Muriel woke up to a new poverty and an extra ten thousand a year. The latter scarcely passed through her mind, but the former made her terribly lonely. Now there seemed nothing left, and the world a vast cold place void of personality.

She repeated three times over during a hurried, lonely breakfast that she had her work, and the post brought her two letters, one with Cynthia’s Paris address, the other in a handwriting that drew all the blood to her heart. She put it aside and read Cynthia’s. It told of her work and of Launcelot. The tone was softer than usual. Muriel was scarcely surprised when she read “Launcelot says his prayers every evening, and always goes to church on Sundays. So I do, too. His soul wants nourishment as well as his body, and I promised to take care of him. The other night Geoff took him to bed, and when I went up to look at them they were kneeling side by side looking out of the window. Launcelot has an idea that the Holy Grail is in one of the stars, and he is always looking for it. You have found it, Muriel, dear, and I am beginning to believe that some day I may find it too.” She did not mention Leslie Damores; evidently he had not discovered her yet. Muriel hesitated to send him Cynthia’s address; she believed it better for them both to wait.

Finally she took up the second letter. “Will you forgive me for writing to you? Gladys and I are married. We have left India for good, which means my profession dropped, you understand; but Gladys says there is no one to dress for in India. You’ll think it awful cheek on my part, but she’s very young yet, and you used to have a tremendous influence over her. I suppose you couldn’t drop in now and then and give her a hint or two? I should like to see you awfully.—Jack.”

Muriel carefully put the letter on a table, and sat with her hands on her lap gazing steadfastly into the fire. She saw three things, and she saw them plainly. One was that Jack did not love his wife, another that she, Muriel, had hardly forgiven Gladys, and thirdly that Jack would like to see her awfully. There was a dim, shadowy fourth, but this she brushed angrily away; it hinted that there was more sunlight in the room than before she had read the letter.

Finally she drifted into a compromise it would do no harm to see Gladys. She wrote telling her of her loss and inviting her to tea the following week. She was very nervous when the afternoon came, and paced restlessly up and down the long reception room in her heavy black dress vexed with her expectancy, listening to the noises in the street. The sharp jingle of a hansom passing, hesitating, stopping, brought her to a chair.

Then came the sound of an electric bell, and a minute later the door swung open and a footman announced “Captain Hurstly, miss.”

Muriel looked at him inquiringly. She did not appear in the least nervous now, for natures that tremble at a hindrance rise triumphantly to meet a calamity, and in a moment she realized that his presence was fully that.

“Gladys couldn’t come at the last minute, and I did want to see you so, Muriel,” he explained. He pleaded as he had always done, and he was just as handsome. She let these things have full weight with her before she spoke.

“Won’t you sit down, Captain Hurstly; they will bring tea in a minute. I am sorry your wife could not come.”

Jack looked at her with eloquent, grieved eyes, but she meeting them saw the coward in his soul, and her face hardened. He had not cared enough for her to remain unmarried, merely enough to desire a flirtation after marriage. She had not slept properly for three nights after she received his letter. He was the first to find the silence uncomfortable.

“I am not sorry she could not come,” he said with a tender inflection; “I wanted to see you alone. It is a long while since I have seen you, Muriel. To me it seems desperately long, and yet you have not changed at all.”

“You are mistaken, Captain Hurstly; I have changed a great deal. You also have altered considerably.” Muriel’s tone was convincing even to herself; she was beginning to believe she could after all bear it.

“It is true I have altered,” he replied. “You alone might know how terribly, but I suppose it is never wise to follow a wrong by a folly. Only one can’t help oneself when one’s world, all that one has ever cared for, tumbles about one’s ears. Oh, Muriel, how could you do it! how could you do it!” He was intensely in earnest; he could always be that at the very shortest notice. He stood in front of her looking down with the same passionate blue eyes which used to stir her heart, and yet when he met hers it did not seem as if he was looking down.

“If you have come to open a question forever closed between us, Captain Hurstly, and which your own honor and good sense should know to be doubly closed by your marriage, I must ask you to excuse me. I did not invite your wife to tea as a permission for you to insult me.”

“You are right,” he said looking at her with frank admiration; “you are always right, Muriel, without you I have forgotten how to be. Forgive me, I did not come here to upbraid you for ruining my life——”

“I should think not, indeed,” Muriel interrupted scornfully.

“But to ask you to help me about Gladys. Are you my friend enough to wish to do that—Muriel?” She flushed painfully.

“I should like to help you,” she said in a low voice.

“It’s simply that she won’t understand the danger of flirting with other men—every and any other man apparently,” he explained; “and I don’t want my wife to be a second Edith le Mentier.” There was a pause; his illustration was unfortunate.

“You give her no cause to complain of you by your attention to the—first Mrs. le Mentier?” she could not forbear to ask.

“Muriel!” he cried. The protest was too vehement to be convincing. She rose and held out her hand.

“I will do all I can for your wife, Captain Hurstly—I am afraid it will be little enough—on one condition”—he waited anxiously—“that you will not attempt to see me again.”

“You really mean it?” He spoke slowly, intensely. She never knew afterwards how she kept her hands from trembling.

“You have singularly forgotten the little you knew of me if you think I do not mean what I say, Captain Hurstly.” She turned wearily to the door. He compared her in his mind with Edith le Mentier. Muriel was telling him to go away. She had told him to come back. Gladys was only a shadow in his life, a chained shadow; he did not even think of her at this moment. He had never depended on principles or considered consequences.

“Good-bye, then, Muriel,” he said. “I suppose I must thank you for your promise, though its condition is terrible to me. You don’t know what you may be driving me to!”

“Oh, I’m not driving you,” cried Muriel desperately, the weakness of his nature dawning more fully on her; “drive yourself, Captain Hurstly—drive yourself!”

So he went, and was driven by some passion of irresponsibility from Muriel to Edith le Mentier. He found her in.

For Muriel there was just earth—weak earth—where her ideal had once made heaven for her.

It is not often we are brought into such sharp contact with our broken idols; if it were we should cease to make new ones—and that would be a loss.

Muriel stood face to face with the knowledge that she had been a fool—a girl with a dream—lie—hugged to her heart: and God help women who have to realize such dreams in the daylight of facts.

All she could find to say was that he was absolutely dead; she had not risen yet to see her deliverance. If the world had been empty before, now it was a blank. Those who die leave a sense of loss, but to know that one we loved has never lived is the greatest and most tragic emptiness of all. Muriel saw failure written over her heart. There was only one thing left: she fell on her knees and offered up her failure. So love passed away from her, but it left her on her knees.

It was early, and the sunlight with sharp shadows had a chilly and almost stage effect. The sky was dazzling over Notre Dame. Geoffrey Grant sat in the great church, watching the sunbeams catch up and glorify the dust. Worshippers and sightseers slipped in and out, and many candles gleamed.

The thought of Muriel had driven him there; and now he was alone with it, he thought half cynically how many had been driven there from the effects of unhappy love affairs, only they had called it aspiration. He at least was honest with himself; he knew it was Muriel.

In his early youth he had been embittered by a girl. It was the usual story of love and no money, and the girl had chosen not to wait. When success and good fortune came to him, he was indifferent to it. He treated all women with a sort of good-natured contempt, thinking them creatures of diseased nerves and hysterical affections. Necessary evils distinctly, but of the two perhaps more evil than necessary. His sister had been the one exception; he almost worshipped her. Then came her story. A crisis which he had passed through, by an extraordinary power, but once faced, he had resolutely killed, and hidden all traces of the past. His sister never knew what agony she had brought into his life. She believed that his perceptions were blunted, instead they were too delicate to be obvious; he had encased them in reserve, and bore without wincing because the worst pain stings into silence. Muriel had been a revelation to him, her gaiety was so spontaneous, her brightness so infectious. She had thrown her life, all dusty and human, into the glory of the sunbeam, and she was strong. He had watched her with Jack Hurstly, and he watched her afterwards. As a doctor her magnificent healthiness appealed to him. He could not imagine her having nervous prostration; as a man he marvelled at her. She knew that he loved her, yet she could look him straight in the eyes and be frankly friendly.

It had become the purpose of his life to strengthen their friendship into something more. For a long while he had struggled against it, but it was a passion that found grace with his whole nature; and, when he had come to the conclusion that strength lay in submission, Cynthia needed him, and he laid down his love and his work to face the Arch Fear of his life. If Cynthia should fail!

The last month had worn lines in his face, and his keen eyes in repose looked sadder than ever. He had fought, and the worst was over; he had watched and fenced, waited and listened, seized opportunities, avoided dangers, guided and guarded, and slaved that Cynthia should be safe and ignorant of his efforts. He had felt happier when Launcelot came, and this afternoon had left her with a mind at rest.

The figure of a woman with a child in her arms attracted him. She had evidently come a long way; she was tired and footsore, and very poorly dressed. He watched her buy a candle for the Virgin’s shrine and kneel there till overcome with weariness, she slept, her head against a pillar, but even though she slept she clasped the child. He felt less impatience than usual with the wasteful, senseless candle-buying, and the love, the unconscious love of motherhood, and all things beautiful touched him closely. After all, he wondered, there was something strangely more than human in women who could give so much as Muriel and that mother. No physical passion could explain it all—it was so selfless, so extraordinary, so unnatural in another mood he might have called it, but here and now “supernatural” seemed the more fitting word. The baby stirred in its sleep, and the mother’s eyes opened watchfully. She changed its position to a more comfortable one in her arms, then she made the sign of the Cross on its forehead, and crossing herself rose to her feet and left the church. The doctor rose too, and then, moved by an emotion he could never account for knelt and prayed. He smiled a little whimsically to himself. “Why, I believe I am becoming a Christian,” he thought. But he had not changed; he was only beginning to see what all along the tremendous struggle of his life had been making him. People who are so much better than their creeds often wake up to find their creeds are higher than they dreamed.

He had found her! He repeated breathlessly to himself the one great fact. Leslie Damores had searched all their old haunts in Paris, had wandered and waited and watched, and now at last found her in a great class-room of French students. He had come as a special favor to the master in whose studio they worked, and he could not signal her out for more than a word, but by a clever clumsiness he knocked over her drawing-board. As he picked it up and gave it to her all the great unspoken things passed between them. It proved the mocking inadequacy of words that all he could say was “When may I see you?” and that she could only answer “After the class.” The first blessed moment had gone, general criticisms had to be given, and French and English art discussed. An hour passed interminably; he could not always stand where the glint of red gold hair made of the studio a new heaven and a new earth. Then in a blessed skirmish of conflicting drawing-boards and parting chatter the class broke up, and somehow the master and the pupil found themselves once more in the streets of Paris, or the new Jerusalem. There was at that moment ridiculously little in a name. Their thoughts were only a happy chaos, and he could do nothing but repeat the only fact that mattered.

“I have found you at last,” he said.

“I don’t believe you ought to have looked for me,” she replied gravely, for she was afraid.

“What made you run away, Cynthia?” he asked. She could give him any reason but the right one. She chose to deny the charge.

“I didn’t run away,” she said; “I merely wanted to come to Paris.”

“Then why shouldn’t I look for you?” cried Leslie triumphantly; “I merely wanted to come too.”

“I don’t know where we are going to,” said Cynthia, looking at him to see if he was much altered.

“I don’t think it in the least matters providing we go there together,” laughed Damores. “As it happens, here’s a cemetery; shall we go in and look at the tombstones?” Cynthia laughed as well. It was too absurd to think of death. There were lines in his face; he must have missed her a good deal. They went into the cemetery together. A husband who had come to put some flowers on the grave of his dead wife thought them heartless. They were not heartless, they were only too happy to remember they had hearts at all.

“Now you have come, what are you going to do?” she asked at last. She could not meet his eyes now; the things they meant cried too loudly for an answer.

“I am going to marry you,” he replied smiling, “if you’ll let me. I don’t think anything else matters just at present.” Cynthia felt the color in great rebellious waves sweep over her face. She looked with unseeing eyes at the wreaths of absurdly artificial flowers.

“Do you fully realize what that means, Leslie?” she asked. “Can you face everything—everything?”

“Everything! everything!” said Leslie quietly, “with you; without you I cannot live my life. You are the best of everything I do. You never came to see my picture—it would have told you all. Once I made a tremendous mistake. It seems a crime when I look back. There is only one thing that can ever wipe it out. Cynthia, is it too late to ask you to be my wife, and overlook the past?” She could not speak, her heart thundered, and seemed to shake the ground she stood on.

God had given her a tremendous reward, a gift unspeakable after she had renounced what had been to her the very hope of joy, and from the lips of the man she loved pardon and oblivion swept her sin into the free, pure waters of love. She lifted up her eyes to him that he might read there all her heart and soul his eternally and for ever. For a long while silence came down and covered them. They turned at last, and slowly and without speaking left the place of tombs—the acre of God’s sleeping ones. The man who had been stung by their laughter, seeing their faces again, recalled his injury. “After all,” he thought, “they had their business here.” And he was right, for love and death live in no separate houses.

Gladys was desperately unhappy. She had got what she wanted, and that, unfortunately, is frequently what follows. The unscrupulous get much, but they lose more; and Gladys, who had won her heart’s desire, sitting in a beautifully furnished room before the photograph of the husband she adored, was weeping bitterly. From the first day of their marriage jars had arisen. He was hopelessly selfish about his personal comforts, but he had a certain tremendous code of honor of the sort that abhors a lie and connives at a betrayal. Gladys was given to frequent fibbing. He had been disgusted, and had not hidden it; she had been spiteful and pointedly malicious. Little bitter unspoken things rose up as their eyes met. Their honeymoon had not been a success. (An exacting woman and a selfish man should avoid honeymoons.)

Their home-coming was scarcely more so. They were both very extravagant in different directions, and they had no patience for each other’s extravagances and no self-denial for their own; they were weak and obstinate over trifles. Gladys was extremely demonstrative and fond of talking; Jack cared very little for outward expressions of feeling, and preferred women who could hold their tongues. He was perfectly frank, and paid all his compliments to other women. Gladys lived on admiration, and if she could not get it from the man who ought to give it to her, she would try to draw it from the man who would. She found this very easy. A good many of her husband’s brother officers admired her, and one of them, a Major Kennedy, frequently told her so.

She was crying bitterly now over a note that lay on her lap. It was an invitation to a dinner from Edith le Mentier to meet Major Kennedy. It mentioned her husband in a way that brought the angry color to her cheeks. She was beginning to understand, and the tears dried. She thought of what Major Kennedy had said of the way to treat husbands: “Give ’em a little wholesome indifference, and look round you; that’s the way to whistle ’em back!”

After all, a woman might have a good deal of fun without any harm coming from it. Lots of married women did. Look at Edith le Mentier for instance—hateful thing! Yet no one could doubt that her husband was devoted to her—and other women’s husbands too! Her eyes flashed as she thought of Jack. She stamped her foot. “I’ll pay them both out!” she cried, and she accepted Edith le Mentier’s “delightful invitation.”

Muriel called on Mrs. Hurstly later in the season. There was a moment’s silence as the two women met. The room so daintily and beautifully furnished seemed filled with memories. Their eyes were drawn together to the photograph of Jack Hurstly in uniform. It was a curious coincidence that he had given to his wife the very photograph Muriel had returned to him. It was the only copy. Muriel withdrew her hand and sat down with her back to the photograph.

“And are you going to live in London?” she asked Gladys, studying the girl’s face, the defiant sad eyes and peevish mouth, the fretful restlessness of the dainty figure. Pity was killing the last traces of her disappointment in her. Gladys returned her gaze curiously; she was thinking how becoming black was to Muriel.

“Oh, yes!” she said; “I suppose we shall practically live here. I hate the country, you know, except for house-parties, and Jack’s estate is particularly dreary, I think. I hate ‘estates,’ they’re like appropriated pews, one always wants to sit somewhere else! Have you given up your club craze yet? Your uncle’s death must have made a lot of difference to you?” Muriel smiled.

“If you mean am I horribly rich? I’ll admit it, but it will make the ‘club craze’ flourish more than ever, I expect. I have bought up three houses in Stepney and turned them into one for a settlement of workers. I am making arrangements now to enlarge the club, and in two or three weeks I shall go back to it.” There was a slight pause. Gladys played with some violets in a stand. “Are you quite happy?” said Muriel at last very gently. “I hope, dear, you are quite happy?” It appeared to Gladys absurd to suppose she could possibly mean it, yet the tone sounded sincere.

“Happy?—of course we are! Why we have only been married a few months, and Jack has discovered I wear my own hair and keep my own complexion, and I am reassured as to the harmlessness of his habits and the extent of his income. What more can one ask?”

“Those in themselves might add to your unhappiness if you were so already, but they could scarcely succeed in making you happy, I am afraid,” said Muriel quietly.

“Wouldn’t you be happy with—Jack?” questioned Gladys. Sorrow, if it doesn’t increase tenderness, tends to brutality. Muriel met her eyes calmly.

“No,” she said slowly, “I do not think I should be quite happy—with Jack.” She did not refer to their broken engagement. Gladys expected her to, and was touched.

“It was horrid of me to say that,” she said, “if you still care for him, and rude of me if you don’t.”

“I don’t think you either rude or horrid,” said Muriel quietly, “only not quite happy. I am very sorry for you, dear, because, though I don’t care for Jack as I did, he made me very miserable once.” Gladys pulled two violets to pieces on her lap. Muriel shivered; she hated wanton destruction of anything, and she loved flowers.

“I have behaved very badly to you,” said Gladys at last in a low voice. “It was I that helped Edith le Mentier make trouble between you and Jack.”

“You loved him so?” asked Muriel gently. Gladys burst into tears.

“I don’t know why you should treat me like this,” she sobbed, “for I did my best to ruin your life, and I would again to get—Jack!” Muriel took her in her arms; all her old love and pity returned to her.

“It would make no difference to me if you did,” said Muriel; “I should only be sorry for you. Tell me what’s the matter?”

“He doesn’t care! he doesn’t care!” she wailed. “I don’t believe he ever did, and now he’s gone back to that hateful woman again. Why shouldn’t I amuse myself if I want to? He doesn’t love me, and—and other people do!” Muriel’s face grew stern with pain. If she had wished for revenge it was at her feet, but with all her soul she sorrowed for the wreckage of two lives.

“I don’t think you are quite yourself,” she said. “If you love Jack, you know he is the only other person there is. He must have cared for you as well, or he wouldn’t have married you, dear. So put the other people quite away, and smile, and wear your prettiest clothes. You will find Mrs. le Mentier quite a secondary consideration. Why, she isn’t even pretty! Jack only goes to see her because you won’t be nice to him. Now have you been quite nice to him? Given up yourself in all the little ways, that he might give himself up to you in the great ways? Remember men are like children: you must put their toys away, and bring them out again at the right times, and not fret them about unnecessary things. Now, put on some of the dear violets and come home to tea with me!” Gladys looked at her suspiciously. Muriel laughed. “There’s nothing I want to get out of you!” she cried; “and you are no use to me whatever. Now, will you come?” Gladys had the grace to blush; an impulse to trust the girl she had wronged moved her. She gave her a letter to read and went out of the room to get her things on. Muriel read the letter standing, then she went to the window and sat down.

She felt very tired. It is not so much of a surprise to find the outwardly barbarous with angel hearts, as to see the delicate and finished products of a noble civilization inwardly corrupt. The letter was from Major Kennedy. There are times when conditional immortality seems the only safeguard of heaven. Muriel felt too miserable almost to breathe. There come moments in the brightest lives of blank depression. The greatest effort she ever made was to take Gladys back to tea with her. That evening Jack Hurstly dined at home, and his wife burned an unanswered letter.

“So Launcelot is to go to school, and Cynthia is to be married, and you are to be left all alone?” asked Muriel smiling as she handed Geoff a cup of tea. She had handed him a good many cups of tea since he had been back in England.

“I am to be left all alone,” repeated the doctor, looking at her steadily.

“I have been practically alone ever since I can remember,” said Muriel suddenly, “but I have seldom been lonely. In fact I often think it is only the people who don’t live alone who are lonely. They are always trying to be understood, to break through barriers and live on a common level, and there’s no such chance, for the more one shares the little things the more pitilessly isolated the big things make us. It is so dreadfully inadequate that tantalizing partial help one gets from others.”

“There I think you are wrong,” he said looking quietly across at her. “It’s the whole loaf theory you’re defending. You might just as well say a man had better have no legs than one, or could be as active without a crutch as with one, simply because he can’t be very active anyway. We all want what help we can get, and it is not the least necessary for people to understand us to help us. Children are the greatest help. People who know that we want the moon may be wise enough to tell us it is only a worn-out world of rocks, but people who can’t fathom our desires can still help us by telling us it is beautiful. It is one of the first lessons doctors learn to help patients to help themselves. In fact it is the greatest good we or anybody else can do.”

“Yet you don’t say that the most ignorant doctors are the best?” she prevaricated.

“No! because sympathy of that kind without knowledge is sympathy without a backbone. Physical cases require the definite as a foundation, but when one deals with the invisible, love comes first, not knowledge. Ignorant mothers mean more to their children than thoughtful scholars could—even if they do slap them occasionally. A man or woman without a home, if they have no jars and frets, must miss the influence of it, and feel the horrible loneliness of life.” He so intensely meant what he said that Muriel felt she had been flippant, and yet his seriousness made her long to be more so.

“Birds who sit on telegraph wires, and can fly away from the line of communication whenever they want to, are more to my liking,” she said.

“You forget that the birds have nests,” suggested the doctor smiling.

“And you that we don’t have wings,” sighed Muriel. “And we can’t change our mates every spring; when we choose we choose for life, expecting the better—and getting the worst!”

“Not always,” said Geoff quietly.

Muriel felt angry; she could not tell why. She had never talked in this strain before; she felt vicious with the universe, and its representative opposite her made her worse; besides she had just been to see Gladys.

“If there was an alternative we would take it,” she said. “But half of us women are brought up in such a lackadaisical way that there’s no use for us. When we have brains and opportunity we are generally physically handicapped. People don’t cut the woman who works now—they shrug their shoulders at her, and that’s worse! As for resources (they advise resources, you know, after one’s reached twenty-six), they are an outlet for wasted powers, a puny outlet, a mere compromise with failure! Oh! I’ve seen it again and again, dozens of times, capable, efficient girls brought up to be perfectly, daintily useless! After the schoolroom is over they get a dress allowance—and practise on the piano. Their heads must be full of something, so then come the rubbish—heaps of life, silly curates, silly extravagances, or piteously futile old maidhood! They keep us from being trained for anything else because they want us to marry, but all the other trainings help towards that the more one learns the more fit one is to teach. Self-reliance, good judgment and a sense of proportion are not out of place in a wife, and motherhood is only a word without them.” The doctor laughed.

“Train your enterprising exceptions,” he said; “perhaps in time they’ll give the average woman a lift, but I don’t go all the way with you by any means. You over-estimate women because of one or two women you have met who stand mentally above their race. Average women at present haven’t brains enough to seize opportunities or to apply sensible educations. Domesticities or resources, and a silly curate or two, are just what they can appreciate, and good, solid hard work what they wish to avoid. I don’t say women lack brains, but as a rule they lack depth and continuity. They have very little of the mental soundness, even the clever ones, that the average man has as a matter of course. They don’t concentrate, and they’re altogether too personal to make much headway in the professions. You needn’t look as if you wished to annihilate me, Miss Muriel—I’ve no doubt you could—but I believe it to be a fact that women as a whole haven’t got physical or intellectual stamina enough for public life, and all the education and opportunities in the world will never give it to them!”

“But we’re only beginning,” cried Muriel. “See how far we’ve got already.”

“That’s the worst argument you have got against you,” said the doctor smiling. “You are too quick to be natural; you work in spurts with reactions—growth, real growth, is a much slower affair. But even granting you that you have been kept back, you simply can’t be more mentally than you have physical strength for, and as long as you are labelled women, you’ll be labelled weak.” Muriel laughed.

“You sound so horribly sensible,” she said, “and you leave us no power!”

“Ah! there you’re mistaken,” said the doctor. “All your strength (and Heaven knows you’ve got enough!) lies in weakness! When we come to the bottom of it, emotion rules the world, and woman is queen of the emotions.”

“Oh, doctor! doctor!” cried Muriel with uplifted hands. “Principles! principles!” Geoff smiled grimly.

“Ah! principles,” he said; “they are very good things for theories, and they act as a drug on the passions—but sometimes they don’t act! Good-bye, Miss Muriel, my principles warn me of my office hour.”

Muriel let him go willingly. She felt absurd, snubbed, dissatisfied. She wanted some one to look at her as Jack had looked, with those adoring, humble eyes, and to listen to her as Jack had listened passionately sympathetic, and ready to agree with her that two blacks make the loveliest white in the world. She hated herself for being so rubbed up the wrong way; and in one breath accused Dr. Grant of being rude, and herself of being ridiculous. Finally she decided that neither of these things had anything to do with it, but that she was upset about Gladys.

“The worst of being unusual,” said Edith le Mentier to Jack as he talked with her under the cover of loud, unmeaning drawing-room music, “is—that’s it’s so common. Really you know it’s ridiculous running away. Everybody does it!”

“Still you know one can’t come back again—one’s got to count the cost,” he said looking at her anxiously.

She had made him think he cared a good deal for her, and she cared desperately for him. He did not realize how much—it was her greatest victory that he didn’t. She trembled at even feeling his eyes on her, his presence near her.

“I feel such a brute,” he said, “leaving Gladys.”

“Brutes can’t live with fools,” said Edith le Mentier. “I like—brutes,” she added under her breath. Then she looked at him. “I don’t see the necessity for you to leave—Gladys,” she said.

The music stopped with a crash. The hostess cried, “Oh, how delicious! Thank you! And which of the dear old masters was that?” The conversation leaped joyously into freedom.

Jack felt the room and the plants and the beautiful dresses whirl round him like a dream.

“But,” he said, “I’m not that sort of a man.” He had risen to the very height of his standard. Edith understood instantly.

“I mean,” she said gently and sadly, “we might never see each other again.”

“Edith! Edith!” he said; “not that, my darling!”

“Remember where you are,” she said in an undertone. “They’re going to ask me to sing,” she added. “Come to me to-morrow.”

“I wish you would tell me if you mean to trust me!” he pleaded.

She shrugged her shoulders; they were very pretty ones; then she sang. They had nothing there she knew but Gounod’s “There is a green hill far away.” And so she sang that. She sang it beautifully.

Gladys was sitting up for him, she had had a headache and could not accompany him. She always had a headache if there was the chance of her meeting Edith le Mentier. She had dressed very sweetly to welcome him, and looked very young and pathetic. It was so late that he scolded her for sitting up for him, but she told him she had something special to say, and took him into the library, shutting the door. The fire gleamed cheerily, and Jack, as he leaned back in a big arm-chair, and looked at the pretty, eager face opposite him, felt more of a brute than ever.

“I have had Muriel with me all the afternoon,” she began nervously, “and she made me promise to talk it all over frankly with you. She’s been so good to me, Jack!—and I told her that I would——” She hesitated, and looked at the fire.

He could see that her lips trembled, and a sudden longing to take her in his arms and comfort her came over him, as he had done one short year ago in the Indian garden. But he did not—it was some time since he had done so. And there was this evening’s terrible barrier in between.

“Do you know, Jack, we haven’t been married quite a year, and yet we aren’t very happy, are we? I’m afraid I have been terribly to blame, Jack. I wanted to tell you so long ago, but you didn’t—didn’t seem to care a bit. Then you began to see such a lot of that horrible woman, and I hated that, and I thought I hated you! People told me I ought to amuse myself, and that there were other men besides neglectful husbands—and Major Kennedy, he’s a great friend of yours, and he came so often to the house—and you never seemed to care. Indeed, I don’t believe you ever took the trouble to find out, and I was very miserable and silly! I daresay being miserable should have made me wise, but you were the highest thing I loved, and still love, Jack, and you didn’t care!” She paused a moment, catching her breath, and he grew white in a sudden agony of fear and pain.

He had lived with this woman—she was his wife! He had married her a young, untried girl, and he had given her the key to all the dangers, and left her to face them alone. He dared not interrupt her, and so he waited, fearing each heavy, silent moment as it passed.

“I wanted love, and he—he said he loved me, Jack! Ah! don’t speak! I was a fool and worse! but indeed I didn’t understand, and then—Muriel came,”—he drew in a deep breath, it might have been a sob of relief,—“and I tried to be different. Do you remember that night, two weeks ago, when you came in late and I kissed you, and you—laughed at me? Oh, Jack, how it hurt me! And then the next day he told me he would sell his soul for a kiss. Perhaps he didn’t mean anything, but you had gone to tea with Edith le Mentier, and I—let him, Jack!” He started forward, but she stopped him by a gesture. “Wait till I finish, please,” she said. “Then I understood, and I sent him away, and cried all the afternoon. He wanted me to run away with him, and I was weak and frightened. I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for Muriel. You said I wasn’t truthful, so I want to be quite truthful now. I think if it hadn’t been for Muriel I should have gone. I wanted to hurt your pride if I couldn’t win your love; but Muriel stood by me, and wouldn’t let me go. She told me what to say to Major Kennedy. I’m not sure—but I believe she said something to him herself—anyway he went off somewhere at once. Oh, Jack, can’t you love me! can you ever be good to me again?” She lifted up her arms towards him, with the tears rolling down her cheeks. She was weak and irresolute, vain and foolish, but he had done nothing to help her, yet she had gone through what had defeated him, and she was asking him whether he could forgive her! “I loved you, Jack,” she cried piteously; “I loved you all the time! And it’s all over now for ever and ever!” The color rushed into her face and a new look came into her eyes—a look he did not understand.

“Why do you say it’s all over?” he asked dully. “It may happen again.”

“It will never come again,” she said, “because—oh, Jack, I—I’m afraid, but I’m very glad too—it’s always so wonderful, and don’t you understand?” she covered her face with her hands, “I am going to be—the mother of your child!” At last it came to him, and for ever killed the irresponsibility of love’s selfishness. He took her now in his arms, he dared to do so, because now for him too the other was all over. She was helpless and clinging, she was his wife, and she was going into the valley of the shadow of death because she loved him. “Oh, Jack, will you forgive?”

“Forgive you!” he cried, and tried to explain to her how sorry he was, how much to blame, and how glad at last that they both of them understood, and how now it would all be different—so wonderfully different! But he did not tell her about Edith le Mentier.

When she was safe in bed he wrote to the other woman, and hurt her very bitterly. The other woman, for all her faults, is very often brave, and Edith le Mentier suffered horribly; but she bore the great defeat, and was only a very little irritable the next morning. She did not sing Gounod’s song again; she said it was scarcely suitable.

She always shrugged her shoulders and smiled when people mentioned Jack’s wife, and when they spoke of him she said “Poor fellow!”

Who could tell that those were the figures of the sum called tragedy? Not the tragedy of the true-hearted who see through pain the vista of glory, but that inordinate agony which because it is so solely selfish eats into the heart that bears it, and for the vista substitutes a cul-de-sac.

Jack and Gladys went to his estate in the country, where they spent some bad hours, and learned lessons of tolerance. It was, fortunately for Jack, the hunting season, and he rode hard to hounds. Gladys cultivated the country people, read a great deal, and took an intelligent interest in Jack’s “runs.” At the end of the time they could live together quite comfortably, and avoided the unendurable with the ready forbearance of quite long married people. The knowing what to avoid is the key to most things, though it is often difficult to turn.

A son was born to them, making Jack a proud father, and consequently a good husband. And Gladys found a life more engrossing than her own. She wrote and asked Muriel to stand godmother.

There was trouble at Shindies Alley, not that there was anything unusual in that! For it was a place where trouble was the commonplace, and what the comfortable call tragedy almost a nursery rule. Only the trouble was worse than usual, amounting to the prospect of the police and a possible murder case in the papers. “Rough Tom” being not quite so drunk as usual had beaten his wife nearly to death, a thing he had done before, but never quite so effectually. It was better, the neighbors thought, to send a boy to the doctor’s, he and the lady at the club had been there before. This time the doctor arrived first. “Rough Tom” was off, no one of course knew where. All denied any knowledge of him, though exultingly willing to report any unnecessary and loathsome details of the row. The doctor dismissed the crowd curtly. They vanished silently into dark holes and corners.

It was a cold night. The children sharing the den where their mother lay cursing and groaning cried dismally. They also cried loudly; it seemed worth while with both a row and a doctor. Geoff despatched them to a neighbor’s across the passage, and examined the woman by a guttering candle. She swore horribly, but she was too much engrossed with pain to be afraid; she was also anxious to explain that it was not her man’s fault but another woman’s, whom she called by a variety of names. She was too ill to be moved, and the doctor began with steady gentleness to dress the wounds. He needed a nurse, but he had no time to send for one. The case was urgent. We fight as earnestly for the most apparently useless lives as for the dearest, yet we cannot believe that God has as high a respect for the ultimate fate of the crushed soul’s life as we have to keep breath in a ruined body.

It was the doctor’s profession, but it was that least of all that made him fight for her. He looked up and saw Muriel at the door. He felt intensely angry that she should know such a place existed.

“I should advise you to go away,” he said coldly. Muriel looked up for a moment, simply astonished, then she advanced towards him and the heap of rags.

“I am going to help you,” she said.

“You are only in the way,” he replied grimly, not raising his eyes from the patient. “I want a nurse, not—a young lady.” The last words might have been an insult. She flushed angrily.

“I can hold her for you,” she said; “I am not afraid.” It was necessary to have some help.

“You will faint?” he questioned incredulously.

“No, Dr. Grant, I shall not!” said Muriel. He knew by her tone that she was very angry.

“Well, then, don’t waste any more time,” was his only reply.

In another moment she was down on her knees, obeying short, imperious orders. Dr. Grant never left much to the initiative of his nurses. The sight was almost more repulsive than she could bear. She wanted to cover her face with her hands instead of using them on the awful crushed form. She wanted to scream at the woman’s pain, to rage at the doctor’s cruelty, to fly from this whole world of constant reiterated woe; but she was far too angry even to let her hands tremble. At last she felt that her strength was going; she turned white, cold perspiration stood on her forehead. The doctor glanced at her sharply, and then—he laughed. The hot blood rushed to her heart; she grew rigid now, but not with fear; the noise in her ears ceased. She heard every word he said, anticipated every need, and had not reached the limit of her strength when the doctor released her.

“The morphia will keep her quiet till morning,” he said. “You’d better go home.”

“Will she live?” she asked him.

“Unfortunately—yes,” said Geoff. “Women of that sort generally do—to be beaten again!” They went in silence to the door. Muriel was quite certain now that she disliked him.

Geoff left a few parting directions to a reluctant, but almost entirely sober, neighbor. When they were in the street Muriel waited for him to explain; but he did not explain. It was a habit of his not to, possibly owing to his professional desire to steer clear of the definite. Muriel was too astonished, hurt and indignant to remain silent for long. She stopped.

“Good-night, Dr. Grant,” she said with an icy formality. The doctor’s eyes twinkled.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. She looked at him with a searching angry glance.

“Your manner has not pleased me to-night,” she replied quietly; “I should prefer to return alone.”

“I am sorry if I have displeased you, Miss Dallerton,” said Geoff with his mouth ominously twitching. Was it imaginable that she couldn’t see he wanted to kiss her? As she stood there, aggrieved, defiant, serious, her eyes like two points of light under her heavy hair, the bright color in her cheeks, the whole daring absurdity of her seriously facing life there in a horrible alley instead of the delicate luxury of a West-End drawing-room, he could have laughed at the inappropriateness of it. “It’s too cold for an apology,” he ventured more gravely. “I will see you about this later, if I may. Please let me see you home first.”

She did not want to seem girlishly tempestuous, so she assented to his last request, but in bitter silence walked with him to the club. She did not give him her hand as he said “Good-night.” She wanted tremendously to refuse to allow him to call, to cut short their acquaintance, to never set eyes on him again. But she felt an absurd desire to cry brought on by the physical strain of the past two hours, so that she said nothing.

Yet when she was in her room she would not cry. She forced the tears back, and remembered how he had laughed at her! The utter careless brutality of his whole behavior! And Cynthia could be so foolish as to imagine he cared for her! She herself had never for an instant dreamed it—she refused to admit it—it was impossible! It never occurred to her in the least that Geoff had been trying to rouse her courage through opposition, and to control his own too tender feelings by a mask of rudeness. Even if it had occurred to her she would probably have been just as angry, for what she was really indignant with was his strength and her weakness, and she could find no excuses for that.