The morning brought counsel to Muriel. She would say nothing. Jack would not return for a year or two, and in the meantime Gladys’ passionate little heart might have turned elsewhere, or in any case the quick pain of certainty be less. For herself she turned her eager mind anew to the work before her. Love acted as a spur upon the discipline of her life; it made the dark places plainer, and lit up with light and hope the saddest mysteries. She was one of those few souls in whom experiences can never conflict or stand in opposition to each other. She knit them link by link into a chain binding her closer and higher towards her ideals. She never thought much about her difficulties until she came up to them, but when she once faced them they helped her afterwards. Edith le Mentier’s delicate insinuation she had felt a passing disgust at, and had straightway brushed aside. Jealousy and suspicion need darkness and a closed-up room; all Muriel’s rooms were open to the sky and bright with sunshine. Nevertheless when she looked at Edith le Mentier she felt an uneasiness she could not account for.

The party broke up the next morning. The doctor and his sister returned to town, while the others went to various other country houses, Muriel and her uncle going to Scotland for the remainder of her holiday. She was impatient to go back to her work, and the month passed in making arrangements and re-arrangements all involving voluminous correspondence. She wrote to Cyril Johnstone about Captain Hurstly’s club work, and as it was under parochial guidance, and various ritual stipulations of the young man’s were agreed to by the open-minded, slightly lax old vicar, he was soon settled in deeply earnest and energetic work such as the slow old parish had never seen before. Yet, as Muriel soon saw, the example of his stern habits and indefatigable labor bore much fruit of admiration and respect, though scarcely that imitation which the zealous young priest expected the doctrines he would have died for to bring forth. He was not satisfied with Muriel’s generous explanation. “It’s your doctrines that have made you, and if the people accept you, surely they are on the way to accept the doctrines?” She returned a week earlier than her uncle wished her to, to encourage Jack’s “Parson,” though she wrote to Jack that “your young priest doesn’t at all approve of me. He considers me a shallow society woman with a club craze, and shakes his head over my unaccountable friendship with you. He gave me splendid advice the other day, and I’m afraid I lost my temper with him, but the gravity with which he regarded me as he said, ‘My dear young lady, I am not speaking to you as a mere man, but from my priestly office,’ restored my sense of humor. . . . But no, Jack, I have a reason for wishing our engagement private. If it were any feeling of my own I would tell you, as it is you must take it on trust as you do me. Did you ever know Mrs. le Mentier very well?”

Muriel wrote the last sentence and then crossed it out. He might think—— Besides, it was so absurd. She felt angry with herself for having crossed it out—it was so unimportant. She was surprised that night by a letter from Cynthia Grant, who had passed out of her mind with the press of duty and pleasure and life. Now, however, she awoke to a vigorous interest.

Muriel thought for a moment, then laughed, and wired back: “Please come, plenty of interesting tumors.”

It was the first day of October before the two women settled to work. Life opened before them full, arduous, engrossing. Around them in teeming factories and crowded dust-yards lived the people into whose lives their own brought knowledge, health, horizon. Year after year these sordid lives go on, working until dead-tired they stumble home and stand an hour or two in the close streets full of the dangers and temptations of the city; the holidays’ rough carnivals of over-feeding and drinking. Death, disease and sin the only breaks in the grim monotony of passing years, and now slowly and gradually the change was taking place. From their work the young people streamed into the clubs, and were taught little by little lessons of life, courtesy, truthfulness, honesty; and these not by confronting them with strange virtues, but in developing their own, generosity, kindliness and the marvellous quality of “straightness,” the shield of so many of the poor. Men found billiards and other games, even cards, though gambling was not allowed; they could pass their evenings in social good fellowship without spending their wages or staggering home drunk. Their wives, too, in another part were not less well cared for, and their sons and daughters, kept out of the streets four or five nights out of the seven, were all the more inclined to stay at home on the other two. More than all this, living among them and sharing all they suffered was a “lidy,” who if she had chosen need never have done a stroke of work, or given a thought to anything but pleasure and ease and beauty. Though some of the more hardened jeered at her for her sacrifice, the greater part were drawn in generous animation and gratitude into the work, and even those who jeered left her alone and would have fought any who tried to do her an injury.

“You only touch the fringe,” Cynthia said to her one day. “So what’s the use? When you die it will all sink back again!”

“Do you know,” said Muriel smiling, “I believe there is healing in the very hem of His garment, and that all these children in whom we start a larger life will in time permeate the apathetic multitude. As for ourselves, don’t doubt that when we die the work will not go on. Truly I should be very despairing if I dreamed that such tremendous purposes rested on my shoulders. We just fit in here, that’s all, and make the room larger for the next comer!”

“Humph!” said Cynthia dryly; “after I’d made the room larger, I should prefer sitting in it myself.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Muriel; “you would go on to make an addition to the house!”

“My brother comes here to-night,” Cynthia stated abruptly. “He’s going to bring a magic lantern for the men, and show them some of his Chinese slides.”

“I’m so glad,” said Muriel gratefully.

“Do you like him?” Cynthia asked.

“Like your brother? Of course, very much.”

“So little as that?” cried Cynthia laughing wistfully. “Oh, Muriel, Muriel!” Muriel colored and frowned. It was a subject that visibly annoyed her, and which she tried to ignore. Dr. Grant had been very kind to the club. She had tried to believe he was interested in the work; it was a little baffling to find it hinted that it might be the worker. Cynthia watched her carefully. “Is there nothing besides the work?” she thought to herself. She introduced the subject of a meal, and Muriel laughingly discovered she had forgotten her lunch.

“You were writing letters at lunch time, weren’t you?” suggested Cynthia.

There was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is constantly drawing attention to the inconveniences of one’s clothing. The clouds were the dull brown of approaching rain, drifting in rags across the chilly sky. Cynthia Grant, who had been all the night before and half the day through fighting over the undesirable life of a mother and child, felt almost aggrieved that she had saved them both. “What did I want to do it for? The whole system’s rotten! Why should it be considered mercy to prolong the agony instead of cutting it short? I don’t care for the woman; I hate the child; and, even if I liked them both, I don’t think their lives worth living. Why that drunken brute of a husband, who is always throwing chairs at the poor thing, should say ‘Thank God!’ when I told him she’d live is a puzzle; he could easily have got some one fresh to throw chairs at, and the brat is only one mouth more to feed! I feel far more sympathy for that woman with ten children who told me she had had ‘no churchyard luck’.” She chuckled grimly to herself, and looked with a tolerant, amused gaze at the narrow alley, with its children at play in the gutters, wizened and old, with sharp, cruel, degraded little faces, slatternly women at doors, and skulking forms, that were scarcely human, lurking in corners and in the wretched rooms that were called “living,” a phrase more applicable to the vermin that inhabited them than the half-human creatures that sprawled there. It was a bad alley, and the tough knotted stick in Cynthia’s hand did not look out of place.

“Yes,” she thought to herself, “Muriel must be impelled by some pretty desperate attraction to give up her life to this sort of thing. It will make her old before her time. And as for the people here, her influence will probably cease as most influence does with her presence, and trickle off them as easily as water off a duck’s back. As for me, I suppose I might as well be here as anywhere else—now.”

She looked at the sky and wondered what poets saw in it. It suggested to her nothing but the need of a broom. She was tired out when she reached rooms over the club, and glad of the tea Muriel had prepared for her.

Muriel could not stay, for it was the time when her girls came out of the factory, and she must be ready to meet them. She was in one of her merriest and brightest moods. The gloom of the outside world could not touch her; even the sordid misery of the streets she had visited that afternoon only seemed to her vistas of future sunshine. She believed in no sympathy that stopped at sorrow; but it was because she believed so deeply in the reality of sorrow that she knew the certainty of joy.

“What makes you so happy?” said Cynthia wistfully; “I see nothing to cause it.” Muriel wrinkled her eyebrows as she always did when puzzled. Geoff called it her “frowning for a vision,” and compared it to a sailor’s whistling for a wind. At last the partial vision came.

“I don’t see why it should be so difficult to be happy,” she said. “All that one hasn’t got is bound to come some day; all that one truly has will never go. And when one is quite sure of that oneself, it is beautiful to be able to encourage one’s bit of the world to go on waiting for their bright side. And how good and bright and dear things really are if we only come to look through them, and don’t make culs-de-sac of sorrows. If love is the key of the world, joy is the hand that turns it, I feel sure. To make a creed of joy and a fact of love is to win half the battles, and be ready to fight the other half. But you know all this just as well as I do, and practise it far better—so what’s the use of talking? Simple things become mysteries directly you try to explain them. Mind you rest and sleep. I’ll be back for supper,” and she disappeared. It grew dark in the room afterwards.

It was decided that one more effort should be made to rescue Muriel Dallerton.

Mary Huntly, persuaded by her husband, wrote asking her for two days early in the season.

Cynthia peremptorily ordered her to go, and she went.

The weather in the opening charm of June would to most people have been better spent in the country; only London lovers felt the greater charm of the full, bright season set in the green freshness of the Park.

There was a ball the first night, and Muriel danced in a dream of delight at the old easy ways, and all the beauties of sight and sound and sense. Gladys was away on a visit, so the return to civilization was marked by no jar of severed friendship.

A day spent on the river with one of those groups, where each one knows his neighbor well enough for associations to make past pleasures present ones, and yet not too deeply to be able to play lightly on the surface of personalities, made Muriel thirsty for more. It is true that there were strained relationships even there, though hidden with a cultivated ease; but she refused to see them, and let herself be soothed into a fairyland of fancies.

Mary had arranged as a climax a tea-party in the gardens.

“Of course,” she said apologetically, “one knows they aren’t private, but it’s the best place in the world to wander, if only on that account. Wandering I always think the chief charm of tea out-of-doors; it’s a compensation for one’s hair being blown about and the butter melting.”

“It all depends on having the right person to wander with,” suggested her companion.

“Well, but what are all our social efforts but an attempt to find the right person—and then wander?” laughed Mrs. Huntly. “It’s the magic lottery that makes London seasons, and keeps up house-parties——”

“And finally limits one to a wedding ring,” interrupted one of the group.

“Or charms one away from the limits!” ventured a daring young man to Muriel. She felt vaguely uncomfortable, these children of light played so near the brink of things.

“I don’t think I quite know what you mean,” she said gravely.

“He doesn’t mean anything,” said Mary Huntly shortly. The young man turned to someone with whom he needn’t explain. Muriel wondered whether she would enjoy wandering in the gardens. “At any rate I shall not have the right person,” she thought.

When the afternoon came the overpowering youthfulness of spring danced in her veins, and made it easy for the unpleasant to pass from her mind. She was with a little group who had not yet separated to wander, when she saw a woman whom she had known crossing the grass at a little distance from where they sat.

“Why, there is Sally Covering,” she cried. “It seems years since I have seen her!” There was a moment’s awkward silence. Muriel looked in astonishment from one to the other. They all began to talk in the way of people who wish to ignore an impossible moment. Alec Bruce, who was one of the party, asked her an irrelevant question, but she brushed it aside.

“I am going to speak to her,” she said.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Alec. They spoke rapidly, and Muriel felt the color rush to her face. She felt annoyed with herself for speaking at all; but now that she had spoken she would not be a coward, so she walked the intervening space, and came up with the woman.

“Mrs. Covering! you haven’t forgotten me?” she cried. The woman started at the sound of her name, and turned sharply. She was painted more than a little, and inartistically. She gave a queer little laugh as she took Muriel’s outstretched hand.

“Dear me, no!” she said; “I am not the one who forgets, Miss Dallerton.” Muriel held her hand and looked into her eyes.

“I suppose you will think me very rude to stop you like this!” she said; “but I should like so much to talk to you a few moments, if you are not engaged.”

Mrs. Covering withdrew her hand. She was embarrassed, puzzled, and a trifle defiant.

“I cannot think what you wish to say to me, Miss Dallerton,” she answered; “but I am quite at your disposal for the next few minutes.”

They walked together in silence for a moment, Muriel searching for the right word. She remembered the woman’s story now. She had left her husband, and made what the set she lived in called the “dreadful break.” Muriel could not quite remember with whom; but people did not talk to her much about that kind of thing, and she had only heard the outlines of the story. What Muriel finally did say was not in the least what Mrs. Covering expected.

“You have never been to see me,” she said, “in my new home.”

“Oh! I don’t see people now,” said Mrs. Covering, with some bitterness; “I have got out of the habit.”

“Mrs. Covering,” said Muriel, “I should like to be able to contradict a report about you. Will you give me leave?” Mrs. Covering made an attempt to remain defiant.

“Really, Miss Dallerton,” she began, “I cannot conceive——” But as she looked at the girl’s honest, tender eyes her lips quivered. “It’s no use,” she said. “Please let us say good-bye here. It was very good of you to speak to me.”

“But it isn’t true?” said Muriel. Mrs. Covering looked back to where through the trees her old acquaintances in ostentatious conversation pretended not to be watching them.

“Well, anyway,” she said, “I was honest enough to leave my husband; if I hadn’t I might be over there now with your friends.” Muriel took her hand. She knew that sometimes the human touch does more than the work of words.

“Will you come to me?” she said. “Will you promise to come to me when you want help? That you will want help I feel sure; for you are sad already, and you can’t help being more sad. Only don’t get desperate. Come to me, and we will find some way out of it together!”

“I’m not sad!” said Mrs. Covering quickly. “I don’t see why you should think so. I’m happy—absolutely happy! Can’t you see how happy I am?” She bit her lip to keep it from quivering. “And as for there being an end—Oh, Miss Dallerton, there isn’t an end for a woman like me, there’s only—a new beginning!”

“And that you will try with me?” said Muriel with an insistence that she herself could scarcely understand.

“The ten minutes are up,” said Mrs. Covering trying hard to smile, “and I have an appointment. If it is ever possible I will come to you, Miss Dallerton—at any rate I shall never forget that you asked me. But I do not think I shall come.”

She walked quickly away, and Muriel watched her in silence. She remembered that people had said Sally Covering was the best-dressed woman in London. She was still—for it is rarely that the little things change. We don’t forget to put on gloves because our heart is broken. Muriel felt a passion to be alone. Alone in this world of green, robbed for the moment of its fresh beauty; alone to face the problem that rose in inexorable, dark power in society as well as in the slums—the problem which seems ever the same unrelenting enemy of joy and health and the beauty of life, and attacked the vital principles of all she believed in and hoped for. It was very difficult to go back to the group of merry idlers, dancing like butterflies over a precipice—butterflies intent on hiding from the unwary that there is a precipice.

The buzz of talk increased as she drew near them. One lady put up her lorgnette and looked at her as if she were some new invention, and then turning said in a perfectly audible voice: “The paragon of virtue approaches, but I don’t see the lost sheep!” The group dispersed and left Muriel for a moment with her hostess.

“Oh, Muriel, how could you do such a thing?” wailed Mary Huntly. “People must draw a line somewhere, you know. They may swallow the slums, but for you—before their very eyes——”

“To speak to an old friend,” said Muriel quietly. “Mary, you can’t blame me. It’s terrible! terrible! But just because it is, one can’t let it pass!” Mary shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s hopeless to argue with you, child,” she said. “Yet even you must see that if people will do such things, they must be ignored for the sake of society at large.”

“Society at large,” said Muriel bitterly, “which has caused the trouble, must protect itself from its own victims, I understand, Mary.”

“But what would you have one do?” said Mary Huntly. “What good did your speaking to her do?”

“It showed her that one cared,” said Muriel. “Too late, I am afraid, in her case. But one must give them a chance to come back, or at least see where they have gone, and wake them up to the horror of it! If you leave them to wake up too late for themselves, they will only fall into a deeper horror!”

“A woman of that sort,” said Mrs. Huntly “is incorrigible—simply incorrigible, Muriel.”

“Oh, Mary, you don’t mean that, I know. If it was some one you loved you would try to help her!”

Mrs. Huntly turned with relief to welcome Dr. Grant. There was a positive pleasure in her greeting. It put an end to an unpleasant situation. The only thing in life that Mrs. Huntly was afraid of was an unpleasant situation.

“Here’s your doctor, child,” she said in an undertone; “do go and wander.” Muriel accepted the proposition almost willingly.

Geoff looked this afternoon so strong and unconventional—not even a frock-coat could make a man-about-town out of him. Not that he in the least answered her problem. He would probably have refused to discuss it with her, and would certainly have disagreed with her in his conclusions; and yet there was something in the strong, sound spirit of the man infinitely refreshing to her after the cruel butterflies.

It was with a new sense of trust and confidence in him that she wandered in the gardens. She realized at last that the parting of the ways had come between her old friends and her new life. Before she had been happy with them because her eyes were shut, now she saw beneath all that seemed gay and delightful a horror of selfishness, hardness and wrong.

Mrs. Covering never came to her; but whenever she felt a longing to return to the old life the thought of her face and the knowledge of what the day’s wanderings had shown her came back with the same bitterness.

She knew that the man with whom Mrs. Covering had made “the dreadful break” would soon be received back into society again.

Mothers with marriageable daughters do not ask too many questions if the woman disappears—and the woman always disappears.

There were times when Muriel almost envied Mary her faith in the incorrigible—it relieved her of so much responsibility.

“Really, Gladys,” said Mary Huntly firmly, “I think you should give some reason for the way you are behaving. I don’t want to bother you, but there was my own brother, Cyril——”

“What’s the use of fast-days and a cope, Mary? I should give him beefsteaks on Fridays and sausages for vigils, and he would apply for a separation. Besides, I don’t care for him.”

“There is still Alec Bruce,” said Mary Huntly slowly. “He would let you have your own way in everything, and never remember a fast from one year’s end to another. Muriel Dallerton was engaged to him once years ago, before she met Captain Hurstly. It was her fault entirely that it was broken off, she was so down on him. By the way, what has become of your friendship for Muriel?” Gladys shrugged her shoulders.

“Fancy marrying a man who would let you have your own way in everything. I should be bored to death. No, Mary, I am only twenty, and I really will marry somebody sometime I promise you.”

She ignored the question about Muriel and got up idly to look at the paper. After a few minutes it fell on her lap, and she gazed with wide-open eyes straight in front of her. In print, so that all the world could see, ran an announcement of a severe hunting accident to Captain Hurstly of the ——, with the addition that Miss Dallerton, his fiancée, and her uncle were soon to be on their way out to India to join him. It was thought probable that in the event of Captain Hurstly’s recovery the young couple would be married out there. Gladys watched with fascinated gaze the skilful movements of the footmen removing tea. She never forgot the delicate traced pattern on the cloth, or the two muffins and a half. She carefully counted and wondered, with an interest out of proportion to its subject, what would eventually be their fate. It did not surprise her that Edith le Mentier should be announced, and she found herself smiling quite naturally at that lady’s little graceful poses, when suddenly she heard herself addressed by name.

“Have you heard of Muriel Dallerton’s great coup? My dear child, you really should go in for slum clubs—they’re so taking. I should do it myself if I could ever think of anything to say to those kind of creatures. And then one finds out that she’s been all the time engaged to Jack Hurstly, and is actually going out to India to nurse him through an accident and pull him safely into the bonds of matrimony. If I were a yellow journalist I could make the most touching headlines for it—‘Death or Marriage?’ ‘If he survives the first accident, will he survive the second?’ etc.” Gladys laughed.

“But, Mrs. le Mentier,” she said, “perhaps it’s not so inevitable as all that. Mary was telling me she had been engaged before.” There was a moment’s silence. Mrs. Huntly looked sharply across at her friend, and Edith subdued a smile. She could not resist, however, a little shot.

“Once upon a time there was a naughty boy,” she said, “so Muriel put him in the corner, and he ran away. Isn’t that true, Mary?” The door opened and two maiden ladies, who were very charitable and rather plain, took up Mrs. Huntly’s attention. Gladys drew Edith to the window.

“Is Captain Hurstly a good boy?” she said, smiling. Edith looked down at her caressingly.

“One’s always good if one isn’t found out,” she said.

“But if one is found out, one is much worse,” persisted Gladys.

“I don’t think Muriel ever cared for Alec Bruce,” said Mrs. le Mentier. “Why, don’t you wish her to marry Jack?” she added, glancing at the girl tenderly.

“I’m so sorry for the doctor,” smiled Gladys.

“If Muriel knew,” Gladys continued, “that he was not such a good boy, she would be certain to put him in the corner even longer, because she does care for him.”

“If she sees him now while he’s ill she’ll give in. We all do when Nature takes it into her head to punish,” mused Mrs. le Mentier.

“Then if she knew soon, she wouldn’t go?” asked Gladys. “I’m going to see her to-morrow,” she added.

“Dear Muriel,” said Mrs. le Mentier.

“Shall I take her any message from you?” Gladys questioned.

“I think,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I must go myself to wish her bon voyage.”

Mrs. le Mentier went home and arranged two little packets of letters—letters that might have been burned, that ought to have been burned, only that some women have the fatal habit of holding on to the wrong things.

Gladys went upstairs and cried, and hated herself, and bathed her eyes, and hated Muriel more.

Meanwhile, quite unconsciously, Muriel packed her trunk and gave last directions to Cynthia about the club and its management in her absence, and in her heart she prayed, “O God, let him live—let him live.”

And Jack Hurstly fought with death and heat and India through long hours of breathless night.

The boat did not sail until evening, and as Muriel parted from Cynthia Grant to go on to her uncle’s on a cold, chilly November morning a hansom drove to the door, and Gladys, deeply veiled, sprang out. She greeted Muriel with her old tender affection. In a minute or more they were rattling away through the dim streets together.

“I can’t understand,” said Gladys at last, “what it all means. You cannot be breaking your word to me—you cannot. I have trusted you so. But I have waited so long for an explanation, and it has never come, and now you are going to him.” Muriel looked steadily at her companion with unfaltering, sad eyes.

“I made a terrible mistake,” she said gently. “For a while I thought it in my power to give to you that which can’t be transferred. But why should we talk of this now?—even while we speak he may have passed beyond it all!” Gladys wrung her hands together desperately.

“He is mine,” she muttered—“mine—and I shall never see his face again!” Then suddenly she controlled herself. “You have broken your word?” she asked.

“I have,” said Muriel.

“Do you expect a marriage founded on broken promises to prosper?”

“Hush! he may be dead,” said Muriel.

The hansom drove up to the door; the two girls looked at each other; Gladys did not get out, but as Muriel moved towards the house she leaned out of the window. “I pray to God he is dead,” she said quietly, then she gave the address to the cabman. She left a card at Mrs. le Mentier’s door: “Muriel is with her uncle—they go to-night.”

“I hope, my dear,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I am not too frightfully out of place. But the fog drove me to you—it positively did. Mystery is so more-ish, and you know how dreadfully curious I am. When were you first engaged to Jack, dear?” Muriel smiled.

“I don’t know, truly,” she said, “for it feels now as if it was always.”

“Then it must have been very recent. Recent things always feel like that,” said Edith. She sank down before the fire and began to warm her hands; the rings on them gleamed and glittered with an almost malicious sparkling. “It is very brave of you to marry Jack,” she murmured, smiling—“very brave. I hardly think I should have had the pluck to if I were single again.”

Muriel looked in front of her. She was counting the minutes; every one seemed a slow, aching century separating her from the man who might be dying. It was a refined mode of torture to have to talk of him. She began to understand the feeling of a caged wild beast. As an expression it is trite, but as an emotion it possessed her as original.

“You are not very consistent, are you?” suggested Mrs. le Mentier with a little hard laugh. “We none of us are, I suppose; only it’s rather disappointing to us wicked ones when one of the saints back down. Being so deficient ourselves we expect so much more of them. It’s the shock that one feels when a really good cook fails in his favorite dish.”

“I’m afraid I’m not consistent, and I’m sure I’m not one of the saints,” said Muriel with a little strained smile. “What do you mean, Mrs. le Mentier?”

“Once on a time,” replied her companion critically, regarding her dainty hands, “there was a girl who wouldn’t marry a man—there’s nothing so very astonishing about that, you’ll say; it’s happened before and it may happen again. But she wouldn’t marry him because she found out that his record showed a stumble or two. One may consider her a little fastidious, but one respects her. The man behaved very nicely; he respected her too. But then there came another man, and human nature made her forget all about his record, which, when you come to think of it, is very natural, and not at all to be blamed. It is a pity to be too fastidious, but one can’t perhaps respect her as much.”

“Mrs. le Mentier,” said Muriel, rising to her feet, “will you kindly tell me what you mean?” Mrs. le Mentier slowly began to draw on her gloves—they fitted her to perfection—but she remained seated.

“You might ask Jack when you see him—if he is well enough to be bothered with such unimportant things—if he remembers four years ago this last July. You might ask him if he would like you to see his correspondence at that time. You might laugh with him, when he is convalescent, over these letters. I have them in this little bag here, which when I heard of your engagement seemed better in your hands than mine. You might,” said Edith, holding out her hand to Muriel, and smiling her sweetest smile, “tell Captain Hurstly that his old friends have not forgotten him. Good-bye, my dear Muriel; bon voyage—my best respects to your uncle—don’t trouble to come downstairs—do you know the last good remedy for mal-de-mer?—you never suffer from it? That’s right; a speedy return, my dear, and mind you don’t forget my little messages to Jack when you see him—good-bye!”

Muriel waited until the door was closed, then she went and looked at the letters. She knew the handwriting; she hungered for a sight of any words from him; and she looked at it now as if she was looking at it for the last time. Then she sat down where Edith le Mentier had been sitting, and tore them up one by one and threw them into the fire. Muriel had scarcely finished when Sir Arthur came into the room.

“Muriel!” he cried in a tone of justifiable displeasure, “I have told you before never to put paper into the fire. Do you know you endanger our lives by your carelessness? Letters should be put into the waste-paper basket, not made bonfires of! Have you got your trunks packed, child, and all your arrangements made? We start in another hour.”

“Uncle Arthur,” said Muriel quietly, “you will think me very strange, I know, and very wilful, but I’m not going to start to-day. I’m going back to the club to-night. I—I don’t think I am feeling very well.”

Expression for the most part is a distinctly limited faculty, and those who carry it to its bounds in the ordinary occurrence of life find nothing left to say when the occasion transcends their experience. Sir Arthur Dallerton was dumb; he made several efforts to speak—he put his hand to his heart—he stared at the ceiling—he was almost startled into a prayer—finally he gasped out:⁠—

“You wicked girl! Send my man to me,” and closed his eyes.

Muriel escaped. He had not tried to combat her decision; he was in fact very much relieved not to have to go. He had only submitted to the mid-winter journey because it was expected of him—but he was surprised, horribly surprised. There is something very shocking to an Englishman in any sudden change: to Sir Arthur Dallerton it amounted to a crime. Muriel had surprised him, and he could not forgive her.

It was dark when Muriel drove back to the club that night, but the fog had lifted and the stars were out. There was something in the street lights and noises that awoke in her the tremendous emptiness the world can hold. It was a shadow, a delusion, a mere dim, spectral mist, the background for an infinite weary pain that made the real pivot of the universe. She almost killed herself with self-reproaches. What was she that she should blot out the glory of her lover’s world for the words of a jealous woman?—for a mistake in the past—a sin if you choose. It might be a sin. If he had sinned all the sins, if he was sin itself, it didn’t matter—she loved him—loved him—loved him! And the great steamer with its iron speed might even now be leaving the docks, and she had set her face against him like a flint, and there was no turning back. Life had placed before her the old choice of love and duty, and though passion justified of reason rose with double power to storm the fortress of her will, and last, and bitterest of all, the traitor within called to her to give way for hope’s sake, life’s sake, love’s sake, when it seemed for another’s good—to release one she would have gladly died to comfort—to gain that which in all the world she most desired for his sake, for her own, for the apparent good of them both—(Oh, how the traitor clamors at the gate, the traitor with those eyes, that voice!)—all the glowing world of hers, the infinite golden gladness of love—even with those to oppose and madden her, she shut her hands tight, and with a wordless, inexpressible prayer lifted up her soul. With most the struggle comes before decision, with many at the point itself, but with some few it is after the decision is made and when there is no turning back. So Muriel struggled now, though at the moment she had been wrapt as it were apart from all uncertainty in the cloud of renunciation.

“Muriel!” Cynthia stood before her, petrified. Had she had news it was too late? She drew her towards the fire, and Muriel sat down and looked at her wistfully as a child might.

“I think I had better tell you all about it now,” she said, “though I feel sure you will not understand.”

“You have been doing something foolish, I suppose,” said Cynthia curtly. “Well, what is it?” But she drew very tenderly the girl’s jacket off, and smoothed her hair with gentle hands.

“I have given Jack up,” said Muriel wearily, “because Edith le Mentier——” she stopped. “Oh, I can’t explain,” she murmured. “The words don’t mean anything, but—but, Cynthia, I couldn’t marry a man who had once loved, or thought he loved, that woman. I could not trust a man whom I felt was weaker than I. If I had children——” she paused again. “You see I knew a woman who married, and the man was a dear fellow; but he had been weak, and the strain was in him—and he was weak again. When I was engaged to Alec Bruce she said to me, ‘It’s not of so much importance to avoid bad men—they’re danger signals we aren’t blind to—but for God’s sake never marry a weak one.’ ” Muriel caught her breath with a little dry sob.

“Oh, you little idiot, you little idiot,” cried Cynthia with flashing eyes. “What’s another woman’s, any woman’s, all other women’s experience to one’s own heart? Love, and take the consequences—there’s nothing else; it’s the only thing worth while. Why should you condemn yourself and Jack to a death in life because of that wretched woman?—besides, you don’t even know if it’s true! It’s madness, Muriel—madness. He’ll marry somebody else, and turn out a mere do-nothing, and you’ll wear your life out in another five years. And it’s all useless, reasonless, cruel. And then you’ll pray for his soul, and expect me too, perhaps. But I shan’t! Can’t you see you’re driving him back to her?”

Muriel dragged herself to her feet. “You forget I believe,” she said very slowly, “in the life of the world to come.” Then covering her face with her hands she burst into tears.

Cynthia Grant wrote that night to her brother: “I don’t know whether it’s any use, Geoff, but she’s broken the whole business off between herself and Jack Hurstly. She’s desperate, but determined. It’s all for a mere nothing. I cannot understand her; but I won’t let her work herself to death if I can help it. She was a fool ever to have cared for him, and more of a fool not to have married him. It would be difficult to know which we do more harm with, we women, our hearts or our souls—‘Where a soul may be discerned.’ ”

But Muriel was on her knees all night praying that he might live and she might be forgiven.

It was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England longs for the south of France, and every one who has been out of England compares it unfavorably with other climates.

Cynthia had left Muriel with a frightful cold and the club accounts, and had gone out to buy her some violets. They had heard that morning from Mary Huntly that Jack was recovering, though the fever resulting from the accident had necessitated sick leave. He would probably have got Muriel’s letter by now. Cynthia looked longingly at some impossibly expensive roses, when she heard a man’s voice behind her.

“By Jove! Cynthia!” Her heart leaped from January to June. She turned her head slightly to face the obtruder—a delicate, fine-looking man with the eyes of a poet, and a chin which it would do some poets good to have. It took a moment for them to get over the memory of the last time they had met. It had begun to rain a little, and people had put up their umbrellas and pushed on more rapidly than ever.

“What do you want?” he asked, looking from the girl to the window.

“What can you afford?” said Cynthia, laughing. She was wondering what people wanted to hurry for on such a lovely day.

“I am very rich,” he responded. “Honor bright! I could buy over the business. I sold my last picture for—I can’t tell you how much, it might stir up your demon of independence. I’m going to get you the roses.” In two minutes he came back with them in his hand. “By the way, you might as well put up your umbrella, mightn’t you, it seems to be raining?” he said.

“Oh, so it is,” said Cynthia absently. They stood together uncomfortably, knowing that if no good excuse arose they would have to part.

“Don’t you think a cup of tea would be nice?” he suggested. Cynthia nodded her head decisively.

“Yes,” she said, “and muffins.”

“Do you remember,” said her companion, as they turned towards a possible restaurant “those dear little French cakes and——”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Cynthia sternly, “and I’m not going to.” Leslie Damores laughed.

“You even forgot,” he said teasingly, “just now that it was raining!”

“I thought you were in France. I didn’t know you were ever coming back to England again,” said Cynthia a little doubtfully. She noticed that he had not asked her what she was doing, and it hurt her. She would volunteer no information. They sat down by a clean table in a warm inner room; neat-capped maids fluttered here and there; it was very restful and very English. To the artist who had not been in England for eight years it was home, and the girl who held the roses in her lap filled in the picture. He studied her face carefully.

“You’re awfully changed,” he said at last. Cynthia laughed.

“I was twenty-two when I saw you last, and now I am thirty. I was never one of the dimpling kind that stay young either; as for you—you’re a man, so it’s different. But”—her voice grew strangely gentle—“you’re not quite the same, you know, Leslie; fame has come to you, and you look more of a fighter, and yet not quite so hard.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that youth should be so exacting—with its impossible whites and blacks—and that the more one roughs it, and the harder knocks one gets, the more generously shaded it all becomes,” he said, watching her with keen, eager eyes. She turned her head away and played restlessly with the flowers in her lap. “It could never change as much as that,” she thought.

The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American. The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the hour.

“I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips. “He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow, and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare the time—good-bye.”

He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets, wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in London.

Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind, and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange, lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise. This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened, glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child. The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall, slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of thirty, pushed her way to the front.

“Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?” Cynthia nodded shortly.

“Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she said.

The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door. It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women, each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect, commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary, purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There, under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help. Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it all.

After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table.

“ ’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her. The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “ ’E’s all I ’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?”

Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for all who love the little ones.

“Does he suffer much?” she asked.

“ ’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink, miss?”

“Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very bad case.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?”

“I’m afraid not, Carrie.”

“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the question.

“He may live some time yet.” The girl wrapped the child up in the blanket; the fierceness in her eyes did not prevent the gentle touches of her hands.

“I ’ate God, so there! an’ I ’ate the club! an’ I ’ate you and the other lidy! I ’ate you all!” she cried hoarsely. Then suddenly the anger died out of her face; she turned hopelessly to the door, pausing irresolutely she asked again in dull despair, “Then there isn’t hanythink as you can do?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.” She drew the blanket closer round the child and passed out into the night.

It was late and Muriel had gone to bed. Cynthia came in and sat down by her.

“Do you think a man would ever trust a girl a second time?” she asked.

“That would depend, wouldn’t it,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “upon the girl’s character, and the attitude towards the broken trust, and how long ago it had happened, and what she had done in the meantime?”

“Do you think it possible if she was different that he would love her again?” Muriel sighed.

“I would have married Jack,” she said, “if he had been different, but he was the same. I suppose it all depends on whether one’s power of detachment is strong enough.”

“You’re very tired, dearest,” said Cynthia, “and I shouldn’t bother you; but—but I suppose you pray, don’t you?” Muriel smiled; she did not say she had done nothing else since she had forfeited her life’s happiness.

“Yes, I try to,” she said.

“Then,” said Cynthia, “perhaps you might as well pray for me. Good-night!”