Chapter X

Chapter XJudge Barton’s servant, aided by Kingsnorth’s boy and Martin’s, had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled without one. “We shall see you in the morning, then,” said Charlotte, and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that he had not gone to his quarters, because the Señora had sent him word thatshe wished to speak with him; but finding the time pass slowly, he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence, and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no harm. “Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but mañana, mañana! As she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time.”The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned to her room. Martin was standing before her glass in his shirt and trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.“Now will you believe me?” he began teasingly. “What did I tell you about the Judge?”“I haven’t a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose brought him down here?”“I told you he wanted to see you.”“He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want him on my hands all the time. He may just as wellgo with you each day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take him on your shoulders.”There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte’s manner. She was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box, which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her down on his knee.“You are the funniest woman I ever knew,” he said reflectively, “the first one I ever knew who wouldn’t play on a man’s jealousy. The truth is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you’ve disarmed me.”“I can’t conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I should enjoy making you distrust me?”Martin’s face was a study. “You might not mean anything but a little fun,” he said apologetically. “Most women begin that way. And then you might find that you liked him best. That happens.It happens often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher.”His tone grew bitter as he pronounced the last words. It was almost the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.“We may as well have this out now,” she said. “Perhaps I am making a mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I believe they value her higher.” She closed his protesting lips with a gentle finger. “I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions, but thejoint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of old-fashioned things. I believe that what chastity is to a woman, physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining a dream of universal barrenness. However, that’s irrelevant. We can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won’t be kissed—it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man’s right to resent another man’s possessive thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say that I will always love you.There are offences which you could commit against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being, even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it.” Her bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes flashed a reply to hers.“You had no cause to say that last,” he said hotly.“No cause, when ten minutes ago, you assured me of my unlikeness to other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and no other man’s. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for there are conditions which might cancel yourright to ask loyalty. No: it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male sex; that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice, you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge.”She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment of her assurances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs, he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive efforts got control of herself.But she lay with her head on his shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful dignity.“We have had our tragic moment,” she said, “and I with my wretched love of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let’s put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton, and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged out the genuine one. That’s singularly in keeping with my lifelong habit. Don’t look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?” She put her face caressingly against his.“Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn’t analyze things so minutely, Lottie.”“I wish I didn’t too, Martin, but I can’t help it. That’s my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!” She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.“All the same, I love you as you,” he said. “I can’t measure how much more or less for being sure of you—but I’m mighty glad to be sure of you—and I can’t take my own insides to pieces asyou can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie.”But as he smoked a last cigar,—for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him—Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife’s earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogethertoo mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;—she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;—he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin’s secret verdict—that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject’s life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confrères on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else’s. The womenof his acquaintance bored him to irritation. “I am in love,” he admitted to himself, “in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taughthim that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood’s ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as “my tragedy,” and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man’s sense that desireis right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte’s high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,—in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,—his old passion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with—that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to associate with whom, on the terms onwhich he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him—to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband’s presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days—seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.Chapter XIThe next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o’clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day’s dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte’s gradual revelation of all her hiddenloveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.“In spite of the noise, isn’t it still, isn’t it lonely, isn’t it delightful?” she said. “It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain.”“I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.“That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digestand to let one’s soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions.”“I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory.”“Oh, yes, I have grown,” she declared tranquilly. “It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience.”“Very good; but you don’t want to keep it up forever,” remarked Collingwood.“I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has finished sorting.”“A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my doubts of a philosophy’s ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent.”“Your demands are modest.” This in rather an inscrutable voice from the Judge.“Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life, and you will hear something that really is modest.”“Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest demands.”Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He was sitting at his wife’s feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned his head back luxuriously against her knee.“Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do with more if I could get it, but I don’t see where I can do with less.”“And you call that modest!” said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.“I call any demand on life modest which can beexpressed in dollars and cents. But Martin’s only modest demand is for the five millions. He has others not so modest.”“Name one,” challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.“I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself.”“And how about me?” There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in Judge Barton’s voice.“Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily.”“Which are seldom honored,” the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.“This is all getting blamed mysterious to me,” interrupted Collingwood. “I wish you two would talk down to my level.”“Talk up to it, you mean,” replied Charlotte good-naturedly. “For you cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn’t in it; while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on an ideal universe. TheJudge and I are not content with things as they are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar’s.“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspireTo grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,Would not we shatter it to bits—and thenRemould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”“That’s pretty. Say that again,” said Martin; and she repeated it. At its end he said wistfully, “I thought you and I had our hearts’ desires.” And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.“Don’t tell me my husband can’t make pretty speeches,” said Charlotte.“He clings to his commercial instincts,” said the Judge, “for he asked as much as he gave.”“Humph!” grunted Martin. “I am beginning to be proud of myself. I didn’t know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are understood. Youaremy heart’s desire. All the rest is just working, and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It’s taking hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself that I’ll blast what I want out of thisuniverse yet. That’s just living. But I don’t want the world made over. It suits me all right, and I thought it suited you.”Judge Barton’s gaze was fixed on the vague moving mass of waters before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest in her answer.“It does not suit me altogether,” she replied slowly, “but if Judge Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I’ll admit that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It’s the sort of thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both want to talk business.”The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. “I’ll follow you before long,” he said, and before she was out of earshot she heard him say, “What do you think the administration is likely to do?” The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled, knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping it till noon at least for very consistency’s sake. Through its open sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open casement, sitting at her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine o’clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with an armful of books, which she distributed; and with thehelp of one of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a rude blackboard.At this point the Judge’s resolution weakened. He donned a coat and ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess’s somewhat suspicious, “Better so soon?” he returned an honest confession.“It was just one of my boyhood headaches,” he admitted, “the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o’clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin.” And Rufino began chantingly:“E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me.” He paused triumphantly.“Isee a cup,” corrected Charlotte. “Say it after me—cup,cup” and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:—“I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me.” There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to saythrow, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take histongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: “I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa,” and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, “Srow de cuppa to me.”The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to “develop” the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man’s intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or awayfrom him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman’s entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in atalebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and healternatelyfelt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the “medequilla.” There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk sufferingwith a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island’s population was represented in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of herprotégées, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.“I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and I can’t let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn’t any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn’t bear an audience.”“I’m off,” said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl,but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child—that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles whichhe was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a femininecreature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood’s breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband’s table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship?And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge’s visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in herwrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.“You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,” she added.Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. “Was that why you sent me away this morning?” he inquired.For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.“Why do you stand it?” he asked.Charlotte wasdumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him.“These are quite fine,” she said quietly. “You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions.”She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it rested on the table edge.“Do you think you can put this scene off?” he demanded. “You have got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first place. It is time the thing came to an end.”Mrs. Collingwood very quietly pulled her hand out of his grasp.“So,” she said. She had the air of one who finds herself incarcerated with a madman. Judge Barton leaned far across the table, his eyes gleaming, his rather large, powerful face flushed, all the brute strength of the man dominating the urbane jurist who said clever things in a rich, well-modulated voice.“You had no business to marry him in the first place,” he said. “But that’s done. Still you can change it.”“Yes,” replied Mrs. Collingwood, a very level intonation of contempt in her tone. It irritated the Judge, and his vehemence rose higher.“Anything can be changed in these days,” he went on. “I want you to divorce Collingwood and to marry me.”“Well, I shan’t,” said Mrs. Collingwood. She did not offer to rise, however. Her heart was swelling with anger, humiliation, and a dull disappointment in the man in front of her. But some unaccountable instinct held her listening to the end. She did want to hear what he would say, she knew it would wound her, but she had a very strong curiosity as to how far he would go; and a retrospect of all her past association with him flashed through her mind. A faint smile curved her lips as she remembered the weeks when he had been free, had he so chosen, to make love to her. But he had not wanted to make love to her, till, in the making, he violated all the laws of right and loyalty. She sat very white and rigid, and the Judge felt in her once again the woman who had challenged his old self-complacency.“I suppose it was natural,” he went on. “You were alone. You had to have your romance. But what will it be to ours?—to ours? I’ll be a lover to rival the lovers of history—a husband—and we’ll do some of the things we want to do in thisworld. We have ambitions, both of us. Dear—” his voice dropped like a violin note on the octave—“take the same courage you had in hand to make this mistake, and remedy it. You defied public opinion in marrying Collingwood. Defy it once again to get rid of him. The world will understand you better. Yes, by Jove! it will sympathize more.”“I shall not test it,” said Mrs. Collingwood. This time she rose definitely. “I thank God you are going away to-morrow. The very air will be freer and cleaner after you have gone.”He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor, still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final, and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to utterance which no humanpower can revoke, though life itself would be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many a month and year to come.Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her, and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried away Judge Barton’s self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not Charlotte Collingwood’s personality, it was what she had done that opened the way to his advances.After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own misery? She was a fair actress to the world,taking refuge in a kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer measures pressure?

Chapter XJudge Barton’s servant, aided by Kingsnorth’s boy and Martin’s, had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled without one. “We shall see you in the morning, then,” said Charlotte, and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that he had not gone to his quarters, because the Señora had sent him word thatshe wished to speak with him; but finding the time pass slowly, he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence, and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no harm. “Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but mañana, mañana! As she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time.”The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned to her room. Martin was standing before her glass in his shirt and trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.“Now will you believe me?” he began teasingly. “What did I tell you about the Judge?”“I haven’t a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose brought him down here?”“I told you he wanted to see you.”“He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want him on my hands all the time. He may just as wellgo with you each day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take him on your shoulders.”There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte’s manner. She was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box, which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her down on his knee.“You are the funniest woman I ever knew,” he said reflectively, “the first one I ever knew who wouldn’t play on a man’s jealousy. The truth is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you’ve disarmed me.”“I can’t conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I should enjoy making you distrust me?”Martin’s face was a study. “You might not mean anything but a little fun,” he said apologetically. “Most women begin that way. And then you might find that you liked him best. That happens.It happens often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher.”His tone grew bitter as he pronounced the last words. It was almost the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.“We may as well have this out now,” she said. “Perhaps I am making a mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I believe they value her higher.” She closed his protesting lips with a gentle finger. “I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions, but thejoint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of old-fashioned things. I believe that what chastity is to a woman, physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining a dream of universal barrenness. However, that’s irrelevant. We can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won’t be kissed—it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man’s right to resent another man’s possessive thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say that I will always love you.There are offences which you could commit against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being, even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it.” Her bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes flashed a reply to hers.“You had no cause to say that last,” he said hotly.“No cause, when ten minutes ago, you assured me of my unlikeness to other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and no other man’s. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for there are conditions which might cancel yourright to ask loyalty. No: it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male sex; that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice, you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge.”She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment of her assurances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs, he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive efforts got control of herself.But she lay with her head on his shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful dignity.“We have had our tragic moment,” she said, “and I with my wretched love of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let’s put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton, and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged out the genuine one. That’s singularly in keeping with my lifelong habit. Don’t look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?” She put her face caressingly against his.“Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn’t analyze things so minutely, Lottie.”“I wish I didn’t too, Martin, but I can’t help it. That’s my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!” She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.“All the same, I love you as you,” he said. “I can’t measure how much more or less for being sure of you—but I’m mighty glad to be sure of you—and I can’t take my own insides to pieces asyou can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie.”But as he smoked a last cigar,—for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him—Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife’s earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogethertoo mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;—she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;—he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin’s secret verdict—that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject’s life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confrères on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else’s. The womenof his acquaintance bored him to irritation. “I am in love,” he admitted to himself, “in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taughthim that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood’s ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as “my tragedy,” and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man’s sense that desireis right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte’s high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,—in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,—his old passion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with—that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to associate with whom, on the terms onwhich he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him—to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband’s presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days—seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.

Chapter X

Judge Barton’s servant, aided by Kingsnorth’s boy and Martin’s, had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled without one. “We shall see you in the morning, then,” said Charlotte, and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that he had not gone to his quarters, because the Señora had sent him word thatshe wished to speak with him; but finding the time pass slowly, he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence, and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no harm. “Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but mañana, mañana! As she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time.”The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned to her room. Martin was standing before her glass in his shirt and trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.“Now will you believe me?” he began teasingly. “What did I tell you about the Judge?”“I haven’t a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose brought him down here?”“I told you he wanted to see you.”“He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want him on my hands all the time. He may just as wellgo with you each day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take him on your shoulders.”There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte’s manner. She was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box, which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her down on his knee.“You are the funniest woman I ever knew,” he said reflectively, “the first one I ever knew who wouldn’t play on a man’s jealousy. The truth is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you’ve disarmed me.”“I can’t conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I should enjoy making you distrust me?”Martin’s face was a study. “You might not mean anything but a little fun,” he said apologetically. “Most women begin that way. And then you might find that you liked him best. That happens.It happens often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher.”His tone grew bitter as he pronounced the last words. It was almost the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.“We may as well have this out now,” she said. “Perhaps I am making a mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I believe they value her higher.” She closed his protesting lips with a gentle finger. “I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions, but thejoint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of old-fashioned things. I believe that what chastity is to a woman, physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining a dream of universal barrenness. However, that’s irrelevant. We can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won’t be kissed—it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man’s right to resent another man’s possessive thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say that I will always love you.There are offences which you could commit against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being, even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it.” Her bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes flashed a reply to hers.“You had no cause to say that last,” he said hotly.“No cause, when ten minutes ago, you assured me of my unlikeness to other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and no other man’s. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for there are conditions which might cancel yourright to ask loyalty. No: it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male sex; that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice, you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge.”She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment of her assurances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs, he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive efforts got control of herself.But she lay with her head on his shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful dignity.“We have had our tragic moment,” she said, “and I with my wretched love of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let’s put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton, and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged out the genuine one. That’s singularly in keeping with my lifelong habit. Don’t look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?” She put her face caressingly against his.“Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn’t analyze things so minutely, Lottie.”“I wish I didn’t too, Martin, but I can’t help it. That’s my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!” She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.“All the same, I love you as you,” he said. “I can’t measure how much more or less for being sure of you—but I’m mighty glad to be sure of you—and I can’t take my own insides to pieces asyou can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie.”But as he smoked a last cigar,—for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him—Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife’s earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogethertoo mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;—she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;—he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin’s secret verdict—that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject’s life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confrères on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else’s. The womenof his acquaintance bored him to irritation. “I am in love,” he admitted to himself, “in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taughthim that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood’s ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as “my tragedy,” and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man’s sense that desireis right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte’s high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,—in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,—his old passion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with—that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to associate with whom, on the terms onwhich he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him—to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband’s presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days—seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.

Judge Barton’s servant, aided by Kingsnorth’s boy and Martin’s, had put up the tents and had seen thoroughly to the comfort of the visitors, so that there was nothing more to do than to bid the guests good night and to warn them of the island habit of sea bathing every morning. Jones had no bathing suit, but Kingsnorth said he would be able to lend him one; while Judge Barton, showing his fine white teeth in an appreciative smile, remarked that he never travelled without one. “We shall see you in the morning, then,” said Charlotte, and she and Martin betook themselves to their own dwelling. Martin sank lazily into his hammock on the veranda for a final cigar, while Charlotte went to give some orders to her cook about breakfast. She found that gentleman asleep on the kitchen table with his head on a bread board. Rudely awakened and asked for explanations, he stated that he had not gone to his quarters, because the Señora had sent him word thatshe wished to speak with him; but finding the time pass slowly, he had fallen asleep as she had found him. He asked her plaintively why she had been so impatient with him for so small an offence, and he held out the bread board to show that it had suffered no harm. “Wash it with boiling water! Why not? but mañana, mañana! As she could plainly see there was no boiling water at that time.”

The situation being one in which racial intelligence beats itself helplessly against racial unintelligence, Charlotte contented herself with a note in her housekeeping tablets to remind her to superintend the washing process the next morning, gave her orders, and returned to her room. Martin was standing before her glass in his shirt and trousers, a costume which always seemed to add to his stature.

“Now will you believe me?” he began teasingly. “What did I tell you about the Judge?”

“I haven’t a word to say, but I was surprised. What do you suppose brought him down here?”

“I told you he wanted to see you.”

“He said he wanted to see us, and we will treat him on that basis. That means that you must do your share of the entertaining. I do not want him on my hands all the time. He may just as wellgo with you each day as stay around the house. Promise me, dear, that you will take him on your shoulders.”

There was an unmistakable earnestness about Charlotte’s manner. She was pulling hairpins out of her hair as she spoke, and she laid those feminine accessories somewhat vigorously in a mother of pearl box, which Martin, to honor his calling, had insisted on having made for her. Her husband sank suddenly into a rocking chair and pulled her down on his knee.

“You are the funniest woman I ever knew,” he said reflectively, “the first one I ever knew who wouldn’t play on a man’s jealousy. The truth is I was just half inclined to be jealous, but you’ve disarmed me.”

“I can’t conceive myself, Martin, playing on your jealousy. The whole idea is abhorrent to me. Jealousy implies distrust. Do you think me capable of a flirtation with Judge Barton? Do you think I should enjoy making you distrust me?”

Martin’s face was a study. “You might not mean anything but a little fun,” he said apologetically. “Most women begin that way. And then you might find that you liked him best. That happens.It happens often. And the Judge is a big somebody, and I am a pearl-fisher.”

His tone grew bitter as he pronounced the last words. It was almost the first time that Charlotte had heard him refer to the worldly distinctions that he affected to despise. But if he had expected his self-disparagement to bring him a reward in a counter disparagement of the Judge, he was disappointed. Charlotte sat on his knee, a very earnest figure, her teeth nipping her lower lip, her brows frowning with a very real perplexity. Her manner brought back to him his old fear of her unexpectedness in thought and action. But even as he sat wondering, she turned and smiled, and he drew a long breath of relief.

“We may as well have this out now,” she said. “Perhaps I am making a mistake in revealing myself to you frankly. I think men understand the other sort of woman better, the one who plays upon their jealousy. I believe they value her higher.” She closed his protesting lips with a gentle finger. “I am afraid that I do not belong wholly to the twentieth century, Martin. They call it the age of individualism. But I believe yet in those old tenets which were not individual opinions, but thejoint consensus of generations seeking a livable basis for men and women. I believe in marriage and the family, and a lot of old-fashioned things. I believe that what chastity is to a woman, physical courage is to a man. I believe that women are born into this world to bear children and that men are born to fight for woman and child. The men of the present day seem to entertain a dream of universal peace, so perhaps the women are excusable for entertaining a dream of universal barrenness. However, that’s irrelevant. We can discuss that another time. But when I took you for my husband, Martin, believing in all these old-fashioned ideas, I did it in the consciousness that the choice was final, the determining factor of my life. So long as you live, there is between me and every other man in the world a barrier (I know not what it is) across which my mind will never step, and across which no man will ever try to address me twice. No, I won’t be kissed—it is the first time I have ever repelled a caress from you, but to me this moment is too serious for caresses. You have the man’s right to resent another man’s possessive thought of me; but you have no right to be jealous of me. I do not say that I will always love you.There are offences which you could commit against me which would turn my love to hatred. I do not pose as the angelic, forgiving woman. I give fidelity. I demand it in return. If you ever cease to love me, somehow, if it breaks my heart, I shall cease to love you. I would not submit to personal brutality from you or from any living being. But so long as you live there will be, in a sentimental sense, but one man in the world for me. I want you to know that, to understand it and feel it in every fibre of your being, even though I know you hold me cheaper for so understanding it.” Her bosom heaved, her cheeks were fiery, and she would have sprung from his knee only that he held her in a clasp that was iron. His own eyes flashed a reply to hers.

“You had no cause to say that last,” he said hotly.

“No cause, when ten minutes ago, you assured me of my unlikeness to other women! Look into your heart of hearts and ask yourself if I am a dearer possession now that you know that, come good or ill, with you or apart from you, in love or in anger, I hold myself yours and no other man’s. And I do so not out of any false loyalty to you, for there are conditions which might cancel yourright to ask loyalty. No: it is loyalty to myself. And this much I know of the whole male sex; that while you are infinitely content to know that there are women who can entertain such ideals and hold to them at any sacrifice, you hold the individual woman cheaper for the knowledge.”

She stared at him accusingly, and at first, half confounded, half amused with her unusual intensity, he tried to stare back; but in the end, his eyes fell and a dull shame burned in his cheek. For he knew that what she said was true, and that in the very moment of her assurances, he felt the loss of something to guard, felt that easy-going surety which a man of his experiences with women knows only too well how to diagnose. However, another emotion of a very great pride in her capacity and in her frankness and a sense of guilt made him very abject. He held her when she tried again to slip from his arms; and when, to his consternation, she put her head down on his shoulder and her body was shaken with noiseless sobs, he was as comforting as she could have desired him to be, and she felt a repentant tear mingle with her own.

She allowed herself no luxury of grief, and after a few convulsive efforts got control of herself.But she lay with her head on his shoulder for a long time, and when she spoke it was with a mournful dignity.

“We have had our tragic moment,” she said, “and I with my wretched love of staring facts in the face have unearthed a family skeleton. Let’s put it back in the cupboard, Martin. Yours was a bogey skeleton, and I was so anxious to show it up for a fraud, that I dragged out the genuine one. That’s singularly in keeping with my lifelong habit. Don’t look so long-faced, Martin. Are you angry?” She put her face caressingly against his.

“Angry! Why should I be angry? I wish you didn’t analyze things so minutely, Lottie.”

“I wish I didn’t too, Martin, but I can’t help it. That’s my punishment for being I. Oh, how I wish I were not I!” She looked at him with eyes unfathomably tired and sad, eyes of that gentle appeal that went straight to the depths of his masculine heart.

“All the same, I love you as you,” he said. “I can’t measure how much more or less for being sure of you—but I’m mighty glad to be sure of you—and I can’t take my own insides to pieces asyou can, but all the same I love you, love you, Lottie.”

But as he smoked a last cigar,—for he said that their talk had driven sleep from him—Mr. Collingwood uttered but one phrase as he monotonously paced back and forth across his veranda. Sometimes he uttered it with irritation, sometimes he mouthed it slowly as if its terse brevity were the outlet of profound conviction. Sometimes he even smiled tenderly over it, as a memory of his wife’s earnestness brushed across his vision. But however he said it, he repeated it again and again; and it was, “Well, I’ll be damned!” For the lady he had married had again said and done the unexpected thing.

Charlotte was still less inclined to sleep than her lord, though she went through the semblance of courting slumber. She was infinitely annoyed with herself for her own outburst, and was seeking what seemed a reasonable cause for so much emotion, but could not find one. She heartily wished Judge Barton had seen fit to wait for an invitation before he invaded Maylubi; and, though she declined to admit that she looked upon his coming as an omen, she was inclined to feel that he had been altogethertoo mixed in her romance. He had been an unsympathetic and amused onlooker at her courtship; he had been with them on that last crucial evening before their marriage;—she wondered how much his mere presence had influenced her in her subsequent speech with Martin;—he had been present at the wedding; and now his coming was contemporaneous with their nearest approach to a quarrel. As for what she had eased her mind of to Martin, she knew that she was right, but she added, self-accusingly, that her knowing it was all wrong. Quite mournfully she arraigned herself, and she assented whole-heartedly in what she knew must be Martin’s secret verdict—that women have no business with ideas of a philosophy on sex matters: that they should be limited to instincts and to principles. Long after Martin had ceased to pass upon his own condemnation, and was sleeping like an exaggerated infant, she lay wide-eyed, fearing she knew not what, but conscious of change impending. She had had eight months of a happiness more nearly perfect than she had ever dreamed could be hers, and it was not in the nature of things temporal as she knew them that such happiness could be of long duration.

Judge Barton meanwhile had retired to his tent, but had him drawn thence by a late-rising moon and his own cogitations. As he paced slowly up and down the silvery beach, his thoughts rushed one after another in confusing circles. First of all he anathematized himself for daring to put to the test that lulled security of his own feelings for Mrs. Collingwood. He had left her on her wedding day, himself a prey to a charm that had struck him, as it were, between the eyes, struck him with that force which emotion can attain only when it is suddenly aroused for one who has played an unheeded part in the subject’s life up to the moment of its birth. It had been months since he deemed that his sudden obsession for Mrs. Collingwood was dead, killed by very weariness of itself, and by continual thwarting. For a week or ten days after his parting with her, he had gone about with her face constantly before him, with her voice in his ears. He had started at the sight of a figure in the distance, resembling hers. His appetite had failed him, zest in all things had departed from him. The congratulations of his confrères on a brilliant decision had, it seemed to him, been mockery. He wanted her approval, nobody else’s. The womenof his acquaintance bored him to irritation. “I am in love,” he admitted to himself, “in love with a married woman whom I probably might have married myself had I so desired. I saw her every day for six weeks, and far from entertaining any sentimental thoughts about her, I deliberately set myself to tease and annoy her. I lost all sight of her for six weeks, and in that time never gave her a thought; but when I found her with her lover at her side and saw her vow herself to him, for reasons only known to the imp of perversity I discovered that she was my long lost affinity. My God! was ever man before such an imbecile? How can a man conceive such an affection for a woman who has given him one tremulous smile on her wedding day? What does this thing feed on? Am I coming to my dotage?”

In such strain did the Judge berate himself through ten or twelve weary days, and then the obsession left him as suddenly as it had come. Interest and ambition returned, he found his women friends as entertaining as ever, and though he thought often and kindly of Mrs. Collingwood, his meditations were tinged with a strain of that violet usually allotted to the dead. Past experience had taughthim that sentimental fancies about women, once chilled, are hard to resuscitate, and he felt quite certain that Mrs. Collingwood’s ghost would trouble his musings no more. He fell into the habit of thinking about the experience humorously, he spoke of it to himself as “my tragedy,” and once he nearly allowed a clever woman to worm the story out of him. The accidental intrusion of a third person was all that saved him from an access of garrulity; but having been saved, he was able to contemplate with retrospective horror his nearness to the brink and to avoid all subsequent promenadings on that path.

When by mere chance, he found himself invited to accompany the Commissioner and the oyster-shell agent on their voyage of discovery, he accepted the invitation with delight, regarding himself as a man protected by inoculation. He owned up, however, to a frank curiosity about the Collingwoods, and to a strong desire to see them together in their home; but he had as little expectation of a revival of his fancy for Mrs. Collingwood as he had of beholding so great a change in the lady herself.

But it had revived! It was there in full force, bringing with it the primitive man’s sense that desireis right. From the moment he had again beheld Charlotte’s high-bred face with her soul shining through the gray eyes, and had been again conscious of her fastidiousness and of her intelligence,—in short, of all the overpowering emanations of a unique personality,—his old passion to dominate her, to hold her fascinated by his own powerful magnetism, burned like a fever within him. It burned the more that in the lapsed months some new element of charm had come to her, as if the enlarging of human experience had fused and melted into softer lines those sturdy elements of character which had repelled quite as often as they had attracted him. She was not to be flirted with—that he knew only too well, and he had to put on eyes and voice a guard that cost him dear; but he could not resist following her when she went to supervise her dinner preparations, he could not resist the grudging sense he had of every word addressed to another than himself.

He cursed his folly in submitting himself to temptation. By his own act he had put himself in this place and had burned his bridges behind him. He had let himself in for a week of the society of a woman, to associate with whom, on the terms onwhich he must meet her, was sheer tantalization. She would not flirt with him, nor was she of the ingenuously simple sort which can be flirted with without knowing the fact. The Judge smiled ruefully as he tried to imagine Charlotte Collingwood dominated by any emotion which she could not analyze. Plainly, he had one course before him—to see as little as possible of Mrs. Collingwood except in her husband’s presence, and to guard his eyes and tongue if by chance he should find himself alone with her. He was rather proud of his virtuous resolutions, but he dreaded the slow-going days—seven of them before the steamer would return and he could put time and distance between him and Charlotte Collingwood. The Judge had great faith in Time as a mender of all things.

Chapter XIThe next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o’clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day’s dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte’s gradual revelation of all her hiddenloveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.“In spite of the noise, isn’t it still, isn’t it lonely, isn’t it delightful?” she said. “It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain.”“I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.“That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digestand to let one’s soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions.”“I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory.”“Oh, yes, I have grown,” she declared tranquilly. “It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience.”“Very good; but you don’t want to keep it up forever,” remarked Collingwood.“I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has finished sorting.”“A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my doubts of a philosophy’s ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent.”“Your demands are modest.” This in rather an inscrutable voice from the Judge.“Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life, and you will hear something that really is modest.”“Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest demands.”Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He was sitting at his wife’s feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned his head back luxuriously against her knee.“Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do with more if I could get it, but I don’t see where I can do with less.”“And you call that modest!” said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.“I call any demand on life modest which can beexpressed in dollars and cents. But Martin’s only modest demand is for the five millions. He has others not so modest.”“Name one,” challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.“I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself.”“And how about me?” There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in Judge Barton’s voice.“Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily.”“Which are seldom honored,” the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.“This is all getting blamed mysterious to me,” interrupted Collingwood. “I wish you two would talk down to my level.”“Talk up to it, you mean,” replied Charlotte good-naturedly. “For you cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn’t in it; while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on an ideal universe. TheJudge and I are not content with things as they are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar’s.“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspireTo grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,Would not we shatter it to bits—and thenRemould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”“That’s pretty. Say that again,” said Martin; and she repeated it. At its end he said wistfully, “I thought you and I had our hearts’ desires.” And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.“Don’t tell me my husband can’t make pretty speeches,” said Charlotte.“He clings to his commercial instincts,” said the Judge, “for he asked as much as he gave.”“Humph!” grunted Martin. “I am beginning to be proud of myself. I didn’t know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are understood. Youaremy heart’s desire. All the rest is just working, and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It’s taking hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself that I’ll blast what I want out of thisuniverse yet. That’s just living. But I don’t want the world made over. It suits me all right, and I thought it suited you.”Judge Barton’s gaze was fixed on the vague moving mass of waters before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest in her answer.“It does not suit me altogether,” she replied slowly, “but if Judge Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I’ll admit that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It’s the sort of thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both want to talk business.”The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. “I’ll follow you before long,” he said, and before she was out of earshot she heard him say, “What do you think the administration is likely to do?” The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled, knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping it till noon at least for very consistency’s sake. Through its open sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open casement, sitting at her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine o’clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with an armful of books, which she distributed; and with thehelp of one of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a rude blackboard.At this point the Judge’s resolution weakened. He donned a coat and ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess’s somewhat suspicious, “Better so soon?” he returned an honest confession.“It was just one of my boyhood headaches,” he admitted, “the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o’clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin.” And Rufino began chantingly:“E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me.” He paused triumphantly.“Isee a cup,” corrected Charlotte. “Say it after me—cup,cup” and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:—“I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me.” There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to saythrow, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take histongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: “I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa,” and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, “Srow de cuppa to me.”The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to “develop” the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man’s intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or awayfrom him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman’s entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in atalebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and healternatelyfelt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the “medequilla.” There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk sufferingwith a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island’s population was represented in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of herprotégées, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.“I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and I can’t let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn’t any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn’t bear an audience.”“I’m off,” said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl,but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child—that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles whichhe was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a femininecreature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood’s breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband’s table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship?And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge’s visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in herwrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.“You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,” she added.Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. “Was that why you sent me away this morning?” he inquired.For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.“Why do you stand it?” he asked.Charlotte wasdumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him.“These are quite fine,” she said quietly. “You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions.”She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it rested on the table edge.“Do you think you can put this scene off?” he demanded. “You have got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first place. It is time the thing came to an end.”Mrs. Collingwood very quietly pulled her hand out of his grasp.“So,” she said. She had the air of one who finds herself incarcerated with a madman. Judge Barton leaned far across the table, his eyes gleaming, his rather large, powerful face flushed, all the brute strength of the man dominating the urbane jurist who said clever things in a rich, well-modulated voice.“You had no business to marry him in the first place,” he said. “But that’s done. Still you can change it.”“Yes,” replied Mrs. Collingwood, a very level intonation of contempt in her tone. It irritated the Judge, and his vehemence rose higher.“Anything can be changed in these days,” he went on. “I want you to divorce Collingwood and to marry me.”“Well, I shan’t,” said Mrs. Collingwood. She did not offer to rise, however. Her heart was swelling with anger, humiliation, and a dull disappointment in the man in front of her. But some unaccountable instinct held her listening to the end. She did want to hear what he would say, she knew it would wound her, but she had a very strong curiosity as to how far he would go; and a retrospect of all her past association with him flashed through her mind. A faint smile curved her lips as she remembered the weeks when he had been free, had he so chosen, to make love to her. But he had not wanted to make love to her, till, in the making, he violated all the laws of right and loyalty. She sat very white and rigid, and the Judge felt in her once again the woman who had challenged his old self-complacency.“I suppose it was natural,” he went on. “You were alone. You had to have your romance. But what will it be to ours?—to ours? I’ll be a lover to rival the lovers of history—a husband—and we’ll do some of the things we want to do in thisworld. We have ambitions, both of us. Dear—” his voice dropped like a violin note on the octave—“take the same courage you had in hand to make this mistake, and remedy it. You defied public opinion in marrying Collingwood. Defy it once again to get rid of him. The world will understand you better. Yes, by Jove! it will sympathize more.”“I shall not test it,” said Mrs. Collingwood. This time she rose definitely. “I thank God you are going away to-morrow. The very air will be freer and cleaner after you have gone.”He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor, still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final, and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to utterance which no humanpower can revoke, though life itself would be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many a month and year to come.Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her, and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried away Judge Barton’s self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not Charlotte Collingwood’s personality, it was what she had done that opened the way to his advances.After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own misery? She was a fair actress to the world,taking refuge in a kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer measures pressure?

Chapter XI

The next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o’clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day’s dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte’s gradual revelation of all her hiddenloveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.“In spite of the noise, isn’t it still, isn’t it lonely, isn’t it delightful?” she said. “It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain.”“I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.“That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digestand to let one’s soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions.”“I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory.”“Oh, yes, I have grown,” she declared tranquilly. “It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience.”“Very good; but you don’t want to keep it up forever,” remarked Collingwood.“I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has finished sorting.”“A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my doubts of a philosophy’s ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent.”“Your demands are modest.” This in rather an inscrutable voice from the Judge.“Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life, and you will hear something that really is modest.”“Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest demands.”Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He was sitting at his wife’s feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned his head back luxuriously against her knee.“Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do with more if I could get it, but I don’t see where I can do with less.”“And you call that modest!” said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.“I call any demand on life modest which can beexpressed in dollars and cents. But Martin’s only modest demand is for the five millions. He has others not so modest.”“Name one,” challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.“I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself.”“And how about me?” There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in Judge Barton’s voice.“Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily.”“Which are seldom honored,” the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.“This is all getting blamed mysterious to me,” interrupted Collingwood. “I wish you two would talk down to my level.”“Talk up to it, you mean,” replied Charlotte good-naturedly. “For you cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn’t in it; while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on an ideal universe. TheJudge and I are not content with things as they are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar’s.“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspireTo grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,Would not we shatter it to bits—and thenRemould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”“That’s pretty. Say that again,” said Martin; and she repeated it. At its end he said wistfully, “I thought you and I had our hearts’ desires.” And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.“Don’t tell me my husband can’t make pretty speeches,” said Charlotte.“He clings to his commercial instincts,” said the Judge, “for he asked as much as he gave.”“Humph!” grunted Martin. “I am beginning to be proud of myself. I didn’t know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are understood. Youaremy heart’s desire. All the rest is just working, and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It’s taking hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself that I’ll blast what I want out of thisuniverse yet. That’s just living. But I don’t want the world made over. It suits me all right, and I thought it suited you.”Judge Barton’s gaze was fixed on the vague moving mass of waters before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest in her answer.“It does not suit me altogether,” she replied slowly, “but if Judge Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I’ll admit that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It’s the sort of thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both want to talk business.”The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. “I’ll follow you before long,” he said, and before she was out of earshot she heard him say, “What do you think the administration is likely to do?” The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled, knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping it till noon at least for very consistency’s sake. Through its open sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open casement, sitting at her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine o’clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with an armful of books, which she distributed; and with thehelp of one of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a rude blackboard.At this point the Judge’s resolution weakened. He donned a coat and ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess’s somewhat suspicious, “Better so soon?” he returned an honest confession.“It was just one of my boyhood headaches,” he admitted, “the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o’clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?”“Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin.” And Rufino began chantingly:“E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me.” He paused triumphantly.“Isee a cup,” corrected Charlotte. “Say it after me—cup,cup” and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:—“I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me.” There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to saythrow, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take histongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: “I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa,” and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, “Srow de cuppa to me.”The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to “develop” the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man’s intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or awayfrom him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman’s entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in atalebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and healternatelyfelt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the “medequilla.” There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk sufferingwith a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island’s population was represented in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of herprotégées, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.“I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and I can’t let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn’t any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn’t bear an audience.”“I’m off,” said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl,but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child—that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles whichhe was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a femininecreature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood’s breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband’s table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship?And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge’s visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in herwrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.“You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,” she added.Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. “Was that why you sent me away this morning?” he inquired.For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.“Why do you stand it?” he asked.Charlotte wasdumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him.“These are quite fine,” she said quietly. “You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions.”She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it rested on the table edge.“Do you think you can put this scene off?” he demanded. “You have got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first place. It is time the thing came to an end.”Mrs. Collingwood very quietly pulled her hand out of his grasp.“So,” she said. She had the air of one who finds herself incarcerated with a madman. Judge Barton leaned far across the table, his eyes gleaming, his rather large, powerful face flushed, all the brute strength of the man dominating the urbane jurist who said clever things in a rich, well-modulated voice.“You had no business to marry him in the first place,” he said. “But that’s done. Still you can change it.”“Yes,” replied Mrs. Collingwood, a very level intonation of contempt in her tone. It irritated the Judge, and his vehemence rose higher.“Anything can be changed in these days,” he went on. “I want you to divorce Collingwood and to marry me.”“Well, I shan’t,” said Mrs. Collingwood. She did not offer to rise, however. Her heart was swelling with anger, humiliation, and a dull disappointment in the man in front of her. But some unaccountable instinct held her listening to the end. She did want to hear what he would say, she knew it would wound her, but she had a very strong curiosity as to how far he would go; and a retrospect of all her past association with him flashed through her mind. A faint smile curved her lips as she remembered the weeks when he had been free, had he so chosen, to make love to her. But he had not wanted to make love to her, till, in the making, he violated all the laws of right and loyalty. She sat very white and rigid, and the Judge felt in her once again the woman who had challenged his old self-complacency.“I suppose it was natural,” he went on. “You were alone. You had to have your romance. But what will it be to ours?—to ours? I’ll be a lover to rival the lovers of history—a husband—and we’ll do some of the things we want to do in thisworld. We have ambitions, both of us. Dear—” his voice dropped like a violin note on the octave—“take the same courage you had in hand to make this mistake, and remedy it. You defied public opinion in marrying Collingwood. Defy it once again to get rid of him. The world will understand you better. Yes, by Jove! it will sympathize more.”“I shall not test it,” said Mrs. Collingwood. This time she rose definitely. “I thank God you are going away to-morrow. The very air will be freer and cleaner after you have gone.”He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor, still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final, and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to utterance which no humanpower can revoke, though life itself would be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many a month and year to come.Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her, and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried away Judge Barton’s self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not Charlotte Collingwood’s personality, it was what she had done that opened the way to his advances.After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own misery? She was a fair actress to the world,taking refuge in a kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer measures pressure?

The next morning at the matutinal swim the Judge affixed himself as a satellite to Kingsnorth, and left the married pair to take their morning recreation together. At breakfast, he talked business and accepted with apparent eagerness an invitation to visit the fishing grounds with the workers and the shell-purveyor. He went on that day and on five other days, enduring a great many sights and smells that he by no means enjoyed, but admitting to himself that anything was better than battling with the continual temptation to bombard Mrs. Collingwood with the declaration of his passion for her. He had enough to do to watch his betraying eye and voice during those long hours, from five o’clock till bedtime, during which the little colony was perforce united; and at the end of each day’s dragging torment, he balanced a mental account in which he itemized on one side his self-restraint, its pains and penances, and on the other Charlotte’s gradual revelation of all her hiddenloveableness. At first, a shadow of her old guard had hung about her, and she had been reserved; but reassured by his frank geniality and his apparent desire to see as much of Collingwood as possible, she gradually relaxed her watchfulness, and admitted him to the place of a tried family friend.

One warm night, when the Maclaughlins, Kingsnorth, and the oyster-agent had given themselves up to the delights of bridge, the other three strolled along the beach till they came to an old banca lying bottom up on the sand. There was no moon, but the stars burned steadily overhead, their reflections rising and falling with each slow wave. A ghostly thread of white fire outlined each breaker that toppled lazily over, and the gentle succession of splashes was like a deep harmonic accompaniment to the shrill chorus of insect life which burst from the grove behind them. They sat and listened a long while, each under the same charm, which was a different charm. It was Charlotte who first broke the silence.

“In spite of the noise, isn’t it still, isn’t it lonely, isn’t it delightful?” she said. “It is like a sort of Truce of God thrown into our lives of struggle and overstrain.”

“I can never accustom myself to those sentiments from you, Mrs. Collingwood,” said the Judge. “To me you seem a woman so eminently fitted to be a part of the great world, that I cannot understand your getting along so well without it. It is like seeing a musician trying to live without music, or an artist without pencils and brushes.”

“Charlotte swam out into the big world and got a mouthful of salt water, and it made her sick,” Martin put it. He fancied the Judge’s words had reference to living in a city among hordes of fellow beings. Of society as a fine art, Martin had no conception.

“That’s quite true, Martin; but it isn’t my only reason for liking our present life. Your ‘great world,’ Judge Barton, means a continual drain upon one’s tact and patience, a continual smoothing over of difficulties, of forcing oneself to adapt oneself to people with whom one has no real sympathy. This life is a sort of moral drifting, with the consciousness that the current moves in the right direction. The other world is full of experiences. One passes from one perception to another, one’s being is wrung with the continual play of warring emotions; but here one sits down quietly to digestand to let one’s soul feed on the food one has gathered in that plethora of emotions.”

“I wonder if you know how aptly you illustrate your theory.”

“Oh, yes, I have grown,” she declared tranquilly. “It seems to me my horizon has broadened infinitely while I have been here. When I was a child living in a convent, we internes were given annually a week at the seashore. Our unfailing recreation was to run about with a tin pail and a spade, filling the pail with sea-shells, seaweed, and all the other seashore treasures which children delight in. And when we went home, I remember the joy I had in going through my pail. Things flopped in so rapidly during the day that I hardly knew what was there. But the ecstasy of the twilight hour when I sorted my treasures! My life here has been something like that tin pail sorting-out. I have sat down to review impressions, to throw away the valueless, to classify and arrange the rest. It has been a priceless experience.”

“Very good; but you don’t want to keep it up forever,” remarked Collingwood.

“I fancy Mrs. Collingwood will begin constructing after she has finished sorting.”

“A philosophy! Remember you warned me against it. Besides I have my doubts of a philosophy’s ever being satisfactory to a woman. For myself I have no hopes of ever being more than consistently inconsistent.”

“Your demands are modest.” This in rather an inscrutable voice from the Judge.

“Do you really think so? Have you not learned that really modest demands on life are like elegantly simple clothing, the most expensive to be obtained? Get my husband to tell you his demands on life, and you will hear something that really is modest.”

“Out with it, Collingwood. I have never given you credit for modest demands.”

Collingwood puffed out two rings of smoke, and removed his cigar. He was sitting at his wife’s feet as she sat on the banca, and he leaned his head back luxuriously against her knee.

“Above five millions as near as I can make it is my figure. I might do with more if I could get it, but I don’t see where I can do with less.”

“And you call that modest!” said Judge Barton ironically to Charlotte.

“I call any demand on life modest which can beexpressed in dollars and cents. But Martin’s only modest demand is for the five millions. He has others not so modest.”

“Name one,” challenged Collingwood, sitting up in some surprise.

“I shall do nothing of the kind. Find them out for yourself.”

“And how about me?” There was a tone almost of abject anxiety in Judge Barton’s voice.

“Ah, you! You know that you draw sight drafts on the universe daily.”

“Which are seldom honored,” the Judge remarked somewhat bitterly.

“This is all getting blamed mysterious to me,” interrupted Collingwood. “I wish you two would talk down to my level.”

“Talk up to it, you mean,” replied Charlotte good-naturedly. “For you cannot believe for an instant that the irresponsible demands of two persons asking for the impossible are to be put on a higher level than a practical demand like yours that can be expressed in figures, even if it runs into seven. You ask nothing of life, Martin, that isn’t in it; while those drafts of Judge Barton, as well as my own, are drawn on an ideal universe. TheJudge and I are not content with things as they are. We do not own up often, but this seems a propitious moment. Deep in his heart each of us is echoing that old refrain of Omar’s.

“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspireTo grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,Would not we shatter it to bits—and thenRemould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”

“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”

“That’s pretty. Say that again,” said Martin; and she repeated it. At its end he said wistfully, “I thought you and I had our hearts’ desires.” And Judge Barton broke into his short, ironical laugh.

“Don’t tell me my husband can’t make pretty speeches,” said Charlotte.

“He clings to his commercial instincts,” said the Judge, “for he asked as much as he gave.”

“Humph!” grunted Martin. “I am beginning to be proud of myself. I didn’t know I gave or asked. I thought I referred to things that are understood. Youaremy heart’s desire. All the rest is just working, and being glad when I succeed, and angry when I fail. It’s taking hard knocks and gritting my teeth over them, and saying to myself that I’ll blast what I want out of thisuniverse yet. That’s just living. But I don’t want the world made over. It suits me all right, and I thought it suited you.”

Judge Barton’s gaze was fixed on the vague moving mass of waters before them, but Charlotte fancied she could detect a tense interest in her answer.

“It does not suit me altogether,” she replied slowly, “but if Judge Barton will forgive an exchange of conjugal compliments, I’ll admit that it has come very near suiting me, since I married you. My little burst of this evening is an echo of a former self. It’s the sort of thing I have said so much in my life, that it ripples off my tongue through force of habit whenever anyone strikes a harmonious note. And now I am going in. I am tired and sleepy, and I know that you both want to talk business.”

The Judge rose as she did. Martin remained on the upturned banca. “I’ll follow you before long,” he said, and before she was out of earshot she heard him say, “What do you think the administration is likely to do?” The rest trailed off in an indistinct murmur; but she smiled, knowing that Philippine policy was uppermost.

The next morning Judge Barton found his self-denying spirit in the minority, and a very insistent small voice demanding a reward for five days of self-immolation. Secure in the knowledge of his past will-power, and confident that the next day would see him off the island, he asked himself why there was any need of sacrificing himself to the heat and smells of another day on the launch. He pleaded a headache, ate little to bear evidence to his sincerity, and after breakfast retired to his tent with the honest intention of keeping it till noon at least for very consistency’s sake. Through its open sides, he could view Mrs. Collingwood at her daily routine.

She came out upon the broad veranda, made a minute examination of the flower-pots, pulled a few dead fronds from a great air-fern which hung in one of the windows, and cut a nosegay from the hedge of golden cannas. Afterwards he saw her through the open casement, sitting at her desk, and apparently making entries in an account book. At nine o’clock, six or eight children between the ages of seven and fourteen arrived and squatted down on the veranda. Charlotte came out with an armful of books, which she distributed; and with thehelp of one of the larger boys, she also brought out an easel on which was a rude blackboard.

At this point the Judge’s resolution weakened. He donned a coat and ambled over to the veranda. To his hostess’s somewhat suspicious, “Better so soon?” he returned an honest confession.

“It was just one of my boyhood headaches,” he admitted, “the kind that used to keep me in bed till nine o’clock, when school had taken up. Did you never have that sort of headache, Mrs. Collingwood?”

“Never. I was a conscientious child, though I am willing to admit that it was doubtless a great mistake to be so. Rufino, begin.” And Rufino began chantingly:

“E see a cuf. A ball is in de cuf. Srow de ball to me.” He paused triumphantly.

“Isee a cup,” corrected Charlotte. “Say it after me—cup,cup” and she pronounced the final consonant so distinctly that Rufino proceeded without difficulty:—

“I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa. Srow de ball to me.” There was no little difficulty in inducing Rufino to saythrow, and he did not succeed until Mrs. Collingwood made him take histongue in his two fingers and pull it through his teeth, preliminary to attacking the word. His mates took exuberant joy in this feat, and the next boy, Wenceslao de los Angeles, started out glibly: “I see a cuppa. A ball is in de cuppa,” and then dropped his book, gave his tongue a convulsive jerk and spluttered, “Srow de cuppa to me.”

The Judge gurgled as helplessly as the children did, blushed, tried to save the situation, and looked exceedingly severe. Mrs. Collingwood, a little flushed, threw him a protesting glance, smiled, bit her lip and went on with the reading lesson. When every aspirant had had a chance to see the cup and to pull his tongue, she proceeded to “develop” the lesson. The Judge was bored. It was one of the miseries of his strange infatuation for her that merely being with her or able to watch her afforded him no satisfaction. He wanted to monopolize her, to keep her attention constantly centred in himself. If this feeling was Nature, working in its own blind way to accomplish what the man’s intellect told him could not be done, the Judge ruefully reflected that Nature can sometimes keep a man very miserable, and that she wastes a great deal of human effort. For whether her thoughts were with him or awayfrom him, he was secretly conscious of what she had told her husband, that there was for her, in one sense, but one man in the world. Her old suspicion of him was lulled, and she stood ready for fair honest friendship; but there never had been, in one glance of her eye, in her occasional merry laugh, or in her frank converse, the faintest evidence of that sex consciousness which is in no wise to be confounded with social self-consciousness, but which, as an element in woman’s entity, is the only possible excuse for the banalities which men are usually eager to exchange with them by the hour.

The Judge was wearily awaiting the close of the reading lesson when he received another disappointment in the sight of numerous physically incommoded individuals who strolled up by detachments, and squatted at the foot of the veranda steps. There was a consumptive in atalebon, or hammock, in which the sick are carried about. There was a small boy with a boil on his kneecap. He had plastered it with lime, a disinfectant for almost all skin troubles in the Philippines; and healternatelyfelt it gingerly, and glanced apprehensively, if fascinatedly, in the direction of the “medequilla.” There were ulcers, and yellow jaundiced folk sufferingwith a seasonal fever. The Judge decided that fully one-fifth of the island’s population was represented in the assemblage, and he gave a shrug of commiseration as he reflected how they must have suffered unaided before the coming of Charlotte.

He was watching her somewhat closely as she struggled with the limited understanding of one of herprotégées, when she glanced down the beach, and he saw a great tide of crimson rush to her cool, clear skin. Naturally his eyes followed hers, but he saw approaching only a rather young and comely girl carrying a young child in her arms. He had barely time to perceive this when Mrs. Collingwood turned to him.

“I am going to dismiss my class and take these poor people next, and I can’t let you assist at that. I am dreadfully self-conscious about it with any on-lookers. There isn’t any evading the fact that it is really daring on my part to attempt to play physician, and nurse, too; but something has to be done for them. But I really couldn’t bear an audience.”

“I’m off,” said the Judge with a laugh. He did not, however, turn toward his tent, which would have taken him away from the approaching girl,but swung briskly down the sand in the direction from which she was advancing.

She greeted him with the customary civility of Filipinos, and he vouchsafed her a nod. He dared not stop and speak to her, but he made directly for the native village, a mile away, where he asked the headman who she was. When he had extracted the full details of the story, he turned and strolled slowly back. But he did not rejoin Mrs. Collingwood. He went, instead, to his tent, where he sat gazing meditatively across the sea while he turned over and over the facts that he had heard.

She had compromised with life with a vengeance! He felt that she had gone far when he beheld the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth. But to live openly in daily converse with such a man, to sit at the table with him, and to minister to the needs of his illegitimate child—that was carrying tolerance or charity to a length unprecedented. He made no allowance for the fact that she found herself confronted with a situation in which to take action was to risk her domestic happiness. What he scorned in her was the fact that she could be happy under such circumstances. He knew very well that women put up with worse in the very circles whichhe was struggling so desperately to attain; but he knew also the veil of decent concealment which those circles know so well how to assume. He had to admit, also, that she had proved more of a philosopher than he had given her credit for being, and she had dared to reprove him for his gibe, and he had apologized with God knows what of contrition! The hunter instinct that is so strong in all men rose up in him; and suddenly he realized why he had so remorselessly wounded her and tormented her in those early days of their acquaintance. It was that deep in his mind had lain the desire for her, which still held, but which then he had been unwilling to gratify by marriage; and proportionally as he had felt that she was out of his reach and that he dared not insult her by one sign of sentimentality unbacked by the desire of marriage, he had hated her with the smouldering hatred of balked affection. Well, he loved her still, and he was willing to marry her. If she could get rid of Collingwood, he was willing to marry her. He hardly doubted that she would do it. He felt pretty sure of the motives which had made her marry the young ruffian, who had, he admitted, improved considerably under her hands. She was a femininecreature in spite of her brains, unable to face life without love, and she had been grateful to the man who offered it to her, and had given her the shelter of his roof. But that any woman of Charlotte Collingwood’s breeding would deliberately prefer Martin Collingwood to a man of her own class, Judge Alexander Barton declined to believe. Nor was he altogether wrong. She might not have taken Collingwood in the beginning, had the Judge been his honest rival at that time. But having taken him, she had no intention of questioning her bargain. The Judge read her very correctly up to that point of secret loyalty and gratitude, which to a man of his ambitions was outside the possibilities of human nature.

Why should she not, he asked himself, get rid of Collingwood without scandal and marry him. She was a woman to be proud of. He had seen her at her husband’s table and knew that she graced it. There must be somewhere in the United States an influential kindred who might not care to make too much of her as a nurse, but who would be glad to welcome the wife of an eminent jurist; and with proper family backing, the Judge saw many things. Why not a commissionership, yes, a governorship?And then (for everybody knows that a Governor of the Philippines has a great chance to keep in the public eye) why not something better by-and-by? The Judge’s visions grew more rosy than it is safe to chronicle here.

Strange it was that his week of intimate association had not shown him the utter futility and madness of thinking to approach Mrs. Collingwood with the audacious plan he had in mind. Partly, his own passion blinded his judgment; partly, he had so long been accustomed to the society of women to whom social preferment is the end of life that he had lost sight of the stronger and nobler elements of character that can live in the feminine breast. To be just to the society in which the Judge moved, there was a very fair sprinkling of noble women within it, but his restless ambition drove him into intimacy with those who could understand him and sympathize without the necessity of explanations.

The result of his musings was that he went to luncheon in a dangerous mood. It had full opportunity to show itself, for Mrs. Maclaughlin did not appear. She sent word that she had been engaged in the poultry yard all morning, had bathed late, and would prefer taking her luncheon in herwrapper at home. As the Judge had caught a glimpse of her drying her rather wiry gray tresses in the sunshine of a window, he was able to corroborate her statement; and Charlotte laughed as she gave orders for the preparation of the tray.

“You can be trusted to see all things that you are not wanted to see,” she added.

Then the Judge went point-blank and very indiscreetly at the matter in his mind. “Was that why you sent me away this morning?” he inquired.

For an instant her face flamed, and then the color left it white, with an angry gleam in her eyes. She played with her teaspoon a minute, and then she asked him a civil question about his impressions of her school. It was his turn to flush. The rebuke was the more scathing for its silence. His temper rose, and even in that instant he found time to wonder why he should have such an infatuation for a woman who had such power to enrage him.

“Why do you stand it?” he asked.

Charlotte wasdumbfounded. She had her hospital patient on her hands again, when she had imagined, for nearly a week, that she had found a friend. Mechanically she pushed a dish of candied fruits (they were at dessert) toward him.“These are quite fine,” she said quietly. “You had better try them and then have your cigar. Meanwhile I must ask you to excuse me. My cook awaits dinner directions.”

She was rising, but he reached a hand across and seized hers as it rested on the table edge.

“Do you think you can put this scene off?” he demanded. “You have got to listen. You had no business to marry Collingwood in the first place. It is time the thing came to an end.”

Mrs. Collingwood very quietly pulled her hand out of his grasp.

“So,” she said. She had the air of one who finds herself incarcerated with a madman. Judge Barton leaned far across the table, his eyes gleaming, his rather large, powerful face flushed, all the brute strength of the man dominating the urbane jurist who said clever things in a rich, well-modulated voice.

“You had no business to marry him in the first place,” he said. “But that’s done. Still you can change it.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Collingwood, a very level intonation of contempt in her tone. It irritated the Judge, and his vehemence rose higher.

“Anything can be changed in these days,” he went on. “I want you to divorce Collingwood and to marry me.”

“Well, I shan’t,” said Mrs. Collingwood. She did not offer to rise, however. Her heart was swelling with anger, humiliation, and a dull disappointment in the man in front of her. But some unaccountable instinct held her listening to the end. She did want to hear what he would say, she knew it would wound her, but she had a very strong curiosity as to how far he would go; and a retrospect of all her past association with him flashed through her mind. A faint smile curved her lips as she remembered the weeks when he had been free, had he so chosen, to make love to her. But he had not wanted to make love to her, till, in the making, he violated all the laws of right and loyalty. She sat very white and rigid, and the Judge felt in her once again the woman who had challenged his old self-complacency.

“I suppose it was natural,” he went on. “You were alone. You had to have your romance. But what will it be to ours?—to ours? I’ll be a lover to rival the lovers of history—a husband—and we’ll do some of the things we want to do in thisworld. We have ambitions, both of us. Dear—” his voice dropped like a violin note on the octave—“take the same courage you had in hand to make this mistake, and remedy it. You defied public opinion in marrying Collingwood. Defy it once again to get rid of him. The world will understand you better. Yes, by Jove! it will sympathize more.”

“I shall not test it,” said Mrs. Collingwood. This time she rose definitely. “I thank God you are going away to-morrow. The very air will be freer and cleaner after you have gone.”

He stood looking after her, red-eyed, enraged, yet longing with all the fierce strength of his nature to seize her in his arms and conquer her as Martin Collingwood had once conquered her. When he heard the snap of her closing door, he fell into a sort of stupor, still sitting at the table, his head resting on his clasped hands.

The vehement forceful fury of his mood fell away from him, and he sat staring haggardly at the white cloth. The act was final, and having committed it, he had full opportunity to question its discretion. Strange tragedy of temperament, forcing eye and voice to utterance which no humanpower can revoke, though life itself would be reckoned a fair price for revocation! Sitting there alone with his thoughts, Alexander Barton was conscious of a shame that would stay with him for life, of a futile hopeless anger and despair with himself, of an ache that would take the taste out of life for many a month and year to come.

Meanwhile, Charlotte had passed into her room, where she stood very quietly looking out of the window. Her heart lay heavy within her, and a dull, gripping pain tugged at her throat. She had a sense of having been morally bruised and beaten. For she saw with painful distinctness, that it was not only brute feeling which had carried away Judge Barton’s self-control; but that deeper, subtler was his measurement of the compromise she had made with life. It was not Charlotte Collingwood’s personality, it was what she had done that opened the way to his advances.

After a time she lay down, and she remained so for the rest of the afternoon, with her face buried in her pillow. How was she to face Martin with the wretched story? How was she to dissemble her own misery? She was a fair actress to the world,taking refuge in a kind of stoic dignity. But how was she to hide her embarrassment and misery from the man who could measure her moods as a barometer measures pressure?

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