IT happened thus. Leversedge was off duty. He and I were alone, drinking our coffee after luncheon in the central hall of the hotel. It is a very good hall, lighted from above by a glass roof. Galleries—over the white balustrades of which waiters and chambermaids, valets, couriers, and ladies'-maids lean half the day, watching the antics of their social superiors down below—open upon it right up to the fourth floor.

The Perrys had gone out to luncheon. Mrs. Septimus Mertyns had just announced her advent at a popular hostelry in the neighbouring little town—half a mile away down a scorching boulevard, very inadequately shaded by rows of small, round-headed mountain-ash trees. You may reach the place—the Perrys had done so—by means of an electric tram of phenomenal joltiness, the whirrings and hootings of which distract the sensitive ear from 7 A.M. to 9.30 at night.

Mrs. Mertyns, like the highland chieftain of legend or heroic story, had brought her tail along with her. A truly resplendent tail, socially and intellectually considered; dazzling to the eyes of Perry père et mère, and even, in a degree, to the more experienced orbs of the Carissima also. For it counted a clever peeress who does not get on well with her stupid peer; pretty Mrs. Neville St. John, some time Miss Hattie White, an American. (She gets on equally well with St. John or without him, so there is no indiscretion in naming names. Upon the present occasion, I may remark, she was getting on quite capitally without him.) Walter Creighton, A.R.A., was also of the party; and Percy Gerrard, the well-known editor of the . Lastly, Septimus Mertyns himself, looking bleak and slightly harried. When his wife clearly is enjoying herself, it is reprehensibly weak of a husband to look harried. Bleak he must look, I suppose, poor dear, if nature has fashioned him that way,—but let that pass. The Perrys were bidden to meet the resplendent tail, and the Perrys went.

Leversedge did not go. Being a very true gentleman, he assumed that he had not cared to go. “It was too hot,”—too hot, forsooth, for this sun-grilled being just home from the tropics! Whether he had not been included in the invitation, or whether Miss Perry had desired him to refuse it, offered food for speculation. I could not determine. But I observed that he was a trifle low in his mind as he sat in that cool hall, among the palms and indiarubber plants, smoking the cigarette of peace and drinking black coffee. His talk ran on serious subjects.

The irruption of some lively children from out of the lift, accompanied by French bonnes and English governesses galore, caused a pause in our conversation. Leversedge was very fond of children, a wholesome trait in any man's character. He watched them, and as their cries and chatter died away out of doors in the garden he asked me—

“Do you believe in devils?”

Now, this, if you like, was serious. It almost amounted to being fundamental; and I own to an inherent distaste for formulating opinions upon fundamentals.

“A devil, Leversedge,” I therefore playfully protested. “Don't let us approach the question in the plural number. It becomes too complicated, too crowded. One devil,—one surely is enough for all practical purposes? In the singular he is precious, though archaic; and, if only for dramatic and literary reasons, I don't think we can afford to abolish him. He supplies the dash of absolute black, you see, which brings out all the delicate lights and shades of the moral picture. Without him the nuances would lose their values. No, we must keep one. He may be of any size you like,—quite a small one if you wish it, a veritable little ewe-lamb of a devil. But for the sake of his colour,—I am getting slightly mixed as to sex, I fancy, but my knowledge of the sheepfold is scarcely professional,—well, of its colour, which is black, you understand, uncompromising black, I implore that one, just one, may be spared to us.”

Leversedge smiled upon me, but in a spirit of gentle endurance. His pensiveness remained, unabated.

“I was not talking of property devils,” he answered; “and they would hardly serve your purpose anyhow; for they seem to make them red nowadays, mostly, not black. I saw last time I was home, at the Lyceum; but I didn't think the scarlet variety patronised there amounted to very much. They were altogether too solid. You know, at a push you could do for them,—shoot, or stick, or strangle them. You must be an uncommonly poor lot if you find things frightening that you could strangle.”

He smoked reflectively for a little.

“No,” he went on; “I—I mean you—I mean nobody's afraid of what they can strangle. Even when I was home last, I could have supplied the management with the ground-plan of a much nastier species of fiend than those hairy, pudding-bodied creatures. And now—”

Leversedge's voice caught with a click in his throat. He sprang to his feet, making a violent movement of both hands, as though forcing something heavy and clinging off his lap.

“Get down,” he cried, “you brute,—you hideous brute.”

This was startling. But there are incidents which, while provoking curiosity almost to bursting-point, have about them a gravity—a gravity born of their very absurdity sometimes—which would effectually prevent any but a double-soled idiot making comments or asking questions. I did neither. Leversedge had just spoken of people being frightened; and that more sympathetically than I should have expected, for he was himself certainly no poltroon. He was a quiet, steady, sensible fellow, the kind of man to whom women turn instinctively, as to a life-belt or lightning-conductor, in an emergency. Yet at this moment his face expressed fear, and more than fear. It expressed downright terror and uncontrollable disgust.

Really he presented a very distressing spectacle. His mouth was slightly open, while his lips curled back queerly from his teeth. It may sound ridiculous, but I could almost swear that his hair bristled. His action had been too rapid for premeditation. I never doubted it was wholly spontaneous and honest. Still, I knew—knew as positively as I have ever known anything in my life—that nothing, animate or inanimate, had been reposing upon his excellently white, flannel trousers. Knew, equally well, that nothing had slipped from off them on to the inlaid marble floor as, beating his knees, he lunged up out of the chair beside me.

We had only just finished our coffee. The tray and a flacon of cognac still stood on the table before me. After about a minute Leversedge laid hold of the flacon, and emptied half its contents into one of the dirty coffee-cups. He gulped down the brandy, and wiped his moustache and beard—as well as he could, for his teeth were chattering and his hands shaking, like those of a person in the cold fit of a fever. Then he walked up and down the length of the hall once or twice, fished a cane stool out from under one of the seats, came back and sat down beside me again.

He had entered into possession of himself. But he was still shaking. Very carefully he placed the stool on his knees, wrong way about, so that the four legs of it stuck up into the air, took out his cigarette case, and lighted another cigarette.

“I beg your pardon, Hammond,” he said, as he did so. “This has not happened to me for some time, and it took me by surprise. I don't make such a fool of myself when I am in training—when I'm habitually hag-ridden. But I've been pretty free of all that lately.”

He looked round, doing his best to smile, though his lips twitched oddly.

T0 most of us foggy islanders 90° in the shade takes the gilt off the ginger-bread even in so delectable a matter as a luncheon to meet a resplendent tail. Perry père et mère were distinctly demoralised in aspect, and even the Carissima was not quite up to her usual level.

Miss Perry looked warm, which was a pity, for it was not her rôle to look warm. It was her rôle to remind you of sunrise rather than sunset, to be virginal, flower-like, I might say dewy. She was tall; and our grandmothers, I think, would have described her appearance as elegant, the more so that her shoulders sloped and that her features were somewhat indefinite. For truly, in her the paternal rat and the maternal clock-moon had mixed themselves to the point of uncertainty, the roundness of the one putting a perpetual check upon the sharpness of the other, and vice versâ—two affirmatives going to make a negative, if one may reverse the rule laid down in our English grammar. Her colouring, on the other hand, was quite definite. It was red and brown. I have heard it called Italian, or gipsy-like. A budding poet once asserted, in dedicatory verse, that her complexion reminded him of split pomegranates. But then, poets pay odd compliments—specially young ones. Miss Perry's hair was brown, and abundant. Her eyes were also brown, and the whites of them very white. They were extremely pretty eyes; not large and placed flatly in her head, but dewy, almost always dewy, and full of appeal.

In short, she was unquestionably an uncommonly attractive young lady, particularly at a little distance. She needed to be focussed—but nearly every pretty woman, like every good picture, needs that! And she dressed well, though her clothes needed focussing too. At close quarters they had an unhappy knack of looking new without looking quite fresh. On the day in case, I remember, she wore a brown linen suit with a wealth of primrose silk vest to it. Both were smart, but slightly tired—perhaps from long sojourn in her boxes. The yellow roses in her large, black-lace hat were tired also. But I own to a sense of shame in having noticed these defects. I felt it was unhandsome of me, since she advanced upon her lover with a really captivating air of appeal and anxiety.

A pathetic note had intruded itself into my friendship for Constantine Leversedge during the last half-hour. If any pleasure was going, he had a prescriptive right to it. He was owed compensation. Solitude à deux is, of course, the very seat of bliss in matters of the affections; I therefore did my possible to procure him a tête-à-tête with the fair Charlotte by concentrating the attention of her parents upon myself. I succeeded. Mrs. Perry, dear good woman, had subsided on to the settee in the centre of the hall, too extenuated by the heat to be otherwise than perfectly docile. Mr. Perry was active, I might almost say rampageous; he was thirsting to communicate impressions, triumphs. In the capacity of an audience I was therefore acceptable to him.

“Well, well, good afternoon to you, Mr. Hammond,” he cried. “You see, we have returned. Not all the darts of the sun-god—torrid sunshine to-day, I'm sure, really torrid—could detain us any longer. Even in the gayest scenes, the most intellectually stimulating society, the heart of the true woman”—Mr. Perry nodded playfully over his shoulder in the direction of Miss Charlotte and Leversedge—“draws her back to ‘the kindred points of heaven and home.’ Hotel and heaven and home, as I may say in this case; which is accurate in fact, and pleasing to the ear as alliteration, eh, Mr. Hammond? Yes, thank you, we have had a charming party, really a delightful party,—haven't we, Mamma?”

This to Mrs. Perry, flushed as a moon in the early stages of an eclipse, vainly courting coolness by untying her bonnet strings and spreading out her fingers upon her knees, as she sat upon the settee.

“Delightful,” he continued, without waiting for an answer; “and most gratifying to us as—as the authors of her days, as I may say—wasn't it, Mamma?—to witness the high estimation in which our dear Charlotte is held by really superior persons. Nothing new, of course,”—Mr. Perry said this with a smile which came as near being haughty as the fashion of a rat permitted;—“but testimony to an old truth, if that truth be pleasing, is always welcome. And she sustained her part in the conversation victoriously. I do not exaggerate when I employ the word victorious. Really there are moments when my daughter's knowledge of all subjects that come under discussion almost staggers me. It is encyclopædic, I'm sure,—positively encyclopædic. I listen and admire and— Still the wonder grows How one small head can carry all she knows.”

(For under excitement it was Mr. Perry's habit thus to gather in the British poets by some more or less hybrid quotation. I have heard with trembling, that he has been known to recite whole poems of a patriotic character—“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” for instance, or “God bless the Prince of Wales”—during the lapses of active interest—these are not infrequent, I understand—at local meetings of the Primrose League.)

“Mamma, I am sure, will endorse my statement,” he added. “My daughter in congenial society, among her intellectual equals, is surprising, really surprising.”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Perry said, thus appealed to—“of course everybody was very clever. Mrs. Mertyns' friends always are. And it seemed to me Charlotte talked as cleverly as any of them; at least I understood quite as little of what she meant. And it always shows people are saying what is clever when you can't make out what they mean; don't you think so, Mr. Hammond?”

“Unquestionably, my dear lady,” I replied. “An infallible test!”

Mr. Perry glanced at me sharply, and then again addressed that unconscious satirist his wife.

“You would like to have the lift, my love, and go up to our apartment and rest.—Here, ascenseur, ascenseur!”

“I think I will sit still a little first,” Mrs. Perry replied, throwing back her bonnet strings. “Heat is very confusing. Don't you find it so, Mr. Hammond? It quite upsets me. Once or twice at luncheon I turned so faint and giddy I wondered if I could remain at table, which was very awkward for me.”—Mrs. Perry sighed.—“It seems to me clever people, like Charlotte's friends, are so strong,” she said. “They often look delicate, and yet somehow they always seem ready to go anywhere, and do anything, and talk. They never seem overcome with the heat, or the cold either, for that matter. I'm sure it must be very nice to feel like—”

“Habit,” broke in Mr. Perry,—“habit—there is a vast amount in that. I declare I hesitate to limit the power of habit. But I wish you had been with us, Mr. Hammond. You would have appreciated the conversation, and no doubt increased its charms—no doubt increased them. One brief passage of arms between my daughter and Mr. Percy Gerrard, upon the place of the imagination in modern realistic fiction, was brilliant, positively brilliant. And so the wordy battle grew, swelling almost to dissonance; Then broke in laughter, and, with courteous phrase, Sunk back to sweet agreement—this the end. And Mertyns told some very good stories towards the conclusion of lunch. One of the late Earl of Beaconsfield, which was new to me. A first-rate story—not more so than some of my own, but still first-rate. Just remind me, after dinner, my dear, and I'll tell it to Mr. Hammond. It will amuse him.”

“Yes, but it seems a pity you couldn't have heard Mr. Mertyns tell it himself; for it seemed to me everybody would have been so glad to see you, Mr. Hammond,” Mrs. Perry said. “They all seemed so surprised to hear you were at this hotel with us. Mrs. St. John said she wondered what on earth you could be doing here, and that she wished so much you would come and tell her.”

“Mrs. St. John is a delightful woman, and if she is very good perhaps I will tell her,” I replied.

Perplexity obscured Mrs. Perry's countenance as a passing cloud, then she beamed out harvest-moon-wise at me.

“Oh,” she said, “I see. Now you're being clever.”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “I am guilty of much, but, believe me, of that never.”

“My dear, I really think we may as well be moving.”—This from Mr. Perry, not without a hint of asperity.—“Ascenseur! Where is that lazy lad? Asleep, I suppose, as usual.—Yes, most kind inquiries after you, I'm sure, Mr. Hammond. The ladies begged you would call upon them. In fact, I suspected,”—he here became very arch,—“I may have been wrong, but I suspected it was thought you were a little remiss in not having done so already. Come, ascenseur, ascenseur, I tell you; don't you hear?”

I WAS called away to Evian for a couple of days to meet a friend—who does not enter into this history, so we will, if you please, leave her out of it. I returned, rather depressed, by an afternoon boat that was packed with an amazingly plain-headed selection of tourists of all nations. They named the mountains by the help of red Baedekers, patronised the beauties of nature, smoked atrocious tobacco, expectorated freely, and were othervise objectionable to almost every sense.

Yet if you could detach your mind from the vileness of surrounding humanity, the aspect of nature was very enjoyable. Rain had fallen in the early morning, and the fresh-washed landscape wore a delightfully clean and youthful look. The hotels and villas on the north shore of the lake shone out among their rich orchards and gardens; while the lake itself, a “heavenly floor,” showing all shades from indigo to azure, was turned up with the most delectable bottle-green at the edges. The Savoy Alps were azure likewise, shot with pinkish lights upon their topmost crags, and with a bloom of sunlit woods about their feet. The Swiss are nothing but a nation of “marchands de soupe.” Granted; but it must be conceded they have the merit of selling the contents of their stock-pots in an admirably pretty country.

On disembarking, the first person I saw—barring the heavy porter in peg-top trousers, who managed the gang-plank—was Mr. Perry. He appeared worried. He scuttled up and down over the black timbers of the pier and clung to the rusty side-rails, scanning the lovely levels of the lake with irritable eyes. At intervals he hailed some—to me—imperceptible object in the far distance, and signalled with a bulky white umbrella. Catching sight of me, he saluted me with wavings of this instrument.

“Ah! you are back again, Mr. Hammond,” he cried. “And all our little society will be most happy to welcome you back—I'm sure, most happy. Even in so purely fortuitous an association of our fellow-creatures, even in the passing relations of an hotel, we miss the accustomed face, the vacant place at table raises a regret.”

I expressed my sense of indebtedness for these polite observations. But Mr. Perry bad returned to his agitated survey of the lake.

“Excuse me,” he exclaimed. “I think I perceive them.”

He climbed upon the cross-bar ironwork of rails with surprising agility, and gave forth a really portentous howl.

“Coming in that direction you must have seen them in passing, Mr. Hammond, in the steamer,” he said, turning suddenly and almost angrily upon me, after waiting vainly for some response to this terrible noise. “Did you not recognise them?”

“Who and what are they?” I ventured to inquire.

“Constantine Leversedge has taken my daughter out boating.”—Mr. Perry descended dejectedly from his perch.—“No, I was in error. I did not perceive them, nor evidently did you.”

He removed his hat and wiped his forehead. I may mention that Mr. Perry invariably wore a tall hat at this period, and black clothes. After which ceremony he somewhat recovered his equanimity.

“No, no,” he cried, “we must school ourselves, we must school ourselves— To wait and hope, and still to hope and wait, Last lesson learned by man of heaven directed fate. But I am not among the pessimists, Mr. Hammond. I can look forward, I am thankful to say, and look up.”

All of which unquestionably was very praiseworthy on the part of Mr. Perry; but a little too large, so it struck me, for the immediate situation. I pointed out that the young people were in no danger, that disaster was wholly improbable, the sky being absolutely clear, the water as smooth as a millpond.

“Ah, you misconceive me,” Mr. Perry rejoined.—He carried his head on one side, and nodded sagely, looking up from under his eyebrows.—“You misconceive me. I fear other dangers than material ones just now,—a father's anxieties, natural and not I think condemnable where the future of so dear an object as an only daughter is concerned. Frankly, then,—for in speaking to you I speak to a man of the world, Mr. Hammond,—our charming friends, Mrs. Septimus Mertyns and Mr. Gerrard, have called. They are actually here, they are indoors with Mamma. And it annoys me,” he said, “I cannot disguise from myself that it annoys me profoundly, my daughter should not be at home to receive them. Constantine shows himself inconsiderate in detaining her so long. I thought it probable our friends would visit us this afternoon, and I gave him a pretty broad hint on the subject. I regret to say so—but you must have observed it yourself, Mr. Hammond—Constantine Leversedge is obtuse, unhappily obtuse; he is insufficiently sensible of his social privileges. Having been deprived of intellectual advantages, and the enjoyment of intercourse with persons of superior gifts and position for so long, I should have expected him to prize these things highly. But unfortunately it is not so. He displays, is displaying at this moment, in my opinion, a lamentable indifference to an opportunity of cultivating a most valuable acquaintance. I hoped he had taken my hint. He assured me he would return soon after five. Unless I am very much mistaken, six will be striking almost immediately.”

Evidently this was serious. So I tried to appease Mr. Perry by remarking that, considering how exquisite a companion he possessed, Leversedge's conduct was more than comprehensible, excusable, almost justifiable. For is not unpunctuality, as I pointed out, the natural prerogative of happy lovers? For them time has ceased. Eternity enfolds them. How, then, can they be expected to remember that wholly mechanical contrivance, the clock? And, to pass from the general to the particular, was it altogether inconceivable that even Mrs. Mertyns might, at a push, recall faint memories of a period when to linger with the great Septimus beyond the appointed time had been bliss? Was Perry himself, indeed, entirely guiltless under this head? For had he never, in the dear dead past, toyed with Mrs. Perry,—pretty, pretty picture!—oblivious of the fleet-footed hours, which, as the poets so insistently remind us, “will not stay”?

“Ah yes, the young will be young, will be young, Mr. Hammond,” he admitted. “It therefore is incumbent upon those who, like Mamma and myself, have reached what I may term the watershed of our terrestrial existence, to watch attentively and prevent the commission of thoughtless indiscretion on the part of our youthful relatives. Keep a sharp look-out on our green apples, our green apples, ah ha!—eh? And society is not to be trifled with. Not—but, excuse me, this time I do perceive them.”

A rowing-boat, containing two persons, rounded the nose of the stone breakwater which protects the bathing-place and little harbour on the right of the garden. And my companion, uttering ejaculations of uncontrollable satisfaction, chased off the steamboat pier and trotted along the path at the bottom of the hotel grounds to meet it.

The breakwater, I may mention, runs back in a low, broad-topped stone wall, enclosing two sides of a triangular piece of ground planted with close rows of plane trees. The hotel boatman's house stands at one corner. The men dry their nets here, and the boats are hauled up for repairs. It is a nice, moist, shady place, commanding an entrancing view, where the gnat trumpets by day and by night, and the midge actively investigates all pasturage afforded by the human loiterer.

As for me, I never run; should not, I imagine, were it even to clasp to my heart a potentially eloping daughter—which thing, heaven, in its mercy, eternally forbid! So I followed Mr. Perry, in all the calm dignity of the non-parental mind, along the lake path under quivering balsam-poplars and charmingly pendent willows, arriving at the place of gnats only in time to see his lop-sided, little, black figure and the tall, cream-coloured one of the fair Charlotte speeding away, through sunshine and shadow, in the direction of the hotel and social distinction.

Verily, the ways of Providence are not equal! I had returned from Evian in a depressed frame of mind, as I have already recorded. I had started for that agreeably mundane little watering-place in a somewhat Byronic humour, determined to do a trifle of living on my own account. But the humour had not lasted. With me it rarely does. Once on the spot, a spirit of pallid Platonism invaded me, chilling to death all possibility of drama. It really was rather provoking, for I love drama; and the position had been worthy of one of those French comedies from which the heart must be extracted, during the process of adaptation for the English stage, if young maidens are to be spared anxiety when taking members of the elder generation to the theatre. I had planned it all so nicely, yet nothing had come of it. And now, directly I returned to this innocent locality, to these commonplace, not to say rather common, people, I found that, in full play which I had vainly sought across the water.

Mr. Perry's conversation had given me food for thought. While one glance at Leversedge assured me that for him the wheels had been going round during my absence, going round to some purpose.

HE had just beached the boat, a gaudy emerald-green and buff affair with scarlet cushions to it, and stood in the shifting angular shadow of the plane trees, watching the receding figure of the lady of his affections and that of his prospective father-in-law. As they passed out of sight, behind a belt of flowering shrubs in the garden, Leversedge half shut his eyes and threw back his head. Then his chin dropped on his chest, and he stared vacantly at a pair of swans sailing about the clear water of the little harbour, just back of the row of gaily painted boats—which creaked and bumped together as the slight wash from the beat of the birds' black paddles took them.

A good many of us, I suppose, as we get on in life, have a face our friends do not know, though our looking-glasses do, when doors are shut and the room is empty. That is the face of our naked self, and therefore it is somewhat indecent for any but ourselves to behold it. Leversedge believed himself to be alone, he had let slip appearances, and I beheld the face of his naked self. It was very interesting; but, as things naked often will, it gave me a shock.

Not that there was anything evil in it. It held no revelation of cleverly veiled iniquities, no trace either of fox or satyr. The man's self bare was, like the man's self clothed, cleanly, sober, and—on its own lines—not undignified. If sin was about, one judged him more likely to be sinned against than sinning; which, so the authorities assure us, “is far better.” But, in his case, even the farthest better was still but a poor best. For Leversedge looked hunted, looked tormented; looked as people will look after a disaster at sea, or a heavy shock of earthquake; looked as those are reported to look who have seen a ghost.

Of course we all join in denying the existence of the supernatural and relegating it to the, at present somewhat over-populated, country of Exploded Ideas; or only in permitting its existence in the form of some derangement of nerve ganglia or of the intestines. The pill, to put it concisely, has superseded the prayer—to the great advantage of the vender of patent medicines, whose advertisement-boards have so gracefully usurped the station of the wayside cross in modern English landscape.

I mention this in self-defence. For Leversedge certainly did look as though, in pre-scientific phrase, he had seen a ghost; and no one knows better than I do, I need hardly say, that ghosts, like miracles, “do not happen.” Therefore Leversedge's body must clearly have been playing some fool's trick on Leversedge's brain; and Leversedge, in being taken in and so harassed by such trickery was clearly guilty of a grave scientific misdemeanour. Demonstrably it was my place to be angry with him, to convince him of foolishness. But I did none of these things. I own to it with contrition, I was horribly sorry for him—that was all. And only the more sorry, when, suddenly awakening to the fact of my presence, he gripped himself, left off contemplating the swans, accosted me with as much nonchalance as he could muster (not being a very accomplished actor); while an almost defiant inquiry as to how much of the face of his naked self I had beheld haunted his eyes.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Hammond; I didn't see you,” he said. “We've been having a very jolly time out on the water. It really is a glorious afternoon. But the sunshine's rather dazzling. It strikes right up in your face off the surface of the lake in a blinding sort of way. Well, what have you been doing? Been amusing yourself over there?”

“With the wisest moderation,” I replied. “My joys during the last two days have had nothing bacchanalian about them. I have lost a little money, I have gained a little experience, since we parted. And so have you, I fancy, my dear fellow.”

“Why? I've lost no money,” Leversedge said rather quickly.

“No, but you have lost flesh, which always implies a deepening of experience.”

Leversedge seemed startled. Then, after a moment's pause, he exclaimed inconsequently—

“Why, you don't mean to say it shows as much as that!”

“I only mean to say that you are looking a good deal out of sorts.”

“You see too much, Hammond.” He spoke shortly, but recovered himself almost at once. “I'm hardly the person to accuse others of seeing too much, though.”

“So I feared,” I said.

“I have had a hell of a time with—with that blasted dog”—Leversedge flung away from me savagely. “Oh, it's humiliating!” he cried. “I tell you I'm ashamed, downright ashamed of myself. I can't hold my tongue—I want to talk about it. I want to tell somebody. I am as full of my own symptoms and sensations as some hysterical girl. I can't keep them to myself. Oh! it's humiliating; I tell you it's degrading to one's manhood.”

He turned and stood quietly by me again, and again I beheld the face of his naked self.

“I don't know what to do for the best,” he said. “I want advice—advice; I, who have never asked advice of any living soul, but just shoved along by myself and kept my own counsel, ever since—when I was a little chap of eleven, after my mother died—my father chucked me into the rough and tumble of Harrow to sink or swim as I could. And I have swum after a fashion—that's just why it's so rough on one. If you're going to smash up, upon my word I believe it's best to do it early, before you have grown to believe in yourself. You haven't so far to fall, so it hurts less. But I beg your pardon, Hammond,” he added civilly, changing his tone. “I have no earthly claim on your patience and kindness, and I must be boring you frightfully.”

“Boring me?” I cried. “Ye gods! is one bored watching in the operating theatre? Is one bored when seeing a man hanged?”

Leversedge smiled grimly. Perhaps my words evoked some recollection.

“No,” he replied. “There are nicer occupations; but I grant you you are not much bored, as a rule, when a man's being hung.”

We moved away and sat down on the top of the wall together, and I confessed Leversedge—smoking all the while, which I fear was far from the orthodox attitude of a confessor. But it was agitating work, and I needed support of some kind.

“You see, the thing's growing worse,” he said,— “not merely more frequent in coming, but different; it is developing—that's what knocks me about so. It doesn't stop where it did. The brute is materialising itself—that's the word, isn't it?—more and more.”—He drew his heels up on to the coping, and bowed himself together, clasping his bands round his knees.—“When I was sitting with the Perrys the other evening, it curled itself up on my lap. And I could not play the fool before them, you know, by blaspheming at it and making a scene. I had to sit still.”—He leant forward, resting his chin upon his knees, and spoke very steadily.—“And I tell you I felt all the shape of it—its shoulder, the crinkled turn of its ribs—it must be horribly thin—and its left fore and hind leg pressing down on me as it lay on them, as plain as I feel my fingers holding each other just now. It was all cold and damp, and—and it smelt, Hammond, and that was unspeakably filthy. You know how a mangy cur can smell.”

“This is bad,” I said.

Leversedge raised his head slowly and looked at me.

“I believe you. It is bad—just as bad as bad can be.” He rested his chin on his knees again.—“And the beast has taken a fancy to my bedroom, unfortunately. Last night, as soon as I put the candles out, I saw the eyes down by the side of the bed and they made a rush. I heaved a book at them which I had been reading. It was . I'm awfully fond of . Poor little Becky, I always want to give her her five thousand a year to ‘be good on.’ Oh dear me!—Well, they wriggled down again; the beast was knocked backwards on to the floor, you understand. But in a minute it made another rush, and came up across the counterpane, and settled itself against the pillow, those eyes staring bang into mine.”

Leversedge put his feet to the ground and, turning away, leaned his elbows on the low wall. His hat was off, and he held his head back. I saw, against the wide heavenly blue expanse of the lake, his face in profile, his pointed beard, and the rather long line of his bare throat—in which the apple moved sharply as he swallowed once or twice. He was fine-looking, but too colourless and worn for health—the Elizabethan adventurer still, but the adventurer who has touched the limit of success, who is beginning to make acquaintance with the side of adventure which deals in sickness, in prison, in the failure of hope, in foreknowledge of death.

“I swore at it, but it did not move. I could not bring myself to touch it, so we stayed like that some time.”—He paused and swallowed again.—“At last I turned over on the other side, and it came and scratched at my back, between the shoulders, as if it was digging out a rabbit. And then—why, then I began to pray, Hammond. If there's a devil, there must be a God somewhere too, I suppose, if it's only to balance things; and I thought perhaps He might happen to hear. It did leave off scratching, but it turned round and round, and snuggled into the small of my back and lay there against me like a lump of ice. It chilled me clean through. I couldn't stand it, so I lighted the candles again, and walked up and down till that blessed sun arose and it was day.”

For a minute or two I smoked in silence, and Leversedge stared across the lake. The grisly night of which he told me and this radiant evening were in curious contrast. At last he said—“Hammond, what on earth am I to do?”

“About about?” I asked, for I knew he had not finished his confession yet.

“About my engagement—about Charlotte Perry,” he answered rather hoarsely.

“Ah! That comes into it.”

He looked up at me.—“Of course that comes into it. Why, that's the heart of it. Do you suppose I should care a twopenny-damn about it but for that?”

“I am afraid I should care a very immense amount, my dear fellow,” I said, “quite entirely apart from that.”

Leversedge straightened himself up.

“CONSTANTINE,” he called. “Où est il? savez-vous où il est—Monsieur Leversedge?”

Now, I am, I trust, the last person in the world to be guilty of an impertinence towards my elders; but, as Mr. Perry pursued his active way towards us, the word pecky rose unbidden to my lips. His expression denoted desire for some object on which to wreak a measure of vengeance. A cherry, perhaps, would do; perhaps a worm or fly; possibly—for have not even doves, under stress of emotion, been known to use their tender beaks upon their fellow-doves?—possibly he coveted a human victim. At sight of me, however, I observed him make an effort to summon a more genial aspect, and overlay his evident irascibility with a varnish of playfulness. He shook his finger waggishly at me; and my heart fell. Could this, indeed, be a father of heroic children?

“Ah ha! I see, I see!” he exclaimed. “The mystery touches on explanation. ‘This is the cause, the cause, my soul.’ Hence Constantine plays truant. When you two young gentlemen get together there is no hope of you.”

He turned to Leversedge, and as he did so the spirit of peckiness resumed full sway.

“We have been expecting you,” he cried. “Charlotte has been visibly disturbed by your absence.”

“Oh, has she? I'm sure I am very sorry,” Leversedge said. “I understood some friends of yours were there, and—”

“Precisely,” returned Mr. Perry quite excitedly. “That is the point. Friends of ours are here. Mr. Percy Gerrard and Mrs. Septimus Mertyns are kindly calling upon us. Most talented person, I am sure, Mrs. Mertyns,—an advantage, Constantine, as I was saying recently to Mr. Hammond, a positive advantage for one whom, like yourself, I may call a débutant in the London world, to have the entrée of her charming house.”

During the progress of this somewhat confused exordium, Leversedge's vaguely-distracted brow had gathered into a quite definite frown. He was bothered, annoyed, and, for once, did not try to conceal the fact.

“I have not the honour of knowing Mrs. Mertyns,” he said.

“Precisely,” cried Mr. Perry again. “That, as I remark, is the point. Charlotte perceived this was a most favourable opportunity for effecting the introduction. She is very thoughtful, very—dear girl,”—here he smiled in a really kingly manner,—“very wise; she notes, and never undervalues, a social opportunity. For which I commend her. Indifference in social matters is, rightly understood, but the mask of ignorance— Ignorance, that churlish sin, Which, seeking to cloak others, shows itself Still basest born of all.”

“Dear me!” murmured Leversedge, lifting his shoulders, as he drew a long breath.

“Charlotte took for granted you would follow us up from the boat immediately. When she found you did not do so, she was disappointed, I had almost said pained; for she recognised your mistake. Mamma, remarking her disappointment—affection lends wings to perception, Mr. Hammond—interrupting me in the midst of a most interesting conversation with Mr. Gerrard upon the deepening of the conservative sentiment among the educated artisans of our great commercial centres, whispered to me to come and tell you. And here I am;—me voilà, as I may say, Mr. Hammond, here I am.”

“Yes, you are very sensibly here, Mr. Perry: and it is, as always, a happiness to be in your company,” I replied, with effusion.

I had an idea Leversedge intended revolt. I wanted to give him time to mature that excellent intention.

Mr. Perry glanced at me sharply; then he again addressed our companion.

“Well, Constantine, I have delivered myself of my mission. Why this delay?”

“Because”—Leversedge spoke very slowly—“I will explain why to Charlotte later, and she will understand,”—he paused,—“yes, she'll understand; because I don't, to tell the truth, feel very much inclined to go and see these people just now. I—I am not in the humour.”

“But—but—this is unheard of,” cried Mr. Perry. “Not inclined,—this is incredible. Not inclined,—this is insanity.”

“Oh no, it isn't; it is disinclination,” Leversedge replied, pushing his hands down into the pockets of his boating coat and smiling wearily. “Nothing worse than disinclination. Not insanity, not just yet,—at least, I believe not.”

“I fail to grasp your meaning.” Mr. Perry looked vicious.

“Oh, it's very simple. As I say, I will explain to Charlotte; she'll understand.”—Leversedge repeated the phrase more as one who needs, than as one who has, a conviction of the truth of that which he asserts.—“We will leave it all in her hands. It may be better in the longrun for me not to know these people at all.”

BUT just then a deprecating voice, worthy to be that of modesty incarnate, gently addressed me.—“Mr. Hammond, I hesitate to interrupt you, for I have watched you and I see you are thinking. I fancy you are regretting. And so I hesitate.”

Charlotte Perry had approached from somewhere in the surrounding dimness. She stood on my right, between me and the steps, and her appearance was arresting. She had swathed herself in an Indian shawl, which framed her face, was drawn closely about her shoulders and folded arms, draping her whole figure and almost concealing even the skirt of her dress. This shawl was an exquisite thing—one of Leversedge's many costly gifts. In colour violet, it was stiffened at the border with delicate gold and silver threads and arabesques worked in many-coloured silks. The warm light from the windows behind us touched these rich colours in places, touched the girl's profile and the soft brown hair about her forehead. The result was eminently picturesque. Charlotte Perry looked quite delightfully pretty; and had Leversedge not possessed prior claims, I really could have found it in my heart—but then fortunately Leversedge did possess them. I remembered this; yet I hold a man a fool who, be his sentiments ever so honourable, omits to let a woman know when he finds her pleasant to look upon.

“Hesitate no longer, my dear young lady,” I therefore answered. “Interruptions, when they appear in so charming a form, believe me, are never unwelcome.”

Miss Perry gazed at me for a moment, and her dewy eyes were very bright.—“I wonder,” she said softly, “are you ever in earnest? Are you ever serious?”

“I am profoundly serious in my welcome of this particular interruption.”

The girl drew her breath with a little sob. “Can—can one trust you, I wonder?” she said.

“Try me,” I cried,—“try me. Such as I am you shall not, I warrant you, find me wanting.”

Still Miss Perry drew her breath somewhat sobbingly. She leaned her shrouded head against the iron pillar of the verandah. The leaves and scarlet flowers of the honeysuckle clustered around it. I regretted the half dark, for I merely received an impression, and the picture must have been worthy to be seen clearly. Just then I heard a distinct grunt. Various animals grunt; my knowledge of natural history, though by no means profound, carries me as far as that. But only one human being of my acquaintance produces—whether voluntarily or involuntarily I know not—that unengaging sound. A rather squat black person passed slowly down the farther side of the marble steps.

“Percy Gerrard!” I exclaimed. “Where has the great man been hiding the light of his countenance? I did not know he was here.”

“I am in trouble,” Miss Perry murmured, disregarding my remark.—“I am in great trouble.” She clasped her hands, and the shawl fell in loose folds about her.—“You know my parents, Mr. Hammond. You know their devotion to me? Of course you know it, and have probably smiled at it.”

“Heaven forbid!” I murmured.

“Ah, but you have. For is it not obviously exaggerated—an affection blinding to the critical faculty? They have no measure. No one realises more keenly than I do that their misplaced admiration makes both me and themselves absurd.”—Miss Perry's tone expressed the tenderest apology, the most appeasing humility.—“They cannot help it, I suppose,” she said gently. “But their attitude does not fail to distress and embarrass me greatly, all the same. Do not imagine that I undervalue their goodness to me. It is beautiful, but, alas! it is impeding. I cannot be quite frank with them. I cannot dare to risk causing them pain.”

She swung aside with a really fine movement. As she did so the light from the salon window fell full on her face; I saw that her eyes overflowed with tears.

“And I am in pain,” she cried softly. “I suffer, ah! I suffer. I am cruelly perplexed. For I fail to see where duty—the high duty which compels acquiescence, and dignifies self-surrender—truly lies.”

I am very alive to sentiment. This was touching and I was touched. Yet in the girl's speech and action was there not just a hint, a remote hint, of Perry père in his noblest manner? I therefore hardened my heart slightly, determining to test the fair sufferer and bring her to book.

“Leversedge has spoken to you,” I said.

“Yes, that is part of the pain; but not in the way you no doubt imagine, Mr. Hammond. If my parents knew all that he has told me, they would certainly require us to part. They would think only of me. Therefore they must not know.”

And I, hearing this, repented of my late suspicion in mental sackcloth and ashes. “That is well,” I said,—“very well.”

“Is it?”—Miss Perry smiled upon me. I divined more than saw the working of her singularly captivating mouth.—“How little men know of women, after all! How easily they mistake that which will attract and that which will repulse us! I should have expected Constantine to mistake; but you, Mr. Hammond, are different. From you I should have hoped for a more subtle judgment. Understand, this strange story of Constantine's has no terror for me.”

“The gods be praised for that,” I murmured. “Leversedge is not born under so very unlucky a star, after all.”

The girl leaned her head against the iron pillar, clustered with honeysuckle, again. The wind took her hair, blowing it back over the embroidered edge of the shawl. Her eyes were astonishingly bright.

“No, it has no terror for me,” she repeated. “If this curse is laid upon him, it is clearly my office to share it, to shield him, to sustain him in these dark seasons and places of his existence. And so, far from repulsing, it attracts me. It supplies the touch of mystery which was lacking. It dignifies what was otherwise commonplace. It wraps us—him and me—about with a peculiar atmosphere.”

As she spoke, she pressed her head in among the leaves and flowers and drew the folds of her shawl tighter about her with an odd action as of physical enjoyment. Charlotte Perry had never appeared to me so perfectly natural as at this moment. Her deprecatory manner had vanished. She glowed, so to speak. She was positively seductive, but she was also a little displeasing.

“If Constantine knew how to use it,” she continued, “it might be tremendous and splendid. He might make an immense success, an immense reputation. He would be received anywhere on the strength of it. Ah! what a superb opportunity some men would find in this! To have your legend thus ready to hand, and, if properly treated, such a legend! You might dominate society.”

The girl let her hands fall at her sides dejectedly.

“But he has no idea how to use it—no more idea than a child. The opportunity will be wasted. He does not rise to it in the very least. I have tried to inspire him, tried to show him how unique and therefore precious a fate has befallen him; but I cannot develop any enthusiasm in him. I cannot, cannot make him see.”

“No,” I agreed; “that, I am afraid, is a point of view which will never commend itself to Leversedge. I fear you will never make him see.”

Miss Perry looked at me sharply—as her father might have looked. Then she bent her head, put her hands over her eyes, moved a couple of paces to the right hurriedly, while the wind—lending itself sympathetically to the situation—caught her shawl and blew it up and outward into a great arc of dusky colour, against which her light dress, her slightly bowed figure, her arms bare to the elbow, were revealed.

“Ah!” she cried, “I am very unfortunate. I have given you a wrong impression—you, Antony Hammond, the last person I would have misjudge my motives.”

The hypercritical might have called all this artificial and theatrical perhaps. I can never find it in my heart to be hypercritical where a thing is really well done; and, without question, this was beautifully done. The personal note, too, in the young lady's outcry I found comforting to my little sprig of private vanity. So, naturally I protested vehemently against all possibility of misjudging her motives. But Miss Perry refused to listen. She stood before me clutching one corner of her shawl, letting the rest of it lie heaped about her feet on the wet marble pavement, while she addressed me with lips trembling from emotion.

“I know it,” she said, “and of course you know it—who better, seeing who you are and what you are? But I cannot help it. I am not well-bred—my poor, dear parents are altogether mistaken about me; how should they, alas! of all people, perceive just that? I am not well-bred, and the knowledge I am not haunts me and poisons my happiness; for I am conscious that to you, and such as you, Mr. Hammond, I must seem lacking in delicacy at times, lacking in innate refinement. I am conscious that in what I said just now I have seemed thus lacking. I misled you by my inherent inability to express myself, to put things as a high-bred woman would put them.”

Distress impeded the girl's utterance.

“I seemed guilty of proposing to trade upon Constantine's strange hallucination. I seemed oh! it is too dreadful—like the unnatural mother who makes capital out of the deformity of her child. And I am incapable of entertaining such an idea. Surely you must feel I am incapable of it? Indeed, you cruelly misread me. It was not of myself I was thinking, not of any advantage I could gain, but of him, of Constantine—exclusively, solely of him.”

This was abundantly moving. I would have spoken, but Miss Perry paused only an instant for breath, and then continued in the most charmingly pleading tones.

“You know—as a poet, who should know better?—that we none of us can live without our romance, without an ideal, without some secret, hidden place in which the soul finds and maintains the completeness of its individuality. We must have not only this passive support; we must have an active one too—we must have some realm to conquer. A strange fate has overtaken Constantine. He must either sink under it or find his romance in it. I thought it conceivable he might do that last. I dreamed he might be saved, that I might save him that way—but—but you say it cannot be.”

I tried to point out to Miss Perry that a far less recondite way of salvation was open to Leversedge through her instrumentality. She had only to stand by him, to be good to him, to—if I might put it crudely—love him. Why are homely, honest things such as these always the most difficult to say? I feared I was playing a somewhat bearish part, and most unromantically drowning fine fancifulness in the cold waters of common-sense. I protest the position was hard on me, for I should greatly have preferred meeting my fair companion's utterances in a more sympathetic spirit. I found her abundantly captivating. But friendship demanded I should not yield too freely to such finding. I therefore strove to quench our little possible flames—both hers and mine—in this douche of cold water.

But I am only a man after all. Miss Perry was far more than man, namely, woman—which means that she was a past-master in the art of strategy. I had advanced upon her lumberingly along the plain. She suddenly opened fire upon me from heights I had never even reconnoitred.

WHY is there always a third person to whom one owes a duty? And why do the claims of that third person become paramount at precisely the most inconvenient moments? “'Twas even thus from childhood's hour” in my experience. Ah! what is it to have retained a little odd and end of a conscience! I protest I wish I had been born a blackguard; a gentleman-like, but otherwise unmitigated, villain, then life might indeed have been worth living!

Charlotte Perry moved down the dusky alley beside me in silence. We reached the path running along the shore before she spoke.

The moon had sailed out from behind the floats of cloud, and her light made a wide pale stain right across the lake, in which the broken crests of the waves leapt up like tongues of silver flame. The wind swept tumultuously through the thick foliage of the trees above us. Away on the Savoy side, under the shadowy mass of the mountains, clusters of twinkling lights marked the site of the villages of St. Gingolph and Meillerie. The scene was a wholly appropriate setting to a romantic tête-à-tête. It might have really been enchanting but for the intruding claims of the inevitable third person.

Miss Perry paced along slowly, swathed closely in her shawl, her head bent. She addressed me in broken sentences. Her voice was so low that, what with the swishing wind and breaking waves, at times I could barely catch her words.

“The root of my suffering is this,” she murmured, “I am sensible of a change in myself, which makes me doubt whether the voice of supreme duty counsels self-emancipation or self-abnegation. Now that we have met again, I cannot disguise from myself that I have developed, and that Constantine—you care for him, you are his friend, therefore I can say it,—that Constantine has not developed. There was a time when what he had to offer me seemed enough—wealth and all the advantages it brings with it, a very respectable social position and—”

“And very sincere affection,” I put in.

The girl stopped abruptly and faced me, wringing, literally wringing, her hands.

“Ah! what will you think of me?” she cried.

“That you are entirely charming,” I answered.

“Be serious, pray, pray be serious,” Miss Perry implored.

She stood gazing up at the moon, trying apparently to control some overmastering emotion, pressing her hands upon her bosom; while her shawl, once more yielding to the wind blew hither and thither, forming all manner of fantastic evolutions. Sometimes it sailed out in a streaming pennon, sometimes it clung closely, shrouding her figure as that of a nun.

“Constantine has much, very much to give. But, but in the last year—is it faithless, is it wrong of me?—I have come to dream of a love very different from his. And I cannot decide whether that is a temptation or a revelation. A love occult, profound, mysterious—a love which should be a religion, an illumination, which should realise all the richest, deepest aspirations of one's soul. I think, from what I read, they knew this love in Italy during the Renaissance—some, a few, a very few, have known it since—”

Her voice sank away into an awestricken whisper.

“Only a few, a very few,” she repeated, “have known it since. Constantine could never know it; he could not grasp the idea. And therefore I tremble lest I should do violence to the light that is in me by contracting a marriage in which this element must of necessity be absent—this hidden mutual adoration of elect hearts.”

There was a momentary silence. The sound of the lake was hoarse along the shore, the trees bent, reeled under the force of the warm wind. The girl's shawl suddenly sprung up in flapping bat-like wings from her shoulders, giving her lightly clad figure the strangest appearance. It affected me. I became resolutely practical.

“You wish to break off your engagement,” I said.

“No, no—not unless, unless—”

And Charlotte Perry's lips gathered into that fascinating sketch of a kiss, while she looked full at me in the most astonishing manner.

I grew hot. I grew cold. I rallied my friendship for Leversedge. I wished I was not a man of honour. I wished a cloud would pass over the moon. I thanked God I was a man of honour. I blew up the embers of my affection for the woman I ought to have married. I wished I knew what on earth to say. I craved for the presence of Perry père; I should have hailed him as my deliverer from one of the worst moments of my life. I wondered if I was making a contemptible mistake. I wished sweet Lydia Castern had never refused me. I wondered if I was a fatuous ass. I wished Leversedge would rush out of the nearest bush and seize me by the throat. I wished anything and everything, in short, but that this marvellously pretty girl, with the dewy eyes and bewitching mouth, should continue to stand looking thus at me.

“My dear, young lady—” I began, with a courage born of desperation.

I HAVE mentioned Percy Gerrard. I disliked him then, I may add that I dislike him still. A certain pleasure is derivable from describing those whom one dislikes. I will not deny myself that pleasure.

At this particular period of his development; Gerrard had lately passed from the expansive and aggressive to the reserved style. He moved as one anointed by profound experiences, as one hallowed by an esoteric wisdom of the heart.—Had Miss Perry, by chance, acquired some of her curious little theories on the subject of the affections from this source? I could not say.—In bearing, Gerrard was withdrawn, augustly apart. He had religious scruples too, or, to be quite accurate, religious persons had, according to his own report, scruples concerning him. He hinted at diplomacies on the part of Eminences sent forth from the Eternal City. Both in speech and in print he gave one to understand that, not only many a member of the Sacred College, but even the Holy Father himself, was engaged in efforts to gather this wandering sheep—in whom mystic and worldling were so subtlely mixed—into the great central Catholic fold. The honest man commits himself hastily. The truly wise man commits himself very, very slowly. For is not the possible convert precious, alike to those whose communion he is on the edge of joining, and those whose communion he is on the edge of leaving? Gerrard knew this. He remained on the edge, wooed by both parties. I believe, for I don't see him often in these days, he remains there still.

In person he was not beautiful. I have heard that plain but vivacious lady, Madame Jacobini, describe him as “a cross between a second-rate Parisian petit crevé and a Methodist parson gone wrong.” There is an element of excess in this statement, yet truly he was not beautiful. For he was short, sallow, and inclined to stoutness; in moments of asperity I could have found it in my heart to call him greasy-looking. His hair was black, rather long, and of an uncomfortable thinness and smoothness. What of moustache he owned was black also. He dressed soberly, as in mourning for lost illusions. He had political aspirations of the grand seigneur type,—he dwelt on pictures of the stately, conscientious noble, of the lowly and contented serf. As far as I know, he never owned a rod, pole, or perch—let alone acre—of his native or any other soil. But that is a base detail. As rank would not marry him—I speak from hearsay—he had decided to marry money. Meanwhile a lady possessed of neither, according to contemporary scandal, solaced the leisures of this truly remarkable mind.

In the days immediately succeeding my surprising interview with Miss Perry, I observed that Gerrard treated us to an increasing amount of his society. He came in to luncheon; he came in to dinner. He, if I may employ so common an expression in speaking of so uncommon a person, was perpetually hanging about.

I was hanging about too. For I soon discovered Miss Perry's demand that I should help her in the present crisis of her affairs was no empty one. I had begged her to dispose of me. She took me at my word. She did dispose of me. I am far from complaining, for our fair Charlotte did everything (almost everything) well, and she disposed of me admirably. She held me with a silken chain; held me so gently, so deferentially, yet with so delicate a flavour of chastened sadness, of just conceivable reproach, that I came near hugging that same chain. It became natural I should be constantly at hand. Gerrard, as I have said, was also constantly at hand. So, of course, was Leversedge. It was not her object, I entirely acquit the young lady of any so paltry a scheme, but in point of fact she did thus establish a rival court to those of the American prima donna and the Russian poet—a court which not only rivalled, but came near eclipsing theirs. For while they merely herded indiscriminately with their kind, Miss Perry throned it alone in her maidenly sweetness, always attended by one, sometimes by two, more frequently by three still youngish and entirely eligible English gentlemen. Such things give me pleasure!—Let it be added, that her worthy parents were constantly, though unobtrusively, within hail; their office, like that of the chorus in a Greek play, to direct the eyes of the spectators upon the chief actors in the piece by praising these last, lauding their talents, virtues, and beauty, reciting their titles, and the innumerable noble deeds they had performed, or might, in the hopeful opinion of the chorus, almost certainly be expected to perform very shortly.

But we were not always in public. The suite of apartments retained by Leversedge for the Perry family included a smart little sitting-room. And it was here, as far as my memory serves me, that the next serious scene of the Perry-Leversedge drama enacted itself.

The devotion of Miss Perry's parents to their offspring reached the point of self-effacement. And further than that no devotion, surely, can go? As my intimacy with this interesting family increased, I could not fail to remark the young lady, on more than one occasion, tenderly but firmly suggest that her mother might stand in need of repose. Sometimes the dear good woman took the hint gratefully. Sometimes she appeared slightly perplexed, and did not display entire docility; or, and that was embarrassing, bungled in speech and required explanation. She was guilty of this last, I grieve to report, on the evening in question.

We were gathered in the sitting-room, and Charlotte had been playing to us. Mrs. Perry, supported by a wealth of puce silk cushions, was seated on a sofa, at right angles to the large French-window opening on to the balcony. A disposition to slumber after the last and heaviest meal of the day, in which hereditary middle-class habit triumphed for a brief space over a somewhat late developed social sense, held Mrs. Perry in its ponderous grasp. Her knitting fell on to her lap. She recovered it. Soon it fell again, and this time with a distinct tinkle of the steel needles. Our active Perry, seated beside her (the sound of whose own breathing had, more than once, quite audibly filled up the pauses in his daughter's really magnificent rendering of the ill-omened Kreutzer Sonata), recalled her to a fitting sense of her dignified surroundings by gently fanning her with the half-completed woollen sock, while murmuring in tones of playful severity—

I OBEYED his summons, and leaned beside Leversedge upon the stone balustrade of the balcony.

To-night the garden was very sufficiently illuminated. Earlier in the evening the local orchestra had discoursed music of a questionable sweetness upon the verandah; and the whole of our company, reinforced by a contingent from the town, still lingered in the balmy night air, taking little drinks around the tables upon the terrace, or strolling about the paths and shadowy alleys. A gang of children, clothed in white garments, chased each other, with cries, across the broad lawns and in and out of the shrubberies. Far out on the lake, someone was singing to a thrumming banjo accompaniment.

This was the first time I had seen Leversedge, save in the presence of witnesses, for several days. I had fancied, probably quite erroneously, that I detected a slight unwillingness on the part of the fair Charlotte to leave us together. I was the more glad, therefore, to note a very distinct improvement provement in my companion's looks and bearing. He seemed less harassed, steadier, more solid; he bore himself as a man contented and at ease. I even thought that just now I perceived a smile at the back of his eyes, so to speak, indicating that the late incident—though he so gallantly came to the rescue—had appealed to his sense of humour.

“It's a glorious night, isn't it?” he said.

Leversedge's shoulders shook slightly.

“I really am awfully fond of Mrs. Perry, though,” he added. “And that fellow Gerrard actually came in at the right moment for once in his life.”

“Are you revising your first opinion?” I asked; for I was rather curious as to the relation of the two men. “Are you growing to relish the society of our celebrated Percy?”

“Oh, I think him more or less of a skunk, which is exactly what I always have thought him,” Leversedge answered in tones of cheerful contempt. “And we see a lot more of him than I personally in the least care to see; but when a man's clear that he has the game in his own hands, he is an ass if he worries about trifles. I can put up with Mr. Percy Gerrard well enough for the next week or two. And if he fools about too much after we are married, I'll just let him know his place by kicking him.” Leversedge quietly chuckled.—“I walked downstairs behind him the other day, and I've an idea nature specially constructed him with a view to a kicking.”

Clearly Leversedge was in excellent spirits.

“The course of true love runs smooth, then?” I remarked. “The marriage takes place?”

Leversedge stood up and stretched himself, opening his chest and bringing his clenched fists up to the level of his shoulders.

“Yes, the marriage takes place—takes place—takes place,” he said, smiling.

Then he leaned his elbows on the top of the balustrade again, and for a minute or two we were silent. The man was evidently happy, and when a man is happy I hold he may very safely be left to his own thoughts. For, next to slapping an infant to make it cease crying, or beating a cripple with his own crutches to make him hurry, I know no more brutal stupidity than awakening the happy from their dream of bliss by talking to them. Happiness is not so common that one cares to risk interfering with it. Let them speak first. After a time Leversedge did speak.

“You were perfectly right, Hammond,” he said, “and I was a miserably faithless idiot of a creature. Of course the right way was to trust her. I'm immensely grateful to you. You've been a wonderfully good friend to us both. She told me you had had a little talk with her the other day, and, I think, if possible, she's been sweeter to me than ever since then.”

Leversedge turned his face to me. It was radiant.

“Dear God,” he said very softly, “it's the loveliest thing on earth to be certain at last that the woman you love really loves you.”

“And of that you are certain?” I asked.

“Yes, haven't I had proof? She has been tried in the fire and shown what she is made of—pure gold. I've left off cursing the dog, Hammond—for three whole days I've forgotten to curse him. Ah! there's Charlotte playing again. She does play divinely, doesn't she? Let's come to the window and listen.”

And it really was worth while to listen; for if not exactly divine, Miss Perry's playing was remarkably good. Her technique was admirable—so admirable, that you could afford to forget all about it, and give yourself to the emotional element crying through and superseding the mechanical one.

Gerrard had subsided into an arm-chair close to the grand piano. He was not a large man, yet he had the iniquitous habit of slightly overflowing every chair in which he sat. To-night he overflowed more than usual, changing his position frequently, shading his eyes with a music score, glancing about him restlessly, grunting, then shading them again. As Miss Perry concluded the nocturne she had been playing, he rose with a sloth-like slowness to his small square feet; and, as the girl, turning her head, looked at him, said—

“No, my craving for music is not yet satisfied, far from it. But before I ask you to steep my jaded senses once more in this purifying ocean of sound, I must implore that the room may be darkened somewhat. You have done your best to mitigate the glaring abominations of colour and form in this terrible hotel salon, I am sure, Miss Perry; but yet much, much of necessity remains which causes anguish to a cultivated eye. And the garish light of these candles and lamps brings all unlovely details into fullest relief.”

“Really I didn't think the room half bad,” Leversedge said in an aside.

“May we not have some of them extinguished, Miss Perry?—thus letting the stars, there, through the open window, the fragrance of the garden borne upon the night wind, and the perilous rapture of Chopin—think of the Majorcan episode, that exquisite exile à deux, the eternal sough of the breeze in the pine trees, and George Sand (the woman of the sphinx-like and unfathomable eyes) sitting by drinking in the insatiable passion of the master's music,—let these, I say, even here, amid the bare commonplaces of a modern hotel, for one beneficent hour have it all their own way.”

THE dark is all very well. The dark may even prove a friend; at times I have found it so myself. But this was not one of those times, and somehow I mistrusted the events of the last few minutes; neither Gerarrd's action or our fair Charlotte's had appeared to me quite spontaneous. I reproved myself for my eternal cavilling where these two persons were concerned; yet I remained impressed with the feeling that his request had been curiously insistent, her granting of it curiously elaborate.

And then, the darkened room unquestionably wore a somewhat sinister aspect, by no means calculated to dispel uncomfortable suspicions, however foolish and unfounded such suspicions might be. The electric lights on the terrace threw a vague, stark sort of brightness, crossed by equally vague bluish shadows, upon the ceiling, upon portions of the wall above the piano, and upon the edges of the furniture near the window. The shadow of the ironwork of the balcony lay along the floor, twisted and contorted by the opposing angles of the lamps below. Otherwise the room and its contents were colourless and indistinct.

As Miss Perry's fingers touched the keys again, I placed myself on the sofa left vacant by her mother's departure to the connubial chamber. The silk-covered pillows, that had supported that good lady's back and promoted her unaristocratic tendency towards slumber, had now slipped down on to the seat. The crumpled surface of the upper one and the frill of it caught the light. Leversedge stepped back on to the balcony. He stood there, his left shoulder resting against the woodwork of the window-frame. His face was turned towards the darkened room; but I had a sense it bore an expression of exaltation, the exaltation of something successfully dared and won. The man was generous to a fault. Generosity communicates a pleasant glow to the whole person. I have been generous myself just often enough to know that one's first sensation is delicious, as is the first moment after jumping out of a cold bath. I have, also, observed you need subsequently to rub yourself very hard if you would retain either the moral or spiritual sensation of warmth. The tonic has been a trifle too strong, a reaction follows. These thoughts passed through my mind as I looked up at Leversedge, and in doing so became aware that his lean, well-made figure—showing black against the purple depth of the night sky—was surrounded, like the cushions and carved woodwork of the sofa immediately below him, by a pale luminous outline.

Charlotte Perry played that nocturne—I stupidly forget the number of it—with a tenderness beyond all praise. I murmured something of my very genuine admiration, the most rudimentary taste forbidding, to my thinking, at all pronounced applause. Gerrard, however, uplifted his voice without hesitation. He belongs to a set—the Mrs. Septimus Mertyns set—in which endless discussion is fashionable, and a hundred and one wise reasons are offered in justification of even the most trivial personal opinion. He spoke languidly, yet loud. He intended us to hear.

“Thanks,” he said, “you have surpassed yourself. I fancy that unconsciously you have done more. We were speaking of self-revelation just now. Surely, in your rendering of that delicious thing, you permitted yourself to draw away a veil from your own soul, and, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, in a measure revealed your deepest self!”

Leversedge moved slightly.

“The spiritual element in that nocturne is definite, it speaks directly to my religious instinct,” he continued. “But the spiritual element is not the only one, for the sentiment as a whole is marvellously complex. That is what renders it so profoundly interesting. The religious emotion in its simple expression is always joyous, isn't it?”

“I think so,” the girl answered softly.

“I am sure that it is,” Gerrard asserted. “Recalling the hours when I have been most deeply conscious of the magnetism of the Divine Idea, I recognise that they were hours of unalloyed joyousness.”

I hugged myself silently at the thought of Gerrard of all men on earth, Percy Gerrard, author of , and editor of the , with his lethargic temperament and gift of heavy feeding, in a condition of unalloyed joyousness, thanks to the magnetism of the Divine Idea!

“But here, notwithstanding the presence of true spirituality, I find little gladness. I am aware, indeed, throughout of a tremor of intense and vital melancholy. You were aware of that also, Miss Perry; and you intended to convey it to your hearer?”

“Ah yes!” she answered, again softly.

Leversedge shifted his position.

“I knew it!” exclaimed Gerrard. “Your dramatic instinct, of course, is strong, since you possess in so remarkable a degree the artistic temperament. But, knowing you as well as I am learning to know you, I can rapidly detect where you draw upon the comparative shallows of the dramatic instinct, and where upon the deeps of living personal experience.”

“The deuce you can!” said Leversedge, under his breath.

“May I try, will you grant me permission to try, to construe your thought?”

Gerrard still addressed himself with rather ostentatious exclusiveness to Miss Perry; but he still spoke quite loud, his voice cracking up now and again into the shrillest and most unengaging treble. It had the effect of a challenge as delivered by a cockerel, none too certain of his own prowess or of his footing, from the top of a wall. His manner and the subject of his discourse, in short, were quite ironically at variance.

“To me it seems you found in that nocturne, and gave in your rendering of it, the melancholy, not of a rejected soul—far from that—but rather of one who, after long struggle, has sacrificed the consummation of terrestrial happiness in obedience to the compelling dominion of some moral idea; and who, looking back, momentarily gauges the immensity, I had almost said, the enormity of such a sacrifice.”—He paused, trying, as I imagined, to gain more mastery over his wandering voice.—“Yes, your reading was richly subtle, richly pathetic. I too can figure that broken melody, those searching harmonies, which seem to vibrate through the secret places of one's most innermost being, as the utterance of some exquisite woman, artist by nature, saint through the constraining power of adverse circumstance, as she realises for some brief but hideous instants the eternal anguish, the glory of her own self-dedication.”

“It's all very fine, I daresay,” Leversedge said; “but, upon my honour, if this sort of thing goes on the kicking will have to take place sooner than I expected.”

Gerrard turned towards us, his face projecting itself as a livid platelike object from the encompassing obscurity.

“I beg your pardon, I did not quite catch what you were saying, Mr. Leversedge; you were good enough to remark?”

“Oh! my remark will keep until a more convenient season,” the other answered. “When that season arrives I shall have the greatest pleasure, I assure you, in repeating it with appropriate action.”

But here Charlotte Perry's hands most opportunely descended with a crash upon the piano.

The young lady's melting mood seemed to have passed, giving place to a very different humour. What she played during the ensuing ten to fifteen minutes I do not know. I never heard it before; I am more than willing never to hear it again. I suppose it must have been a tarantella, but a tarantella conceived in a madhouse. It gave me a nightmarish impression of innumerable tormented, shrieking, human figures whirling in a desperate and formless dance—driven hither and thither in purposeless fashion, like desert sand by an evil wind. It was exciting, for it took one into the region of utter lawlessness; and that region is always exciting, however undesirable. This was decidedly exciting, but it was not quite nice.

Miss Perry lent herself whole-heartedly to the spirit of the music. I trust I am far from being a prude, but there are limits, and she passed them. Her playing was not quite nice. Perhaps, therefore,—I have confessed to a dislike of the man,—it stirred Gerrard's somewhat sluggish blood. I watched him rise, and move slowly close to the side of the grand piano, facing the girl as she played—his squat person a blot of deeper darkness against the dark.

Leversedge made a movement also. I fancied he did not relish the performance, and was going out on to the balcony to escape somewhat from it; but he merely stepped into the middle of the window, while his shadow, crossing that of the iron balustrade, lay right along the carpet of the room almost to where the skirt of Miss Perry's light dress trailed back from the music stool.

I APPROACHED Miss Perry. Her reception of me was not enthusiastic; in fact for some seconds she appeared unaware of my presence. She had taken off her large, lace hat and thrown it on the deck beside her. Her face and upper portion of her figure were shaded by her parasol; the yellow and black frills of which, like the short curly hair about her forehead and the nape of her neck, were uplifted and softly dropped again by the warm wind. Her head was turned away; I could only see the outline of her cheek. She had, I remember, unfastened the collar of her yellow silk blouse, thereby exposing rather more of her throat than is customary in morning dress. A bunch of buttercups was stuck in her waistband. They drooped with the heat, some were crushed and broken, as though in sympathy with their wearer. For Miss Perry drooped too, was crushed too. Her whole attitude betokened this in the most touching manner. To recognise in this withdrawn and pensive figure the player of the evil witch-music of last night, or the very capable woman who had bidden me, so peremptorily, leave her to manage her own affairs, was a heavy tax on my imagination. If change is essential to charm in woman, then Miss Perry was triumphantly charming, for her capacity of change was Protean.

As the steamer-bell ceased ringing and the decks began to vibrate with the working of the engines, Miss Perry turned her head. She gazed at me mutely. Her eyes were full of tears, her dark eyelashes were gathered into little points by those she had already shed.

“You do not care to talk,” I said. “Your father tells me you are over-tired. You would rather have me go away.”

“No,” she replied. “There are things of which I must speak to you. I should not myself perhaps have chosen to-day, for I have hardly arranged my thought as yet. I can hardly see my trouble, or my action, still less my future”—the girl paused, and two tears rolled slowly down over her pretty red-brown cheeks—“in perspective. It is all too close to me as yet. Still, perhaps this opportunity is given me purposely; I dare not reject it. It is improbable we shall often see each other alone again.”

I had not been feeling altogether friendly towards Charlotte Perry. I had doubted her, and that on rather ugly grounds. And I had not the least proposed that our interview should be of a sentimental character. But listening to her modest hesitating speech, seeing her evident distress, of course I softened towards her and was moved to sympathy. I am not a stock or a stone, so, how the devil could I help it?

“Whatever course events may take,” I protested, “it will not be my fault if we do not meet often hereafter.”

“You are hopeful because to you it is a light matter,” said Miss Perry.

“On the contrary, I am hopeful because I am in a normal condition, and am therefore qualified to judge of the probabilities of things. You are somewhat over-tired.”

“Yes, I am cruelly tired,” the girl assented.

“Then be advised, my dear young lady, and do not overtax yourself with the discussion of burning questions just now. Tell me whether you slept—no? Well, I almost feared as much,—and then let me do my poor best to entertain you. Let me talk to you about the weather; about our compagnons de voyage, whose voices reverberate so pleasingly under that truly beautiful tin awning; about our friend Clement Bartlett's new play, of which Carr writes me word that it is to be a brilliant success.—Picture that! The foolish things of this world do indeed confound the wise at times! Your memory happily cannot carry you back to that prehistoric period, but I well remember Clement's first appearance. Like the man in ‘The Egoist,’ he ‘had a leg,’ but this appeared to me to constitute the whole of his dramatic outfit. And now we are called upon to hail him as the coming play-wright!”

“Is it quite kind always to—to scoff?” Charlotte Perry asked very softly.

“Poor dear Bartlett has survived so many smiles that one more will not greatly affect him—specially as he will remain serenely unaware of it. Moreover, I am past the appeals of friendship at this moment; I would ruthlessly offer up the reputation of my nearest and dearest to afford you a little amusement.”

Whereat to my extreme embarrassment the girl bowed her head, dragged her handkerchief out of the bosom of her blouse, and fell to weeping in a perfectly audible manner.

“Pray, pray don't, my dear Miss Perry, this is too distressing; pray control yourself,” I feebly entreated.

“It is always the same,” she moaned—really my position was rather frightful!—“I had hoped that for once you would understand, and treat me seriously—after last night. But it is useless. Nothing makes any difference. You always play with me—because, at heart, you always despise me.”

“Despise you?—good heavens! of what imbecility have I been guilty now, that you should imagine I despise you?”

ONE does not, unfortunately, arrive at my time of life without having been in some tight places; but no place, I solemnly declare, that I have ever been in quite equalled this one for tightness. It pinched me most exceedingly shrewdly. For all that which Miss Perry had said was true—true, every word of it!—And we had passed the stage of acquaintance when one can successfully take refuge in denial. Not even lying of the most barefaced and unblushing character would extricate me from the very ungraceful predicament in which my companion's frankness had placed me.

I do not often lose my temper; but now a certain exasperation seized on me. For was it not really a little too bad that this charming person should thus lock the door on me and set her back against it? It is disgusting to me to be compelled to handle a woman other than courteously. Yet, unless I exercised something of brutal masculine force in removing her, how on earth was I to get the door open and make good my escape?

IT is really rather annoying to find how, having once, though for the most perfectly legitimate object, started a disturbing line of thought, that line of thought refuses to quit you, finds perpetual occasion for reproducing itself; hunts you, in short, as though it had started you instead of your starting it. For instance, I had been very thoroughly into the question of the One Man and the One Woman on the lake-boat that afternoon. It would have appeared that, having so satisfactorily closed the question, I ought also to have disposed of it, and have been—for a time, at all events—delivered from its hauntings. But it was not so, it was not so. I might have closed the question, but very certainly I had failed to dispose of it. I had relieved my feelings in a sonnet to an imaginary Uniquely Fair One, in the small hours of the night. Yet, notwithstanding this drastic remedy—the metrical difficulties of sonnet-construction I find extremely reducing to an enkindled imagination, no wonder this particular form of poetic outcry has been dear to the distracted lover of all ages—I discovered next morning that, in truth, the question still retained the very strongest disposition to dispose, if not of me, still of my time and thought.

I loitered on the verandah after breakfast. The morning was positively divine, the air having just that hint of an edge to it which agreeably convinced you, notwithstanding the heat haze dancing over the brilliant landscape, that glaciers and snow-fields were after all within easy reach. And that edge to the air, far from soothing a slightly heated fancy, is liable to produce des éblouissements and provoke a feverish restlessness. Across the startlingly green lawn, just below, the lithe young Russian lady of the scarlet silk blouse and black pigtail wandered bare-headed. She was innocently employed in picking ox-eyed daisies and clover heads from among the grass; and as she plucked them she indulged in snatches of song—sad with the sorrow of long northern winters, as it seemed to me, and the endless monotony of the Steppe.

I do not attempt to trace out the association of ideas. It may have been a revolt against the melancholy of the folk-song; it may have been an effect of colour—vivid scarlet against vivid green, the strong note of black—heaven forgive me if I begin to talk like an art critic!—in skirt and hair, affecting my brain as a dram might; it may have been a certain fierceness in the action of the fine-made, angular figure, stooping and pulling at the flowers—I can't pretend to say. Suffice it that my soul was invaded by a crazy longing to live, to give myself away, to be dangerous. I went back upon the position of yesterday; and it was borne in upon me—it has often been so before—that I am but a paltry creature, the decadent product of a decadent age. I know so well what to avoid, I know so very ill what to do. I fell to envying Leversedge his diabolic dog; Charlotte Perry the courage of her perversions—that perhaps is the best way of stating it; even Perry père his enthusiasm for the Primrose League and rich enjoyment of the enunciation of platitudes; even Percy Gerrard his inherent grossness. Oh! to be positive for once, instead of tentative merely, or negative! When candid persons tell me so, I wish, of course, to beat them; but, in the privacy of that evil quarter of an hour, I accused myself of being thin; and Myself answered that in truth I was, morally emotionally, and in respect of all action, thin, very lamentably thin indeed.

And just when I was touching the lowest deep of this unpleasant, but, no doubt, salutary depth of self-abasement, when I was becoming literally flattened out by the heavy weight of my own inadequacies, enter unto me Mrs. Perry. She emerged from the glass doors of the salon rotund and beaming.

“Dear me now, Mr. Hammond,” she exclaimed, “this is what I really do call a piece of luck. I have been so wishing all the morning I had some lady-friend to talk it all over with; and you see I have nothing but acquaintances here, and I never can get over the feeling it isn't very suitable to be intimate with the people you just meet travelling. You see, you don't really know anything about them, nor how they live, and how many servants they keep, and how they behave at home. It's so easy for anybody to look respectable on the Continent. And you're so afraid, if you take to them, it may make awkwardnesses afterwards,aren't you?”

All of which certainly did not come very much under the head of adventurous and vigorous living! Failing other female acquaintances, of well-accredited position, good Mrs. Perry took me. I was relegated to the modest position of the safe she-gossip, to that of the maiden aunt. For a moment the Eternal Masculine in me—for the Eternal Masculine does exist just as actually as the Eternal Feminine, though it happens at the present time not to have so fashionable a notoriety as the latter—arose in revolt. But in my present condition of self-abasement, it rebelled only for a moment. I had fallen very low in my own estimation. I was almost willing to regard myself as nothing better than an example of infructuous and hoary spinsterhood.

“You have always taken such a kind interest in our dear young people,” she continued, “that I know you will be pleased to hear everything is so comfortably settled.”

She confronted me bridling, her worthy moon-face suffused with smiles. But, unfortunately, the searching morning light did not suit my present companion as well as the scarlet-bloused figure that had been my late inspiration, and torment.

Mrs. Perry's matutinal appearance invariably suggested the thought that she was wearing out her last year's Sunday gown. The present example of that economical habit was green; enriched by steel and bugle ornaments, notably in the region of the waist, where they took the form of strings of pendants bearing an affinity to Papuan full dress. Her grey hair, smoothly banded on the brow, was greenish in hue from the too lavish application of some adhesive unguent. It was, moreover, surmounted by a lace and ribbon cap, in form and colour curiously resembling a poached egg. What remained to her of her eyebrow, raised to a permanently surprised height, pushed her forehead up into innumerable horizontal lines. I found it impossible to dislike Mrs. Perry, she was too perfectly simple and genuine a being. Yet to me, just now, she proved confusing, for the tone of her profoundly insular voice, her comfortable and somewhat uncontrolled figure, even the last few words she had spoken, recalled irresistibly to my mind that mysterious functionary, the monthly nurse, whom, to my terror, I meet at the recurrent christening festivals which enliven the house of my excellent little married sister. Unable to divest my mind of this association of ideas, I answered Mrs. Perry slightly at random.

“I am delighted to hear it. I am to understand you, then, that they are both doing very well?”

“Oh, very well,” Mrs. Perry replied with unction. “Indeed, Mr. Hammond, between ourselves, I think Charlotte's a very fortunate girl, for Constantine Leversedge has really being doing better than could have been expected.”

The phrase was a little astonishing; but I retained my presence of mind.

“Good news upon good news!” I exclaimed. “This is capital.”

“So it is; and I am sure I feel very thankful, and so does Mr. Perry.”

Her eyebrows aspired still higher.

“For, of course, we've had our misgivings at times, Mr. Hammond. You see, we lost our dear little boy as an infant. So she's our only child.”

The tenderness of the maternal passion found quite moving expression in Mrs. Perry's homely countenance.

“WELL, you see,” said she, “what Mr. Perry felt was that Charlotte's marriage did not explain itself. I should have thought if the young people loved each other that was explanation enough. I am sure when Mr. Perry and I were engaged, our friends took for granted that was explanation enough, and so did dear father and mother too. But things move on so fast nowadays, Mr. Hammond, I'm sure I never quite know where I am—”

Mrs. Perry sighed.

“You are not alone. The pace is hot, and the Time-Spirit leaves many of us somewhat breathless,” I remarked.

My companion probably knew as much about the Zeitgeist as about the theory of Palingenesis; but Mrs. Perry had a gracious habit of taking the will for the deed. She comprehended that my intention was consolation, she was therefore—in a measure, at all events—consoled.

“Yes, to be sure,” she replied; “and Mr. Perry has kept on saying to me, ‘We owe it to ourselves, Susan, and we owe it to Charlotte's very charming and cultivated circle of acquaintance, to show a really solid reason, to show sufficient cause—’”

(Ah! shade of M. de Voltaire!)

“For Mr. Perry always pointed out—though I never could quite understand why being clever should make so much difference—that in the case of such a talented girl as Charlotte, her friends wouldn't recognise affection as very much of a reason. It seems a pity, doesn't it?”

“So it does. Ten thousand pities,” I rejoined very cordially.

The good woman beamed again.

“Dear me, with all your nice feelings—if it isn't too intimate to mention it—it does seem a loss you ain't married, Mr. Hammond. There must be plenty of young ladies who would be so very willing, you know—indeed, I've more than once thought—if it hadn't been decided long ago—Mr. Perry and I—for there's no one I've seen for a long while I've taken so to—but then it is all decided, you see—and—”

I laid my hand on the arm of my companion's chair. I regarded her, as I believe, with an air of delicately mingled gratitude and restraint, for this was the very last road I wished to travel down with Mrs. Perry.

DECIDEDLY the middle class should avoid high spirits. As a condition of mind and body, high spirits are questionably becoming, even in the young and noble; while in persons of mature age and unexalted, though maybe respectable, station, they are liable to degenerate into that which is really very terrible indeed.

All this was borne in upon me forcibly during the ensuing five minutes.

“Mamma!—where is Mrs. Perry? Mamma!”

And, as so frequently, in urgent pursuit of a missing member of his family, Perry père chased along the terrace below. Regardless of the evident fervour of their conversation, I beheld him draw up before the two Russians, raise the grey felt hat with its streaming pugaree, and inquire—Mr. Perry invariably appeared to entertain the idea that all foreigners are afflicted with deafness, so he bawled the said inquiry, smiling the while with a sort of voracious intensity—

“Pardon, mademoiselle, pray excuse me—mais avez vous vu Madame Perry? Savez vous où elle est, où est, enfin, ma femme?”

The young lady looked round in very evident surprise. Then her eyes lighted on me. And their expression was not without malice, as she extended her hand in the direction of the verandah with a sweeping gesture, which had the effect of enclosing Mrs. Perry and myself, of framing us for ever side by side.

“Mais la voilà, monsieur,” she said. “La voilà avèc monsieur son ámi.”

“Ah! ha! I see," cried Mr. Perry gaily. “Mille fois merci, mademoiselle.”

And, dragging on a pair of purplish-brown kid gloves, he hurried up the steps.

“I see,” he cried, shaking his two fingers archly, “I see. A sly flirtation with mamma. Naughty, very naughty,— Billing and cooing together they sat, Quite unaware they were watched by the cat.”

I am not naturally of a bloodthirsty disposition, but there are hours when the mildest men become as furies. I could have massacred Perry père just then. An application of the wheel, the rack, the boot, or the thumb-screw would have given me rapture. I could have roasted him at a slow fire without a movement of compassion. All the more so, that I perceived her knowledge of the English language was quite sufficient to give the lady of the red silk blouse a strong sense of the inglorious comedy of my position. To kill is well. To be offended is often undignified, and always silly. It is not in my power to kill, so I smiled benignly upon Mr. Perry, and did my possible to meet him in a Christian spirit.

“Yes,” I said, “Mrs. Perry has been more than kind, and we have had a, to me, delightful little talk. I congratulate you. I have been hearing capital news.”

“Ah! ha! I understand,” he replied. “She could not keep it to herself— The brimming pitcher sure will overflow, And spill the ruby liquor on the thirsty soil below. Well, well, I own there are excuses for a tendency to garrulity on the part of some of us this morning! A difficult chapter in our family annals is happily concluded; a period of anxiety is past; a shadow is, as one may say, lifted from our parental hearts. But I trust, my love, you have not exaggerated?” he added, in sterner and more judicial accents. “I would not have a false impression created. We must not make too much of it, Mr. Hammond.”

“Indeed, there appears to be a most agreeably heavy amount to make much of,” I remarked.

“An elegant competence,” Mr. Perry said airily,—“an elegant competence. Our daughter will be in a position to gratify her literary and artistic tastes, to entertain her circle of friends in becoming style, and take that place in London society for which, as I at once proudly and gratefully asseverate, her talents so eminently fit her. This is the reward of my fostering care. I recognise it. Yes, yes, I own to-day you see in me a happy father, and a very nice thing that is to see, I'm sure. But now to business—my love, I am on my way to the boat. I mentioned to Charlotte, and she agreed with me, that after the flattering sympathy—really most flattering to all of us as a family—which she has exhibited, it was only due to Mrs. Mertyns that she should be early acquainted with the rosy hue which now, as I may say, flushes our daughter's future. There have been moments,” said Mr. Perry darkly, drawing himself up and addressing me,—“as our charming friend Mrs. Mertyns well knows—only yesterday—but let that pass. I will not dwell on fears once entertained. Hope has now taken their place.—Yes, Mr. Hammond, our dear children will enjoy a very pretty little fortune— Gold, much red gold, shall grace these nuptials And cement the basis of domestic joys.”

“Well, I am very willing Mrs. Mertyns should know,” Mrs. Perry responded. “I thought of writing home myself to my cousins, and dear Aunt Trumbull at Brixton. They've always been very true to me, and—”

“Quite so, quite so, my dear—and therefore Charlotte has penned a brief note, and has commissioned me to be the bearer of it. I have it here”—he tapped the breast-pocket of his coat. “Yes, Mr. Hammond, without seeking to obtrude myself, I may just hint that practical experience has given me a not contemptible knowledge of such matters, and I have much pleasure in testifying to the excellent business capacity of our future son-in-law. Leversedge has done well, remarkably well, considering his age and opportunities. I could wish he had displayed less reticence regarding the amount of his income. Clear information under that head would have spared us many anxious hours,—wouldn't it, Mamma?”

“Leversedge is admirably modest,” I said parenthetically.

This remark produced a really extraordinary expression of reflective wisdom on the part of Mr. Perry. He meditated visibly, as visibly roused himself from meditation.

“Most true,” he replied. “I yield to no one in my appreciation of our dear boy Constantine—Mamma will bear me out in that. But, as one of our greatest poets observes,— Let not your modesty outrun discretion Lest, falling from fair favour to contempt, You mask a greater by a lesser good. And there has been a touch of secretiveness, a hint, perhaps,—though far be it from me to be harsh,—of that pride which apes humility in Constantine's attitude.”

“To be sure, I never thought of him as proud now,” interposed Mrs. Perry.

“Ah! ah! my love, public life, the rub of the world—eh, Mr. Hammond?—teaches us men to read men—yes, very shrewdly indeed, to read them.”

“It doesn't prevent most of you making mistakes over women, though, sometimes,” the good creature said quite sharply. Then she repented, and looked very mildly at her husband.—“So you're going up by the boat then, Joseph,” she added.

The fashion of a rat had become very apparent in Mr. Perry, but he controlled himself. Perhaps he meant to speak to Mrs. Perry quietly alone afterwards. This is one of the advantages of matrimony; let us be fair to that much-canvassed institution;—it gives excellent opportunities for the private, unwitnessed adjustment of small differences.

“Yes, yes,” he cried,— “With thee, my bark, I swiftly speed Across the foaming brine— call on Mrs. Mertyns; communicate the information, which I am convinced she will cordially welcome, and return here in time for the midday meal, unless she should ask me to remain. I do not think I could very well refuse, you know. I think we owe it to Mrs. Mertyns to accept any invitation of hers. You will not therefore feel anxious, my love, should my return be delayed. Make my apologies to our end of the table.”

Here Mr. Perry struggled violently, almost showily, for all his playfulness had returned, with the fingers of his kid gloves.

“Oblige me by holding my umbrella, Mamma, while I reduce these offenders to order. New? Yes, Mr. Hammond; and they are a little wayward, a little, as I may say, recalcitrant. Patience, always patience—even the trivialities of existence call that godlike virtue into exercise at times.—Which reminds me of what I was saying to Constantine just now, and I am convinced you will endorse it. A fortune must not only be made, it must be guarded, be increased. Is there, indeed, any reason why it should not be doubled? A wife, as I pointed out to him (for it is only prudent to reckon with these little possible accidents beforehand), not infrequently implies a family. It is therefore his duty not to relax his efforts. Children are costly commodities in these days, extremely costly. Let him therefore look forward, and continue to apply himself to business. As I told him, neither Mrs. Perry nor myself would ever stand in his way, if the state of his affairs pointed to the desirability of his taking a three or six months' trip to the southern confines of the Dark Continent. During his absence, his home should be ours. With perfect security he could leave his Charlotte under the protection of her natural guardians. Mamma and I would join her at her house in town at any moment. Ah, and that reminds me, we must consult you upon a knotty point,—a knotty point, Mr. Hammond! In favour of which locality is your vote given? Where shall they reside? Mamma inclines to the north side of the park; eh, my love? But I maintain she is in error. A young ménage should be en evidence. So give me Mayfair or Belgravia,” exclaimed Mr. Perry daringly, “for preference, Belgravia.”

“Well, I always shall say people are much more neighbourly in the suburbs or out Bayswater way than down in the squares,” Mrs. Perry asserted, with a certain mild obstinacy.

“Neighbourly!” cried her husband, as he might have cried ‘murder.’ “My dear, there are social distinctions which I fear your mind will never—here, give me, if you please, my umbrella.”

The chunking sound of the engines of the approaching lake-boat claimed the speaker's attention and restored his good humour.

“Farewell,” he added—“I must away. Remember, I may be detained. I may be unable to join you at déjeûner. Your kindest regards, I am sure, to our charming friends, Mr. Hammond.”

And, with flying pugaree and waving umbrella, he fled down the steps and across the sunny lawn in the direction of the panting steamer. In even the best trained wives, the most thoroughly domesticated—as the advertisements put it—of women, domesticity will wear a trifle thread-bare now and again. Mrs. Perry adjusted her cap, around the lace and ribbons of which the wind had frolicked somewhat too freely, with dignity.

“You see, Mr. Perry is rather excited,” she said. “I suppose everybody forgets themselves sometimes under excitement, and of course he has been very troubled about Charlotte's future, and now that everything's so comfortably settled he feels the—”

She so evidently searched about for a word that I suggested “reaction.”

“Yes, reaction. That's just it, and thank you. And I am sure I shall always be grateful to you for our pleasant chat, and for letting me be so confidential.”

She executed a movement as of rising from her chair.

“Permit me,” I said, offering my hand as a pulley.

I experienced a sensation of dead weight, followed—Mrs. Perry being on her feet—by one of the most affectionate pressure. She had a motherly hand, and a motherly hand is still among the dearest things of experience, by whoever possessed, even when one acknowledges to the fatal age of forty.

“My dear lady,” I repeated, “the gratitude should be mine. I am honoured by your confidence in me.”

She smiled, blinked, choked a little.

“I suppose when you're getting on in life, like I am, you always feel a little lonely. And then, kindness, and somebody who'll listen, does go to your heart somehow.”

She arranged herself, smoothed down the Papuan full dress.

“Well, I'll go up and write to Aunt Trumbull,” she said. “The post's at twelve, and, I'm sorry to say, I never was very quick over letters.”

SO Charlottle Perry never cried,—never, from a child, had been given to the weakness of weeping. Among the many enlightening pieces of information I had recently received, this struck me as one of the most interesting. I found myself repeating it over and over as I loitered down the garden. Perplexing young person! And the copious tears of yesterday, what then did they indicate? A breaking down of stoicism; the heart of the woman fairly touched at last; or merely a pose more elaborate, more realistically developed, than all former poses?

In the days of my youth and my vanity, I thought I knew a great deal about human nature; I fancied myself an adept in the reading of character. But as I grow older I grow less and less confident of my own astuteness. My slowness in “catching on” indeed appears to me positively abysmal. The comprehension—in the true sense of that word—of even the most fatuous of one's fellow-mortals demands, not only a patience almost superhuman, but a lifetime of observation. One thing among all the perplexities, however,was quite certain, namely, that I had not got to the end of Charlotte Perry yet.

Meanwhile, I own, I kept a look-out for the scarlet silk blouse. Not only did I need a change from the Perry atmosphere to a less depressing climate and wider horizon, but I owed the owner of that brilliant garment one, to put it vulgarly. “Discipline must be maintained,” as observed the immortal Sergeant Bagnet. She had been malicious. She must pay for her malice—somehow—were it only indirectly by acting as an antidote to the insularity of good Mrs. Perry. But the offender had become invisible. I searched for her, but I searched vainly. She and her dyspeptic cavalier had disappeared. Finally, hearing a sound of voices from the place of gnats, I turned my footsteps thither.

Alas! under the sharp-edged shadow of the plane-trees only two English nurses and their charges were visible.—A small boy and girl,—two wildly active blue and white little beings, apparently in imminent risk of immersion, jumping from gunwale to gunwale of the pack of rowing-boats that were drawn up half out of the water on the paved slope at the near end of the little harbour. And a lusty infant of tender age, armed with a wooden spade, and suffering permanent eclipse, as to its face, from the vast proportions of a flapping white linen hat, who made staggering rushes in unexpected directions; indulging, meanwhile, in that wordless and wholly unrelated description of vocalisation, which should delight the heart of the evolutionary philologist, since it points so distinctly to the conclusion that the utterances of the primæval savage are heard over again in the earliest notes of the contemporary Christian child.

It was uncommonly warm under the plane-trees. Owing to the turn of the coast-line the whole of the little bay was sheltered from the breeze; so that the gay-coloured flags of the rowing-boats, among which the stars and stripes predominated, hung limp and flaccid from the white stern-posts. The length of the stone pier lay in a blaze of sunshine. And at the extreme end of it, raised high above the quay by a flight of steep steps, stood, not the accentuated black and red figure of my coveted young Russian, but Leversedge,—tall, gaunt, curiously unsubstantial looking, in a pale brown shooting-coat and white trousers.

His back was towards me, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded, as he gazed down into the blue water ridged with slow, smooth undulations from the wash of the lately passed steamer. He was absolutely still—a modern St. Simeon Stylites upon his lonely pillar—victim, even as this last was, allowing for the difference of outlook brought about by the lapse of fifteen centuries, of the strange torments of a fixed idea.

“But you are sure you do not think my coming to-day an intrusion?” she said. “I felt so strongly about it. I felt I really must come. And yet I was diffident. We discussed the question yesterday evening all through dinner. I think all my people would have liked to come. But I could not allow that. I know your Charlotte so well. I know and respect her instinctive shrinking from publicity. And so I said I would just slip away quietly with my husband. We would take a little Darby and Joan day's holiday. We could efface ourselves immediately if it seemed better to do so. But I thought it possible Septimus might be useful, for I gathered from what Mr. Perry told me there were papers to be witnessed, and my husband is so utterly dependable and so accustomed—ah! dear friend,” she cried, making a little rustling rush forward with both arms outstretched.

“Well, then, here's Lottie at last! And I'm sure I'm as thankful as possible, Mr. Hammond, for I was as nervous as could be something would happen to some of them.”

This parenthetically from Mrs. Perry.

Charlotte looked exceedingly pretty, standing there framed by the dark lines of the doorway. She wore a biscuit-coloured dress with very large pink sleeves to it; and a hat to match, garlanded with pink roses, the broad brim of which, turning up, formed a pale straw-coloured nimbus about her head. The girl's mouth gathered, quivered; her eyes were adorably dewy. She and Mrs. Mertyns held each other's hands, looked at each other, sighed, kissed with a sort of chastened rapture, murmuring simultaneously—

“Dear, dear friend!”

“I have not done wrong in coming?”

It seemed as if Charlotte Perry could not answer. She threw back her head, smiled, bit her lip. Then suddenly she seemed to become aware of my presence. Her breath caught, as though in pain. This appeared to me a quite uncalled-for demonstration, for had we not come down together inside the omnibus to the station?

Mrs. Mertyns took the place by the window—drew Miss Perry down on the one next to her. I think it had been her intention I should occupy the vacant place opposite,—upon the seat of the other she had piled parasols, dust cloaks, and a large basket of fruit and flowers,—but if such was her intention it was frustrated by the advent of our active Perry, who whipped into the empty place, rubbing his hands.

“Delightful surprise!” he cried. “I am sure, most delightful. A display of sympathy, of spontaneous solicitude, altogether flattering to myself and my family; adding one more to an already long list of charming acts of courtesy. We are in your debt, and how to pay,” said Mr. Perry, with sudden solemnity, “passes me. I ransack the chambers of my brain, but they are empty of any suggestion of a possible means of payment. Yet,” he continued, brightening, “who knows, a time may come, an opportunity may be granted me, and then— The faithful heart bound fast to thine by gracious friendly deeds, Will rouse to stalwart action interpreting thy needs.”

Charlotte Perry looked hard at the speaker. Then she addressed her friend in low and hurried accents.

JUST then the door opened at the far end of the car and admitted Leversedge. He came down the narrow gangway between the seats, lifting his hat to two athletic Englishwomen of the High School variety, whose overflowing hold-alls he slightly displaced in passing.

“Oh, here you all are,” he said. “How d'ye do, Mrs. Mertyns? No, pray, don't anybody move. I see you're all settled.”—Mrs. Perry and Septimus, it may be remarked, occupied the single seats the other side of the gangway.—“I can just as well find a place farther up the carriage.”

All the same he loitered, gazing at Charlotte Perry; hoping, as I thought, that she would make some sign. But she made none. Leversedge turned away. I followed him. And so it happened that we journeyed towards Geneva, sitting opposite to each other, rather cut off from the rest of the company. It was extremely hot, and we had to pull down the canvas blinds and half close the windows to keep out sun and dust. The train roared along; the vineyards reeling past on one hand, the rocks, white with fluttering mouettes and lapped by clear little green waves, on the other. It need hardly be stated that the two athletic Englishwomen had left all windows down and blinds up in their compartment, thus supplying us with a liberal measure of glare, cinders, and engine smoke. Above the noise of the train, from time to time, I heard Mrs. Mertyns' somewhat senseless and soulless laugh. Like many women in society, she had a tendency to laugh, not in proportion as she was amused, but in proportion as she was bored. I could well believe Perry père's style was finely irritating in all this heat. The more excellent of her, then, to have come! I have never entertained a better opinion of Mrs. Mertyns.

Leversedge, meanwhile, sat silent, his long legs outstretched beneath the little iron table between us, his head bent, his mind busy, judging by his expression, with rather gloomy thoughts.

“Sometimes it strikes me we men are awful brutes when it comes to marriage,” he said suddenly. “We want so much. We must have everything. Nothing less than the whole will satisfy us.”

“Upon my word, I think we give a good deal in return,” I replied. “The counter-demand is considerable, a matter by no means to be sneezed at—so considerable, in my estimation, that, as you see, I have never yet found myself equal to meeting it, and so remain, to the present hour, at once hugging and deploring my state of single blessedness. Oh, I'm all on the man's side, believe me, in marriage. In my eyes the bridegroom, the husband, is the leader of a forlorn hope—at once a noodle and a hero.”

“Thank you,” Leversedge said; “you are encouraging. But the truth is, you don't understand, you're out of it.”

I am afraid I made use of an expletive which had better not be repeated. Leversedge regarded me with an expression both humorous and dogged.

“Yes, you're out of it,” he repeated. “It's not that you are unequal to meeting the demand. You've never felt the thing. You've never been knocked out of time by a woman. Bless me, you don't stop to calculate the amount of giving and taking then; you don't weigh things; you don't speculate. When a man meets his fate, he meets it. The whole matter is outside argument. It is just so,—he may be a noodle, but he doesn't stop to care about that.”

Leversedge paused a moment, shifted his position, laid hold with both hands of the woodwork of the back of the seat high above his head.

“No, the man doesn't give much in proportion to the woman, to the girl, to the good woman,” he said. “For the man knows the ropes, after all; he has a precious clear idea of what he is driving at. He knows what he wants quite well, shamelessly lessly well, in too many cases. But hers is an act of faith almost divine. God in heaven! it seems to me there is no limit to the gratitude, to the reverence, Hammond, with which we should regard an innocent girl who is willing to marry any one of us.”

He smiled at me.

“I beg your pardon for prosing like this. But it's borne in upon me to-day that I am a wretchedly selfish animal. And I suppose something of the cheap old superstition clings to me that in confessing your sins you rid yourself of them, to a certain extent at all events. A better man than I, under all the circumstances, would have talked less and done something practical. Old Perry's income, such as it is, pretty well dies with him. And she ought to have money, she can use it—it is necessary to a woman with her gifts, and it is miserable to think of her wanting it, now or any when. A better man than I would have seen to all that, provided against any bother that way—and then set her free, given her up, whether she would or not.”

Leversedge threw himself forward, and for once the blood rushed into his face.

“But I can't,” he said huskily,—“I can't. Before God, I have tried; but I have not the pluck. I want her. I must have her—for a little while—just for a little while—and then—”

THE joyless little ceremony was over, and Leversedge had got his wife as far as civil law could give her to him. His will was signed and witnessed by Mertyns and myself. Then we turned from business to the courting of pleasure. We ate a smart luncheon at a smart hotel, towards the end of which entertainment Mr. Perry was with difficulty restrained from making a speech. Finally we went for a walk. At this point Mrs. Mertyns' courage ran out; she departed, with many protestations of sorrow, to seek for some distinguished Genevan littérateur whom she suddenly felt an overwhelming necessity to call upon. She went away in a cab, with a white awning to it like the tester of a four-post bed. She left us Septimus.

Perry père et mère clung to each other through that dreadful walk, clung to the Carissima, clung to the rest of us. Escape was impossible. Like Wordsworth's cloud, “we moved together, if we moved at all.” It was hot and dusty, and the horror of being “out for the day” was most sensibly upon us.

Returning from the farther shore of the Rhone by the broad Pont des Bergues,—to the middle of which Rousseau's Island is moored by a little iron suspension bridge,—good Mrs. Perry made a sudden diversion. There was yet a weary hour before our train started. She begged plaintively to be taken on to the island. Not that she was filled by the spirit of pilgrimage, by memories of the delightful pages of the , or the disintegrating ones of the . She saw trees, and green benches whereon she might rest a while, and seek relief from the fatigues and trampings of this very peripatetic day.

Leversedge took care of her, found her a cool spot, sat by her saying, I am sure, an infinity of nice kind things. Mr. Perry and Mr. Mertyns drifted into a ponderous conversation on the affairs of the nation at home and abroad. While I found myself standing under the narrow shimmering shade of the great poplars with the fair Charlotte,—the sapphire waters of the Rhone rushing down between the white piers of the bridges at the pace of a galloping horse; the façades of the solid square houses, fronting the quay and its rows of round-headed plane trees, lying in strong sunshine and blue shadow; the city piled up behind to the stern mass of the Romanesque cathedral, the two squat towers of which showed hard and dark against the pale lilac limestone terraces of the Grand Salève.

The girl's pretty eyes had been reproachful whenever they chanced to meet mine during that deadly day. They were reproachful still. I perceived that the atmosphere was electric, I feared we were on the verge of an explanation, and I cordially detest explanations. So I talked, I did more, I chattered. I gave my companion a really rather witty description of a sentimental journey I had once made—in company with the friend who shall be nameless-from Geneva, via Aix les Bains, to Annecy, for the purpose of visiting Les Charmettes—sacred to the memory of that most charming victim of every conceivable false philosophy, Madame de Warens.

Suddenly the girl stopped me.

“You go too far,” she said, “for I cannot believe you are utterly heartless, and so you must be aware, in a measure, of all I am feeling.—Oh! I know you are talking well—you usually do that. But, just now, that you should be agreeable is of very slight moment to me.”

She raised her hand and pointed to the dark high-shouldered cathedral.

“You remember they burnt people up there, once upon a time,” she said. “Well, I feel towards your talk much as those people must have felt towards the grasshoppers—listen to them now—singing gaily in the sunshine while the flames leapt up that—”

“No, no, no, pardon me,” I cried. “It is you who go very much too far. For goodness' sake don't souse us thus suddenly in a sea of tragedy right up to the neck. Forgive my remarking that your illustration is a wild exaggeration, altogether beyond the facts of the case.”

“You know what I have done, you know why I have done it, and you make agreeable conversation. You have no word of recognition, of admission. Does not your sense of justice compel you to own my sincerity at last?”

“Oh, quarrel with me as much as you like,” I said. “That is healthy enough. But don't lose sight of the proportion of things, and indulge in distorted comparisons. It is unworthy of your intelligence to do so, to go thus madly beyond the facts of the case.”

The girl clasped her hands and moved a couple of steps aside, with one of those swift movements which would look so excellently upon the stage.

“But can anything really go beyond the facts of the case?” she asked in tones of sharp, thin distress.

Upon my word, I was very much provoked with the Carissima, provoked to the point of being greatly minded to tell her, once and for all, that she was a goose.

“Yes, most emphatically many things can,” I answered. “Does a man's love carry so little weight with you that you dare speak as though to be the sole and supreme object of it was a dire misfortune? Moreover, Leversedge comes to you with his hands by no means empty. He does not merely offer you the trivial matter of his whole heart, but the exceedingly substantial matter of his whole fortune.”

The girl's colour had faded. She regarded me with some amazement. She had often surprised me; now I proposed to have my turn.

“You cannot suppose money matters to me?” she faltered.

“Indeed,” I returned, “I can very readily suppose it. Money matters vitally to every one of us who is in his, or her, sober senses. Miseries come whether one is rich or whether one is poor; but, I own, I never encountered any form of misery yet which money could not do a good deal to alleviate. But that is not the main point; the main point is your very limited appreciation of the affection of the man you are marrying.”

“Are you aware that you are simply scolding me?” my companion inquired sweetly.

“Yes, I am perfectly well aware of it, my dear young lady,” I replied genially. “And unless you actually run away from me, or call for help, I am fully prepared to continue the process. I am not nearly through with the business yet; and it is all for your good—all, believe me. See now, you have done me the honour to be very confidential with me. You have confided to me dreams of an ideal affection.”

The colour rushed into the fair Charlotte's face again. She closed her charming eyes, and raised her hand as though to ward off a blow. But the vision of Leversedge was upon me; Leversedge in that basting railway carriage, and the broken passion of his utterance. I would not relent.

“Bear with me while I point out to you that those dreams are but pale and ghostly fictions, beside the real, the very full-blooded, romance of Leversedge's affection. All that you have vaguely imagined yourself feeling regarding some possible, conceivable, but non-existent being, he positively and actually feels regarding you. Don't you understand, you are the last word of poetry, of art, of religion—even—to him. And is that nothing? Is it a slight matter to be to a man the incarnation, the ultimate expression, of all enchantments, all delights—that in you he finds the realisation of his highest aspirations—finds it there or nowhere?”

I paused, somewhat out of breath from my own—most unusual—flight of eloquence. I am not often thus loudly didactic. To be so is to be crude, and I shudder at crudity. Even now I dared not pause long, lest a quite opposite side of the case should present itself to me, and I should begin to fear not only that my enthusiasm was slightly ridiculous, but that I might, after all, be presenting my hearer with a garbled edition. Garbled or not, it appeared to work upon her. She stood silent; and her pretty face, set in the aureole of her wide-brimmed, rose-garlanded hat, wore a questioning expression somewhat—so I flattered myself—new to it. And this encouraged me. I held a brief for Leversedge—well, then, I would strike while the iron was hot, I would go on, I would plead his cause yet further.

“My dear young lady, you have been bewitched by much talk, by much reading, by all manner of ingenious hair-splittings regarding the emotions, regarding the relation of men and women. Do come back out of all that, all those misleading generalisations and fanciful interpretations, and deal with the matter in hand. You have just married a man who adores you, to whom you—briefly—represent rapture; well, lend yourself a little to the situation. It is not a contemptible one. For, to how many women do you suppose it happens, in their whole lifetime, ever to represent that to any member of our sex?”

AS though the day had not already been long I enough, we broke out into extensive festivity at the Grand Hôtel that evening. We had indulged in small dances before, when the gold and crimson chairs and sofas fled back against the walls of the salon, while the band brayed lustily upon the verandah. But to-night—whether by request of Perry père, I know not—proceedings were upon a grander scale. The neighbouring hotels and pensions had sent us their contingent of English and American youth, English and American maturity; while even the native population had subscribed precious specimens, with those petticoats disproportionately short in the one sex and ties disproportionately narrow in the other, those necks quite unnecessarily large and uncovered in both, which are so characteristic of the descendants of William Tell, and of the conquerors of Morat and Grandson. In honour of these guests the hotel was lighted from end to end; there were even rumours of supper to be obtained in the salle à-manger. The rooms were really crowded. We were nothing, indeed, if not gay that evening.

On our return from Geneva, I had dined with Leversedge and the Perry family in the restaurant. Dined? rather say feasted! And Perry père had been horribly profuse in anecdote; but I capped his vilest quotations, I applauded his stalest stories. For the Carissima was gentle, natural, wholly captivating; while Leversedge held himself gallantly, and had a light in his eyes good to see. And these things produced in me an amiability little short of divine. I so very seldom am overtaken with charitable activities in respect of my fellow-men, I so seldom do anything—in the least burdensome to myself—to promote their welfare, that I was really quite overcome by my own successful altruism. If, thanks to me—for had I not, overruling the distaste of the one, and scruples of the other, pushed these two into each other's arms, thus finally and irrevocably?—if, I say, the half marriage went so merrily, might not the whole marriage go to perfection? For the time I enjoyed all the proud pleasures of the preacher, the evangelist, the director. I comprehended the fascinations of the sacerdotal position. I had “played with souls” for their good, temporal and eternal; and had won them, though the odds against such winning were extremely heavy. I had saved Leversedge's reason, probably his life into the bargain. I had converted the Carissima. And, for the time, I own it, my conceit of myself was colossal—rampantly, gloriously blatant.

It was in this spirit of profound self-congratulation that I beheld Leversedge and his bride pass out into the dusky brightness of the garden, and that I conducted Mrs. Perry to a gilded chair in the salon, whence she could witness the humours of the dance; while Mr. Perry, full of dinner, hilarity, and parental pride, instituted himself Leader of the Revels, encouraging the musicians, and inducing the wildest confusion by introducing young ladies, of whose names and nationalities he was quite uncertain, to gentlemen, whom he did not in the very least know.

Then the sweet influences of accomplished duty pervaded me—a large, digestive calm, subtly mingled with the blissful serenity of one upon whose undertakings the gods have smiled, so that he finds himself both a better and abler man than he had ever imagined himself to be. I retired into the hall, to a secluded corner behind one of the groups of pillars supporting the first-floor gallery. There I sat and smoked, and thought—as I invariably do think when I am feeling very good—of the white rectory house away in slumberous Midlandshire, of the old ecclesiastical historian (his living interest in things long dead, his deadly indifference regarding things still living), and of the woman I ought to have married, the only woman, as I firmly believe (when I am feeling very good), that I ever really loved, the woman I never make the slightest effort to see—sweet Lydia Castern.—And meanwhile I watched the passing crowd, and, since the double doors of the salon, facing me, stood wide open, caught passing glimpses of the dancers, my senses pleasantly dulled by the sound of many footsteps, many voices, the rustle of women's garments, across all which, advantageously tempered by distance, came the strains of the band.

Surely I might take my ease. Was not everything going to admiration? Out there, under the stars, amid the magic of the fair September night, was not Constantine Leversedge making love, his soul delivered from the grotesque and ghastly dream of the diabolic dog? And was not Charlotte, née Perry, listening, her soul delivered from dreams hardly less grotesque and ghastly—from false standards of taste, of fashion, from false refinements, false intellectualities, from a silly pursuit of decadent eccentricities? Was she not beginning to comprehend what an exquisite, yet very simple solution—notwithstanding the prurient purities of contemporary feminine novelists and reformers—true-love offers to the much-vexed question of the sexes? Beginning to comprehend how deep-rooted and terrible, yet how exceedingly pretty a pastime, is the love of an honest man—and many men are honest, after all, you know—for an honest woman?

My soul expanded under these charming meditations. For was I not the deus ex machina, was not this good work mainly of my making? Had I yielded to the Carissima's thoughtless coquetries, and involved myself in any intimate relation to her, how different the result! It was the cut of her shoes that saved me? Perish the thought!—it was my own high-mindedness, my own self-forgetting appreciation of the justice of the situation. Had I counselled Leversedge weakly to withdraw, instead of bravely to remain, again how different the result! I beheld the vision of two wasted lives. The Carissima, moreover, let loose upon society, possibly to entangle me—yes, me, after all, in the end. Instead of which, here I sat, replete with the perfect peace of conscious impeccability. Verily, how delightful are the leisures of the righteous, how inspiring the repose of him who seeks the advantage of others rather than advantage of his own! Five minutes more, and I might have added a hundred and fifty-first to the hundred and fifty Psalms of King David, with a difference—a difference possibly somewhat in the direction of M. Tartufe. But I was saved from any such disaster by the sound of a low grunt.

As I have already stated, I am—I thankfully affirm—acquainted with but one human being who testifies to the fact of his presence in this primitive manner. It is a little introductory habit of Mr. Percy Gerrard; and he often employs it as a preface to observations the reverse of agreeable—so I fancy, but then I own to a prejudice against Percy Gerrard.

On the present occasion he had “stolen upon me softly”; and his manner struck me as less intolerably superior than usual. He really seemed to wish to make himself agreeable.

“'Evening, Hammond,” he murmured affably, as he dropped into a neighbouring chair. “Dancing? How superfluous! You are very right to remain out here. The modern bourgeois ballroom—and this, I imagine, is pre-eminently bourgeois—is a revolting spectacle. Few sights, indeed, can be more repulsive than a herd of both sexes, underbred and perspiring, clasping each other's waists, and revolving, with prolonged and boisterous fatuity, in time to some wholly imbecile tune such as offends my ear at the present moment.”

Nevertheless, Gerrard pushed his chair farther to the left, with the evident desire to gain a clearer view of the festivities going forward in the salon. But a good many persons stood about the doorway, and it was only at intervals that one obtained full sight of the dancers.

“An exhibition of untamed animality!” he murmured mured in tones of disgust. “I hold it proof of the skin-deep quality of our vaunted civilisation that performances of this description are countenanced, nay, encouraged—it is humiliating to think of—by really very decently educated people.”

“From the Perfectly Ordered State, then, dancing is excluded?” I inquired.

For I was still at peace with all mankind, and even Gerrard's unlovely humours failed to ruffle me. I even played up to him, indulged him. In the columns of he had lately been sketching Arcadias and Utopias according to his graceful fancy. He was not slow to observe the allusion, and turned to me with a gleam of gratified vanity in his dull eyes.

“Ah! you read those little things of mine!” he said. “They had merit—I knew it.”

“Of course you knew it. It is the most abject of exploded fictions that a man can write a masterpiece without knowing it.”

He directed his slow glance upon the crowd round the door of the salon again.

“Yes; I agree with you. I knew those articles had merit, and the best critics confirmed my judgment. I have been asked to reprint them.”

“Do so,” I said. “The world will be the gainer.”

Gerrard gathered himself up in his chair—planting his small square feet on the top rung of it —into a sort of spiderlike blob. What an immensely displeasing creature he was!

“Yes, I think I shall reprint them,” he said. “That is the worst of journalism—really beautiful things are too often lost, forgotten along with the day that gave them birth. But, since you are interested in my visions, in the Perfectly Ordered State, which, as I devoutly trust, is equivalent to saying, in the Coming Civilisation, woman will resume her natural position, that from which the moral and intellectual barbarism of the last few centuries has ousted her with such deplorable results. In the Coming Civilisation there will be a very hard-and-fast line drawn between the public and the private life. For we have ceased most lamentably to appreciate the decencies of the high wall, the heavy curtain, the locked door. The Democratic Spirit, rightly understood, is disgustingly immodest. It has done its best to murder secrecy and concealment, which are necessary elements in all really exquisite living.”

The crowd opened to give passage to the American prima-donna, her well-preserved mother, and her stout poodle; and, for the moment, the glistening floor of the ballroom and its racing couples were disclosed to observation.

“And so I take it,” Gerrard continued, “in the Perfect State, woman will again dance with all the grace of richly developed suggestion—behind closed doors—for the delectation of man, who will sit still and just watch her, lending her the emotional support of a profoundly sympathetic admiration, not the brutally material one of an encircling arm.”

“The coming civilisation has a little Oriental turn to it then?” I remarked.

“How should it be otherwise?” he replied. “In many matters the Oriental has always continued true to the light that was in him. His mind has remained unconfused by those weak notions of abstract justice, which war against the life of sense and of society.”

Gerrard drew his hand over his moist, uncomfortably smooth hair. I may add that it partially concealed his ears. Why does one instinctively distrust a man whose ears are partially concealed by his hair?

“The pendulum has swung far enough now, in all conscience, in the western ‘Hail Columbia!’ direction; with unalloyed gladness I hail indications of the return, the eastern beat.—And that reminds me—talking of dancing, of course you know that most exquisite place, Palewell Friars? I was down there at Whitsuntide this year. They like to have me. You remember the view from the cedar drawing-room? That delightful Italian garden and the river flowing just below it, the lime avenues, and the broken ground in the deer-park studded with the old Spanish chestnuts, composes as entirely a lovely home scene as—”

He stopped. Again the crowd had broken up about the door, disclosing a view of the ballroom.

“A civil marriage is perfectly valid, perfectly sound in law?” Gerrard asked, with curious abruptness, his voice cracking up queerly at the end of the sentence.

“Unquestionably,” I said.

“Precisely—of course,” he spread himself in his chair.—“I know most of our fine English country houses, from the inside, I am happy to say. But Palewell always strikes me as unique, nothing jars, nothing obtrudes itself. Its charm is a solicitation, not a demand; while there is the inimitable flavour of an intensely aristocratic atmosphere pervading the whole scene, the whole life.”

“Which exactly suits you?” I suggested. Gerrard turned his head, and I perceived a singularly insolent gleam in his eyes.

“It does,” he replied; “you are perfectly right, it certainly does. I draw breath there with the emotion of perfect and natural well-being, with which, as I conceive, the Blest draw breath in the translucent air of Paradise—I am at home.”

He paused and sighed.

“We all have intimations, at times, of that which is utterly in harmony with the best of our own being—a delicious satisfaction of both the religious and artistic instincts. I had attended mass one morning in that little gem of a chapel; and later, in the richly toned and shadowed cedar drawing-room, while the sunlight yet caressed the grey stone mullions of that range of vast windows, Lady Clare danced to us.—You know her? Petite but svelte, sherry-coloured eyes and hair, with a dark pencilling of eyelash and eyebrow. A skin like cream—yet that illustration hardly gratifies me. It is a little disgustingly suggestive of the cow, and the farm-girl, and a rude first-hand relation to nature.”

Gerrard lounged sideways in his chair, and flattened down his hair again.

“Think, therefore, I beseech you, only of cream in some delectable golden jug of Renaissance workmanship, about the delicately turned body of which fauns and naïads toy amorously, in a wonder of subtly interlacing lines. Yes, I think that fairly renders the immediate sentiment of her appearance. It was all very beautiful. The magnificent room, the high-bred woman, her bare neck and arms braving the sunlight, on which those historic rubies—you know them?—glowed and shone as she passed from the voluptuous monotony of the Nautch to the frank gaminerie of the Café Chantant.”

“Innocent alike of the intention of either?” I remarked.

“I really can't tell,” he said, with an effort at candour. “But I hope so; of course I hope so, for it would go far to carry out my cherished theory of woman.—And there were contrasts in the setting of the scene which, emotionally speaking, were wonderfully helpful. The other women present wore shirts and sailor hats, the men were in breeches and dirty shooting-boots. Pour comble de bonheur little Freddy Hellard lighted cigarettes, and no one chid him. Ah, I shall long remember that morning, it was big with—”

Gerrard rose to his feet, peering in the direction of the ballroom. Again the crowd had opened, drifting to right and left, while Leversedge and the Carissima were revealed standing in the doorway. Evidently they had been valsing. The girl's abundant hair was slightly disordered; she carried the train of her soft peach-bloom coloured muslin dress over her arm. Leversedge faced her. He was laughing a little, fanning her, talking to her. Things went well, then? Verily, they went most exceedingly well. I thanked the gods. I approved my own conduct in this business afresh. Yet I almost regretted to see these lovers in the commonplace hurley-burley of a ball. I could not find it in my heart to think it the very best taste in the world that they should thus appear so conspicuously in public. Moreover, I wished earnestly to believe them in that state of mind in which solitude, and the repetition of certain sweet nothings, are so adorably full of high illumination, high delight. That they should tolerate the close contact of their fellow-creatures, that they should have any desire for activity, disappointed me. Or, might I trust this pointed to the light-heartedness that comes of complete happiness, the exuberant gaiety which is born of fulness of content? There is a stage of mental as well as physical well-being which, in all living things, expresses itself in playfulness, skittishness, a disposition, as you may say frankly, to jump about. Could it be—but oh, dear me, for that were indeed a notable conversion!—that Charlotte, née Perry, had reached the stage of innocent rapture in which all young and wholesome creatures develop this disposition to jump about? Yet the peace of the—to themselves, unexpectedly—virtuous being still upon me, I was disposed to press a point in the direction of cheerfulness; to endure all things, in the shape of that most unsavoury animal, Gerrard; to hope all things for the salvation of Leversedge's mind; to believe all things, concerning its purification from fashionable frivolities, of the Carissima's spirit. And as to a questionableness of taste in thus appearing in public, well, after all, what is Taste? The hedge from behind which the feeble shoot at the strong; the refuge of the unproductive; the cloak under which the unsuccessful try to cover the blackness of their envy; the spangles with which talent tries so to dazzle the eyes of the commonplace multitude, that it shall fail to see the stars of true genius shining on quietly very far above its head. My metaphors might be confused, but my determination of conviction was great. Constantine and Charlotte were right to dance, it meant everything most promising that they should dance. Taste?—who in the moment of honest gladness, or honest misery, ever stops to think about taste?

Thus did I reason with myself, while Gerrard paused beside me, curiously spiderlike. I quite thought he intended advancing upon the couple in the doorway. But the crowd, to my relief, speedily closed up again, and he sank back into his chair with a grunt.

“Poor girl,” he murmured, “I have a regard for her. It is painful. She was worthy of a better fate than the embraces of that —. But let us turn to something pleasanter, Hammond. I felt very thankful during that scene at Palewell; for I recognised that my prayers had been answered, and that I had not misread the signs of the times. I recognised that the reaction has set in, in very truth; that the degrading fiction of the equality of the sexes is already exploded; that education, doing its worst, has still failed to do any abiding injury, since the fin de siècle woman, true in instinct, though false in idea, mistakes the badge of her servitude for the brevet of her emancipation, and, to prove the completeness of her liberty, dances, like any slave-girl of the harem, for the entertainment of her hereditary masters. A cynic might sneer at this, as a last and crowning example of the illogic of the feminine mind. I cannot sneer. To me the matter is solemnly glad from the bigness of its promise. ‘Woman never civilises,’—thank God for that.”

I loathed Gerrard. But what was the good of relieving my feelings by being rude to him, and telling him so? I had a growing conviction that he was here for a set purpose, that he harboured designs of some sort against the peace of mind of Leversedge and the Carissima. If I was rude to him, he would go away and carry out his purpose—perhaps—all the sooner. Let them dance—let them dance; meanwhile I would, greatly enduring, continue the conversation.

“How about the suffrage, then,” I asked, as one greedy of information, “to which, as a good Conservative, your organ—that is the technical term, I believe—your organ, has devoted so many eloquent pages?”

“Assuredly, Hammond, you are not taken in by that little blague?” he said, turning his head slowly and looking at me. “We need it for the protection of our own property, of course, menaced as it is by the rapacity of the masses. Not one woman in a million is public-spirited—the vast majority have a savage rage for their own little possessions. We give it as the rope, the enough of rope, which will enable these dear foolish female creatures very effectually to hang themselves. Don't you see?”

“Most emphatically I do see,” I said.

Something in my tone, I suppose, conveyed to my hearer that I had had about enough. Ah! how stupid is it ever to lose one's temper, even in a good cause! Gerrard grunted, again rose to his feet. He stood, smoothing down his hair, and looking intently at the open door of the ballroom.

“By the way,” he said, “you know, I suppose, whether this story of Mrs. Mertyns' is true about that lunatic Leversedge's money?”

“What story?” I asked.

“Oh! that there is really a great deal of it, and that he has left it unconditionally to his wife?”

I got up too, and pushed my chair aside to let the apostolic-looking Russian poet and his daughters pass. They stopped a moment; we talked. I hoped Gerrard would go. But he remained at my elbow.

“You signed the will, I understand,” he said. “Of course you know all about it.”

“Upon my word,” I replied, “I do not see—if you will excuse my saying so—that whatever I do know or don't know is any particular concern of yours.”

Percy Gerrard is not constitutionally brave. I was delighted to note that he backed away from me a little, that he was distinctly uncomfortable and embarrassed.

“Oh! of course I don't want details,” he said hastily. “Pray, don't misunderstand my motives in asking. I have, as I told you just now, a regard for the poor girl. She is clever; in good hands something might be made of her. I am aware, just as you are aware, and everybody else is aware, that the man she is marrying is insane. And I own, I should be glad to know that when her husband retires into the enforced seclusion which is already, in my humble opinion, so desirable for the comfort and safety of other people, she, poor thing, will at least be decently provided for.”

“Make your charitable mind easy,” I replied. “Mrs. Leversedge will be by no means destitute.”

“So I understood. It is a relief to have you confirm the report.”

Gerrard gazed meditatively at me. He had regained all his habitual insolence of demeanour.

“Thanks, Hammond,” he said. “You are really very obliging. That is all I wanted to know.”

And he pushed his way through the crowd into the brilliantly-lighted salon.

IT was the misfortune of Percy Gerrard that he had dirty fingers, and smirched everything he touched. Those dirty fingers of his had broken up the fulness of my self-complacency; I began to misdoubt the efficacy of the gospel which I had so lately preached with such success. My mental atmosphere changed, and for the worse; my whole outlook was affected. The hall, for instance, which had only been pleasantly warm half an hour ago, grew stuffy. The crowd, which had been amusing, grew oppressive. I had seen handsome couples, nice young couples; I had noted gay little flirtations. Now there seemed to start into disquieting prominence all sorts of queer people; people one could not quite place, people who from their general appearance suggested the idea that they had retired from active service—whether of business or pleasure—and were just “stopping over,” without much either of name or local habitation, making out the time till the cemetery should claim them and the very little they still were should utterly cease to be. A watering-place or hotel population always contains figures of this sort. Women of uncertain nationality, in strange garments, whose purses are light, whose eyes are hungry for social or any other sort of recognition, and whose day, such as it may have been, is very clearly over. Men of more than middle age, who once no doubt held distinguished positions in distant lands; but who now grumble away a purposeless existence on a pension or annuity, play a fractious game of whist, and air imaginary grievances of gigantic proportions.

Within the last half-hour these melancholy figures seemed to have multiplied exceedingly in the hall of the Grand Hôtel. And their near neighbourhood was depressing. For is it not more or less thus that we all, every one of us, end, alas! Platitudes regarding the brevity of things gay and pleasant, the certainty of the ultimate arrival of things altogether the reverse, began to form themselves on my lips. I recognised that I needed change of air, and that speedily.

Just within the great door of the portico I paused. The night was clear and sweet. In the basin of the little dribbling fountain, frogs were croaking—not the sonorous, full-throated chant of the southern frogs, but a modest tinkling note as of tiny bells. Great bats were hawking over the shrubberies in the dim garden. The stars were very large and keen. While from the wine-shop of some hamlet, far up among the vineyards, came the sound of a rude chorus of men's voices and the thumping of a drum. Figures passed along the wide carriage-drive, slipping out of the half darkness on the one hand and vanishing into it again on the other, as figures pass across the stage in some interlude of a play. First the lady of the scarlet silk blouse went swiftly by, talking excitedly to her two companions, the debilitated Russian young men. She had a white lace handkerchief thrown over her head, and it gleamed far down the avenue of pollarded chestnuts long after her figure, and those of her cavaliers, had been swallowed up in the shadow of the thick trees. Then a cheery lad in evening dress, a typical British subaltern, with the shortest of red hair and honestest of sunburnt faces, went by. He escorted a trim American maiden, to whom, in the last week, he had very obviously and completely lost his heart. The two were laughing, evidently the joke was a first-rate one. Almost immediately after, Perry père fled across the scene, a lopsided stripe of hurrying blackness.

I let him get to a safe distance, then I went out and followed the path along the left of the big hotel, under the long row of dining-room windows. All the chandeliers were lighted within, and a confused noise of talk and of feasting reached me. Who paid, I wondered—not those who ate and drank, not the hotel proprietor, very certainly, nor yet Mr. Perry. Leversedge, I supposed; that was his rôle.—Yes, Percy Gerrard's dirty fingers had decidedly spoilt the evening for me! Leversedge, I feared, was doomed to pay for most things, whoever happened to consume them.

And just as I had reached this somewhat disheartening conclusion, at the turn of the terrace, in the full glare of the great cluster of electric lights fixed flowerlike against the corner of the huge building, I came upon Leversedge himself.

He lounged, with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the soft night-moths, that fluttered around the bulbs of hard white light. I felt troubled, I therefore became weakly vapid—in speech.

“You here? The gay and giddy dance is over then,” I said.

Leversedge's eyes met mine in vague inquiry for an instant.

“Oh! we've had some splendid turns,” he said. “Charlotte dances divinely.”

“Does she not do all things divinely?”

“Pretty nearly,” he answered, smiling.

All went well still, then; my soul received comfort, my faith in my own gospel revived. Yea, these lovers should yet find complete salvation and—sustaining thought—through me.

Leversedge was staring at the upward flying night-moths again.

“Poor, silly fools,” he said slowly, “they're a little too much of a parable.”

But my cheerfulness had returned.

“My dear fellow,” I replied, “they ‘needs must love the highest when they see it,’ like the rest of us. But the highest is perfectly safe in this case, and will not do them any injury. They can't singe themselves. The globes are sealed.”

Leversedge's mildly distracted brow gathered into a frown for a moment, and he raised his shoulders the least bit in the world.

“No, they can't singe themselves,” he said, “but they can bash their silly heads in, which will answer much the same purpose.” Then he added, quickly and courteously—“I beg your pardon, Hammond; I am an ass, and like an ass I am a little bit out of temper.”

Just then, somewhere down in the direction of the little harbour, a dog yelped. I saw Leversedge start.

“What's that?” he said, under his breath.

His face straightened. He listened. I listened too, somehow. It was exceedingly stupid of me, for I ought to have talked; but I could not help myself. I had to listen. The sounds of revelry from the dining-room had grown faint; a breath of air had stirred the surface of the bank of shrubs on our right. And again, down by the harbour, a dog, evidently a small dog, yelped and whimpered.

“Let us come round to the front of the house,” Leversedge said, rather hurriedly. “That set of Lancers must be over by now, I should think, and she told me to meet her at the steps.”

As we went along the terrace, he added—

“That greasy animal, Gerrard, has turned up again to-night. He insisted upon Charlotte's sitting out this square dance with him, which bored her, and annoyed me rather. Of course I know, I'm rather out of it, Hammond, from having been away so long; but if that fellow's not a bad lot, I never saw any man that was.”

“Briefly, he is a beast!” I exclaimed.

Leversedge chuckled audibly.

“Thanks, I feel better,” he said. “Charlotte doesn't fancy him either, I know; but she's seen a good deal of him at Mrs. Mertyns', and she can't be uncivil, you see. As to this dance, she couldn't civilly get out of it.”

As we moved forward the air became positively heavy with the rich, aromatic scent of the magnolia blossoms, while the sound of the band came upon us with a sudden gush, in the light tuneful music of .

“APRÈS,” cried Mr. Perry, addressing his daughter in rallying tones,—“après le bal! Surely you young people stand in need of a little light refreshment? A plan, a plan, I have a charming plan—eh, Mamma? Let's offer our friends here an al fresco entertainment, before we part at the close of this auspicious day, to meet again to-morrow morning. Ah yes, meet at the church door at half-past ten o'clock. I look for many friendly faces to be gathered at the church door, I'm sure, quite a number of friendly faces.—But now to supper.”

In speaking, Mr. Perry waved us towards a table, by one of the large magnolias, at the farther side of the terrace. The rough zinc top of the table, I remember, caught the light, as did the white balustrade parallel to which it stood, over which pink climbing roses, set in the flower-border below, had thrown long trails of leaf and blossom. Beyond lay a quarter of an acre of lawn sloping away into a darkness of trees, bordering the lake shore.

SO we three were left alone. To form one of that trinity was not an honour, very certainly, which I coveted. But there was no way to avoid it; so, inwardly protesting, and feeling, I confess, ignominiously nervous, I remained.

Leversedge came on along the side of the table, and dropped into the chair which I, in the moment of the catastrophe, had vacated. The girl did not look at him; she continued in the same rigid attitude, her arms still flung out across the table amid the wreck of the supper; her fingers doubling and undoubling convulsively—the only sign she gave of her agitation. And Leversedge laid his hand on her bare arm just below the elbow. It was rather ghastly to think how her muscles working like that, right under his fingers, must have affected him. For a little space he sat silent, trying to force back a rising tide of very vital emotion—while, I remember, the coffee from an overturned cup dripped slowly, slowly from the farther edge of the table on to the gravel below. At last he said—

SOME ten minutes later Leversedge got up from beside the little table. He had made no outcry. He was quiet, desolatingly quiet, almost apathetic; and he was shaking all over, shaking, so that instinctively I put out my hand to support him.

“Thanks,” he said. “There's nothing that I know of to wait for now. Perhaps we may as well go in, Hammond; don't you think so?”

But on the threshold of the glass door of the salon he paused, shaking too violently to go farther. The ballroom was dark, silent, empty—only lights, as one saw through the open doors, beyond in the hall.

“I think I must have got a bit of a chill,” Leversedge remarked. “I expect there's a lot of damp at night off the lake, and if you've once had a touch of fever it's likely to lay hold of you.”

Then we went on across the salon into the hall, and up the great staircase, slowly, waiting now and then, because he shook so badly, to Leversedge's sedge's room on the first floor. I remember the impression made on me as I opened the door of it. The effect within was striking; for there were candles everywhere,—on the chimneypiece, the writing-table, the chest of drawers, by the bedside,—a positive blaze of light, turning this bachelor bedchamber into something curiously suggestive of a chapelle ardente.

I suppose Leversedge noticed my surprise.

“Candles? Oh yes,” he said; “I always tell them to light a good many like that, now—it's pleasanter, you know, at night.”

He gazed round the room in a dazed, vacant kind of way. Upon the writing-table stood a folding, leather photograph frame, somewhat worn and travel-stained with much packing. It contained a series of pictures of Charlotte Perry, covering quite a number of years, judging by the changing fashion of her costume. The last photograph was of very recent date; the girl's charming face set in the aureole of the wide-brimmed, rose-garlanded hat which she had worn that morning. Leversedge's wandering glance lighted on these pictures; and a terrible emotion gripped his very vitals.

“My love!” he cried out loud,—“my love!”

His apathy passed away, and in a moment he had turned and spoke to me courteously, and with a certain stateliness.