Chapter XII

Chapter XIIThe evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to Mrs. Collingwood’s disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her; and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had, to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling; but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers sporting in the sea, and the coastguardcutter lying a mile or so off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.The Commissioner’s first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool, and he had thought much during his week’s absence. Without in the least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood’s personality and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a connection with the queer islandménage. The result of his reflections was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him no grudge. She had accepted her husband’s associates kindly for his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins were “impossible.” It mattered little to her, because she had turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even took satisfaction in playing herpart gracefully. She enjoyed the Commissioner’s mystification, and the little access of deference in his manner when he spoke to her.She was saved the necessity of any direct speech with the Judge, till, at the very last moment, he snatched a second while the others were grouped around the Commissioner.“I don’t dare put out a hand,” he said, “and I suppose you won’t believe me when I say that I am sorry, and that I didn’t sleep last night for execrating myself. I am sorry in the dullest, heart-sickest way a man can be. I knew as well before I said those things as I know now that it would not do me any good, and yet they had to come out. Well, I’ve lost a friend. But do you suppose you can ever think kindly of me again?”She raised her eyes to him for one of those slow painful glances that she sometimes gave, and she answered measuredly:“I don’t think unkindly of you on my own account. Somehow the thing has no bearing on me. I have seen you in the proper light, and I do not think you are worth thinking unkindly about. But for my husband’s sake I shall always feel a resentment. He gave you shelter under his roof, anda seat at his table; and in turn you would have betrayed him. On his account, I shall always feel anger, but for me you are just—erased.”“You can say, at least, as bitter things as other women,” the Judge retorted with pale lips. She shrugged her shoulders lightly and extended a very high hand.“It has been such a pleasure to have you with us,” she said quite distinctly. Her eyes met his unflinchingly, but his own were bright with moisture. He wrung her hand in spite of its high bent wrist.“No, don’t do that,” he said. “Give me a good honest handshake. I’m sorry. I shall be sorry for some time to come. Besides—” his expressive pause said as plainly as words, “You have conducted yourself admirably. The thing has done you no harm.”Collingwood saw the shrug, the look exchanged, and the handshake. He perceived war in his wife’s manner, and he wondered what it was all about. But as the Commissioner was already seating himself in the human chair to be carried out to the boat there was no time to ask questions then. He was still more surprised when his wife came up to him, and slipping a hand in his, stoodwatching the departing dignitary. Charlotte had a horror of public demonstrations, and the act was unlike her. He slipped an arm around her, glancing, as he did so, somewhat sheepishly at his other guests; but the Judge was apparently absorbed in the process of turning up the bottoms of an exceedingly well made pair of trousers before embarking in turn; and, as he was carried out, his anxiety to protect a pair of spotless shoes seemed superior to every other consideration.When the guests were once aboard their boat, the fishers made haste to embark in their own; and Mrs. Collingwood, with a hasty wave of her hand, turned immediately and went indoors.She drew a long breath of relief as she entered her little sitting-room. There was a sort of clearing in the atmosphere, a sense of wholesomeness and content in having their lives to themselves. She passed lovingly from one piece of furniture to another, giving a touch here, making some slight change there. Her housekeeping cares became a renewed pleasure. All day she busied herself about house and mending, laying aside wholly the books and magazines which, for several hours each day, had been her wonted entertainment. When Martincame home at five o’clock, she met him, a radiant creature, eyes smiling, face beaming content, her laugh spontaneous as a child’s. He was inclined to be lonely, and said as much at dinner. Mrs. Maclaughlin agreed with him, but Maclaughlin and Kingsnorth went over to Charlotte’s side, and insisted that things were cosier with their own little family.After dinner, husband and wife sat on their veranda steps while Martin smoked a pipe or two. He was very thoughtful, she silently content. Suddenly he broke out:“Charlotte, did you and the Judge quarrel?”Charlotte started perceptibly and answered after a decided pause:“What makes you think we did?”“I saw your handshake.”He felt rather than saw another little shrug. It was a reckless gesture. Charlotte wanted very much to quarrel with her little gods just then. She kept silence, however, and he was forced to go on insistently.“Did he try to make love to you?”There was a miserable humor in her reply. “Not in your acceptance of the term, Martin.”“Well, what is my acceptance of the term? I should like to know what you mean by that.”“He did not put his arm around my waist or try to kiss me.”“Then what were you scrapping with him for?” said Martin with such instant relief that Charlotte laughed helplessly, though the tears were rolling down her cheeks. Martin studied her intently through the gloom.“There’s something behind all this,” he remarked sententiously. “I never before knew you to dodge a question, or to be in such a mood. Now, see here, I’ve got some rights in this matter and I want to know about it.”His tone brought her up sharp in her half-hysterical mirth. She replied quickly.“You will not like it, Martin.”“I’ll have to decide that.”“Well, if nothing but the truth will do, he proposed to me that I should get rid of you and marry him.”Collingwood threw down his cigar with an oath, and jumped, in the sudden rush of his anger, quite clear of the steps. He made several short, quickturns back and forth before he finally sat down again at his wife’s side.“I suppose he had some reason for thinking you might entertain such a proposition,” he said bitterly.Charlotte’s pride sprang to arms. “He may have had one,” she replied laconically. “It was not in any glance or words I had given him. I haven’t been flirting with him. My conscience is clear.”“But men don’t make propositions of that sort without a reason, Charlotte.”Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. “You are the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons.” But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.“Well, what was the reason?” he demanded.“He thought I might be ambitious.”It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.“And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea,” he reproached her.“I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him—as you are quite capable of doing—and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists.”With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin’s kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.“I should like to know what you said to him.”But Charlotte could suffer no more. “Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,” she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercisedalmost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martinhad every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind’s eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which less spirited womenpropitiatean injured deity were foreign to her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are, to conjugal frowns.All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness was jolted out of her at Martin’s first angry word. Another woman might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step, she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse to her societywould have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of Charlotte’s words, “I have not been flirting with him,” but Martin Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with Martin Collingwood’s footwear. To a man of Collingwood’s temperament, being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, thatwhy!It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoiningroom, the clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.Kingsnorth remarked: “I thought I should have to go to work without you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were.”“All tom-foolishness,” said Martin. “I am no six-weeks-old baby. You let me oversleep like this again,” he added, addressing the muchacho, “and I’ll beat you with a dog whip.”Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that of an oculist’s advertisement. A moment later Charlotte addressed some trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness, and theyfell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She rose at last, saying, “If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;” and she made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It never once occurred to her that Martincould publicly affront her at breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.Yet that is precisely what he did. The day’s work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover’s benediction for the first time since their marriage.He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled againstthe tears that would have betrayed her—struggled till her eyeballs ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself “Thoroughbred, by Jove,” and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood’s conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o’clock.So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed hiswhy; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled inher breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte’s marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth’s. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and thatMartin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.“Nonsense,” said Charlotte. “I am absolutely contented. I don’t feel droopy.”But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. “But youarea bit pale,” he said. “I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let’s accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can’t complain if we take him at his word.”At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. “Why can’t I go too, then?” she said.“We need a housekeeper,” cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, “Don’t talk of it.”“Fiddlesticks,” Martin said. “You can get along by yourself a while. It’s just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company while I am at business.”By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or twofrowns; but she had taken the bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.Charlotte’s heart sank and her anticipation of pleasure subsided into dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin’s society seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin’s enthusiasm.Chapter XIIIIt was all finally settled, and preparations such as could be made were begun. Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence.Collingwood was childishly eager for the change. His head, too, was full of memories and of places—how they would revisit the place where such and such a conversation had taken place,—did she remember that wrestle of their two individualities,—or drive over the ground where he had pleadedso fiercely for the right to take care of her, to stand between her and the bread-and-butter struggle. Particularly he looked forward to the Luneta evenings, for, of all moments in his life, he held that moment on the Luneta when she had dropped her flag the sweetest. He said as much to her, and she blushed like a girl. He also said something to the same effect to Mrs. Mac when that lady was sharpening her imagination one evening at dinner.“We are going to run off and leave you just once, Mrs. Mac,” he said. “I’ve got one drive with my wife all planned out; it will be a Sunday evening. I am going to take her to the Luneta that evening; justsheand I.”“Oh, I can understand,” replied Mrs. Mac. “For that matter, Mac and I were young once ourselves.”Kingsnorth, who had preserved a kind of displeased reticence ever since it had been settled that Mrs. Mac was to go to Manila with the Collingwoods, started to say something, bestowed upon the lady an unfriendly glance, and somewhat pointedly asked Mrs. Collingwood if she was going to join the bridge game after dinner.Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. “Not unless I’m actually needed,” she replied.“You hate it so badly, you’ll have to be excused,” Collingwood said. “Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day.”“You make me feel like a prescription,” said Charlotte, laughingly. “Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband’s faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever.”“I note that fact,” said Kingsnorth, gravely. “I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Cheshire cat.” But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the whitestretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.“It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this,” she said. “I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless æons, and I could ask no more than one day’s sunshine and that same day’s sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare.”“As it is to me,” Kingsnorth rejoined. “I don’t know why I stand it from day to day. I don’t see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away.”“Yet you gave up your trip, you pretended to feel about this as you don’t feel. Why did you do it, Mr. Kingsnorth?”“I wanted you and Martin to go. You can say what you please about being satisfied and contented;some of your radiance and vitality have disappeared in the last two or three weeks.”Charlotte flushed uncomfortably. She did not enjoy the thought that she was so closely watched and studied. Kingsnorth, divining her thoughts, went on hastily.“Besides, I am as miserable there as here. I want the impossible. I’m crying for the moon. I’ve cried for it—My God!—these twenty years. I wonder, Mrs. Collingwood, if you can understand a mood of savage self-dissatisfaction—a mood in which it seems indecent that you should be alive yourself, and unjust that so many million fellow-beings should find this world an agreeable place. There are times when I should like to be an Atlas poised on the gulf of space! How I’d send the old ball and all that dwell in it humming into the void, to go on and on into darkness! You know that poem of Byron’s—”“Yes, I know the poem and the mood.” She regretted the statement as soon as she had made it, and bit her lips in silent confusion. Kingsnorth stopped and faced her. They stood close to a great clump of pandan bushes where a path, making ashort cut from the cottages to the point, led away through the bunched sand grass.“Are you going to draw that line on me forever, Mrs. Collingwood?” he demanded.“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“Oh, yes, you do. I am Martin’s friend, Mrs. Collingwood. Am I never going to be yours?”“Just as far as it is a friendship including Martin, yes. But why fence over the matter? The friendship which you would form with me excludes him. I should have poor powers of analysis, Mr. Kingsnorth, if I could not perceive that you have not been bidding for the friendship of a friend’s wife, as she is joined to his life and yours in the present. What you want is a friendship based on the past. You want to build something out of what we have both experienced and what he has not experienced, and I will have nothing of it.”“I meant no disloyalty to him,” Kingsnorth muttered.“Disloyalty; no! But would he feel his position a dignified one? Would he have no cause for complaint with both you and me?”“You coddle him,” said Kingsnorth, with a short bitter laugh.“I am jealous for all that touches his dignity as well as mine.”Kingsnorth lost his head. “Why did you marry him?” he said.“I married him because I was in love with him, Mr. Kingsnorth. I haven’t regretted it. I love him better to-day, if it were possible, than I did then. I have answered your question because I was able to answer it frankly; but, none the less, I resent its impertinence.”“I apologize. But you will admit, lady of the stony heart, that there are situations that provoke human curiosity past the limits of all good manners.”Charlotte stood tapping one foot on the ground a long while before she spoke. She was thinking deeply, and the result of her meditations was a sudden appeal.“Mr. Kingsnorth,” she said gently, “I should like to put this matter honestly before you. You and I find ourselves in a peculiar situation. When I first came here I was utterly taken aback by your presence. You saw my confusion. You probably read it aright, and I saw in your eyes, that first morning, the question which you have just askedme. The answer is easy, and yet not easy to make. For the sake of human affection in my life, to escape a loneliness and a sense of isolation that were almost intolerable to me, I compromised with my ambitions. I know how you and all the rest of the world—or, at least, that part of it in which you and I were brought up—regard my marriage. All the same, I do not regret it, and my life with Martin has been full of happiness. I don’t intend to jeopardize one drop of that happiness. I have steadily refused to drift into any relations with you that could startle Martin’s mind into recognition of facts which he is blind to, and which I choose to ignore. Are you so selfish that, for the sake of a few idle hours, a few reminiscences, perhaps, you would ask me to risk the dearest possession I have in the world—my husband’s unalloyed pleasure in our own relations, his perfect confidence in himself?” She drew a long breath. “It would be a sacrilege. I’ll guard his happy self-confidence as I would guard my own self-respect.”“That self-confidence of his is deuced irritating to the onlooker.” Then with a burst of anger, “You can’t forgive me for being myself, but youwill forgive him for bringing you here and expecting you to associate with me.”“The association has done me no harm, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“No, you’re right. You’ve treated me like a leper.”“I have treated you with the courtesy and consideration which any woman owes to her husband’s friends.”“And you’ve measured it out drop by drop, as you would medicine in a glass; just as you’ll measure out courtesy to Mrs. Maclaughlin on this trip. Good Lord! Mrs. Collingwood, you can’t have that woman at your heels in Manila. What is Martin thinking of? Let me give him a hint for you.”“Don’t you dare,” she cried, her face crimsoning, her eyes beginning to flash. Then with a sudden repression of her feelings, “What evil genius inspires this desire to interfere? Why can you not leave me to manage my own affairs? Martin is pleased at the idea of Mrs. Maclaughlin’s going, and that is enough for me.” Then she began to laugh softly. “Please, Mr. Kingsnorth, let this be the last time that you and I discuss my personalaffairs or Martin’s. Martin and I have a little Garden of Eden of our own, but I am no primitive Eve. With my consent, he shall not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”Kingsnorth turned around with a shrug. “How long do you think you can keep it up?”“As long as we live in Maylubi, at the least. I hope forever.”“Not another day,” said Collingwood’s voice, as he stepped into the path clear in view from behind the pandan bushes. “I’ve been listening to this jargon for ten minutes. Now I should like to know what it means?”Kingsnorth did not start or utter a word; he only stared defiantly at Collingwood. He was conscious of a low repressed sound from Mrs. Collingwood, who stood as if turned to stone, her gaze fixed not on her husband, but on Kingsnorth. She was nibbling a ratched edge of pandan fibre which she had stripped as they talked; but her expression was one of bitter accusation. Plainly she held him responsible for the conversation he had forced upon her, and the betrayal which had ensued.Collingwood was white and his brown eyes glitteredwith an uncanny lustre. He was holding himself in with a strong hand.It was Charlotte who spoke first. “At what point did you enter the conversation, Martin?” she inquired suavely.“I didn’t enter. But I judge I heard from the beginning. Mrs. Mac found she had something else to do, and Mac wanted to read; so I came across, short cut, to join you. I waited a minute, intending to scare you, and then what I heard made me want to hear more.”Charlotte gave a little reckless shrug, and turned her face seaward. Her expression cut Kingsnorth to the heart.“If you heard from the beginning, you must see that I forced a conversation on Mrs. Collingwood that she disliked,” he said slowly.“Oh, yes, I got that all right. I’m not playing the jealous husband. Charlotte’s all right; so are you, for that matter. What I’d like to have explained is this compromise talk.”Charlotte raised her eyes to his. A leaden pain seemed to make them heavy and spiritless.“You don’t need explanations, Martin,” she said.“Would to Heaven you did; though I’d tear my tongue out by the roots before I would give them, if you really did.”“I guess I gathered the point,” Martin replied bitterly. “There isn’t much to be said. It makes a thousand things that have mystified me plain as day. You’ve deceived me. You’ve played a nasty part. It does you small credit.”Kingsnorth started to move away. “You needn’t go,” Martin said, “I don’t see any reason to be sensitive about discussing this thing before you. You seemed to be admitted to things before I was.”“I learned what my eyes and wits told me. I give you my word of honor that until to-night Mrs. Collingwood and I have never spoken of you or of your and her private affairs. What she said to me was in self-defence and only to parry an insistence that I sincerely regret.” He turned toward Charlotte appealingly, but she made a fierce little movement as if to wave away anything apologetic he might say.“It must have been a damned interesting comedy,” Martin went on, the words stinging like sleet.“Stop!” cried Charlotte. She put up a hand.“I have never deceived you, Martin. If you recall the day on which you left the hospital, and on which you came to me and asked me to marry you, you will remember that I spelt out with almost painful distinctness the things which have been alluded to to-night. You simply refused to listen to them. You would not understand. Every word fell on deaf ears.”“Well, they’re sensitive enough now, I understand the situation. You’ve simply reversed the squawman act. You wanted a home and somebody to love you, and you took what you could get, not what you wanted. And you said to yourself that it did not matter, for you never expected to go home, and you wouldn’t have to show me to your friends. That’s all very fine, from the squawman’s view-point. It’s practical. But by the living God I’m no squaw, to be content with my position! You’re not proud of me, I see. Damnation! do you think I’ll live with you, or any woman that walks the earth, on those terms?”There was an instant’s silence. Collingwood somewhat relieved by his own violence, glared at the woman, who, up to that hour, had never known less than tenderness from him. Kingsnorth stoodbowed with shame and repentance. For an instant Charlotte’s frozen glance met her husband’s. Then with an unconscious gesture she laid one hand on her constricted throat, and, turning, took the path across the grove. Her white figure moved so lightly that they could not realize the difficulty with which she walked. But as the shadows of the tall cocoanut trees closed around her, she grasped a slender bole with both arms and leaned against it, panting. Nausea swept over her. Despair, humiliation, hopelessness weighed her down. Her knees trembled beneath her, and with a little moan, too soft to reach the ears of the two men, who remained motionless, she sank at the foot of the tree.She lay there a long time, unable to rise, though she was not fainting. Weakness had fastened upon her. But under her breath she kept on repeating one sobbing phrase:“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair—three men against one woman. They are so hard. They aren’t generous. It isn’t fair.”At length Collingwood turned abruptly and walked down the beach. Kingsnorth came out of his stupor and pursued him.“Collingwood,” he said earnestly, “if I were not such a blackguard myself, I’d call you one, for your treatment of your wife. She’s had no chance between us.”“She can take care of herself, I think. My advice to you is to keep out of the matter.”“How can I? I’ve been the cause of it.”“You the cause!” Martin stared an instant and broke into a short, ugly laugh. “Do you suppose I care for that talk out there to-night? You did me a favor. What I care about is the part I’ve played for the last ten months. A devilish pretty dupe I’ve been.”Kingsnorth recognized the futility of argument with a man whose self-love has been so sorely wounded. “You’ll see this thing differently when you cool down,” he remarked. “Don’t say anything more to your wife. She’s a noble woman, Martin, a damned sight too good for you, if you want the truth; and you’ve half killed her to-night. Hold in till you’ve had time to get your second thoughts. If you want to beat my face in, I’ll stand it. God! I’m certain it would be a relief.”Martin’s reply was an inarticulate grunt, as heflung up the path to his own cottage. He charged up the steps through the lightedsala, and into the bedroom, expecting to find Charlotte there. The desire to quarrel was strong in him.The empty room surprised him, and for an instant jolted his thoughts into a less combative vein. He went out and sat down on the veranda steps, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, and expecting each minute to see her white-clad figure emerge from the dark line of the cocoanut grove. Gloomy thoughts seized upon his mind.The chiming of thesalaclock brought him to a sudden realization that it was eleven o’clock and Charlotte had not returned. Alarm overcame his rage, and he started hastily up the path through the grove. He almost stumbled over her before he saw her.“What in the name of Heaven are you doing here?” he demanded. “Get up and come home at once.”She tried to obey him, but it was with the third unassisted effort only that she dropped her head with a moan that went to his heart. “I can’t get up. I would if I could.” And Martin stooped and lifted her to her feet.“Can you walk?” he asked. His voice trembled.She nodded and dragged herself along with his aid. Collingwood was thoroughly frightened. He helped her to her room, where she fell on her bed nerveless. No fury could have blinded him to her utter exhaustion, to the set despair of her face. He went into the dining-room and brought her a glass of whiskey. When she had drunk it, a bit of color came back into her face and she looked at him appealingly.“Don’t say any more to-night, please, Martin. If you’ll go out on the veranda, I’ll get myself to bed without assistance. I can’t talk.” Her teeth chattered.Collingwood, half sulky still, half compassionate, betook himself to the veranda and a succession of cigars. Away from the sight of her suffering, anger and humiliation sat again upon his shoulders. When in the wee small hours, he sought his room, he asked her grouchily if she had slept, or if he could do anything for her. To both questions she uttered a denial. It was evident that she had not been crying though she looked very pale and worn; and the next morning she was unable to rise.Chapter XIVIt seemed to Mrs. Collingwood that the next three days embodied the quintessence of all that had ever fallen to her lot of discomfort and misery. To lie physically helpless, a burden and a care to the one person who, at that time, was most out of love with her, was humiliation of the most cankering variety. Added to it was the sense of loss, the consciousness of ruin and disaster, and a feeling of shame that bowed her to the earth. Her husband’s bitter words had sunk deep into her soul. She saw herself as a creature degraded and partaking of the instincts of the most depraved class. Her marriage began to assume the complexion of an adventure. Was there an element of the adventuress in her? she asked herself tremulously. In reply came a wild rush of denial, an agony of revolt. As she envisaged herself she could not but justify her own actions. The feminine weakness, and dread of life’s bread-and-butter struggle, alone justified them. And she had lovedMartin tenderly; she had been a good wife, loyal to his interests, guarding his dignity as her own, literally pouring her affection and her gratitude for all his tenderness toward her into his carelessly outstretched palm. No mother ever more sedulously stood between her child and the evil of the world than she had sought to save Martin Collingwood the pain of knowing what he had come to know. His ingratitude, though she would not use that word even to herself, cut her to the depths of her heart.But it was plain that their romance was ended; “the thing had gone to smash,” in Collingwood’s forceful language. Time and time again she went over that night on the Luneta before their marriage, and Martin’s words, and her own miserable doubts and fears. The worst had happened, as she had feared it might, but Collingwood was not living up to his philosophy. He was angry at her, held himself a man cheated, put all the blame on her, wanted in a dumb, fruitless way to quarrel with her.On the evening of her second day in bed, they attempted to thresh out their difficulties, but it was soon evident that they had reached a hopelessimpasse. Charlotte ended what was a miserable controversy.“What is your quarrel with me about, Martin?” she said. “Simply that I am I, that I have lived through certain experiences, that I have certain criterions of taste and judgment that you have not. I have not obtruded them on you. I haven’t made myself obnoxious by them. I deny that I have ever deceived you, and I have tried honestly to think and feel as you do. Ihaven’tbeen playing a part. I have been thoroughly happy. But you can’t any more make me put your values on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to, convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I’ll have no quarrel with you, no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters, what actual part need they play in our life? If I am content to put them out of sight, why cannot you do so?”“I’ll be damned if I’ll live with any woman on earth on your terms,” Collingwood reiterated.She looked him steadily in the eyes. “Then the thing is finally settled, and we can spare ourselves the pain of useless discussion. For in the thing we are quarrelling with—not my actions, but my philosophy of life—I shall not change. Nor can I fancy any woman with a spark of modesty or decency in her, entreating a man to live with her. If you will allow me to remain here during your stay in Manila, I’ll go before you get back.”“How do you think you are going to live?”She gave a little reckless shrug. “I supported myself before we were married. I suppose I can do so again. I’ll make no demands on your pocket book. I didn’t marry you to be supported. I married you to be loved by you, to feel that I gave in your life and home an order and an assistance—yes, and a joy—to equalize what I cost you in money. When there is no longer exchange, I refuse to accept.”“Big talk,” said Martin. She did not reply, but turned away wearily. The servant knocked at the door a minute after to say that dinner was ready, and he went to his meal. After that, it seemed that they had subsided into a tacit acceptance of their future as she had outlined it.Collingwood was quite as unhappy as his wife was. All his masculine pride was chafing, but his masculine heart was aching. He wanted to be set gloriously in the right, to ascend the pedestal from which he had been ignominiously tumbled by a few incautious words overheard. He wanted, though he hardly phrased it to himself, apologies for his wife’s daring to understand a thing that he had not understood. He had literally eaten of the tree of knowledge and was enraged with what lay patent to his seared vision.The consciousness of what had been going on in Kingsnorth’s mind, in Judge Barton’s, in the Commissioner’s, burnt like acid on a wound. He saw, with astonishing clearness, Judge Barton’s viewpoint, and he marvelled no more at that gentleman’s temerity. His beggar maid a princess! his throne amésalliance!—the thought burned. His tortured self-love yawned like an abyss which no heaping of prostrate offenders could ever fill; and against his wife’s quiet dignity his thwarted will raged sullenly.Yet it is doubtful if he ever really regarded their separation as probable. Tacitly he accepted her statement that she was going away. In realityhe hardly thought of such a possibility. Alone with his thoughts, all his will and his imagination bent itself to her conquest. It was that hour of her final humiliation and confession to which he looked forward. How long was she going to keep it up?During her few days’ illness, however, he showed her some courtesies for which she returned a dignified, but not an affectionate, gratitude. Indeed, she had been up and about the house two or three days before her husband perceived that the door of her heart and mind, which she had so shyly opened to him, had closed, and that he stood outside of it, a part of that concourse which Charlotte Ponsonby had always feared and distrusted. She had trusted him most of all the world, and he had turned upon her and hurt her more cruelly than anyone else had ever done. Without reproach or lamentation or any sign of self-pity, she retired behind those invincible ramparts to which Martin had been blind in hospital days, but to which he was now so much alive.It would have been exceedingly difficult for him to tell in what the change consisted. Her courtesy was finely measured, it is true, but it was not an armed truce between belligerents. It was therefuge of dignity, of one who feels his position false, but would save appearances by outward grace, at least. She who had been his wife, his dearest possession, became only a graceful hostess in his home—a lady who stood ready to lend a deferential ear to his suggestions, or carry out, to the best of her ability, his every wish, expressed or unexpressed. She ignored his gloom, saw to all his needs, spoke to him always kindly, though without humility or contrition; but for herself she asked not one fraction of his time or his attention. The occasions for little courtesies which he had been accustomed to offer her were skilfully avoided; but were never rudely made conspicuous by their avoidance. Her quiet pride was infinitely more than a match for his aggressive self-love; her supreme naturalness, the most impregnable armor she could have worn.Kingsnorth beheld the transformation in her, was first astonished, then interested, then moved to profound pity and contrition. With tact equal to her own, he set himself to meet the situation, seconded all her efforts to make their awkward meals natural and easy, silenced Mrs. Mac’s gaping curiosity, and managed, in doing it all, to keep himself well inthe background. With Collingwood he had one conversation on the launch, but the sum and substance was that gentleman’s reiteration of the terms on which he would live.“Damnation!” was Kingsnorth’s irritable response, “you are simply making an ass of yourself, Collingwood. I can’t call you a brute, because I’ve been too much of one myself. I live in glass houses—I can’t throw stones. You’ve married a jewel among women, and you’re going to make your ruffled dignity make smash of two lives that ought to be happy. Moreover, you are not in earnest. This is all bluffing and bad temper to bring Mrs. Collingwood to her knees, and to make her put herself in the wrong when you know there isn’t any wrong or right about things. Now I’ll give you a piece of advice, old man. You are trying that game on the wrong woman: see that you don’t carry it too far, and turn her affection into dislike. I’ve learned one thing, learned it tragically well in this life; and that is that one has justonechance really in this world with one person. Now don’t lose your chance with your wife.”To this Martin vouchsafed a grunt. Hardly conscious of it, he had set his will to bring Charlotteto his terms. He could not listen to anything that crossed that strong desire.The days went by slowly where they had once gone so fast, and neither husband nor wife referred again to that tacit agreement of separation. Yet Martin knew from the bundle of letters which he was to carry up to Manila that Charlotte was making plans for business life again; and once, when he came into the sitting-room unexpectedly, he found her frowning over her bank book. He knew the balance it contained, for, on their wedding journey, they had laughed at her little savings; and he knew she could not long maintain herself upon it. He smiled grimly at her flushed discomfiture when he found her pondering ways and means, and somewhat brutally said to himself that she would find that she had little rope to run upon.Yet at the last moment it was he who wavered, he who rang down the curtain on their make-believe. She had looked after his garments and had packed his trunk with wifely solicitude; had prepared for his launch trip, foods for which she knew his predilection, and had, at the moment of farewell, saved the situation by putting out a friendly hand.“I do hope you will have a pleasant trip,” she said,—and what it cost her to speak so easily and naturally, only she could have told,—“and thank you for giving me the weeks here to get ready. I’ll go over to Cuyo when the launch goes up for you on your return trip, and will leave a letter for you there. There are some things I can’t say to you, but I should like to write them. They will, perhaps, leave a better feeling between us.”To these words Martin found, at the time, no answer. He wrung her hand, muttered something, and hastened away. Yet when his belongings had all been deposited in the boat, and the men were waiting to “chair” him out, he turned on his heel, and strode back to the cottage.He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain, and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood, the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills, stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. “Oh, go!” she said. “It’s a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can’t help ourselves. I knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be.”“What I want you to do,” Martin said honestly, “is to take into consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of you—can do it well. That ought to count for something.”“O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I’ve leaned on you and your love, Martin. I’ve told you so a thousand times.”“Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles.”“But I don’t set the trifles against them. I havenever weighed one against the other—never for an instant.”“But you know that you could.” Poor Martin here uttered helplessly what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.“Ah,” she sighed. “Don’t judge me by what I know; judge me by what I’ve done and thought.”“You’ve got to change,” he muttered. “I can’t. I’m right. You’re wrong.”“The things you have in mind can’t be changed by will power, dear. They are the results of education, association, environment. New environment may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. ‘I’ve done all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.’ I’m not stubborn, Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am.”The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He raged helplessly against the truth of her words.When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin’s insistent curiosity, permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week’s retirement.Though at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past, and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood’s idea that her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true, from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome to all the world, everybody’s hand against her, her hand against everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself, in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even Mrs. Maclaughlin’s frank speech grew guarded.Kingsnorth merely looked at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes, he went vigorously on her side. She was “gentle folks,” he maintained, a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s democratic partiality, naturally roused in Martin’s favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.

Chapter XIIThe evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to Mrs. Collingwood’s disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her; and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had, to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling; but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers sporting in the sea, and the coastguardcutter lying a mile or so off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.The Commissioner’s first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool, and he had thought much during his week’s absence. Without in the least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood’s personality and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a connection with the queer islandménage. The result of his reflections was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him no grudge. She had accepted her husband’s associates kindly for his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins were “impossible.” It mattered little to her, because she had turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even took satisfaction in playing herpart gracefully. She enjoyed the Commissioner’s mystification, and the little access of deference in his manner when he spoke to her.She was saved the necessity of any direct speech with the Judge, till, at the very last moment, he snatched a second while the others were grouped around the Commissioner.“I don’t dare put out a hand,” he said, “and I suppose you won’t believe me when I say that I am sorry, and that I didn’t sleep last night for execrating myself. I am sorry in the dullest, heart-sickest way a man can be. I knew as well before I said those things as I know now that it would not do me any good, and yet they had to come out. Well, I’ve lost a friend. But do you suppose you can ever think kindly of me again?”She raised her eyes to him for one of those slow painful glances that she sometimes gave, and she answered measuredly:“I don’t think unkindly of you on my own account. Somehow the thing has no bearing on me. I have seen you in the proper light, and I do not think you are worth thinking unkindly about. But for my husband’s sake I shall always feel a resentment. He gave you shelter under his roof, anda seat at his table; and in turn you would have betrayed him. On his account, I shall always feel anger, but for me you are just—erased.”“You can say, at least, as bitter things as other women,” the Judge retorted with pale lips. She shrugged her shoulders lightly and extended a very high hand.“It has been such a pleasure to have you with us,” she said quite distinctly. Her eyes met his unflinchingly, but his own were bright with moisture. He wrung her hand in spite of its high bent wrist.“No, don’t do that,” he said. “Give me a good honest handshake. I’m sorry. I shall be sorry for some time to come. Besides—” his expressive pause said as plainly as words, “You have conducted yourself admirably. The thing has done you no harm.”Collingwood saw the shrug, the look exchanged, and the handshake. He perceived war in his wife’s manner, and he wondered what it was all about. But as the Commissioner was already seating himself in the human chair to be carried out to the boat there was no time to ask questions then. He was still more surprised when his wife came up to him, and slipping a hand in his, stoodwatching the departing dignitary. Charlotte had a horror of public demonstrations, and the act was unlike her. He slipped an arm around her, glancing, as he did so, somewhat sheepishly at his other guests; but the Judge was apparently absorbed in the process of turning up the bottoms of an exceedingly well made pair of trousers before embarking in turn; and, as he was carried out, his anxiety to protect a pair of spotless shoes seemed superior to every other consideration.When the guests were once aboard their boat, the fishers made haste to embark in their own; and Mrs. Collingwood, with a hasty wave of her hand, turned immediately and went indoors.She drew a long breath of relief as she entered her little sitting-room. There was a sort of clearing in the atmosphere, a sense of wholesomeness and content in having their lives to themselves. She passed lovingly from one piece of furniture to another, giving a touch here, making some slight change there. Her housekeeping cares became a renewed pleasure. All day she busied herself about house and mending, laying aside wholly the books and magazines which, for several hours each day, had been her wonted entertainment. When Martincame home at five o’clock, she met him, a radiant creature, eyes smiling, face beaming content, her laugh spontaneous as a child’s. He was inclined to be lonely, and said as much at dinner. Mrs. Maclaughlin agreed with him, but Maclaughlin and Kingsnorth went over to Charlotte’s side, and insisted that things were cosier with their own little family.After dinner, husband and wife sat on their veranda steps while Martin smoked a pipe or two. He was very thoughtful, she silently content. Suddenly he broke out:“Charlotte, did you and the Judge quarrel?”Charlotte started perceptibly and answered after a decided pause:“What makes you think we did?”“I saw your handshake.”He felt rather than saw another little shrug. It was a reckless gesture. Charlotte wanted very much to quarrel with her little gods just then. She kept silence, however, and he was forced to go on insistently.“Did he try to make love to you?”There was a miserable humor in her reply. “Not in your acceptance of the term, Martin.”“Well, what is my acceptance of the term? I should like to know what you mean by that.”“He did not put his arm around my waist or try to kiss me.”“Then what were you scrapping with him for?” said Martin with such instant relief that Charlotte laughed helplessly, though the tears were rolling down her cheeks. Martin studied her intently through the gloom.“There’s something behind all this,” he remarked sententiously. “I never before knew you to dodge a question, or to be in such a mood. Now, see here, I’ve got some rights in this matter and I want to know about it.”His tone brought her up sharp in her half-hysterical mirth. She replied quickly.“You will not like it, Martin.”“I’ll have to decide that.”“Well, if nothing but the truth will do, he proposed to me that I should get rid of you and marry him.”Collingwood threw down his cigar with an oath, and jumped, in the sudden rush of his anger, quite clear of the steps. He made several short, quickturns back and forth before he finally sat down again at his wife’s side.“I suppose he had some reason for thinking you might entertain such a proposition,” he said bitterly.Charlotte’s pride sprang to arms. “He may have had one,” she replied laconically. “It was not in any glance or words I had given him. I haven’t been flirting with him. My conscience is clear.”“But men don’t make propositions of that sort without a reason, Charlotte.”Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. “You are the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons.” But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.“Well, what was the reason?” he demanded.“He thought I might be ambitious.”It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.“And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea,” he reproached her.“I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him—as you are quite capable of doing—and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists.”With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin’s kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.“I should like to know what you said to him.”But Charlotte could suffer no more. “Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,” she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercisedalmost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martinhad every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind’s eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which less spirited womenpropitiatean injured deity were foreign to her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are, to conjugal frowns.All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness was jolted out of her at Martin’s first angry word. Another woman might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step, she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse to her societywould have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of Charlotte’s words, “I have not been flirting with him,” but Martin Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with Martin Collingwood’s footwear. To a man of Collingwood’s temperament, being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, thatwhy!It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoiningroom, the clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.Kingsnorth remarked: “I thought I should have to go to work without you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were.”“All tom-foolishness,” said Martin. “I am no six-weeks-old baby. You let me oversleep like this again,” he added, addressing the muchacho, “and I’ll beat you with a dog whip.”Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that of an oculist’s advertisement. A moment later Charlotte addressed some trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness, and theyfell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She rose at last, saying, “If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;” and she made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It never once occurred to her that Martincould publicly affront her at breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.Yet that is precisely what he did. The day’s work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover’s benediction for the first time since their marriage.He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled againstthe tears that would have betrayed her—struggled till her eyeballs ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself “Thoroughbred, by Jove,” and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood’s conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o’clock.So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed hiswhy; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled inher breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte’s marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth’s. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and thatMartin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.“Nonsense,” said Charlotte. “I am absolutely contented. I don’t feel droopy.”But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. “But youarea bit pale,” he said. “I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let’s accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can’t complain if we take him at his word.”At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. “Why can’t I go too, then?” she said.“We need a housekeeper,” cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, “Don’t talk of it.”“Fiddlesticks,” Martin said. “You can get along by yourself a while. It’s just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company while I am at business.”By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or twofrowns; but she had taken the bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.Charlotte’s heart sank and her anticipation of pleasure subsided into dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin’s society seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin’s enthusiasm.

Chapter XII

The evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to Mrs. Collingwood’s disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her; and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had, to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling; but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers sporting in the sea, and the coastguardcutter lying a mile or so off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.The Commissioner’s first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool, and he had thought much during his week’s absence. Without in the least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood’s personality and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a connection with the queer islandménage. The result of his reflections was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him no grudge. She had accepted her husband’s associates kindly for his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins were “impossible.” It mattered little to her, because she had turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even took satisfaction in playing herpart gracefully. She enjoyed the Commissioner’s mystification, and the little access of deference in his manner when he spoke to her.She was saved the necessity of any direct speech with the Judge, till, at the very last moment, he snatched a second while the others were grouped around the Commissioner.“I don’t dare put out a hand,” he said, “and I suppose you won’t believe me when I say that I am sorry, and that I didn’t sleep last night for execrating myself. I am sorry in the dullest, heart-sickest way a man can be. I knew as well before I said those things as I know now that it would not do me any good, and yet they had to come out. Well, I’ve lost a friend. But do you suppose you can ever think kindly of me again?”She raised her eyes to him for one of those slow painful glances that she sometimes gave, and she answered measuredly:“I don’t think unkindly of you on my own account. Somehow the thing has no bearing on me. I have seen you in the proper light, and I do not think you are worth thinking unkindly about. But for my husband’s sake I shall always feel a resentment. He gave you shelter under his roof, anda seat at his table; and in turn you would have betrayed him. On his account, I shall always feel anger, but for me you are just—erased.”“You can say, at least, as bitter things as other women,” the Judge retorted with pale lips. She shrugged her shoulders lightly and extended a very high hand.“It has been such a pleasure to have you with us,” she said quite distinctly. Her eyes met his unflinchingly, but his own were bright with moisture. He wrung her hand in spite of its high bent wrist.“No, don’t do that,” he said. “Give me a good honest handshake. I’m sorry. I shall be sorry for some time to come. Besides—” his expressive pause said as plainly as words, “You have conducted yourself admirably. The thing has done you no harm.”Collingwood saw the shrug, the look exchanged, and the handshake. He perceived war in his wife’s manner, and he wondered what it was all about. But as the Commissioner was already seating himself in the human chair to be carried out to the boat there was no time to ask questions then. He was still more surprised when his wife came up to him, and slipping a hand in his, stoodwatching the departing dignitary. Charlotte had a horror of public demonstrations, and the act was unlike her. He slipped an arm around her, glancing, as he did so, somewhat sheepishly at his other guests; but the Judge was apparently absorbed in the process of turning up the bottoms of an exceedingly well made pair of trousers before embarking in turn; and, as he was carried out, his anxiety to protect a pair of spotless shoes seemed superior to every other consideration.When the guests were once aboard their boat, the fishers made haste to embark in their own; and Mrs. Collingwood, with a hasty wave of her hand, turned immediately and went indoors.She drew a long breath of relief as she entered her little sitting-room. There was a sort of clearing in the atmosphere, a sense of wholesomeness and content in having their lives to themselves. She passed lovingly from one piece of furniture to another, giving a touch here, making some slight change there. Her housekeeping cares became a renewed pleasure. All day she busied herself about house and mending, laying aside wholly the books and magazines which, for several hours each day, had been her wonted entertainment. When Martincame home at five o’clock, she met him, a radiant creature, eyes smiling, face beaming content, her laugh spontaneous as a child’s. He was inclined to be lonely, and said as much at dinner. Mrs. Maclaughlin agreed with him, but Maclaughlin and Kingsnorth went over to Charlotte’s side, and insisted that things were cosier with their own little family.After dinner, husband and wife sat on their veranda steps while Martin smoked a pipe or two. He was very thoughtful, she silently content. Suddenly he broke out:“Charlotte, did you and the Judge quarrel?”Charlotte started perceptibly and answered after a decided pause:“What makes you think we did?”“I saw your handshake.”He felt rather than saw another little shrug. It was a reckless gesture. Charlotte wanted very much to quarrel with her little gods just then. She kept silence, however, and he was forced to go on insistently.“Did he try to make love to you?”There was a miserable humor in her reply. “Not in your acceptance of the term, Martin.”“Well, what is my acceptance of the term? I should like to know what you mean by that.”“He did not put his arm around my waist or try to kiss me.”“Then what were you scrapping with him for?” said Martin with such instant relief that Charlotte laughed helplessly, though the tears were rolling down her cheeks. Martin studied her intently through the gloom.“There’s something behind all this,” he remarked sententiously. “I never before knew you to dodge a question, or to be in such a mood. Now, see here, I’ve got some rights in this matter and I want to know about it.”His tone brought her up sharp in her half-hysterical mirth. She replied quickly.“You will not like it, Martin.”“I’ll have to decide that.”“Well, if nothing but the truth will do, he proposed to me that I should get rid of you and marry him.”Collingwood threw down his cigar with an oath, and jumped, in the sudden rush of his anger, quite clear of the steps. He made several short, quickturns back and forth before he finally sat down again at his wife’s side.“I suppose he had some reason for thinking you might entertain such a proposition,” he said bitterly.Charlotte’s pride sprang to arms. “He may have had one,” she replied laconically. “It was not in any glance or words I had given him. I haven’t been flirting with him. My conscience is clear.”“But men don’t make propositions of that sort without a reason, Charlotte.”Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. “You are the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons.” But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.“Well, what was the reason?” he demanded.“He thought I might be ambitious.”It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.“And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea,” he reproached her.“I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him—as you are quite capable of doing—and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists.”With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin’s kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.“I should like to know what you said to him.”But Charlotte could suffer no more. “Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,” she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercisedalmost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martinhad every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind’s eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which less spirited womenpropitiatean injured deity were foreign to her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are, to conjugal frowns.All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness was jolted out of her at Martin’s first angry word. Another woman might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step, she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse to her societywould have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of Charlotte’s words, “I have not been flirting with him,” but Martin Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with Martin Collingwood’s footwear. To a man of Collingwood’s temperament, being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, thatwhy!It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoiningroom, the clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.Kingsnorth remarked: “I thought I should have to go to work without you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were.”“All tom-foolishness,” said Martin. “I am no six-weeks-old baby. You let me oversleep like this again,” he added, addressing the muchacho, “and I’ll beat you with a dog whip.”Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that of an oculist’s advertisement. A moment later Charlotte addressed some trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness, and theyfell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She rose at last, saying, “If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;” and she made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It never once occurred to her that Martincould publicly affront her at breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.Yet that is precisely what he did. The day’s work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover’s benediction for the first time since their marriage.He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled againstthe tears that would have betrayed her—struggled till her eyeballs ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself “Thoroughbred, by Jove,” and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood’s conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o’clock.So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed hiswhy; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled inher breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte’s marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth’s. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and thatMartin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.“Nonsense,” said Charlotte. “I am absolutely contented. I don’t feel droopy.”But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. “But youarea bit pale,” he said. “I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let’s accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can’t complain if we take him at his word.”At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. “Why can’t I go too, then?” she said.“We need a housekeeper,” cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, “Don’t talk of it.”“Fiddlesticks,” Martin said. “You can get along by yourself a while. It’s just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company while I am at business.”By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or twofrowns; but she had taken the bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.Charlotte’s heart sank and her anticipation of pleasure subsided into dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin’s society seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin’s enthusiasm.

The evening meal passed off more easily than had seemed possible to Mrs. Collingwood’s disturbed imagination. Judge Barton managed to appear perfectly at ease, and she played her own part better than she had fancied that she could. Only one dread preyed upon her. There was a readiness in Kingsnorth to devote himself to the entertainment of the guests, and a tact on his part in holding the household together which made her suspect that keen observer of a desire to aid her; and such a desire could only lead to the inference that he had, to some extent, grasped the situation. The thought was galling; but its bitterness was, for the time, mitigated by her sense of need.

She slept little that night, but toward morning she fell into a doze from which she was aroused by the sounds of breakfast preparations in the next room. She jumped up hurriedly, only to behold the bathers sporting in the sea, and the coastguardcutter lying a mile or so off shore. Dressing as quickly as she could she hastened down to the beach in time to meet the Commissioner as he came ashore.

The Commissioner’s first rush of enthusiasm had had time to cool, and he had thought much during his week’s absence. Without in the least abating his very high opinion of Mrs. Collingwood’s personality and attainments, he had had time to consider the possible attitude of Mrs. Commissioner, and the difficulties attendant upon too close a connection with the queer islandménage. The result of his reflections was a self-conscious restraint, and a very bungling masculine attempt to recede from a position without betraying himself in the act.

Charlotte read his self-consciousness aright, ignored the existence of a Mrs. Commissioner, saved his feelings for him, and bore him no grudge. She had accepted her husband’s associates kindly for his sake; but she had never ceased to look upon them with the clear vision of her upbringing. Socially Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins were “impossible.” It mattered little to her, because she had turned her back forever upon society and all its works. She even took satisfaction in playing herpart gracefully. She enjoyed the Commissioner’s mystification, and the little access of deference in his manner when he spoke to her.

She was saved the necessity of any direct speech with the Judge, till, at the very last moment, he snatched a second while the others were grouped around the Commissioner.

“I don’t dare put out a hand,” he said, “and I suppose you won’t believe me when I say that I am sorry, and that I didn’t sleep last night for execrating myself. I am sorry in the dullest, heart-sickest way a man can be. I knew as well before I said those things as I know now that it would not do me any good, and yet they had to come out. Well, I’ve lost a friend. But do you suppose you can ever think kindly of me again?”

She raised her eyes to him for one of those slow painful glances that she sometimes gave, and she answered measuredly:

“I don’t think unkindly of you on my own account. Somehow the thing has no bearing on me. I have seen you in the proper light, and I do not think you are worth thinking unkindly about. But for my husband’s sake I shall always feel a resentment. He gave you shelter under his roof, anda seat at his table; and in turn you would have betrayed him. On his account, I shall always feel anger, but for me you are just—erased.”

“You can say, at least, as bitter things as other women,” the Judge retorted with pale lips. She shrugged her shoulders lightly and extended a very high hand.

“It has been such a pleasure to have you with us,” she said quite distinctly. Her eyes met his unflinchingly, but his own were bright with moisture. He wrung her hand in spite of its high bent wrist.

“No, don’t do that,” he said. “Give me a good honest handshake. I’m sorry. I shall be sorry for some time to come. Besides—” his expressive pause said as plainly as words, “You have conducted yourself admirably. The thing has done you no harm.”

Collingwood saw the shrug, the look exchanged, and the handshake. He perceived war in his wife’s manner, and he wondered what it was all about. But as the Commissioner was already seating himself in the human chair to be carried out to the boat there was no time to ask questions then. He was still more surprised when his wife came up to him, and slipping a hand in his, stoodwatching the departing dignitary. Charlotte had a horror of public demonstrations, and the act was unlike her. He slipped an arm around her, glancing, as he did so, somewhat sheepishly at his other guests; but the Judge was apparently absorbed in the process of turning up the bottoms of an exceedingly well made pair of trousers before embarking in turn; and, as he was carried out, his anxiety to protect a pair of spotless shoes seemed superior to every other consideration.

When the guests were once aboard their boat, the fishers made haste to embark in their own; and Mrs. Collingwood, with a hasty wave of her hand, turned immediately and went indoors.

She drew a long breath of relief as she entered her little sitting-room. There was a sort of clearing in the atmosphere, a sense of wholesomeness and content in having their lives to themselves. She passed lovingly from one piece of furniture to another, giving a touch here, making some slight change there. Her housekeeping cares became a renewed pleasure. All day she busied herself about house and mending, laying aside wholly the books and magazines which, for several hours each day, had been her wonted entertainment. When Martincame home at five o’clock, she met him, a radiant creature, eyes smiling, face beaming content, her laugh spontaneous as a child’s. He was inclined to be lonely, and said as much at dinner. Mrs. Maclaughlin agreed with him, but Maclaughlin and Kingsnorth went over to Charlotte’s side, and insisted that things were cosier with their own little family.

After dinner, husband and wife sat on their veranda steps while Martin smoked a pipe or two. He was very thoughtful, she silently content. Suddenly he broke out:

“Charlotte, did you and the Judge quarrel?”

Charlotte started perceptibly and answered after a decided pause:

“What makes you think we did?”

“I saw your handshake.”

He felt rather than saw another little shrug. It was a reckless gesture. Charlotte wanted very much to quarrel with her little gods just then. She kept silence, however, and he was forced to go on insistently.

“Did he try to make love to you?”

There was a miserable humor in her reply. “Not in your acceptance of the term, Martin.”

“Well, what is my acceptance of the term? I should like to know what you mean by that.”

“He did not put his arm around my waist or try to kiss me.”

“Then what were you scrapping with him for?” said Martin with such instant relief that Charlotte laughed helplessly, though the tears were rolling down her cheeks. Martin studied her intently through the gloom.

“There’s something behind all this,” he remarked sententiously. “I never before knew you to dodge a question, or to be in such a mood. Now, see here, I’ve got some rights in this matter and I want to know about it.”

His tone brought her up sharp in her half-hysterical mirth. She replied quickly.

“You will not like it, Martin.”

“I’ll have to decide that.”

“Well, if nothing but the truth will do, he proposed to me that I should get rid of you and marry him.”

Collingwood threw down his cigar with an oath, and jumped, in the sudden rush of his anger, quite clear of the steps. He made several short, quickturns back and forth before he finally sat down again at his wife’s side.

“I suppose he had some reason for thinking you might entertain such a proposition,” he said bitterly.

Charlotte’s pride sprang to arms. “He may have had one,” she replied laconically. “It was not in any glance or words I had given him. I haven’t been flirting with him. My conscience is clear.”

“But men don’t make propositions of that sort without a reason, Charlotte.”

Again she said nothing. The answer was burning on her lips. “You are the reason. The associates you have given me here are the reasons.” But she maintained silence. Collingwood was angered by what he thought her obstinacy.

“Well, what was the reason?” he demanded.

“He thought I might be ambitious.”

It was an honest answer and as generous as it was frank. But Collingwood was in no mood to measure generosity.

“And you let him get away without giving me a chance to kick him into the Sulu Sea,” he reproached her.

“I did. The greatest fear I had was that he would not get away without your doing it. Suppose you had kicked him—as you are quite capable of doing—and he had kicked back. One or the other would have been hurt. Suppose it had been you, do you think I should have enjoyed seeing you suffer? Or suppose you had hurt him, do you think it would have been a satisfaction to me to know that you had fought for me, and had to be punished for it? Do I want my husband in jail or maimed for rebuking an insolence that I could handle myself? I defended your dignity and mine, and Judge Barton has been a thousand times more rebuked by my tongue than he would have been by your fists.”

With this speech and with the memory of her shrug and handshake, Martin’s kindling jealousy had to be temporarily extinguished. He returned with a more conciliating manner to the charge.

“I should like to know what you said to him.”

But Charlotte could suffer no more. “Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,” she implored. She rose and walked away. The action was the result of lifelong habit. She had never allowed herself to indulge in emotion before others, and she had exercisedalmost the will of a red Indian to refrain from giving way to an overwhelming burst of tears; but when, after she had regained some control of herself, her thoughts returned to Collingwood, a sense of bitter disappointment in him mingled with her self-pity.

He had not followed her! He had shown her no sympathy in her momentary outburst of unhappiness. She was conscious of never having deserved better of his loyalty and sympathy, and she had never received less! She finally took up a book and endeavored to read, but her heart was sick with wounded love and pride. She found old feelings that she had believed scourged out of her being rising in tumultuous violence. There was the feeling of outraged pride and sensibility, the swelling sense of injustice, and a blind twisting and turning to see a way out of the situation. Suddenly that which the Judge had proposed leaped back into her mind. The ear which had been deaf to him when he appealed to her ambitions became sensitively alive to a whisper when that whisper promised succor from distaste. She was frightened at her own attitude and took herself severely to task. She said to herself that she was morbid, that Martinhad every right to be displeased with her, for she had denied him frankness; but even as she ranged these weights in her mind’s eye the scale tipped lower and lower with the weight of his displeasure.

Live under the bane of his anger she could not. The tentative overtures, the timid looks or glances, the humility with which less spirited womenpropitiatean injured deity were foreign to her nature; but equally she was not calloused, as many women are, to conjugal frowns.

All the self-confidence which she had gained in months of happiness was jolted out of her at Martin’s first angry word. Another woman might have turned his wrath away with a laugh, might have nestled her hand into his with a whisper and a kind look; but it was not in Charlotte Collingwood to offer a caress to an angry husband. It would have been to her an act beyond the pale of decency. Her heart harbored no revenge. Every moment as she sat listening for his step, she justified his resentment, she told herself over and over that she had no tact and no consideration, and that Martin was an abused husband; but to have risen and sought him when he was plainly averse to her societywould have seemed to her the acme of unwomanliness.

Meanwhile Mr. Collingwood was pacing the sands. His temper was seething. He did not understand the situation, and the more he realized his inability to understand it, the higher rose his desire to hold somebody accountable. There was no doubting the sincerity of Charlotte’s words, “I have not been flirting with him,” but Martin Collingwood thought there had to be a reason for such a radical step on the part of so conservative a man as the Judge. Then there was the fact that the Judge had departed without that closer acquaintance with Martin Collingwood’s footwear. To a man of Collingwood’s temperament, being balked of the physical pleasures of revenge was worse even than the sting of the affront. Why had not Charlotte told him? She had clearly not meant to tell him. She had meant to let him go on shaking that viper by the hand when they met. But why? Ah, thatwhy!

It was long after midnight when he entered his home. His wife was asleep or pretended to be so; and when he awoke late, after a troubled sleep, he found her dressed and gone. From the adjoiningroom, the clinking of cups and saucers told him that breakfast was going on.

Collingwood dressed quickly and went in to breakfast wearing an unpleasant face. After one quick glance, Charlotte gave him a smiling good morning, to which he vouchsafed a surly reply.

Kingsnorth remarked: “I thought I should have to go to work without you, old man. Mrs. Collingwood would not have you waked. She made us talk in whispers and eat in parenthesis, as it were.”

“All tom-foolishness,” said Martin. “I am no six-weeks-old baby. You let me oversleep like this again,” he added, addressing the muchacho, “and I’ll beat you with a dog whip.”

Then electrically everybody knew that something was wrong in the Collingwood household. Mrs. Maclaughlin stole a frightened look at Charlotte whose face flamed, Maclaughlin stared first at Collingwood and then at his wife, and finally turned his wondering eyes on Kingsnorth, who met his gaze with an eye about as intelligent as that of an oculist’s advertisement. A moment later Charlotte addressed some trifling remark to Kingsnorth who answered with a suspicious readiness, and theyfell into conversation unshared by the rest of the table.

Collingwood continued to gloom after the Maclaughlins and Kingsnorth, who had nearly finished when he appeared, had excused themselves. Charlotte sat on profoundly uncomfortable. She had no words in which to address his frowning majesty, but she was heartsick. She rose at last, saying, “If you will excuse me, Martin, I will leave you to finish alone, I forgot about those launch supplies;” and she made her errand in the kitchen detain her until she saw the launch puffing lazily across the blue, sparkling water.

She went back to her room and lay down half nauseated with the misery surging within her. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to meet the emergency she was confronting. She came of a family to whom the scene which had taken place in her breakfast-room could be possible only as a definite, final act of estrangement. She was as utterly ignorant of those persons who alternately frown and smile and betray joy or sorrow unthinkingly to the world as Martin was ignorant of the jealous guarding of appearances which pertained to her world. It never once occurred to her that Martincould publicly affront her at breakfast and forget all about it before dinner.

Yet that is precisely what he did. The day’s work restored his natural sunny self. He dismissed the Judge from his mind with the mental reservation of kicking him on sight; and when he came home that night, he strode up the steps, caught his wife in his arms, and kissed her as naturally as if they had not, that very morning, omitted that lover’s benediction for the first time since their marriage.

He made no apology for his late spleen. Truth is, he hardly thought of it as affecting her. She clung to him as he kissed her, and he saw that she was pale and her eyes heavily lidded; but he asked her no questions. She had had, in truth, a hard day. As soon as the glowering man body was safely out of the way, Mrs. Maclaughlin came over, bent on extracting information. In her life and in the lives of most of her friends, connubial difficulties meant neighborhood confidences and lamentations. Charlotte parried her hints and, to a point-blank question, returned a look so rebuking that Mrs. Maclaughlin went home in high dudgeon. For the rest of the day, Charlotte struggled againstthe tears that would have betrayed her—struggled till her eyeballs ached and her weary head seemed drawn back upon her shoulders.

At dinner Kingsnorth stole one furtive glance, said to himself “Thoroughbred, by Jove,” and bent himself to seconding Mrs. Collingwood’s conversational efforts. After dinner they all played bridge till eleven o’clock.

So the whole incident was passed over without speech between husband and wife. But with it went the completeness, the golden, unreal joy of their honeymoon. Though they walked and talked together, and played at being lovers again, a sense of distrust hung over their relations. Collingwood secretly nursed hiswhy; his wife still asked herself proudly if she had deserved public humiliation at his hands. Led by an evil genius he could not have selected a more adroit way to offend her and to arouse her critical faculties against him than that he had chosen. Private reproaches she could have endured with more fortitude than she could endure public sulking.

Nevertheless, she made a Spartan effort to clear him at her own expense, and a no less loyal attempt to conceal from him that a wound still rankled inher breast. But it did rankle, and, in the next six weeks, it seemed to her that she and Martin grew steadily apart; that in spite of every effort to stay the widening process, it went on slowly and relentlessly, and that it was leading them gradually but inevitably to that moment which she had so greatly dreaded before her marriage.

It was the custom at the island for the three men to take turns in going to Manila for commissaries, and to dispose of their pearls and shells. Collingwood had been engaged in this work the year before, when he met with the accident which landed him in the hospital; the Maclaughlins had been up since Charlotte’s marriage, and the next trip was Kingsnorth’s. But as the time drew near, he astounded them all by the announcement that he did not want to go, and that he wished Collingwood to take his place. When pressed for a reason for his apparent insanity, he declared that if a man had to live in purgatory or a worse place, he had better stay there all the time, and not seek spots that would emphasize its drawbacks when he returned to it. He insisted that Collingwood enjoyed Manila while to him it was the extreme of boredom, and thatMartin ought to take his wife away for a change, that her spirits were drooping.

“Nonsense,” said Charlotte. “I am absolutely contented. I don’t feel droopy.”

But Collingwood had taken alarm. He stared at her. “But youarea bit pale,” he said. “I wonder why I had not noticed it. Besides, I should like to be in Manila again with you. Let’s accept. Kingsnorth proposed it himself. He can’t complain if we take him at his word.”

At this point, Mrs. Maclaughlin put in a bomb. “Why can’t I go too, then?” she said.

“We need a housekeeper,” cried Kingsnorth, while Maclaughlin remarked hastily, “Don’t talk of it.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Martin said. “You can get along by yourself a while. It’s just the thing. Charlotte will have somebody for company while I am at business.”

By this time, Charlotte was ready with a smile and an echo of his remark. Kingsnorth grew morose while Mrs. Maclaughlin began to enumerate the things which actually demanded her presence in Manila. Maclaughlin gave her one or twofrowns; but she had taken the bit in her teeth; and it was soon decided that she was to have her way.

Charlotte’s heart sank and her anticipation of pleasure subsided into dread. Mrs. Maclaughlin was, at all times, a trial to her. She had little sympathy with the self-complacent temperament which is not subject to atmospheric influences; and Mrs. Maclaughlin’s society seemed to her several degrees less desirable in Manila than it did in Maylubi. She made no objection, however, and even succeeded in forcing herself to a half-hearted share in Martin’s enthusiasm.

Chapter XIIIIt was all finally settled, and preparations such as could be made were begun. Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence.Collingwood was childishly eager for the change. His head, too, was full of memories and of places—how they would revisit the place where such and such a conversation had taken place,—did she remember that wrestle of their two individualities,—or drive over the ground where he had pleadedso fiercely for the right to take care of her, to stand between her and the bread-and-butter struggle. Particularly he looked forward to the Luneta evenings, for, of all moments in his life, he held that moment on the Luneta when she had dropped her flag the sweetest. He said as much to her, and she blushed like a girl. He also said something to the same effect to Mrs. Mac when that lady was sharpening her imagination one evening at dinner.“We are going to run off and leave you just once, Mrs. Mac,” he said. “I’ve got one drive with my wife all planned out; it will be a Sunday evening. I am going to take her to the Luneta that evening; justsheand I.”“Oh, I can understand,” replied Mrs. Mac. “For that matter, Mac and I were young once ourselves.”Kingsnorth, who had preserved a kind of displeased reticence ever since it had been settled that Mrs. Mac was to go to Manila with the Collingwoods, started to say something, bestowed upon the lady an unfriendly glance, and somewhat pointedly asked Mrs. Collingwood if she was going to join the bridge game after dinner.Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. “Not unless I’m actually needed,” she replied.“You hate it so badly, you’ll have to be excused,” Collingwood said. “Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day.”“You make me feel like a prescription,” said Charlotte, laughingly. “Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband’s faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever.”“I note that fact,” said Kingsnorth, gravely. “I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Cheshire cat.” But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the whitestretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.“It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this,” she said. “I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless æons, and I could ask no more than one day’s sunshine and that same day’s sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare.”“As it is to me,” Kingsnorth rejoined. “I don’t know why I stand it from day to day. I don’t see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away.”“Yet you gave up your trip, you pretended to feel about this as you don’t feel. Why did you do it, Mr. Kingsnorth?”“I wanted you and Martin to go. You can say what you please about being satisfied and contented;some of your radiance and vitality have disappeared in the last two or three weeks.”Charlotte flushed uncomfortably. She did not enjoy the thought that she was so closely watched and studied. Kingsnorth, divining her thoughts, went on hastily.“Besides, I am as miserable there as here. I want the impossible. I’m crying for the moon. I’ve cried for it—My God!—these twenty years. I wonder, Mrs. Collingwood, if you can understand a mood of savage self-dissatisfaction—a mood in which it seems indecent that you should be alive yourself, and unjust that so many million fellow-beings should find this world an agreeable place. There are times when I should like to be an Atlas poised on the gulf of space! How I’d send the old ball and all that dwell in it humming into the void, to go on and on into darkness! You know that poem of Byron’s—”“Yes, I know the poem and the mood.” She regretted the statement as soon as she had made it, and bit her lips in silent confusion. Kingsnorth stopped and faced her. They stood close to a great clump of pandan bushes where a path, making ashort cut from the cottages to the point, led away through the bunched sand grass.“Are you going to draw that line on me forever, Mrs. Collingwood?” he demanded.“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“Oh, yes, you do. I am Martin’s friend, Mrs. Collingwood. Am I never going to be yours?”“Just as far as it is a friendship including Martin, yes. But why fence over the matter? The friendship which you would form with me excludes him. I should have poor powers of analysis, Mr. Kingsnorth, if I could not perceive that you have not been bidding for the friendship of a friend’s wife, as she is joined to his life and yours in the present. What you want is a friendship based on the past. You want to build something out of what we have both experienced and what he has not experienced, and I will have nothing of it.”“I meant no disloyalty to him,” Kingsnorth muttered.“Disloyalty; no! But would he feel his position a dignified one? Would he have no cause for complaint with both you and me?”“You coddle him,” said Kingsnorth, with a short bitter laugh.“I am jealous for all that touches his dignity as well as mine.”Kingsnorth lost his head. “Why did you marry him?” he said.“I married him because I was in love with him, Mr. Kingsnorth. I haven’t regretted it. I love him better to-day, if it were possible, than I did then. I have answered your question because I was able to answer it frankly; but, none the less, I resent its impertinence.”“I apologize. But you will admit, lady of the stony heart, that there are situations that provoke human curiosity past the limits of all good manners.”Charlotte stood tapping one foot on the ground a long while before she spoke. She was thinking deeply, and the result of her meditations was a sudden appeal.“Mr. Kingsnorth,” she said gently, “I should like to put this matter honestly before you. You and I find ourselves in a peculiar situation. When I first came here I was utterly taken aback by your presence. You saw my confusion. You probably read it aright, and I saw in your eyes, that first morning, the question which you have just askedme. The answer is easy, and yet not easy to make. For the sake of human affection in my life, to escape a loneliness and a sense of isolation that were almost intolerable to me, I compromised with my ambitions. I know how you and all the rest of the world—or, at least, that part of it in which you and I were brought up—regard my marriage. All the same, I do not regret it, and my life with Martin has been full of happiness. I don’t intend to jeopardize one drop of that happiness. I have steadily refused to drift into any relations with you that could startle Martin’s mind into recognition of facts which he is blind to, and which I choose to ignore. Are you so selfish that, for the sake of a few idle hours, a few reminiscences, perhaps, you would ask me to risk the dearest possession I have in the world—my husband’s unalloyed pleasure in our own relations, his perfect confidence in himself?” She drew a long breath. “It would be a sacrilege. I’ll guard his happy self-confidence as I would guard my own self-respect.”“That self-confidence of his is deuced irritating to the onlooker.” Then with a burst of anger, “You can’t forgive me for being myself, but youwill forgive him for bringing you here and expecting you to associate with me.”“The association has done me no harm, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“No, you’re right. You’ve treated me like a leper.”“I have treated you with the courtesy and consideration which any woman owes to her husband’s friends.”“And you’ve measured it out drop by drop, as you would medicine in a glass; just as you’ll measure out courtesy to Mrs. Maclaughlin on this trip. Good Lord! Mrs. Collingwood, you can’t have that woman at your heels in Manila. What is Martin thinking of? Let me give him a hint for you.”“Don’t you dare,” she cried, her face crimsoning, her eyes beginning to flash. Then with a sudden repression of her feelings, “What evil genius inspires this desire to interfere? Why can you not leave me to manage my own affairs? Martin is pleased at the idea of Mrs. Maclaughlin’s going, and that is enough for me.” Then she began to laugh softly. “Please, Mr. Kingsnorth, let this be the last time that you and I discuss my personalaffairs or Martin’s. Martin and I have a little Garden of Eden of our own, but I am no primitive Eve. With my consent, he shall not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”Kingsnorth turned around with a shrug. “How long do you think you can keep it up?”“As long as we live in Maylubi, at the least. I hope forever.”“Not another day,” said Collingwood’s voice, as he stepped into the path clear in view from behind the pandan bushes. “I’ve been listening to this jargon for ten minutes. Now I should like to know what it means?”Kingsnorth did not start or utter a word; he only stared defiantly at Collingwood. He was conscious of a low repressed sound from Mrs. Collingwood, who stood as if turned to stone, her gaze fixed not on her husband, but on Kingsnorth. She was nibbling a ratched edge of pandan fibre which she had stripped as they talked; but her expression was one of bitter accusation. Plainly she held him responsible for the conversation he had forced upon her, and the betrayal which had ensued.Collingwood was white and his brown eyes glitteredwith an uncanny lustre. He was holding himself in with a strong hand.It was Charlotte who spoke first. “At what point did you enter the conversation, Martin?” she inquired suavely.“I didn’t enter. But I judge I heard from the beginning. Mrs. Mac found she had something else to do, and Mac wanted to read; so I came across, short cut, to join you. I waited a minute, intending to scare you, and then what I heard made me want to hear more.”Charlotte gave a little reckless shrug, and turned her face seaward. Her expression cut Kingsnorth to the heart.“If you heard from the beginning, you must see that I forced a conversation on Mrs. Collingwood that she disliked,” he said slowly.“Oh, yes, I got that all right. I’m not playing the jealous husband. Charlotte’s all right; so are you, for that matter. What I’d like to have explained is this compromise talk.”Charlotte raised her eyes to his. A leaden pain seemed to make them heavy and spiritless.“You don’t need explanations, Martin,” she said.“Would to Heaven you did; though I’d tear my tongue out by the roots before I would give them, if you really did.”“I guess I gathered the point,” Martin replied bitterly. “There isn’t much to be said. It makes a thousand things that have mystified me plain as day. You’ve deceived me. You’ve played a nasty part. It does you small credit.”Kingsnorth started to move away. “You needn’t go,” Martin said, “I don’t see any reason to be sensitive about discussing this thing before you. You seemed to be admitted to things before I was.”“I learned what my eyes and wits told me. I give you my word of honor that until to-night Mrs. Collingwood and I have never spoken of you or of your and her private affairs. What she said to me was in self-defence and only to parry an insistence that I sincerely regret.” He turned toward Charlotte appealingly, but she made a fierce little movement as if to wave away anything apologetic he might say.“It must have been a damned interesting comedy,” Martin went on, the words stinging like sleet.“Stop!” cried Charlotte. She put up a hand.“I have never deceived you, Martin. If you recall the day on which you left the hospital, and on which you came to me and asked me to marry you, you will remember that I spelt out with almost painful distinctness the things which have been alluded to to-night. You simply refused to listen to them. You would not understand. Every word fell on deaf ears.”“Well, they’re sensitive enough now, I understand the situation. You’ve simply reversed the squawman act. You wanted a home and somebody to love you, and you took what you could get, not what you wanted. And you said to yourself that it did not matter, for you never expected to go home, and you wouldn’t have to show me to your friends. That’s all very fine, from the squawman’s view-point. It’s practical. But by the living God I’m no squaw, to be content with my position! You’re not proud of me, I see. Damnation! do you think I’ll live with you, or any woman that walks the earth, on those terms?”There was an instant’s silence. Collingwood somewhat relieved by his own violence, glared at the woman, who, up to that hour, had never known less than tenderness from him. Kingsnorth stoodbowed with shame and repentance. For an instant Charlotte’s frozen glance met her husband’s. Then with an unconscious gesture she laid one hand on her constricted throat, and, turning, took the path across the grove. Her white figure moved so lightly that they could not realize the difficulty with which she walked. But as the shadows of the tall cocoanut trees closed around her, she grasped a slender bole with both arms and leaned against it, panting. Nausea swept over her. Despair, humiliation, hopelessness weighed her down. Her knees trembled beneath her, and with a little moan, too soft to reach the ears of the two men, who remained motionless, she sank at the foot of the tree.She lay there a long time, unable to rise, though she was not fainting. Weakness had fastened upon her. But under her breath she kept on repeating one sobbing phrase:“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair—three men against one woman. They are so hard. They aren’t generous. It isn’t fair.”At length Collingwood turned abruptly and walked down the beach. Kingsnorth came out of his stupor and pursued him.“Collingwood,” he said earnestly, “if I were not such a blackguard myself, I’d call you one, for your treatment of your wife. She’s had no chance between us.”“She can take care of herself, I think. My advice to you is to keep out of the matter.”“How can I? I’ve been the cause of it.”“You the cause!” Martin stared an instant and broke into a short, ugly laugh. “Do you suppose I care for that talk out there to-night? You did me a favor. What I care about is the part I’ve played for the last ten months. A devilish pretty dupe I’ve been.”Kingsnorth recognized the futility of argument with a man whose self-love has been so sorely wounded. “You’ll see this thing differently when you cool down,” he remarked. “Don’t say anything more to your wife. She’s a noble woman, Martin, a damned sight too good for you, if you want the truth; and you’ve half killed her to-night. Hold in till you’ve had time to get your second thoughts. If you want to beat my face in, I’ll stand it. God! I’m certain it would be a relief.”Martin’s reply was an inarticulate grunt, as heflung up the path to his own cottage. He charged up the steps through the lightedsala, and into the bedroom, expecting to find Charlotte there. The desire to quarrel was strong in him.The empty room surprised him, and for an instant jolted his thoughts into a less combative vein. He went out and sat down on the veranda steps, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, and expecting each minute to see her white-clad figure emerge from the dark line of the cocoanut grove. Gloomy thoughts seized upon his mind.The chiming of thesalaclock brought him to a sudden realization that it was eleven o’clock and Charlotte had not returned. Alarm overcame his rage, and he started hastily up the path through the grove. He almost stumbled over her before he saw her.“What in the name of Heaven are you doing here?” he demanded. “Get up and come home at once.”She tried to obey him, but it was with the third unassisted effort only that she dropped her head with a moan that went to his heart. “I can’t get up. I would if I could.” And Martin stooped and lifted her to her feet.“Can you walk?” he asked. His voice trembled.She nodded and dragged herself along with his aid. Collingwood was thoroughly frightened. He helped her to her room, where she fell on her bed nerveless. No fury could have blinded him to her utter exhaustion, to the set despair of her face. He went into the dining-room and brought her a glass of whiskey. When she had drunk it, a bit of color came back into her face and she looked at him appealingly.“Don’t say any more to-night, please, Martin. If you’ll go out on the veranda, I’ll get myself to bed without assistance. I can’t talk.” Her teeth chattered.Collingwood, half sulky still, half compassionate, betook himself to the veranda and a succession of cigars. Away from the sight of her suffering, anger and humiliation sat again upon his shoulders. When in the wee small hours, he sought his room, he asked her grouchily if she had slept, or if he could do anything for her. To both questions she uttered a denial. It was evident that she had not been crying though she looked very pale and worn; and the next morning she was unable to rise.

Chapter XIII

It was all finally settled, and preparations such as could be made were begun. Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence.Collingwood was childishly eager for the change. His head, too, was full of memories and of places—how they would revisit the place where such and such a conversation had taken place,—did she remember that wrestle of their two individualities,—or drive over the ground where he had pleadedso fiercely for the right to take care of her, to stand between her and the bread-and-butter struggle. Particularly he looked forward to the Luneta evenings, for, of all moments in his life, he held that moment on the Luneta when she had dropped her flag the sweetest. He said as much to her, and she blushed like a girl. He also said something to the same effect to Mrs. Mac when that lady was sharpening her imagination one evening at dinner.“We are going to run off and leave you just once, Mrs. Mac,” he said. “I’ve got one drive with my wife all planned out; it will be a Sunday evening. I am going to take her to the Luneta that evening; justsheand I.”“Oh, I can understand,” replied Mrs. Mac. “For that matter, Mac and I were young once ourselves.”Kingsnorth, who had preserved a kind of displeased reticence ever since it had been settled that Mrs. Mac was to go to Manila with the Collingwoods, started to say something, bestowed upon the lady an unfriendly glance, and somewhat pointedly asked Mrs. Collingwood if she was going to join the bridge game after dinner.Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. “Not unless I’m actually needed,” she replied.“You hate it so badly, you’ll have to be excused,” Collingwood said. “Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day.”“You make me feel like a prescription,” said Charlotte, laughingly. “Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband’s faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever.”“I note that fact,” said Kingsnorth, gravely. “I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Cheshire cat.” But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the whitestretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.“It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this,” she said. “I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless æons, and I could ask no more than one day’s sunshine and that same day’s sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare.”“As it is to me,” Kingsnorth rejoined. “I don’t know why I stand it from day to day. I don’t see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away.”“Yet you gave up your trip, you pretended to feel about this as you don’t feel. Why did you do it, Mr. Kingsnorth?”“I wanted you and Martin to go. You can say what you please about being satisfied and contented;some of your radiance and vitality have disappeared in the last two or three weeks.”Charlotte flushed uncomfortably. She did not enjoy the thought that she was so closely watched and studied. Kingsnorth, divining her thoughts, went on hastily.“Besides, I am as miserable there as here. I want the impossible. I’m crying for the moon. I’ve cried for it—My God!—these twenty years. I wonder, Mrs. Collingwood, if you can understand a mood of savage self-dissatisfaction—a mood in which it seems indecent that you should be alive yourself, and unjust that so many million fellow-beings should find this world an agreeable place. There are times when I should like to be an Atlas poised on the gulf of space! How I’d send the old ball and all that dwell in it humming into the void, to go on and on into darkness! You know that poem of Byron’s—”“Yes, I know the poem and the mood.” She regretted the statement as soon as she had made it, and bit her lips in silent confusion. Kingsnorth stopped and faced her. They stood close to a great clump of pandan bushes where a path, making ashort cut from the cottages to the point, led away through the bunched sand grass.“Are you going to draw that line on me forever, Mrs. Collingwood?” he demanded.“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“Oh, yes, you do. I am Martin’s friend, Mrs. Collingwood. Am I never going to be yours?”“Just as far as it is a friendship including Martin, yes. But why fence over the matter? The friendship which you would form with me excludes him. I should have poor powers of analysis, Mr. Kingsnorth, if I could not perceive that you have not been bidding for the friendship of a friend’s wife, as she is joined to his life and yours in the present. What you want is a friendship based on the past. You want to build something out of what we have both experienced and what he has not experienced, and I will have nothing of it.”“I meant no disloyalty to him,” Kingsnorth muttered.“Disloyalty; no! But would he feel his position a dignified one? Would he have no cause for complaint with both you and me?”“You coddle him,” said Kingsnorth, with a short bitter laugh.“I am jealous for all that touches his dignity as well as mine.”Kingsnorth lost his head. “Why did you marry him?” he said.“I married him because I was in love with him, Mr. Kingsnorth. I haven’t regretted it. I love him better to-day, if it were possible, than I did then. I have answered your question because I was able to answer it frankly; but, none the less, I resent its impertinence.”“I apologize. But you will admit, lady of the stony heart, that there are situations that provoke human curiosity past the limits of all good manners.”Charlotte stood tapping one foot on the ground a long while before she spoke. She was thinking deeply, and the result of her meditations was a sudden appeal.“Mr. Kingsnorth,” she said gently, “I should like to put this matter honestly before you. You and I find ourselves in a peculiar situation. When I first came here I was utterly taken aback by your presence. You saw my confusion. You probably read it aright, and I saw in your eyes, that first morning, the question which you have just askedme. The answer is easy, and yet not easy to make. For the sake of human affection in my life, to escape a loneliness and a sense of isolation that were almost intolerable to me, I compromised with my ambitions. I know how you and all the rest of the world—or, at least, that part of it in which you and I were brought up—regard my marriage. All the same, I do not regret it, and my life with Martin has been full of happiness. I don’t intend to jeopardize one drop of that happiness. I have steadily refused to drift into any relations with you that could startle Martin’s mind into recognition of facts which he is blind to, and which I choose to ignore. Are you so selfish that, for the sake of a few idle hours, a few reminiscences, perhaps, you would ask me to risk the dearest possession I have in the world—my husband’s unalloyed pleasure in our own relations, his perfect confidence in himself?” She drew a long breath. “It would be a sacrilege. I’ll guard his happy self-confidence as I would guard my own self-respect.”“That self-confidence of his is deuced irritating to the onlooker.” Then with a burst of anger, “You can’t forgive me for being myself, but youwill forgive him for bringing you here and expecting you to associate with me.”“The association has done me no harm, Mr. Kingsnorth.”“No, you’re right. You’ve treated me like a leper.”“I have treated you with the courtesy and consideration which any woman owes to her husband’s friends.”“And you’ve measured it out drop by drop, as you would medicine in a glass; just as you’ll measure out courtesy to Mrs. Maclaughlin on this trip. Good Lord! Mrs. Collingwood, you can’t have that woman at your heels in Manila. What is Martin thinking of? Let me give him a hint for you.”“Don’t you dare,” she cried, her face crimsoning, her eyes beginning to flash. Then with a sudden repression of her feelings, “What evil genius inspires this desire to interfere? Why can you not leave me to manage my own affairs? Martin is pleased at the idea of Mrs. Maclaughlin’s going, and that is enough for me.” Then she began to laugh softly. “Please, Mr. Kingsnorth, let this be the last time that you and I discuss my personalaffairs or Martin’s. Martin and I have a little Garden of Eden of our own, but I am no primitive Eve. With my consent, he shall not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”Kingsnorth turned around with a shrug. “How long do you think you can keep it up?”“As long as we live in Maylubi, at the least. I hope forever.”“Not another day,” said Collingwood’s voice, as he stepped into the path clear in view from behind the pandan bushes. “I’ve been listening to this jargon for ten minutes. Now I should like to know what it means?”Kingsnorth did not start or utter a word; he only stared defiantly at Collingwood. He was conscious of a low repressed sound from Mrs. Collingwood, who stood as if turned to stone, her gaze fixed not on her husband, but on Kingsnorth. She was nibbling a ratched edge of pandan fibre which she had stripped as they talked; but her expression was one of bitter accusation. Plainly she held him responsible for the conversation he had forced upon her, and the betrayal which had ensued.Collingwood was white and his brown eyes glitteredwith an uncanny lustre. He was holding himself in with a strong hand.It was Charlotte who spoke first. “At what point did you enter the conversation, Martin?” she inquired suavely.“I didn’t enter. But I judge I heard from the beginning. Mrs. Mac found she had something else to do, and Mac wanted to read; so I came across, short cut, to join you. I waited a minute, intending to scare you, and then what I heard made me want to hear more.”Charlotte gave a little reckless shrug, and turned her face seaward. Her expression cut Kingsnorth to the heart.“If you heard from the beginning, you must see that I forced a conversation on Mrs. Collingwood that she disliked,” he said slowly.“Oh, yes, I got that all right. I’m not playing the jealous husband. Charlotte’s all right; so are you, for that matter. What I’d like to have explained is this compromise talk.”Charlotte raised her eyes to his. A leaden pain seemed to make them heavy and spiritless.“You don’t need explanations, Martin,” she said.“Would to Heaven you did; though I’d tear my tongue out by the roots before I would give them, if you really did.”“I guess I gathered the point,” Martin replied bitterly. “There isn’t much to be said. It makes a thousand things that have mystified me plain as day. You’ve deceived me. You’ve played a nasty part. It does you small credit.”Kingsnorth started to move away. “You needn’t go,” Martin said, “I don’t see any reason to be sensitive about discussing this thing before you. You seemed to be admitted to things before I was.”“I learned what my eyes and wits told me. I give you my word of honor that until to-night Mrs. Collingwood and I have never spoken of you or of your and her private affairs. What she said to me was in self-defence and only to parry an insistence that I sincerely regret.” He turned toward Charlotte appealingly, but she made a fierce little movement as if to wave away anything apologetic he might say.“It must have been a damned interesting comedy,” Martin went on, the words stinging like sleet.“Stop!” cried Charlotte. She put up a hand.“I have never deceived you, Martin. If you recall the day on which you left the hospital, and on which you came to me and asked me to marry you, you will remember that I spelt out with almost painful distinctness the things which have been alluded to to-night. You simply refused to listen to them. You would not understand. Every word fell on deaf ears.”“Well, they’re sensitive enough now, I understand the situation. You’ve simply reversed the squawman act. You wanted a home and somebody to love you, and you took what you could get, not what you wanted. And you said to yourself that it did not matter, for you never expected to go home, and you wouldn’t have to show me to your friends. That’s all very fine, from the squawman’s view-point. It’s practical. But by the living God I’m no squaw, to be content with my position! You’re not proud of me, I see. Damnation! do you think I’ll live with you, or any woman that walks the earth, on those terms?”There was an instant’s silence. Collingwood somewhat relieved by his own violence, glared at the woman, who, up to that hour, had never known less than tenderness from him. Kingsnorth stoodbowed with shame and repentance. For an instant Charlotte’s frozen glance met her husband’s. Then with an unconscious gesture she laid one hand on her constricted throat, and, turning, took the path across the grove. Her white figure moved so lightly that they could not realize the difficulty with which she walked. But as the shadows of the tall cocoanut trees closed around her, she grasped a slender bole with both arms and leaned against it, panting. Nausea swept over her. Despair, humiliation, hopelessness weighed her down. Her knees trembled beneath her, and with a little moan, too soft to reach the ears of the two men, who remained motionless, she sank at the foot of the tree.She lay there a long time, unable to rise, though she was not fainting. Weakness had fastened upon her. But under her breath she kept on repeating one sobbing phrase:“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair—three men against one woman. They are so hard. They aren’t generous. It isn’t fair.”At length Collingwood turned abruptly and walked down the beach. Kingsnorth came out of his stupor and pursued him.“Collingwood,” he said earnestly, “if I were not such a blackguard myself, I’d call you one, for your treatment of your wife. She’s had no chance between us.”“She can take care of herself, I think. My advice to you is to keep out of the matter.”“How can I? I’ve been the cause of it.”“You the cause!” Martin stared an instant and broke into a short, ugly laugh. “Do you suppose I care for that talk out there to-night? You did me a favor. What I care about is the part I’ve played for the last ten months. A devilish pretty dupe I’ve been.”Kingsnorth recognized the futility of argument with a man whose self-love has been so sorely wounded. “You’ll see this thing differently when you cool down,” he remarked. “Don’t say anything more to your wife. She’s a noble woman, Martin, a damned sight too good for you, if you want the truth; and you’ve half killed her to-night. Hold in till you’ve had time to get your second thoughts. If you want to beat my face in, I’ll stand it. God! I’m certain it would be a relief.”Martin’s reply was an inarticulate grunt, as heflung up the path to his own cottage. He charged up the steps through the lightedsala, and into the bedroom, expecting to find Charlotte there. The desire to quarrel was strong in him.The empty room surprised him, and for an instant jolted his thoughts into a less combative vein. He went out and sat down on the veranda steps, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, and expecting each minute to see her white-clad figure emerge from the dark line of the cocoanut grove. Gloomy thoughts seized upon his mind.The chiming of thesalaclock brought him to a sudden realization that it was eleven o’clock and Charlotte had not returned. Alarm overcame his rage, and he started hastily up the path through the grove. He almost stumbled over her before he saw her.“What in the name of Heaven are you doing here?” he demanded. “Get up and come home at once.”She tried to obey him, but it was with the third unassisted effort only that she dropped her head with a moan that went to his heart. “I can’t get up. I would if I could.” And Martin stooped and lifted her to her feet.“Can you walk?” he asked. His voice trembled.She nodded and dragged herself along with his aid. Collingwood was thoroughly frightened. He helped her to her room, where she fell on her bed nerveless. No fury could have blinded him to her utter exhaustion, to the set despair of her face. He went into the dining-room and brought her a glass of whiskey. When she had drunk it, a bit of color came back into her face and she looked at him appealingly.“Don’t say any more to-night, please, Martin. If you’ll go out on the veranda, I’ll get myself to bed without assistance. I can’t talk.” Her teeth chattered.Collingwood, half sulky still, half compassionate, betook himself to the veranda and a succession of cigars. Away from the sight of her suffering, anger and humiliation sat again upon his shoulders. When in the wee small hours, he sought his room, he asked her grouchily if she had slept, or if he could do anything for her. To both questions she uttered a denial. It was evident that she had not been crying though she looked very pale and worn; and the next morning she was unable to rise.

It was all finally settled, and preparations such as could be made were begun. Charlotte found that, with a prospect of returning to the world, a variety of interests which she had thought quite extinct revived and grew clamorous. Memory was busy, too, with the days of her courtship. That strange mingling of ecstasy and misery through which she had passed seemed quite remote and, in retrospect, quite unnecessary. A hundred times she asked herself why she had been such a goose, why she had hesitated, why she had permitted the possible opinion of the world at large to influence her. She went about almost uplifted with the sense of new moral independence.

Collingwood was childishly eager for the change. His head, too, was full of memories and of places—how they would revisit the place where such and such a conversation had taken place,—did she remember that wrestle of their two individualities,—or drive over the ground where he had pleadedso fiercely for the right to take care of her, to stand between her and the bread-and-butter struggle. Particularly he looked forward to the Luneta evenings, for, of all moments in his life, he held that moment on the Luneta when she had dropped her flag the sweetest. He said as much to her, and she blushed like a girl. He also said something to the same effect to Mrs. Mac when that lady was sharpening her imagination one evening at dinner.

“We are going to run off and leave you just once, Mrs. Mac,” he said. “I’ve got one drive with my wife all planned out; it will be a Sunday evening. I am going to take her to the Luneta that evening; justsheand I.”

“Oh, I can understand,” replied Mrs. Mac. “For that matter, Mac and I were young once ourselves.”

Kingsnorth, who had preserved a kind of displeased reticence ever since it had been settled that Mrs. Mac was to go to Manila with the Collingwoods, started to say something, bestowed upon the lady an unfriendly glance, and somewhat pointedly asked Mrs. Collingwood if she was going to join the bridge game after dinner.

Charlotte smiled across the table at her husband. “Not unless I’m actually needed,” she replied.

“You hate it so badly, you’ll have to be excused,” Collingwood said. “Better let Kingsnorth take you for a stroll. You need exercise and his temper needs sweetening. He has been in a devilish mood all day.”

“You make me feel like a prescription,” said Charlotte, laughingly. “Mr. Kingsnorth, if your temper does not improve after a dose of my society, my husband’s faith in me as a panacea for all troubles of the mind will have gone forever.”

“I note that fact,” said Kingsnorth, gravely. “I commit myself now to come back grinning like a Cheshire cat.” But he knew, in spite of her light manner, that Charlotte was displeased. It was seldom that she permitted herself the least badinage with him; and he recognized it nearly always as a cloak to cover some hasty and more aggressive instinct.

Nevertheless, when they started away after dinner, she fell into a more intimate tone with him than she generally used. The sunset was just dying out, and its flaming radiance seemed to exaggerate the wide sweep of the waters, the whitestretch of sand, and the lithe, swaying boles of the cocoanut groves. Charlotte paused to look about her in a sudden rush of tenderness for the solitude.

“It is wonderful how contented one can be in such a situation as this,” she said. “I am amazed at myself. I am never sad, seldom even lonely. I have a feeling, at times, that this could go on and on and on in endless æons, and I could ask no more than one day’s sunshine and that same day’s sunset. It is inexplicable and yet it is all in myself; anything to upset that harmony between my soul and this could make it a nightmare, an endless nightmare.”

“As it is to me,” Kingsnorth rejoined. “I don’t know why I stand it from day to day. I don’t see how mere dollars and cents can compensate for stagnating here. Yet I am such a slave to the dollar that I do stay; the good Lord only knows when I shall go away.”

“Yet you gave up your trip, you pretended to feel about this as you don’t feel. Why did you do it, Mr. Kingsnorth?”

“I wanted you and Martin to go. You can say what you please about being satisfied and contented;some of your radiance and vitality have disappeared in the last two or three weeks.”

Charlotte flushed uncomfortably. She did not enjoy the thought that she was so closely watched and studied. Kingsnorth, divining her thoughts, went on hastily.

“Besides, I am as miserable there as here. I want the impossible. I’m crying for the moon. I’ve cried for it—My God!—these twenty years. I wonder, Mrs. Collingwood, if you can understand a mood of savage self-dissatisfaction—a mood in which it seems indecent that you should be alive yourself, and unjust that so many million fellow-beings should find this world an agreeable place. There are times when I should like to be an Atlas poised on the gulf of space! How I’d send the old ball and all that dwell in it humming into the void, to go on and on into darkness! You know that poem of Byron’s—”

“Yes, I know the poem and the mood.” She regretted the statement as soon as she had made it, and bit her lips in silent confusion. Kingsnorth stopped and faced her. They stood close to a great clump of pandan bushes where a path, making ashort cut from the cottages to the point, led away through the bunched sand grass.

“Are you going to draw that line on me forever, Mrs. Collingwood?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Kingsnorth.”

“Oh, yes, you do. I am Martin’s friend, Mrs. Collingwood. Am I never going to be yours?”

“Just as far as it is a friendship including Martin, yes. But why fence over the matter? The friendship which you would form with me excludes him. I should have poor powers of analysis, Mr. Kingsnorth, if I could not perceive that you have not been bidding for the friendship of a friend’s wife, as she is joined to his life and yours in the present. What you want is a friendship based on the past. You want to build something out of what we have both experienced and what he has not experienced, and I will have nothing of it.”

“I meant no disloyalty to him,” Kingsnorth muttered.

“Disloyalty; no! But would he feel his position a dignified one? Would he have no cause for complaint with both you and me?”

“You coddle him,” said Kingsnorth, with a short bitter laugh.

“I am jealous for all that touches his dignity as well as mine.”

Kingsnorth lost his head. “Why did you marry him?” he said.

“I married him because I was in love with him, Mr. Kingsnorth. I haven’t regretted it. I love him better to-day, if it were possible, than I did then. I have answered your question because I was able to answer it frankly; but, none the less, I resent its impertinence.”

“I apologize. But you will admit, lady of the stony heart, that there are situations that provoke human curiosity past the limits of all good manners.”

Charlotte stood tapping one foot on the ground a long while before she spoke. She was thinking deeply, and the result of her meditations was a sudden appeal.

“Mr. Kingsnorth,” she said gently, “I should like to put this matter honestly before you. You and I find ourselves in a peculiar situation. When I first came here I was utterly taken aback by your presence. You saw my confusion. You probably read it aright, and I saw in your eyes, that first morning, the question which you have just askedme. The answer is easy, and yet not easy to make. For the sake of human affection in my life, to escape a loneliness and a sense of isolation that were almost intolerable to me, I compromised with my ambitions. I know how you and all the rest of the world—or, at least, that part of it in which you and I were brought up—regard my marriage. All the same, I do not regret it, and my life with Martin has been full of happiness. I don’t intend to jeopardize one drop of that happiness. I have steadily refused to drift into any relations with you that could startle Martin’s mind into recognition of facts which he is blind to, and which I choose to ignore. Are you so selfish that, for the sake of a few idle hours, a few reminiscences, perhaps, you would ask me to risk the dearest possession I have in the world—my husband’s unalloyed pleasure in our own relations, his perfect confidence in himself?” She drew a long breath. “It would be a sacrilege. I’ll guard his happy self-confidence as I would guard my own self-respect.”

“That self-confidence of his is deuced irritating to the onlooker.” Then with a burst of anger, “You can’t forgive me for being myself, but youwill forgive him for bringing you here and expecting you to associate with me.”

“The association has done me no harm, Mr. Kingsnorth.”

“No, you’re right. You’ve treated me like a leper.”

“I have treated you with the courtesy and consideration which any woman owes to her husband’s friends.”

“And you’ve measured it out drop by drop, as you would medicine in a glass; just as you’ll measure out courtesy to Mrs. Maclaughlin on this trip. Good Lord! Mrs. Collingwood, you can’t have that woman at your heels in Manila. What is Martin thinking of? Let me give him a hint for you.”

“Don’t you dare,” she cried, her face crimsoning, her eyes beginning to flash. Then with a sudden repression of her feelings, “What evil genius inspires this desire to interfere? Why can you not leave me to manage my own affairs? Martin is pleased at the idea of Mrs. Maclaughlin’s going, and that is enough for me.” Then she began to laugh softly. “Please, Mr. Kingsnorth, let this be the last time that you and I discuss my personalaffairs or Martin’s. Martin and I have a little Garden of Eden of our own, but I am no primitive Eve. With my consent, he shall not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

Kingsnorth turned around with a shrug. “How long do you think you can keep it up?”

“As long as we live in Maylubi, at the least. I hope forever.”

“Not another day,” said Collingwood’s voice, as he stepped into the path clear in view from behind the pandan bushes. “I’ve been listening to this jargon for ten minutes. Now I should like to know what it means?”

Kingsnorth did not start or utter a word; he only stared defiantly at Collingwood. He was conscious of a low repressed sound from Mrs. Collingwood, who stood as if turned to stone, her gaze fixed not on her husband, but on Kingsnorth. She was nibbling a ratched edge of pandan fibre which she had stripped as they talked; but her expression was one of bitter accusation. Plainly she held him responsible for the conversation he had forced upon her, and the betrayal which had ensued.

Collingwood was white and his brown eyes glitteredwith an uncanny lustre. He was holding himself in with a strong hand.

It was Charlotte who spoke first. “At what point did you enter the conversation, Martin?” she inquired suavely.

“I didn’t enter. But I judge I heard from the beginning. Mrs. Mac found she had something else to do, and Mac wanted to read; so I came across, short cut, to join you. I waited a minute, intending to scare you, and then what I heard made me want to hear more.”

Charlotte gave a little reckless shrug, and turned her face seaward. Her expression cut Kingsnorth to the heart.

“If you heard from the beginning, you must see that I forced a conversation on Mrs. Collingwood that she disliked,” he said slowly.

“Oh, yes, I got that all right. I’m not playing the jealous husband. Charlotte’s all right; so are you, for that matter. What I’d like to have explained is this compromise talk.”

Charlotte raised her eyes to his. A leaden pain seemed to make them heavy and spiritless.

“You don’t need explanations, Martin,” she said.“Would to Heaven you did; though I’d tear my tongue out by the roots before I would give them, if you really did.”

“I guess I gathered the point,” Martin replied bitterly. “There isn’t much to be said. It makes a thousand things that have mystified me plain as day. You’ve deceived me. You’ve played a nasty part. It does you small credit.”

Kingsnorth started to move away. “You needn’t go,” Martin said, “I don’t see any reason to be sensitive about discussing this thing before you. You seemed to be admitted to things before I was.”

“I learned what my eyes and wits told me. I give you my word of honor that until to-night Mrs. Collingwood and I have never spoken of you or of your and her private affairs. What she said to me was in self-defence and only to parry an insistence that I sincerely regret.” He turned toward Charlotte appealingly, but she made a fierce little movement as if to wave away anything apologetic he might say.

“It must have been a damned interesting comedy,” Martin went on, the words stinging like sleet.

“Stop!” cried Charlotte. She put up a hand.“I have never deceived you, Martin. If you recall the day on which you left the hospital, and on which you came to me and asked me to marry you, you will remember that I spelt out with almost painful distinctness the things which have been alluded to to-night. You simply refused to listen to them. You would not understand. Every word fell on deaf ears.”

“Well, they’re sensitive enough now, I understand the situation. You’ve simply reversed the squawman act. You wanted a home and somebody to love you, and you took what you could get, not what you wanted. And you said to yourself that it did not matter, for you never expected to go home, and you wouldn’t have to show me to your friends. That’s all very fine, from the squawman’s view-point. It’s practical. But by the living God I’m no squaw, to be content with my position! You’re not proud of me, I see. Damnation! do you think I’ll live with you, or any woman that walks the earth, on those terms?”

There was an instant’s silence. Collingwood somewhat relieved by his own violence, glared at the woman, who, up to that hour, had never known less than tenderness from him. Kingsnorth stoodbowed with shame and repentance. For an instant Charlotte’s frozen glance met her husband’s. Then with an unconscious gesture she laid one hand on her constricted throat, and, turning, took the path across the grove. Her white figure moved so lightly that they could not realize the difficulty with which she walked. But as the shadows of the tall cocoanut trees closed around her, she grasped a slender bole with both arms and leaned against it, panting. Nausea swept over her. Despair, humiliation, hopelessness weighed her down. Her knees trembled beneath her, and with a little moan, too soft to reach the ears of the two men, who remained motionless, she sank at the foot of the tree.

She lay there a long time, unable to rise, though she was not fainting. Weakness had fastened upon her. But under her breath she kept on repeating one sobbing phrase:

“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair—three men against one woman. They are so hard. They aren’t generous. It isn’t fair.”

At length Collingwood turned abruptly and walked down the beach. Kingsnorth came out of his stupor and pursued him.

“Collingwood,” he said earnestly, “if I were not such a blackguard myself, I’d call you one, for your treatment of your wife. She’s had no chance between us.”

“She can take care of herself, I think. My advice to you is to keep out of the matter.”

“How can I? I’ve been the cause of it.”

“You the cause!” Martin stared an instant and broke into a short, ugly laugh. “Do you suppose I care for that talk out there to-night? You did me a favor. What I care about is the part I’ve played for the last ten months. A devilish pretty dupe I’ve been.”

Kingsnorth recognized the futility of argument with a man whose self-love has been so sorely wounded. “You’ll see this thing differently when you cool down,” he remarked. “Don’t say anything more to your wife. She’s a noble woman, Martin, a damned sight too good for you, if you want the truth; and you’ve half killed her to-night. Hold in till you’ve had time to get your second thoughts. If you want to beat my face in, I’ll stand it. God! I’m certain it would be a relief.”

Martin’s reply was an inarticulate grunt, as heflung up the path to his own cottage. He charged up the steps through the lightedsala, and into the bedroom, expecting to find Charlotte there. The desire to quarrel was strong in him.

The empty room surprised him, and for an instant jolted his thoughts into a less combative vein. He went out and sat down on the veranda steps, chewing the end of an unlighted cigar, and expecting each minute to see her white-clad figure emerge from the dark line of the cocoanut grove. Gloomy thoughts seized upon his mind.

The chiming of thesalaclock brought him to a sudden realization that it was eleven o’clock and Charlotte had not returned. Alarm overcame his rage, and he started hastily up the path through the grove. He almost stumbled over her before he saw her.

“What in the name of Heaven are you doing here?” he demanded. “Get up and come home at once.”

She tried to obey him, but it was with the third unassisted effort only that she dropped her head with a moan that went to his heart. “I can’t get up. I would if I could.” And Martin stooped and lifted her to her feet.

“Can you walk?” he asked. His voice trembled.

She nodded and dragged herself along with his aid. Collingwood was thoroughly frightened. He helped her to her room, where she fell on her bed nerveless. No fury could have blinded him to her utter exhaustion, to the set despair of her face. He went into the dining-room and brought her a glass of whiskey. When she had drunk it, a bit of color came back into her face and she looked at him appealingly.

“Don’t say any more to-night, please, Martin. If you’ll go out on the veranda, I’ll get myself to bed without assistance. I can’t talk.” Her teeth chattered.

Collingwood, half sulky still, half compassionate, betook himself to the veranda and a succession of cigars. Away from the sight of her suffering, anger and humiliation sat again upon his shoulders. When in the wee small hours, he sought his room, he asked her grouchily if she had slept, or if he could do anything for her. To both questions she uttered a denial. It was evident that she had not been crying though she looked very pale and worn; and the next morning she was unable to rise.

Chapter XIVIt seemed to Mrs. Collingwood that the next three days embodied the quintessence of all that had ever fallen to her lot of discomfort and misery. To lie physically helpless, a burden and a care to the one person who, at that time, was most out of love with her, was humiliation of the most cankering variety. Added to it was the sense of loss, the consciousness of ruin and disaster, and a feeling of shame that bowed her to the earth. Her husband’s bitter words had sunk deep into her soul. She saw herself as a creature degraded and partaking of the instincts of the most depraved class. Her marriage began to assume the complexion of an adventure. Was there an element of the adventuress in her? she asked herself tremulously. In reply came a wild rush of denial, an agony of revolt. As she envisaged herself she could not but justify her own actions. The feminine weakness, and dread of life’s bread-and-butter struggle, alone justified them. And she had lovedMartin tenderly; she had been a good wife, loyal to his interests, guarding his dignity as her own, literally pouring her affection and her gratitude for all his tenderness toward her into his carelessly outstretched palm. No mother ever more sedulously stood between her child and the evil of the world than she had sought to save Martin Collingwood the pain of knowing what he had come to know. His ingratitude, though she would not use that word even to herself, cut her to the depths of her heart.But it was plain that their romance was ended; “the thing had gone to smash,” in Collingwood’s forceful language. Time and time again she went over that night on the Luneta before their marriage, and Martin’s words, and her own miserable doubts and fears. The worst had happened, as she had feared it might, but Collingwood was not living up to his philosophy. He was angry at her, held himself a man cheated, put all the blame on her, wanted in a dumb, fruitless way to quarrel with her.On the evening of her second day in bed, they attempted to thresh out their difficulties, but it was soon evident that they had reached a hopelessimpasse. Charlotte ended what was a miserable controversy.“What is your quarrel with me about, Martin?” she said. “Simply that I am I, that I have lived through certain experiences, that I have certain criterions of taste and judgment that you have not. I have not obtruded them on you. I haven’t made myself obnoxious by them. I deny that I have ever deceived you, and I have tried honestly to think and feel as you do. Ihaven’tbeen playing a part. I have been thoroughly happy. But you can’t any more make me put your values on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to, convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I’ll have no quarrel with you, no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters, what actual part need they play in our life? If I am content to put them out of sight, why cannot you do so?”“I’ll be damned if I’ll live with any woman on earth on your terms,” Collingwood reiterated.She looked him steadily in the eyes. “Then the thing is finally settled, and we can spare ourselves the pain of useless discussion. For in the thing we are quarrelling with—not my actions, but my philosophy of life—I shall not change. Nor can I fancy any woman with a spark of modesty or decency in her, entreating a man to live with her. If you will allow me to remain here during your stay in Manila, I’ll go before you get back.”“How do you think you are going to live?”She gave a little reckless shrug. “I supported myself before we were married. I suppose I can do so again. I’ll make no demands on your pocket book. I didn’t marry you to be supported. I married you to be loved by you, to feel that I gave in your life and home an order and an assistance—yes, and a joy—to equalize what I cost you in money. When there is no longer exchange, I refuse to accept.”“Big talk,” said Martin. She did not reply, but turned away wearily. The servant knocked at the door a minute after to say that dinner was ready, and he went to his meal. After that, it seemed that they had subsided into a tacit acceptance of their future as she had outlined it.Collingwood was quite as unhappy as his wife was. All his masculine pride was chafing, but his masculine heart was aching. He wanted to be set gloriously in the right, to ascend the pedestal from which he had been ignominiously tumbled by a few incautious words overheard. He wanted, though he hardly phrased it to himself, apologies for his wife’s daring to understand a thing that he had not understood. He had literally eaten of the tree of knowledge and was enraged with what lay patent to his seared vision.The consciousness of what had been going on in Kingsnorth’s mind, in Judge Barton’s, in the Commissioner’s, burnt like acid on a wound. He saw, with astonishing clearness, Judge Barton’s viewpoint, and he marvelled no more at that gentleman’s temerity. His beggar maid a princess! his throne amésalliance!—the thought burned. His tortured self-love yawned like an abyss which no heaping of prostrate offenders could ever fill; and against his wife’s quiet dignity his thwarted will raged sullenly.Yet it is doubtful if he ever really regarded their separation as probable. Tacitly he accepted her statement that she was going away. In realityhe hardly thought of such a possibility. Alone with his thoughts, all his will and his imagination bent itself to her conquest. It was that hour of her final humiliation and confession to which he looked forward. How long was she going to keep it up?During her few days’ illness, however, he showed her some courtesies for which she returned a dignified, but not an affectionate, gratitude. Indeed, she had been up and about the house two or three days before her husband perceived that the door of her heart and mind, which she had so shyly opened to him, had closed, and that he stood outside of it, a part of that concourse which Charlotte Ponsonby had always feared and distrusted. She had trusted him most of all the world, and he had turned upon her and hurt her more cruelly than anyone else had ever done. Without reproach or lamentation or any sign of self-pity, she retired behind those invincible ramparts to which Martin had been blind in hospital days, but to which he was now so much alive.It would have been exceedingly difficult for him to tell in what the change consisted. Her courtesy was finely measured, it is true, but it was not an armed truce between belligerents. It was therefuge of dignity, of one who feels his position false, but would save appearances by outward grace, at least. She who had been his wife, his dearest possession, became only a graceful hostess in his home—a lady who stood ready to lend a deferential ear to his suggestions, or carry out, to the best of her ability, his every wish, expressed or unexpressed. She ignored his gloom, saw to all his needs, spoke to him always kindly, though without humility or contrition; but for herself she asked not one fraction of his time or his attention. The occasions for little courtesies which he had been accustomed to offer her were skilfully avoided; but were never rudely made conspicuous by their avoidance. Her quiet pride was infinitely more than a match for his aggressive self-love; her supreme naturalness, the most impregnable armor she could have worn.Kingsnorth beheld the transformation in her, was first astonished, then interested, then moved to profound pity and contrition. With tact equal to her own, he set himself to meet the situation, seconded all her efforts to make their awkward meals natural and easy, silenced Mrs. Mac’s gaping curiosity, and managed, in doing it all, to keep himself well inthe background. With Collingwood he had one conversation on the launch, but the sum and substance was that gentleman’s reiteration of the terms on which he would live.“Damnation!” was Kingsnorth’s irritable response, “you are simply making an ass of yourself, Collingwood. I can’t call you a brute, because I’ve been too much of one myself. I live in glass houses—I can’t throw stones. You’ve married a jewel among women, and you’re going to make your ruffled dignity make smash of two lives that ought to be happy. Moreover, you are not in earnest. This is all bluffing and bad temper to bring Mrs. Collingwood to her knees, and to make her put herself in the wrong when you know there isn’t any wrong or right about things. Now I’ll give you a piece of advice, old man. You are trying that game on the wrong woman: see that you don’t carry it too far, and turn her affection into dislike. I’ve learned one thing, learned it tragically well in this life; and that is that one has justonechance really in this world with one person. Now don’t lose your chance with your wife.”To this Martin vouchsafed a grunt. Hardly conscious of it, he had set his will to bring Charlotteto his terms. He could not listen to anything that crossed that strong desire.The days went by slowly where they had once gone so fast, and neither husband nor wife referred again to that tacit agreement of separation. Yet Martin knew from the bundle of letters which he was to carry up to Manila that Charlotte was making plans for business life again; and once, when he came into the sitting-room unexpectedly, he found her frowning over her bank book. He knew the balance it contained, for, on their wedding journey, they had laughed at her little savings; and he knew she could not long maintain herself upon it. He smiled grimly at her flushed discomfiture when he found her pondering ways and means, and somewhat brutally said to himself that she would find that she had little rope to run upon.Yet at the last moment it was he who wavered, he who rang down the curtain on their make-believe. She had looked after his garments and had packed his trunk with wifely solicitude; had prepared for his launch trip, foods for which she knew his predilection, and had, at the moment of farewell, saved the situation by putting out a friendly hand.“I do hope you will have a pleasant trip,” she said,—and what it cost her to speak so easily and naturally, only she could have told,—“and thank you for giving me the weeks here to get ready. I’ll go over to Cuyo when the launch goes up for you on your return trip, and will leave a letter for you there. There are some things I can’t say to you, but I should like to write them. They will, perhaps, leave a better feeling between us.”To these words Martin found, at the time, no answer. He wrung her hand, muttered something, and hastened away. Yet when his belongings had all been deposited in the boat, and the men were waiting to “chair” him out, he turned on his heel, and strode back to the cottage.He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain, and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood, the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills, stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. “Oh, go!” she said. “It’s a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can’t help ourselves. I knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be.”“What I want you to do,” Martin said honestly, “is to take into consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of you—can do it well. That ought to count for something.”“O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I’ve leaned on you and your love, Martin. I’ve told you so a thousand times.”“Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles.”“But I don’t set the trifles against them. I havenever weighed one against the other—never for an instant.”“But you know that you could.” Poor Martin here uttered helplessly what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.“Ah,” she sighed. “Don’t judge me by what I know; judge me by what I’ve done and thought.”“You’ve got to change,” he muttered. “I can’t. I’m right. You’re wrong.”“The things you have in mind can’t be changed by will power, dear. They are the results of education, association, environment. New environment may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. ‘I’ve done all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.’ I’m not stubborn, Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am.”The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He raged helplessly against the truth of her words.When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin’s insistent curiosity, permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week’s retirement.Though at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past, and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood’s idea that her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true, from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome to all the world, everybody’s hand against her, her hand against everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself, in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even Mrs. Maclaughlin’s frank speech grew guarded.Kingsnorth merely looked at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes, he went vigorously on her side. She was “gentle folks,” he maintained, a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s democratic partiality, naturally roused in Martin’s favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.

Chapter XIV

It seemed to Mrs. Collingwood that the next three days embodied the quintessence of all that had ever fallen to her lot of discomfort and misery. To lie physically helpless, a burden and a care to the one person who, at that time, was most out of love with her, was humiliation of the most cankering variety. Added to it was the sense of loss, the consciousness of ruin and disaster, and a feeling of shame that bowed her to the earth. Her husband’s bitter words had sunk deep into her soul. She saw herself as a creature degraded and partaking of the instincts of the most depraved class. Her marriage began to assume the complexion of an adventure. Was there an element of the adventuress in her? she asked herself tremulously. In reply came a wild rush of denial, an agony of revolt. As she envisaged herself she could not but justify her own actions. The feminine weakness, and dread of life’s bread-and-butter struggle, alone justified them. And she had lovedMartin tenderly; she had been a good wife, loyal to his interests, guarding his dignity as her own, literally pouring her affection and her gratitude for all his tenderness toward her into his carelessly outstretched palm. No mother ever more sedulously stood between her child and the evil of the world than she had sought to save Martin Collingwood the pain of knowing what he had come to know. His ingratitude, though she would not use that word even to herself, cut her to the depths of her heart.But it was plain that their romance was ended; “the thing had gone to smash,” in Collingwood’s forceful language. Time and time again she went over that night on the Luneta before their marriage, and Martin’s words, and her own miserable doubts and fears. The worst had happened, as she had feared it might, but Collingwood was not living up to his philosophy. He was angry at her, held himself a man cheated, put all the blame on her, wanted in a dumb, fruitless way to quarrel with her.On the evening of her second day in bed, they attempted to thresh out their difficulties, but it was soon evident that they had reached a hopelessimpasse. Charlotte ended what was a miserable controversy.“What is your quarrel with me about, Martin?” she said. “Simply that I am I, that I have lived through certain experiences, that I have certain criterions of taste and judgment that you have not. I have not obtruded them on you. I haven’t made myself obnoxious by them. I deny that I have ever deceived you, and I have tried honestly to think and feel as you do. Ihaven’tbeen playing a part. I have been thoroughly happy. But you can’t any more make me put your values on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to, convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I’ll have no quarrel with you, no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters, what actual part need they play in our life? If I am content to put them out of sight, why cannot you do so?”“I’ll be damned if I’ll live with any woman on earth on your terms,” Collingwood reiterated.She looked him steadily in the eyes. “Then the thing is finally settled, and we can spare ourselves the pain of useless discussion. For in the thing we are quarrelling with—not my actions, but my philosophy of life—I shall not change. Nor can I fancy any woman with a spark of modesty or decency in her, entreating a man to live with her. If you will allow me to remain here during your stay in Manila, I’ll go before you get back.”“How do you think you are going to live?”She gave a little reckless shrug. “I supported myself before we were married. I suppose I can do so again. I’ll make no demands on your pocket book. I didn’t marry you to be supported. I married you to be loved by you, to feel that I gave in your life and home an order and an assistance—yes, and a joy—to equalize what I cost you in money. When there is no longer exchange, I refuse to accept.”“Big talk,” said Martin. She did not reply, but turned away wearily. The servant knocked at the door a minute after to say that dinner was ready, and he went to his meal. After that, it seemed that they had subsided into a tacit acceptance of their future as she had outlined it.Collingwood was quite as unhappy as his wife was. All his masculine pride was chafing, but his masculine heart was aching. He wanted to be set gloriously in the right, to ascend the pedestal from which he had been ignominiously tumbled by a few incautious words overheard. He wanted, though he hardly phrased it to himself, apologies for his wife’s daring to understand a thing that he had not understood. He had literally eaten of the tree of knowledge and was enraged with what lay patent to his seared vision.The consciousness of what had been going on in Kingsnorth’s mind, in Judge Barton’s, in the Commissioner’s, burnt like acid on a wound. He saw, with astonishing clearness, Judge Barton’s viewpoint, and he marvelled no more at that gentleman’s temerity. His beggar maid a princess! his throne amésalliance!—the thought burned. His tortured self-love yawned like an abyss which no heaping of prostrate offenders could ever fill; and against his wife’s quiet dignity his thwarted will raged sullenly.Yet it is doubtful if he ever really regarded their separation as probable. Tacitly he accepted her statement that she was going away. In realityhe hardly thought of such a possibility. Alone with his thoughts, all his will and his imagination bent itself to her conquest. It was that hour of her final humiliation and confession to which he looked forward. How long was she going to keep it up?During her few days’ illness, however, he showed her some courtesies for which she returned a dignified, but not an affectionate, gratitude. Indeed, she had been up and about the house two or three days before her husband perceived that the door of her heart and mind, which she had so shyly opened to him, had closed, and that he stood outside of it, a part of that concourse which Charlotte Ponsonby had always feared and distrusted. She had trusted him most of all the world, and he had turned upon her and hurt her more cruelly than anyone else had ever done. Without reproach or lamentation or any sign of self-pity, she retired behind those invincible ramparts to which Martin had been blind in hospital days, but to which he was now so much alive.It would have been exceedingly difficult for him to tell in what the change consisted. Her courtesy was finely measured, it is true, but it was not an armed truce between belligerents. It was therefuge of dignity, of one who feels his position false, but would save appearances by outward grace, at least. She who had been his wife, his dearest possession, became only a graceful hostess in his home—a lady who stood ready to lend a deferential ear to his suggestions, or carry out, to the best of her ability, his every wish, expressed or unexpressed. She ignored his gloom, saw to all his needs, spoke to him always kindly, though without humility or contrition; but for herself she asked not one fraction of his time or his attention. The occasions for little courtesies which he had been accustomed to offer her were skilfully avoided; but were never rudely made conspicuous by their avoidance. Her quiet pride was infinitely more than a match for his aggressive self-love; her supreme naturalness, the most impregnable armor she could have worn.Kingsnorth beheld the transformation in her, was first astonished, then interested, then moved to profound pity and contrition. With tact equal to her own, he set himself to meet the situation, seconded all her efforts to make their awkward meals natural and easy, silenced Mrs. Mac’s gaping curiosity, and managed, in doing it all, to keep himself well inthe background. With Collingwood he had one conversation on the launch, but the sum and substance was that gentleman’s reiteration of the terms on which he would live.“Damnation!” was Kingsnorth’s irritable response, “you are simply making an ass of yourself, Collingwood. I can’t call you a brute, because I’ve been too much of one myself. I live in glass houses—I can’t throw stones. You’ve married a jewel among women, and you’re going to make your ruffled dignity make smash of two lives that ought to be happy. Moreover, you are not in earnest. This is all bluffing and bad temper to bring Mrs. Collingwood to her knees, and to make her put herself in the wrong when you know there isn’t any wrong or right about things. Now I’ll give you a piece of advice, old man. You are trying that game on the wrong woman: see that you don’t carry it too far, and turn her affection into dislike. I’ve learned one thing, learned it tragically well in this life; and that is that one has justonechance really in this world with one person. Now don’t lose your chance with your wife.”To this Martin vouchsafed a grunt. Hardly conscious of it, he had set his will to bring Charlotteto his terms. He could not listen to anything that crossed that strong desire.The days went by slowly where they had once gone so fast, and neither husband nor wife referred again to that tacit agreement of separation. Yet Martin knew from the bundle of letters which he was to carry up to Manila that Charlotte was making plans for business life again; and once, when he came into the sitting-room unexpectedly, he found her frowning over her bank book. He knew the balance it contained, for, on their wedding journey, they had laughed at her little savings; and he knew she could not long maintain herself upon it. He smiled grimly at her flushed discomfiture when he found her pondering ways and means, and somewhat brutally said to himself that she would find that she had little rope to run upon.Yet at the last moment it was he who wavered, he who rang down the curtain on their make-believe. She had looked after his garments and had packed his trunk with wifely solicitude; had prepared for his launch trip, foods for which she knew his predilection, and had, at the moment of farewell, saved the situation by putting out a friendly hand.“I do hope you will have a pleasant trip,” she said,—and what it cost her to speak so easily and naturally, only she could have told,—“and thank you for giving me the weeks here to get ready. I’ll go over to Cuyo when the launch goes up for you on your return trip, and will leave a letter for you there. There are some things I can’t say to you, but I should like to write them. They will, perhaps, leave a better feeling between us.”To these words Martin found, at the time, no answer. He wrung her hand, muttered something, and hastened away. Yet when his belongings had all been deposited in the boat, and the men were waiting to “chair” him out, he turned on his heel, and strode back to the cottage.He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain, and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood, the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills, stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. “Oh, go!” she said. “It’s a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can’t help ourselves. I knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be.”“What I want you to do,” Martin said honestly, “is to take into consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of you—can do it well. That ought to count for something.”“O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I’ve leaned on you and your love, Martin. I’ve told you so a thousand times.”“Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles.”“But I don’t set the trifles against them. I havenever weighed one against the other—never for an instant.”“But you know that you could.” Poor Martin here uttered helplessly what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.“Ah,” she sighed. “Don’t judge me by what I know; judge me by what I’ve done and thought.”“You’ve got to change,” he muttered. “I can’t. I’m right. You’re wrong.”“The things you have in mind can’t be changed by will power, dear. They are the results of education, association, environment. New environment may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. ‘I’ve done all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.’ I’m not stubborn, Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am.”The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He raged helplessly against the truth of her words.When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin’s insistent curiosity, permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week’s retirement.Though at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past, and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood’s idea that her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true, from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome to all the world, everybody’s hand against her, her hand against everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself, in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even Mrs. Maclaughlin’s frank speech grew guarded.Kingsnorth merely looked at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes, he went vigorously on her side. She was “gentle folks,” he maintained, a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s democratic partiality, naturally roused in Martin’s favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.

It seemed to Mrs. Collingwood that the next three days embodied the quintessence of all that had ever fallen to her lot of discomfort and misery. To lie physically helpless, a burden and a care to the one person who, at that time, was most out of love with her, was humiliation of the most cankering variety. Added to it was the sense of loss, the consciousness of ruin and disaster, and a feeling of shame that bowed her to the earth. Her husband’s bitter words had sunk deep into her soul. She saw herself as a creature degraded and partaking of the instincts of the most depraved class. Her marriage began to assume the complexion of an adventure. Was there an element of the adventuress in her? she asked herself tremulously. In reply came a wild rush of denial, an agony of revolt. As she envisaged herself she could not but justify her own actions. The feminine weakness, and dread of life’s bread-and-butter struggle, alone justified them. And she had lovedMartin tenderly; she had been a good wife, loyal to his interests, guarding his dignity as her own, literally pouring her affection and her gratitude for all his tenderness toward her into his carelessly outstretched palm. No mother ever more sedulously stood between her child and the evil of the world than she had sought to save Martin Collingwood the pain of knowing what he had come to know. His ingratitude, though she would not use that word even to herself, cut her to the depths of her heart.

But it was plain that their romance was ended; “the thing had gone to smash,” in Collingwood’s forceful language. Time and time again she went over that night on the Luneta before their marriage, and Martin’s words, and her own miserable doubts and fears. The worst had happened, as she had feared it might, but Collingwood was not living up to his philosophy. He was angry at her, held himself a man cheated, put all the blame on her, wanted in a dumb, fruitless way to quarrel with her.

On the evening of her second day in bed, they attempted to thresh out their difficulties, but it was soon evident that they had reached a hopelessimpasse. Charlotte ended what was a miserable controversy.

“What is your quarrel with me about, Martin?” she said. “Simply that I am I, that I have lived through certain experiences, that I have certain criterions of taste and judgment that you have not. I have not obtruded them on you. I haven’t made myself obnoxious by them. I deny that I have ever deceived you, and I have tried honestly to think and feel as you do. Ihaven’tbeen playing a part. I have been thoroughly happy. But you can’t any more make me put your values on life and people, than you can, because somebody wishes you to, convince yourself that there is no America; that all your past life has been a dream; that all you have known and felt and seen has been mere imagination, a fancy on your part. I’ll have no quarrel with you, no reproaches. I married you of my own free will, and married you for love. As for my philosophy of life or my views on worldly matters, what actual part need they play in our life? If I am content to put them out of sight, why cannot you do so?”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll live with any woman on earth on your terms,” Collingwood reiterated.

She looked him steadily in the eyes. “Then the thing is finally settled, and we can spare ourselves the pain of useless discussion. For in the thing we are quarrelling with—not my actions, but my philosophy of life—I shall not change. Nor can I fancy any woman with a spark of modesty or decency in her, entreating a man to live with her. If you will allow me to remain here during your stay in Manila, I’ll go before you get back.”

“How do you think you are going to live?”

She gave a little reckless shrug. “I supported myself before we were married. I suppose I can do so again. I’ll make no demands on your pocket book. I didn’t marry you to be supported. I married you to be loved by you, to feel that I gave in your life and home an order and an assistance—yes, and a joy—to equalize what I cost you in money. When there is no longer exchange, I refuse to accept.”

“Big talk,” said Martin. She did not reply, but turned away wearily. The servant knocked at the door a minute after to say that dinner was ready, and he went to his meal. After that, it seemed that they had subsided into a tacit acceptance of their future as she had outlined it.

Collingwood was quite as unhappy as his wife was. All his masculine pride was chafing, but his masculine heart was aching. He wanted to be set gloriously in the right, to ascend the pedestal from which he had been ignominiously tumbled by a few incautious words overheard. He wanted, though he hardly phrased it to himself, apologies for his wife’s daring to understand a thing that he had not understood. He had literally eaten of the tree of knowledge and was enraged with what lay patent to his seared vision.

The consciousness of what had been going on in Kingsnorth’s mind, in Judge Barton’s, in the Commissioner’s, burnt like acid on a wound. He saw, with astonishing clearness, Judge Barton’s viewpoint, and he marvelled no more at that gentleman’s temerity. His beggar maid a princess! his throne amésalliance!—the thought burned. His tortured self-love yawned like an abyss which no heaping of prostrate offenders could ever fill; and against his wife’s quiet dignity his thwarted will raged sullenly.

Yet it is doubtful if he ever really regarded their separation as probable. Tacitly he accepted her statement that she was going away. In realityhe hardly thought of such a possibility. Alone with his thoughts, all his will and his imagination bent itself to her conquest. It was that hour of her final humiliation and confession to which he looked forward. How long was she going to keep it up?

During her few days’ illness, however, he showed her some courtesies for which she returned a dignified, but not an affectionate, gratitude. Indeed, she had been up and about the house two or three days before her husband perceived that the door of her heart and mind, which she had so shyly opened to him, had closed, and that he stood outside of it, a part of that concourse which Charlotte Ponsonby had always feared and distrusted. She had trusted him most of all the world, and he had turned upon her and hurt her more cruelly than anyone else had ever done. Without reproach or lamentation or any sign of self-pity, she retired behind those invincible ramparts to which Martin had been blind in hospital days, but to which he was now so much alive.

It would have been exceedingly difficult for him to tell in what the change consisted. Her courtesy was finely measured, it is true, but it was not an armed truce between belligerents. It was therefuge of dignity, of one who feels his position false, but would save appearances by outward grace, at least. She who had been his wife, his dearest possession, became only a graceful hostess in his home—a lady who stood ready to lend a deferential ear to his suggestions, or carry out, to the best of her ability, his every wish, expressed or unexpressed. She ignored his gloom, saw to all his needs, spoke to him always kindly, though without humility or contrition; but for herself she asked not one fraction of his time or his attention. The occasions for little courtesies which he had been accustomed to offer her were skilfully avoided; but were never rudely made conspicuous by their avoidance. Her quiet pride was infinitely more than a match for his aggressive self-love; her supreme naturalness, the most impregnable armor she could have worn.

Kingsnorth beheld the transformation in her, was first astonished, then interested, then moved to profound pity and contrition. With tact equal to her own, he set himself to meet the situation, seconded all her efforts to make their awkward meals natural and easy, silenced Mrs. Mac’s gaping curiosity, and managed, in doing it all, to keep himself well inthe background. With Collingwood he had one conversation on the launch, but the sum and substance was that gentleman’s reiteration of the terms on which he would live.

“Damnation!” was Kingsnorth’s irritable response, “you are simply making an ass of yourself, Collingwood. I can’t call you a brute, because I’ve been too much of one myself. I live in glass houses—I can’t throw stones. You’ve married a jewel among women, and you’re going to make your ruffled dignity make smash of two lives that ought to be happy. Moreover, you are not in earnest. This is all bluffing and bad temper to bring Mrs. Collingwood to her knees, and to make her put herself in the wrong when you know there isn’t any wrong or right about things. Now I’ll give you a piece of advice, old man. You are trying that game on the wrong woman: see that you don’t carry it too far, and turn her affection into dislike. I’ve learned one thing, learned it tragically well in this life; and that is that one has justonechance really in this world with one person. Now don’t lose your chance with your wife.”

To this Martin vouchsafed a grunt. Hardly conscious of it, he had set his will to bring Charlotteto his terms. He could not listen to anything that crossed that strong desire.

The days went by slowly where they had once gone so fast, and neither husband nor wife referred again to that tacit agreement of separation. Yet Martin knew from the bundle of letters which he was to carry up to Manila that Charlotte was making plans for business life again; and once, when he came into the sitting-room unexpectedly, he found her frowning over her bank book. He knew the balance it contained, for, on their wedding journey, they had laughed at her little savings; and he knew she could not long maintain herself upon it. He smiled grimly at her flushed discomfiture when he found her pondering ways and means, and somewhat brutally said to himself that she would find that she had little rope to run upon.

Yet at the last moment it was he who wavered, he who rang down the curtain on their make-believe. She had looked after his garments and had packed his trunk with wifely solicitude; had prepared for his launch trip, foods for which she knew his predilection, and had, at the moment of farewell, saved the situation by putting out a friendly hand.

“I do hope you will have a pleasant trip,” she said,—and what it cost her to speak so easily and naturally, only she could have told,—“and thank you for giving me the weeks here to get ready. I’ll go over to Cuyo when the launch goes up for you on your return trip, and will leave a letter for you there. There are some things I can’t say to you, but I should like to write them. They will, perhaps, leave a better feeling between us.”

To these words Martin found, at the time, no answer. He wrung her hand, muttered something, and hastened away. Yet when his belongings had all been deposited in the boat, and the men were waiting to “chair” him out, he turned on his heel, and strode back to the cottage.

He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain, and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.

He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood, the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills, stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.

She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. “Oh, go!” she said. “It’s a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can’t help ourselves. I knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be.”

“What I want you to do,” Martin said honestly, “is to take into consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of you—can do it well. That ought to count for something.”

“O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I’ve leaned on you and your love, Martin. I’ve told you so a thousand times.”

“Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles.”

“But I don’t set the trifles against them. I havenever weighed one against the other—never for an instant.”

“But you know that you could.” Poor Martin here uttered helplessly what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.

“Ah,” she sighed. “Don’t judge me by what I know; judge me by what I’ve done and thought.”

“You’ve got to change,” he muttered. “I can’t. I’m right. You’re wrong.”

“The things you have in mind can’t be changed by will power, dear. They are the results of education, association, environment. New environment may change them gradually. What you ask I cannot give. ‘I’ve done all I can do, come as far to meet you as I can.’ I’m not stubborn, Martin. I would do anything in my power to meet your wishes. You are quarrelling not with what I do, but with what I am.”

The answer was a grunt of impatience as Martin flung away again. He raged helplessly against the truth of her words.

When, at last, the launch was hull down on the sky line, Charlotte went to bed, and shutting out Mrs. Maclaughlin’s insistent curiosity, permitted herself the luxury of nearly a week’s retirement.Though at times she wept, for the most part she tried to shut out the past, and to concentrate her thoughts on the future. Collingwood’s idea that her dread of business life would outweigh her sense of humiliation and her wounded self-love was entirely wrong. She shrank, it is true, from the world; but the thought that there was an alternative never suggested itself to her. Collingwood had said that he would not live with her, or what had seemed to her the equivalent of that. She took him at his word. The fact that legally he was her husband counted no more in her summing up of the situation than if he had been a chance stranger encountered in the street. Live for an hour more than was absolutely necessary under the same roof with a man who entertained such feelings for her? She turned sick at the thought.

When at last she emerged from her retirement she was the woman of hospital days, the super-sensitive orphan, feeling herself unwelcome to all the world, everybody’s hand against her, her hand against everybody; but she took them, as Kingsnorth phrased it to himself, in the hollow of her own hand. In the presence of her reserve, even Mrs. Maclaughlin’s frank speech grew guarded.Kingsnorth merely looked at her in a kind of mute apology. Again and again she caught his glance with its furtive appeal; but each time her own eyes met it, not with studied blankness, but with a naturalness that was almost histrionic.

Maclaughlin had returned with the launch before her seclusion was at an end, and after a family discussion of what was patent to their eyes, he went vigorously on her side. She was “gentle folks,” he maintained, a deal sight too good for Martin Collingwood; and Collingwood was behaving like a fool. Mrs. Maclaughlin’s democratic partiality, naturally roused in Martin’s favor, was somewhat rudely snubbed.

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