The Street Called Straight

t may be admitted at once that, on arriving at Tory Hill and hearing from Olivia's lips the tale of her father's downfall, Colonel Rupert Ashley received the first perceptible check in a very distinguished career. Up to this point the sobriquet of "Lucky Ashley," by which he was often spoken of in the Rangers, had been justified by more than one spectacular success. He had fulfilled so many special missions to uncivilized and half-civilized and queerly civilized tribes that he had come to feel as if he habitually went on his way with the might of the British Empire to back him. It was he who in South Africa brought the M'popos to order without shedding a drop of blood; it was he who in the eastern Soudan induced the followers of the Black Prophet to throw in their lot with the English, securing by this move the safety of Upper Egypt; it was he who in the Malay Peninsula intimidated the Sultan of Surak into accepting the British protectorate, thus removing a menace to the peace of the Straits Settlements. Even if he had had no other exploits to his credit, these alone would have assured his favor with the home authorities. It had become something like a habit, at the Colonial Office or the War Officer or the Foreign Office, as the case might be, whenever there was trouble on one of the Empire's vague outer frontiers, to ask, "Where's Ashley?" Wherever he was, at Gibraltar or Simla or Cairo or at the Rangers' dépôt in Sussex, he was sent for and consulted. Once having gained a reputation for skill in handling barbaric potentates, he knew how to make the most of it, both abroad and in Whitehall. On rejoining his regiment, too, after some of his triumphant expeditions, he was careful to bear himself with a modesty that took the point from detraction, assuring, as it did, his brother-officers that they would have done as well as he, had they enjoyed the same chances.

He was not without a policy in this, since from the day of receiving his commission he had combined a genuine love of his profession with a quite laudable intention to "get on." He cherished this ambition more naturally, perhaps, than most of his comrades, who took the profession of arms lightly, for the reason that the instinct for it might be said to be in his blood. The Ashleys were not an old county family. Indeed, it was only a generation or so since they had achieved county rank. It was a fact not generally remembered at the present day that the grandfather of the colonel of the Sussex Rangers had been a successful and estimable manufacturer of brushes. In the early days of Queen Victoria he owned a much-frequented emporium in Regent Street, at which you could get anything in the line from a tooth-brush to a currycomb. Retiring from business in the fifties, with a considerable fortune for the time, this Mr. Ashley had purchased Heneage from the impoverished representatives of the Umfravilles. As luck would have it, the new owners found a not unattractive Miss Umfraville almost going with the place, since she lived in select but inexpensive lodgings in the village. Her manners being as gentle as her blood, and her face even gentler than either, if such a thing could be, it was in keeping with the spirit that had borne the Ashleys along to look upon her as an opportunity. Young Mr. Ashley, to whom his father had been able to give the advantages of Oxford, knew at a glance that with this lady at his side recognition by the county would be assured. Being indifferent to recognition by the county except in so far as it expressed a phase of advancement, and superior to calculation as a motive for the matrimonial state, young Ashley proceeded with all due formality to fall in love; and it was from the passion incidental to this episode that Lucky Ashley was born.

All this had happened so long ago, according to modern methods of reckoning, that the county had already forgotten what it was the original Ashley had manufactured, or that he had manufactured anything at all. By the younger generation it was assumed that Heneage had passed to the Ashley family through intermarriage with the Umfravilles. Certain it was that the Ashleys maintained the Umfraville tradition and used the Umfraville arms. What chiefly survived of the spirit that had made the manufacture of brushes so lucrative a trade was the intention young Rupert Ashley took with him into the army—to get on.

He had got on. Every one spoke of him nowadays as a coming man. It was conceded that when generals like Lord Englemere or Lord Bannockburn passed away, it would be to such men as Rupert Ashley—the number of them could be counted on the fingers of your two hands!—that the country would look for its defenders. They were young men, comparatively, as yet; but they were waiting and in training. It was a national asset to know that they were there.

It was natural, then, that Ashley's eyes should be turning in the direction of the great appointments. He had won so much distinction in the Jakh War and the Dargal War that there was nothing to which, with time, he could not aspire. True, he had rivals; true, there were men who could supplant him without putting any great strain upon their powers; true, there were others with more family influence, especially of that petticoat influence which had been known to carry so much weight in high and authoritative quarters; but he had confidence in himself, in his ability, his star—the last named of which had the merit of always seeming to move forward.

Everything began to point, therefore, to his marrying. In a measure it was part of his qualification for high command. He had reached that stage in his development, both private and professional, at which the co-operation of a good and graceful wife would double his capacity for public service, besides giving him that domestic consolation of which he began to feel the need. There were posts he could think of—posts that would naturally be vacant before many years were past—in which the fact of his being unmarried would be a serious drawback if his name were to come up. Better to be unmarried than to be saddled with a wife who from any deficiency of birth or manner was below the level of her station! Of course! He had seen more than one man, splendidly qualified otherwise, passed over because of that mischance. But with a wife who in her way was equal to him in his they would both go far. Who could venture to say how far?

In this respect he was fortunate in knowing exactly what he wanted. That is, he had seen enough of the duties of high position to be critical of the ladies who performed them. Experience enabled him to create his ideal by a process of elimination. Many a time, as he watched some great general's wife—Lady Englemere, let us say, or Lady Bannockburn—receive her guests, he said to himself, "That is exactly what my wife shall not be." She should not be a military intrigante like the one, nor a female martinet like the other, nor a gambler like a third, nor a snob like a fourth, nor a fool about young men like several he could think of. By dint of fastidious observation and careful rejection of the qualities of which he disapproved, a vision rose before him of the woman who would be the complement of himself. He saw her clever, spirited, high-bred—a woman of the world, familiar with literature and arts, and speaking at least one language besides her mother-tongue. In dress she should be exquisite, in conversation tactful, in manner sympathetic. As mistress of the house she should be thorough; as a hostess, full of charm; as a mother—but his imagination hardly went into that. That she should be a perfect mother he took for granted, just as he took it for granted that she should be beautiful. A woman who had the qualifications he desired could not be less than beautiful from the sheer operation of the soul.

Considering how definite his ideas were—and moderate, on the whole—it surprised him to find no one to embody them. It sometimes seemed to him that the traditional race of Englishwomen had become extinct. Those he met were either brilliant and hard, or handsome and horsey, or athletic and weedy, or smart and selfish, or pretty and silly, or sweet and provincial, or good and grotesque. With the best will in the world to fall in love, he found little or no temptation. Indeed, he had begun to think that the type of woman on whom he had set his heart was, like some article of an antiquated fashion, no longer produced when unexpectedly he saw her.

He saw her unexpectedly, because it was at church; and whatever his motives on that bright Sunday morning in May in attending the old garrison chapel in Southsea, the hope of seeing his vision realized was not one. If, apart from the reasons for which people are supposed to go to church, he had any special thought, it was that of meeting Mrs. Fane. It had happened two or three times already that, having perceived her at the service, he had joined her on the Common afterward, and she had asked him home to lunch. They had been pleasant little luncheons—so pleasant that he almost regretted the fact that she was an American. He had nothing against Americans in themselves. He knew a number of their women who had married into one arm or another of the Service with conspicuous advantage to their husbands. That, in fact, was part of the trouble. There were so many of them nowadays that he had begun to feel vaguely that where there was question of high position—and he hoped modestly that in his case there was distinctly question of that—it was time the principle was being established of England for the English. Nevertheless, he had got so far in his consideration of Drusilla Fane as to ask himself whether she was not, as the widow of a British officer, an Englishwoman to all intents and purposes as well as in the strict letter of the law. He could not say that he was in love with her; but neither could he say that one of these days he might not be. If he ever were it would certainly be on the principle of faute de mieux; but many a man has chosen his wife on no better ground than that.

Such criticism as he had to make to her disadvantage he could form there and then in the chapel while they were reading the lessons or chanting the psalms. She sat two or three rows in front of him, on the other side of the aisle. There was something about Drusilla in church that suggested a fish out of water. He had noticed it before. She was restless, inattentive; she kept turning her head to see who was behind her or at the other end of the pew; she rarely found the places in the prayer-book or knew just when to kneel down; when she did kneel down she sank into an awkward little bunch; every now and then she stifled, or did not stifle, a yawn.

Ashley had a theory that manner in church is the supreme test of the proprieties. He knew plenty of women who could charm at a dinner or dazzle at a dance, but who displayed their weaknesses at prayer. All unwitting to herself, poor Drusilla was inviting his final—or almost final—judgment on her future, so far at least as he was concerned, for the simple reason that she twitched and sighed and forgot to say the Amens.

And just then his eyes traveled to her neighbor—a tall young lady, dressed in white, with no color in her costume but a sash of hues trembling between sea-green and lilac. She was slender and graceful, with that air at once exquisite and unassuming that he had seen in the Englishwoman of his dreams. Though he could get no more than a side glimpse of her face, he divined that it was pure and that it must be thrown into relief by the heavy coil of coppery-brown hair. But what he noticed in her first was that which he thought of concerning other women last—a something holy and withdrawn, a quality of devotion without which he had no conception of real womanhood. It seemed to be a matter of high courtesy with her not to perceive that the choir-boys sang out of tune or that the sermon was prosy. In the matter of kneeling he had seen only one woman in his life—and she the highest in the land—who did it with this marvelous grace at once dignified and humble. "It takes old England," he said to himself, gloatingly, "to make 'em like that—simple and—stunning."

But on the Common after service, and at luncheon after that, and during the three or four weeks that ensued, he had much to do in reforming his opinions. There were several facts about Olivia Guion that disorientated his points of view and set him looking for new ones. Though he was not wholly successful in finding them, he managed, nevertheless, to justify himself for falling in love in violation of his principles. He admitted that he would have preferred to marry a compatriot of his own, and some one above the rank of a solicitor's daughter; but, since he had discovered the loveliest and noblest creature in the world, it was idle to cavil because one land or one situation in life rather than another had produced her. As well complain of the rubies and pearls that deck the English crown because some were found in Tibetan mountains and others in Indian seas. There are treasures, he argued, so precious as to transcend all merely national limitations, making them petty and irrelevant. The one thing to the point was that in Olivia Guion he had won the human counterpart of himself, who could reflect his qualities and complete them.

He had been so proud that the blow on receiving Olivia's letter in New York was a cruel one. Though it told him nothing but that her father had lost all his money and that the invitations to the wedding had been withdrawn, this in itself was immeasurably distressing to a man with a taste for calling public attention to his movements and who liked to see what concerned him march with a certain pomp. His marriage being an event worthy to take place in sight of the world, he had not only found ways of making it a topic of interest before leaving England, but he had summoned to it such friends of distinction as he possessed on the American side of the water. Though he had not succeeded in getting the British Ambassador, Benyon, the military attaché at Washington, was to come with his wife, and Lord Woolwich, who was aide-de-camp at Ottawa, had promised to act as best man. His humiliation on speculating as to what they must have said when they received Olivia's card announcing that the marriage was not to take place on the 28th was such that he fell to wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to bluff the loss of money. They might have carried out their plans in spite of it. Indeed he felt the feasibility of this course the more strongly after he had actually seen Olivia and she had given him the outlines of her tale.

Watching his countenance closely, she saw that he blanched. Otherwise he betrayed no sign of flinching. His manner of sitting rigid and upright in his corner of the rustic seat was a perfectly natural way of listening to a story that affected him so closely. What distressed her chiefly was the incongruity between his personality and the sordid drama in which she was inviting him to take part. He was even more distinguished-looking than he appeared in the photographs she cherished or in the vision she had retained in her memory. Without being above the medium male height, he was admirably shaped by war, sport, and exercise. His neat head, with its thick, crispy hair, in which there was already a streak of gray, was set on his shoulders at just the right poise for command. The high-bridged nose, inherited from the Umfravilles, was of the kind commonly considered to show "race." The eyes had the sharpness, and the thin-lipped mouth the inflexibility, that go with a capacity for quick decisions. While he was not so imposing in mufti as in his uniform, the trim traveling-suit of russet brown went well with the bronze tint of the complexion. It was so healthy a bronze, as a usual thing, that his present pallor was the more ashen from contrast.

Knowing from his telegram the hour at which to expect him, she had gone down the driveway to meet him when she saw him dismiss his taxicab at the gate. She chose to do this in order that their first encounter might take place out-of-doors. With the windows of the neighboring houses open and people sitting on verandas or passing up and down the road, they could exchange no more than some conventional greeting. She would assume nothing on the ground of their past standing toward each other. He seemed to acquiesce in this, since he showed no impatience at being restricted to the formality of shaking hands.

Happily for both, commonplace words were given them—questions and answers as to his voyage, his landing, his hotel. He came to her relief, too, as they sauntered toward the house, by commenting on its dignity and Georgian air, as well as by turning once or twice to look at the view. Nearing the steps she swerved from the graveled driveway and began to cross the lawn.

"We won't go in just yet," she explained. "Papa is there. He felt he ought to dress and come downstairs to receive you. He's very far from well. I hope you'll do your best not to—to think of him too harshly."

"I shouldn't think harshly of any one simply because he'd had business bad luck."

"He has had business bad luck—but that isn't all. We'll sit here."

Taking one corner of a long garden-seat that stood in the shade of an elm, she signed to him to take the other. On the left they had the Corinthian-columned portico of the garden front of the house; in the distance, the multicolored slopes of the town. Olivia, at least, felt the stimulating effect of the, golden forenoon sunshine.

As for Ashley, in spite of his outward self-possession, he was too bewildered to feel anything at all. Having rushed on from New York by night, he was now getting his first daylight glimpse of America; and, though, owing to more urgent subjects for, thought, he was not consciously giving his attention to things outward, he had an oppressive sense of immensity and strangeness. The arch of the sky was so sweeping, the prospect before them so gorgeous, the sunlight so hard, and the distances so clear! For the first time in his life a new continent aroused in him an odd sense of antagonism. He had never had it in Africa or Asia or in the isles of the Southern Sea. There he had always gone with a sense of power, with the instinct of the conqueror; while here.... But Olivia was speaking, saying things too appalling for immediate comprehension.

Her voice was gentle and even; she spoke with a certain kind of ease. She appeared to rehearse something already learned by heart.

"So, you see, he didn't merely lose his own money; he lost theirs—the money of his clients—which was in his trust. I hadn't heard of it when I wrote you in New York, otherwise I should have told you. But now that you know it—"

He looked mystified. "He's jolly lucky not to be in England," he said, trying not to seem as stunned as he felt. "There that sort of thing is a very serious—"

"Offence," she hastened to say. "Oh, so it is here. I must tell you quite plainly that if the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to—"

"But the money did come?"

She made a point of finishing her sentence. "If the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to prison. Yes, the money did come. A friend of—of papa's—and Drusilla's—advanced it. It's been paid over to the people who were going to law."

"So that part of it is settled?"

"That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken against papa."

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts unsparingly. It was the only way. Her very statements, so it seemed to her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she had to say, she ceased speaking. Taking it for granted that he was thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words, she, too, remained silent. She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor alarmed. The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts. Once he had grasped the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details. The important thing was his own conduct. Amid circumstances overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival, relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words "precisely the right thing" because they formed a ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows. They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, "You can always be sure that Rupert will do precisely the right thing." Though he was but a lad at Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the Victoria Cross.

He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given the note to his character his record would never have been written on that roll of heroes. "I should have funked it," was his way of putting it, by which he meant that he would have funked it through sheer ignorance of himself and of his aptitude for the high and noble. It was an aptitude that flourished best under an appreciative eye—of the dowager countess looking down from heaven—or of the discerning here on earth—as an actor is encouraged by a sympathetic public to his highest histrionic efforts. If there was anything histrionic in Ashley himself, it was only in the sense that he was at his finest when, actually or potentially, there was some one there to see. He had powers then of doing precisely the right thing which in solitude might have been dormant from lack of motive.

It was undoubtedly because he felt the long-sighted eyes of England on him that he had done precisely the right thing in winning the Victoria Cross. He confessed this—to himself. He confessed it often—every time, in fact, when he came to a difficult passage in his life. It was his strength, his inspiration. He confessed it now. If he sat silent while Olivia Guion waited till it seemed good to him to speak, it was only that he might remind himself of the advantages of doing the right thing, however hard. He had tested those advantages time and time again. The very memories they raised were a rebuke to weakness and hesitation. If he ever had duties he was inclined to shirk, he thought of that half-hour which had forever set the seal upon his reputation as a British soldier.

He thought of it now. He saw himself again looking up at the bristling cliffs that were to be rushed, whence the Afridis were pouring their deadly fire. He saw himself measuring with his eye the saddle of precipitous slope that had to be crossed, devoid of cover and strewn with the bodies of dead Ghurkas. Of the actual crossing, with sixty Rangers behind him, he had little or no recollection. He had passed under the hail of bullets as through perils in a dream. As in a dream, too, he remembered seeing his men, when he turned to cheer them on, go down like nine-pins—throwing up their arms and staggering, or twisting themselves up like convulsive cats. It was grotesque rather than horrible; he felt himself grinning inwardly, as at something hellishly comic, when he reached the group of Ghurkas huddled under the cavernous shelter of the cliff. Then, just as he threw himself on the ground, panting like a spent dog and feeling his body all over to know whether or not he had been wounded, he saw poor Private Vickerson out in the open, thirty yards from the protection of the wall of rock. While the other Rangers to a man were lying still, on the back with the knees drawn up, or face downward, with the arms outstretched, or rolled on the side as though they were in bed, Vickerson was rising on his hands and dragging himself forward. It was one of Ashley's most vivid recollections that Vickerson's movements were like a seal's. They had the drollery of a bit of infernal mimicry. It was also a vivid recollection that when he ran out to the soldier's aid he had his first sensation of fear. The bullets whizzed so thick about him that he ran back again. It was an involuntary running back, as involuntary as snatching his fingers out of a fire. He could remember standing under the rock, and, as Vickerson did not move, half hoping he were dead. That would put an end to any further attempts to save him. But the soldier stirred again, propping himself with both hands and pulling his body onward for a few inches more. Again Ashley ran out into a tempest of iron and fire and over ground slippery with blood. He could still feel himself hopping back, as a barefooted boy who has ventured into a snow-storm hops back into the house. A third time he ran out, and a fourth. At the fourth he distinctly worded the thought which had been at the back of his mind from the beginning, "I shall get the V.C. for this." He tried to banish the unworthy suggestion, but it was too strong for him. Over the cliffs, and out of the clouds, and from beyond the horizon, he felt the unseen eyes of England upon him, inciting him to such a valor that at the fifth attempt he dragged in his man.

He came out of this reverie, which, after all, was brief, to find the gentle tones in which Olivia had made her astounding revelations still in his ears; while she herself sat expectant, and resigned. He knew she was expectant and resigned and that she had braced her courage for the worst. With many men, with most men, to do so would have been needful. In the confusion of his rapid summaries and calculations it was a pleasurable thought that she should learn from him, and through him and in him, that it was not so with all. The silence which at first was inadvertent now became deliberate as—while he noted with satisfaction that he had not overstated to himself the exquisite, restrained beauty of her features, her eyes, her hair, her hands, and of the very texture and fashion of her clothing—he prolonged the suspense which was to be the prelude to his justifying once again the dowager countess's good opinion. It was to his credit as a brave man that he could nerve himself for this with his eyes wide open—wider open than even Mrs. Fane's—to to the consequences that might be in store for him.

shley had the tact, sprung of his English instinct for moderation, not to express his good intentions too directly. He preferred to let them filter out through a seemingly casual manner of taking them for granted. Neither did he attempt to disguise the fact that the strangeness incidental to meeting again, in trying conditions and under another sky, created between himself and Olivia a kind of moral distance across which they could draw together only by degrees. It was a comfort to her that he did not try to bridge it by anything in the way of forced tenderness. He was willing to talk over the situation simply and quietly until, in the course of an hour or two, the sense of separation began to wear away.

The necessity on her part of presenting Ashley to her father and offering him lunch brought into play those social resources that were as second nature to all three. It was difficult to think the bottom could be out of life while going through a carefully chosen menu and drinking an excellent vin de Graves at a table meticulously well appointed. To escape the irony of this situation they took refuge in the topics that came readiest, the novelty to Ashley of the outward aspect of American things keeping them on safe ground till the meal was done. It was a relief to both men that Guion could make his indisposition an excuse for retiring again to his room.

It was a relief to Olivia, too. For the first time in her life she had to recognize her father as insupportable to any one but herself and Peter Davenant. Ashley did his best to conceal his repulsion; she was sure of that; he only betrayed it negatively in a tendency to ignore him. He neither spoke nor listened to him any more than he could help. By keeping his eyes on Olivia he avoided looking toward him. The fact that Guion took this aversion humbly, his head hanging and his attention given to his plate, did not make it the less poignant.

All the same, as soon as they were alone in the dining-room the old sense of intimacy, of belonging to each other, suddenly returned. It returned apropos of nothing and with the exchange of a glance. There was a flash in his eyes, a look of wonder in hers—and he had taken her, or she had slipped, into his arms.

And yet when a little later he reverted to the topic of the morning and said, "As things are now, I really don't see why we shouldn't be married on the 28th—privately, you know," her answer was, "What did you think of papa?"

Though he raised his eyebrows in surprise that she should introduce the subject, he managed to say, "He seems pretty game."

"He does; but I dare say he isn't as game as he looks. There's a good deal before him still."

"If we're married on the 28th he'd have one care the less."

"Because I should be taken off his hands. I'm afraid that's not the way to look at it. The real fact is that he'd have nobody to help him."

"I've two months' leave. You could do a lot for him in that time."

She bent over her piece of work. It was the sofa-cushion she had laid aside on the day when she learned from Davenant that her father's troubles were like Jack Berrington's. They had come back for coffee to the rustic seat on the lawn. For the cups and coffee service a small table had been brought out beside which she sat. Ashley had so far recovered his sang-froid as to be able to enjoy a cigar.

"Would you be very much hurt," she asked, without raising her head, "if I begged you to go back to England without our being married at all?"

"Oh, but I say!"

The protest was not over-strong. He was neither shocked nor surprised. A well-bred woman, finding herself in such trouble as hers, would naturally offer him some way of escape from it.

"You see," she went on, "things are so complicated already that if we got married we should complicate them more. There's so much to be done—as to papa—and this house—and the future—of the kind of thing you don't know anything about. They're sordid things, too, that you'd be wasted on if you tried to learn them."

He smiled indulgently. "And so you're asking me—a soldier!—to run away."

"No, to let me do it. It's so—so impossible that I can't face it."

"Oh, nonsense!" He spoke with kindly impatience. "Don't you love me? You said just now—in the dining-room—when—"

"Yes, I know; I did say that. But, you see—we must consider it—love can't be the most important thing in the world for either you or me."

"I understand. You mean to say it's duty. Very good. In that case, my duty is as plain as a pikestaff."

"Your duty to stand by me?"

"I should be a hound if I didn't do it."

"And I should feel myself a common adventuress if I were to let you."

"Oh—I say!"

His protest this time was more emphatic. There was even a pleading note in it. In the course of two or three hours he had got back much of the feeling he had had in England that she was more than an exquisite lady, that she was the other part of himself. It seemed superfluous on her part to fling open the way of retreat for him too wide.

She smiled at his exclamation. "Yes, I dare say that's how it strikes you. But it's very serious to me. Isn't it serious to you, too, to feel that you must be true to me—and marry me—after all that's come to pass?"

"One doesn't think that way—or speak that way—of marrying the woman one—adores."

"Men have been known to marry the women they adored, and still regret the consequences they had to meet."

"She's right," he said to himself. "It is serious."

There could be no question as to her wisdom in asking him to pause. At his age and in his position, and with his merely normal capacity for passion, it would be absurd to call the world well lost for love. Notwithstanding his zeal to do the right thing, there was something due to himself, and it was imperative that he should consider it. Dropping the stump of his cigar into his empty coffee-cup, he got up and strode away. The emotion of the minute, far in excess of the restrained phrases convention taught them to use, offered an excuse for his unceremoniousness.

He walked to the other side of the lawn, then down to the gate, then round to the front of the house. To a chance passer-by he was merely inspecting the premises. What he saw, however, was not the spectacular foliage, nor the mellow Georgian dwelling, but himself going on his familiar victorious way, freed from a clogging scandal that would make the wheels of his triumphal car drive heavily. He saw himself advancing, as he had advanced hitherto, from promotion to promotion, from command to command. He saw himself first alone, and then with a wife—a wife who was not Olivia Guion. Then suddenly the vision changed into something misty and undefined; the road became dark, the triumphal car jolted and fell to pieces; there was reproach in the air and discomfort in his sensations. He recognized the familiar warnings that he was not doing precisely the right thing. He saw Olivia Guion sitting as he had left her four or five minutes before, her head bent over her stitching. He saw her there, deserted, alone. He saw the eyes of England on him, as he drove away in his triumphal car, leaving her to her fate. His compunction was intense, his pity overwhelming. Merely at turning his back on her to stroll around the lawn he felt guilty of a cowardly abandonment. And he felt something else—he felt the clinging of her arms around his neck; he felt the throb of her bosom against his own as she let herself break down just for a second—just for a sob. It seemed to him that he should feel that throb forever.

He hurried back to where he had left her. "It's no use," he said to himself; "I'm in for it, by Jove. I simply can't leave her in the lurch."

There was no formal correctness about Ashley's habitual speech. He kept, as a rule, to the idiom of the mess, giving it distinction by his crisp, agreeable enunciation.

Olivia had let the bit of embroidery rest idly in her lap. She looked up at his approach. He stood before her.

"Do I understand," he asked, with a roughness assumed to conceal his agitation, "that you're offering me my liberty?"

"No; that I'm asking you for mine."

"On what grounds?"

She arched her eyebrows, looking round about her comprehensively. "I should think that was clear. On the grounds of—of everything."

"That's not enough. So long as you can't say that you don't—don't care about me any more—"

There was that possibility. It was very faint, but if she made use of it he should consider it decisive. Doing precisely the right thing would become quite another course of action if her heart rejected him. But she spoke promptly.

"I can't say that; but I can say something more important."

He nodded firmly. "That settles it, by Jove. I sha'n't give you up. There's no reason for it. So long as we love each other—"

"Our loving each other wouldn't make your refusal any the less hard for me. As your wife I should be trying to fill a position for which I'm no longer qualified and in which I should be a failure."

"As my wife," he said, slowly, with significant deliberation, "we could make the position anything you felt able to fill."

She considered this. "That is, you could send in your papers and retire into private life."

"If we liked."

"So that you'd be choosing between your career—and me."

"I object to the way of putting it. If my career, as you call it, didn't make you happy, you should have whatever would do the trick."

"I'm afraid you'll think me captious if I say that nothing could do it. If you weren't happy, I couldn't be; and you'd never be happy except as a soldier."

"That trade would be open to me whatever happened."

"In theory, yes; but in practice, if you had a wife who was under a cloud you'd have to go under it, too. That's what it would come to in the working-out."

She stood up from sheer inability to continue sitting still. The piece of embroidery fell on the grass. Ashley smiled at her—a smile that was not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him. Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the future. "She's stunning—by Jove!" It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. For the first time since he had known her he was less the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high position than he was a man in love with a woman. Separating these two elements within himself, he was able to value her qualities, not as adornments to some Home or Colonial Headquarters House, but as of supreme worth for their own sake. "People have only got to see her," he said, inwardly, to which he added aloud:

"I dare say the cloud may not be so threatening, after all; and even if it is, I should go under it with the pluckiest woman in the world."

She acknowledged this with a scarcely visible smile and a slight inclination of the head. "Thank you; I'm foolish enough to like to hear you say it. I think I am plucky—alone. But I shouldn't be if I involved anybody else."

"But if it was some one who could help you?"

"That might be different, but I don't know of any one who could. You couldn't. If you tried you'd only injure yourself without doing me any good."

"At the least, I could take you away from—from all this."

"No, because it's the sort of thing one can never leave behind. It's gone ahead of us. It will meet us at every turn. You and I—and papa—are probably by to-day a subject for gossip in half the clubs in New York. To-morrow it will be the same thing in London—at the club you call the Rag—and the Naval and Military—and your different Service clubs—"

To hide the renewal of his dismay he pooh-poohed this possibility. "As a mere nine days' wonder."

"Which isn't forgotten when the nine days are past. Long after they've ceased speaking of it they'll remember—"

"They'll remember," he interrupted, fiercely, "that I jilted you."

She colored hotly. "That you—what?"

He colored, too. The words were as much a surprise to him as to her. He had never thought of this view of the case till she herself summoned up the vision of his friends and enemies discussing the affair in big leather arm-chairs in big, ponderous rooms in Piccadilly or St. James's Square. It was what they would say, of course. It was what he himself would have said of any one else. He had a renewed feeling that retreat was cut off.

"If we're not married—if I go home without you—it's what'll be on everybody's lips."

"But it won't be true," she said, with a little gasp.

He laughed. "That won't matter. It's how it'll look."

"Oh, looks!"

"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? It's what makes the difference. I shall figure as a cad."

He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery. She was inexpressibly shocked.

"Oh, but you couldn't," was all she could find to say, but she said it with conviction.