"I can't imagine myself in such a situation," said Stella, getting up indignantly.
"Naturally," interposed Julian smoothly. "But, still, if you had happened, by some dreadful mischance, to find yourself engaged to me—"
"I should have broken it off directly," said Stella, turning to go—"directly I found out—"
"Found out what?" asked Julian.
"That you were nothing but a cold-blooded tease!" cried Stella over her shoulder.
"You perfect darling!" said Julian under his breath. "By Jove! that was a narrow squeak!"
It puzzled Stella extremely that she found herself unable to say, "What is it that you want, Julian?" She knew that there was something that he wanted, and there was nothing that she would dream of denying him. What, therefore, could be simpler than asking him? And yet she did not want to ask him.
She began by trying hard to understand what it was that he had told her above the bluebell wood, because she thought if she discovered what he wanted then, the rest would follow. He had wanted a particular kind of help from her; that was plain. It had something to do with her being a woman; that was plainer. But was it to his advantage or to his disadvantage that she was a woman? Ought she to suppress the fact or build on it? And how could she build on it or suppress it when she never felt in the least like anything else but a woman?
Cicely used to say that the only safe way with men was never to be nice to them; but Stella had always thought any risk was better than such a surly plan. Besides, Julian couldn't mean that. He liked her to be nice to him. She saw quite plainly that he liked her to be nice to him.
Unfortunately, Julian had taken for granted in Stella a certain experience of life, and Stella had never had any such experience. She had never once recognized fancy in the eyes of any man. As for love, it belonged solely to her dreams; and the dreams of a woman of twenty-eight, unharassed by fact, are singularly unreliable. She thought of Mr. Travers, but he did not count. She had never been able to realize what he had felt for her. Her relation to him was as formal, despite his one singular lapse, as that of a passenger to a ticket-collector. She had nothing to go on but her dreams.
In her very early youth she had selected for heroes two or three characters from real life. They were Cardinal Newman, Shelley, and General Gordon. Later, on account of a difference in her religious opinions, she had replaced the Cardinal by Charles Lamb. None of these characters was in the least like Julian.
One had apparently no experience of women, the other two had sisters, and Shelley's expression of love was vague and might be said to be misleading.
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,That I beheld her not.
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,That I beheld her not.
Life had unfortunately refused to meet Shelley on the same terms, and difficulties had ensued, but it was this impracticable side of him that Stella had accepted. She had skipped Harriet, and landed on "Epipsychidion." Love was to her "a green and golden immortality." She was not disturbed by it, because the deepest experiences of life do not disturb us. What disturbs us is that which calls us away from them.
It made it easier to wait to find out what Julian wanted that he was happier with her. He was hardly ever impersonal or cold now, and he sometimes made reasons to be with her that had nothing to do with their work.
It was June, and the daffodils had gone, but there were harebells and blue butterflies upon the downs, and in the hedges wild roses and Star of Bethlehem. Lady Verny spent all her time in the garden. She said the slugs alone took hours. They were supposed by the uninitiated to be slow, but express trains could hardly do more damage in less time. So Stella and Ostrog took their walks alone, and were frequently intercepted by Julian on their return.
Julian, who ought to have known better, thought that the situation might go on indefinitely, and Stella did not know that there was any situation; she knew only that she was in a new world. There was sorrow outside it, there was sorrow even in her heart for those outside it; but through all sorrow was this unswerving, direct experience of joy. She would have liked to share it with Julian, but she thought it was all her own, and that what he liked about her—since he liked something—was her ability to live beyond the margin of her personal delight. The color of it was in her eyes, and the strength of it at her heart; but she never let it interfere with Julian. She was simply a companion with a hidden treasure. She sometimes thought that having it made her a better companion; but even of this she was not sure.
It made her a little nervous taking Ostrog out alone, but she always took the lead with him, and slipped it on him if a living creature appeared on the horizon. There were some living creatures he didn't mind, but you couldn't be sure which.
One evening she was tired and forgot him. There was a wonderful sunset. She stood to watch it in a hollow of the downs where she was waiting for Julian. The soft, gray lines rose up on each side of her, immemorial, inalterable lines of gentle land. The air was as transparently clear as water, and hushed with evening. Far below her, where the small church steeple sprang, she saw the swallows cutting V-shaped figures to and fro above the shining elms.
For a long time she heard no sound, and then, out of the stillness, came a faint and hollow boom. Far away across the placid shapes of little hills, over the threatened seas, the guns sounded from France—the dim, intolerable ghosts of war.
Ostrog, impatient of her stillness, bounded to the edge of the hollow and challenged the strange murmur to the echo. He was answered immediately. A sheep-dog shot up over the curve of the down. Ostrog was at his throat in an instant.
There was a momentary recoil for a fresh onslaught, and then the shrieks of the preliminary tussle changed into the full-throated growl of combat. There was every prospect that one or other of them would be dead before their jaws unlocked.
Stella hovered above them in frantic uncertainty. She was helpless till she saw that there was no other help. The sheep-dog had had enough; a sudden scream of pain stung her into action. She seized Ostrog's hind leg and twisted it sharply from under him.
At the moment she did so she heard Julian's voice:
"Wait! For God's sake, let go!"
But she could not wait; the sheep-dog was having the life squeezed out of him. She tugged and twisted again. Ostrog's grip slackened, he flung a snap at her across his shoulder, and then, losing his balance, turned on her in a flash. She guarded her head, but his teeth struck at her shoulder. She felt herself thrust back by his weight, saw his red jaws open for a fresh spring, and then Julian's crutch descended sharply on Ostrog's head. Ostrog dropped like a stone, the bob-tailed sheep-dog crawled safely away, and Stella found herself in Julian's arms.
"Dearest, sure you're not hurt? Sure?" he implored breathlessly, and then she knew what his eyes asked her, they were so near her own and so intent; and while her lips said, "Sure, Julian," she knew her own eyes answered them.
He drew her close to his heart and kissed her again and again.
The idea of making any resistance to him never occurred to Stella. Nothing that Julian asked of her could seem strange. She only wondered, if that was what he wanted, why he had not done it before.
He put her away from him almost roughly.
"There," he said, "I swore I'd never touch you! And I have! I'm a brute and a blackguard. Try and believe I'll never do it again. Promise you won't leave me? Promise you'll forgive me? I was scared out of my wits, and that's a fact. D' you think you can forgive me, Stella?"
"But what have I to forgive?" Stella asked. "I let you kiss me."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Julian, half laughing, "you are an honest woman! Well, if you did, you mustn't 'let me' again, that's all. Ostrog, you wretch, lie down! You ought to have a sound thrashing. I'd have shot you if you'd hurt her; but as I've rather scored over the transaction, I'll let you off."
Stella looked at Julian thoughtfully.
"Why mustn't I let you again?" she inquired, "if that is what you want?"
Julian, still laughing, but half vexed, looked at her.
"Look here," he said, "didn't I tell you you'd got to help me? I can't very well keep you here and behave to you like that, can I?"
Stella considered for a moment, then she said quietly, "Were you flirting with me, Julian?"
"I wish to God I was!" said Julian, savagely. "If I could get out of it as easily as that, d'you suppose I should have been such a fool as not to have tried?"
"I don't think you would have liked me to despise you," said Stella, gently. "You see, if you had given me nothing when I was giving you all I had, I should have despised you."
Julian stared at her. She was obviously speaking the truth, but in his heart he knew that if she had loved him and he had flirted with her, he would have expected her to be the one to be despised.
He put out his hand to her and then drew it back sharply.
"No, I'm hanged if I'll touch you," he said under his breath. "I love you all right,—you needn't despise me for that,—but telling you of it's different. I was deadly afraid you'd see; any other woman would have seen. I've held on to myself for all I was worth, but it hasn't been the least good, really. I suppose I've got to be honest about it: I can't keep you with me, darling; you'll have to go. It makes it a million times worse your caring, but it makes it better, too."
"I don't see why it should be worse at all," said Stella, calmly. "If we both care, and care really, I don't see that anything can be even bad."
Julian pulled up pieces of the turf with his hand. He frowned at her sternly.
"You mustn't tempt me," he said; "I told you once I can't marry."
"You told me once, when you didn't know I cared," agreed Stella. "I understand your feeling that about a woman who didn't care or who only cared a little, but not about a woman who really cares."
"But, my dear child," said Julian, "that's what just makes it utterly impossible. I can't understand how I ever was such a selfish brute as to dream of taking Marian. I was ill at the time, and hadn't sized it up; but if you think I'm going to letyoumake such a sacrifice, you're mistaken. I'd see you dead before I married you!"
Stella's eyebrows lifted, but she did not seem impressed.
"I think," she said gently, "you talk far too much as if it had only got to do with you. Suppose I don't wish to see myself dead?"
"Well, you must try to see the sense of it," Julian urged. "You're young and strong; you ought to have a life. I'm sure you love children. You like to be with me, and all that; you're the dearest companion a man ever had. It isn't easy, Stella, to say I won't keep you; don't make it any harder for me. I've looked at this thing steadily for months. I don't mind owning that I thought you might get to care if I tried hard enough to make you; but, darling, I honestly didn't try. You can't say I wasn't awfully disagreeable and cross. I knew I was done for long ago, but I thought you were all right. You weren't like a girl in love, you were so quiet and—and sisterly and all that. If I'd once felt you were beginning to care in that way, I'd have made some excuse; I wouldn't have let it come to this. I'd rather die than hurt you."
"Well, but you needn't hurt me," said Stella, "and neither of us need die. It's not your love that wants to get rid of me, Julian; it's your pride. But I haven't any pride in that sense, and I'm not going to let you do it."
"By Jove! you won't!" cried Julian. His eyes shot a gleam of amusement at her. It struck him that the still little figure by his side was extraordinarily formidable. He had never thought her formidable before. He had thought her brilliant, intelligent, and enchanting, not formidable; but he had no intention of giving way to her. Formidable or not, he felt quite sure of himself. He couldn't let her down.
"The sacrifice is all the other way," Stella went on. "You would be sacrificing me hopelessly to your pride if you refused to marry me simply because some one of all the things you want to give me you can't give me. Do you suppose I don't mind,—mind for you, I mean, hideously,—mind so much that if I were sure marrying you would make you feel the loss more, I'd go away from you this minute and never come near you again? But I do not think it will make it worse for you. You will have me; you will have my love and companionship, and they are—valuable to you, aren't they, Julian?"
Julian's eyes softened and filled.
"Yes," he muttered, turning his head away from her; "they're valuable."
"Then," she said, "if you are like that to me, if I want you always, and never anybody else, have you a right to rob me of yourself, Julian?"
"If I could believe," he said, his voice shaking, "that you'd never be sorry, never say to yourself, 'Why did I do it?' But, oh, my dear, you know so little about the ordinary kind of love! You don't realize a bit, and I do. It must make it all so confoundedly hard for you, and I'm such an impatient chap. I mightn't be able to help you. And you're right: I'm proud. If I once thought you cared less or regretted marrying me, it would clean put the finish on it. But you're not right about not loving you, Stella, that's worse than pride; loving you makes it impossible. I can't take the risk for you. I'll do any other mortal thing you want, but not that!"
"Julian," asked Stella in a low voice, "do you think I am a human being?"
"Well, no!" said Julian. "Since you ask me, more like a fairy or an elf or something. Why?"
"Because you're not treating me as if I were," said Stella, steadily. "Human beings have a right to their own risks. They know their own minds, they share the dangers of love."
"Then one of 'em mustn't take them all," said Julian, quickly.
"How could one take them all?" said Stella. "I have to risk your pride, and you have to risk my regret. As a matter of fact, your pride is more of a certainty than a risk, and my regret is a wholly imaginary idea, founded upon your ignorance of my character. Still, I'm willing to put it like that to please you. You have every right to sacrifice yourself to your own theories, but what about sacrificing me? I give you no such right."
For the first time Julian saw what loving Stella would be like; he would never be able to get to the end of it. Marriage would be only the beginning. She had given him her heart without an effort, and he found that she was as inaccessible as ever. His soul leaped toward this new, unconquerable citadel. He held himself in hand with a great effort.
"What you don't realize," he said, "is that our knowledge of life is not equal. If I take you at your word, you will make discoveries which it will be too late for you to act upon. You cannot wish me to do what is not fair to you."
"I want my life to be with you," said Stella. "Whatever discoveries I make, I shall not want them to be anywhere else. You do not understand, but if you send me away, you will take from me the future which we might have used together. You will not be giving me anything in its place but disappointment and utter uselessness. You'll make me—morally—a cripple. Do you still wish me to go away from you?"
Julian winced as if she had struck him.
"No, I'll marry you," he said; "but you've made me furiously angry. Please go home by yourself. I wonder you dare use such an illustration to me."
Stella slipped over the verge of the hollow. She, too, wondered how she had dared; but she knew quite well that if she hadn't dared, Julian would have sent her away.
Stella was afraid that when she went down to dinner it would be like slipping into another life—a life to which she was attached by her love for Julian, but to which she did not belong. It did not seem possible to her that Lady Verny would be able to bear her as a daughter-in-law. As a secretary it had not mattered in the least that she was shabby and socially ineffective. And she couldn't be different; they'd have to take her like that if they took her at all. She ranged them together in her fear of their stateliness; she almost wished that they wouldn't take her at all, but let her slink back to Redcliffe Square and bury herself in her own insignificance.
But when she went down-stairs she found herself caught in a swift embrace by Lady Verny, and meeting without any barrier the adoration of Julian's eyes.
"My dear, my dear," said Lady Verny, "I always felt that you belonged to me."
"But are you pleased?" whispered Stella in astonishment.
"Pleased!" cried Lady Verny, with a little shaken laugh. "I'm satisfied; a thing that at my age I hardly had the right to expect."
"Mother thinks it's all her doing," Julian explained. "It's her theory that we've shown no more initiative than a couple of guaranteed Dutch bulbs. Shall I tell you what she was saying before you came down-stairs?"
"Dear Julian," said Lady Verny, blushing like a girl, "you're so dreadfully modern, you will frighten Stella if you say things to her so quickly before she has got used to the idea of you."
"She's perfectly used to the idea of me," laughed Julian, "and I've tried frightening her already without the slightest success. Besides, there's nothing modern about a madonna lily, which is what we were discussing. My mother said, Stella, that she didn't care very much for madonna lilies in the garden. They're too ecclesiastical for the other flowers, but very suitable in church for weddings. And out in ten days' time, didn't you say, Mother? I hope they haven't any of Stella's procrastinating habits."
"You mustn't mind his teasing, dear," Lady Verny said, smiling. "We will go in to dinner now. You're a little late, but no wonder. I am delighted to feel that now I have a right to scold you."
"The thing that pleases me most," said Julian, "is that I shall be able to remove Stella's apples and pears forcibly from her plate and peel them myself. I forget how long she has been here, but the anguish I have suffered meal by meal as I saw her plod her unreflecting way over their delicate surfaces, beginning at the stalk and slashing upward without consideration for any of the laws of nature, nothing but the self-control of a host could have compelled me to endure. I offered to peel them for her once, but she said she liked peeling them; and I was far too polite to say, 'Darling, you've got to hand them over to me.' I'm going to say it now, though, every time."
"Hush, dear," said Lady Verny, nervously. "Thompson has barely shut the door. I really don't know what has happened to your behavior."
"I haven't any," said Julian. "I'm like the old lady in the earthquake who found herself in the street with no clothes on. She bowed gravely to a gentleman she had met the day before and said, 'I should be happy to give you my card, Mr. Jones, but I have lost the receptacle.' Things like that happen in earthquakes. I have lost my receptacle." He met Stella's eyes and took the consent of her laughter. He was as happy with her as a boy set loose from school.
Lady Verny, watching him, was almost frightened at his lack of self-restraint. "He has never trusted any one like this before," she thought. "He is keeping nothing back." It was like seeing the released waters of a frozen stream.
While they sat in the hall before Julian rejoined them, Lady Verny showed Stella all the photographs of Julian taken since he was a baby.
There was a singularly truculent one of him, at three years old, with a menacingly poised cricket-bat, which Stella liked best of all. Lady Verny had no copy of it, but she pressed Stella to take it.
"Julian will give you so many things," she said; "but I want to give you something that you will value, and which is quite my own." So Stella took the truculent baby, which was Lady Verny's own.
"You look very comfortable sitting there together; I won't disturb you for chess," Julian observed when he came in shortly afterward. "I was wondering if you would like to hear what I did in Germany. It's a year old now and as safe with you as with me, but it mustn't go any further."
Julian told his story very quietly, leaning back against the cushions of a couch by the open window. Above his head, Stella could see the dark shapes of the black yew hedges and the wheeling of the bats as they scurried to and fro upon their secret errands.
Neither Lady Verny nor Stella moved until Julian had finished speaking. It was the most thrilling of detective stories; but it is not often that the roots of our being are involved in detective stories.
They could not believe that he lay there before them, tranquilly smoking a cigarette and breathed on by the soft June air. As they watched his face comfort and security vanished. They were in a ruthless world where a false step meant death. Julian had been in danger, but it was never the danger which he had been in that he described; it was the work he had set out to do and the way he had done it. He noticed danger only when it obstructed him. Then he put his wits to meet it. They were, as Stella realized, very exceptional wits for meeting things. Julian combined imagination with strict adherence to fact. He had the courage which never broods over an essential risk and the caution which avoids all unnecessary ones.
"Of course," he broke off for a moment, "you felt all the time rather like a flea under a microscope. Don't underrate the Germans. As a microscope there's nothing to beat them; where the microscope leaves off is where their miscalculations begin. A microscope can tell everything about a flea except where it is going to hop.
"I had a lively time over my hopping; but the odd part of it was the sense of security I often had, as if some one back of me was giving me a straight tip. I don't understand concentration. You'd say it is your own doing, of course, and yet behind your power of holding on to things, it seems as if Something Else was holding on much harder. It's as if you set a ball rolling, and some one else kicked it in the right direction.
"After I'd been in Germany for a month I began to believe in an Invisible Kicker-Off. It was company for me, for I was lonely. I had to calculate every word I said, and there's no sense of companionship where one has to calculate. The feeling that there was something back of me was quite a help. I'd get to the end of my job, and then something fresh would be pushed toward me.
"For instance, I met a couple of naval officers by chance,—I wasn't out for anything naval,—and they poured submarine facts into me as you pour milk into a jug—facts that we needed more than the points I'd come to find out.
"I'm not at all sure," Julian finished reflectively, "that if you grip hard enough under pressure, you don't tap facts.
"Have you ever watched a crane work? You shift a lever, and it comes down as easily as a parrot picks up a pencil; it'll lift a weight that a hundred men can't move an inch, and swing it up as if it were packing feathers. Funny idea, if there's a law that works like that.
"I came back through Alsace and Lorraine, meaning to slip through the French lines. A sentry winged me in the woods. Pure funk on his part; he never even came to hunt up what he'd let fly at. But it finished my job."
Lady Verny folded up her embroidery.
"It was worth the finish, Julian," she said quickly. "I am glad you told me, because I had not thought so before." Then she left them.
"It isn't finished, Julian," murmured Stella in a low voice. "It never can be when it's you."
"Well," said Julian, "it's all I've got to give you; so I'm rather glad you like it, Stella."
They talked till half the long summer night was gone. She sat near him, and sometimes Julian let his hand touch her shoulder or her hair while he unpacked his heart to her. The bitterness of his reserve was gone.
"I think perhaps I could have stood it decently if it hadn't been for Marian," he explained. "I was damned weak about her, and that's a fact. You see, I thought she had the kind of feeling for me that women sometimes have and which some men deserve; but I'm bound to admit I wasn't one of them. When I saw that Marian took things rather the way I should have taken them myself, I went down under it. I said, 'That's the end of love.' It was the end of the kind I was fit for, the kind that has an end.
"Now I'm going to tell you something. I never shall again, so you must make the most of it, and keep it to hold on to when I behave badly. You've put the fear of God into me, Stella. Nothing else would have made me give in to you; and you know I have given in to you, don't you?"
"You've given me everything in the world I want," said Stella, gently, "if that's what you call giving in to me."
"I've done more than that," said Julian, quietly. "I've let you take my will and turn it with that steady little hand of yours; and it's the first time—and I don't say it won't be the last—that I've let any man or woman change my will for me.
"Now I'm going to send you to bed. I oughtn't to have you kept you up like this; but if I've got to let you go back to your people to-morrow, we had to know each other a little better first, hadn't we? I've been trying not to know you all these months.
"Before you go, would you mind telling me about Mr. Travers and the cat?"
"No," said Stella, with a startled look; "anything else in the world, Julian, but not Mr. Travers and the cat."
"Ostrog and I are frightfully jealous by nature," Julian pleaded. "He wouldn't be at all nice to that cat if he met it without knowing its history."
"He can't be unkind to the poor cat," said Stella; "it's dead."
"And is Mr. Travers dead, too?" asked Julian.
"I should think," said Stella, "that he was about as dead as the red-haired girl in the library."
"What red-haired girl?" cried Julian, sharply. "Who's been telling you—I mean what made you think I knew her? It's a remarkably fine bit of painting."
"But you did know her," said Stella; "only don't tell me anything about her unless you want to."
"I won't refuse to answer any questions you ask," said Julian after a pause, "but I'd much rather wait until we're married. I am a little afraid of hurting you; you wouldn't be hurt, you see, if you were used to me and knew more about men. You're an awfully clever woman, Stella, but the silliest little girl I ever knew."
"I'll give up the red-haired girl if you'll give up Mr. Travers," said Stella. She rose, and stood by his side, looking out of the window.
"Do you want to say good night, or would you rather go to bed without?" he asked her.
"Of course I'll say good night," said Stella. "But, Julian, there are some things I so awfully hate your doing. Saying good night doesn't happen to be one of them. It's lighting my candle unless I'm sure you want to. I want to be quite certain you don't mind me in little things like that."
Julian put his arms round her and kissed her as gently as he would have kissed a child. "Of course you shall light your candle," he said tenderly, "just to show I don't mind you. But it isn't my pride now. I don't a bit object to your seeing I can't. I'm quite sure of you, you see; unless you meant to hurt me, you simply couldn't do it. And if you meant to hurt me, it would be because you wanted to stop me hurting myself, like this afternoon, wouldn't it?"
Stella nodded. She wanted to tell him that she had always loved him, long before he remembered that she existed. All the while he had felt himself alone, she was as near him as the air that touched his cheek. But she could not find words in which to tell him of her secret companionship. The instinct that would have saved them only brushed her heart in passing.
Julian was alarmed at her continued silence.
"You're not frightened or worried or anything, are you?" he asked anxiously. "Sure you didn't mind saying good night? It's not compulsory, you know, even if we are engaged. I'd hate to bother you."
"I'm not bothered," Stella whispered; "I—only love you. I was saying it to you in my own way."
"I'll wait three days for you," said Julian, firmly. "Not an hour more. You quite understand, don't you, that I'm coming up at the end of three days to bring you home for good?"
Stella shivered as she thought of Redcliffe Square. Julian wouldn't like Redcliffe Square, and she wouldn't be able to make him like it; and yet she wouldn't be able not to mind his not liking it.
Julian knew nothing about Redcliffe Square, but he noticed that Stella shivered when he told her that he was going to bring her home for good.
It would be too strong an expression to say that after Stella's departure Julian suffered from reaction. He himself couldn't have defined what he suffered from, but he was uneasy.
He had given himself away to Stella as he had never in his wildest dreams supposed that one could give oneself away to a woman. But he wasn't worrying about that; he hadn't minded giving himself away to Stella.
Samson was the character in the Old Testament whom Julian most despised, because he had let Delilah get things out of him. What Samson had got back hadn't been worth it, and could probably have been acquired without the sacrifice of his hair. He had simply given in to Delilah because he had a soft spot for her; and Delilah quite blamelessly (from Julian's point of view) had retaliated by crying out, "The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!"
Julian had always felt perfectly safe with women of this type; they couldn't have entrapped him. But there wasn't an inch of Delilah in Stella. She had no Philistines up her sleeve for any of the contingencies of life and she had not tried to get anything out of Julian.
That was where his uneasiness began. He understood her sufficiently to trust her, but he was aware that beyond his confidence she was a mapless country; he did not even know which was water and which was land. His uncertainty had made him shrink from telling Stella about Eugénie Matisse.
If Marian had been sharp enough—she probably wouldn't have been—to guess that Julian knew the girl in the picture, she would have known, too, precisely what kind of girl she was, and she would have thought none the worse of Julian.
But he didn't know what Stella expected. He wasn't afraid that she would cast him off for that or any other of his experiences; then he would have told her. She would have forgiven him as naturally as she loved him; but what if her forgiveness had involved her pain?
He had spoken the truth when he told Stella that she had "put the fear of God into him." Julian had not known much about God before or anything about fear; but he was convinced now that the fear of God was not that God might let you down, but that you might let down God. He wanted to be as careful of Stella as if she had been a government secret.
Did she know in the least what she was in for. Or was she like an unconscious Iphigenia vowed off to mortal peril by an inadvertent parent?
He had done his best to make her realize the future, but there are certain situations in life when doing one's best to make a person aware of a fact is equivalent to throwing dust in his eyes. And Stella herself might by a species of divine fooling, have outwitted both himself and her. She might be marrying Julian for pity under the mask of love.
Her pity was divine, and he could stand it for himself perfectly; but he couldn't stand it for her. Why had she shivered when he had said he was going to bring her home? He cursed his helplessness. If he had not been crippled he would have taken her by surprise, and let his instincts judge for him; but he had had to lie there like a log, knowing that if he asked her to come to him, she would have blinded him by her swift, prepared responsiveness.
The moment on the downs hardly counted. She had been so frightened that it had been like taking advantage of her to take her in his arms.
The one comfort he clung to was her fierce thrust at his pride. He repeated it over and over to himself for reassurance. She had said, if he wouldn't marry her, he would make her morally a cripple. That really sounded like love, for only love dares to strike direct at the heart. If he could see her, he knew it would be all right; if even she had written (she had written, of course, but had missed the midnight post), he would have been swept back into the safety of their shared companionship. But in his sudden loneliness he mistrusted fortune. When a man has had the conceit knocked out of him, he is not immediately the stronger for it; and he is the more vulnerable to doubt not only of himself, but of others. The saddest part of self-distrust is that it breeds suspicion.
It would be useless to speak to his mother about it, for, though a just woman, she was predominantly his mother; she wanted Stella too much for Julian to admit a doubt of Stella's wanting him for herself. She would have tried to close all his questions with facts. This method of discussion appealed to Julian as a rule, but he had begun to discover that there are deeper things than facts.
Lady Verny was in London at a flower show, and Julian was sitting in the summer-house, which he was planning to turn into a room for Stella. His misgivings had not yet begun to interfere with his plans. He had just decided to have one of the walls above the water meadows replaced by glass when his attention was attracted by the most extraordinary figure he had ever seen.
She was advancing rapidly down a grass path, between Lady Verny's favorite herbaceous borders, pursued by the butler. At times Thompson, stout and breathless, succeeded in reaching her side, evidently for the purpose of expostulation, only to be swept backward by the impetuosity of her speed. Eurydice was upon a secret mission. She had borrowed a pound from Stella with which to carry it out; and she was not going to be impeded by a butler.
She no longer followed the theories of Mr. Bolt, but she still had to wear out the kind of clothes that went with Mr. Bolt's theories. He liked scarlet hats. Eurydice's hat was scarlet, and her dress was a long purple robe that hung straight from her shoulders.
It was cut low in the neck, with a system of small scarlet tabloids let in around the shoulders. Golden balls, which were intended to represent pomegranates, dangled from her waist.
Eurydice's hair was thick and very dark; there was no doing anything with it. Her eyebrows couched menacingly above her stormy eyes. Her features were heavy and colorless, except her mouth, which was unnaturally (and a little unevenly) red.
She wore no gloves,—she had left them behind in the train,—and she carried a scarlet parasol with a broken rib.
"I wish you'd send this man away," she said as she approached Julian. "He keeps getting under my feet, and I dislike menials. I saw where you were for myself. I nearly got bitten by a brute of a dog on the terrace. You have no right to keep a creature that's a menace to the public."
"I regret that you have been inconvenienced," said Julian, politely; "but I must point out to you that the public are not expected upon the terrace of a private garden."
"As far as that goes," said Eurydice, frowning at a big bed of blue Delphiniums, "nobody has a right to have a private garden."
Thompson, with an enormous effort, physical as well as spiritual, cut off the end of the border by a flying leap, and reached the young woman's elbow.
"If you please, Sir Julian," he gasped, "this lady says she'd rather not give her name. She didn't wish to wait in the hall, nor in the drawing-room, sir, and I've left James sitting on Ostrog's 'ead,—or I'd have been here before. What with one thing and another, Sir Julian, I came as quickly as I could."
"I saw you did, Thompson," said Julian, with a gleam of laughter; "and now you may go. Tell James to get off Ostrog's head." He turned his eyes on his visitor. "I am Miss Waring," she said as the butler vanished.
"This is extraordinarily kind of you," Julian said, steadying himself with one hand, and holding out his other to Eurydice. "I think you must be Miss Eurydice, aren't you? I was looking forward to meeting you to-morrow. I hope nothing is wrong with Stella?"
"Everything is wrong with her," flashed Eurydice, ignoring his outstretched hand; "but she doesn't know I've come to talk to you about it. She'd never forgive me if she did. So if I say anything you don't like, you can revenge yourself on me by telling her. I haven't come to bekind, as you call it. I care far too much for the truth."
"Still, you may as well sit down," said Julian, drawing a chair toward her with his free hand. "The truth is quite compatible with a wicker arm-chair. You needn't lean back in it if you're afraid of relaxing your moral fiber.
"As to revenge, I always choose my own, and even if you make it necessary, I don't suppose it will include your sister. What you suggest would have the disadvantage of doing that, wouldn't it? I mean the disadvantage to me. It hasn't struck you apparently as a disadvantage that you are acting disloyally toward your sister in doing what you know she would dislike."
Eurydice flung back her head and stared at him. She accepted the edge of the wicker arm-chair provisionally. Her eyes traveled relentlessly over Julian. She took in, and let him see that she took in, the full extent of his injury; but she spared him pity. She looked as if she were annoyed with him for having injuries.
"What I'm doing," she said, "is my business, not yours. It mightn't please Stella,—I must take the risk of that,—but if it saves her from you, it will be worth it."
Julian bowed; his eyes sparkled. An enemy struck him as preferable to a secret doubt.
"I didn't know," she said after a slight pause which Julian did nothing to relieve, "that you were as badly hurt as you appear to be. It makes it harder for me to talk to you as freely as I had intended."
"I assure you," said Julian, smiling, "that you need have no such scruples. My incapacities are local, and I can stand a long tongue as well as most men, even if I like it as little."
"I thought you would be insolent, and you are insolent," said Eurydice, with gloomy satisfaction. "That was one of the things I said to Stella."
Julian leaned forward, and for a moment his frosty, blue eyes softened as he looked at her.
"I admit I'm not very civil if I'm wrongly handled," he said in a more conciliatory tone. "Your manner was just a trifle unfortunate, Miss Eurydice; but I'd really like to be friends with you. I've not forgotten that Stella told me you were her 'special' sister. Shall we start quite afresh, and you just tell me as nicely as you know how what wrong you think I'm doing Stella?"
"I couldn't possibly be friends with you," Eurydice said coldly. "The sight of you disgusts me."
Julian lowered his eyes for a moment; when he raised them again the friendliness had gone. They were as hard as wind-swept seas.
"I suppose," he suggested quietly, "that you have some point to make. Isn't that a little off it?"
"I don't mean physically," said Eurydice, with a wave of her hand which included his crutches. "You can't help being a cripple. It is morally I am sick to think of you. Here you are, surrounded by luxury, waited on hand and foot by menials, and yet you can't face your hardships alone—you are so parasitic by nature that you have to drag down a girl like Stella by trading on her pity."
"It would," said Julian in a level voice, holding his temper down by an effort, "be rather difficult for even the cleverest parasite to drag your sister down in the sense of degrading her. Possibly you merely refer to her having consented to marry me?"
"No, I don't," said Eurydice, obstinately. "I call it dragging a person down if you make them sacrifice their integrity. Stella and I always agreed about that before. She cared more for the truth than anything. Now she doesn't; she cares more about hurting your feelings. I faced her with it last night, and she never even attempted to answer me. She only said, 'Oh, don't!' and covered her face with her hands."
"What unspeakable thing did you say to her?" asked Julian, savagely, "to make her do that?"
Ostrog, released from James, rejoined them, cowering down at his master's feet; he was aware that he was in the presence of an anger fiercer than his own.
"I didn't come here to mince matters," said Eurydice, defiantly. "If you want to know what I said to Stella, I asked her why she was going to marry a tyrannical, sterile cripple?"
For a moment Julian did not answer her; when he did, he had regained an even quieter manner than before.
"Very forcibly put," he said in a low voice; "and your sister covered her face with her hands and said, 'Oh, don't!'—you must have felt very proud of yourself."
"If you think I like hurting Stella, you're wrong," said Eurydice. "But I'd rather hurt her now than see her whole life twisted out of shape by giving way to a feeling that isn't the strongest feeling in her, or I wouldn't have come down here. But she didn't deny it."
"What didn't she deny?" asked Julian.
"What I came to tell you," said Eurydice. "The strongest feeling in Stella's life is her love for Mr. Travers, and she gave him up because she discovered that it was also the strongest thing in mine."
Julian flung back his head.
"Seriously, Miss Eurydice," he asked, "are you asking me to believe that your sister's in love with a town clerk?"
Eurydice flushed crimson under the undisguised amusement in Julian's eyes. He was amused, even though he had suddenly remembered that Mr. Travers was the name of the town clerk.
"Why not?" asked Eurydice, fiercely. "He's wonderful. He isn't like you—he works. He's like Napoleon, only he's always right, andhehasn't asked her to be his permanent trained nurse!"
Julian had a theory that you cannot swear at women; so he caught the words back, and wondered what would happen if Eurydice said anything worse.
"Don't you think," he said after a pause, "that if you insulted me once every five minutes, and then took a little rest, we might finish quicker? I will admit that there is no reason why Stella shouldn't be in love with Mr. Travers except the reason that I have for thinking she's in love with me."
"Well, she isn't," asserted Eurydice. "She's awfully fond of you, but it all started with her finding out that you were unhappier than she was. She came to you to get over what she felt about Mr. Travers, and to free him to care for me; but he doesn't. That's how I found out; I asked him."
"The deuce you did!" exclaimed Julian. "Poor old Travers!"
Eurydice ignored this flagrant impertinence. She repeated Mr. Travers's exact words: "I cared for your sister, Miss Waring; I am not a changeable man."
"But I notice," said Julian, politely, "that this profession of Mr. Travers's feelings which you succeeded in wringing from him does not include your sister's. I had already inferred from my slight knowledge of your sister that Mr. Travers was attached to her. The inference was easy."
"I hoped that myself," said Eurydice—"I mean, that she didn't care. I wrote and asked Cicely. She's my other sister; she hates me, but she's just. She doesn't know about you, of course. Would you like to see her letter?"
"It seems a fairly caddish thing to do, doesn't it?" asked Julian, pleasantly. "However, perhaps this is hardly the moment for being too particular. Yes, you can hand me over the letter." Julian read:
My dear Eurydice:You ask if I think Stella cared for Mr. Travers. I dislike this kind of question very much. However, as you seem to have some qualms of conscience at last, you may as well know that I think she did. She's never had anything for herself. You've always taken all there was to take, and I dare say she thought Mr. Travers ought to be included. She never told me that she cared for him, but of course even you must know that Stella wouldn't do such a thing as that. She spoke during her illness of him once in a way that made me suspect what she was feeling, added to which I was sure that she was struggling against great mental pain, as well as physical. She evidently wanted to get away from the town hall and leave Mr. Travers to you. You can draw your own inferences from these facts. Stella would rather be dragged to pieces by wild horses than tell you any more; so, if I were you, I would avoid asking her.Your affectionate sister,Cicely.
My dear Eurydice:
You ask if I think Stella cared for Mr. Travers. I dislike this kind of question very much. However, as you seem to have some qualms of conscience at last, you may as well know that I think she did. She's never had anything for herself. You've always taken all there was to take, and I dare say she thought Mr. Travers ought to be included. She never told me that she cared for him, but of course even you must know that Stella wouldn't do such a thing as that. She spoke during her illness of him once in a way that made me suspect what she was feeling, added to which I was sure that she was struggling against great mental pain, as well as physical. She evidently wanted to get away from the town hall and leave Mr. Travers to you. You can draw your own inferences from these facts. Stella would rather be dragged to pieces by wild horses than tell you any more; so, if I were you, I would avoid asking her.
Your affectionate sister,Cicely.
"You did ask her, of course," said Julian, handing Eurydice the letter; "and as we are both acting in a thoroughly underhand way, perhaps you will not mind repeating to me Stella's reply."
"At first she didn't answer at all," said Eurydice, slowly, "and then when I asked her again she said; 'I'm not going to tell you anything at all about Mr. Travers. I came here to tell you about Julian, only you won't listen to me.' Then," said Eurydice, "she cried."
"Please don't tell me any more," said Julian, quickly, shading his eyes with his hand. "I should be awfully obliged if you'd go. I think you've said enough."
Eurydice also thought that she had said enough; so she returned with the satisfaction of one who has accomplished a mission, on the rest of Stella's pound.
This is going to be my last love-letter to you, Stella. I wonder if you will know it is a love-letter. It won't sound particularly like one. It's to tell you that I can't go through with our marriage. I can't give you my reasons, and I can't face you without giving them to you. You must try to take my word for it that I am doing what I think best for both of us.You see, I trust you to do what I want, though I know I am acting in a way that you'll despise. If you will think of what it means for me to act in such a way, you'll realize that I am pretty certain that I am right.You are the best friend I ever had, man or woman, and I know you value my friendship, so that it seems uncommonly mean to take it away from you; and yet I'm afraid I can't be satisfied with your friendship.It would honestly make me happier to hear that you were married; but I couldn't meet you afterward, and if you don't marry, I couldn't let you alone.You see, I tried that plan when I didn't know you'd let me do anything else, and it can't be said to have worked very well, can it? It would be quite impossible now. There are two things I'd like you to remember. One is, if you set out, as I think you did, to heal a broken man, you've succeeded, and nothing can take away from your success. You put in a new mainspring. I am going to work now. Some day I'll finish the book, but not yet. The second thing is something I want you to do for me. I know I have no right to ask you! I'm only appealing to your mercy. Will you let my mother help you a little? I know you won't let me, but you would have let me, Stella. Think what that means to me—to know that you would have taken my help, and that by freeing you I am also, in a sense, deserting you. If you still want to make a man happier who has only been a nuisance to you, you can't say I haven't shown you the way.I should like to give you Ostrog, but I suppose he'd be out of place in a town hall.I'm not going to ask you to forgive me; for I'm not really sorry for anything except that there wasn't more of it and I'm never going to forget anything.Good-by.Your lover,Julian.
This is going to be my last love-letter to you, Stella. I wonder if you will know it is a love-letter. It won't sound particularly like one. It's to tell you that I can't go through with our marriage. I can't give you my reasons, and I can't face you without giving them to you. You must try to take my word for it that I am doing what I think best for both of us.
You see, I trust you to do what I want, though I know I am acting in a way that you'll despise. If you will think of what it means for me to act in such a way, you'll realize that I am pretty certain that I am right.
You are the best friend I ever had, man or woman, and I know you value my friendship, so that it seems uncommonly mean to take it away from you; and yet I'm afraid I can't be satisfied with your friendship.
It would honestly make me happier to hear that you were married; but I couldn't meet you afterward, and if you don't marry, I couldn't let you alone.
You see, I tried that plan when I didn't know you'd let me do anything else, and it can't be said to have worked very well, can it? It would be quite impossible now. There are two things I'd like you to remember. One is, if you set out, as I think you did, to heal a broken man, you've succeeded, and nothing can take away from your success. You put in a new mainspring. I am going to work now. Some day I'll finish the book, but not yet. The second thing is something I want you to do for me. I know I have no right to ask you! I'm only appealing to your mercy. Will you let my mother help you a little? I know you won't let me, but you would have let me, Stella. Think what that means to me—to know that you would have taken my help, and that by freeing you I am also, in a sense, deserting you. If you still want to make a man happier who has only been a nuisance to you, you can't say I haven't shown you the way.
I should like to give you Ostrog, but I suppose he'd be out of place in a town hall.
I'm not going to ask you to forgive me; for I'm not really sorry for anything except that there wasn't more of it and I'm never going to forget anything.
Good-by.
Your lover,Julian.
Stella was in the middle of ironing the curtains when she received Julian's letter. Everything else was ready for his visit except the curtains.
Mrs. Waring was dressed. It had taken several hours, a needle and cotton, and all the pins in the house, and now she was sitting in a drawing-room which was tidier than any she had sat in since her early married life. She thought that it looked a little bare.
Professor Waring was in the Museum. He had become so restless after breakfast that it had seemed best to despatch him there, and retrieve him after Julian arrived.
Eurydice had not asked Mr. Travers for a morning off; she had merely conceded that she would allow Stella to arrange a subsequent meeting with Julian on Sunday, if it was really necessary.
Eurydice kissed Stella tenderly before she left the house to go to the town hall. She knew that she had saved her sister, but she foresaw for the victim of salvation a few painful moments. Even a kindly Providence may have its twinges of remorse.
Stella let the iron get cold while she was reading Julian's letter; but when she had finished it, she heated the iron again and went on with the curtains. They could not be hung up rough dried.
Mrs. Waring was relieved to hear that Julian was not coming. Stella told her at once, while she was slipping the rings on the curtains, which she had brought up-stairs. She added a little quickly, but in her ordinary voice:
"And we aren't going to be married, after all."
"Dear me!" said Mrs. Waring, trying not to appear more relieved still. "Then there won't have to be any new arrangements. Marriage is very unreliable, too—it turns out so curiously unlike what it begins, and it even begins unlike what one had expected. I often wish there could be more mystical unions. I can't agree with dear Eurydice about the drawback of Julian's being rich. We are told that money is the root of all evil, but there is no doubt that it is more peaceful and refreshing to have it, as it were, growing under one's hand; and, after all, evil is only seeming. I think I'll just go up-stairs and take off these constricting clothes, unless, dear, you'd like me to help you in any way. You'll remember, won't you, that sensation is but the petal of a flower?"
Stella said that she thought, if she had the step-ladder, she would be all right.
The only moment of the day (it was curiously made up of moments prolonged to seem like years) when Stella wasn't sure whether she was really all right or not was when she heard Lady Verny's voice in the hall. Lady Verny's voice was singularly like Julian's.
Something happened to Stella's heart when she heard it; it had an impulse to get outside of her. She had to sit down on the top of the stairs until her heart had gone back where it belonged.
The drawing-room had gone to pieces again. The kitten's saucer was in the middle of the floor, and the plate-basket came half in and half out of the sofa-cover. Lady Verny was looking at it with fascinated eyes. She had never seen a plate-basket under a sofa-cover before. Mrs. Waring, exhausted by her hours of dressing, had gone to lie down. So there was only Stella. She came in a little waveringly, and looked at Lady Verny without speaking.
Lady Verny shot a quick, penetrating glance at her, and then held out her arms.
"My dear! what has he done? What has he done?" she murmured.
Stella led Lady Verny carefully away from the saucer of milk into the only safe arm-chair; then she sat down on a footstool at her feet.
"I thought," she said in a very quiet voice, "that you'd come, but I didn't think you'd come so soon. I don't know what he's done."
"It's all so extravagant and absurd," said Lady Verny, quickly, "and so utterly unlike Julian! I have never known him to alter an arrangement in his life, and as to breaking his word! I left him happier than I have ever seen him. He'd been telling me that you insisted on my staying with you after your marriage. I told him that I had always thought it a most out-of-place and unsuitable plan, and that he couldn't have two women in our respective positions in his house, and he laughed and said: 'Oh, yes, I can. Stella has informed me that marrying me isn't a position; it's to be looked on in the light of an intellectual convenience. You're to run the house, and she's to run me. I've quite fallen in with it.' I think that was the last thing he said, and when I came back, there was his astounding letter to say that your marriage was impossible, and that I was on no account to send him on your letters or to refer to you in mine.
"He gave me his banker's address, and said that he'd see me later on, and had started some intelligence work for the War Office. He was good enough to add that I might go and see you if I liked. I really think he must be mad, unless you can throw some light on the subject. A letter came from you after he had gone."
Stella, who had been without any color at all, suddenly flushed.
"Ah," she said, "I'm glad he didn't read that before he went! I mean, if he'd gone after reading it, I should have felt—" She put out her hands with a curious little helpless gesture, but she did not say what she would have felt.
"Can't you explain?" Lady Verny asked gravely. "Can't you explainanything? Youwereperfectly happy, weren't you? I haven't been a blind, meddling, incompetent old idiot, have I?"
Stella shook her head.
"When he left me," she said, "he gave me this." She took it out of her belt and handed it to Lady Verny; it was a check for two hundred pounds inclosed in a piece of paper, on which was written, "Dearest, please!" "I took it," said Stella.
Lady Verny was silent for a moment; then she said more gravely still:
"My dear, I think I ought to tell you something,—it is not fair not to let you have every possible indication that there is,—but the day after you left, while I was away, I hear from Thompson, who seemed to be extremely upset by her, that a ladydidcall to see Julian and she would not give her name. Thompson says he thinks she was a foreigner.
"I do not know what Julian may have told you about his life, but I myself am quite positive he would have asked no woman to marry him unless he felt himself free from any possible entanglement. Still, there it is: he went away after this person's visit."
For a moment it seemed to Stella that some inner citadel of security within her had collapsed. She knew so little about men; she had nothing but her instincts to guide her, and the memory of Eugénie Matisse's evil, laughing eyes. She covered her face with her hands and shut out every thought but Julian. It seemed to her as if she had never been so alone with him before, as if in some strange, hidden way she was plunging into the depths of his soul.
When she looked up she had regained her calm.
"No," she said; "I am quite sure of Julian. Perhaps some woman could make him feel shaken—shaken about its being right to marry me. I can believe that, if she was very cruel and clever and knew how to hurt him most; but there is nothing else, or Julian would have told me."
Lady Verny gave a long sigh of relief.
"That is what I think myself," she said; "but I couldn't have tried to persuade you of it. My dear, did Julian know that you had always loved him?"
Stella shook her head.
"I thought he knew all that mattered," she explained. "I didn't tell him anything else. You see, there was so very little time, and I was rather cowardly, perhaps. I didn't want him justat onceto know that I had loved him before he even knew that I existed."
"I see, I see," said Lady Verny. "But would you mind his knowing now? He can't be allowed to behave in this extraordinary way, popping off like a conjurer without so much as leaving a decent address behind him. I intend to tell him precisely what I think of his behavior, and I hope that you will do the same."
Stella turned round to face Lady Verny.
"No," she said firmly; "neither of us must do that. I don't know why Julian has done this at all, but it is quite plain that he does not want to be interfered with. He wishes to act alone, and I think he must act alone. I shall not write to him or try to see him."
"But, my dear child," exclaimed Lady Verny, "how, if we enter into this dreadful conspiracy of silence, can anything come right?"
"I don't know," said Stella, quietly; "but Julian let it go wrong quite by himself, and I think it must come right, if it comes right at all, in the same way. If it didn't, he would distrust it. I shouldn't—I should be perfectly happy just to see him; but, then, you see, Iknowit's all right. Julian doesn't. Seeing me wouldn't make it so; it would simply make him give in, and go on distrusting. We couldn't live like that. You see, I don'tknowwhat has happened; but I do know what he wants, so I think I must do it."
"But you don't think this state of things is what hewants, do you?" Lady Verny demanded. "I may of course be mistaken, but up till now I have been able to judge fairly well what a man wanted of a woman when he couldn't take his eyes off her face."
"He wants me more than that," said Stella, proudly. "I think he wants me very nearly—not quite—as much as I want him. That's why I couldn't make him take less than he wanted. To take me and not trust me would be to take less. If we leave him quite alone for six months or a year, perhaps, he'll have stopped shutting his mind up against his feelings. It might be safer then to make an appeal to him; but I shouldn't like to appeal to him. Still, I don't say I won't do anything you think right, dear Lady Verny, if you want me to, to make him happier; only I must besurethat it will make him happierfirst. I know now that it wouldn't."
"You're the most extraordinary creature!" said Lady Verny. "Of course I always knew you were, but it's something to be so justified of one's instincts. I'm not sure that I sha'n't do precisely what you say—for quite different reasons. Julian will count on one of us disobeying his injunctions, and he'll be perfectly exasperated not to have news of you. Well, exasperation isn't going to do any man any harm; it'll end by jerking him into some common-sense question, if nothing else will."
Stella smiled, but she shook her head.
"Please don't hope," she said under her breath.
"There's one thing," Lady Verny said after a short pause, "that I do ask you to be sensible about. I can't take you abroad, as there hardly seems at the present time any abroad to take you to, but I want you to come and live with me. I think, after all this, I really rather need a companion."
Stella hid her face in Lady Verny's lap.
"I can't," she whispered. "You're too like him."
Lady Verny said nothing at all for a moment; she looked about the room. It was clean; for a London room it was quite clean, and Stella thought she had hidden all the holes in the carpet. Lady Verny's ruthless, practised eye took the faded, shabby little room to pieces and reconstructed the rest of the dingy makeshift home from it. She knew that Stella's room would be the worst of all.
"My dear," she said at last, "you are so very nearly a member of my family that I think I may appeal to you about its honor. Are you going to live like this and not let me help you? You are not strong enough to work, and this folly of poor Julian's won't make you any stronger. Since you can't live with me, won't you accept a little of what is really yours?"
"Money?" asked Stella, looking up into Lady Verny's face. "I would if you weren't his mother, because I love you; but I can't now. You see, Julian's taken his honor away from me; he's left me only my own. I know he'll think me cruel, and I'll never return what I did take. He'll think perhaps I would use it, if I needed it, and that may make him happier; but I mustn't take any more. I must be cruel."
"Yes, you're very cruel," said Lady Verny, kissing her. "Well, I sha'n't bully you, for I wouldn't do it myself. It'll only make my heart ache in a new way, and really, I'm so used to its aching that I oughtn't to grumble at any fresh manifestation. As to Julian's heart, he's been so extraordinarily silly that only the fact that folly is a sign of love induces me to believe he's got one." She rose to her feet, with her arms still about Stella. "I'm simply not to mention you at all?" she asked.
Stella shook her head. She clung to Lady Verny speechlessly, but without tears.
"And when I see him next," Lady Verny asked a little dryly,—"and, presumably, he'll send for me in about a fortnight,—he'll say, 'Well, did she take the money'? What am I to answer to that?"
"Say," whispered Stella, "that she would have liked to take it, but she couldn't."
"I could make up something a great deal crueller to say than that," said Lady Verny, grimly. "However, I dare say you're right; it sounds so precisely like you that it's bound to hurt him more than any gibe."
Stella burst into tears.
"Oh, don't! don't!" she sobbed. "You must—you must be kind to him! I don't want anything in the world to hurt him."
"I know you don't," said Lady Verny, gently. "You little silly, I only wanted to make you cry. It'll be easier if you cry a little."
Stella cried more than ever then, because Lady Verny was so terribly like Julian.