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at once. After we had been silent for a while I asked
whether the man took away the girl next day.

Fyne said that he did; in the afternoon, in a fly,
with a few clothes the maid had got together and brought
across from the big house. He only saw a figure in the dark,
ten minutes before they left for the railway station, in
the Fynes' sitting room at the hotel. It was a most painful
ten minutes for the Fynes. The respectable citizen addressed
Miss de Barral as "Florrie" and "my dear", remarking to her
that she was not very big "there's not much of you my dear"
in a familiarly disparaging tone. Then turning to Mrs. Fyne,
and quite loud "She's very white in the face. Why's that?"
To this Mrs. Fyne made no reply. She had put the girl's hair
up that morning with her own hands. It changed her very
much, observed Fyne. He, naturally, played a subordinate,
merely approving part. All he could do for Miss de Barral
personally was to go downstairs and put her into the fly
himself while Miss de Barral's nearest relation having been
shouldered out of the way stood by, with an umbrella and a
little black bag, watching this proceeding with grim amuse-
ment, as it seemed. It was difficult to guess what the girl
thought or what she felt. She no longer looked a child.
She whispered to Fyne a faint "Thank you," from the fly, and
he said to her in very distinct tones and while still holding
her hand: "Pray don't forget to write fully to my wife in a

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day or two Miss de Barral." Then Fyne stepped back and the
cousin climbed into the fly muttering quite audibly: "I
don't think you'll be troubled much with her in the future;"
without however looking at Fyne on whom he did not even
bestow a nod. The fly drove away.

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CHAPTER Five

THE TEA-PARTY.

"Amiable personality," I observed seeing Fyne on the point of falling into a brown study. But I could not help adding with meaning: "He hadn't the gift of prophecy though."

Fyne got up suddenly with a muttered "No, evidently not". He was gloomy, hesitating. I supposed that he would not wish to play chess that afternoon. This would dispense me from leaving my rooms on a day much too fine to be wasted in walking exercise. And I was disappointed when picking up his cap he intimated to me his hope of seeing me at the cottage about four o'clock - as usual.

"It wouldn't be as usual." I put a particular stress on that remark. He admitted, after a short reflection, that it would not be. No. Not as usual. In fact it was his wife who hoped, rather, for my presence. She had formed a very favourable opinion of my practical sagacity.

This was the first I ever heard of it. I had never suspected that Mrs. Fyne had taken the trouble to distinguish in me the signs of sagacity or folly. The few words we had exchanged last night in the excitement - or the bother --

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of the girl's disappearance, were the first moderately significant words which had ever passed between us. I had felt myself always to be in Mrs. Fyne's view her husband's chessplayer and nothing else - a convenience - almost an implement.

"I am highly flattered," I said. "I have always heard that there are no limits to feminine intuition; and now I am half inclined to believe it is so. But still I fail to see in what way my sagacity, practical or otherwise, can be of any service to Mrs. Fyne. One man's sagacity is very much like any other man's sagacity. And with you at hand....."

Fyne, manifestly not attending to what I was saying, directed straight at me his worried solemn eyes and struck in:

"Yes, yes. Very likely. But you will come - won't you?"

I had made up my mind that no Fyne of either sex would make us walk three miles (there and back to their cottage) on this fine day. If the Fynes had been an average social couple one knows only because leisure must be got through somehow, I would have made short work of that special invitation. But they were not that. Their undeniable humanity had to be acknowledged. At the same time I wanted to have my own way. So I proposed that I should be allowed the pleasure of offering them a cup of tea at my rooms.

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A short reflective pause - and Fyne accepted eagerly in his own and his wife's name. A moment after I heard the click of the gate-latch and then in an ecstacy of barking from his demonstrative dog his serious head went past my window on the other side of the hedge, its troubled gaze fixed forward, and the mind inside obviously employed in earnest speculation of an intricate nature. One at least of his wife's girl-friends had become more than a mere shadow for him. I surmised however that it was not of the girl-friend but of his wife that Fyne was thinking. He was an excellent husband.

I prepared myself for the afternoon's hospitalities, calling in the farmer's wife and reviewing with her the resources of the house and the village. She was a helpful woman. But the resources of my sagacity I did not review. Except in the gross material sense of the afternoon tea I made no preparations for Mrs. Fyne.

It was impossible for me to make any such preparations. I could not tell what sort of sustenance she would look for from my sagacity. And as to taking stock of the wares of my mind no one I imagine is anxious to do that sort of thing if it can be avoided. A vaguely grandiose state of mental self-confidence is much too agreeable to be disturbed recklessly by such a delicate investigation. Perhaps if I had had a helpful woman at

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my elbow, a dear, flattering, acute, devoted woman......
There are in life moments when one positively regrets not
being married. No! I don't exaggerate. I have said -
moments, not years or even days. Moments. The farmer's
wife obviously could not be asked to assist. She could not
have been expected to possess the necessary insight and I
doubt whether she would have known how to be flattering
enough. She was being helpful in her own way, with an
extraordinary black bonnet on her head, a good mile off by
that time, trying to discover in the village shops a piece
of eatable cake. The pluck of women! The optimism of
the dear creatures!

And she managed to find something which looked
eatable. That's all I know as I had no opportunity to
observe the more intimate effects of that comestible. I
myself never eat cake, and Mrs. Fyne, when she arrived
punctually, brought with her no appetite for cake. She had
no appetite for anything. But she had a thirst - the sign
of deep, of tormenting emotion. Yes it was emotion, not the
brilliant sunshine - more brilliant than warm as is the way
of our discreet self-repressed, distinguished, insular sun,
which would not turn a real lady scarlet - not on any account.
Mrs. Fyne looked even cool. She wore a white skirt and coat;
a white hat with a large brim reposed on her smoothly
arranged hair. The coat was cut something like an army

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mess-jacket and the style suited her. I daresay there
are many youthful subalterns, and not the worst-looking too,
who resemble Mrs. Fyne in the type of face, in the sunburnt
complexion, down to that something alert in bearing.

But not many would have had that aspect breathing a readiness
to assume any responsibility under Heaven. This is the sort
of courage which ripens late in life and of course Mrs. Fyne
was of mature years for all her unwrinkled face.

She looked round the room, told me positively
that I was very comfortable there; to which I assented,
humbly, acknowledging my undeserved good fortune.

"Why undeserved?" she wanted to know.

"I engaged these rooms by letter without asking
any questions. It might have been an abominable hole,"
I explained to her. "I always do things like that. I don't
like to be bothered. This is no great proof of sagacity -
is it? Sagacious people I believe like to exercise that
faculty. I have heard that they can't even help showing it
in the veriest trifles. It must be very delightful.
But I know nothing of it. I think that I have no sagacity -
no practical sagacity."

Fyne made an inarticulate bass murmur of protest.
I asked after the children whom I had not seen yet since my
return from town. They had been very well. They were always
well. Both Fyne and Mrs. Fyne spoke of the rude health of

185

their children as if it were a result of moral excellence;
in a peculiar tone which seemed to imply some contempt for
people whose children were liable to be unwell at times.
One almost felt inclined to apologise for the inquiry.
And this annoyed me; unreasonably, I admit, because the
assumption of superior merit is not a very exceptional weakness.
Anxious to make myself disagreeable by way of retaliation
I observed in accents of interested civility that the dear
girls must have been wondering at the sudden disappearance of
their mother's young friend. Had they been putting any
awkward questions about Miss Smith. Wasn't it as Miss Smith
that Miss De Barral had been introduced to me?

Mrs. Fyne, staring fixedly but also colouring deeper
under her tan, told me that the children had never liked
Flora very much. She hadn't the high spirits which endear
grown-ups to healthy children, Mrs. Fyne explained unflinchingly.
Flora had been staying at the cottage several times before.
Mrs. Fyne assured me that she often found it very difficult
to have her in the house.

"But what else could we do?" she exclaimed.

That little cry of distress quite genuine in its
inexpressiveness, altered my feeling towards Mrs. Fyne.
It would have been so easy to have done nothing and to have
thought no more about it. My liking for her began while she
was trying to tell me of the night she spent by the girl's

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bedside, the night before her departure with her unpropossessing relative. That Mrs. Fyne found means to comfort the child I doubt very much. She had not the genius for the task of undoing that which the hate of an infuriated woman had planned so well.

You will tell me perhaps that children's impressions are not durable. That's true enough. But here, child is only a manner of speaking. The girl was within a few days of her sixteenth birthday; she was old enough to be matured by the shock. The very effort she had to make in conveying the impression to Mrs. Fyne, in remembering the details, in finding adequate words - or any words at all - was in itself a terribly enlightening, an ageing process. She had talked a long time, uninterrupted by Mrs. Fyne, childlike enough in her wonder and pain, pausing now and then to interject the pitiful query: "It was cruel of her. Wasn't it cruel, Mrs. Fyne?"

She said anything, while he had looked very gloomy and miserable. He couldn't have taken part against his aunt - could he? But after all he did, when she called upon him, take "that cruel woman away". He had dragged her out by the arm. She had seen that plainly. She remembered it. That was it! The woman was mad. "Oh! Mrs. Fyne don't tell me she wasn't mad. If you had only seen her face....."

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But Mrs. Fyne was unflinching in her idea that as much truth as could be told was due in the way of kindness to the girl, whose fate she feared would be to live exposed to the hardest realities of unprivileged existences. She explained to her that there were in the world evil-minded, selfish people. Unscrupulous people.... These two persons had been after her father's money. The best thing she could do was to forget all about them.

"After papa's money? I don't understand," poor Flora de Barral had murmured, and lay still as if trying to think it out in the silence and shadows of the room where only a night-light was burning. Then she had a long shivering fit while holding tight the hand of Mrs. Fyne whose patient immobility by the bedside of that brutally murdered childhood did infinite honour to her humanity. That vigil must have been the more trying because I could see very well that at no time did she think the victim particularly charming or sympathetic. It was a manifestation of pure compassion, of compassion in itself, so to speak, not many women would have been capable of displaying with that unflinching steadiness. The shivering fit over, the girl's next words in an outburst of sobs were, "Oh! Mrs. Fyne am I really such a horrid thing as she has made me out to be?"

"No, no!" protested Mrs. Fyne. "It is your former governess who is horrid and odious. She is a vile woman.

188

I cannot tell you that she was mad but I think she must have
been beside herself with rage and full of evil thoughts.
You must try not to think of these abominations my dear child."

They were not fit for anyone to think of much, Mrs.
Fyne commented to me in a curt positive tone. All that
had been very trying. The girl was like a creature
struggling under a net.

"But how can I forget? she called my father
a cheat and a swindler! Do tell me Mrs. Fyne that it isn't
true. It can't be true. How can it be true?"

She sat up in bed with a sudden wild motion
as if to jump out and flee away from the sound of the words
which had just passed her own lips. Mrs. Fyne restrained
her, soothed her, induced her at last to lay her head on
her pillow again, assuring her all the time that nothing this
woman had had the cruelty to say deserved to be taken to heart.
The girl, exhausted, cried quietly for a time. It may be
she had noticed something evasive in Mrs. Fyne's assurances.
After a while, without stirring, she whispered brokenly.

"That awful woman told me that all the world
would call papa these awful names. Is it possible? Is it
possible?"

Mrs. Fyne kept silent.

"Do say something to me, Mrs. Fyne," the daughter
of De Barral insisted in the same feeble whisper.

189

Again Mrs. Fyne assured me that it had been
very trying. Terribly trying. "Yes, thanks, I will."
She leaned back in the chair with folded arms while I poured
another cup of tea for her, and Fyne went out to pacify
the dog which, tied up under the porch, had become suddenly
very indignant at somebody having the audacity to walk along
the lane, Mrs. Fyne stirred her tea for a long time, drank
a little, put the cup down and said with that air of accepting
all the consequences:

"Silence would have been unfair. I don't think
it would have been kind either. I told her that she must
be prepared for the world passing a very severe judgment
on her father. ..."

"Wasn't it admirable," cried Marlow interrupting
his narrative. "Admirable!" And as I looked dubiously
at this unexpected enthusiasm he started justifying it after
his own manner.

"I say admirable because it was so characteristic.
It was perfect. Nothing short of genius could have found
better - and this was nature. As they say of an artist's
work: this was a perfect Fyne. Compassion - judiciousness -
something correctly measured. None of your dishevelled
sentiment. And right! You must confess that nothing could
have been more right. I had a mind to shout "Brava!
Brava!" but I did not do that. I took a piece of cake and

drop 3 lines here

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went out to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control. His sharp comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes the nerve of a nigger minstrel on a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low, sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly demonstrative, half strangling himself in his collar, his eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in everything else.

Fyne was slightly vexed with me. As kind a master as any dog could wish to have, he yet did not approve of cake being given to dogs. The Fyne dog was supposed to lead a Spartan existence on a diet of repulsive biscuits with an occasional dry, hygienic, bone thrown in. Fyne looked down gloomily at the appeased animal, I too looked at that fool-dog; and (you know how one's memory gets suddenly stimulated) I was reminded visually, with an almost painful distinctness, of the ghostly white face of the girl I saw last accompanied by that dog - deserted by that dog. I almost heard her distressed voice as if on

191

the verge of resentful tears calling to the dog, the
umsympathetic dog. Perhaps she had not the power of evoking
sympathy, that personal gift of direct appeal to the feelings.
I said to Fyne, mistrusting the supine attitude of the dog;

"Why don't you let him come inside?"

Oh dear no! He couldn't think of it! I might
indeed have saved my breath, I knew it was one of the Fynes'
rules of life, part of their solemnity and responsibility, one
of those things that were part of their unassertive but ever
present superiority, that their dog must not be allowed in.
It was most improper to intrude the dog into the houses of the
people they were calling on - if it were only a careless
bachelor in farmhouse lodgings and a personal friend of the dog,
It was out of question. But they would let him bark one's
sanity away outside *under* one's window. They were strangely
consistent in their lack of imaginative sympathy. I didn't
insist but simply led the way back to the parlour, hoping that
no wayfarer would happen along the lane for the next hour or
so to disturb the dog's composure.

Mrs. Fyne seated immovable before the table charged
with plates, cups, jugs, a cold teapot, crumbs, and the general
litter of the entertainment turned her head towards us.

"You see, Mr. Marlow," she said in an unexpectedly
confidential tone: "they are so utterly unsuited for each
other."

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At that moment I did not know how to apply this remark. I thought at first of Fyne and the dog. Then I adjusted it to the matter in hand which was neither more nor less than an elopement. Yes, by Jove! It was something very much like an elopement - with certain unusual characteristics of its own which made it in a sense equivocal. With amused wonder I remembered that my sagacity was requisitioned in such a connection. How unexpected! But we never know what tests our gifts may be put to. Sagacity dictated caution first of all. I believe caution to be the first duty of sagacity. Fyne sat down as if preparing himself to witness a joust, I thought.

"Do you think so Mrs. Fyne?" I said sagaciously.
"Of course you are in a position..." I was continuing with caution when she struck out vivaciously for immediate assent.

"Obviously! Clearly! You yourself must admit..."

"But Mrs. Fyne," I remonstrated, "you forget that I don't know your brother."

This argument which was not only sagacious but true, overwhelmingly true, unanswerably true, seemed to surprise her.

I wondered why. I did not know enough of her brother for the remotest guess at what he might be like. I had never set eyes on the man, I didn't know him so

193

completely that by contrast I seemed to have known Miss De Barral - whom I had seen twice (altogether about sixty minutes) and with whom I had exchanged about sixty words - from the cradle so to speak. And perhaps, I thought, looking down at Mrs. Fyne (I had remained standing) perhaps she thinks that this ought to be enough for a sagacious assent.

She kept silent; and I looking at her with polite expectation, went on addressing her mentally in a mood of familiar approval which would have astonished her had it been audible: You my dear at any rate are a sincere woman....

"I call a woman sincere," Marlow began again after giving me a cigar and lighting one himself, "I call a woman sincere when she volunteers a statement resembling remotely in form what she really would like to say, what she really thinks ought to be said if it were not for the necessity to spare the stupid sensitiveness of men. The women's rougher, simpler more upright judgment, embraces the whole truth, which their tact, their mistrust of masculine idealism, ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life - the unit in the great sum

194

of existence. And they know it, They are merciful.
This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs. Fyne's
outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my
affections nor my vanity were engaged. That's why, may be,
she ventured so far. For a woman she chose to be as open as
the day with me. There was not only the form but almost the
whole substance of her thought in what she said. She believed
she could risk it. She had reasoned somewhat in this way;
there's a man, possessing a certain amount of sagacity...."

Marlow paused with a whimsical look at me.
The last few words he had spoken with the cigar in his teeth.
He took it out now by an ample movement of his arm and blew a
thin cloud.

"You smile? It would have been more kind to
spare my blushes. But as a matter of fact I need not blush.
This is not vanity; it is analysis. We'll let sagacity stand.
But we must also note what sagacity in this connection stands
for. When you see this you shall see also that there was nothing
in it to alarm my modesty. I don't think Mrs. Fyne credited
me with the possession of wisdom tempered by common sense.
And had I had the wisdom of the Seven Sages of Antiquity, she
would not have been moved to confidence or admiration. The
secret scorn of women for the capacity to consider judiciously
and to express profoundly a meditated conclusion is unbounded.
They have no use for these lofty exercises which they look

195

upon as a sort of purely masculine game - game meaning a
respectable occupation devised to kill time in this man-
arranged life which must be got through somehow. What women's
acuteness really respects are, the inept "ideas" and the sheeplike
impulses by which our actions and opinions are determined in
matters of real importance. For if women are not rational
they are indeed acute. Even Mrs. Fyne was acute. The good
woman was making up to her husband's chess-player simply be-
cause she had scented in him that small portion of feminity,
that drop of superior essence of which I am myself aware,
which, I gratefully acknowledge, has saved me from one or two
misadventures in my life either ridiculous or lamentable, I
am not very certain which. It matters very little.
Anyhow misadventures. Observe that I say 'feminity,' a privi-
lege, not 'feminism,' an attitude. I am not a feminist. It
was Fyne who on certain solemn grounds had adopted that men-
tal attitude; but it was enough to glance at him sitting on
one side, to see that he was purely masculine to his finger-
tips, masculine solidly, densely, amusingly, -- hopelessly.

I did glance at him. You don't get your sagacity
recognised by a man's wife without feeling the propriety and
even the need to glance at the man now and again, especially
when he is bodily present at the recognition. So I glanced
at him. Very masculine. So much so that "hopelessly"

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was not the last word of it. He was helpless. He was bound
and delivered by it. And if by the obscure promptings of my
composite temperament I beheld him with malicious amusement,
yet being in fact, by definition and especially from profound
conviction, a man, I could not help sympathising with him largely.
Seeing him thus disarmed, so completely captive by the very
nature of things I was moved to speak to him kindly.

"Well. And what do you think of it?"

"I don't know. How's one to tell. But I say
that the thing is done now and there's an end of it," said the
masculine creature as bluntly as his innate solemnity permitted.

Mrs. Fyne moved a little in her chair. I turned
to her and remarked gently that this was a charge, a criticism,
which was often made. Some people always ask: What could he
see in her? Others wonder what she could have seen in him?
Expressions of unsuitability.

She said with all the emphasis of her quietly
folded arms:

"I know perfectly well what Flora has seen in
my brother."

I bowed my head to the gust but pursued my point.

"And then the marriage in most cases turns out no
worse than the average, to say the least of it."

Mrs. Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn
of my sagacity. She rested her eyes on my face as though

197

in doubt whether I had enough feminity in my composition to
understand the case.

I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be
asking herself; Is it after all, worth while to talk to that
man? You understand how provoking this was. I looked in my
mind for something appallingly stupid to say, with the object
of distressing and teasing Mrs. Fyne. It is humiliating to
confess a failure. One would think that a man of average
intelligence could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so.
I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty consists
in being relevant. Discovering that I could find no really
telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a
platitude. I advanced in a common-sense tone that surely in
the matter of marriage a man had only himself to please.

Mrs. Fyne received this without the flutter of
an eyelid. I received no gravity. Fyne's masculine breast,
as might have been expected, was pierced by that old, regulation
shaft. He grunted most feelingly. I turned to him with false
simplicity. "Don't you agree with me?"

"The very thing I've been telling my wife," he
exclaimed in his extra-manly bass. "We have been discussing...."

A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous!
Perhaps the very first difference they had ever had; Mrs. Fyne
unflinching and ready for any responsibility, Fyne solemn

198.

and shrinking - the children in bed upstairs; and outside
the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land on the starry
background of the universe, with the crude light of the open
window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back
now; a truant no longer but a downright fugitive. Yet a
fugitive carrying off spoils. It was the flight of a raider -
or a traitor? This affair of the purloined brother, as I had
named it to myself, had a very puzzling physiognomy. The girl
must have been desperate, I thought, hearing the grave voice
of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of his words not
at all, except the very last words which were:

"Of course, it's extremely distressing."

I looked at him inquisitively. What was distressing
him? The purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the
daughter of the financier-convict. Or only, if I may say so,
the wind of their flight disturbing the solemn placidity of
the Fynes' domestic atmosphere. My incertitude did not
last long, for he added:

"Mrs. Fyne urges me to go to London at once."

One could guess at, almost see, his profound
distaste for the journey, his distress at a difference of
feeling with his wife. With his serious view of the sublunary
comedy Fyne suffered from not being able to agree solemnly
with her sentiment as he was accustomed to do, in recognition
of having had his way in one supreme instance; when he made

199.

her elope with him - the most momentous step imaginable
in a young lady's life. He had been really trying to
acknowledge it by taking the rightness of her feeling for
granted on every other occasion. It had become a sort of
habit at last. And it is never pleasant to break a habit.
The man was deeply troubled. I said: "Really! To go to
London!"

He looked dumbly into my eyes. It was pathetic
and funny. "And you of course feel it would be useless,"
I pursued.

He evidently felt that, though he said nothing.
He only went on blinking at me with a solemn and comical
slowness. "Unless it be to carry there the family's blessing,"
I went on, indulging my chaffing humour steadily, in a
rather sneaking fashion, for I dared not look at Mrs. Fyne,
to my right. No sound or movement came from that direction.
"You think very naturally that to match mere good, sound, reasons,
against the passionate conclusions of love is a waste of
intellect bordering on the absurd."

He looked surprised as if I had discovered
something very clever. He, dear man, had thought of nothing
at all. He simply knew that he did not want to go to London
on that mission. More masculine delicacy. In a moment he
became enthusiastic.

200.

"Yes! Yes! Exactly. A man in love ..... You hear
my dear? Here you have an independent opinion ...."

"Can anything be more hopeless," I insisted to
the fascinated little Fyne, "than to pit reason against love.
I must confess however that in this case when I think of that
poor girl's sharp chin I wonder if ......."

My levity was too much for Mrs. Fyne. Still leaning
back in her chair she exclaimed:

"Mr. Marlow!"

drop 3
lines' here

As if mysteriously affected by her indignation the
absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have
been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal
was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and
went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to
discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of
anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, had con-
fidence in my sagacity. It was touching, this confidence.
It was at any rate more genuine than the confidence his wife
pretended to have in her husband's chess player, of three
successive holidays. Confidence be hanged! Sagacity -
indeed! She had simply marched in without a shadow of
misgiving to make me back her up. But she had delivered
herself into my hands ......"

201.

Interrupting his narrative Marlow addressed me in
his tone between grim jest and grim earnest:

"Perhaps you didn't know that my character is
upon the whole rather vindictive."

"No, I didn't know," I said with a grin. "That's
rather unusual for a sailor. They always seemed to me the
least vindictive body of men in the world."

"H'm! Simple souls," Marlow muttered moodily.
"Want of opportunity. The world leaves them alone for the
most part. For myself it's towards women that I feel
vindictive mostly, in my small way. I admit that it is
small. But then the occasions in themselves are not great.
Mainly I resent that pretence of winding us round their dear
little fingers, as of right. Not that the result ever
amounts to much generally. There are so very few momentous
opportunities. It is the assumption that each of us is a
combination of a kid and an imbecile which I find provoking -
in a small way; in a very small way. You needn't stare as
though I were breathing fire and smoke out of my nostrils.
I am not a women-devouring monster. I am not even what is
technically called "a brute". I hope there's enough of a
kid and an imbecile in me to answer the requirements of some
really good woman eventually - some day. Some day. Why
do you gasp? You don't suppose I should be afraid of getting
married? That supposition would be offensive ......"

202.

"I wouldn't dream of offending you," I said.

"Very well. But meantime please remember that I was not married to Mrs. Fyne. That lady's little finger was none of my legal property. I had not run off with it. It was Fyne who had done that thing. Let him be wound round as much as his backbone could stand - or even more, for all I cared. His rushing away from the discussion on the transparent pretence of quieting the dog confirmed my notion of there being a considerable strain on his elasticity. I confronted Mrs. Fyne resolved not to assist her in her eminently feminine occupation of thrusting a stick in the spokes of another woman's wheel.

She tried to preserve her calm-eyed superiority. She was familiar and olympian, fenced in by the tea-table, that excellent symbol of domestic life in its lighter hour and its perfect security. In a few severely unadorned words she gave me to understand that she had ventured to hope for some really helpful suggestion from me. To this almost chiding declaration - because my vindictiveness seldom goes further than a bit of teasing - I said that I was really doing my best. And being a physiognomist ....

"Being what?" she interrupted me.

"A physiognomist," I repeated raising my voice a little.

203.

"A physiognomist, Mrs. Fyne. And on the principles of that science a pointed little chin is a sufficient ground for interference. You want to interfere - do you not?"

Her eyes grew distinctly bigger. She had never been bantered before in her life. The late subtle poet's method of making himself unpleasant was merely savage and abusive. Fyne had been always solemnly subservient. What other men she knew I cannot tell but I assume they must have been gentlemanly creatures. The girl-friends sat at her feet. How could she recognise my intention. She didn't know what to make of my tone.

"Are you serious in what you say?" she asked slowly. And it was touching. It was as if a very young, confiding girl had spoken. I felt myself relenting.

"No. I am not, Mrs. Fyne," I said. "I didn't know I was expected to be serious as well as sagacious. No. That science is farcical and therefore I am not serious. It's true that most sciences are farcical except those which teach us how to put things together."

"The question is how to keep these two people apart," she struck in. She had recovered. I admired the quickness of women's wit. Mental agility is a rare perfection. And aren't they agile! Aren't they - just! And tenacious! When they once get hold you may uproot the tree but you won't shake them off the branch. In fact the more you shake ...... But only look at the charm of contradictory perfections!

204.

No wonder men give in - generally. I won't say I was actually charmed by Mrs. Fyne. I was not delighted with her. What affected me was not what she displayed but something which she could not conceal. And that was emotion - nothing less. The form of her declaration was dry, almost peremptory - but not its tone. Her voice faltered just the least bit, she smiled faintly; and as we were looking straight at each other I observed that her eyes were glistening in a peculiar manner. She was distressed. And indeed that Mrs. Fyne should have appealed to me at all was in itself the evidence of her profound distress. "By Jove she's desperate too," I thought. This discovery was followed by a movement of instinctive shrinking from this unreasonable and unmasculine affair. They were all alike, with their supreme interest aroused only by fighting with each other about some man: a lover, a son, a brother.

"But do you think there's time yet to do anything?" I asked.

She had an impatient movement of her shoulders without detaching herself from the back of the chair. Time! Of course! It was less than forty-eight hours since she had followed him to London ...... I am no great clerk at those matters but I murmured vaguely an allusion to special licences. We couldn't tell what might have happened to-day already. But she knew better, scornfully. Noting had happened.

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"Nothing's likely to happen before next Friday, --
if then."

This was wonderfully precise. Then after a pause
she added that she should never forgive herself if some
effort were not made, an appeal

"To your brother?" I asked.

"Yes. John ought to go to-morrow. Nine o'clock train."

"So early as that!" I said. But I could not find
it in my heart to pursue this discussion in a jocular tone;
I submitted to her several obvious arguments, dictated apparent-
ly by common sense but in reality by my secret compassion.
Mrs. Fyne brushed them aside, with the semi-conscious egoism
of all safe, established, existences. They had known each
other so little. Just three weeks. And of that time, too
short for the birth of any serious sentiment, the first week
had to be deducted. They would hardly look at each other
to begin with. Flora barely consented to acknowledge Captain
Anthony's presence. Good morning - good night - that was
all - absolutely the whole extent of their intercourse.
Captain Anthony was a silent man, completely unused to
the society of girls of any sort and so shy in fact that he
avoided raising his eyes to her face at the table. It was

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perfectly absurd. It was even inconvenient, embarrassing
to her - Mrs. Fyne. After breakfast Flora would go off
by herself for a long walk and Captain Anthony (Mrs. Fyne
referred to him at times also as Roderick) joined the
children. But he was actually too shy to get on terms
with his own nieces ....

This would have sounded pathetic if I hadn't known
the Fyne children who were at the same time solemn and
malicious, and nursed a secret contempt for all the world.
No one could get on terms with those fresh and comely young
monsters, They just tolerated their parents and seemed
to have a sort of mocking understanding among themselves
against all outsiders, yet with no visible affection for
each other. They had the habit of exchanging derisive glances
which to a shy man must have been very trying. They thought
their uncle no doubt a bore and perhaps an ass.

I was not surprised to hear that very soon Anthony
formed the habit of crossing the two neighbouring fields
to seek the shade of a clump of elms at a good distance
from the cottage. He lay on the grass and smoked his pipe
all the morning. Mrs. Fyne wondered at her brother's in-
dolent habits. He had asked for books it is true but there
were but few in the cottage. He read them through in three
days and then continued to lie contentedly on his back with
no other companion but his pipe. Amazing indolence! The

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live-long morning. Mrs. Fyne, busy writing upstairs in the
cottage, could see him out of the window. She had a very
long sight, and these elms were grouped on a rise of the ground.
His indolence was plainly exposed to her criticism on a gentle
green slope. Mrs. Fyne wondered at it; she was disgusted too.
But having just then 'commenced author', as you know, she
could not tear herself away from the fascinating novelty.
She let him wallow in his vice. I imagine Captain Anthony
must have had a rather pleasant time in a quiet way. It was,
I remember a hot dry summer, favourable to contemplative life
out of doors. And Mrs. Fyne was scandalised. Women don't
understand the force of a contemplative temperament. It simply
shocks them. They feel instinctively that it is the one which
escapes best the domination of feminine influences. The dear
girls were exchanging jeering remarks about "lazy uncle
Roderick" openly, in her indulgent hearing. And it was so
strange, she told me, because as a boy he was anything but
indolent. On the contrary. Always active.

I remarked that a man of thirty-five was no longer
a boy. It was an obvious remark but she received it without
favour. She told me positively that the best, the nicest
men remained boys all their lives. She was disappointed not to
be able to detect anything boyish in her brother. Very, very
sorry. She had not seen him for fifteen years or thereabouts,

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except on three or four occasions for a few hours at a time.
No. Not a trace of the boy he used to be left in him.

She fell silent for a moment and I mused idly on the boyhood of little Fyne. I could not imagine what it might have been like. His dominant trait was clearly the remnant of still earlier days, because I've never seen such staring solemnity as Fyne's except in a very young baby. But where was he all that time? Didn't he suffer contamination from the indolence of Captain Anthony, I inquired. I was told that Mr. Fyne was very little at the cottage at the time. Some colleague of his was convalescing after a severe illness in a little seaside village in the neighbourhood, and Fyne went off every morning by train to spend the day with the elderly invalid who had no one to look after him. It was a very praiseworthy excuse for neglecting his brother-in-law "the son of the poet-you know," with whom he had nothing in common even in the remotest degree. If Captain Anthony (Roderick) had been a pedestrian it would have been sufficient; but he was not. Still, in the afternoon, he went sometimes for a slow casual stroll, by himself of course, the children having definitely cold-shouldered him; and his only sister being busy with that inflammatory book which was to blaze upon the world a year or more afterwards. It seems however that she was capable of detaching her eyes from her task now and then,

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if only for a moment, because it was from that garret fitted
out for a study that one afternoon she observed her brother and
Flora de Barral coming down the road side by side. They had
met somewhere accidentally - (which of them crossed the other's
path, as the saying is, I don't know) and were returning to
tea together. She noticed that they appeared to be conversing
without constraint.

"I had the simplicity to be pleased," Mrs. Fyne
commented with a dry little laugh. "Pleased for both their
sakes." Captain Anthony shook off his indolence from that
day forth, and accompanied Miss Flora frequently on her morning
walks. Mrs. Fyne remained pleased. She could now forget
them comfortably and give herself up to the delights of
audacious thought and literary composition. Only a week before
the blow fell she, happening to raise her eyes from the paper,
saw two figures seated on the grass under the shade of the
elm. She could make out the white blouse. There could be
no mistake.

"I suppose they imagined themselves concealed
by the hedge. They forgot no doubt I was working in the
garret," she said bitterly. "Or perhaps they didn't care.
They were right. I am rather a simple person.".. She laughed
again..."I was incapable of suspecting such duplicity."

"Duplicity is a strong word Mrs. Fyne -- isn't
it?" I expostulated. "And considering that Captain Anthony
himself..."

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"Oh well - perhaps," she interrupted me. Her eyes which never strayed away from mine, her set features, her whole immovable figure, how well I knew those appearances of a person who has "made up her mind". A very hopeless condition that, specially in women. I mistrusted her concession so easily, so stonily made. She reflected a moment. "Yes. I ought to have said - ingratitude, perhaps."

After having thus disengaged her brother and pushd
the poor girl a little further off as it were - isn't women's
cleverness perfectly diabolic when they are really put on
their mettle? - after having done these things and also made
me feel that I was no match for her, she went on scrupulously:
"One doesn't like to use that word either. The claim is very
small. It's so little one could do for her. Still....."

"I daresay," I exclaimed throwing diplomacy to the
winds. "But really, Mrs. Fyne, it's impossible to dismiss
your brother like this out of the business....."

"She threw herself at his head," Mrs. Fyne uttered
firmly.

"He had no business to put his head in the way, then,"
I retorted with an angry laugh. I didn't restrain myself be-
cause her fixed stare seemed to express the purpose to daunt me.

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I was not afraid of her, but it occurred to me that I was within
an ace of drifting into a downright quarrel with a lady and, besides
my guest. There was the cold teapot, the emptied cups emblems
of hospitality. It could not be. I cut short my angry laugh
while Mrs. Fyne murmured with a slight movement of her shoulders
"He! Poor man! Oh come ....."

By a great effort of will I found myself able to smile
amiably, to speak with proper softness.

"My dear Mrs. Fyne you forget that I don't know him -
not even by sight. It's difficult to imagine a victim as
passive as all that; but granting you the (I very nearly said:
imbecility, but checked myself in time) the innocence of
Captain Anthony, don't you think now, frankly, that there is
a little of your own fault in what has happened. You bring
them together, you leave your brother to himself ....."

She sat up and leaning her elbow on the table sustained
her head in her open palm casting down her eyes. Compunction?
It was indeed a very off-hand way of treating a brother come
to stay for the first time in fifteen years. I suppose she
discovered very soon that she had nothing in common with that
sailor, that stranger, fashioned and marked by the sea of long

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voyages. In her strong-minded way she had scorned pretences,
had gone to her writing which interested her immensely. A
very praiseworthy thing your sincere conduct, -- if it didn't
at times resemble brutality so much. But I don't think it was
compunction. That sentiment is rare in women.

"Is it?" I interrelated indignantly.

"You know more women than I do," retorted the unabashed Marlow. "You make it your business to know them -- don't you? You go about a lot amongst all sorts of people. You are a tolerably honest observer. Well, just try to remember how many instances of compunction you have seen. I am ready to take your bare word for it. Compunction! Have you ever seen as much as its shadow? Have you ever? Just a shadow -- a passing shadow! I tell you it is so rare that you may call it non-existent. They are too passionate. Too pedantic.

Too courageous with themselves -- perhaps. No I don't think for a moment that Mrs. Fyne felt the slightest compunction at her treatment of her sea-going brother. What he thought of it who can tell? It is possible that he wondered why he had been so insistently urged to come. It is possible that he wondered bitterly -- or contemptuously -- or humbly. And it may be that

213

he was only surprised and bored. Had he been as sincere in
his conduct as his only sister he would have probably taken
himself off at the end of the second day. But perhaps he was
afraid of appearing brutal. I am not far removed from the
conviction that between the sincerities of his sister and of
his dear nieces, Captain Anthony of the Ferndale must have
had his loneliness brought home to his bosom for the first
time of his life, at an age, thirty-five or thereabouts, when
one is mature enough to feel the pang of such a discovery.
Angry, or simply sad, but certainly disillusioned, he wanders
about and meets the girl one afternoon and under the sway of
a strong feeling forgets his shyness. This is no supposition.
It is a fact. There was such a meeting in which the shyness
must have perished before we don't know what encouragement,
or in the community of mood made apparent by some casual word.
You remember that Mrs. Fyne saw them one afternoon coming back
to the cottage together. Don't you think that I have hit on
the psychology of the situation?

"Doubtless ..." I began to ponder.

"I was very certain of my conclusions at the time," Marlow went on impatiently. "But don't think for a moment

214.

that Mrs. Fyne in her new attitude and toying thoughtfully with
a tea-spoon was about to surrender. She murmured;

"It's the last thing I should have thought could
happen.'

"You didn't suppose they were romantic enough," I
suggested drily.

She let it pass and with great decision but as if
speaking to herself,

"Roderick really must be warned."

She didn't give me the time to ask of what precisely.
She raised her head and addressed me.

"I am surprised and grieved more than I can tell you
at Mr. Fyne's resistance. We have been always completely at
one on every question. And that we should differ now on a
point touching my brother so closely is a most painful surprise
to me." Her hand rattled the tea-spoon brusquely by an in-
voluntary movement. "It is intolerable," she added tempestuous-
ly -- for Mrs. Fyne that is. I suppose she had nerves of her
own like any other woman.

"Under the porch where Fyne had sought refuge with the
dog there was silence. I took it for a proof of deep sagacity.

215.

I don't mean on the part of the dog. He was a confirmed fool.

I said:

"You want absolutely to interfere?..." Mrs. Fyne nodded just perceptibly ... "Well - for my part ... but I don't really know how matters stand at the present time. You have had a letter from Miss De Barral. What does that letter say?"

"She asks for her valise to be sent to her new address," Mrs. Fyne uttered reluctantly and stopped. I waited a bit - then exploded.

"Well! What's the matter? Where's the difficulty? Does your husband object to that? You don't mean to say that he wants you to appropriate the girl's clothes?"

"Mr. Marlow!"

"Well but you talk of a painful difference of opinion with your husband, and then, when I ask for information on the point, you bring out a valise. And only a few moments ago you reproached me for not being serious. I wonder who is the serious person of us two now."

She smiled faintly and in a friendly tone from which I concluded at once that she did not mean to show me the girl's letter, she said that undoubtedly the letter disclosed an understanding between Captain Anthony and Flora De Barral.

"What understanding?" I pressed her. "An engagement is an understanding."

216.

"There is no engagement - not yet," she said decisively. "That letter, Mr. Marlow, is couched in very vague terms. That is why ...."

I interrupted her without ceremony.

"You still hope to interfere to some purpose. Isn't it so? Yes? But how should you have liked it if anybody had tried to interfere between you and Mr. Fyne at the time when your understanding with each other could still have been described in vague terms?"

She had a genuine movement of astonished indignation. It is with the accent of perfect sincerity that she cried out at me.

"But it isn't at all the same thing! How can you! ..."

Indeed how could I! The daughter of a poet and the daughter of a convict are not comparable in the consequences of their conduct if their necessity may wear at times a similar aspect. Amongst these consequences I could perceive undesirable cousins for these dear healthy girls and such like, possible causes of embarrassment in the future.

"No! You can't be serious," Mrs. Fyne's smouldering resentment broke out again. "You haven't thought....."

217.

"Oh yes, Mrs. Fyne! I have thought. I am still thinking. I am even trying to think like you."

"Mr. Marlow," she said earnestly. "Believe me that I really am thinking of my brother in all this...." I assured her that I quite believed she was. For there is no law of nature making it impossible to think of more than one person at a time. Then I said:

"She has told him all about herself of course."

"All about her life," assented Mrs. Fyne with an air, however, of making some mental reservation which I did not pause to investigate. "Her life!" I repeated. "That girl must have had a mighty bad time of it."

"Horrible," Mrs. Fyne admitted with a ready frankness which did her infinite honour under the circumstances, and a warmth of tone which made me look at her with a friendly eye. "Horrible! No! You can't imagine the sort of vulgar people she became dependent on! ... You know her father never attempted to see her while he was still at large. After his arrest he instructed that relative of his - the odious person who took her away from Brighton - not to let his daughter come to the court during the trial. He refused to hold any communication with her whatever."

I remembered what Mrs. Fyne had told me before of the view she had years ago of De Barral clinging to the

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CHAPTER VI

FLORA.

"A very singular prohibition," remarked Mrs. Fyne
after a short silence. "He seemed to love the child."

She was puzzled. But I surmised that it might have
been the sullenness of a man unconscious of guilt and standing
at bay to fight his "persecutors", as he called them; or else
the fear of a softer emotion weakening his defiant attitude;
perhaps, even, it was a self-denying ordinance, in order to
spare the girl the sight of her father in the dock, accused
of cheating, sentenced as a swindler — proving the possession
of a certain moral delicacy —...

Mrs Fyne didn't know what to think. She supposed it
might have been mere callousness. But the people amongst
whom the girl had fallen had positively not a grain of moral
delicacy. Of that she was certain. Mrs. Fyne could not
undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity.
Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household,
over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed
Mrs. Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery

220

220

which she could not have thought possible.

I, on the contrary, thought it very possible. I could imagine easily how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in that household -- envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the "odious person" was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded -- if they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in that grubbing lot had enough humanity to leave her alone. At first she was made much of, in an offensively patronising manner. The connection with the great de Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash. They dragged her to their place of worship whatever it might have been, where the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to other beings like themselves at which they exhibited her with ignoble self-satisfaction. She did not know how to defend herself from their

221

importunities, insolences and exigencies. She lived amongst them, a passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she were flayed. After the trial her position became still worse. On the least occasion and even on no occasions at all she was scolded or else taunted with her dependence.

The pious girl lectured her on her defects, the romping girl teased her with contemptuous references to her accomplishments, and was always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some "fellow" or other. The mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly, wounding remarks. I must say they were probably not aware of the ugliness of their conduct. They were nasty amongst themselves as a matter of course; their disputes were nauseating in origin, in manner, in the spirit of mean selfishness. The women, too, seemed to enjoy greatly any sort of row and were always ready to combine together to make awful scenes to the luckless girl on incredibly flimsy pretences. Thus Flora on one occasion had been reduced to rage and despair, had her most secret feelings lacerated, had obtained a view of the utmost baseness to which common human nature can descend - I won't say "à propos de bottes" as the French would excellently put it, but literally "à propos of some mislaid cheap lace trimmings for a nightgown the rompish

222

one was making for herself. Yes, that was the origin of the grossest scenes which, in their repetition, must have had a deplorable effect on the unformed character of one of the most pitiful of de Barral's victims. I have it from Mrs. Fyne. The girl turned up at the Fynes' house at half past nine on a cold, drizzly evening. She had walked bareheaded, I believe, just as she ran out of the house, from somewhere in Poplar to the neighbourhood of Sloane Square - without stopping, without drawing breath, if only for a sob.

"We were having some people to dinner," said the anxious sister of Captain Anthony.

She had heard the front door bell and wondered what it might mean. The parlourmaid managed to whisper to her without attracting attention. The servants had been frightened by the invasion of that wild girl in a muddy skirt and with wisps of damp hair sticking to her pale cheeks. But they had seen her before. This was not the first occasion, noret the last.

Directly she could slip away from her guests Mrs. Fyne ran upstairs.

"I found her in the night nursery crouching on the floor, her head resting on the cot of the youngest of my girls.

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The eldest was sitting up in bed looking at her across the room.

Only a nightlight was burning there. Mrs. Fyne raised her up, took her over to Mr. Fyne's little dressing-room on the other side of the landing, to a fire by which she could dry herself, and left her there. She had to go back to her guests.

A most disagreeable surprise it must have been to the Fynes. Afterwards they both went up and interviewed the girl. She jumped up at their entrance. She had shaken her damp hair loose; now her eyes were dry - with the heat of rage.

I can imagine little Fyne solemnly sympathetic, solemnly listening, solemnly retreating to the marital bedroom. Mrs. Fyne pacified the girl, and, fortunately, there was a bed which could be made up for her in the dressing-room.

"But what could one do after all!" concluded Mrs. Fyne.

And this stereotyped exclamation, expressing the difficulty of the problem and the readiness (at any rate) of good intentions, made me, as usual, feel more kindly towards her.

Next morning, very early, long before Fyne had to start for his office, the "odious personage" turned up, not exactly unexpected perhaps, but startling all the same, if only by the promptness of his action. From what Flora herself related to Mrs. Fyne, it seems that without being very perceptibly less

224

"odious" than his family he had in a rather mysterious fashion interposed his authority for the protection of the girl. "Not that he cares," explained Flora. "I am sure he does not. I could not stand being liked by any of these people. If I thought he liked me I would drown myself rather than go back with him."

For of course there was no such thing as a course to take "Florrie" home. The scene was played in the dining-room; breakfast interrupted, dishes growing cold, little Fyne's toast growing leathery, Fyne out of his chair with his back to the fire, the newspaper on the carpet, servants shut out, Mrs. Fyne rigid in her place with the girl sitting beside her; the "odious person", who had bustled in with hardly a greeting, looking from Fyne to Mrs. Fyne as though he were inwardly amused at something he knew of them; and then beginning ironically his discourse. He did not apologise for disturbing Fyne and his "good lady" at breakfast, because he knew they did not want (with a nod at the girl) to have more of her than could be helped. He came the first possible moment because he had his business to attend to. He wasn't drawing a tip-top salary (this staring at Fyne) in a luxuriously carpeted office. Not

225

he. He had risen to be an employer of labour and was bound to give a good example.

I believe the fellow was aware of, and enjoyed quietly, the consternation his presence brought to the bosom of Mr. and Mrs. Fyne. He turned briskly to the girl. Mrs. Fyne confessed to me that they had remained all three silent and inanimate. He turned to the girl: "What's this game, Florrie? You had better give it up. If you expect me to run all over London looking for you every time you happen to have a tiff with your auntie and cousins you are mistaken. I can't afford it."

Tiff - was the sort of definition to take one's breath away, having regard to the fact that both the word convict, and the word pauper had been used a moment before. Flora de Barral ran away from the quarrel about the lace trimmings. Yes, these very words! So at least the girl had told Mrs. Fyne the evening before. The word tiff in connection with her tale had a peculiar savour, a paralysing effect. Nobody made a sound. The relative of de Barral proceeded uninterrupted to a display of magnanimity. "Auntie told me to tell you she's sorry - there! And Amelia (the romping sister) shan't worry you again. I'll see to that. You ought to be satisfied. Remember your

226

position."

Emboldened by the utter stillness pervading the room
he addressed himself to Mrs. Fyne with stolid effrontery:

"What I say is that people should be good-natured.
She can't stand being chaffed. She puts on her grand airs.
She won't take a bit of a joke from people as good as herself
anyway. We are a plain lot. We don't like it. And that's
how this trouble begins."

Insensible to the stony stare of three pairs of eyes,
which, if the stories of our childhood as to the power of the
human eye are true, ought to have been enough to daunt a tiger,
that unabashed manufacturer from the East End fastened his fangs,
figuratively speaking, into the poor girl and prepared to drag
her away for a prey to his cubs of both sexes: "Auntie has
thought of sending you your hat and coat. I've got them out
side in the cab."

Mrs. Fyne looked mechanically out of the window. A
four-wheeler stood before the gate under the weeping sky. The
driver in his conical cape and tarpaulin hat, streamed with
water. The drooping horse looked as though it had been fished
out, half unconscious, from a pond. Mrs. Fyne found some relief

227

in looking at that miserable sight, away from the room in
which the voice of the amiable visitor resounded with a vulgar
intonation exhorting the strayed sheep to return to the delightful
fold. "Come, Florrie, make a move. I can't wait on you all
day here."

Mrs. Fyne heard all this without turning her head away
from the window. Fyne on the hearthrug had to listen and to
look on too. I shall not try to form a surmise as to the real
nature of the suspense. Their very goodness must have made it
very anxious. The girl's hands were lying in her lap; her
head was lowered as if in deep thought; and the other went on
delivering a sort of homily. Ingratitude was condemned in it,
the sinfulness of pride was pointed out - together with the
proverbial fact that it "goes before a fall." There were also
some sound remarks as to the danger of nonsensical notions and
the disadvantages of a quick temper. It sets one's best
friends against one. "And if anybody ever wanted friends in
the world it's you, my girl." Even respect for parental
authority was invoked. "In the first hour of his trouble
your father wrote me to take care of you - don't forget it.
Yes, to me, just a plain man, rather than to any of his fine
West-end friends. You can't get over that. And a father's

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a father no matter what a mess he's got himself into. You ain't going to throw over your own father - are you?

It was difficult to say whether he was more absurd than cruel or more cruel than absurd. Mrs. Fyne, with the fine ear of a woman, seemed to detect a jeering intention in his meanly unctuous tone, something more vile than mere cruelty. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw the girl raise her two hands to her head, then let them fall again on her lap. Fyne in front of the fire was like the victim of an unholy spell - bereft of motion and speech but obviously in pain. It was a short pause of perfect silence, and then that "odious creature" (he must have been really a remarkable individual in his way) struck out into sarcasm.

"Well? ...." Again a silence. "If you have fixed it up with the lady and gentleman present here for your board and lodging you had better say so. I don't want to interfere in a bargain I know nothing of. But I wonder how your father will take it when he comes out .... or don't you expect him ever to come out?"

At that moment, Mrs. Fyne told me she met the girl's eyes. There was that in them which made her shut her own.

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She also felt as though she would have liked to put her fingers
in her ears. She restrained herself, however; and the "plain
man" passed in his appalling versatility from sarcasm to veiled
menace.

"You have - eh? Well and good. But before I go home
let me ask you, my girl, to think if by any chance you throwing
us over like this won't be rather bad for your father later on?
Just think it over."

He looked at his victim with an air of cunning mystery.
She jumped up so suddenly that he started back. Mrs. Fyne rose
too, and even the spell was removed from her husband. Mrs. Fyne
thought that he was going to say something, but the girl dropped
back into the chair and turned her head to look at Mrs. Fyne.
This time it was no accidental meeting of fugitive glances.
It was a deliberate communication. To my question as to its
nature Mrs. Fyne said she did not know. "Was it appealing?"
I suggested. "No," she said. "Was it frightened, angry,
crushed, resigned?" "No! No! Nothing of these." But it had
frightened her. She remembered it to this day. She had been
ever since fancying she could detect the lingering reflection of
that look in all the girl's glances. In the attentive, in the
casual - even in the grateful glances - in the expression of the

230

230

softest moods.

"Has she her soft moods, then?" I asked with interest.

Mrs. Fyne, much moved by her recollections, heeded not my inquiry. All her mental energy was concentrated on the nature of that memorable glance. The general tradition of mankind teaches us that glances occupy a considerable place in the self-expression of women. Mrs. Fyne was trying honestly to give me some idea, as much perhaps to satisfy her own uneasiness as my curiosity. She was frowning in the effort as you see sometimes a child do (what is delightful in woman is that they so often resemble intelligent children - I mean the crustiest, the sourest, the most battered of them do - at times). She was frowning, I say, and I was beginning to smile faintly at her when all at once she came out with something totally unexpected.

"It was horribly merry," she said.

I suppose she must have been satisfied by my sudden gravity because she looked at me in a friendly manner.

"Yes, Mrs. Fyne," I said, smiling no longer. "I see. It would have been horrible even on the stage."

"Ah!" she interrupted me - and I really believe her change of attitude back to folded arms was meant to check a

231

shudder. "But it wasn't on the stage, and it was not with her
lips that she laughed."

"Yes. It must have been horrible," I assented.
"And then she had to go away ultimately - I suppose. You
didn't say anything?"

"No," said Mrs. Fyne. "I rang the bell and told one
of the maids to go and bring the hat and coat out of the cab.
And then we waited."

I don't think that there ever was such waiting unless
possibly in a jail at some moment or other on the morning of
an execution. The servant appeared with the hat and coat
and then, still as on the morning of an execution, when the
condemned, I believe, is offered a breakfast, Mrs. Fyne, anxious
that the white-faced girl should swallow something warm (if
she could) before leaving her house for an interminable drive
through raw cold air in a damp four-wheeler - Mrs. Fyne broke
the awful silence: "You really must try to eat something."
In her best resolute manner. She turned to the "odious person"
with the same determination. "Perhaps you will sit down and
have a cup of coffee, too."

The worthy "employer of labour" sat down. He might

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have been awed by Mrs. Fyne's peremptory manner - for she did
not think of conciliating him then. He sat down, provisionally,
like a man who finds himself much against his will in doubtful
company. He accepted ungraciously the cup handed to him by
Mrs. Fyne, took an unwilling sip or two and put it down as if
there were some moral contamination in the coffee of these
"swells." Between whiles he directed mysteriously unexpressive
glances at little Fyne, who, I gather, had no breakfast that
morning at all. Neither had the girl. She never moved her
hands from her lap till her appointed guardian got up, leaving
the cup half full.

"Well. If you don't mean to take advantage of this
lady's kind offer I may just as well take you home at once. I
want to begin my day - I do."

After a few more dumb, leaden-footed minutes while
Flora was putting on her hat and jacket, the Fynes without
moving, without saying anything, saw these two leave the room.

"She never looked back at us," said Mrs. Fyne. "She
just followed him out. I've never had such a crushing impression
of the miserable dependence of girls - of women. This was an
extreme case. But a young man - any man - could have gone to

233

break stones on the roads or something of that kind - or enlist-
ed - or ....

It was very true. Women can't go forth on the high
roads and by ways to pick up a living, even when dignity, in-
dependence, or existence itself are at stake. But what made
me interrupt Mrs. Fyne's tirade was profound surprise at the
fact of that respectable citizen being so willing to keep in
his home the poor girl for whom it seemed there was no place
in the world. And not only willing but anxious. I admit
that I couldn't credit him with generous impulses. For it
seemed obvious to me from what I had learned that, to put it
mildly, he was not an impulsive person.

"I confess that I can't understand his motive," I ex-
claimed.

"This is exactly what John wondered at, at first," said
Mrs. Fyne. By that time an intimacy - if not exactly confidence—
had sprung up between us which permitted her in this discussion
to refer to her husband as John. "You know he had not opened
his lips all that time," she pursued. "I don't blame his re-
straint. On the contrary. What could he have said? I could
see he was observing the man very thoughtfully .... "

234

"And so, Mr. Fyne listened, observed and meditated," I said. "That's an excellent way of coming to a conclusion. And may I ask at what conclusion he had managed to arrive? On what ground did he cease to wonder at the inexplicable? For I can't admit humanity to be the explanation. It would be too monstrous."

It was nothing of the sort, Mrs. Fyne assured me with some resentment as though I had aspersed little Fyne's sanity. But I had only suspected him of that sentimentalism which believes in the existence of a redeeming spot under the surface of ruffianism in all its varied forms. I was doing little Fyne an injustice; and, besides, I suppose, the worthy citizen was too plain and was not sufficiently picturesque for that pretty theory. Fyne very sensibly had set himself the mental task of discovering the self-interest. I should not have thought him capable of so much cynicism. He said to himself that for people of that sort (religious fears or the vanity of righteousness put aside) money - not great wealth, but money, just a little money - is the measure of virtue, of expediency, of wisdom - of pretty well everything. But the girl was absolutely destitute. The father was in prison after the most terribly complete and disgraceful smash of modern times. And then it

235

dawned upon Fyne that this was just it. The great smash, in
the great dust of vanishing millions! Was it possible that
they all had vanished to the last penny? Wasn't there, some-
where, something palpable; some fragment of the fabric left?

"That's it," had exclaimed Fyne, startling his wife
by this explosive unsealing of his lips less than half an hour
after the departure of de Barral's cousin with de Barral's
daughter. It was still in the dining-room, very near the time
for him to go forth affronting the elements in order to put in
another day's work in his country's service. All he could say
at the moment in elucidation of this breakdown from his usual
placid solemnity was:

"The fellow imagines that de Barral has got some plun-
der put away somewhere."

Fyne must have been thinking it all out. (I hope not
to the detriment of his country's service) during the day, be-
cause in the evening he developed to Mrs. Fyne the psychology
of the situation. Fellows of that sort would naturally judge
others by what they knew of their own innermost selves. The
odious person was no doubt very proud of his honesty - though
why one should be proud of not being a thief he, Fyne, couldn't

236

imagine. At the same time he had a sneaking sort of pride in
being a relative of a financier like de Barral. He was simply
unable to believe that such a man had not been clever enough
to find means to secrete somehow a considerable sum of money.

This being the theory arrived at by Fyne his comment
on it was that a good many bankrupts had been known to have
taken such a precaution. It was possible in de Barral's case.
Fyne went so far in his display of cynical pessimism as to say
that it was extremely probable.

He explained at length to Mrs. Fyne that de Barral
certainly did not take anyone into his confidence. But the
beastly relative had made up his low mind that it was so.
He was selfish and pitiless in his stupidity, but he had clearly
conceived the notion of making a claim on de Barral when de
Barral came out of prison on the strength of having "looked after"
(as he would have himself expressed it) his daughter. He nursed
his hopes, such as they were, in secret, and it is to be supposed
kept them even from his wife.

I could see it very well. That belief accounted for
his mysterious air while he interfered in favour of the girl.
He was the only protector she had. It was as though Flora had

237

been fated to be always surrounded by treachery and lies
stifling every better impulse, every instinctive aspiration
of her soul to trust and to love. It would have been enough
to drive a fine nature into the madness of universal suspicion -
into any sort of madness. I don't know how far a sense of
humour will stand by one. To the foot of the gallows, perhaps.
But from my recollection of Flora de Barral I feared that she
hadn't much sense of humour. She had cried at the desertion
of the absurd Fyne dog. That animal was certainly free from
duplicity. He was frank and simple and ridiculous. The
exasperation of the girl at his unhypocritical behaviour had
been funny but not humorous.

As you may imagine I was not very anxious to resume
the discussion on the justice, expediency, effectiveness or what
not, of Fyne's journey to London. It isn't that I was un-
faithful to little Fyne out in the porch with the dog. (They
kept amazingly quiet there. Could they have gone to sleep?)
What I felt was that either my sagacity or my conscience would
come out damaged from that campaign. And no man will willingly
put himself in the way of moral damage. I did not want a war
with Mrs. Fyne. I much preferred to hear something more of

238

the girl. I said:

"And so she went away with that respectable ruffian."

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders slightly - "What else could she have done?" I agreed with her by another hopeless gesture. It isn't so easy for a girl like Flora de Barral to become a factory hand, a pathetic seamstress or even a barmaid. She wouldn't have known how to begin. She was the captive of the meanest conceivable fate. And she wasn't mean enough for it. It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth. As I don't want you to think that I am unduly partial to the girl we shall say that she failed decidedly to endear herself to that simple, virtuous and, I believe, teetotal household. It's my conviction that an angel would have failed likewise. It's no use to go into details, suffice it to state that before the year was out she was again at the Fynes' door.

This time she was escorted by a stout youth. His large pale face wore a smile of inane cunning soured by annoyance. His clothes were new and the indescribable smartness of their cut, a "genre" which had never been obtruded on her notice before, astonished Mrs. Fyne, who came out into the hall with

239

her hat on; for she was about to go out to hear a new pianist
(a girl) in a friend's house. The youth addressing Mrs. Fyne
easily begged her not to let "that silly thing go back to us
any more." There had been, he said, nothing but "ructions"
at home about her for the last three weeks. Everybody in the
family was heartily sick of quarrelling. His governor had
charged him to bring her to this address and say that the lady
and gentleman were quite welcome to all there was in it. She
hadn't enough sense to appreciate a plain, honest English home
and she was better out of it.

The young, pimply-faced fellow was vexed at this job
the governor had sprung on him. It was the cause of his
missing an appointment for that afternoon with a certain young
lady. The lady he was engaged to. But he meant to dash back
and try for a sight of her that evening yet "if he were a burst
over it." "Good-bye, Florrie. Good luck to you - and I hope
I'll never see your face again."

With that he ran out of the hall in lover-like haste
leaving the hall-door wide open. Mrs. Fyne had not found a
word to say. She had been too much taken aback even to gasp
freely. But she had the presence of mind to grab the girl's
arm just as she, too, was running out into the street - with

240

the haste, I suppose, of despair and to keep I don't know what
tragic tryst.

"You stopped her with your own hand, Mrs. Fyne," I said.
"I presume she meant to get away. That girl is no comedian --
if I am any judge."

"Yes! I had to use some force to drag her in."

Mrs. Fyne had no difficulty in stating the truth.

"You see I was in the very act of letting myself out when these
two appeared. So that, when that unpleasant young man ran off,
I found myself alone with Flora. It was all I could do to hold
her in the hall while I called to the servants to come and shut
the door."

As is my habit, or my weakness, or my gift, I don't
know which, I visualised the story for myself. I really can't
help it. And the vision of Mrs. Fyne dressed for a rather
special afternoon function, engaged in wrestling with a wild-
eyed, white-faced girl had a certain dramatic fascination.

"Really!" I murmured.

"Oh! There's no doubt that she struggled," said Mrs.
Fyne. She compressed her lips for a moment and then added:
"As to her being a comedian, that's another question."

Mrs. Fyne had returned to her attitude of folded arms.

241

I saw before me the daughter of the refined poet accepting life
whole with its unavoidable conditions, of which one of the first
is the instinct of self-preservation and the egoism of every
living creature. "The fact remains nevertheless that you -
yourself - have, in your own words, pulled her in," I insisted
in a jocular tone, with a serious intention.

"What was one to do," exclaimed Mrs. Fyne with almost
comic exasperation. "Are you reproaching me with being too
impulsive?"

And she went on telling me that she was not that in
the least. One of the recommendations she always insisted on
(to the girl-friends, I imagine) was to be on guard against
impulse. Always! But I had not been there to see the face
of Flora at the time. If I had it would be haunting me to
this day. Nobody unless made of iron would have allowed a
human being with a face like that to rush out alone into the
streets.

"And doesn't it haunt you, Mrs. Fyne?" I asked.

"No, not now," she said implacably. "Perhaps if I
had let her go it might have done ...... Don't conclude, though,
that I think she was playing a comedy then, because after
struggling at first she ended by remaining. She gave up very

242

suddenly. She collapsed in our arms, mine and the maid's
who came running up in response to my calls, and ......
"

"And the door was then shut," I completed the phrase
in my own way.

"Yes, the door was shut," Mrs. Fyne lowered and raised
her head slowly.

I did not ask her for details. Of one thing I am
certain, and that is that Mrs. Fyne did not go out to the musical
function that afternoon. She was no doubt considerably annoyed
at missing the privilege of hearing privately an interesting
young pianist (a girl) who, since, had become one of the recognised performers. Mrs. Fyne did not dare leave her house.
As to the feelings of little Fyne when he came home from the
office, via his club, just half an hour before dinner, I have
no information. But I venture to affirm that in the main
they were kindly, though it is quite possible that in the first
moment of surprise he had to keep down a swear-word or two.

the
The long and/short of it all is that next day the Fynes
made up their minds to take into their confidence a certain healthy
old lady. With certain old ladies the passing years bring
back a sort of mellowed youthfulness of feeling, an optimistic
outlook, liking for novelty, readiness for experiment. The

243

old lady was very much interested: "Do let me see the poor
thing!" She was accordingly allowed to see Flora de Barral
in Mrs. Fyne's drawing-room on a day when there was no one else
there, and she preached to her with charming, sympathetic
authority: "The only way to deal with our troubles, my dear
child, is to forget them. You must forget yours. It's very
simple. Look at me. I always forget mine. At your age
one ought to be cheerful."

Later on when left alone with Mrs. Fyne she said to
that lady: "I do hope the child will manage to be cheerful.
I can't have sad faces near me. At my age one needs cheerful
companions."

And in this hope she carried off Flora de Barral to
Bournemouth for the winter months in the quality of reader and
companion. She had said to her with kindly jocularity: "We
shall have a good time together. I am not a grumpy old woman."
But on their return to London she sought Mrs. Fyne at once.
She had discovered that Flora was not naturally cheerful. When
she made efforts to be it was still worse. The old lady couldn't
stand the strain of that. And then, to have the whole thing
out, she could not bear to have for a companion anyone who did
not love her. She was certain that Flora did not love her.

244

Why? She couldn't say. Moreover, she had caught the girl looking at her in a peculiar way at times. Oh no! - it was not an evil look - it was an unusual expression which one could not understand. And when one remembered that her father was in prison shut up together with a lot of criminals and so on - it made one uncomfortable. If the child had only tried to forget her troubles! But she obviously was incapable or unwilling to do so. And that was somewhat perverse - wasn't it? Upon the whole, she thought it would be better perhaps . . . . . .

Mrs. Fyne assented hurriedly to the unspoken conclusion: "Oh certainly! Certainly," wondering to herself what was to be done with Flora next; but she was not very much surprised at the change in the old lady's view of Flora de Barral. She almost understood it.

What came next was a German family, the continental acquaintances of the wife of one of Fyne's colleagues in the Home Office. Flora of the enigmatical glances was despatched to them without much reflection. As it was not considered absolutely necessary to take them into full confidence, they neither expected the girl to be specially cheerful nor were they discomposed unduly by the indescribable quality of her glances. The German woman was quite ordinary; there were two boys to

245

look after; they were ordinary, too, I presume; and Flora,
I understand, was very attentive to them. If she taught them
anything it must have been by inspiration alone, for she cer-
tainly knew nothing of teaching. But it was most "conversa-
tion" which was demanded from her. Flora de Barral conversing
with two small German boys, regularly, industriously, con-
scientiously, in order to keep herself alive in the world which
held for her the past we know and the future of an even more
undesirable quality - seems to me a very fantastic combination.
But I believe it was not so bad. She was being, she wrote,
mercifully drugged by her task. She had learned to "converse"
all day long, mechanically, absently, as if in a trance. An
uneasy trance it must have been! Her worst moments were
when off duty - alone in the evening, shut up in her own little
room - her dulled thoughts waking up slowly till she started
into the full consciousness of her position, like a person
waking up in contact with something venomous - a snake, for in-
stance - experiencing a mad impulse to fling the thing away and
run off screaming to hide somewhere.

At this period of her existence Flora de Barral used to
write to Mrs. Fyne not regularly but fairly often. I don't
know how long she would have gone on "conversing" and,

246

incidentally, helping to supervise the beautifully stocked
linen closets of that well-to-do German household, if the
man of it had not developed in the intervals of his avocation
(he was a merchant and a thoroughly domesticated character) a
psychological resemblance to the Bournemouth old lady. It ap-
peared that he, too, wanted to be loved.

He was not, however, of a conquering temperament - a
kiss-snatching, door-bursting type of libertine. In the very
act of straying from the path of virtue he remained a respectable
merchant. It would have been perhaps better for Flora if he
had been a mere brute. But he set about his sinister enter-
prise in a sentimental, cautious, almost paternal manner; and
thought he would be safe with a pretty orphan. The girl for
all her experience was still too innocent, and indeed not yet
sufficiently aware of herself as a woman, to mistrust these
masked approaches. She did not see them, in fact. She
thought him sympathetic - the first expressively sympathetic
person she had ever met. She was simply unaware of any in-
tention. She was so innocent that she could not understand
the fury of the German woman. For, as you may imagine, the
wifely penetration was not to be deceived for any great length

247

of time - the more so that the wife was older than the hus-
band. The man with the peculiar cowardice of respectability
never said a word in her defence. He stood by and heard her
reviled in the most abusive terms, only nodding and frowning
vaguely from time to time. It will give you the idea of the
girl's innocence when I say that at first she actually thought
this storm of indignant reproaches to be caused by the dis-
covery of her real name and her relation to a convict. She
had been sent out under an assumed name - a highly recommended
orphan of honourable parentage. Her distress, her burning
cheeks, her attempts to express her regret for this deception
were taken for a confession of guilt. "You attempted to bring
dishonour to my home," the German woman screamed at her.

Here's a misunderstanding for you. Flora de Barral,
who felt the shame but did not believe in the guilt of her
father, retorted fiercely, "Nevertheless I am as honourable
as you are." And then the German woman nearly went into a
fit from rage. "I shall have you thrown out into the street."
Flora was not exactly thrown out into the street, I
believe, but she was bundled bag and baggage on board a steamer
for London. Did I tell you these people lived in Hamburg?

248

Well yes - sent to the docks late on a rainy winter evening
in charge of some sneering lackey or other who behaved to her
insolently and left her on deck burning with indignation, her
hair half down, shaking with excitement and, truth to say,
scared as near as possible into hysterics. If it had not been
for the stewardess who, without asking questions, good soul,
took charge of her quietly in the ladies' saloon (luckily it
was empty) it is by no means certain she would ever have
reached England. I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning
man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair
pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not
creatures of despair. Suicide, I suspect, is very often the
outcome of mere mental weariness - not an act of savage energy
but the final symptom of complete collapse. The quiet, matter-
of-fact attention of a ship's stewardess, who did not seem aware
of other human agonies than sea-sickness, who talked of the
probable weather of the passage - it would be a rough night,
she thought - and who insisted in a professionally busy manner,
"Let me make you comfortable down below at once, miss," as though
she were thinking of nothing else but her tip - was enough to
dissipate the shades of death gathering round the mortal weariness
of bewildered thinking which makes the idea of non-existence

249

welcome so often to the young. Flora de Barral did lie down
and it may be presumed she slept. At any rate she survived
the voyage across the North Sea and told Mrs. Fyne all about
it, concealing nothing and receiving no rebuke - for Mrs. Fyne's
opinions had a large freedom in their pedantry. She held, I
suppose, that a woman holds an absolute right - or possesses a
perfe ct excuse - to escape in her own way from a man-mismanaged
world.

What is to be noted is that even in London, having
had time to take a reflective view, poor Flora was far from
being certain as to the true inwardness of the violent dis-
missal. She felt the humiliation of it with an almost mad-
dened resentment.

"And did you enlighten her on the point?" I ventured to
ask.

Mrs. Fyne moved her shoulders with a philosophical
acceptance of all the necessities which ought not to be.
Something had to be said, she murmured. She had told the

250

girl enough to make her come to the right conclusion by herself.

"And she did?"

"Yes. Of course. She isn't a goose," retorted Mrs. Fyne tartly.

"Then her education is completed," I remarked with some bitterness. "Don't you think she ought to be given a chance?"

Mrs. Fyne understood my meaning.

"Not this one," she snapped in a quite feminine way. "It's all very well for you to plead, but I .... "

"I do not plead. I simply asked. It seemed natural to ask what you thought."

"It's what I feel that matters. And I can't help my feelings. You may guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy at home. You have heard, no doubt .... Yes? Well, I was made still more unhappy and hurt - I don't mind telling you that. He made his way to some distant relations of our mother's people

251

in business who I believe were not known to my father at all.
I don't wish to judge their action ....."

I interrupted Mrs. Fyne here. I had heard. Fyne
was not very communicative in general, but he was proud of his
father-in-law - "Carleon Anthony, the poet, you know." Proud
of his celebrity without approving of his character. It was
on that account, I strongly suspect, that he seized with avidity
upon the theory of poetical genius being allied to madness, which
he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading a few
years ago. It struck him as being truth itself - illuminating
like the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it
sometimes. Once, just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this
theory which he regarded as so incontrovertible did not cause
him some uneasiness about his wife and the dear girls? He
transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me in his deep
solemn voice to remember the "well established fact" that genius
was not transmissible.

I said only "Oh! Isn't it?" and he thought he had
silenced me by an unanswerable argument. But he continued to
talk of his glorious father-in-law, and it was in the course of
that conversation that he told me how, when the Liverpool relations

252

of the poet's late wife naturally addressed themselves to him
in considerable concern, suggesting a friendly consultation
as to the boy's future, the incensed (but always refined) poet
wrote in answer a letter of mere polished badinage which offend-
ed mortally the Liverpool people. This witty outbreak of what
was in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless
that they simply kept the boy. They let him go to sea not
because he was in their way but because he begged hard to be
allowed to go.

"Oh! You do know," said Mrs. Fyne after a pause.
"Well - I felt myself very much abandoned. Then his choice
of life - so extraordinary, so unfortunate, I may say. I was
very much grieved. I should have liked him to have been dis-
tinguished - or at any rate to remain in the social sphere
where we could have had common interests, acquaintances, thoughts.
Don't think that I am estranged from him. But the precise
truth is that I do not know him. I was most painfully affected
when he was here by the difficulty of finding a single topic
we could discuss together."

While Mrs. Fyne was talking of her brother I let my
thoughts wander out of the room to little Fyne who by leaving
me alone with his wife had, so to speak, entrusted his domestic
peace to my honour.

253

"Well, then, Mrs. Fyne, does it not strike you that it would be reasonable under the circumstances to let your brother take care of himself?"

"And suppose I have grounds to think that he can't take care of himself in a given instance." She hesitated in a funny, bashful manner which roused my interest. Then: "Sailors I believe are very susceptible," she added with forced assurance.

I burst into a laugh which only increased the coldness of her observing stare.

"They are. Immensely! Hopelessly! My dear Mrs. Fyne - you had better give it up! It only makes your husband miserable."

"And I am quite miserable too. It is really our first difference ...... "

"Regarding Miss de Barral?" I asked.

"Regarding everything. It's really intolerable that this girl should be the occasion. I think he really ought to give way."

She turned her chair round a little and picking up the book I had been reading in the morning began to turn the leaves absently.

254

Her eyes being off me, I felt I could allow myself
to leave the room. Its atmosphere had become hopeless for
little Fyne's domestic peace. You may smile. But to the
solemn all things are solemn. I had enough sagacity to under-
stand that.

I slipped out into the porch. The dog was slumbering
at Fyne's feet. The muscular little man leaning on his elbow
and gazing over the fields presented a forlorn figure. He turned
his head quickly, but seeing I was alone, relapsed into his
moody contemplation of the green landscape.

I said loudly and distinctly: "I've come out to smoke
a cigarette," and sat down near him on the little bench. Then
lowering my voice: "Tolerance is an extremely difficult virtue,"
I said. "More difficult for some than heroism. More difficult
than compassion."

I avoided looking at him. I knew well enough that he
would not like this opening. General ideas were not to his taste. He
mistrusted them. I lighted a cigarette, not that I wanted to smoke, but
to give another moment to the consideration of the advice -
the diplomatic advice I had made up my mind to bowl him over
with. And I continued in subdued tones.

"I have been led to make these remarks by what I have

255

discovered since you left us. I suspected from the first.
And now I am certain. What your wife can not tolerate in this
affair is Miss de Barral being what she is."

He made a movement, but I kept my eyes away from him and
went on steadily. "That is - her being a woman. I have some
idea of Mrs. Fyne's mental attitude towards society with its
injustices, with its atrocious or ridiculous conventions. As
against them there is no audacity of action your wife's mind
refuses to sanction. The doctrine which I imagine she stuffs
into the pretty heads of your girl-guests is almost vengeful.
A sort of moral fire-and-sword doctrine. How far the lesson
is wise is not for me to say. I don't permit myself to judge.
I seem to see her very delightful disciples singeing themselves
with the torches, and cutting their fingers with the swords of
Mrs. Fyne's furnishing.

"My wife holds her opinions very seriously," murmured
Fyne suddenly.

"Yes. No doubt," I assented in a low voice as before.
"But it is a mere intellectual exercise. What I see is that
in dealing with reality Mrs. Fyne ceases to be tolerant. In
other words, that she can't forgive Miss de Barral for being a

256

woman and behaving like a woman. And yet this is not only
reasonable and natural, but it is her only chance. A woman
against the world has no resources but in herself. Her only
means of action is to be what _she is_. You understand what I
mean."

Fyne mumbled between his teeth that he understood.
But he did not seem interested. What he expected of me was
to extricate him from a difficult situation. I don't know
how far credible this may sound, to less solemn married
couples, but to remain at variance with his wife seemed to
him a considerable incident. Almost a disaster.

"It looks as though I didn't care what happened to
her brother," he said. "And after all if anything........."

I became a little impatient but without raising
my tone. "What thing?" I asked. "The liability to get
penal servitude is so far like genius that it isn't hereditary.
And what else can be objected to the girl? All the energy of
her deeper feelings, which she would use up vainly in the
danger and fatigue of a struggle with society may be turned
into devoted attachment to the man who offers her a way of
escape from what can be only a life of moral anguish. I
don't mention the physical difficulties."

257

Glancing at Fyne out of the corner of one eye I discovered that he was attentive. He made the remark that I should have said all this to his wife. It was a sensible enough remark. But I had given Mrs. Fyne up. I asked him if his impression was that his wife meant to entrust him with a letter for her brother?

No. He didn't think so. There were certain reasons which made Mrs. Fyne unwilling to commit her arguments to paper. Fyne was to be primed with them. But he had no doubt that if he persisted in his refusal she would make up her mind to write.

"She does not wish me to go unless with a full conviction that she is right," said Fyne solemnly.

"She's very exacting," I commented. And then I reflected that she was used to it. "Would nothing less do for once?"

"You don't mean that I should give way - do you?" asked Fyne in a whisper of alarmed suspicion.

As this was exactly what I meant, I let his fright sink into him. He fidgetted. If the word may be used of so solemn a personage, he wriggled. And when the horrid suspicion had descended into his very heels, so to speak, he became very still.

258

He sat gazing stonily into space bounded by the yellow, burnt-
up slopes of the rising ground a couple of miles away. The
face of the down showed the white scar of the quarry where not
more than sixteen hours before Fyne and I had been groping in
the dark with horrible apprehension of finding under our hands
the shattered body of a girl. For myself I had in addition
the memory of my meeting with her. She was certainly walking
very near the edge - courting a sinister solution. But, now,
having by the most unexpected chance come upon a man, she had
found another way to escape from the world. Such world as was
open to her - without shelter, without bread, without honour.
The best she could have found in it would have been a precarious
dole of pity diminishing as her years increased. The appeal
of the abandoned child Flora to the sympathies of the Fynes had
been irresistible. But now she had become a woman, and Mrs.
Fyne was presenting an implacable front to a particularly
feminine transaction. I may say triumphantly feminine.
It is true that Mrs. Fyne did not want women to be women. Her
theory was that they should turn into unscrupulous sexless
nuisances. An offended theorist dwelt in her bosom somewhere.
In what way she expected Flora de Barral to set about saving
herself from a most miserable existence I can't conceive; but

259

I verily believe that she would have found it easier to for-
give the girl an actual crime; say the rifling of the Bourne-
mouth old lady's desk, for instance. And then - for Mrs.
Fyne was very much of a woman herself - her sense of proprietor-
ship was very strong within her; and though she had not much
use for her brother, yet she did not like to see him annexed
by another woman. By a chit of a girl. And such a girl,
too. Nothing is truer than that, in this world, the luckless
have no right to their opportunities - as if misfortune were
a legal disqualification. Fyne's sentiments (as they naturally
would be in a man) had more stability. A good deal of his
sympathy survived. Indeed I heard him murmur "Ghastly nui-
sance", but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic
accord that he was thinking. With my eyes on the dog lying
curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in
a subdued impersonal tone: "Yes. Why not let yourself be
persuaded?"

I never saw little Fyne less solemn. He hissed
through his teeth in unexpectedly figurative style that it
would take a lot to persuade him to "push under" the head of
a poor devil of a girl quite sufficiently plucky" - and snorted.

260

He was still gazing at the distant quarry, and I think he was
affected by that sight. I assured him that I was far from
advising him to do anything so cruel. I am convinced he had
always doubted the soundness of my principles, because he
turned on me swiftly as though he had been on the watch for
a lapse from the straight path.

"Then what do you mean? That I should pretend!"

"No! What nonsense! It would be immoral. I may
however tell you that if I had to make a choice I would rather
do something immoral than something cruel. What I meant was
that, not believing in the efficacy of the interference, the
whole question is reduced to your consenting to do what your
wife wishes you to do. That would be acting like a gentleman,
surely. And acting unselfishly too, because I can very well
understand how distasteful it may be to you. Generally speak-
ing, an unselfish action is a moral action. I'll tell you
what. I'll go with you ..... "

He turned round and stared at me with surprise and sus-
picion. "You would go with me?" he repeated.

"You don't understand," I said, amused at the in-
credulous disgust of his tone. "I must run up to town to-
morrow morning. We will go together. You have a set of
travelling chessmen?"

231

His physiognomy, contracted by a variety of emotions, relaxed to a certain extent at the idea of a game. I told him that as I had business at the Docks he should have my company to the very ship.

"We shall beguile the way to the wilds of the East by improving conversation," I encouraged him.

"My brother-in-law is staying at an hotel - the Eastern Hotel," he said, becoming sombre again. "I haven't the slightest idea where it is."

"I know the place. I shall leave you at the door with the comfortable conviction that you are doing what's right since it pleases a lady and cannot do any harm to anybody whatever."

"You think so? No harm to anybody?" he repeated doubtfully.

"I assure you it's not the slightest use," I said with all possible emphasis which seemed only to increase the solemn discontent of his expression.

"But in order that my going should be a perfectly candid proceeding I must first convince my wife that it isn't the slightest use," he objected portentously.

"Oh, you casuist!" I said. And I said nothing more because at that moment Mrs. Fyne stepped out into the porch.

262

We rose together at her appearance. Her clear, colourless,
unflinching glance enveloped us both critically. I sustained
the chill smilingly, but Fyne stopted at once to release the
dog. He was some time about it; then simultaneously with his
recovery of upright position the animal passed at one bound from
profoundest slumber into most tumultuous activity. Enveloped
in the tornado of his inane scurryings and barkings I took Mrs.
Fyne's hand extended to me woodenly and bowed over it with
mechanical deference. She walked down the path without a word;
Fyne had preceded her and was waiting by the open gate. They
passed out and walked up the road surrounded by a low cloud of
dust raised by the dog gyrating madly about their two figures
progressing side by side with rectitude and propriety, and (I
don't know why) looking to me as if they had annexed the whole
countryside. Perhaps it was that they had impressed me some-
how with the sense of their superiority. What superiority?
Perhaps it consisted just in their limitations. It was obvious
that neither of them had carried away a high opinion of me.
But what affected me most was the indifference of the Fyne dog.
He used to precipitate himself at full speed and with a frightful
final upward spring upon my waistcoat, at least once at each of

263

our meetings. He had neglected that ceremony this time not-
withstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in offer-
ing him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation
from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on
a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral - who was
morbidly sensitive.

I sat down in the porch and, maybe inspired by secret
antagonism to the Fynes, I said to myself deliberately that
Captain Anthony must be a fine fellow. Yet on the facts as I
knew them he might have been a pernicious trifler or a downright
scoundrel. He had made a miserable, hopeless girl follow him
clandestinely to London. It is true that the girl had written
since, only Mrs. Fyne had been remarkably vague as to the con-
tents. They were unsatisfactory. They did not positively
announce imminent nuptials as far as I could make it out from
her rather mysterious hints. But then her inexperience might
have led her astray. There was no fathoming the innocence of
a woman like Mrs. Fyne who, venturing as far as possible in
theory, would know nothing of the real aspect of things. It
would have been comic if she were making all this fuss for
nothing. But I rejected this suspicion for the honour of human

264

nature.

I imagined to myself Captain Anthony as simple and romantic. It was much more pleasant. Genius is not hereditary but temperament may be. And he was the son of a poet with an admirable gift of individualising or etherealising the common-place; of making touching, delicate, fascinating, the most the hopeless commonplaces of so-called, refined existence.

What I could not understand was Mrs. Fyne's dog-in-the-manger attitude. Sentimentally she needed that brother of hers so little! What could it matter to her one way or another - setting aside common humanity which would suggest at least a neutral attitude. Unless indeed it was the blind working of the law that in our world of chances the luckless must be put in the wrong somehow.

And musing thus on the general inclination of our instincts towards injustice I met unexpectedly, at the turn of the road, as it were, a shape of duplicity. It might have been unconscious on Mrs. Fyne's part, but her leading idea appeared to me to be not to keep, not to preserve her brother - but to get rid of him definitely. She did not hope to stop anything. She had too much sense for that. Almost anyone out of an

265

idiotasyllum would have had enough sense for that. She wanted
the protest to be made, emphatically, with Fyne's fullest con-
currence in order to make all intercourse for the future im-
possible. Such an action would estrange the pair for ever
from the Fynes. She understood her brother and the girl too.
Happy together, they would never forgive that outspoken hos-
tility - and should the marriage turn out badly .... Well, it
would be just the same. Neither of them would be likely to
bring their troubles to such a good prophet of evil.

Yes. That must have been her motive. The inspira-
tion of conscious or possibly unconscious Machiavellism!

Either she was afraid of having a sister-in-law to look after
during the husband's long absences; or dreaded the more or less
distant eventuality of her brother being persuaded to leave the
sea, the friendly refuge of his unhappy youth, and to settle on
shore, bringing to her very door this undesirable, this em-
barrassing connection. And in that case what difficulties
might be created, what distasteful explanations might be forced
on one! She had probably persuaded herself that it was more
worthy, more courageous to declare one's attitude at once - and
even more kind. The motive of kindness was not likely to have

266

been forgotten in that obscure travail of mind forging motives
for actions. She wanted to be done with it - maybe simply from
the fatigue of continuous effort in good or evil, which, in the
bulk of common mortals, accounts for so many surprising incon-
sistencies of conduct.

I don't know that I knowingly classed Mrs. Fyne, in my
thoughts, amongst common mortals. She was too quietly sure of
herself for that. But little Fyne, as I spied him next morning
(out of the carriage window) speeding along the platform, looked
very much like a common flustered mortal who has made a very near
thing of catching his train: the starting wild eyes, the tense and
excited face, the distracted gait - all the common symptoms were
there rendered more impressive by the flutter of his native solem-
nity which clung to him like a torn garment. Had he - I asked
myself with interest - resisted his wife to the very last minute
and then bolted up the road from the last conclusive argument,
as though it had been a loaded gun suddenly produced? I opened
the carriage door, and a vigorous porter shoved him in from be-
hind just as the end of the rustic platform went gliding swiftly
from under his feet. He was very much out of breath, and I
waited with some curiosity the moment he would recover his power
of speech. That moment came. He said "Good morning" with a

269.

I said, "if only no bigger than the palm of my hand, she would
probably learn to keep a better balance."

Fyne ignored this little remark. His wife, he said,
was not the sort of person to be addressed mockingly on a serious
subject. There was an unpleasant strain oflvity in that
letter, extending even to the references to Captain Anthony him-
self. Such a disposition was enough, his wife had pointed out
to him, to alarm one for the future, had all the circumstances
of that preposterous project been as satisfactory as in fact
they were not. Other parts of the letter seemed to have a
challenging tone - as if daring them (the Fynes) to approve her
conduct. And at the same time implying that she did not care,
that it was for their own sakes that she hoped they would "go
against the world - the horrid world which had crushed poor papa."

Fyne called upon me to admit that this was pretty cool -
considering. And there was another thing, too. It seems that
for the last six months (she had been assisting two ladies who
kept a kindergarten school in Bayswater - a mere pittance), Flora
had insisted on devoting all her spare time to the study of the
trial. She had been looking up files of old newspapers, and
working herself up into a state of indignation with what she
called the injustice and the hypocrisy of the prosecution.

270.

Her father, Fyne reminded me, had made some palpable hits in his answers in Court, and she had fastened on them triumphantly. She had reached the conclusion of her father's innocence, and had been brooding over it. Mrs. Fyne had pointed out to him the danger of this ....

The train ran into the station and Fyne, jumping out directly it came to a standstill, seemed glad to cut short the conversation. We walked in silence a little way, boarded a 'bus, then walked again. I don't suppose that since the days of his childhood, when surely he was taken to see the Tower, he had been once east of Temple Bar. He looked about him sullenly; and when I pointed out to him in the distance the rounded front of the Eastern Hotel at the bifurcation of two very broad, mean, shabby thoroughfares, rising like a grey stucco tower above the lowly roofs of the dirty-yellow two-story houses, he only grunted disapprovingly.

"I wouldn't lay too much stress on what you have been telling me," I observed quietly as we approached slowly that unattractive building. "No man will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to be not well balanced, - you know."

"Oh! Accepted his suit," muttered Fyne, who seemed

271.

to have been very thoroughly convinced indeed. "It may
have been the other way about." And then he added: "I am
going through with it."

I said that this was very praiseworthy but that a certain
moderation of statement ...... He waved his hand at me and
mended his pace. I guess that he was anxious to get his mission
over as quickly as possible. He barely gave himself time to
shake hands with me and made a rush at the narrow glass door
with the word Hotel on it. It swung to behind his back with
no more noise than the snap of a toothless jaw.

The absurd temptation to remain and see what would come
of it got over my better judgment. I hung about irresolute,
wondering how long an embassy of that sort would take, and
whether Fyne on coming out would consent to be communicative.
I feared he would be shocked at finding me there,¹¹ would con-
sider my conduct incorrect, conceivably treat me with contempt.
I walked off a few paces. Perhaps it would be possible to
read something on Fyne's face as he came out; and, if necessary,
I could always eclipse myself discreetly through the door of
one of the bars, the ground floor of the Eastern Hotel was
an unabashed pub, with plate-glass fronts, a display of

272.

brass rails, and divided into many compartments each having its
own entrance.

But of course all this was silly. The marriage, the
love, the affairs of Captain Anthony were none of my business.
I was on the point of moving down the street for good when my
attention was attracted by a girl approaching the hotel entrance
from the west. She was dressed very modestly in black. It was
the white straw hat of a good form and trimmed with a bunch of
pale roses which had caught my eye. The whole figure seemed
familiar. Of course! Flora de Barral. She was making for
the hotel, she was going in. And Fyne was with Captain Anthony!
To meet him could not be pleasant for her. I wished to save her
from the awkwardness, and as I hesitated what to do she looked up
and our eyes happened to meet just as she was turning off the
pavement into the hotel doorway. Instinctively I extended my arm.
It was enough to make her stop. I suppose she had some faint
notion that she had seen me before somewhere. She walked slowly
forward, prudent and attentive, watching my faint smile.

"Excuse me," I said directly she had approached me near
enough. "Perhaps you would like to know that Mr. Fyne is up-stairs with Captain Anthony at this moment."

She uttered a faint "Ah! Mr. Fyne!" I could read in

273.

her eyes that she had recognised me now. Her serious expression extinguished the imbecile grin of which I was conscious. I raised my hat. She responded with a slow inclination of the head while her luminous, mistrustful maiden's glance seemed to whisper, "What is this one doing here?"

"I came up to town with Fyne this morning," I said, speaking quietly, in a businesslike tone. "I have to see a friend in East India Dock. Fyne and I parted this moment at the door here ..... " The girl regarded me with darkening eyes ... "Mrs. Fyne did not come with her husband," I went on, then hesitated before that white face so still in the pearly shadow thrown down by the hat-brim. "But she sent him," I murmured by way of warning.

Her eyelids fluttered slowly over the fixed stare. I imagine she was not much disconcerted by this development. "I live a long way from here," she whispered.

I said perfunctorily, "Do you?" And we remained gazing at each other. The uniform paleness of her complexion was not that of an anaemic girl. It had a transparent vitality and at that particular moment the faintest possible rosy tinge, the merest suspicion of colour, an equivalent, I suppose, in any other girl to blushing like a peony, while she told me that

274

Captain Anthony had arranged to show her the ship that morning.

It was easy to understand that she did not want to meet
Fyne. And when I mentioned in a discreet murmur that he had
come because of her letter she glanced at the hotel-door quickly,
and moved off a few steps to a position where she could watch
the entrance without being seen. I followed her. At the
junction of the two thoroughfares she stopped in the thin
traffic of the broad pavement and turned to me with an air of
challenge. "And so you know."

I told her that I had not seen the letter. I had only
heard of it. She was a little impatient. "I mean all about
me."

Yes. I knew all about her. The distress of Mr. and
Mrs. Fyne - especially of Mrs. Fyne was so great that they would
have shared it with anybody almost - not belonging to their
circle of friends. I happened to be at hand - that was all.

"You understand that I am not their friend. I am only
a holiday acquaintance."

"She was not very much upset?" queried Flora de Barral,
meaning, of course, Mrs. Fyne. And I admitted that she was
less so than her husband - and even less than myself. Mrs.
Fyne was a very self-possessed person which nothing could

275

startle out of her extreme theoretical position. She did not seem startled when Fyne and I proposed going to the quarry.

"You put that notion into their heads," the girl said.

I advanced that the notion was in their heads already. But it was much more vividly in my head since I had seen her up there with my own eyes, tempting providence.

She was looking at me with extreme attention, and murmured:

"Is that what you called it to them? Tempting ... "

"No. I told them that you were making up your mind and I came along just then. I told them that you were saved by me. My shout checked you ... " She moved her head gently from right to left in negation ... "No? Well, have it your own way."

I thought to myself, "She has found another issue. She wants to forget now. And no wonder. She wants to persuade herself that she had never known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life. "After all," I conceded aloud, "things are not always what they seem."

Her little head with its deep blue eyes, eyes of tenderness and anger under the black arch of fine eyebrows was

276

very still. The mouth looked very red in the white face peeping from under the veil, the little pointed chin had in its form something aggressive. Slight and even angular in her modest black dress she was an appealing and - yes - she was a desirable little figure.

Her lips moved very fast asking me.

"And they believed you at once?"

"Yes, they believed me at once. Mrs. Fyne's word to us was "Go!"

A white gleam between the red lips was so short that I remained uncertain whether it was a smile or a ferocious baring of little even teeth. The rest of the face preserved its innocent, tense and enigmatical expression. She spoke rapidly.

"No, it wasn't your shout. I had been there some time before you saw me. And I was not there to tempt providence, as you call it. I went up there for - for what you thought I was going to do. Yes, I climbed two fences. I did not mean to leave anything to providence. There seem to be people for whom providence can do nothing. I suppose you are shocked to hear me talk like that?"

I shook my head. I was not shocked. What had kept her back all that time, till I appeared on the scene below, she was neither fear nor any other kind of hesitation. One reaches

277.

a point, she said with appalling youthful simplicity, where
nothing that concerned one mattered any longer. But something
did keep her back. I should have never guessed what it was.
She herself confessed that it seemed absurd to say. It was the
Fyne dog.

Flora paused looking at me with a peculiar expression
and then went on. You see, she imagined he had become extremely
attached to her. She took it into her head that he might fall
over or jump down after her. She tried to drive him away.
She spoke sternly to him. It only made him more frisky. He
barked and jumped about her skirt in his usual idiotic high
spirits. He scampered away in circles between the pines charging
upon her and leaping as high as her waist. She commanded, "Go
away. Go home." She even picked up from the ground a bit of
a broken branch and threw it at him. At this his delight knew
no bounds; his rushes became faster, his yapping louder; he
seemed to be having the time of his life. She was convinced
that the moment she threw herself down he would spring over after
her as if it were part of the game. She was vexed almost to
tears. She was touched too. And when he stood still at some
distance as if suddenly rooted to the ground wagging his tail

278

slowly and watching her intensely with his shining eyes
another fear came to her. She imagined herself gone and the
 creature sitting on the brink, its head thrown up to the sky
and howling for hours. This thought was not to be borne.
Then my shout reached her ears, *shout*

She told me all this with simplicity. My voice had
destroyed her poise - the suicide poise of her mind. Every
act of ours, the most criminal, the most mad presupposes a
balance of thought, feeling and will, like a correct attitude
for an effective stroke in a game. And I had destroyed it.
She was no longer in proper form for the act. She was not very
much annoyed. Next day would do. She would have to slip
away without attracting the notice of the dog. She thought of
the necessity almost tenderly. She came down the path carrying
her despair with lucid calmness. But when she saw herself
deserted for me by the dog, she had an impulse to turn round,
go up again and be done with it. Not even that animal cared
for her - in the end.

"I really did think that he was attached to me. What
did he want to pretend for, like this? I thought nothing could
hurt me any more. Oh yes. I would have gone up, but I felt

279.

suddenly so tired. So tired. And then you were there.
I didn't know what you would do. You might have tried to
follow me and I didn't think I could run - not up hill - not
then."

She had raised her white face a little, and it seemed
bizarre to hear her say these things. At that time of the
morning there are comparatively few people out in that part of
the town. The broad interminable perspective of the East India
Dock Road, the great perspective of drab brick walls, of grey
pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts
and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in
its spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of
forms, of colouring, of life - under a harsh unconcerned sky
dried by the wind to a clear blue. It had been raining during
the night. The sunshine itself seemed poor. From time to time
a few bits of paper, a little dust and straw whirled past us on
the broad flat promontory of the pavement before the rounded
front of the hotel.

Flora de Barral was silent for a while. I said:

"And next day you thought better of it."

Again she raised her eyes to mine with that peculiar

230

expression of informed innocence; and again her white cheeks
took on the faintest tinge of pink - the merest shadow of a
blush.

"Next day," she uttered distinctly, "I didn't think.
I remembered. That was enough. I remembered what I should
never have forgotten. Never. And Captain Anthony arrived
at the cottage in the evening."

"Ah yes. Captain Anthony," I murmured. And she repeated also in a murmur, "Yes! Captain Anthony." The faint flush of warm life left her face. I subdued my voice still more and not looking at her: "You found him sympathetic?" I ventured.

Her long dark lashes went down a little with an air of
calculated discretion. At least so it seemed to me. And yet
no one could say that I was inimical to that girl. But there you
are! Explain it as you may, in this world the friendless, like
the poor, are always a little suspect, as if honesty and delicacy
were only possible to the privileged few.

"Why do you ask?" she said after a time, raising her eyes
suddenly to mine in an effect of candour which on the same principle, (of the disinherited not being to be trusted) might have
been judged equivocal.

"If you mean what right I have ...." She moved slightly