BOOK III

END OF BOOK II

BOOK III

DERELICT

CHAPTER I

Virtue is the personality of many women. Rob them of it, those of them whose value it enhances, and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star out of the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth. It is a common trend of the mind in these modern days to make nobility out of the women whose personality needs no virtue to lift it to a pedestal of fame. But really, it is they who make the nobility for themselves. Phryne of Athens, Helen of Troy, Catherine of Russia, Mary of Scotland—these are women who have ennobled themselves without aid of eulogy. Personality has been theirs without necessity for the robe of virtue to grace them in the eyes of the world. But with the seemingly lesser women, the women of seemingly no vast account—with those whose whole individuality depends upon the invaluable possession of their virtue, no great epic can well be sung, no loud pæan sounded. You may find just a lyric here, a rondel there, set to the lilt of a phrase in an idle hour and sung in a passing moment to send a tired heart asleep. But that is all. Yet they are the women upon whom the world has spent six thousand years in the making; they are the women at whose breasts are fed the sons of men. The whole race has been weaned by them; every country has been nursed into manhood in their arms. But they are too normal or they are too much a class to have men sing of them. There is not one mother of children in the vast calendars of history who stands out now for our eyes to reverence. Upon the stage of the world their part is played, and what eye is there can grasp in comprehensive glance the whole broad sweep of power which their frail hands have wielded? Only upon that mimic platform of fame, raised where the eyes of all can watch the figure as it treads the boards, have women stood apart where the recorder can jot their names upon a scroll of history for the world to read. There is no virtue essential here; virtue indeed but adds a glamour with its absence.

There is some subtle attraction in a Catherine of Russia or a Manon Lescaut which tempts the cunning lust of men to cry their praise for the nobility of heart that lies beneath. But what elusive charm is there in the mother of children whose stainless virtue is her only personality? None? Yet to the all-seeing eye, to the all-comprehending brain—to that omniscience whom some call God, be it in Trinity or in Unity, and others know not what to call—these are the women who lift immeasurably above fame, infinitely above repute.

So, therefore, rob them of their virtue and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star from the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth, you filch from the generous hand of Nature that very possession which she holds most dear. For without virtue, these women are nothing. Without virtue, you may see them dragging the bed of the streets for the bodies they can find. It is the last task which Nature sets them—bait to lure men from the theft of that virtue in others which they can in no wise repay.

And this very virtue itself needs no little power of subtle comprehension to understand; for intrinsically it is a fixed quality while outwardly it changes, just as the tide of custom ebbs or flows. Intrinsically then, it is that quality in a woman which breeds respect in men—respect, the lure of which is so often their own vanity. And the pure, the chaste, the untouched woman, whether it be vanity or not, is she whom men most venerate. Of these they make mothers—for these alone they will live continently. And however much love a man may bear in his heart for a woman whom some other than himself has possessed, the knowledge of it will corrupt like a poison in the blood though he forgive her a thousand times.

Such a woman, pure, chaste, and untouched, had been Sally Bishop. But to one man alone can a woman be this, and then, only so long as she remains with him. Once he has cast her off, when once she is discarded, she becomes to all who know her, a woman of easy virtue, prey to the first hungry hands that are ready to claim her. This, in an age when the binding sacrament of matrimony is being held up to ridicule both in theory and in practice, is perhaps the only reasonable argument that can be utilized in its defence. It is surely not pedantic to hope that the purity of some women is still essential for the race, and it is surely not illogical to suppose that marriage is the means, in such cases as that of Sally Bishop, to this humble end.

Pure, certainly, she had been, even in the eyes of such a man as Devenish; but in the light of a discarded mistress, all her virtue vanished. Innate in the mind of the worst of men is the timid hesitation before he brands a virtuous woman; but when once he knows that she has fallen, conscience lifts, like a feather on the breeze. With a light heart, he reaps the harvest of tares which some other than himself must be blamed for sowing, and with a light heart he goes his way, immune to remorse.

This then is the Tragedy which, like some insect in the heart of the rose, had eaten its way into the romance of Sally Bishop.

For three days after Traill had left her, she broke under the flood of her despair. For those three days she did not move out of her rooms, taking just what nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards where they stored the food for their breakfasts. On the side of her bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread—anything that she could find—in that unconscious instinct with which the body prompts the mind for its own preservation. But these meals—if such they can be called—she took at no stated times. Crusts of bread lay about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had fed herself. For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence, with eyes strained staringly before her. Of tears, there were none. Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it. It was more like the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.

For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the darkness came. She did not undress. The nights were warm then, or cold might have driven her between the clothes. But, on the third evening, she disrobed. This was habit reasserting itself. She did it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed at all.

The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes—fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration—would have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out, then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where all glimmer of intelligence is dead.

Inevitably this must have followed, had not Janet visited her late in the evening of the fourth day. Two days before, she had written saying that she would come if Traill were not likely to be there.

Her note finished abruptly, characteristic of all her letters.

"If I don't hear from you to the contrary," it concluded, "I shall arrive."

She heard nothing to the contrary. The letter had lain, since its arrival, in the box downstairs. Sally had not moved out of her room. The possibility of a letter from Traill might have drawn her forth; but she knew that such a possibility did not exist. The woman who attended to their rooms she had sent away.

"I shall be able to look after these two rooms myself," she had thought vaguely. Then she had locked herself into her bedroom, taken up a duster to begin the morning's work and, after five minutes, idly lifting each thing in her hand, she had seated herself by the side of the bed, allowing the duster to fall limply from her fingers. Then, throwing herself on to the pillows, had given way with tearless eye to her despair.

When Janet's knock fell, she was lying in bed, eyes gaping at the ceiling above her in a gaze that scarcely wandered or moved from the spot upon which they were fixed. At the unexpected sound, she sat up. Intelligence struggled for the mastery in her mind. There, in her eyes, you could see it fight for victory.

"Who's that?" she called out querulously in a thin voice.

"Janet! Do you mean to say you're not up yet?"

"No."

"Well, come and unlock the door. I can't get in."

Sally drove the energy into her limbs with an effort and tumbled from the bed. As her feet touched the floor, she lurched forward with weakness. She clutched at the clothes and held herself erect; but her knees trembled, knocking together like wooden clubs that are shaken by reckless vibration.

With a little moan of weakness she stumbled to the door, holding to the end of the bed, the back of a chair, the handle of the door in her uncertain progress.

As soon as she heard the key turned, Janet entered and found Sally in her night-dress, a white ghost of what she was, swinging unsteadily before her—so a dead body, swung from a gallows, eddies in a lifting wind.

"Sally!" she exclaimed.

Sally stared at her. Her dry lips half-parted to make Janet's name. Her eyes, burnt out in the deep black hollows, flickered with a light of thankful recognition. Then she swung forward, a dead weight on to Janet's shoulder.

For a moment, Janet held her there, looking over the shoulders that crumbled against her thin breast, at the disordered room before her. She saw the crusts of bread, she saw the bed-clothes hanging to the floor. She gazed down at the unkempt head of hair that dragged lifelessly on her shoulder, and her eyes were wide in bewildered amazement.

"Great God!" she exclaimed.

And she realized how inadequate that was.

CHAPTER II

For three weeks Janet stayed with her, sleeping with her, arms tight-locked about her yielding body as they had often slept together in the days at Kew. With her own hands, she fed her; in the warmth of her big, generous heart, she nursed her back to life, as you revive some little bird, starved and cold, in the heat of your two hands.

During the first fortnight, she asked no questions. What had happened was obvious. She learnt from the people on the second floor in the office of the railway company that Traill had left his rooms; but under what circumstances and why, she made no inquiries. Brought face to face with the exigencies in the lives of others, there is a fund of common sense to be found in the character of the revolutionary woman. That Janet Hallard was an artist, now with a studio of sorts of her own, says nothing for her temperament and less for her art. She had no conception of the higher life, and to her mind the inner mysticism was a jumble of confused nonsense—the blind leading the blind, for whom the ultimate ditch was a bastard theosophy. As a matter of fact, Janet had no mean ideas of design; but they were vigorous and, for her living, she had to struggle against the overwhelming sentimentalism of thenouveauart.

In dealing with Sally then, a subject needing tact, common sense and an unyielding strength of purpose, she was more than eminently fitted to save her from the edge of the precipice towards which she had found her so blindly stumbling. It was just such a moment as when one sees one's dearest friend walking blindly to the verge of an abyss and knows that too sudden a cry, too swift a movement to save them, may plunge their reckless body for ever into eternity. In this moment, Janet kept her wits. With infinite care, with infinite tenderness, never weakening to the importunate demands that were made of her, giving up her work, giving up every other interest that she had, she slowly drew Sally back into the steady current of existence; saw day by day the life come tardily again into the bloodless cheeks, and watched the smearing shadows beneath the hollow eyes as they disappeared.

Then, at the end of a fortnight, she learnt in quavering sentences from Sally's lips, trembling as they told it, the story of her desertion.

"You shouldn't have followed him, Sally," she whispered gently at its conclusion.

"I know I shouldn't—I know I shouldn't. And so I know of course he isn't to blame. It's that woman—his sister. I always knew she hated me—knew it! She used to look at me like you look at soiled things in a shop! She pointed me out to him in the theatre. I can guess the things she said. She brought the other—the other one to see him. Oh, wasn't it cunning of her? Mustn't she be a brute! Think what she's done to me! Look how wretched she's made my life! And she's got every single thing she can want. Oh, I don't wonder that people have their doubts about this marvellous mercy of God! I don't see any mercy in what's happened to me. I never saw any mercy in what happened to father; and yet he only did what he ought to have done."

The excitement was rising within her—a steady torrent lifting to the flood. Janet watched its progress steadily in her eyes. When it reached this point, she adroitly changed the current of her thoughts.

"What did your father do?" she asked with interest.

Sally looked up and the expression in her eyes changed.

"Have I never told you?"

"No."

"He consecrated too much wine one Easter Sunday where he was taking alocum tenens—and afterwards, when he had to drink it—it went to his head."

She told it so seriously that Janet was driven to choke the rush of laughter rising within her.

"Why did he have to drink it?" she asked.

"They have to. Consecrated wine mustn't be kept."

"But why not? Does it go bad?"

"Janet! No—but, don't you see?—they do keep it in the Roman Catholic Church—on the altar—that's why the little red lamp is always burning in front. That's why the people bow when they first come into the church. And don't you see they're afraid in the Anglican Church, that if the Bread and Wine were kept, people might venerate it as the real Presence, which of course it isn't."

"Isn't it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"Then he had to drink it all himself?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't he get somebody to help him?"

"He did try. He asked the warden—but the warden was a total abstainer."

Janet looked sternly out of the window.

"Then he asked a man he saw outside the church—but he was apparently an atheist. At any rate, he didn't believe in that."

"P'raps he thought the wine wasn't good?" Janet suggested.

"Oh no—he offered to drink it; but of course as he didn't believe—"

"Didn't believe in what? He believed it was wine, didn't he?"

"Oh yes—but he didn't believe in the Communion. So father had to drink it himself. And then, the Bishop came into the vestry and found him."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing then—but a few months later, he was appointed to the chaplaincy of a Union—of course a much smaller position than the one he had occupied."

"Didn't they give any reasons?"

"Oh yes—in a sort of a way. They said that they thought the rectorship of Cailsham was rather too responsible a post for him. They asked him to accept the other in such a way that it would have been hard to refuse. Of course, they couldn't actually turn him out. But mother hated him for going. It was soon after we left there that I came up to you in London. They were getting so poor. My brother couldn't be kept up at Oxford. The governess had to go. Father died not long after I left. I know what he died of. They called it a general break-up."

"Oh—I know that," said Janet. "There's the shot-gun prescription—all the pharmacopoeia ground into a pill and fired down the patient's throat. It must hit something. That general break-up is the double-barrelled diagnosis. You believe it was the resignation of the rectorship that finished him."

"Yes—I'm sure of it. I remember, the day I went away from home—when I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter. It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me—something about there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ from the dead—and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the very lowest depth of despair."

Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said quietly—

"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"

"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little boys—sons of gentlemen—preparatory for the Grammar School at Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when she gets as poor as mother is."

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to deal in her business of designing.

"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham Court Road—he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying. 'He's something to do with the stage—his brother's in the booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him out.'"

Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound since Janet had been with her.

"It's true," said Janet. "I'm not making it up. He got that car—allowing for his trade discount—for a hundred and thirty-five pounds—cape-cart hood and all. It only costs him thirteen pounds a year in tyres—and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol with him inside, and he reckons he's been saved five shillings a week regularly in dinners since he got it. Well, what else do you think a man buys a motor-car for if he can't afford it? Some one has to pay for it—why not his friends? That's the English system of hospitality—what I buy you pay for; what you pay for I get, and what I've got I must have bought, otherwise I shouldn't have it. It's the principle of thereductio ad absurdum, if you know what that is. Everybody gets what they want, everybody else pays for it, and everybody's happy. I'll do your washing if you'll do mine. Can you have a more generous hospitality than that?"

Sally laughed again, and then Janet launched her boat of enterprise.

"You're fond of kiddies, aren't you, Sally?" she asked suddenly.

A tender look crept into Sally's eyes. "You know I am," she replied.

"Well—why don't you go down to your people at Cailsham and help them for a little while in the school?"

The look of tenderness died out. Her eyes roamed pitiably about the room.

"I couldn't leave here," she said powerlessly.

"Why not?"

"I couldn't. It's all reminding me I know; but I couldn't be happy anywhere else. I should be miserable away from here."

The meeting of such obstacles as this, Janet had anticipated. She knew well that slough of the mind which sucks in its own despair, and with all the concentration of her persuasion, she strove to lift Sally out of the morass. Failing on that occasion, she turned the conversation into another channel—let it drift as it pleased; but the next day she led it back again. At all costs Sally must be removed from the association of her surroundings, and no means offered better than these. Yet at the end of three weeks, notwithstanding all the patient persuasion that she employed, her object was as far from being reached as at the beginning.

"If you spoil your life, Sally," she said, as she was going, "it'll be the bitterest disappointment to me that I can think of. No man is worth it to a woman—no woman's worth it to a man. Can't you get some ambition to do something? All your time's your own, and you haven't got to work for your living. He's been generous enough—I'll admit that. Let me give you lessons in drawing."

"I could never learn anything like that," said Sally, wearily. "Haven't got it in me."

This mood of wilful depression, bordering upon melancholia, can be perhaps the most trying test to friendship that exists. To throw life into the balance of chance—to fling it absolutely away in a moment of heroism for a friend one loves, is a simple task compared with the unwearying patience that is needed to face the lightless gloom of another's misery. It taints all life, discolours all pleasures, tracks one—dogs one, like a shadow on the wall. Yet Janet passed the test with love the greater, even at the end of the gauntlet of those three weeks.

"I'll be with you all day, the day after to-morrow," she said, as she departed; "and think about teaching the kiddies—I would if I were you. You'd get awfully fond of them—as if they were your own. Sons of gentlemen! Think of them! Dear little chaps! My God—the mothers bore them, though."

CHAPTER III

It should not be lightly touched upon, this heroism of Janet Hallard's in sacrificing three weeks of her work—every hour of which meant some living to her—in order to save Sally from that ultimate dark world of dementia towards which she was inevitably drifting. It was not the sacrifice of time alone, not the fact that on her return she was compelled to sell some of her valued possessions in order to meet the rent of her studio which the work she had left undone would have amply supplied. Much rather was it the noble perseverance of effort through the dim, impenetrable gloom of Sally's wide-eyed misery, her own spirits never cast down by the seeming impossibility of the task, her resources never exhausted by the persistent drain that was made upon them. Here was the strength of her masculinity united with the patient endurance of the woman in her heart. No man, of his own nature alone, could have won through the sweating labour of those three weeks—few women either. But that very combination of sex, that very duality of her nature which, as a woman, made her unlovable to any man, and endeared her so closely to Sally's life, had succeeded where a thousand others of her sex would have failed.

She left Sally, it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted mass that lies before her.

So she slowly returned to the common factors of existence, and in six weeks from the time of Traill's departure, was ready to smile at any moment to the humour of Janet's dry criticisms of life. But to move from her rooms, to disassociate herself from the past with every sorrow and every joy that it contained, was more than she could bring herself to do. Through all Janet's persuasions, Sally remained obdurate.

"I've only got the rooms for three years," she replied finally. "I can't think of it as really past until that time's gone by; Then, I will. I'll go anywhere you like. I'll come and share your studio with you."

They entered into a formal agreement on that and, knowing the Romance in Sally's nature, Janet pursued her quest of success on the other point no further.

But circumstance, with an arm stronger than Janet could ever wield, succeeded where she had failed.

One evening, as Sally was preparing to go out alone to dinner, she heard footsteps mounting the stairs to her floor. On the moment, her heart leapt, beating to her throat. Her hands, raising the hat to her head, so trembled that she had to put it back upon the dressing-table. A cold dew damped her forehead. She put her hand up and found it wet. Then the knock fell and, shaking in every limb, she set her lips and walked as firmly as she could to the door. There she stopped, taking a deep breath. Then she swung it open.

It was Devenish.

He took off his hat and held a hand out to her. She accepted it, confused in her mind as to the reason of his coming. Did he know? Or was he utterly unconscious? He must have known; he had come to her door.

"Do you mind my coming in?" he asked.

"No, not at all."

She made way for him to pass into her sitting-room. There followed an awkward pause which he tried to fill with the laying down of his hat and the discarding of his gloves. Sally stood there where she had closed the door, waiting for him to explain his presence. Had he brought a message for her from Jack? Had he come to see Jack—knowing nothing—and, finding the rooms below occupied by another tenant, had he come to learn the reason of her? Why had he come? And at last he turned frankly to her.

"Miss Bishop, I saw Jack the other day. He told me."

Sally lifted her head with an assumption of pride, a strained effort to show the pride that Janet had urged her to possess. She crossed the room and dropped into a chair.

"Aren't you going to sit down?" she asked.

"Thanks." He took the nearest chair, winding his watch-chain about his finger to convey the air that he was at ease.

"Did Jack send you to see me?" she asked then.

"No."

"You've no message from him?"

"No."

"Then, why do you come here?" She wanted to put the question firmly, but in her ears it sounded wavering; in his, touched only with surprise.

"Do you remember that evening we dined together?" he asked in reply.

Could she forget it? She nodded her head in silence.

"If you recollect, I said I wished to offer my friendship?"

Her head nodded again. She did not make it easy for him; but the social training inures one to the difficulties of forging conversation. He ploughed through with a straight, undeviating edge that in no way displeased her.

"Well, I don't want to distress you by going over the whole business which, as you might quite justly say, was none of mine. I thought you might find it a bit lonely, and so, as I'd taken you out to dinner before"—he raised his eyes, finishing the sentence with a smile and lifting eyebrows. "Were you going out to dinner now?" he added, before she had time to reply.

"Yes, I was."

"Then will you come with me?"

She met his gaze with frank speculation. What did it matter where she went? Who was there to care? Janet, the only one, would urge her to it if she knew. There was no doubt in her mind that friendship had prompted him. It was a considerate thought on his part to come and offer to take her out because he had imagined she might be lonely. She felt grateful to him, but with no desire to show it. If it pleased him to be generous on her behalf, why should she refuse to profit by it? But here was no thought of giving in return. A woman seldom meets but one man in the world to whom she will give without a shadow of the desire for the value in return. What was there in the world now to prevent her from taking what life offered of its small, distracting pleasures? A moment of recklessness brought a deceptive lift to her spirits.

"I shall be very glad to," she said.

In her mind was no unfaithfulness to the memory of Traill. Unfaithful, even to a slender memory, it was not in her nature to be. The benefit of the Church now was the only door through which she could pass out of his life. She considered no likelihood of it; for, in common with those of her sex in whom the strong waters of emotion run deep in the vein of sentiment, she felt—being once possessed by him—that he was the lord of her life.

"But I warn you," she added, with a pathetic smile, "I shan't be good company. You'll have to do all the talking. You'll have to make all the jokes."

"I'm prepared to do as much and more," he said lightly.

"Then you must wait while I put on my hat. Play the piano—can you?"

"No—not I. Can you?"

"Yes—just a little."

"Sing?"

"Yes—sometimes."

"Ah, that settles it. We come back here after dinner, and you sing every song in your repertoire."

She laughed brightly at his enthusiasm. "You're really fond of music?" she said.

"Yes, passionately. And I suffer little for my passion because I know absolutely nothing about it. That's a promise, then? You'll sing to me after dinner?"

"Yes, I should love to."

So much had her spirits lifted in this deceptive atmosphere of diversion that Devenish even heard her humming a tune in the other room. And he smiled, looking up to the ceiling with hands spread out and fingers lightly playing one upon the other.

At a restaurant in Great Portland Street, shut off from the rest of the room by the astute arrangement of a screen—ranged around every table, presumably to ward off the draught—they dined in comparative seclusion. Into the selection of that dinner Devenish put a great part of his ingenuity. The man who knows how to choose a meal and savour those intervals between the courses with anecdote, has reached a high-water mark of social excellence. Devenish was the type. He was not hampered with the possession of intelligence. Wit he had, but it was not his own. The man, after all, who can echo the wit of others and suit its application to the moment is a man of no little accomplishment. The least that can be said of him is that he is worthy of his place at a dinner-table where conversation is as empty as the bubbles that shoot through the glittering wine to the frothy surface. To suffer from intelligence in such an atmosphere as this is a disease—the silent sickness—of which such symptoms as the lips tight bound, the heart heavy, and an aching void behind the eyes, are common to all its victims. Later, in the course of its development, if the attack is acute, comes the forced speech from lips now scarcely opened—forced speech recognizable by its various degrees of imbecility. The man, for instance, who asks you if you have been to a theatre lately when you have just deftly foisted upon the company the latest joke you heard in a musical comedy, has reached that stage of the disease when retirement is the only cure. Like quinine in fever districts, there is one drug which may ward off the icy fingers of the complaint—champagne—but it should be administered at frequent intervals.

From such a malady as this, Devenish was not only immune, but he carried with him that lightness of spirit which may go far to relieve others of their suffering. Add to this a face well-featured, a figure well-planned with all the alertness of an athlete, an immaculate taste in dress, and you have the type which the 'Varsity mould offers yearly to the ephemeral needs of her country. The impression remains, stamped upon the man until he is well-nigh forty. He knows how to get drunk in the most gentlemanly way and his judgment about women is sometimes very shrewd. A knowledge of the classics is of service to him if he does nothing. If, on the other hand, he sets about the earning of his living—a drudgery that some of these youths are compelled to submit to—the classics are only the peas in the shoe which, as a pilgrim to the far-off shrine of utility, he is compelled to wear.

Not having to earn his own livelihood, or rather, having already earned it in the profession of matrimony into which he had entered in partnership with a wealthy woman, Devenish was a pride to the college which had turned him out.

He knew most of those people in London who range in the category of—worth knowing. Anecdotes of them all—those little personal insights into private domestic relations of which surely there must somewhere be an illicit still, hidden in the mountains where gossip echoes—he had at the tips of his fingers.

"Surely you've heard that last thing that Mrs. —— said at the first night of ——;" and thereafter follows some quaint conceit—smuggled, God knows how, from the illicit still in the mountains, stamped with a fictitious year to give it flavour—which the well-known actress in question would have offered her soul to have said on the occasion alluded to in the story, but which she had never even thought of.

It may be concluded, then, from these apparently needless digressions that Devenish was good company. He did his best to amuse Sally—he succeeded. When they were halfway through the dinner and he had casually refilled her glass with champagne, she was prepared to see humour in everything he said.

There is a mood of recklessness—wild determined recklessness—that strikes, like a light in the heavens, across the face of despair. In such a mood was Sally then. Her mind, empty of the vice which so often accompanies it, was echoing with the cry—What does it matter? What does it matter? When he filled her glass a second time, she half raised a hand from her lap to stop him. But what did it matter? It would put her in good spirits, and in good spirits she felt the strong desire to be. Between this and the harmful result of the wine, so far a call was stretched in her mind that she never let it enter her consideration. Let him fill her glass a second time! She was to return to rooms empty but of the bitterest of associations. The whole long night had to be passed through with that haunting speculation—which now so frequently beset her—the wondering of what Traill was doing, the questioning in what woman's arms he was finding the joy of desire which he had found in hers.

What did it signify then, this evening in which she let go the strained reserve which at any other time she would have retained? What did it signify, so long as the deepest beating of her heart was unmoved by the quickened pulses and the eyes alight with a reckless laughter?

It mattered nothing to her who knew its meaning; but to Devenish, seeing the colour lifting to her cheeks, watching the sparkling in those eyes which had met his but an hour or more ago, when disappointed hope had thrown them into deep shadows, there was a tentative significance. It appealed to the lowest nature of his senses to see her, whom he had long desired, unbending in her reticence. Her laughter was a whip about his body; her lips, parted—losing that expression of restraint—were becoming an obsession to his eyes. But he guarded all his actions with a steady hand.

When her glass was empty for the second time, he stretched out his hand to refill it again.

"Oh—I'd better not have any more," she said lightly. "Whatever would you do with me if I took too much?" And she laughed. Laughed, he imagined, at the possibilities that rose to her mind, and it was on the edge of his lips to say the things he would do.

"Another glass can't hurt you," he said, laughing with her. "Here—I'll fill mine—there"—he held up the bottle for her to see—"Now you have the remainder. You don't want me to drink it all, do you? I should like to know what you'd do—I suppose you'd give me in charge of the head waiter? I guess you'd shirk your responsibilities more than I would." And as he talked, he emptied the bottle into her glass beneath the fringe of the conversation.

"Ever hear that story," he began again, and caught her attention once more with an idle tale that had worn its way through half the clubs in Town. His yarns were all fresh to her, and, moreover, he spun them amazingly well. There was none of that disconcerting fear of their staleness to thwart him—no need for the tentative preface—"You'll say if you've heard this before." One suggested another—they rolled off his tongue. And while she sipped her champagne, he kept her amused; never allowed her the moments of inaction in which to relent. He amused himself. The old, worn-out story has all the humour still keen in it for you—ifyoutell it. It was no effort, no strain to Devenish. He laughed as heartily as she did over the stale old jests. Their novelty to her made them new to him. She leant her elbows on the table and watched his face as he told them.

"Now," he said, when they had finished their coffee, "how about the songs? I've done my share of the entertainment. As soon as I've got the bill, we'll go back, and you can supply the more serious items of the programme."

"Really—I'm afraid I couldn't. I believe you think I sing well—I don't. I did think of going on the stage once—into musical comedy—but not because I was musical."

"Well—of course not. It isn't a refuge for the art. But I have my belief in your being able to sing. You're not going to shake that."

"Very well—I suppose I'll try." Her hands lifted to her face. "My cheeks are burning. Do they look very red?"

"No—not particularly—the room's warm, I think."

She permitted herself to be satisfied with that explanation. Had a mirror been near at hand, she would have realized in its reflection that the warmth of the room was not the only cause for the flushed scarlet of her cheeks, or the light that glittered in the expanded pupils of her eyes.

When Devenish had paid the bill, they departed. A hansom conveyed them back to Sally's rooms in Regent Street. Once seated in it, she leaned back in the corner, and her eyes closed.

"I do feel so awfully sleepy," she said, ingenuously.

He glanced at her swiftly. Was that simplicity, or a veiled request for him to close his arms about her? How could she be simple? The mistress of a man for three years—what simplicity could be left in her now? Undoubtedly she must know—of course she knew by now—the thoughts that were travelling wildly through his mind.

"Poor child," he said considerately—"I suppose you are."

Her eyes opened to that. She sat a little straighter in the corner. There was a tone in his voice more subtle than friendship. Her ears had heard it, but her senses were too drowsy then to dwell for long upon its consideration.

He would have said more—in another moment, he would have slipped his arm around her waist, had it not been for her sudden movement of reserve. That warned him. Unconsciously a woman gives out of herself the impression of whether she be easy of winning or not. With Sally, notwithstanding all the circumstances that ranged against her in his mind, Devenish realized that an inconsidered step would be fatal to his desires. That did not thwart him. He admired her the more for it; wanted her the more.

When they reached her rooms and, taking off her hat, she seated herself at the piano, creating in the susceptibility of his mind a greater sense of the intimacy of their relations, he stood at the other side of the room watching her, content to let his anticipations slowly drift upon the quiet stream of events to the ultimate cataract of their realization.

This is the true nature of the sensualist. Woman or man, whatever sex, you may know them by their feline delight in the procrastination of the moment. It is an evolution of the intellect. The raw, unbridled forces of nature have no dealings with such as these. They are people of pleasure. They have taken the gifts that Nature has offered and, with the subtle cunning of their minds, have torn the inviolable parchment of her laws to shreds before her face. With no inheritance of the intellect, Devenish possessed all the other qualities. Sensualist as he was, with that strain of refinement induced by the easy circumstances of life, the paid women disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as Devenish, most dangerous to society.

If the threadbare hypocrisy of this country of England could but bring itself to don the acknowledgment that the hired woman has her place in the scheme of things, such men as Devenish would find the virtuous woman more closely guarded from their strategies than she is.

When her first song was finished, Sally turned in her chair, laughing frankly to his eyes.

"You needn't suffer on account of your passion for music by having to criticize," she said. "I know it was awful."

He crossed the room to her side. "As you like," he said, bringing his eyes full to hers. "You can call it anything you please—but I want some more." He picked up the pieces of music that lay on the top of the piano. "Do you sing that song out of the Persian Garden—Beside the Shalimar? I forget the words of it?"

Her fingers ran through the pile of music. "'Pale Hands I Loved.' Is that it?" She lifted her face and looked up at him.

"Yes—yes—sing that!"

"I'm afraid I haven't got the music—can't play without the music."

He drew a deep breath. "That's a pity," he said.

"Well—listen—I'll sing this."

She placed the music before her on the rest, and with one hand on the back of her chair, the other resting on the piano, he bent over her, eyes wandering from the gold of her hair to the parting of her lips as she sang. It was just such a song as he had asked for; filled with the abandoned sentimentalism of decadent passion—

"Lord of my life, than whom none other sharethThe deep, red, silent wine that fills my soul—Take thou and drain, till not one drop remainethTo wet thy lips—then turn thou down the bowl.

"Lord of my heart—this boon I crave—this only,That all my worth may be possessed by thee;Make thou my life a chalice, drained, that lonelyStands on the altar of Eternity."

She looked up at him as her fingers wandered to the final chord. His lips were set in a thin line, and he was breathing quickly.

"Why did you sing that?" he asked.

She blindly shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know—why shouldn't I? The music's a good deal nicer than the words, I think. Don't you find the words are rather silly? They are of most songs, I think."

"And you call that silly," he said. "I suppose it's a woman's song—but, my God! do you know I could sing that to you?"

His arm was round her then, dragging her towards him in a lithe grip, the fierce strength of which she too well understood. She struggled, breathing heavily, for her freedom; but he caught her face in his hand, dragged it to his lips and covered her with kisses.

Then she broke free, rising to her feet, overturning the chair behind her, pushing back the disordered hair from her forehead.

"How dare you!" she breathed.

Countless women have said it, in countless moments similar to this. And with it, often, seeing all the circumstances that have led up to it in their different light, comes the knowledge—as it came also to Sally—the understanding of how the man has dared. Recklessness had led her. In her heart, she blamed herself. She might have known men now; known them from her knowledge at least of one man. Undoubtedly she was to blame, taking everything into account—the defencelessness of her position, the fact that he had known of her relationship with Traill and its termination; yet her eyes flamed with contempt as they met his.

"Your hat is over on that chair." she said presently in a strident voice. "Will you go?"

He crossed the room quietly—no want of composure—and picked it up.

"Would you rather I didn't come and see you again?" he asked, brushing the hat casually with his sleeve.

"I never want to see you again!" she exclaimed.

He smiled amiably. "Don't you think you're rather foolish?"

"Foolish!"

"Yes—the unmarried man who keeps a woman is bound to leave her some time or other—that's not half as likely to be the case with—"

"What do you mean?" She was white to the lips.

He looked puzzled. "I'm afraid I can't understand you," he said.

She tried to answer him, but the words mingled in a stammering of confusion before she could utter them.

"You don't think there's a chance of Traill coming back to you, do you?" he went on. "I shouldn't be here, I assure you, if there were."

Sally's knees trembled with weakness. An overwhelming nausea shook her till she shuddered.

"Did he tell you to come here?" she whispered.

"Heavens, no! I don't suppose he'd do that. He wouldn't do a thing like that. But I'm pretty sure he's in love with that Miss Standish-Roe—the beautiful Coralie. He knows it. He won't admit it; but I'm certain he is, and I rather think I'd better open his eyes a little."

That last remark did not fall within her understanding. She took no notice of it.

"And so you came here of your own accord?"

"Yes—why not? I had an apparently erroneous idea that you liked me. When you let me come back here after dinner, I was sure of it. I saw no reason why we shouldn't get along together just as well as you and Traill did."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and she hid her face in her hand.

"Oh yes—I see my mistake by this time," he said easily. All passion was cooled in him now. "I'm sorry. There was no intention of insulting you in my mind." He moved to the door. "I—I thought you understood it."

Sally dropped into a chair, her face still covered; shame—the deepest sense of it—beating through all her pulses.

"Well—I must only hope you'll excuse my—my ignorance of women, though I must admit you're a bit different to the rest. Well—I suppose I'd better say good night, then."

She heard him take the step forward. She could see in her mind the hand held out, but she did not look up. He turned again to the door. She heard it open. She heard it close. She heard his footsteps slowly descending the stairs. And still she sat there with her face close-buried in her hands.

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