you kiss me."

"By Jove!" exclaimed Julian, half laughing, "you are an honest woman!
Well, if you did, you mustn't 'let me' again, that's all. Ostrog, you
wretch, lie down! You ought to have a sound thrashing. I'd have shot you
if you'd hurt her; but as I've rather scored over the transaction, I'll
let you off."

Stella looked at Julian thoughtfully.

"Why mustn't I let you again?" she inquired, "if that is what you want?"

Julian, still laughing, but half vexed, looked at her.

"Look here," he said, "didn't I tell you you'd got to help me? I can't
very well keep you here and behave to you like that, can I?"

Stella considered for a moment, then she said quietly, "Were you
flirting with me, Julian?"

"I wish to God I was!" said Julian, savagely. "If I could get out of it
as easily as that, d'you suppose I should have been such a fool as not
to have tried?"

"I don't think you would have liked me to despise you," said Stella,
gently. "You see, if you had given me nothing when I was giving you all
I had, I should have despised you."

Julian stared at her. She was obviously speaking the truth, but in his
heart he knew that if she had loved him and he had flirted with her, he
would have expected her to be the one to be despised.

He put out his hand to her and then drew it back sharply.

"No, I'm hanged if I'll touch you," he said under his breath. "I love
you all right,--you needn't despise me for that,--but telling you of
it's different. I was deadly afraid you'd see; any other woman would
have seen. I've held on to myself for all I was worth, but it hasn't
been the least good, really. I suppose I've got to be honest about it: I
can't keep you with me, darling; you'll have to go. It makes it a
million times worse your caring, but it makes it better, too."

"I don't see why it should be worse at all," said Stella, calmly. "If we
both care, and care really, I don't see that anything can be even bad."

Julian pulled up pieces of the turf with his hand. He frowned at her
sternly.

"You mustn't tempt me," he said; "I told you once I can't marry."

"You told me once, when you didn't know I cared," agreed Stella. "I
understand your feeling that about a woman who didn't care or who only
cared a little, but not about a woman who really cares."

"But, my dear child," said Julian, "that's what just makes it utterly
impossible. I can't understand how I ever was such a selfish brute as to
dream of taking Marian. I was ill at the time, and hadn't sized it up;
but if you think I'm going to let _you_ make such a sacrifice, you're
mistaken. I'd see you dead before I married you!"

Stella's eyebrows lifted, but she did not seem impressed.

"I think," she said gently, "you talk far too much as if it had only got
to do with you. Suppose I don't wish to see myself dead?"

"Well, you must try to see the sense of it," Julian urged. "You're young
and strong; you ought to have a life. I'm sure you love children. You
like to be with me, and all that; you're the dearest companion a man
ever had. It isn't easy, Stella, to say I won't keep you; don't make it
any harder for me. I've looked at this thing steadily for months. I
don't mind owning that I thought you might get to care if I tried hard
enough to make you; but, darling, I honestly didn't try. You can't say I
wasn't awfully disagreeable and cross. I knew I was done for long ago,
but I thought you were all right. You weren't like a girl in love, you
were so quiet and--and sisterly and all that. If I'd once felt you were
beginning to care in that way, I'd have made some excuse; I wouldn't
have let it come to this. I'd rather die than hurt you."

"Well, but you needn't hurt me," said Stella, "and neither of us need
die. It's not your love that wants to get rid of me, Julian; it's your
pride. But I haven't any pride in that sense, and I'm not going to let
you do it."

"By Jove! you won't!" cried Julian. His eyes shot a gleam of amusement
at her. It struck him that the still little figure by his side was
extraordinarily formidable. He had never thought her formidable before.
He had thought her brilliant, intelligent, and enchanting, not
formidable; but he had no intention of giving way to her. Formidable or
not, he felt quite sure of himself. He couldn't let her down.

"The sacrifice is all the other way," Stella went on. "You would be
sacrificing me hopelessly to your pride if you refused to marry me
simply because some one of all the things you want to give me you can't
give me. Do you suppose I don't mind,--mind for you, I mean,
hideously,--mind so much that if I were sure marrying you would make you
feel the loss more, I'd go away from you this minute and never come near
you again? But I do not think it will make it worse for you. You will
have me; you will have my love and companionship, and they are--valuable
to you, aren't they, Julian?"

Julian's eyes softened and filled.

"Yes," he muttered, turning his head away from her; "they're valuable."

"Then," she said, "if you are like that to me, if I want you always, and
never anybody else, have you a right to rob me of yourself, Julian?"

"If I could believe," he said, his voice shaking, "that you'd never be
sorry, never say to yourself, 'Why did I do it?' But, oh, my dear, you
know so little about the ordinary kind of love! You don't realize a bit,
and I do. It must make it all so confoundedly hard for you, and I'm such
an impatient chap. I mightn't be able to help you. And you're right: I'm
proud. If I once thought you cared less or regretted marrying me, it
would clean put the finish on it. But you're not right about not loving
you, Stella, that's worse than pride; loving you makes it impossible. I
can't take the risk for you. I'll do any other mortal thing you want,
but not that!"

"Julian," asked Stella in a low voice, "do you think I am a human
being?"

"Well, no!" said Julian. "Since you ask me, more like a fairy or an elf
or something. Why?"

"Because you're not treating me as if I were," said Stella, steadily.
"Human beings have a right to their own risks. They know their own
minds, they share the dangers of love."

"Then one of 'em mustn't take them all," said Julian, quickly.

"How could one take them all?" said Stella. "I have to risk your pride,
and you have to risk my regret. As a matter of fact, your pride is more
of a certainty than a risk, and my regret is a wholly imaginary idea,
founded upon your ignorance of my character. Still, I'm willing to put
it like that to please you. You have every right to sacrifice yourself
to your own theories, but what about sacrificing me? I give you no such
right."

For the first time Julian saw what loving Stella would be like; he would
never be able to get to the end of it. Marriage would be only the
beginning. She had given him her heart without an effort, and he found
that she was as inaccessible as ever. His soul leaped toward this new,
unconquerable citadel. He held himself in hand with a great effort.

"What you don't realize," he said, "is that our knowledge of life is not
equal. If I take you at your word, you will make discoveries which it
will be too late for you to act upon. You cannot wish me to do what is
not fair to you."

"I want my life to be with you," said Stella. "Whatever discoveries I
make, I shall not want them to be anywhere else. You do not understand,
but if you send me away, you will take from me the future which we might
have used together. You will not be giving me anything in its place but
disappointment and utter uselessness. You'll make me--morally--a
<DW36>. Do you still wish me to go away from you?"

Julian winced as if she had struck him.

"No, I'll marry you," he said; "but you've made me furiously angry.
Please go home by yourself. I wonder you dare use such an illustration
to me."

Stella slipped over the verge of the hollow. She, too, wondered how she
had dared; but she knew quite well that if she hadn't dared, Julian
would have sent her away.




CHAPTER XXIV


Stella was afraid that when she went down to dinner it would be like
slipping into another life--a life to which she was attached by her love
for Julian, but to which she did not belong. It did not seem possible to
her that Lady Verny would be able to bear her as a daughter-in-law. As a
secretary it had not mattered in the least that she was shabby and
socially ineffective. And she couldn't be different; they'd have to take
her like that if they took her at all. She ranged them together in her
fear of their stateliness; she almost wished that they wouldn't take her
at all, but let her slink back to Redcliffe Square and bury herself in
her own insignificance.

But when she went down-stairs she found herself caught in a swift
embrace by Lady Verny, and meeting without any barrier the adoration of
Julian's eyes.

"My dear, my dear," said Lady Verny, "I always felt that you belonged to
me."

"But are you pleased?" whispered Stella in astonishment.

"Pleased!" cried Lady Verny, with a little shaken laugh. "I'm satisfied;
a thing that at my age I hardly had the right to expect."

"Mother thinks it's all her doing," Julian explained. "It's her theory
that we've shown no more initiative than a couple of guaranteed Dutch
bulbs. Shall I tell you what she was saying before you came
down-stairs?"

"Dear Julian," said Lady Verny, blushing like a girl, "you're so
dreadfully modern, you will frighten Stella if you say things to her so
quickly before she has got used to the idea of you."

"She's perfectly used to the idea of me," laughed Julian, "and I've
tried frightening her already without the slightest success. Besides,
there's nothing modern about a madonna lily, which is what we were
discussing. My mother said, Stella, that she didn't care very much for
madonna lilies in the garden. They're too ecclesiastical for the other
flowers, but very suitable in church for weddings. And out in ten days'
time, didn't you say, Mother? I hope they haven't any of Stella's
procrastinating habits."

"You mustn't mind his teasing, dear," Lady Verny said, smiling. "We will
go in to dinner now. You're a little late, but no wonder. I am delighted
to feel that now I have a right to scold you."

"The thing that pleases me most," said Julian, "is that I shall be able
to remove Stella's apples and pears forcibly from her plate and peel
them myself. I forget how long she has been here, but the anguish I have
suffered meal by meal as I saw her plod her unreflecting way over their
delicate surfaces, beginning at the stalk and slashing upward without
consideration for any of the laws of nature, nothing but the
self-control of a host could have compelled me to endure. I offered to
peel them for her once, but she said she liked peeling them; and I was
far too polite to say, 'Darling, you've got to hand them over to me.'
I'm going to say it now, though, every time."

"Hush, dear," said Lady Verny, nervously. "Thompson has barely shut the
door. I really don't know what has happened to your behavior."

"I haven't any," said Julian. "I'm like the old lady in the earthquake
who found herself in the street with no clothes on. She bowed gravely to
a gentleman she had met the day before and said, 'I should be happy to
give you my card, Mr. Jones, but I have lost the receptacle.' Things
like that happen in earthquakes. I have lost my receptacle." He met
Stella's eyes and took the consent of her laughter. He was as happy with
her as a boy set loose from school.

Lady Verny, watching him, was almost frightened at his lack of
self-restraint. "He has never trusted any one like this before," she
thought. "He is keeping nothing back." It was like seeing the released
waters of a frozen stream.

While they sat in the hall before Julian rejoined them, Lady Verny
showed Stella all the photographs of Julian taken since he was a baby.

There was a singularly truculent one of him, at three years old, with a
menacingly poised cricket-bat, which Stella liked best of all. Lady
Verny had no copy of it, but she pressed Stella to take it.

"Julian will give you so many things," she said; "but I want to give you
something that you will value, and which is quite my own." So Stella
took the truculent baby, which was Lady Verny's own.

"You look very comfortable sitting there together; I won't disturb you
for chess," Julian observed when he came in shortly afterward. "I was
wondering if you would like to hear what I did in Germany. It's a year
old now and as safe with you as with me, but it mustn't go any further."

Julian told his story very quietly, leaning back against the cushions of
a couch by the open window. Above his head, Stella could see the dark
shapes of the black yew hedges and the wheeling of the bats as they
scurried to and fro upon their secret errands.

Neither Lady Verny nor Stella moved until Julian had finished speaking.
It was the most thrilling of detective stories; but it is not often that
the roots of our being are involved in detective stories.

They could not believe that he lay there before them, tranquilly
smoking a cigarette and breathed on by the soft June air. As they
watched his face comfort and security vanished. They were in a ruthless
world where a false step meant death. Julian had been in danger, but it
was never the danger which he had been in that he described; it was the
work he had set out to do and the way he had done it. He noticed danger
only when it obstructed him. Then he put his wits to meet it. They were,
as Stella realized, very exceptional wits for meeting things. Julian
combined imagination with strict adherence to fact. He had the courage
which never broods over an essential risk and the caution which avoids
all unnecessary ones.

"Of course," he broke off for a moment, "you felt all the time rather
like a flea under a microscope. Don't underrate the Germans. As a
microscope there's nothing to beat them; where the microscope leaves off
is where their miscalculations begin. A microscope can tell everything
about a flea except where it is going to hop.

"I had a lively time over my hopping; but the odd part of it was the
sense of security I often had, as if some one back of me was giving me
a straight tip. I don't understand concentration. You'd say it is your
own doing, of course, and yet behind your power of holding on to things,
it seems as if Something Else was holding on much harder. It's as if you
set a ball rolling, and some one else kicked it in the right direction.

"After I'd been in Germany for a month I began to believe in an
Invisible Kicker-Off. It was company for me, for I was lonely. I had to
calculate every word I said, and there's no sense of companionship where
one has to calculate. The feeling that there was something back of me
was quite a help. I'd get to the end of my job, and then something fresh
would be pushed toward me.

"For instance, I met a couple of naval officers by chance,--I wasn't out
for anything naval,--and they poured submarine facts into me as you pour
milk into a jug--facts that we needed more than the points I'd come to
find out.

"I'm not at all sure," Julian finished reflectively, "that if you grip
hard enough under pressure, you don't tap facts.

"Have you ever watched a crane work? You shift a lever, and it comes
down as easily as a parrot picks up a pencil; it'll lift a weight that a
hundred men can't move an inch, and swing it up as if it were packing
feathers. Funny idea, if there's a law that works like that.

"I came back through Alsace and Lorraine, meaning to slip through the
French lines. A sentry winged me in the woods. Pure funk on his part; he
never even came to hunt up what he'd let fly at. But it finished my
job."

Lady Verny folded up her embroidery.

"It was worth the finish, Julian," she said quickly. "I am glad you told
me, because I had not thought so before." Then she left them.

"It isn't finished, Julian," murmured Stella in a low voice. "It never
can be when it's you."

"Well," said Julian, "it's all I've got to give you; so I'm rather glad
you like it, Stella."

They talked till half the long summer night was gone. She sat near him,
and sometimes Julian let his hand touch her shoulder or her hair while
he unpacked his heart to her. The bitterness of his reserve was gone.

"I think perhaps I could have stood it decently if it hadn't been for
Marian," he explained. "I was damned weak about her, and that's a fact.
You see, I thought she had the kind of feeling for me that women
sometimes have and which some men deserve; but I'm bound to admit I
wasn't one of them. When I saw that Marian took things rather the way I
should have taken them myself, I went down under it. I said, 'That's the
end of love.' It was the end of the kind I was fit for, the kind that
has an end.

"Now I'm going to tell you something. I never shall again, so you must
make the most of it, and keep it to hold on to when I behave badly.
You've put the fear of God into me, Stella. Nothing else would have made
me give in to you; and you know I have given in to you, don't you?"

"You've given me everything in the world I want," said Stella, gently,
"if that's what you call giving in to me."

"I've done more than that," said Julian, quietly. "I've let you take my
will and turn it with that steady little hand of yours; and it's the
first time--and I don't say it won't be the last--that I've let any man
or woman change my will for me.

"Now I'm going to send you to bed. I oughtn't to have you kept you up
like this; but if I've got to let you go back to your people to-morrow,
we had to know each other a little better first, hadn't we? I've been
trying not to know you all these months.

"Before you go, would you mind telling me about Mr. Travers and the
cat?"

"No," said Stella, with a startled look; "anything else in the world,
Julian, but not Mr. Travers and the cat."

"Ostrog and I are frightfully jealous by nature," Julian pleaded. "He
wouldn't be at all nice to that cat if he met it without knowing its
history."

"He can't be unkind to the poor cat," said Stella; "it's dead."

"And is Mr. Travers dead, too?" asked Julian.

"I should think," said Stella, "that he was about as dead as the
red-haired girl in the library."

"What red-haired girl?" cried Julian, sharply. "Who's been telling
you--I mean what made you think I knew her? It's a remarkably fine bit
of painting."

"But you did know her," said Stella; "only don't tell me anything about
her unless you want to."

"I won't refuse to answer any questions you ask," said Julian after a
pause, "but I'd much rather wait until we're married. I am a little
afraid of hurting you; you wouldn't be hurt, you see, if you were used
to me and knew more about men. You're an awfully clever woman, Stella,
but the silliest little girl I ever knew."

"I'll give up the red-haired girl if you'll give up Mr. Travers," said
Stella. She rose, and stood by his side, looking out of the window.

"Do you want to say good night, or would you rather go to bed without?"
he asked her.

"Of course I'll say good night," said Stella. "But, Julian, there are
some things I so awfully hate your doing. Saying good night doesn't
happen to be one of them. It's lighting my candle unless I'm sure you
want to. I want to be quite certain you don't mind me in little things
like that."

Julian put his arms round her and kissed her as gently as he would have
kissed a child. "Of course you shall light your candle," he said
tenderly, "just to show I don't mind you. But it isn't my pride now. I
don't a bit object to your seeing I can't. I'm quite sure of you, you
see; unless you meant to hurt me, you simply couldn't do it. And if you
meant to hurt me, it would be because you wanted to stop me hurting
myself, like this afternoon, wouldn't it?"

Stella nodded. She wanted to tell him that she had always loved him,
long before he remembered that she existed. All the while he had felt
himself alone, she was as near him as the air that touched his cheek.
But she could not find words in which to tell him of her secret
companionship. The instinct that would have saved them only brushed her
heart in passing.

Julian was alarmed at her continued silence.

"You're not frightened or worried or anything, are you?" he asked
anxiously. "Sure you didn't mind saying good night? It's not
compulsory, you know, even if we are engaged. I'd hate to bother you."

"I'm not bothered," Stella whispered; "I--only love you. I was saying it
to you in my own way."

"I'll wait three days for you," said Julian, firmly. "Not an hour more.
You quite understand, don't you, that I'm coming up at the end of three
days to bring you home for good?"

Stella shivered as she thought of Redcliffe Square. Julian wouldn't like
Redcliffe Square, and she wouldn't be able to make him like it; and yet
she wouldn't be able not to mind his not liking it.

Julian knew nothing about Redcliffe Square, but he noticed that Stella
shivered when he told her that he was going to bring her home for good.




CHAPTER XXV


It would be too strong an expression to say that after Stella's
departure Julian suffered from reaction. He himself couldn't have
defined what he suffered from, but he was uneasy.

He had given himself away to Stella as he had never in his wildest
dreams supposed that one could give oneself away to a woman. But he
wasn't worrying about that; he hadn't minded giving himself away to
Stella.

Samson was the character in the Old Testament whom Julian most despised,
because he had let Delilah get things out of him. What Samson had got
back hadn't been worth it, and could probably have been acquired without
the sacrifice of his hair. He had simply given in to Delilah because he
had a soft spot for her; and Delilah quite blamelessly (from Julian's
point of view) had retaliated by crying out, "The Philistines be upon
thee, Samson!"

Julian had always felt perfectly safe with women of this type; they
couldn't have entrapped him. But there wasn't an inch of Delilah in
Stella. She had no Philistines up her sleeve for any of the
contingencies of life and she had not tried to get anything out of
Julian.

That was where his uneasiness began. He understood her sufficiently to
trust her, but he was aware that beyond his confidence she was a mapless
country; he did not even know which was water and which was land. His
uncertainty had made him shrink from telling Stella about Eugenie
Matisse.

If Marian had been sharp enough--she probably wouldn't have been--to
guess that Julian knew the girl in the picture, she would have known,
too, precisely what kind of girl she was, and she would have thought
none the worse of Julian.

But he didn't know what Stella expected. He wasn't afraid that she would
cast him off for that or any other of his experiences; then he would
have told her. She would have forgiven him as naturally as she loved
him; but what if her forgiveness had involved her pain?

He had spoken the truth when he told Stella that she had "put the fear
of God into him." Julian had not known much about God before or anything
about fear; but he was convinced now that the fear of God was not that
God might let you down, but that you might let down God. He wanted to be
as careful of Stella as if she had been a government secret.

Did she know in the least what she was in for. Or was she like an
unconscious Iphigenia vowed off to mortal peril by an inadvertent
parent?

He had done his best to make her realize the future, but there are
certain situations in life when doing one's best to make a person aware
of a fact is equivalent to throwing dust in his eyes. And Stella herself
might by a species of divine fooling, have outwitted both himself and
her. She might be marrying Julian for pity under the mask of love.

Her pity was divine, and he could stand it for himself perfectly; but he
couldn't stand it for her. Why had she shivered when he had said he was
going to bring her home? He cursed his helplessness. If he had not been
crippled he would have taken her by surprise, and let his instincts
judge for him; but he had had to lie there like a log, knowing that if
he asked her to come to him, she would have blinded him by her swift,
prepared responsiveness.

The moment on the downs hardly counted. She had been so frightened that
it had been like taking advantage of her to take her in his arms.

The one comfort he clung to was her fierce thrust at his pride. He
repeated it over and over to himself for reassurance. She had said, if
he wouldn't marry her, he would make her morally a <DW36>. That really
sounded like love, for only love dares to strike direct at the heart. If
he could see her, he knew it would be all right; if even she had written
(she had written, of course, but had missed the midnight post), he would
have been swept back into the safety of their shared companionship. But
in his sudden loneliness he mistrusted fortune. When a man has had the
conceit knocked out of him, he is not immediately the stronger for it;
and he is the more vulnerable to doubt not only of himself, but of
others. The saddest part of self-distrust is that it breeds suspicion.

It would be useless to speak to his mother about it, for, though a just
woman, she was predominantly his mother; she wanted Stella too much for
Julian to admit a doubt of Stella's wanting him for herself. She would
have tried to close all his questions with facts. This method of
discussion appealed to Julian as a rule, but he had begun to discover
that there are deeper things than facts.

Lady Verny was in London at a flower show, and Julian was sitting in the
summer-house, which he was planning to turn into a room for Stella. His
misgivings had not yet begun to interfere with his plans. He had just
decided to have one of the walls above the water meadows replaced by
glass when his attention was attracted by the most extraordinary figure
he had ever seen.

[Illustration: The most extraordinary figure we had ever seen]

She was advancing rapidly down a grass path, between Lady Verny's
favorite herbaceous borders, pursued by the butler. At times Thompson,
stout and breathless, succeeded in reaching her side, evidently for the
purpose of expostulation, only to be swept backward by the impetuosity
of her speed. Eurydice was upon a secret mission. She had borrowed a
pound from Stella with which to carry it out; and she was not going to
be impeded by a butler.

She no longer followed the theories of Mr. Bolt, but she still had to
wear out the kind of clothes that went with Mr. Bolt's theories. He
liked scarlet hats. Eurydice's hat was scarlet, and her dress was a long
purple robe that hung straight from her shoulders.

It was cut low in the neck, with a system of small scarlet tabloids let
in around the shoulders. Golden balls, which were intended to represent
pomegranates, dangled from her waist.

Eurydice's hair was thick and very dark; there was no doing anything
with it. Her eyebrows couched menacingly above her stormy eyes. Her
features were heavy and colorless, except her mouth, which was
unnaturally (and a little unevenly) red.

She wore no gloves,--she had left them behind in the train,--and she
carried a scarlet parasol with a broken rib.

"I wish you'd send this man away," she said as she approached Julian.
"He keeps getting under my feet, and I dislike menials. I saw where you
were for myself. I nearly got bitten by a brute of a dog on the terrace.
You have no right to keep a creature that's a menace to the public."

"I regret that you have been inconvenienced," said Julian, politely;
"but I must point out to you that the public are not expected upon the
terrace of a private garden."

"As far as that goes," said Eurydice, frowning at a big bed of blue
Delphiniums, "nobody has a right to have a private garden."

Thompson, with an enormous effort, physical as well as spiritual, cut
off the end of the border by a flying leap, and reached the young
woman's elbow.

"If you please, Sir Julian," he gasped, "this lady says she'd rather not
give her name. She didn't wish to wait in the hall, nor in the
drawing-room, sir, and I've left James sitting on Ostrog's 'ead,--or I'd
have been here before. What with one thing and another, Sir Julian, I
came as quickly as I could."

"I saw you did, Thompson," said Julian, with a gleam of laughter; "and
now you may go. Tell James to get off Ostrog's head." He turned his eyes
on his visitor. "I am Miss Waring," she said as the butler vanished.

"This is extraordinarily kind of you," Julian said, steadying himself
with one hand, and holding out his other to Eurydice. "I think you must
be Miss Eurydice, aren't you? I was looking forward to meeting you
to-morrow. I hope nothing is wrong with Stella?"

"Everything is wrong with her," flashed Eurydice, ignoring his
outstretched hand; "but she doesn't know I've come to talk to you about
it. She'd never forgive me if she did. So if I say anything you don't
like, you can revenge yourself on me by telling her. I haven't come to
be _kind_, as you call it. I care far too much for the truth."

"Still, you may as well sit down," said Julian, drawing a chair toward
her with his free hand. "The truth is quite compatible with a wicker
arm-chair. You needn't lean back in it if you're afraid of relaxing your
moral fiber.

"As to revenge, I always choose my own, and even if you make it
necessary, I don't suppose it will include your sister. What you suggest
would have the disadvantage of doing that, wouldn't it? I mean the
disadvantage to me. It hasn't struck you apparently as a disadvantage
that you are acting disloyally toward your sister in doing what you know
she would dislike."

Eurydice flung back her head and stared at him. She accepted the edge of
the wicker arm-chair provisionally. Her eyes traveled relentlessly over
Julian. She took in, and let him see that she took in, the full extent
of his injury; but she spared him pity. She looked as if she were
annoyed with him for having injuries.

"What I'm doing," she said, "is my business, not yours. It mightn't
please Stella,--I must take the risk of that,--but if it saves her from
you, it will be worth it."

Julian bowed; his eyes sparkled. An enemy struck him as preferable to a
secret doubt.

"I didn't know," she said after a slight pause which Julian did nothing
to relieve, "that you were as badly hurt as you appear to be. It makes
it harder for me to talk to you as freely as I had intended."

"I assure you," said Julian, smiling, "that you need have no such
scruples. My incapacities are local, and I can stand a long tongue as
well as most men, even if I like it as little."

"I thought you would be insolent, and you are insolent," said Eurydice,
with gloomy satisfaction. "That was one of the things I said to Stella."

Julian leaned forward, and for a moment his frosty, blue eyes softened
as he looked at her.

"I admit I'm not very civil if I'm wrongly handled," he said in a more
conciliatory tone. "Your manner was just a trifle unfortunate, Miss
Eurydice; but I'd really like to be friends with you. I've not forgotten
that Stella told me you were her 'special' sister. Shall we start quite
afresh, and you just tell me as nicely as you know how what wrong you
think I'm doing Stella?"

"I couldn't possibly be friends with you," Eurydice said coldly. "The
sight of you disgusts me."

Julian lowered his eyes for a moment; when he raised them again the
friendliness had gone. They were as hard as wind-swept seas.

"I suppose," he suggested quietly, "that you have some point to make.
Isn't that a little off it?"

"I don't mean physically," said Eurydice, with a wave of her hand which
included his crutches. "You can't help being a <DW36>. It is morally I
am sick to think of you. Here you are, surrounded by luxury, waited on
hand and foot by menials, and yet you can't face your hardships
alone--you are so parasitic by nature that you have to drag down a girl
like Stella by trading on her pity."

"It would," said Julian in a level voice, holding his temper down by an
effort, "be rather difficult for even the cleverest parasite to drag
your sister down in the sense of degrading her. Possibly you merely
refer to her having consented to marry me?"

"No, I don't," said Eurydice, obstinately. "I call it dragging a person
down if you make them sacrifice their integrity. Stella and I always
agreed about that before. She cared more for the truth than anything.
Now she doesn't; she cares more about hurting your feelings. I faced her
with it last night, and she never even attempted to answer me. She only
said, 'Oh, don't!' and covered her face with her hands."

"What unspeakable thing did you say to her?" asked Julian, savagely,
"to make her do that?"

Ostrog, released from James, rejoined them, cowering down at his
master's feet; he was aware that he was in the presence of an anger
fiercer than his own.

"I didn't come here to mince matters," said Eurydice, defiantly. "If you
want to know what I said to Stella, I asked her why she was going to
marry a tyrannical, sterile <DW36>?"

For a moment Julian did not answer her; when he did, he had regained an
even quieter manner than before.

"Very forcibly put," he said in a low voice; "and your sister covered
her face with her hands and said, 'Oh, don't!'--you must have felt very
proud of yourself."

"If you think I like hurting Stella, you're wrong," said Eurydice. "But
I'd rather hurt her now than see her whole life twisted out of shape by
giving way to a feeling that isn't the strongest feeling in her, or I
wouldn't have come down here. But she didn't deny it."

"What didn't she deny?" asked Julian.

"What I came to tell you," said Eurydice. "The strongest feeling in
Stella's life is her love for Mr. Travers, and she gave him up because
she discovered that it was also the strongest thing in mine."

Julian flung back his head.

"Seriously, Miss Eurydice," he asked, "are you asking me to believe that
your sister's in love with a town clerk?"

Eurydice flushed crimson under the undisguised amusement in Julian's
eyes. He was amused, even though he had suddenly remembered that Mr.
Travers was the name of the town clerk.

"Why not?" asked Eurydice, fiercely. "He's wonderful. He isn't like
you--he works. He's like Napoleon, only he's always right, and _he_
hasn't asked her to be his permanent trained nurse!"

Julian had a theory that you cannot swear at women; so he caught the
words back, and wondered what would happen if Eurydice said anything
worse.

"Don't you think," he said after a pause, "that if you insulted me once
every five minutes, and then took a little rest, we might finish
quicker? I will admit that there is no reason why Stella shouldn't be
in love with Mr. Travers except the reason that I have for thinking
she's in love with me."

"Well, she isn't," asserted Eurydice. "She's awfully fond of you, but it
all started with her finding out that you were unhappier than she was.
She came to you to get over what she felt about Mr. Travers, and to free
him to care for me; but he doesn't. That's how I found out; I asked
him."

"The deuce you did!" exclaimed Julian. "Poor old Travers!"

Eurydice ignored this flagrant impertinence. She repeated Mr. Travers's
exact words: "I cared for your sister, Miss Waring; I am not a
changeable man."

"But I notice," said Julian, politely, "that this profession of Mr.
Travers's feelings which you succeeded in wringing from him does not
include your sister's. I had already inferred from my slight knowledge
of your sister that Mr. Travers was attached to her. The inference was
easy."

"I hoped that myself," said Eurydice--"I mean, that she didn't care. I
wrote and asked Cicely. She's my other sister; she hates me, but she's
just. She doesn't know about you, of course. Would you like to see her
letter?"

"It seems a fairly caddish thing to do, doesn't it?" asked Julian,
pleasantly. "However, perhaps this is hardly the moment for being too
particular. Yes, you can hand me over the letter." Julian read:

     My dear Eurydice:

     You ask if I think Stella cared for Mr. Travers. I dislike this
     kind of question very much. However, as you seem to have some
     qualms of conscience at last, you may as well know that I think she
     did. She's never had anything for herself. You've always taken all
     there was to take, and I dare say she thought Mr. Travers ought to
     be included. She never told me that she cared for him, but of
     course even you must know that Stella wouldn't do such a thing as
     that. She spoke during her illness of him once in a way that made
     me suspect what she was feeling, added to which I was sure that she
     was struggling against great mental pain, as well as physical. She
     evidently wanted to get away from the town hall and leave Mr.
     Travers to you. You can draw your own inferences from these facts.
     Stella would rather be dragged to pieces by wild horses than tell
     you any more; so, if I were you, I would avoid asking her.

     Your affectionate sister,

     CICELY.

"You did ask her, of course," said Julian, handing Eurydice the letter;
"and as we are both acting in a thoroughly underhand way, perhaps you
will not mind repeating to me Stella's reply."

"At first she didn't answer at all," said Eurydice, slowly, "and then
when I asked her again she said; 'I'm not going to tell you anything at
all about Mr. Travers. I came here to tell you about Julian, only you
won't listen to me.' Then," said Eurydice, "she cried."

"Please don't tell me any more," said Julian, quickly, shading his eyes
with his hand. "I should be awfully obliged if you'd go. I think you've
said enough."

Eurydice also thought that she had said enough; so she returned with the
satisfaction of one who has accomplished a mission, on the rest of
Stella's pound.




CHAPTER XXVI


     This is going to be my last love-letter to you, Stella. I wonder if
     you will know it is a love-letter. It won't sound particularly like
     one. It's to tell you that I can't go through with our marriage. I
     can't give you my reasons, and I can't face you without giving them
     to you. You must try to take my word for it that I am doing what I
     think best for both of us.

     You see, I trust you to do what I want, though I know I am acting
     in a way that you'll despise. If you will think of what it means
     for me to act in such a way, you'll realize that I am pretty
     certain that I am right.

     You are the best friend I ever had, man or woman, and I know you
     value my friendship, so that it seems uncommonly mean to take it
     away from you; and yet I'm afraid I can't be satisfied with your
     friendship.

     It would honestly make me happier to hear that you were married;
     but I couldn't meet you afterward, and if you don't marry, I
     couldn't let you alone.

     You see, I tried that plan when I didn't know you'd let me do
     anything else, and it can't be said to have worked very well, can
     it? It would be quite impossible now. There are two things I'd like
     you to remember. One is, if you set out, as I think you did, to
     heal a broken man, you've succeeded, and nothing can take away
     from your success. You put in a new mainspring. I am going to work
     now. Some day I'll finish the book, but not yet. The second thing
     is something I want you to do for me. I know I have no right to ask
     you! I'm only appealing to your mercy. Will you let my mother help
     you a little? I know you won't let me, but you would have let me,
     Stella. Think what that means to me--to know that you would have
     taken my help, and that by freeing you I am also, in a sense,
     deserting you. If you still want to make a man happier who has only
     been a nuisance to you, you can't say I haven't shown you the way.

     I should like to give you Ostrog, but I suppose he'd be out of
     place in a town hall.

     I'm not going to ask you to forgive me; for I'm not really sorry
     for anything except that there wasn't more of it and I'm never
     going to forget anything.

     Good-by.

     Your lover,

     JULIAN.

Stella was in the middle of ironing the curtains when she received
Julian's letter. Everything else was ready for his visit except the
curtains.

Mrs. Waring was dressed. It had taken several hours, a needle and
cotton, and all the pins in the house, and now she was sitting in a
drawing-room which was tidier than any she had sat in since her early
married life. She thought that it looked a little bare.

Professor Waring was in the Museum. He had become so restless after
breakfast that it had seemed best to despatch him there, and retrieve
him after Julian arrived.

Eurydice had not asked Mr. Travers for a morning off; she had merely
conceded that she would allow Stella to arrange a subsequent meeting
with Julian on Sunday, if it was really necessary.

Eurydice kissed Stella tenderly before she left the house to go to the
town hall. She knew that she had saved her sister, but she foresaw for
the victim of salvation a few painful moments. Even a kindly Providence
may have its twinges of remorse.

Stella let the iron get cold while she was reading Julian's letter; but
when she had finished it, she heated the iron again and went on with the
curtains. They could not be hung up rough dried.

Mrs. Waring was relieved to hear that Julian was not coming. Stella told
her at once, while she was slipping the rings on the curtains, which she
had brought up-stairs. She added a little quickly, but in her ordinary
voice:

"And we aren't going to be married, after all."

"Dear me!" said Mrs. Waring, trying not to appear more relieved still.
"Then there won't have to be any new arrangements. Marriage is very
unreliable, too--it turns out so curiously unlike what it begins, and it
even begins unlike what one had expected. I often wish there could be
more mystical unions. I can't agree with dear Eurydice about the
drawback of Julian's being rich. We are told that money is the root of
all evil, but there is no doubt that it is more peaceful and refreshing
to have it, as it were, growing under one's hand; and, after all, evil
is only seeming. I think I'll just go up-stairs and take off these
constricting clothes, unless, dear, you'd like me to help you in any
way. You'll remember, won't you, that sensation is but the petal of a
flower?"

Stella said that she thought, if she had the step-ladder, she would be
all right.

The only moment of the day (it was curiously made up of moments
prolonged to seem like years) when Stella wasn't sure whether she was
really all right or not was when she heard Lady Verny's voice in the
hall. Lady Verny's voice was singularly like Julian's.

Something happened to Stella's heart when she heard it; it had an
impulse to get outside of her. She had to sit down on the top of the
stairs until her heart had gone back where it belonged.

The drawing-room had gone to pieces again. The kitten's saucer was in
the middle of the floor, and the plate-basket came half in and half out
of the sofa-cover. Lady Verny was looking at it with fascinated eyes.
She had never seen a plate-basket under a sofa-cover before. Mrs.
Waring, exhausted by her hours of dressing, had gone to lie down. So
there was only Stella. She came in a little waveringly, and looked at
Lady Verny without speaking.

Lady Verny shot a quick, penetrating glance at her, and then held out
her arms.

"My dear! what has he done? What has he done?" she murmured.

Stella led Lady Verny carefully away from the saucer of milk into the
only safe arm-chair; then she sat down on a footstool at her feet.

"I thought," she said in a very quiet voice, "that you'd come, but I
didn't think you'd come so soon. I don't know what he's done."

"It's all so extravagant and absurd," said Lady Verny, quickly, "and so
utterly unlike Julian! I have never known him to alter an arrangement in
his life, and as to breaking his word! I left him happier than I have
ever seen him. He'd been telling me that you insisted on my staying with
you after your marriage. I told him that I had always thought it a most
out-of-place and unsuitable plan, and that he couldn't have two women in
our respective positions in his house, and he laughed and said: 'Oh,
yes, I can. Stella has informed me that marrying me isn't a position;
it's to be looked on in the light of an intellectual convenience. You're
to run the house, and she's to run me. I've quite fallen in with it.' I
think that was the last thing he said, and when I came back, there was
his astounding letter to say that your marriage was impossible, and that
I was on no account to send him on your letters or to refer to you in
mine.

"He gave me his banker's address, and said that he'd see me later on,
and had started some intelligence work for the War Office. He was good
enough to add that I might go and see you if I liked. I really think he
must be mad, unless you can throw some light on the subject. A letter
came from you after he had gone."

Stella, who had been without any color at all, suddenly flushed.

"Ah," she said, "I'm glad he didn't read that before he went! I mean, if
he'd gone after reading it, I should have felt--" She put out her hands
with a curious little helpless gesture, but she did not say what she
would have felt.

"Can't you explain?" Lady Verny asked gravely. "Can't you explain
_anything_? You _were_ perfectly happy, weren't you? I haven't been a
blind, meddling, incompetent old idiot, have I?"

Stella shook her head.

"When he left me," she said, "he gave me this." She took it out of her
belt and handed it to Lady Verny; it was a check for two hundred pounds
inclosed in a piece of paper, on which was written, "Dearest, please!"
"I took it," said Stella.

Lady Verny was silent for a moment; then she said more gravely still:

"My dear, I think I ought to tell you something,--it is not fair not to
let you have every possible indication that there is,--but the day after
you left, while I was away, I hear from Thompson, who seemed to be
extremely upset by her, that a lady _did_ call to see Julian and she
would not give her name. Thompson says he thinks she was a foreigner.

"I do not know what Julian may have told you about his life, but I
myself am quite positive he would have asked no woman to marry him
unless he felt himself free from any possible entanglement. Still, there
it is: he went away after this person's visit."

For a moment it seemed to Stella that some inner citadel of security
within her had collapsed. She knew so little about men; she had nothing
but her instincts to guide her, and the memory of Eugenie Matisse's
evil, laughing eyes. She covered her face with her hands and shut out
every thought but Julian. It seemed to her as if she had never been so
alone with him before, as if in some strange, hidden way she was
plunging into the depths of his soul.

When she looked up she had regained her calm.

"No," she said; "I am quite sure of Julian. Perhaps some woman could
make him feel shaken--shaken about its being right to marry me. I can
believe that, if she was very cruel and clever and knew how to hurt him
most; but there is nothing else, or Julian would have told me."

Lady Verny gave a long sigh of relief.

"That is what I think myself," she said; "but I couldn't have tried to
persuade you of it. My dear, did Julian know that you had always loved
him?"

Stella shook her head.

"I thought he knew all that mattered," she explained. "I didn't tell him
anything else. You see, there was so very little time, and I was rather
cowardly, perhaps. I didn't want him just _at once_ to know that I had
loved him before he even knew that I existed."

"I see, I see," said Lady Verny. "But would you mind his knowing now? He
can't be allowed to behave in this extraordinary way, popping off like
a conjurer without so much as leaving a decent address behind him. I
intend to tell him precisely what I think of his behavior, and I hope
that you will do the same."

Stella turned round to face Lady Verny.

"No," she said firmly; "neither of us must do that. I don't know why
Julian has done this at all, but it is quite plain that he does not want
to be interfered with. He wishes to act alone, and I think he must act
alone. I shall not write to him or try to see him."

"But, my dear child," exclaimed Lady Verny, "how, if we enter into this
dreadful conspiracy of silence, can anything come right?"

"I don't know," said Stella, quietly; "but Julian let it go wrong quite
by himself, and I think it must come right, if it comes right at all, in
the same way. If it didn't, he would distrust it. I shouldn't--I should
be perfectly happy just to see him; but, then, you see, I _know_ it's
all right. Julian doesn't. Seeing me wouldn't make it so; it would
simply make him give in, and go on distrusting. We couldn't live like
that. You see, I don't _know_ what has happened; but I do know what he
wants, so I think I must do it."

"But you don't think this state of things is what he _wants_, do you?"
Lady Verny demanded. "I may of course be mistaken, but up till now I
have been able to judge fairly well what a man wanted of a woman when he
couldn't take his eyes off her face."

"He wants me more than that," said Stella, proudly. "I think he wants me
very nearly--not quite--as much as I want him. That's why I couldn't
make him take less than he wanted. To take me and not trust me would be
to take less. If we leave him quite alone for six months or a year,
perhaps, he'll have stopped shutting his mind up against his feelings.
It might be safer then to make an appeal to him; but I shouldn't like to
appeal to him. Still, I don't say I won't do anything you think right,
dear Lady Verny, if you want me to, to make him happier; only I must be
_sure_ that it will make him happier _first_. I know now that it
wouldn't."

"You're the most extraordinary creature!" said Lady Verny. "Of course I
always knew you were, but it's something to be so justified of one's
instincts. I'm not sure that I sha'n't do precisely what you say--for
quite different reasons. Julian will count on one of us disobeying his
injunctions, and he'll be perfectly exasperated not to have news of you.
Well, exasperation isn't going to do any man any harm; it'll end by
jerking him into some common-sense question, if nothing else will."

Stella smiled, but she shook her head.

"Please don't hope," she said under her breath.

"There's one thing," Lady Verny said after a short pause, "that I do ask
you to be sensible about. I can't take you abroad, as there hardly seems
at the present time any abroad to take you to, but I want you to come
and live with me. I think, after all this, I really rather need a
companion."

Stella hid her face in Lady Verny's lap.

"I can't," she whispered. "You're too like him."

Lady Verny said nothing at all for a moment; she looked about the room.
It was clean; for a London room it was quite clean, and Stella thought
she had hidden all the holes in the carpet. Lady Verny's ruthless,
practised eye took the faded, shabby little room to pieces and
reconstructed the rest of the dingy makeshift home from it. She knew
that Stella's room would be the worst of all.

"My dear," she said at last, "you are so very nearly a member of my
family that I think I may appeal to you about its honor. Are you going
to live like this and not let me help you? You are not strong enough to
work, and this folly of poor Julian's won't make you any stronger. Since
you can't live with me, won't you accept a little of what is really
yours?"

"Money?" asked Stella, looking up into Lady Verny's face. "I would if
you weren't his mother, because I love you; but I can't now. You see,
Julian's taken his honor away from me; he's left me only my own. I know
he'll think me cruel, and I'll never return what I did take. He'll think
perhaps I would use it, if I needed it, and that may make him happier;
but I mustn't take any more. I must be cruel."

"Yes, you're very cruel," said Lady Verny, kissing her. "Well, I sha'n't
bully you, for I wouldn't do it myself. It'll only make my heart ache in
a new way, and really, I'm so used to its aching that I oughtn't to
grumble at any fresh manifestation. As to Julian's heart, he's been so
extraordinarily silly that only the fact that folly is a sign of love
induces me to believe he's got one." She rose to her feet, with her arms
still about Stella. "I'm simply not to mention you at all?" she asked.

Stella shook her head. She clung to Lady Verny speechlessly, but without
tears.

"And when I see him next," Lady Verny asked a little dryly,--"and,
presumably, he'll send for me in about a fortnight,--he'll say, 'Well,
did she take the money'? What am I to answer to that?"

"Say," whispered Stella, "that she would have liked to take it, but she
couldn't."

"I could make up something a great deal crueller to say than that," said
Lady Verny, grimly. "However, I dare say you're right; it sounds so
precisely like you that it's bound to hurt him more than any gibe."

Stella burst into tears.

"Oh, don't! don't!" she sobbed. "You must--you must be kind to him! I
don't want anything in the world to hurt him."

"I know you don't," said Lady Verny, gently. "You little silly, I only
wanted to make you cry. It'll be easier if you cry a little."

Stella cried more than ever then, because Lady Verny was so terribly
like Julian.




CHAPTER XXVII


It was the hour of the day that Julian liked least. Until four o'clock
in the afternoon his mind was protected by blinkers; he saw the road
ahead of him, but the unmerciful vastness of the world was hidden from
him. He was thankful that he could not see it, because it was possessed
by Stella.

He could keep her out of his work; but there was no other subject she
left untouched, no prospect that was not penetrated with her presence,
no moment of his consciousness that she did not ruthlessly share.

He knew when he left her that he must be prepared for a sharp wrench and
an unforgetable loss; what he had not foreseen was that the wrench would
be continuous, and that he would be confronted by her presence at every
turn.

Women's faces had haunted him before, and he had known what it was to be
maddened by the sudden cessation of an intense relationship; but that
was different. He could not remember Stella's face; he had no visual
impression of her physical presence; he had simply lost the center of
his thoughts. He felt as if he were living in a nightmare in which one
tries to cross the ocean without a ticket.

He was perpetually starting lines of thought which were not destined to
arrive. For the first few weeks it was almost easier; he felt the
immediate relief which comes from all decisive action, and he was able
to believe that he was angry with Stella. She had obeyed him implicitly
by not writing, and his mother never mentioned her except for that worst
moment of all when she gave him Stella's words, without comment. "She
would like to take the money, but she cannot do it." This fed his anger.

"If I'd been that fellow Travers, I suppose she'd have taken it right
enough," he said to himself, bitterly, and without the slightest
conviction. He said nothing at all to his mother. Julian knew why Stella
had not taken the money. It was because she had not consented to what he
had done; he had forced her will. Of all her remembered words, the ones
that remained most steadily in his mind were: "You are not only
sacrificing yourself; you are sacrificing me. I give you no such right."

That was her infernal woman's casuistry. He had a perfect right to save
her. He was doing what a man of honor ought to do, freeing a woman he
loved from an incalculable burden. It was no use Stella's saying she
ought to have a choice,--pity had loaded her dice,--and it was sheer
nonsense to accuse him of pride. He hadn't any. He'd consented to take
her till he found she had a decent marriage at her feet. He couldn't
have done anything else then but give her up. The greatest scoundrel
unhung wouldn't have done anything else. It relieved Julian to compare
himself to this illusory and self-righteous personage.

As to facing Stella with it, which he supposed was her fantastic claim,
it only showed what a child she was and how little Stella knew about the
world or men. There were things you couldn't tell a woman. Stella was
too confoundedly innocent.

Why should he put them both to a scene of absolute torture? Surely he
had endured enough. He wasn't a coward, but to meet her eyes and go
against her was rather more than he could undertake, knocked about as he
was by every kind of beastly helplessness. He fell back upon self-pity
as upon an ally; it helped him to obscure Stella's point of view. She
ought to have realized what it would make him suffer; and she didn't, or
she would have taken the money. He did well, he assured himself, to be
angry; everything in life had failed him. Stella had failed him. But at
this point his prevailing sanity shook him into laughter. He could still
laugh at the idea of Stella's having failed him.

You do not fail people because you refuse to release them from acting up
to the standard you had expected of them; you fail them when you expect
less of them than they can give you. When Julian had faced this fact
squarely he ceased to beat about the bush of his vanity. He confessed to
himself that he was a coward not to have had it out with Stella. But he
acquiesced in this spiritual defeat; he assured himself that there were
situations in life when for the sake of what you loved you had to be a
coward. Of course it was for Stella's sake; a man, he argued, doesn't
lie down on a rack because he likes it.

He wished he could have gone on being angry with Stella, because when he
stopped being angry he became frightened.

He was haunted by the fear of Stella's poverty. He didn't know anything
about poverty except that it was disagreeable and a long way off. He had
a general theory that people who were very poor were either used to it
or might have helped it; but this general theory broke like a bubble at
the touch of a special instance.

The worst of it was that Stella had not really told him anything about
her life. He knew that her father was a well-known Egyptologist, that
her mother had various odd ethical beliefs, and he knew all that he
wanted to know about Eurydice. But of Stella's actual life, of its
burdens and its cares, what had she told him? That there weren't any
bells in the house and that the clocks didn't go.

This showed bad management and explained her unpunctuality, but it
explained nothing more. It did not tell Julian how poor she was, or if
she was properly looked after when she came home from work.

If she married Travers, she would have about nine hundred a year. Julian
had made investigations into the income of metropolitan town clerks.

He supposed that people could just manage on this restricted sum, with
economy; but there seemed no reliable statistics about the incomes of
famous Egyptologists. Why hadn't he asked Stella? She ought to have told
him without being asked. He tried being angry with her for her
secretiveness, but it hurt him, so he gave it up. He knew she would have
told him if he had asked her.

Julian made himself a nuisance at the office for which he worked on the
subject of pay for woman clerks. It relieved him a little, but not much.

Logically he ought to have felt only his own pain, which he could have
stood; he had made Stella safe by it. But he had deserted her; he
couldn't get this out of his head. He kept saying to himself, "If she's
in any trouble, why doesn't she go to Travers?" But he couldn't believe
that Stella would ever go to Travers.

The lighting restrictions--it was November, and the evening
thoroughfares were as dark as tunnels--unnerved him. Stella might get
run over; she was certain to be hopelessly absent-minded in traffic, and
would always be the last person to get on to a crowded bus.

It was six months since he had broken off their engagement. Julian did
not think it could possibly remind Stella of him if he sent her,
addressed by a shop assistant, a flash-light lamp for carrying about the
streets. She wouldn't send back a thing as small as a torch-lamp, even
if she did dislike anonymous presents. He was justified in this
conjecture. Stella kept the lamp, but she never had a moment's doubt as
to whom it came from; if it had had "Julian" engraved on it she couldn't
have been surer.

Julian always drove to his club at four o'clock, so that he didn't have
to take his tea alone. He didn't wish to talk to anybody, but he liked
being disturbed. Then he played bridge till dinner, dined at the club,
and went back to his rooms, where he worked till midnight. This made
everything quite possible except when he couldn't sleep.

He sat in an alcove, by a large, polished window of the club. It was
still light enough to see the faces of the passers-by, to watch the
motor-buses lurching through the traffic like steam tugs on a river, and
the shadows creeping up from Westminster till they filled the green park
with the chill gravity of evening.

A taxi drew up opposite to the club, and a man got out of it. There was
nothing particularly noticeable about the man except that he was very
neatly dressed. Julian took an instant and most unreasonable dislike to
him. He said under his breath, "Why isn't the fellow in khaki?"

The man paid the driver what was presumably, from the scowl he received
in return, his exact fare. Then he prepared to enter the club. He did
not look in the least like any of the men who belonged to Julian's club.
A moment later the waiter brought to Julian a card with "Mr. Leslie
Travers" engraved upon it.

"Confound his impudence," was Julian's immediate thought. "Why on earth
should I see the fellow?" Then he realized that he was being angry
simply because Mr. Travers had probably seen Stella.

Julian instantly rejected the idea that Stella had sent Mr. Travers to
see him; she wouldn't have done that. He wasn't in any way obliged to
receive him; still, there was just the off chance that he might hear
something about Stella if he did. Julian would rather have heard
something about Stella from a condemned murderer; but as Providence had
not provided him with this source of information, he decided to see the
town clerk instead. You could say what you liked to a man if he happened
to annoy you, and Julian rather hoped that Mr. Travers would give him
this opportunity.

Mr. Travers entered briskly and without embarrassment. His official
position had caused him to feel on rather more than an equality with the
people he was likely to meet. He did not think that Sir Julian Verny was
his equal.

Mr. Travers considered all members of the aristocracy loafers. Even when
they worked, they did it, as it were, on their luck. They had had none
of the inconveniences and resulting competence of having climbed from
the bottom of the ladder to the top by their own unaided efforts.

There were three or four other men in the room when he entered it, but
Mr. Travers picked out Julian in an instant. Their eyes met, and neither
of them looked away from the other. Julian said stiffly: "Sit down,
won't you? What will you take--a whisky and soda?"

"Thanks," said Mr. Travers, drawing up a chair opposite Julian and
placing his hat and gloves carefully on the floor beside him. "I do not
drink alcohol in between meals, but I should like a little aerated
water."

Julian stared at him fixedly. This was the man Eurydice had compared
with Napoleon, to the latter's disadvantage.

Mr. Travers refused a cigar, and sat in an arm-chair as if there were a
desk in front of him. It annoyed Julian even to look at him.

"I have no doubt," said Mr. Travers, "that you are wondering why I
ventured to ask you for this interview."

"I'm afraid I am, rather," Julian observed, with hostile politeness. "I
know your name, of course."

"Exactly," said Mr. Travers, as if Julian had presented him with a
valuable concession greatly to his advantage. "I had counted upon that
fact to approach you directly and without correspondence. One should
avoid black and white, I think, when it is possible, in dealing with
personal matters."

"I am not aware," said Julian, coldly, "that there are any personal
matters between us to discuss."

"I dare say not," replied Mr. Travers, blandly, placing the tips of his
fingers slowly together. "You may have observed, Sir Julian, that
coincidences bring very unlikely people together at times. I admit that
they have done so in this instance."

"What for?" asked Julian, succinctly. He found that he disliked Mr.
Travers quite as much as he intended to dislike him, and he despised him
more.

"An injustice has been brought to my notice," said Mr. Travers, slowly
and impressively. He was not in the least flurried by Julian's hostile
manner, which he considered was due to an insufficient business
education; it only made him more careful as to his own. "I could not
overlook it, and as it directly concerns you, Sir Julian, I am prepared
to make a statement to you on the subject."

"I'm sure I'm much obliged to you," said Julian; "but I trust you will
make the statement as short and as little personal as possible."

"Speed," Mr. Travers said reprovingly, "is by no means an assistance in
elucidating personal problems; and I may add, Sir Julian, that it is at
least as painful for me as for you, to touch upon personal matters with
a stranger."

"The fact remains," said Julian, impatiently, "that you're doing it, and
I'm not. Go on!"

Mr. Travers frowned. Town clerks are not as a rule ordered to go on.
Even their mayors treat them with municipal hesitancy. Still, he went
on. Julian's eyes held him as in a vice.

"You have probably heard my name," Mr. Travers began, "from the elder
Miss Waring." Julian nodded. "She was for two years and a half my
secretary. I may say that she was the most efficient secretary I have
ever had. There have been, I think, few instances in any office where
the work between a man and woman was more impersonal or more
satisfactory. It is due to the elder Miss Waring that I should tell you
this. It was in fact entirely due to her, for I found myself unable to
continue it. There was a lapse on my part. Miss Waring was consideration
itself in her way of meeting this--er--lapse; but she unconditionally
refused me."

Julian drew a quick breath, and turned his eyes away from Mr. Travers.

"At the same time," Mr. Travers continued, "she gave me to understand,
in order, I fancy, to palliate my error of judgment, that her affections
were engaged elsewhere."

Julian could not speak. His pride had him by the throat. He could not
tell Mr. Travers to go on now, although he felt as if his life depended
on it.

"There are one or two points which I put together, at a later date," Mr.
Travers continued, after a slight pause, "and by which I was able to
connect Miss Waring's statement with her subsequent actions. She is, if
I may say so, a woman who acts logically. You were the man upon whom her
affections were placed, Sir Julian, and that was her only reason for
accepting your proposal of marriage."

Julian stared straight in front of him. It seemed to him as if he heard
again the music of Chaliapine--the unconquerable music of souls that
have outlasted their defeat. He lost the sound of Mr. Travers's
punctilious, carefully lowered voice. When he heard it again, Mr.
Travers was saying:

"It came to my knowledge through an interview with the younger Miss
Waring, who has also become one of our staff, that she had regrettably
misinformed you as to her sister's point of view. The younger Miss
Waring acts at times impetuously and without judgment, but she had no
intention whatever of harming her sister. She has been deeply anxious
about her for the last few months, and she at length communicated her
anxiety to me."

"Anxious," exclaimed Julian, sharply. "What the devil's she anxious
about?"

"Her sister's state of health is not at all what it should be," Mr.
Travers said gravely. "She looks weak and thin, and she occasionally
forgets things. This is a most unusual and serious sign in a woman of
her capacity."

"Damn her capacity!" said Julian savagely. "Why on earth couldn't you
stop her working?"

"It is not in my province to stop people earning their daily bread,"
said Mr. Travers, coldly, "and I have never discussed this or any other
private question with the elder Miss Waring since her return. When she
came back to the town hall she refused to displace her sister, who had
undertaken her former work and went into the surveyor's office."

"All right, all right," said Julian, hastily. "I dare say you couldn't
have helped it; but how on earth did you find out if you've never talked
to Miss Waring, what had happened?"

"I investigated the matter," said Mr. Travers, "with the younger Miss
Waring. She confessed to me, under some slight pressure on my part, her
very mistaken conclusions, and the action she had based upon them. I
sent her at once, without mentioning what course of action I had decided
to take myself, to her sister."

"You shouldn't have done that," said Julian, with the singular injustice
Mr. Travers had previously noted and disliked in members of the upper
classes. "There wasn't any need to give Eurydice away to her; I could
have managed without that."

"You forget," said Mr. Travers, steadily, "the younger Miss Waring had
forfeited her sister's confidence; it would have been impossible to
avoid clearing up the situation by bringing all the facts to light. It
will not, I feel sure, cause permanent ill feeling between the two
sisters."

Julian gave a long, curious sigh. His relief was so intense that he
could hardly believe in it; but he could believe, not without
reluctance, in the hand that had set him free. It had taken a town clerk
to show him where he stood.

"It would be difficult," he began--"By Jove! it's impossible to express
thanks for this kind of thing! You won't expect it, perhaps, and I know
of course, you didn't do it for me. For all that, I'm not ungrateful.
I--well--I think you're more of a man than I am, Travers."

"Not at all, Sir Julian," said Mr. Travers, who privately felt surprised
that there should be any doubt upon the matter. "Any one would have
done precisely the same who had the good fortune to know the elder Miss
Waring."

"Perhaps they would," said Julian, smiling, "or, you might add, the
misfortune to come across the erratic proceedings of the younger one."

Mr. Travers looked graver still.

"There I cannot agree with you," he said quietly. "Perhaps I should have
mentioned the matter before, but it scarcely seemed germane to the
occasion; I am about to marry Miss Eurydice."

A vivid memory of Eurydice shot through Julian's mind. He saw her
advancing down the grass path arrayed in the purple garment, with the
scarlet hat and the dangling pomegranates; and the thought of her in
conjunction with the town clerk was too much for him. Laughter seized
him uncontrollably and shook him. He flung back his head and roared with
laughter, and the graver and more disapproving Mr. Travers looked, the
more helplessly and shamelessly Julian laughed.

"I'm most frightfully sorry," he gasped, "but I can't help it. Are you
sure you're going to marry her? I mean, _must_ you?"

Mr. Travers took his hat and gloves carefully in his hand.

"This is not a subject I care to discuss with you, Sir Julian," he said,
with dignity, "nor is your tone a suitable one in which to refer to a
lady. A man of my type does not shilly-shally on the question of
matrimony; either he is affianced or he is _not_. I have already told
you that I am. You may have some excuse for misjudging the younger Miss
Waring; but there can be no excuse whatever for your flippant manner of
referring to our marriage. It is most uncalled for. I might say
offensive."

A spasm of returning laughter threatened Julian again, but he succeeded
in controlling it.

"My dear Travers," he said, holding out his hand, "please don't go away
with a grievance. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself as it is, and more
grateful to you than I can possibly express. You'll forgive me for not
getting up, won't you? And try to overlook my bad manners."

It was the first time during the interview that Mr. Travers realized
Julian's disabilities, but they did not make him feel more lenient.

Mr. Travers liked an invalid to behave as if he were an invalid, and he
thought that a man in Julian's position should not indulge in unseemly
mirth.

"Pray don't get up," he said coldly. "I am bound to accept your apology,
of course, though I must confess I think your laughter very ill timed."

Julian took this rebuke with extraordinary humility. He insisted on
giving Mr. Travers an unnecessarily cordial hand-shake, and invited him
to drop in again at some hour when he would have a drink.

Mr. Travers waived aside this suggestion, he did not wish to continue
Julian's acquaintance and he disapproved of Julian's club. The large
luxurious lounges, the silent obsequious servants and the sprinkling of
indolent men swallowed up in soft arm-chairs, bore out Mr. Travers's
opinion of the higher classes. They were drones--whether they were in
khaki or not.

Mr. Travers sighed heavily as he crossed the threshold. "She was a
perfect business woman," he said to himself bitterly, "nipped in the
bud."

For the first time since Mr. Travers had known her, he found himself
doubting the judgment of the elder Miss Waring.




CHAPTER XXVIII


Julian's first impulse was to drive to the town hall and carry Stella
off. He was debarred from doing so only by a secret fear that she might
refuse to come. He was a little afraid of this first meeting with
Stella. She might haul him over the coals as much as she liked; but he
wanted to stage-manage the position of the coals.

He decided after a few moments of reflection to ring her up on the
telephone. The porter at the other end said that Miss Waring was still
at work, and seemed to think that this settled the question of any
further effort on his part. Julian speedily undeceived him. He used
language to the town hall porter which would have lifted every separate
hair from Mr. Travers's head. It did not have this effect upon the
porter. He was a man who appreciated language, and he understood that
there was an expert at the other end of the line. It even spurred him
into a successful search for Stella.

"That you, Stella?" Julian asked, "Do you know who's speaking to you?"

There was a pause before she answered a little unsteadily:

"Yes, Julian."

"Well," said Julian, with an anxiety he could hardly keep out of his
voice, "I want to see you for a few minutes if you can spare the time.
Will you come to the Carlton to tea? I suppose I mustn't ask you to my
rooms."

"I can't do either," replied Stella. "I'm too busy. Can't you wait till
Saturday?"

"Impossible," Julian replied firmly. "May I come and fetch you in a
taxi? I suppose you don't dine and sleep at the town hall, do you?"

"No, you mustn't do that," said Stella, quickly; "but you can come to
the Cottage Dairy Company, which is just opposite here, if you like. I
shall go there for a cup of tea at five o'clock. I can spare you half an
hour, perhaps."

"Oh, you will, will you?" said Julian, grimly. "I suppose I
must be thankful for what I can get. Five sharp, then, at the
what-you-may-call-'em."

Stella put up the receiver, but he thought before she did so that he
heard her laugh.

Julian had never been to the Cottage Dairy Company before. It was a very
nice, clean, useful little shop, and there was no necessity for him to
take such an intense dislike to it. The rooms are usually full, and for
reasons of space the tables are placed close together. The tables are
marble-topped and generally clean. There is not more smell of inferior
food than is customary in the cheaper restaurants of London.

Julian arrived at five minutes to the hour, and he turned the place
literally upside down. It did no good, because Cottage Dairy Companies
are democratic, and do not turn upside down to advantage.

He only succeeded in upsetting a manageress and several waitresses, and
terrifying an unfortunate shop-girl who was occupying the only table in
the room at which Julian could consent to sit by standing over her until
she had finished her tea, half of which she left in consequence.

Stella was ten minutes late; by the time she arrived Julian had driven
away the shop-girl, had the table cleared, and frozen every one in the
neighborhood who cast longing glances at the empty place in front of
him. He was consumed with fury at the thought that in all probability
Stella had had two meals a day for six months in what he most unfairly
characterized as a "loathsome, stinking hole."

As a matter of fact, Stella had not been able to afford the Cottage
Dairy Company. She had had her meals at the People's Restaurant, which
is a little cheaper and not quite so nice.

Julian's anger failed him when he saw Stella's face. She looked ill. He
could not speak at first, and Stella made no attempt whatever to help
him. She merely dropped her umbrella at his feet, sat down opposite him,
and trembled.

"How dare you come to this infernal place?" Julian asked her at last,
with readjusted annoyance, "and why didn't you tell me you were ill?"
Then he ordered tea from a hovering waitress. "If you have anything
decent to eat, you can bring it," he said savagely.

Stella smiled deprecatingly at the outraged waitress before she answered
Julian.

"I'm not ill," she said gently, "and I couldn't very well tell you
anything, could I, when I didn't know where you were?"

"Of course, if you make a point of eating and drinking poison," said
Julian, bitterly, "you aren't likely to be very well. I suppose you
could have told my mother, but no doubt that didn't occur to you. You
simply wished--" He stopped abruptly at the approach of the waitress.

Stella did not try to pour out the tea; she showed no proper spirit
under Julian's unjust remarks. She only put her elbows on the table and
looked at him.

"There, drink that," he said, "if you can. It's the last chance you'll
get of this particular brand. They call it China, and it looks like dust
out of a rubbish-heap. I don't know what you call that thing on the
plate in front of you, but I suppose it's meant to eat. So you may as
well try to eat it."

"Food," said Stella, with the ghost of her old fugitive smile, "isn't
everything, Julian."

"It's all you'll get me to talk about in a place like this," said
Julian, firmly. "I wonder you didn't suggest our meeting in one of those
shelters on the Strand! Do you realize that there's a Hindu two yards to
your right, a family of Belgian refugees behind us, and the most
indescribable women hemming us in on every side? How can you expect us
to talk here?"

"But you and I are here," said Stella, quietly. "Julian, how could you
believe what Eurydice told you?"

Julian lowered his eyes.

"Must I tell you now?" he asked gravely. "I'd rather not."

"Yes, I think you must," said Stella, relentlessly, "You needn't tell me
much, but you must say enough for me to go on with. If you don't, I
can't talk at all; I can only be afraid."

Julian kept his eyes on a tea-stained spot of marble. There was no
confidence in his voice now; it was not even very steady as he answered
her.

"I made a mistake," he said. "You weren't there. I wanted you to have
everything there was. I can't explain. I ought to have let you choose,
but if you'd chosen wrong I should have felt such a cur. I can't say any
more here. Please, Stella!"

She was quick to let him off.

"I oughtn't to have left you so soon," she said penitently; "that was
_quite_ my fault."

Julian made no answer. He drew an imaginary pattern on the table with a
fork; he couldn't think why they'd given him a fork unless it was a
prevision that he would need something to fidget with. It helped him to
recover his assurance.

"I suppose you know," he said reflectively, contemplating the
unsuspicious Hindu on his right, "that I'm never going to let you out of
my sight again?"

"I dare say I shall like being alone sometimes," replied Stella; "but I
don't want you to go calmly off and arrange things that break us both to
pieces. I'd never see you again rather than stand that!"

"Now," said Julian, "you've roused the Belgians; they're awfully
interested. I'll never go off again, though you're not very accurate; it
was you that went off first. I only arranged things, badly I admit, when
I was left alone. I wasn't so awfully calm. As far as that goes, I've
been calmer than I am now. Have you had enough tea?"

"You know it's you I mind about," said Stella, under her breath.

"You mustn't say that kind of thing in a tea-shop," said Julian,
severely. "You're very nearly crying, and though I'd simply love to have
you cry, I believe it's against the regulations. And there's a fat lady
oozing parcels to my left who thinks it's all my fault, and wants to
tell me so."

"I'm not crying," said Stella, fiercely. "I'm going back to work. I
don't believe you care about anything but teasing."

"I don't believe I do," agreed Julian, with twinkling eyes; "but I
haven't teased any one for six months, you know, Stella. How much may I
tip the waitress? Let's make it something handsome; I've enjoyed my tea.
I'll take you across to the town hall."

"It's only just the other side of the road," Stella objected.

"Still, I'd like you to get into this taxi," said Julian, hailing one
from the door.

Stella looked at him searchingly. "I should be really angry if you
tried to carry me off," she warned him.

"My dear Stella," said Julian, meeting her eyes imperturbably, "I
haven't the nerve to try such an experiment. I'm far too much afraid of
you. Get in, won't you? The man'll give me a hand." He turned to the
driver. "Drive wherever you like for a quarter of an hour," he
explained, "and then stop at the town hall."

The taxi swung into the darkened thoroughfare, and Julian caught Stella
in his arms and kissed her as if he could never let her go.

"Not very clever of you," he murmured, "not to guess why I wanted a
taxi."

[Illustration: "Not very clever of you," he murmured, "not to guess why
I wanted a taxi"]

Stella clung to him speechlessly. She did not know what to say; she only
knew that he was there and that the desperate loneliness of the empty
world was gone.

She wanted to speak of the things that she believed in, she wanted not
to forget to reassure him, in this great subdual of her heart; but she
did not have to make the effort. It was Julian who spoke of these things
first.

He spoke hurriedly, with little pauses for breath, as if he were
running.

"I know now," he said, "I've been a fool and worse. I saw it as soon as
I looked at you; it broke me all up. How could I tell you'd mind losing
a man like me? I'm glad it's dark; I'm glad you can't see me. I'm
ashamed. Stella, the fact is, I gave you up because I couldn't stick it;
my nerve gave way."

"I shouldn't have left you so soon; it was all my fault for leaving
you," Stella murmured.

"That rather gives the show away, doesn't it," asked Julian "not to be
able to stand being left?"

"You weren't thinking only of yourself," Stella urged defensively.

"Wasn't I?" said Julian. "I kept telling myself I was behaving decently
when I was only being grand. Isn't that thinking of yourself?"

"But on the downs," urged Stella, "you weren't like that, darling."

"You were on the downs, remember," said Julian. "I got your point of
view then--to give in, anyhow, to love. It wasn't easy, but it made it
more possible that if I didn't marry you, you only had hard work and a
dull life. It seemed different when I heard about that fellow Travers.
You see, that cut me like a knife. I kept thinking--well, you know what
a man like me keeps thinking--at least I don't know that you do. It was
my business to fight it through alone."

"No it isn't," Stella protested quickly. "We haven't businesses that
aren't each other's."

"Well," admitted Julian, "I couldn't bear thinking I'd cheated you out
of my own values; so I let yours slide. I knew, if I gave you the
choice, you'd stick to me; but I couldn't trust you not to make a
mistake. That's where my nerve broke down."

"Ah, but I didn't know," whispered Stella; "I didn't know enough how to
show you I loved you. If you'd seen, you wouldn't have broken down. I
was afraid to try. Now I can. All these six months have eaten up my not
knowing how." She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "You see,
I do know how!"

He held her close, without speaking; then he murmured: "And knowing how
doesn't make you afraid?"

"It's the only thing that doesn't," said Stella, lifting her eyes to
his.

The taxi stopped before the door of the town hall.

"And have I got to let you go now?" Julian asked gently.

"I shall never really go," Stella explained; "but you can let me get out
and tidy up the surveyor's papers, and then be free for you to-morrow."

Julian opened the door for her. She stood for a moment under the arc of
light beneath the lamp-post looking back at him.

The love between them held them like a cord. Julian had never felt so
little aware of his helplessness; but he wondered, as he gazed into her
eyes, if Stella realized the bitterness of all that they had lost.

She neither stirred nor spoke. She held his eyes without faltering; she
gave him back knowledge for knowledge, love for love; and still there
was no bitterness. At last he knew that she had seen all that was in his
heart; and then for a moment, if but for a moment, Julian forgot what
they had lost; he remembered only what they had found.




CHAPTER XXIX


When Stella reentered the town hall the porter was still sitting at his
desk near the door, but every one else had gone.

"Oh, I hope I have not kept you, Humphreys," Stella said apologetically.
"I had no idea it was so late. I'll be as quick as I can."

"Mr. Travers is still in 'is room," Humphreys admitted gloomily; "'e
came back an hour ago. Gawd knows how long 'e'll be at it. There's been
a tri-bunal and wot not this afternoon. Talk abaht mud in the trenches!
'Alf the gutters of Lunnon 'as been dribbling through this 'ere 'all.
I've asked for an extra char, an', what's more, I mean ter 'ave 'er. War
or no war, I'll 'ave a woman under me."

The surveyor's office was empty. Stella's papers were just as she had
left them, but her whole life lay in between.

She would never copy the surveyor's plans again or do the office
accounts or look through the correspondence. She would not hover in the
drafty passages and listen to the grumbling Humphreys nor stand outside
glass doors and help bewildered fellow-clerks over their blunders before
they went in to face a merciless authority.

She would probably never see green baize again. She tried to fix her
mind on the accounts, but through the columns of figures ran the wind
from the downs. The half-darkened, empty room filled itself with
Amberley.

She tried to imagine her life with Julian. It would be unlike anything
she had lived before; it would require of her all she had to give. The
town hall had not done this. It had taken the outer surfaces of her
mind, her time, and much of her youth: but her inner self had been free.

It was not free now; it had entered that dual communion of love. It was
one with Julian, and yet not one; because she knew that though he filled
every entrance to her heart, though her mind companioned his mind, and
her life rested on him, yet she was still herself. She would be for
Julian the Stella of Amberley, but she would not cease to be the Stella
of the town hall.

She would not part with her experiences; poverty, drudgery, the endless
petty readjustments to the ways of others should belong to her as much
as joy. Privilege should neither hold nor enchain her, and she would
never let anything go.

She would keep her people, her old interests, Mr. Travers, even the
surveyor, if he wished to be kept. Stella mightn't be able to impart
them to Julian, but she could give him all he wanted and still have
something to spare. Julian himself would profit by her alien interests;
he would get tired of a woman who hadn't anything to spare. Stella was
perfectly happy, but she could still see over the verge of her
happiness. Joy had come to her with a shock of surprise which would have
puzzled Julian. He had the strength of attack, which is always startled
when it cannot overcome opposition. Julian never cooperated with
destiny, he always fought it. Sometimes he overcame it; but when it
overcame him, he could not resign himself to defeat. Stella took
unhappiness more easily; in her heart, even now, she believed in it. She
believed that the balance of life is against joy, that destiny and fate
prey upon it, overcloud it, and sometimes destroy it; and she believed
that human beings can readjust this balance. She believed in a success
which is independent of life, an invisible and permanent success.

She did not think of this for herself, it never occurred to her that she
possessed it; but she believed in its existence, and she wanted it, and
sought for it, in every soul she knew. She wanted it most for Julian,
but she did not think it could be got for him to-morrow. She did not
expect to get it for him, though she would have given all she possessed
to help him to obtain it.

She only hoped that he would win it for himself, and that she would not
be a hindrance to his winning it; that was as far as Stella's hopes
carried her before she returned to the accounts.

When she had finished the accounts, she took them to the town clerk's
room.

Mr. Travers was sitting as usual at his desk, but he did not appear to
be writing. Perhaps he was also doing his accounts.

"I'm afraid," Stella said apologetically, "I'm very late with these
papers, Mr. Travers. I was detained longer than I had intended."

"I expected you to be late," said Mr. Travers, quietly. "In fact, I
should not have been surprised if you had not returned at all. It
occurred to me that you might not come back to the town hall again."

"I had to finish my work," said Stella, gently, "and I wanted to see
you; but after this, if you and Mr. Upjohn can find some one else to
take my place, I shall not return. I know I ought not to leave you in
the lurch like this without proper notice; I should have liked to have
given you at least another week to find some one to take my place, but I
am afraid I must leave at once."

"I think I can make a temporary arrangement to tide us over," Mr.
Travers replied thoughtfully. "Your leaving us was bound to be a loss in
any case."

They were silent for a moment. Mr. Travers still sat at his desk, and
Stella stood beside him with the papers in her hand.

"I hope you will not think I took too much upon myself, Miss Waring,"
said Mr. Travers at last, "in going to see Sir Julian Verny this
afternoon. It seemed to me a man's job, if I may say so, and not a
woman's. I thought your sister had done enough in letting you know
herself how gravely she had misunderstood us all; and if I had notified
you of my intention, I feared that you might not have seen your way to
ratify it."

"I am very glad indeed you spared Eurydice," said Stella; "I would not
have let her go to Julian. I would have gone myself; but I am glad I did
not have to do it. You spared us both."

"That," said Mr. Travers, "was what I had intended."

Stella put the papers on the desk; then she said hesitatingly:

"Mr. Travers, may I ask you something?"

"Yes, Miss Waring; I am always at your disposal," replied Mr. Travers,
clearing his throat. "You are not an exacting questioner."

"I hope you will not think me so," said Stella, gently; "but are you
sure--will you be quite happy with Eurydice?"

Mr. Travers met her eyes. She did not think she had ever seen him look
as he looked now; his eyes were off their guard. It was perhaps the only
time in his life when Mr. Travers wished any one to know exactly what
he felt.

"You will remember, Miss Waring," he said, "that I told you once before
that I am a lonely man. I have not won affection from people. I think I
have obtained your sister's regard, and I am proud to have done so. I
suppose, too, that all men have the desire to protect some one. I do not
know much about feelings in general, but I should suppose that the
desire for protection _is_ a masculine instinct?"

Stella nodded. She wished to give Mr. Travers all the instincts that he
wanted, and if he preferred to think them solely masculine, she had not
the least objection.

"I see that you agree with me," said Mr. Travers, with satisfaction,
"and you will therefore be able to understand my point of view. I have a
very real regard for Miss Eurydice. Her work is of great, though
unequal, value, and I should like to see her happy and comfortable and,
if I may say so, safe. I do not think that the life of women who work in
public offices, unless they are peculiarly gifted by nature, is safe. I
may be old-fashioned, Miss Waring, but I still maintain that woman's
sphere is the home."

"I am glad you feel like that about Eurydice," said Stella, softly.

She paused for a moment. She wanted to thank him, but she knew that she
must thank him only for some little thing. The greater things she must
leave entirely alone. He trusted her to do this; he was trusting her
with all he had. She must protect him from her gratitude.

"Before I leave the town hall, Mr. Travers," she said, "I want to thank
you for what I have learned here. That is really one of the reasons I
came back to-night. You have been such a help to me as a business woman.
I am not going to give it up. I shall keep all that you have taught me,
and take it into my new life with me. It has been an education to work
in your office under your rule."

"I am glad you have felt it to be so, Miss Waring," said Mr. Travers,
with grave satisfaction. "I have devoted what talents I possess to the
running of this town hall, under the auspices of the mayor, of course. I
am very much gratified if my methods have been of any service to you.
Our relationship has certainly not been a one-sided benefit. I took
occasion to say to Sir Julian this afternoon that I had never had a more
efficient secretary."

"I am so glad you told Julian that," said Stella, smiling. "My work with
him was only make-believe."

"There is a leniency about your dealings with people," Mr. Travers
continued, ignoring her reference to Julian, "which sometimes needs
restraint, Miss Waring. The world, I fear, cannot be run upon lenient
principles. Nevertheless, in some cases I am not prepared to say that
your system has not got merits of its own. I recognize that personal
leniency modifies certain problems even of business life. I should be
apprehensive of seeing it carried too far; but up to a certain point,"
said Mr. Travers, rising to his feet and holding out his hand to Stella
to close the interview, "I am prepared to accept your theory."

THE END





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Second Fiddle, by Phyllis Bottome

*** 