The Project Gutenberg eBook of Quisanté, by Anthony Hope.

"Your husband had a slight seizure while dining with us to-night. He is comfortable now, and there is no immediate reason for anxiety. But doctor thinks you had better come up earliest convenient train to-morrow. Winterton Mildmay."

May read the telegram, standing between Marchmont and Dick. She handed it to Dick, saying, "Read it, and will you send an answer that I'll come as early as possible in the morning;" then she walked to the table and sat down by it. Dick gave Marchmont the slip of paper and went off to despatch the answer. Nobody else was in the room, except Fanny Gaston, who was playing softly on the piano in the corner. Marchmont came up to May and put the telegram down on the table by her.

"I don't suppose it's very serious," she said. "But I must go, of course." She went on under the cover of Fanny's gentle music. "It's all rather odd though—its coming to-night and its happening at the Mildmays'. I forgot, though, you don't know why I feel that so odd. How Lady Mildmay'll nurse him! I expect I shall have a struggle to get him out of the house and home again."

Marchmont made no answer but stood looking down on her face. She met his glance fairly, and knew what it was that had forced itself into his mind and now found expression in his eyes. She had declared to him that her fate was irrevocable, that the lines of her life were set, that nothing but death could alter them, and that death had no part in her thoughts about her husband. The telegram did not prove her wrong; yet seizure was a vague word under which much might lie hidden. But her mood and her feeling still remained; it was not in hope or in any attempt at self-consolation, but in the expression of an obstinate conviction which dominated her mind that she said in answer to Marchmont's glance, "I can't believe it's anything really amiss. I expect I shall find him at work again when I get back to-morrow."

With a little movement of his hands Marchmont turned away. He had at command no conventional phrases in which to express a desire that she might prove right. It was impossible to say that he wished she might prove wrong; even in his own mind a man leaves a hope like that vague and unformulated. But he marvelled, still without understanding, at the strange obstinate idea which seemed almost to exalt Quisanté above the ordinary lot of mortals, to see in him a force so living that it could not perish, a vitality so intense that death could lay no hand on it. He glanced at her as he crossed the room to the piano; she sat now with the telegram in her hands and her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. It needed a sharper summons, a nearer reality, to rouse her from the conviction that her life was bound for ever to that of the man whom she had chosen and for whom she had given so much. It would all go on, right to the end of everything. The telegram had not shaken that faith in her, nor altered that despair.

A knotty point of casuistry was engaging the thoughts of the Dean of St. Neot's. Morewood had been to see him, had told without disguise the whole story of his blunder at the dinner-table at Ashwood, had referred to Alexander Quisanté's serious illness, and had finally, without apology and without periphrasis, expressed the hope that Alexander Quisanté would die. The Dean's rebuke had produced a strenuous effort at justification. Quisanté was, the painter pointed out, no doubt a force, but a force essentially immoral (Morewood took up morality when it suited his purpose); he did work, but he made unhappiness; he affected people's lives, but not so as to promote their well-being. Or if the Dean chose to champion the man, Morewood was ready for him again. If Quisanté were good, were moral, were deserving of defence, then the merely natural process lugubriously described as death, and fantastically treated with black plumes and crape, would, so far as he himself was concerned, be no more than a transition to a better state of existence, while certain solid and indisputable benefits would accrue to those who were condemned to wait a little longer for their summons. Whether the Dean elected to be for Quisanté or against him, Morewood claimed a verdict.

This challenging of a man's general notions by the putting of a thorny special case was rather resented by the Dean; it reminded him of the voluble atheist in Hyde Park, who bases his attack on the supernatural on the obsolete enactments of the Book of Leviticus. None the less he was rather puzzled as to what he had a right to wish about Alexander Quisanté, and so he had recourse to his usual remedy—a consultation with his wife. He had the greatest faith in Mrs. Baxter's eye for morality; perhaps generations of clerical ancestry had bred in her such an instinct as we see in sporting-dogs; she could not go wrong. On this question she was immediately satisfactory.

"We are forbidden," she said, removing a piece of tape from her mouth, "to wish anybody's death; you know that as well as I do, Dan." She made a stitch or two. "We must leave it to Providence," she ended serenely.

At first sight there was nothing much in this dictum; it appeared even commonplace. But Mrs. Baxter had been lunching with the Mildmays, had heard a full account of what the doctors said about Quisanté, and had expressed her conviction that he could not possibly last long. So far as could be judged then, the confidence which she proposed to show ran no appreciable risk of being misplaced, while at the same time she avoided committing herself by any expression of a personal opinion.

"If he had thought less about himself and more about other people——" she resumed.

"If you weren't in such a hurry, Dan, to show what you call your enlightenment (though heaven knows you may be wrong all the time, and a judgment is a perfectly possible thing) you'd have found out that I was only going to say that, if he'd thought more of other people, he'd find other people thinking more about him now."

Mrs. Baxter looked less grateful than she might have for this endorsement of her views; self-confidence is apt to hold external support in cheap esteem.

"When the first Mrs. Greening died," she remarked, "they gave the maids very nice black frocks, with a narrow edging of good crape. The very first Sunday-out that Elizabeth had—the butcher's daughter near the Red Cow—you remember?—she stuck a red ribbon round the neck."

"Mrs. Greening was the most selfish woman I've ever known," explained Mrs. Baxter; and she added with a pensive smile, "And I've lived in a Cathedral town for thirty years."

The red-ribbon became intelligible; it fell into line with Morewood's ill-disciplined wish. Both signified an absence of love, such a departing without being desired as serves for the epitaph of a Jewish king. The Dean cast round for somebody who would prove such an inscription false on Alexander Quisanté's tomb.

"And his wife!" mused the Dean. It was impossible to say whether there were a question in his words or not. But his first instance had not been Quisanté's wife; the old aunt offered a surer case.

"If you always knew what a man's wife thought about him, you'd know a great deal," said Mrs. Baxter. She possessed in the fullest degree her sex's sense of an ultimate superiority in perception; men knew neither what their wives did nor what they were; wives might not know what their husbands did, but they always knew what they were. It would be rash to differ from a person of her observation and experience; half a dozen examples would at once have confounded the objector.

Mrs. Baxter took perhaps a too private and domestic view of the man whose fate she was discussing; she judged the husband and friend, she had nothing to say to the public character. The voices of his political associates and acquaintances, of his fellow-workers in business, of his followers and enthusiastic adherents in his constituency, did not reach her ears, and perhaps, if they had, would not have won much attention. The consternation of Constantine Blair, Lady Castlefort's dismay, the sad gossiping and head-shaking that went on in the streets of Henstead and round old Mr. Foster's comfortable board, witnessed to a side of Quisanté in which Mrs. Baxter did not take much interest. She did not understand the sort of stupor with which they who had lived with him and worked with him saw the force he wielded and the anticipations he filled them with both struck down by a sudden blow; she did not share the feeling that all at once a gap had been made in life.

But something of this sort was the effect in all the circles which Quisanté had invaded and in which he had moved. The philosophical might already be saying that there was no necessary man; to the generality that reflection would come only later, when they had found a new leader, a fresh inspiration, and another personality in which to see the embodiment of their hopes. Now the loss was too fresh and too complete; for although it might be doubtful how long Quisanté's life would last, there seemed no chance of his ever filling the place to which he had appeared to be destined. Only a miracle could give that back to one who must cling to life, if he could keep his hold on it at all, at the cost of abandoning all the efforts and all the activities which had made it what it was alike for himself and for others. He was rallying slowly and painfully from his blow; a repetition of it would be the certain penalty of any strenuous mental exertion or any sustained strain of labour. In inactivity, in retirement, in the placid existence of a recognised invalid he might live years, indeed probably would; but otherwise the authorities declined to promise him any life at all. His body had played him false in the end. Constantine Blair began to look out for a candidate for Henstead and to wonder whether Sir Winterton would again expose himself to the unpleasantness of a contested election; Lady Castlefort must find another Prime Minister, the fighting men another champion, even the Alethea Printing Press Limited a new chairman. The places he had filled or made himself heir to were open to other occupants and fresh pretenders. That the change seemed so considerable proved how great a figure he had become in men's eyes no less than how utterly his career was overthrown. The comments on his public life were very flattering, but already they praised in the tone of an obituary notice, and the hopes they expressed of his being able some day to return to the arena were well understood to be no more than a kind or polite refusal to display naked truth in the merciless clearness of print.

Here was the state of things which extorted from Morewood the blunt wish that Quisanté might die. Such a desire was hardly cruel to the man himself, since he must now lose all that he had loved best in the market of the world; but it was not the man himself who had been most in Morewood's thoughts. With a penetration sharpened by the memory of his blunder he had appreciated the perverse calamity which had fallen on the man's wife, and had passed swiftly to the conclusion that for her an end by death was the only chance, the only turn of events which could give back to her the chance of a real life to be lived. He knew by what Quisanté had attracted and held her; all that, it seemed, was gone now. He divined also in what Quisanté repelled and almost terrified her; that would remain so long as breath was in the man and might grow even more intense. A sense of fairness somehow impelled him to his wish; her bargain had turned out so badly; the underlying basis of her marriage was broken; she was left to pay the price to the last penny, but was to get nothing of what she had looked to purchase. Was it not then the part of a courageous man to face his instinctive wish, and to accept it boldly? Cant and tradition apart, it must be the wish of every sensible person. For she knew, she had realised most completely on the very evening when Quisanté was struck down, what manner of man he was. She might have endured if she had still been able to tell herself of the wonderful things that he would do. No such comfort was open now. The man was still what he was; but he would do nothing. There came the change.

"That's the weak point about marriage as compared with other contractual arrangements," said Morewood to Dick Benyon. "You can never in any bargain ensure people getting what they expect to get—because to do that you'd have to give all of them sense—but in most you can to a certain extent see that they're allowed to keep what they actually did get. In marriage you can't. Something of this sort happens and the whole understanding on which the arrangement was based breaks down."

"The only way of getting anything like justice for her is that he should die. You must see that?"

"I don't know anything about it," said Dick morosely, "but I hear there's no particular likelihood of his dying if he obeys orders and keeps quiet."

"Just so, just so," said Morewood. "That's exactly what I mean. Do you suppose she'd ever have taken him if he'd been going to keep quiet? You know why you took him up; well, she did just the same. You know what you found him; she's found him just the same. What's left now? The rôle of a loving nurse! She's not born a nurse; and how in the devil's name is she to be expected to love him?"

Dick Benyon found no answer to questions which put with a brutal truthfulness the salient facts of the position. The one thing necessary, the one thing which would have made the calamity bearable, perhaps better than bearable, was wanting. She might love or have loved things in him, or about him, or done by him; himself she did not love; and now nothing but himself remained to her. Seeing the matter in this light, Dick was dumb before Morewood's challenge to him to say, if he dared, that he hoped a long life for Alexander Quisanté. Yet neither would he wish his death; for Dick had been an enthusiast, the spell had been very strong on him, and there still hung about him something of that inability to think of Quisanté as dead or dying, something of the idea that he must live and must by very strength of will find strength of body, which had prevented May herself from believing that the news which came in her telegram could mean anything really serious. While Quisanté lived, there would always be to Dick a possibility that he would rise up from his sickness and get to work again. Death would end this, death with its finality and its utter incongruous stillness. Death was repose, and neither for good nor for evil had Quisanté ever embraced repose. He had never been quiet; when he was not achieving, he had been grimacing. In death he could do neither.

"I can't fancy the fellow dead," said Dick to his wife and his brother. "I should be expecting him to jump up again every minute."

Lady Richard shuddered. The actual Quisanté had been bad; the idea of a dead Quisanté horribly galvanized into movement by a restlessness that the tomb could not stifle was hideous. Jimmy came to her aid with a rather unfeeling but apparently serious suggestion.

"Poor May!" said Lady Richard. Neither of them pressed her to explain the precise point in May Quisanté's position which produced this exclamation of pity. It might have been that the death was possible, or that the death was not certain, or at least not near, or it might have sprung from a purely general reflection on the unhappiness of having life coupled with the life of such a man as Quisanté.

All these voices of a much interested, much pitying, much (and on the whole not unenjoyably) discussing world were heard only in dim echoes in the Mildmays' big quiet house in Carlton-House Terrace, where Quisanté had been stricken by his blow. There May had found him on her hasty return from Ashwood, and here he was still, thanks to the host's and hostess's urgent entreaties. They declared that he was not fit to be moved; the doctors hardly endorsed this view heartily but went so far as to say that any disturbance was no doubt bad in its degree; Lady Mildmay seized eagerly on the grudging support. "Let him stay here till he's fit to go to the country," she urged. "I'm sure we can make him comfortable. And—" she smiled apologetically, "I'm a good nurse, if I'm nothing else, you know."

"My dear, you don't know what a lot Winterton thinks of Mr. Quisanté; he's proud to be of the least service to him. And you do know, I think, how it delights him to be any use at all to you."

In spite of that reason buried in her own heart which made every kindness received from these kind hands bitter to her, May let him stay. He wanted to stay, she thought, so far as his relaxed face and dimmed eyes gave evidence of any desire. And besides—yes, Lady Mildmay was a good nurse; he might find none so good if he were moved away. No sense of duty, no punctilious performance of offices, no such constancy of attendance as a wife is bound to render, could give what Lady Mildmay gave. Yet more than these May could not achieve. It was rather cruel, as it seemed to her, that the great and sudden call on her sympathy should come at the moment of all others when the spring of her sympathy was choked, when anger still burnt in her heart, when passionate resentment for a wound to her own pride and her own honour still inflamed her, when the mood in which she had broken out in her talk with Marchmont was still predominant. Such a falling-out of events sometimes made this real and heavy sickness seem like one of Quisanté's tricks, of at least suggested that he might be making the most of it in his old way, as he had of his faintness at the Imperial League banquet, or of his headache when old Foster's letter followed on the declaration of the poll at Henstead. Such feelings as these, strong enough to chill her pity till Lady Mildmay wondered at a wife so cold, were not deep or sincere enough to blind May Quisanté's eyes. Even without the doctor's story—which she had insisted on being told in all its plainness—she thought that she would have known the meaning of what had befallen her husband and herself, and have grasped at once its two great features, the great certainty and the great uncertainty; the certainty that his career was at an end, the uncertainty as to how near his life was to its end. Such a position chimed in too well with the bitter mood of Ashwood not to seem sent to crown it by a malicious device of fate's. At the very moment when she least could love, she was left no resource but love; at the moment when she would have turned her eyes most away from him and most towards his deeds, the deeds were taken away and he only was left; at the time when her hot anger against him drove her into a cry for release, she received no promise of release, or a promise deferred beyond an indefinitely stretching period of a worse imprisonment. For she clung to no such hope as that which made Dick Benyon dream of a resurrection of activity and of power, and had nothing to look for save years of a life both to herself and to him miserable. It might be sin to wish him dead; but was it sin to wish him either alive or dead, either in vigour or at rest? Sin or no sin, that was the desire in her heart, and it would not be stifled however much she accused its inhumanity or recognised the want of love in it. Was the fault all hers? With her lips still burning from the lie that she had told for him, she could not answer 'yes.'

Still and silent Quisanté lay on his bed. His head was quite clear now and his eyes grew brighter. He watched Lady Mildmay as she ministered to him, and he watched his wife with his old quick furtive glances, so keen to mark every shade of her manner towards him. She had never really deceived him as to her thoughts of him; she did not deceive him now. He knew that her sympathies were estranged, more estranged than they had ever been before. So far as the reason lay in the incident of Ashwood, it was hidden from him; he knew nothing of the last great shame that he had put on her. But long before this he had recognised where his power over her lay, by what means he had gained and by what he kept it; he had been well aware that if she were still to be under his sway, the conquest must be held by his achievements; he himself was as nothing beside them. Now, as he lay, he was thinking what would happen. He also had heard the doctor's story or enough of it to enable him to guess the purport of their sentence on him; he was to live as an invalid, to abandon all his ambitions, to throw away all that made people admire him or made him something in the world's eyes and something great in hers. On these terms and on these only life was offered to him now; if he refused, if he defied nature, then he must go on with the sword ever hanging over him, in the knowledge that it soon must fall. He told himself that, yet was but half-convinced. Need it fall? With the first spurt of renewed strength he raised that question and argued it, till he seemed able to say 'It may fall,' rather than 'It must.'

What should be his course then? The world thought it had done with him. All seemed gone for which his wife had prized him. Should he accept that, and in its acceptance take up his life as valetudinarian, his life forgotten of the world which he had loved to conquer, barren of interest for the woman whom it had been his strongest passion to win against her instincts, to hold as it were against her will, and to fascinate in face of her distaste? Such were the terms offered; Alexander Quisanté lay long hours open-eyed and thought of them. There had come into his head an idea that attracted him mightily and suited well with his nature, so oddly mixed of strength and weakness, greatness and smallness, courage and bravado, the idea of a means by which he might keep the world's applause and his wife's fascinated interest, aye, and increase them too, till they should be more intense than they had ever been. That would be a triumph, played before admiring eyes. But what would be the price of it, and was the price one that he would pay. It might be the biggest price a mortal man can pay. So for a few days more Alexander Quisanté lay and thought about it.

Once old Miss Quisanté came to see him, at his summons, not of her own volunteering. Since the blow fell she had neither come nor written, and May, with a sense of relief, had caught at the excuse for doing no more than sending now and again a sick-room report. Aunt Maria looked old, frail, and very yellow, as she made her way to a chair by her nephew's bed. He turned to her with the smile of mockery so familiar to her eyes.

"You've always sent for me when you wanted me before, Sandro, and I supposed you would this time."

"May's kept you posted up? You know what those fools of doctors say?" The old woman nodded. Quisanté was smiling still. "I'm done then, eh?" he asked.

Her hands were trembling, but her voice was hard and unsympathetic. "It sounds like it," she said.

"You'll see me out after all," said he, "if I'm not careful. That's what it comes to." He gave a low laugh as Aunt Maria's lips moved but no words came. He leant over a little nearer to her and asked, "Have you had any talk with my wife about it?"

"Nothing to be said, eh? What does she think, though? Oh, you know! You've got your wits about you. Don't take to considering my feelings at this time of day."

"I tell you, I love my wife." Aunt Maria made no remark. "And you both think I'm done for? Well, we'll see!"

Aunt Maria looked up with a gleam of new interest in her sharp eyes, so like the eyes of the man on the bed. Quisanté met her glance and understood it; it appealed at once to his malice and to his vanity; it was a foretaste of the wonder he would raise and the applause he would win, if he determined to face the price that might have to be paid for them. He had listened with exasperated impatience to kind Lady Mildmay's pleadings with him, to her motherly insisting on perfect rest for his mind, and to her pathetically hopeful picture of the new interests and the new pleasure he would find in days of rest and peace, with his wife tenderly looking after him. To such charming as that his ears were deaf; they pricked at the faintest sound of distant cheering. It would be something to show even Aunt Maria that he was not done with; what would it not be to show it to the world—and to that wife of his whom he loved and could hold only by his deeds?

"I only know what the doctors say," remarked Miss Quisanté. "They say you must throw up everything."

"You wouldn't have me risk another of those damned strokes, would you?" he asked, the mockery most evident now in his voice and look. "Lady Mildmay implores me to be careful, almost with tears. I suppose my own aunt'll be still more anxious, and my own wife too?"

"Doctors aren't infallible. And they don't know you, Sandro. You're not like other men." Hard as the tone was, his ears drank in the words eagerly. "They don't know how much there is in you."

"May thinks I'm done for?" Aunt Maria nodded. "And she'll nurse me? Take me to some infernal invalids' place, full of bath-chairs, and walk beside mine, eh?" Aunt Maria smiled grimly. "She'll like that, won't she?" he asked.

"Oh, and my dear aunt doesn't agree with them?" Eagerness now broke through the mockery in his tones. He had longed so for a word of hope, for someone to persuade him that he might still live and could still work. "But suppose they proved right? Well, that's no worse than the other anyhow."

"Not much," said Aunt Maria. "But I don't believe 'em." Her faith in him came back at his first summons of it. He had but to tell her that he would live and need not die, and she would believe him. Sandro's ways were not as other men's; she could not believe that for Sandro as for other men there were necessities not to be avoided, and a fate not to be mastered by any defiant human will. So there she sat, persuading him that he was not mortal; and he lay listening, mocking, embittered, yet still lending an ear to the story, eager to believe her fable, rejoicing in the power that he had over her mind. If he felt all this for Aunt Maria, what would he not feel for the world, and for that wife of his? If old Aunt Maria could so wake in him the love of life and the hatred of that living death to which he had been condemned, what passionate will to live would rise in answer to the world's wonder and his wife's?

"I wish you'd give me that little book on the table there," he said. Aunt Maria obeyed. "My engagement-book," he explained. "Look. I had things booked for five months ahead. See—speeches, meetings, committees, the Alethea—so on—so on. They're all what they call cancelled now." He turned the leaves and Aunt Maria stood by him, watching.

He flung the book down on the floor in sudden peevishness, with an oath of anger and exasperation.

Lady Mildmay would have come and whispered softly to him, patted his hand, given him lemonade, and bade him try to sleep while she read softly to him. His old Aunt Maria Quisanté stood motionless, saying not a word, looking away from him. Yet she was nearer to his mood and suited him better than kind Lady Mildmay.

"You've done a good bit already, Sandro," she said. "And you're only thirty-nine."

"And I'm to die at thirty-nine, or else live like an idiot, bored to death, and boring to death everybody about me!"

"I shall go now," said Aunt Maria. "Good-bye, Sandro. Send for me again when you want me."

"Tell her what you think. You know: I mean, tell her that perhaps it's not as bad as the doctors say; that I may get about a bit soon and—and so on—You know."

"She's not to conclude it's all over with me yet." Miss Quisanté nodded and moved towards the door.

She returned, picked up the engagement-book and gave it him; then she stood for a moment by the bed, beginning to smile a little.

"You've got a lot to fret about," she said. "Don't you fret about money, Sandro. I can manage a thousand in a month or so. No use hoarding it; it looks as if we should neither of us want it long."

"Then in God's name put it in the Alethea. What are you thinking about? It's the biggest thing out."

"All right. I shall put it in, if you do. I tell you that in three years' time you'll be rich out of it, and I shall draw an income of a couple of thousand a year at least as long as the patent lasts, if not longer."

"Fourteen years; then we'll try for an extension, for another seven, you know, and we ought to get it. First and last I expect to get fifty thousand out of the Alethea alone, besides another thing that I've talked over with Mandeville. I'll tell you about it some day, I can't to-day. I—I'm a little tired. But anyhow the Alethea's sure. I'll put the thousand into it for you, and I'll hand you back double the money this time next year."

He was leaning on his left elbow, talking volubly; his eyes were bright, his right hand moved in rapid apt gestures; his voice was sanguine as he spoke of the seven years' extension of the Alethea patent; he had forgotten his stroke and the verdict of his doctors. Aunt Maria nodded her head to him, saying, "I'll send it you as soon as I can," and made for the door. She was smiling now; Sandro seemed more himself again. He, left alone, lay back on his pillow, breathing fast, rather exhausted; but after awhile he opened the engagement-book again and ran his eyes up and down its columns. Lady Mildmay found him thus occupied when she came to give him a cup of milk.

Weston Marchmont, punctilious to the verge of fastidiousness, or even over it, in his conduct towards the world and his friends, allowed himself easily enough a liberty of speculative opinion which the Dean of St. Neot's would have hesitated about and the Dean's wife decidedly veiled by a reference to Providence. To him the blow that had fallen on Quisanté seemed no public evil. Allowing the man's talents, he distrusted both his aims and his methods; they would not have come to good; the removal of his personality meant relief from an influence which was not healthy and an example which taught nothing beyond the satisfaction of ambition and the pursuit of power. It was well then if Quisanté were indeed, as he himself said, "done with," so far as public activity went. Marchmont, not concealing his particular interest but rather facing it and declaring it just, went on to say that, since Quisanté was done with publicly, it was well that he should be done with privately also, and that as speedily as might be. Love for May Quisanté might be the moving spring of this conclusion, but he insisted that it was not necessary thereto. Any reasonable person her friend, nay, anybody whose attention was fairly directed to the case, must hold the same view. There was a hideous mistake to be undone, and only one way of undoing it. Permanent unions in marriage, immense and indispensable engines of civilisation, yet exacted their price. One instance of the compensating payment was that deaths sometimes became desirable; you had to wish a death sooner than life-long misery for a friend; to wish it was not wrong, though to have to wish it might be distasteful. In this self-justification he contrived to subordinate, while he admitted, his own strong interest in the death and his violent dislike of the sufferer which robbed the death of its pain so far as he was concerned. People's infatuation with Quisanté, above all May's infatuation, had so irritated him that he did not scruple to accept the only means of ending them; that they would be thus ended it never came into his mind to doubt. His regret was only for the stretch of delay, for the time of waiting, for the respite promised to the doomed man if he would be docile and obedient; for all of them life was passing, and too much had already in tragic mistake been spent on Alexander Quisanté.

"I think you're damnably inhuman," said Dick Benyon, expressing, as he often did, an unsophisticated but not perhaps an altogether unsound popular judgment. "He's a remarkable man. And after all she married him. She needn't have. As for the party—well, I don't know how we shall replace him."

"I don't want him replaced," said Marchmont. "Everything that he was doing had better be left undone; and everything that he is had better not be. You call me inhuman. Well, people who repress their pity for individuals in the interests of the general welfare are always called that."

Marchmont thought for a moment. "No, I don't," he admitted. "I see why one might; but I can't do it myself." He paused and added, smiling, "I suppose that's the weak point in my attitude."

"One of them," said Dick, but he said no more. There are limits to candid discussion even among the closest friends; he could not tell Marchmont in so many words that he wanted Quisanté dead so as to be able to marry Quisanté's wife, however well aware of the fact he might be and Marchmont might suspect him to be. Or, if he had said this, he could have said it only in vigorous reproof, perhaps even in horror; and to this he was not equal. For Dick was sorely torn. On the one hand he had never ceased to hang on Quisanté's words and to count on Quisanté's deeds; on the other, he had never acquitted himself of responsibility for a marriage which he believed to have been most disastrous. Worst of all then for him was what threatened now, an end of the illuminating words and the stirring deeds, but no end to the marriage yet in sight. To him too death seemed the best thing, unless that wonderful unlikely resurrection of activity and power could come. And even then—Dick remembered the face of Quisanté's wife as she lied for him to her friends at Ashwood. The resurrection must be not only with a renewed but with a transformed mind, if it were to bring happiness, and to bring no more of things like that.

The world at large, conceiving that the last word had been said and the last scene in which it was interested played, had soon turned its curious eyes away from Quisanté's sick bed, leaving only the gaze of the smaller circle personally concerned in the dull and long-drawn-out ending of a piece once so full of dramatic incident. But the world found itself wrong, and all the eyes spun round in amazed staring when the sick man leapt from his bed and declared that he was himself again. The news came in paragraphs, to the effect that after another week's rest Mr. Quisanté, whose health had made a rapid and great improvement, hoped to return to his Parliamentary duties and to fulfil the more urgent of his public engagements. Here was matter enough for surprise, but it was needful to add the fast-following well-authenticated stories of how the doctors had protested, how Sir Rufus Beaming had washed his hands of the case, and how Dr. Claud Manton had addressed an energetic warning to Lady May Quisanté. This last item came home most closely to the general feeling, and the general voice asked what Lady May was thinking of. There was warrant for the question in the wondering despair of Lady Mildmay and the sad embarrassment of debonair Sir Winterton. The Mildmays knew all about it, the whole thing had happened in their house; but Sir Winterton, challenged with the story about Sir Rufus, could only hum and ha, and Lady Mildmay had not denied the interview between Quisanté's wife and the energetic Dr. Manton. What was the meaning of it? And, once again, what was Lady May Quisanté thinking of? Was she blind, was she careless? Or were the doctors idiots? The world, conscious of its own physical frailty, shrank from the last question and confined its serious attention to the two preceding ones. "Does she want to kill him?" asked the honest graspers of the obvious. "Does she think him above all laws?" was the question of those who wished to be more subtle. At least she was a puzzle. All agreed on that.

Lady Richard discountenanced all speculation and all questionings. For her part she did her duty, mentioning to Mrs. Baxter that this was what she meant to do and that, whatever happened, she intended to be able, salvâ conscientiâ, to tell herself that she had done it; Mrs. Baxter approved, saying that this was what the second Mrs. Greening had done when her husband's sister's daughter, a very emancipated young woman as it seemed, had incomprehensibly flirted with the auctioneer's apprentice and had scouted Mrs. Greening's control; Mrs. Greening had told the girl's mother and sent the girl home, second class, under the care of the guard. Similarly then Lady Richard, without embarking on any consideration of ultimate problems, wrote to May, suggesting that Mr. Quisanté wanted rest and putting Ashwood at her disposal for so long as she and her husband might be pleased to occupy it. "If they don't choose to go, it's not my fault," said Lady Richard with the sigh which declares that every reasonable requirement of conscience has been fulfilled. Happy lady, to be able to repose in this conviction by the simple expedient of lending a house not otherwise required at the moment! So kind are we to our own actions that Lady Richard felt meritorious.

They chose to go, and went unaccompanied save by their baby girl and Aunt Maria—this last a strange addition made at Quisanté's own request. He had not been wont to show such a desire for the old lady's society when there was nothing to be gained by seeking it; nor had it seemed to May altogether certain that Miss Quisanté would come. Yet she came with ardent eagerness and her nephew was plainly glad to have her. It took May a little while to understand why, but soon she saw the reason. Aunt Maria was deep in the conspiracy, or the infatuation, or whatever it was to be called; she flattered Quisanté's hope of life, she applauded his defiance of the inevitable; she hung on him more and more, herself forgetting and making him forget the peril of the way he trod. He wanted to be told that he was right, and he wanted an applauding audience. In both ways Aunt Maria satisfied him. She would talk of the present as though it were no more than a passing interruption of a long career, of the future as though it stretched in assured leisure through years of great achievement, of his life and his life's work as though both were in his own hand and subject to nothing save his own will and power. She was to him the readiest echo of the world's wonder and applause, the readiest assurance that his great effort was not going unrecognised. Hence he would have her with him, though there seemed no more love and no more tenderness between them than when in old days they had quarrelled and he had grumbled and she had flung him her money with a bitter jeer. But she lived in him and could think of him only as living, and through her he could cheat himself into an assurance that indeed he could live and work.

Then Aunt Maria was very bad for him. That could not be denied, but something more nearly touching herself pressed on May Quisanté. She had seen the Mildmays' painful puzzle; she had listened to Dr. Claud Manton's energetic warning; it was before her, no less than before the patient, that Sir Rufus had washed his hands. She was not ignorant of the questions the world asked. She was not careless, nor was she any longer the dupe of her old delusion that such a man as Quisanté could not die. Her eye for truth had conquered; now she believed that, if he persisted in his rebellion, he must surely die; unless all medical knowledge went for nothing, he would surely die, and die not after long years of lingering, but soon, perhaps very soon. A moment of excitement, say one of the moments that she had loved so much, might kill him; so Claud Manton said. A life of excitement would surely and early do the work. And why was he rebellious? She accused himself, she accused Aunt Maria, she accused the foolishly wondering, foolishly chattering world; and in every accusation there was some justice. Was there enough to acquit the other defendant who stood arraigned? To that she dared not answer "Yes," because of the fear which was in her that the strongest amongst all the various impulses driving him to his defiance was in the end to be found in his relations to her, in the attitude of his own wife towards him. Ashwood was full of associations; there was Duty Hill, where he had risen to his greatest and thereby won her; there was the tree beneath which she had sat with Marchmont on the evening when the knowledge of her husband's worst side had been driven like a sharp knife into her very heart. But more vivid than these memories now was the recollection of that first evening when she had seen him sitting alone, nobody's friend, and had determined to be human towards him and to treat him in a human way. There had been the true beginning of her great experiment. Now she told herself that she had failed in it, had never been human to him, and had never treated him in a human way, had not been what a man's wife should be, had stood always outside, a follower, an admirer, a critic, an accuser, never simply the woman who was his wife. His fault or hers, or that of both—it seemed to matter little. The experiment had been hers; and because she had made it and failed, it seemed to her that he was braving death. Had she been different, perhaps he would not have rebelled and could have lived the quiet life with her. It needed little more to make her tell herself that she drove him to his death, that she was with the enemy, with the chattering world and with poor deluded old Aunt Maria; she was of the conspirators; she egged him on to brave his doom.

In darker vein still ran her musings sometimes, when there came over her that haunting self-distrust; the fear that she was juggling with herself, shutting her eyes to the sin of her own heart, and, in spite of all her protestations, was really inspired by a secret hope too black and treacherous to put in words. However passionately she repudiated it, it still cried mockingly, "I am here!" It asked if her prayers for her husband's life were sincere, if her care for him were more than a due paid to decency, if the doom were in truth a thing she dreaded, and not a deliverance which convention alone forbade her openly to desire. Plainly, plainly—did she wish the doom to fall, did she wish him dead, was the rebellion that threatened death the course which the secret craving of her heart urged him to take? To do everything for him was not enough, if the doubt still lurked that her heart was not in the doing. For now she could no more ask coolly what she wished; the thing had come too near; it was odious to have a thought except of saving him by all means and at every cost; it was intolerable not to know at least that no part of the impulse which drove him to his rebellion lay at her door, not to feel at least that she had nothing but dread and horror for the threatened doom. She had no love for him; it came home to her now with a strange new sense of self-condemnation; she had married him for her own pleasure, because he interested her and made life seem dull without him. She pleaded no more that he had killed her love; it had never been there to kill. Had she left him to find a woman who loved him in and for himself, not for his doings, not for the interest of him, that woman might now be winning him by love from the open jaws of death.

Yet again laughter, obstinate and irrepressible, shot often in a jarring streak of inharmonious colour across the sombre fabric of her thoughts. He was not only mad, not only splendid—he seemed both to her—he was absurd too at moments, often when he was with Aunt Maria. Letters came in great numbers, from political followers, from women prominent in society, from constituents, from old Foster and Japhet Williams at Henstead, even from puissant Lady Castlefort; they wondered, applauded, implored, flattered, in every key of that sweet instrument called praise. Quisanté read them out, pluming and preening his feathers, strutting about, crowing. He would repeat the passages he liked, asking his wife's approbation; that he must have, it seemed. She gave it with what heartiness she could, and laughed only in her sleeve. Surely a man facing death could have forgotten all this? Not Alexander Quisanté. He could die, and die bravely; but the world must stand by his bedside. So till the end, whenever that most uncertainly dated end might come, the old mixture promised to go on, the great and small, the mean and grand, the call for tears and throbs of the heart alternating with the obstinate curling or curving of lips swift to respond to the vision of the contemptible or the ludicrous.

But she had her appeal to make, the one thing, it seemed, she could do to put herself at all in the right, the offer she must make, and try to make with a sincerity which should rise unimpaired from the conflicts of her heart. She had caught at coming to Ashwood because she thought she could make it best there, not indeed in the room where she had lied for him, nor by the tree where she had turned to Marchmont in a pang of wild regret, but there, on Duty Hill, where he had won her, had touched his highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him. Again it was a quiet evening, and still the valley stretched below; nothing changed here made all the changes of her life seem half unreal. Here she told him he must live, he must be docile and must live.

"You may get strong again, but for the time you must do as the doctors say. You ought to; for the little girl's sake, if for nothing else, you ought to. You know you're risking another seizure now, and you know what that might mean."

"You ought to live for your daughter." She paused a minute and added, "And some day we might have a son, and you'd live again in him; we both should; we should feel that we were doing—that you were doing—everything he did. I think your son would be a great man, and I should be proud to be his mother. Isn't the hope of that worth something?"

"I know what you think of me," she continued. "You think an active life essential to me, that I can't do without it. God knows I loved all you did, I loved your triumphs, I loved to hear you speak and see them listen. You know I loved all that, loved it too much perhaps. But I'll do without it. I'm your wife, your fate's mine. It'll be the braver thing for you to face it, really; I'm ready to face it with you."

"We know what we both are," she went on with a little smile. "We're not Mildmays, you and I. But let's try. I must tell you. I can't bear to think that it's partly at least because of me that you won't try, that if I were a different sort of woman it might be much easier for you to try. If it's that at all, imagine what I should feel if—if anything happened such as the doctors are afraid of."

He shrugged his shoulders, seeming to say that he would not discuss it. "A great many considerations influence me," he said with a touch of pompousness.

"Am I one of them?" she persisted. "Because I don't want to be. I'm ready to share your life, whatever it is."

"Are you?" he asked, with something of the same malicious smile that he was wont to bestow on Aunt Maria. "Do you think you could share my life? Do you think you have?"

"I know what you mean," she said, flushing a little. "I daresay I've been hard and—and didn't take the pains to understand, and was uncharitable perhaps. Anyhow there'll be no opportunity for any more—any more misunderstandings of that sort."

She looked at him almost despairingly; he seemed so strangely hostile, so bitterly sensitive to her judgment of him.

"You think me," he went on, with his persistent eyes unwaveringly set on her, "a not over-honest mountebank; that's what you and your friends think me."

"Oh, I wish I'd never tried to talk to you about it!" she cried. "You take hold of some hasty mood or look of mine and treat it as if it were everything. You know it isn't."

"You'll forget it all when we're settled down at—where was it?—Torquay or somewhere—in our villa, like two old tabby-cats sitting in the sun? No time to think it all over then? No, only all the hours of every day!" He paused and then added in a low hard voice, "I'm damned if I'll do it. I may have to die, but I'll die standing." His eyes gleamed now, and for the first time they turned from her and roamed over the prospect that lay below Duty Hill. But they were back on her face soon.

"No, no," she implored. "Not because of me, for heaven's sake, not because of me!"

"Because of it all. Yes, and because of you too. You don't love me, you never have." He leant towards her. "But I love you," he said, "yes, as I loved you when I asked you to be my wife on this hill where we are. Then don't you understand? I won't go and live that old cat's life with you." He laid his hand on hers. "Your eyes shall still sparkle for me, your breath shall still come quick for me, your heart beat for me; or I'll have no more of it at all."

The touch of rhetoric, so characteristic of him, so unlike anything that Marchmont or Dick Benyon would have used in such a case, did not displease her then. And it hit the truth as his penetration was wont to hit it. That was what he wanted, that was what she could and should and must give, or he would have nothing from her. Here was the truth; but the truth was what she had struggled so hard to deny and feared so terribly to find true. He was not indeed led by a sense of obligation towards her; the need was for himself. It was not that he felt in her a right to call on him for exertions or for a performance of his side of the bargain; it was that he could not bear to lose his tribute from her. But still she stood self-condemned. Again the thought came—with a woman who loved him there might have been another tribute that she could have paid and he been content to levy. He would have believed such a woman if she told him that he would be as much to her, and she as much absorbed in him, in the villa at Torquay as ever in the great world; and perhaps—oh, only perhaps, it is true—he would have made shift with that and fed his appetite on the homage of one, since his wretched body denied him the rows on rows of applauding spectators that he loved. But from his wife's lips he would not accept any such assurance, and from her no such homage could be hoped for to solace him.

Then the strange creature began to talk to her, not of what he had done, nor even of what he had hoped to do, but of what he meant and was going to do; how he would grow greater and richer, of schemes in politics and in business, of the fervour and devotion of the fighting men behind him and how they were sick of the old gang and would have no leader but Alexander Quisanté; of the prosperity of the Alethea, how the shares rose, how big orders came in, how utterly poor old Maturin had blundered. He spoke like a strong man with a wealth of years and store-houses of force, who sees life stretched long before him, material to be shaped by his hand and forced into what he will make it. He talked low and fast, his eyes again roaming over the prospect; the evening fell while he still talked. Almost it seemed then that the doctors were wrong, that his courage was no folly, that indeed he would not die. O for the faith to believe that! For his spell was on her again now, and now she would not have him die. Once again he had his desire; once more her heart beat and her eyes gleamed for him. But then it came on her, with a sudden fierce light of conviction, that all this was hollow, useless, vain, that the sentence was written and the doom pronounced. No pleading however eloquent could alter it. Quisanté was stopped in mid-career by a short sharp sob that escaped from his wife's lips. He turned and looked at her, breaking off the sentence that he had begun. She met his glance with a frightened look in her eyes.

"Nothing, nothing," she stammered. "I—I was excited by what you were saying." She tried to laugh. "I'm emotional, you know, and you can always rouse my emotions."

"Was it that?" For a moment longer he sat upright, looking hard at her; then his body relaxed, and he lay back, his lower lip dropping and his eyes half closed. An expression of great weariness and despair came over him. He had read the meaning of her sob; and now he hid his face in his hands. His pretences failed him, and he was assailed by the bitterness of truth and of death.

After an instant Quisanté rose slowly and falteringly; he laid his arm in hers, and they stood side by side, gazing down into the valley. This hill had come to mean much in their lives, and somehow now they seemed to be saying good-bye to it.

"I could never forget this hill," she said, "any more than I could forget you. You told me just now that I didn't love you. Well, as you mean it, perhaps not. But you've been almost everything in the world to me. Everything in the world isn't all good, but it's—everything." She turned to him suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. "Lean on me as we go down the hill," she said. There was pity and tenderness in the words and the tone. But Quisanté drew his arm sharply away and braced his body to uprightness.

"I'm not tired. I can go quite well by myself. You look more tired than I do," he said. "Come, we shall be late," and he set off down the hill at a brisk pace.

Her appeal then had failed; this last little incident told her that with unpitying plainness. If he had yielded for a moment before the face of reality, he soon recovered himself, turned away from the sight, and went back to his masquerading. She lacked the power to lead him from it, and again she feared that she lacked the power because her will was not sincere and single. Now they must go on to that uncertain end, he playing his part before the world, before her and Aunt Maria, she looking on, sometimes in admiration, sometimes in contempt, always in fear of the moment when the actor's speeches would be suddenly cut short and the curtain, falling on the interrupted scene, hide him for ever from the audience whom he had made wondering applauding partners in his counterfeit. The last of his life was to be like the rest of it, with the same elements of tragedy and of farce, of what attracted and of what revolted, of the great and the little. It was to be like in another way too; it was to be lived alone, without any true companion for his soul, without the love that he had not asked except of one, and, asking of that one, had not obtained. As the days went on, the fascination of the spectacle she watched grew on her; it was more poignant now than in the former time, and it filled all her life. Thus in some sort Alexander Quisanté had his way; his hold on her was not relaxed, his dominion over her not abrogated, to the end of his life he would be what she told him he had been—almost everything. When the end came, what would he be? The question crossed her thoughts, but found no answer; some day it would fall to be answered. Now she could only watch and wait, half persuaded that the pretence was no pretence, yet always dreading the summons of reality to end the play. So the world asked in vain what May Quisanté was thinking of, whether she wanted to kill him, or whether she thought him above all laws. A puzzle to the world and a puzzle to her friends, she waited for the falling of the blow which Quisanté daily challenged.

Sir Rufus Beaming met Dr. Claud Manton at the Athenaeum and showed him a newspaper paragraph.

"To address a great meeting at Henstead!" said Manton, raising his brows and shaping his lips for a whistle. "'From his own and neighbouring constituencies.'"

"He might just as well take chloroform comfortably by his fireside," said Sir Rufus. "It would be a little quicker, perhaps, but not a bit more sure."

Constantine Blair, no less active and soon little less serene in opposition than in power, felt himself more than justified in all that he had ever said about Weston Marchmont when he received an intimation of Marchmont's intention to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. Yet he was aghast at this voluntary retirement into the wilderness of private life, a life without bustle, without gossip, without that sense of being intimate with the march of affairs and behind the scenes of the national theatre. There were reasons assigned, of course. One was that Marchmont found himself ("I'll bet he does!" groaned Constantine with anticipatory resignation) more in agreement with the other side than with his own on an important question of foreign politics then to the front. But this state of matters had ceased to be unusual with him and hardly in itself accounted for the step he was now taking. The care of his estate was the second reason, properly dismissed as plainly frivolous. In the end of the letter more sincerity peeped out, as the writer lapsed from formality into friendship. "I know I shall surprise many people and grieve some, but I'm sick of the thing. I can't endure the perpetual haggling between what I ought to do and what I'm expected to do; the compromises that result satisfy me as little as anybody. In fine, my dear Constantine, I'm going back to my pictures, my books, my hills, and my friends." Constantine read with a genuine sorrow and criticised with a contemptuous sniff. Pictures, books—and hills! Hills! It was insulting his intelligence. And though friends were all very well, yet where was the use of them if a man deprived himself of all the sources of entertaining conversation? But there was nothing to be done—except to tell Lady Castlefort a day before the rest of the world knew. Constantine held her favour on that tenure. She showed no surprise.

"If I hadn't known him since he was so high, I'd wish he had the what-do-you-call-it seizures instead of the other man."

"But Quisanté's not going, he means to hold on," said Constantine. "I'm glad of it. Henstead's very shaky. But we shall hold Marchmont's seat all right. We're going to put up Dick Benyon."

"He's safe enough, he won't worry you," said Lady Castlefort. "You'll have to fight Henstead before long, all the same. The man'll die, you know."

"And he will be a loss—a loss to us, whatever one may think about the country." Constantine looked troubled. "Oh, it's not your business to think about the country—or mine either, thank goodness," she added rather irritably. She was more distressed about Weston Marchmont than she chose to tell; and it was impossible not to be annoyed at the perversity. Of the two men whom she had singled out for greatness one might go on but would not, the other asked nothing but to be allowed to go on, and found refusal at the hands of fate. There was another thing in her thoughts too. She had a strong belief in hostesses, natural to her, perhaps not unreasonable. In either of two events she had foreseen an ideal hostess for the party in the woman she still thought of as May Gaston. There was no need to detail the two events; suffice it to say that, whichever of them now happened, it appeared that May Gaston would not be able to figure as a great hostess; at least there would have to rise for her some star not yet visible in the heavens.

Marchmont and May had neither met nor written to one another since their talk under the tree at Ashwood. He had not doubted that she would understand silence and like silence best; from him any word seemed impossible. But on the day when his determination was made public he received a summons from her and at once obeyed it. He found her alone, though she told him that she expected Quisanté back from the City in a little while.

"He wants to see you," she said. "I don't know why, unless it's just as a curiosity." She smiled for a moment. "I'm sorry you find you can't stand it," she went on.

"Yes, pretty near at times, but I'm not as honest as you. I may see all you see, but I should always go on." She glanced at him. "I'm more like my husband than I'm like you," she ended.

"I know you don't, but it's true. I daresay you never will understand it, because of the other May Gaston you've made for yourself. But it's true. And you know what he is. He's ready to give body and soul—Oh, I'm not just using a phrase—body and soul to keep the things that you've given up for your hills. How scornful your hills made Constantine Blair!"

"Are you importing metaphorical meanings into my hills?" he asked, sitting down near her.

"Oh, well then, perhaps it was," she admitted, smiling. "But that's all consistent, isn't it? You couldn't trim your sails to suit the breeze even in a letter like that."

"Are you rebuking me? Are you contemptuous? What are you?" He leant back and looked at her, smiling.

Marchmont nodded gravely; it was easy to see the odd way in which his action fitted into the drama of her life.

"But we've no hills," she went on. "You leave London—all London means—to wander on hills, high glorious hills; he'd leave it for a villa, a small villa at a seaside place."

"It comes easier to talk in them sometimes. And I—I'm of my husband's way of thinking."

"I don't believe it," he said again, but looking at her now with a little touch of doubt.

"I couldn't," he went on. "I'm not fit for it; that's the end of the matter. Use your own term of abuse. I shall hear plenty of them."

"I don't want to abuse you," she said. She walked quickly over to him, gave him her hand for a moment, and then returned to her place. "But it makes me feel rather strange to you." She looked full at him with a plain distress in her eyes, and her voice shook a little. "I'm coming to feel more strange towards you," she went on. "I thought we had got nearer at Ashwood, we did for the moment. But now I'm farther off again."

"I would have you always very near," he said in low tones, his eyes saying more than his lips.

"I know. And perhaps you've had thoughts——" She paused before she added, "Alexander's quite set on his course, nothing will stop him—except the thing that I expect to stop him. You know what I mean?"

She became silent, and he, watching her, was silent too. What was this strangeness of which she spoke? He felt it too but without understanding it. It caused in him a vague discomfort, an apprehension that some obstacle was between them, something more than any external hindrance, a thing which might perhaps remain though all external hindrance were removed. Her last words both puzzled and wounded him with their implication of a deeper sympathy between Quisanté and herself than existed or could exist between her and him. That he did not understand, and could not without giving up his own idea of her, the May Gaston which, as she said, he had made for himself. Was his image gone indeed? Had Alexander Quisanté's chisel altered the features beyond recognition and till true identity was gone? Yet Alexander Quisanté was the man who had put on her the shame for which she had sobbed under the tree on that evening at Ashwood. Before such a seeming contradiction his penetration stood baffled. She had said then that her present life would, she supposed, go on right to the end, and had said it as though the prospect were unendurable; now a new and to him unnatural resignation seemed to have come upon her, just when her present life had shown that it was not likely to go on right to the end.

"I've prayed my husband to give up," she said, "I don't beg you not to give up. To begin with, you wouldn't listen to me any more than he did. And then, I suppose, you're right for yourself."

"I daresay. I've learnt about you in learning about myself. And I can feel it just as you do—Oh, how intolerably strongly sometimes!" She added with a smile, "We've only just missed suiting one another," and then, "Yes, but we have missed, you know."

"I don't believe it," he persisted, struggling to throw off the new doubt she was thrusting into his mind. His thought was that, once she got free of her husband, she would indeed be his. That he must hold to. It was Quisanté, not she herself, who made her now feel strange to him; and Quisanté's spell was not to last; her quiet certitude that her husband's days were numbered carried conviction to him also. "But I won't talk any more about it now," he said.

"No, it seems inhuman," she agreed. "I spend all my days cheating myself into a hope that he'll get better. I know you don't like him, but if you lived with him as I do, you'd come to hope as I do. Yes, in spite of all you know about us; and you know more than anybody alive. I've not been so—so disloyal—to anybody else." She smiled as she quoted the word against him.

May Quisanté laughed at his tone almost scornfully. "The way you say that shows how little you understand," she exclaimed. "It's not a bit like that." She took a step nearer to him. "When it comes," she said slowly, "I shan't shed a single tear, but I shall feel that my life's over. He'll have had it all."

She laughed again, asking bitterly, "Does God forbid what Alexander wants—except one thing? And what I tell you is what he would want. He would want to have had it all."

"You're right; we won't talk any more," she said. "But don't think that it's all only because I'm overwrought, or something feminine of that kind. It's the truth. When it comes, Aunt Maria'll die and I shall live; but the difference won't be as great as it sounds."

This time he was about to speak, but she stopped him, saying, "No, no more now. Tell me about Dick Benyon. He's to have your seat, isn't he?"

"You're sorry?" she asked, forgetting Dick and coming back again to the man before her.

Quisanté ran quickly up the stairs and burst into the room. His face was alight with animation, and before greeting Marchmont he cried, "I've carried it, I've brought them round. We attack all along the line, and I open the ball at Henstead next week! They'll be out in six months, and I shall——" Suddenly he paused. "They'll be out in six months," he said again.

Marchmont rose and shook hands, "It doesn't matter to me now if they are," he said, laughing. "Blair's troubles and mine are both over now."

"I know," nodded Quisanté. "Well, I suppose you know best. But hasn't May been trying to convert you?"

"No, I haven't tried to convert him," she said. "I'm not going to try to convert people any more."

After this she fell into silence, listening and watching while the two men talked. Talk between them could never be intimate and could hardly be even easy, but they interested one another to-day. On Quisanté's face especially there was a look of searching, of wonder, of a kind of protest. Once he flung himself back and stared at his guest with a fixity of gaze painful to see. But he said nothing of what was passing in his mind. At last Marchmont turned to May again.

"I shall hear of you at Henstead," he said. "I'm going to pay the Mildmays a visit. I suppose, as you're on the war-path, you won't come over?"

"I might," she said, "if we were there long enough. I expect Alexander mustn't. Friendship with the enemy is not always appreciated."

"Oh, I might go," Quisanté remarked. "The Alethea's an admirable excuse." He spoke with a laugh but then, glancing at his wife, saw her face flush. He turned to Marchmont and found him rising to his feet. Much puzzled, Quisanté looked again from one to the other, noting the sudden constraint that had fallen on them. What had he said? What was there in the mention of the Alethea to disturb a conversation so harmonious? That there was something his quick wit told him in a moment. While Marchmont said good-bye to May he stood by, frowning a little, and then escorted his guest downstairs. While he was away his wife stood quite still in the middle of the room, a little flushed and breathing rather quickly.

Quisanté came back, sat down, and took up a newspaper. May sat in her usual chair, doing nothing. Presently he asked, "Did I say anything wrong?"

"No. But I'd rather you didn't talk about the Alethea when Mr. Marchmont is with us." He looked up in, surprise. "It embarrasses me—and him too."