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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Invader
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Margaret L. Woods
+
+Release Date: February 23, 2009 [EBook #28162]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVADER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, David Clarke, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              The Invader
+
+                                A NOVEL
+
+
+
+                                   By
+
+                           Margaret L. Woods
+
+
+
+
+
+                          New York and London
+
+                      Harper & Brothers Publishers
+
+                                  1907
+
+
+
+
+                 Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+                          Published May, 1907.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+Hilda Greaves
+
+AND THE DUMB COMPANIONS OF TAN-YR-ALLT
+THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR
+GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE
+FRIEND
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE INVADER
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Dinner was over and the ladies had just risen, when the Professor had
+begged to introduce them to the new-comer on his walls. The Invader, it
+might almost have been called, this full-length, life-size portrait,
+which, in the illumination of a lamp turned full upon it, seemed to take
+possession of the small room, to dominate at the end of the polished-oak
+table, where the light of shaded candles fell on old blue plates, old
+Venetian glass, a bit of old Italian brocade, and chrysanthemums in a
+china bowl coveted by collectors. Every detail spoke of the
+connoisseurship, the refined and personal taste characteristic of Oxford
+in the eighties. The authority on art put up his eye-glasses and
+fingered his tiny forked beard uneasily.
+
+"There's no doubt it's a good thing, Fletcher," he said, presently--"really
+quite good. But it's too like Romney to be Raeburn, and too like Raeburn to
+be Romney. You ought to be able to find out the painter, if, as you say,
+it's a portrait of your own great-grandmother--"
+
+"He did say so!" broke in Sanderson, exultantly. "He said it was an
+ancestress. Fletcher, you're a vulgar fraud. You've got no ancestress.
+You bought her. There's a sale-ticket still on the frame under the
+projection at the right-hand lower corner. I saw it."
+
+Sanderson was a small man and walked about perpetually, except when
+taking food: sometimes then. He was a licensed insulter of his friends,
+and now stood before the picture in a belligerent attitude. The
+Professor stroked his amber beard and smiled down on Sanderson.
+
+"True, O Sanderson; and at the same time untrue. I did buy the picture,
+and the lady was my great-grandmother once, but she did not like the
+position and soon gave it up. This picture must have been done after she
+had given it up."
+
+"Is this a conundrum or blather, invented to hide your ignominy in a
+cloud of words?" asked Sanderson.
+
+"It's a _hors d'oeuvre_ before the story," interposed Ian Stewart,
+throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through
+his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the
+kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'"
+
+The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled
+deprecatingly.
+
+"I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story.
+It was a bit of a scandal at the time."
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young married woman, with a face
+like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with
+her waist under her arms becomes simply classical."
+
+"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor;
+"but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother,
+for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton."
+
+There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew
+her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor
+Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained:
+
+"My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a
+hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was
+silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught
+her Latin and Greek--which was all very well--and married her, which was
+distinctly unwise. She had one son--my grandfather--and then ran away
+with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on
+the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real
+successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as
+soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally
+objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out
+lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her
+learning as by her morals."
+
+"She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that
+she had to be a wit lest people should find out she was a blue. There's
+a good deal about her in the Englefield _Memoirs_. She travelled
+extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real
+treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections."
+
+"I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was
+burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw.
+
+"A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to
+fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window--and was
+never seen again."
+
+"She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart,
+meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture.
+
+"Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows
+something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time
+reading gossip and calling it history."
+
+"Gossip's like many common things, interesting when fossilized,"
+squeaked a little, white-haired, pink-faced old gentleman, like an
+elderly cherub in dress-clothes. He had remained at the other end of the
+room because he did not care for pictures. Now he toddled a little
+nearer and every one made way for him with a peculiar respect, for he
+was the Master of Durham, whose name was great in Oxford and also in the
+world outside it. He looked up first at the pictured face and then at
+Milly Flaxman, a young cousin of Fletcher's and a scholar of Ascham
+Hall, who had taken her First in Mods, and was hoping to get one in
+Greats. The Master liked young girls, but they had to be clever as well
+as pleasing in appearance to attract his attention.
+
+"It's very like Miss Flaxman," he squeaked.
+
+Every one turned their eyes from the picture to Milly, whose pale cheeks
+blushed a bright pink. The blush emphasized her resemblance to her
+ancestress, whose brilliant complexion, however, hinted at rouge.
+Milly's soft hair was amber-colored, like that of the lady in the
+picture, but it was strained back from her face and twisted in a minute
+knot on the nape of her neck. That was the way in which her aunt Lady
+Thomson, whose example she desired to follow in all things, did her
+hair. The long, clearly drawn eyebrows, dark in comparison with the
+amber hair, the turquoise blue eyes, the mouth of the pictured lady were
+curiously reproduced in Milly Flaxman. Possibly her figure may have been
+designed by nature to be as slight and supple, yet rounded, as that of
+the white-robed, gray-scarfed lady above there. But something or some
+one had intervened, and Milly looked stiff and shapeless in a green
+velveteen frock, scooped out vaguely around her white young throat and
+gathered in clumsy folds under a liberty silk sash.
+
+Mrs. Shaw cried out enraptured at the interesting resemblance which had
+escaped them all, to be instantly caught by the elderly cherub in the
+background, who did not care about art, while the Professor explained
+that both Milly's parents were, like himself, great-grandchildren of
+Lady Hammerton. The seraph now fell upon Milly, too shy to resist, had
+out her hair-pins in a trice and fingered the fluffy hair till it made
+an aureole around her face. Then by some conjuring trick producing a
+gauzy white scarf, Mrs. Shaw twisted it about the girl's head, in
+imitation of the lady on the wall, who had just such a scarf, but with a
+tiny embroidered border of scarlet, twisted turban-wise and floating
+behind.
+
+"There!" she cried, pushing the feebly protesting Milly into the full
+light of the lamp the Professor was holding, "allow me to present to you
+the new Lady Hammerton!"
+
+There was a moment of wondering silence. Milly's pulses beat, for she
+felt Ian Stewart's eyes upon her. Neither he nor any one else there had
+ever quite realized before what capacities for beauty lay hid in the
+subdued young face of Milly Flaxman. She had nothing indeed of the
+charm, at once subtle and challenging, of the lady above there. She,
+with one hand on the gold head of a tall cane, looking back, seemed to
+dare unseen adorers to follow her into a magic, perhaps a fatal
+fairyland of mountain and waterfall and cloud; a land whose dim mists
+and silver gleams seemed to echo the gray and the white of her floating
+garments, its autumn leaves to catch a faint reflection from her hair,
+while far off its sky showed a thin line of sunset, red like the border
+of her veil. Milly's soft cheeks and lips were flushed, her eyes bright
+with a mixture of very innocent emotions, as she stood with every one's
+eyes, including Ian Stewart's, upon her.
+
+But in a minute the Master took up Mrs. Shaw's remark.
+
+"No," he said, emphatically; "not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
+new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."
+
+"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
+great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.
+
+"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
+who saw that Milly was feeling shy.
+
+When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
+there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
+speech.
+
+"My mother," he said--and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
+fact that the Master had had a mother--"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
+the twenties. She was often at Bath."
+
+The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
+other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
+had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
+intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:
+
+"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
+us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."
+
+The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
+longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
+hands on his little round knees. Then he said:
+
+"She was a raddled woman."
+
+And his pupils knew he had finished speaking. What he had said was
+disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
+it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
+whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
+Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
+strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.
+
+"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
+very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
+adored her to the last."
+
+The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
+one did, he uttered again:
+
+"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."
+
+Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.
+
+"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."
+
+"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
+fervently.
+
+The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.
+
+"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
+he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
+discussion was closed. Then he turned to Sanderson and made some remark
+about a house which Sanderson's College, of which he was junior bursar,
+was selling to Durham.
+
+Fletcher, the only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own
+masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she
+would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical
+matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage
+with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who
+shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt
+himself pitiably unequal to the task, although he was as anxious as his
+wife was that Stewart should marry Milly. Did not all their friends wish
+it? It seemed to them that there could not be a more suitable couple. If
+Milly was working so terribly hard to get her First in Greats, it was
+largely because Mr. Stewart was one of her tutors and she knew he
+thought a good deal of success in the Schools.
+
+There could be no doubt about Milly Flaxman's goodness; in fact, some of
+the girls at Ascham complained that it "slopped over." Her clothes were
+made on hygienic principles which she treated as a branch of morals, and
+she often refused to offer the small change of polite society because it
+weighed somewhat light in the scales of truth. But these were foibles
+that the young people's friends were sure Ian Stewart would never
+notice. As to him, although only four and thirty, he was already a
+distinguished man. A scholar, a philosopher, and an archæologist, he had
+also imagination and a sense of style. He had written a brilliant book
+on Greek life at a particular period, which had brought him a reputation
+among the learned and also found readers in the educated public. His
+disposition was sweet, his character unusually high, judged even by the
+standard of the academic world, which has a higher standard than most.
+Obviously he would make an excellent husband; and equally obviously, as
+he had no near relations and his health was delicate, it would be a
+capital thing for him to have a home of his own and a devoted wife to
+look after him. Their income would be small, but not smaller than that
+of most young couples in Oxford, who contrived, nevertheless, to live
+refined and pleasant lives and to be well-considered in a society where
+money positively did not count.
+
+But if Fletcher did not succeed in forwarding this matrimonial scheme in
+the dining-room, his wife succeeded no better when the gentlemen came
+into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
+seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
+without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
+himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
+which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
+matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
+Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
+unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
+as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
+she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
+turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
+the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
+to effect a change of partners, Ian explained that he found himself
+unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
+place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
+liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
+extravagance of apology for this early departure.
+
+He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
+dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
+mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
+November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
+night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
+remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
+free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
+The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
+elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
+cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
+glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
+the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
+elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
+was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
+whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
+from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
+osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
+the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many
+whispers, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
+of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
+ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
+slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
+the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
+secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
+go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
+familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
+secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.
+
+Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
+floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
+blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
+reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
+nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
+and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
+the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
+playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
+Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
+his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
+marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
+tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
+usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
+intended to marry; for he did not desire to be left an old bachelor in
+college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
+love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
+of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
+it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
+marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
+tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
+Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
+question.
+
+And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
+night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
+trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
+dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
+them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
+passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death
+and oblivion, to the dark night whose silence is only sometimes stirred
+by vague whispers, anxious yet faint, dying upon the ear before the
+sense can seize them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Parties in Oxford always break up early, and Milly had a good excuse for
+carrying her aching, disappointed heart back to Ascham at ten o'clock,
+for every one knew she was working hard. Too hard, Mr. Fletcher said,
+looking concernedly at her heavy eyes, mottled complexion, and the
+little crumples which were beginning to come in her low white forehead.
+Her cousins, however, had more than a suspicion that these marks of care
+and woe were not altogether due to her work, but that Ian Stewart was
+accountable for most of them.
+
+The Professor escorted her to the gates of the Ladies' College; but she
+walked down the dark drive alone, mindful of familiar puddles, and
+hearing nothing of those mysterious whispers of night which in Ian
+Stewart's ears had breathed a "ground" to his troubled thoughts of her.
+
+She mounted the stairs to her room at the top of the house. It was an
+extremely neat room, and by day, when the bed was disguised as a sofa,
+and the washstand closed, there was nothing to reveal that it served as
+a bedroom, although a tarnished old mirror hung in a dark corner. The
+oak table and pair of brass candlesticks upon it were kept in shining
+order by Milly's own zealous hands.
+
+Milly found her books open at the right place and her writing materials
+ready to hand. In a very few minutes her outer garments and simple
+ornaments were put away, and clothed in a clean but shrunk and faded
+blue dressing-gown, she sat down to work. The work was Aristotle's
+_Ethics_, and she was going through it for the second time, amplifying
+her notes. But this second time the Greek seemed more difficult, the
+philosophic argument more intricate than ever. She had had very little
+sleep for weeks, and her head ached in a queer way as though something
+inside it were strained very tight. It was plain that she had come to
+the end of her powers of work for the present--and she had calculated
+that only by not wasting a day, except for a week's holiday at Easter,
+could she get through all that had to be done before the Schools!
+
+She put Aristotle away and opened Mommsen, but even to that she could
+not give her attention. Her thoughts returned to the bitter
+disappointment which the evening had brought. Ian Stewart had been next
+her at dinner, but even then he had talked to her rather less than to
+Mrs. Shaw. Afterwards--well, perhaps it was only what she deserved for
+not making it plain to poor Mr. Toovey that she could never return his
+feelings. And now the First, which she had looked to as a thing that
+would set her nearer the level of her idol, was dropping below the
+horizon of the possible. Aunt Beatrice always said--and she was
+right--that tears were not, as people pretended, a help and solace in
+trouble. They merely took the starch out of you and left you a poor
+soaked, limp creature, unfit to face the hard facts of life. But
+sometimes tears will lie heavy and scalding as molten lead in the brain,
+until at length they force their way through to the light. And Milly
+after blowing her nose a good deal, as she mechanically turned the pages
+of Mommsen, at length laid her arms on the book and transferred her
+handkerchief to her eyes. But she tried to look as though she were
+reading when Flora Timson came in.
+
+"At it again, M.! You know you're simply working yourself stupid."
+
+Thus speaking, Miss Timson, known to her intimates at Ascham as "Tims,"
+wagged sagely her very peculiar head. A crimson silk handkerchief was
+tied around it, turban-wise, and no vestige of hair escaped from
+beneath. There was in fact none to escape. Tims's sallow, comic little
+face had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes on it, and her small figure was
+not of a quality to triumph over the obvious disadvantages of a tight
+black cloth dress with bright buttons, reminiscent of a page's suit.
+
+Milly pushed the candles farther away and looked up.
+
+"I was wanting to see you, Tims. Do tell me whether you managed to get
+out of Miss Walker what Mr. Stewart said about my chances of a First."
+
+Tims pushed her silk turban still higher up on her forehead.
+
+"I can always humbug Miss Walker and make her say lots of indiscreet
+things," Tims returned, with labored diplomacy. "But I don't repeat
+them--at least, not invariably."
+
+There was a further argument on the point, which ended by Milly shedding
+tears and imploring to be told the worst.
+
+Tims yielded.
+
+"Stewart said your scholarship was A 1, but he was afraid you wouldn't
+get your First in Greats. He said you had a lot of difficulty in
+expressing yourself and didn't seem to get the lead of their philosophy
+and stuff--and--and generally wanted cleverness."
+
+"He said that?" asked Milly, in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though
+to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know--not to go on
+hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery in the end, no
+doubt."
+
+There was such a depth of despair in her face and voice that Tims was
+appalled at the consequence of her own revelation. She paced the room in
+agitation, alternately uttering incoherent abuse of her friend's folly
+and suggesting that she should at once abandon the ungrateful School of
+_Literæ Humaniores_ and devote herself like Tims, to the joys of
+experimental chemistry and the pleasures of practical anatomy.
+
+Meantime, Milly sat silent, one hand supporting her chin, the other
+playing with a pencil.
+
+At length Tims, taking hold of Milly under the arms, advised her to "go
+to bed and sleep it off."
+
+Milly rose dully and sat on the edge of her bed, while Tims awkwardly
+removed the hair-pins which Mrs. Shaw had so deftly put in. But as she
+was laying them on the little dressing-table, Milly suddenly flung
+herself down on the bed and lay there a twisted heap of blue flannel,
+her face buried in the pillows, her whole body shaken by a paroxysm of
+sobs. Tims supposed that this might be a good thing for Milly; but for
+herself it created an awkward situation. Her soothing remarks fell flat,
+while to go away and leave her friend in this condition would seem
+brutal. She sat down to "wait till the clouds rolled by," as she phrased
+it. But twenty minutes passed and still the clouds did not roll by.
+
+"Look here, M." she said, argumentatively, standing by the bed. "You're
+in hysterics. That's what's the matter with you."
+
+"I know I am," came in tones of muffled despair from the pillow.
+
+"Well!" Tims was very stern and accented her words heavily,
+"then--pull--yourself--together--dear girl. Sit up!"
+
+Milly sat up, pressed her handkerchief over her face, and held her
+breath. For a minute all was quiet; then another violent sob forced a
+passage.
+
+"It's no use, Tims," she gasped. "I cannot--cannot--stop. Oh, what
+would--!" She was going to say, "What would Aunt Beatrice think of me if
+she knew how I was giving way!" but a fresh flood of tears suppressed
+her speech. "My head's so bad! Such a splitting headache!"
+
+Tims tried scolding, slapping, a cold sponge, every remedy inexperience
+could suggest, but the hysterical weeping could not be checked.
+
+"Look here, old girl," she said at length, "I know how I can stop you,
+but I don't believe you'll let me do it."
+
+"No, not that, Tims! You know Miss Burt doesn't--"
+
+"Doesn't approve. Of course not. Perhaps you think old B. would approve
+of the way you're going on now. Ha! Would she!"
+
+The sarcasm caused a new and alarming outburst. But finally, past all
+respect for Miss Burt, and even for Lady Thomson herself, Milly
+consented to submit to any remedy that Tims might choose to try.
+
+She was assisted hurriedly to undress and put to bed. Tims knew the
+whereabouts of the prize-medal which Milly had won at school, and
+placing the bright silver disk in her hand, directed her to fix her eyes
+upon it. Seated on her heels on the patient's bed, her crimson turban
+low on her forehead, her face screwed into intent wrinkles, Tims began
+passing her slight hands slowly before Milly's face.
+
+The long slender fingers played about the girl's fair head, sometimes
+pressed lightly upon her forehead, sometimes passed through her fluffy
+hair, as it lay spread on the pillow about her like an amber cloud.
+
+"Don't cry, M.," Tims began repeating in a soft, monotonous voice.
+"You've got nothing to cry about; your head doesn't ache now. Don't
+cry."
+
+At first it was only by a strong effort that Milly could keep her
+tear-blinded eyes fixed on the bright medal before her; but soon they
+became chained to it, as by some attractive force. The shining disk
+seemed to grow smaller, brighter, to recede imperceptibly till it was a
+point of light somewhere a long way off, and with it all the sorrows and
+agitations of her mind seemed also to recede into a dim distance, where
+she was still aware of them, yet as though they were some one else's
+sorrows and agitations, hardly at all concerning her. The aching tension
+of her brain was relaxed and she felt as though she were drowning
+without pain or struggle, gently floating down, down through a green
+abyss of water, always seeing that distant light, showing as the sun
+might show, seen from the depths of the sea.
+
+Before a quarter of an hour had passed, her sobs ceased in sighing
+breaths, the breaths became regular and normal, the whole face slackened
+and smoothed itself out. Tims changed the burden of her song.
+
+"Go to sleep, Milly. What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly."
+
+Milly was sinking down upon the pillow, breathing the calm breath of
+deep, refreshing slumber. Tims still crouched upon the bed, chanting her
+monotonous song and contemplating her work. At length she slipped off,
+conscious of pins-and-needles in her legs, and as she withdrew, Milly
+with a sudden motion stretched her body out in the white bed, as
+straight and still almost as that of the dead. The movement was
+mechanical, but it gave a momentary check to Tims's triumph. She leaned
+over her patient and began once more the crooning song.
+
+"Go to sleep, M.! What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly!"
+
+But presently she ceased her song, for it was evident that Milly Flaxman
+had indeed gone very sound asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Tims was proud of the combined style and economy of her dress. She was
+constantly discovering and revealing to an unappreciative world the
+existence of superb tailors who made amazingly cheap dresses. For two
+years she had been vainly advising her friends to go to the man who had
+made her the frock she still wore for morning; a skirt and coat of tweed
+with a large green check in it, a green waistcoat with gilt buttons, and
+green gaiters to match. In this costume and coiffed with a man's wig, of
+the vague color peculiar to such articles, Tims came down at her usual
+hour, prepared to ask Milly what she thought of hypnotism now. But there
+was no Milly over whom to enjoy this petty triumph. She climbed to the
+top story as soon as breakfast was over, and entering Milly's room,
+found her patient still sleeping soundly, low and straight in the bed,
+just as she had been the preceding night. She was breathing regularly
+and her face looked peaceful, although her eyes were still stained with
+tears. The servant came in as Tims was looking at her.
+
+"I've tried to wake Miss Flaxman, miss," she said. "She's always very
+particular as I should wake her, but she was that sound asleep this
+morning, I 'adn't the 'eart to go on talking. Poor young lady! I expect
+she's pretty well wore out, working away at her books, early and late,
+the way she does."
+
+"Better leave her alone, Emma," agreed Tims. "I'll let Miss Burt know
+about it."
+
+Miss Burt was glad to hear Milly Flaxman was oversleeping herself. She
+had not been satisfied with the girl's appearance of late, and feared
+Milly worked too hard and had bad nights.
+
+Tims had to go out at ten o'clock and did not return until
+luncheon-time. She went up to Milly's room and knocked at the door. As
+before, there was no answer. She went in and saw the girl still sound
+asleep, straight and motionless in the bed. Her appearance was so
+healthy and natural that it was absurd to feel uneasy at the length of
+her slumber, yet remembering the triumph of hypnotism, Tims did feel a
+little uneasy. She spoke to Miss Burt again about Milly's prolonged
+sleep, but Miss Burt was not inclined to be anxious. She had strictly
+forbidden Tims to hypnotize--or as she called it, mesmerize--any one in
+the house, so that Tims said no more on the subject. She was working at
+the Museum in the early part of the afternoon, only leaving it when the
+light began to fail. But after work she went straight back to Ascham.
+Milly was still asleep, but she had slightly shifted her position, and
+altogether there was something about her aspect which suggested a
+slumber less profound than before. Tims leaned over her and spoke
+softly:
+
+"Wake up, M., wake up! You've been asleep quite long enough."
+
+Milly's body twitched a little. A responsive flicker which was almost a
+convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident,
+however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from
+the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her
+Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance of the
+tweed frock with green waistcoat and gaiters, put the kettle on the
+fire. Then she went down-stairs to fetch some bread and butter and an
+egg, wherewith to feed the patient when she awoke.
+
+She had not long left the room when the slumberer's eyes opened
+gradually and stared with the fixity of semi-consciousness at a stem of
+blossoming jessamine in the wall-paper. Then she slowly stretched her
+arms above her head until some inches of wrist, slight and round and
+white, emerged from the strictly plain night-gown sleeve. So she lay,
+till suddenly, almost with a start, she pulled herself up and looked
+about her. The gaze of her wide-open eyes travelled questioningly around
+the quiet-toned room which two windows at right angles to each other
+still kept light with the reflection of a yellow winter sunset. She
+pushed the bedclothes down, dropped first one bare white foot, then the
+other to the ground and looked doubtfully at a pair of worn felt
+slippers which were placed beside the bed, before slipping her feet into
+them. With the same air as of one assuming garments which do not belong
+to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked
+to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from
+it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of
+somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius.
+With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the
+western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the
+garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from
+the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain
+glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow.
+For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the
+hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods,
+sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom
+of heaven and earth, a long straight pool of yellow light.
+
+She leaned out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be
+pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had
+made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her
+amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of
+an angel in some old Florentine picture.
+
+Miss Burt in galoshes and with a wrap over her head was coming up the
+garden. She caught sight of that vision of gold and pale blue in the
+window and smiled and waved her hand to Milly Flaxman. The vision
+withdrew, trembling slightly as though with cold, and closed the
+window.
+
+Tims came in, carrying a boiled egg and a plate of bread and butter.
+Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed
+the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.
+
+"Well, old girl," she asked; "what do you say to hypnotism now? Put
+_you_ to sleep, right enough, anyhow. Know what time it is?"
+
+The awakened sleeper made a few steps forward, leaned her hands on the
+table, on the other side of which Tims stood, and gazed upon her with
+startling intentness. Then she began to speak in a rapid, urgent voice.
+Her words were in themselves ordinary and distinct, yet what she said
+was entirely incomprehensible, a nightmare of speech, as though some
+talking-machine had gone wrong and was pouring out a miscellaneous stock
+of verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest without meaning or cohesion.
+Certain words reappeared with frequency, but Tims had a feeling that the
+speaker did not attach their usual meaning to them. This travesty of
+language went on for what appeared to the transfixed and terrified
+listener quite a long time. At length the serious, almost tragic,
+babbler, meeting with no response save the staring horror of Tims's too
+expressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
+which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
+smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
+ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
+nightmare. But she pulled herself together and determined to show
+presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
+ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.
+
+"Sit down, Milly," she said--and the use of her friend's proper name
+showed that she felt the occasion to be serious--"and don't speak again
+till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
+bit confused now, you know."
+
+The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
+from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
+herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
+with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
+understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
+and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
+finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
+cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
+methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
+which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
+her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
+more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
+moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
+Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
+from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
+her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain that
+Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
+than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
+speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
+been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
+in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
+length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
+any use.
+
+She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
+upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
+teetotaller; all the more reason, thought Tims, why a dose of alcohol
+should give her nerves and circulation a fillip, only she must not know
+of it, or she would certainly refuse the remedy.
+
+Pocketing the bottle and flourishing the teapot, Tims mounted again to
+Milly's room. Her patient, who had spent the time wandering about the
+room and examining everything in it, as well as she could in the
+fast-falling twilight, resumed her position in the chair as soon as she
+heard a step in the passage, and greeted her returning keeper with an
+attractive smile. Tims uttering words of commendation, slyly poured some
+brandy into one of the large teacups before lighting the candles.
+
+"Now, my girl," she said, when she had made the tea, "drink this, and
+you'll feel better."
+
+Milly leaned forward, her round chin on her hand, and looked intently at
+the tea-service and at the proffered cup. Then she suddenly raised her
+head, clapped her hands softly, and cried in a tone of delighted
+discovery, "Tea!"
+
+"Excuse me," she added, taking the cup with a little bow; and in two
+seconds had helped herself to three lumps of sugar. Tims was surprised,
+for Milly never took sugar in her tea.
+
+"That's right, M., you're going along well!" cried Tims, standing on the
+hearth-rug, with one hand under her short coat-tails, while she gulped
+her own tea, and ate two pieces of bread and butter put together. Milly
+ate hers and drank her tea daintily, looking meanwhile at her companion
+with wonder which gradually gave way to amusement. At length leaning
+forward with a dimpling smile, she interrogated very politely and quite
+lucidly.
+
+"Pardon me, sir, you are--? Ah, the doctor, no doubt! My poor head, you
+see!" and she drew her fingers across her forehead.
+
+Tims started, and grabbed her wig, as was her wont in moments of
+agitation. She stood transfixed, the teacup at a dangerous angle in her
+extended hand.
+
+"Good God!" she ejaculated. "You are mad and no mistake, my poor old
+girl."
+
+The "old girl" made a supreme effort to contain herself, and then burst
+into a pretty, rippling laugh in which there was nothing familiar to
+Tims's ear. She rose from her chair vivaciously and took the cup from
+Tims's hand, to deposit it in safety on the chimney piece.
+
+"How silly I was!" she cried, regarding Tims sparklingly. "Do you know I
+was not quite sure whether you were a man or a woman. Of course I see
+now, and I'm so glad. I do like men, you know, so much better than
+women."
+
+"Milly," retorted Tims, sternly, settling her wig. "You are mad, you
+need not be bad as well. But it's my own fault for giving you that
+brandy. You know as well as I do that I hate men--nasty, selfish,
+guzzling, conceited, guffawing brutes! I never wanted to speak to a man
+in my life, except in the way of business."
+
+Milly waved her amber head gracefully for a moment as though at a loss,
+then returned playfully, "That must be because the women spoil you so."
+
+Tims smiled sardonically; but regaining her sense of the situation, out
+of which she had been momentarily shocked, applied herself to the
+problem of calling back poor Milly's wandering mind.
+
+"Sit down, my girl," she said, abruptly, putting her arm around Milly's
+body, so soft and slender in the scanty folds of the blue dressing-gown.
+Milly obeyed precipitately. Then drawing a small chair close to her,
+Tims said in gentle tones which could hardly have been recognized as
+hers:
+
+"M., darling, do you know where you are?"
+
+Milly turned on her a face from which the unnatural vivacity had fallen
+like a mask; the appealing face of a poor lost child.
+
+"Am I--am I--in a _maison de santé_?" she asked tremulously, fixing her
+blue eyes on Tims, full of piteous anxiety.
+
+"A lunatic asylum? Certainly not," replied Tims. "Now don't begin
+crying again, old girl. That's how the trouble began."
+
+"Was it?" asked Milly, dreamily. "I thought it was--" she paused,
+frowning before her in the air, as though trying to pursue with her
+bodily vision some recollection which had flickered across her
+consciousness only to disappear.
+
+"Well, never mind that now," said Tims, hastily; "get your bearings
+right first. You're in Ascham College."
+
+"A College!" repeated Milly vaguely, but in a moment her face
+brightened, "I know. A place of learning where they have professors and
+things. Are you a professor?"
+
+"No, I'm a student. So are you."
+
+Milly looked fixedly at Tims, then smiled a melancholy smile. "I see,"
+she said, "we're both studying--medicine--medicine for the mind." She
+stood up, locked her hands behind her head in her soft hair and wailed
+miserably. "Oh, why won't some kind person come and tell me where I am,
+and what I was before I came here?"
+
+Tears of wounded feelings sprang to Tims's eyes. "Milly, my beauty!" she
+cried despairingly, "I'm trying to be kind to you and tell you
+everything you want to know. Your name is Mildred Flaxman and you used
+to live in Oxford here, but now all your people have gone to Australia
+because your father's got a deanery there."
+
+"Have they left me here, mad and by myself?" asked Milly; "have I no one
+to look after me, no one to give me a home?"
+
+"I suppose Lady Thomson or the Fletchers would," returned Tims, "but you
+haven't wanted one. You've been quite happy at Ascham. Do try and
+remember. Can't you remember getting your First in Mods. and how you've
+been working to get one in Greats? Your brain's been right enough until
+to-day, old girl, and it will be again. I expect it's a case of collapse
+of memory from overwork. Things will come back to you soon and I'll help
+you all I can. Do try and recollect me--Tims." There was an unmistakable
+choke in Tims's voice. "We have been such chums. The others are all
+pretty nasty to me sometimes--they seem to think I'm a grinning, wooden
+Aunt Sally, stuck up for them to shy jokes at. But you've never once
+been nasty to me, M., and there's precious few things I wouldn't do to
+help you. So don't go talking to me as though there weren't any one in
+the world who cared a brass farthing about you."
+
+"I'm sure I'm most thankful to find I have got some one here who cares
+about me," returned Milly, meekly, passing her hand across her eyes for
+lack of a handkerchief. "You see, it's dreadful for me to be like this.
+I seem to know what things are, and yet I don't know. A little while ago
+it seemed to me I was just going to remember something--something
+different from what you've told me. But now it's all gone again. Oh,
+please give me a handkerchief!"
+
+Tims opened one of Milly's tidy drawers and sought for a handkerchief.
+When she had found it, Milly was standing before the high
+chimney-piece, over which hung a long, low mirror about a foot wide and
+divided into three parts by miniature pilasters of tarnished gilt. The
+mirror, too, was tarnished here and there, but it had been a good glass
+and showed undistorted the blue Delft jars on the mantel-shelf, glimpses
+of flickering firelight in the room, amber hair and the tear-bedewed
+roses of a flushed young face. Suddenly Milly thrust the jars aside,
+seized the candle from the table, and, holding it near her face, looked
+intently, anxiously in the glass. The anxiety vanished in a moment, but
+not the intentness. She went on looking. Tims had always perceived
+Milly's beauty--which had an odd way of slipping through the world
+unobserved--but had never seen her look so lovely as now, her eyes wide
+and brilliant, and her upper lip curved rosily over a shining glimpse of
+her white teeth.
+
+Beauty had an extraordinary fascination for Tims, poor step-child of
+nature! Now she stood looking at the reflection of Milly without
+noticing how in the background her own strange, wizened face peered dim
+and grotesque from the tarnished mirror, like the picture of a witch or
+a goblin behind the fair semblance of some princess in a fairy tale.
+
+"I do remember myself partly," said Milly, doubtfully; "and yet--somehow
+not quite. I suppose I shall remember you and this queer place soon, if
+they don't put me into a mad-house at once."
+
+"They sha'n't," said Tims, decisively. "Trust to me, M., and I'll see
+you through. But I'm afraid you'll have to give up all thought of your
+First."
+
+"My what," asked Milly, turning round inquiringly.
+
+"Your First Class, your place, you know, in the Final Honors School,
+Lit. Hum., the biggest examination of the lot."
+
+"Do I want it very much, my First?"
+
+"Want it? I should just think you do want it!"
+
+Milly stared at the fire for a minute, warming one foot before she spoke
+again. Then:
+
+"How funny of me!" she observed, meditatively.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Tims's programme happened to be full on the following day, so that it
+was half-past twelve before she knocked at Milly's door and was
+admitted. Milly stood in the middle of the room in an attitude of
+energy, with her small wardrobe lying about her on the floor in
+ignominious heaps.
+
+"Tell me, Tims," said Milly, after the first inquiries, "are those
+positively all the clothes I possess?"
+
+"Of course they are, M. What do you want with more?"
+
+"Are they in the fashion?" asked Milly, anxiously.
+
+Tims stared.
+
+"Fashion! Good Lord, M.! What does it matter whether you look the same
+as every fool in the street or not?"
+
+"Oh, Tims!" cried Milly, laughing that pretty rippling laugh so strange
+in Tims's ears. "I was quite right when I made a mistake, you're just
+like a man. All the better. But you can't expect me not to care a bit
+about my clothes like you, you really can't."
+
+Tims drew herself up.
+
+"You're wrong, my girl, I'm a deal fonder of frocks than you are. I
+always think," she added, looking before her dreamily, "that I was
+meant to be a very good dresser, only I was brought up too economical."
+Generally speaking, when Tims had uttered one of her deepest and truest
+feelings, she would glance around, suddenly alert and suspicious to
+surprise the twinkle in her auditor's eye. But in the clear blue of
+Milly Flaxman's quiet eyes, she had ceased to look for that tormenting
+twinkle, that spark which seemed destined to dance about her from the
+cradle to the grave.
+
+Presently she found herself hanging up Milly's clothes while Milly paid
+no attention; for she alternately stood before the glass in the dark
+corner, and kneeled on the hearth-rug, curling-tongs in hand. And the
+hair, the silky soft amber hair, which could be twisted into a tiny ball
+or fluffed into a golden fleece at will, was being tossed up and pulled
+down, combed here and brushed there, altogether handled with a zeal and
+patience to which it had been a stranger since the days when it had been
+the pride of the nursery. Tims the untidy, as one in a dream, went on
+tidying the room she was accustomed to see so immaculate.
+
+"There!" cried Milly, turning, "that's how I wear it, isn't it?"
+
+"Good Lord, no!" exclaimed Tims, contemplating the transformed Milly.
+"It suits you, M., in a way, but it looks queer too. The others will all
+be hooting if you go down-stairs like that."
+
+Milly plumped into a chair irritably.
+
+"How ever am I to know how I did my hair if I can't remember? Please do
+it for me."
+
+Tims smiled sardonically.
+
+"I'll lend you my hair," she said; "the second best. But _do_ your hair!
+You really are as mad as a hatter."
+
+Milly shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You can't? Then I keep it like this," she said.
+
+An argument ensued. Tims left the room to try and find a photograph of
+Milly as she had been.
+
+When she returned she found her friend standing in absorbed
+contemplation of a book in her hand.
+
+"This is Greek, isn't it?" she asked, holding it up. Her face wore a
+little frown as of strained attention.
+
+"Right you are," shrieked Tims in accents of relief. "Greek it is. Can
+you read it?"
+
+"Not yet," replied Milly, flushing with excitement, "but I shall soon, I
+know I shall. Last night I couldn't make head or tail of the books. Now
+I understand right enough what they are, and I know some are in Greek
+and some in English. I can't read either yet, but it's all coming back
+gradually, like the daylight coming in at the window this morning."
+
+"Hooray! Hooray!" shouted Tims. "You'll be reading as hard as ever in a
+week if I don't look after you. But see here, my girl, you've given me a
+nasty jar, and I'm not going to let you break your heart or crack your
+brain in a wild-goose chase. You can't get that First, you know; you're
+on a fairly good Second Class level, and you'd better make up your mind
+to stay there."
+
+"A fairly good Second Class level!" repeated Milly, still turning the
+leaves of the book. "That doesn't sound very exhilarating--and I rather
+think I shall do as I like about staying there."
+
+Tims began to heat.
+
+"Well, that's what Stewart said about you. I don't believe I told you
+half plain enough what Stewart did say, for fear of hurting your
+feelings. He said you are a good scholar, but barring that, you weren't
+at all clever."
+
+Milly looked up from her book; but she was not tearful. There was a curl
+in her lip and the light of battle in her eye.
+
+"Stewart said that, did he? Now if I were a gentleman I should
+say--'damn his impudence'--and 'who the devil is Stewart'; but then I'm
+not. You can say it."
+
+Tims stared. "Oh, come, I say!" she exclaimed. "I don't swear, I only
+quote. But my goodness, when you remember who Stewart is, you'll
+be--well, pained to think of the language you're using about him."
+
+"Why?" asked Milly, her head riding disdainfully on her slender neck.
+
+"Because he's your tutor and lecturer--and a regular tiptop man at Greek
+and all that--and you--you respect him most awfully."
+
+"Do I?" cried Milly--"did perhaps in my salad days. I've no respect
+whatever for professors now, my good Tims. I know what they're like.
+Here's Stewart for you."
+
+She took up a pen and a scrap of paper and dashed off a clever ludicrous
+sketch of a man with long hair, an immense brow, and spectacles.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Tims; "that's not a bit like him."
+
+She held the paper in her hand and looked fixedly at it. Milly had been
+wont seriously to grieve over her hopeless lack of artistic talent and
+she had never attempted to caricature. Tims was thinking of a young
+fellow of a college who had lately died of brain disease. In the earlier
+stages of his insanity, it had been remarked that he had an originality
+which had not been his when in a normal state. What if her friend were
+developing the same terrible disease? If it were so, it was no use
+fussing, since there was no remedy. Still, she felt a desperate need to
+take some sort of precaution.
+
+"If I were you, M.," she said, "I'd go to bed and keep very quiet for a
+day or two. You're so--so odd, and excited, they'd notice it if you went
+down-stairs."
+
+"Would they?" asked Milly, suddenly sobered. "Would they say I was mad?"
+An expression of fear came into her face, and its strangely luminous
+eyes travelled around the room with a look as of some trapped creature
+seeking escape.
+
+There was an awkward pause.
+
+"I'm not mad," affirmed Milly, swallowing with a dry throat. "I'm
+perfectly sensible, but any one would be odd and excited too who
+was--was as I am--with a number of words and ideas floating in my mind
+without my having the least idea where they spring from. Please, Tims
+dear, tell me how I am to behave. I should so hate to be thought queer,
+wanting in any way."
+
+Tims considered.
+
+"For one thing, you mustn't talk such a lot. You never have been one for
+chattering; and lately, of course, with your overwork, you've been
+particularly quiet. Don't talk, M., that's my advice."
+
+"Very well," replied Milly, gloomily.
+
+Tims hesitated and went on:
+
+"But I don't see how you're going to hide up this business about your
+memory. I wish you'd let me tell old B., anyhow."
+
+"I won't have any one told," cried Milly. "Not a creature. If only
+you'll help me, dear, dear Tims--you will help me, won't you?--I shall
+soon be all right, and no one except you will ever know. No one will be
+able to shrug their shoulders and say, whatever I do, 'Of course she's
+crazy.' I should hate it so! I know I can get on if I try. I'm much
+cleverer than you and that silly old Stewart think. Promise me, promise
+me, darling Tims, you won't betray me!"
+
+Tims was not weak-minded, but she was very tender-hearted and
+exceedingly susceptible to personal charms. She ought not, she knew she
+ought not, to have yielded, but she did. She promised. Yet in her
+friend's own interest, she contended that Milly must confess to a
+certain failure of memory from over-fatigue, if only as a pretext for
+dropping her work for a while. It was agreed that Milly should remain in
+bed for several days, and she did so; less bored than might have been
+expected, because she had the constant excitement of this or that bit of
+knowledge filtering back into her mind. But this knowledge was purely
+intellectual. With Tims's help she had recovered her reading powers, and
+although she felt at first only a vague recognition of something
+familiar in the sense of what she read, it was evident that she was fast
+regaining the use of the treasures stored in her brain by years of
+dogged and methodical work. But the facts and personalities which had
+made her own life seemed to have vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind."
+
+Tims, having primed her well beforehand, brought in the more important
+girls to see her, and by dint of a cautious reserve she passed very well
+with them, as with Miss Burt and Miss Walker. Tims seemed to feel much
+more nervous than Milly herself did when she joined the other students
+as usual.
+
+There were moments when Tims gasped with the certainty that the
+revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was
+about to be made. Then Mildred--for so, despising the soft diminutive,
+she now desired to be called--by some extraordinary exertion of tact and
+ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of
+it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that
+Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given up worrying
+about her Schools, and that no one would have believed how much prettier
+she could make herself by doing her hair a different way.
+
+Miss Burt, however, was somewhat puzzled and uneasy. Although Milly was
+looking unusually well, it was evident that all was not quite right with
+her, for she complained of a failure of memory, a mental fatigue which
+made it impossible for her to go to lectures, and she seemed to have
+lost all interest in the Schools, which had so lately been for her the
+"be-all" as well as the "end-all here." Miss Burt knew Milly's only near
+relation in England, Lady Thomson, intimately; and for that reason
+hesitated to write to her. She knew that Beatrice Thomson had no
+patience with the talk--often silly enough--about girls overworking
+their brains. She herself had never been laid up in her life, except
+when her leg was broken, and her views on the subject of ill-health were
+marked. She regarded the catching of scarlet-fever or influenza as an
+act of cowardice, consumption or any organic disease as scarcely, if at
+all, less disgraceful than drunkenness or fraud, while the countless
+little ailments to which feminine flesh seems more particularly heir she
+condemned as the most deplorable of female failings, except the love of
+dress.
+
+Eventually Miss Burt did write to Lady Thomson, cautiously. Lady Thomson
+replied that she was coming up to town on Thursday, and could so arrange
+her journey as to have an hour and a half in Oxford. She would be at
+Ascham at three-thirty. Mildred rushed to Tims with the agitating news
+and both were greatly upset by it. However, Aunt Beatrice had got to be
+faced sometime or other and Mildred's spirit rose to the encounter.
+
+She had by this time provided herself with another dress, encouraged to
+do so by the money in hand left by the frugal Milly the First. She had
+got a plain tailor-made coat and skirt, in a becoming shade of brown;
+and with the unbecoming hard collar _de rigueur_ in those days, she wore
+a turquoise blue tie, which seemed to reflect the color of her eyes. And
+in spite of Tims's dissuasions, she put on the new dress on Thursday,
+and declined to screw her hair up in the old way, as advised.
+
+Accordingly on Thursday at twenty-five minutes to four, Mildred
+appeared, in answer to a summons, in the quiet-colored, pleasant
+drawing-room at Ascham, with its French windows giving on to the lawn,
+where some of the girls were playing hockey, not without cries. Her
+first view of Aunt Beatrice was a pleasant surprise. A tall, upstanding
+figure, draped in a long, soft cloak trimmed with fur, a handsome face
+with marked features, marked eyebrows, a fine complexion and bright
+brown eyes under a wide-brimmed felt hat.
+
+Having exchanged the customary peck, she waited in silence till Mildred
+had seated herself. Then surveying her niece with satisfaction:
+
+"Come, Milly," said she, in a full, pleasant voice; "I don't see much
+signs of the nervous invalid about you. Really, Polly," turning to Miss
+Burt, "she has not looked so well for a long time."
+
+"She's been much better since she dropped her work," replied Miss Burt.
+
+"Taking plenty of fresh air and exercise, I suppose"--Aunt Beatrice
+smiled kindly on her niece--"I'm afraid I've kept you from your hockey
+this afternoon, Milly."
+
+"Oh no, Aunt Beatrice, certainly not," replied Milly, with the extreme
+courtesy of nervousness. "I never play hockey now."
+
+Lady Thomson turned to the Head with a shade of triumph in her
+satisfaction.
+
+"There, Polly! What did I tell you? I was sure there was something else
+at the bottom of it. Steady work, methodically done, never hurt anybody.
+But of course if she's given up exercise, her liver or something was
+bound to get out of order."
+
+"No, really, I take lots of exercise," interposed Milly; "only I don't
+care for hockey, it's such a horrid, rough, dirty game; don't you think
+so? And Miss Walker got a front tooth broken last winter."
+
+Lady Thomson looked at her in a surprised way.
+
+"Well, if you've not been playing hockey, what exercise have you been
+taking?"
+
+"Walks," replied Milly, feebly, feeling herself on the wrong track; "I
+go walks with Ti--with Flora Timson when she has time."
+
+Aunt Beatrice looked at the matter judicially.
+
+"Of course, games are best for the physique. Look at men. Still, walking
+will do, if one takes proper walks. I hope Flora Timson takes you good
+long walks."
+
+"Indeed she does!" cried Milly. "Immense! She walks a dreadful pace, and
+we get over stiles and things."
+
+"Immense is a little vague. How far do you go on an average?"
+
+Mildred's notions of distance were vague. "Quite two miles, I'm sure,"
+she responded, cheerfully.
+
+Aunt Beatrice made no comment. She looked steadily and scrutinizingly
+at her niece, and in a kind but deepened voice told her to go up to her
+room, whither she, Lady Thomson, would follow in a few minutes, just to
+see how the Mantegnas looked now they were framed.
+
+As soon as the door had closed behind Mildred, she turned to Miss Burt.
+"You're right, in a way, Polly, after all. There is something odd about
+Milly, but I think it's affectation. Did you hear her answer? Two miles!
+When to my knowledge she can easily walk ten."
+
+Meantime, Mildred mounted slowly to her room. She had tidied it under
+Tims's instructions and had nothing to do but to sit down and think
+until Lady Thomson's masculine step was heard outside her door.
+
+Aunt Beatrice came in and laid aside her hat and cloak, showing a dress
+of rough gray tweed, and short--so far a tribute to the practical--but
+otherwise made on some awkward artistic or hygienic principle. Her
+glossy brown hair was brushed back and twisted tight, as Milly's used to
+be, but with different effect, because of its heaviness and length.
+
+"Why have you crammed up one of your windows with a dressing-glass?"
+asked Aunt Beatrice, putting a picture straight.
+
+"Because I can't see myself in that dark corner," returned Mildred,
+demurely meek, but waiting her opportunity.
+
+"See yourself! My dear child, you hardly ever want to see yourself, if
+you are habitually neat and dressed sensibly. I see you've adopted the
+mannish style. That's a phase of vanity. You'll come back to the
+beautiful and natural before long."
+
+Mildred leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.
+
+"I don't think so, Aunt Beatrice. I've settled the dress question once
+and for all. I've found a clean, tidy, convenient style of dress and I
+can't waste time thinking about altering it again."
+
+"You don't seem to mind wasting it on doing your hair," returned Aunt
+Beatrice, smiling, but not grimly, for she enjoyed logical fencing, even
+to her opponent's fair hits.
+
+"If I had beautiful hair like yours, I shouldn't need to," replied
+Mildred. "But you know how endy and untidy mine always was."
+
+Aunt Beatrice, embarrassed by the compliment, looked at her watch. "It
+seems as if we women can't escape our fate," she said. "Here we are
+gabbling about dress when we've plenty of important things to talk over.
+Miss Burt wrote to me that you were overworked, run down, nerves out of
+order, and all the usual nonsense. I'm thankful to find you looking
+remarkably well. I should like to know what this humbug about not being
+able to work means."
+
+"It means that--well, I simply can't," returned Mildred, earnestly this
+time. "I can't remember things."
+
+"You must be able to remember; unless your brain's diseased, which is
+most improbable. But I ought to take you to a brain specialist, I
+suppose."
+
+Milly changed color. "Please, oh please, Aunt Beatrice, don't do that!"
+
+Lady Thomson, in fact, hardly meant it; for her niece's appearance was
+unmistakably healthy. However, the threat told.
+
+"I shall if you don't improve. I can't understand you. Either you're
+hysterical or you've got one of those abominable fits of frivolity which
+come on women like drink on men, and destroy their careers. I thought we
+had both set our hearts on your getting another First."
+
+"But, Aunt Beatrice, they say I can't. They say I'm not clever enough."
+
+"Oh, that's what they say, is it?" Lady Thomson smiled in calm but deep
+contempt. "How do they explain the idiots who have got Firsts? Archibald
+Toovey, for instance?" Her eyes met her niece's, and both smiled.
+
+"Ah, yes! Mr. Toovey," returned Milly, who had met Archibald Toovey at
+the Fletchers', and converted his patronizing courtship into imbecile
+raptures.
+
+"But that quite explains your losing an interest in your work. Just for
+once, I should like to take you away before the end of term. We would go
+straight to Rome next Monday. We shall meet the Breretons there, and go
+fully over the new excavations and discoveries, besides the old things,
+which will be new, of course, to you. Then we will go on to Naples, do
+the galleries and Pompeii, and come back by Florence and Paris before
+Christmas. By that time you will be ready to settle down to your work
+steadily again and forget all this nonsense."
+
+Mildred's face had lighted up momentarily at the word "Rome." Then she
+sucked her under lip and looked at the fire. When Lady Thomson's
+programme was ended, she made a pause before she said, slowly:
+
+"Thank you so much, dear Aunt Beatrice. I should love to go, but--I
+don't think--no, I don't think I'd better. You see, there's the
+expense."
+
+"Of course I don't expect you to pay for yourself. I take you."
+
+"How very kind and sweet of you! But--well, do you know, you've
+encouraged me so about that. First, I feel now as though I could sit
+down and get it straight away. I will get it, Aunt Beatrice, if only to
+make that old Professor look foolish."
+
+Lady Thomson, though disappointed in a way, felt that Milly Flaxman was
+doing credit to her principles, showing a spirit worthy of her family.
+She did not urge the Roman plan; but content with a victory over "nerves
+and the usual nonsense," withdrew triumphant to the railway station.
+
+Tims came in when she was gone and heard about the Roman offer.
+
+"You refused, when Aunt Beatrice was going to plank down the dollars?
+M., you are a fool!"
+
+"No, Tims," Mildred answered, deliberately; "you see, I don't feel sure
+yet whether I can manage Aunt Beatrice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Oxford is beautiful at all times, beautiful even now, in spite of the
+cruel disfigurement inflicted upon her by the march of modern vulgarity,
+but she has three high festivals which clothe her with a special glory
+and crown her with their several crowns. One is the Festival of May,
+when her hoary walls and ancient enclosures overflow with emerald and
+white, rose-color and purple and gold, a foam of leafage and blossom,
+breaking spray-like over edges of stone, gray as sea-worn rocks. And all
+about the city the green meadows and groves burn with many tones of
+color, brilliant as enamels or as precious stones, yet of a texture
+softer and richer, more full of delicate shadows than any velvet mantle
+that ever was woven for a queen.
+
+Another Festival comes with that strayed bacchanal October, who hangs
+her scarlet and wine-colored garlands on cloister and pinnacle, on wall
+and tower. And gradually the foliage of grove and garden, turns through
+shade of bluish metallic green, to the mingled splendor of pale gold and
+beaten bronze and deepest copper, half glowing and half drowned in the
+low, mellow sunlight, and purple mist of autumn.
+
+Last comes the Festival of Mid-winter, the Festival of the Frost. The
+rime comes, or the snow, and the long lines of the buildings, the
+fret-work of stone, the battlements, carved pinnacles and images of
+saints or devils, stand up with clear glittering outlines, or clustered
+about and overhung with fantasies of ice and snow. Behind, the deep-blue
+sky itself seems to glitter too. The frozen floods glitter in the
+meadows, and every little twig on the bare trees. There is no color in
+the earth, but the atmosphere of the river valley clothes distant hills
+and trees and hedges with ultramarine vapor. Towards evening the mist
+climbs, faintly veiling the tall groves of elms and the piled masses of
+the city itself. The sunset begins to burn red behind Magdalen Tower,
+all the towers and aery pinnacles rise blue yet distinct against it. And
+this festival is not only one of nature. The glittering ice is spread
+over the meadows, and, everywhere from morning till moonlight, the
+rhythmical ring of the skate and the sound of voices sonorous with the
+joy of living, travel far on the frosty air. Sometimes the very rivers
+are frozen, and the broad, bare highway of the Thames and the
+tree-sheltered path of the Cherwell are alive with black figures,
+heel-winged like Mercury, flying swiftly on no errand, but for the mere
+delight of flying.
+
+It was early on such a shining festival morning that Mildred, a willowy,
+brown-clad figure, came down to a piece of ice in an outlying meadow.
+Her shadow moved beside her in the sunshine, blue on the whiteness of
+the snow, which crunched crisp and thin under her feet. She carried a
+black bag in her hand--sign of the serious skater, and her face was
+serious, even apprehensive. She saw with relief that except the sweepers
+there was no one on the ice. A row of shivering men, buttoned up to the
+chin in seedy coats, rose from the chairs where they awaited their
+appointed prey, and all yelled to her at once. She crowned the hopes of
+one by occupying his seat, but the important task of putting on the
+bladed boots she could depute to none. Tims, whom no appeal of
+friendship could induce to shiver on the ice, had told her that Milly
+was an expert skater. She was, in fact, correct and accomplished, but
+there was a stiffness and sense of effort about her style, a want of
+that appearance of free and daring abandonment to the stroke of the
+blade once launched, that makes the beauty of skating. Mildred knew only
+that she had to live up to the reputation of a mighty skater, and was
+not sure whether she could even stand on these knifelike edges. She
+laced one boot, happy in the belief that at any rate there would be no
+witness to her voyage of discovery. But a renewed yelling among the men
+made her lift her head, and there, striding swiftly over the crisp snow,
+came a tall, handsome young man, with a pointed, silky black beard and
+fine, short-sighted black eyes, aglow with the pleasure of the frosty
+sun.
+
+It was Ian Stewart. The young lady whom he discovered to be Miss Flaxman
+just as he reached the chairs, was much more annoyed than he at the
+encounter. Here was an acquaintance, it seemed, and one provided with
+the bag and orange which Tims had warned her was the mark of the
+serious skater. They exchanged remarks on the weather and she went on
+lacing her other boot in great trepidation. The moment was come. She did
+not recoil from the insult of being seized under her elbows by two men
+and carefully planted on her feet as though she were most likely to
+tumble down. So far as she knew, she was likely to. But, lo! no sooner
+was she up than muscles and nerves, recking nothing of the brain's blind
+denial, asserted their own acquaintance with the art of balance and
+motion. Wondering, and for a few minutes still apprehensive, but
+presently lost in the pleasure of the thing, Mildred began to fly over
+the ice. And the dark, handsome man who had taken off his cap to her
+became supremely unimportant. Unluckily the piece of flood-ice was not
+endless and she had to come back. He was circling around an orange, and
+she, throwing herself instinctively on to the outside edge, came down
+towards him in great, sweeping curves, absorbed in the delight of this
+motion, so new yet so perfectly under her control. Ian Stewart,
+perceiving that the girl was absolutely unconscious of his presence,
+blushed in his soul to think that he had been induced to believe himself
+to be of importance in her eyes.
+
+"Miss Flaxman," he said, skating up to her, "I see you have no orange.
+Can't we skate a figure together around mine?"
+
+"I've forgotten all about figures," replied Mildred, with truth.
+
+"Try some simple turns," he urged. "There are plenty here," and he held
+up a book in his hand like the one she had found in her own black bag.
+But it had "Ian Stewart, Durham College," written clearly on the
+outside.
+
+"So that's Stewart!" thought Milly; and she could not help laughing at
+her own thoughts, which had created him in a different image.
+
+Stewart did not know why she laughed, but he found the sound and sight
+of the laugh new and charming.
+
+"It's awfully kind of you to undertake my education in another branch,
+Mr. Stewart," she answered, pouting, "in spite of having found out that
+I'm not at all clever."
+
+She smiled at him mutinously, sweeping towards the orange with head
+thrown back over her left shoulder. Momentarily the poise of her head
+recalled the attitude of the portrait of Lady Hammerton, beckoning her
+unseen companions to that far-off mysterious mountain country, where the
+torrents shine so whitely through the mist and the red line of sunset
+speaks of coming night.
+
+Stewart colored, slightly confused. This brutal statement did not seem
+to him to represent the just and candid account he had given Miss Walker
+of Miss Flaxman's abilities.
+
+"Some one's been misreporting me, I see," he returned. "But anyhow, on
+the ice, Miss Flaxman, it's you who are the Professor; I who am the
+pupil. So I offer you a fair revenge."
+
+Accordingly, Mildred soon found herself placed at a due distance from
+the orange, with Stewart equally distant from it on the other side.
+After a few minutes of extreme uneasiness, she discovered that although
+she had to halt at each fresh call, she had a kind of mechanical
+familiarity with the simple figures which he gave her.
+
+Stewart, though learned, was human; and to sweep now at the opposite
+pole to his companion, now with a swing of clasping hands at the centre
+of their delightful dance, his eyes always perforce on his charming
+partner, and her eyes on him, undeniably raised the pleasure of skating
+to a higher power than if he had circled the orange in company with mere
+man.
+
+So they fleeted the too-short time in the sparkling blue and white
+world, drinking the air like celestial wine.
+
+The Festival of the Frost had fallen in the Christmas Vacation, and
+Oxford society in vacation is essentially different from that of
+Term-time, when it is overflowed by men who are but birds of passage,
+coming no one inquires whence, and flitting few know whither. The party
+that picnicked, played hockey, danced and figured on their skates
+through the weeks of the frost, was in those days almost like a family
+party. So it happened that Ian Stewart met the new Miss Flaxman in an
+atmosphere of friendly ease that years of term-time society would not
+have afforded him. How new she was he did not guess, but supposed the
+change to be in his own eyes. Other people, however, saw it. Her very
+skating was different. It had gained in grace and vigor, but she was
+seldom seen wooing the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had
+acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she
+initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing
+and hand-in-hand figures in general.
+
+Ian Stewart, too, neglected the orange and went in for hand-in-hand
+figures that season. Other things, too, he neglected; work, which he had
+never before allowed to suffer measurably from causes within his
+control; and far from blushing for his idleness, he rejoiced in it, as
+the surest sign of all that for him the Festival of Spring had come in
+the time of nature's frost.
+
+It was not only the crisp air, the frequent sun, the joyous flights over
+the ringing ice that made his blood run faster through his veins and
+laughter come more easily to his lips; that aroused him in the morning
+with a strange sense of delight, as though some spirit had awakened him
+with a glad reveille at the window of his soul. He, too, was in Arcady.
+That in itself should be sufficient joy; he knew he must restrain his
+impatience for more. Not till the summer, when the lady of his heart had
+ceased to be also his pupil, must he make avowal of his love.
+
+Mildred on her part found Stewart the most attractive of the men with
+whom she was acquainted. As yet in this new existence of hers, she had
+not moved outside the Oxford circle--a circle exceptional in England,
+because in it intellectual eminence, not always recognized, when
+recognized receives as much honor as is accorded to a great fortune or
+a great name in ordinary society. Stewart's abilities were of a kind to
+be recognized by the Academic world. He was already known in the
+Universities of the Continent and America. Oxford was proud of him; and
+although Mildred had no desire to marry as yet, it gratified her taste
+and her vanity to win him for a lover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Mildred had had no desire to spend her vacations with Lady Thomson, and
+on the ground of her reading for the Schools, had been allowed to spend
+them in Oxford. Tims, who had no relations, remained with her. She had
+for Mildred a sentiment almost like that of a parent, besides an
+admiration for which she was slightly ashamed, feeling it to be
+something of a slur on the memory of Milly, her first and kindest
+friend.
+
+Mildred had recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her
+former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work for her
+First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon
+her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native
+passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the
+mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness,
+vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the
+contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the
+"Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in
+contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been
+wont to express her ideas. But in the region of actual knowledge, she
+now and again perpetrated some immense and childish blunder, which made
+the teachers, who nursed and trained her like a jockey or a race-horse,
+tremble for the results of the Greats Examination.
+
+All too swiftly the date of the Schools loomed on the horizon; drew
+near; was come. The June weather was glorious on the river, but in the
+town, above all in the Examination Schools, it was very hot. The sun
+glared pitilessly in through the great windows of the big T-shaped room,
+till the temperature was that of a greenhouse. The young men in their
+black coats and white ties looked enviously at the girl candidate, the
+only one, in her white waist and light skirt. They envied her, too, her
+apparent indifference to a crisis that paled the masculine cheek. In
+fact, Mildred was nervous, but her nerves were strung up to so high a
+pitch that she was sensitive neither to temperature nor to fatigue, nor
+to want of sleep. And at the service of her quick intelligence and ready
+pen lay all the stored knowledge of Milly the First.
+
+On the last day, when the last paper was over, Tims came and found her
+in the big hall, planting the pins in her hat with an almost feverish
+energy. Although it was five o'clock, she said she wanted air, not tea.
+The last men had trooped listlessly down the steps of the Schools and
+the two girls stood there while Mildred drew on her gloves. The sun
+wearing to the northwest, shone down that curve of the High Street which
+all Europe cannot match. The slanting gold illumined the gray face of
+the University and the wide pavement, where the black-gowned victims of
+the Schools threaded their sombre way through groups of joyous youths in
+flannels and ladies in summer attire. On the opposite side cool shadows
+were beginning to invade the sunshine, to slant across the old houses,
+straight-roofed or gabled, the paladian pile of Queen's, the mediæval
+front of All Souls, with its single and perfect green tree, leading up
+to the consummation of the great spire of St. Mary's.
+
+Already, from the tall bulk of the nave, a shadow fell broad across the
+pavement. But still the heat of the day reverberated from the stones
+about them. They turned down to the Botanical Gardens and paced that
+gray enclosure, full of the pride of branches and the glory of flowers
+and overhung by the soaring vision of Magdalen Tower. Mildred was
+walking fast and talking volubly about the Examination and everything
+else.
+
+"Look here, old girl," said Tims at last, when they reached for the
+second time the seat under the willow trellis, "I'm going to sit down
+here, unless you'll come to tea at Boffin's."
+
+"I don't want to sit down," returned Mildred, seating herself; "or to
+have tea or anything. I want to be just going, going, going. I feel as
+though if I stop for a minute something horrid will happen."
+
+Tims wrinkled her whole face anxiously.
+
+"Don't do that, Tims," cried Mildred, sharply. "You look hideous."
+
+Tims colored, rose and walked away. She suddenly thought, with tears in
+her eyes, of the old Milly who would never have spoken to her like
+that. By the time she had reached the little basin in the middle of the
+garden, where the irises grew, Mildred had caught her up.
+
+"Tims, dear old Tims! What a wretch I am! I couldn't help letting off
+steam on something--you don't know what I feel like."
+
+Tims allowed herself to be pacified, but in her heart there remained a
+yearning for her earlier and gentler friend--that Milly Flaxman who was
+certainly not dead, yet as certainly gone out of existence.
+
+It was towards the end of the last week of Term, and the gayeties of
+Commemoration had already begun. Mildred threw herself into them with
+feverish enjoyment. She seemed to grudge even the hours that must be
+lost in the unconsciousness of sleep. The Iretons, cousins from India,
+who had never known the former Milly, took a house in Oxford for a week.
+She went with them to three College balls and a Masonic, and spent the
+days in a carnival of luncheon and boating-parties. She attracted plenty
+of admiration, and enjoyed herself wildly, yet also purposefully;
+because she was trying to get rid of that haunting feeling that if she
+stopped a minute "something horrid would happen."
+
+Stewart meantime was finding love not so entirely beautiful and
+delightful a thing as he had at first imagined it. In his dreamy way he
+had overlooked the fact of Commemoration, and planned when Term was over
+to find Mildred constantly at the Fletchers' and to be able to arrange
+quiet days on the river. But if he found her there, she was always in
+company, and though she made herself as charming to him as usual, she
+showed no disposition to forsake all others and cleave only to him. He
+was not a dancing man, and suffered cruelly on the evenings when he knew
+her to be at balls, and fancied all her partners in love with her.
+
+But on the Thursday after Commemoration, the Fletchers gave a strawberry
+tea at Wytham, as a farewell festivity to their cousins. And Ian Stewart
+was there. With Mrs. Fletcher's connivance, he took Mildred home alone
+in a canoe, by the deep and devious stream which runs under Wytham
+woods. She went on talking with a vivacious gayety which was almost
+foolish. He saw that it was unreal and that her nerves were at high
+tension. His own were also. He did not intend to propose to her that
+day; but he could no longer restrain himself, and he began to speak to
+her of his love.
+
+"Hush!" she cried, with a vehement gesture. "Not to-day! oh, not to-day!
+I can't bear it!" She put her head on her knee and moaned again, "Not
+to-day, I'm too tired, I really am. I can't bear it."
+
+This was all the answer he could get, and her manner left him in
+complete uncertainty as to whether she meant to accept or to refuse him.
+
+Tims had been at the strawberry tea too, and came into Mildred's room in
+the evening, curious to know what had happened. She found Mildred
+without a light, sitting, or rather lying in a wicker chair. When the
+candle was lighted she saw that Mildred was very pale and shivering.
+
+"You're overtired, my girl," she said. "That's what's the matter with
+you."
+
+"Oh, Tims," moaned Mildred. "I feel so ill and so frightened. I know
+something horrid's going to happen--I know it is."
+
+"Don't be a donkey," returned Tims. "I'll help you undress and then you
+turn in. You'll be as jolly as a sandboy to-morrow."
+
+But Mildred was crying tremulously. "Oh, Tims, how dreadful it would be
+to die!"
+
+"Idiot!" cried Tims, and shook Mildred with all her might. Mildred's
+tiny sobs turned into a shriek of laughter.
+
+"My goodness!" ejaculated Tims; "you're in hysterics!"
+
+"I know I am," gasped Mildred. "I was laughing to think of what Aunt
+Beatrice would say." And she giggled amid her tears.
+
+Tims insisted on her rising from the chair, undressing, and getting into
+bed. Then she sat by her in the half-dark, waiting for the miserable
+tears to leave off.
+
+"Don't cry, old girl, don't cry. Go to sleep and forget all about it,"
+she kept repeating, almost mechanically.
+
+At length leaning over the bed she saw that Mildred was asleep, lying
+straight on her bed with her feet crossed and her hands laid on her
+bosom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+About noon on Friday Milly Flaxman awoke. She lay very quiet, sleepy and
+comfortable, her eyes fixed idly on a curve in the jessamine-pattern
+paper opposite her bed. The windows were wide open, the blinds down and
+every now and again flapping softly, as a capricious little breeze went
+by, whispering through the leafy trees outside. There seemed nothing
+unusual in that; she always slept with her windows open. But as her
+senses emerged from those mists which lie on the surface of the river of
+sleep, she was conscious of a balmy warmth in the room, of an impression
+of bright sunshine behind the dark blinds, and of noises from the
+streets reaching her with a kind of sharpness associated with sunshine.
+She sat up, looked at her watch, and was shocked to find how late she
+had slept. She must have missed a lecture. Then the recollection of the
+dinner-party at the Fletchers', the verdict of Mr. Stewart on her chance
+of a First, and her own hysterical outburst returned to her,
+overpowering all outward impressions. She felt calm and well now, but
+unhappy and ashamed of herself. She put her feet out of bed and looked
+round mechanically for her dressing-gown and slippers. Their absence was
+unimportant, for no sense of chill struck through her thin night-gown
+to her warm body, and going to the window, she drew up the blind.
+
+The high June sun struck full upon her, hot and dazzling, but not so
+dazzling that she could not see the row of garden trees through whose
+bare branches she had yesterday descried the squalid roofs of the town.
+They were spreading now in a thick screen of fresh green leaves. She
+leaned out, as though further investigation might explain the
+phenomenon, and saw a red standard rose in full flower under her window.
+The thing was exactly like a dream, and she tried to wake up but could
+not. She was panic-stricken and trembling. Had she been very, very ill?
+Was it possible to be unconscious for six months? She looked at herself
+in a dressing-glass near the window, which she had never placed there,
+and saw that she was pale and had dark marks under her eyes, but not
+more so than had been the case in that yesterday so strangely and
+mysteriously removed in time. Her slender white arms and throat were as
+rounded as usual. And if she had been ill, why was she left alone like
+this? She found a dressing-gown not her own, and went on a voyage of
+discovery. But the other rooms on her floor were dismantled and
+tenantless. The girls were gone and the servants were "cleaning" in a
+distant part of the College. She felt incapable of getting into bed
+again and waiting for some one to come, so she began dressing herself
+with trembling hands. Every detail increased the sense of strangeness.
+There were a number of strange clothes, ball-dresses and others,
+hanging in her cupboard, strange odds and ends thrust confusedly into
+her bureau. She found at length a blue cotton frock of her own, which
+seemed just home from the wash. She had twisted up her hair and was
+putting on the blue frock, when she heard a step on the stairs, and
+paused with beating heart. Who was coming? How would the mystery be
+resolved? The door opened and Tims came in--the old Tims, wrinkled face,
+wig, and old straw hat on one side as usual.
+
+"Tims!" cried Milly, flying towards her and speaking with pale lips.
+"Please, please tell me--what has happened? Have I been very ill?" And
+she stared in Tims's face with a tragic mask of terror and anxiety.
+
+"Now take it easy--take it easy, M., my girl!" cried Tims, giving her a
+great squeeze and a clap on the shoulder. "I'm jolly glad to see you
+back. But don't let's have any more of your hysterics. No, never no
+more!"
+
+"Have I been away?" asked Milly, her lips still trembling.
+
+"I should think you had!" exclaimed Tims. "But nobody knows it except
+me. Don't forget that. Here's a note for you from old B. Read it first
+or we shall both forget all about it. She had to go away early this
+morning."
+
+Milly opened the note and read:
+
+     "DEAR MILLY,--I am sorry not to say good-bye, but glad you
+     are sleeping off your fatigue. I want to tell you, between
+     ourselves, not to go on worrying about the results of the
+     Schools, as I think you are doing, in spite of your
+     pretences to the contrary. I hear you have done at least one
+     brilliant paper, and although I, of course, know nothing
+     certain, I believe you and the College will have reason to
+     rejoice when the list comes out.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "MARY BURT."
+
+"What does it mean?--oh, what can it mean?" faltered Milly, holding out
+the missive to Tims.
+
+"It means you've been in for Greats, my girl, and done first-rate. But
+the strain's been a bit too much for you, and you've had another
+collapse of memory. You had one in the end of November. You've been
+uncommonly well ever since, and worked like a Trojan, but you've not
+been quite your usual self, and I'm glad you've come right again, old
+girl. Let me tell you the whole business."
+
+Tims did so. She wanted social tact, but she had the tact of the heart
+which made her hide from Milly how very different, how much more
+brilliant and attractive Milly the Second had been than her normal self.
+She only made her friend feel that the curious episode had entailed no
+disgrace, but that somehow in her abnormal condition she had done well
+in the Schools, and probably touched the top of her ambition.
+
+"But I don't feel as though it had been quite straightforward to hide it
+up so," said Milly. "I shall write and tell Miss Burt and Aunt Beatrice,
+and tell the Fletchers when I go to them."
+
+"You'll do nothing of the kind, you stupid," snapped Tims. "You'll be
+simply giving me away if you do. What is the good? It won't happen
+again unless you're idiot enough to overwork yourself again. Very likely
+not then; for, as an open-minded, scientific woman, I believe it to have
+been a case of hypnotism, and in France and the United States they'd
+have thought it a very interesting one. But in England people are so
+prejudiced they'd say you'd simply been out of your mind; although that
+wouldn't prevent them from blaming me for hypnotizing you."
+
+While Tims spoke thus, there was a knocking without, and a maid
+delivered a note for Miss Flaxman. Milly held it in her hands and
+studied it musingly before opening the envelope. Her pale, troubled face
+colored and grew more serious. Tims had not mentioned Ian Stewart, but
+Milly had not forgotten him or his handwriting. Tims knew it too. She
+restrained her excitement while Milly turned her back and stood by the
+window reading the note. She must have read them several times over, the
+two sides of the sheet inscribed with Stewart's small, scholarly
+handwriting, before she turned her transfigured face towards the
+anxiously expectant Tims.
+
+"Tims, dear," she said at length, smiling tremulously, and laying
+tremulous hands on Tims's two thin shoulders--"dear old Tims, why didn't
+you tell me?"
+
+"Tell you what?" asked Tims, grinning delightedly. Milly threw her arms
+round her friend's neck and hid her happy tears and blushes between
+Tims's ear and shoulder.
+
+"Mr. Stewart--it seems too good to be true--he loves me, he really does.
+He wants me to be his wife."
+
+Most girls would have hugged and kissed Milly, and Tims did hug her, but
+instead of kissing her, she banged and slapped her back and shoulders
+hard all over, shaking the while with deep internal chuckles. It hurt,
+but Milly did not mind, for it was sympathy. Presently she drew herself
+away, and wiping her damp eyes, said, smiling shyly:
+
+"He's never guessed how much I care about him. I'm so glad. He says he
+doesn't wonder at my hesitation and talks about others more worthy to
+love me. But you know there isn't any one except Mr. Toovey. Poor Mr.
+Toovey! I do hope I haven't behaved very badly to him."
+
+"Never mind Toovey," chuckled Tims. "Anyhow, Milly, I've got a good load
+off my mind. I didn't half like having put that other girl into your
+boots. However, you've come back, and everything's going to be all
+right."
+
+"All right!" breathed Milly. "Why, Tims, darling, I never thought any
+one in the world could be half so happy as I am."
+
+And Tims left Milly to write the answer for which Ian Stewart was so
+anxiously waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The engagement proceeded after the manner of engagements. No one was
+surprised at it and every one was pleased. The little whirlpool of talk
+that it created prevented Milly's ignorance of the events of the past
+six or seven months from coming to the surface. She lay awake at night,
+devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But
+she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an
+unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state,
+and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since
+the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that
+quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him
+about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to
+bring to light unsuspected sides of a personality. But he laughed at
+hypnotism as a mixture of fraud and hysteria. So with many searchings of
+heart, she dropped the subject.
+
+She was staying at the Fletchers' and saw Ian every day. He was all that
+she could wish as a lover, and it never occurred to her to ask whether
+he felt all that he himself could have wished as such. He was very fond
+of Milly and quite content with her, but not perfectly content with
+himself. He supposed he must at bottom be one of those ordinary and
+rather contemptible men who care more for the excitement of the chase
+than for the object of it. But he felt sure he was really a very lucky
+fellow, and determined not to give way to the self-analysis which is
+always said to be the worst enemy of happiness.
+
+Miss Flaxman had been the only woman in for Greats, and as a favor she
+was taken first in _viva voce_. The questions were directed to probing
+her actual knowledge in places where she had made one or two amazing
+blunders. But she emerged triumphant, and went in good spirits to
+Clewes, Aunt Beatrice's country home in the North, whither Ian Stewart
+shortly followed her. Beyond the fact that she wore perforce and with
+shame, not having money to buy others, frocks which Lady Thomson
+disapproved, she was once more the adoring niece to whom her aunt was
+accustomed. And Lady Thomson liked Ian. She never expected men to share
+her fads.
+
+In due time came the announcement of the First, bringing almost as many
+congratulatory letters as the engagement. And on August 2d Milly sailed
+for Australia, where she was to spend two or three months with her
+family.
+
+In October the newspapers announced that the marriage of Miss Mildred
+Beatrice Flaxman, eldest daughter of the Dean of Stirling, South
+Australia, with Mr. Ian Stewart, Fellow of Durham College, Oxford, would
+take place at Oxford in the second week in December.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped
+chamber-maid of the Hôtel du Chalet made the statement to the manager,
+who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired
+yesterday, pauvre petite!"
+
+The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:
+
+"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman
+went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want
+sanveeches when one sleeps."
+
+"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping
+like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her
+duties.
+
+The _déjeuner_ was over, and those guests who had not already gone out
+for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and
+staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions
+and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
+died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
+a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
+But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning,
+startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
+varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
+was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
+painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
+room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
+been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
+slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
+other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
+her sitting up on the bedside.
+
+"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"
+
+A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
+anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
+power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
+unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
+flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
+strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
+Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
+allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
+nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
+been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
+not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
+audible cry she sprang to her feet.
+
+"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"
+
+The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
+plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
+might have been heard in the corridor.
+
+"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
+capable of it."
+
+Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
+thinking.
+
+"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
+am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
+somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"--she was
+thinking of Milly--"How I should like to strangle her!"
+
+She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs,
+propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
+snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
+only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
+was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
+prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
+photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
+that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
+from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
+was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
+with a veil of fine lace.
+
+"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
+from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
+for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"
+
+But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
+indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
+must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
+was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
+thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
+of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
+combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
+on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
+out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
+on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
+ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
+falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
+deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
+cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
+blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
+and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
+against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
+secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
+looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
+Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
+for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
+any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
+lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey.
+Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
+climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
+knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
+on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
+smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
+Archibald Toovey.
+
+Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
+towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
+her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
+into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
+those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
+something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
+by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
+been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old--disappointed,
+that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
+happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
+falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
+himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
+the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
+hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
+returned to him in one delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
+the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
+the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
+laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
+endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
+his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
+at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
+and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
+his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
+received no apology.
+
+Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
+eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
+kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
+walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
+quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
+thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
+anxiety about his safety and indulging another on the subject of his wet
+feet. A smile of tender amusement visited his lips as he took hold of
+the door-handle. Exactly as he touched it, the key on the other side
+turned. The lock had been stiff, but it had shot out in the nick of
+time, and he found himself brought up short in his impulsive career and
+hurtling against a solid barrier. He knocked, but no one answered. He
+could have fancied he heard panting breaths on the other side of the
+ill-fitting door.
+
+"Mayn't I come in, darling?" he asked, gently, but with a shade of
+reproach in his voice.
+
+"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of
+coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He
+paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women
+were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget
+that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and
+devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in
+this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference.
+
+"Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?"
+
+"Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then
+after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?"
+
+Ian smiled to himself as he answered:
+
+"My feet are wet. I want to change."
+
+He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said
+to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door
+to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of
+anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause:
+
+"I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if
+you'll wait."
+
+He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and
+shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always
+put away his things for him and should have known where to find them.
+The door opened a chink and the shoes and stockings came flying through
+on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine
+strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but
+fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and
+stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the
+smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that
+women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been
+uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than
+content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of
+hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her
+that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young
+wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the
+crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those
+tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our
+personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power
+of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that--very
+fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware--he
+did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive
+that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings
+with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a
+complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus
+advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the
+enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible
+transformations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms
+which they believe to be moly; but the true moly is not easy to
+distinguish. And he hoped that he and Milly, in their different ways,
+had found and were both wearing the milk-white flower. Yet he knew that
+this was a matter which must be left to the arbitrament of time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+On their return to Oxford the young couple were fêted beyond the common.
+People who had known Milly Flaxman in earlier days were surprised to
+think how little they had noticed her beauty or guessed what a fund of
+humor, what an extraordinary charm, had lurked beneath the surface of
+her former quiet, grave manner. The Master of Durham alone refused to be
+surprised. He merely affirmed in his short squeak that he had always
+admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in
+the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors
+from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the
+austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe.
+
+Wherever she appeared, the vivid personality of Mrs. Stewart made a kind
+of effervescence which that indescribable entity, a vivid personality,
+is sure to keep fizzing about it. She was devoutly admired, fiercely
+criticised, and asked everywhere. It is true she had quite given up her
+music, but she drew caricatures which were irresistibly funny, and was a
+tremendous success in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
+everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her house,
+although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
+the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
+destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
+good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
+Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
+extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
+brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
+principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
+of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
+ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
+that the _aura_ surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
+Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
+a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
+her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
+others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
+her manners or her character.
+
+To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
+where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
+a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
+adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
+housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
+were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
+midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to reflect
+that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
+complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
+happiness.
+
+Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
+the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
+he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
+time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
+seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
+agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
+Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
+Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
+country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low and Dieppe would
+cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
+her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
+although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
+was displeased with him.
+
+Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
+imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
+scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
+"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
+as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
+do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
+and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
+asleep. The room was dark, but he saw her by the illumination of
+distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
+appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
+low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
+open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
+white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
+writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
+concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
+to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
+was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
+not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
+continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
+long past midnight and the town was asleep.
+
+He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
+pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
+nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
+and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
+trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
+as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
+it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
+chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
+strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
+there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast
+died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
+sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
+various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the
+wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which
+had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the
+night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at
+times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or
+superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves--never before so strongly, so
+over-masteringly as to-night. A blue blaze of crooked lightning
+zigzagged down the outer darkness and seemed to strike the earth but a
+little beyond the garden wall. Following on its heels a tremendous clap
+of thunder burst, as it were, on the very chimneys. The solid house
+shook to its foundations. But the tide of horrible, irrational fear
+which swept over Ian's whole being was not caused by this mere
+exaggerated commonplace of nature. He could give no guess what it was
+that caused it; he only knew that it was agony. He knew what it meant to
+feel the hair lift on his head; he knew what the Psalmist meant when he
+said, "My bones are turned to water." And as he stood unable to move,
+afraid to turn his head, abject and ashamed of his abjectness, he was
+listening, listening for he knew not what.
+
+At length it came. He heard the stairs creak and a soft padding footstep
+coming slowly down them; with it the brush of a light garment and
+intermittently a faint human sound between a sigh and a sob. He did not
+reflect that he could not really have heard such slight sounds through a
+thick stone wall and a closed door. He heard them. The steps stopped at
+the door; a hand seemed feeling to open it, and again there was a
+painful sigh. The physical terror had not passed from him, but the
+sudden though that it was his wife and that she was frightened or ill,
+made him able to master it. He seized the lamp, because he knew the
+light in the hall was extinguished, rushed to the door, opened it and
+looked out. There was no one there. He made a hasty but sufficient
+search and returned to the study.
+
+The extremity of his fear was now passed, but an unpleasantly eery
+feeling still lingered about him and he had a very definite desire to
+find himself in some warm, human neighborhood. He had left the door open
+and was arranging the papers on his writing-table, when once again he
+heard those soft padding feet on the stairs; but this time they were
+much heavier, more hurried, and stumbled a little. He stood bent over
+the table, a bundle of papers in his hand, no longer overcome by mortal
+terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
+more--nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
+the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
+and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
+pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
+she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed only in a long
+night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
+turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
+of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
+to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
+out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
+for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
+fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
+uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
+Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
+staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
+rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
+darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
+confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
+accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
+refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
+animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
+phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
+had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
+rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate--"My husband!
+Mine! Mine!"--but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
+as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
+kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
+to catch her, but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
+stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
+gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
+shuddering.
+
+"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
+love! Ian! My life!--my life! My own husband!"
+
+Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
+had not thought she loved him so passionately. He lifted her on to a
+deep old sofa at the end of the room, wrapped her in a warm Oriental
+coverlet which hung there, and held her to his heart, murmuring love and
+comfort in her cold little ear. It seemed gradually to soothe her,
+although he did not think she really awoke. Then he put her down,
+lighted the lamp outside, and, not without difficulty, carried her up to
+bed. Her eyes were half closed when he laid her down and drew the
+bedclothes over her; and a minute or two later, when he looked in from
+his dressing-room, she was evidently asleep.
+
+When he got into bed she did not stir, and while he lay awake for
+another hour, she remained motionless and breathing regularly. He
+assured himself that the whole curious occurrence could be explained by
+the electrical state of the atmosphere, which had affected his own
+nerves in a way he would never humiliate himself by confessing to any
+one. Those mysterious footsteps on the stairs which he had heard,
+footsteps like his wife's yet not hers; that hand upon the door, that
+voice of sighs, were the creation of his own excited brain. In time he
+would doubtless come to believe his own assurances on the point, but
+that night at the bottom of his heart he did not believe them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Next morning, if Ian himself slept late, Milly slept later still. The
+strained and troubled look which he had seen upon her face even in sleep
+the night before, had passed away in the morning, but she lay almost
+alarmingly still and white. He was reassured by remembering that once
+when they were in Switzerland she had slept about sixteen hours and
+awakened in perfect health. He remained in the house watching over her,
+and about four o'clock she woke up. But she was very pale and very
+quiet; exhausted, he thought, by her strange mental and physical
+exertions of the night before.
+
+She came down to tea with her pretty hair unbecomingly twisted up, and
+dressed in a brownish-yellow tea-gown, which he fancied he remembered
+hearing her denounce as only fit to be turned into a table-cloth. He did
+not precisely criticise these details, but they helped in the impression
+of lifelessness and gloom that hung about her. It was a faint, gleamy
+afternoon, and such sun as there was did not shine into the study. The
+dark panelling looked darker than usual, and as she sat silent and
+listless in a corner of the old sofa, her hair and face stood out
+against it almost startling in their blondness and whiteness. She was
+strangely unlike herself, but Stewart comforted himself by remembering
+that she had been odd in her manner and behavior, though in a different
+way, after her long sleep in Switzerland. After he had given her tea, he
+suggested that they should walk in the garden, as the rain was over.
+
+"Not yet, Ian," she said. "I want to try and tell you something. I can
+do it better here."
+
+Her mouth quivered. He sat down by her on the sofa.
+
+"Must you tell me now?" he asked, smiling. "Do you really think it
+matters?"
+
+"Yes--it does matter," she answered, tremulously, pressing her folded
+hands against her breast. "It's something I ought to have told you
+before you married me--but indeed, indeed I didn't know how dreadful it
+was--I didn't think it would happen again."
+
+He was puzzled a moment, then spoke, still smiling:
+
+"I suppose you mean the sleep-walking. Well, darling, it is a bit
+creepy, I admit, but I shall get used to it, if you won't do it too
+often."
+
+"Did I really walk?" she asked--and a look of horror was growing on her
+face. "Ah! I wasn't sure. No--it's not that--it is--oh, don't think me
+mad, Ian!"
+
+"Tell me, dearest. I promise I won't."
+
+"I've not been here at all since you've been living in this house. I've
+not seen you, my own precious husband, since I went to sleep in
+Switzerland, at the Hôtel du Chalet--don't you remember--when we had
+been that long walk up to the glacier and I was so tired?"
+
+Stewart was exceedingly startled. He paused, and then said, very gently
+but very firmly:
+
+"That's nonsense, dearest. You have been here, you've been with me all
+the time."
+
+"Ah! You think so, but it was not _I_--no, don't interrupt me--I mean to
+tell you, I must, but I can't if you interrupt me. It was awfully wrong
+of me not to tell you before; but I tried to, and then I saw you
+wouldn't believe me. Do you remember a dinner-party at the Fletchers',
+the autumn before we were engaged--when Cousin David had just bought
+that picture?"
+
+"That portrait of Lady Hammerton, which is so like you? Yes, I remember
+it perfectly."
+
+"You know I wanted my First so much and I had been working too hard, and
+then I was told that evening that you had said I couldn't get it--"
+
+"Silly me!"
+
+"And I felt certain you didn't love me--"
+
+"Silly you!"
+
+"Don't interrupt me, please. And I wasn't well, and I cried and cried
+and I couldn't leave off, and then I allowed Tims to hypnotize me. We
+both knew she had no business to do it, it was wrong of us, of course,
+but we couldn't possibly guess what would happen. I went to sleep, and
+so far as I knew I never woke again for more than six months, not till
+the Schools were over."
+
+"But, my darling, I skated with you constantly in the Christmas
+Vacation, and took your work through the Term. I assure you that you
+were quite awake then."
+
+"I remember nothing about it. All I know is that some one got my First
+for me."
+
+"But, Mildred--"
+
+"Why do you call me Mildred? That's what they called me when I woke up
+last time; but my own name's Milly."
+
+Stewart rose and paced the room, then came back.
+
+"It's simply a case of collapse of memory, dear. It's very trying, but
+don't let's be fanciful about it."
+
+"I thought it was only that--I told you, didn't I, something of that
+sort? But I didn't know then, nobody told me, that I wasn't like myself
+at all those months I couldn't remember. Last night in my sleep I
+knew--I knew that some one else, something else--I can't describe it,
+it's impossible--was struggling hard with me in my own brain, my own
+body, trying to hold me down, to push me back again into the place,
+whatever it was, I came out of. But I got stronger and stronger till I
+was quite myself and the thing couldn't really stop me. I dare say it
+only lasted a few seconds, then I felt quite free--free from the
+struggle, the pressure; and I saw myself standing in the room, with some
+kind of white floating stuff over my head and about me, and I saw myself
+open the door and go out of the room. I wasn't a bit surprised, but I
+just lay there quiet and peaceful. Then suddenly it came to me that I
+couldn't have seen myself, that the person, the figure I had seen go
+out of the door was the other one, the creature I had been struggling
+with, who had stolen my shape; and it came to me that she was gone to
+steal you--to steal your heart from me and take you away; and you
+wouldn't know, you would think it was I, and you would follow her and
+love her and never know it was not your own wife you were loving. And I
+was mad with anger; I never knew before what it meant, Ian, to be as
+angry as that. I struggled hard to get up, and at last I managed it, and
+I came down-stairs after her, but I couldn't find her, and I was sure
+that she had gone and had taken you away with her. And you say I really
+did come down-stairs."
+
+"Yes, darling, and if you had been awake instead of asleep, as you
+obviously were, you would have seen that this nightmare of yours was
+nothing but a nightmare. You would have seen that I was alone here,
+quietly arranging my papers before going to bed. You gave me a fright
+coming down as you did, for there was a tremendous thunderstorm going
+on, and I am ashamed to say how queer my own nerves were. The electrical
+state of the atmosphere and a very loud clap of thunder just overhead,
+account for the whole business, which probably lasted only a few seconds
+from beginning to end. Be reasonable, little woman, you are generally
+the most reasonable person I know--except when you talk about going to
+Dieppe."
+
+Milly gave him a strange look.
+
+"Why am I not reasonable when I talk about going to Dieppe?"
+
+He drew her to him and kissed her hair.
+
+"Never mind why. We aren't going to excite ourselves to-day or do
+anything but make love and forget nightmares and everything
+disagreeable."
+
+She drew herself away a little and looked with frightened eyes in his.
+
+"But I can't forget, Ian, that I don't remember anything that has
+happened since we were on our honeymoon in Switzerland. And now we are
+in Oxford, and I can see it's quite late in the summer. How can I forget
+that somehow I am being robbed of myself--robbed of my life with you?"
+
+"Wait till to-morrow and you'll remember everything right enough."
+
+But Milly was not to be convinced. She was willing to submit on the
+question of last night's experiences, but she assured him that Tims
+would bear her out in the assertion that she had never recovered her
+recollection of the months preceding her engagement. Ian ceased trying
+to convince her that she was mistaken on this point; but he argued that
+the memory was of all functions of the brain the most uncertain, that
+there was no limit to its vagaries, which were mere matters of nerves
+and circulation, and that Dr. Norton-Smith, the nerve and brain
+specialist to whom he would take her, would probably turn out to have a
+dozen patients subject to the same affliction as herself. One never
+hears of half the ills that flesh is heir to until the inheritance falls
+to one's own lot.
+
+Milly was a common-sense young woman, and his explanation, especially as
+it was his, pacified her for the time. The clouds had been rolling away
+while they talked, the space of deep blue sky overhead growing larger,
+the sunshine fuller. There was a busy twittering and shaking of little
+wings in the tall pear-tree near the house, where the tomtits in their
+varied liveries loved to congregate. July was not far advanced and the
+sun had still some hours in which to shine. Ian and Milly went out and
+walked in the Parks. The tennis-club lawns were almost deserted, but
+they met a few acquaintances taking their constitutional, like
+themselves, and an exchange of ordinary remarks with people who took her
+normality for granted, helped Milly to believe in it herself. So long as
+the blank in her memory continued, she could not be free from care; but
+she went to sleep that night in Ian's arms, feeling herself protected by
+them not only from bodily harm, but from all those dreadful fears and
+evil fantasies that "do assault and hurt the soul."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Ian had been so busy persuading Milly to view her own case as a simple
+one, and so busy comforting her with an almost feminine intuition of
+what would really afford her comfort, that it was only in the watches of
+the night that certain disquieting recollections forced their way into
+his mind. It was of course now part of his creed that he had loved Milly
+Flaxman from the first--only he had never known her well till that
+Christmas Vacation when they had skated so much together. Later on, such
+disturbing events as engagement and marriage had seemed to him enough to
+explain any changes he had observed in her. Later still, he had been too
+much in love to think about her at all, in the true sense of the word.
+She had been to him "all a wonder and a wild desire."
+
+Now, taking the dates of her collapses of memory, he made, despite
+himself, certain notes on those changes. It is to be feared he did not
+often want to see Miss Timson; but on the day after Milly's return to
+the world, he cycled out to visit her friend. Tims was spending the
+summer on the wild and beautiful ridge which has since become a suburb
+of Oxford. It was doubtful whether he would find her in, as she was
+herself a mighty cyclist, making most of her journeys on the wheel,
+happy in the belief that she was saving money at the expense of the
+railway companies.
+
+The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and
+broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands,
+clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a
+self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity.
+But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always
+lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner
+of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level
+country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars
+Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to
+where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy
+track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone,
+whence the poet of _Thyrsis_ looking northward, saw the "fair city with
+her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon
+it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether
+blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling
+trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by
+clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting
+vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the
+youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening
+cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of
+red-roofed homesteads and towered churches, moved slowly the broad
+shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above.
+Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world
+showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich,
+indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to
+burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken
+hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep
+in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their
+maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its
+detachment from the wide background floating behind.
+
+Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house
+and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But
+flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright
+little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the
+real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm
+became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her
+collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face
+merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern
+in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of
+positive pleasure.
+
+"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a
+bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old
+boy, don't you?"
+
+The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
+He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
+joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."
+
+"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
+in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! _I_ don't
+want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
+of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
+on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."
+
+"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"--there was a note of
+impatience in Ian's voice--"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
+as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
+how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
+her work, but on the whole it improved."
+
+"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
+remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
+and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
+babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
+asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
+the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
+old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
+difference?"
+
+Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the
+stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
+to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
+far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
+paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
+unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
+courtship and marriage.
+
+"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
+only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
+Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."
+
+"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
+right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
+no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
+what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."
+
+Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
+have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
+sympathy.
+
+"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
+particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
+medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"
+
+"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
+gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
+you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
+which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
+clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
+The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
+whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
+independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
+but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
+stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
+Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm--I'm fond of
+them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
+difference."
+
+Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.
+
+"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.
+
+They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
+Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
+hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
+hat.
+
+"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
+"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
+for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
+on earth did she?"
+
+He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
+everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
+the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
+memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
+diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty
+months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
+experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified--his own surprise,
+almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
+after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
+even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
+marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
+the Hôtel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant
+nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to
+be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his
+sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only
+saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from
+Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his
+undeviating course.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Milly, too, had not been without a sharp reminder that the leaves in her
+life so blank to her, had been fully inscribed by another. She hardly
+yet felt mistress of the house, but it was pleasant to rest and read in
+the low, white-panelled drawing-room, which lowered awnings kept cool,
+although the afternoon sun struck a golden shaft across the flowering
+window-boxes of its large and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room
+was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at
+bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The
+only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored
+prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed
+pieces of needlework which harmonized with them.
+
+Presently the door-bell rang and a Mr. Fitzroy was announced by the
+parlor-maid, in a tone which implied that she was accustomed to his
+name. He looked about the age of an undergraduate and was
+extraordinarily well-groomed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being
+in a riding-dress. His sleek dark hair was neatly parted in the middle
+and he was clean shaven, when to be so smacked of the stage; but his
+manners and expression smacked of nothing of the kind.
+
+"I'm awfully glad to find you at home, Mrs. Stewart," he said. "I've
+been lunching at the Morrisons', and, you know, I'm afraid there's going
+to be a row."
+
+The Morrisons? They lived outside Oxford, and Milly knew them by sight,
+that was all.
+
+"What about?" she asked, kindly, thinking the young man had come for
+help, or at least sympathy, in some embarrassment of his own.
+
+"Why, about your acting Galatea. Jim Morrison's been a regular fool
+about it. He'd no business to take it for granted that that was the part
+I wanted Mrs. Shaw for. Now it appears she's telling every one that
+she's been asked to play the lead at the Besselsfield theatricals; and,
+by Jove, he says she is to, too!"
+
+Milly went rather pale and then quite pink.
+
+"Then of course I couldn't think of taking the part," she said, gasping
+with relief at this providential escape.
+
+Mr. Fitzroy in his turn flushed. He had an obstinate chin and the cares
+of stage-management had already traced a line right across his smooth
+forehead. It deepened to a furrow as he leaned forward out of his low
+wicker chair, clutching the pair of dogskin gloves which he held in his
+hand.
+
+"Oh, come, I say now, Mrs. Stewart!" and his voice and eye were
+surprisingly stern for one so young. "That's not playing fair. You
+promised me you'd see me through this show, and you know as well as I
+do, Mrs. Shaw can no more act than those fire-irons."
+
+"But I--" Milly was about to say "I've never acted in my life"--when she
+remembered that she knew less than any one in her acquaintance what she
+had or had not done in that recent life which was not hers. "I shouldn't
+act Galatea at all well," she substituted lamely; "and I shouldn't look
+the part nearly as well as Mrs. Shaw will."
+
+"Excuse me, Mrs. Stewart, but I'm certain you're simply cut out for it
+all round, and you told me the other day you were particularly anxious
+to play it. You promised you'd stick to me through thick and thin and
+not care a twopenny--I mean a straw--what Jim Morrison and Mrs. Shaw--"
+
+In the stress of conversation they had neither of them noticed the
+tinkle of the front-door bell. Now the door of the room, narrow and in
+the thickness of an enormous wall, was thrown open and Mrs. Shaw was
+announced.
+
+Fitzroy, forgetful of manners in his excitement, stooped forward and
+gripping Milly's arm almost hissed:
+
+"Remember! You've promised me."
+
+The words filled Milly with misery. That any one should be able to
+accuse her of breaking a promise, however unreal her responsibility for
+it, was horrible to her.
+
+Mrs. Shaw entered, no longer the seraph of twenty months ago. She had
+latterly put off the æsthetic raiment she had worn with such peculiar
+grace, and her dress and coiffure were quite in the fashion of the
+hour. The transformation somewhat shocked Milly, who could never help
+feeling a slight austere prejudice against fashionably dressed woman.
+Then, considering how little she knew Mrs. Shaw, it was embarrassing to
+be kissed by her.
+
+"It's odd I should find you here, Mr. Fitzroy," said Mrs. Shaw, settling
+her rustling skirts on a chintzy chair. "I've just come to talk to Mrs.
+Stewart about the acting. I'm so sorry there's been a misunderstanding
+about it."
+
+Her tone was civil but determined, and there was a fighting look in her
+eye.
+
+"So am I, Mrs. Shaw, most uncommonly sorry," returned Fitzroy, patting
+his sleek hair and feeling that his will was adamant, however pretty
+Mrs. Shaw might be.
+
+"Of course, I shouldn't have thought of taking the part away from Mrs.
+Stewart," she resumed, glancing at Milly, not without meaning, "but Mr.
+Morrison asked me to take it quite a fortnight ago. I've learned most of
+it and rehearsed two scenes already with him. He says they go capitally,
+and we both think it seems rather a pity to waste all that labor and
+change the part now."
+
+Fitzroy cast a look at Mrs. Stewart which was meant to call up
+reinforcements from that quarter; but as she sat there quite silent, he
+cleared his throat and begun:
+
+"It's an awful bore, of course, but I fancy it's about three weeks or a
+month since I first asked Mrs. Stewart to play the lead--isn't it, Mrs.
+Stewart?"
+
+Milly muttered assent, horribly suspecting a lie. A flash of indignant
+scorn from Mrs. Shaw confirmed the suspicion.
+
+"Mrs. Stewart said something quite different when I spoke to her about
+it at tennis on Friday. Didn't you, Mildred?" she asked.
+
+Milly crimsoned.
+
+"Did I?" she stammered. "I'm afraid I've got a dreadfully bad
+memory--for--for dates of that kind."
+
+Mrs. Shaw smiled coldly. Mr. Fitzroy felt himself deceived in Mrs.
+Stewart as an ally. He had counted on her promised support, on her wit
+and spirit to carry him through, and her conduct was simply cowardly.
+
+"The fact is, Mrs. Shaw," he said, "Jim Morrison's not bossing this show
+at all. That's where the mistake has come in. My aunt, Lady Wolvercote,
+is a bit of an autocrat, don't you know, and she doesn't like us fellows
+to arrange things on our own account. If she knew you I'm sure she'd see
+what a splendid Galatea you'd make, but as it is she's set her heart on
+getting Mrs. Stewart from the very first."
+
+Had he stopped here his position would have been good, but an indignant
+instinct, urging him to push the reluctant Mrs. Stewart into the proper
+place of woman--that natural shield of man against all the social
+disagreeables he brings on himself--made Fitzroy rush into the fatal
+detail.
+
+"My aunt told you so at the Masonic; didn't she, Mrs. Stewart?"
+
+Milly, under the young man's imperious eye, assented feebly, but Mrs.
+Shaw laughed. She perfectly remembered Mildred having mentioned on that
+very occasion that she did not know Lady Wolvercote by sight.
+
+"I'm afraid I've come just a few minutes too soon," she said, dryly.
+"You and Mr. Fitzroy don't seem to have talked things over quite
+enough."
+
+The saying was dark and yet too clear. Milly, the meticulously truthful,
+saw herself convicted of some horrible falsehood. She blushed violently,
+gasped, and rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Mr. Fitzroy
+ignoring the insinuation, changed his line.
+
+"The part we really wanted you to take, Mrs. Shaw, was that of a nymph
+in an Elizabethan masque which Lumley has written, with music by Stephen
+Bampton. It's to be played in the rose garden and there's a chorus of
+nymphs who sing and dance. We want them to look perfectly lovely, don't
+you know, and as there can't be any make-up to speak of, it's awfully
+difficult to find the right people."
+
+Mrs. Shaw disdained the lure and mentally condemned his anxiously civil
+manner as "soapy."
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Morrison to go to Lady Wolvercote at once," she said,
+"and see whether she really wishes me to give up the part. Time's
+getting on, and he says he won't be able to have many more rehearsals."
+
+There was a sound as of a carriage stopping in the street below, the
+jingling of bits, and a high female voice giving an order. Fitzroy,
+inwardly exasperated by Mrs. Shaw's resistance and the abject conduct of
+his ally, sprang to his feet.
+
+"I believe that's my aunt!" he exclaimed. "She wants me to call at
+Blenheim on the way home, and I suppose the Morrisons told her where I
+was."
+
+He managed to slip his head out between the edge of an awning and the
+mignonette and geraniums of a window-box.
+
+"It's my aunt, right enough. May I fetch her up, Mrs. Stewart?" He was
+down the stairs in a moment and voluble in low-voiced colloquy with the
+lady in the barouche.
+
+Lady Wolvercote was organizing the great fancy fair for the benefit of
+the County Cottage Hospitals, and had left the dramatic part of the
+programme to her nephew to arrange. She was a tall, slight woman, of the
+usual age for aunts, and pleasant to every one; but she took it for
+granted that every one would do as she wished--naturally, since they
+always did in her neighborhood. As she stumbled up the stairs after
+Charlie Fitzroy--it was a dark staircase and narrow in proportion to its
+massive oak balusters--she felt faintly annoyed with him for dragging
+her into the quarrels of his middle-class friends, but confident that
+she could manage them without the least trouble.
+
+Milly was relieved at the return of Mr. Fitzroy with his aunt. She had
+had an unhappy five minutes with Mrs. Shaw, who had been saying cryptic
+but unpleasant things and calling her "Mildred"; whereas she did not so
+much as know Mrs. Shaw's Christian name.
+
+Seeing Mrs. Shaw, beautiful, animated, well-dressed, and Milly neatly
+clothed, since her clothes were not of her own choosing, but with her
+hair unbecomingly knotted, the brightness of her eyes, complexion, and
+expression in eclipse, Lady Wolvercote wondered at her nephew's choice.
+But that was his affair. She began to talk in a rather high-pitched
+voice and continuously, like one whose business it is to talk; so that
+it was difficult to interrupt without rudeness.
+
+"So you're going to be kind enough to act Galatea for us at our fancy
+fair, Mrs. Stewart? We want it to be a great success, and Lord
+Wolvercote and I have heard so much about your acting. My nephew said
+the part of Galatea would suit you exactly; didn't you, Charlie?"
+
+"Down to the ground," interpolated, or rather accompanied, Fitzroy. "We
+shall have the placards out on Wednesday, and people are looking forward
+already to seeing Mrs. Stewart. There'll be a splendid audience."
+
+"Every one has promised to fill their houses for the fair," Lady
+Wolvercote was continuing, "and the Duke thinks he may be able to get
+down ----," she mentioned a royalty. "You're going to help us too,
+aren't you, Mrs. Shaw? It's so very kind of you. We've got such a pretty
+part for you in a musical affair which Lenny Lumley wrote with somebody
+or other for the Duchess of Ulster's Elizabethan bazaar. There's a
+chorus of fairies--nymphs, Charlie? Yes, nymphs, and we want them all
+to be very pretty and able to sing, and there's a charming dance for
+them. I'm afraid that silly boy, Jim Morrison, made some mistake about
+it, and told you we wanted you to act Galatea. But of course we couldn't
+possibly do without you in the other thing, and Mrs. Stewart seems quite
+pointed out for that Galatea part. Jim's such a dear, isn't he? And such
+a splendid actor, every one says he really ought to go on the stage. But
+we none of us pay the least attention to anything the dear boy says, for
+he always does manage to get things wrong."
+
+Mrs. Shaw had been making little movements preparatory to going. She had
+no gift for the stage except beauty, but that produces an illusion of
+success, and she took her acting with the seriousness of a Duse.
+
+"I'm sorry I didn't know Mr. Morrison's habits better," she replied.
+"I've been studying the part of Galatea a good deal and rehearsing it
+with him as well. Of course, I don't for a moment wish to prevent Mrs.
+Stewart from taking it, but I've spent a good deal of time upon it and
+I'm afraid I can't undertake anything else. Of course, it's very
+inconvenient stopping in Oxford in August, and I shouldn't care to do it
+except for the sake of a part which I felt gave me a real opportunity--"
+
+"But it's a very pretty part we've got for you," resumed Lady
+Wolvercote, perplexed. "And we were hoping to see you over at
+Besselsfield a good deal for rehearsals--"
+
+It seemed to her a "part of nature's holy plan" that the prospect of
+Besselsfield should prove irresistibly attractive to the wives of
+professional men.
+
+"Thanks, so much, but I'm sure you and Mr. Fitzroy must know plenty of
+girls who would do for that sort of part," returned Mrs. Shaw.
+
+Milly here broke in eagerly:
+
+"Please, Lady Wolvercote, do persuade Mrs. Shaw to take Galatea; I'm
+sure I sha'n't be able to do it a bit; and I would try and take the
+nymph. I should love the music, and I know I could do the singing,
+anyhow."
+
+She rose because Mrs. Shaw had risen and was looking for her parasol and
+shaking out her plumes. But why did Mr. Fitzroy and Mrs. Shaw both stare
+at her in an unvarnished surprise, touched with ridicule on the lady's
+side?
+
+"No, no, Mrs. Stewart, that won't do!" cried he, in obvious dismay. At
+the same moment Mrs. Shaw ejaculated, ironically:
+
+"That's very brave of you Mildred! I thought you hated music and were
+never going to try to sing again."
+
+She and Fitzroy had both been present on an occasion when Mildred, urged
+on by Milly's musical reputation, had committed herself to an experiment
+in song which had not been successful.
+
+"Thank you very much," Mrs. Shaw went on, "for offering to change, but
+of course Lady Wolvercote must arrange things as she likes; and, to
+speak frankly, I'm not particularly sorry to give the acting up, as my
+husband was rather upset at my not being able to go to Switzerland with
+him on the 28th. No, please don't trouble; I can let myself out.
+Good-bye, Lady Wolvercote; I hope the fair and the theatricals will be a
+great success. Good-bye, Mr. Fitzroy, good-bye."
+
+Lady Wolvercote's faint remonstrances were drowned in the adieus, and
+Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly
+into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing
+with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage
+had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a
+public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard
+Fitzroy's bitter remarks on Mrs. Shaw--not forgetting Jim Morrison--or
+Lady Wolvercote exclaiming in a voice almost dreamy with amazement:
+
+"Really it's too extraordinary!"
+
+"I'm very sorry Mrs. Shaw won't take the part," said Milly, clasping and
+unclasping her slender fingers, "for I know I can't do it myself."
+
+Fitzroy was protesting, but she forced herself to continue: "You don't
+know what I'm like when I'm nervous. When we had _tableaux vivants_ at
+Ascham I was supposed to be Charlotte putting a wreath on Werther's urn,
+and I trembled so much that I knocked the urn down. It was only
+card-board, so it didn't break, but every one laughed and the tableau
+was spoiled."
+
+Fitzroy and his aunt cried out that that was nothing, a first
+appearance; any one could see she had got over that now. Pale, with
+terrified eyes, she looked from one to the other of her tormentors, who
+continued to sing the praises of her past prowess on the boards and to
+foretell the unprecedented harvest of laurels she would reap at
+Besselsfield. The higher their enthusiasm rose, the more profound became
+her dejection. There seemed no loop-hole for escape, unless the earth
+would open and swallow her, which however much to be desired was hardly
+to be expected.
+
+The ting of a bicycle-bell below did not seem to promise assistance, for
+cyclists affected the quiet street. But it happened that this bicycle
+bore Ian to the door. He did not notice the coronet on the carriage
+which stood before it, and assumed it to belong to one of the three or
+four ladies in Oxford who kept such equipages. Yet in the blank state of
+Milly's memory, he was sorry she had not denied herself to visitors,
+which Mildred had already learned to do with a freedom only possible to
+women who are assured social success. Commonly the sight of a carriage
+would have sent him tiptoeing past the drawing-room, but now, vaguely
+uneasy, he came straight in. He looked particularly tall in the frame of
+the doorway, so low that his black hair almost touched the lintel;
+particularly handsome in the shaded, white-panelled room, into which the
+dark glow of his sunburned skin and brown eyes, bright with exercise,
+seemed to bring the light and warmth of the summer earth and sky.
+
+Milly sprang to meet him. Lady Wolvercote was surprised to learn that
+this was Mrs. Stewart's husband. She had no idea a Don could be so
+young and good-looking. Judging of Dons solely by the slight and
+slighting references of her undergraduate relatives, she had imagined
+them to be weird-looking men, within various measurable distances of the
+grave.
+
+"Lady Wolvercote and Mr. Fitzroy want me to act Galatea at the
+Besselsfield theatricals," said Milly, clinging to his sleeve and
+looking up at him with appealing eyes. "Please tell them I can't
+possibly do it. I'm--I'm not well enough--am I?"
+
+"We're within three weeks of the performance, sir," put in Fitzroy.
+"Mrs. Stewart promised she'd do it, and we shall be in a regular fix now
+if she gives it up. Mrs. Shaw's chucked us already."
+
+"Yes, and every one says how splendidly Mrs. Stewart acts," pleaded Lady
+Wolvercote.
+
+Stewart had half forgotten the matter; but now he remembered that
+Mildred had been keen to have the part only a week ago, and a little
+pettish because he had advised her to leave it alone, on account of Mrs.
+Shaw. Now she was hanging on him with desperate eyes and that worried
+brow which he had not seen once since he had married her.
+
+"I'm extremely sorry, Lady Wolvercote," he said, "but my wife's had a
+nervous break-down lately and I can't allow her to act. She's not fit
+for it."
+
+"Ah, I see--I quite understand!" returned Lady Wolvercote. "But we'd
+take great care of her, Mr. Stewart. She could come and stay at
+Besselsfield."
+
+Fitzroy's gloom lifted. His aunt was a trump. Surely an invitation to
+Besselsfield must do the job. But Stewart, though apologetic, was
+inflexible. He had forbidden his wife to act and there was an end of it.
+The perception of the differences between the two personalities of Milly
+which had been thrust to-day on his unwilling mind, made him grasp the
+meaning of her frantic appeals for protection. He relieved her of all
+responsibility for her refusal to act.
+
+Lady Wolvercote observed, as she and her nephew went sadly on their way,
+that Mr. Stewart seemed a very, very odd man in spite of his presentable
+manners and appearance; and Fitzroy replied gloomily that of course he
+was a beast. Dons always were beasts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+The diplomatic incident of the theatricals was not the only minor
+trouble which Milly found awaiting her. The cook's nerves were upset by
+a development of rigid economy on the part of her mistress, and she gave
+notice; the house parlor-maid followed suit. No one seemed to have kept
+Ian's desk tidy, his papers in order, or his clothes properly mended. It
+was a joy to her to put everything belonging to him right.
+
+When all was arranged to her satisfaction: "Ian," she said, sitting on
+his knee with her head on his shoulder, "I can't bear to think how
+wretched you must have been all the time I was away."
+
+Ian was silent a minute.
+
+"But you haven't been away, and I don't like you to talk as though you
+had."
+
+Wretched? It would have been absurd to think of himself as wretched now;
+yet compared with the wonderful happiness that had been his for more
+than half a year, what was this "house swept and garnished"? An empty
+thing. Words of Tims's which he had thought irritating and absurd at the
+time, haunted him now. "_You don't mean to say you haven't seen the
+difference?_" He might not have seen it, but he had felt it. He felt it
+now.
+
+There was at any rate no longer any question of Dieppe. They took
+lodgings at Sheringham and he made good progress with his book. Yet not
+quite so good as he had hoped. Milly was indefatigable in looking up
+points and references, in preventing him from slipping into the small
+inaccuracies to which he was prone; but he missed the stimulus of
+Mildred's alert mind, so quick to hit a blot in logic or in taste, so
+vivid in appreciation.
+
+Milly meantime guessed nothing of his dissatisfaction. She adored her
+husband more every day, and her happiness would have been perfect had it
+not been for the haunting horror of the possible "change" which might be
+lurking for her round the corner of any night--that "change," which
+other people might call what they liked, but which meant for her the
+robbery of her life, her young happy life with Ian. He had taken her
+twice to Norton-Smith before the great man went for his holiday.
+Norton-Smith had pronounced it a peculiar but not unprecedented case of
+collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the
+consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time,
+rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would,
+he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs.
+Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young
+woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to bring to the
+doctor's notice the changes in character and intelligence that had
+accompanied the losses of memory, he found his remarks set aside like
+the chatter of a foolish child.
+
+If maternity would indeed exorcise the Invader, Milly had lost no time
+in beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would;
+not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God
+would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she
+was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any
+little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply
+religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar
+injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She
+prayed earnestly to God every night to help and protect her and her
+child, and the period of six or seven months, at which the "change" had
+come before, passed without a sign of it. In April a little boy was
+born. They called him Antonio, after a learned Italian, a friend and
+teacher of Ian's.
+
+The advent of the child did something to explain the comparative
+seclusion into which Mrs. Stewart had retired, and the curious dulling
+of that brilliant personality of hers. The Master of Durham was among
+the few of Mrs. Stewart's admirers who declined to recognize the change
+in her. He had been attracted by the girl Milly Flaxman, by her gentle,
+shy manners and pretty face, combined with her reputation for
+scholarship; the brilliant Invader had continued to attract him in
+another way. The difference between the two, if faced, would have been
+disagreeably mysterious. He preferred to say and think that there was
+none; Mrs. Stewart was probably not very well.
+
+Milly's shyness made it peculiarly awkward for her to find herself in
+possession of a number of friends whom she would not have chosen
+herself, and of whose doings and belongings she was in complete
+ignorance. However, if she gave offence she was unconscious of it, and
+it came very naturally to her to shrink back into the shadow of her
+household gods. Ian and the baby were almost sufficient in themselves to
+fill her life. There was just room on the outskirts of it for a few
+relations and old friends, and Aunt Beatrice still held her honored
+place. But it was through Aunt Beatrice that she was first to learn the
+feel of a certain dull heartache which was destined to grow upon her
+like some fell disease, a thing of ceaseless pain.
+
+She was especially anxious to get Aunt Beatrice, who had been in America
+all the Summer Vacation, to stay with them in the Autumn Term as Lady
+Thomson had been with them in May, and Milly did not like to think of
+the number of things, all wrong, which she was sure to have noticed in
+the house. Besides, what with theatricals and other engagements, it was
+evident that a good many people had been "in and out" in the Summer
+Term--a condition of life which Lady Thomson always denounced. Milly was
+anxious for her to see that that phase was past and that her favorite
+niece had settled down into the quiet, well-ordered existence of which
+she approved.
+
+Aunt Beatrice came; but oh, disappointment! If it had been possible to
+say of Lady Thomson, whose moods were under almost perfect control,
+that she was out of temper, Milly would have said it. She volunteered no
+opinion, but when asked, she compared Milly's new cook unfavorably with
+her former one. When her praise was anxiously sought, she observed that
+it was undesirable to be careless in one's housekeeping, but less
+disagreeable than to be fussy and house-proud. She added that
+Milly--whom she called Mildred--must be on her guard against relaxing
+into domestic dulness, when she could be so extremely clever and
+charming if she liked. Milly was bewildered and distressed. She felt
+sure that she had passed through a phase of which Aunt Beatrice ought to
+have disapproved. She had evidently been frivolous and neglectful of her
+duties; yet it seemed as though her aunt had been better pleased with
+her when she was like that. What could have made Aunt Beatrice, of all
+women, unkind and unjust?
+
+In this way more than a year went by. The baby grew and was
+short-coated; the October Term came round once more, and still Milly
+remained the same Milly. To have wished it otherwise would have seemed
+like wishing for her death.
+
+But at times a great longing for another, quite another, came over Ian.
+It was like a longing for the beloved dead. Of course it was mad--mad!
+He struggled against the feeling, and generally succeeded in getting
+back to the point of view that the change had been more in himself, in
+his own emotional moods, than in Milly.
+
+October, the golden month, passed by and November came in, soft and
+dim; a merry month for the hunting men beside the coverts, where the
+red-brown leaves still hung on the oak-trees and brushwood, and among
+the grassy lanes, the wide fresh fields and open hill-sides. No ill
+month either for those who love to light the lamp early and open their
+books beside a cheerful fire. But then the rain came, a persistent,
+soaking rain. Milly always went to her district on Tuesdays, no matter
+what the weather, and this time she caught a cold. Ian urged her to stop
+in bed next morning. He himself had to be in College early, and could
+not come home till the afternoon.
+
+It was still raining and the early falling twilight was murky and brown.
+The dull yellow glare of the street-lamps was faintly reflected in the
+muddy wetness of pavements and streets. He was carrying a great armful
+of books and papers under his dripping mackintosh and umbrella. As he
+walked homeward as fast as his inconvenient load allowed, he became
+acutely conscious of a depression of spirits which had been growing upon
+him all day. It was the weather, he argued, affecting his nerves or
+digestion. The vision of a warm, cosey house, a devoted wife awaiting
+him, ought to have cheered him, but it did not. He hoped he would not
+feel irritable when Milly rushed into the hall as soon as his key was
+heard in the front door, to feel him all over and take every damp thread
+tragically. Poor dear Milly! What a discontented brute of a husband she
+had got! The fault was no doubt with himself, and he would not really be
+happy even if some miracle did set him down on a sunny Mediterranean
+shore, with enough money to live upon and nothing to think of but his
+book. Mildred used to say that she always went to a big dinner at Durham
+in the unquenchable hope of meeting and fascinating some millionaire who
+had sense enough to see how much better it would be to endow writers of
+good books than readers of silly ones.
+
+With the recollection there rang in the ears of his mind the sound of a
+laugh which he had not heard for seventeen months. Something seemed to
+tighten about his heart. Yes, he could be quite happy without the
+millionaire, without the sunny skies, without even the pretty,
+comfortable home at whose door he stood, if somewhere, anywhere, he
+could hope to hear that laugh again, to hold again in his arms the
+strange bright bride who had melted from them like snow in
+spring-time--but that way madness lay. He thrust the involuntary longing
+from him almost with horror, and turned the latch-key in his door.
+
+The hall lamp was burning low and the house seemed very chilly and
+quiet. He put his books down on the oak table, threw his streaming
+mackintosh upon the large chest, and went up to his dressing-room, to
+change whatever was still damp about him before seeking Milly, who
+presumably was nursing her cold before the study fire. When he had
+thrown off his shoes, he noticed that the door leading to his wife's
+room was ajar and a faint red glow of firelight showed invitingly
+through the chink. A fire! It was irresistible. He went in quickly and
+stirred the coals to a roaring blaze. The dancing flames lit up the
+long, low room with its few pieces of furniture, its high white
+wainscoting, and paper patterned with birds and trellised leaves. They
+lit up the low white bed and the white figure of his sleeping wife. Till
+then he had thought the room was empty. She lay there so deathly still
+and straight that he was smitten with a sudden fear; but leaning over
+her he heard her quiet, regular breathing and saw that if somewhat pale,
+she was normal in color. He touched her hand. It was withdrawn by a
+mechanical movement, but not before he had felt that it was warm.
+
+A wild excitement thrilled him; it would have been truer to say a wild
+joy, only that it held a pang of remorse for itself. So she had lain at
+the Hôtel du Chalet when he had left her for that long walk over the
+crisp mountain snow. And when he had returned, she--what She? No, his
+brain did not reel on the verge of madness; it merely accepted under the
+compulsion of knowledge a truth of those truths that are too profound to
+admit of mere external proof. For our reason plays at the edge of the
+universe as a little child plays at the edge of the sea, gathering from
+its fringes the flotsam and jetsam of its mighty life. But miles and
+miles beyond the ken of the eager eye, beyond the reach of the alert
+hand, lies the whole great secret life of the sea. And if it were all
+laid bare and spread at the child's feet, how could the little hand
+suffice to gather its vast treasures, the inexperienced eye to perceive
+and classify them?
+
+Alone in the firelit, silent room, with this tranced form before him,
+Ian Stewart knew that the woman who would arise from that bed would be a
+different woman from the one who had lain down upon it. By what
+mysterious alchemy of nature transmuted he could not understand, any
+more than he could understand the greater part of the workings of that
+cosmic energy which he was compelled to recognize, although he might be
+cheated with words into believing that he understood them. Another woman
+would arise and she his Love. She had been gone so long; his heart had
+hungered for her so long, in silence even to himself. She had been dead
+and now she was about to be raised from the dead. He lighted the
+candles, locked the doors, and paced softly up and down, stopping to
+look at the figure on the bed from time to time. Far around him, close
+about him, life was moving at its usual jog-trot pace. People were going
+back to their College rooms or domestic hearths, grumbling about the
+weather or their digestions or their colds, thinking of their work for
+the evening or of their dinner engagements--and suddenly a door had shut
+between him and all that outside world. He was no longer moving in the
+driven herd. He was alone, above them in an upper chamber, awaiting the
+miracle of resurrection.
+
+In the visions that passed before his mind's eye the face of Milly,
+pale, with pleading eyes, was not absent; but with a strange hardness
+which he had never felt before, he thrust the sighing phantom from him.
+She had had her turn of happiness, a long one; it was only fair that
+now they two, he and that Other, should have their chance, should put
+their lips to the full cup of life. The figure on the bed stirred,
+turned on one side, and slipped a hand under the pure curve of the young
+cheek. He was by the bed in a moment; but it still slept, though less
+profoundly, without that tranced look, as though the flame of life
+itself burned low within.
+
+How would she first greet him? Last time she had leaned into the clear
+sunshine and laughed to him from the cloud of her amber hair; and a
+spirit in his blood had leaped to the music of her laugh, even while the
+rational self knew not it was the lady of his love. But however she came
+back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after
+all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been
+set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing
+to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day,
+it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky
+discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of
+his daily work. And this, too, was good.
+
+Yes, it was better because of the contrast between the wonder and its
+environment, better because he himself was more conscious of his joy. He
+sat on the bed a while watching her impatiently. In his eyes she was
+already filled with a new loveliness, but he wanted her hair, her amber
+hair. It was brushed back and imprisoned tightly in a little plait tied
+with a white ribbon--Milly's way. With fingers clumsy, yet gentle, he
+took off the ribbon and cautiously undid the plait. Then he took a comb
+and spread out the silk-soft hair more as he liked to see it, pleased
+with his own skill in the unaccustomed task. She stirred again, but
+still she did not wake. He was pacing up and down the room when she
+raised herself a little on her pillow and looked fixedly at the opposite
+wall. Ian held his breath. He stood perfectly still and watched her.
+Presently she sat up and looked about her, looked at him with a faint,
+vague smile, like that of a baby. He sat down at the foot of the bed and
+took her hand. She smiled at him again, this time with more definite
+meaning.
+
+"Do you know who it is, sweetheart?" he said in a low voice. She nodded
+slightly and went on smiling, as though quietly happy.
+
+"Ian," she breathed, at length.
+
+"Yes, darling."
+
+"I've been away a long, long time. How long?"
+
+He told her.
+
+She uttered a little "Ah!" and frowned; lay quiet awhile, then drew her
+hand from Ian's and sat up still more.
+
+"I sha'n't lie here any longer," she said, in a stronger voice. "It's
+just waste of time." She pushed back the clothes and swung her feet out
+of bed. "Oh, how glad I am to be back again! Are you glad I'm back, Ian?
+Say you are, do say you are!"
+
+And Ian on his knees before her, said that he was.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Ian was leaning against the high mantel-piece of his study. Above it,
+let into the panelling, was an eighteenth-century painting of the Bridge
+and Castle of St. Angelo, browned by time. He was wondering how to tell
+Mildred about the child, and whether she would resent its presence. She,
+too, was meditating, chin on hand. At length she looked up with a sudden
+smile.
+
+"What about the baby, Ian? Don't you take any notice of it yet?"
+
+He was surprised.
+
+"How do you know about him?"
+
+She frowned thoughtfully.
+
+"I seem to know things that have happened in a kind of way--rather as
+though I had seen them in a dream. But they haven't happened to me, you
+know."
+
+"Was it the same last time?"
+
+"No; but the first time I came, and especially just at first, I seemed
+to remember all kinds of things--" She paused as though trying in vain
+to revive her impressions--"Odd things, not a bit like anything in
+Oxford. I can't recall them now, but sometimes in London I fancy I've
+seen places before."
+
+"Of course you have, dear."
+
+"And the first time I saw that old picture there I knew it was Rome, and
+I had a notion that I'd been there and seen just that view."
+
+"You've been seeing pictures and reading books and hearing talk all your
+life, and in the peculiar state of your memory, I suppose you can't
+distinguish between the impressions made on it by facts and by ideas."
+
+Mildred was silent; but it was not the silence of conviction. Then she
+jumped up.
+
+"I'm going to see Baby. You needn't come if you don't want."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"I'm afraid it's too late. Milly doesn't like--" He broke off with a
+wild laugh. "What am I talking about!"
+
+"I suppose you were going to say, Milly doesn't like people taking a
+candle into the room when Baby is shut up for the night. I don't care
+what Milly likes. He's my baby now, and he's sure to look a duck when
+he's asleep. Come along!"
+
+She put her arm through his and together they climbed the steep
+staircase to the nursery.
+
+Mildred had returned to the world in such excellent spirits at merely
+being there, that she took those awkward situations which Milly had
+inevitably bequeathed to her, as capital jokes. The partial and external
+acquaintance with Milly's doings and points of view which she had
+brought back with her, made everything easier than before; but her
+derisive dislike of her absent rival was intensified. It pained Ian if
+she dropped a hint of it. Tims was the only person to whom she could
+have the comfort of expressing herself; and even Tims made faces and
+groaned faintly, as though she did not enjoy Mildred's wit when Milly
+was the subject of it. She gave Milly's cook notice at once, but most
+things she found in a satisfactory state--particularly the family
+finances. More negatively satisfactory was the state of her wardrobe,
+since so little had been bought. Mildred still shuddered at the
+recollection of the trousseau frocks.
+
+Once more Mrs. Stewart, whose social career had been like that of the
+proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement
+was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active
+brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to take up more
+serious interests.
+
+It seemed wiser, too, to make no sudden break with Milly's habits.
+Still, Emma, the nurse, opined that Baby got on all the better since
+Mrs. Stewart had become "more used to him like"--wasn't always changing
+his food, taking his temperature, wanting him to have bandages and
+medicine, forbidding him to be talked to or sung to, and pulling his
+little, curling-up limbs straight when he was going to sleep. He was a
+healthy little fellow and already pretty, with his soft dark
+hair--softer than anything in the world except a baby's hair--his
+delicate eyebrows and bright dark eyes. Mildred loved playing with him.
+Sometimes when Ian heard the tiny shrieks of baby laughter, he used to
+think with a smile and yet with a pang of pity, how shocked poor Milly
+would have been at this titillation of the infant brain. But he did not
+want thoughts of Milly--so far as he could he shut the door of his mind
+against them. She would come back, no doubt, sooner or later; and her
+coming back would mean that Mildred would be robbed of her life, his own
+life robbed of its joy.
+
+At the end of Term the Master of Durham sent a note to bid the Stewarts
+to dine with him and meet Sir Henry Milwood, the rich Australian, and
+Maxwell Davison, the traveller and Orientalist. Ian remarked that
+Davison was a cousin, although they had not met since he was a boy.
+Maxwell Davison had gone to the East originally as agent for some big
+firm, and had spent there nearly twenty years. He was an accomplished
+Persian and Arabic scholar, and gossip related that he had run off with
+a fair Persian from a Constantinople harem and lived with her in Persia
+until her death. But that was years ago.
+
+When the Stewarts entered the Master's bare bachelor drawing-room, they
+found besides the Milwoods, only familiar faces. Maxwell Davison was
+still awaited, and with interest. He came, and that interest did not
+appear to be mutual, judging from the Oriental impassivity of his long,
+brown face, with its narrow, inscrutable eyes. He was tall, slight,
+sinewy as a Bedouin, his age uncertain, since his dry leanness and the
+dash of silver at his temples might be the effect of burning desert
+suns.
+
+Mildred was delighted at first at being sent into dinner with him, but
+she found him disappointingly taciturn. In truth, he had acquired
+Oriental habits and views with regard to women. If a foolish Occidental
+custom demanded that they should sit at meat with the lords of creation,
+he, Maxwell Davison, would not pretend to acquiesce in it. Mildred, to
+whom it was unthinkable that any man should not wish to talk to her,
+merely pitied his shyness and determined to break it down; but Davison's
+attitude was unbending.
+
+After dinner the Master, his mortar-board cap on his head, opened the
+drawing-room door and invited them to come across to the College Library
+to see some bronzes and a few other things that Mr. Davison had
+temporarily deposited there. He had divined that Maxwell Davison would
+be willing to sell, and in his guileful soul the little Master may have
+had schemes of persuading his wealthy friend Milwood to purchase any
+bronzes that might be of value to the College or the University. Of the
+ladies, only Mildred and Miss Moore, the archæologist, braved the chill
+of the mediæval Library to inspect the collection. Davison professed to
+no artistic or antiquarian knowledge of the bronzes. They had come to
+him in the way of trade and had all been dug up in Asia Minor--no, not
+all, for one he had picked up in England. Nevertheless he had succeeded
+in getting a pretty clear notion of the relative value of his
+bronzes--the Oriental curios with them it was his business to
+understand. He could not help observing the sure instinct with which
+Mrs. Stewart selected what was best among all these different objects.
+She had the _flair_ of the born collector. The learned archæologists
+present leaned over the collection discussing and disputing, and took no
+notice of her remarks as she rapidly handled each article. But Davison
+did, and when at length she took up a small figure of Augustus--the
+bronze that had not come from Asia Minor--and looked at it with a
+peculiar doubtful intentness, he began to feel uncomfortable.
+
+"Anything wrong with that?" he asked, in spite of himself.
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davison, please ask some one who knows! I don't. Only I--I seem
+to have seen something like it before, that's all."
+
+Sanderson, roaming around the professed archæologists, took the bronze
+from her hands.
+
+"I'll tell you where you've seen it, Mrs. Stewart. It's engraved in
+Egerton's _Private Collections of Great Britain_. I picked that up the
+other day--first edition, 1818. I dare say the book's here. We'll see."
+
+Sanderson took a candle and went glimmering away down the long, dark
+room.
+
+"What can this be?" asked Mildred, taking up what looked like a glass
+ball.
+
+"Please stand over here and look into it for five minutes," returned
+Davison, evasively. "Perhaps you'll see what it is then."
+
+He somehow wanted to get rid of Mildred's appraisal of his goods.
+
+"Mr. Davison, your glass ball has gone quite cloudy!" she exclaimed, in
+a minute or two.
+
+"That's all right. Go on looking and you'll see something more," he
+returned.
+
+Presently she said:
+
+"It's so curious. I see the whole room reflected in the glass now, but
+it's much lighter than it really is, and the windows seem larger. It all
+looks so different. There is some one down there in white."
+
+Sanderson came up the room carrying a large quarto, open.
+
+"Here's your bronze, right enough," he said, putting the book down on
+the table. "It's under the heading, _Hammerton Collection_."
+
+He pointed to a small engraving inscribed, "Bronze statuette of
+Augustus. _Very rare._"
+
+"But some fellow's been scribbling something here," continued Sanderson,
+turning the book around to read a note written along the margin. He read
+out: "'A forgery. Sold by Lady Hammerton to Mr. Solomons, 1819. See case
+Solomons _versus_ Hammerton, 1820.'"
+
+The turning of the book showed Mildred a full-page engraving entitled,
+"The Gallery, Hammerton House." It represented a long room somewhat like
+the one in which they stood, but still more like the room she had seen
+in the crystal; and in the middle distance there was a slightly sketched
+figure of a woman in a light dress. Half incredulous, half frightened,
+she pored over the engraving which reproduced so strangely the image she
+had seen in Maxwell Davison's mysterious ball.
+
+"How funny!" she almost whispered.
+
+"You may call it funny, of course, that Lady Hammerton succeeded in
+cheating a Jew, which is what it looks like," rejoined Sanderson, bent
+on hunting down his quarry; "but it was pretty discreditable to her
+too."
+
+"Not at all," Maxwell Davison's harsh voice broke in. "That was
+Solomons's look out. I sha'n't bring a lawsuit against the fellow who
+sold me that Augustus, if it is a forgery. A man's a fool to deal in
+things he doesn't understand."
+
+"What is this glass ball, Mr. Davison?" asked Miss Moore, in her turn
+taking up the uncanny thing Mildred had laid down.
+
+"It's a divining-crystal. In the East certain people, mostly boys, look
+in these crystals and see all sorts of things, present, past, and to
+come."
+
+Miss Moore laughed.
+
+"Or pretend they do!"
+
+"Who knows? It isn't of any interest, really. The things that have
+happened have happened, and the things that are to happen will happen
+just as surely, whether we foresee them or not."
+
+Miss Moore turned to the Master.
+
+"Look, Master--this is a divining-crystal, and Mr. Davison's trying to
+persuade me that in the East people really see visions in it."
+
+The Master smiled.
+
+"Mr. Davison has a poor opinion of ladies' intelligence, I'm afraid. He
+thinks they are children, who will believe any fairy tale."
+
+Davison had drawn near to Mildred as the Master spoke; his eyes met hers
+and the impassive face wore a faint, ironical smile.
+
+"The Wisdom of the West speaks!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "I'd
+almost forgotten the sound of it."
+
+Then scrutinizing her pale face: "I'm afraid you've had a scare. What
+did you see?"
+
+"I saw--well, I fancy I saw the Gallery at Hammerton House and my
+ancestress, Lady Hammerton. It was burned, you know, and she was burned
+with it, trying to save her collections. I expect she condescended to
+give me a glimpse of them because I've inherited her mania. I'd be a
+collector, too, if I had the money."
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"You should take Ian to the East," returned Davison. "You could make
+money there and learn things--the Wisdom of the East, for instance."
+
+Mildred, recovering her equanimity, smiled at him.
+
+"No, never! The Wisdom of the West engrosses us; but you'll come and
+tell us about the other, won't you?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Maxwell Davison settled in Oxford for six months, in order to see his
+great book on Persian Literature through the press. His advent had been
+looked forward to as promising a welcome variety, bringing a splash of
+vivid color into a somewhat quiet-hued, monotonous world. But there was
+doomed to be some disappointment. Mr. Davison went rather freely to
+College dinners but seldom into general society. It came to be
+understood that he disliked meeting women; Mrs. Stewart, however, he
+appeared to except from his condemnation or rule. Ian was his cousin,
+which made a pretext at first for going to the Stewarts' house; but he
+went because he found the couple interesting in their respective ways.
+Some Dons, unable to believe that a man without a University education
+could teach them anything, would lecture him out of their little
+pocketful of knowledge about Oriental life and literature. Ian, on the
+contrary, was an admirable producer of all that was interesting in
+others; and in Davison that all was much. At first he had tried to keep
+Mrs. Stewart in what he conceived to be her proper place; but as time
+went on he found himself dropping in at the old house with surprising
+frequency, and often when he knew Ian to be in College or too busy to
+attend to him.
+
+He had brought horses with him and offered to give Mildred a mount
+whenever she liked. Milly had learned the rudiments of the art, but she
+was too timid to care for riding. Mildred, on the other hand, delighted
+in the swift motion through the air, the sensation of the strong
+bounding life almost incorporated with her own, and if she had moments
+of terror she had more of ecstatic daring. She and Davison ended by
+riding together once or twice a week.
+
+Interesting as Mildred found Maxwell Davison's companionship, it did not
+altogether conduce to her happiness. She who had been so content to be
+merely alive, began now to chafe at the narrow limits of her existence.
+He opened the wide horizons of the world before her, and her soul seemed
+native to them. One April afternoon they rode to Wytham together. The
+woods of Wytham clothe a long ridge of hill around which the young
+Thames sweeps in a strong curve and through them a grass ride runs
+unbroken for a mile and a half. Now side by side, now passing and
+repassing each other, they had "kept the great pace" along the track,
+the horses slackening their speed somewhat as they went down the dip,
+only to spring forward with fresh impetus, lifting their hind-quarters
+gallantly to the rise; then given their heads for the last burst along
+the straight bit to the drop of the hill, away they went in passionate
+competition, foam-flecked and sending the clods flying from their
+hurrying hoofs.
+
+A mile and a half of galloping only serves to whet the appetite of a
+well-girt horse, and the foaming rivals hardly allowed themselves to be
+pulled up at the edge of a steep grassy slope, where already here and
+there a yellow cowslip bud was beginning to break its pale silken
+sheath. At length their impatient dancing was over, and they stood
+quiet, resigned to the will of the incomprehensible beings who
+controlled them. But Mildred's blood was dancing still and she abandoned
+herself to the pleasure of it, undistracted by speech. Beyond the
+shining Thames, wide-curving through its broad green meadows, and the
+gray bridge and tower of Eynsham, that great landscape, undulating,
+clothed in the mystery of moving cloud-shadows, gave her an agreeable
+impression of being a view into a strange country, hundreds of miles
+away from Oxford and the beaten track. But Maxwell's eyes were fixed
+upon her.
+
+The wood about them was just breaking into the various beauty of spring
+foliage, emerald and gold and red; a few trees still holding up naked
+gray branches among it; here and there a white cloud of cherry blossom,
+shining in a clearing or floating mistily amid bursting tree-tops below
+them. They turned to the right, down a narrow ride, mossy and winding,
+where perforce they trod on flowers as they went; for the path and the
+wood about it were carpeted with blue dog-violets and the pale soft
+blossoms of primroses, opening in clusters amid their thick fresh
+foliage and the brown of last year's fallen leaves. The sky above wore
+the intense blue in which dark clouds are seen floating, and as the
+gleams of travelling sunshine passed over the wooded hill, its colors
+also glowed with a peculiar intensity. The horses, no longer excited by
+a vista of turf, were walking side by side. But the beauty of earth and
+sky were nothing to Maxwell, whose whole being was intent on the beauty
+of the woman in the saddle beside him; the rose and the gold of cheek
+and hair, the lithe grace of the body, lightly moving to the motion of
+her horse.
+
+She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.
+
+"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to
+you."
+
+"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on
+her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"
+
+"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you
+condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm
+learning the proper way for a woman to talk."
+
+"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've
+covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."
+
+"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat?
+Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What
+he'd feel!"
+
+She laughed delightedly.
+
+"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose path,' you see, and
+they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're
+not afraid of anything."
+
+"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and--most butlers."
+
+Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.
+
+"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you
+better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's
+because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty
+things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you,
+you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."
+
+"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them
+out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"
+
+He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her
+horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced
+herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task
+accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently
+she turned towards him, brightening.
+
+"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer
+without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free
+feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could
+jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and
+nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one
+chose. But I can't explain what I mean."
+
+"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean
+is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an
+air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it!
+None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be
+the life for you."
+
+It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous
+soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her
+wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom,
+travel, and motion--all that really was as the breath of life to her--it
+fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that
+sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once
+excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment
+she had turned to him with a challenging smile.
+
+"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."
+
+"So it is--for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less
+mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake--which causes such a deal
+of unnecessary misery and waste in the world--the mistake of supposing
+that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey.
+You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's
+bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to
+wish them to distort themselves to fit it."
+
+"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so
+glad."
+
+"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you
+oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to
+the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as
+you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You
+daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice
+it is to ride with your hat off."
+
+They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to
+Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field
+to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods
+from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the
+horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred
+did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.
+
+"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as
+she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show
+him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet
+smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind
+her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its
+head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs
+drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a
+minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from
+each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most
+Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the
+hind-quarters of his big horse lifting powerfully under him, as it sped
+with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and
+vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed,
+seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business,
+she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the
+long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by
+which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in
+hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew
+past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the
+gate.
+
+"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her
+whip at him.
+
+Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and
+anxiety.
+
+"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her.
+"You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate,
+pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off
+yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do
+you're a poor horse-woman."
+
+He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly
+because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
+hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
+only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
+interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
+they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
+his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale
+as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
+that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
+lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
+brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
+and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
+when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
+the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together,
+through flying scuds of rain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one
+which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people,
+who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to
+whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the
+by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out
+of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not
+precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but
+in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she
+found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in
+Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a
+free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he
+constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions
+might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good
+sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the
+shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides
+involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did
+not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was
+only a dislike to her being somebody else's slave. He was a despot at
+heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women.
+Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her,
+maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she
+had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered
+whether her strange interest in the society of a man for whom she had no
+affection, could be that. She did not feel towards Ian as an ordinary
+wife might have done, yet his feelings and interests weighed much with
+her. Milly, too, she must necessarily consider, but she did that in a
+different, an almost vengeful spirit.
+
+One evening Ian, looking up from his work, asked her what she was
+smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it
+was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit
+within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning
+Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell
+Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the
+biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however Tims might affirm the contrary,
+Mildred had a fixed impression that Milly could be in a rage.
+
+The fire-game was hastening to its close; but before Mildred could prove
+herself a real mistress of the dangerous element, the sleep fell upon
+her.
+
+Except a sensation of fatigue, for which it was easy to find a reason,
+there was no warning of the coming change. But Ian had dreams in the
+night and opened his eyes in the morning with a feeling of uneasiness
+and depression. Mildred could never sleep late without causing him
+anxiety, and on this morning his first glance at her filled him with a
+dread certainty. She was sleeping what was to her in a measure the sleep
+of death. He had a violent impulse to awaken her forcibly; but he feared
+it would be dangerous. With his arm around her and his head close to
+hers on the pillow, he whispered her name over and over again. The
+calmness of her face gradually gave way to an expression of struggle
+approaching convulsion, and he dared not continue. He could only await
+the inevitable in a misery which from its very nature could find no
+expression and no comforter.
+
+Milly, unlike Mildred, did not return to the world in a rapture of
+satisfaction with it. The realization of the terrible robbery of life of
+which she had again been the victim, was in itself enough to account for
+a certain sadness even in her love for Ian and for her child. The
+hygiene of the nursery had been neglected according to her ideas, yet
+Baby was bonny enough to delight any mother's heart, however heavy it
+might be. Ian, she said, wanted feeding up and taking care of; and he
+submitted to the process with a gentle, melancholy smile. Just one
+request he made; that she would not spoil her pretty hair by screwing it
+up in her usual unbecoming manner. She understood, studying a certain
+photograph in a drawer--what drawer was safe from Milly's tidyings?--and
+dressed her hair as like it as she knew how, with a secret bitterness of
+heart.
+
+Mildred had found a diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to
+her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had
+continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought
+might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the
+two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of
+union between them. Their indivisibility in the eyes of the world made
+their external interests inevitably one. New friends and acquaintances
+Mildred had noted down, with useful remarks upon them. She was not
+confidential on the subject of Maxwell Davison, but she gave the bare
+necessary information.
+
+It was now late in the Summer Term and her bedroom chimney-piece was
+richly decorated with invitation cards. Among others there was an
+invitation to a garden-party at Lady Margaret Hall. Milly put on a fresh
+flowered muslin dress, apparently unworn, that she found hanging in one
+of the deep wall-cupboards of the old house, and a coarse burnt-straw
+hat, trimmed with roses and black ribbon, which became her marvellously
+well. All the scruples of an apostle of hygienic dress, all the
+uneasiness of an economist at the prospect of unpaid bills, disappeared
+before the pleasure of a young woman face to face with an extremely
+pretty reflection in a pier-glass. That glass, an oval in a light
+mahogany frame, of the Regency period, if not earlier, was one of
+Mildred's finds in the slums of St. Ebbes.
+
+She walked across the Parks, where the Cricket Match of the season was
+drawing a crowd, meaning to come out by a gate below Lady Margaret Hall,
+the gardens and buildings of which did not then extend to the Cherwell.
+In their place were a few tennis-grounds and a path leading to a
+boat-house, shared by a score or more of persons. While she was still
+coming across the grass of the Parks, a man in flannels, very white in
+the sun, came towards her from the gate for which she was making. He
+must have recognized her from a long way off. He was a striking-looking
+man of middle age, walking with a free yet indolent stride that carried
+him along much faster than it appeared to do.
+
+Milly had no idea who the stranger was, but he greeted her with: "Here
+you are at last, Mildred! Do you know how much behind time you are?"--he
+took out his watch--"Exactly thirty-five minutes. I should have given
+you up if I hadn't known that breaking your promise is not among your
+numerous vices, and unpunctuality is."
+
+Who on earth was he? And why did he call her by her Christian name?
+Milly went a beautiful pink with embarrassment.
+
+"I'm so sorry. I thought the party would have just begun," she replied.
+
+"You don't mean to say you want to keep me kicking my heels while you go
+to a confounded party? I thought you knew I was off to Paris to-night,
+after that Firdusi manuscript, and I think of taking the Continental
+Express to Constantinople next week. I don't know when I shall be back.
+Surely, Mildred, it's not a great deal to ask you to spare half an hour
+from a wretched party to come on the river with me before I go?" It
+struck Maxwell as he ended that he was falling into the whining of the
+Occidental lover. He was determined that he would clear the situation
+this afternoon; the more determined because he was conscious of a
+feeling odiously resembling fear which had before now held him back from
+plain dealing with Mildred. Afraid of a woman? It was too ridiculous.
+
+Milly, meanwhile, felt herself on firmer ground. This must be Ian's
+cousin, Maxwell Davison, the Orientalist. But there was nothing nomadic
+in her heart to thrill to the idea of being on the Cherwell this
+afternoon, in London this evening, in Paris next morning, in
+Constantinople next week.
+
+"Of course I'll come on the river with you," she said. "I'm sorry I'm
+late. I'm afraid I--I'd forgotten."
+
+Forgotten! How simply she said it! Yet it was surely the veriest
+impudence of coquetry. He looked at her slowly from the hat downward, as
+he lounged leisurely at her side.
+
+"War-paint, I see!" he remarked. "Armed from head to heel with all the
+true and tried female weapons. They're just the same all the world
+over--'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,'--though no doubt you
+fancy they're different. Who's the frock put on for, Mildred? For the
+party, or--for me?"
+
+Milly was conscious of such an extreme absence of intention so far as
+Maxwell was concerned, that it would have been rude to express it. She
+went very pink again, and lifting forget-me-not blue eyes to his
+inscrutable ones, articulated slowly:
+
+"I'm sure I don't know."
+
+Her eyes were like a child's and a shy smile curved her pink lips
+adorably as she spoke. Such mere simplicity would not in itself have
+cast a spell over Maxwell, but it came to him as a new, surprising phase
+of the eternal feminine in her; and it had the additional charm that it
+caused that subjugated feeling resembling fear, with which Mildred could
+inspire him, to disappear entirely. He was once more in the proper
+dominant attitude of Man. He felt the courage now to make her do what he
+believed she wished to do in her heart; the courage, too, to punish her
+for the humiliation she had inflicted upon him. Six months ago he would
+have had nothing but a hearty contempt for the man who could beat thirty
+yards of gravel-path for half an hour, watch in hand, in a misery of
+impatience, waiting on the good pleasure of a capricious woman.
+
+Meantime he laughed good-humoredly at Milly's answer and began to talk
+of neutral matters. If her tongue did not move as nimbly as usual, he
+flattered himself it was because she knew that the hour of her surrender
+was at hand.
+
+Milly knew the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer
+days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and
+how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves.
+How, when the big doors were opened on to the raft and the slowly
+moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the
+running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there
+in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one
+of the barred doors, took it out to the water. Mildred would have felt a
+half-conscious æsthetic pleasure in watching his movements,
+superficially indolent but instinct with strength. Milly had not the
+same æsthetic sensibilities, and she was still disagreeably embarrassed
+at finding herself on such a familiar footing with a man whom she had
+never seen before. Then, although she followed Aunt Beatrice's golden
+rule of never allowing a question of feminine dress to interfere with
+masculine plans, she could not but feel anxious as to the fate of her
+fresh muslin and ribbons packed into a canoe. Maxwell, however, had
+learned canoeing years ago on the Canadian lakes, and did not splash.
+His lean, muscular brown arms and supple wrists took the canoe rapidly
+through the water, with little apparent effort.
+
+It was the prime of June and the winding willow-shaded Cherwell was in
+its beauty. White water-lilies were only just beginning to open silver
+buds, floating serenely on their broad green and red pads; but prodigal
+masses of wild roses, delicately rich in scent and various in color,
+overhung the river in brave arching bowers or starred bushes and
+hedgerows so closely that the green briers were hardly visible. Beds of
+the large blue water forget-me-not floated beside the banks, and above
+them creamy meadow-sweet lifted its tall plumes among the reeds and
+grasses. Small water-rats swam busily from bank to bank or played on the
+roots of the willows, and bright wings of birds and insects fluttered
+and skimmed over the shining stream.
+
+The Cherwell, though not then the crowded waterway it has since become,
+was usually popular with boaters on such an afternoon. But there must
+have been strong counter-attractions elsewhere, for Milly and Davison
+passed only one, a party of children working very independent oars, on
+their way to the little gray house above the ferry, where an old
+Frenchman dispensed tea in arbors.
+
+There was a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe
+and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It
+was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a
+person who had rights over her--a tone which before he had been more
+willing than able to adopt; but now the bit was between his teeth.
+Perhaps absorbed in his own intent, he hardly noticed how little she
+answered; but he did notice every point of her beauty as she leaned back
+on the cushions in the light shade of her parasol, from the soft
+brightness of her hair to the glimpse of delicate white skin which
+showed through the open-work stocking on her slender foot.
+
+When they were in the straight watery avenue between green willow walls,
+which leads up to the ferry, he slackened the pace.
+
+"And what are you going to do next week?" he asked, as one of a series
+of ironical questions.
+
+"A great deal; much more than I care to do. I'm going up to town to see
+the new Savoy opera, and I'm going to a dance, and to several
+garden-parties, and to dine with the Master of Durham."
+
+"Quite enough for some people; but not for you, Mildred. Think of
+it--year after year, always the same old run. October Term, Lent Term,
+Summer Term! A little change in Vacations, say a month abroad, when you
+can afford it. You aren't meant for it, you know you're not, any more
+than a swallow's meant for the little hopping, pecketing life of a
+London sparrow."
+
+"Indeed, I don't see the likeness either way. I'm quite happy as I am."
+
+He smiled mockingly.
+
+"Quite happy! As it's very proper you should be, of course. Come,
+Mildred, no humbug! Think how you'd feel if you knew that instead of
+going to all those idiotic parties next week you were going to
+Constantinople."
+
+"Isn't it dreadfully hot at this time of year?"
+
+"I like it hot. But at any rate one can always find some cool place in
+the hottest weather. How would you like to go in a caravan from Cairo to
+Damascus next autumn?"
+
+"I dare say it would be delightful, if the country one passed through
+were not too wild and dangerous. But Ian would never be able to leave
+his work for an expedition like that."
+
+Maxwell smiled grimly.
+
+"I'd no idea you'd want him. I shouldn't. Do be serious. If you fancy
+I'm the sort of man you can go on playing with forever, you're most
+confoundedly mistaken."
+
+Milly was both offended and alarmed. Was this strange man mad? And she
+alone with him on the river!
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said, coldly.
+
+"Don't you?" he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile--"Well, I
+know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women,
+but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you,
+except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a set
+of trained, accomplished hypocrites!"
+
+Indignation overcame fear in Milly's bosom.
+
+"We are nothing of the kind," she said. "How can you talk such
+nonsense?"
+
+"Nonsense? I suppose being a woman you can't really be logical, although
+you generally pretend to be so. Why have you pranked yourself out, spent
+an hour I dare say in making yourself pretty to-day? For what possible
+reason except to attract the eyes of a crowd of men, young fools or
+doddering old ones--"
+
+Milly uttered an expression of vehement denial, but he continued:
+
+"Or else to whet my appetite for forbidden fruit. But there's no 'or'
+about it, is there? Most likely you had both of those desirable objects
+in view."
+
+Milly was not a coward when her indignation was aroused. She took hold
+of the sides of the canoe and began raising herself.
+
+"I don't know whether you mean to be insulting," she said; "but I don't
+wish to hear any more of this sort of thing. I'd rather you put me out,
+please."
+
+"Sit down," he said, with authority--the canoe was rocking
+violently--"unless you're anxious to be drowned. I warn you I'm a very
+poor swimmer, and if we upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my
+being able to save you."
+
+Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save
+herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.
+
+"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.
+
+They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire
+rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage,
+and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and
+the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his
+shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some
+inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to
+Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the
+rope and on.
+
+"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision,
+after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my
+manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring
+you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send
+you on a field-walk in that smart frock and shoes--" he smiled at her,
+and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his
+smile--"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all
+these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years
+that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial
+conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must
+remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come
+right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be
+stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to
+recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of
+Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core.
+And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined,
+but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."
+
+Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick
+to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument,
+but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary,
+that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized
+in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in
+her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in
+opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent
+towards the turning paddle, hardly heard what she was saying. He was
+paddling fast and considering many things.
+
+They came to where the river ran under a narrow grass field, rising in
+a steep bank and shut off from the world by a tall hedge and a row of
+elms, that threw long shadows down the grass and were reflected in the
+water. A path led through it, but it was little frequented. On the other
+side was a wide, green meadow, where the long grass was ripening under
+rose-blossoming hedges, and far beyond was the blueness of distant hills
+and woods. Maxwell ran the bow of the canoe into a thick bed of
+forget-me-nots, growing not far from the bank. He laid the dripping
+paddle aside, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his head in his
+hands for a minute or more. When he turned his face towards her it was
+charged with passion, but most of all with a grave masterfulness. He had
+been sitting on a low seat, but now he kneeled so as to come nearer to
+her, and, stretching out his long arms, laid a hand, brown,
+long-fingered, smooth, on her two slight, gray-gloved ones.
+
+"Mildred," he said, and his voice seemed to have lost its harshness,
+"I've brought you here to make you decide what you are going to do with
+me and with yourself. I want you--you know I want you, but I don't come
+begging for you as an alms. I say, just compare the life, the free,
+glorious life I can give you, and the wretched, petty round of existence
+here. Come with me, won't you? Don't be afraid I shall treat you like a
+slave; I follow Nature, and Nature made you a queen. Come with me
+to-night, come to Paris, to Constantinople, to all the East! Never mind
+about love yet, we won't talk about that, for I don't really flatter
+myself you love me; I'm only sure you don't love Ian--"
+
+Milly had listened to him so far, drawing herself back to the farthest
+end of the canoe, half petrified with amazement, half dominated by his
+powerful personality. At these words her pallor gave way to a scarlet
+flush.
+
+"How dare you!" she cried, in a voice tremulous with indignation. "How
+dare you talk to me like this? How dare you name my husband? You brought
+me out here on purpose to say such things to me? Oh, it's abominable,
+it's disgraceful!"
+
+There was no room for doubt as to the sincerity of her indignation.
+Maxwell drew back and his face changed. There were patches of dull red
+on his cheeks, almost as though he had been struck, and his narrow eyes
+glittered. Looking at him, Milly felt physical fear; she thought once
+more of insanity. There was a silence; then she spoke again.
+
+"Put me on to the bank here, please. I'll walk back."
+
+"I shall let you go when I choose," returned he, in a grating voice. "I
+have something to say to you first."
+
+He paused and his frown darkened upon her. "You asked me how I 'dared.'
+Dare! Do you take me for a dog, to be chained up and tantalized with
+nice bits, and hardly allowed to whine for them? I say, how dare you
+entice me with your beauty--it's decked out now for me--entice me with
+all your beguiling ways, your pretence of longing to go away and to live
+the free life in the East as I live it? Now, when you've made me want
+you--what else have you been aiming at? You pretend to be surprised, you
+pretend even to yourself, to be dreadfully shocked. What damned humbug!
+With us only the dancing-girls venture to play such tricks as you do,
+and they daren't go too far, because the men are men and wear knives.
+But here you proper women, with your weakness unnaturally protected, you
+go about pretending you don't know there's such a thing in the world as
+desire--oh, of course not!--and all the while you're deliberately
+exciting it and playing upon it."
+
+Mildred had been right in saying that the gentle Milly could be in a
+rage; though it was a thing that had happened to her only once or twice
+before since her childhood. It happened now. Anger, burning anger,
+extinguished the fear that had held her silent while he was speaking.
+
+"It's false!" she cried, with burning face and blazing eyes. "It's
+disgraceful of you to say such things--it's degrading for me to have to
+hear them. I will get away from you, if I have to jump into the river."
+
+She started forward, but Maxwell, with his tall, lithe body and long
+arms, had a great reach. He leaned forward and his iron hands were upon
+her shoulders, forcing her back.
+
+"Don't be a fool," he said, still fierce in eye and voice.
+
+Her lips trembled with fury so that she could hardly speak.
+
+"Do you consider yourself a gentleman?"
+
+He laughed scornfully.
+
+"I don't consider the question at all. I am a man; you are a woman, and
+you have presumed to make a plaything of me. You thought you could do it
+with impunity because we are civilized, because you are a lady; for
+bar-maids and servant-girls do get their throats cut sometimes still.
+Don't be frightened, I'm not going to kill you, but I mean to make you
+understand for once that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that
+they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better
+animal--"
+
+He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation.
+Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed,
+and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly
+on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook
+lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough
+to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to
+pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she
+bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently,
+but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell
+looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not
+stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow,
+through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When
+she was half-way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and
+instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:
+
+"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I
+sha'n't."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit
+for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from
+that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from
+any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked
+after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives
+were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in
+the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had
+been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for
+him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness
+will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our
+lives are made up of mere to-morrows--if Shakespeare had not happened to
+put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of
+imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But
+even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly
+regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that
+demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she
+lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real
+delight, and that it was well she should have nothing to spend in
+ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share.
+Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and
+Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her
+bric-à-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese
+ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor
+miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the
+horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after
+that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow,
+a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind.
+Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the
+colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid
+existence.
+
+In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern
+towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately
+as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual
+personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with
+the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen
+in her nursery days.
+
+Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a
+Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian,
+and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the
+wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the
+evening that Ian expected her to go to bed at once; but she followed
+him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on
+the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some
+perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an
+address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in
+London.
+
+Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old,
+high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate
+tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with
+gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of
+dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife
+sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into
+nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the
+inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:
+
+"I've got something awful to tell you."
+
+Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot
+chair.
+
+"What about? Tony?"--for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had
+reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.
+
+"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."
+
+Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he
+liked Tony.
+
+"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"
+
+"Nothing--but oh, Ian! I--hate even to speak of such a thing--"
+
+"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."
+
+"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he--he made love to
+me."
+
+The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.
+
+"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then,
+after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a
+cad."
+
+"He--he wanted me to run away with him."
+
+Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.
+
+"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.
+
+"But it's worse--it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me.
+I--_I_ of course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the
+garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said
+all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up
+for him--"
+
+"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still
+coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't.
+I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl,
+but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous
+happening."
+
+"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said
+he knew I didn't love you--that _I_ didn't love _you_, my own darling
+husband. Some one, some one--must be responsible for his thinking that.
+How do I know what happens when--when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a
+creature who doesn't love you!"
+
+Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, but there was a faint flush
+on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to
+a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled
+apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of
+grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.
+
+"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length.
+"Don't give me pain by imagining evil about--about yourself. You could
+never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that
+a man could wish his wife to be."
+
+He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft
+face between his hands kissed her forehead.
+
+"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it
+any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so
+bad to-morrow morning."
+
+But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back
+against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.
+
+"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's
+not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil
+spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me!
+I've always tried to be good."
+
+There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's
+case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as
+another, whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat
+down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon
+him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a
+nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung
+herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.
+
+"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in
+God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you
+away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked
+spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take
+possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O
+Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."
+
+Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in
+evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he
+said, quietly:
+
+"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little
+more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition,
+like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand?
+Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to
+be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it
+worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."
+
+"At first I thought it was like that--an eclipse of memory. But now I
+feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I.
+To-night Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to
+find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the
+frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was
+reminded of--that fearful night when I came back and saw--something. I
+am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."
+
+Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.
+
+"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."
+
+"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how
+any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like
+her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing
+happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the
+lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I
+could bear it better if--But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you
+left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who
+deceives you, and--"
+
+"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are
+absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."
+
+There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard
+before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new
+to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.
+
+"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me
+tell you what she is?"
+
+He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered
+with cold deliberation:
+
+"I cannot cease to love my own wife because--because she's not always
+exactly the same."
+
+They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa.
+The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped
+from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again
+slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place
+in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of
+an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls
+and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a
+bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark
+doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two,
+or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously
+flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of
+life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant
+with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in
+flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the
+stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and
+since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and
+fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with
+blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The
+scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of
+physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes from
+blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.
+
+Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical
+contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with
+passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress.
+He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness
+of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class,
+and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If
+his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities
+which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any
+such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position
+of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has
+affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was
+not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no
+severance.
+
+He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow
+Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself.
+Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession
+of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange
+tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the
+thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among
+the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as
+peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he
+were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life,
+it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an
+overwrought brain.
+
+There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is
+almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart
+found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And
+at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle,
+appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and
+carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had
+taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a
+hobble. Meditative, he looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. No
+artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that
+round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality
+and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and
+benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger
+man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose
+counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.
+
+When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar
+to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and
+saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table,
+he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such
+a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him
+to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his
+old pupil with silent benevolence.
+
+"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very
+bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more
+than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always
+been good to her as well as to me."
+
+"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you
+married wisely."
+
+"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she--we didn't
+quite grasp--its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of
+those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see
+involved real and extraordinary variations in her character--a change,
+in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to
+Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him
+without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a
+silence. At length the Master said:
+
+"I suspect we don't understand women."
+
+"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great
+difference in my wife at various times?"
+
+"Not more than I feel in myself--not of another character, that is. We
+live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing
+about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your
+wife's quite normal, really."
+
+"But the memory alone, surely--"
+
+"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You
+remember meeting Sir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young
+clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and
+went sheep-farming in Australia, where he made his fortune."
+
+"But his personality?" asked Stewart, with anxiety. "Was that changed?"
+
+"Certainly. A colonial sheep-farmer is a different person from a young
+Don just in orders."
+
+"I don't mean that, Master. I mean did he rise from his bed with ideas,
+with feelings quite opposite to those which had possessed him when he
+lay down upon it? Did he ever have a return of the clerical phase,
+during which he forgot how he became a sheep-farmer and wished to take
+up his old work again?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+There was a pause. The Master played with his gold spectacles and sucked
+his under lip. Then:
+
+"Take a good holiday, Stewart," he said.
+
+Stewart's clear-cut face hardened and flushed momentarily. "These are
+not fancies of my own, Master. Cases occur in which two, sometimes more
+than two, entirely different personalities alternate in the same
+individual. The spontaneous cases are rare, of course, but hypnotism
+seems to develop them pretty freely. The facts are there, but English
+scientists prefer to say nothing about them."
+
+The Master rose and trotted restlessly about.
+
+"They're quite right," he returned, at length. "Such ideas can lead to
+nothing but mischief."
+
+"Surely that is the orthodox theologian's usual objection to scientific
+fact."
+
+The Master lifted his head and looked at his rebel disciple. For
+although he was an officiating clergyman, he and the orthodox
+theologians were at daggers drawn.
+
+"Views, statements of this kind are not knowledge," he said, after a
+while, and continued moving uneasily about without looking at Stewart.
+
+Stewart did not reply; it seemed useless to go on talking. He recognized
+that the Master's attitude was what his own had been before the iron of
+fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped
+that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his
+judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He
+sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking
+the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him.
+To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the
+hard sofa would have seemed an oddly assorted pair. Stewart's length of
+frame, the raven black of his hair and beard, the marble pallor of his
+delicate features, made the little Master look smaller, pinker, plumper
+than usual; but his face, radiating wisdom and affection, was more than
+beautiful in the eyes of his old disciple.
+
+"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always
+think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let
+me speak to you now as a father might--and probably wouldn't."
+
+Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.
+
+"You are young, but your wife is much younger. A man marries a girl
+many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of
+responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the
+same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much
+greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more
+help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you
+have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but
+she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She
+lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have
+nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to
+hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do
+not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that
+your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her
+happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of
+mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them.
+So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you
+will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of
+accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason
+and Religion are the only true guides."
+
+The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses
+which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The
+spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was,
+as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.
+
+He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout
+sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about
+twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the
+beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile,
+because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to
+be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost
+which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying
+physiology in London and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of
+life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of
+cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a
+comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however,
+she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women
+poorer than herself to benefit by it.
+
+She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious
+illness of her next-door neighbor--Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a
+small post in the British Museum--had prevented her from visiting Oxford
+during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have
+been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper
+to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going
+sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly
+neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which
+she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her
+long neglect of her friend.
+
+It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burt was still at Ascham and
+Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the
+Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned
+towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded
+her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss
+about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed
+to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when
+she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and
+dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse
+happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months,
+was sitting on the drawing-room floor.
+
+The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a
+gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept
+working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a
+knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her
+skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected
+picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the
+box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to
+hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until
+it jumped up with a bang--a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles,
+and scarlet snout--to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune.
+Then Tony, be sure, would laugh until he rolled from side to side. Mummy
+never responded to his wishes now, but Daddy had pleaded for the
+Jack-in-the-box to be spared, and sometimes when quite alone with Tony,
+would play the monkey-game in his inferior paternal style, pleased with
+such modified appreciation as the young critic might bestow upon him.
+
+"I'm sorry Baby's so troublesome," apologized the distressed Milly, for
+the third time lifting Tony up and replacing him in a sitting posture,
+with his picture-book. "I'm trying to teach him to sit quiet, but I'm
+afraid he's been played with a great deal more than he should have
+been."
+
+"To tell the truth, I thought so the last time I was here," replied Aunt
+Beatrice. "But he's still young enough to be properly trained. It's such
+waste of a reasonable person's time to spend it making idiotic noises at
+a small baby. And it's a thousand times better for the child's brain and
+nerves for it to be left entirely to itself."
+
+Tony said nothing, but his face began to work in a threatening manner.
+
+"I perfectly agree with you, Aunt Beatrice," responded Milly, eagerly.
+
+Lady Thomson continued:
+
+"Children should be spoken to as little as possible until they are from
+two to two and a half years old; then they should be taught to speak
+correctly."
+
+Milly chimed in: "Yes, that's always been my own view. I do feel it so
+important that their very first impressions should be the right ones,
+that the first pictures they see should be good, that they should never
+be sung to out of tune and in general--"
+
+Apparently this programme for babies did not commend itself to Tony;
+certainly the first item, enjoining silent development, did not. His
+face had by this time worked the right number of minutes to produce a
+roar, and it came. Milly picked him up, but the wounds of his spirit
+were not to be immediately healed, and the roar continued. Finally he
+had to be handed over to the parlor-maid, and so came to great happiness
+in the kitchen, where there were no rules against infantile
+conversation. Milly was flushed and disturbed.
+
+"Baby has not been properly brought up," she said. "He's been allowed
+his own way too much."
+
+"Since you say so, Milly, I must confess I noticed in the spring that
+you seemed to be bringing the child up in an easy-going, old-fashioned
+way I should hardly have expected of you. I hope you will begin now to
+study the theory of education. A mother should take her vocation
+seriously. I own I don't altogether understand the taste for frivolities
+which you have developed since you married. It's harmless, no doubt, but
+it doesn't seem quite natural in a young woman who has taken a First in
+Greats."
+
+Milly's hands grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at
+her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had
+ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had
+befallen her; yet she did it.
+
+"The person you saw here last spring wasn't I. Oh, Aunt Beatrice! Can't
+you see the difference?"
+
+Lady Thomson looked at her in surprise:
+
+"What do you mean? I was speaking of my visit to you in March."
+
+"And don't you see the difference? Oh, how hateful you must have found
+me!"
+
+"Really, Mildred, I saw nothing hateful about you. On the contrary, if
+you want the plain truth, I greatly prefer you in a cheerful,
+common-sense mood, as you were then, even if your high spirits do lead
+you into a little too much frivolity. I think it a more wholesome, and
+therefore ultimately a more useful, frame of mind than this causeless
+depression, which leads you to take such a morbid, exaggerated view of
+things."
+
+Every word pierced Milly's heart with a double pang.
+
+"You liked her better than me?" she asked, piteously. "Yet I've always
+tried to be just what you wanted me to be, Aunt Beatrice, to do
+everything you thought right, and she--Oh, it's too awful!"
+
+"What do you mean, Mildred?"
+
+"I mean that the person you prefer to me as I am now, the person who was
+here in March, wasn't I at all."
+
+The fine healthy carnation of Lady Thomson's cheek paled. In her calm,
+rapid way she at once found the explanation of Milly's unhealthy,
+depressed appearance and manner. Poor Mildred Stewart was insane. Beyond
+the paling of her cheek, however, Lady Thomson allowed no sign of shock
+to be visible in her.
+
+"That's an exaggerated way of talking," she replied. "I suppose you mean
+your mood was different."
+
+Milly was looking straight in front of her with haggard eyes.
+
+"No; it simply wasn't I at all. You believe in the Bible, don't you?"
+
+"Not in verbal inspiration, of course, but in a general way, yes,"
+returned Lady Thomson, puzzled but guarded.
+
+"Do you believe in the demoniacs? In possession by evil spirits?"
+
+Milly was not looking at vacancy now. Her desperate hands clutched the
+arms of her chair, as she leaned forward and fixed her aunt with hollow
+eyes, awaiting her reply.
+
+"Certainly not! Most certainly not! They were obviously cases of
+epilepsy and insanity, misinterpreted by an ignorant age."
+
+"No--it's all true, quite literally true. Three times, and for six
+months or more each time, I have been possessed by a spirit that cannot
+be good. I know it's not. It takes my body, it takes the love of people
+I care for, away from me--" Milly's voice broke and she pressed her
+handkerchief over her face. "You all think her--But she's bad, and some
+day she'll do something wicked--something that will break my heart, and
+you'll all insist it was I who did it, and you'll believe I'm a wicked
+woman."
+
+Lady Thomson looked very grave.
+
+"Mildred, dear," she said, "try and collect yourself. It is really
+wicked of you to give way to such terrible fancies. Would God permit
+such a thing to happen to one of His children? We feel sure He would
+not."
+
+Milly shook her head, but the struggle with her hysterical sobs kept her
+silent. Lady Thomson walked to the window, feeling more "upset" than she
+had ever felt in her life. The window was open, but an awning shut out
+the view of the street. From the window-boxes, filled with pink
+geraniums and white stocks, a sweet, warm scent floated into the room,
+and the rattle of the milkman's cart, the chink of his cans, fell upon
+Lady Thomson's unheeding ears. So did voices in colloquy, but she did
+not particularly note a female one of a thin, chirpy quality, addressing
+the parlor-maid with a familiarity probably little appreciated by that
+elegantly decorous damsel.
+
+Milly had scarcely mastered her tears and Lady Thomson had just begun to
+address her in quiet, firm tones, when Tims burst unannounced into the
+room. Her hat was incredibly on one side, and her sallow face almost
+crimson with heat, but bright with pleasure at finding herself once more
+in Oxford.
+
+"Hullo, old girl!" she cried, blind to the serious scene into which she
+was precipitated. "How are you? Now don't kiss me"--throwing herself
+into an attitude of violent defence against an embrace not yet
+offered--"I'm too hot. Carried my bag myself all the way from the
+station and saved the omnibus."
+
+Lady Thomson fixed Tims with a look of more than usually cold
+disapproval. Milly proffered a constrained greeting.
+
+"Anything gone wrong?" asked Tims, after a minute, peering at Milly's
+tear-stained eyes with her own short-sighted ones.
+
+Milly answered with a forced self-restraint which appeared like cold
+deliberation.
+
+"Aunt Beatrice thinks I'm mad because I say I'm not the same person she
+found in my place last March. I want you to tell her that it's not just
+my fancy, but that you know that sometimes a quite different person
+takes my place, and I'm not responsible for anything she says or does."
+
+"Yes, that's a solemn Gospel fact, right enough," affirmed Tims.
+
+Lady Thomson could hardly control her indignation, but she did, although
+she spoke sternly to Tims.
+
+"Do I understand you to say, Miss Timson, that it's a 'solemn Gospel
+fact'--Gospel! Good Heavens--that Milly is possessed by a devil?"
+
+Tims plumped down on the sofa and stared at Lady Thomson.
+
+"Possessed by a devil? Good Lord, no! What do you mean?"
+
+"Mildred believes herself to be possessed by an evil spirit."
+
+Tims turned to Milly in consternation.
+
+"Milly, old girl! Come! Poor old Milly! I never thought you were so
+superstitious as all that. Besides, I know more about it than you do,
+and I tell you straight, you mayn't be quite such a good sort when
+you're in your other phase, but as to there being a devil in it--well,
+devil's all nonsense, but if that were so, I should like to have a devil
+myself, and the more the merrier."
+
+Milly turned on her a face pale with horror and indignation. Her eyes
+flashed and she raised a remonstrating hand.
+
+"Hush!" she cried. "Hush! You don't know what dreadful things you're
+saying. I don't know exactly what this spirit is that robs me of my
+life; I'm only sure it's not Me and it's not good."
+
+"Whatever may be the matter with you, Mildred," said Lady Thomson, "it
+can't possibly be that. I suppose you have suffered from loss of memory
+again and it's upset your nerves. Why will people have nerves? I should
+advise you to go to Norton-Smith at once."
+
+Milly's tears were flowing again but she managed to reply:
+
+"I've been to Dr. Norton-Smith, Aunt Beatrice. He doesn't seem to
+understand."
+
+"He doesn't want to," interjected Tims, scornfully. "You don't suppose a
+respectable English nerve-doctor wants to know anything about
+psychology? They'd be interested in the case in France, or in the United
+States, but they wouldn't be able to keep down Milly Number Two."
+
+"Then what use would they be to me?" asked Milly, despairingly. "I can
+only trust in God; and He seems to have forsaken me."
+
+"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful
+way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds
+dreadfully mad."
+
+"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager
+confidence.
+
+"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't
+bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like,
+only--only it isn't true."
+
+Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its
+simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant
+boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old
+houses--the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had
+been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched
+his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the
+unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he
+heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room.
+He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the
+extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.
+
+"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what
+becomes of Personal Immortality?"
+
+Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality
+was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian,
+which she did effusively.
+
+"Hullo!" he remarked, cheerfully, when her effusion was over. "No Milly
+and no tea!"
+
+"We don't want either just yet," returned Lady Thomson. "I'm terribly
+anxious about Mildred, Ian, and Miss Timson has not said anything to
+make me less so. I want a sound, sensible opinion on the state of
+her--her nerves."
+
+Ian's brow clouded.
+
+"Tell me frankly, do you notice so great a difference in her from time
+to time, as to account for the positively insane delusion she has got
+into her head?"
+
+"What do you mean, Aunt Beatrice?" asked Ian, shortly, sternly eying
+Tims, whom he imagined to have let out the secret.
+
+"Mildred has made an extraordinary statement to me about not being the
+same person now as she was in March. Of course I see she--well, she is
+not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very
+different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it
+into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how
+you could have allowed her to come to that state of--of mental
+aberration, without doing anything."
+
+Ian was silent. He looked gaunt and sombrely dark in the low,
+awning-shaded room, with its heavy beams and floor of wavelike
+unevenness.
+
+"You'll have to put her under care next, if you don't take some steps.
+Send her for a sea-voyage."
+
+"I'd take her myself if I thought it would do her any good," said Tims.
+"But I'll lay my bottom dollar it wouldn't."
+
+"I'm afraid I think Miss Timson's view of the matter as insane as
+Milly's," returned Lady Thomson, tartly.
+
+Ian lifted his bowed head and addressed Tims:
+
+"I should like to know exactly what your view of the matter is, Miss
+Timson. We need not discuss poor Milly's; it's too absurd and also too
+painful."
+
+"It's no doubt a case of disintegration of personality," replied Tims,
+after a pause. "Somewhere inside our brains must be a nerve-centre
+which co-ordinates most of our mental, our sensory and motor processes,
+in such a manner as to produce consciousness, volition, what we call
+personality. But after all there are always plenty of activities within
+us going on independent of it. Your heart beats, your stomach
+digests--even your memory works apart from your consciousness sometimes.
+Now suppose some shock or strain enfeebles your centre of consciousness,
+so that it ceases to be able to co-ordinate all the mental processes it
+has been accustomed to superintend. What you call your personality is
+the outcome of your memory and all your other faculties and tendencies
+working together, checking and balancing each other. Suppose your centre
+of consciousness so enfeebled; suppose at the same time an enfeeblement
+of memory, causing you to completely forget external facts: certain of
+your faculties and tendencies are left working and they are co-ordinated
+without an important part of the memory, without many other faculties
+and tendencies which checked and balanced them. Naturally you appear to
+yourself and to every one else a totally different person; but it's not
+a new personality really, it's only a bit of the old one which goes on
+its own hook, while the rest is quiescent."
+
+"This is the most abominably materialistic theory of the human mind I
+ever heard," exclaimed Lady Thomson, indignantly. "The most degrading to
+our spiritual natures."
+
+Ian leaned against the high, carved mantel-piece and pushed back the
+black hair from his forehead.
+
+"I'm not concerned with that," he replied, deliberately, discussing
+this case so vitally near to him with an almost terrible calmness. "But
+I can't feel that this disintegration theory altogether covers the
+ground. There is no development of characteristics previously to be
+found in Milly; on the contrary, the qualities of mind and character
+which she exhibits when--when the change comes over her, are precisely
+the opposite of those she exhibits in what I presume we ought to call
+her normal state."
+
+"There must be some reason for it, old chap, you know," returned Tims;
+"and it seems to me that's the line you've got to move along, unless
+you're an idiot and go in for devils or spiritualistic nonsense."
+
+"I believe I've followed what you've been saying, Miss Timson," said
+Lady Thomson, in her fullest tones; "and I can assure you I feel under
+no necessity to become either a materialist or an idiot in consequence."
+
+Ian spoke again.
+
+"I don't profess to be scientific, but I do seem to see another possible
+line, running parallel with yours, but not quite the same. It's evident
+we can inherit faculties, characteristics, from our ancestors which
+never become active in us; but we know they must have been present in us
+in a quiescent state, because we can transmit them to children in whom
+they become active. Mildred's father and mother, for example, are not
+scholars, although her grandfather and great-grandfather were; yet in
+one of her parents at least there must be a germ of the scholar's
+faculty which has never been developed, because Mildred has inherited
+it. Now why can't we develop all the faculties, the germs of which lie
+within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount
+of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole
+desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient
+vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit.
+Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the
+flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which
+it usually flows most strongly; its course is diverted and it fertilizes
+tracts of our brain and nervous system which before have been lying
+quiescent, sterile. If we lose the memory of our former lives, and if at
+the same time hereditary faculties and tendencies, of the existence of
+which we were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically
+new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we
+regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones
+sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt
+this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing
+to say on the question."
+
+"It certainly has not," commented Lady Thomson, decisively. "I ought to
+know what Science is, considering how often I've met Mr. Darwin and
+Professor Huxley. Hypnotism and this kind of unpleasant talk is not
+Science. It's only a new variety of the hocus-pocus that's been imposing
+on human weakness ever since the world began. I'd sooner believe with
+poor Milly that she's possessed by a devil. It's less silly to accept
+inherited superstitions than to invent brand-new ones."
+
+"But we've got to account somehow for the extraordinary changes which
+take place in Milly," sighed Ian, wearily.
+
+The light lines across his forehead were showing as furrows, and Tims's
+whole face was corrugated.
+
+"No hocus-pocus about them, anyway," she said.
+
+"There's a great deal of fancy about them," retorted Lady Thomson. "A
+nervous, imaginative man like you, Ian, ought to be on your guard
+against allowing such notions to get hold of you. It's so easy to fancy
+things are as you're afraid they may be, and then you influence Milly
+and she goes from bad to worse. I think I may claim to understand her if
+any one does, and all I see is that she gives way to moods. At first I
+thought it was a steady development of character; but I admit that when
+she is unwell and out of spirits, she becomes just her old timid,
+over-conscientious self again. She's always been very easily influenced,
+very dependent, and now--I hardly like to say such a thing of my own
+niece--but I fear there's a touch of hysteria about her. I've always
+heard that hysterical people, even when they've been perfectly frank and
+truthful before, become deceitful and act parts till it's impossible to
+tell fact from falsehood with regard to them. I would suggest your
+letting Mildred come to me for a month or two, Ian. I feel sure I should
+send her back to you quite cured of all this nonsense."
+
+At this point Milly came in. Ian stretched out his hand towards her with
+protective tenderness; but even at the moment when his whole soul was
+moved by an impulse of compassion so strong that it seemed almost love,
+a spirit within him arose and mocked at all hypotheses, telling him that
+this poor stricken wife of his, seemingly one with the lady of his
+heart, was not she, but another.
+
+"Aunt Beatrice was just saying you ought to get away from domestic cares
+for a month or two, Milly," he said, as cheerfully as he could.
+
+Lady Thomson explained.
+
+"What you want is a complete change; though I don't know what people
+mean when they talk about 'domestic cares.' I should like to have you up
+at Clewes for the rest of the Long. Ian can look after the baby."
+
+Milly smiled at her sweetly, but rather as though she were talking
+nonsense.
+
+"It's very kind of you, Aunt Beatrice, but Ian and I have never been
+parted for a day since we were married; I mean not when--and I don't
+feel as though I could spare a minute of his company. And poor Baby,
+too! Oh no! But of course it's very good of you to think of it."
+
+"Then you must all come to Clewes," decided Aunt Beatrice, after some
+remonstrance. "That'll settle it."
+
+"But my work!" ejaculated Ian in dismay. "How am I to get on at Clewes,
+away from the libraries?"
+
+"There are some things in life more important than books, Ian," returned
+Lady Thomson.
+
+"But it won't do a penn'orth of good," broke in Tims, argumentatively.
+"I don't pretend to have more than a working hypothesis, but whoever
+else may prove to be right, Lady Thomson's on the wrong line."
+
+Lady Thomson surveyed her in silence; Ian took no notice of her remark.
+He was looking before him with a sadness incomprehensible to the
+uncreative man--to the man who has never dreamed dreams and seen
+visions; with the sadness of one who just as the cloudy emanations of
+his mind are beginning to take form and substance sees them scattered,
+perhaps never again to reunite, by some cold breath from the relentless
+outside world of circumstance. He made his renunciation in silence;
+then, with a quiet smile, he turned to Lady Thomson and answered her.
+
+"You're very kind, Aunt Beatrice, and quite right. There are things in
+life much more important than books."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+So the summer went by; a hot summer, passed brightly enough to all
+appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in
+expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an
+anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the
+optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow
+was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the
+quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole
+attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning tenderness
+towards himself and Tony, was that of a woman who feels the stamp of
+death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would
+sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to
+tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was
+different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could
+love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian,
+who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation
+of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the
+Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the
+perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.
+
+To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was
+almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care,
+which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its
+native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and
+terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other
+life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet
+held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not
+to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden
+life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the
+man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would
+be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta
+of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an
+illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between
+the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never
+felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his
+marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had
+gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.
+
+One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a
+spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there
+also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech
+she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.
+
+It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for people who have
+been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her
+melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice
+of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table
+with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright
+flower-beds on the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by
+its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.
+
+"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I
+suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a
+long letter."
+
+"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for
+his wife.
+
+Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It
+held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of
+foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been
+scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written
+anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was
+writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own
+handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own
+eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.
+
+"I--I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.
+
+"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written?
+You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say
+tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that when that
+happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I
+recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."
+
+"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly.
+"She always follows your advice, you know. It--it's only scrabbles."
+
+He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely
+puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had
+written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made
+out: "You are only miserab ..."--the words were interspersed with really
+illegible scrawls--"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want
+to ... Mild ..."
+
+Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"
+
+He scribbled with his pencil: "You."
+
+She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."
+
+Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at
+odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was
+really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she
+exclaimed:
+
+"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go
+dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."
+
+Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt
+Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth
+garments, passed with its usual vigorous gait across the burning
+sunlight on the lawn and broad gravel walk, to disappear under the
+awning of a French window. Milly, very pale, had closed her eyes and her
+hands were clasped. She trembled, but her voice and expression were calm
+and even resolute.
+
+"The evil spirit is trying to get possession of me in another way now,"
+she said. "But with God's help I shall be able to resist it."
+
+Ian too was pale and disturbed. It was to him as though he had suddenly
+heard a beloved voice calling faintly for help.
+
+"It's only automatic writing, dear," he replied. "You may not have been
+aware you were writing, but it probably reflects something in your
+thoughts."
+
+"It does not," returned she, firmly. "However miserable I may sometimes
+be, I could never wish to give up a moment of my life with you, my own
+husband, or to leave you and our child to the influence of this--this
+being."
+
+She stretched out her arms to him.
+
+"Please hold me, Ian, and will as I do, that I may resist this horrible
+invasion. I have a feeling that you can help me."
+
+He hesitated. "I, darling? But I don't believe--"
+
+She approached him, and took hold of him urgently, looking him in the
+eyes.
+
+"Won't you do it, husband dear? Please, for my sake, even if you don't
+believe, promise you'll will to keep me here. Will it, with all your
+might!"
+
+What madness it was, this fantastic scene upon the well-kept lawn, under
+the square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the
+maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply
+with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before
+answering her with a meaningless half-laugh:
+
+"Of course I'll promise anything you like, dear."
+
+He put his arms around her and rested his face upon her golden head.
+
+"Will!" she whispered, and the voice was one of command rather than of
+appeal. "Will! You have promised."
+
+He willed as she commanded him.
+
+The triple madness of it! He did not believe--and yet it seemed to him
+that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from
+below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her
+enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to
+his brow, and the sweat stood upon it.
+
+Aunt Beatrice's masculine foot crunched the gravel. She stood there
+dressed and ready for the drive, beckoning them with her parasol. They
+came across the lawn holding each other by the hand, and Milly's face
+was calm, even happy. Aunt Beatrice smiled at them broadly with her
+large, handsome mouth and bright brown eyes.
+
+"What, not had enough of spooning yet, you foolish young people! The
+carriage will be round in one minute, and Milly won't be ready."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+There is a joy in the return of every season, though the return of
+spring is felt and celebrated beyond the rest. The gay flame dancing on
+the hearth where lately all was blackness, the sense of immunity from
+the "wrongs and arrows" of the skies and their confederate earth, the
+concentration of the sense upon the intimate charms which four walls can
+contain, bring to civilized man consolation for the loss of summer's
+lavish warmth and beauty. Children are always sensible of these opening
+festivals of the seasons, but many mature people enjoy without realizing
+them.
+
+To Mildred the world was again new, and she looked upon its most
+familiar objects with the delighted eyes of a traveller returning to a
+favorite foreign country. So she did not complain because when she had
+left the earth it had been hurrying towards the height of June, and she
+had returned to find the golden boughs of October already stripped by
+devastating winds. The flames leaped merrily under the great carved
+mantel-piece in her white-panelled drawing-room, showing the date 1661,
+and the initials of the man who had put it there, and on its narrow
+shelf a row of Chelsea figures which she had picked up in various
+corners of Oxford. The chintz curtains were drawn around the bay-window
+and a bright brass _scaldino_ stood in it, filled with the yellows and
+red-browns, the silvery pinks and mauves of chrysanthemums. The ancient
+charm, the delicate harmony of the room, in which every piece of
+furniture, every picture, every ornament, had been chosen with an
+exactness of taste seldom found in the young, made it more pleasurable
+to a cultivated eye than the gilded show drawing-rooms into which wealth
+too commonly crowds a medley of incongruous treasures and costly
+nullities.
+
+It was a free evening for Ian, and as it was but the second since the
+Desire of his Eyes had returned to him, his gaze followed her movements
+in a contented silence, as she wandered about the room in her slight
+grace, the whiteness of her skin showing through the transparency of a
+black dress, which, although it was old, Milly would have thought
+unsuitable for a domestic evening. When everything was just where it
+should be, she returned to the fire and sank into a chair thoughtfully.
+
+"How I should like some rides," she said; "but I suppose I can't have
+them, not unless Maxwell Davison's still in Oxford."
+
+Ian's face clouded.
+
+"He's not," he returned, shortly; and knocked the ashes out of his pipe,
+hesitating as to how he should put what he had to say about Maxwell
+Davison.
+
+Mildred put her hand over her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
+Suddenly the silence was broken by a burst of rippling laughter. Ian
+started; his own thoughts had not been so diverting.
+
+"What's the joke, Mildred?"
+
+"Oh, Ian, don't you know? Max made love to Milly and she--she bit him!
+Wasn't it frightfully funny?" She laughed again, with a more inward
+enjoyment.
+
+"I didn't know you bit him, although he richly deserved it; but of
+course I knew he made love to you. How do you know?"
+
+"It came to me just now in a sort of flash. I seemed to see him--to see
+her, floundering out of the canoe; and both of them in such a towering
+rage. It really was too funny."
+
+Ian's face hardened.
+
+"I am afraid I can't see the joke of a man making love to my wife."
+
+"You old stupid! He'd never have dared to behave like that to me; but
+Milly's such an ass."
+
+"Milly was frightened, shocked, as any decent woman would be to whom
+such a thing happened. She certainly didn't encourage Maxwell; but she
+found an appointment already made for her to go on the river with him.
+No doubt she took an exaggerated view of her--of your--good God,
+Mildred, what am I to say?--well, of your relations with him."
+
+Mildred had closed her eyes. A strange knowledge of things that had
+passed during her suppression was coming to her in glimpses.
+
+"I know," she returned, in a kind of wonder at her own knowledge.
+"Absurd! But Max did behave abominably. I couldn't have believed it of
+him, even with that silly little baa-lamb. Of course she couldn't manage
+him. She won't be able to manage Tony long."
+
+"Please don't speak of--of your other self in that way, Mildred. You're
+very innocent of the world in both your selves, and you must have been
+indiscreet or it would never have occurred to Maxwell to make love to
+you."
+
+Ian was actually frowning, his lips were tight and hard, the clear
+pallor of his cheek faintly streaked with red. Mildred, leaning forward,
+looked at him, interested, her round chin on her hands.
+
+"Are you angry, Ian? I really believe you are. Is it with me?"
+
+"No, not with you. But of course I'm angry when I think of a fellow like
+that, my own cousin, a man who has been a guest in my house over and
+over again, being cad enough to make love to my wife."
+
+Mildred was smiling quietly to herself.
+
+"How primitive you are, Ian!" she said. "I suppose men are primitive
+when they're angry. I don't mind, but it does seem funny _you_ should
+be."
+
+He looked at her, surprised.
+
+"Primitive? What do you mean?"
+
+"What difference does it make, Max being your cousin, you silly old boy?
+You'd hardly ever seen him till last winter. Clans aren't any use to us
+now, are they? And when a man's got a house of his own, as Max had, or
+even a hotel, why should he be so grateful as all that for a few decent
+meals? He's not in the desert, depending on you for food and protection.
+Anyhow, it seems curious to expect him to weigh little things like that
+in the balance against what is always said to be such a very strong
+feeling as a man's love for a woman."
+
+Men often deplore that they have failed in their attempts fundamentally
+to civilize Woman. They would use stronger language if Woman often made
+attempts fundamentally to civilize them.
+
+"Please don't look at me like that," Mildred said, tremulously, after a
+pause. And the tears rushed to her eyes.
+
+Ian's face softened, as leaning against the tall white mantel-piece he
+looked down and met the tear-bright gaze of his beloved.
+
+"Poor sweetheart!" he exclaimed. "You're just a child for all your
+cleverness, and you don't half understand what you're talking about. But
+listen to me--" He kneeled before her, bringing their heads almost on a
+level. "I won't have any more affairs like this of Maxwell's. I dare say
+it was as much my fault as yours, but it mustn't happen again."
+
+She dabbed away two tears that hung on her eyelashes, and looked at him
+with such a bright alluring yet elusive smile as might have flitted
+across the face of Ariel.
+
+"How can I help it if Milly flirts? I don't believe I can help it if I
+do myself. But I can tell you this, Ian--yes, really--" Her soft white
+arms went about his neck. "I've never seen a man yet who was a patch
+upon you for cleverness and handsomeness and goodness and
+altogetherness. No! You really are the very nicest man I ever saw!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+In spite of the deepening dislike between the two egos which struggled
+for the possession of Mildred Stewart's bodily personality, they had a
+common interest in disguising the fact of their dual existence. Yet the
+transformation never occurred without producing its little harvest of
+inconveniences, and the difficulty of disguising the difference between
+the two was the greater because of the number of old acquaintances and
+friends of Milly Flaxman living in Oxford.
+
+This was one reason why, when Ian was offered the headship of the
+Merchants' Guild College in London, Mildred encouraged him to take it.
+The income, too, seemed large in comparison to their Oxford one; and the
+great capital, with its ever-roaring surge of life, drew her with a
+natural magnetism. The old Foundation was being reconstructed, and was
+ambitious of adorning itself with a name so distinguished as Ian
+Stewart's, while at the same time obtaining the services of a man with
+so many of his best years still before him. Stewart, although he could
+do fairly well in practical administration, if he gave his mind to it,
+had won distinction as a student and man of letters, and feared that,
+difficult as it was to combine the real work of his life with
+bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to
+combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But
+he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment
+of others, less informed or less judicious than himself. He found it
+impossible to believe that the opinion of the Master of Durham was not
+better than his own; and his old friend and tutor was strongly in favor
+of his accepting the headship. His most really happy and successful
+years had been those later ones in which he had shone as the Head of the
+most brilliant College in Oxford, a man of affairs and, in his
+individual way, a social centre. Accordingly he found it impossible to
+believe that it might be otherwise with Ian Stewart. The majority of
+Ian's most trusted advisers were of the same opinion as the Master,
+since the number of persons who can understand the conditions necessary
+to the productiveness of exceptional and creative minds is always few.
+Besides, most people at bottom are in Martha's attitude of scepticism
+towards the immaterial service of the world.
+
+Lady Thomson voiced the general opinion in declaring that a man could
+always find time to do good work if he really wanted to do it. She
+rejoiced when Ian put aside the serious doubts which beset him and
+accepted the London offer. Mildred also rejoiced, although she regretted
+much that she must leave behind her, and in particular the old panelled
+house.
+
+This was, however, the one part of Oxford that Milly did not grieve to
+have lost, when she awoke once more from long months of sleep, to find
+herself in a new home. For she had grown to be silently afraid of the
+old house, with the great chimney-stacks like hollowed towers within it,
+made, it seemed, for the wind to moan in; its deep embrasures and
+panelling, that harbored inexplicable sounds; its ancient boards that
+creaked all night as if with the tread of mysterious feet. Awake in the
+dark hours, she fancied there were really footsteps, really knockings,
+movements, faint sighs passing outside her door, and that some old
+wicked life which should long since have passed away through the portals
+of the grave, clung to those ancient walls with a horrible tenacity,
+still refusing the great renunciation of death.
+
+It was true that in the larger, more hurried world of London it was
+easier to dissimulate her transformations than it had been in Oxford.
+The comparative retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by
+her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns--which more and
+more encroached upon those of the original personality--the strong,
+intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common
+body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against
+which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover
+with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her
+young heart of its happiness; and for that very reason it grew deeper
+and more envenomed.
+
+That Ian should love her evil and mysterious rival as though they two
+were really one was horrible to her. Even her child was not unreservedly
+her own, to bring up according to her own ideas, to love without fear of
+that rival. Tony was like his father in the sweetness of his
+disposition, as well as in his dark beauty, and he accented with
+surprising resignation the innumerable rules and regulations which Milly
+set about his path and about his bed. But although he was healthy, his
+nerves were highly strung, and it seemed as though her feverish anxiety
+for his physical, moral, and intellectual welfare reacted upon him and
+made him, after a few weeks of her influence, less vigorous in
+appearance, less gay and boylike than he was during her absence. Ian
+dared not hint a preference for the animal spirits that Mildred
+encouraged, with their attendant noise and nonsense, considered by Milly
+so undesirable. But one day Tims observed, cryptically, that "A watched
+boy never boils"; and Emma, the nurse, told Mrs. Stewart bluntly that
+she thought Master Tony wasn't near so well and bright when he was
+always being looked after, as he was when he was let go his own way a
+bit, like other children. Then a miserable fear beset Milly lest the
+boy, too, should notice the change in his mother; lest he should look
+forward to the disappearance of the woman who loved him so passionately,
+watched over him with such complete devotion, and in his silent heart
+regret, invoke, that other. It was at once soothing and bitter to her to
+be assured by Ian and by Tims that they had never been able to discover
+the least sign that Tony was aware when the change occurred between the
+two personalities of his mother.
+
+Two years passed in London, two years out of which the original owner
+enjoyed a total share of only nine months; and this, indeed, she could
+not truly have been said to have enjoyed, since happiness was far from
+her. Death would have been a sad but simple catastrophe, to be met with
+resignation to the will of God. What resignation could be felt before
+this gradual strangulation of her being at the hands of a nameless yet
+surely Evil Thing? Her love for Ian was so great that his sufferings
+were more to her than her own, and in the space of those two years she
+saw that on him, too, sorrow had set its mark. The glow of his good
+looks and the brilliancy of his mind were alike dulled. It was not only
+that his shoulders were bent, his hair thinned and touched with gray,
+but his whole appearance, once so individual, was growing merely
+typical; that of the middle-aged Academic, absorbed in the cares of his
+profession. His real work was not merely at a stand-still, but a few
+more such years and his capacity for it would be destroyed. She felt
+this vaguely, with the intuition of love. If the partnership had been
+only between him and her, he surely would have yielded to her prayer to
+give up the headship of the Merchants' Guild College after a set term;
+but he put the question by. Evidently that Other, who cared for nothing
+but her own selfish interests and amusements, who spent upon them the
+money that he ought to be saving, would never allow him to give up his
+appointment unless something better offered. It was not only her own
+life, it was the higher and happier part of his that she was struggling
+to save in those desperate hours when she sought around her for some
+weapon wherewith to fight that mortal foe. She turned to priests,
+Anglican, Roman Catholic; but they failed her. Both believed her to be
+suffering under an insane delusion, but the Roman Catholic priest would
+have attempted to exorcise the evil spirit if she would have joined his
+Communion. She was too honest to pretend to a belief that was not hers.
+
+When she returned from her last vain pilgrimage to the Church of the
+Sacred Heart and stood before the glass, removing a thick black veil
+from the pale despair of her face, she was suddenly aware of a strange,
+unfamiliar smile lifting the drooped lines of her lips--an elfish smile
+which transformed her face to something different from her own. And
+immediately those smiling lips uttered words that fell as unexpectedly
+on her ears as though they had proceeded from the mouth of another
+person.
+
+"Never mind," they said, briskly. "It wouldn't have been of the least
+use."
+
+For a minute a wild terror made her brain swim and she fled to the door,
+instinctively seeking protection; but she stayed herself, remembering
+that Ian, who was sleeping badly at night, was now asleep in his study.
+Weak and timid though she was, she would lay no fresh burden on him, but
+fight her battle, if battle there was to be, alone.
+
+She walked back deliberately to the glass and looked steadily at her
+own reflection. Her brows were frowning, her eyes stern as she had never
+before seen them, but they were assuredly hers, answering to the mood of
+her own mind. Her lips were cold, and trembled so that although she had
+meant solemnly to defy the Power of Evil within her she was unable to
+articulate. As she looked in the glass and saw herself--her real
+self--so evidently there, the strange smile, the speech divorced from
+all volition of hers which had crossed her lips, began to lose reality.
+Still her lips trembled, and at length a convulsion shook them as
+irresistible as that of a sob. Words broke stammeringly out which were
+not hers:
+
+"Struggle for life--the stronger wins. I'm stronger. It's no use
+struggling--no use--no use--no use!"
+
+Milly pressed her lips hard against her teeth with her hands, stopping
+this utterance by main force. Her heart hammered so loud it seemed as
+though some one must hear it and come to ask what was the matter. But no
+one came. She was left alone with the Thing within her.
+
+It may have been a long while, it may have been only a few seconds that
+she remained standing at her dressing-table, her hands pressed hard
+against her convulsed mouth. She had closed her eyes, afraid to look
+longer in the glass, lest something uncanny should peer out of it. She
+did not pray--she had prayed so often before--but she fought with her
+whole strength against the encroaching power of the Other. At length she
+gradually released her lips. They were bruised, but they had ceased to
+move. It was she herself who spoke, low but clearly and with
+deliberation:
+
+"I shall struggle. I shall never give in. You think you're the stronger.
+I won't let you be. I'm fighting for my husband's happiness--do you
+hear?--as well as my own. You're strong, but we shall be stronger, he
+and I, in the end."
+
+There was no answer, the sense of struggle was gone from her; and
+suddenly she felt how mad it was to be talking to herself like that in
+an empty room. She took off the little black toque which sat on her
+bright head with an alien smartness to which she was now accustomed, and
+forced herself to look in the glass while she pinned up a stray lock of
+hair. Beyond an increased pallor and darker marks under her eyes, she
+saw nothing unusual in her appearance.
+
+It was five o'clock, and Ian would probably be awake and wanting his
+tea. She went softly into the study and leaned over him. Sleep had
+almost smoothed away the lines of effort and worry which had marred the
+beauty of his face; in the eyes of her love he was always the same
+handsome Ian Stewart as in the old Oxford days, when he had seemed as a
+young god, so high above her reach.
+
+She went to an oak table behind the sofa, on which the maid had set the
+tea-things without awakening him, and sat there quietly watching the
+kettle. The early London twilight began to veil the room. Ian stirred on
+the sofa and sat up, with his back to her, unconscious of her presence.
+She rose, vaguely supposing herself about to address some gentle word
+to him. Then suddenly she had thrown one soft hand under his chin and
+one across his eyes, and with a _brusquerie_ quite unnatural to her
+pulled him backwards, while a ripple of laughter so strange as to be
+shocking in her own ears burst from her lips, which cried aloud with a
+defiant gayety:
+
+"Who, Ian? Guess!"
+
+Ian, with a sudden force as strange to her as her own laughter, her own
+gay cry, pulled her hands away, held them an instant fast; then,
+kneeling on the sofa, he caught her in his long arms across the back of
+it, and after the pressure of a kiss upon her lips such as she had never
+felt before, breathed with a voice of unutterable gladness: "Mildred!
+Darling! Dearest love!"
+
+A hoarse cry, almost a shriek, broke from the lips of Milly. The woman
+he held struggled from his arms and stared at him wildly in the veiling
+twilight. A strange horror fell upon him, and for several seconds he
+remained motionless, leaning over the back of the sofa. Then, groping
+towards the wall, he switched on the electric light. He saw it plainly,
+the white mask of a woman smitten with a mortal blow.
+
+"Milly," he uttered, stammeringly. "What's the matter? You are ill."
+
+She turned on him her heart-broken look, then pressing her hand to her
+throat, spoke as though with difficulty.
+
+"I love you very much--you don't know how much I love you. I've tried
+so hard to be a good wife to you."
+
+Ian perceived catastrophe, yet dimly; sought with desperate haste to
+remember why for a moment he had believed that that Other was come back;
+what irreparable thing he had said or done.
+
+Meantime he must say something. "Milly, dear! What's gone wrong? What
+have I done, child?"
+
+"You've let her take you--" She spoke more freely now, but with a
+startling fierceness--"You've let her take you from me."
+
+"Ah, the old trouble! My poor Milly! I know it's terrible for you. I can
+only say that no one else really exists; that you are always you
+really."
+
+"That's not true. You don't believe it yourself. That wicked creature
+has made you love her--her own wicked way. You want to have her instead
+of me; you want to destroy your own wife and to get her back again."
+
+The cruel, ultimate truth that Milly's words laid bare--the truth which
+he constantly refused to look upon, in mercy to himself and
+her--paralyzed the husband's tongue. He tried to approach her with vague
+words and gestures of affection and remonstrance, but she motioned him
+from her.
+
+"No. Don't say you love me; I can't believe it, and I hate to hear you
+say what's not true."
+
+For a moment the fierce heart of Primitive Woman had blazed up within
+her--that fire which all the waters of baptism fail to quench. But the
+flame died down as suddenly as it had arisen, and appealing with
+outspread hands, as to some invisible judge, she wailed, miserably:
+
+"Oh, what am I to do--what am I to do? I love you so much, and it's all
+no use."
+
+Ian was as white as herself.
+
+"Milly, my poor girl, don't break our hearts."
+
+He stretched his arms towards her, but she turned away from him towards
+the door, made a few steps, then stopped and clutched her throat. He
+thought her struggling with sobs; but when once more, as though in fear,
+she turned her face towards him, he saw it strangely convulsed. He moved
+towards her in an alarmed silence, but before he could reach her and
+catch her in his arms, her head drooped, she swayed once upon her feet,
+and fell heavily to the ground.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+"Now be reasonable Tims. You can be if you choose."
+
+Mildred was perched on a high stool in Tims's Chambers, breathing spring
+from a bunch of fresh Neapolitan violets, grown by an elderly admirer of
+hers, and wearing her black, winter toque and dress with that invincible
+air of smartness which she contrived to impart to the oldest clothes,
+provided they were of her own choosing. Tims, who from her face and
+attitude might have been taken for a victim of some extreme and secret
+torture, crouched, balancing herself on the top rail of her fender. She
+replied only by a horrible groan.
+
+"Who do you suppose is the happier when Milly comes back?" continued
+Mildred.
+
+"Well--the brat."
+
+"Tony? He doesn't even know when she's there; but by the time she's done
+with him he's unnaturally good. He can't like that, can he?"
+
+"Then there's Ian, good old boy!"
+
+"That's humbug. You know it is."
+
+"But it's Milly herself I really care about," cried Tims. "You've been a
+pig to her, Mil. She says you're a devil, and if I weren't a scientific
+woman I swear I should begin to believe there was something in it."
+
+"No, Tims, dear," returned Mildred with earnestness. "I'm neither a pig
+nor a devil." She paused. "Sometimes I think I've lived before, some
+quite different life from this. But I suppose you'll say that's all
+nonsense."
+
+"Of course it is--rot," commented Tims, sternly. "You're a physiological
+freak, that's what you are. You're nothing but Milly all the time, and
+you ought to be decent to her."
+
+"I don't want to hurt her anyhow," apologized Mildred; "but you see when
+I'm only half there--well, I am only half there. I'm awfully rudimentary
+and I can't grasp anything except that I'm being choked, squeezed out of
+existence, and that I must make a fight for my life. Any woman becomes
+rudimentary who is fighting for her life against another woman; only
+I've more excuse for it, because as a scientist you must see that I can
+only be in very partial possession of my brain."
+
+Tims had pulled her wig down over her eyes and glared at space. "That's
+all very well for you," she said; "but why should I help you to kill
+poor old M.?"
+
+"Do try and understand! Every time she comes back she's more and more
+miserable; and that's not cheerful for Ian either, is it? Now, through
+that underhand trick of rudimentary Me--you see I don't try to hide my
+horrid ways--she knows Ian adores me and, comparatively speaking,
+doesn't care two straws about her. That will make her more miserable
+than she has ever been before. She'll only want to live so that I
+mayn't."
+
+"I don't see how Ian's going to get on without her. _You_ don't do much
+for him, my girl, except spend his money."
+
+"Of course, that's quite true. I'm not in the least suited to Ian or his
+life or his income; but that's not my fault. How perverse men are!
+Always in love with the wrong women, aren't they?"
+
+Tims's countenance relaxed and she replied with a slight air of
+importance:
+
+"My opinion of men has been screwed up a peg lately. Every now and then
+you do find one who's got too much sense for any rot of that kind."
+
+Mildred continued.
+
+"Ian's perfectly wretched at what happened; can't understand it, of
+course. He doesn't say much, but I can see he dreads explanations with
+Milly. He's good at reserve, but no good at lies, poor old dear, and
+just think of all the straight questions she'll ask him! It'll be
+torture to both of them. Poor Milly! I've no patience with her. Why
+should she want to live? Life's no pleasure to her. She's known a long
+time that Tony's really jollier and better with me, and now she knows
+Ian doesn't want her. How can you pretend to think Milly happy, Tims?
+Hasn't she said things to you?"
+
+"Yes," groaned Tims. "Poor old M.! She's pretty well down on her luck,
+you bet."
+
+"And I enjoy every minute of my life, although I could find plenty to
+grumble at if I liked. Listen to me, Tims. How would it be to strike a
+bargain? Let me go on without any upsets from Milly until I'm forty. I'm
+sure I sha'n't care what happens to me at forty. Then Milly may have
+everything her own way. What would it matter to her? She likes to take
+time by the forelock and behaves already as though she were forty. I
+feel sure you could help me to keep her quiet if only you chose."
+
+"If I chose to meddle at all, I should be much more likely to help her
+to come back," returned Tims, getting snappish.
+
+"Alas! I fear you would, Tims, dear, in spite of knowing it would only
+make her miserable. That shows, doesn't it, how unreasonable even a
+distinguished scientific woman can be?"
+
+This aspersion on Tims's reasoning powers had to be resented and the
+resentment to be soothed. And the soothing was so effectually done that
+Tims owned to herself afterwards there was some excuse for Ian's
+infatuation.
+
+But Tims had no desire to meddle, and the months passed by without any
+symptoms of the change appearing. It seemed as if Mildred's hold upon
+life had never been so firm, the power of her personality never so fully
+developed. She belonged to a large family which in all its branches had
+a trick of throwing up successful men and brilliant women. But in
+reaction against Scottish clannishness, it held little together, and in
+the two houses whence Mildred was launched on her London career, she
+had no nursery reputation of Milly's with which to contend.
+
+One of these houses was that of her cousin, Sir Cyril Meres, a
+fashionable painter with a considerable gift for art, and more for
+success--success social and financial. His beautiful house, stored with
+wonderful collections, had a reputation, and was frequented by every one
+of distinction in the artistic or intellectual world--by those of the
+world of wealth and rank who were interested in such matters, and the
+yet larger number who affected to be interested in them. For those
+Anglo-Saxon deities, Mammon and Snobbery, who have since conquered the
+whole civilized globe, had temporarily fallen back for a fresh spring,
+and in the eighties and early nineties Culture was reckoned very nearly
+as _chic_ as motoring in the first years of the new century.
+
+Several painters of various degrees of talent attempted to fix on canvas
+the extraordinary charm of Mrs. Stewart's appearance. Not one of them
+succeeded; but the peculiar shade of her hair, the low forehead and
+delicate line of the dark eyebrows, the outline of the mask, sometimes
+admired, sometimes criticised, made her portrait always recognized,
+whether simpering as a chocolate-box classicality, smiling sadly from
+the flowery circle of the Purgatorio, or breaking out of some rough mass
+of paint with the provocative leer of a _cocotte_ of the Quartier Latin.
+
+The magnetism of her personality defied analysis, as her essential
+beauty defied the painter's art. It was a magnetism which surrounded her
+with an atmosphere of adorations, admirations, enmities--all equally
+violent and irrational. Her wit had little to do with the making of her
+enemies, because it was never used in offence against friends or even
+harmless acquaintances; only against her foes she employed it with the
+efficiency and mercilessness of a red Indian wielding the tomahawk.
+
+The other family where she found her niche awaiting her was of a
+different order. It was that of the retired Indian judge, Sir John
+Ireton, whose wife had chaperoned her through a Commemoration the summer
+she had taken her First in Greats. Ireton was not only in Parliament,
+but his house was a meeting-place where politicians cemented personal
+ties and plotted party moves. Milly in her brief appearances, had been
+of use to Lady Ireton, but Mildred proved socially invaluable. There
+were serious persons who suspected Mrs. Stewart of approaching politics
+in a flippant spirit; but on certain days she had revealed a grave and
+ardent belief in the dogmas of the party and a piety of attitude towards
+the person of its great apostle, which had convinced them that she was
+not really cynical or frivolous.
+
+Lady Augusta Goring was the most important conquest of the kind Milly
+had made. She was the only child of the Marquis of Ipswich, and one of
+those rather stupid people whose energy of mind and character is often
+mistaken by themselves and others for cleverness. Lady Augusta was
+handsome in a dull, massive way, and so conscientious that she had
+seldom time to smile. Her friends said she would smile oftener if her
+husband caused her less anxiety; but considering who George Goring was
+and how he had been brought up, he might have been much worse. Where
+women were concerned, scandal had never accused him of anything more
+flagrant than dubious flirtations. It was his political intrigues,
+constantly threatening unholy _liaisons_ in the most unthinkable
+directions; his sudden fits of obstinate idleness, often occurring at
+the very moment when some clever and promising political scheme of his
+own was ripe for execution, which so unendurably harassed the staid
+Marquis and the earnest Lady Augusta. They were highly irritating, too,
+to Sir John Ireton, who had believed himself at one time able to tame
+and tutor the tricksy young politician.
+
+The late Lord Ipswich had been a "sport" in the Barthop family; a black
+sheep, but clever, and a well known collector. Accidental circumstances
+had greatly enriched him, and as he detested his brother and successor,
+he had left his pictures to the nation and all of his fortune which he
+could dispose of--which happened to be the bulk--to his natural son,
+George Goring. But his will had not been found for some weeks after his
+death, and while the present Marquis had believed himself the inheritor
+of the whole property, he had treated the nameless and penniless child
+of his brother with perfect delicacy and generosity. When George Goring
+found himself made rich at the expense of his uncle, he proposed to his
+cousin Lady Augusta and was accepted.
+
+Mildred was partly amused and partly bored to discover herself on so
+friendly a footing with Lady Augusta. Putting herself into that passive
+frame of mind in which revelations of Milly's past actions were most
+often vouchsafed to her, she saw herself type-writing in a small,
+high-ceilinged room looking out on a foggy London park, and Lady Augusta
+seated at a neighboring table, surrounded by papers. Type-writing was
+not then so common as it is now, and Milly had learned the art in order
+to give assistance to Ian. Mildred was annoyed to find herself in danger
+of having to waste her time in a mechanical occupation which she
+detested, or else of offending a woman whom her uncle valued as a friend
+and political ally.
+
+It was a slight compensation to receive an invitation to accompany the
+Iretons to a great ball at Ipswich House. There was no question of Ian
+accompanying her. He was usually too tired to care for going out in the
+evening and went only to official dinners and to the houses of old
+friends, or of people with whom he had educational connections. It did
+not occur to him that it might be wise to put a strain upon himself
+sometimes, to lay by his spectacles, straighten his back, have his beard
+trimmed and appear at Mildred's side in the drawing-rooms where she
+shone, looking what he was--a husband of whom she had reason to be
+proud. More and more engrossed by his own work and responsibilities, he
+let her drift into a life quite apart from his, content to see her world
+from his own fireside, in the sparkling mirror of her talk.
+
+Ipswich House was a great house, if of little architectural merit, and
+the ball had all the traditional spectacular splendor common to such
+festivities. The pillared hall and double staircase, the suites of
+spacious rooms, were filled with a glittering kaleidoscopic crowd of
+fair and magnificently bejewelled women and presumably brave, certainly
+well-groomed and handsome men. The excellence of the music, the masses
+of flowers, the number of great names and well-advertised society
+beauties present, would subsequently provide material for long and
+eulogistic paragraphs in the half-penny press and the Ladies' Weeklies.
+
+Mildred enjoyed it as a spectacle rather than as a ball, for she knew
+few people there, and the young political men whom she had met at her
+uncle's parties were too much engaged with ladies of more importance, to
+whom they were related or to whom they owed social attention, to write
+their names more than once on her programme. One of these, however,
+asked her if she had noticed how harassed both Lord Ipswich and Lady
+Augusta looked. Goring's speech, he said, at the Fothering by-election
+was reported and commented upon in all the papers, and had given
+tremendous offence to the leaders of his party; while the fact that he
+had not turned up in time for the ball must be an additional cross to
+his wife, who made such a firm stand against the social separation of
+married couples.
+
+When Mildred returned to her uncle she found him the centre of a group
+of eminent politicians, all denouncing in more or less subdued tones the
+outrageous utterances and conduct of Goring, and most declaring that
+only consideration for Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta prevented them from
+publicly excommunicating the hardened offender. Others, however, while
+admitting the outrage, urged that he was too brilliant a young man to be
+lightly thrown away, and advised patience, combined with the
+disciplinary rod. Sir John was of the excommunicatory party. Later in
+the evening he disappeared into some remote smoking or card-room, not so
+much forgetting his niece as taking it for granted that she was, as
+usual, surrounded by friends and admirers of both sexes. But a detached
+personality, however brilliant, is apt to be submerged in such a crowd
+of social eminences, bound together by ties of blood, of interests, and
+of habit, as filled the salons of Ipswich House. Mildred walked around
+the show contentedly enough for a time, receiving a smile here and a
+pleasant word there from such of her acquaintances as she chanced upon,
+but practically alone. And being alone, she found herself yielding to a
+vulgar envy of richer women's clothes and jewels. Her dress, with which
+she had been pleased, looked ordinary beside the creations of great
+Parisian _ateliers_, and the few old paste ornaments which were the only
+jewels she possessed, charming as they were, seemed dim and scant among
+the crowns and constellations of diamonds that surrounded her. Her pride
+rebelled against this envy, but could not conquer it.
+
+More gnawing pangs, however, assailed her presently, the pangs of
+hunger; and no one offered to take her in to supper. The idea of taking
+herself in was revolting; she preferred starvation. But where could
+Uncle John have hidden himself? She sought the elderly truant with all
+the suppressed annoyance of a chaperon seeking an inconsiderate flirt of
+a girl. And it happened that a spirit in her feet led her to the door of
+a small room in which Milly and Lady Augusta had been wont to transact
+their business. A curious feeling of familiarity, of physical habit,
+caused her to open the big mahogany door. There was no air of public
+festivity about the room, which was furnished with a substantial, almost
+shabby masculine comfort. But oh, tantalizing spectacle! Under the
+illumination of a tall, crimson-shaded, standard lamp, stood a little,
+white-covered table, reminding her irresistibly of a little table in a
+fairy story, which the due incantation causes to rise out of the ground.
+A small silver-gilt tureen of soup smoked upon it and a little pile of
+delicate rolls lay beside the plate set for one. But alas! she might
+not, like the favored girl in the fairy story, proceed without ceremony
+to satisfy her hunger at the mysterious little table.
+
+A door immediately opposite that of the small sitting-room opened
+noiselessly, and a young man entered with a light, quick step. He saw
+Mildred, but for a second or so she did not see him. He was at her side
+when she looked around and their eyes met. They had never seen each
+other before, but at that meeting of the eyes a curious feeling, such as
+two Europeans might experience, meeting in the heart of some dark
+continent, affected them both.
+
+There was something picturesque about the young man's appearance, in
+spite of the impeccable cut and finish of his dress-suit and the waxed
+ends of his small blond mustache. His hair was of a ruddy nut-brown
+color, and had a wave in it; his bright hazel eyes seemed exactly to
+match it. His face had a fine warm pallor, and his under lip, which with
+his chin was somewhat thrust forward, was redder than the lip of a
+child. It was perhaps this noticeable coloring and something in his port
+which made him, in spite of the correct modernity of his dress, suggest
+some seventeenth-century portrait.
+
+"Forgive my passing you," he said, at length; "but I'm starving."
+
+"So am I," she returned, hardly aware of what she was saying. Some
+strange, almost hypnotic attraction seemed to rivet her whole attention
+on the mere phenomenon of this man.
+
+"By Jove! Aren't they feeding the multitude down there?" he asked,
+nodding in the direction of the supper-room.
+
+"Of course," she answered, with the simple gravity of a child, her blue
+eyes still fixed upon him. "But I can't ask for supper for myself, can
+I?"
+
+Her need was distinctly material; yet the young man confronting her
+white grace, the strange look in her blue eyes, had a dreamlike feeling,
+almost as though he had met a dryad or an Undine between two of the
+prosaic, substantial doors of Ipswich House. And as in a dream the most
+extraordinary things seem familiar and expected, so the apparition of
+the Undine and her confidence in him seemed familiar, in fact just what
+he had been expecting during those hours of fog off the Goodwins, when
+the sirens, wild voices gathering up from all the seas of the world, had
+been screaming to each other across the hidden waters. That same inner
+concentration upon the mere phenomenon of a presence, an existence,
+which had given the childlike note to Mildred's speech, froze a
+compliment upon his lips; and they stood silent, eying each other
+gravely. A junior footman appeared, carrying a bottle of champagne in a
+bucket, and the young man addressed him in a vague, distracted tone,
+very unlike his usual manner.
+
+"Look here, Arthur, here's a lady who can't get any supper."
+
+The footman went quite pink at this personal reproach. He happened to
+have heard some one surmise, on seeing Mildred roaming about alone, that
+she was a newspaper woman.
+
+"Please sir," he replied, "I don't know how it's happened, for her
+Ladyship told Mr. Mackintosh to be sure and see as the newspaper ladies
+and gentlemen were well looked after, and he thought as they'd all had
+supper."
+
+It seemed incredible that Mildred should not have heard this reply,
+uttered so close to her; but though it fell upon her ears it did not
+penetrate to her mind.
+
+"Bring up supper for two, Arthur," said Goring, in his usual decisive
+tone. "That'll do, won't it?" he added, and turned to Mildred, ushering
+her into the room. "You'll have supper with me, I hope? My name's
+Goring; I'm Lord Ipswich's son-in-law and I live in his house; so you
+see it's all right."
+
+The corollary was not evident; but the mention of the name brought
+Mildred back to the ordinary world. So this was George Goring, the
+plague of his political party, the fly in the ointment of a respectable
+Marquis and his distinguished daughter. She had not fancied him like
+this. For one thing, she did not know him to be younger than his wife,
+and between the careworn solidity of Lady Augusta and this vivid
+restless personality, the five actual years of difference seemed
+stretched to ten.
+
+"I'm convinced it's all right, Mr. Goring," she replied, throwing
+herself into a chair and smiling at him sparklingly. "It must be all
+right. I want my supper so much I should have to accept your invitation
+even if you were a burglar."
+
+Goring, whose habit it was to keep moving, laughed as he walked about,
+one hand in his trousers pocket.
+
+"Why shouldn't I be a burglar? A burglar, with an assistant disguised as
+a footman, sacking the bedrooms of Lord Ipswich's house while the ball
+proceeds? There's copy for you! Shall I do it? 'Mr. George Goring's
+Celebrated Black Pearls Stolen,' would make a capital head-line. Perhaps
+you've heard I'd do anything to keep my name in the newspapers."
+
+"It certainly gets there pretty often," returned Mildred, politely; "and
+whenever it's mentioned it has an enlivening effect."
+
+The footman had reappeared and they were unfolding their dinner-napkins,
+sitting opposite each other at the little table.
+
+"As how, enlivening?"
+
+"Like a bit of bread dropped into a glass of flat champagne."
+
+"You think my party's like champagne? Why, it couldn't exist for a
+moment if it sparkled."
+
+"I was talking of newspapers, not of your party; though there's no doubt
+you do enliven that."
+
+"Do I? Like what? No odiously inoffensive comparisons, if you please."
+
+"Well, I have heard people say like--like a blister on the back of the
+neck."
+
+Goring laughed. "Thanks. That's better."
+
+"The patient's using language, but he won't really tear it off, because
+he knows that would hurt him more, and the blister will do him good in
+the end, if he bears with it."
+
+"But there's the blister's side to it, too. It's infernally tiring for a
+blister to be sticking on to such a fellow everlastingly. It'll fly off
+of itself before long, if he doesn't look out. Hullo! What am I saying?
+I suppose you'll have all this out in some confounded paper--'The Rebel
+Member Returns. A Chat with Mr. Goring'--Don't do that; but I'll give
+you some other copy if you like."
+
+"You're very kind in giving me all this copy. What shall I do with it?
+Shall I keep it as a memento?"
+
+"No, no. You can sell it; honor bright you can."
+
+"Can I? Shall I get much for it? Enough money to buy me a tiara, do you
+think?"
+
+"Do you really want to wear the usual fender? Now, why? I suppose
+because you aren't sufficiently aware how--" he paused on the edge of a
+compliment which seemed suddenly too full-flavored and ordinary to be
+addressed to this strangely lovely being, with her smile at once so
+sparkling and so mysterious. He substituted: "How much more
+distinguished it is to look like an Undine than like a peeress."
+
+Mildred seemed slightly taken aback.
+
+"Why do you say 'Undine?'" she asked, almost sharply. "Do I--do I look
+as if I came out of a Trafalgar Square fountain with fell designs on
+Lord Ipswich?"
+
+"Of course not. But--I can't exactly define even to myself what I mean,
+only you do suggest an Undine to me. To some one else you might be
+simply Miss--Forgive me, I don't know your name."
+
+He had not even troubled to glance at her left hand, and when the "Mrs."
+was uttered it affected him oddly. It was one of the peculiar
+differences between her two personalities that, casually encountered,
+Mildred was as seldom taken for a married woman as Milly for an
+unmarried one.
+
+"Do I look as if I'd got no soul?" she persisted, leaning a little
+towards him, an intensity that might almost have been called anxiety in
+her gaze.
+
+He could even have fancied she had grown paler. He, too, became serious.
+His eyes brightened, meeting hers, and a slight color came into his
+cheeks.
+
+"Quite the contrary," he answered. "I should say you had a great
+deal--in fact, I shall begin to believe in detachable souls again. Fancy
+most people as just souls, without trimmings. It makes one laugh. But
+your body looks like an emanation from the spirit; as though it might
+flow away in a white waterfall or go up in a white fire; and as though,
+if it did, your soul could certainly precipitate another body, which
+must certainly be like this one, because it would be as this is, the
+material expression of a spirit."
+
+She listened as he spoke, seriously, her eyes on his. But when he had
+done, she dropped her chin on her hand and laughed delightedly.
+
+"You think I should be able to grow a fresh body, like a lobster growing
+a fresh claw? What fun!"
+
+There was a sound without, not of the footman struggling with dishes and
+plates and the door-handle, but of middle-aged voices.
+
+Instinctively Goring and Mildred straightened themselves and looked
+polite. Lord Ipswich and Sir John Ireton, deep in political converse,
+came slowly in and then stopped short in surprise. Mildred lost not a
+moment in carrying the war into their country. She turned about and
+addressed her uncle in a playful tone, which yet smacked of reproof.
+
+"Here you are at last, Uncle John! I thought you'd forgotten all about
+me. I've been walking miles in mad pursuit of you, till I was so tired
+and hungry I think I should have dropped if Mr. Goring hadn't taken
+pity upon me and made me eat his supper."
+
+Sir John defended himself, and Lord Ipswich was shocked to think that a
+lady had been in such distress in his house; although the apparition of
+Goring prevented him from feeling it as acutely as he would otherwise
+have done. His pleasant pink face took on an expression of severity as
+he responded to his son-in-law's somewhat too cheerful greeting.
+
+"Sorry to be so late, but we were held up by a fog at the mouth of the
+Thames."
+
+"It must have been very important business to take you all the way to
+Brussels so suddenly."
+
+"It certainly wouldn't wait. I heard there was a whole set of Beauvais
+tapestries to be had for a mere song. I couldn't buy them without seeing
+them you know, and the big London and Paris dealers were bound to chip
+in if I didn't settle the matter pretty quick. I'm precious glad I did,
+for they're the finest pieces I ever saw and would have fetched five
+times what I gave for them at Christie's."
+
+"Ah--really!" was all Lord Ipswich's response, coldly uttered and
+accompanied by a smile more sarcastic than often visited his neat and
+kindly lips. Sir John Ireton and Mildred, aware of the delicate
+situation, partly domestic and partly political, upon which they were
+intruding, took themselves away and were presently rolling through the
+empty streets in the gray light of early morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Not long afterwards Mildred received a letter the very address of which
+had an original appearance, looking as if it were written with a stick
+in a fist rather than with a pen between fingers. It caught her
+attention at once from half a dozen others.
+
+     "DEAR MRS. STEWART,--Yesterday I was at Cochrane's studio
+     and he told me Meres was the greatest authority in England
+     on tapestry, and also a cousin of yours. Please remember (or
+     forgive) the supper on Tuesday, and of your kindness, ask
+     him to let me see his lot and give me his opinion on mine.
+     Cochrane had a folly he called a portrait of you in his
+     studio. I turned its face to the wall; and in the end he
+     admitted I was right.
+
+     "Yours sincerely,
+
+     "GEORGE GORING."
+
+Accordingly, on a very hot day early in July, Goring met Mildred again,
+at Sir Cyril Meres's house on Campden Hill. The long room at one end of
+which stood the small dining-table looked on the greenness of a lawny,
+lilac-sheltered garden, so that such light as filtered through the green
+jalousies was green also. There was a great block of ice somewhere in
+the room, and so cool it was, so greenly dim there, that it seemed
+almost like a cavern of the sea. Mildred wore a white dress, and, as
+was the fashion of the moment, a large black hat shadowed with
+ostrich-feathers. Once more on seeing her he had a startled impression
+of looking upon an ethereal creature, a being somehow totally distinct
+from other beings; and for lack of some more appropriate name, he called
+her again in his mind "Undine." As the talk, which Cyril Meres had a
+genius for making general, became more animated, he half lost that
+impression in one of a very clever, charming woman, with a bright wit
+sailing lightly over depths of knowledge to which he was unaccustomed in
+her sex.
+
+The party was not intended to number more than eight persons, of whom
+Lady Thomson was one, and they sat down seven. When Sir Cyril observed:
+"We won't wait any longer for Davison," Mildred was too much interested
+in Goring's presence to inquire who this Davison might be.
+
+She sparkled on half through luncheon to the delight of every one but
+Miss Ormond the actress, who would have preferred to play the lead
+herself. Then came a pause. A door was opened at the far end of the dim
+room, and the missing guest appeared. Sir Cyril rose hastily to greet
+him. He advanced without any apologetic hurry in his gait; the same
+impassive Maxwell Davison as before, but leaner, browner, more
+silver-headed from three more years of wandering under Oriental suns.
+Mildred could hardly have supposed it possible that the advent of any
+human being could have given her so disagreeable a sensation.
+
+Sir Cyril was unaware that she knew Maxwell Davison; surprised to hear
+that he was a cousin of Stewart's, between whom and himself there
+existed a mutual antipathy, expressing itself in terms of avoidance. His
+own acquaintance with Davison was recent and in the way of business. He
+had had the fancy to build for the accommodation of his Hellenic
+treasures a room in imitation of the court of a Græco-Roman house which
+he had helped to excavate in Asia Minor. He had commissioned Davison to
+buy him hangings for it to harmonize with an old Persian carpet in cream
+color and blue of which he was already possessed. Davison had brought
+these with him and a little collection of other things which he thought
+Meres might care to look at. He did not know the Stewarts had moved to
+London, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find himself seated at the
+same table with Mildred; he had not forgotten, still less forgiven, the
+lure of her coquetry, the insult of her rebuff.
+
+Lady Thomson was next him and questioned him exhaustively about his book
+on Persian Literature and the travels of his lifetime. Miss Ormond took
+advantage of Mrs. Stewart's sudden silence to talk to the table rather
+cleverly around the central theme of herself. Goring conversed apart
+with Mrs. Stewart.
+
+Coffee was served in the shrine which Sir Cyril had reared for his Greek
+collection, of which the gem was a famous head of Aphrodite--an early
+Aphrodite, divine, removed from all possible pains and agitations of
+human passion. The room was an absurdity on Campden Hill, said some,
+but undeniably beautiful in itself. The columns, of singular lightness
+and grace, were of a fine marble which hovered between creamy white and
+faint yellow, and the walls and floor were of the same tone, except for
+a frieze on a Greek model, very faintly colored, and the old Persian
+carpet. In fine summer weather the large skylight covering the central
+space was withdrawn, and such sky as London can show looked down upon
+it. The new hangings which Maxwell Davison had brought with him were
+already displayed on a tall screen, and his miscellaneous collection of
+antiquities, partly sent from Durham College, partly lately acquired,
+were arranged on a marble bench.
+
+"I shouldn't have brought these things, Sir Cyril," he said; "if I'd
+known Mrs. Stewart was here. She's got a way of hinting that my most
+cherished antiquities are forgeries; and the worst of it is, she makes
+every one believe her, including myself."
+
+Mildred protested.
+
+"I don't pretend to know anything about antiquities, Mr. Davison. I'm
+sure I never suspected you of a forgery, and if I had, I hope I
+shouldn't have been rude enough to tell you so."
+
+Maxwell Davison laughed his harsh laugh.
+
+"Do you want me to believe you can't be rude, Mrs. Stewart?"
+
+"I'm almost afraid she can't be," interposed Lady Thomson's full voice.
+"People who make a superstition of politeness infallibly lose the higher
+courtesy of truth."
+
+Here Sir Cyril Meres called Davison away to worship at the shrine of the
+Aphrodite, while Goring invited Mrs. Stewart into a neighboring corridor
+where some tapestries were hanging.
+
+The divining crystal was among the objects returned from Oxford, and had
+been included in the collection which Davison had brought with him, on
+the chance that the painter might fancy such curiosities. When Goring
+and Mildred returned from their leisurely inspection of the tapestries,
+Miss Ormond had it in her hand, and Lady Thomson was commenting on some
+remark of hers.
+
+"I've no doubt, as you say, it has played a wicked part before now in
+Oriental intrigues. But of course the poor crystal is perfectly innocent
+of the things read into it by rascals, practising on the ignorant and
+superstitious."
+
+"Sometimes, perhaps, Lady Thomson," returned Miss Ormond; "but sometimes
+people do see extraordinary visions in a crystal."
+
+Lady Thomson sniffed.
+
+"Excitable, imaginative people do, I dare say."
+
+"On the contrary, prosaic people are far more likely to see things than
+highly strung imaginative creatures like myself. I've tried several
+times and have never seen anything. I believe having a great deal of
+brain-power and emotion and all that tells against it. I shouldn't be at
+all surprised now if Mrs. Stewart, who is--well, I should fancy, just a
+little cold, very bright and all that on the surface, you know--I
+shouldn't wonder if she could crystal-gaze very successfully. I should
+like to know whether she's ever tried."
+
+"I'm sure she's not," replied Lady Thomson, firmly. "My niece, Mrs.
+Stewart, is a great deal too sensible and well-educated."
+
+"Mrs. Stewart can't honestly say the same for herself," interposed
+Davison; "she gazed in this very crystal some years ago and certainly
+saw something in it."
+
+Miss Ormond exclaimed in triumph. Mildred froze. She did not desire the
+rôle of Society Seer.
+
+"What did I see, Mr. Davison?" she asked.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Nothing of importance. You saw a woman in a light dress. Perhaps it was
+Lady Hammerton the collector, originally guilty, you remember, in the
+matter of the forged Augustus."
+
+"Mildred had only to peep in any glass to see Lady Hammerton, or some
+one sufficiently like her," observed Meres.
+
+"That idea was started when David Fletcher picked up the fancy picture
+which he chose to call a portrait of Lady Hammerton," cried Lady
+Thomson, who was just taking her leave. "Such nonsense! I protest
+against my own niece and a scholar of Ascham being likened to that
+scandalous woman."
+
+Cyril Meres smiled and stroked his soft, silvery beard.
+
+"Quite right of you to protest, Beatrice. Still, I'm glad Lady Hammerton
+didn't stick heroically to her Professor--as Mildred here does. We
+should never have been proud of her as an ancestress if she had."
+
+"Heroically?" repeated Maxwell Davison under his breath, and laughed.
+But the meaning of his laugh was lost on every one except Mildred. She
+flushed hotly at the thought of having to bear the responsibility of
+that ridiculous scene on the Cherwell; it was humiliating, indeed. She
+took up the crystal to conceal her chagrin.
+
+"Do please see something, Mrs. Stewart!" exclaimed Miss Ormond.
+
+"What sort of thing?"
+
+"Anything! Whatever you see, it will be quite thrilling.
+
+"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart," petitioned Goring, wandering towards the
+crystal-gazer. "I should so like to thrill Miss Ormond."
+
+"It's no good your trying that way," smiled the lady, playing fine eyes.
+"It's only shadows that are thrilling in the crystal; shadows of
+something happening a long way off; or sometimes a coming event casts a
+shadow before--and that's the most thrilling of all."
+
+"A coming event! That's exactly what I am, a tremendous coming Political
+Event. You ask them in the House," cried Goring, thrusting out his chin
+and aiming a provocative side-smile at a middle-aged Under-Secretary of
+State who discreetly admired Miss Ormond.
+
+"Modest creature!" ejaculated the Under-Secretary playfully with his
+lips; and in his heart vindictively, "Conceited devil!"
+
+"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart!" pleaded Goring, half kneeling on a chair
+and leaning over the crystal.
+
+"I do," she returned. "I'd rather not. You look so distorted and odd;
+and so do I, don't I? Dreadful! But the crystal's getting cloudy."
+
+"Then you're going really to see something!" exclaimed Miss Ormond. "How
+delightful! Come away directly, Mr. Goring, or you'll spoil everything."
+
+Sir Cyril and Davison looked up from some treasure of Greek art. The
+conversation was perfunctory, every one's curiosity waiting on Mildred
+and the crystal.
+
+"Don't you see anything yet, Mrs. Stewart?" asked Miss Ormond at length,
+impatiently.
+
+"No," replied Mildred, hesitatingly. "At least, not exactly. I see
+something like rushing water and foam."
+
+"The reflection of clouds overhead," pronounced the Under-Secretary,
+dogmatically, glancing upward.
+
+"I'm sure it's nothing of the kind," asserted Miss Ormond. "Please go on
+looking, Mrs. Stewart, and perhaps you'll see a water-spirit."
+
+"Why do you want her to see a water-spirit?" asked Davison, ironically.
+"In all countries of the world they are reckoned spiteful, treacherous
+creatures. I was once bitten by one severely, and I have never wanted to
+see one since."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davison! Are you serious? What do you mean?" questioned Miss
+Ormond.
+
+Mrs. Stewart hastily put down the crystal. "I don't want to see one,"
+she said; "I'm afraid it might bring me bad luck, and, besides, I can't
+wait for it, I've got several calls to make before I go home, and I
+think there's a storm coming." She shivered. "I'm quite cold."
+
+Miss Ormond said that must be the effect of the crystal, as the
+afternoon was still oppressively hot.
+
+Goring caught up with Mrs. Stewart in the gravel drive outside the house
+and walked through Kensington Gardens with her. It seemed to them both
+quite natural that they should be walking together, and their talk was
+in the vein of old friends who have met after a long separation rather
+than in that of new acquaintances. When he left her and turned to walk
+across Hyde Park towards Westminster, he examined his impressions and
+perceived that he was in a state of mind foreign to his nature, and
+therefore the butt of his ridicule; a state in which, if he and Mrs.
+Stewart had been unmarried persons, he would have said to himself, "That
+is the woman I shall marry." It would not have been a passion or an
+emotion that would have made him say that; it would have been a
+conviction. As it was, the thing was absurd. Cochrane had told him, half
+in jest, that Mrs. Stewart was a breaker of hearts, but had not hinted
+that her own was on the market. Her appearance made it surely an
+interesting question whether she had a heart at all.
+
+And for himself? He hated to think of his marriage, because he
+recognized in it the fatal "little spot" in the yet ungarnered fruit of
+his life. He was only thirty, but he had been married seven years and
+had two children, both of them the image of all the Barthops that had
+ever been, except his own father. In moments of depression he saw
+himself through all the coming years being gradually broken, crushed
+under a weight of Barthops--father-in-law, wife and children--moulded
+into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one
+but himself knew the weakness of his character--explosive, audacious in
+alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or
+hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to
+resist constant domestic pressure--the unconscious pressure of radically
+opposed character. The crowd applauds the marriage of such opposites
+because their side almost always wins; partly by its own weight and
+partly by their weight behind. But the truth is that two beings opposed
+in emotional temperament and mental processes are only a few degrees
+more able to help and understand each other in the close union of
+marriage than the two personalities of Milly Stewart in the closer union
+of her body.
+
+From one point of view it was Goring's fatal weakness to have a real
+affection for his father-in-law, who was a pattern of goodness and
+good-breeding. Consequently, that very morning he had promised Lord
+Ipswich to walk in the straightest way of the party, for one year at
+least; and if he must slap faces, to select them on the other side of
+the House. Nevertheless, if he really wished to give sincere
+gratification to Lord Ipswich and to dear Augusta, he must needs give
+up his capricious and offensive tactics altogether. These things might
+give him a temporary notoriety in the House and country, but they were
+not in the traditions of the Ipswich family, which had held a high place
+in politics for two hundred years. The Marquis said that he had always
+tried to make George feel that he was received as a true son of the
+family and heir of its best traditions, if not of its name. There had
+been a great deal of good faith on both sides. Yet now a solitary young
+man, looking well in the frock-coat and tall hat of convention, might
+have been observed stopping and striking the gravel viciously as he
+reflected on the political future which his father-in-law was mapping
+out for him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Sir James Carus, the well-known scientist, had for some time been
+employing Miss Timson in the capacity of assistant, and spoke highly of
+her talents. She began to have a reputation in scientific circles, and
+owing to her duties with Carus she could not come to the Stewarts' as
+often as she had formerly done. But she preserved her habit of
+dismissing the parlor-maid at the door and creeping up to the
+drawing-room like a thief in the night.
+
+On the day following Sir Cyril Meres's luncheon-party she arrived in her
+usual fashion. The windows were shaded against the afternoon sun, but
+the sky was now overcast, and such a twilight reigned within that at
+first she could distinguish little, and the drawing-room seemed to her
+to be empty. But in a minute she discerned a white figure supine in a
+large arm-chair--Mildred, and asleep.
+
+She had a writing-board on her knee, and a hand resting on it still held
+a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir
+when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a
+something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which
+suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly might
+even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a mixed emotion.
+
+"Good old Milly! Poor old girl!" she breathed to the white figure in the
+arm-chair. "Don't be in a hurry! You won't find it all beer and skittles
+when you're here."
+
+It seemed to her that a slight convulsion passed over the sleeper's
+face.
+
+Tims seated herself on a low chair, in the attitude of certain gargoyles
+that crouch under the eaves of old churches, elbows on knees, chin on
+hands, and fixed her eyes in silence on her silent companion. In spite
+of her work along the acknowledged lines of science, she had pursued her
+hypnotic studies furtively, half in scorn and half in fear of her
+scientific brethren. What would she not have given to be enabled to
+watch, to comprehend the changes passing within that human form so close
+to her that she could see its every external detail, could touch it by
+the out-stretching of a hand! But its inner shrine, its secret place,
+remained barred against those feeble implements of sense with which
+nature has provided the explorative human intelligence. Its content was
+more mysterious, more inaccessible than that of the remotest star which
+yields the secret of its substance to the spectroscope of the
+astronomer.
+
+Tims's thoughts had forsaken the personal side of the question, when she
+was recalled to it by seeing the right hand in which the stylograph had
+been lying begin to twitch, the fingers to contract. There was no
+answering movement in the face--even when the sleeper at length firmly
+grasped the pen and suddenly sat up. Tims rose quickly, and then
+perceived, lying on the writing-board, a directed envelope and a
+half-finished note to herself. She slipped the note-paper nearer to the
+twitching hand, and after a few meaningless flourishes, it wrote slowly
+and tentatively:
+
+"Tims--Milly--cannot get back. Help me ... Save Ian. Wicked creature--no
+conscience--"
+
+Here the power of the hand began to fail, and the writing was terminated
+by mere scrawls. The sleeper's eyes were now open, but not wide. They
+had a strange, glassy look in them, nor did she show any consciousness
+of Tims's presence. She dropped the pen, folded the paper in the same
+slow and tentative manner in which she had written upon it, and placed
+it in the directed envelope lying there. Then her face contracted, her
+fingers slackened, and she fell back again to the depths of the chair.
+
+"Milly!" cried Tims, almost involuntarily bending over her. "Milly!"
+
+Again there was a slight contraction of the face and of the whole body.
+
+At the moment that Tims uttered Milly's name, Ian was entering the room.
+His long legs brought him up to the chair in an instant, and he asked,
+without the usual salutation:
+
+"What's the matter? Has--has the change happened?"
+
+His voice unconsciously spoke dismay. Tims looked at him.
+
+"No, not exactly," she articulated, slowly; and, after a pause: "Poor
+old Milly's trying to come back, that's all."
+
+She paused again; then:
+
+"You look a bit worried, old man."
+
+He tossed back his head with a gesture he had kept from the days when
+the crest of raven-black hair had been wont to grow too long and
+encroach on his forehead. It was grizzled now, and much less intrusive.
+
+"I'm about tired out," he said, shortly.
+
+"Look here," she continued, "if you really want Milly back, just say so.
+She's kind of knocking at the door, and I believe I could let her in if
+I tried."
+
+He dropped wearily into a chair.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Miss Timson, don't put the responsibility on me!"
+
+"I can't help it," returned Tims. "She's managed to get this through to
+me--" She handed Milly's scrawled message to Ian.
+
+He read it, then read it again and handed it back.
+
+"Strange, certainly."
+
+"Does it mean anything in particular?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders almost impatiently and sighed.
+
+"Oh no! It's the poor child's usual cry when she's here. She's got it
+into her head that the self she doesn't know is frightfully wicked, and
+makes me miserable. I've tried over and over again to convince her, but
+it's all nonsense."
+
+He thought to himself: "She is coming back still full of this mortal,
+heart-rending jealousy, and we shall have more painful scenes."
+
+"Well, it's your business to say what I'm to do," insisted Tims. "I
+don't think she'd have troubled to write if she'd found she could get
+back altogether without my help; but the other one's grown a bit too
+strong for her. Do you want Milly back?"
+
+The remorseless Tims forced on Ian a plain question which in his own
+mind he habitually sought to evade. He leaned back and shaded his eyes
+with his hand. After a silence he spoke, low, as if with effort:
+
+"I can't honestly say I want the change to happen just now, Miss Timson.
+It means a great deal of agitation, a thorough upheaval of everything.
+We have an extremely troublesome business on at the Merchants'
+Guild--I've just come away from a four hours' meeting; and upon my word
+I don't think I can stand a--domestic revolution at the same time. It
+would utterly unfit me for my work."
+
+He did not add that he had been looking forward to receiving helpful
+counsel from Mildred, with her clear common-sense, seasoned with wit.
+
+Tims wagged her head and stared in his face.
+
+"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated, slowly.
+
+Miss Timson still possessed the rare power of irritating Ian Stewart. He
+grew restive.
+
+"I suppose I am a selfish brute. Men always are, aren't they? But, after
+all, my wife enjoys life in her present state at least as much as she
+does in the other."
+
+"Not for the same reason, dear boy," returned Tims. "Old M., bless her,
+just lives for you. You don't imagine, do you, that Mildred cares about
+you like that?"
+
+Ian flushed slightly, and his face hardened.
+
+"One can't very well discuss one's wife's feeling for one's self," he
+said. "I believe I have every reason to be happy, however things are.
+And I very much doubt, Miss Timson, whether you can really effect the
+change in her in any way. At any rate, I'd rather you didn't try,
+please. I'll have her moved to her room, where she'll most likely sleep
+till to-morrow."
+
+Tims bent over the sleeper. Then:
+
+"I don't believe she will, somehow. You'd better leave her with me for
+the present, and I'll let you know if anything happens."
+
+He obeyed, and in a minute she heard the front door close after him.
+Tims sat down in the chair which he had vacated.
+
+"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated again, presently, and added: "What idiots
+men are! All except old Carus and Mr. Fitzallan. He's sensible enough."
+
+Her thoughts wandered away, until they were recalled by the door opening
+a mere chink to let a child slip into the room--a slim, tall child, in a
+blue smock--Tony. His thick, dark hair was cropped boywise now, and the
+likeness of the beautiful, sensitive child face to Ian's was more
+marked. It was evident that in him there was to be no blending of
+strains, but an exact reproduction of the paternal type.
+
+Tims was in his eyes purely a comic character, but the ready grin with
+which he usually greeted her was replaced to-day by a little,
+inattentive smile. He went past her and stood by the sofa, looking
+fixedly at his mother with a grave mouth and a slight frown on his
+forehead. At length he turned away, and was about to leave the room as
+quietly as he had come, when Tims brought him to a stand-still at her
+knee. He held up an admonishing finger.
+
+"Sh! Don't you wake my Mummy, or Daddy 'll be angry with you."
+
+"We sha'n't wake her; she's too fast asleep. Tell me why you looked so
+solemnly at her just now, Tony?"
+
+Tony, his hands held fast, wriggled, rubbed his shoulder against his
+ear, and for all answer laughed in a childish, silly way. Such is the
+depth and secretiveness of children, whom we call transparent.
+
+"Did you think Mummy was dead?"
+
+"What's 'dead'?" asked Tony, with interest, putting off his mask of
+inanity.
+
+"People are dead when they've gone to sleep and will never wake again,"
+returned Tims.
+
+Tony thought a minute; then his dark eyes grew very large. He whispered
+slowly, as though with difficulty formulating his ideas:
+
+"Doesn't they _never_ wake? Doesn't they wake up after ever so long,
+when peoples can't remember everything--and it makes them want to cry,
+only grown-up people aren't 'lowed?"
+
+Tims was puzzled. But even in her bewilderment it occurred to her that
+if poor Milly should return, she would be distressed to find in what a
+slovenly manner Tony was allowed to express himself.
+
+"I don't know what you mean, Tony. Say it again and put it more
+clearly."
+
+Tims had around her neck a necklace composed of casts of coins in the
+British Museum. She did not usually wear ornaments, because she
+possessed none, except a hair-bracelet, two brooches, and a large gold
+cross which had belonged to her late aunt. Tony's soft, slender fingers
+went to the necklace, and ignoring her question, he asked: "Why have you
+got these funny things round your neck, Auntie Tims?"
+
+"They're not funny. They're beautiful--copies of money which the old
+Greeks used to use. A gentleman gave it to me." Tims spoke with a grand
+carelessness. "I dare say if you're a good boy he'll tell you stories
+about them himself some day. But I want you to explain what it was you
+meant to say about dead people. Dead people don't come back, you know."
+
+Tony touched her hand, which lay open on her knee, and played with the
+fingers a minute. Then raising his eyes he said, plaintively:
+
+"I do so want my tea."
+
+Once more he had wiped the conversational slate, and the baffled Tims
+dismissed him. He opened the door a little and slipped out; put his dark
+head in again with an engaging smile, said politely, "I sha'n't be away
+_very_ long," and closed the door softly behind him. For that soft
+closing of the door was one of the things poor Milly had taught him
+which the little 'peoples' did contrive to remember.
+
+The sleeper now began to stir slightly in her sleep, and before Tony's
+somewhat prolonged tea was over, she sat up and looked about her.
+
+"Is that Tims?" she asked, in a colorless voice.
+
+"Yes--is it you, Milly?"
+
+"No. What makes you think so?"
+
+"Milly's been trying to come back. I suppose she couldn't manage it."
+
+"Ah!"--there was a deep satisfaction in Mildred's tone now; "I thought
+she couldn't!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+George Goring and Mildred Stewart did not move in the same social set,
+but their sets had points of contact, and it was at these that Goring
+was now most likely to be found; especially at the pleasant bachelor
+house on Campden Hill. Mrs. Stewart walked in the Park every morning at
+an unfashionable hour, and sometimes, yet not too often for discretion,
+Goring happened to be walking there too. All told, their meetings were
+not very numerous, nor very private. But every half-hour they spent in
+each other's company seemed to do the work of a month of intimacy.
+
+July hastened to an end, but an autumn Session brought Goring up to town
+in November, and three months of absence found him and Mildred still at
+the same point. Sir Cyril Meres was already beginning to plan his
+wonderful _tableaux-vivants_, which, however, did not come off until
+February. The extraordinary imitative talent which his artistic career
+had been one long struggle to disguise, was for once to be allowed full
+play. The _tableaux_ were to represent paintings by certain
+fellow-artists and friends; not actual pictures by them, but pictures
+which they might have painted, and the supposed authors were allowed a
+right of veto or criticism.
+
+A stage of Renaissance design, which did not jar with the surrounding
+architecture, was erected in the depth of the portico at the end of the
+Hellenic room.
+
+The human material at Meres's command was physically admirable. He had
+long been the chosen portrait-painter of wealth and fashion, and there
+was not a beauty in Society, with the biggest "S," who was not delighted
+to lend her charms for his purpose. The young men might grumble for
+form's sake, but at the bottom of their hearts they were equally
+sensible to the compliment of being asked to appear. It was when it came
+to the moulding of the material for artistic purposes, that the trouble
+began. The English have produced great actors, but in the bulk they have
+little natural aptitude for the stage; and what they have is discouraged
+by a social training which strains after the ideal composure, the few
+movements, the glassy eye of a waxwork. Only a small and chosen number,
+it is true, fully attain that ideal; but when we see them we recognize
+with a start, almost with a shudder, that it is there, the perfection of
+our deportment.
+
+Cyril Meres was, however, an admirable stage-manager, exquisite in tact,
+in temper, and urbane patience. The results of his prolonged training
+were wonderful; yet again and again he found it impossible to carry out
+his idea without placing his cousin Mrs. Stewart at the vital point of
+his picture. She was certainly not the most physically beautiful woman
+there, but she was unrivalled by any other in the grace, the variety,
+the meaning of her gestures, the dramatic transformations of her
+countenance. She was Pandora, she was Hope, she was Lady Hammerton, she
+was the Vampire, and she was the Queen of Faerie.
+
+There is jealousy on the amateur stage as well as on the professional,
+and ladies of social position, accustomed to see their beauty lauded in
+the newspapers, saw no reason why Mrs. Stewart should be thrust to the
+front of half of the pictures. Lady Langham, the "smart" Socialist, with
+whom George Goring had flirted last season, to Lady Augusta's real
+dismay, was the leading rival candidate for Mildred's rôles. But Lady
+Langham never guessed that Mrs. Stewart was the cause of George Goring's
+disappearance from the list of her admirers, and she still had hopes of
+his return.
+
+The _tableaux_ were a brilliant success. Ian was there on the first
+evening, so was Lady Augusta Goring. Lady Langham, peeping through the
+curtains, saw her, and swept the horizon--that is, the circle of black
+coats around the walls--in vain for George Goring. Then Lady Augusta
+became audible, saying that in the present state of affairs in the House
+it was quite impossible for Mr. Goring to leave it, even for dinner, on
+that evening or the next. Nevertheless, on the next evening, Lady
+Langham espied George Goring in the act of taking a vacant chair near
+the front, next to a social _protégée_ of her own. She turned and
+mentioned the fact to a friend, who smiled meaningly and remarked, "In
+spite of Lady Augusta's whip!"
+
+Mildred, passing, caught the information, the comment, the smile. During
+the rehearsals for the _tableaux_, she had heard people coupling the
+names of Goring and Lady Langham, not seriously, yet seriously enough
+for her. A winged shaft of jealousy pierced at once her heart and her
+pride. Was she allowing her whole inner life to be shaken, dissolved by
+the passing admiration of a flirt? Her intimate self had assurance that
+it was not so; but sometimes a colder wind, blowing she knew not whence,
+or the lash of a chance word, threw her into the attitude of a chance
+observer, one who sees, guesses, does not know.
+
+Meantime George Goring had flung himself down in the only vacant chair
+he could see, and careless of the brilliant company about him, careless
+even of the face of Aphrodite herself, smiling divinely, unconcerned
+with human affairs, from a far corner he waited for the curtain to go
+up. His neighbor spoke. She had met him at the Langhams last season.
+What a pity he had just missed Lady Langham's great _tableau_, "Helen
+before the Elders of Troy"! There was no one to be compared to Maud
+Langham, so beautiful, so clever! She would have made her fortune if she
+had gone on the stage. Goring gave the necessary assent.
+
+The curtain went up, exhibiting a picture called "The Vampire." It was
+smaller than most and shown by a curious pale light. A fair young girl
+was lying in a deep sleep on a curtained bed, and hovering, crawling
+over her with a deadly, serpentine grace, was a white figure wrapped in
+a veiling garment that might have been a shroud. Out of white cerements
+showed a trail of yellow hair and a face alabaster white, save for the
+lips that were blood red--an intent face with a kind of terrible beauty,
+yet instinct with cruelty. One slender, bloodless hand was in the girl's
+hair, and, even without the title, it would have been plain that there
+was a deadly purpose in that creeping figure.
+
+"Isn't it horrid?" whispered Goring's neighbor. "Fancy that Mrs. Stewart
+letting herself be made to look so dreadful!"
+
+"Who?" asked Goring, horrified. He had not recognized Mildred.
+
+"Why, the girl on the bed's Gertrude Waters, and the Vampire's a cousin
+of Sir Cyril Meres. A horrid little woman some people admire, but I
+shouldn't think any one would after this. I call it disgusting, don't
+you?"
+
+"It's horrible!" gasped George; "it oughtn't to be allowed. What does
+that fellow Meres mean by inventing such deviltries? By Jove, I should
+like to thrash him!"
+
+The neighbor stared. It was all very well to be horrified at Mrs.
+Stewart, but why this particular form of horror?
+
+"Please call me when it's over," said Goring, putting his head down
+between his hands.
+
+What an eccentric young man he was! But clever people often were
+eccentric.
+
+In due course the _tableau_ was over, and to the relief of one
+spectator at least, it was not encored. The next was some harmless
+domestic scene with people in short waists. George Goring looked in vain
+for Mildred among them, longing to see her, the real lovely her, and
+forget the horrible thing she had portrayed. Lady Langham was there, and
+his neighbor commended her tediously, convinced of pleasing.
+
+There followed a large and very beautiful picture in the manner of a
+great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer,
+meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of
+the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was
+coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while
+Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp
+across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge.
+He appeared suddenly to have beheld her, pausing above him before
+descending the heathery bank that edged the wood; and looking in her
+face, to have entered at once into the land of Faerie. The pose, the
+figure, the face of the Faerie Queen were of the most exquisite charm
+and beauty, touched with a something of romance and mystery that no
+other woman there except Mildred could have lent it. The youth who
+personated Thomas the Rhymer was temporarily in love with Mrs. Stewart
+and acted his part with intense expression. Goring, shading his eyes
+with his hand, fixed them upon her as long as he dared; then glanced at
+the Rhymer and was angry. He turned to his chattering neighbor and
+asked:
+
+"Who's the chap doing Thomas? Looks as if he wanted a wash."
+
+"I don't know. Nobody particular, I should think. Wasn't it a pity they
+didn't have Lady Langham for the Faerie Queen? I do call it absurd the
+way Sir Cyril Meres has put that pert, insignificant cousin of his
+forward in quite half the pictures--and when he might have had Maud
+Langham."
+
+Goring threw himself back in his chair and laughed his quite loud laugh.
+
+"'A mad world, my masters,'" he quoted.
+
+His neighbor took this for Mr. Goring's eccentric way of approving her
+sentiments. But what he really meant was: What a strange masquerade is
+the world! This neighbor of his, so ordinary, so desirous to please,
+would have shuddered at the notion of hinting to him the patent fact
+that Lady Augusta Goring was a tiring woman; while she pressed upon him
+laudations of a person to whom he was perfectly indifferent, mingled
+with insulting comments on the only woman in the world for him--the
+woman who was his world, without whom nothing was; on her whose very
+name, even on these silly, hostile lips, gave him a strong sensation,
+whether of pain or pleasure he could hardly tell.
+
+After the performance he constrained himself to go the round of the
+ladies of his acquaintance who had been acting and compliment them
+cleverly and with good taste. Lady Langham of course seized the lion's
+share of his company and his compliments. He seemed to address only a
+few remarks of the same nature to Mrs. Stewart, but he had watched his
+opportunity and was able to say to her:
+
+"I must leave in a quarter of an hour at latest. Please let me drive you
+back. You won't say no?"
+
+There was a pleading note in the last phrase and his eyes met hers
+gravely, anxiously. It was evident that she must answer immediately,
+while their neighbors' attention was distracted from them. She was pale
+before under her stage make-up, and now she grew still paler.
+
+"Thanks. I told Cousin Cyril I was tired and shouldn't stay long. I'll
+go and change at once."
+
+Then Thomas the Rhymer was at her elbow again, bringing her something
+for which she had sent him.
+
+The green-room, in which she resumed the old white lace evening-dress
+that she had worn to dine with her cousin, was strewn with the delicate
+underclothing, the sumptuous wraps and costly knick-knacks of wealthy
+women. She had felt ashamed, as she had undressed there, of her own poor
+little belongings among these; and ashamed to be so ashamed. As she had
+seen her garments overswept by the folds of the fair Socialist's white
+velvet mantle, lined with Arctic fox and clasped with diamonds, she had
+smiled ironically at the juxtaposition. Since circumstances and her own
+gifts had drawn her into the stream of the world, she had been more and
+more conscious, however unwillingly, of a longing for luxuries, for rich
+settings to her beauty, for some stage upon which her brilliant
+personality might shine uplifted, secure. For she seemed to herself
+sometimes like a tumbler at a fair, struggling in the crowd for a space
+in which to spread his carpet. Now--George Goring loved her. Let the
+others keep their furs and laces and gewgaws, their great fortunes or
+great names. Yet if it had been possible for her to take George Goring's
+love, he could have given her most of these things as well.
+
+Wrapped in a gauzy white scarf, she seemed to float rather than walk
+down the stairs into the hall, where Thomas the Rhymer was lingering, in
+the hope of finding an excuse to escort her home. She was pale, with a
+clear, beautiful pallor, a strange smile was on her lips and her eyes
+shone like stars. The Queen of Faerie had looked less lovely, meeting
+him on the edge of the wood. She nodded him good-night and passed
+quickly on into the porch. With a boyish pang he saw her vanish, not
+into the darkness of night, but into the blond interior of a smart
+brougham. A young man, also smart--her husband, for aught he
+knew--paused on the step to give orders to the coachman, and followed
+her in. A moment he saw her dimly, in the glare of carriage-lamps, a
+white vision, half eclipsed by the black silhouette of the man at her
+side; then they glided away over the crunching gravel of the drive, into
+the fiery night of London.
+
+"Do you really think it went off well?" she asked, as they passed
+through the gates into the street. George was taking off his hat and
+putting it down on the little shelf opposite. He leaned back and was
+silent a few seconds; then starting forward, laid his hand upon her
+knee.
+
+"Don't let's waste time like that, Mildred," he said--and although he
+had never called her so before, it seemed natural that he should--"we
+haven't got much. You know, don't you, why I asked you to drive with
+me?"
+
+She in her turn was silent a moment, then meeting his eyes:
+
+"Yes," she said, quite simply and courageously.
+
+"I thought you could hardly help seeing I loved you, however blind other
+people might be."
+
+Her head was turned away again and she looked out of the window, as she
+answered in a voice that tried to be light:
+
+"But it isn't of any consequence, is it? I suppose you're always in love
+with somebody or other."
+
+"Is that what people told you about me?"--and it was new and wonderful
+to her to hear George Goring speak with this calmness and
+gravity--"You've not been long in the world, little girl, or you'd know
+how much to believe of what's said there."
+
+"No," she answered, in turn becoming calm and deliberate. "When I come
+to think of it, people only say that women generally like you and that
+you flirt with them. I--I invented the rest."
+
+"But, good Heavens! Why?" There was a note of pain and wonder in his
+voice.
+
+She paused, and his hand moved under her cloak to be laid on the two
+slender hands clasped on her lap.
+
+"I suppose I was jealous," she said.
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Absurd child! But I'm a bit of an ass that way myself. I was jealous of
+Thomas the Rhymer this evening."
+
+"That brat!"
+
+She laughed low, the sweet laugh that was like no one else's. It was
+past midnight and the streets were comparatively quiet and dark, but at
+that moment they were whirled into a glare of strong light. They looked
+in each other's eyes in silence, his hand tightening its hold upon hers.
+Then again they plunged into wavering dimness, and he resumed, gravely
+and calmly as before, but bending nearer her.
+
+"If I weren't anxious to tell you the exact truth, to avoid
+exaggeration, I should say I fell in love with you the first time I met
+you. It seems to me now as though it had been so. And the second
+time--you remember it was one very hot day last July, when we both
+lunched with Meres--I hadn't the least doubt that if I had been free and
+you also, I should have left no stone unturned to get you for my wife."
+
+Every word was sweet to her, yet she answered sombrely:
+
+"But we are not free."
+
+He, disregarding the answer, went on:
+
+"You love me, as I love you?"
+
+"As you love me, dearest; and from the first."
+
+A minute's silence, while the hands held each other fast. Then low,
+triumphantly, he exclaimed: "Well?"
+
+Her slim hands began to flutter a little in his as she answered all that
+that "Well" implied.
+
+"It's impossible, dear. It's no use arguing about it. It's just waste of
+time--and we've only got this little time."
+
+"To do what? To make love in? Dear, we've got all our lives if we
+please. We've both made a tremendous mistake, we've both got a chance
+now of going back on it, of setting our lives right again, making them
+better indeed than we ever dreamed of their being. We inflict some loss
+on other people--no loss comparable to our gain--we hurt them chiefly
+because of their bloated ideas of their claims on us. I know you've
+weighed things, have no prejudices. Rules, systems, are made for types
+and classes, not for us. You belong to no type, Mildred. I belong to no
+class."
+
+She answered low, painfully:
+
+"It's true I am unlike other people; that's the very reason, why--I--I'm
+not good to love." There was a low utterance that was music in her ears,
+yet she continued: "Then, dear friend, think of your career, ruined for
+me, by me. You might be happy for a while, then you'd regret it."
+
+"That's where you're wrong. My career? A rotten little game, these House
+of Commons party politics, when you get into it! The big things go on
+outside them; there's all the world outside them. Anyhow, my career, as
+I planned it, is ruined already. The Ipswich gang have collared me; I
+can't call my tongue my own, Mildred. Think of that!"
+
+She smiled faintly.
+
+"Temporary, George! You'll soon have your head up--and your tongue
+out."
+
+"Oh, from time to time, I presume, I shall always be the Horrid Vulgar
+Boy of those poor Barthops; I shall kick like a galvanized frog long
+after I'm dead. But--I wouldn't confess it to any one but you, dear--I'm
+not strong enough to stand against the everlasting pressure that's
+brought to bear upon me. You know what I mean, don't you?"
+
+"Yes. You'll be no good if you let the originality be squeezed out of
+you. Don't allow it."
+
+"Nothing can prevent it--unless the Faerie Queen will stretch out her
+dearest, sweetest hands to me and lead me, poor mortal, right away into
+the wide world, into some delightful country where there's plenty of
+love and no politics. I want love so much, Mildred; I've never had it,
+and no one has ever guessed how much I wanted it except you,
+dear--except you."
+
+Yes, she had guessed. The queer childhood, so noisy yet so lonely, had
+been spoken of; the married life spoke for itself.
+
+His arm was around her now, their faces drawn close together, and in the
+pale, faint light they looked each other deep in the eyes. Then their
+lips met in a long kiss.
+
+"You see how it is," he whispered; "you can't help it. It's got to be.
+No one has power to prevent it."
+
+But he spoke without knowledge, for there was one who had power to
+prevent it, one conquered, helpless, less than a ghost, who yet could
+lay an icy hand on the warm, high-beating heart of her subduer, and say:
+"Love and desire, the pride of life and the freedom of the world, are
+not for you. I forbid them to you--I--by a power stronger than the laws
+of God or man. True, you have no husband, you have no child, for those
+who seem to be yours are mine. You have taken them from me, and now you
+must keep them, whether you will or no. You have taken my life from me,
+and my life you must have, that and none other."
+
+It was against this unknown and inflexible power that George Goring
+struggled with all the might of his love, and absolutely in vain.
+Between him and Mildred there could be no lies, no subterfuges; only
+that one silence which to him, of all others, she dared not break.
+
+She seemed to have been engaged in this struggle, at once so sweet and
+so bitter, for an eternity before she stood on her own doorstep,
+latch-key in hand.
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Goring. So much obliged for the lift."
+
+"Delighted, I'm sure. All right now? Good-night. Drop me at the House,
+Edwards."
+
+He lifted his hat, stepped in and closed the carriage-door sharply
+behind him; and in a minute the brougham with its lights rolling almost
+noiselessly behind the big fast-trotting bay horse, had disappeared
+around a neighboring corner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house was cold and dark, except for a candle which burned on an oak
+dresser in the narrow hall. As Mildred dragged herself up the stairs,
+she had a sensation of physical fatigue, almost bruisedness, as though
+she had come out of some actual bodily combat. Her room, fireless and
+cold, was solitary, for Ian's sleep had to be protected from
+disturbance. Nevertheless, having loosened her wraps, she threw herself
+on the bed and lay there long, her bare arms under her head. The
+sensation of chill, her own cold soft flesh against her face, seemed to
+brace her mind and body, to restore her powers of clear, calm judgment,
+so unlike the usual short-sighted, emotionalized judgments of youth. She
+had nothing of the ordinary woman's feeling of guilt towards her
+husband. The intimate bond between herself and George Goring did not
+seem in any relation the accidental one between her and Ian Stewart. She
+had never before faced the question, the possibility of a choice between
+the two. Now she weighed it with characteristic swiftness and decision.
+She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his
+marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but
+that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she
+herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could
+she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer
+cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back again to the student's
+life, the only life that could bring him honor, and in the long run
+satisfaction. And that life would not be lonely, because Tony, so
+completely his father's child, would be with him. As for herself and
+George Goring, she had no fear of the future. They two were strong
+enough to hew and build alone their own Palace of Delight. Her intuitive
+knowledge of the world informed her that, in the long run, society, if
+firmly disregarded, admits the claim of certain persons to go their own
+way--even rapidly admits it, though they be the merest bleating strays
+from the common fold, should they haply be possessed of rank or fortune.
+The way lay plain enough before Mildred, were it not for that Other. But
+she, the shadowy one, deep down in her limbo, laid a finger on the gate
+of that Earthly Paradise and held it, as inflexibly as any armed
+archangel, against the master key of her enemy's intelligence, the
+passionate assaults of her heart.
+
+Mildred, however, was one who found it hard, if not impossible, to
+acquiesce in defeat. Two o'clock boomed from the watching towers of
+Westminster over the great city. She rose from her bed, cold as a marble
+figure on a monument, and went to the dressing-table to take off her few
+and simple ornaments. The mirror on it was the same from which that
+alien smile had peered twelve months ago, filling the sad soul of Milly
+with trembling fear and sinister foreboding. The white face that stole
+into its shadowy depths to-night, and looked Mildred in the eyes, was in
+a manner new to her also. It had a new seriousness, a new intensity, as
+of a woman whose vital energies, once spending themselves in mere
+corruscations, in mere action for action's sake, were now concentrated
+on one definite thought, one purpose, one emotion, which with an intense
+yet benign fire blended in perfect harmony the life of the soul and of
+the body.
+
+For a moment the face in its gravity recalled to her the latest
+photograph of Milly, a tragic photograph she did not care to look at
+because it touched her with a pity, a remorse, which were after all
+quite useless. But the impression was false and momentary.
+
+"No," she said, speaking to the glass, "it's not really like. Poor weak
+woman! I understand better now what you have suffered." Then almost
+repeating the words of her own cruel subconscious self--"But there's all
+the difference between the weak and the strong. I am the stronger, and
+the stronger must win; that's written, and it's no use struggling
+against the law of nature."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+George Goring was never so confident in himself as when he was fighting
+an apparently losing game; and the refusal of Mildred to come to him, a
+refusal based, as he supposed, on nothing but an insurmountable
+prejudice against doing what was not respectable, struck him as a stage
+in their relations rather than as the end of them. He did not attempt to
+see her until the close of the Easter Vacation. People began to couple
+their names, but lightly, without serious meaning, for Goring being
+popular with women, had a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a flirt.
+When a faithful cousin hinted things about him and Mrs. Stewart to Lady
+Augusta, she who believed herself to have seen a number of similar
+temporary enslavers, put the matter by, really glad that a harmless
+nobody should have succeeded to Maud Langham with her dangerous
+opinions.
+
+Ian Stewart on his side was barely acquainted with Goring. Sir John
+Ireton and the newspapers informed him that George Goring was a flashy,
+untrustworthy politician; and the former added that he was a terrible
+nuisance to poor Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta. That such a man could
+attract Mildred would never have occurred to him.
+
+The fear of Milly's return, which she could not altogether banish, still
+at times checked and restrained Mildred. Could she but have secured
+Tims's assistance in keeping Milly away, she would have felt more
+confident of success. It was hopeless to appeal directly to the
+hypnotist, but her daring imagination began to conceive a situation in
+which mere good sense and humanity must compel Tims to forbid the return
+of Milly to a life made impossible for her. She had not seen Tims for
+many weeks, not since the Easter Vacation, which had already receded
+into a remote distance; so far had she journeyed since then along the
+path of her fate. Nor had she so much as wondered at not seeing Tims.
+But now her mind was turned to consider the latent power which that
+strange creature held over her life, her dearest interests; since how
+might not Milly comport herself with George?
+
+Then it was that she realized how long it had been since Tims had crept
+up the stairs to her drawing-room; pausing probably in the middle of
+them to wipe away with hasty pocket-handkerchief some real or fancied
+trace of her foot on a carpet which she condemned as expensive.
+
+Mildred had written her a note, but it was hardly posted when the door
+was flung open and Miss Timson was formally announced by the
+parlor-maid. Tony, who was looking at pictures with his mother, rose
+from her side, prepared to take a hop, skip, and jump and land with his
+arms around Tims's waist. But he stopped short and contemplated her
+with round-eyed solemnity. The ginger-colored man's wig had developed
+into a frizzy fringe and the rest of the coiffure of the hour. A large
+picture hat surmounted it, and her little person was clothed in a vivid
+heliotrope dress of the latest mode. It was a handsome dress, a handsome
+hat, a handsome wig, yet somehow the effect was jarring. Tony felt
+vaguely shocked. "Bless thee! Thou art translated!" he might have cried
+with Quince; but being a polite child, he said nothing, only put out a
+small hand sadly. Tims, however, unconscious of the slight chill cast by
+her appearance, kissed him in a perfunctory, patronizing way, as ladies
+do who are afraid of disarranging their veils. She greeted Mildred also
+with a parade of mundane elegance, and sat down deliberately on the
+sofa, spreading out her heliotrope skirts.
+
+"You can run away just now, little man," she said to Tony. "I want to
+talk to your mother."
+
+"How smart you are!" observed Mildred, seeing that comment of some kind
+would be welcome. "Been to Sir James Carus's big party at the Museum, I
+suppose. You're getting a personage, Tims."
+
+"I dare say I shall look in later, but I shouldn't trouble to dress up
+for that, my girl. Clothes would be quite wasted there. But I think one
+should always try to look decent, don't you? One's men like it."
+
+Mildred smiled.
+
+"I suppose Ian would notice it if I positively wasn't decent. But, Tims,
+dear, does old Carus really criticise your frocks?"
+
+For indeed the distinguished scientist, Miss Timson's chief, was the
+only man she could think of to whom Tims could possibly apply the
+possessive adjective. Tims bridled.
+
+"Of course not; I was thinking of Mr. Fitzalan."
+
+That she had for years been very kind to a lonely little man of that
+name who lived in the same block of chambers, Mildred knew,
+but--Heavens! Even Mildred's presence of mind failed her, and she
+stared. Meeting her amazed eye, Tims's borrowed smile suddenly broke its
+bounds and became her own familiar grin, only more so:
+
+"We're engaged," she said.
+
+"My dear Tims!" exclaimed Mildred, suppressing an inclination to burst
+out laughing. "What a surprise!"
+
+"I quite thought you'd have been prepared for it," returned Tims. "A bit
+stupid of you not to guess it, don't you know, old girl. We've been
+courting long enough."
+
+Mildred hastened to congratulate the strange bride and wish her
+happiness, with all that unusual grace which she knew how to employ in
+adorning the usual.
+
+"I thought I should like you to be the first to know," said Tims,
+sentimentally, after a while; "because I was your bridesmaid, you see.
+It was the prettiest wedding I ever saw, and I should love to have a
+wedding like yours--all of us carrying lilies, you know."
+
+"I remember there were green stains on my wedding-dress," returned
+Mildred, with forced gayety.
+
+Tims, temporarily oblivious of all awkward circumstances, continued,
+still more sentimentally:
+
+"Then I was there, as I've told you, when Ian's pop came to poor old M.
+Poor old girl! She was awfully spifligatingly happy, and I feel just the
+same now myself."
+
+"Well, it wasn't I, anyhow, who felt 'awfully spifligatingly happy' on
+that occasion," replied Mildred, with a touch of asperity in her voice.
+
+Tims, legitimately absorbed in her own feelings, did not notice it. She
+continued:
+
+"I dare say the world will say Mr. Fitzalan had an eye on my money; and
+it's true I've done pretty well with my investments. But, bless you! he
+hadn't a notion of that. You see, I was brought up to be stingy, and I
+enjoy it. He thought of course I was a pauper, and proposed we should
+pauper along together. He was quite upset when he found I was an
+heiress. Wasn't it sweet of him?"
+
+Mildred said it was.
+
+"Flora Fitzalan!" breathed Tims, clasping her hands and smiling into
+space. "Isn't it a pretty name? It's always been my dream to have a
+pretty name." Then suddenly, as though in a flash seeing all those
+personal disadvantages which she usually contrived to ignore:
+
+"Life's a queer lottery, Mil, my girl. We know what we are, we know not
+what we shall be, as old Billy says. Who'd ever have thought that a
+nice, quiet girl like Milly, marrying the lad of her heart and all that,
+would come to such awful grief; while look at me--a queer kind of girl
+you'd have laid your bottom dollar wouldn't have much luck, prospering
+like anything, well up in the Science business, and now, what's ever so
+much better, scrumptiously happy with a good sort of her own. Upon my
+word, Mil, I've half a mind to fetch old M. back to sympathize with me,
+for although you've said a peck of nice things, I don't believe you
+understand what I'm feeling the way the old girl would."
+
+Mildred went a little pale and spoke quickly.
+
+"You won't do that really, Tims? You won't be so cruel to--to every
+one?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't see why you're always to be jolly and have
+everything your own way. Oh, Lord! When I think how happy old M. was
+when she was engaged, the same as I am, and then on her
+wedding-day--just the same as I shall be on mine."
+
+Mildred straightened out the frill of a muslin cushion cover, her head
+bent.
+
+"Just so. She had everything _her_ own way that time. I gave her that
+happiness, it was all my doing. She's had it and she ought to be
+content. Don't be a fool, Tims--" she lifted her face and Tims was
+startled by its expression--"Can't you see how hard it is on me never to
+be allowed the happiness you've got and Milly's had? Don't you think I
+might care to know what love is like for myself? Don't you think I might
+happen to want--I tell you I'm a million times more alive than
+Milly--and I want--I want everything a million times more than she
+does."
+
+Tims was astonished.
+
+"But it's always struck me, don't you know, that Ian was a deal more in
+love with you than he ever was with poor old M."
+
+"And you pretend to be in love and think that's enough! It's not enough;
+you must know it's not. It's like sitting at a Barmecide feast, very
+hungry, only the Barmecide's sitting opposite you eating all the time
+and talking about his food. I tell you it's maddening, perfectly
+maddening--" There was a fierce vehemence in her face, her voice, the
+clinch of her slender hands on the muslin frill. That strong vitality
+which before had seemed to carry her lightly as on wings, over all the
+rough places of life, had now not failed, but turned itself inwards,
+burning in an intense flame at once of pain and of rebellion against its
+own pain.
+
+Tims in the midst of her happiness, felt vaguely scared. Mildred seeing
+it, recovered herself and plunged into the usual engagement talk. In a
+few minutes she was her old beguiling self--the self to whose charm Tims
+was as susceptible in her way as Thomas the Rhymer had been in his.
+
+When she had left, and from time to time thereafter, Tims felt vaguely
+uncomfortable, remembering Mildred's outburst of vehement bitterness on
+the subject of love. It was so unlike her usual careless tone, which
+implied that it was men's business, or weakness, to be in love with
+women, and that only second-rate women fell in love themselves.
+
+Mildred seemed altogether more serious than she used to be, and Milly
+herself could not have been more sympathetic over the engagement. Even
+Mr. Fitzalan, when Tims brought him to call on the Stewarts was not
+afraid of her, and found it possible to say a few words in reply to her
+remarks. Tims's ceremonious way of speaking of her betrothed, whom she
+never mentioned except as Mr. Fitzalan, made Ian reflect with sad humor
+on the number of offensively familiar forms of address which he himself
+had endured from her, and on the melancholy certainty that she had never
+spoken of him in his absence by any name more respectful than the plain
+unprefixed "Stewart." But he hoped that the excitement of her engagement
+had wiped out of her remembrance that afternoon when poor Milly had
+tried to return. For he did not like to think of that moment of weakness
+in which he had allowed Tims to divine so much of a state of mind which
+he could not unveil even to himself without a certain shame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The summer was reaching its height. The weather was perfect. Night after
+night hot London drawing-rooms were crowded to suffocation, awnings
+sprang mushroom-like from every West End pavement; the sound of music
+and the rolling of carriages made night, if not hideous, at least
+discordant to the unconsidered minority who went to bed as usual.
+Outside in the country, even in the suburbs, June came in glory, with
+woods in freshest livery of green, with fragrance of hawthorn and broom
+and gorse, buttercup meadows and gardens brimmed with roses. It seemed
+to George Goring and Mildred as though somehow this warmth, this gayety
+and richness of life in the earth had never been there before, but that
+Fate and Nature, of which their love was part, were leading them on in a
+great festal train to the inevitable consummation. The flame of life had
+never burned clearer or more steadily in Mildred, and every day she felt
+a growing confidence in having won so complete a possession of her whole
+bodily machinery that it would hardly be in the power of Milly to
+dethrone her. The sight of George Goring, the touch of his hand, the
+very touch of his garment, gave her a feeling of unconquerable life. It
+was impossible that she and George should part. All her sanguine and
+daring nature cried out to her that were she once his, Milly should not,
+could not, return. Tims, too, was there in reserve. Not that Tims would
+feel anything but horror at Mildred's conduct in leaving Ian and Tony;
+but the thing done, she would recognize the impossibility of allowing
+Milly to return to such a situation.
+
+Ian, whose holidays were usually at the inevitable periods, was by some
+extraordinary collapse of that bloated thing, the Academic conscience,
+going away for a fortnight in June. He had been deputed to attend a
+centenary celebration at some German University, and a conference of
+savants to be held immediately after it, presented irresistible
+attractions.
+
+One Sunday Tims and Mr. Fitzalan went to Hampton Court with the usual
+crowd of German, Italian, and French hair-dressers, waiters, cooks, and
+restaurant-keepers, besides native cockneys of all classes except the
+upper.
+
+The noble old Palace welcomed this mass of very common humanity with
+such a pageant of beauty as never greeted the eyes of its royal
+builders. Centuries of sunshine seem to have melted into the rich reds
+and grays and cream-color of its walls, under which runs a quarter of a
+mile of flower-border, a glowing mass of color, yet as full of delicate
+and varied detail as the border of an illuminated missal. Everywhere
+this modern wealth and splendor of flowers is arranged, as jewels in a
+setting, within the architectural plan of the old garden. There the dark
+yews retain their intended proportion, the silver fountain rises where
+it was meant to rise, although it sprinkles new, unthought-of lilies.
+Behind it, on either side the stately vista of water, and beside it, in
+the straight alley, the trees in the freshness and fulness of their
+leafage, stand tall and green, less trim and solid it may be, but
+essentially as they were meant to stand when the garden grew long ago in
+the brain of a man. And out there beyond the terrace the Thames flows
+quietly, silverly on, seeming to shine with the memory of all the
+loveliness those gliding waters have reflected, since their ripples
+played with the long, tremulous image of Lechlade spire.
+
+Seen from the cool, deep-windowed rooms of the Palace, where now the
+pictures hang and hundreds of plebeian feet tramp daily, the gardens
+gave forth a burning yet pleasant glow of heat and color in the full
+sunshine. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, having eaten their frugal lunch early
+under the blossoming chestnut-trees in Bushey Park, went into the
+Picture Gallery in the Palace at an hour when it happened to be almost
+empty. The queer-looking woman not quite young, and the little, bald,
+narrow-chested, short-sighted man, would not have struck the passers-by
+as being a pair of lovers. A few sympathetic smiles, however, had been
+bestowed upon another couple seated in the deep window of one of the
+smaller rooms; a pretty young woman and an attractive man. The young man
+had disposed his hat and a newspaper in such a way as not to make it
+indecently obvious that he was holding her hand. It was she who called
+attention to the fact by hasty attempts to snatch it away when people
+came in.
+
+"What do you do that for?" asked the young man. "There's not the
+slightest chance of any one we know coming along."
+
+"But George--"
+
+"Do try and adapt yourself to your _milieu_. These people are probably
+blaming me for not putting my arm around your waist."
+
+"George! What an idiot you are!" She laughed a nervous laugh.
+
+By this time the last party of fat, dark young women in rainbow hats,
+and narrow-shouldered, anæmic young men, had trooped away towards food.
+Goring waited till the sound of their footsteps had ceased. He was
+holding Mildred's hand, but he had drawn it out from under the newspaper
+now, and the gay audacity of his look had changed to something at once
+more serious and more masterful.
+
+"I don't like your seeming afraid, Mildred," he said. "It spoils my idea
+of you. I like to think of you as a high-spirited creature, conscious
+enough of your own worth to go your own way and despise the foolish
+comments of the crowd."
+
+To hear herself so praised by him made the clear pink rise to Mildred's
+cheeks. How could she bear to fall below the level of his expectation,
+although the thing he expected of her had dangers of which he was
+ignorant?
+
+"I'm glad you believe that of me," she said; "although it's not quite
+true. I cared a good deal about the opinion of the world before--before
+I knew you; only I was vain enough to think it would never treat me very
+badly."
+
+"It won't," he replied, his audacious smile flashing out for a moment.
+"It'll come sneaking back to you before long; it can't keep away.
+Besides, I'm cynic enough to know my own advantages, Mildred. Society
+doesn't sulk forever with wealthy people, whatever they choose to do."
+
+She answered low: "But I shouldn't care if it did, George. I want
+you--just to go right away with you."
+
+A wonderful look of joy and tenderness came over his face. "Mildred! Can
+it really be you saying that?" he breathed. "Really you, Mildred?"
+
+They looked each other in the eyes and were silent a minute; but while
+the hand next the window held hers, the other one stole out farther to
+clasp her. He was too much absorbed in that gaze to notice anything
+beyond it; but Mildred was suddenly aware of steps and a voice in the
+adjoining room. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, in the course of a conscientious
+survey of all the pictures on the walls, had reached this point in their
+progress. The window-seat on which Goring and Mildred were sitting was
+visible through a doorway, and Tims had on her strongest glasses.
+
+Since her engagement, Tims's old-maidish bringing up seemed to be
+bearing fruit for the first time.
+
+"I think we'd better cough or do something," she said. "There's a couple
+in there going on disgracefully. I do think spooning in public such bad
+form."
+
+"I dare say they think they're alone," returned the charitable Mr.
+Fitzalan, unable to see the delinquents because he was trying to put a
+loose lens back into his eye-glasses. Tims came to his assistance,
+talking loudly; and her voice was of a piercing quality. Mildred,
+leaning forward, saw Mr. Fitzalan and Tims, both struggling with
+eye-glasses. She slipped from George's encircling arm and stood in the
+doorway of the farther room, beckoning to him with a scared face. He got
+up and followed her.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked, more curious than anxious; for an
+encounter with Lady Augusta in person could only precipitate a crisis he
+was ready to welcome. Why should one simple, definite step from an old
+life to a new one, which his reason as much as his passion dictated, be
+so incredibly difficult to take?
+
+Mildred hurried him away, explaining that she had seen some one she knew
+very well. He pointed out that it was of no real consequence. She could
+not tell him that if Tims suspected anything before the decisive step
+was taken, one of the safeguards under which she took it might fail.
+
+They found no exit at the end of the suite of rooms, still less any
+place of concealment. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan came upon them discussing
+the genuineness of a picture in the last room but one. When Tims saw
+that it was Mildred, she made some of the most dreadful grimaces she had
+ever made in her life. Making them, she approached Mildred, who seeing
+there was no escape, turned around and greeted her with a welcoming
+smile.
+
+"Were you--were you sitting on that window-seat?" asked Tims, fixing her
+with eyes that seemed bent on piercing to her very marrow.
+
+Mildred smiled again, with a broader smile.
+
+"I don't know about 'that window-seat.' I've sat on a good many
+window-seats, naturally, since I set forth on this pilgrimage. Is there
+anything particular about that one? I've never seen Hampton Court
+before, Mr. Fitzalan, so as some people I knew were coming to-day, I
+thought I'd come too. May I introduce Mr. Goring?"
+
+So perfectly natural and easy was Mildred's manner, that Tims already
+half disbelieved her own eyes. They must have played her some trick; yet
+how could that be? She recalled the figures in the window-seat, as seen
+with all the peculiar, artificial distinctness conferred by strong
+glasses. The young man called Goring had smiled into the hidden face of
+his companion in a manner that Tims could not approve. She made up her
+mind that as soon as she had leisure she would call on Mildred and
+question her once more, and more straitly, concerning the mystery of
+that window-seat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+On Monday and Tuesday an interesting experiment which she was conducting
+under Carus claimed Tims's whole attention, except for the evening
+hours, which were dedicated to Mr. Fitzalan. But she wrote to say that
+Mildred might expect her to tea on Wednesday. On Wednesday the post
+brought her a note from Mildred, dated Tuesday, midnight.
+
+     "DEAR TIMS,--I am afraid you will not find me to-morrow
+     afternoon, as I am going out of town. But do go to tea with
+     Tony, who is just back from the sea and looking bonny. He is
+     such a darling! I always mind leaving him, although of
+     course I am not his mother. Oh, dear, I am so sleepy, I
+     hardly know what I am saying. Good-bye, Tims, dear. I am
+     very glad you are so happy with that nice Mr. Fitzalan of
+     yours.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     M. B. S."
+
+So far the note, although bearing signs of haste, was in Mildred's usual
+clear handwriting; but there was a postscript scrawled crookedly across
+the inner sides of the sheet and prefixed by several flourishes:
+
+     "Meet me at Paddington 4.30 train to-morrow. Meet me.
+      M."
+
+Another flourish followed.
+
+The note found Tims at the laboratory, which she had not intended
+leaving till half-past four. But the perplexing nature of the
+postscript, conflicting as it did with the body of the letter, made her
+the more inclined to obey its direction.
+
+She arrived at Paddington in good time and soon caught sight of Mildred,
+although for the tenth part of a second she hesitated in identifying
+her; for Mildred seldom wore black, although she looked well in it.
+To-day she was dressed in a long, black silk wrap--which, gathered about
+her slender figure by a ribbon, concealed her whole dress--and wore a
+long, black lace veil which might have baffled the eyes of a mere
+acquaintance. Tims could not fail to recognize that willowy figure, with
+its rare grace of motion, that amber hair, those turquoise-blue eyes
+that gleamed through the swathing veil with a restless brilliancy
+unusual even in them. With disordered dress and hat on one side, Tims
+hastened after Mildred.
+
+"So here you are!" she exclaimed; "that's all right! I managed to come,
+you see, though it's been a bit of a rush."
+
+Mildred looked around at her, astonished, possibly dismayed; but the
+veil acted as a mask.
+
+"Well, this is a surprise, Tims! What on earth brought you here? Is
+anything the matter?"
+
+"Just what I wanted to know. Why are you in black? Going to a funeral?"
+
+"Good Heavens, no! The only funeral I mean to go to will be my own. But,
+Tims, I thought you were going to tea with Tony. Why have you come
+here?"
+
+"Didn't you tell me to come in the postscript of your letter?"
+
+Mildred was evidently puzzled.
+
+"I don't remember anything about it," she said. "I was frightfully tired
+when I wrote to you--in fact, I went to sleep over the letter; but I
+can't imagine how I came to say that."
+
+Tims was not altogether surprised. She had had an idea that Mildred was
+not answerable for that postscript, but Mildred herself had no clew to
+the mystery, never having been told of Milly's written communication of
+a year ago. She sickened at the possibility that in some moment of
+aberration she might have written words meant for another on the note to
+Tims.
+
+Tims felt sure that Milly wished her to do something--but what?
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked. "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to stay with some friends who have a house on the river, and
+I'm going to do--what people always do on the river. Any other questions
+to ask, Tims?"
+
+"Yes. I should like to know who your friends are."
+
+Mildred laughed nervously.
+
+"You won't be any the wiser if I tell you." And in the instant she
+reflected that what she said was true. "I am going to the Gorings'."
+
+The difference between that and the exact truth was only the difference
+between the plural and the singular.
+
+"Don't go, old girl," said Tims, earnestly. "Come back to Tony with me
+and wait till Ian comes home."
+
+Mildred was very pale behind the heavy black lace of her veil and her
+heart beat hard; but she spoke with self-possession.
+
+"Don't be absurd, Tims. Tony is perfectly well, and there's Mr. Goring
+who is to travel down with me. How can I possibly go back? You're
+worrying about Milly, I suppose. Well, I'm rather nervous about her
+myself. I always am when I go away alone. You don't mind my telling them
+to wire for you if I sleep too long, do you? And you'd come as quick as
+ever you could? Think how awkward it would be for Milly and for--for the
+Gorings."
+
+"I'd come right enough," returned Tims, sombrely. "But if you feel like
+that, don't go."
+
+"I don't feel like that," replied Mildred; "I never felt less like it,
+or I shouldn't go. Still, one should be prepared for anything that may
+happen. All the same, I very much doubt that you will ever see your poor
+friend Milly again, Tims. You must try to forgive me. Now do make haste
+and go to darling Tony--he's simply longing to have you. I see Mr.
+Goring has taken our places in the train, and I shall be left behind if
+I don't go. Good-bye, old Tims."
+
+Mildred kissed Tims's heated, care-distorted face, and turned away to
+where Goring stood at the book-stall buying superfluous literature. Tims
+saw him lift his hat gravely to Mildred. It relieved her vaguely to
+notice that there seemed no warmth or familiarity about their greeting.
+She turned away towards the Metropolitan Railway, not feeling quite sure
+whether she had failed in an important mission or merely made a fool of
+herself.
+
+She found Tony certainly looking bonny, and no more inclined to break
+his heart about his mother's departure than any other healthy, happy
+child under like circumstances. Indeed, it may be doubted whether a
+healthy, happy child, unknowing whence its beatitudes spring, does not
+in its deepest, most vital moment regard all grown-up people as
+necessary nuisances. No one came so delightfully near being another
+child as Mildred; but Tims was a capital playfellow too, a broad
+comedian of the kind appreciated on the nursery boards.
+
+A rousing game with him and an evening at the theatre with Mr. Fitzalan,
+distracted Tims's thoughts from her anxieties. But at night she dreamed
+repeatedly and uneasily of Milly and Mildred as of two separate persons,
+and of Mr. Goring, whose vivid face seen in the full light of the window
+at Hampton Court, returned to her in sleep with a distinctness
+unobtainable in her waking memory.
+
+On the following day her work with Sir James Carus was of absorbing
+interest, and she came home tired and preoccupied with it. Yet her
+dreams of the night before recurred in forms at once more confused and
+more poignant. At two o'clock in the morning she awoke, crying aloud: "I
+must get Milly back"; and her pillow was wet with tears. For the two
+following hours she must have been awake, because she heard all the
+quarters strike from a neighboring church-tower, yet they appeared like
+a prolonged nightmare. The emotional impression of some forgotten dream
+remained, and she passed them in an agony of grief for she knew not
+what, of remorse for having on a certain summer afternoon denied Milly's
+petition for her assistance, and of intense volition, resembling prayer,
+for Milly's return.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The intense heat of early afternoon quivered on the steep woods which
+fell to the river opposite the house. The sunlit stream curved under
+them, moving clear and quiet over depths of brown, tangled
+water-growths, and along its fringe of gray and green reeds and grasses
+and creamy plumes of meadow-sweet. The house was not very large. It was
+square and white; an old wistaria, an old Gloire-de-Dijon, and a newer
+carmine cluster-rose contended for possession of its surface. Striped
+awnings were down over all the lower windows and some of the upper. A
+large lawn, close-shorn and velvety green, as only Thames-side lawns can
+be, stretched from the house to the river. It had no flower-beds on it,
+but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark
+shadows, and trellises and pillars overrun by a flood of roses of every
+shade, from deep crimson to snow white. The lawn was surrounded by
+shrubberies and plantations, and beyond it there was nothing to be seen
+except the opposite woods and the river, and sometimes boats passing by
+with a measured sound of oars in the rowlocks, or the temporary
+commotion of a little steam-launch. It looked a respectable early
+Victorian house, but it had never been quite that, for it had been
+built by George Goring's father fifty years earlier, and he himself had
+spent much of his boyhood there.
+
+Everything and every one seemed asleep, except a young man in flannels
+with a flapping hat hanging over his eyes, who stood at the end of a
+punt and pretended to fish. There was no one to look at him or at the
+house behind him, and if there had been observers, they would not have
+guessed that they were looking at the Garden of Eden and that he was
+Adam. Only last evening he and that fair Eve of his had stood by the
+river in the moonlight, where the shattering hawthorn-bloom made the air
+heavy with sweetness, and had spoken to each other of this their
+exquisite, undreamed-of happiness. There had been a Before, there would
+be an After, when they must stand on their defence against the world,
+must resist a thousand importunities, heart-breaking prayers, to return
+to the old, false, fruitless existence.
+
+But just for these days they could be utterly alone in their paradise,
+undisturbed even by the thoughts of others, since no one knew they were
+there and together. Alas! they had been so only forty-eight hours, and
+already a cold little serpent of anxiety had crept in among their roses.
+
+Before entrusting herself to him, Mildred had told him that, in spite of
+her apparent good health, she was occasionally subject to long
+trance-like fits, resembling sleep; should this happen, it would be
+useless to call an ordinary doctor, but that a Miss Timson, a well-known
+scientific woman and a friend of hers, must be summoned at once. He had
+taken Miss Timson's address and promised to do so; but Mildred had not
+seemed to look upon the fit as more than a remote contingency. Perhaps
+the excitement, the unconscious strain of the last few days had upset
+her nerves; for this morning she had lain in what he had taken for a
+natural sleep, until, finding her still sleeping profoundly at noon, he
+had remembered her words and telegraphed to Miss Timson. An answer to
+his telegram, saying that Miss Timson would come as soon as possible,
+lay crumpled up at the bottom of the punt.
+
+The serpent was there, but Goring did not allow its peeping coils
+thoroughly to chill his roses. His temperament was too sanguine, he felt
+too completely steeped in happiness, the weather was too beautiful. Most
+likely Mildred would be all right to-morrow.
+
+Meantime, up there in the shaded room, she who had been Mildred began to
+stir in her sleep. She opened her eyes and gazed through the square
+window, at the sunlit awning that overhung it, and at the green leaves
+and pale buds of the Gloire-de-Dijon rose. There was a hum of bees close
+by that seemed like the voice of the hot sunshine. It should have been a
+pleasant awakening, but Milly awoke from that long sleep of hers with a
+brooding sense of misfortune. The remembrance of the afternoon when she
+had so suddenly been snatched away returned to her, but it was not the
+revelation of Ian's passionate love for her supplanter that came back to
+her as the thing of most importance. Surely she must have known that
+long before, for now the pain seemed old and dulled from habit. It was
+the terrible strength with which the Evil Spirit had possessed her,
+seizing her channels of speech even while she was still there, hurling
+her from her seat without waiting for the passivity of sleep. No, her
+sense of misfortune was not altogether, or even mainly, connected with
+that last day of hers. Unlike Mildred, she had up till now been without
+any consciousness of things that had occurred during her quiescence, and
+she had now no vision; only a strong impression that something terrible
+had befallen Ian.
+
+She looked around the bedroom, and it seemed to her very strange;
+something like an hotel room, yet at once too sumptuous and too shabby.
+There was a faded pink flock wall-paper with a gilt pattern upon it, the
+chairs were gilded and padded and covered with worn pink damask, the bed
+was gilded and hung with faded pink silk curtains. Everywhere there was
+pink and gilding, and everywhere it was old and faded and rubbed. A few
+early Victorian lithographs hung on the walls, portraits of
+ballet-dancers and noblemen with waists and whiskers. No one had tidied
+the room since the night before, and fine underclothing was flung
+carelessly about on chairs, a fussy petticoat here, the bodice of an
+evening dress there; everywhere just that touch of mingled daintiness
+and disorder which by this time Milly recognized only too well.
+
+The bed was large, and some one else had evidently slept there besides
+herself, for the sheet and pillow were rumpled and there was a
+half-burnt candle and a man's watch-chain on the small table beside it.
+Wherever she was then, Ian was there too, so that she was at a loss to
+understand her own sinister foreboding.
+
+She pulled at the bell-rope twice.
+
+There were only three servants in the house; a housekeeper and two
+maids, who all dated from the days of Mrs. Maria Idle, ex-mistress of
+the late Lord Ipswich, dead herself now some six months. The housekeeper
+was asleep, the maids out of hearing. She opened the door and found a
+bathroom opposite her bedroom. It had a window which showed her a strip
+of lawn with flower-beds upon it, beyond that shrubberies and tall trees
+which shut out any farther view. A hoarse cuckoo was crying in the
+distance, and from the greenery came a twittering of birds and sometimes
+a few liquid pipings; but there was no sound of human life. The place
+seemed as empty as an enchanted palace in a fairy story.
+
+Milly's toilet never took her very long. She put on a fresh, simple
+cotton dress, which seemed to have been worn the day before, and was
+just hesitating as to whether she should go down or wait for Ian to
+come, when Clarkson, the housekeeper, knocked at her door.
+
+"I thought if you was awake, madam, you might like a bit of lunch," she
+said.
+
+Milly refused, for this horrible feeling of depression and anxiety made
+her insensible to hunger. She looked at the housekeeper with a certain
+surprise, for Clarkson was as decorated and as much the worse for wear
+as the furniture of the bedroom. She was a large, fat woman, laced into
+a brown cashmere dress, with a cameo brooch on her ample bosom; her hair
+was unnaturally black, curled and dressed high on the top of her head,
+she had big gold earrings, and a wealth of powder on her large, red
+face.
+
+"Can you tell me where I am likely to find Mr. Stewart?" asked Milly,
+politely.
+
+The woman stared, and when she answered there was more than a shade of
+insolence in her coarse voice and smile.
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell, madam. Mr. Stewart's not our gentleman here."
+
+Milly, understanding the reply as little as the housekeeper had
+understood the question, yet felt that some impertinence was intended
+and turned away.
+
+There was nothing for it but to explore on her own account. A staircase
+of the dull Victorian kind led down to a dark, cool hall. The front door
+was open. She walked to it and stood under a stumpy portico, looking
+out. The view was much the same as that seen from the bathroom, only
+that instead of grass and flower-beds there was a gravel sweep, and,
+just opposite the front door, a circle of grass with a tall
+monkey-puzzle tree in the centre. Except for the faded gorgeousness of
+the bedroom, the house looked like an ordinary country house, belonging
+to old people who did not care to move with the times. Why should she
+feel at every step a growing dread of what might meet her there?
+
+She turned from the portico and opened, hesitatingly, the door of a room
+on the opposite side of the hall. It was a drawing-room, with traces of
+the same shabby gorgeousness that prevailed in the bedroom, but
+mitigated by a good deal of clean, faded chintz; and at one end was a
+brilliant full-length Millais portrait of Mrs. Maria Idle in blue silk
+and a crinoline. It was a long room, pleasant in the dim light; for
+although it had three windows, the farthest a French one and open, all
+were covered with awnings, coming low down and showing nothing of the
+outer world but a hand's breadth of turf and wandering bits of creeper.
+It was sweet with flowers, and on a consol table before a mirror stood a
+high vase from which waved and twined tall sprays and long streamers of
+cluster-roses, carmine and white. It was beautiful, yet Milly turned
+away from it almost with a shudder. She recognized the touch of the hand
+that must have set the roses there. And the nameless horror grew upon
+her.
+
+Except for the flowers, there was little sign of occupation in the room.
+A large round rosewood table was set with blue glass vases on mats and
+some dozen photograph--albums and gift-books, dating from the sixties.
+But on a stool in a corner lay a newspaper; and the date on it gave her
+a shock. She had supposed herself to have been away about four months;
+she found she had been gone sixteen. There had been plenty of time for a
+misfortune to happen, and she felt convinced that it had happened. But
+what? If Ian or Tony were dead she would surely still be in mourning.
+Then on a little rosewood escritoire, such as ladies were wont to use
+when they had nothing to write, she spied an old leather writing-case
+with the initials M. B. F. upon it. It was one Aunt Beatrice had given
+her when she first went to Ascham, and it seemed to look on her
+pleasantly, like the face of an old friend. She found a few letters in
+the pockets, among them one from Ian written from Berlin a few days
+before, speaking of his speedy return and of Tony's amusing letter from
+the sea-side. She began to hope her feeling of anxiety and depression
+might be only the shadow of the fear and anguish which she had suffered
+on that horrible afternoon sixteen months ago. She must try not to think
+about it, must try to be bright for Ian's sake. Some one surely was with
+her at this queer place, since she was sharing a room with another
+person--probably a female friend of that Other's, who had such a crowd
+of them.
+
+She drew the awning half-way up and stood on the step outside the French
+window. The lawn, the trees, the opposite hills were unknown to her, but
+the spirit of the river spoke to her familiarly, and she knew it for the
+Thames. A gardener in shirt-sleeves was filling a water-barrel by the
+river, under a hawthorn-tree, and the young man in the punt was putting
+up his fishing-tackle. As she looked, the strangeness of the scene
+passed away. She could not say where it was, but in some dream or vision
+she had certainly seen this lawn, that view, before; when the young man
+turned and came nearer she would know his face. And the dim, horrible
+thing that was waiting for her somewhere about the quiet house, the
+quiet garden, seemed to draw a step nearer, to lift its veil a little.
+Who was it that had stood not far from where the gardener was standing
+now, and seen the moon hanging large and golden over the mystery of the
+opposite woods? Whoever it was, some one's arm had been fast around her
+and there had been kisses--kisses.
+
+It took but a few seconds for these half-revelations to drop into her
+mind, and before she had had time to reflect upon them, the young man in
+the punt looked up and saw her standing there on the step. He took off
+his floppy hat and waved it to her; then he put down his tackle, ran to
+the near end of the punt and jumped lightly ashore. He came up the green
+lawn, and her anxiety sent her down to meet him almost as eagerly as
+love would have done. The hat shaded all the upper part of his face, and
+at a distance, in the strong sunshine, the audacious chin, the red lower
+lip, caught her eye first and seemed to extinguish the rest of the face.
+And suddenly she disliked them. Who was the man, and how did she come to
+know him? But former experiences of strange awakenings had made her
+cautious, self-controlling, almost capable of hypocrisy.
+
+"So you're awake!" shouted George, still a long way down the lawn.
+"Good! How are you? All right?"
+
+She nodded "Yes," with a constrained smile.
+
+In a minute they had met, he had turned her around, and with his arm
+under hers was leading her towards the house again.
+
+"All right? Really all right?" he asked very softly, pressing her arm
+with his hand and stooping his head to bring his mouth on a level with
+her ear.
+
+"Very nearly, at any rate," she answered, coldly, trying to draw away
+from him.
+
+"What are you doing that for?" he asked. "Afraid of shocking the
+gardener, eh? What queer little dear little ways you've got! I suppose
+Undines are like that."
+
+He drew her closer to him as he threw back his head and laughed a noisy
+laugh that jarred upon her nerves.
+
+Milly began to feel indignant. It was just possible that a younger
+sister in Australia might have married and brought this extraordinary
+young man home to England, but his looks, his tone, were not fraternal;
+and she had never forgotten the Maxwell Davison episode. She walked on
+stiffly.
+
+"Every one seems to be out," she observed, as calmly as she could.
+
+He frowned.
+
+"You mean those devils of servants haven't been looking after you?" he
+asked. "Yet I gave Clarkson her orders. Of course they're baggages, but
+I haven't had the heart to send them away from the old place, for who on
+earth would take them? I expect we aren't improving their chances, you
+and I, at this very moment; in spite of respecting the gardener's
+prejudices."
+
+He chuckled, as at some occult joke of his own.
+
+They stooped together under the half-raised awning of the French window,
+and entered the dim, flower-scented drawing-room side by side. The young
+man threw off his hat, and she saw the silky ripple of his nut-brown
+hair, his smooth forehead, his bright-glancing hazel eyes, all the happy
+pleasantness of his countenance. Before she had had time to reconsider
+her dislike of him, he had caught her in his arms and kissed her hair
+and face, whispering little words of love between the kisses. For one
+paralyzed moment Milly suffered these dreadful words, these horrible
+caresses. Then exerting the strength of frenzy, she pushed him from her
+and bounded to the other side of the room, entrenching herself behind
+the big rosewood table with its smug mats and vases and albums.
+
+"You brute! you brute! you hateful cad!" she stammered with trembling
+lips; "how dare you touch me?"
+
+George Goring stared at her with startled eyes.
+
+"Mildred! Dearest! Good God! What's gone wrong?"
+
+"Where's my husband?" she asked, in a voice sharp with anger and terror.
+"I want to go--I must leave this horrid place at once."
+
+"Your husband?"
+
+It was Goring's turn to feel himself plunged into the midst of a
+nightmare, and he grew almost as pale as Milly. How in Heaven's name was
+he going to manage her? She looked very ill and must of course be
+delirious. That would have been alarming in any case, and this
+particular form of delirium was excruciatingly painful.
+
+"Yes, my husband--where is he? I shall tell him how you've dared to
+insult me. I must go. This is your house--I must leave it at once."
+
+Goring did not attempt to come near her. He spoke very quietly.
+
+"Try and remember, Mildred; Stewart is not here. He will not even be in
+England till to-morrow. You are alone with me. Hadn't you better go to
+bed again and--" he was about to say, "wait until Miss Timson comes,"
+but as it was possible that the advent of the person she had wished him
+to summon might now irritate her, he substituted--"and keep quiet? I
+promise not to come near you if you don't wish to see me."
+
+"I am alone here with you?" Milly repeated, slowly, and pressed her hand
+to her forehead. "Good God," she moaned to herself, "what can have
+happened?"
+
+"Yes. For Heaven's sake, go and lie down. I expect the doctor can give
+you something to soothe your nerves and then perhaps you'll remember."
+
+She made a gesture of fierce impatience.
+
+"You think I'm mad, but I'm not. I have been mad and I am myself again;
+only I can't remember anything that's happened since I went out of my
+mind. I insist upon your telling me. Who are you? I never saw you before
+to my knowledge."
+
+Her voice, her attitude were almost truculent as she faced him, her
+right hand dragging at the loose clasp of a big photograph album. Every
+word, every look, was agony to Goring, but he controlled himself by an
+effort.
+
+"I am George Goring," he said, slowly, and paused with anxious eyes
+fixed upon her, hoping that the name might yet stir some answering
+string of tenderness in the broken lyre of her mind.
+
+She too paused, as though tracking some far-off association with the
+name. Then:
+
+"Ah! poor Lady Augusta's husband," she repeated, yet sterner than before
+in her anger. "My friend Lady Augusta's husband! And why am I here alone
+with you, Mr. Goring?"
+
+"Because I am your lover, Mildred. Because I love you better than any
+one or any thing in the world; and yesterday you thought you loved me,
+you thought you could trust all your life to me."
+
+She had known the answer already in her heart, but the fact stated
+plainly by another, became even more dreadful, more intolerable, than
+before. She uttered a low cry and covered her eyes with her hand.
+
+"Mildred--dearest!" he breathed imploringly.
+
+Then she raised her head and looked straight at him with flaming eyes,
+this fair, fragile creature transformed into a pitiless Fury. She forgot
+that indeed an Evil Spirit had dwelt within her; George Goring might be
+victim rather than culprit. In this hour of her anguish the identity of
+that body of hers, which through him was defiled, that honor of hers,
+yes and of Ian Stewart's, which through him was dragged in the dust,
+made her no longer able to keep clearly in mind the separateness of the
+Mildred Stewart of yesterday from herself.
+
+"I tell you I was mad," she gasped; "and you--you vile, wicked man!--you
+took advantage of it to ruin my life--to ruin my husband's life! You
+must know Ian Stewart, a man whose shoes you are not fit to tie. Do you
+think any woman in her senses would leave him for you? Ah!--" she
+breathed a long, shuddering breath and her hand was clinched so hard
+upon the loose album clasp that it ran into her palm.
+
+"Mildred!" cried George, staggered, stricken as though by some fiery
+rain.
+
+"I ought to be sorry for your wife," she went on. "She is a splendid
+woman, she has done nothing to deserve that you should treat her so
+scandalously. But I can't--I can't"--a dry sob caught her voice--"be
+sorry for any one except myself and Ian. I always knew I wasn't good
+enough to be his wife, but I was so proud of it--so proud--and now--Oh,
+it's too horrible! I'm not fit to live."
+
+George had sunk upon a chair and hidden his face in his hands.
+
+"Don't say that," he muttered hoarsely, almost inaudibly. "It was my
+doing."
+
+She broke out again.
+
+"Of course it was. It's nothing to you, I suppose. You've broken my
+husband's heart and mine too; you've hopelessly disgraced us both and
+spoiled our lives; and all for the sake of a little amusement, a little
+low pleasure. We can't do anything, we can't punish you; but if curses
+were any use, oh, how I could curse you, Mr. Goring!"
+
+The sobs rising in a storm choked her voice. She rushed from the room,
+closing the door behind her and leaving George Goring there, his head on
+his hands. He sat motionless, hearing nothing but the humming silence of
+the hot afternoon.
+
+Milly, pressing back her tears, flew across the hall and up the stairs.
+The vague nightmare thing that had lurked for her in the shadows of the
+house, when she had descended them so quietly, had taken shape at last.
+She knew now the unspeakable secret of the pink and gold bedroom, the
+shabbily gorgeous bed, the posturing dancers, the simpering, tailored
+noblemen. The atmosphere of it, scented and close, despite the open
+window, seemed to take her by the throat. She dared not stop to think,
+lest this sick despair, this loathing of herself, should master her. To
+get home at once was her impulse, and she must do it before any one
+could interfere.
+
+It was a matter of a few seconds to find a hat, gloves, a parasol. She
+noticed a purse in the pocket of her dress and counted the money in it.
+There was not much, but enough to take her home, since she felt sure the
+river shimmering over there was the Thames. She did not stay to change
+her thin shoes, but flitted down the stairs and out under the portico,
+as silent as a ghost. The drive curved through a shrubbery, and in a
+minute she was out of sight of the house. She hurried past the lodge,
+hesitating in which direction to turn, when a tradesman's cart drove
+past. She asked the young man who was driving it her way to the station,
+and he told her it was not very far, but that she could not catch the
+next train to town if she meant to walk. He was going in that direction
+himself and would give her a lift if she liked. She accepted the young
+man's offer; but if he made it in order to beguile the tedium of his
+way, he was disappointed.
+
+The road was dusty and sunny, and this gave her a reason for opening her
+large parasol. She cowered under it, hiding herself from the women who
+rolled by in shiny carriages with high-stepping horses; not so much
+because she feared she might meet acquaintances, as from an instinctive
+desire to hide herself, a thing so shamed and everlastingly wretched,
+from every human eye. And so it happened that, when she was close to the
+station, she missed seeing and being seen by Tims, who was driving to
+Mr. Goring's house in a hired trap which he had sent to meet her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Milly took a ticket for Paddington and hurried to the train, which was
+waiting at the platform, choosing an empty compartment. Action had
+temporarily dulled the passion of her misery, her rage, her shuddering
+horror at herself. But alone in the train, it all returned upon her,
+only with a complete realization of circumstance which made it worse.
+
+It had been her impulse to rush to her home, to her husband, as for
+refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort
+in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to
+tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could
+she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of
+this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however
+homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man
+she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until
+to-morrow. She supposed the Evil Thing had counted on stealing home in
+time to meet him, and would have met him with an innocently smiling
+face.
+
+A moment Milly triumphed in the thought that it was she herself who
+would meet Ian and reveal to him the treachery of the creature who had
+supplanted her in his heart. Then with a shudder she hid her face,
+remembering that it was, after all, her own dishonor and his which she
+must reveal. He would of course take her back, and if that could be the
+end, they might live down the thing together. But it would not be the
+end. "I am the stronger," that Evil Thing had said, and it was the
+stronger. At first step by step, now with swift advancing strides, it
+was robbing her of the months, the years, till soon, very soon, while in
+the world's eyes she seemed to live and thrive, she would be dead; dead,
+without a monument, without a tear, her very soul not free and in God's
+hands, but held somewhere in abeyance. And Ian? Through what
+degradation, to what public shame would he, the most refined and
+sensitive of men, be dragged! His child--her child and Ian's--would grow
+up like that poor wretched George Goring, breathing corruption, lies,
+dishonor, from his earliest years. And she, the wife, the mother, would
+seem to be guilty of all that, while she was really bound,
+helpless--dead.
+
+The passion of her anger and despair stormed through her veins again
+with yet greater violence, but this time George Goring was forgotten and
+all its waves broke impotently against that adversary whose diabolical
+power she was so impotent to resist, who might return to-morrow, to-day
+for aught she knew.
+
+She had been moving restlessly about the compartment, making vehement
+gestures in her desperation, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming
+idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to
+thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought
+to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves
+of emotion--one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and
+timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over
+her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too
+in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind
+that this was the only thing to be done--she, usually so full of mental
+and moral hesitation. Let it be done quickly--now, while the spur of
+excitement pricked her on. The Thing seemed to have a knowledge of her
+experiences which was not reciprocal. How it would laugh if it
+recollected in its uncanny way, that she had wanted to kill herself and
+it with her, that she had had it at her mercy and then had been too weak
+and cowardly to strike! Should she buy some poison when she reached
+Paddington? She knew nothing about poisons and their effects, except
+that carbolic caused terrible agony, and laudanum was not to be trusted
+unless you knew the dose. The train was slowing up and the lonely river
+gleamed silverly below. It beckoned to her, the river, upon whose stream
+she had spent so many young, happy days.
+
+She got out at the little station and walked away from it with a quick,
+light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment.
+After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and
+humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's
+riddle, the way to victory.
+
+She knew the place where she found herself, for she had several times
+made one of a party rowing down from Oxford to London. But it was not
+one of the frequented parts of the river, being a quiet reach among
+solitary meadows. She remembered that there was a shabby little house
+standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had
+put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the
+neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had
+come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be far off.
+
+She walked quickly along the bank, turning over and over in her mind the
+same thoughts; the cruel wrong which now for so many years she had
+suffered, the final disgrace brought upon her and her husband, and she
+braced her courage to strike the blow that should revenge all. The act
+to which this fair-haired, once gentle woman was hurrying along the
+lonely river-bank, was not in its essence suicide; it was revenge, it
+was murder.
+
+When she came to the shabby little house where the boats lay under an
+unlovely zinc-roofed shed, she wondered whether she might ask for ink
+and paper and write to some one. She longed to send one little word to
+Ian; but then what could she say? She could not have seen him and
+concealed the truth from him, but it was one of the advantages of her
+disappearance that he need never know the dishonor done him. And she
+knew he considered suicide a cowardly act. He was quite wrong there. It
+was an act of heroic courage to go out like this to meet death. It was
+so lonely; even lonelier than death must always be. She had the
+conviction that she was not doing wrong, but right. Hers was no common
+case. And for the first time she saw that there might be a reason for
+this doom which had befallen her. Men regard one sort of weakness as a
+sin to be struggled against, another as something harmless, even
+amiable, to be acquiesced in. But perhaps all weakness acquiesced in was
+a sin in the eyes of Eternal Wisdom, was at any rate to be left to the
+mercy of its own consequences. She looked back upon her life and saw
+herself never exerting her own judgment, always following in some one
+else's tracks, never fighting against her physical, mental, moral
+timidity. It was no doubt this weakness of hers that had laid her open
+to the mysterious curse which she was now, by a supreme effort of
+independent judgment and physical courage, resolved to throw off.
+
+A stupid-looking man in a dirty cotton shirt got out the small boat she
+chose; stared a minute in surprise to see the style in which she, an
+Oxford girl born and bred, handled the sculls, and then went in again to
+continue sleeping off a pint of beer.
+
+She pulled on mechanically, with a long, regular stroke, and one by one
+scenes, happy river-scenes out of past years, came back to her with
+wonderful vividness. Looking about her she saw an osier-bed dividing
+the stream, and beside it the opening into the willow-shaded backwater
+which she remembered. She turned the boat's head into it. Heavy clouds
+had rolled up and covered the sky, and there was a kind of twilight
+between the dark water and the netted boughs overhead. Very soon she
+heard the noise of a weir. Once such a sound had been pleasant in her
+ears; but now it turned her cold with fear. On one side the backwater
+flowed sluggishly on around the osier-bed; on the other it hurried
+smoothly, silently away, to broaden suddenly before it swept in white
+foam over an open weir into a deep pool below. She trembled violently
+and the oars moved feebly in her hands, chill for all the warmth of the
+afternoon. Her boat was in the stream which led to the weir, but not yet
+fully caught by the current. A few more strokes and the thing would be
+done, she would be carried quickly on and over that dancing, sparkling
+edge into the deep pool below. Her courage failed, could not be screwed
+to the sticking-point; she hung on the oars, and the boat, as if
+answering to her thought, stopped, swung half around. As she held the
+boat with the oars and closed her eyes in an anguish of hesitation and
+terror, a strange convulsion shook her, such as she had felt once
+before, and a low cry, not her own, broke from her lips.
+
+"No--no!" they uttered, hoarsely.
+
+The Thing was there then, awake to its danger, and in another moment
+might snatch her from herself, return laughing at her cowardice, to that
+house by the river. She pressed her lips hard together, and silently,
+with all the strength of her hate and of her love, bent to the oars. The
+little boat shot forward into mid-stream, the current seized it and
+swept it rapidly on towards the dancing edge of water. She dropped the
+sculls and a hoarse shriek broke from her lips; but it was not she who
+shrieked, for in her heart was no fear, but triumph--triumph as of one
+who is at length avenged of her mortal enemy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the darkened drawing-room, the room so full of traces of all that had
+been exquisite in Mildred Stewart, Ian mourned alone. Presently the door
+opened a little, and a tall, slender, childish figure in a white smock,
+slipped in and closed it gently behind him. Tony stole up to his father
+and stood between his knees. He looked at Ian, silent, pale, large-eyed.
+That a grown-up person and a man should shed tears was strange, even
+portentous, to him.
+
+"Won't Mummy come back, not ever?" asked the child at last, piteously,
+in a half whisper.
+
+"No, never, Tony; Mummy won't ever come back. She's gone--gone for
+always."
+
+The child looked in his father's eyes strangely, penetratingly.
+
+"Which Mummy?" he asked.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Invader
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Margaret L. Woods
+
+Release Date: February 23, 2009 [EBook #28162]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVADER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, David Clarke, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/title_page.jpg" alt="Title Page" width="500" height="793" /></div>
+
+<h1>The Invader</h1>
+
+<h4>A NOVEL</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>Margaret L. Woods</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/seal.jpg" alt="Seal" width="150" height="182" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>New York and London</h3>
+
+<h3>Harper &amp; Brothers Publishers</h3>
+
+<h3>1907</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h5>Copyright, 1907, by <span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span>.</h5>
+
+<h5>Published May, 1907.
+</h5>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h3>TO</h3>
+
+<h2>Hilda Greaves</h2>
+
+<h3>AND THE DUMB COMPANIONS OF TAN-YR-ALLT<br />
+THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR<br />
+GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE<br />
+FRIEND</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE INVADER</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+
+<p>Dinner was over and the ladies had just risen, when the Professor had
+begged to introduce them to the new-comer on his walls. The Invader, it
+might almost have been called, this full-length, life-size portrait,
+which, in the illumination of a lamp turned full upon it, seemed to take
+possession of the small room, to dominate at the end of the polished-oak
+table, where the light of shaded candles fell on old blue plates, old
+Venetian glass, a bit of old Italian brocade, and chrysanthemums in a
+china bowl coveted by collectors. Every detail spoke of the
+connoisseurship, the refined and personal taste characteristic of Oxford
+in the eighties. The authority on art put up his eye-glasses and
+fingered his tiny forked beard uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no doubt it's a good thing, Fletcher," he said, presently&mdash;"really
+quite good. But it's too like Romney to be Raeburn, and too like Raeburn to
+be Romney. You ought to be able to find out the painter, if, as you say,
+it's a portrait of your own great-grandmother&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He did say so!" broke in Sanderson, exultantly. "He said it was an
+ancestress. Fletcher, you're a vulgar fraud. You've got no ancestress.
+You bought her. There's a sale-ticket still on the frame under the
+projection at the right-hand lower corner. I saw it."</p>
+
+<p>Sanderson was a small man and walked about perpetually, except when
+taking food: sometimes then. He was a licensed insulter of his friends,
+and now stood before the picture in a belligerent attitude. The
+Professor stroked his amber beard and smiled down on Sanderson.</p>
+
+<p>"True, O Sanderson; and at the same time untrue. I did buy the picture,
+and the lady was my great-grandmother once, but she did not like the
+position and soon gave it up. This picture must have been done after she
+had given it up."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this a conundrum or blather, invented to hide your ignominy in a
+cloud of words?" asked Sanderson.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a <i>hors d'&oelig;uvre</i> before the story," interposed Ian Stewart,
+throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through
+his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the
+kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'"</p>
+
+<p>The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled
+deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story.
+It was a bit of a scandal at the time."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> married woman, with a face
+like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with
+her waist under her arms becomes simply classical."</p>
+
+<p>"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor;
+"but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother,
+for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton."</p>
+
+<p>There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew
+her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor
+Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained:</p>
+
+<p>"My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a
+hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was
+silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught
+her Latin and Greek&mdash;which was all very well&mdash;and married her, which was
+distinctly unwise. She had one son&mdash;my grandfather&mdash;and then ran away
+with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on
+the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real
+successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as
+soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally
+objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out
+lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her
+learning as by her morals."</p>
+
+<p>"She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that
+she had to be a wit lest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> people should find out she was a blue. There's
+a good deal about her in the Englefield <i>Memoirs</i>. She travelled
+extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real
+treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was
+burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>"A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to
+fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window&mdash;and was
+never seen again."</p>
+
+<p>"She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart,
+meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture.</p>
+
+<p>"Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows
+something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time
+reading gossip and calling it history."</p>
+
+<p>"Gossip's like many common things, interesting when fossilized,"
+squeaked a little, white-haired, pink-faced old gentleman, like an
+elderly cherub in dress-clothes. He had remained at the other end of the
+room because he did not care for pictures. Now he toddled a little
+nearer and every one made way for him with a peculiar respect, for he
+was the Master of Durham, whose name was great in Oxford and also in the
+world outside it. He looked up first at the pictured face and then at
+Milly Flaxman, a young cousin of Fletcher's and a scholar of Ascham
+Hall, who had taken her First in Mods, and was hoping to get one in
+Greats. The Master liked young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> girls, but they had to be clever as well
+as pleasing in appearance to attract his attention.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very like Miss Flaxman," he squeaked.</p>
+
+<p>Every one turned their eyes from the picture to Milly, whose pale cheeks
+blushed a bright pink. The blush emphasized her resemblance to her
+ancestress, whose brilliant complexion, however, hinted at rouge.
+Milly's soft hair was amber-colored, like that of the lady in the
+picture, but it was strained back from her face and twisted in a minute
+knot on the nape of her neck. That was the way in which her aunt Lady
+Thomson, whose example she desired to follow in all things, did her
+hair. The long, clearly drawn eyebrows, dark in comparison with the
+amber hair, the turquoise blue eyes, the mouth of the pictured lady were
+curiously reproduced in Milly Flaxman. Possibly her figure may have been
+designed by nature to be as slight and supple, yet rounded, as that of
+the white-robed, gray-scarfed lady above there. But something or some
+one had intervened, and Milly looked stiff and shapeless in a green
+velveteen frock, scooped out vaguely around her white young throat and
+gathered in clumsy folds under a liberty silk sash.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Shaw cried out enraptured at the interesting resemblance which had
+escaped them all, to be instantly caught by the elderly cherub in the
+background, who did not care about art, while the Professor explained
+that both Milly's parents were, like himself, great-grandchildren of
+Lady Hammerton. The seraph now fell upon Milly, too shy to resist, had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+out her hair-pins in a trice and fingered the fluffy hair till it made
+an aureole around her face. Then by some conjuring trick producing a
+gauzy white scarf, Mrs. Shaw twisted it about the girl's head, in
+imitation of the lady on the wall, who had just such a scarf, but with a
+tiny embroidered border of scarlet, twisted turban-wise and floating
+behind.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" she cried, pushing the feebly protesting Milly into the full
+light of the lamp the Professor was holding, "allow me to present to you
+the new Lady Hammerton!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment of wondering silence. Milly's pulses beat, for she
+felt Ian Stewart's eyes upon her. Neither he nor any one else there had
+ever quite realized before what capacities for beauty lay hid in the
+subdued young face of Milly Flaxman. She had nothing indeed of the
+charm, at once subtle and challenging, of the lady above there. She,
+with one hand on the gold head of a tall cane, looking back, seemed to
+dare unseen adorers to follow her into a magic, perhaps a fatal
+fairyland of mountain and waterfall and cloud; a land whose dim mists
+and silver gleams seemed to echo the gray and the white of her floating
+garments, its autumn leaves to catch a faint reflection from her hair,
+while far off its sky showed a thin line of sunset, red like the border
+of her veil. Milly's soft cheeks and lips were flushed, her eyes bright
+with a mixture of very innocent emotions, as she stood with every one's
+eyes, including Ian Stewart's, upon her.</p>
+
+<p>But in a minute the Master took up Mrs. Shaw's remark.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, emphatically; "not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
+new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
+great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
+who saw that Milly was feeling shy.</p>
+
+<p>When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
+there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
+speech.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," he said&mdash;and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
+fact that the Master had had a mother&mdash;"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
+the twenties. She was often at Bath."</p>
+
+<p>The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
+other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
+had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
+intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
+us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."</p>
+
+<p>The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
+longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
+hands on his little round knees. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"She was a raddled woman."</p>
+
+<p>And his pupils knew he had finished speaking.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> What he had said was
+disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
+it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
+whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
+Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
+strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.</p>
+
+<p>"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
+very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
+adored her to the last."</p>
+
+<p>The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
+one did, he uttered again:</p>
+
+<p>"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."</p>
+
+<p>Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
+fervently.</p>
+
+<p>The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.</p>
+
+<p>"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
+he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
+discussion was closed. Then he turned to Sanderson and made some remark
+about a house which Sanderson's College, of which he was junior bursar,
+was selling to Durham.</p>
+
+<p>Fletcher, the only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own
+masculine stupidity. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> felt sure that if his wife had been there she
+would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical
+matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage
+with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who
+shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt
+himself pitiably unequal to the task, although he was as anxious as his
+wife was that Stewart should marry Milly. Did not all their friends wish
+it? It seemed to them that there could not be a more suitable couple. If
+Milly was working so terribly hard to get her First in Greats, it was
+largely because Mr. Stewart was one of her tutors and she knew he
+thought a good deal of success in the Schools.</p>
+
+<p>There could be no doubt about Milly Flaxman's goodness; in fact, some of
+the girls at Ascham complained that it "slopped over." Her clothes were
+made on hygienic principles which she treated as a branch of morals, and
+she often refused to offer the small change of polite society because it
+weighed somewhat light in the scales of truth. But these were foibles
+that the young people's friends were sure Ian Stewart would never
+notice. As to him, although only four and thirty, he was already a
+distinguished man. A scholar, a philosopher, and an archæologist, he had
+also imagination and a sense of style. He had written a brilliant book
+on Greek life at a particular period, which had brought him a reputation
+among the learned and also found readers in the educated public. His
+disposition was sweet, his character unusually high, judged even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> by the
+standard of the academic world, which has a higher standard than most.
+Obviously he would make an excellent husband; and equally obviously, as
+he had no near relations and his health was delicate, it would be a
+capital thing for him to have a home of his own and a devoted wife to
+look after him. Their income would be small, but not smaller than that
+of most young couples in Oxford, who contrived, nevertheless, to live
+refined and pleasant lives and to be well-considered in a society where
+money positively did not count.</p>
+
+<p>But if Fletcher did not succeed in forwarding this matrimonial scheme in
+the dining-room, his wife succeeded no better when the gentlemen came
+into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
+seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
+without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
+himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
+which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
+matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
+Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
+unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
+as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
+she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
+turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
+the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
+to effect a change of partners,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> Ian explained that he found himself
+unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
+place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
+liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
+extravagance of apology for this early departure.</p>
+
+<p>He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
+dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
+mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
+November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
+night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
+remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
+free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
+The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
+elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
+cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
+glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
+the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
+elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
+was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
+whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
+from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
+osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
+the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+whispers, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
+of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
+ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
+slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
+the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
+secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
+go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
+familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
+secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.</p>
+
+<p>Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
+floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
+blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
+reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
+nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
+and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
+the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
+playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
+Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
+his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
+marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
+tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
+usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
+intended to marry; for he did not desire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> to be left an old bachelor in
+college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
+love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
+of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
+it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
+marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
+tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
+Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
+question.</p>
+
+<p>And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
+night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
+trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
+dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
+them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
+passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death
+and oblivion, to the dark night whose silence is only sometimes stirred
+by vague whispers, anxious yet faint, dying upon the ear before the
+sense can seize them.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+
+<p>Parties in Oxford always break up early, and Milly had a good excuse for
+carrying her aching, disappointed heart back to Ascham at ten o'clock,
+for every one knew she was working hard. Too hard, Mr. Fletcher said,
+looking concernedly at her heavy eyes, mottled complexion, and the
+little crumples which were beginning to come in her low white forehead.
+Her cousins, however, had more than a suspicion that these marks of care
+and woe were not altogether due to her work, but that Ian Stewart was
+accountable for most of them.</p>
+
+<p>The Professor escorted her to the gates of the Ladies' College; but she
+walked down the dark drive alone, mindful of familiar puddles, and
+hearing nothing of those mysterious whispers of night which in Ian
+Stewart's ears had breathed a "ground" to his troubled thoughts of her.</p>
+
+<p>She mounted the stairs to her room at the top of the house. It was an
+extremely neat room, and by day, when the bed was disguised as a sofa,
+and the washstand closed, there was nothing to reveal that it served as
+a bedroom, although a tarnished old mirror hung in a dark corner. The
+oak table and pair of brass candlesticks upon it were kept in shining
+order by Milly's own zealous hands.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Milly found her books open at the right place and her writing materials
+ready to hand. In a very few minutes her outer garments and simple
+ornaments were put away, and clothed in a clean but shrunk and faded
+blue dressing-gown, she sat down to work. The work was Aristotle's
+<i>Ethics</i>, and she was going through it for the second time, amplifying
+her notes. But this second time the Greek seemed more difficult, the
+philosophic argument more intricate than ever. She had had very little
+sleep for weeks, and her head ached in a queer way as though something
+inside it were strained very tight. It was plain that she had come to
+the end of her powers of work for the present&mdash;and she had calculated
+that only by not wasting a day, except for a week's holiday at Easter,
+could she get through all that had to be done before the Schools!</p>
+
+<p>She put Aristotle away and opened Mommsen, but even to that she could
+not give her attention. Her thoughts returned to the bitter
+disappointment which the evening had brought. Ian Stewart had been next
+her at dinner, but even then he had talked to her rather less than to
+Mrs. Shaw. Afterwards&mdash;well, perhaps it was only what she deserved for
+not making it plain to poor Mr. Toovey that she could never return his
+feelings. And now the First, which she had looked to as a thing that
+would set her nearer the level of her idol, was dropping below the
+horizon of the possible. Aunt Beatrice always said&mdash;and she was
+right&mdash;that tears were not, as people pretended, a help and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> solace in
+trouble. They merely took the starch out of you and left you a poor
+soaked, limp creature, unfit to face the hard facts of life. But
+sometimes tears will lie heavy and scalding as molten lead in the brain,
+until at length they force their way through to the light. And Milly
+after blowing her nose a good deal, as she mechanically turned the pages
+of Mommsen, at length laid her arms on the book and transferred her
+handkerchief to her eyes. But she tried to look as though she were
+reading when Flora Timson came in.</p>
+
+<p>"At it again, M.! You know you're simply working yourself stupid."</p>
+
+<p>Thus speaking, Miss Timson, known to her intimates at Ascham as "Tims,"
+wagged sagely her very peculiar head. A crimson silk handkerchief was
+tied around it, turban-wise, and no vestige of hair escaped from
+beneath. There was in fact none to escape. Tims's sallow, comic little
+face had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes on it, and her small figure was
+not of a quality to triumph over the obvious disadvantages of a tight
+black cloth dress with bright buttons, reminiscent of a page's suit.</p>
+
+<p>Milly pushed the candles farther away and looked up.</p>
+
+<p>"I was wanting to see you, Tims. Do tell me whether you managed to get
+out of Miss Walker what Mr. Stewart said about my chances of a First."</p>
+
+<p>Tims pushed her silk turban still higher up on her forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"I can always humbug Miss Walker and make her say lots of indiscreet
+things," Tims returned,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> with labored diplomacy. "But I don't repeat
+them&mdash;at least, not invariably."</p>
+
+<p>There was a further argument on the point, which ended by Milly shedding
+tears and imploring to be told the worst.</p>
+
+<p>Tims yielded.</p>
+
+<p>"Stewart said your scholarship was A 1, but he was afraid you wouldn't
+get your First in Greats. He said you had a lot of difficulty in
+expressing yourself and didn't seem to get the lead of their philosophy
+and stuff&mdash;and&mdash;and generally wanted cleverness."</p>
+
+<p>"He said that?" asked Milly, in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though
+to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know&mdash;not to go on
+hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery in the end, no
+doubt."</p>
+
+<p>There was such a depth of despair in her face and voice that Tims was
+appalled at the consequence of her own revelation. She paced the room in
+agitation, alternately uttering incoherent abuse of her friend's folly
+and suggesting that she should at once abandon the ungrateful School of
+<i>Literæ Humaniores</i> and devote herself like Tims, to the joys of
+experimental chemistry and the pleasures of practical anatomy.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, Milly sat silent, one hand supporting her chin, the other
+playing with a pencil.</p>
+
+<p>At length Tims, taking hold of Milly under the arms, advised her to "go
+to bed and sleep it off."</p>
+
+<p>Milly rose dully and sat on the edge of her bed, while Tims awkwardly
+removed the hair-pins which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> Mrs. Shaw had so deftly put in. But as she
+was laying them on the little dressing-table, Milly suddenly flung
+herself down on the bed and lay there a twisted heap of blue flannel,
+her face buried in the pillows, her whole body shaken by a paroxysm of
+sobs. Tims supposed that this might be a good thing for Milly; but for
+herself it created an awkward situation. Her soothing remarks fell flat,
+while to go away and leave her friend in this condition would seem
+brutal. She sat down to "wait till the clouds rolled by," as she phrased
+it. But twenty minutes passed and still the clouds did not roll by.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, M." she said, argumentatively, standing by the bed. "You're
+in hysterics. That's what's the matter with you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know I am," came in tones of muffled despair from the pillow.</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" Tims was very stern and accented her words heavily,
+"then&mdash;pull&mdash;yourself&mdash;together&mdash;dear girl. Sit up!"</p>
+
+<p>Milly sat up, pressed her handkerchief over her face, and held her
+breath. For a minute all was quiet; then another violent sob forced a
+passage.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use, Tims," she gasped. "I cannot&mdash;cannot&mdash;stop. Oh, what
+would&mdash;!" She was going to say, "What would Aunt Beatrice think of me if
+she knew how I was giving way!" but a fresh flood of tears suppressed
+her speech. "My head's so bad! Such a splitting headache!"</p>
+
+<p>Tims tried scolding, slapping, a cold sponge, every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> remedy inexperience
+could suggest, but the hysterical weeping could not be checked.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, old girl," she said at length, "I know how I can stop you,
+but I don't believe you'll let me do it."</p>
+
+<p>"No, not that, Tims! You know Miss Burt doesn't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't approve. Of course not. Perhaps you think old B. would approve
+of the way you're going on now. Ha! Would she!"</p>
+
+<p>The sarcasm caused a new and alarming outburst. But finally, past all
+respect for Miss Burt, and even for Lady Thomson herself, Milly
+consented to submit to any remedy that Tims might choose to try.</p>
+
+<p>She was assisted hurriedly to undress and put to bed. Tims knew the
+whereabouts of the prize-medal which Milly had won at school, and
+placing the bright silver disk in her hand, directed her to fix her eyes
+upon it. Seated on her heels on the patient's bed, her crimson turban
+low on her forehead, her face screwed into intent wrinkles, Tims began
+passing her slight hands slowly before Milly's face.</p>
+
+<p>The long slender fingers played about the girl's fair head, sometimes
+pressed lightly upon her forehead, sometimes passed through her fluffy
+hair, as it lay spread on the pillow about her like an amber cloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't cry, M.," Tims began repeating in a soft, monotonous voice.
+"You've got nothing to cry about; your head doesn't ache now. Don't
+cry."</p>
+
+<p>At first it was only by a strong effort that Milly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> could keep her
+tear-blinded eyes fixed on the bright medal before her; but soon they
+became chained to it, as by some attractive force. The shining disk
+seemed to grow smaller, brighter, to recede imperceptibly till it was a
+point of light somewhere a long way off, and with it all the sorrows and
+agitations of her mind seemed also to recede into a dim distance, where
+she was still aware of them, yet as though they were some one else's
+sorrows and agitations, hardly at all concerning her. The aching tension
+of her brain was relaxed and she felt as though she were drowning
+without pain or struggle, gently floating down, down through a green
+abyss of water, always seeing that distant light, showing as the sun
+might show, seen from the depths of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Before a quarter of an hour had passed, her sobs ceased in sighing
+breaths, the breaths became regular and normal, the whole face slackened
+and smoothed itself out. Tims changed the burden of her song.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to sleep, Milly. What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly."</p>
+
+<p>Milly was sinking down upon the pillow, breathing the calm breath of
+deep, refreshing slumber. Tims still crouched upon the bed, chanting her
+monotonous song and contemplating her work. At length she slipped off,
+conscious of pins-and-needles in her legs, and as she withdrew, Milly
+with a sudden motion stretched her body out in the white bed, as
+straight and still almost as that of the dead. The movement was
+mechanical, but it gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> a momentary check to Tims's triumph. She leaned
+over her patient and began once more the crooning song.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to sleep, M.! What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly!"</p>
+
+<p>But presently she ceased her song, for it was evident that Milly Flaxman
+had indeed gone very sound asleep.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+
+<p>Tims was proud of the combined style and economy of her dress. She was
+constantly discovering and revealing to an unappreciative world the
+existence of superb tailors who made amazingly cheap dresses. For two
+years she had been vainly advising her friends to go to the man who had
+made her the frock she still wore for morning; a skirt and coat of tweed
+with a large green check in it, a green waistcoat with gilt buttons, and
+green gaiters to match. In this costume and coiffed with a man's wig, of
+the vague color peculiar to such articles, Tims came down at her usual
+hour, prepared to ask Milly what she thought of hypnotism now. But there
+was no Milly over whom to enjoy this petty triumph. She climbed to the
+top story as soon as breakfast was over, and entering Milly's room,
+found her patient still sleeping soundly, low and straight in the bed,
+just as she had been the preceding night. She was breathing regularly
+and her face looked peaceful, although her eyes were still stained with
+tears. The servant came in as Tims was looking at her.</p>
+
+<p>"I've tried to wake Miss Flaxman, miss," she said. "She's always very
+particular as I should wake her, but she was that sound asleep this
+morn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>ing, I 'adn't the 'eart to go on talking. Poor young lady! I expect
+she's pretty well wore out, working away at her books, early and late,
+the way she does."</p>
+
+<p>"Better leave her alone, Emma," agreed Tims. "I'll let Miss Burt know
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burt was glad to hear Milly Flaxman was oversleeping herself. She
+had not been satisfied with the girl's appearance of late, and feared
+Milly worked too hard and had bad nights.</p>
+
+<p>Tims had to go out at ten o'clock and did not return until
+luncheon-time. She went up to Milly's room and knocked at the door. As
+before, there was no answer. She went in and saw the girl still sound
+asleep, straight and motionless in the bed. Her appearance was so
+healthy and natural that it was absurd to feel uneasy at the length of
+her slumber, yet remembering the triumph of hypnotism, Tims did feel a
+little uneasy. She spoke to Miss Burt again about Milly's prolonged
+sleep, but Miss Burt was not inclined to be anxious. She had strictly
+forbidden Tims to hypnotize&mdash;or as she called it, mesmerize&mdash;any one in
+the house, so that Tims said no more on the subject. She was working at
+the Museum in the early part of the afternoon, only leaving it when the
+light began to fail. But after work she went straight back to Ascham.
+Milly was still asleep, but she had slightly shifted her position, and
+altogether there was something about her aspect which suggested a
+slumber less profound than before. Tims leaned over her and spoke
+softly:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Wake up, M., wake up! You've been asleep quite long enough."</p>
+
+<p>Milly's body twitched a little. A responsive flicker which was almost a
+convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident,
+however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from
+the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her
+Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance of the
+tweed frock with green waistcoat and gaiters, put the kettle on the
+fire. Then she went down-stairs to fetch some bread and butter and an
+egg, wherewith to feed the patient when she awoke.</p>
+
+<p>She had not long left the room when the slumberer's eyes opened
+gradually and stared with the fixity of semi-consciousness at a stem of
+blossoming jessamine in the wall-paper. Then she slowly stretched her
+arms above her head until some inches of wrist, slight and round and
+white, emerged from the strictly plain night-gown sleeve. So she lay,
+till suddenly, almost with a start, she pulled herself up and looked
+about her. The gaze of her wide-open eyes travelled questioningly around
+the quiet-toned room which two windows at right angles to each other
+still kept light with the reflection of a yellow winter sunset. She
+pushed the bedclothes down, dropped first one bare white foot, then the
+other to the ground and looked doubtfully at a pair of worn felt
+slippers which were placed beside the bed, before slipping her feet into
+them. With the same air as of one assuming garments which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> do not belong
+to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked
+to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from
+it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of
+somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius.
+With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the
+western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the
+garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from
+the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain
+glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow.
+For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the
+hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods,
+sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom
+of heaven and earth, a long straight pool of yellow light.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be
+pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had
+made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her
+amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of
+an angel in some old Florentine picture.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burt in galoshes and with a wrap over her head was coming up the
+garden. She caught sight of that vision of gold and pale blue in the
+window and smiled and waved her hand to Milly Flaxman. The vision
+withdrew, trembling slightly as though with cold, and closed the
+window.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims came in, carrying a boiled egg and a plate of bread and butter.
+Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed
+the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, old girl," she asked; "what do you say to hypnotism now? Put
+<i>you</i> to sleep, right enough, anyhow. Know what time it is?"</p>
+
+<p>The awakened sleeper made a few steps forward, leaned her hands on the
+table, on the other side of which Tims stood, and gazed upon her with
+startling intentness. Then she began to speak in a rapid, urgent voice.
+Her words were in themselves ordinary and distinct, yet what she said
+was entirely incomprehensible, a nightmare of speech, as though some
+talking-machine had gone wrong and was pouring out a miscellaneous stock
+of verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest without meaning or cohesion.
+Certain words reappeared with frequency, but Tims had a feeling that the
+speaker did not attach their usual meaning to them. This travesty of
+language went on for what appeared to the transfixed and terrified
+listener quite a long time. At length the serious, almost tragic,
+babbler, meeting with no response save the staring horror of Tims's too
+expressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
+which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
+smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
+ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
+nightmare. But she pulled herself together and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> determined to show
+presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
+ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, Milly," she said&mdash;and the use of her friend's proper name
+showed that she felt the occasion to be serious&mdash;"and don't speak again
+till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
+bit confused now, you know."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
+from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
+herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
+with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
+understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
+and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
+finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
+cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
+methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
+which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
+her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
+more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
+moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
+Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
+from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
+her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> that
+Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
+than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
+speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
+been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
+in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
+length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
+any use.</p>
+
+<p>She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
+upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
+teetotaller; all the more reason, thought Tims, why a dose of alcohol
+should give her nerves and circulation a fillip, only she must not know
+of it, or she would certainly refuse the remedy.</p>
+
+<p>Pocketing the bottle and flourishing the teapot, Tims mounted again to
+Milly's room. Her patient, who had spent the time wandering about the
+room and examining everything in it, as well as she could in the
+fast-falling twilight, resumed her position in the chair as soon as she
+heard a step in the passage, and greeted her returning keeper with an
+attractive smile. Tims uttering words of commendation, slyly poured some
+brandy into one of the large teacups before lighting the candles.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my girl," she said, when she had made the tea, "drink this, and
+you'll feel better."</p>
+
+<p>Milly leaned forward, her round chin on her hand, and looked intently at
+the tea-service and at the proffered cup. Then she suddenly raised her
+head,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> clapped her hands softly, and cried in a tone of delighted
+discovery, "Tea!"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," she added, taking the cup with a little bow; and in two
+seconds had helped herself to three lumps of sugar. Tims was surprised,
+for Milly never took sugar in her tea.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right, M., you're going along well!" cried Tims, standing on the
+hearth-rug, with one hand under her short coat-tails, while she gulped
+her own tea, and ate two pieces of bread and butter put together. Milly
+ate hers and drank her tea daintily, looking meanwhile at her companion
+with wonder which gradually gave way to amusement. At length leaning
+forward with a dimpling smile, she interrogated very politely and quite
+lucidly.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, sir, you are&mdash;? Ah, the doctor, no doubt! My poor head, you
+see!" and she drew her fingers across her forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Tims started, and grabbed her wig, as was her wont in moments of
+agitation. She stood transfixed, the teacup at a dangerous angle in her
+extended hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God!" she ejaculated. "You are mad and no mistake, my poor old
+girl."</p>
+
+<p>The "old girl" made a supreme effort to contain herself, and then burst
+into a pretty, rippling laugh in which there was nothing familiar to
+Tims's ear. She rose from her chair vivaciously and took the cup from
+Tims's hand, to deposit it in safety on the chimney piece.</p>
+
+<p>"How silly I was!" she cried, regarding Tims sparklingly. "Do you know I
+was not quite sure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> whether you were a man or a woman. Of course I see
+now, and I'm so glad. I do like men, you know, so much better than
+women."</p>
+
+<p>"Milly," retorted Tims, sternly, settling her wig. "You are mad, you
+need not be bad as well. But it's my own fault for giving you that
+brandy. You know as well as I do that I hate men&mdash;nasty, selfish,
+guzzling, conceited, guffawing brutes! I never wanted to speak to a man
+in my life, except in the way of business."</p>
+
+<p>Milly waved her amber head gracefully for a moment as though at a loss,
+then returned playfully, "That must be because the women spoil you so."</p>
+
+<p>Tims smiled sardonically; but regaining her sense of the situation, out
+of which she had been momentarily shocked, applied herself to the
+problem of calling back poor Milly's wandering mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, my girl," she said, abruptly, putting her arm around Milly's
+body, so soft and slender in the scanty folds of the blue dressing-gown.
+Milly obeyed precipitately. Then drawing a small chair close to her,
+Tims said in gentle tones which could hardly have been recognized as
+hers:</p>
+
+<p>"M., darling, do you know where you are?"</p>
+
+<p>Milly turned on her a face from which the unnatural vivacity had fallen
+like a mask; the appealing face of a poor lost child.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I&mdash;am I&mdash;in a <i>maison de santé</i>?" she asked tremulously, fixing her
+blue eyes on Tims, full of piteous anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>"A lunatic asylum? Certainly not," replied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> Tims. "Now don't begin
+crying again, old girl. That's how the trouble began."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it?" asked Milly, dreamily. "I thought it was&mdash;" she paused,
+frowning before her in the air, as though trying to pursue with her
+bodily vision some recollection which had flickered across her
+consciousness only to disappear.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, never mind that now," said Tims, hastily; "get your bearings
+right first. You're in Ascham College."</p>
+
+<p>"A College!" repeated Milly vaguely, but in a moment her face
+brightened, "I know. A place of learning where they have professors and
+things. Are you a professor?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm a student. So are you."</p>
+
+<p>Milly looked fixedly at Tims, then smiled a melancholy smile. "I see,"
+she said, "we're both studying&mdash;medicine&mdash;medicine for the mind." She
+stood up, locked her hands behind her head in her soft hair and wailed
+miserably. "Oh, why won't some kind person come and tell me where I am,
+and what I was before I came here?"</p>
+
+<p>Tears of wounded feelings sprang to Tims's eyes. "Milly, my beauty!" she
+cried despairingly, "I'm trying to be kind to you and tell you
+everything you want to know. Your name is Mildred Flaxman and you used
+to live in Oxford here, but now all your people have gone to Australia
+because your father's got a deanery there."</p>
+
+<p>"Have they left me here, mad and by myself?" asked Milly; "have I no one
+to look after me, no one to give me a home?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I suppose Lady Thomson or the Fletchers would," returned Tims, "but you
+haven't wanted one. You've been quite happy at Ascham. Do try and
+remember. Can't you remember getting your First in Mods. and how you've
+been working to get one in Greats? Your brain's been right enough until
+to-day, old girl, and it will be again. I expect it's a case of collapse
+of memory from overwork. Things will come back to you soon and I'll help
+you all I can. Do try and recollect me&mdash;Tims." There was an unmistakable
+choke in Tims's voice. "We have been such chums. The others are all
+pretty nasty to me sometimes&mdash;they seem to think I'm a grinning, wooden
+Aunt Sally, stuck up for them to shy jokes at. But you've never once
+been nasty to me, M., and there's precious few things I wouldn't do to
+help you. So don't go talking to me as though there weren't any one in
+the world who cared a brass farthing about you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I'm most thankful to find I have got some one here who cares
+about me," returned Milly, meekly, passing her hand across her eyes for
+lack of a handkerchief. "You see, it's dreadful for me to be like this.
+I seem to know what things are, and yet I don't know. A little while ago
+it seemed to me I was just going to remember something&mdash;something
+different from what you've told me. But now it's all gone again. Oh,
+please give me a handkerchief!"</p>
+
+<p>Tims opened one of Milly's tidy drawers and sought for a handkerchief.
+When she had found<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> it, Milly was standing before the high
+chimney-piece, over which hung a long, low mirror about a foot wide and
+divided into three parts by miniature pilasters of tarnished gilt. The
+mirror, too, was tarnished here and there, but it had been a good glass
+and showed undistorted the blue Delft jars on the mantel-shelf, glimpses
+of flickering firelight in the room, amber hair and the tear-bedewed
+roses of a flushed young face. Suddenly Milly thrust the jars aside,
+seized the candle from the table, and, holding it near her face, looked
+intently, anxiously in the glass. The anxiety vanished in a moment, but
+not the intentness. She went on looking. Tims had always perceived
+Milly's beauty&mdash;which had an odd way of slipping through the world
+unobserved&mdash;but had never seen her look so lovely as now, her eyes wide
+and brilliant, and her upper lip curved rosily over a shining glimpse of
+her white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty had an extraordinary fascination for Tims, poor step-child of
+nature! Now she stood looking at the reflection of Milly without
+noticing how in the background her own strange, wizened face peered dim
+and grotesque from the tarnished mirror, like the picture of a witch or
+a goblin behind the fair semblance of some princess in a fairy tale.</p>
+
+<p>"I do remember myself partly," said Milly, doubtfully; "and yet&mdash;somehow
+not quite. I suppose I shall remember you and this queer place soon, if
+they don't put me into a mad-house at once."</p>
+
+<p>"They sha'n't," said Tims, decisively. "Trust to me, M., and I'll see
+you through. But I'm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> afraid you'll have to give up all thought of your
+First."</p>
+
+<p>"My what," asked Milly, turning round inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Your First Class, your place, you know, in the Final Honors School,
+Lit. Hum., the biggest examination of the lot."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I want it very much, my First?"</p>
+
+<p>"Want it? I should just think you do want it!"</p>
+
+<p>Milly stared at the fire for a minute, warming one foot before she spoke
+again. Then:</p>
+
+<p>"How funny of me!" she observed, meditatively.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Tims's programme happened to be full on the following day, so that it
+was half-past twelve before she knocked at Milly's door and was
+admitted. Milly stood in the middle of the room in an attitude of
+energy, with her small wardrobe lying about her on the floor in
+ignominious heaps.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Tims," said Milly, after the first inquiries, "are those
+positively all the clothes I possess?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course they are, M. What do you want with more?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are they in the fashion?" asked Milly, anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>Tims stared.</p>
+
+<p>"Fashion! Good Lord, M.! What does it matter whether you look the same
+as every fool in the street or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Tims!" cried Milly, laughing that pretty rippling laugh so strange
+in Tims's ears. "I was quite right when I made a mistake, you're just
+like a man. All the better. But you can't expect me not to care a bit
+about my clothes like you, you really can't."</p>
+
+<p>Tims drew herself up.</p>
+
+<p>"You're wrong, my girl, I'm a deal fonder of frocks than you are. I
+always think," she added,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> looking before her dreamily, "that I was
+meant to be a very good dresser, only I was brought up too economical."
+Generally speaking, when Tims had uttered one of her deepest and truest
+feelings, she would glance around, suddenly alert and suspicious to
+surprise the twinkle in her auditor's eye. But in the clear blue of
+Milly Flaxman's quiet eyes, she had ceased to look for that tormenting
+twinkle, that spark which seemed destined to dance about her from the
+cradle to the grave.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she found herself hanging up Milly's clothes while Milly paid
+no attention; for she alternately stood before the glass in the dark
+corner, and kneeled on the hearth-rug, curling-tongs in hand. And the
+hair, the silky soft amber hair, which could be twisted into a tiny ball
+or fluffed into a golden fleece at will, was being tossed up and pulled
+down, combed here and brushed there, altogether handled with a zeal and
+patience to which it had been a stranger since the days when it had been
+the pride of the nursery. Tims the untidy, as one in a dream, went on
+tidying the room she was accustomed to see so immaculate.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" cried Milly, turning, "that's how I wear it, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord, no!" exclaimed Tims, contemplating the transformed Milly.
+"It suits you, M., in a way, but it looks queer too. The others will all
+be hooting if you go down-stairs like that."</p>
+
+<p>Milly plumped into a chair irritably.</p>
+
+<p>"How ever am I to know how I did my hair if I can't remember? Please do
+it for me."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims smiled sardonically.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll lend you my hair," she said; "the second best. But <i>do</i> your hair!
+You really are as mad as a hatter."</p>
+
+<p>Milly shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't? Then I keep it like this," she said.</p>
+
+<p>An argument ensued. Tims left the room to try and find a photograph of
+Milly as she had been.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned she found her friend standing in absorbed
+contemplation of a book in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Greek, isn't it?" she asked, holding it up. Her face wore a
+little frown as of strained attention.</p>
+
+<p>"Right you are," shrieked Tims in accents of relief. "Greek it is. Can
+you read it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet," replied Milly, flushing with excitement, "but I shall soon, I
+know I shall. Last night I couldn't make head or tail of the books. Now
+I understand right enough what they are, and I know some are in Greek
+and some in English. I can't read either yet, but it's all coming back
+gradually, like the daylight coming in at the window this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Hooray! Hooray!" shouted Tims. "You'll be reading as hard as ever in a
+week if I don't look after you. But see here, my girl, you've given me a
+nasty jar, and I'm not going to let you break your heart or crack your
+brain in a wild-goose chase. You can't get that First, you know; you're
+on a fairly good Second Class level, and you'd better make up your mind
+to stay there."</p>
+
+<p>"A fairly good Second Class level!" repeated Milly, still turning the
+leaves of the book. "That<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> doesn't sound very exhilarating&mdash;and I rather
+think I shall do as I like about staying there."</p>
+
+<p>Tims began to heat.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's what Stewart said about you. I don't believe I told you
+half plain enough what Stewart did say, for fear of hurting your
+feelings. He said you are a good scholar, but barring that, you weren't
+at all clever."</p>
+
+<p>Milly looked up from her book; but she was not tearful. There was a curl
+in her lip and the light of battle in her eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Stewart said that, did he? Now if I were a gentleman I should
+say&mdash;'damn his impudence'&mdash;and 'who the devil is Stewart'; but then I'm
+not. You can say it."</p>
+
+<p>Tims stared. "Oh, come, I say!" she exclaimed. "I don't swear, I only
+quote. But my goodness, when you remember who Stewart is, you'll
+be&mdash;well, pained to think of the language you're using about him."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" asked Milly, her head riding disdainfully on her slender neck.</p>
+
+<p>"Because he's your tutor and lecturer&mdash;and a regular tiptop man at Greek
+and all that&mdash;and you&mdash;you respect him most awfully."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I?" cried Milly&mdash;"did perhaps in my salad days. I've no respect
+whatever for professors now, my good Tims. I know what they're like.
+Here's Stewart for you."</p>
+
+<p>She took up a pen and a scrap of paper and dashed off a clever ludicrous
+sketch of a man with long hair, an immense brow, and spectacles.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" said Tims; "that's not a bit like him."</p>
+
+<p>She held the paper in her hand and looked fixedly at it. Milly had been
+wont seriously to grieve over her hopeless lack of artistic talent and
+she had never attempted to caricature. Tims was thinking of a young
+fellow of a college who had lately died of brain disease. In the earlier
+stages of his insanity, it had been remarked that he had an originality
+which had not been his when in a normal state. What if her friend were
+developing the same terrible disease? If it were so, it was no use
+fussing, since there was no remedy. Still, she felt a desperate need to
+take some sort of precaution.</p>
+
+<p>"If I were you, M.," she said, "I'd go to bed and keep very quiet for a
+day or two. You're so&mdash;so odd, and excited, they'd notice it if you went
+down-stairs."</p>
+
+<p>"Would they?" asked Milly, suddenly sobered. "Would they say I was mad?"
+An expression of fear came into her face, and its strangely luminous
+eyes travelled around the room with a look as of some trapped creature
+seeking escape.</p>
+
+<p>There was an awkward pause.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not mad," affirmed Milly, swallowing with a dry throat. "I'm
+perfectly sensible, but any one would be odd and excited too who
+was&mdash;was as I am&mdash;with a number of words and ideas floating in my mind
+without my having the least idea where they spring from. Please, Tims
+dear, tell me how I am to behave. I should so hate to be thought queer,
+wanting in any way."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims considered.</p>
+
+<p>"For one thing, you mustn't talk such a lot. You never have been one for
+chattering; and lately, of course, with your overwork, you've been
+particularly quiet. Don't talk, M., that's my advice."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," replied Milly, gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>Tims hesitated and went on:</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't see how you're going to hide up this business about your
+memory. I wish you'd let me tell old B., anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't have any one told," cried Milly. "Not a creature. If only
+you'll help me, dear, dear Tims&mdash;you will help me, won't you?&mdash;I shall
+soon be all right, and no one except you will ever know. No one will be
+able to shrug their shoulders and say, whatever I do, 'Of course she's
+crazy.' I should hate it so! I know I can get on if I try. I'm much
+cleverer than you and that silly old Stewart think. Promise me, promise
+me, darling Tims, you won't betray me!"</p>
+
+<p>Tims was not weak-minded, but she was very tender-hearted and
+exceedingly susceptible to personal charms. She ought not, she knew she
+ought not, to have yielded, but she did. She promised. Yet in her
+friend's own interest, she contended that Milly must confess to a
+certain failure of memory from over-fatigue, if only as a pretext for
+dropping her work for a while. It was agreed that Milly should remain in
+bed for several days, and she did so; less bored than might have been
+expected, because she had the constant excitement of this or that bit of
+knowledge filtering back into her mind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> But this knowledge was purely
+intellectual. With Tims's help she had recovered her reading powers, and
+although she felt at first only a vague recognition of something
+familiar in the sense of what she read, it was evident that she was fast
+regaining the use of the treasures stored in her brain by years of
+dogged and methodical work. But the facts and personalities which had
+made her own life seemed to have vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind."</p>
+
+<p>Tims, having primed her well beforehand, brought in the more important
+girls to see her, and by dint of a cautious reserve she passed very well
+with them, as with Miss Burt and Miss Walker. Tims seemed to feel much
+more nervous than Milly herself did when she joined the other students
+as usual.</p>
+
+<p>There were moments when Tims gasped with the certainty that the
+revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was
+about to be made. Then Mildred&mdash;for so, despising the soft diminutive,
+she now desired to be called&mdash;by some extraordinary exertion of tact and
+ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of
+it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that
+Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given up worrying
+about her Schools, and that no one would have believed how much prettier
+she could make herself by doing her hair a different way.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burt, however, was somewhat puzzled and uneasy. Although Milly was
+looking unusually well, it was evident that all was not quite right with
+her, for she complained of a failure of memory,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> a mental fatigue which
+made it impossible for her to go to lectures, and she seemed to have
+lost all interest in the Schools, which had so lately been for her the
+"be-all" as well as the "end-all here." Miss Burt knew Milly's only near
+relation in England, Lady Thomson, intimately; and for that reason
+hesitated to write to her. She knew that Beatrice Thomson had no
+patience with the talk&mdash;often silly enough&mdash;about girls overworking
+their brains. She herself had never been laid up in her life, except
+when her leg was broken, and her views on the subject of ill-health were
+marked. She regarded the catching of scarlet-fever or influenza as an
+act of cowardice, consumption or any organic disease as scarcely, if at
+all, less disgraceful than drunkenness or fraud, while the countless
+little ailments to which feminine flesh seems more particularly heir she
+condemned as the most deplorable of female failings, except the love of
+dress.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually Miss Burt did write to Lady Thomson, cautiously. Lady Thomson
+replied that she was coming up to town on Thursday, and could so arrange
+her journey as to have an hour and a half in Oxford. She would be at
+Ascham at three-thirty. Mildred rushed to Tims with the agitating news
+and both were greatly upset by it. However, Aunt Beatrice had got to be
+faced sometime or other and Mildred's spirit rose to the encounter.</p>
+
+<p>She had by this time provided herself with another dress, encouraged to
+do so by the money in hand left by the frugal Milly the First. She had
+got a plain tailor-made coat and skirt, in a be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>coming shade of brown;
+and with the unbecoming hard collar <i>de rigueur</i> in those days, she wore
+a turquoise blue tie, which seemed to reflect the color of her eyes. And
+in spite of Tims's dissuasions, she put on the new dress on Thursday,
+and declined to screw her hair up in the old way, as advised.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly on Thursday at twenty-five minutes to four, Mildred
+appeared, in answer to a summons, in the quiet-colored, pleasant
+drawing-room at Ascham, with its French windows giving on to the lawn,
+where some of the girls were playing hockey, not without cries. Her
+first view of Aunt Beatrice was a pleasant surprise. A tall, upstanding
+figure, draped in a long, soft cloak trimmed with fur, a handsome face
+with marked features, marked eyebrows, a fine complexion and bright
+brown eyes under a wide-brimmed felt hat.</p>
+
+<p>Having exchanged the customary peck, she waited in silence till Mildred
+had seated herself. Then surveying her niece with satisfaction:</p>
+
+<p>"Come, Milly," said she, in a full, pleasant voice; "I don't see much
+signs of the nervous invalid about you. Really, Polly," turning to Miss
+Burt, "she has not looked so well for a long time."</p>
+
+<p>"She's been much better since she dropped her work," replied Miss Burt.</p>
+
+<p>"Taking plenty of fresh air and exercise, I suppose"&mdash;Aunt Beatrice
+smiled kindly on her niece&mdash;"I'm afraid I've kept you from your hockey
+this afternoon, Milly."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, Aunt Beatrice, certainly not," replied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> Milly, with the extreme
+courtesy of nervousness. "I never play hockey now."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson turned to the Head with a shade of triumph in her
+satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"There, Polly! What did I tell you? I was sure there was something else
+at the bottom of it. Steady work, methodically done, never hurt anybody.
+But of course if she's given up exercise, her liver or something was
+bound to get out of order."</p>
+
+<p>"No, really, I take lots of exercise," interposed Milly; "only I don't
+care for hockey, it's such a horrid, rough, dirty game; don't you think
+so? And Miss Walker got a front tooth broken last winter."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson looked at her in a surprised way.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you've not been playing hockey, what exercise have you been
+taking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Walks," replied Milly, feebly, feeling herself on the wrong track; "I
+go walks with Ti&mdash;with Flora Timson when she has time."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice looked at the matter judicially.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, games are best for the physique. Look at men. Still, walking
+will do, if one takes proper walks. I hope Flora Timson takes you good
+long walks."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed she does!" cried Milly. "Immense! She walks a dreadful pace, and
+we get over stiles and things."</p>
+
+<p>"Immense is a little vague. How far do you go on an average?"</p>
+
+<p>Mildred's notions of distance were vague. "Quite two miles, I'm sure,"
+she responded, cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice made no comment. She looked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> steadily and scrutinizingly
+at her niece, and in a kind but deepened voice told her to go up to her
+room, whither she, Lady Thomson, would follow in a few minutes, just to
+see how the Mantegnas looked now they were framed.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the door had closed behind Mildred, she turned to Miss Burt.
+"You're right, in a way, Polly, after all. There is something odd about
+Milly, but I think it's affectation. Did you hear her answer? Two miles!
+When to my knowledge she can easily walk ten."</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, Mildred mounted slowly to her room. She had tidied it under
+Tims's instructions and had nothing to do but to sit down and think
+until Lady Thomson's masculine step was heard outside her door.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice came in and laid aside her hat and cloak, showing a dress
+of rough gray tweed, and short&mdash;so far a tribute to the practical&mdash;but
+otherwise made on some awkward artistic or hygienic principle. Her
+glossy brown hair was brushed back and twisted tight, as Milly's used to
+be, but with different effect, because of its heaviness and length.</p>
+
+<p>"Why have you crammed up one of your windows with a dressing-glass?"
+asked Aunt Beatrice, putting a picture straight.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I can't see myself in that dark corner," returned Mildred,
+demurely meek, but waiting her opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"See yourself! My dear child, you hardly ever want to see yourself, if
+you are habitually neat and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> dressed sensibly. I see you've adopted the
+mannish style. That's a phase of vanity. You'll come back to the
+beautiful and natural before long."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think so, Aunt Beatrice. I've settled the dress question once
+and for all. I've found a clean, tidy, convenient style of dress and I
+can't waste time thinking about altering it again."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seem to mind wasting it on doing your hair," returned Aunt
+Beatrice, smiling, but not grimly, for she enjoyed logical fencing, even
+to her opponent's fair hits.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had beautiful hair like yours, I shouldn't need to," replied
+Mildred. "But you know how endy and untidy mine always was."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice, embarrassed by the compliment, looked at her watch. "It
+seems as if we women can't escape our fate," she said. "Here we are
+gabbling about dress when we've plenty of important things to talk over.
+Miss Burt wrote to me that you were overworked, run down, nerves out of
+order, and all the usual nonsense. I'm thankful to find you looking
+remarkably well. I should like to know what this humbug about not being
+able to work means."</p>
+
+<p>"It means that&mdash;well, I simply can't," returned Mildred, earnestly this
+time. "I can't remember things."</p>
+
+<p>"You must be able to remember; unless your brain's diseased, which is
+most improbable. But I ought to take you to a brain specialist, I
+suppose."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Milly changed color. "Please, oh please, Aunt Beatrice, don't do that!"</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson, in fact, hardly meant it; for her niece's appearance was
+unmistakably healthy. However, the threat told.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall if you don't improve. I can't understand you. Either you're
+hysterical or you've got one of those abominable fits of frivolity which
+come on women like drink on men, and destroy their careers. I thought we
+had both set our hearts on your getting another First."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Aunt Beatrice, they say I can't. They say I'm not clever enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's what they say, is it?" Lady Thomson smiled in calm but deep
+contempt. "How do they explain the idiots who have got Firsts? Archibald
+Toovey, for instance?" Her eyes met her niece's, and both smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes! Mr. Toovey," returned Milly, who had met Archibald Toovey at
+the Fletchers', and converted his patronizing courtship into imbecile
+raptures.</p>
+
+<p>"But that quite explains your losing an interest in your work. Just for
+once, I should like to take you away before the end of term. We would go
+straight to Rome next Monday. We shall meet the Breretons there, and go
+fully over the new excavations and discoveries, besides the old things,
+which will be new, of course, to you. Then we will go on to Naples, do
+the galleries and Pompeii, and come back by Florence and Paris before
+Christmas. By that time you will be ready to settle down to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> your work
+steadily again and forget all this nonsense."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred's face had lighted up momentarily at the word "Rome." Then she
+sucked her under lip and looked at the fire. When Lady Thomson's
+programme was ended, she made a pause before she said, slowly:</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you so much, dear Aunt Beatrice. I should love to go, but&mdash;I
+don't think&mdash;no, I don't think I'd better. You see, there's the
+expense."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I don't expect you to pay for yourself. I take you."</p>
+
+<p>"How very kind and sweet of you! But&mdash;well, do you know, you've
+encouraged me so about that. First, I feel now as though I could sit
+down and get it straight away. I will get it, Aunt Beatrice, if only to
+make that old Professor look foolish."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson, though disappointed in a way, felt that Milly Flaxman was
+doing credit to her principles, showing a spirit worthy of her family.
+She did not urge the Roman plan; but content with a victory over "nerves
+and the usual nonsense," withdrew triumphant to the railway station.</p>
+
+<p>Tims came in when she was gone and heard about the Roman offer.</p>
+
+<p>"You refused, when Aunt Beatrice was going to plank down the dollars?
+M., you are a fool!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, Tims," Mildred answered, deliberately; "you see, I don't feel sure
+yet whether I can manage Aunt Beatrice."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+
+<p>Oxford is beautiful at all times, beautiful even now, in spite of the
+cruel disfigurement inflicted upon her by the march of modern vulgarity,
+but she has three high festivals which clothe her with a special glory
+and crown her with their several crowns. One is the Festival of May,
+when her hoary walls and ancient enclosures overflow with emerald and
+white, rose-color and purple and gold, a foam of leafage and blossom,
+breaking spray-like over edges of stone, gray as sea-worn rocks. And all
+about the city the green meadows and groves burn with many tones of
+color, brilliant as enamels or as precious stones, yet of a texture
+softer and richer, more full of delicate shadows than any velvet mantle
+that ever was woven for a queen.</p>
+
+<p>Another Festival comes with that strayed bacchanal October, who hangs
+her scarlet and wine-colored garlands on cloister and pinnacle, on wall
+and tower. And gradually the foliage of grove and garden, turns through
+shade of bluish metallic green, to the mingled splendor of pale gold and
+beaten bronze and deepest copper, half glowing and half drowned in the
+low, mellow sunlight, and purple mist of autumn.</p>
+
+<p>Last comes the Festival of Mid-winter, the Fes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>tival of the Frost. The
+rime comes, or the snow, and the long lines of the buildings, the
+fret-work of stone, the battlements, carved pinnacles and images of
+saints or devils, stand up with clear glittering outlines, or clustered
+about and overhung with fantasies of ice and snow. Behind, the deep-blue
+sky itself seems to glitter too. The frozen floods glitter in the
+meadows, and every little twig on the bare trees. There is no color in
+the earth, but the atmosphere of the river valley clothes distant hills
+and trees and hedges with ultramarine vapor. Towards evening the mist
+climbs, faintly veiling the tall groves of elms and the piled masses of
+the city itself. The sunset begins to burn red behind Magdalen Tower,
+all the towers and aery pinnacles rise blue yet distinct against it. And
+this festival is not only one of nature. The glittering ice is spread
+over the meadows, and, everywhere from morning till moonlight, the
+rhythmical ring of the skate and the sound of voices sonorous with the
+joy of living, travel far on the frosty air. Sometimes the very rivers
+are frozen, and the broad, bare highway of the Thames and the
+tree-sheltered path of the Cherwell are alive with black figures,
+heel-winged like Mercury, flying swiftly on no errand, but for the mere
+delight of flying.</p>
+
+<p>It was early on such a shining festival morning that Mildred, a willowy,
+brown-clad figure, came down to a piece of ice in an outlying meadow.
+Her shadow moved beside her in the sunshine, blue on the whiteness of
+the snow, which crunched crisp and thin under her feet. She carried a
+black<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> bag in her hand&mdash;sign of the serious skater, and her face was
+serious, even apprehensive. She saw with relief that except the sweepers
+there was no one on the ice. A row of shivering men, buttoned up to the
+chin in seedy coats, rose from the chairs where they awaited their
+appointed prey, and all yelled to her at once. She crowned the hopes of
+one by occupying his seat, but the important task of putting on the
+bladed boots she could depute to none. Tims, whom no appeal of
+friendship could induce to shiver on the ice, had told her that Milly
+was an expert skater. She was, in fact, correct and accomplished, but
+there was a stiffness and sense of effort about her style, a want of
+that appearance of free and daring abandonment to the stroke of the
+blade once launched, that makes the beauty of skating. Mildred knew only
+that she had to live up to the reputation of a mighty skater, and was
+not sure whether she could even stand on these knifelike edges. She
+laced one boot, happy in the belief that at any rate there would be no
+witness to her voyage of discovery. But a renewed yelling among the men
+made her lift her head, and there, striding swiftly over the crisp snow,
+came a tall, handsome young man, with a pointed, silky black beard and
+fine, short-sighted black eyes, aglow with the pleasure of the frosty
+sun.</p>
+
+<p>It was Ian Stewart. The young lady whom he discovered to be Miss Flaxman
+just as he reached the chairs, was much more annoyed than he at the
+encounter. Here was an acquaintance, it seemed, and one provided with
+the bag and orange which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> Tims had warned her was the mark of the
+serious skater. They exchanged remarks on the weather and she went on
+lacing her other boot in great trepidation. The moment was come. She did
+not recoil from the insult of being seized under her elbows by two men
+and carefully planted on her feet as though she were most likely to
+tumble down. So far as she knew, she was likely to. But, lo! no sooner
+was she up than muscles and nerves, recking nothing of the brain's blind
+denial, asserted their own acquaintance with the art of balance and
+motion. Wondering, and for a few minutes still apprehensive, but
+presently lost in the pleasure of the thing, Mildred began to fly over
+the ice. And the dark, handsome man who had taken off his cap to her
+became supremely unimportant. Unluckily the piece of flood-ice was not
+endless and she had to come back. He was circling around an orange, and
+she, throwing herself instinctively on to the outside edge, came down
+towards him in great, sweeping curves, absorbed in the delight of this
+motion, so new yet so perfectly under her control. Ian Stewart,
+perceiving that the girl was absolutely unconscious of his presence,
+blushed in his soul to think that he had been induced to believe himself
+to be of importance in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Flaxman," he said, skating up to her, "I see you have no orange.
+Can't we skate a figure together around mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've forgotten all about figures," replied Mildred, with truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Try some simple turns," he urged. "There are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> plenty here," and he held
+up a book in his hand like the one she had found in her own black bag.
+But it had "Ian Stewart, Durham College," written clearly on the
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>"So that's Stewart!" thought Milly; and she could not help laughing at
+her own thoughts, which had created him in a different image.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart did not know why she laughed, but he found the sound and sight
+of the laugh new and charming.</p>
+
+<p>"It's awfully kind of you to undertake my education in another branch,
+Mr. Stewart," she answered, pouting, "in spite of having found out that
+I'm not at all clever."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at him mutinously, sweeping towards the orange with head
+thrown back over her left shoulder. Momentarily the poise of her head
+recalled the attitude of the portrait of Lady Hammerton, beckoning her
+unseen companions to that far-off mysterious mountain country, where the
+torrents shine so whitely through the mist and the red line of sunset
+speaks of coming night.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart colored, slightly confused. This brutal statement did not seem
+to him to represent the just and candid account he had given Miss Walker
+of Miss Flaxman's abilities.</p>
+
+<p>"Some one's been misreporting me, I see," he returned. "But anyhow, on
+the ice, Miss Flaxman, it's you who are the Professor; I who am the
+pupil. So I offer you a fair revenge."</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, Mildred soon found herself placed at a due distance from
+the orange, with Stewart<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> equally distant from it on the other side.
+After a few minutes of extreme uneasiness, she discovered that although
+she had to halt at each fresh call, she had a kind of mechanical
+familiarity with the simple figures which he gave her.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart, though learned, was human; and to sweep now at the opposite
+pole to his companion, now with a swing of clasping hands at the centre
+of their delightful dance, his eyes always perforce on his charming
+partner, and her eyes on him, undeniably raised the pleasure of skating
+to a higher power than if he had circled the orange in company with mere
+man.</p>
+
+<p>So they fleeted the too-short time in the sparkling blue and white
+world, drinking the air like celestial wine.</p>
+
+<p>The Festival of the Frost had fallen in the Christmas Vacation, and
+Oxford society in vacation is essentially different from that of
+Term-time, when it is overflowed by men who are but birds of passage,
+coming no one inquires whence, and flitting few know whither. The party
+that picnicked, played hockey, danced and figured on their skates
+through the weeks of the frost, was in those days almost like a family
+party. So it happened that Ian Stewart met the new Miss Flaxman in an
+atmosphere of friendly ease that years of term-time society would not
+have afforded him. How new she was he did not guess, but supposed the
+change to be in his own eyes. Other people, however, saw it. Her very
+skating was different. It had gained in grace and vigor, but she was
+seldom seen wooing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had
+acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she
+initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing
+and hand-in-hand figures in general.</p>
+
+<p>Ian Stewart, too, neglected the orange and went in for hand-in-hand
+figures that season. Other things, too, he neglected; work, which he had
+never before allowed to suffer measurably from causes within his
+control; and far from blushing for his idleness, he rejoiced in it, as
+the surest sign of all that for him the Festival of Spring had come in
+the time of nature's frost.</p>
+
+<p>It was not only the crisp air, the frequent sun, the joyous flights over
+the ringing ice that made his blood run faster through his veins and
+laughter come more easily to his lips; that aroused him in the morning
+with a strange sense of delight, as though some spirit had awakened him
+with a glad reveille at the window of his soul. He, too, was in Arcady.
+That in itself should be sufficient joy; he knew he must restrain his
+impatience for more. Not till the summer, when the lady of his heart had
+ceased to be also his pupil, must he make avowal of his love.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred on her part found Stewart the most attractive of the men with
+whom she was acquainted. As yet in this new existence of hers, she had
+not moved outside the Oxford circle&mdash;a circle exceptional in England,
+because in it intellectual eminence, not always recognized, when
+recognized receives as much honor as is accorded to a great fortune or
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> great name in ordinary society. Stewart's abilities were of a kind to
+be recognized by the Academic world. He was already known in the
+Universities of the Continent and America. Oxford was proud of him; and
+although Mildred had no desire to marry as yet, it gratified her taste
+and her vanity to win him for a lover.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mildred had had no desire to spend her vacations with Lady Thomson, and
+on the ground of her reading for the Schools, had been allowed to spend
+them in Oxford. Tims, who had no relations, remained with her. She had
+for Mildred a sentiment almost like that of a parent, besides an
+admiration for which she was slightly ashamed, feeling it to be
+something of a slur on the memory of Milly, her first and kindest
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred had recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her
+former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work for her
+First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon
+her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native
+passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the
+mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness,
+vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the
+contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the
+"Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in
+contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been
+wont to express her ideas. But in the region of actual knowledge, she
+now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> and again perpetrated some immense and childish blunder, which made
+the teachers, who nursed and trained her like a jockey or a race-horse,
+tremble for the results of the Greats Examination.</p>
+
+<p>All too swiftly the date of the Schools loomed on the horizon; drew
+near; was come. The June weather was glorious on the river, but in the
+town, above all in the Examination Schools, it was very hot. The sun
+glared pitilessly in through the great windows of the big T-shaped room,
+till the temperature was that of a greenhouse. The young men in their
+black coats and white ties looked enviously at the girl candidate, the
+only one, in her white waist and light skirt. They envied her, too, her
+apparent indifference to a crisis that paled the masculine cheek. In
+fact, Mildred was nervous, but her nerves were strung up to so high a
+pitch that she was sensitive neither to temperature nor to fatigue, nor
+to want of sleep. And at the service of her quick intelligence and ready
+pen lay all the stored knowledge of Milly the First.</p>
+
+<p>On the last day, when the last paper was over, Tims came and found her
+in the big hall, planting the pins in her hat with an almost feverish
+energy. Although it was five o'clock, she said she wanted air, not tea.
+The last men had trooped listlessly down the steps of the Schools and
+the two girls stood there while Mildred drew on her gloves. The sun
+wearing to the northwest, shone down that curve of the High Street which
+all Europe cannot match. The slanting gold illumined the gray face of
+the University and the wide pavement, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> the black-gowned victims of
+the Schools threaded their sombre way through groups of joyous youths in
+flannels and ladies in summer attire. On the opposite side cool shadows
+were beginning to invade the sunshine, to slant across the old houses,
+straight-roofed or gabled, the paladian pile of Queen's, the mediæval
+front of All Souls, with its single and perfect green tree, leading up
+to the consummation of the great spire of St. Mary's.</p>
+
+<p>Already, from the tall bulk of the nave, a shadow fell broad across the
+pavement. But still the heat of the day reverberated from the stones
+about them. They turned down to the Botanical Gardens and paced that
+gray enclosure, full of the pride of branches and the glory of flowers
+and overhung by the soaring vision of Magdalen Tower. Mildred was
+walking fast and talking volubly about the Examination and everything
+else.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, old girl," said Tims at last, when they reached for the
+second time the seat under the willow trellis, "I'm going to sit down
+here, unless you'll come to tea at Boffin's."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to sit down," returned Mildred, seating herself; "or to
+have tea or anything. I want to be just going, going, going. I feel as
+though if I stop for a minute something horrid will happen."</p>
+
+<p>Tims wrinkled her whole face anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't do that, Tims," cried Mildred, sharply. "You look hideous."</p>
+
+<p>Tims colored, rose and walked away. She suddenly thought, with tears in
+her eyes, of the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> Milly who would never have spoken to her like
+that. By the time she had reached the little basin in the middle of the
+garden, where the irises grew, Mildred had caught her up.</p>
+
+<p>"Tims, dear old Tims! What a wretch I am! I couldn't help letting off
+steam on something&mdash;you don't know what I feel like."</p>
+
+<p>Tims allowed herself to be pacified, but in her heart there remained a
+yearning for her earlier and gentler friend&mdash;that Milly Flaxman who was
+certainly not dead, yet as certainly gone out of existence.</p>
+
+<p>It was towards the end of the last week of Term, and the gayeties of
+Commemoration had already begun. Mildred threw herself into them with
+feverish enjoyment. She seemed to grudge even the hours that must be
+lost in the unconsciousness of sleep. The Iretons, cousins from India,
+who had never known the former Milly, took a house in Oxford for a week.
+She went with them to three College balls and a Masonic, and spent the
+days in a carnival of luncheon and boating-parties. She attracted plenty
+of admiration, and enjoyed herself wildly, yet also purposefully;
+because she was trying to get rid of that haunting feeling that if she
+stopped a minute "something horrid would happen."</p>
+
+<p>Stewart meantime was finding love not so entirely beautiful and
+delightful a thing as he had at first imagined it. In his dreamy way he
+had overlooked the fact of Commemoration, and planned when Term was over
+to find Mildred constantly at the Fletchers' and to be able to arrange
+quiet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> days on the river. But if he found her there, she was always in
+company, and though she made herself as charming to him as usual, she
+showed no disposition to forsake all others and cleave only to him. He
+was not a dancing man, and suffered cruelly on the evenings when he knew
+her to be at balls, and fancied all her partners in love with her.</p>
+
+<p>But on the Thursday after Commemoration, the Fletchers gave a strawberry
+tea at Wytham, as a farewell festivity to their cousins. And Ian Stewart
+was there. With Mrs. Fletcher's connivance, he took Mildred home alone
+in a canoe, by the deep and devious stream which runs under Wytham
+woods. She went on talking with a vivacious gayety which was almost
+foolish. He saw that it was unreal and that her nerves were at high
+tension. His own were also. He did not intend to propose to her that
+day; but he could no longer restrain himself, and he began to speak to
+her of his love.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" she cried, with a vehement gesture. "Not to-day! oh, not to-day!
+I can't bear it!" She put her head on her knee and moaned again, "Not
+to-day, I'm too tired, I really am. I can't bear it."</p>
+
+<p>This was all the answer he could get, and her manner left him in
+complete uncertainty as to whether she meant to accept or to refuse him.</p>
+
+<p>Tims had been at the strawberry tea too, and came into Mildred's room in
+the evening, curious to know what had happened. She found Mildred
+without a light, sitting, or rather lying in a wicker<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> chair. When the
+candle was lighted she saw that Mildred was very pale and shivering.</p>
+
+<p>"You're overtired, my girl," she said. "That's what's the matter with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Tims," moaned Mildred. "I feel so ill and so frightened. I know
+something horrid's going to happen&mdash;I know it is."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a donkey," returned Tims. "I'll help you undress and then you
+turn in. You'll be as jolly as a sandboy to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>But Mildred was crying tremulously. "Oh, Tims, how dreadful it would be
+to die!"</p>
+
+<p>"Idiot!" cried Tims, and shook Mildred with all her might. Mildred's
+tiny sobs turned into a shriek of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"My goodness!" ejaculated Tims; "you're in hysterics!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know I am," gasped Mildred. "I was laughing to think of what Aunt
+Beatrice would say." And she giggled amid her tears.</p>
+
+<p>Tims insisted on her rising from the chair, undressing, and getting into
+bed. Then she sat by her in the half-dark, waiting for the miserable
+tears to leave off.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't cry, old girl, don't cry. Go to sleep and forget all about it,"
+she kept repeating, almost mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>At length leaning over the bed she saw that Mildred was asleep, lying
+straight on her bed with her feet crossed and her hands laid on her
+bosom.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>About noon on Friday Milly Flaxman awoke. She lay very quiet, sleepy and
+comfortable, her eyes fixed idly on a curve in the jessamine-pattern
+paper opposite her bed. The windows were wide open, the blinds down and
+every now and again flapping softly, as a capricious little breeze went
+by, whispering through the leafy trees outside. There seemed nothing
+unusual in that; she always slept with her windows open. But as her
+senses emerged from those mists which lie on the surface of the river of
+sleep, she was conscious of a balmy warmth in the room, of an impression
+of bright sunshine behind the dark blinds, and of noises from the
+streets reaching her with a kind of sharpness associated with sunshine.
+She sat up, looked at her watch, and was shocked to find how late she
+had slept. She must have missed a lecture. Then the recollection of the
+dinner-party at the Fletchers', the verdict of Mr. Stewart on her chance
+of a First, and her own hysterical outburst returned to her,
+overpowering all outward impressions. She felt calm and well now, but
+unhappy and ashamed of herself. She put her feet out of bed and looked
+round mechanically for her dressing-gown and slippers. Their absence was
+unimportant, for no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> sense of chill struck through her thin night-gown
+to her warm body, and going to the window, she drew up the blind.</p>
+
+<p>The high June sun struck full upon her, hot and dazzling, but not so
+dazzling that she could not see the row of garden trees through whose
+bare branches she had yesterday descried the squalid roofs of the town.
+They were spreading now in a thick screen of fresh green leaves. She
+leaned out, as though further investigation might explain the
+phenomenon, and saw a red standard rose in full flower under her window.
+The thing was exactly like a dream, and she tried to wake up but could
+not. She was panic-stricken and trembling. Had she been very, very ill?
+Was it possible to be unconscious for six months? She looked at herself
+in a dressing-glass near the window, which she had never placed there,
+and saw that she was pale and had dark marks under her eyes, but not
+more so than had been the case in that yesterday so strangely and
+mysteriously removed in time. Her slender white arms and throat were as
+rounded as usual. And if she had been ill, why was she left alone like
+this? She found a dressing-gown not her own, and went on a voyage of
+discovery. But the other rooms on her floor were dismantled and
+tenantless. The girls were gone and the servants were "cleaning" in a
+distant part of the College. She felt incapable of getting into bed
+again and waiting for some one to come, so she began dressing herself
+with trembling hands. Every detail increased the sense of strangeness.
+There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> were a number of strange clothes, ball-dresses and others,
+hanging in her cupboard, strange odds and ends thrust confusedly into
+her bureau. She found at length a blue cotton frock of her own, which
+seemed just home from the wash. She had twisted up her hair and was
+putting on the blue frock, when she heard a step on the stairs, and
+paused with beating heart. Who was coming? How would the mystery be
+resolved? The door opened and Tims came in&mdash;the old Tims, wrinkled face,
+wig, and old straw hat on one side as usual.</p>
+
+<p>"Tims!" cried Milly, flying towards her and speaking with pale lips.
+"Please, please tell me&mdash;what has happened? Have I been very ill?" And
+she stared in Tims's face with a tragic mask of terror and anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>"Now take it easy&mdash;take it easy, M., my girl!" cried Tims, giving her a
+great squeeze and a clap on the shoulder. "I'm jolly glad to see you
+back. But don't let's have any more of your hysterics. No, never no
+more!"</p>
+
+<p>"Have I been away?" asked Milly, her lips still trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you had!" exclaimed Tims. "But nobody knows it except
+me. Don't forget that. Here's a note for you from old B. Read it first
+or we shall both forget all about it. She had to go away early this
+morning."</p>
+
+<p>Milly opened the note and read:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Milly</span>,&mdash;I am sorry not to say good-bye, but glad you
+are sleeping off your fatigue. I want to tell you, between
+ourselves, not to go on worrying about the results<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> of the
+Schools, as I think you are doing, in spite of your
+pretences to the contrary. I hear you have done at least one
+brilliant paper, and although I, of course, know nothing
+certain, I believe you and the College will have reason to
+rejoice when the list comes out.</p>
+
+<p class="f1">"Yours affectionately,</p>
+
+<p class="f2">"<span class="smcap">Mary Burt.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"What does it mean?&mdash;oh, what can it mean?" faltered Milly, holding out
+the missive to Tims.</p>
+
+<p>"It means you've been in for Greats, my girl, and done first-rate. But
+the strain's been a bit too much for you, and you've had another
+collapse of memory. You had one in the end of November. You've been
+uncommonly well ever since, and worked like a Trojan, but you've not
+been quite your usual self, and I'm glad you've come right again, old
+girl. Let me tell you the whole business."</p>
+
+<p>Tims did so. She wanted social tact, but she had the tact of the heart
+which made her hide from Milly how very different, how much more
+brilliant and attractive Milly the Second had been than her normal self.
+She only made her friend feel that the curious episode had entailed no
+disgrace, but that somehow in her abnormal condition she had done well
+in the Schools, and probably touched the top of her ambition.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't feel as though it had been quite straightforward to hide it
+up so," said Milly. "I shall write and tell Miss Burt and Aunt Beatrice,
+and tell the Fletchers when I go to them."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll do nothing of the kind, you stupid," snapped Tims. "You'll be
+simply giving me away<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> if you do. What is the good? It won't happen
+again unless you're idiot enough to overwork yourself again. Very likely
+not then; for, as an open-minded, scientific woman, I believe it to have
+been a case of hypnotism, and in France and the United States they'd
+have thought it a very interesting one. But in England people are so
+prejudiced they'd say you'd simply been out of your mind; although that
+wouldn't prevent them from blaming me for hypnotizing you."</p>
+
+<p>While Tims spoke thus, there was a knocking without, and a maid
+delivered a note for Miss Flaxman. Milly held it in her hands and
+studied it musingly before opening the envelope. Her pale, troubled face
+colored and grew more serious. Tims had not mentioned Ian Stewart, but
+Milly had not forgotten him or his handwriting. Tims knew it too. She
+restrained her excitement while Milly turned her back and stood by the
+window reading the note. She must have read them several times over, the
+two sides of the sheet inscribed with Stewart's small, scholarly
+handwriting, before she turned her transfigured face towards the
+anxiously expectant Tims.</p>
+
+<p>"Tims, dear," she said at length, smiling tremulously, and laying
+tremulous hands on Tims's two thin shoulders&mdash;"dear old Tims, why didn't
+you tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you what?" asked Tims, grinning delightedly. Milly threw her arms
+round her friend's neck and hid her happy tears and blushes between
+Tims's ear and shoulder.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Stewart&mdash;it seems too good to be true&mdash;he loves me, he really does.
+He wants me to be his wife."</p>
+
+<p>Most girls would have hugged and kissed Milly, and Tims did hug her, but
+instead of kissing her, she banged and slapped her back and shoulders
+hard all over, shaking the while with deep internal chuckles. It hurt,
+but Milly did not mind, for it was sympathy. Presently she drew herself
+away, and wiping her damp eyes, said, smiling shyly:</p>
+
+<p>"He's never guessed how much I care about him. I'm so glad. He says he
+doesn't wonder at my hesitation and talks about others more worthy to
+love me. But you know there isn't any one except Mr. Toovey. Poor Mr.
+Toovey! I do hope I haven't behaved very badly to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind Toovey," chuckled Tims. "Anyhow, Milly, I've got a good load
+off my mind. I didn't half like having put that other girl into your
+boots. However, you've come back, and everything's going to be all
+right."</p>
+
+<p>"All right!" breathed Milly. "Why, Tims, darling, I never thought any
+one in the world could be half so happy as I am."</p>
+
+<p>And Tims left Milly to write the answer for which Ian Stewart was so
+anxiously waiting.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The engagement proceeded after the manner of engagements. No one was
+surprised at it and every one was pleased. The little whirlpool of talk
+that it created prevented Milly's ignorance of the events of the past
+six or seven months from coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> to the surface. She lay awake at night,
+devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But
+she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an
+unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state,
+and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since
+the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that
+quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him
+about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to
+bring to light unsuspected sides of a personality. But he laughed at
+hypnotism as a mixture of fraud and hysteria. So with many searchings of
+heart, she dropped the subject.</p>
+
+<p>She was staying at the Fletchers' and saw Ian every day. He was all that
+she could wish as a lover, and it never occurred to her to ask whether
+he felt all that he himself could have wished as such. He was very fond
+of Milly and quite content with her, but not perfectly content with
+himself. He supposed he must at bottom be one of those ordinary and
+rather contemptible men who care more for the excitement of the chase
+than for the object of it. But he felt sure he was really a very lucky
+fellow, and determined not to give way to the self-analysis which is
+always said to be the worst enemy of happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Flaxman had been the only woman in for Greats, and as a favor she
+was taken first in <i>viva voce</i>. The questions were directed to probing
+her actual knowledge in places where she had made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> one or two amazing
+blunders. But she emerged triumphant, and went in good spirits to
+Clewes, Aunt Beatrice's country home in the North, whither Ian Stewart
+shortly followed her. Beyond the fact that she wore perforce and with
+shame, not having money to buy others, frocks which Lady Thomson
+disapproved, she was once more the adoring niece to whom her aunt was
+accustomed. And Lady Thomson liked Ian. She never expected men to share
+her fads.</p>
+
+<p>In due time came the announcement of the First, bringing almost as many
+congratulatory letters as the engagement. And on August 2d Milly sailed
+for Australia, where she was to spend two or three months with her
+family.</p>
+
+<p>In October the newspapers announced that the marriage of Miss Mildred
+Beatrice Flaxman, eldest daughter of the Dean of Stirling, South
+Australia, with Mr. Ian Stewart, Fellow of Durham College, Oxford, would
+take place at Oxford in the second week in December.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped
+chamber-maid of the Hôtel du Chalet made the statement to the manager,
+who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired
+yesterday, pauvre petite!"</p>
+
+<p>The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman
+went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want
+sanveeches when one sleeps."</p>
+
+<p>"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping
+like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her
+duties.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>déjeuner</i> was over, and those guests who had not already gone out
+for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and
+staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions
+and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
+died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
+a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
+But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> with frowning,
+startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
+varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
+was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
+painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
+room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
+been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
+slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
+other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
+her sitting up on the bedside.</p>
+
+<p>"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"</p>
+
+<p>A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
+anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
+power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
+unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
+flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
+strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
+Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
+allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
+nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
+been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
+not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
+audible cry she sprang to her feet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"</p>
+
+<p>The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
+plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
+might have been heard in the corridor.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
+capable of it."</p>
+
+<p>Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
+thinking.</p>
+
+<p>"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
+am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
+somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"&mdash;she was
+thinking of Milly&mdash;"How I should like to strangle her!"</p>
+
+<p>She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs,
+propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
+snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
+only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
+was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
+prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
+photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
+that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
+from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
+was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
+with a veil of fine lace.</p>
+
+<p>"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
+from her. "Fancy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span> my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
+for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"</p>
+
+<p>But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
+indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
+must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
+was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
+thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
+of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
+combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
+on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
+out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
+on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
+ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
+falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
+deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
+cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
+blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
+and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
+against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
+secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
+looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
+Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
+for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
+any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
+lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey.
+Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
+climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
+knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
+on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
+smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
+Archibald Toovey.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
+towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
+her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
+into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
+those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
+something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
+by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
+been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old&mdash;disappointed,
+that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
+happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
+falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
+himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
+the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
+hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
+returned to him in one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
+the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
+the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
+laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
+endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
+his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
+at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
+and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
+his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
+received no apology.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
+eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
+kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
+walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
+quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
+thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
+anxiety about his safety and indulging another on the subject of his wet
+feet. A smile of tender amusement visited his lips as he took hold of
+the door-handle. Exactly as he touched it, the key on the other side
+turned. The lock had been stiff, but it had shot out in the nick of
+time, and he found himself brought up short in his impulsive career and
+hurtling against a solid barrier. He knocked, but no one answered. He
+could have fancied he heard panting breaths on the other side of the
+ill-fitting door.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mayn't I come in, darling?" he asked, gently, but with a shade of
+reproach in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of
+coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He
+paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women
+were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget
+that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and
+devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in
+this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference.</p>
+
+<p>"Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then
+after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>Ian smiled to himself as he answered:</p>
+
+<p>"My feet are wet. I want to change."</p>
+
+<p>He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said
+to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door
+to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of
+anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if
+you'll wait."</p>
+
+<p>He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and
+shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always
+put away his things for him and should have known where to find them.
+The door opened a chink and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> shoes and stockings came flying through
+on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine
+strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but
+fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and
+stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the
+smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that
+women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been
+uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than
+content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of
+hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her
+that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young
+wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the
+crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those
+tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our
+personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power
+of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that&mdash;very
+fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware&mdash;he
+did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive
+that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings
+with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a
+complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus
+advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the
+enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible
+trans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>formations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms
+which they believe to be moly; but the true moly is not easy to
+distinguish. And he hoped that he and Milly, in their different ways,
+had found and were both wearing the milk-white flower. Yet he knew that
+this was a matter which must be left to the arbitrament of time.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>On their return to Oxford the young couple were fêted beyond the common.
+People who had known Milly Flaxman in earlier days were surprised to
+think how little they had noticed her beauty or guessed what a fund of
+humor, what an extraordinary charm, had lurked beneath the surface of
+her former quiet, grave manner. The Master of Durham alone refused to be
+surprised. He merely affirmed in his short squeak that he had always
+admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in
+the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors
+from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the
+austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever she appeared, the vivid personality of Mrs. Stewart made a kind
+of effervescence which that indescribable entity, a vivid personality,
+is sure to keep fizzing about it. She was devoutly admired, fiercely
+criticised, and asked everywhere. It is true she had quite given up her
+music, but she drew caricatures which were irresistibly funny, and was a
+tremendous success in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
+everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> house,
+although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
+the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
+destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
+good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
+Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
+extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
+brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
+principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
+of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
+ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
+that the <i>aura</i> surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
+Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
+a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
+her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
+others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
+her manners or her character.</p>
+
+<p>To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
+where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
+a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
+adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
+housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
+were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
+midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> reflect
+that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
+complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
+the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
+he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
+time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
+seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
+agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
+Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
+Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
+country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low and Dieppe would
+cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
+her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
+although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
+was displeased with him.</p>
+
+<p>Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
+imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
+scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
+"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
+as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
+do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
+and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
+asleep. The room was dark,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> but he saw her by the illumination of
+distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
+appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
+low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
+open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
+white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
+writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
+concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
+to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
+was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
+not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
+continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
+long past midnight and the town was asleep.</p>
+
+<p>He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
+pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
+nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
+and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
+trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
+as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
+it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
+chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
+strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
+there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
+sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
+various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the
+wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which
+had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the
+night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at
+times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or
+superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves&mdash;never before so strongly, so
+over-masteringly as to-night. A blue blaze of crooked lightning
+zigzagged down the outer darkness and seemed to strike the earth but a
+little beyond the garden wall. Following on its heels a tremendous clap
+of thunder burst, as it were, on the very chimneys. The solid house
+shook to its foundations. But the tide of horrible, irrational fear
+which swept over Ian's whole being was not caused by this mere
+exaggerated commonplace of nature. He could give no guess what it was
+that caused it; he only knew that it was agony. He knew what it meant to
+feel the hair lift on his head; he knew what the Psalmist meant when he
+said, "My bones are turned to water." And as he stood unable to move,
+afraid to turn his head, abject and ashamed of his abjectness, he was
+listening, listening for he knew not what.</p>
+
+<p>At length it came. He heard the stairs creak and a soft padding footstep
+coming slowly down them; with it the brush of a light garment and
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>termittently a faint human sound between a sigh and a sob. He did not
+reflect that he could not really have heard such slight sounds through a
+thick stone wall and a closed door. He heard them. The steps stopped at
+the door; a hand seemed feeling to open it, and again there was a
+painful sigh. The physical terror had not passed from him, but the
+sudden though that it was his wife and that she was frightened or ill,
+made him able to master it. He seized the lamp, because he knew the
+light in the hall was extinguished, rushed to the door, opened it and
+looked out. There was no one there. He made a hasty but sufficient
+search and returned to the study.</p>
+
+<p>The extremity of his fear was now passed, but an unpleasantly eery
+feeling still lingered about him and he had a very definite desire to
+find himself in some warm, human neighborhood. He had left the door open
+and was arranging the papers on his writing-table, when once again he
+heard those soft padding feet on the stairs; but this time they were
+much heavier, more hurried, and stumbled a little. He stood bent over
+the table, a bundle of papers in his hand, no longer overcome by mortal
+terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
+more&mdash;nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
+the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
+and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
+pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
+she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> only in a long
+night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
+turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
+of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
+to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
+out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
+for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
+fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
+uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
+Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
+staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
+rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
+darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
+confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
+accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
+refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
+animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
+phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
+had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
+rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate&mdash;"My husband!
+Mine! Mine!"&mdash;but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
+as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
+kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
+to catch her,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
+stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
+gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
+shuddering.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
+love! Ian! My life!&mdash;my life! My own husband!"</p>
+
+<p>Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
+had not thought she loved him so passionately. He lifted her on to a
+deep old sofa at the end of the room, wrapped her in a warm Oriental
+coverlet which hung there, and held her to his heart, murmuring love and
+comfort in her cold little ear. It seemed gradually to soothe her,
+although he did not think she really awoke. Then he put her down,
+lighted the lamp outside, and, not without difficulty, carried her up to
+bed. Her eyes were half closed when he laid her down and drew the
+bedclothes over her; and a minute or two later, when he looked in from
+his dressing-room, she was evidently asleep.</p>
+
+<p>When he got into bed she did not stir, and while he lay awake for
+another hour, she remained motionless and breathing regularly. He
+assured himself that the whole curious occurrence could be explained by
+the electrical state of the atmosphere, which had affected his own
+nerves in a way he would never humiliate himself by confessing to any
+one. Those mysterious footsteps on the stairs which he had heard,
+footsteps like his wife's yet not hers; that hand upon the door, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+voice of sighs, were the creation of his own excited brain. In time he
+would doubtless come to believe his own assurances on the point, but
+that night at the bottom of his heart he did not believe them.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+
+<p>Next morning, if Ian himself slept late, Milly slept later still. The
+strained and troubled look which he had seen upon her face even in sleep
+the night before, had passed away in the morning, but she lay almost
+alarmingly still and white. He was reassured by remembering that once
+when they were in Switzerland she had slept about sixteen hours and
+awakened in perfect health. He remained in the house watching over her,
+and about four o'clock she woke up. But she was very pale and very
+quiet; exhausted, he thought, by her strange mental and physical
+exertions of the night before.</p>
+
+<p>She came down to tea with her pretty hair unbecomingly twisted up, and
+dressed in a brownish-yellow tea-gown, which he fancied he remembered
+hearing her denounce as only fit to be turned into a table-cloth. He did
+not precisely criticise these details, but they helped in the impression
+of lifelessness and gloom that hung about her. It was a faint, gleamy
+afternoon, and such sun as there was did not shine into the study. The
+dark panelling looked darker than usual, and as she sat silent and
+listless in a corner of the old sofa, her hair and face stood out
+against it almost startling in their blondness and whiteness. She was
+strangely unlike her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>self, but Stewart comforted himself by remembering
+that she had been odd in her manner and behavior, though in a different
+way, after her long sleep in Switzerland. After he had given her tea, he
+suggested that they should walk in the garden, as the rain was over.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet, Ian," she said. "I want to try and tell you something. I can
+do it better here."</p>
+
+<p>Her mouth quivered. He sat down by her on the sofa.</p>
+
+<p>"Must you tell me now?" he asked, smiling. "Do you really think it
+matters?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;it does matter," she answered, tremulously, pressing her folded
+hands against her breast. "It's something I ought to have told you
+before you married me&mdash;but indeed, indeed I didn't know how dreadful it
+was&mdash;I didn't think it would happen again."</p>
+
+<p>He was puzzled a moment, then spoke, still smiling:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you mean the sleep-walking. Well, darling, it is a bit
+creepy, I admit, but I shall get used to it, if you won't do it too
+often."</p>
+
+<p>"Did I really walk?" she asked&mdash;and a look of horror was growing on her
+face. "Ah! I wasn't sure. No&mdash;it's not that&mdash;it is&mdash;oh, don't think me
+mad, Ian!"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, dearest. I promise I won't."</p>
+
+<p>"I've not been here at all since you've been living in this house. I've
+not seen you, my own precious husband, since I went to sleep in
+Switzerland, at the Hôtel du Chalet&mdash;don't you remember&mdash;when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> we had
+been that long walk up to the glacier and I was so tired?"</p>
+
+<p>Stewart was exceedingly startled. He paused, and then said, very gently
+but very firmly:</p>
+
+<p>"That's nonsense, dearest. You have been here, you've been with me all
+the time."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! You think so, but it was not <i>I</i>&mdash;no, don't interrupt me&mdash;I mean to
+tell you, I must, but I can't if you interrupt me. It was awfully wrong
+of me not to tell you before; but I tried to, and then I saw you
+wouldn't believe me. Do you remember a dinner-party at the Fletchers',
+the autumn before we were engaged&mdash;when Cousin David had just bought
+that picture?"</p>
+
+<p>"That portrait of Lady Hammerton, which is so like you? Yes, I remember
+it perfectly."</p>
+
+<p>"You know I wanted my First so much and I had been working too hard, and
+then I was told that evening that you had said I couldn't get it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Silly me!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I felt certain you didn't love me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Silly you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't interrupt me, please. And I wasn't well, and I cried and cried
+and I couldn't leave off, and then I allowed Tims to hypnotize me. We
+both knew she had no business to do it, it was wrong of us, of course,
+but we couldn't possibly guess what would happen. I went to sleep, and
+so far as I knew I never woke again for more than six months, not till
+the Schools were over."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my darling, I skated with you constantly in the Christmas
+Vacation, and took your work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> through the Term. I assure you that you
+were quite awake then."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember nothing about it. All I know is that some one got my First
+for me."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mildred&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you call me Mildred? That's what they called me when I woke up
+last time; but my own name's Milly."</p>
+
+<p>Stewart rose and paced the room, then came back.</p>
+
+<p>"It's simply a case of collapse of memory, dear. It's very trying, but
+don't let's be fanciful about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought it was only that&mdash;I told you, didn't I, something of that
+sort? But I didn't know then, nobody told me, that I wasn't like myself
+at all those months I couldn't remember. Last night in my sleep I
+knew&mdash;I knew that some one else, something else&mdash;I can't describe it,
+it's impossible&mdash;was struggling hard with me in my own brain, my own
+body, trying to hold me down, to push me back again into the place,
+whatever it was, I came out of. But I got stronger and stronger till I
+was quite myself and the thing couldn't really stop me. I dare say it
+only lasted a few seconds, then I felt quite free&mdash;free from the
+struggle, the pressure; and I saw myself standing in the room, with some
+kind of white floating stuff over my head and about me, and I saw myself
+open the door and go out of the room. I wasn't a bit surprised, but I
+just lay there quiet and peaceful. Then suddenly it came to me that I
+couldn't have seen myself, that the person, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> figure I had seen go
+out of the door was the other one, the creature I had been struggling
+with, who had stolen my shape; and it came to me that she was gone to
+steal you&mdash;to steal your heart from me and take you away; and you
+wouldn't know, you would think it was I, and you would follow her and
+love her and never know it was not your own wife you were loving. And I
+was mad with anger; I never knew before what it meant, Ian, to be as
+angry as that. I struggled hard to get up, and at last I managed it, and
+I came down-stairs after her, but I couldn't find her, and I was sure
+that she had gone and had taken you away with her. And you say I really
+did come down-stairs."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, darling, and if you had been awake instead of asleep, as you
+obviously were, you would have seen that this nightmare of yours was
+nothing but a nightmare. You would have seen that I was alone here,
+quietly arranging my papers before going to bed. You gave me a fright
+coming down as you did, for there was a tremendous thunderstorm going
+on, and I am ashamed to say how queer my own nerves were. The electrical
+state of the atmosphere and a very loud clap of thunder just overhead,
+account for the whole business, which probably lasted only a few seconds
+from beginning to end. Be reasonable, little woman, you are generally
+the most reasonable person I know&mdash;except when you talk about going to
+Dieppe."</p>
+
+<p>Milly gave him a strange look.</p>
+
+<p>"Why am I not reasonable when I talk about going to Dieppe?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He drew her to him and kissed her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind why. We aren't going to excite ourselves to-day or do
+anything but make love and forget nightmares and everything
+disagreeable."</p>
+
+<p>She drew herself away a little and looked with frightened eyes in his.</p>
+
+<p>"But I can't forget, Ian, that I don't remember anything that has
+happened since we were on our honeymoon in Switzerland. And now we are
+in Oxford, and I can see it's quite late in the summer. How can I forget
+that somehow I am being robbed of myself&mdash;robbed of my life with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait till to-morrow and you'll remember everything right enough."</p>
+
+<p>But Milly was not to be convinced. She was willing to submit on the
+question of last night's experiences, but she assured him that Tims
+would bear her out in the assertion that she had never recovered her
+recollection of the months preceding her engagement. Ian ceased trying
+to convince her that she was mistaken on this point; but he argued that
+the memory was of all functions of the brain the most uncertain, that
+there was no limit to its vagaries, which were mere matters of nerves
+and circulation, and that Dr. Norton-Smith, the nerve and brain
+specialist to whom he would take her, would probably turn out to have a
+dozen patients subject to the same affliction as herself. One never
+hears of half the ills that flesh is heir to until the inheritance falls
+to one's own lot.</p>
+
+<p>Milly was a common-sense young woman, and his explanation, especially as
+it was his, pacified<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> her for the time. The clouds had been rolling away
+while they talked, the space of deep blue sky overhead growing larger,
+the sunshine fuller. There was a busy twittering and shaking of little
+wings in the tall pear-tree near the house, where the tomtits in their
+varied liveries loved to congregate. July was not far advanced and the
+sun had still some hours in which to shine. Ian and Milly went out and
+walked in the Parks. The tennis-club lawns were almost deserted, but
+they met a few acquaintances taking their constitutional, like
+themselves, and an exchange of ordinary remarks with people who took her
+normality for granted, helped Milly to believe in it herself. So long as
+the blank in her memory continued, she could not be free from care; but
+she went to sleep that night in Ian's arms, feeling herself protected by
+them not only from bodily harm, but from all those dreadful fears and
+evil fantasies that "do assault and hurt the soul."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ian had been so busy persuading Milly to view her own case as a simple
+one, and so busy comforting her with an almost feminine intuition of
+what would really afford her comfort, that it was only in the watches of
+the night that certain disquieting recollections forced their way into
+his mind. It was of course now part of his creed that he had loved Milly
+Flaxman from the first&mdash;only he had never known her well till that
+Christmas Vacation when they had skated so much together. Later on, such
+disturbing events as engagement and marriage had seemed to him enough to
+explain any changes he had observed in her. Later still, he had been too
+much in love to think about her at all, in the true sense of the word.
+She had been to him "all a wonder and a wild desire."</p>
+
+<p>Now, taking the dates of her collapses of memory, he made, despite
+himself, certain notes on those changes. It is to be feared he did not
+often want to see Miss Timson; but on the day after Milly's return to
+the world, he cycled out to visit her friend. Tims was spending the
+summer on the wild and beautiful ridge which has since become a suburb
+of Oxford. It was doubtful whether he would find her in, as she was
+herself a mighty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> cyclist, making most of her journeys on the wheel,
+happy in the belief that she was saving money at the expense of the
+railway companies.</p>
+
+<p>The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and
+broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands,
+clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a
+self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity.
+But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always
+lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner
+of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level
+country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars
+Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to
+where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy
+track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone,
+whence the poet of <i>Thyrsis</i> looking northward, saw the "fair city with
+her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon
+it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether
+blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling
+trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by
+clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting
+vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the
+youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening
+cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of
+red-roofed homesteads and towered churches,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> moved slowly the broad
+shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above.
+Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world
+showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich,
+indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to
+burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken
+hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep
+in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their
+maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its
+detachment from the wide background floating behind.</p>
+
+<p>Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house
+and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But
+flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright
+little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the
+real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm
+became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her
+collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face
+merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern
+in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of
+positive pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a
+bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old
+boy, don't you?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
+He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
+joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
+in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! <i>I</i> don't
+want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
+of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
+on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"&mdash;there was a note of
+impatience in Ian's voice&mdash;"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
+as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
+how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
+her work, but on the whole it improved."</p>
+
+<p>"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
+remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
+and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
+babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
+asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
+the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
+old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
+difference?"</p>
+
+<p>Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> views as to the
+stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
+to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
+far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
+paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
+unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
+courtship and marriage.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
+only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
+Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."</p>
+
+<p>"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
+right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
+no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
+what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."</p>
+
+<p>Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
+have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
+sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
+particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
+medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
+gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
+you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
+which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
+clapping their glass to the blind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
+The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
+whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
+independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
+but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
+stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
+Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm&mdash;I'm fond of
+them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
+difference."</p>
+
+<p>Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.</p>
+
+<p>They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
+Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
+hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
+hat.</p>
+
+<p>"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
+"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
+for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
+on earth did she?"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
+everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
+the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
+memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
+diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
+experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified&mdash;his own surprise,
+almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
+after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
+even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
+marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
+the Hôtel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant
+nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to
+be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his
+sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only
+saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from
+Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his
+undeviating course.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Milly, too, had not been without a sharp reminder that the leaves in her
+life so blank to her, had been fully inscribed by another. She hardly
+yet felt mistress of the house, but it was pleasant to rest and read in
+the low, white-panelled drawing-room, which lowered awnings kept cool,
+although the afternoon sun struck a golden shaft across the flowering
+window-boxes of its large and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room
+was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at
+bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The
+only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored
+prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed
+pieces of needlework which harmonized with them.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the door-bell rang and a Mr. Fitzroy was announced by the
+parlor-maid, in a tone which implied that she was accustomed to his
+name. He looked about the age of an undergraduate and was
+extraordinarily well-groomed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being
+in a riding-dress. His sleek dark hair was neatly parted in the middle
+and he was clean shaven, when to be so smacked of the stage;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> but his
+manners and expression smacked of nothing of the kind.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awfully glad to find you at home, Mrs. Stewart," he said. "I've
+been lunching at the Morrisons', and, you know, I'm afraid there's going
+to be a row."</p>
+
+<p>The Morrisons? They lived outside Oxford, and Milly knew them by sight,
+that was all.</p>
+
+<p>"What about?" she asked, kindly, thinking the young man had come for
+help, or at least sympathy, in some embarrassment of his own.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, about your acting Galatea. Jim Morrison's been a regular fool
+about it. He'd no business to take it for granted that that was the part
+I wanted Mrs. Shaw for. Now it appears she's telling every one that
+she's been asked to play the lead at the Besselsfield theatricals; and,
+by Jove, he says she is to, too!"</p>
+
+<p>Milly went rather pale and then quite pink.</p>
+
+<p>"Then of course I couldn't think of taking the part," she said, gasping
+with relief at this providential escape.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fitzroy in his turn flushed. He had an obstinate chin and the cares
+of stage-management had already traced a line right across his smooth
+forehead. It deepened to a furrow as he leaned forward out of his low
+wicker chair, clutching the pair of dogskin gloves which he held in his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, I say now, Mrs. Stewart!" and his voice and eye were
+surprisingly stern for one so young. "That's not playing fair. You
+promised me you'd see me through this show, and you know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> as well as I
+do, Mrs. Shaw can no more act than those fire-irons."</p>
+
+<p>"But I&mdash;" Milly was about to say "I've never acted in my life"&mdash;when she
+remembered that she knew less than any one in her acquaintance what she
+had or had not done in that recent life which was not hers. "I shouldn't
+act Galatea at all well," she substituted lamely; "and I shouldn't look
+the part nearly as well as Mrs. Shaw will."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, Mrs. Stewart, but I'm certain you're simply cut out for it
+all round, and you told me the other day you were particularly anxious
+to play it. You promised you'd stick to me through thick and thin and
+not care a twopenny&mdash;I mean a straw&mdash;what Jim Morrison and Mrs. Shaw&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In the stress of conversation they had neither of them noticed the
+tinkle of the front-door bell. Now the door of the room, narrow and in
+the thickness of an enormous wall, was thrown open and Mrs. Shaw was
+announced.</p>
+
+<p>Fitzroy, forgetful of manners in his excitement, stooped forward and
+gripping Milly's arm almost hissed:</p>
+
+<p>"Remember! You've promised me."</p>
+
+<p>The words filled Milly with misery. That any one should be able to
+accuse her of breaking a promise, however unreal her responsibility for
+it, was horrible to her.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Shaw entered, no longer the seraph of twenty months ago. She had
+latterly put off the æsthetic raiment she had worn with such peculiar
+grace, and her dress and coiffure were quite in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> fashion of the
+hour. The transformation somewhat shocked Milly, who could never help
+feeling a slight austere prejudice against fashionably dressed woman.
+Then, considering how little she knew Mrs. Shaw, it was embarrassing to
+be kissed by her.</p>
+
+<p>"It's odd I should find you here, Mr. Fitzroy," said Mrs. Shaw, settling
+her rustling skirts on a chintzy chair. "I've just come to talk to Mrs.
+Stewart about the acting. I'm so sorry there's been a misunderstanding
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>Her tone was civil but determined, and there was a fighting look in her
+eye.</p>
+
+<p>"So am I, Mrs. Shaw, most uncommonly sorry," returned Fitzroy, patting
+his sleek hair and feeling that his will was adamant, however pretty
+Mrs. Shaw might be.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I shouldn't have thought of taking the part away from Mrs.
+Stewart," she resumed, glancing at Milly, not without meaning, "but Mr.
+Morrison asked me to take it quite a fortnight ago. I've learned most of
+it and rehearsed two scenes already with him. He says they go capitally,
+and we both think it seems rather a pity to waste all that labor and
+change the part now."</p>
+
+<p>Fitzroy cast a look at Mrs. Stewart which was meant to call up
+reinforcements from that quarter; but as she sat there quite silent, he
+cleared his throat and begun:</p>
+
+<p>"It's an awful bore, of course, but I fancy it's about three weeks or a
+month since I first asked Mrs. Stewart to play the lead&mdash;isn't it, Mrs.
+Stewart?"</p>
+
+<p>Milly muttered assent, horribly suspecting a lie.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> A flash of indignant
+scorn from Mrs. Shaw confirmed the suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Stewart said something quite different when I spoke to her about
+it at tennis on Friday. Didn't you, Mildred?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Milly crimsoned.</p>
+
+<p>"Did I?" she stammered. "I'm afraid I've got a dreadfully bad
+memory&mdash;for&mdash;for dates of that kind."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Shaw smiled coldly. Mr. Fitzroy felt himself deceived in Mrs.
+Stewart as an ally. He had counted on her promised support, on her wit
+and spirit to carry him through, and her conduct was simply cowardly.</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is, Mrs. Shaw," he said, "Jim Morrison's not bossing this show
+at all. That's where the mistake has come in. My aunt, Lady Wolvercote,
+is a bit of an autocrat, don't you know, and she doesn't like us fellows
+to arrange things on our own account. If she knew you I'm sure she'd see
+what a splendid Galatea you'd make, but as it is she's set her heart on
+getting Mrs. Stewart from the very first."</p>
+
+<p>Had he stopped here his position would have been good, but an indignant
+instinct, urging him to push the reluctant Mrs. Stewart into the proper
+place of woman&mdash;that natural shield of man against all the social
+disagreeables he brings on himself&mdash;made Fitzroy rush into the fatal
+detail.</p>
+
+<p>"My aunt told you so at the Masonic; didn't she, Mrs. Stewart?"</p>
+
+<p>Milly, under the young man's imperious eye,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> assented feebly, but Mrs.
+Shaw laughed. She perfectly remembered Mildred having mentioned on that
+very occasion that she did not know Lady Wolvercote by sight.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I've come just a few minutes too soon," she said, dryly.
+"You and Mr. Fitzroy don't seem to have talked things over quite
+enough."</p>
+
+<p>The saying was dark and yet too clear. Milly, the meticulously truthful,
+saw herself convicted of some horrible falsehood. She blushed violently,
+gasped, and rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Mr. Fitzroy
+ignoring the insinuation, changed his line.</p>
+
+<p>"The part we really wanted you to take, Mrs. Shaw, was that of a nymph
+in an Elizabethan masque which Lumley has written, with music by Stephen
+Bampton. It's to be played in the rose garden and there's a chorus of
+nymphs who sing and dance. We want them to look perfectly lovely, don't
+you know, and as there can't be any make-up to speak of, it's awfully
+difficult to find the right people."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Shaw disdained the lure and mentally condemned his anxiously civil
+manner as "soapy."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall ask Mr. Morrison to go to Lady Wolvercote at once," she said,
+"and see whether she really wishes me to give up the part. Time's
+getting on, and he says he won't be able to have many more rehearsals."</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound as of a carriage stopping in the street below, the
+jingling of bits, and a high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> female voice giving an order. Fitzroy,
+inwardly exasperated by Mrs. Shaw's resistance and the abject conduct of
+his ally, sprang to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe that's my aunt!" he exclaimed. "She wants me to call at
+Blenheim on the way home, and I suppose the Morrisons told her where I
+was."</p>
+
+<p>He managed to slip his head out between the edge of an awning and the
+mignonette and geraniums of a window-box.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my aunt, right enough. May I fetch her up, Mrs. Stewart?" He was
+down the stairs in a moment and voluble in low-voiced colloquy with the
+lady in the barouche.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Wolvercote was organizing the great fancy fair for the benefit of
+the County Cottage Hospitals, and had left the dramatic part of the
+programme to her nephew to arrange. She was a tall, slight woman, of the
+usual age for aunts, and pleasant to every one; but she took it for
+granted that every one would do as she wished&mdash;naturally, since they
+always did in her neighborhood. As she stumbled up the stairs after
+Charlie Fitzroy&mdash;it was a dark staircase and narrow in proportion to its
+massive oak balusters&mdash;she felt faintly annoyed with him for dragging
+her into the quarrels of his middle-class friends, but confident that
+she could manage them without the least trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Milly was relieved at the return of Mr. Fitzroy with his aunt. She had
+had an unhappy five minutes with Mrs. Shaw, who had been saying cryptic
+but unpleasant things and calling her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> "Mildred"; whereas she did not so
+much as know Mrs. Shaw's Christian name.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing Mrs. Shaw, beautiful, animated, well-dressed, and Milly neatly
+clothed, since her clothes were not of her own choosing, but with her
+hair unbecomingly knotted, the brightness of her eyes, complexion, and
+expression in eclipse, Lady Wolvercote wondered at her nephew's choice.
+But that was his affair. She began to talk in a rather high-pitched
+voice and continuously, like one whose business it is to talk; so that
+it was difficult to interrupt without rudeness.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're going to be kind enough to act Galatea for us at our fancy
+fair, Mrs. Stewart? We want it to be a great success, and Lord
+Wolvercote and I have heard so much about your acting. My nephew said
+the part of Galatea would suit you exactly; didn't you, Charlie?"</p>
+
+<p>"Down to the ground," interpolated, or rather accompanied, Fitzroy. "We
+shall have the placards out on Wednesday, and people are looking forward
+already to seeing Mrs. Stewart. There'll be a splendid audience."</p>
+
+<p>"Every one has promised to fill their houses for the fair," Lady
+Wolvercote was continuing, "and the Duke thinks he may be able to get
+down &mdash;&mdash;," she mentioned a royalty. "You're going to help us too,
+aren't you, Mrs. Shaw? It's so very kind of you. We've got such a pretty
+part for you in a musical affair which Lenny Lumley wrote with somebody
+or other for the Duchess of Ulster's Elizabethan bazaar. There's a
+chorus of fairies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>&mdash;nymphs, Charlie? Yes, nymphs, and we want them all
+to be very pretty and able to sing, and there's a charming dance for
+them. I'm afraid that silly boy, Jim Morrison, made some mistake about
+it, and told you we wanted you to act Galatea. But of course we couldn't
+possibly do without you in the other thing, and Mrs. Stewart seems quite
+pointed out for that Galatea part. Jim's such a dear, isn't he? And such
+a splendid actor, every one says he really ought to go on the stage. But
+we none of us pay the least attention to anything the dear boy says, for
+he always does manage to get things wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Shaw had been making little movements preparatory to going. She had
+no gift for the stage except beauty, but that produces an illusion of
+success, and she took her acting with the seriousness of a Duse.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry I didn't know Mr. Morrison's habits better," she replied.
+"I've been studying the part of Galatea a good deal and rehearsing it
+with him as well. Of course, I don't for a moment wish to prevent Mrs.
+Stewart from taking it, but I've spent a good deal of time upon it and
+I'm afraid I can't undertake anything else. Of course, it's very
+inconvenient stopping in Oxford in August, and I shouldn't care to do it
+except for the sake of a part which I felt gave me a real opportunity&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But it's a very pretty part we've got for you," resumed Lady
+Wolvercote, perplexed. "And we were hoping to see you over at
+Besselsfield a good deal for rehearsals&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It seemed to her a "part of nature's holy plan" that the prospect of
+Besselsfield should prove irresistibly attractive to the wives of
+professional men.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks, so much, but I'm sure you and Mr. Fitzroy must know plenty of
+girls who would do for that sort of part," returned Mrs. Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>Milly here broke in eagerly:</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Lady Wolvercote, do persuade Mrs. Shaw to take Galatea; I'm
+sure I sha'n't be able to do it a bit; and I would try and take the
+nymph. I should love the music, and I know I could do the singing,
+anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>She rose because Mrs. Shaw had risen and was looking for her parasol and
+shaking out her plumes. But why did Mr. Fitzroy and Mrs. Shaw both stare
+at her in an unvarnished surprise, touched with ridicule on the lady's
+side?</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, Mrs. Stewart, that won't do!" cried he, in obvious dismay. At
+the same moment Mrs. Shaw ejaculated, ironically:</p>
+
+<p>"That's very brave of you Mildred! I thought you hated music and were
+never going to try to sing again."</p>
+
+<p>She and Fitzroy had both been present on an occasion when Mildred, urged
+on by Milly's musical reputation, had committed herself to an experiment
+in song which had not been successful.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you very much," Mrs. Shaw went on, "for offering to change, but
+of course Lady Wolvercote must arrange things as she likes; and, to
+speak frankly, I'm not particularly sorry to give the act<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>ing up, as my
+husband was rather upset at my not being able to go to Switzerland with
+him on the 28th. No, please don't trouble; I can let myself out.
+Good-bye, Lady Wolvercote; I hope the fair and the theatricals will be a
+great success. Good-bye, Mr. Fitzroy, good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Wolvercote's faint remonstrances were drowned in the adieus, and
+Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly
+into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing
+with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage
+had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a
+public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard
+Fitzroy's bitter remarks on Mrs. Shaw&mdash;not forgetting Jim Morrison&mdash;or
+Lady Wolvercote exclaiming in a voice almost dreamy with amazement:</p>
+
+<p>"Really it's too extraordinary!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm very sorry Mrs. Shaw won't take the part," said Milly, clasping and
+unclasping her slender fingers, "for I know I can't do it myself."</p>
+
+<p>Fitzroy was protesting, but she forced herself to continue: "You don't
+know what I'm like when I'm nervous. When we had <i>tableaux vivants</i> at
+Ascham I was supposed to be Charlotte putting a wreath on Werther's urn,
+and I trembled so much that I knocked the urn down. It was only
+card-board, so it didn't break, but every one laughed and the tableau
+was spoiled."</p>
+
+<p>Fitzroy and his aunt cried out that that was nothing, a first
+appearance; any one could see she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> had got over that now. Pale, with
+terrified eyes, she looked from one to the other of her tormentors, who
+continued to sing the praises of her past prowess on the boards and to
+foretell the unprecedented harvest of laurels she would reap at
+Besselsfield. The higher their enthusiasm rose, the more profound became
+her dejection. There seemed no loop-hole for escape, unless the earth
+would open and swallow her, which however much to be desired was hardly
+to be expected.</p>
+
+<p>The ting of a bicycle-bell below did not seem to promise assistance, for
+cyclists affected the quiet street. But it happened that this bicycle
+bore Ian to the door. He did not notice the coronet on the carriage
+which stood before it, and assumed it to belong to one of the three or
+four ladies in Oxford who kept such equipages. Yet in the blank state of
+Milly's memory, he was sorry she had not denied herself to visitors,
+which Mildred had already learned to do with a freedom only possible to
+women who are assured social success. Commonly the sight of a carriage
+would have sent him tiptoeing past the drawing-room, but now, vaguely
+uneasy, he came straight in. He looked particularly tall in the frame of
+the doorway, so low that his black hair almost touched the lintel;
+particularly handsome in the shaded, white-panelled room, into which the
+dark glow of his sunburned skin and brown eyes, bright with exercise,
+seemed to bring the light and warmth of the summer earth and sky.</p>
+
+<p>Milly sprang to meet him. Lady Wolvercote was surprised to learn that
+this was Mrs. Stewart's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> husband. She had no idea a Don could be so
+young and good-looking. Judging of Dons solely by the slight and
+slighting references of her undergraduate relatives, she had imagined
+them to be weird-looking men, within various measurable distances of the
+grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Lady Wolvercote and Mr. Fitzroy want me to act Galatea at the
+Besselsfield theatricals," said Milly, clinging to his sleeve and
+looking up at him with appealing eyes. "Please tell them I can't
+possibly do it. I'm&mdash;I'm not well enough&mdash;am I?"</p>
+
+<p>"We're within three weeks of the performance, sir," put in Fitzroy.
+"Mrs. Stewart promised she'd do it, and we shall be in a regular fix now
+if she gives it up. Mrs. Shaw's chucked us already."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and every one says how splendidly Mrs. Stewart acts," pleaded Lady
+Wolvercote.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart had half forgotten the matter; but now he remembered that
+Mildred had been keen to have the part only a week ago, and a little
+pettish because he had advised her to leave it alone, on account of Mrs.
+Shaw. Now she was hanging on him with desperate eyes and that worried
+brow which he had not seen once since he had married her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm extremely sorry, Lady Wolvercote," he said, "but my wife's had a
+nervous break-down lately and I can't allow her to act. She's not fit
+for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I see&mdash;I quite understand!" returned Lady Wolvercote. "But we'd
+take great care of her, Mr. Stewart. She could come and stay at
+Besselsfield."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Fitzroy's gloom lifted. His aunt was a trump. Surely an invitation to
+Besselsfield must do the job. But Stewart, though apologetic, was
+inflexible. He had forbidden his wife to act and there was an end of it.
+The perception of the differences between the two personalities of Milly
+which had been thrust to-day on his unwilling mind, made him grasp the
+meaning of her frantic appeals for protection. He relieved her of all
+responsibility for her refusal to act.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Wolvercote observed, as she and her nephew went sadly on their way,
+that Mr. Stewart seemed a very, very odd man in spite of his presentable
+manners and appearance; and Fitzroy replied gloomily that of course he
+was a beast. Dons always were beasts.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The diplomatic incident of the theatricals was not the only minor
+trouble which Milly found awaiting her. The cook's nerves were upset by
+a development of rigid economy on the part of her mistress, and she gave
+notice; the house parlor-maid followed suit. No one seemed to have kept
+Ian's desk tidy, his papers in order, or his clothes properly mended. It
+was a joy to her to put everything belonging to him right.</p>
+
+<p>When all was arranged to her satisfaction: "Ian," she said, sitting on
+his knee with her head on his shoulder, "I can't bear to think how
+wretched you must have been all the time I was away."</p>
+
+<p>Ian was silent a minute.</p>
+
+<p>"But you haven't been away, and I don't like you to talk as though you
+had."</p>
+
+<p>Wretched? It would have been absurd to think of himself as wretched now;
+yet compared with the wonderful happiness that had been his for more
+than half a year, what was this "house swept and garnished"? An empty
+thing. Words of Tims's which he had thought irritating and absurd at the
+time, haunted him now. "<i>You don't mean to say you haven't seen the
+difference?</i>" He might not have seen it, but he had felt it. He felt it
+now.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was at any rate no longer any question of Dieppe. They took
+lodgings at Sheringham and he made good progress with his book. Yet not
+quite so good as he had hoped. Milly was indefatigable in looking up
+points and references, in preventing him from slipping into the small
+inaccuracies to which he was prone; but he missed the stimulus of
+Mildred's alert mind, so quick to hit a blot in logic or in taste, so
+vivid in appreciation.</p>
+
+<p>Milly meantime guessed nothing of his dissatisfaction. She adored her
+husband more every day, and her happiness would have been perfect had it
+not been for the haunting horror of the possible "change" which might be
+lurking for her round the corner of any night&mdash;that "change," which
+other people might call what they liked, but which meant for her the
+robbery of her life, her young happy life with Ian. He had taken her
+twice to Norton-Smith before the great man went for his holiday.
+Norton-Smith had pronounced it a peculiar but not unprecedented case of
+collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the
+consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time,
+rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would,
+he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs.
+Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young
+woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to bring to the
+doctor's notice the changes in character and intelligence that had
+accompanied the losses of memory, he found his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> remarks set aside like
+the chatter of a foolish child.</p>
+
+<p>If maternity would indeed exorcise the Invader, Milly had lost no time
+in beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would;
+not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God
+would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she
+was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any
+little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply
+religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar
+injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She
+prayed earnestly to God every night to help and protect her and her
+child, and the period of six or seven months, at which the "change" had
+come before, passed without a sign of it. In April a little boy was
+born. They called him Antonio, after a learned Italian, a friend and
+teacher of Ian's.</p>
+
+<p>The advent of the child did something to explain the comparative
+seclusion into which Mrs. Stewart had retired, and the curious dulling
+of that brilliant personality of hers. The Master of Durham was among
+the few of Mrs. Stewart's admirers who declined to recognize the change
+in her. He had been attracted by the girl Milly Flaxman, by her gentle,
+shy manners and pretty face, combined with her reputation for
+scholarship; the brilliant Invader had continued to attract him in
+another way. The difference between the two, if faced, would have been
+disagreeably mysterious. He preferred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> to say and think that there was
+none; Mrs. Stewart was probably not very well.</p>
+
+<p>Milly's shyness made it peculiarly awkward for her to find herself in
+possession of a number of friends whom she would not have chosen
+herself, and of whose doings and belongings she was in complete
+ignorance. However, if she gave offence she was unconscious of it, and
+it came very naturally to her to shrink back into the shadow of her
+household gods. Ian and the baby were almost sufficient in themselves to
+fill her life. There was just room on the outskirts of it for a few
+relations and old friends, and Aunt Beatrice still held her honored
+place. But it was through Aunt Beatrice that she was first to learn the
+feel of a certain dull heartache which was destined to grow upon her
+like some fell disease, a thing of ceaseless pain.</p>
+
+<p>She was especially anxious to get Aunt Beatrice, who had been in America
+all the Summer Vacation, to stay with them in the Autumn Term as Lady
+Thomson had been with them in May, and Milly did not like to think of
+the number of things, all wrong, which she was sure to have noticed in
+the house. Besides, what with theatricals and other engagements, it was
+evident that a good many people had been "in and out" in the Summer
+Term&mdash;a condition of life which Lady Thomson always denounced. Milly was
+anxious for her to see that that phase was past and that her favorite
+niece had settled down into the quiet, well-ordered existence of which
+she approved.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice came; but oh, disappointment! If it had been possible to
+say of Lady Thomson, whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> moods were under almost perfect control,
+that she was out of temper, Milly would have said it. She volunteered no
+opinion, but when asked, she compared Milly's new cook unfavorably with
+her former one. When her praise was anxiously sought, she observed that
+it was undesirable to be careless in one's housekeeping, but less
+disagreeable than to be fussy and house-proud. She added that
+Milly&mdash;whom she called Mildred&mdash;must be on her guard against relaxing
+into domestic dulness, when she could be so extremely clever and
+charming if she liked. Milly was bewildered and distressed. She felt
+sure that she had passed through a phase of which Aunt Beatrice ought to
+have disapproved. She had evidently been frivolous and neglectful of her
+duties; yet it seemed as though her aunt had been better pleased with
+her when she was like that. What could have made Aunt Beatrice, of all
+women, unkind and unjust?</p>
+
+<p>In this way more than a year went by. The baby grew and was
+short-coated; the October Term came round once more, and still Milly
+remained the same Milly. To have wished it otherwise would have seemed
+like wishing for her death.</p>
+
+<p>But at times a great longing for another, quite another, came over Ian.
+It was like a longing for the beloved dead. Of course it was mad&mdash;mad!
+He struggled against the feeling, and generally succeeded in getting
+back to the point of view that the change had been more in himself, in
+his own emotional moods, than in Milly.</p>
+
+<p>October, the golden month, passed by and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> November came in, soft and
+dim; a merry month for the hunting men beside the coverts, where the
+red-brown leaves still hung on the oak-trees and brushwood, and among
+the grassy lanes, the wide fresh fields and open hill-sides. No ill
+month either for those who love to light the lamp early and open their
+books beside a cheerful fire. But then the rain came, a persistent,
+soaking rain. Milly always went to her district on Tuesdays, no matter
+what the weather, and this time she caught a cold. Ian urged her to stop
+in bed next morning. He himself had to be in College early, and could
+not come home till the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>It was still raining and the early falling twilight was murky and brown.
+The dull yellow glare of the street-lamps was faintly reflected in the
+muddy wetness of pavements and streets. He was carrying a great armful
+of books and papers under his dripping mackintosh and umbrella. As he
+walked homeward as fast as his inconvenient load allowed, he became
+acutely conscious of a depression of spirits which had been growing upon
+him all day. It was the weather, he argued, affecting his nerves or
+digestion. The vision of a warm, cosey house, a devoted wife awaiting
+him, ought to have cheered him, but it did not. He hoped he would not
+feel irritable when Milly rushed into the hall as soon as his key was
+heard in the front door, to feel him all over and take every damp thread
+tragically. Poor dear Milly! What a discontented brute of a husband she
+had got! The fault was no doubt with himself, and he would not really be
+happy even if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> some miracle did set him down on a sunny Mediterranean
+shore, with enough money to live upon and nothing to think of but his
+book. Mildred used to say that she always went to a big dinner at Durham
+in the unquenchable hope of meeting and fascinating some millionaire who
+had sense enough to see how much better it would be to endow writers of
+good books than readers of silly ones.</p>
+
+<p>With the recollection there rang in the ears of his mind the sound of a
+laugh which he had not heard for seventeen months. Something seemed to
+tighten about his heart. Yes, he could be quite happy without the
+millionaire, without the sunny skies, without even the pretty,
+comfortable home at whose door he stood, if somewhere, anywhere, he
+could hope to hear that laugh again, to hold again in his arms the
+strange bright bride who had melted from them like snow in
+spring-time&mdash;but that way madness lay. He thrust the involuntary longing
+from him almost with horror, and turned the latch-key in his door.</p>
+
+<p>The hall lamp was burning low and the house seemed very chilly and
+quiet. He put his books down on the oak table, threw his streaming
+mackintosh upon the large chest, and went up to his dressing-room, to
+change whatever was still damp about him before seeking Milly, who
+presumably was nursing her cold before the study fire. When he had
+thrown off his shoes, he noticed that the door leading to his wife's
+room was ajar and a faint red glow of firelight showed invitingly
+through the chink. A fire! It was irresistible. He went in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> quickly and
+stirred the coals to a roaring blaze. The dancing flames lit up the
+long, low room with its few pieces of furniture, its high white
+wainscoting, and paper patterned with birds and trellised leaves. They
+lit up the low white bed and the white figure of his sleeping wife. Till
+then he had thought the room was empty. She lay there so deathly still
+and straight that he was smitten with a sudden fear; but leaning over
+her he heard her quiet, regular breathing and saw that if somewhat pale,
+she was normal in color. He touched her hand. It was withdrawn by a
+mechanical movement, but not before he had felt that it was warm.</p>
+
+<p>A wild excitement thrilled him; it would have been truer to say a wild
+joy, only that it held a pang of remorse for itself. So she had lain at
+the Hôtel du Chalet when he had left her for that long walk over the
+crisp mountain snow. And when he had returned, she&mdash;what She? No, his
+brain did not reel on the verge of madness; it merely accepted under the
+compulsion of knowledge a truth of those truths that are too profound to
+admit of mere external proof. For our reason plays at the edge of the
+universe as a little child plays at the edge of the sea, gathering from
+its fringes the flotsam and jetsam of its mighty life. But miles and
+miles beyond the ken of the eager eye, beyond the reach of the alert
+hand, lies the whole great secret life of the sea. And if it were all
+laid bare and spread at the child's feet, how could the little hand
+suffice to gather its vast treasures, the inexperienced eye to perceive
+and classify them?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Alone in the firelit, silent room, with this tranced form before him,
+Ian Stewart knew that the woman who would arise from that bed would be a
+different woman from the one who had lain down upon it. By what
+mysterious alchemy of nature transmuted he could not understand, any
+more than he could understand the greater part of the workings of that
+cosmic energy which he was compelled to recognize, although he might be
+cheated with words into believing that he understood them. Another woman
+would arise and she his Love. She had been gone so long; his heart had
+hungered for her so long, in silence even to himself. She had been dead
+and now she was about to be raised from the dead. He lighted the
+candles, locked the doors, and paced softly up and down, stopping to
+look at the figure on the bed from time to time. Far around him, close
+about him, life was moving at its usual jog-trot pace. People were going
+back to their College rooms or domestic hearths, grumbling about the
+weather or their digestions or their colds, thinking of their work for
+the evening or of their dinner engagements&mdash;and suddenly a door had shut
+between him and all that outside world. He was no longer moving in the
+driven herd. He was alone, above them in an upper chamber, awaiting the
+miracle of resurrection.</p>
+
+<p>In the visions that passed before his mind's eye the face of Milly,
+pale, with pleading eyes, was not absent; but with a strange hardness
+which he had never felt before, he thrust the sighing phantom from him.
+She had had her turn of happiness, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> long one; it was only fair that
+now they two, he and that Other, should have their chance, should put
+their lips to the full cup of life. The figure on the bed stirred,
+turned on one side, and slipped a hand under the pure curve of the young
+cheek. He was by the bed in a moment; but it still slept, though less
+profoundly, without that tranced look, as though the flame of life
+itself burned low within.</p>
+
+<p>How would she first greet him? Last time she had leaned into the clear
+sunshine and laughed to him from the cloud of her amber hair; and a
+spirit in his blood had leaped to the music of her laugh, even while the
+rational self knew not it was the lady of his love. But however she came
+back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after
+all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been
+set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing
+to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day,
+it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky
+discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of
+his daily work. And this, too, was good.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it was better because of the contrast between the wonder and its
+environment, better because he himself was more conscious of his joy. He
+sat on the bed a while watching her impatiently. In his eyes she was
+already filled with a new loveliness, but he wanted her hair, her amber
+hair. It was brushed back and imprisoned tightly in a little plait tied
+with a white ribbon&mdash;Milly's way. With<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> fingers clumsy, yet gentle, he
+took off the ribbon and cautiously undid the plait. Then he took a comb
+and spread out the silk-soft hair more as he liked to see it, pleased
+with his own skill in the unaccustomed task. She stirred again, but
+still she did not wake. He was pacing up and down the room when she
+raised herself a little on her pillow and looked fixedly at the opposite
+wall. Ian held his breath. He stood perfectly still and watched her.
+Presently she sat up and looked about her, looked at him with a faint,
+vague smile, like that of a baby. He sat down at the foot of the bed and
+took her hand. She smiled at him again, this time with more definite
+meaning.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know who it is, sweetheart?" he said in a low voice. She nodded
+slightly and went on smiling, as though quietly happy.</p>
+
+<p>"Ian," she breathed, at length.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, darling."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been away a long, long time. How long?"</p>
+
+<p>He told her.</p>
+
+<p>She uttered a little "Ah!" and frowned; lay quiet awhile, then drew her
+hand from Ian's and sat up still more.</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't lie here any longer," she said, in a stronger voice. "It's
+just waste of time." She pushed back the clothes and swung her feet out
+of bed. "Oh, how glad I am to be back again! Are you glad I'm back, Ian?
+Say you are, do say you are!"</p>
+
+<p>And Ian on his knees before her, said that he was.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ian was leaning against the high mantel-piece of his study. Above it,
+let into the panelling, was an eighteenth-century painting of the Bridge
+and Castle of St. Angelo, browned by time. He was wondering how to tell
+Mildred about the child, and whether she would resent its presence. She,
+too, was meditating, chin on hand. At length she looked up with a sudden
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"What about the baby, Ian? Don't you take any notice of it yet?"</p>
+
+<p>He was surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know about him?"</p>
+
+<p>She frowned thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I seem to know things that have happened in a kind of way&mdash;rather as
+though I had seen them in a dream. But they haven't happened to me, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it the same last time?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; but the first time I came, and especially just at first, I seemed
+to remember all kinds of things&mdash;" She paused as though trying in vain
+to revive her impressions&mdash;"Odd things, not a bit like anything in
+Oxford. I can't recall them now, but sometimes in London I fancy I've
+seen places before."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course you have, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"And the first time I saw that old picture there I knew it was Rome, and
+I had a notion that I'd been there and seen just that view."</p>
+
+<p>"You've been seeing pictures and reading books and hearing talk all your
+life, and in the peculiar state of your memory, I suppose you can't
+distinguish between the impressions made on it by facts and by ideas."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was silent; but it was not the silence of conviction. Then she
+jumped up.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to see Baby. You needn't come if you don't want."</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid it's too late. Milly doesn't like&mdash;" He broke off with a
+wild laugh. "What am I talking about!"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you were going to say, Milly doesn't like people taking a
+candle into the room when Baby is shut up for the night. I don't care
+what Milly likes. He's my baby now, and he's sure to look a duck when
+he's asleep. Come along!"</p>
+
+<p>She put her arm through his and together they climbed the steep
+staircase to the nursery.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred had returned to the world in such excellent spirits at merely
+being there, that she took those awkward situations which Milly had
+inevitably bequeathed to her, as capital jokes. The partial and external
+acquaintance with Milly's doings and points of view which she had
+brought back with her, made everything easier than before; but her
+derisive dislike of her absent rival was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> intensified. It pained Ian if
+she dropped a hint of it. Tims was the only person to whom she could
+have the comfort of expressing herself; and even Tims made faces and
+groaned faintly, as though she did not enjoy Mildred's wit when Milly
+was the subject of it. She gave Milly's cook notice at once, but most
+things she found in a satisfactory state&mdash;particularly the family
+finances. More negatively satisfactory was the state of her wardrobe,
+since so little had been bought. Mildred still shuddered at the
+recollection of the trousseau frocks.</p>
+
+<p>Once more Mrs. Stewart, whose social career had been like that of the
+proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement
+was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active
+brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to take up more
+serious interests.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed wiser, too, to make no sudden break with Milly's habits.
+Still, Emma, the nurse, opined that Baby got on all the better since
+Mrs. Stewart had become "more used to him like"&mdash;wasn't always changing
+his food, taking his temperature, wanting him to have bandages and
+medicine, forbidding him to be talked to or sung to, and pulling his
+little, curling-up limbs straight when he was going to sleep. He was a
+healthy little fellow and already pretty, with his soft dark
+hair&mdash;softer than anything in the world except a baby's hair&mdash;his
+delicate eyebrows and bright dark eyes. Mildred loved playing with him.
+Sometimes when Ian heard the tiny shrieks of baby laughter, he used<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> to
+think with a smile and yet with a pang of pity, how shocked poor Milly
+would have been at this titillation of the infant brain. But he did not
+want thoughts of Milly&mdash;so far as he could he shut the door of his mind
+against them. She would come back, no doubt, sooner or later; and her
+coming back would mean that Mildred would be robbed of her life, his own
+life robbed of its joy.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of Term the Master of Durham sent a note to bid the Stewarts
+to dine with him and meet Sir Henry Milwood, the rich Australian, and
+Maxwell Davison, the traveller and Orientalist. Ian remarked that
+Davison was a cousin, although they had not met since he was a boy.
+Maxwell Davison had gone to the East originally as agent for some big
+firm, and had spent there nearly twenty years. He was an accomplished
+Persian and Arabic scholar, and gossip related that he had run off with
+a fair Persian from a Constantinople harem and lived with her in Persia
+until her death. But that was years ago.</p>
+
+<p>When the Stewarts entered the Master's bare bachelor drawing-room, they
+found besides the Milwoods, only familiar faces. Maxwell Davison was
+still awaited, and with interest. He came, and that interest did not
+appear to be mutual, judging from the Oriental impassivity of his long,
+brown face, with its narrow, inscrutable eyes. He was tall, slight,
+sinewy as a Bedouin, his age uncertain, since his dry leanness and the
+dash of silver at his temples might be the effect of burning desert
+suns.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was delighted at first at being sent into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> dinner with him, but
+she found him disappointingly taciturn. In truth, he had acquired
+Oriental habits and views with regard to women. If a foolish Occidental
+custom demanded that they should sit at meat with the lords of creation,
+he, Maxwell Davison, would not pretend to acquiesce in it. Mildred, to
+whom it was unthinkable that any man should not wish to talk to her,
+merely pitied his shyness and determined to break it down; but Davison's
+attitude was unbending.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner the Master, his mortar-board cap on his head, opened the
+drawing-room door and invited them to come across to the College Library
+to see some bronzes and a few other things that Mr. Davison had
+temporarily deposited there. He had divined that Maxwell Davison would
+be willing to sell, and in his guileful soul the little Master may have
+had schemes of persuading his wealthy friend Milwood to purchase any
+bronzes that might be of value to the College or the University. Of the
+ladies, only Mildred and Miss Moore, the archæologist, braved the chill
+of the mediæval Library to inspect the collection. Davison professed to
+no artistic or antiquarian knowledge of the bronzes. They had come to
+him in the way of trade and had all been dug up in Asia Minor&mdash;no, not
+all, for one he had picked up in England. Nevertheless he had succeeded
+in getting a pretty clear notion of the relative value of his
+bronzes&mdash;the Oriental curios with them it was his business to
+understand. He could not help observing the sure instinct with which
+Mrs. Stewart selected what was best among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> all these different objects.
+She had the <i>flair</i> of the born collector. The learned archæologists
+present leaned over the collection discussing and disputing, and took no
+notice of her remarks as she rapidly handled each article. But Davison
+did, and when at length she took up a small figure of Augustus&mdash;the
+bronze that had not come from Asia Minor&mdash;and looked at it with a
+peculiar doubtful intentness, he began to feel uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything wrong with that?" he asked, in spite of himself.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed nervously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Davison, please ask some one who knows! I don't. Only I&mdash;I seem
+to have seen something like it before, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>Sanderson, roaming around the professed archæologists, took the bronze
+from her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you where you've seen it, Mrs. Stewart. It's engraved in
+Egerton's <i>Private Collections of Great Britain</i>. I picked that up the
+other day&mdash;first edition, 1818. I dare say the book's here. We'll see."</p>
+
+<p>Sanderson took a candle and went glimmering away down the long, dark
+room.</p>
+
+<p>"What can this be?" asked Mildred, taking up what looked like a glass
+ball.</p>
+
+<p>"Please stand over here and look into it for five minutes," returned
+Davison, evasively. "Perhaps you'll see what it is then."</p>
+
+<p>He somehow wanted to get rid of Mildred's appraisal of his goods.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Davison, your glass ball has gone quite cloudy!" she exclaimed, in
+a minute or two.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's all right. Go on looking and you'll see something more," he
+returned.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's so curious. I see the whole room reflected in the glass now, but
+it's much lighter than it really is, and the windows seem larger. It all
+looks so different. There is some one down there in white."</p>
+
+<p>Sanderson came up the room carrying a large quarto, open.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's your bronze, right enough," he said, putting the book down on
+the table. "It's under the heading, <i>Hammerton Collection</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to a small engraving inscribed, "Bronze statuette of
+Augustus. <i>Very rare.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"But some fellow's been scribbling something here," continued Sanderson,
+turning the book around to read a note written along the margin. He read
+out: "'A forgery. Sold by Lady Hammerton to Mr. Solomons, 1819. See case
+Solomons <i>versus</i> Hammerton, 1820.'"</p>
+
+<p>The turning of the book showed Mildred a full-page engraving entitled,
+"The Gallery, Hammerton House." It represented a long room somewhat like
+the one in which they stood, but still more like the room she had seen
+in the crystal; and in the middle distance there was a slightly sketched
+figure of a woman in a light dress. Half incredulous, half frightened,
+she pored over the engraving which reproduced so strangely the image she
+had seen in Maxwell Davison's mysterious ball.</p>
+
+<p>"How funny!" she almost whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"You may call it funny, of course, that Lady<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> Hammerton succeeded in
+cheating a Jew, which is what it looks like," rejoined Sanderson, bent
+on hunting down his quarry; "but it was pretty discreditable to her
+too."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," Maxwell Davison's harsh voice broke in. "That was
+Solomons's look out. I sha'n't bring a lawsuit against the fellow who
+sold me that Augustus, if it is a forgery. A man's a fool to deal in
+things he doesn't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"What is this glass ball, Mr. Davison?" asked Miss Moore, in her turn
+taking up the uncanny thing Mildred had laid down.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a divining-crystal. In the East certain people, mostly boys, look
+in these crystals and see all sorts of things, present, past, and to
+come."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Moore laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Or pretend they do!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows? It isn't of any interest, really. The things that have
+happened have happened, and the things that are to happen will happen
+just as surely, whether we foresee them or not."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Moore turned to the Master.</p>
+
+<p>"Look, Master&mdash;this is a divining-crystal, and Mr. Davison's trying to
+persuade me that in the East people really see visions in it."</p>
+
+<p>The Master smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Davison has a poor opinion of ladies' intelligence, I'm afraid. He
+thinks they are children, who will believe any fairy tale."</p>
+
+<p>Davison had drawn near to Mildred as the Master spoke; his eyes met hers
+and the impassive face wore a faint, ironical smile.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The Wisdom of the West speaks!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "I'd
+almost forgotten the sound of it."</p>
+
+<p>Then scrutinizing her pale face: "I'm afraid you've had a scare. What
+did you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw&mdash;well, I fancy I saw the Gallery at Hammerton House and my
+ancestress, Lady Hammerton. It was burned, you know, and she was burned
+with it, trying to save her collections. I expect she condescended to
+give me a glimpse of them because I've inherited her mania. I'd be a
+collector, too, if I had the money."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed nervously.</p>
+
+<p>"You should take Ian to the East," returned Davison. "You could make
+money there and learn things&mdash;the Wisdom of the East, for instance."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred, recovering her equanimity, smiled at him.</p>
+
+<p>"No, never! The Wisdom of the West engrosses us; but you'll come and
+tell us about the other, won't you?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Maxwell Davison settled in Oxford for six months, in order to see his
+great book on Persian Literature through the press. His advent had been
+looked forward to as promising a welcome variety, bringing a splash of
+vivid color into a somewhat quiet-hued, monotonous world. But there was
+doomed to be some disappointment. Mr. Davison went rather freely to
+College dinners but seldom into general society. It came to be
+understood that he disliked meeting women; Mrs. Stewart, however, he
+appeared to except from his condemnation or rule. Ian was his cousin,
+which made a pretext at first for going to the Stewarts' house; but he
+went because he found the couple interesting in their respective ways.
+Some Dons, unable to believe that a man without a University education
+could teach them anything, would lecture him out of their little
+pocketful of knowledge about Oriental life and literature. Ian, on the
+contrary, was an admirable producer of all that was interesting in
+others; and in Davison that all was much. At first he had tried to keep
+Mrs. Stewart in what he conceived to be her proper place; but as time
+went on he found himself dropping in at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> old house with surprising
+frequency, and often when he knew Ian to be in College or too busy to
+attend to him.</p>
+
+<p>He had brought horses with him and offered to give Mildred a mount
+whenever she liked. Milly had learned the rudiments of the art, but she
+was too timid to care for riding. Mildred, on the other hand, delighted
+in the swift motion through the air, the sensation of the strong
+bounding life almost incorporated with her own, and if she had moments
+of terror she had more of ecstatic daring. She and Davison ended by
+riding together once or twice a week.</p>
+
+<p>Interesting as Mildred found Maxwell Davison's companionship, it did not
+altogether conduce to her happiness. She who had been so content to be
+merely alive, began now to chafe at the narrow limits of her existence.
+He opened the wide horizons of the world before her, and her soul seemed
+native to them. One April afternoon they rode to Wytham together. The
+woods of Wytham clothe a long ridge of hill around which the young
+Thames sweeps in a strong curve and through them a grass ride runs
+unbroken for a mile and a half. Now side by side, now passing and
+repassing each other, they had "kept the great pace" along the track,
+the horses slackening their speed somewhat as they went down the dip,
+only to spring forward with fresh impetus, lifting their hind-quarters
+gallantly to the rise; then given their heads for the last burst along
+the straight bit to the drop of the hill, away they went in passionate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+competition, foam-flecked and sending the clods flying from their
+hurrying hoofs.</p>
+
+<p>A mile and a half of galloping only serves to whet the appetite of a
+well-girt horse, and the foaming rivals hardly allowed themselves to be
+pulled up at the edge of a steep grassy slope, where already here and
+there a yellow cowslip bud was beginning to break its pale silken
+sheath. At length their impatient dancing was over, and they stood
+quiet, resigned to the will of the incomprehensible beings who
+controlled them. But Mildred's blood was dancing still and she abandoned
+herself to the pleasure of it, undistracted by speech. Beyond the
+shining Thames, wide-curving through its broad green meadows, and the
+gray bridge and tower of Eynsham, that great landscape, undulating,
+clothed in the mystery of moving cloud-shadows, gave her an agreeable
+impression of being a view into a strange country, hundreds of miles
+away from Oxford and the beaten track. But Maxwell's eyes were fixed
+upon her.</p>
+
+<p>The wood about them was just breaking into the various beauty of spring
+foliage, emerald and gold and red; a few trees still holding up naked
+gray branches among it; here and there a white cloud of cherry blossom,
+shining in a clearing or floating mistily amid bursting tree-tops below
+them. They turned to the right, down a narrow ride, mossy and winding,
+where perforce they trod on flowers as they went; for the path and the
+wood about it were carpeted with blue dog-violets and the pale soft
+blossoms of primroses, opening in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> clusters amid their thick fresh
+foliage and the brown of last year's fallen leaves. The sky above wore
+the intense blue in which dark clouds are seen floating, and as the
+gleams of travelling sunshine passed over the wooded hill, its colors
+also glowed with a peculiar intensity. The horses, no longer excited by
+a vista of turf, were walking side by side. But the beauty of earth and
+sky were nothing to Maxwell, whose whole being was intent on the beauty
+of the woman in the saddle beside him; the rose and the gold of cheek
+and hair, the lithe grace of the body, lightly moving to the motion of
+her horse.</p>
+
+<p>She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.</p>
+
+<p>"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on
+her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you
+condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm
+learning the proper way for a woman to talk."</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've
+covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat?
+Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What
+he'd feel!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed delightedly.</p>
+
+<p>"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> path,' you see, and
+they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're
+not afraid of anything."</p>
+
+<p>"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and&mdash;most butlers."</p>
+
+<p>Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.</p>
+
+<p>"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you
+better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's
+because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty
+things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you,
+you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."</p>
+
+<p>"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them
+out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her
+horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced
+herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task
+accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently
+she turned towards him, brightening.</p>
+
+<p>"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer
+without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free
+feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could
+jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and
+nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one
+chose. But I can't explain what I mean."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean
+is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an
+air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it!
+None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be
+the life for you."</p>
+
+<p>It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous
+soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her
+wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom,
+travel, and motion&mdash;all that really was as the breath of life to her&mdash;it
+fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that
+sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once
+excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment
+she had turned to him with a challenging smile.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."</p>
+
+<p>"So it is&mdash;for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less
+mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake&mdash;which causes such a deal
+of unnecessary misery and waste in the world&mdash;the mistake of supposing
+that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey.
+You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's
+bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to
+wish them to distort themselves to fit it."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so
+glad."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you
+oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to
+the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as
+you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You
+daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice
+it is to ride with your hat off."</p>
+
+<p>They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to
+Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field
+to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods
+from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the
+horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred
+did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as
+she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show
+him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet
+smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind
+her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its
+head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs
+drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a
+minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from
+each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most
+Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the
+hind-quarters of his big horse lifting pow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>erfully under him, as it sped
+with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and
+vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed,
+seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business,
+she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the
+long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by
+which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in
+hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew
+past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the
+gate.</p>
+
+<p>"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her
+whip at him.</p>
+
+<p>Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and
+anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her.
+"You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate,
+pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off
+yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do
+you're a poor horse-woman."</p>
+
+<p>He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly
+because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
+hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
+only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
+interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
+they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
+his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> his lean face, which was as pale
+as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
+that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
+lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
+brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
+and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
+when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
+the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together,
+through flying scuds of rain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one
+which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people,
+who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to
+whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the
+by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out
+of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not
+precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but
+in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she
+found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in
+Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a
+free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he
+constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions
+might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good
+sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the
+shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides
+involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did
+not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was
+only a dislike to her being somebody else's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> slave. He was a despot at
+heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women.
+Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her,
+maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she
+had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered
+whether her strange interest in the society of a man for whom she had no
+affection, could be that. She did not feel towards Ian as an ordinary
+wife might have done, yet his feelings and interests weighed much with
+her. Milly, too, she must necessarily consider, but she did that in a
+different, an almost vengeful spirit.</p>
+
+<p>One evening Ian, looking up from his work, asked her what she was
+smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it
+was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit
+within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning
+Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell
+Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the
+biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however Tims might affirm the contrary,
+Mildred had a fixed impression that Milly could be in a rage.</p>
+
+<p>The fire-game was hastening to its close; but before Mildred could prove
+herself a real mistress of the dangerous element, the sleep fell upon
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Except a sensation of fatigue, for which it was easy to find a reason,
+there was no warning of the coming change. But Ian had dreams in the
+night and opened his eyes in the morning with a feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> of uneasiness
+and depression. Mildred could never sleep late without causing him
+anxiety, and on this morning his first glance at her filled him with a
+dread certainty. She was sleeping what was to her in a measure the sleep
+of death. He had a violent impulse to awaken her forcibly; but he feared
+it would be dangerous. With his arm around her and his head close to
+hers on the pillow, he whispered her name over and over again. The
+calmness of her face gradually gave way to an expression of struggle
+approaching convulsion, and he dared not continue. He could only await
+the inevitable in a misery which from its very nature could find no
+expression and no comforter.</p>
+
+<p>Milly, unlike Mildred, did not return to the world in a rapture of
+satisfaction with it. The realization of the terrible robbery of life of
+which she had again been the victim, was in itself enough to account for
+a certain sadness even in her love for Ian and for her child. The
+hygiene of the nursery had been neglected according to her ideas, yet
+Baby was bonny enough to delight any mother's heart, however heavy it
+might be. Ian, she said, wanted feeding up and taking care of; and he
+submitted to the process with a gentle, melancholy smile. Just one
+request he made; that she would not spoil her pretty hair by screwing it
+up in her usual unbecoming manner. She understood, studying a certain
+photograph in a drawer&mdash;what drawer was safe from Milly's tidyings?&mdash;and
+dressed her hair as like it as she knew how, with a secret bitterness of
+heart.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mildred had found a diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to
+her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had
+continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought
+might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the
+two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of
+union between them. Their indivisibility in the eyes of the world made
+their external interests inevitably one. New friends and acquaintances
+Mildred had noted down, with useful remarks upon them. She was not
+confidential on the subject of Maxwell Davison, but she gave the bare
+necessary information.</p>
+
+<p>It was now late in the Summer Term and her bedroom chimney-piece was
+richly decorated with invitation cards. Among others there was an
+invitation to a garden-party at Lady Margaret Hall. Milly put on a fresh
+flowered muslin dress, apparently unworn, that she found hanging in one
+of the deep wall-cupboards of the old house, and a coarse burnt-straw
+hat, trimmed with roses and black ribbon, which became her marvellously
+well. All the scruples of an apostle of hygienic dress, all the
+uneasiness of an economist at the prospect of unpaid bills, disappeared
+before the pleasure of a young woman face to face with an extremely
+pretty reflection in a pier-glass. That glass, an oval in a light
+mahogany frame, of the Regency period, if not earlier, was one of
+Mildred's finds in the slums of St. Ebbes.</p>
+
+<p>She walked across the Parks, where the Cricket<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> Match of the season was
+drawing a crowd, meaning to come out by a gate below Lady Margaret Hall,
+the gardens and buildings of which did not then extend to the Cherwell.
+In their place were a few tennis-grounds and a path leading to a
+boat-house, shared by a score or more of persons. While she was still
+coming across the grass of the Parks, a man in flannels, very white in
+the sun, came towards her from the gate for which she was making. He
+must have recognized her from a long way off. He was a striking-looking
+man of middle age, walking with a free yet indolent stride that carried
+him along much faster than it appeared to do.</p>
+
+<p>Milly had no idea who the stranger was, but he greeted her with: "Here
+you are at last, Mildred! Do you know how much behind time you are?"&mdash;he
+took out his watch&mdash;"Exactly thirty-five minutes. I should have given
+you up if I hadn't known that breaking your promise is not among your
+numerous vices, and unpunctuality is."</p>
+
+<p>Who on earth was he? And why did he call her by her Christian name?
+Milly went a beautiful pink with embarrassment.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so sorry. I thought the party would have just begun," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say you want to keep me kicking my heels while you go
+to a confounded party? I thought you knew I was off to Paris to-night,
+after that Firdusi manuscript, and I think of taking the Continental
+Express to Constantinople next week. I don't know when I shall be back.
+Surely, Mildred, it's not a great deal to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> ask you to spare half an hour
+from a wretched party to come on the river with me before I go?" It
+struck Maxwell as he ended that he was falling into the whining of the
+Occidental lover. He was determined that he would clear the situation
+this afternoon; the more determined because he was conscious of a
+feeling odiously resembling fear which had before now held him back from
+plain dealing with Mildred. Afraid of a woman? It was too ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>Milly, meanwhile, felt herself on firmer ground. This must be Ian's
+cousin, Maxwell Davison, the Orientalist. But there was nothing nomadic
+in her heart to thrill to the idea of being on the Cherwell this
+afternoon, in London this evening, in Paris next morning, in
+Constantinople next week.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I'll come on the river with you," she said. "I'm sorry I'm
+late. I'm afraid I&mdash;I'd forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>Forgotten! How simply she said it! Yet it was surely the veriest
+impudence of coquetry. He looked at her slowly from the hat downward, as
+he lounged leisurely at her side.</p>
+
+<p>"War-paint, I see!" he remarked. "Armed from head to heel with all the
+true and tried female weapons. They're just the same all the world
+over&mdash;'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,'&mdash;though no doubt you
+fancy they're different. Who's the frock put on for, Mildred? For the
+party, or&mdash;for me?"</p>
+
+<p>Milly was conscious of such an extreme absence of intention so far as
+Maxwell was concerned, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> it would have been rude to express it. She
+went very pink again, and lifting forget-me-not blue eyes to his
+inscrutable ones, articulated slowly:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were like a child's and a shy smile curved her pink lips
+adorably as she spoke. Such mere simplicity would not in itself have
+cast a spell over Maxwell, but it came to him as a new, surprising phase
+of the eternal feminine in her; and it had the additional charm that it
+caused that subjugated feeling resembling fear, with which Mildred could
+inspire him, to disappear entirely. He was once more in the proper
+dominant attitude of Man. He felt the courage now to make her do what he
+believed she wished to do in her heart; the courage, too, to punish her
+for the humiliation she had inflicted upon him. Six months ago he would
+have had nothing but a hearty contempt for the man who could beat thirty
+yards of gravel-path for half an hour, watch in hand, in a misery of
+impatience, waiting on the good pleasure of a capricious woman.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime he laughed good-humoredly at Milly's answer and began to talk
+of neutral matters. If her tongue did not move as nimbly as usual, he
+flattered himself it was because she knew that the hour of her surrender
+was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>Milly knew the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer
+days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and
+how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves.
+How, when the big doors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> were opened on to the raft and the slowly
+moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the
+running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there
+in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one
+of the barred doors, took it out to the water. Mildred would have felt a
+half-conscious æsthetic pleasure in watching his movements,
+superficially indolent but instinct with strength. Milly had not the
+same æsthetic sensibilities, and she was still disagreeably embarrassed
+at finding herself on such a familiar footing with a man whom she had
+never seen before. Then, although she followed Aunt Beatrice's golden
+rule of never allowing a question of feminine dress to interfere with
+masculine plans, she could not but feel anxious as to the fate of her
+fresh muslin and ribbons packed into a canoe. Maxwell, however, had
+learned canoeing years ago on the Canadian lakes, and did not splash.
+His lean, muscular brown arms and supple wrists took the canoe rapidly
+through the water, with little apparent effort.</p>
+
+<p>It was the prime of June and the winding willow-shaded Cherwell was in
+its beauty. White water-lilies were only just beginning to open silver
+buds, floating serenely on their broad green and red pads; but prodigal
+masses of wild roses, delicately rich in scent and various in color,
+overhung the river in brave arching bowers or starred bushes and
+hedgerows so closely that the green briers were hardly visible. Beds of
+the large blue water forget-me-not floated beside the banks, and above<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+them creamy meadow-sweet lifted its tall plumes among the reeds and
+grasses. Small water-rats swam busily from bank to bank or played on the
+roots of the willows, and bright wings of birds and insects fluttered
+and skimmed over the shining stream.</p>
+
+<p>The Cherwell, though not then the crowded waterway it has since become,
+was usually popular with boaters on such an afternoon. But there must
+have been strong counter-attractions elsewhere, for Milly and Davison
+passed only one, a party of children working very independent oars, on
+their way to the little gray house above the ferry, where an old
+Frenchman dispensed tea in arbors.</p>
+
+<p>There was a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe
+and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It
+was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a
+person who had rights over her&mdash;a tone which before he had been more
+willing than able to adopt; but now the bit was between his teeth.
+Perhaps absorbed in his own intent, he hardly noticed how little she
+answered; but he did notice every point of her beauty as she leaned back
+on the cushions in the light shade of her parasol, from the soft
+brightness of her hair to the glimpse of delicate white skin which
+showed through the open-work stocking on her slender foot.</p>
+
+<p>When they were in the straight watery avenue between green willow walls,
+which leads up to the ferry, he slackened the pace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And what are you going to do next week?" he asked, as one of a series
+of ironical questions.</p>
+
+<p>"A great deal; much more than I care to do. I'm going up to town to see
+the new Savoy opera, and I'm going to a dance, and to several
+garden-parties, and to dine with the Master of Durham."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite enough for some people; but not for you, Mildred. Think of
+it&mdash;year after year, always the same old run. October Term, Lent Term,
+Summer Term! A little change in Vacations, say a month abroad, when you
+can afford it. You aren't meant for it, you know you're not, any more
+than a swallow's meant for the little hopping, pecketing life of a
+London sparrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, I don't see the likeness either way. I'm quite happy as I am."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled mockingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite happy! As it's very proper you should be, of course. Come,
+Mildred, no humbug! Think how you'd feel if you knew that instead of
+going to all those idiotic parties next week you were going to
+Constantinople."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it dreadfully hot at this time of year?"</p>
+
+<p>"I like it hot. But at any rate one can always find some cool place in
+the hottest weather. How would you like to go in a caravan from Cairo to
+Damascus next autumn?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say it would be delightful, if the country one passed through
+were not too wild and dangerous. But Ian would never be able to leave
+his work for an expedition like that."</p>
+
+<p>Maxwell smiled grimly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'd no idea you'd want him. I shouldn't. Do be serious. If you fancy
+I'm the sort of man you can go on playing with forever, you're most
+confoundedly mistaken."</p>
+
+<p>Milly was both offended and alarmed. Was this strange man mad? And she
+alone with him on the river!</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean," she said, coldly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you?" he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile&mdash;"Well, I
+know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women,
+but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you,
+except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a set
+of trained, accomplished hypocrites!"</p>
+
+<p>Indignation overcame fear in Milly's bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"We are nothing of the kind," she said. "How can you talk such
+nonsense?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense? I suppose being a woman you can't really be logical, although
+you generally pretend to be so. Why have you pranked yourself out, spent
+an hour I dare say in making yourself pretty to-day? For what possible
+reason except to attract the eyes of a crowd of men, young fools or
+doddering old ones&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Milly uttered an expression of vehement denial, but he continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Or else to whet my appetite for forbidden fruit. But there's no 'or'
+about it, is there? Most likely you had both of those desirable objects
+in view."</p>
+
+<p>Milly was not a coward when her indignation was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> aroused. She took hold
+of the sides of the canoe and began raising herself.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know whether you mean to be insulting," she said; "but I don't
+wish to hear any more of this sort of thing. I'd rather you put me out,
+please."</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down," he said, with authority&mdash;the canoe was rocking
+violently&mdash;"unless you're anxious to be drowned. I warn you I'm a very
+poor swimmer, and if we upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my
+being able to save you."</p>
+
+<p>Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save
+herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.</p>
+
+<p>They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire
+rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage,
+and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and
+the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his
+shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some
+inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to
+Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the
+rope and on.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision,
+after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my
+manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring
+you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send
+you on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span> a field-walk in that smart frock and shoes&mdash;" he smiled at her,
+and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his
+smile&mdash;"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all
+these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years
+that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial
+conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must
+remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come
+right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be
+stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to
+recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of
+Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core.
+And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined,
+but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."</p>
+
+<p>Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick
+to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument,
+but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary,
+that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized
+in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in
+her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in
+opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent
+towards the turning paddle, hardly heard what she was saying. He was
+paddling fast and considering many things.</p>
+
+<p>They came to where the river ran under a narrow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> grass field, rising in
+a steep bank and shut off from the world by a tall hedge and a row of
+elms, that threw long shadows down the grass and were reflected in the
+water. A path led through it, but it was little frequented. On the other
+side was a wide, green meadow, where the long grass was ripening under
+rose-blossoming hedges, and far beyond was the blueness of distant hills
+and woods. Maxwell ran the bow of the canoe into a thick bed of
+forget-me-nots, growing not far from the bank. He laid the dripping
+paddle aside, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his head in his
+hands for a minute or more. When he turned his face towards her it was
+charged with passion, but most of all with a grave masterfulness. He had
+been sitting on a low seat, but now he kneeled so as to come nearer to
+her, and, stretching out his long arms, laid a hand, brown,
+long-fingered, smooth, on her two slight, gray-gloved ones.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred," he said, and his voice seemed to have lost its harshness,
+"I've brought you here to make you decide what you are going to do with
+me and with yourself. I want you&mdash;you know I want you, but I don't come
+begging for you as an alms. I say, just compare the life, the free,
+glorious life I can give you, and the wretched, petty round of existence
+here. Come with me, won't you? Don't be afraid I shall treat you like a
+slave; I follow Nature, and Nature made you a queen. Come with me
+to-night, come to Paris, to Constantinople, to all the East! Never mind
+about love yet, we won't talk about that, for I don't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> really flatter
+myself you love me; I'm only sure you don't love Ian&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Milly had listened to him so far, drawing herself back to the farthest
+end of the canoe, half petrified with amazement, half dominated by his
+powerful personality. At these words her pallor gave way to a scarlet
+flush.</p>
+
+<p>"How dare you!" she cried, in a voice tremulous with indignation. "How
+dare you talk to me like this? How dare you name my husband? You brought
+me out here on purpose to say such things to me? Oh, it's abominable,
+it's disgraceful!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no room for doubt as to the sincerity of her indignation.
+Maxwell drew back and his face changed. There were patches of dull red
+on his cheeks, almost as though he had been struck, and his narrow eyes
+glittered. Looking at him, Milly felt physical fear; she thought once
+more of insanity. There was a silence; then she spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"Put me on to the bank here, please. I'll walk back."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall let you go when I choose," returned he, in a grating voice. "I
+have something to say to you first."</p>
+
+<p>He paused and his frown darkened upon her. "You asked me how I 'dared.'
+Dare! Do you take me for a dog, to be chained up and tantalized with
+nice bits, and hardly allowed to whine for them? I say, how dare you
+entice me with your beauty&mdash;it's decked out now for me&mdash;entice me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> with
+all your beguiling ways, your pretence of longing to go away and to live
+the free life in the East as I live it? Now, when you've made me want
+you&mdash;what else have you been aiming at? You pretend to be surprised, you
+pretend even to yourself, to be dreadfully shocked. What damned humbug!
+With us only the dancing-girls venture to play such tricks as you do,
+and they daren't go too far, because the men are men and wear knives.
+But here you proper women, with your weakness unnaturally protected, you
+go about pretending you don't know there's such a thing in the world as
+desire&mdash;oh, of course not!&mdash;and all the while you're deliberately
+exciting it and playing upon it."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred had been right in saying that the gentle Milly could be in a
+rage; though it was a thing that had happened to her only once or twice
+before since her childhood. It happened now. Anger, burning anger,
+extinguished the fear that had held her silent while he was speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"It's false!" she cried, with burning face and blazing eyes. "It's
+disgraceful of you to say such things&mdash;it's degrading for me to have to
+hear them. I will get away from you, if I have to jump into the river."</p>
+
+<p>She started forward, but Maxwell, with his tall, lithe body and long
+arms, had a great reach. He leaned forward and his iron hands were upon
+her shoulders, forcing her back.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a fool," he said, still fierce in eye and voice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her lips trembled with fury so that she could hardly speak.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you consider yourself a gentleman?"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't consider the question at all. I am a man; you are a woman, and
+you have presumed to make a plaything of me. You thought you could do it
+with impunity because we are civilized, because you are a lady; for
+bar-maids and servant-girls do get their throats cut sometimes still.
+Don't be frightened, I'm not going to kill you, but I mean to make you
+understand for once that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that
+they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better
+animal&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation.
+Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed,
+and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly
+on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook
+lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough
+to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to
+pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she
+bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently,
+but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell
+looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not
+stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow,
+through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When
+she was half-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and
+instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:</p>
+
+<p>"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I
+sha'n't."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit
+for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from
+that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from
+any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked
+after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives
+were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in
+the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had
+been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for
+him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness
+will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our
+lives are made up of mere to-morrows&mdash;if Shakespeare had not happened to
+put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of
+imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But
+even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly
+regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that
+demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she
+lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real
+delight, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> that it was well she should have nothing to spend in
+ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share.
+Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and
+Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her
+bric-à-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese
+ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor
+miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the
+horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after
+that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow,
+a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind.
+Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the
+colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern
+towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately
+as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual
+personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with
+the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen
+in her nursery days.</p>
+
+<p>Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a
+Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian,
+and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the
+wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the
+evening that Ian expected<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> her to go to bed at once; but she followed
+him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on
+the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some
+perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an
+address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old,
+high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate
+tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with
+gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of
+dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife
+sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into
+nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the
+inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:</p>
+
+<p>"I've got something awful to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"What about? Tony?"&mdash;for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had
+reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.</p>
+
+<p>"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."</p>
+
+<p>Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he
+liked Tony.</p>
+
+<p>"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;but oh, Ian! I&mdash;hate even to speak of such a thing&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he&mdash;he made love to
+me."</p>
+
+<p>The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then,
+after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a
+cad."</p>
+
+<p>"He&mdash;he wanted me to run away with him."</p>
+
+<p>Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's worse&mdash;it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me.
+I&mdash;<i>I</i> of course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the
+garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said
+all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up
+for him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still
+coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't.
+I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl,
+but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous
+happening."</p>
+
+<p>"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said
+he knew I didn't love you&mdash;that <i>I</i> didn't love <i>you</i>, my own darling
+husband. Some one, some one&mdash;must be responsible for his thinking that.
+How do I know what happens when&mdash;when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a
+creature who doesn't love you!"</p>
+
+<p>Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> there was a faint flush
+on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to
+a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled
+apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of
+grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.</p>
+
+<p>"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length.
+"Don't give me pain by imagining evil about&mdash;about yourself. You could
+never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that
+a man could wish his wife to be."</p>
+
+<p>He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft
+face between his hands kissed her forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it
+any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so
+bad to-morrow morning."</p>
+
+<p>But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back
+against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's
+not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil
+spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me!
+I've always tried to be good."</p>
+
+<p>There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's
+case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as
+another,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat
+down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon
+him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a
+nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung
+herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in
+God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you
+away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked
+spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take
+possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O
+Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."</p>
+
+<p>Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in
+evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he
+said, quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little
+more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition,
+like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand?
+Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to
+be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it
+worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."</p>
+
+<p>"At first I thought it was like that&mdash;an eclipse of memory. But now I
+feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I.
+To-night<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to
+find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the
+frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was
+reminded of&mdash;that fearful night when I came back and saw&mdash;something. I
+am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."</p>
+
+<p>Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.</p>
+
+<p>"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."</p>
+
+<p>"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how
+any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like
+her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing
+happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the
+lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I
+could bear it better if&mdash;But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you
+left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who
+deceives you, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are
+absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."</p>
+
+<p>There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard
+before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new
+to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.</p>
+
+<p>"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me
+tell you what she is?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered
+with cold deliberation:</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot cease to love my own wife because&mdash;because she's not always
+exactly the same."</p>
+
+<p>They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa.
+The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped
+from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again
+slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place
+in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of
+an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls
+and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a
+bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark
+doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two,
+or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously
+flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of
+life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant
+with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in
+flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the
+stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and
+since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and
+fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with
+blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The
+scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of
+physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> from
+blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.</p>
+
+<p>Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical
+contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with
+passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress.
+He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness
+of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class,
+and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If
+his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities
+which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any
+such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position
+of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has
+affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was
+not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no
+severance.</p>
+
+<p>He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow
+Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself.
+Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession
+of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange
+tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the
+thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among
+the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as
+peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he
+were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life,
+it would be re<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>garded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an
+overwrought brain.</p>
+
+<p>There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is
+almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart
+found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And
+at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle,
+appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and
+carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had
+taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a
+hobble. Meditative, he looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. No
+artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that
+round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality
+and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and
+benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger
+man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose
+counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.</p>
+
+<p>When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar
+to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and
+saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table,
+he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such
+a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him
+to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his
+old pupil with silent benevolence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very
+bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more
+than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always
+been good to her as well as to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you
+married wisely."</p>
+
+<p>"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she&mdash;we didn't
+quite grasp&mdash;its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of
+those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see
+involved real and extraordinary variations in her character&mdash;a change,
+in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to
+Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him
+without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a
+silence. At length the Master said:</p>
+
+<p>"I suspect we don't understand women."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great
+difference in my wife at various times?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not more than I feel in myself&mdash;not of another character, that is. We
+live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing
+about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your
+wife's quite normal, really."</p>
+
+<p>"But the memory alone, surely&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You
+remember meeting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> Sir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young
+clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and
+went sheep-farming in Australia, where he made his fortune."</p>
+
+<p>"But his personality?" asked Stewart, with anxiety. "Was that changed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. A colonial sheep-farmer is a different person from a young
+Don just in orders."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean that, Master. I mean did he rise from his bed with ideas,
+with feelings quite opposite to those which had possessed him when he
+lay down upon it? Did he ever have a return of the clerical phase,
+during which he forgot how he became a sheep-farmer and wished to take
+up his old work again?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. The Master played with his gold spectacles and sucked
+his under lip. Then:</p>
+
+<p>"Take a good holiday, Stewart," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart's clear-cut face hardened and flushed momentarily. "These are
+not fancies of my own, Master. Cases occur in which two, sometimes more
+than two, entirely different personalities alternate in the same
+individual. The spontaneous cases are rare, of course, but hypnotism
+seems to develop them pretty freely. The facts are there, but English
+scientists prefer to say nothing about them."</p>
+
+<p>The Master rose and trotted restlessly about.</p>
+
+<p>"They're quite right," he returned, at length. "Such ideas can lead to
+nothing but mischief."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely that is the orthodox theologian's usual objection to scientific
+fact."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Master lifted his head and looked at his rebel disciple. For
+although he was an officiating clergyman, he and the orthodox
+theologians were at daggers drawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Views, statements of this kind are not knowledge," he said, after a
+while, and continued moving uneasily about without looking at Stewart.</p>
+
+<p>Stewart did not reply; it seemed useless to go on talking. He recognized
+that the Master's attitude was what his own had been before the iron of
+fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped
+that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his
+judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He
+sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking
+the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him.
+To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the
+hard sofa would have seemed an oddly assorted pair. Stewart's length of
+frame, the raven black of his hair and beard, the marble pallor of his
+delicate features, made the little Master look smaller, pinker, plumper
+than usual; but his face, radiating wisdom and affection, was more than
+beautiful in the eyes of his old disciple.</p>
+
+<p>"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always
+think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let
+me speak to you now as a father might&mdash;and probably wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.</p>
+
+<p>"You are young, but your wife is much younger.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> A man marries a girl
+many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of
+responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the
+same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much
+greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more
+help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you
+have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but
+she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She
+lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have
+nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to
+hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do
+not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that
+your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her
+happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of
+mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them.
+So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you
+will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of
+accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason
+and Religion are the only true guides."</p>
+
+<p>The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses
+which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The
+spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was,
+as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout
+sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about
+twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the
+beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile,
+because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to
+be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost
+which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying
+physiology in London and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of
+life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of
+cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a
+comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however,
+she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women
+poorer than herself to benefit by it.</p>
+
+<p>She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious
+illness of her next-door neighbor&mdash;Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a
+small post in the British Museum&mdash;had prevented her from visiting Oxford
+during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have
+been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper
+to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going
+sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly
+neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which
+she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her
+long neglect of her friend.</p>
+
+<p>It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> was still at Ascham and
+Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the
+Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned
+towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded
+her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss
+about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed
+to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when
+she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and
+dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse
+happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months,
+was sitting on the drawing-room floor.</p>
+
+<p>The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a
+gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept
+working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a
+knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her
+skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected
+picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the
+box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to
+hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until
+it jumped up with a bang&mdash;a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles,
+and scarlet snout&mdash;to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune.
+Then Tony, be sure, would laugh until he rolled from side to side. Mummy
+never responded to his wishes now, but Daddy had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> pleaded for the
+Jack-in-the-box to be spared, and sometimes when quite alone with Tony,
+would play the monkey-game in his inferior paternal style, pleased with
+such modified appreciation as the young critic might bestow upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry Baby's so troublesome," apologized the distressed Milly, for
+the third time lifting Tony up and replacing him in a sitting posture,
+with his picture-book. "I'm trying to teach him to sit quiet, but I'm
+afraid he's been played with a great deal more than he should have
+been."</p>
+
+<p>"To tell the truth, I thought so the last time I was here," replied Aunt
+Beatrice. "But he's still young enough to be properly trained. It's such
+waste of a reasonable person's time to spend it making idiotic noises at
+a small baby. And it's a thousand times better for the child's brain and
+nerves for it to be left entirely to itself."</p>
+
+<p>Tony said nothing, but his face began to work in a threatening manner.</p>
+
+<p>"I perfectly agree with you, Aunt Beatrice," responded Milly, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Children should be spoken to as little as possible until they are from
+two to two and a half years old; then they should be taught to speak
+correctly."</p>
+
+<p>Milly chimed in: "Yes, that's always been my own view. I do feel it so
+important that their very first impressions should be the right ones,
+that the first pictures they see should be good, that they should never
+be sung to out of tune and in general&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Apparently this programme for babies did not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> commend itself to Tony;
+certainly the first item, enjoining silent development, did not. His
+face had by this time worked the right number of minutes to produce a
+roar, and it came. Milly picked him up, but the wounds of his spirit
+were not to be immediately healed, and the roar continued. Finally he
+had to be handed over to the parlor-maid, and so came to great happiness
+in the kitchen, where there were no rules against infantile
+conversation. Milly was flushed and disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"Baby has not been properly brought up," she said. "He's been allowed
+his own way too much."</p>
+
+<p>"Since you say so, Milly, I must confess I noticed in the spring that
+you seemed to be bringing the child up in an easy-going, old-fashioned
+way I should hardly have expected of you. I hope you will begin now to
+study the theory of education. A mother should take her vocation
+seriously. I own I don't altogether understand the taste for frivolities
+which you have developed since you married. It's harmless, no doubt, but
+it doesn't seem quite natural in a young woman who has taken a First in
+Greats."</p>
+
+<p>Milly's hands grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at
+her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had
+ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had
+befallen her; yet she did it.</p>
+
+<p>"The person you saw here last spring wasn't I. Oh, Aunt Beatrice! Can't
+you see the difference?"</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson looked at her in surprise:</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean? I was speaking of my visit to you in March."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And don't you see the difference? Oh, how hateful you must have found
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Mildred, I saw nothing hateful about you. On the contrary, if
+you want the plain truth, I greatly prefer you in a cheerful,
+common-sense mood, as you were then, even if your high spirits do lead
+you into a little too much frivolity. I think it a more wholesome, and
+therefore ultimately a more useful, frame of mind than this causeless
+depression, which leads you to take such a morbid, exaggerated view of
+things."</p>
+
+<p>Every word pierced Milly's heart with a double pang.</p>
+
+<p>"You liked her better than me?" she asked, piteously. "Yet I've always
+tried to be just what you wanted me to be, Aunt Beatrice, to do
+everything you thought right, and she&mdash;Oh, it's too awful!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, Mildred?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that the person you prefer to me as I am now, the person who was
+here in March, wasn't I at all."</p>
+
+<p>The fine healthy carnation of Lady Thomson's cheek paled. In her calm,
+rapid way she at once found the explanation of Milly's unhealthy,
+depressed appearance and manner. Poor Mildred Stewart was insane. Beyond
+the paling of her cheek, however, Lady Thomson allowed no sign of shock
+to be visible in her.</p>
+
+<p>"That's an exaggerated way of talking," she replied. "I suppose you mean
+your mood was different."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Milly was looking straight in front of her with haggard eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it simply wasn't I at all. You believe in the Bible, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in verbal inspiration, of course, but in a general way, yes,"
+returned Lady Thomson, puzzled but guarded.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you believe in the demoniacs? In possession by evil spirits?"</p>
+
+<p>Milly was not looking at vacancy now. Her desperate hands clutched the
+arms of her chair, as she leaned forward and fixed her aunt with hollow
+eyes, awaiting her reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not! Most certainly not! They were obviously cases of
+epilepsy and insanity, misinterpreted by an ignorant age."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;it's all true, quite literally true. Three times, and for six
+months or more each time, I have been possessed by a spirit that cannot
+be good. I know it's not. It takes my body, it takes the love of people
+I care for, away from me&mdash;" Milly's voice broke and she pressed her
+handkerchief over her face. "You all think her&mdash;But she's bad, and some
+day she'll do something wicked&mdash;something that will break my heart, and
+you'll all insist it was I who did it, and you'll believe I'm a wicked
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson looked very grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred, dear," she said, "try and collect yourself. It is really
+wicked of you to give way to such terrible fancies. Would God permit
+such a thing to happen to one of His children? We feel sure He would
+not."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Milly shook her head, but the struggle with her hysterical sobs kept her
+silent. Lady Thomson walked to the window, feeling more "upset" than she
+had ever felt in her life. The window was open, but an awning shut out
+the view of the street. From the window-boxes, filled with pink
+geraniums and white stocks, a sweet, warm scent floated into the room,
+and the rattle of the milkman's cart, the chink of his cans, fell upon
+Lady Thomson's unheeding ears. So did voices in colloquy, but she did
+not particularly note a female one of a thin, chirpy quality, addressing
+the parlor-maid with a familiarity probably little appreciated by that
+elegantly decorous damsel.</p>
+
+<p>Milly had scarcely mastered her tears and Lady Thomson had just begun to
+address her in quiet, firm tones, when Tims burst unannounced into the
+room. Her hat was incredibly on one side, and her sallow face almost
+crimson with heat, but bright with pleasure at finding herself once more
+in Oxford.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo, old girl!" she cried, blind to the serious scene into which she
+was precipitated. "How are you? Now don't kiss me"&mdash;throwing herself
+into an attitude of violent defence against an embrace not yet
+offered&mdash;"I'm too hot. Carried my bag myself all the way from the
+station and saved the omnibus."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson fixed Tims with a look of more than usually cold
+disapproval. Milly proffered a constrained greeting.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything gone wrong?" asked Tims, after a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> minute, peering at Milly's
+tear-stained eyes with her own short-sighted ones.</p>
+
+<p>Milly answered with a forced self-restraint which appeared like cold
+deliberation.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Beatrice thinks I'm mad because I say I'm not the same person she
+found in my place last March. I want you to tell her that it's not just
+my fancy, but that you know that sometimes a quite different person
+takes my place, and I'm not responsible for anything she says or does."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's a solemn Gospel fact, right enough," affirmed Tims.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson could hardly control her indignation, but she did, although
+she spoke sternly to Tims.</p>
+
+<p>"Do I understand you to say, Miss Timson, that it's a 'solemn Gospel
+fact'&mdash;Gospel! Good Heavens&mdash;that Milly is possessed by a devil?"</p>
+
+<p>Tims plumped down on the sofa and stared at Lady Thomson.</p>
+
+<p>"Possessed by a devil? Good Lord, no! What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred believes herself to be possessed by an evil spirit."</p>
+
+<p>Tims turned to Milly in consternation.</p>
+
+<p>"Milly, old girl! Come! Poor old Milly! I never thought you were so
+superstitious as all that. Besides, I know more about it than you do,
+and I tell you straight, you mayn't be quite such a good sort when
+you're in your other phase, but as to there being a devil in it&mdash;well,
+devil's all nonsense, but if that were so, I should like to have a devil
+myself, and the more the merrier."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Milly turned on her a face pale with horror and indignation. Her eyes
+flashed and she raised a remonstrating hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" she cried. "Hush! You don't know what dreadful things you're
+saying. I don't know exactly what this spirit is that robs me of my
+life; I'm only sure it's not Me and it's not good."</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever may be the matter with you, Mildred," said Lady Thomson, "it
+can't possibly be that. I suppose you have suffered from loss of memory
+again and it's upset your nerves. Why will people have nerves? I should
+advise you to go to Norton-Smith at once."</p>
+
+<p>Milly's tears were flowing again but she managed to reply:</p>
+
+<p>"I've been to Dr. Norton-Smith, Aunt Beatrice. He doesn't seem to
+understand."</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't want to," interjected Tims, scornfully. "You don't suppose a
+respectable English nerve-doctor wants to know anything about
+psychology? They'd be interested in the case in France, or in the United
+States, but they wouldn't be able to keep down Milly Number Two."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what use would they be to me?" asked Milly, despairingly. "I can
+only trust in God; and He seems to have forsaken me."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful
+way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds
+dreadfully mad."</p>
+
+<p>"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager
+confidence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't
+bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like,
+only&mdash;only it isn't true."</p>
+
+<p>Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its
+simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant
+boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old
+houses&mdash;the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had
+been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched
+his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the
+unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he
+heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room.
+He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the
+extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what
+becomes of Personal Immortality?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality
+was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian,
+which she did effusively.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo!" he remarked, cheerfully, when her effusion was over. "No Milly
+and no tea!"</p>
+
+<p>"We don't want either just yet," returned Lady Thomson. "I'm terribly
+anxious about Mildred, Ian, and Miss Timson has not said anything to
+make me less so. I want a sound, sensible opinion on the state of
+her&mdash;her nerves."</p>
+
+<p>Ian's brow clouded.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me frankly, do you notice so great a difference in her from time
+to time, as to account for the positively insane delusion she has got
+into her head?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, Aunt Beatrice?" asked Ian, shortly, sternly eying
+Tims, whom he imagined to have let out the secret.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred has made an extraordinary statement to me about not being the
+same person now as she was in March. Of course I see she&mdash;well, she is
+not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very
+different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it
+into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how
+you could have allowed her to come to that state of&mdash;of mental
+aberration, without doing anything."</p>
+
+<p>Ian was silent. He looked gaunt and sombrely dark in the low,
+awning-shaded room, with its heavy beams and floor of wavelike
+unevenness.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to put her under care next, if you don't take some steps.
+Send her for a sea-voyage."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd take her myself if I thought it would do her any good," said Tims.
+"But I'll lay my bottom dollar it wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I think Miss Timson's view of the matter as insane as
+Milly's," returned Lady Thomson, tartly.</p>
+
+<p>Ian lifted his bowed head and addressed Tims:</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to know exactly what your view of the matter is, Miss
+Timson. We need not discuss poor Milly's; it's too absurd and also too
+painful."</p>
+
+<p>"It's no doubt a case of disintegration of personality," replied Tims,
+after a pause. "Somewhere inside our brains must be a nerve-centre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+which co-ordinates most of our mental, our sensory and motor processes,
+in such a manner as to produce consciousness, volition, what we call
+personality. But after all there are always plenty of activities within
+us going on independent of it. Your heart beats, your stomach
+digests&mdash;even your memory works apart from your consciousness sometimes.
+Now suppose some shock or strain enfeebles your centre of consciousness,
+so that it ceases to be able to co-ordinate all the mental processes it
+has been accustomed to superintend. What you call your personality is
+the outcome of your memory and all your other faculties and tendencies
+working together, checking and balancing each other. Suppose your centre
+of consciousness so enfeebled; suppose at the same time an enfeeblement
+of memory, causing you to completely forget external facts: certain of
+your faculties and tendencies are left working and they are co-ordinated
+without an important part of the memory, without many other faculties
+and tendencies which checked and balanced them. Naturally you appear to
+yourself and to every one else a totally different person; but it's not
+a new personality really, it's only a bit of the old one which goes on
+its own hook, while the rest is quiescent."</p>
+
+<p>"This is the most abominably materialistic theory of the human mind I
+ever heard," exclaimed Lady Thomson, indignantly. "The most degrading to
+our spiritual natures."</p>
+
+<p>Ian leaned against the high, carved mantel-piece and pushed back the
+black hair from his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not concerned with that," he replied, de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>liberately, discussing
+this case so vitally near to him with an almost terrible calmness. "But
+I can't feel that this disintegration theory altogether covers the
+ground. There is no development of characteristics previously to be
+found in Milly; on the contrary, the qualities of mind and character
+which she exhibits when&mdash;when the change comes over her, are precisely
+the opposite of those she exhibits in what I presume we ought to call
+her normal state."</p>
+
+<p>"There must be some reason for it, old chap, you know," returned Tims;
+"and it seems to me that's the line you've got to move along, unless
+you're an idiot and go in for devils or spiritualistic nonsense."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I've followed what you've been saying, Miss Timson," said
+Lady Thomson, in her fullest tones; "and I can assure you I feel under
+no necessity to become either a materialist or an idiot in consequence."</p>
+
+<p>Ian spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't profess to be scientific, but I do seem to see another possible
+line, running parallel with yours, but not quite the same. It's evident
+we can inherit faculties, characteristics, from our ancestors which
+never become active in us; but we know they must have been present in us
+in a quiescent state, because we can transmit them to children in whom
+they become active. Mildred's father and mother, for example, are not
+scholars, although her grandfather and great-grandfather were; yet in
+one of her parents at least there must be a germ of the scholar's
+faculty which has never been developed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> because Mildred has inherited
+it. Now why can't we develop all the faculties, the germs of which lie
+within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount
+of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole
+desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient
+vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit.
+Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the
+flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which
+it usually flows most strongly; its course is diverted and it fertilizes
+tracts of our brain and nervous system which before have been lying
+quiescent, sterile. If we lose the memory of our former lives, and if at
+the same time hereditary faculties and tendencies, of the existence of
+which we were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically
+new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we
+regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones
+sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt
+this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing
+to say on the question."</p>
+
+<p>"It certainly has not," commented Lady Thomson, decisively. "I ought to
+know what Science is, considering how often I've met Mr. Darwin and
+Professor Huxley. Hypnotism and this kind of unpleasant talk is not
+Science. It's only a new variety of the hocus-pocus that's been imposing
+on human weakness ever since the world began. I'd sooner believe with
+poor Milly that she's possessed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> by a devil. It's less silly to accept
+inherited superstitions than to invent brand-new ones."</p>
+
+<p>"But we've got to account somehow for the extraordinary changes which
+take place in Milly," sighed Ian, wearily.</p>
+
+<p>The light lines across his forehead were showing as furrows, and Tims's
+whole face was corrugated.</p>
+
+<p>"No hocus-pocus about them, anyway," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a great deal of fancy about them," retorted Lady Thomson. "A
+nervous, imaginative man like you, Ian, ought to be on your guard
+against allowing such notions to get hold of you. It's so easy to fancy
+things are as you're afraid they may be, and then you influence Milly
+and she goes from bad to worse. I think I may claim to understand her if
+any one does, and all I see is that she gives way to moods. At first I
+thought it was a steady development of character; but I admit that when
+she is unwell and out of spirits, she becomes just her old timid,
+over-conscientious self again. She's always been very easily influenced,
+very dependent, and now&mdash;I hardly like to say such a thing of my own
+niece&mdash;but I fear there's a touch of hysteria about her. I've always
+heard that hysterical people, even when they've been perfectly frank and
+truthful before, become deceitful and act parts till it's impossible to
+tell fact from falsehood with regard to them. I would suggest your
+letting Mildred come to me for a month or two, Ian. I feel sure I should
+send her back to you quite cured of all this nonsense."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this point Milly came in. Ian stretched out his hand towards her with
+protective tenderness; but even at the moment when his whole soul was
+moved by an impulse of compassion so strong that it seemed almost love,
+a spirit within him arose and mocked at all hypotheses, telling him that
+this poor stricken wife of his, seemingly one with the lady of his
+heart, was not she, but another.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Beatrice was just saying you ought to get away from domestic cares
+for a month or two, Milly," he said, as cheerfully as he could.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson explained.</p>
+
+<p>"What you want is a complete change; though I don't know what people
+mean when they talk about 'domestic cares.' I should like to have you up
+at Clewes for the rest of the Long. Ian can look after the baby."</p>
+
+<p>Milly smiled at her sweetly, but rather as though she were talking
+nonsense.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very kind of you, Aunt Beatrice, but Ian and I have never been
+parted for a day since we were married; I mean not when&mdash;and I don't
+feel as though I could spare a minute of his company. And poor Baby,
+too! Oh no! But of course it's very good of you to think of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must all come to Clewes," decided Aunt Beatrice, after some
+remonstrance. "That'll settle it."</p>
+
+<p>"But my work!" ejaculated Ian in dismay. "How am I to get on at Clewes,
+away from the libraries?"</p>
+
+<p>"There are some things in life more important than books, Ian," returned
+Lady Thomson.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But it won't do a penn'orth of good," broke in Tims, argumentatively.
+"I don't pretend to have more than a working hypothesis, but whoever
+else may prove to be right, Lady Thomson's on the wrong line."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson surveyed her in silence; Ian took no notice of her remark.
+He was looking before him with a sadness incomprehensible to the
+uncreative man&mdash;to the man who has never dreamed dreams and seen
+visions; with the sadness of one who just as the cloudy emanations of
+his mind are beginning to take form and substance sees them scattered,
+perhaps never again to reunite, by some cold breath from the relentless
+outside world of circumstance. He made his renunciation in silence;
+then, with a quiet smile, he turned to Lady Thomson and answered her.</p>
+
+<p>"You're very kind, Aunt Beatrice, and quite right. There are things in
+life much more important than books."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>So the summer went by; a hot summer, passed brightly enough to all
+appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in
+expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an
+anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the
+optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow
+was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the
+quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole
+attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning tenderness
+towards himself and Tony, was that of a woman who feels the stamp of
+death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would
+sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to
+tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was
+different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could
+love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian,
+who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation
+of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the
+Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the
+perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was
+almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care,
+which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its
+native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and
+terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other
+life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet
+held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not
+to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden
+life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the
+man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would
+be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta
+of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an
+illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between
+the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never
+felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his
+marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had
+gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.</p>
+
+<p>One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a
+spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there
+also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech
+she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> people who have
+been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her
+melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice
+of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table
+with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright
+flower-beds on the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by
+its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.</p>
+
+<p>"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I
+suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a
+long letter."</p>
+
+<p>"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for
+his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It
+held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of
+foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been
+scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written
+anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was
+writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own
+handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own
+eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written?
+You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say
+tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> when that
+happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I
+recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly.
+"She always follows your advice, you know. It&mdash;it's only scrabbles."</p>
+
+<p>He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely
+puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had
+written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made
+out: "You are only miserab ..."&mdash;the words were interspersed with really
+illegible scrawls&mdash;"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want
+to ... Mild ..."</p>
+
+<p>Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"</p>
+
+<p>He scribbled with his pencil: "You."</p>
+
+<p>She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at
+odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was
+really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she
+exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go
+dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."</p>
+
+<p>Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt
+Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth
+garments, passed with its usual vigorous gait across the burning
+sunlight on the lawn and broad gravel walk, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> disappear under the
+awning of a French window. Milly, very pale, had closed her eyes and her
+hands were clasped. She trembled, but her voice and expression were calm
+and even resolute.</p>
+
+<p>"The evil spirit is trying to get possession of me in another way now,"
+she said. "But with God's help I shall be able to resist it."</p>
+
+<p>Ian too was pale and disturbed. It was to him as though he had suddenly
+heard a beloved voice calling faintly for help.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only automatic writing, dear," he replied. "You may not have been
+aware you were writing, but it probably reflects something in your
+thoughts."</p>
+
+<p>"It does not," returned she, firmly. "However miserable I may sometimes
+be, I could never wish to give up a moment of my life with you, my own
+husband, or to leave you and our child to the influence of this&mdash;this
+being."</p>
+
+<p>She stretched out her arms to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Please hold me, Ian, and will as I do, that I may resist this horrible
+invasion. I have a feeling that you can help me."</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated. "I, darling? But I don't believe&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She approached him, and took hold of him urgently, looking him in the
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you do it, husband dear? Please, for my sake, even if you don't
+believe, promise you'll will to keep me here. Will it, with all your
+might!"</p>
+
+<p>What madness it was, this fantastic scene upon the well-kept lawn, under
+the square windows of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> the sober, opulent North Country house! And the
+maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply
+with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before
+answering her with a meaningless half-laugh:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I'll promise anything you like, dear."</p>
+
+<p>He put his arms around her and rested his face upon her golden head.</p>
+
+<p>"Will!" she whispered, and the voice was one of command rather than of
+appeal. "Will! You have promised."</p>
+
+<p>He willed as she commanded him.</p>
+
+<p>The triple madness of it! He did not believe&mdash;and yet it seemed to him
+that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from
+below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her
+enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to
+his brow, and the sweat stood upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Beatrice's masculine foot crunched the gravel. She stood there
+dressed and ready for the drive, beckoning them with her parasol. They
+came across the lawn holding each other by the hand, and Milly's face
+was calm, even happy. Aunt Beatrice smiled at them broadly with her
+large, handsome mouth and bright brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What, not had enough of spooning yet, you foolish young people! The
+carriage will be round in one minute, and Milly won't be ready."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is a joy in the return of every season, though the return of
+spring is felt and celebrated beyond the rest. The gay flame dancing on
+the hearth where lately all was blackness, the sense of immunity from
+the "wrongs and arrows" of the skies and their confederate earth, the
+concentration of the sense upon the intimate charms which four walls can
+contain, bring to civilized man consolation for the loss of summer's
+lavish warmth and beauty. Children are always sensible of these opening
+festivals of the seasons, but many mature people enjoy without realizing
+them.</p>
+
+<p>To Mildred the world was again new, and she looked upon its most
+familiar objects with the delighted eyes of a traveller returning to a
+favorite foreign country. So she did not complain because when she had
+left the earth it had been hurrying towards the height of June, and she
+had returned to find the golden boughs of October already stripped by
+devastating winds. The flames leaped merrily under the great carved
+mantel-piece in her white-panelled drawing-room, showing the date 1661,
+and the initials of the man who had put it there, and on its narrow
+shelf a row of Chelsea figures which she had picked up in various
+corners<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> of Oxford. The chintz curtains were drawn around the bay-window
+and a bright brass <i>scaldino</i> stood in it, filled with the yellows and
+red-browns, the silvery pinks and mauves of chrysanthemums. The ancient
+charm, the delicate harmony of the room, in which every piece of
+furniture, every picture, every ornament, had been chosen with an
+exactness of taste seldom found in the young, made it more pleasurable
+to a cultivated eye than the gilded show drawing-rooms into which wealth
+too commonly crowds a medley of incongruous treasures and costly
+nullities.</p>
+
+<p>It was a free evening for Ian, and as it was but the second since the
+Desire of his Eyes had returned to him, his gaze followed her movements
+in a contented silence, as she wandered about the room in her slight
+grace, the whiteness of her skin showing through the transparency of a
+black dress, which, although it was old, Milly would have thought
+unsuitable for a domestic evening. When everything was just where it
+should be, she returned to the fire and sank into a chair thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"How I should like some rides," she said; "but I suppose I can't have
+them, not unless Maxwell Davison's still in Oxford."</p>
+
+<p>Ian's face clouded.</p>
+
+<p>"He's not," he returned, shortly; and knocked the ashes out of his pipe,
+hesitating as to how he should put what he had to say about Maxwell
+Davison.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred put her hand over her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
+Suddenly the silence was broken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> by a burst of rippling laughter. Ian
+started; his own thoughts had not been so diverting.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the joke, Mildred?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Ian, don't you know? Max made love to Milly and she&mdash;she bit him!
+Wasn't it frightfully funny?" She laughed again, with a more inward
+enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you bit him, although he richly deserved it; but of
+course I knew he made love to you. How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"It came to me just now in a sort of flash. I seemed to see him&mdash;to see
+her, floundering out of the canoe; and both of them in such a towering
+rage. It really was too funny."</p>
+
+<p>Ian's face hardened.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid I can't see the joke of a man making love to my wife."</p>
+
+<p>"You old stupid! He'd never have dared to behave like that to me; but
+Milly's such an ass."</p>
+
+<p>"Milly was frightened, shocked, as any decent woman would be to whom
+such a thing happened. She certainly didn't encourage Maxwell; but she
+found an appointment already made for her to go on the river with him.
+No doubt she took an exaggerated view of her&mdash;of your&mdash;good God,
+Mildred, what am I to say?&mdash;well, of your relations with him."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred had closed her eyes. A strange knowledge of things that had
+passed during her suppression was coming to her in glimpses.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she returned, in a kind of wonder at her own knowledge.
+"Absurd! But Max did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> behave abominably. I couldn't have believed it of
+him, even with that silly little baa-lamb. Of course she couldn't manage
+him. She won't be able to manage Tony long."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't speak of&mdash;of your other self in that way, Mildred. You're
+very innocent of the world in both your selves, and you must have been
+indiscreet or it would never have occurred to Maxwell to make love to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Ian was actually frowning, his lips were tight and hard, the clear
+pallor of his cheek faintly streaked with red. Mildred, leaning forward,
+looked at him, interested, her round chin on her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you angry, Ian? I really believe you are. Is it with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not with you. But of course I'm angry when I think of a fellow like
+that, my own cousin, a man who has been a guest in my house over and
+over again, being cad enough to make love to my wife."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was smiling quietly to herself.</p>
+
+<p>"How primitive you are, Ian!" she said. "I suppose men are primitive
+when they're angry. I don't mind, but it does seem funny <i>you</i> should
+be."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her, surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"Primitive? What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"What difference does it make, Max being your cousin, you silly old boy?
+You'd hardly ever seen him till last winter. Clans aren't any use to us
+now, are they? And when a man's got a house of his own, as Max had, or
+even a hotel, why should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> he be so grateful as all that for a few decent
+meals? He's not in the desert, depending on you for food and protection.
+Anyhow, it seems curious to expect him to weigh little things like that
+in the balance against what is always said to be such a very strong
+feeling as a man's love for a woman."</p>
+
+<p>Men often deplore that they have failed in their attempts fundamentally
+to civilize Woman. They would use stronger language if Woman often made
+attempts fundamentally to civilize them.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't look at me like that," Mildred said, tremulously, after a
+pause. And the tears rushed to her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Ian's face softened, as leaning against the tall white mantel-piece he
+looked down and met the tear-bright gaze of his beloved.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor sweetheart!" he exclaimed. "You're just a child for all your
+cleverness, and you don't half understand what you're talking about. But
+listen to me&mdash;" He kneeled before her, bringing their heads almost on a
+level. "I won't have any more affairs like this of Maxwell's. I dare say
+it was as much my fault as yours, but it mustn't happen again."</p>
+
+<p>She dabbed away two tears that hung on her eyelashes, and looked at him
+with such a bright alluring yet elusive smile as might have flitted
+across the face of Ariel.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I help it if Milly flirts? I don't believe I can help it if I
+do myself. But I can tell you this, Ian&mdash;yes, really&mdash;" Her soft white
+arms<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> went about his neck. "I've never seen a man yet who was a patch
+upon you for cleverness and handsomeness and goodness and
+altogetherness. No! You really are the very nicest man I ever saw!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>In spite of the deepening dislike between the two egos which struggled
+for the possession of Mildred Stewart's bodily personality, they had a
+common interest in disguising the fact of their dual existence. Yet the
+transformation never occurred without producing its little harvest of
+inconveniences, and the difficulty of disguising the difference between
+the two was the greater because of the number of old acquaintances and
+friends of Milly Flaxman living in Oxford.</p>
+
+<p>This was one reason why, when Ian was offered the headship of the
+Merchants' Guild College in London, Mildred encouraged him to take it.
+The income, too, seemed large in comparison to their Oxford one; and the
+great capital, with its ever-roaring surge of life, drew her with a
+natural magnetism. The old Foundation was being reconstructed, and was
+ambitious of adorning itself with a name so distinguished as Ian
+Stewart's, while at the same time obtaining the services of a man with
+so many of his best years still before him. Stewart, although he could
+do fairly well in practical administration, if he gave his mind to it,
+had won distinction as a student and man of letters, and feared that,
+difficult as it was to combine the real<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> work of his life with
+bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to
+combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But
+he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment
+of others, less informed or less judicious than himself. He found it
+impossible to believe that the opinion of the Master of Durham was not
+better than his own; and his old friend and tutor was strongly in favor
+of his accepting the headship. His most really happy and successful
+years had been those later ones in which he had shone as the Head of the
+most brilliant College in Oxford, a man of affairs and, in his
+individual way, a social centre. Accordingly he found it impossible to
+believe that it might be otherwise with Ian Stewart. The majority of
+Ian's most trusted advisers were of the same opinion as the Master,
+since the number of persons who can understand the conditions necessary
+to the productiveness of exceptional and creative minds is always few.
+Besides, most people at bottom are in Martha's attitude of scepticism
+towards the immaterial service of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson voiced the general opinion in declaring that a man could
+always find time to do good work if he really wanted to do it. She
+rejoiced when Ian put aside the serious doubts which beset him and
+accepted the London offer. Mildred also rejoiced, although she regretted
+much that she must leave behind her, and in particular the old panelled
+house.</p>
+
+<p>This was, however, the one part of Oxford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> that Milly did not grieve to
+have lost, when she awoke once more from long months of sleep, to find
+herself in a new home. For she had grown to be silently afraid of the
+old house, with the great chimney-stacks like hollowed towers within it,
+made, it seemed, for the wind to moan in; its deep embrasures and
+panelling, that harbored inexplicable sounds; its ancient boards that
+creaked all night as if with the tread of mysterious feet. Awake in the
+dark hours, she fancied there were really footsteps, really knockings,
+movements, faint sighs passing outside her door, and that some old
+wicked life which should long since have passed away through the portals
+of the grave, clung to those ancient walls with a horrible tenacity,
+still refusing the great renunciation of death.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that in the larger, more hurried world of London it was
+easier to dissimulate her transformations than it had been in Oxford.
+The comparative retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by
+her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns&mdash;which more and
+more encroached upon those of the original personality&mdash;the strong,
+intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common
+body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against
+which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover
+with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her
+young heart of its happiness; and for that very reason it grew deeper
+and more envenomed.</p>
+
+<p>That Ian should love her evil and mysterious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> rival as though they two
+were really one was horrible to her. Even her child was not unreservedly
+her own, to bring up according to her own ideas, to love without fear of
+that rival. Tony was like his father in the sweetness of his
+disposition, as well as in his dark beauty, and he accented with
+surprising resignation the innumerable rules and regulations which Milly
+set about his path and about his bed. But although he was healthy, his
+nerves were highly strung, and it seemed as though her feverish anxiety
+for his physical, moral, and intellectual welfare reacted upon him and
+made him, after a few weeks of her influence, less vigorous in
+appearance, less gay and boylike than he was during her absence. Ian
+dared not hint a preference for the animal spirits that Mildred
+encouraged, with their attendant noise and nonsense, considered by Milly
+so undesirable. But one day Tims observed, cryptically, that "A watched
+boy never boils"; and Emma, the nurse, told Mrs. Stewart bluntly that
+she thought Master Tony wasn't near so well and bright when he was
+always being looked after, as he was when he was let go his own way a
+bit, like other children. Then a miserable fear beset Milly lest the
+boy, too, should notice the change in his mother; lest he should look
+forward to the disappearance of the woman who loved him so passionately,
+watched over him with such complete devotion, and in his silent heart
+regret, invoke, that other. It was at once soothing and bitter to her to
+be assured by Ian and by Tims that they had never been able to discover
+the least sign that Tony was aware when the change<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> occurred between the
+two personalities of his mother.</p>
+
+<p>Two years passed in London, two years out of which the original owner
+enjoyed a total share of only nine months; and this, indeed, she could
+not truly have been said to have enjoyed, since happiness was far from
+her. Death would have been a sad but simple catastrophe, to be met with
+resignation to the will of God. What resignation could be felt before
+this gradual strangulation of her being at the hands of a nameless yet
+surely Evil Thing? Her love for Ian was so great that his sufferings
+were more to her than her own, and in the space of those two years she
+saw that on him, too, sorrow had set its mark. The glow of his good
+looks and the brilliancy of his mind were alike dulled. It was not only
+that his shoulders were bent, his hair thinned and touched with gray,
+but his whole appearance, once so individual, was growing merely
+typical; that of the middle-aged Academic, absorbed in the cares of his
+profession. His real work was not merely at a stand-still, but a few
+more such years and his capacity for it would be destroyed. She felt
+this vaguely, with the intuition of love. If the partnership had been
+only between him and her, he surely would have yielded to her prayer to
+give up the headship of the Merchants' Guild College after a set term;
+but he put the question by. Evidently that Other, who cared for nothing
+but her own selfish interests and amusements, who spent upon them the
+money that he ought to be saving, would never allow him to give up his
+appointment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> unless something better offered. It was not only her own
+life, it was the higher and happier part of his that she was struggling
+to save in those desperate hours when she sought around her for some
+weapon wherewith to fight that mortal foe. She turned to priests,
+Anglican, Roman Catholic; but they failed her. Both believed her to be
+suffering under an insane delusion, but the Roman Catholic priest would
+have attempted to exorcise the evil spirit if she would have joined his
+Communion. She was too honest to pretend to a belief that was not hers.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned from her last vain pilgrimage to the Church of the
+Sacred Heart and stood before the glass, removing a thick black veil
+from the pale despair of her face, she was suddenly aware of a strange,
+unfamiliar smile lifting the drooped lines of her lips&mdash;an elfish smile
+which transformed her face to something different from her own. And
+immediately those smiling lips uttered words that fell as unexpectedly
+on her ears as though they had proceeded from the mouth of another
+person.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," they said, briskly. "It wouldn't have been of the least
+use."</p>
+
+<p>For a minute a wild terror made her brain swim and she fled to the door,
+instinctively seeking protection; but she stayed herself, remembering
+that Ian, who was sleeping badly at night, was now asleep in his study.
+Weak and timid though she was, she would lay no fresh burden on him, but
+fight her battle, if battle there was to be, alone.</p>
+
+<p>She walked back deliberately to the glass and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> looked steadily at her
+own reflection. Her brows were frowning, her eyes stern as she had never
+before seen them, but they were assuredly hers, answering to the mood of
+her own mind. Her lips were cold, and trembled so that although she had
+meant solemnly to defy the Power of Evil within her she was unable to
+articulate. As she looked in the glass and saw herself&mdash;her real
+self&mdash;so evidently there, the strange smile, the speech divorced from
+all volition of hers which had crossed her lips, began to lose reality.
+Still her lips trembled, and at length a convulsion shook them as
+irresistible as that of a sob. Words broke stammeringly out which were
+not hers:</p>
+
+<p>"Struggle for life&mdash;the stronger wins. I'm stronger. It's no use
+struggling&mdash;no use&mdash;no use&mdash;no use!"</p>
+
+<p>Milly pressed her lips hard against her teeth with her hands, stopping
+this utterance by main force. Her heart hammered so loud it seemed as
+though some one must hear it and come to ask what was the matter. But no
+one came. She was left alone with the Thing within her.</p>
+
+<p>It may have been a long while, it may have been only a few seconds that
+she remained standing at her dressing-table, her hands pressed hard
+against her convulsed mouth. She had closed her eyes, afraid to look
+longer in the glass, lest something uncanny should peer out of it. She
+did not pray&mdash;she had prayed so often before&mdash;but she fought with her
+whole strength against the encroaching power of the Other. At length she
+gradually released her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> lips. They were bruised, but they had ceased to
+move. It was she herself who spoke, low but clearly and with
+deliberation:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall struggle. I shall never give in. You think you're the stronger.
+I won't let you be. I'm fighting for my husband's happiness&mdash;do you
+hear?&mdash;as well as my own. You're strong, but we shall be stronger, he
+and I, in the end."</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer, the sense of struggle was gone from her; and
+suddenly she felt how mad it was to be talking to herself like that in
+an empty room. She took off the little black toque which sat on her
+bright head with an alien smartness to which she was now accustomed, and
+forced herself to look in the glass while she pinned up a stray lock of
+hair. Beyond an increased pallor and darker marks under her eyes, she
+saw nothing unusual in her appearance.</p>
+
+<p>It was five o'clock, and Ian would probably be awake and wanting his
+tea. She went softly into the study and leaned over him. Sleep had
+almost smoothed away the lines of effort and worry which had marred the
+beauty of his face; in the eyes of her love he was always the same
+handsome Ian Stewart as in the old Oxford days, when he had seemed as a
+young god, so high above her reach.</p>
+
+<p>She went to an oak table behind the sofa, on which the maid had set the
+tea-things without awakening him, and sat there quietly watching the
+kettle. The early London twilight began to veil the room. Ian stirred on
+the sofa and sat up, with his back to her, unconscious of her presence.
+She<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> rose, vaguely supposing herself about to address some gentle word
+to him. Then suddenly she had thrown one soft hand under his chin and
+one across his eyes, and with a <i>brusquerie</i> quite unnatural to her
+pulled him backwards, while a ripple of laughter so strange as to be
+shocking in her own ears burst from her lips, which cried aloud with a
+defiant gayety:</p>
+
+<p>"Who, Ian? Guess!"</p>
+
+<p>Ian, with a sudden force as strange to her as her own laughter, her own
+gay cry, pulled her hands away, held them an instant fast; then,
+kneeling on the sofa, he caught her in his long arms across the back of
+it, and after the pressure of a kiss upon her lips such as she had never
+felt before, breathed with a voice of unutterable gladness: "Mildred!
+Darling! Dearest love!"</p>
+
+<p>A hoarse cry, almost a shriek, broke from the lips of Milly. The woman
+he held struggled from his arms and stared at him wildly in the veiling
+twilight. A strange horror fell upon him, and for several seconds he
+remained motionless, leaning over the back of the sofa. Then, groping
+towards the wall, he switched on the electric light. He saw it plainly,
+the white mask of a woman smitten with a mortal blow.</p>
+
+<p>"Milly," he uttered, stammeringly. "What's the matter? You are ill."</p>
+
+<p>She turned on him her heart-broken look, then pressing her hand to her
+throat, spoke as though with difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>"I love you very much&mdash;you don't know how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span> much I love you. I've tried
+so hard to be a good wife to you."</p>
+
+<p>Ian perceived catastrophe, yet dimly; sought with desperate haste to
+remember why for a moment he had believed that that Other was come back;
+what irreparable thing he had said or done.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime he must say something. "Milly, dear! What's gone wrong? What
+have I done, child?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've let her take you&mdash;" She spoke more freely now, but with a
+startling fierceness&mdash;"You've let her take you from me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the old trouble! My poor Milly! I know it's terrible for you. I can
+only say that no one else really exists; that you are always you
+really."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not true. You don't believe it yourself. That wicked creature
+has made you love her&mdash;her own wicked way. You want to have her instead
+of me; you want to destroy your own wife and to get her back again."</p>
+
+<p>The cruel, ultimate truth that Milly's words laid bare&mdash;the truth which
+he constantly refused to look upon, in mercy to himself and
+her&mdash;paralyzed the husband's tongue. He tried to approach her with vague
+words and gestures of affection and remonstrance, but she motioned him
+from her.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Don't say you love me; I can't believe it, and I hate to hear you
+say what's not true."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the fierce heart of Primitive Woman had blazed up within
+her&mdash;that fire which all the waters of baptism fail to quench. But the
+flame died down as suddenly as it had arisen, and appeal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>ing with
+outspread hands, as to some invisible judge, she wailed, miserably:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what am I to do&mdash;what am I to do? I love you so much, and it's all
+no use."</p>
+
+<p>Ian was as white as herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Milly, my poor girl, don't break our hearts."</p>
+
+<p>He stretched his arms towards her, but she turned away from him towards
+the door, made a few steps, then stopped and clutched her throat. He
+thought her struggling with sobs; but when once more, as though in fear,
+she turned her face towards him, he saw it strangely convulsed. He moved
+towards her in an alarmed silence, but before he could reach her and
+catch her in his arms, her head drooped, she swayed once upon her feet,
+and fell heavily to the ground.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Now be reasonable Tims. You can be if you choose."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was perched on a high stool in Tims's Chambers, breathing spring
+from a bunch of fresh Neapolitan violets, grown by an elderly admirer of
+hers, and wearing her black, winter toque and dress with that invincible
+air of smartness which she contrived to impart to the oldest clothes,
+provided they were of her own choosing. Tims, who from her face and
+attitude might have been taken for a victim of some extreme and secret
+torture, crouched, balancing herself on the top rail of her fender. She
+replied only by a horrible groan.</p>
+
+<p>"Who do you suppose is the happier when Milly comes back?" continued
+Mildred.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;the brat."</p>
+
+<p>"Tony? He doesn't even know when she's there; but by the time she's done
+with him he's unnaturally good. He can't like that, can he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then there's Ian, good old boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's humbug. You know it is."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's Milly herself I really care about," cried Tims. "You've been a
+pig to her, Mil. She says you're a devil, and if I weren't a scientific
+woman I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> swear I should begin to believe there was something in it."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Tims, dear," returned Mildred with earnestness. "I'm neither a pig
+nor a devil." She paused. "Sometimes I think I've lived before, some
+quite different life from this. But I suppose you'll say that's all
+nonsense."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is&mdash;rot," commented Tims, sternly. "You're a physiological
+freak, that's what you are. You're nothing but Milly all the time, and
+you ought to be decent to her."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to hurt her anyhow," apologized Mildred; "but you see when
+I'm only half there&mdash;well, I am only half there. I'm awfully rudimentary
+and I can't grasp anything except that I'm being choked, squeezed out of
+existence, and that I must make a fight for my life. Any woman becomes
+rudimentary who is fighting for her life against another woman; only
+I've more excuse for it, because as a scientist you must see that I can
+only be in very partial possession of my brain."</p>
+
+<p>Tims had pulled her wig down over her eyes and glared at space. "That's
+all very well for you," she said; "but why should I help you to kill
+poor old M.?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do try and understand! Every time she comes back she's more and more
+miserable; and that's not cheerful for Ian either, is it? Now, through
+that underhand trick of rudimentary Me&mdash;you see I don't try to hide my
+horrid ways&mdash;she knows Ian adores me and, comparatively speaking,
+doesn't care two straws about her. That will make her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> more miserable
+than she has ever been before. She'll only want to live so that I
+mayn't."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how Ian's going to get on without her. <i>You</i> don't do much
+for him, my girl, except spend his money."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, that's quite true. I'm not in the least suited to Ian or his
+life or his income; but that's not my fault. How perverse men are!
+Always in love with the wrong women, aren't they?"</p>
+
+<p>Tims's countenance relaxed and she replied with a slight air of
+importance:</p>
+
+<p>"My opinion of men has been screwed up a peg lately. Every now and then
+you do find one who's got too much sense for any rot of that kind."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Ian's perfectly wretched at what happened; can't understand it, of
+course. He doesn't say much, but I can see he dreads explanations with
+Milly. He's good at reserve, but no good at lies, poor old dear, and
+just think of all the straight questions she'll ask him! It'll be
+torture to both of them. Poor Milly! I've no patience with her. Why
+should she want to live? Life's no pleasure to her. She's known a long
+time that Tony's really jollier and better with me, and now she knows
+Ian doesn't want her. How can you pretend to think Milly happy, Tims?
+Hasn't she said things to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," groaned Tims. "Poor old M.! She's pretty well down on her luck,
+you bet."</p>
+
+<p>"And I enjoy every minute of my life, although<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> I could find plenty to
+grumble at if I liked. Listen to me, Tims. How would it be to strike a
+bargain? Let me go on without any upsets from Milly until I'm forty. I'm
+sure I sha'n't care what happens to me at forty. Then Milly may have
+everything her own way. What would it matter to her? She likes to take
+time by the forelock and behaves already as though she were forty. I
+feel sure you could help me to keep her quiet if only you chose."</p>
+
+<p>"If I chose to meddle at all, I should be much more likely to help her
+to come back," returned Tims, getting snappish.</p>
+
+<p>"Alas! I fear you would, Tims, dear, in spite of knowing it would only
+make her miserable. That shows, doesn't it, how unreasonable even a
+distinguished scientific woman can be?"</p>
+
+<p>This aspersion on Tims's reasoning powers had to be resented and the
+resentment to be soothed. And the soothing was so effectually done that
+Tims owned to herself afterwards there was some excuse for Ian's
+infatuation.</p>
+
+<p>But Tims had no desire to meddle, and the months passed by without any
+symptoms of the change appearing. It seemed as if Mildred's hold upon
+life had never been so firm, the power of her personality never so fully
+developed. She belonged to a large family which in all its branches had
+a trick of throwing up successful men and brilliant women. But in
+reaction against Scottish clannishness, it held little together, and in
+the two houses whence Mildred was launched on her Lon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>don career, she
+had no nursery reputation of Milly's with which to contend.</p>
+
+<p>One of these houses was that of her cousin, Sir Cyril Meres, a
+fashionable painter with a considerable gift for art, and more for
+success&mdash;success social and financial. His beautiful house, stored with
+wonderful collections, had a reputation, and was frequented by every one
+of distinction in the artistic or intellectual world&mdash;by those of the
+world of wealth and rank who were interested in such matters, and the
+yet larger number who affected to be interested in them. For those
+Anglo-Saxon deities, Mammon and Snobbery, who have since conquered the
+whole civilized globe, had temporarily fallen back for a fresh spring,
+and in the eighties and early nineties Culture was reckoned very nearly
+as <i>chic</i> as motoring in the first years of the new century.</p>
+
+<p>Several painters of various degrees of talent attempted to fix on canvas
+the extraordinary charm of Mrs. Stewart's appearance. Not one of them
+succeeded; but the peculiar shade of her hair, the low forehead and
+delicate line of the dark eyebrows, the outline of the mask, sometimes
+admired, sometimes criticised, made her portrait always recognized,
+whether simpering as a chocolate-box classicality, smiling sadly from
+the flowery circle of the Purgatorio, or breaking out of some rough mass
+of paint with the provocative leer of a <i>cocotte</i> of the Quartier Latin.</p>
+
+<p>The magnetism of her personality defied analysis, as her essential
+beauty defied the painter's art. It was a magnetism which surrounded her
+with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span> an atmosphere of adorations, admirations, enmities&mdash;all equally
+violent and irrational. Her wit had little to do with the making of her
+enemies, because it was never used in offence against friends or even
+harmless acquaintances; only against her foes she employed it with the
+efficiency and mercilessness of a red Indian wielding the tomahawk.</p>
+
+<p>The other family where she found her niche awaiting her was of a
+different order. It was that of the retired Indian judge, Sir John
+Ireton, whose wife had chaperoned her through a Commemoration the summer
+she had taken her First in Greats. Ireton was not only in Parliament,
+but his house was a meeting-place where politicians cemented personal
+ties and plotted party moves. Milly in her brief appearances, had been
+of use to Lady Ireton, but Mildred proved socially invaluable. There
+were serious persons who suspected Mrs. Stewart of approaching politics
+in a flippant spirit; but on certain days she had revealed a grave and
+ardent belief in the dogmas of the party and a piety of attitude towards
+the person of its great apostle, which had convinced them that she was
+not really cynical or frivolous.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Augusta Goring was the most important conquest of the kind Milly
+had made. She was the only child of the Marquis of Ipswich, and one of
+those rather stupid people whose energy of mind and character is often
+mistaken by themselves and others for cleverness. Lady Augusta was
+handsome in a dull, massive way, and so conscientious that she had
+seldom time to smile. Her friends<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span> said she would smile oftener if her
+husband caused her less anxiety; but considering who George Goring was
+and how he had been brought up, he might have been much worse. Where
+women were concerned, scandal had never accused him of anything more
+flagrant than dubious flirtations. It was his political intrigues,
+constantly threatening unholy <i>liaisons</i> in the most unthinkable
+directions; his sudden fits of obstinate idleness, often occurring at
+the very moment when some clever and promising political scheme of his
+own was ripe for execution, which so unendurably harassed the staid
+Marquis and the earnest Lady Augusta. They were highly irritating, too,
+to Sir John Ireton, who had believed himself at one time able to tame
+and tutor the tricksy young politician.</p>
+
+<p>The late Lord Ipswich had been a "sport" in the Barthop family; a black
+sheep, but clever, and a well known collector. Accidental circumstances
+had greatly enriched him, and as he detested his brother and successor,
+he had left his pictures to the nation and all of his fortune which he
+could dispose of&mdash;which happened to be the bulk&mdash;to his natural son,
+George Goring. But his will had not been found for some weeks after his
+death, and while the present Marquis had believed himself the inheritor
+of the whole property, he had treated the nameless and penniless child
+of his brother with perfect delicacy and generosity. When George Goring
+found himself made rich at the expense of his uncle, he proposed to his
+cousin Lady Augusta and was accepted.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was partly amused and partly bored to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> discover herself on so
+friendly a footing with Lady Augusta. Putting herself into that passive
+frame of mind in which revelations of Milly's past actions were most
+often vouchsafed to her, she saw herself type-writing in a small,
+high-ceilinged room looking out on a foggy London park, and Lady Augusta
+seated at a neighboring table, surrounded by papers. Type-writing was
+not then so common as it is now, and Milly had learned the art in order
+to give assistance to Ian. Mildred was annoyed to find herself in danger
+of having to waste her time in a mechanical occupation which she
+detested, or else of offending a woman whom her uncle valued as a friend
+and political ally.</p>
+
+<p>It was a slight compensation to receive an invitation to accompany the
+Iretons to a great ball at Ipswich House. There was no question of Ian
+accompanying her. He was usually too tired to care for going out in the
+evening and went only to official dinners and to the houses of old
+friends, or of people with whom he had educational connections. It did
+not occur to him that it might be wise to put a strain upon himself
+sometimes, to lay by his spectacles, straighten his back, have his beard
+trimmed and appear at Mildred's side in the drawing-rooms where she
+shone, looking what he was&mdash;a husband of whom she had reason to be
+proud. More and more engrossed by his own work and responsibilities, he
+let her drift into a life quite apart from his, content to see her world
+from his own fireside, in the sparkling mirror of her talk.</p>
+
+<p>Ipswich House was a great house, if of little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> architectural merit, and
+the ball had all the traditional spectacular splendor common to such
+festivities. The pillared hall and double staircase, the suites of
+spacious rooms, were filled with a glittering kaleidoscopic crowd of
+fair and magnificently bejewelled women and presumably brave, certainly
+well-groomed and handsome men. The excellence of the music, the masses
+of flowers, the number of great names and well-advertised society
+beauties present, would subsequently provide material for long and
+eulogistic paragraphs in the half-penny press and the Ladies' Weeklies.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred enjoyed it as a spectacle rather than as a ball, for she knew
+few people there, and the young political men whom she had met at her
+uncle's parties were too much engaged with ladies of more importance, to
+whom they were related or to whom they owed social attention, to write
+their names more than once on her programme. One of these, however,
+asked her if she had noticed how harassed both Lord Ipswich and Lady
+Augusta looked. Goring's speech, he said, at the Fothering by-election
+was reported and commented upon in all the papers, and had given
+tremendous offence to the leaders of his party; while the fact that he
+had not turned up in time for the ball must be an additional cross to
+his wife, who made such a firm stand against the social separation of
+married couples.</p>
+
+<p>When Mildred returned to her uncle she found him the centre of a group
+of eminent politicians, all denouncing in more or less subdued tones the
+out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>rageous utterances and conduct of Goring, and most declaring that
+only consideration for Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta prevented them from
+publicly excommunicating the hardened offender. Others, however, while
+admitting the outrage, urged that he was too brilliant a young man to be
+lightly thrown away, and advised patience, combined with the
+disciplinary rod. Sir John was of the excommunicatory party. Later in
+the evening he disappeared into some remote smoking or card-room, not so
+much forgetting his niece as taking it for granted that she was, as
+usual, surrounded by friends and admirers of both sexes. But a detached
+personality, however brilliant, is apt to be submerged in such a crowd
+of social eminences, bound together by ties of blood, of interests, and
+of habit, as filled the salons of Ipswich House. Mildred walked around
+the show contentedly enough for a time, receiving a smile here and a
+pleasant word there from such of her acquaintances as she chanced upon,
+but practically alone. And being alone, she found herself yielding to a
+vulgar envy of richer women's clothes and jewels. Her dress, with which
+she had been pleased, looked ordinary beside the creations of great
+Parisian <i>ateliers</i>, and the few old paste ornaments which were the only
+jewels she possessed, charming as they were, seemed dim and scant among
+the crowns and constellations of diamonds that surrounded her. Her pride
+rebelled against this envy, but could not conquer it.</p>
+
+<p>More gnawing pangs, however, assailed her presently, the pangs of
+hunger; and no one offered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> to take her in to supper. The idea of taking
+herself in was revolting; she preferred starvation. But where could
+Uncle John have hidden himself? She sought the elderly truant with all
+the suppressed annoyance of a chaperon seeking an inconsiderate flirt of
+a girl. And it happened that a spirit in her feet led her to the door of
+a small room in which Milly and Lady Augusta had been wont to transact
+their business. A curious feeling of familiarity, of physical habit,
+caused her to open the big mahogany door. There was no air of public
+festivity about the room, which was furnished with a substantial, almost
+shabby masculine comfort. But oh, tantalizing spectacle! Under the
+illumination of a tall, crimson-shaded, standard lamp, stood a little,
+white-covered table, reminding her irresistibly of a little table in a
+fairy story, which the due incantation causes to rise out of the ground.
+A small silver-gilt tureen of soup smoked upon it and a little pile of
+delicate rolls lay beside the plate set for one. But alas! she might
+not, like the favored girl in the fairy story, proceed without ceremony
+to satisfy her hunger at the mysterious little table.</p>
+
+<p>A door immediately opposite that of the small sitting-room opened
+noiselessly, and a young man entered with a light, quick step. He saw
+Mildred, but for a second or so she did not see him. He was at her side
+when she looked around and their eyes met. They had never seen each
+other before, but at that meeting of the eyes a curious feeling, such as
+two Europeans might experience, meeting in the heart of some dark
+continent, affected them both.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was something picturesque about the young man's appearance, in
+spite of the impeccable cut and finish of his dress-suit and the waxed
+ends of his small blond mustache. His hair was of a ruddy nut-brown
+color, and had a wave in it; his bright hazel eyes seemed exactly to
+match it. His face had a fine warm pallor, and his under lip, which with
+his chin was somewhat thrust forward, was redder than the lip of a
+child. It was perhaps this noticeable coloring and something in his port
+which made him, in spite of the correct modernity of his dress, suggest
+some seventeenth-century portrait.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive my passing you," he said, at length; "but I'm starving."</p>
+
+<p>"So am I," she returned, hardly aware of what she was saying. Some
+strange, almost hypnotic attraction seemed to rivet her whole attention
+on the mere phenomenon of this man.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! Aren't they feeding the multitude down there?" he asked,
+nodding in the direction of the supper-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she answered, with the simple gravity of a child, her blue
+eyes still fixed upon him. "But I can't ask for supper for myself, can
+I?"</p>
+
+<p>Her need was distinctly material; yet the young man confronting her
+white grace, the strange look in her blue eyes, had a dreamlike feeling,
+almost as though he had met a dryad or an Undine between two of the
+prosaic, substantial doors of Ipswich House. And as in a dream the most
+extraordinary things seem familiar and expected,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span> so the apparition of
+the Undine and her confidence in him seemed familiar, in fact just what
+he had been expecting during those hours of fog off the Goodwins, when
+the sirens, wild voices gathering up from all the seas of the world, had
+been screaming to each other across the hidden waters. That same inner
+concentration upon the mere phenomenon of a presence, an existence,
+which had given the childlike note to Mildred's speech, froze a
+compliment upon his lips; and they stood silent, eying each other
+gravely. A junior footman appeared, carrying a bottle of champagne in a
+bucket, and the young man addressed him in a vague, distracted tone,
+very unlike his usual manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Arthur, here's a lady who can't get any supper."</p>
+
+<p>The footman went quite pink at this personal reproach. He happened to
+have heard some one surmise, on seeing Mildred roaming about alone, that
+she was a newspaper woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Please sir," he replied, "I don't know how it's happened, for her
+Ladyship told Mr. Mackintosh to be sure and see as the newspaper ladies
+and gentlemen were well looked after, and he thought as they'd all had
+supper."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed incredible that Mildred should not have heard this reply,
+uttered so close to her; but though it fell upon her ears it did not
+penetrate to her mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring up supper for two, Arthur," said Goring, in his usual decisive
+tone. "That'll do, won't it?" he added, and turned to Mildred, ushering
+her into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> the room. "You'll have supper with me, I hope? My name's
+Goring; I'm Lord Ipswich's son-in-law and I live in his house; so you
+see it's all right."</p>
+
+<p>The corollary was not evident; but the mention of the name brought
+Mildred back to the ordinary world. So this was George Goring, the
+plague of his political party, the fly in the ointment of a respectable
+Marquis and his distinguished daughter. She had not fancied him like
+this. For one thing, she did not know him to be younger than his wife,
+and between the careworn solidity of Lady Augusta and this vivid
+restless personality, the five actual years of difference seemed
+stretched to ten.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm convinced it's all right, Mr. Goring," she replied, throwing
+herself into a chair and smiling at him sparklingly. "It must be all
+right. I want my supper so much I should have to accept your invitation
+even if you were a burglar."</p>
+
+<p>Goring, whose habit it was to keep moving, laughed as he walked about,
+one hand in his trousers pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I be a burglar? A burglar, with an assistant disguised as
+a footman, sacking the bedrooms of Lord Ipswich's house while the ball
+proceeds? There's copy for you! Shall I do it? 'Mr. George Goring's
+Celebrated Black Pearls Stolen,' would make a capital head-line. Perhaps
+you've heard I'd do anything to keep my name in the newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>"It certainly gets there pretty often," returned Mildred, politely; "and
+whenever it's mentioned it has an enlivening effect."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The footman had reappeared and they were unfolding their dinner-napkins,
+sitting opposite each other at the little table.</p>
+
+<p>"As how, enlivening?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like a bit of bread dropped into a glass of flat champagne."</p>
+
+<p>"You think my party's like champagne? Why, it couldn't exist for a
+moment if it sparkled."</p>
+
+<p>"I was talking of newspapers, not of your party; though there's no doubt
+you do enliven that."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I? Like what? No odiously inoffensive comparisons, if you please."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I have heard people say like&mdash;like a blister on the back of the
+neck."</p>
+
+<p>Goring laughed. "Thanks. That's better."</p>
+
+<p>"The patient's using language, but he won't really tear it off, because
+he knows that would hurt him more, and the blister will do him good in
+the end, if he bears with it."</p>
+
+<p>"But there's the blister's side to it, too. It's infernally tiring for a
+blister to be sticking on to such a fellow everlastingly. It'll fly off
+of itself before long, if he doesn't look out. Hullo! What am I saying?
+I suppose you'll have all this out in some confounded paper&mdash;'The Rebel
+Member Returns. A Chat with Mr. Goring'&mdash;Don't do that; but I'll give
+you some other copy if you like."</p>
+
+<p>"You're very kind in giving me all this copy. What shall I do with it?
+Shall I keep it as a memento?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. You can sell it; honor bright you can."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Can I? Shall I get much for it? Enough money to buy me a tiara, do you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really want to wear the usual fender? Now, why? I suppose
+because you aren't sufficiently aware how&mdash;" he paused on the edge of a
+compliment which seemed suddenly too full-flavored and ordinary to be
+addressed to this strangely lovely being, with her smile at once so
+sparkling and so mysterious. He substituted: "How much more
+distinguished it is to look like an Undine than like a peeress."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred seemed slightly taken aback.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you say 'Undine?'" she asked, almost sharply. "Do I&mdash;do I look
+as if I came out of a Trafalgar Square fountain with fell designs on
+Lord Ipswich?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not. But&mdash;I can't exactly define even to myself what I mean,
+only you do suggest an Undine to me. To some one else you might be
+simply Miss&mdash;Forgive me, I don't know your name."</p>
+
+<p>He had not even troubled to glance at her left hand, and when the "Mrs."
+was uttered it affected him oddly. It was one of the peculiar
+differences between her two personalities that, casually encountered,
+Mildred was as seldom taken for a married woman as Milly for an
+unmarried one.</p>
+
+<p>"Do I look as if I'd got no soul?" she persisted, leaning a little
+towards him, an intensity that might almost have been called anxiety in
+her gaze.</p>
+
+<p>He could even have fancied she had grown paler. He, too, became serious.
+His eyes brightened,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span> meeting hers, and a slight color came into his
+cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite the contrary," he answered. "I should say you had a great
+deal&mdash;in fact, I shall begin to believe in detachable souls again. Fancy
+most people as just souls, without trimmings. It makes one laugh. But
+your body looks like an emanation from the spirit; as though it might
+flow away in a white waterfall or go up in a white fire; and as though,
+if it did, your soul could certainly precipitate another body, which
+must certainly be like this one, because it would be as this is, the
+material expression of a spirit."</p>
+
+<p>She listened as he spoke, seriously, her eyes on his. But when he had
+done, she dropped her chin on her hand and laughed delightedly.</p>
+
+<p>"You think I should be able to grow a fresh body, like a lobster growing
+a fresh claw? What fun!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound without, not of the footman struggling with dishes and
+plates and the door-handle, but of middle-aged voices.</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively Goring and Mildred straightened themselves and looked
+polite. Lord Ipswich and Sir John Ireton, deep in political converse,
+came slowly in and then stopped short in surprise. Mildred lost not a
+moment in carrying the war into their country. She turned about and
+addressed her uncle in a playful tone, which yet smacked of reproof.</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are at last, Uncle John! I thought you'd forgotten all about
+me. I've been walking miles in mad pursuit of you, till I was so tired
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> hungry I think I should have dropped if Mr. Goring hadn't taken
+pity upon me and made me eat his supper."</p>
+
+<p>Sir John defended himself, and Lord Ipswich was shocked to think that a
+lady had been in such distress in his house; although the apparition of
+Goring prevented him from feeling it as acutely as he would otherwise
+have done. His pleasant pink face took on an expression of severity as
+he responded to his son-in-law's somewhat too cheerful greeting.</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry to be so late, but we were held up by a fog at the mouth of the
+Thames."</p>
+
+<p>"It must have been very important business to take you all the way to
+Brussels so suddenly."</p>
+
+<p>"It certainly wouldn't wait. I heard there was a whole set of Beauvais
+tapestries to be had for a mere song. I couldn't buy them without seeing
+them you know, and the big London and Paris dealers were bound to chip
+in if I didn't settle the matter pretty quick. I'm precious glad I did,
+for they're the finest pieces I ever saw and would have fetched five
+times what I gave for them at Christie's."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;really!" was all Lord Ipswich's response, coldly uttered and
+accompanied by a smile more sarcastic than often visited his neat and
+kindly lips. Sir John Ireton and Mildred, aware of the delicate
+situation, partly domestic and partly political, upon which they were
+intruding, took themselves away and were presently rolling through the
+empty streets in the gray light of early morning.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Not long afterwards Mildred received a letter the very address of which
+had an original appearance, looking as if it were written with a stick
+in a fist rather than with a pen between fingers. It caught her
+attention at once from half a dozen others.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Mrs. Stewart</span>,&mdash;Yesterday I was at Cochrane's studio
+and he told me Meres was the greatest authority in England
+on tapestry, and also a cousin of yours. Please remember (or
+forgive) the supper on Tuesday, and of your kindness, ask
+him to let me see his lot and give me his opinion on mine.
+Cochrane had a folly he called a portrait of you in his
+studio. I turned its face to the wall; and in the end he
+admitted I was right.</p>
+
+<p class="f1">"Yours sincerely,</p>
+
+<p class="f2">"<span class="smcap">George Goring.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Accordingly, on a very hot day early in July, Goring met Mildred again,
+at Sir Cyril Meres's house on Campden Hill. The long room at one end of
+which stood the small dining-table looked on the greenness of a lawny,
+lilac-sheltered garden, so that such light as filtered through the green
+jalousies was green also. There was a great block of ice somewhere in
+the room, and so cool it was, so greenly dim there, that it seemed
+almost like a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span> cavern of the sea. Mildred wore a white dress, and, as
+was the fashion of the moment, a large black hat shadowed with
+ostrich-feathers. Once more on seeing her he had a startled impression
+of looking upon an ethereal creature, a being somehow totally distinct
+from other beings; and for lack of some more appropriate name, he called
+her again in his mind "Undine." As the talk, which Cyril Meres had a
+genius for making general, became more animated, he half lost that
+impression in one of a very clever, charming woman, with a bright wit
+sailing lightly over depths of knowledge to which he was unaccustomed in
+her sex.</p>
+
+<p>The party was not intended to number more than eight persons, of whom
+Lady Thomson was one, and they sat down seven. When Sir Cyril observed:
+"We won't wait any longer for Davison," Mildred was too much interested
+in Goring's presence to inquire who this Davison might be.</p>
+
+<p>She sparkled on half through luncheon to the delight of every one but
+Miss Ormond the actress, who would have preferred to play the lead
+herself. Then came a pause. A door was opened at the far end of the dim
+room, and the missing guest appeared. Sir Cyril rose hastily to greet
+him. He advanced without any apologetic hurry in his gait; the same
+impassive Maxwell Davison as before, but leaner, browner, more
+silver-headed from three more years of wandering under Oriental suns.
+Mildred could hardly have supposed it possible that the advent of any
+human being could have given her so disagreeable a sensation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sir Cyril was unaware that she knew Maxwell Davison; surprised to hear
+that he was a cousin of Stewart's, between whom and himself there
+existed a mutual antipathy, expressing itself in terms of avoidance. His
+own acquaintance with Davison was recent and in the way of business. He
+had had the fancy to build for the accommodation of his Hellenic
+treasures a room in imitation of the court of a Græco-Roman house which
+he had helped to excavate in Asia Minor. He had commissioned Davison to
+buy him hangings for it to harmonize with an old Persian carpet in cream
+color and blue of which he was already possessed. Davison had brought
+these with him and a little collection of other things which he thought
+Meres might care to look at. He did not know the Stewarts had moved to
+London, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find himself seated at the
+same table with Mildred; he had not forgotten, still less forgiven, the
+lure of her coquetry, the insult of her rebuff.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson was next him and questioned him exhaustively about his book
+on Persian Literature and the travels of his lifetime. Miss Ormond took
+advantage of Mrs. Stewart's sudden silence to talk to the table rather
+cleverly around the central theme of herself. Goring conversed apart
+with Mrs. Stewart.</p>
+
+<p>Coffee was served in the shrine which Sir Cyril had reared for his Greek
+collection, of which the gem was a famous head of Aphrodite&mdash;an early
+Aphrodite, divine, removed from all possible pains and agitations of
+human passion. The room was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> an absurdity on Campden Hill, said some,
+but undeniably beautiful in itself. The columns, of singular lightness
+and grace, were of a fine marble which hovered between creamy white and
+faint yellow, and the walls and floor were of the same tone, except for
+a frieze on a Greek model, very faintly colored, and the old Persian
+carpet. In fine summer weather the large skylight covering the central
+space was withdrawn, and such sky as London can show looked down upon
+it. The new hangings which Maxwell Davison had brought with him were
+already displayed on a tall screen, and his miscellaneous collection of
+antiquities, partly sent from Durham College, partly lately acquired,
+were arranged on a marble bench.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't have brought these things, Sir Cyril," he said; "if I'd
+known Mrs. Stewart was here. She's got a way of hinting that my most
+cherished antiquities are forgeries; and the worst of it is, she makes
+every one believe her, including myself."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't pretend to know anything about antiquities, Mr. Davison. I'm
+sure I never suspected you of a forgery, and if I had, I hope I
+shouldn't have been rude enough to tell you so."</p>
+
+<p>Maxwell Davison laughed his harsh laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want me to believe you can't be rude, Mrs. Stewart?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm almost afraid she can't be," interposed Lady Thomson's full voice.
+"People who make a superstition of politeness infallibly lose the higher
+courtesy of truth."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Here Sir Cyril Meres called Davison away to worship at the shrine of the
+Aphrodite, while Goring invited Mrs. Stewart into a neighboring corridor
+where some tapestries were hanging.</p>
+
+<p>The divining crystal was among the objects returned from Oxford, and had
+been included in the collection which Davison had brought with him, on
+the chance that the painter might fancy such curiosities. When Goring
+and Mildred returned from their leisurely inspection of the tapestries,
+Miss Ormond had it in her hand, and Lady Thomson was commenting on some
+remark of hers.</p>
+
+<p>"I've no doubt, as you say, it has played a wicked part before now in
+Oriental intrigues. But of course the poor crystal is perfectly innocent
+of the things read into it by rascals, practising on the ignorant and
+superstitious."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes, perhaps, Lady Thomson," returned Miss Ormond; "but sometimes
+people do see extraordinary visions in a crystal."</p>
+
+<p>Lady Thomson sniffed.</p>
+
+<p>"Excitable, imaginative people do, I dare say."</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, prosaic people are far more likely to see things than
+highly strung imaginative creatures like myself. I've tried several
+times and have never seen anything. I believe having a great deal of
+brain-power and emotion and all that tells against it. I shouldn't be at
+all surprised now if Mrs. Stewart, who is&mdash;well, I should fancy, just a
+little cold, very bright and all that on the surface, you know&mdash;I
+shouldn't wonder if she could crys<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>tal-gaze very successfully. I should
+like to know whether she's ever tried."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure she's not," replied Lady Thomson, firmly. "My niece, Mrs.
+Stewart, is a great deal too sensible and well-educated."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Stewart can't honestly say the same for herself," interposed
+Davison; "she gazed in this very crystal some years ago and certainly
+saw something in it."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ormond exclaimed in triumph. Mildred froze. She did not desire the
+rôle of Society Seer.</p>
+
+<p>"What did I see, Mr. Davison?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing of importance. You saw a woman in a light dress. Perhaps it was
+Lady Hammerton the collector, originally guilty, you remember, in the
+matter of the forged Augustus."</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred had only to peep in any glass to see Lady Hammerton, or some
+one sufficiently like her," observed Meres.</p>
+
+<p>"That idea was started when David Fletcher picked up the fancy picture
+which he chose to call a portrait of Lady Hammerton," cried Lady
+Thomson, who was just taking her leave. "Such nonsense! I protest
+against my own niece and a scholar of Ascham being likened to that
+scandalous woman."</p>
+
+<p>Cyril Meres smiled and stroked his soft, silvery beard.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right of you to protest, Beatrice. Still, I'm glad Lady Hammerton
+didn't stick heroically to her Professor&mdash;as Mildred here does. We
+should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span> never have been proud of her as an ancestress if she had."</p>
+
+<p>"Heroically?" repeated Maxwell Davison under his breath, and laughed.
+But the meaning of his laugh was lost on every one except Mildred. She
+flushed hotly at the thought of having to bear the responsibility of
+that ridiculous scene on the Cherwell; it was humiliating, indeed. She
+took up the crystal to conceal her chagrin.</p>
+
+<p>"Do please see something, Mrs. Stewart!" exclaimed Miss Ormond.</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Anything! Whatever you see, it will be quite thrilling.</p>
+
+<p>"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart," petitioned Goring, wandering towards the
+crystal-gazer. "I should so like to thrill Miss Ormond."</p>
+
+<p>"It's no good your trying that way," smiled the lady, playing fine eyes.
+"It's only shadows that are thrilling in the crystal; shadows of
+something happening a long way off; or sometimes a coming event casts a
+shadow before&mdash;and that's the most thrilling of all."</p>
+
+<p>"A coming event! That's exactly what I am, a tremendous coming Political
+Event. You ask them in the House," cried Goring, thrusting out his chin
+and aiming a provocative side-smile at a middle-aged Under-Secretary of
+State who discreetly admired Miss Ormond.</p>
+
+<p>"Modest creature!" ejaculated the Under-Secretary playfully with his
+lips; and in his heart vindictively, "Conceited devil!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart!" pleaded Goring, half kneeling on a chair
+and leaning over the crystal.</p>
+
+<p>"I do," she returned. "I'd rather not. You look so distorted and odd;
+and so do I, don't I? Dreadful! But the crystal's getting cloudy."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you're going really to see something!" exclaimed Miss Ormond. "How
+delightful! Come away directly, Mr. Goring, or you'll spoil everything."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Cyril and Davison looked up from some treasure of Greek art. The
+conversation was perfunctory, every one's curiosity waiting on Mildred
+and the crystal.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you see anything yet, Mrs. Stewart?" asked Miss Ormond at length,
+impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"No," replied Mildred, hesitatingly. "At least, not exactly. I see
+something like rushing water and foam."</p>
+
+<p>"The reflection of clouds overhead," pronounced the Under-Secretary,
+dogmatically, glancing upward.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure it's nothing of the kind," asserted Miss Ormond. "Please go on
+looking, Mrs. Stewart, and perhaps you'll see a water-spirit."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you want her to see a water-spirit?" asked Davison, ironically.
+"In all countries of the world they are reckoned spiteful, treacherous
+creatures. I was once bitten by one severely, and I have never wanted to
+see one since."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Davison! Are you serious? What do you mean?" questioned Miss
+Ormond.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Stewart hastily put down the crystal. "I don't want to see one,"
+she said; "I'm afraid it might bring me bad luck, and, besides, I can't
+wait for it, I've got several calls to make before I go home, and I
+think there's a storm coming." She shivered. "I'm quite cold."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ormond said that must be the effect of the crystal, as the
+afternoon was still oppressively hot.</p>
+
+<p>Goring caught up with Mrs. Stewart in the gravel drive outside the house
+and walked through Kensington Gardens with her. It seemed to them both
+quite natural that they should be walking together, and their talk was
+in the vein of old friends who have met after a long separation rather
+than in that of new acquaintances. When he left her and turned to walk
+across Hyde Park towards Westminster, he examined his impressions and
+perceived that he was in a state of mind foreign to his nature, and
+therefore the butt of his ridicule; a state in which, if he and Mrs.
+Stewart had been unmarried persons, he would have said to himself, "That
+is the woman I shall marry." It would not have been a passion or an
+emotion that would have made him say that; it would have been a
+conviction. As it was, the thing was absurd. Cochrane had told him, half
+in jest, that Mrs. Stewart was a breaker of hearts, but had not hinted
+that her own was on the market. Her appearance made it surely an
+interesting question whether she had a heart at all.</p>
+
+<p>And for himself? He hated to think of his marriage, because he
+recognized in it the fatal "little spot" in the yet ungarnered fruit of
+his life.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> He was only thirty, but he had been married seven years and
+had two children, both of them the image of all the Barthops that had
+ever been, except his own father. In moments of depression he saw
+himself through all the coming years being gradually broken, crushed
+under a weight of Barthops&mdash;father-in-law, wife and children&mdash;moulded
+into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one
+but himself knew the weakness of his character&mdash;explosive, audacious in
+alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or
+hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to
+resist constant domestic pressure&mdash;the unconscious pressure of radically
+opposed character. The crowd applauds the marriage of such opposites
+because their side almost always wins; partly by its own weight and
+partly by their weight behind. But the truth is that two beings opposed
+in emotional temperament and mental processes are only a few degrees
+more able to help and understand each other in the close union of
+marriage than the two personalities of Milly Stewart in the closer union
+of her body.</p>
+
+<p>From one point of view it was Goring's fatal weakness to have a real
+affection for his father-in-law, who was a pattern of goodness and
+good-breeding. Consequently, that very morning he had promised Lord
+Ipswich to walk in the straightest way of the party, for one year at
+least; and if he must slap faces, to select them on the other side of
+the House. Nevertheless, if he really wished to give sincere
+gratification to Lord Ipswich and to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span> dear Augusta, he must needs give
+up his capricious and offensive tactics altogether. These things might
+give him a temporary notoriety in the House and country, but they were
+not in the traditions of the Ipswich family, which had held a high place
+in politics for two hundred years. The Marquis said that he had always
+tried to make George feel that he was received as a true son of the
+family and heir of its best traditions, if not of its name. There had
+been a great deal of good faith on both sides. Yet now a solitary young
+man, looking well in the frock-coat and tall hat of convention, might
+have been observed stopping and striking the gravel viciously as he
+reflected on the political future which his father-in-law was mapping
+out for him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Sir James Carus, the well-known scientist, had for some time been
+employing Miss Timson in the capacity of assistant, and spoke highly of
+her talents. She began to have a reputation in scientific circles, and
+owing to her duties with Carus she could not come to the Stewarts' as
+often as she had formerly done. But she preserved her habit of
+dismissing the parlor-maid at the door and creeping up to the
+drawing-room like a thief in the night.</p>
+
+<p>On the day following Sir Cyril Meres's luncheon-party she arrived in her
+usual fashion. The windows were shaded against the afternoon sun, but
+the sky was now overcast, and such a twilight reigned within that at
+first she could distinguish little, and the drawing-room seemed to her
+to be empty. But in a minute she discerned a white figure supine in a
+large arm-chair&mdash;Mildred, and asleep.</p>
+
+<p>She had a writing-board on her knee, and a hand resting on it still held
+a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir
+when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a
+something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which
+suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> might
+even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a mixed emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Good old Milly! Poor old girl!" she breathed to the white figure in the
+arm-chair. "Don't be in a hurry! You won't find it all beer and skittles
+when you're here."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to her that a slight convulsion passed over the sleeper's
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Tims seated herself on a low chair, in the attitude of certain gargoyles
+that crouch under the eaves of old churches, elbows on knees, chin on
+hands, and fixed her eyes in silence on her silent companion. In spite
+of her work along the acknowledged lines of science, she had pursued her
+hypnotic studies furtively, half in scorn and half in fear of her
+scientific brethren. What would she not have given to be enabled to
+watch, to comprehend the changes passing within that human form so close
+to her that she could see its every external detail, could touch it by
+the out-stretching of a hand! But its inner shrine, its secret place,
+remained barred against those feeble implements of sense with which
+nature has provided the explorative human intelligence. Its content was
+more mysterious, more inaccessible than that of the remotest star which
+yields the secret of its substance to the spectroscope of the
+astronomer.</p>
+
+<p>Tims's thoughts had forsaken the personal side of the question, when she
+was recalled to it by seeing the right hand in which the stylograph had
+been lying begin to twitch, the fingers to contract. There was no
+answering movement in the face&mdash;even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> when the sleeper at length firmly
+grasped the pen and suddenly sat up. Tims rose quickly, and then
+perceived, lying on the writing-board, a directed envelope and a
+half-finished note to herself. She slipped the note-paper nearer to the
+twitching hand, and after a few meaningless flourishes, it wrote slowly
+and tentatively:</p>
+
+<p>"Tims&mdash;Milly&mdash;cannot get back. Help me ... Save Ian. Wicked creature&mdash;no
+conscience&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Here the power of the hand began to fail, and the writing was terminated
+by mere scrawls. The sleeper's eyes were now open, but not wide. They
+had a strange, glassy look in them, nor did she show any consciousness
+of Tims's presence. She dropped the pen, folded the paper in the same
+slow and tentative manner in which she had written upon it, and placed
+it in the directed envelope lying there. Then her face contracted, her
+fingers slackened, and she fell back again to the depths of the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Milly!" cried Tims, almost involuntarily bending over her. "Milly!"</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a slight contraction of the face and of the whole body.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment that Tims uttered Milly's name, Ian was entering the room.
+His long legs brought him up to the chair in an instant, and he asked,
+without the usual salutation:</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter? Has&mdash;has the change happened?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice unconsciously spoke dismay. Tims looked at him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, not exactly," she articulated, slowly; and, after a pause: "Poor
+old Milly's trying to come back, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>She paused again; then:</p>
+
+<p>"You look a bit worried, old man."</p>
+
+<p>He tossed back his head with a gesture he had kept from the days when
+the crest of raven-black hair had been wont to grow too long and
+encroach on his forehead. It was grizzled now, and much less intrusive.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm about tired out," he said, shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," she continued, "if you really want Milly back, just say so.
+She's kind of knocking at the door, and I believe I could let her in if
+I tried."</p>
+
+<p>He dropped wearily into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>"For Heaven's sake, Miss Timson, don't put the responsibility on me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help it," returned Tims. "She's managed to get this through to
+me&mdash;" She handed Milly's scrawled message to Ian.</p>
+
+<p>He read it, then read it again and handed it back.</p>
+
+<p>"Strange, certainly."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it mean anything in particular?"</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders almost impatiently and sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no! It's the poor child's usual cry when she's here. She's got it
+into her head that the self she doesn't know is frightfully wicked, and
+makes me miserable. I've tried over and over again to convince her, but
+it's all nonsense."</p>
+
+<p>He thought to himself: "She is coming back still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> full of this mortal,
+heart-rending jealousy, and we shall have more painful scenes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's your business to say what I'm to do," insisted Tims. "I
+don't think she'd have troubled to write if she'd found she could get
+back altogether without my help; but the other one's grown a bit too
+strong for her. Do you want Milly back?"</p>
+
+<p>The remorseless Tims forced on Ian a plain question which in his own
+mind he habitually sought to evade. He leaned back and shaded his eyes
+with his hand. After a silence he spoke, low, as if with effort:</p>
+
+<p>"I can't honestly say I want the change to happen just now, Miss Timson.
+It means a great deal of agitation, a thorough upheaval of everything.
+We have an extremely troublesome business on at the Merchants'
+Guild&mdash;I've just come away from a four hours' meeting; and upon my word
+I don't think I can stand a&mdash;domestic revolution at the same time. It
+would utterly unfit me for my work."</p>
+
+<p>He did not add that he had been looking forward to receiving helpful
+counsel from Mildred, with her clear common-sense, seasoned with wit.</p>
+
+<p>Tims wagged her head and stared in his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Timson still possessed the rare power of irritating Ian Stewart. He
+grew restive.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I am a selfish brute. Men always are, aren't they? But, after
+all, my wife enjoys life in her present state at least as much as she
+does in the other."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Not for the same reason, dear boy," returned Tims. "Old M., bless her,
+just lives for you. You don't imagine, do you, that Mildred cares about
+you like that?"</p>
+
+<p>Ian flushed slightly, and his face hardened.</p>
+
+<p>"One can't very well discuss one's wife's feeling for one's self," he
+said. "I believe I have every reason to be happy, however things are.
+And I very much doubt, Miss Timson, whether you can really effect the
+change in her in any way. At any rate, I'd rather you didn't try,
+please. I'll have her moved to her room, where she'll most likely sleep
+till to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Tims bent over the sleeper. Then:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe she will, somehow. You'd better leave her with me for
+the present, and I'll let you know if anything happens."</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed, and in a minute she heard the front door close after him.
+Tims sat down in the chair which he had vacated.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated again, presently, and added: "What idiots
+men are! All except old Carus and Mr. Fitzallan. He's sensible enough."</p>
+
+<p>Her thoughts wandered away, until they were recalled by the door opening
+a mere chink to let a child slip into the room&mdash;a slim, tall child, in a
+blue smock&mdash;Tony. His thick, dark hair was cropped boywise now, and the
+likeness of the beautiful, sensitive child face to Ian's was more
+marked. It was evident that in him there was to be no blending of
+strains, but an exact reproduction of the paternal type.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims was in his eyes purely a comic character, but the ready grin with
+which he usually greeted her was replaced to-day by a little,
+inattentive smile. He went past her and stood by the sofa, looking
+fixedly at his mother with a grave mouth and a slight frown on his
+forehead. At length he turned away, and was about to leave the room as
+quietly as he had come, when Tims brought him to a stand-still at her
+knee. He held up an admonishing finger.</p>
+
+<p>"Sh! Don't you wake my Mummy, or Daddy 'll be angry with you."</p>
+
+<p>"We sha'n't wake her; she's too fast asleep. Tell me why you looked so
+solemnly at her just now, Tony?"</p>
+
+<p>Tony, his hands held fast, wriggled, rubbed his shoulder against his
+ear, and for all answer laughed in a childish, silly way. Such is the
+depth and secretiveness of children, whom we call transparent.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think Mummy was dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's 'dead'?" asked Tony, with interest, putting off his mask of
+inanity.</p>
+
+<p>"People are dead when they've gone to sleep and will never wake again,"
+returned Tims.</p>
+
+<p>Tony thought a minute; then his dark eyes grew very large. He whispered
+slowly, as though with difficulty formulating his ideas:</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't they <i>never</i> wake? Doesn't they wake up after ever so long,
+when peoples can't remember everything&mdash;and it makes them want to cry,
+only grown-up people aren't 'lowed?"</p>
+
+<p>Tims was puzzled. But even in her bewilderment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> it occurred to her that
+if poor Milly should return, she would be distressed to find in what a
+slovenly manner Tony was allowed to express himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean, Tony. Say it again and put it more
+clearly."</p>
+
+<p>Tims had around her neck a necklace composed of casts of coins in the
+British Museum. She did not usually wear ornaments, because she
+possessed none, except a hair-bracelet, two brooches, and a large gold
+cross which had belonged to her late aunt. Tony's soft, slender fingers
+went to the necklace, and ignoring her question, he asked: "Why have you
+got these funny things round your neck, Auntie Tims?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're not funny. They're beautiful&mdash;copies of money which the old
+Greeks used to use. A gentleman gave it to me." Tims spoke with a grand
+carelessness. "I dare say if you're a good boy he'll tell you stories
+about them himself some day. But I want you to explain what it was you
+meant to say about dead people. Dead people don't come back, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Tony touched her hand, which lay open on her knee, and played with the
+fingers a minute. Then raising his eyes he said, plaintively:</p>
+
+<p>"I do so want my tea."</p>
+
+<p>Once more he had wiped the conversational slate, and the baffled Tims
+dismissed him. He opened the door a little and slipped out; put his dark
+head in again with an engaging smile, said politely, "I sha'n't be away
+<i>very</i> long," and closed the door softly behind him. For that soft
+closing of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span> door was one of the things poor Milly had taught him
+which the little 'peoples' did contrive to remember.</p>
+
+<p>The sleeper now began to stir slightly in her sleep, and before Tony's
+somewhat prolonged tea was over, she sat up and looked about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that Tims?" she asked, in a colorless voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;is it you, Milly?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. What makes you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Milly's been trying to come back. I suppose she couldn't manage it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"&mdash;there was a deep satisfaction in Mildred's tone now; "I thought
+she couldn't!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>George Goring and Mildred Stewart did not move in the same social set,
+but their sets had points of contact, and it was at these that Goring
+was now most likely to be found; especially at the pleasant bachelor
+house on Campden Hill. Mrs. Stewart walked in the Park every morning at
+an unfashionable hour, and sometimes, yet not too often for discretion,
+Goring happened to be walking there too. All told, their meetings were
+not very numerous, nor very private. But every half-hour they spent in
+each other's company seemed to do the work of a month of intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>July hastened to an end, but an autumn Session brought Goring up to town
+in November, and three months of absence found him and Mildred still at
+the same point. Sir Cyril Meres was already beginning to plan his
+wonderful <i>tableaux-vivants</i>, which, however, did not come off until
+February. The extraordinary imitative talent which his artistic career
+had been one long struggle to disguise, was for once to be allowed full
+play. The <i>tableaux</i> were to represent paintings by certain
+fellow-artists and friends; not actual pictures by them, but pictures
+which they might have painted, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> the supposed authors were allowed a
+right of veto or criticism.</p>
+
+<p>A stage of Renaissance design, which did not jar with the surrounding
+architecture, was erected in the depth of the portico at the end of the
+Hellenic room.</p>
+
+<p>The human material at Meres's command was physically admirable. He had
+long been the chosen portrait-painter of wealth and fashion, and there
+was not a beauty in Society, with the biggest "S," who was not delighted
+to lend her charms for his purpose. The young men might grumble for
+form's sake, but at the bottom of their hearts they were equally
+sensible to the compliment of being asked to appear. It was when it came
+to the moulding of the material for artistic purposes, that the trouble
+began. The English have produced great actors, but in the bulk they have
+little natural aptitude for the stage; and what they have is discouraged
+by a social training which strains after the ideal composure, the few
+movements, the glassy eye of a waxwork. Only a small and chosen number,
+it is true, fully attain that ideal; but when we see them we recognize
+with a start, almost with a shudder, that it is there, the perfection of
+our deportment.</p>
+
+<p>Cyril Meres was, however, an admirable stage-manager, exquisite in tact,
+in temper, and urbane patience. The results of his prolonged training
+were wonderful; yet again and again he found it impossible to carry out
+his idea without placing his cousin Mrs. Stewart at the vital point of
+his picture.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span> She was certainly not the most physically beautiful woman
+there, but she was unrivalled by any other in the grace, the variety,
+the meaning of her gestures, the dramatic transformations of her
+countenance. She was Pandora, she was Hope, she was Lady Hammerton, she
+was the Vampire, and she was the Queen of Faerie.</p>
+
+<p>There is jealousy on the amateur stage as well as on the professional,
+and ladies of social position, accustomed to see their beauty lauded in
+the newspapers, saw no reason why Mrs. Stewart should be thrust to the
+front of half of the pictures. Lady Langham, the "smart" Socialist, with
+whom George Goring had flirted last season, to Lady Augusta's real
+dismay, was the leading rival candidate for Mildred's rôles. But Lady
+Langham never guessed that Mrs. Stewart was the cause of George Goring's
+disappearance from the list of her admirers, and she still had hopes of
+his return.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>tableaux</i> were a brilliant success. Ian was there on the first
+evening, so was Lady Augusta Goring. Lady Langham, peeping through the
+curtains, saw her, and swept the horizon&mdash;that is, the circle of black
+coats around the walls&mdash;in vain for George Goring. Then Lady Augusta
+became audible, saying that in the present state of affairs in the House
+it was quite impossible for Mr. Goring to leave it, even for dinner, on
+that evening or the next. Nevertheless, on the next evening, Lady
+Langham espied George Goring in the act of taking a vacant chair near
+the front, next to a social <i>protégée</i> of her own. She turned and
+mentioned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span> the fact to a friend, who smiled meaningly and remarked, "In
+spite of Lady Augusta's whip!"</p>
+
+<p>Mildred, passing, caught the information, the comment, the smile. During
+the rehearsals for the <i>tableaux</i>, she had heard people coupling the
+names of Goring and Lady Langham, not seriously, yet seriously enough
+for her. A winged shaft of jealousy pierced at once her heart and her
+pride. Was she allowing her whole inner life to be shaken, dissolved by
+the passing admiration of a flirt? Her intimate self had assurance that
+it was not so; but sometimes a colder wind, blowing she knew not whence,
+or the lash of a chance word, threw her into the attitude of a chance
+observer, one who sees, guesses, does not know.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime George Goring had flung himself down in the only vacant chair
+he could see, and careless of the brilliant company about him, careless
+even of the face of Aphrodite herself, smiling divinely, unconcerned
+with human affairs, from a far corner he waited for the curtain to go
+up. His neighbor spoke. She had met him at the Langhams last season.
+What a pity he had just missed Lady Langham's great <i>tableau</i>, "Helen
+before the Elders of Troy"! There was no one to be compared to Maud
+Langham, so beautiful, so clever! She would have made her fortune if she
+had gone on the stage. Goring gave the necessary assent.</p>
+
+<p>The curtain went up, exhibiting a picture called "The Vampire." It was
+smaller than most and shown by a curious pale light. A fair young girl
+was lying in a deep sleep on a curtained bed, and hov<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>ering, crawling
+over her with a deadly, serpentine grace, was a white figure wrapped in
+a veiling garment that might have been a shroud. Out of white cerements
+showed a trail of yellow hair and a face alabaster white, save for the
+lips that were blood red&mdash;an intent face with a kind of terrible beauty,
+yet instinct with cruelty. One slender, bloodless hand was in the girl's
+hair, and, even without the title, it would have been plain that there
+was a deadly purpose in that creeping figure.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it horrid?" whispered Goring's neighbor. "Fancy that Mrs. Stewart
+letting herself be made to look so dreadful!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who?" asked Goring, horrified. He had not recognized Mildred.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the girl on the bed's Gertrude Waters, and the Vampire's a cousin
+of Sir Cyril Meres. A horrid little woman some people admire, but I
+shouldn't think any one would after this. I call it disgusting, don't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's horrible!" gasped George; "it oughtn't to be allowed. What does
+that fellow Meres mean by inventing such deviltries? By Jove, I should
+like to thrash him!"</p>
+
+<p>The neighbor stared. It was all very well to be horrified at Mrs.
+Stewart, but why this particular form of horror?</p>
+
+<p>"Please call me when it's over," said Goring, putting his head down
+between his hands.</p>
+
+<p>What an eccentric young man he was! But clever people often were
+eccentric.</p>
+
+<p>In due course the <i>tableau</i> was over, and to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span> relief of one
+spectator at least, it was not encored. The next was some harmless
+domestic scene with people in short waists. George Goring looked in vain
+for Mildred among them, longing to see her, the real lovely her, and
+forget the horrible thing she had portrayed. Lady Langham was there, and
+his neighbor commended her tediously, convinced of pleasing.</p>
+
+<p>There followed a large and very beautiful picture in the manner of a
+great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer,
+meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of
+the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was
+coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while
+Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp
+across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge.
+He appeared suddenly to have beheld her, pausing above him before
+descending the heathery bank that edged the wood; and looking in her
+face, to have entered at once into the land of Faerie. The pose, the
+figure, the face of the Faerie Queen were of the most exquisite charm
+and beauty, touched with a something of romance and mystery that no
+other woman there except Mildred could have lent it. The youth who
+personated Thomas the Rhymer was temporarily in love with Mrs. Stewart
+and acted his part with intense expression. Goring, shading his eyes
+with his hand, fixed them upon her as long as he dared; then glanced at
+the Rhymer and was angry. He turned to his chattering neighbor and
+asked:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Who's the chap doing Thomas? Looks as if he wanted a wash."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Nobody particular, I should think. Wasn't it a pity they
+didn't have Lady Langham for the Faerie Queen? I do call it absurd the
+way Sir Cyril Meres has put that pert, insignificant cousin of his
+forward in quite half the pictures&mdash;and when he might have had Maud
+Langham."</p>
+
+<p>Goring threw himself back in his chair and laughed his quite loud laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"'A mad world, my masters,'" he quoted.</p>
+
+<p>His neighbor took this for Mr. Goring's eccentric way of approving her
+sentiments. But what he really meant was: What a strange masquerade is
+the world! This neighbor of his, so ordinary, so desirous to please,
+would have shuddered at the notion of hinting to him the patent fact
+that Lady Augusta Goring was a tiring woman; while she pressed upon him
+laudations of a person to whom he was perfectly indifferent, mingled
+with insulting comments on the only woman in the world for him&mdash;the
+woman who was his world, without whom nothing was; on her whose very
+name, even on these silly, hostile lips, gave him a strong sensation,
+whether of pain or pleasure he could hardly tell.</p>
+
+<p>After the performance he constrained himself to go the round of the
+ladies of his acquaintance who had been acting and compliment them
+cleverly and with good taste. Lady Langham of course seized the lion's
+share of his company and his compliments. He seemed to address only a
+few remarks of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span> same nature to Mrs. Stewart, but he had watched his
+opportunity and was able to say to her:</p>
+
+<p>"I must leave in a quarter of an hour at latest. Please let me drive you
+back. You won't say no?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a pleading note in the last phrase and his eyes met hers
+gravely, anxiously. It was evident that she must answer immediately,
+while their neighbors' attention was distracted from them. She was pale
+before under her stage make-up, and now she grew still paler.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks. I told Cousin Cyril I was tired and shouldn't stay long. I'll
+go and change at once."</p>
+
+<p>Then Thomas the Rhymer was at her elbow again, bringing her something
+for which she had sent him.</p>
+
+<p>The green-room, in which she resumed the old white lace evening-dress
+that she had worn to dine with her cousin, was strewn with the delicate
+underclothing, the sumptuous wraps and costly knick-knacks of wealthy
+women. She had felt ashamed, as she had undressed there, of her own poor
+little belongings among these; and ashamed to be so ashamed. As she had
+seen her garments overswept by the folds of the fair Socialist's white
+velvet mantle, lined with Arctic fox and clasped with diamonds, she had
+smiled ironically at the juxtaposition. Since circumstances and her own
+gifts had drawn her into the stream of the world, she had been more and
+more conscious, however unwillingly, of a longing for luxuries, for rich
+settings to her beauty, for some stage upon which her brilliant
+personality might shine uplifted, secure. For she seemed to herself
+sometimes like a tumbler<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> at a fair, struggling in the crowd for a space
+in which to spread his carpet. Now&mdash;George Goring loved her. Let the
+others keep their furs and laces and gewgaws, their great fortunes or
+great names. Yet if it had been possible for her to take George Goring's
+love, he could have given her most of these things as well.</p>
+
+<p>Wrapped in a gauzy white scarf, she seemed to float rather than walk
+down the stairs into the hall, where Thomas the Rhymer was lingering, in
+the hope of finding an excuse to escort her home. She was pale, with a
+clear, beautiful pallor, a strange smile was on her lips and her eyes
+shone like stars. The Queen of Faerie had looked less lovely, meeting
+him on the edge of the wood. She nodded him good-night and passed
+quickly on into the porch. With a boyish pang he saw her vanish, not
+into the darkness of night, but into the blond interior of a smart
+brougham. A young man, also smart&mdash;her husband, for aught he
+knew&mdash;paused on the step to give orders to the coachman, and followed
+her in. A moment he saw her dimly, in the glare of carriage-lamps, a
+white vision, half eclipsed by the black silhouette of the man at her
+side; then they glided away over the crunching gravel of the drive, into
+the fiery night of London.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think it went off well?" she asked, as they passed
+through the gates into the street. George was taking off his hat and
+putting it down on the little shelf opposite. He leaned back and was
+silent a few seconds; then starting forward, laid his hand upon her
+knee.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't let's waste time like that, Mildred," he said&mdash;and although he
+had never called her so before, it seemed natural that he should&mdash;"we
+haven't got much. You know, don't you, why I asked you to drive with
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>She in her turn was silent a moment, then meeting his eyes:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, quite simply and courageously.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you could hardly help seeing I loved you, however blind other
+people might be."</p>
+
+<p>Her head was turned away again and she looked out of the window, as she
+answered in a voice that tried to be light:</p>
+
+<p>"But it isn't of any consequence, is it? I suppose you're always in love
+with somebody or other."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that what people told you about me?"&mdash;and it was new and wonderful
+to her to hear George Goring speak with this calmness and
+gravity&mdash;"You've not been long in the world, little girl, or you'd know
+how much to believe of what's said there."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she answered, in turn becoming calm and deliberate. "When I come
+to think of it, people only say that women generally like you and that
+you flirt with them. I&mdash;I invented the rest."</p>
+
+<p>"But, good Heavens! Why?" There was a note of pain and wonder in his
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>She paused, and his hand moved under her cloak to be laid on the two
+slender hands clasped on her lap.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I was jealous," she said.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Absurd child! But I'm a bit of an ass that way myself. I was jealous of
+Thomas the Rhymer this evening."</p>
+
+<p>"That brat!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed low, the sweet laugh that was like no one else's. It was
+past midnight and the streets were comparatively quiet and dark, but at
+that moment they were whirled into a glare of strong light. They looked
+in each other's eyes in silence, his hand tightening its hold upon hers.
+Then again they plunged into wavering dimness, and he resumed, gravely
+and calmly as before, but bending nearer her.</p>
+
+<p>"If I weren't anxious to tell you the exact truth, to avoid
+exaggeration, I should say I fell in love with you the first time I met
+you. It seems to me now as though it had been so. And the second
+time&mdash;you remember it was one very hot day last July, when we both
+lunched with Meres&mdash;I hadn't the least doubt that if I had been free and
+you also, I should have left no stone unturned to get you for my wife."</p>
+
+<p>Every word was sweet to her, yet she answered sombrely:</p>
+
+<p>"But we are not free."</p>
+
+<p>He, disregarding the answer, went on:</p>
+
+<p>"You love me, as I love you?"</p>
+
+<p>"As you love me, dearest; and from the first."</p>
+
+<p>A minute's silence, while the hands held each other fast. Then low,
+triumphantly, he exclaimed: "Well?"</p>
+
+<p>Her slim hands began to flutter a little in his as she answered all that
+that "Well" implied.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It's impossible, dear. It's no use arguing about it. It's just waste of
+time&mdash;and we've only got this little time."</p>
+
+<p>"To do what? To make love in? Dear, we've got all our lives if we
+please. We've both made a tremendous mistake, we've both got a chance
+now of going back on it, of setting our lives right again, making them
+better indeed than we ever dreamed of their being. We inflict some loss
+on other people&mdash;no loss comparable to our gain&mdash;we hurt them chiefly
+because of their bloated ideas of their claims on us. I know you've
+weighed things, have no prejudices. Rules, systems, are made for types
+and classes, not for us. You belong to no type, Mildred. I belong to no
+class."</p>
+
+<p>She answered low, painfully:</p>
+
+<p>"It's true I am unlike other people; that's the very reason, why&mdash;I&mdash;I'm
+not good to love." There was a low utterance that was music in her ears,
+yet she continued: "Then, dear friend, think of your career, ruined for
+me, by me. You might be happy for a while, then you'd regret it."</p>
+
+<p>"That's where you're wrong. My career? A rotten little game, these House
+of Commons party politics, when you get into it! The big things go on
+outside them; there's all the world outside them. Anyhow, my career, as
+I planned it, is ruined already. The Ipswich gang have collared me; I
+can't call my tongue my own, Mildred. Think of that!"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled faintly.</p>
+
+<p>"Temporary, George! You'll soon have your head up&mdash;and your tongue
+out."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, from time to time, I presume, I shall always be the Horrid Vulgar
+Boy of those poor Barthops; I shall kick like a galvanized frog long
+after I'm dead. But&mdash;I wouldn't confess it to any one but you, dear&mdash;I'm
+not strong enough to stand against the everlasting pressure that's
+brought to bear upon me. You know what I mean, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. You'll be no good if you let the originality be squeezed out of
+you. Don't allow it."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing can prevent it&mdash;unless the Faerie Queen will stretch out her
+dearest, sweetest hands to me and lead me, poor mortal, right away into
+the wide world, into some delightful country where there's plenty of
+love and no politics. I want love so much, Mildred; I've never had it,
+and no one has ever guessed how much I wanted it except you,
+dear&mdash;except you."</p>
+
+<p>Yes, she had guessed. The queer childhood, so noisy yet so lonely, had
+been spoken of; the married life spoke for itself.</p>
+
+<p>His arm was around her now, their faces drawn close together, and in the
+pale, faint light they looked each other deep in the eyes. Then their
+lips met in a long kiss.</p>
+
+<p>"You see how it is," he whispered; "you can't help it. It's got to be.
+No one has power to prevent it."</p>
+
+<p>But he spoke without knowledge, for there was one who had power to
+prevent it, one conquered, helpless, less than a ghost, who yet could
+lay an icy hand on the warm, high-beating heart of her subduer, and say:
+"Love and desire, the pride of life<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> and the freedom of the world, are
+not for you. I forbid them to you&mdash;I&mdash;by a power stronger than the laws
+of God or man. True, you have no husband, you have no child, for those
+who seem to be yours are mine. You have taken them from me, and now you
+must keep them, whether you will or no. You have taken my life from me,
+and my life you must have, that and none other."</p>
+
+<p>It was against this unknown and inflexible power that George Goring
+struggled with all the might of his love, and absolutely in vain.
+Between him and Mildred there could be no lies, no subterfuges; only
+that one silence which to him, of all others, she dared not break.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to have been engaged in this struggle, at once so sweet and
+so bitter, for an eternity before she stood on her own doorstep,
+latch-key in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, Mr. Goring. So much obliged for the lift."</p>
+
+<p>"Delighted, I'm sure. All right now? Good-night. Drop me at the House,
+Edwards."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his hat, stepped in and closed the carriage-door sharply
+behind him; and in a minute the brougham with its lights rolling almost
+noiselessly behind the big fast-trotting bay horse, had disappeared
+around a neighboring corner.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The house was cold and dark, except for a candle which burned on an oak
+dresser in the narrow hall. As Mildred dragged herself up the stairs,
+she had a sensation of physical fatigue, almost bruisedness, as though
+she had come out of some actual bodily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> combat. Her room, fireless and
+cold, was solitary, for Ian's sleep had to be protected from
+disturbance. Nevertheless, having loosened her wraps, she threw herself
+on the bed and lay there long, her bare arms under her head. The
+sensation of chill, her own cold soft flesh against her face, seemed to
+brace her mind and body, to restore her powers of clear, calm judgment,
+so unlike the usual short-sighted, emotionalized judgments of youth. She
+had nothing of the ordinary woman's feeling of guilt towards her
+husband. The intimate bond between herself and George Goring did not
+seem in any relation the accidental one between her and Ian Stewart. She
+had never before faced the question, the possibility of a choice between
+the two. Now she weighed it with characteristic swiftness and decision.
+She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his
+marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but
+that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she
+herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could
+she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer
+cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back again to the student's
+life, the only life that could bring him honor, and in the long run
+satisfaction. And that life would not be lonely, because Tony, so
+completely his father's child, would be with him. As for herself and
+George Goring, she had no fear of the future. They two were strong
+enough to hew and build alone their own Palace of Delight. Her intuitive
+knowledge of the world informed her that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> in the long run, society, if
+firmly disregarded, admits the claim of certain persons to go their own
+way&mdash;even rapidly admits it, though they be the merest bleating strays
+from the common fold, should they haply be possessed of rank or fortune.
+The way lay plain enough before Mildred, were it not for that Other. But
+she, the shadowy one, deep down in her limbo, laid a finger on the gate
+of that Earthly Paradise and held it, as inflexibly as any armed
+archangel, against the master key of her enemy's intelligence, the
+passionate assaults of her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred, however, was one who found it hard, if not impossible, to
+acquiesce in defeat. Two o'clock boomed from the watching towers of
+Westminster over the great city. She rose from her bed, cold as a marble
+figure on a monument, and went to the dressing-table to take off her few
+and simple ornaments. The mirror on it was the same from which that
+alien smile had peered twelve months ago, filling the sad soul of Milly
+with trembling fear and sinister foreboding. The white face that stole
+into its shadowy depths to-night, and looked Mildred in the eyes, was in
+a manner new to her also. It had a new seriousness, a new intensity, as
+of a woman whose vital energies, once spending themselves in mere
+corruscations, in mere action for action's sake, were now concentrated
+on one definite thought, one purpose, one emotion, which with an intense
+yet benign fire blended in perfect harmony the life of the soul and of
+the body.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For a moment the face in its gravity recalled to her the latest
+photograph of Milly, a tragic photograph she did not care to look at
+because it touched her with a pity, a remorse, which were after all
+quite useless. But the impression was false and momentary.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, speaking to the glass, "it's not really like. Poor weak
+woman! I understand better now what you have suffered." Then almost
+repeating the words of her own cruel subconscious self&mdash;"But there's all
+the difference between the weak and the strong. I am the stronger, and
+the stronger must win; that's written, and it's no use struggling
+against the law of nature."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>George Goring was never so confident in himself as when he was fighting
+an apparently losing game; and the refusal of Mildred to come to him, a
+refusal based, as he supposed, on nothing but an insurmountable
+prejudice against doing what was not respectable, struck him as a stage
+in their relations rather than as the end of them. He did not attempt to
+see her until the close of the Easter Vacation. People began to couple
+their names, but lightly, without serious meaning, for Goring being
+popular with women, had a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a flirt.
+When a faithful cousin hinted things about him and Mrs. Stewart to Lady
+Augusta, she who believed herself to have seen a number of similar
+temporary enslavers, put the matter by, really glad that a harmless
+nobody should have succeeded to Maud Langham with her dangerous
+opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Ian Stewart on his side was barely acquainted with Goring. Sir John
+Ireton and the newspapers informed him that George Goring was a flashy,
+untrustworthy politician; and the former added that he was a terrible
+nuisance to poor Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta. That such a man could
+attract Mildred would never have occurred to him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The fear of Milly's return, which she could not altogether banish, still
+at times checked and restrained Mildred. Could she but have secured
+Tims's assistance in keeping Milly away, she would have felt more
+confident of success. It was hopeless to appeal directly to the
+hypnotist, but her daring imagination began to conceive a situation in
+which mere good sense and humanity must compel Tims to forbid the return
+of Milly to a life made impossible for her. She had not seen Tims for
+many weeks, not since the Easter Vacation, which had already receded
+into a remote distance; so far had she journeyed since then along the
+path of her fate. Nor had she so much as wondered at not seeing Tims.
+But now her mind was turned to consider the latent power which that
+strange creature held over her life, her dearest interests; since how
+might not Milly comport herself with George?</p>
+
+<p>Then it was that she realized how long it had been since Tims had crept
+up the stairs to her drawing-room; pausing probably in the middle of
+them to wipe away with hasty pocket-handkerchief some real or fancied
+trace of her foot on a carpet which she condemned as expensive.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred had written her a note, but it was hardly posted when the door
+was flung open and Miss Timson was formally announced by the
+parlor-maid. Tony, who was looking at pictures with his mother, rose
+from her side, prepared to take a hop, skip, and jump and land with his
+arms around Tims's waist. But he stopped short and contemplated her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
+with round-eyed solemnity. The ginger-colored man's wig had developed
+into a frizzy fringe and the rest of the coiffure of the hour. A large
+picture hat surmounted it, and her little person was clothed in a vivid
+heliotrope dress of the latest mode. It was a handsome dress, a handsome
+hat, a handsome wig, yet somehow the effect was jarring. Tony felt
+vaguely shocked. "Bless thee! Thou art translated!" he might have cried
+with Quince; but being a polite child, he said nothing, only put out a
+small hand sadly. Tims, however, unconscious of the slight chill cast by
+her appearance, kissed him in a perfunctory, patronizing way, as ladies
+do who are afraid of disarranging their veils. She greeted Mildred also
+with a parade of mundane elegance, and sat down deliberately on the
+sofa, spreading out her heliotrope skirts.</p>
+
+<p>"You can run away just now, little man," she said to Tony. "I want to
+talk to your mother."</p>
+
+<p>"How smart you are!" observed Mildred, seeing that comment of some kind
+would be welcome. "Been to Sir James Carus's big party at the Museum, I
+suppose. You're getting a personage, Tims."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say I shall look in later, but I shouldn't trouble to dress up
+for that, my girl. Clothes would be quite wasted there. But I think one
+should always try to look decent, don't you? One's men like it."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose Ian would notice it if I positively wasn't decent. But, Tims,
+dear, does old Carus really criticise your frocks?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For indeed the distinguished scientist, Miss Timson's chief, was the
+only man she could think of to whom Tims could possibly apply the
+possessive adjective. Tims bridled.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not; I was thinking of Mr. Fitzalan."</p>
+
+<p>That she had for years been very kind to a lonely little man of that
+name who lived in the same block of chambers, Mildred knew,
+but&mdash;Heavens! Even Mildred's presence of mind failed her, and she
+stared. Meeting her amazed eye, Tims's borrowed smile suddenly broke its
+bounds and became her own familiar grin, only more so:</p>
+
+<p>"We're engaged," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Tims!" exclaimed Mildred, suppressing an inclination to burst
+out laughing. "What a surprise!"</p>
+
+<p>"I quite thought you'd have been prepared for it," returned Tims. "A bit
+stupid of you not to guess it, don't you know, old girl. We've been
+courting long enough."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred hastened to congratulate the strange bride and wish her
+happiness, with all that unusual grace which she knew how to employ in
+adorning the usual.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I should like you to be the first to know," said Tims,
+sentimentally, after a while; "because I was your bridesmaid, you see.
+It was the prettiest wedding I ever saw, and I should love to have a
+wedding like yours&mdash;all of us carrying lilies, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember there were green stains on my wedding-dress," returned
+Mildred, with forced gayety.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims, temporarily oblivious of all awkward circumstances, continued,
+still more sentimentally:</p>
+
+<p>"Then I was there, as I've told you, when Ian's pop came to poor old M.
+Poor old girl! She was awfully spifligatingly happy, and I feel just the
+same now myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it wasn't I, anyhow, who felt 'awfully spifligatingly happy' on
+that occasion," replied Mildred, with a touch of asperity in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>Tims, legitimately absorbed in her own feelings, did not notice it. She
+continued:</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say the world will say Mr. Fitzalan had an eye on my money; and
+it's true I've done pretty well with my investments. But, bless you! he
+hadn't a notion of that. You see, I was brought up to be stingy, and I
+enjoy it. He thought of course I was a pauper, and proposed we should
+pauper along together. He was quite upset when he found I was an
+heiress. Wasn't it sweet of him?"</p>
+
+<p>Mildred said it was.</p>
+
+<p>"Flora Fitzalan!" breathed Tims, clasping her hands and smiling into
+space. "Isn't it a pretty name? It's always been my dream to have a
+pretty name." Then suddenly, as though in a flash seeing all those
+personal disadvantages which she usually contrived to ignore:</p>
+
+<p>"Life's a queer lottery, Mil, my girl. We know what we are, we know not
+what we shall be, as old Billy says. Who'd ever have thought that a
+nice, quiet girl like Milly, marrying the lad of her heart and all that,
+would come to such awful grief; while look at me&mdash;a queer kind of girl
+you'd have laid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span> your bottom dollar wouldn't have much luck, prospering
+like anything, well up in the Science business, and now, what's ever so
+much better, scrumptiously happy with a good sort of her own. Upon my
+word, Mil, I've half a mind to fetch old M. back to sympathize with me,
+for although you've said a peck of nice things, I don't believe you
+understand what I'm feeling the way the old girl would."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred went a little pale and spoke quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't do that really, Tims? You won't be so cruel to&mdash;to every
+one?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I don't see why you're always to be jolly and have
+everything your own way. Oh, Lord! When I think how happy old M. was
+when she was engaged, the same as I am, and then on her
+wedding-day&mdash;just the same as I shall be on mine."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred straightened out the frill of a muslin cushion cover, her head
+bent.</p>
+
+<p>"Just so. She had everything <i>her</i> own way that time. I gave her that
+happiness, it was all my doing. She's had it and she ought to be
+content. Don't be a fool, Tims&mdash;" she lifted her face and Tims was
+startled by its expression&mdash;"Can't you see how hard it is on me never to
+be allowed the happiness you've got and Milly's had? Don't you think I
+might care to know what love is like for myself? Don't you think I might
+happen to want&mdash;I tell you I'm a million times more alive than
+Milly&mdash;and I want&mdash;I want everything a million times more than she
+does."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tims was astonished.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's always struck me, don't you know, that Ian was a deal more in
+love with you than he ever was with poor old M."</p>
+
+<p>"And you pretend to be in love and think that's enough! It's not enough;
+you must know it's not. It's like sitting at a Barmecide feast, very
+hungry, only the Barmecide's sitting opposite you eating all the time
+and talking about his food. I tell you it's maddening, perfectly
+maddening&mdash;" There was a fierce vehemence in her face, her voice, the
+clinch of her slender hands on the muslin frill. That strong vitality
+which before had seemed to carry her lightly as on wings, over all the
+rough places of life, had now not failed, but turned itself inwards,
+burning in an intense flame at once of pain and of rebellion against its
+own pain.</p>
+
+<p>Tims in the midst of her happiness, felt vaguely scared. Mildred seeing
+it, recovered herself and plunged into the usual engagement talk. In a
+few minutes she was her old beguiling self&mdash;the self to whose charm Tims
+was as susceptible in her way as Thomas the Rhymer had been in his.</p>
+
+<p>When she had left, and from time to time thereafter, Tims felt vaguely
+uncomfortable, remembering Mildred's outburst of vehement bitterness on
+the subject of love. It was so unlike her usual careless tone, which
+implied that it was men's business, or weakness, to be in love with
+women, and that only second-rate women fell in love themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred seemed altogether more serious than she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span> used to be, and Milly
+herself could not have been more sympathetic over the engagement. Even
+Mr. Fitzalan, when Tims brought him to call on the Stewarts was not
+afraid of her, and found it possible to say a few words in reply to her
+remarks. Tims's ceremonious way of speaking of her betrothed, whom she
+never mentioned except as Mr. Fitzalan, made Ian reflect with sad humor
+on the number of offensively familiar forms of address which he himself
+had endured from her, and on the melancholy certainty that she had never
+spoken of him in his absence by any name more respectful than the plain
+unprefixed "Stewart." But he hoped that the excitement of her engagement
+had wiped out of her remembrance that afternoon when poor Milly had
+tried to return. For he did not like to think of that moment of weakness
+in which he had allowed Tims to divine so much of a state of mind which
+he could not unveil even to himself without a certain shame.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>The summer was reaching its height. The weather was perfect. Night after
+night hot London drawing-rooms were crowded to suffocation, awnings
+sprang mushroom-like from every West End pavement; the sound of music
+and the rolling of carriages made night, if not hideous, at least
+discordant to the unconsidered minority who went to bed as usual.
+Outside in the country, even in the suburbs, June came in glory, with
+woods in freshest livery of green, with fragrance of hawthorn and broom
+and gorse, buttercup meadows and gardens brimmed with roses. It seemed
+to George Goring and Mildred as though somehow this warmth, this gayety
+and richness of life in the earth had never been there before, but that
+Fate and Nature, of which their love was part, were leading them on in a
+great festal train to the inevitable consummation. The flame of life had
+never burned clearer or more steadily in Mildred, and every day she felt
+a growing confidence in having won so complete a possession of her whole
+bodily machinery that it would hardly be in the power of Milly to
+dethrone her. The sight of George Goring, the touch of his hand, the
+very touch of his garment, gave her a feeling of un<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>conquerable life. It
+was impossible that she and George should part. All her sanguine and
+daring nature cried out to her that were she once his, Milly should not,
+could not, return. Tims, too, was there in reserve. Not that Tims would
+feel anything but horror at Mildred's conduct in leaving Ian and Tony;
+but the thing done, she would recognize the impossibility of allowing
+Milly to return to such a situation.</p>
+
+<p>Ian, whose holidays were usually at the inevitable periods, was by some
+extraordinary collapse of that bloated thing, the Academic conscience,
+going away for a fortnight in June. He had been deputed to attend a
+centenary celebration at some German University, and a conference of
+savants to be held immediately after it, presented irresistible
+attractions.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday Tims and Mr. Fitzalan went to Hampton Court with the usual
+crowd of German, Italian, and French hair-dressers, waiters, cooks, and
+restaurant-keepers, besides native cockneys of all classes except the
+upper.</p>
+
+<p>The noble old Palace welcomed this mass of very common humanity with
+such a pageant of beauty as never greeted the eyes of its royal
+builders. Centuries of sunshine seem to have melted into the rich reds
+and grays and cream-color of its walls, under which runs a quarter of a
+mile of flower-border, a glowing mass of color, yet as full of delicate
+and varied detail as the border of an illuminated missal. Everywhere
+this modern wealth and splendor of flowers is arranged, as jewels in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
+setting, within the architectural plan of the old garden. There the dark
+yews retain their intended proportion, the silver fountain rises where
+it was meant to rise, although it sprinkles new, unthought-of lilies.
+Behind it, on either side the stately vista of water, and beside it, in
+the straight alley, the trees in the freshness and fulness of their
+leafage, stand tall and green, less trim and solid it may be, but
+essentially as they were meant to stand when the garden grew long ago in
+the brain of a man. And out there beyond the terrace the Thames flows
+quietly, silverly on, seeming to shine with the memory of all the
+loveliness those gliding waters have reflected, since their ripples
+played with the long, tremulous image of Lechlade spire.</p>
+
+<p>Seen from the cool, deep-windowed rooms of the Palace, where now the
+pictures hang and hundreds of plebeian feet tramp daily, the gardens
+gave forth a burning yet pleasant glow of heat and color in the full
+sunshine. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, having eaten their frugal lunch early
+under the blossoming chestnut-trees in Bushey Park, went into the
+Picture Gallery in the Palace at an hour when it happened to be almost
+empty. The queer-looking woman not quite young, and the little, bald,
+narrow-chested, short-sighted man, would not have struck the passers-by
+as being a pair of lovers. A few sympathetic smiles, however, had been
+bestowed upon another couple seated in the deep window of one of the
+smaller rooms; a pretty young woman and an attractive man. The young man
+had disposed his hat and a newspaper in such a way as not to make it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+indecently obvious that he was holding her hand. It was she who called
+attention to the fact by hasty attempts to snatch it away when people
+came in.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you do that for?" asked the young man. "There's not the
+slightest chance of any one we know coming along."</p>
+
+<p>"But George&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do try and adapt yourself to your <i>milieu</i>. These people are probably
+blaming me for not putting my arm around your waist."</p>
+
+<p>"George! What an idiot you are!" She laughed a nervous laugh.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the last party of fat, dark young women in rainbow hats,
+and narrow-shouldered, anæmic young men, had trooped away towards food.
+Goring waited till the sound of their footsteps had ceased. He was
+holding Mildred's hand, but he had drawn it out from under the newspaper
+now, and the gay audacity of his look had changed to something at once
+more serious and more masterful.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like your seeming afraid, Mildred," he said. "It spoils my idea
+of you. I like to think of you as a high-spirited creature, conscious
+enough of your own worth to go your own way and despise the foolish
+comments of the crowd."</p>
+
+<p>To hear herself so praised by him made the clear pink rise to Mildred's
+cheeks. How could she bear to fall below the level of his expectation,
+although the thing he expected of her had dangers of which he was
+ignorant?</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you believe that of me," she said; "although it's not quite
+true. I cared a good deal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span> about the opinion of the world before&mdash;before
+I knew you; only I was vain enough to think it would never treat me very
+badly."</p>
+
+<p>"It won't," he replied, his audacious smile flashing out for a moment.
+"It'll come sneaking back to you before long; it can't keep away.
+Besides, I'm cynic enough to know my own advantages, Mildred. Society
+doesn't sulk forever with wealthy people, whatever they choose to do."</p>
+
+<p>She answered low: "But I shouldn't care if it did, George. I want
+you&mdash;just to go right away with you."</p>
+
+<p>A wonderful look of joy and tenderness came over his face. "Mildred! Can
+it really be you saying that?" he breathed. "Really you, Mildred?"</p>
+
+<p>They looked each other in the eyes and were silent a minute; but while
+the hand next the window held hers, the other one stole out farther to
+clasp her. He was too much absorbed in that gaze to notice anything
+beyond it; but Mildred was suddenly aware of steps and a voice in the
+adjoining room. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, in the course of a conscientious
+survey of all the pictures on the walls, had reached this point in their
+progress. The window-seat on which Goring and Mildred were sitting was
+visible through a doorway, and Tims had on her strongest glasses.</p>
+
+<p>Since her engagement, Tims's old-maidish bringing up seemed to be
+bearing fruit for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we'd better cough or do something," she said. "There's a couple
+in there going on dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>gracefully. I do think spooning in public such bad
+form."</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say they think they're alone," returned the charitable Mr.
+Fitzalan, unable to see the delinquents because he was trying to put a
+loose lens back into his eye-glasses. Tims came to his assistance,
+talking loudly; and her voice was of a piercing quality. Mildred,
+leaning forward, saw Mr. Fitzalan and Tims, both struggling with
+eye-glasses. She slipped from George's encircling arm and stood in the
+doorway of the farther room, beckoning to him with a scared face. He got
+up and followed her.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" he asked, more curious than anxious; for an
+encounter with Lady Augusta in person could only precipitate a crisis he
+was ready to welcome. Why should one simple, definite step from an old
+life to a new one, which his reason as much as his passion dictated, be
+so incredibly difficult to take?</p>
+
+<p>Mildred hurried him away, explaining that she had seen some one she knew
+very well. He pointed out that it was of no real consequence. She could
+not tell him that if Tims suspected anything before the decisive step
+was taken, one of the safeguards under which she took it might fail.</p>
+
+<p>They found no exit at the end of the suite of rooms, still less any
+place of concealment. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan came upon them discussing
+the genuineness of a picture in the last room but one. When Tims saw
+that it was Mildred, she made some of the most dreadful grimaces she had
+ever made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span> in her life. Making them, she approached Mildred, who seeing
+there was no escape, turned around and greeted her with a welcoming
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Were you&mdash;were you sitting on that window-seat?" asked Tims, fixing her
+with eyes that seemed bent on piercing to her very marrow.</p>
+
+<p>Mildred smiled again, with a broader smile.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know about 'that window-seat.' I've sat on a good many
+window-seats, naturally, since I set forth on this pilgrimage. Is there
+anything particular about that one? I've never seen Hampton Court
+before, Mr. Fitzalan, so as some people I knew were coming to-day, I
+thought I'd come too. May I introduce Mr. Goring?"</p>
+
+<p>So perfectly natural and easy was Mildred's manner, that Tims already
+half disbelieved her own eyes. They must have played her some trick; yet
+how could that be? She recalled the figures in the window-seat, as seen
+with all the peculiar, artificial distinctness conferred by strong
+glasses. The young man called Goring had smiled into the hidden face of
+his companion in a manner that Tims could not approve. She made up her
+mind that as soon as she had leisure she would call on Mildred and
+question her once more, and more straitly, concerning the mystery of
+that window-seat.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+
+<p>On Monday and Tuesday an interesting experiment which she was conducting
+under Carus claimed Tims's whole attention, except for the evening
+hours, which were dedicated to Mr. Fitzalan. But she wrote to say that
+Mildred might expect her to tea on Wednesday. On Wednesday the post
+brought her a note from Mildred, dated Tuesday, midnight.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Tims</span>,&mdash;I am afraid you will not find me to-morrow
+afternoon, as I am going out of town. But do go to tea with
+Tony, who is just back from the sea and looking bonny. He is
+such a darling! I always mind leaving him, although of
+course I am not his mother. Oh, dear, I am so sleepy, I
+hardly know what I am saying. Good-bye, Tims, dear. I am
+very glad you are so happy with that nice Mr. Fitzalan of
+yours. </p>
+<p class="f1">Yours,</p>
+<p class="f3">M. B. S."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>So far the note, although bearing signs of haste, was in Mildred's usual
+clear handwriting; but there was a postscript scrawled crookedly across
+the inner sides of the sheet and prefixed by several flourishes:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Meet me at Paddington 4.30 train to-morrow. Meet me.</p>
+
+<p class="f1">M."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Another flourish followed.</p>
+
+<p>The note found Tims at the laboratory, which she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span> had not intended
+leaving till half-past four. But the perplexing nature of the
+postscript, conflicting as it did with the body of the letter, made her
+the more inclined to obey its direction.</p>
+
+<p>She arrived at Paddington in good time and soon caught sight of Mildred,
+although for the tenth part of a second she hesitated in identifying
+her; for Mildred seldom wore black, although she looked well in it.
+To-day she was dressed in a long, black silk wrap&mdash;which, gathered about
+her slender figure by a ribbon, concealed her whole dress&mdash;and wore a
+long, black lace veil which might have baffled the eyes of a mere
+acquaintance. Tims could not fail to recognize that willowy figure, with
+its rare grace of motion, that amber hair, those turquoise-blue eyes
+that gleamed through the swathing veil with a restless brilliancy
+unusual even in them. With disordered dress and hat on one side, Tims
+hastened after Mildred.</p>
+
+<p>"So here you are!" she exclaimed; "that's all right! I managed to come,
+you see, though it's been a bit of a rush."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred looked around at her, astonished, possibly dismayed; but the
+veil acted as a mask.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this is a surprise, Tims! What on earth brought you here? Is
+anything the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just what I wanted to know. Why are you in black? Going to a funeral?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Heavens, no! The only funeral I mean to go to will be my own. But,
+Tims, I thought you were going to tea with Tony. Why have you come
+here?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you tell me to come in the postscript of your letter?"</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was evidently puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't remember anything about it," she said. "I was frightfully tired
+when I wrote to you&mdash;in fact, I went to sleep over the letter; but I
+can't imagine how I came to say that."</p>
+
+<p>Tims was not altogether surprised. She had had an idea that Mildred was
+not answerable for that postscript, but Mildred herself had no clew to
+the mystery, never having been told of Milly's written communication of
+a year ago. She sickened at the possibility that in some moment of
+aberration she might have written words meant for another on the note to
+Tims.</p>
+
+<p>Tims felt sure that Milly wished her to do something&mdash;but what?</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you going?" she asked. "What are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to stay with some friends who have a house on the river, and
+I'm going to do&mdash;what people always do on the river. Any other questions
+to ask, Tims?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I should like to know who your friends are."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred laughed nervously.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't be any the wiser if I tell you." And in the instant she
+reflected that what she said was true. "I am going to the Gorings'."</p>
+
+<p>The difference between that and the exact truth was only the difference
+between the plural and the singular.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't go, old girl," said Tims, earnestly. "Come back to Tony with me
+and wait till Ian comes home."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred was very pale behind the heavy black lace of her veil and her
+heart beat hard; but she spoke with self-possession.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be absurd, Tims. Tony is perfectly well, and there's Mr. Goring
+who is to travel down with me. How can I possibly go back? You're
+worrying about Milly, I suppose. Well, I'm rather nervous about her
+myself. I always am when I go away alone. You don't mind my telling them
+to wire for you if I sleep too long, do you? And you'd come as quick as
+ever you could? Think how awkward it would be for Milly and for&mdash;for the
+Gorings."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd come right enough," returned Tims, sombrely. "But if you feel like
+that, don't go."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't feel like that," replied Mildred; "I never felt less like it,
+or I shouldn't go. Still, one should be prepared for anything that may
+happen. All the same, I very much doubt that you will ever see your poor
+friend Milly again, Tims. You must try to forgive me. Now do make haste
+and go to darling Tony&mdash;he's simply longing to have you. I see Mr.
+Goring has taken our places in the train, and I shall be left behind if
+I don't go. Good-bye, old Tims."</p>
+
+<p>Mildred kissed Tims's heated, care-distorted face, and turned away to
+where Goring stood at the book-stall buying superfluous literature. Tims
+saw him lift his hat gravely to Mildred. It re<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>lieved her vaguely to
+notice that there seemed no warmth or familiarity about their greeting.
+She turned away towards the Metropolitan Railway, not feeling quite sure
+whether she had failed in an important mission or merely made a fool of
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>She found Tony certainly looking bonny, and no more inclined to break
+his heart about his mother's departure than any other healthy, happy
+child under like circumstances. Indeed, it may be doubted whether a
+healthy, happy child, unknowing whence its beatitudes spring, does not
+in its deepest, most vital moment regard all grown-up people as
+necessary nuisances. No one came so delightfully near being another
+child as Mildred; but Tims was a capital playfellow too, a broad
+comedian of the kind appreciated on the nursery boards.</p>
+
+<p>A rousing game with him and an evening at the theatre with Mr. Fitzalan,
+distracted Tims's thoughts from her anxieties. But at night she dreamed
+repeatedly and uneasily of Milly and Mildred as of two separate persons,
+and of Mr. Goring, whose vivid face seen in the full light of the window
+at Hampton Court, returned to her in sleep with a distinctness
+unobtainable in her waking memory.</p>
+
+<p>On the following day her work with Sir James Carus was of absorbing
+interest, and she came home tired and preoccupied with it. Yet her
+dreams of the night before recurred in forms at once more confused and
+more poignant. At two o'clock in the morning she awoke, crying aloud: "I
+must get Milly back"; and her pillow was wet with tears. For the two
+following hours she must have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span> awake, because she heard all the
+quarters strike from a neighboring church-tower, yet they appeared like
+a prolonged nightmare. The emotional impression of some forgotten dream
+remained, and she passed them in an agony of grief for she knew not
+what, of remorse for having on a certain summer afternoon denied Milly's
+petition for her assistance, and of intense volition, resembling prayer,
+for Milly's return.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>The intense heat of early afternoon quivered on the steep woods which
+fell to the river opposite the house. The sunlit stream curved under
+them, moving clear and quiet over depths of brown, tangled
+water-growths, and along its fringe of gray and green reeds and grasses
+and creamy plumes of meadow-sweet. The house was not very large. It was
+square and white; an old wistaria, an old Gloire-de-Dijon, and a newer
+carmine cluster-rose contended for possession of its surface. Striped
+awnings were down over all the lower windows and some of the upper. A
+large lawn, close-shorn and velvety green, as only Thames-side lawns can
+be, stretched from the house to the river. It had no flower-beds on it,
+but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark
+shadows, and trellises and pillars overrun by a flood of roses of every
+shade, from deep crimson to snow white. The lawn was surrounded by
+shrubberies and plantations, and beyond it there was nothing to be seen
+except the opposite woods and the river, and sometimes boats passing by
+with a measured sound of oars in the rowlocks, or the temporary
+commotion of a little steam-launch. It looked a respectable early
+Victorian house, but it had never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span> been quite that, for it had been
+built by George Goring's father fifty years earlier, and he himself had
+spent much of his boyhood there.</p>
+
+<p>Everything and every one seemed asleep, except a young man in flannels
+with a flapping hat hanging over his eyes, who stood at the end of a
+punt and pretended to fish. There was no one to look at him or at the
+house behind him, and if there had been observers, they would not have
+guessed that they were looking at the Garden of Eden and that he was
+Adam. Only last evening he and that fair Eve of his had stood by the
+river in the moonlight, where the shattering hawthorn-bloom made the air
+heavy with sweetness, and had spoken to each other of this their
+exquisite, undreamed-of happiness. There had been a Before, there would
+be an After, when they must stand on their defence against the world,
+must resist a thousand importunities, heart-breaking prayers, to return
+to the old, false, fruitless existence.</p>
+
+<p>But just for these days they could be utterly alone in their paradise,
+undisturbed even by the thoughts of others, since no one knew they were
+there and together. Alas! they had been so only forty-eight hours, and
+already a cold little serpent of anxiety had crept in among their roses.</p>
+
+<p>Before entrusting herself to him, Mildred had told him that, in spite of
+her apparent good health, she was occasionally subject to long
+trance-like fits, resembling sleep; should this happen, it would be
+useless to call an ordinary doctor, but that a Miss Timson, a well-known
+scientific woman and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span> friend of hers, must be summoned at once. He had
+taken Miss Timson's address and promised to do so; but Mildred had not
+seemed to look upon the fit as more than a remote contingency. Perhaps
+the excitement, the unconscious strain of the last few days had upset
+her nerves; for this morning she had lain in what he had taken for a
+natural sleep, until, finding her still sleeping profoundly at noon, he
+had remembered her words and telegraphed to Miss Timson. An answer to
+his telegram, saying that Miss Timson would come as soon as possible,
+lay crumpled up at the bottom of the punt.</p>
+
+<p>The serpent was there, but Goring did not allow its peeping coils
+thoroughly to chill his roses. His temperament was too sanguine, he felt
+too completely steeped in happiness, the weather was too beautiful. Most
+likely Mildred would be all right to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, up there in the shaded room, she who had been Mildred began to
+stir in her sleep. She opened her eyes and gazed through the square
+window, at the sunlit awning that overhung it, and at the green leaves
+and pale buds of the Gloire-de-Dijon rose. There was a hum of bees close
+by that seemed like the voice of the hot sunshine. It should have been a
+pleasant awakening, but Milly awoke from that long sleep of hers with a
+brooding sense of misfortune. The remembrance of the afternoon when she
+had so suddenly been snatched away returned to her, but it was not the
+revelation of Ian's passionate love for her supplanter that came back to
+her as the thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span> of most importance. Surely she must have known that
+long before, for now the pain seemed old and dulled from habit. It was
+the terrible strength with which the Evil Spirit had possessed her,
+seizing her channels of speech even while she was still there, hurling
+her from her seat without waiting for the passivity of sleep. No, her
+sense of misfortune was not altogether, or even mainly, connected with
+that last day of hers. Unlike Mildred, she had up till now been without
+any consciousness of things that had occurred during her quiescence, and
+she had now no vision; only a strong impression that something terrible
+had befallen Ian.</p>
+
+<p>She looked around the bedroom, and it seemed to her very strange;
+something like an hotel room, yet at once too sumptuous and too shabby.
+There was a faded pink flock wall-paper with a gilt pattern upon it, the
+chairs were gilded and padded and covered with worn pink damask, the bed
+was gilded and hung with faded pink silk curtains. Everywhere there was
+pink and gilding, and everywhere it was old and faded and rubbed. A few
+early Victorian lithographs hung on the walls, portraits of
+ballet-dancers and noblemen with waists and whiskers. No one had tidied
+the room since the night before, and fine underclothing was flung
+carelessly about on chairs, a fussy petticoat here, the bodice of an
+evening dress there; everywhere just that touch of mingled daintiness
+and disorder which by this time Milly recognized only too well.</p>
+
+<p>The bed was large, and some one else had evi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>dently slept there besides
+herself, for the sheet and pillow were rumpled and there was a
+half-burnt candle and a man's watch-chain on the small table beside it.
+Wherever she was then, Ian was there too, so that she was at a loss to
+understand her own sinister foreboding.</p>
+
+<p>She pulled at the bell-rope twice.</p>
+
+<p>There were only three servants in the house; a housekeeper and two
+maids, who all dated from the days of Mrs. Maria Idle, ex-mistress of
+the late Lord Ipswich, dead herself now some six months. The housekeeper
+was asleep, the maids out of hearing. She opened the door and found a
+bathroom opposite her bedroom. It had a window which showed her a strip
+of lawn with flower-beds upon it, beyond that shrubberies and tall trees
+which shut out any farther view. A hoarse cuckoo was crying in the
+distance, and from the greenery came a twittering of birds and sometimes
+a few liquid pipings; but there was no sound of human life. The place
+seemed as empty as an enchanted palace in a fairy story.</p>
+
+<p>Milly's toilet never took her very long. She put on a fresh, simple
+cotton dress, which seemed to have been worn the day before, and was
+just hesitating as to whether she should go down or wait for Ian to
+come, when Clarkson, the housekeeper, knocked at her door.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought if you was awake, madam, you might like a bit of lunch," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Milly refused, for this horrible feeling of depression and anxiety made
+her insensible to hunger.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span> She looked at the housekeeper with a certain
+surprise, for Clarkson was as decorated and as much the worse for wear
+as the furniture of the bedroom. She was a large, fat woman, laced into
+a brown cashmere dress, with a cameo brooch on her ample bosom; her hair
+was unnaturally black, curled and dressed high on the top of her head,
+she had big gold earrings, and a wealth of powder on her large, red
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you tell me where I am likely to find Mr. Stewart?" asked Milly,
+politely.</p>
+
+<p>The woman stared, and when she answered there was more than a shade of
+insolence in her coarse voice and smile.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure I can't tell, madam. Mr. Stewart's not our gentleman here."</p>
+
+<p>Milly, understanding the reply as little as the housekeeper had
+understood the question, yet felt that some impertinence was intended
+and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing for it but to explore on her own account. A staircase
+of the dull Victorian kind led down to a dark, cool hall. The front door
+was open. She walked to it and stood under a stumpy portico, looking
+out. The view was much the same as that seen from the bathroom, only
+that instead of grass and flower-beds there was a gravel sweep, and,
+just opposite the front door, a circle of grass with a tall
+monkey-puzzle tree in the centre. Except for the faded gorgeousness of
+the bedroom, the house looked like an ordinary country house, belonging
+to old people who did not care to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span> move with the times. Why should she
+feel at every step a growing dread of what might meet her there?</p>
+
+<p>She turned from the portico and opened, hesitatingly, the door of a room
+on the opposite side of the hall. It was a drawing-room, with traces of
+the same shabby gorgeousness that prevailed in the bedroom, but
+mitigated by a good deal of clean, faded chintz; and at one end was a
+brilliant full-length Millais portrait of Mrs. Maria Idle in blue silk
+and a crinoline. It was a long room, pleasant in the dim light; for
+although it had three windows, the farthest a French one and open, all
+were covered with awnings, coming low down and showing nothing of the
+outer world but a hand's breadth of turf and wandering bits of creeper.
+It was sweet with flowers, and on a consol table before a mirror stood a
+high vase from which waved and twined tall sprays and long streamers of
+cluster-roses, carmine and white. It was beautiful, yet Milly turned
+away from it almost with a shudder. She recognized the touch of the hand
+that must have set the roses there. And the nameless horror grew upon
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Except for the flowers, there was little sign of occupation in the room.
+A large round rosewood table was set with blue glass vases on mats and
+some dozen photograph&mdash;albums and gift-books, dating from the sixties.
+But on a stool in a corner lay a newspaper; and the date on it gave her
+a shock. She had supposed herself to have been away about four months;
+she found she had been gone sixteen. There had been plenty of time for a
+misfortune to happen, and she felt convinced that it had hap<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>pened. But
+what? If Ian or Tony were dead she would surely still be in mourning.
+Then on a little rosewood escritoire, such as ladies were wont to use
+when they had nothing to write, she spied an old leather writing-case
+with the initials M. B. F. upon it. It was one Aunt Beatrice had given
+her when she first went to Ascham, and it seemed to look on her
+pleasantly, like the face of an old friend. She found a few letters in
+the pockets, among them one from Ian written from Berlin a few days
+before, speaking of his speedy return and of Tony's amusing letter from
+the sea-side. She began to hope her feeling of anxiety and depression
+might be only the shadow of the fear and anguish which she had suffered
+on that horrible afternoon sixteen months ago. She must try not to think
+about it, must try to be bright for Ian's sake. Some one surely was with
+her at this queer place, since she was sharing a room with another
+person&mdash;probably a female friend of that Other's, who had such a crowd
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>She drew the awning half-way up and stood on the step outside the French
+window. The lawn, the trees, the opposite hills were unknown to her, but
+the spirit of the river spoke to her familiarly, and she knew it for the
+Thames. A gardener in shirt-sleeves was filling a water-barrel by the
+river, under a hawthorn-tree, and the young man in the punt was putting
+up his fishing-tackle. As she looked, the strangeness of the scene
+passed away. She could not say where it was, but in some dream or vision
+she had certainly seen this lawn, that view,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span> before; when the young man
+turned and came nearer she would know his face. And the dim, horrible
+thing that was waiting for her somewhere about the quiet house, the
+quiet garden, seemed to draw a step nearer, to lift its veil a little.
+Who was it that had stood not far from where the gardener was standing
+now, and seen the moon hanging large and golden over the mystery of the
+opposite woods? Whoever it was, some one's arm had been fast around her
+and there had been kisses&mdash;kisses.</p>
+
+<p>It took but a few seconds for these half-revelations to drop into her
+mind, and before she had had time to reflect upon them, the young man in
+the punt looked up and saw her standing there on the step. He took off
+his floppy hat and waved it to her; then he put down his tackle, ran to
+the near end of the punt and jumped lightly ashore. He came up the green
+lawn, and her anxiety sent her down to meet him almost as eagerly as
+love would have done. The hat shaded all the upper part of his face, and
+at a distance, in the strong sunshine, the audacious chin, the red lower
+lip, caught her eye first and seemed to extinguish the rest of the face.
+And suddenly she disliked them. Who was the man, and how did she come to
+know him? But former experiences of strange awakenings had made her
+cautious, self-controlling, almost capable of hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're awake!" shouted George, still a long way down the lawn.
+"Good! How are you? All right?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded "Yes," with a constrained smile.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In a minute they had met, he had turned her around, and with his arm
+under hers was leading her towards the house again.</p>
+
+<p>"All right? Really all right?" he asked very softly, pressing her arm
+with his hand and stooping his head to bring his mouth on a level with
+her ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Very nearly, at any rate," she answered, coldly, trying to draw away
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you doing that for?" he asked. "Afraid of shocking the
+gardener, eh? What queer little dear little ways you've got! I suppose
+Undines are like that."</p>
+
+<p>He drew her closer to him as he threw back his head and laughed a noisy
+laugh that jarred upon her nerves.</p>
+
+<p>Milly began to feel indignant. It was just possible that a younger
+sister in Australia might have married and brought this extraordinary
+young man home to England, but his looks, his tone, were not fraternal;
+and she had never forgotten the Maxwell Davison episode. She walked on
+stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>"Every one seems to be out," she observed, as calmly as she could.</p>
+
+<p>He frowned.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean those devils of servants haven't been looking after you?" he
+asked. "Yet I gave Clarkson her orders. Of course they're baggages, but
+I haven't had the heart to send them away from the old place, for who on
+earth would take them? I expect we aren't improving their chances, you
+and I, at this very moment; in spite of respecting the gardener's
+prejudices."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He chuckled, as at some occult joke of his own.</p>
+
+<p>They stooped together under the half-raised awning of the French window,
+and entered the dim, flower-scented drawing-room side by side. The young
+man threw off his hat, and she saw the silky ripple of his nut-brown
+hair, his smooth forehead, his bright-glancing hazel eyes, all the happy
+pleasantness of his countenance. Before she had had time to reconsider
+her dislike of him, he had caught her in his arms and kissed her hair
+and face, whispering little words of love between the kisses. For one
+paralyzed moment Milly suffered these dreadful words, these horrible
+caresses. Then exerting the strength of frenzy, she pushed him from her
+and bounded to the other side of the room, entrenching herself behind
+the big rosewood table with its smug mats and vases and albums.</p>
+
+<p>"You brute! you brute! you hateful cad!" she stammered with trembling
+lips; "how dare you touch me?"</p>
+
+<p>George Goring stared at her with startled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred! Dearest! Good God! What's gone wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where's my husband?" she asked, in a voice sharp with anger and terror.
+"I want to go&mdash;I must leave this horrid place at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband?"</p>
+
+<p>It was Goring's turn to feel himself plunged into the midst of a
+nightmare, and he grew almost as pale as Milly. How in Heaven's name was
+he going to manage her? She looked very ill and must of course be
+delirious. That would have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span> alarming in any case, and this
+particular form of delirium was excruciatingly painful.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my husband&mdash;where is he? I shall tell him how you've dared to
+insult me. I must go. This is your house&mdash;I must leave it at once."</p>
+
+<p>Goring did not attempt to come near her. He spoke very quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Try and remember, Mildred; Stewart is not here. He will not even be in
+England till to-morrow. You are alone with me. Hadn't you better go to
+bed again and&mdash;" he was about to say, "wait until Miss Timson comes,"
+but as it was possible that the advent of the person she had wished him
+to summon might now irritate her, he substituted&mdash;"and keep quiet? I
+promise not to come near you if you don't wish to see me."</p>
+
+<p>"I am alone here with you?" Milly repeated, slowly, and pressed her hand
+to her forehead. "Good God," she moaned to herself, "what can have
+happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. For Heaven's sake, go and lie down. I expect the doctor can give
+you something to soothe your nerves and then perhaps you'll remember."</p>
+
+<p>She made a gesture of fierce impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"You think I'm mad, but I'm not. I have been mad and I am myself again;
+only I can't remember anything that's happened since I went out of my
+mind. I insist upon your telling me. Who are you? I never saw you before
+to my knowledge."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice, her attitude were almost truculent as she faced him, her
+right hand dragging at the loose clasp of a big photograph album. Every
+word,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span> every look, was agony to Goring, but he controlled himself by an
+effort.</p>
+
+<p>"I am George Goring," he said, slowly, and paused with anxious eyes
+fixed upon her, hoping that the name might yet stir some answering
+string of tenderness in the broken lyre of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>She too paused, as though tracking some far-off association with the
+name. Then:</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! poor Lady Augusta's husband," she repeated, yet sterner than before
+in her anger. "My friend Lady Augusta's husband! And why am I here alone
+with you, Mr. Goring?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I am your lover, Mildred. Because I love you better than any
+one or any thing in the world; and yesterday you thought you loved me,
+you thought you could trust all your life to me."</p>
+
+<p>She had known the answer already in her heart, but the fact stated
+plainly by another, became even more dreadful, more intolerable, than
+before. She uttered a low cry and covered her eyes with her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred&mdash;dearest!" he breathed imploringly.</p>
+
+<p>Then she raised her head and looked straight at him with flaming eyes,
+this fair, fragile creature transformed into a pitiless Fury. She forgot
+that indeed an Evil Spirit had dwelt within her; George Goring might be
+victim rather than culprit. In this hour of her anguish the identity of
+that body of hers, which through him was defiled, that honor of hers,
+yes and of Ian Stewart's, which through him was dragged in the dust,
+made her no longer able to keep clearly in mind the separateness of the
+Mildred Stewart of yesterday from herself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I was mad," she gasped; "and you&mdash;you vile, wicked man!&mdash;you
+took advantage of it to ruin my life&mdash;to ruin my husband's life! You
+must know Ian Stewart, a man whose shoes you are not fit to tie. Do you
+think any woman in her senses would leave him for you? Ah!&mdash;" she
+breathed a long, shuddering breath and her hand was clinched so hard
+upon the loose album clasp that it ran into her palm.</p>
+
+<p>"Mildred!" cried George, staggered, stricken as though by some fiery
+rain.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to be sorry for your wife," she went on. "She is a splendid
+woman, she has done nothing to deserve that you should treat her so
+scandalously. But I can't&mdash;I can't"&mdash;a dry sob caught her voice&mdash;"be
+sorry for any one except myself and Ian. I always knew I wasn't good
+enough to be his wife, but I was so proud of it&mdash;so proud&mdash;and now&mdash;Oh,
+it's too horrible! I'm not fit to live."</p>
+
+<p>George had sunk upon a chair and hidden his face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say that," he muttered hoarsely, almost inaudibly. "It was my
+doing."</p>
+
+<p>She broke out again.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it was. It's nothing to you, I suppose. You've broken my
+husband's heart and mine too; you've hopelessly disgraced us both and
+spoiled our lives; and all for the sake of a little amusement, a little
+low pleasure. We can't do anything, we can't punish you; but if curses
+were any use, oh, how I could curse you, Mr. Goring!"</p>
+
+<p>The sobs rising in a storm choked her voice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span> She rushed from the room,
+closing the door behind her and leaving George Goring there, his head on
+his hands. He sat motionless, hearing nothing but the humming silence of
+the hot afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>Milly, pressing back her tears, flew across the hall and up the stairs.
+The vague nightmare thing that had lurked for her in the shadows of the
+house, when she had descended them so quietly, had taken shape at last.
+She knew now the unspeakable secret of the pink and gold bedroom, the
+shabbily gorgeous bed, the posturing dancers, the simpering, tailored
+noblemen. The atmosphere of it, scented and close, despite the open
+window, seemed to take her by the throat. She dared not stop to think,
+lest this sick despair, this loathing of herself, should master her. To
+get home at once was her impulse, and she must do it before any one
+could interfere.</p>
+
+<p>It was a matter of a few seconds to find a hat, gloves, a parasol. She
+noticed a purse in the pocket of her dress and counted the money in it.
+There was not much, but enough to take her home, since she felt sure the
+river shimmering over there was the Thames. She did not stay to change
+her thin shoes, but flitted down the stairs and out under the portico,
+as silent as a ghost. The drive curved through a shrubbery, and in a
+minute she was out of sight of the house. She hurried past the lodge,
+hesitating in which direction to turn, when a tradesman's cart drove
+past. She asked the young man who was driving it her way to the station,
+and he told her it was not very far, but that she could not catch the
+next train to town if she meant to walk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span> He was going in that direction
+himself and would give her a lift if she liked. She accepted the young
+man's offer; but if he made it in order to beguile the tedium of his
+way, he was disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>The road was dusty and sunny, and this gave her a reason for opening her
+large parasol. She cowered under it, hiding herself from the women who
+rolled by in shiny carriages with high-stepping horses; not so much
+because she feared she might meet acquaintances, as from an instinctive
+desire to hide herself, a thing so shamed and everlastingly wretched,
+from every human eye. And so it happened that, when she was close to the
+station, she missed seeing and being seen by Tims, who was driving to
+Mr. Goring's house in a hired trap which he had sent to meet her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Milly took a ticket for Paddington and hurried to the train, which was
+waiting at the platform, choosing an empty compartment. Action had
+temporarily dulled the passion of her misery, her rage, her shuddering
+horror at herself. But alone in the train, it all returned upon her,
+only with a complete realization of circumstance which made it worse.</p>
+
+<p>It had been her impulse to rush to her home, to her husband, as for
+refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort
+in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to
+tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could
+she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of
+this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however
+homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man
+she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until
+to-morrow. She supposed the Evil Thing had counted on stealing home in
+time to meet him, and would have met him with an innocently smiling
+face.</p>
+
+<p>A moment Milly triumphed in the thought that it was she herself who
+would meet Ian and reveal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span> to him the treachery of the creature who had
+supplanted her in his heart. Then with a shudder she hid her face,
+remembering that it was, after all, her own dishonor and his which she
+must reveal. He would of course take her back, and if that could be the
+end, they might live down the thing together. But it would not be the
+end. "I am the stronger," that Evil Thing had said, and it was the
+stronger. At first step by step, now with swift advancing strides, it
+was robbing her of the months, the years, till soon, very soon, while in
+the world's eyes she seemed to live and thrive, she would be dead; dead,
+without a monument, without a tear, her very soul not free and in God's
+hands, but held somewhere in abeyance. And Ian? Through what
+degradation, to what public shame would he, the most refined and
+sensitive of men, be dragged! His child&mdash;her child and Ian's&mdash;would grow
+up like that poor wretched George Goring, breathing corruption, lies,
+dishonor, from his earliest years. And she, the wife, the mother, would
+seem to be guilty of all that, while she was really bound,
+helpless&mdash;dead.</p>
+
+<p>The passion of her anger and despair stormed through her veins again
+with yet greater violence, but this time George Goring was forgotten and
+all its waves broke impotently against that adversary whose diabolical
+power she was so impotent to resist, who might return to-morrow, to-day
+for aught she knew.</p>
+
+<p>She had been moving restlessly about the compartment, making vehement
+gestures in her des<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>peration, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming
+idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to
+thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought
+to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves
+of emotion&mdash;one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and
+timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over
+her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too
+in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind
+that this was the only thing to be done&mdash;she, usually so full of mental
+and moral hesitation. Let it be done quickly&mdash;now, while the spur of
+excitement pricked her on. The Thing seemed to have a knowledge of her
+experiences which was not reciprocal. How it would laugh if it
+recollected in its uncanny way, that she had wanted to kill herself and
+it with her, that she had had it at her mercy and then had been too weak
+and cowardly to strike! Should she buy some poison when she reached
+Paddington? She knew nothing about poisons and their effects, except
+that carbolic caused terrible agony, and laudanum was not to be trusted
+unless you knew the dose. The train was slowing up and the lonely river
+gleamed silverly below. It beckoned to her, the river, upon whose stream
+she had spent so many young, happy days.</p>
+
+<p>She got out at the little station and walked away from it with a quick,
+light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment.
+After all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span> the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and
+humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's
+riddle, the way to victory.</p>
+
+<p>She knew the place where she found herself, for she had several times
+made one of a party rowing down from Oxford to London. But it was not
+one of the frequented parts of the river, being a quiet reach among
+solitary meadows. She remembered that there was a shabby little house
+standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had
+put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the
+neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had
+come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be far off.</p>
+
+<p>She walked quickly along the bank, turning over and over in her mind the
+same thoughts; the cruel wrong which now for so many years she had
+suffered, the final disgrace brought upon her and her husband, and she
+braced her courage to strike the blow that should revenge all. The act
+to which this fair-haired, once gentle woman was hurrying along the
+lonely river-bank, was not in its essence suicide; it was revenge, it
+was murder.</p>
+
+<p>When she came to the shabby little house where the boats lay under an
+unlovely zinc-roofed shed, she wondered whether she might ask for ink
+and paper and write to some one. She longed to send one little word to
+Ian; but then what could she say? She could not have seen him and
+concealed the truth from him, but it was one of the advantages of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span> her
+disappearance that he need never know the dishonor done him. And she
+knew he considered suicide a cowardly act. He was quite wrong there. It
+was an act of heroic courage to go out like this to meet death. It was
+so lonely; even lonelier than death must always be. She had the
+conviction that she was not doing wrong, but right. Hers was no common
+case. And for the first time she saw that there might be a reason for
+this doom which had befallen her. Men regard one sort of weakness as a
+sin to be struggled against, another as something harmless, even
+amiable, to be acquiesced in. But perhaps all weakness acquiesced in was
+a sin in the eyes of Eternal Wisdom, was at any rate to be left to the
+mercy of its own consequences. She looked back upon her life and saw
+herself never exerting her own judgment, always following in some one
+else's tracks, never fighting against her physical, mental, moral
+timidity. It was no doubt this weakness of hers that had laid her open
+to the mysterious curse which she was now, by a supreme effort of
+independent judgment and physical courage, resolved to throw off.</p>
+
+<p>A stupid-looking man in a dirty cotton shirt got out the small boat she
+chose; stared a minute in surprise to see the style in which she, an
+Oxford girl born and bred, handled the sculls, and then went in again to
+continue sleeping off a pint of beer.</p>
+
+<p>She pulled on mechanically, with a long, regular stroke, and one by one
+scenes, happy river-scenes out of past years, came back to her with
+wonderful vividness. Looking about her she saw an osier-bed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span> dividing
+the stream, and beside it the opening into the willow-shaded backwater
+which she remembered. She turned the boat's head into it. Heavy clouds
+had rolled up and covered the sky, and there was a kind of twilight
+between the dark water and the netted boughs overhead. Very soon she
+heard the noise of a weir. Once such a sound had been pleasant in her
+ears; but now it turned her cold with fear. On one side the backwater
+flowed sluggishly on around the osier-bed; on the other it hurried
+smoothly, silently away, to broaden suddenly before it swept in white
+foam over an open weir into a deep pool below. She trembled violently
+and the oars moved feebly in her hands, chill for all the warmth of the
+afternoon. Her boat was in the stream which led to the weir, but not yet
+fully caught by the current. A few more strokes and the thing would be
+done, she would be carried quickly on and over that dancing, sparkling
+edge into the deep pool below. Her courage failed, could not be screwed
+to the sticking-point; she hung on the oars, and the boat, as if
+answering to her thought, stopped, swung half around. As she held the
+boat with the oars and closed her eyes in an anguish of hesitation and
+terror, a strange convulsion shook her, such as she had felt once
+before, and a low cry, not her own, broke from her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no!" they uttered, hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>The Thing was there then, awake to its danger, and in another moment
+might snatch her from herself, return laughing at her cowardice, to that
+house by the river. She pressed her lips hard to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>gether, and silently,
+with all the strength of her hate and of her love, bent to the oars. The
+little boat shot forward into mid-stream, the current seized it and
+swept it rapidly on towards the dancing edge of water. She dropped the
+sculls and a hoarse shriek broke from her lips; but it was not she who
+shrieked, for in her heart was no fear, but triumph&mdash;triumph as of one
+who is at length avenged of her mortal enemy.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p>In the darkened drawing-room, the room so full of traces of all that had
+been exquisite in Mildred Stewart, Ian mourned alone. Presently the door
+opened a little, and a tall, slender, childish figure in a white smock,
+slipped in and closed it gently behind him. Tony stole up to his father
+and stood between his knees. He looked at Ian, silent, pale, large-eyed.
+That a grown-up person and a man should shed tears was strange, even
+portentous, to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't Mummy come back, not ever?" asked the child at last, piteously,
+in a half whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"No, never, Tony; Mummy won't ever come back. She's gone&mdash;gone for
+always."</p>
+
+<p>The child looked in his father's eyes strangely, penetratingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Which Mummy?" he asked.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Invader
+       A Novel
+
+Author: Margaret L. Woods
+
+Release Date: February 23, 2009 [EBook #28162]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVADER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, David Clarke, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              The Invader
+
+                                A NOVEL
+
+
+
+                                   By
+
+                           Margaret L. Woods
+
+
+
+
+
+                          New York and London
+
+                      Harper & Brothers Publishers
+
+                                  1907
+
+
+
+
+                 Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+                          Published May, 1907.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+Hilda Greaves
+
+AND THE DUMB COMPANIONS OF TAN-YR-ALLT
+THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR
+GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE
+FRIEND
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE INVADER
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Dinner was over and the ladies had just risen, when the Professor had
+begged to introduce them to the new-comer on his walls. The Invader, it
+might almost have been called, this full-length, life-size portrait,
+which, in the illumination of a lamp turned full upon it, seemed to take
+possession of the small room, to dominate at the end of the polished-oak
+table, where the light of shaded candles fell on old blue plates, old
+Venetian glass, a bit of old Italian brocade, and chrysanthemums in a
+china bowl coveted by collectors. Every detail spoke of the
+connoisseurship, the refined and personal taste characteristic of Oxford
+in the eighties. The authority on art put up his eye-glasses and
+fingered his tiny forked beard uneasily.
+
+"There's no doubt it's a good thing, Fletcher," he said, presently--"really
+quite good. But it's too like Romney to be Raeburn, and too like Raeburn to
+be Romney. You ought to be able to find out the painter, if, as you say,
+it's a portrait of your own great-grandmother--"
+
+"He did say so!" broke in Sanderson, exultantly. "He said it was an
+ancestress. Fletcher, you're a vulgar fraud. You've got no ancestress.
+You bought her. There's a sale-ticket still on the frame under the
+projection at the right-hand lower corner. I saw it."
+
+Sanderson was a small man and walked about perpetually, except when
+taking food: sometimes then. He was a licensed insulter of his friends,
+and now stood before the picture in a belligerent attitude. The
+Professor stroked his amber beard and smiled down on Sanderson.
+
+"True, O Sanderson; and at the same time untrue. I did buy the picture,
+and the lady was my great-grandmother once, but she did not like the
+position and soon gave it up. This picture must have been done after she
+had given it up."
+
+"Is this a conundrum or blather, invented to hide your ignominy in a
+cloud of words?" asked Sanderson.
+
+"It's a _hors d'oeuvre_ before the story," interposed Ian Stewart,
+throwing back his tall dark head and looking up at the picture through
+his eye-glasses, his handsome face alive with interest. "'Tak' awa' the
+kickshaws,' Fletcher, 'and bring us the cauf.'"
+
+The Professor gathered his full beard in one hand and smiled
+deprecatingly.
+
+"I don't know how the ladies will like my ex-great-grandmother's story.
+It was a bit of a scandal at the time."
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Fletcher," cried a young married woman, with a face
+like a seraph, "we're all educated now, and scandal about a lady with
+her waist under her arms becomes simply classical."
+
+"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Shaw, I assure you," returned the Professor;
+"but I dare say you all know as much as I do about my great-grandmother,
+for she was the well-known Lady Hammerton."
+
+There were sounds of interest and surprise, for most of the party knew
+her name, and were curious to learn how she came to be Professor
+Fletcher's great-grandmother. Mr. Fletcher explained:
+
+"My great-grandfather was a distinguished professor in Edinburgh a
+hundred years ago. When he was a widower of forty with a family, he was
+silly enough to fall in love with a little miss of sixteen. He taught
+her Latin and Greek--which was all very well--and married her, which was
+distinctly unwise. She had one son--my grandfather--and then ran away
+with an actor from London. After that she made a certain sensation on
+the stage, but I suspect she was clever enough to see that her real
+successes were personal ones; at all events, she made a good marriage as
+soon as ever she got the chance. The Hammerton family naturally
+objected. You'll find all about it in those papers which have come out
+lately. I believe, ladies, they were almost as much scandalized by her
+learning as by her morals."
+
+"She told Sydney Smith years after, I think," observed Stewart, "that
+she had to be a wit lest people should find out she was a blue. There's
+a good deal about her in the Englefield _Memoirs_. She travelled
+extraordinarily for a woman in those days, and most of the real
+treasures at Hammerton House come from her collections."
+
+"I thought they were nearly all burned in a great fire, and she was
+burned trying to save them," said Mrs. Shaw.
+
+"A good many were saved," returned Fletcher; "she had rushed back to
+fetch a favorite bronze, was seen hurling it out of the window--and was
+never seen again."
+
+"She must have been a very remarkable woman," commented Stewart,
+meditatively, his eyes still fixed on the picture.
+
+"Know nothing about her myself," remarked Sanderson; "Stewart knows
+something about everybody. It's sickening the way he spends his time
+reading gossip and calling it history."
+
+"Gossip's like many common things, interesting when fossilized,"
+squeaked a little, white-haired, pink-faced old gentleman, like an
+elderly cherub in dress-clothes. He had remained at the other end of the
+room because he did not care for pictures. Now he toddled a little
+nearer and every one made way for him with a peculiar respect, for he
+was the Master of Durham, whose name was great in Oxford and also in the
+world outside it. He looked up first at the pictured face and then at
+Milly Flaxman, a young cousin of Fletcher's and a scholar of Ascham
+Hall, who had taken her First in Mods, and was hoping to get one in
+Greats. The Master liked young girls, but they had to be clever as well
+as pleasing in appearance to attract his attention.
+
+"It's very like Miss Flaxman," he squeaked.
+
+Every one turned their eyes from the picture to Milly, whose pale cheeks
+blushed a bright pink. The blush emphasized her resemblance to her
+ancestress, whose brilliant complexion, however, hinted at rouge.
+Milly's soft hair was amber-colored, like that of the lady in the
+picture, but it was strained back from her face and twisted in a minute
+knot on the nape of her neck. That was the way in which her aunt Lady
+Thomson, whose example she desired to follow in all things, did her
+hair. The long, clearly drawn eyebrows, dark in comparison with the
+amber hair, the turquoise blue eyes, the mouth of the pictured lady were
+curiously reproduced in Milly Flaxman. Possibly her figure may have been
+designed by nature to be as slight and supple, yet rounded, as that of
+the white-robed, gray-scarfed lady above there. But something or some
+one had intervened, and Milly looked stiff and shapeless in a green
+velveteen frock, scooped out vaguely around her white young throat and
+gathered in clumsy folds under a liberty silk sash.
+
+Mrs. Shaw cried out enraptured at the interesting resemblance which had
+escaped them all, to be instantly caught by the elderly cherub in the
+background, who did not care about art, while the Professor explained
+that both Milly's parents were, like himself, great-grandchildren of
+Lady Hammerton. The seraph now fell upon Milly, too shy to resist, had
+out her hair-pins in a trice and fingered the fluffy hair till it made
+an aureole around her face. Then by some conjuring trick producing a
+gauzy white scarf, Mrs. Shaw twisted it about the girl's head, in
+imitation of the lady on the wall, who had just such a scarf, but with a
+tiny embroidered border of scarlet, twisted turban-wise and floating
+behind.
+
+"There!" she cried, pushing the feebly protesting Milly into the full
+light of the lamp the Professor was holding, "allow me to present to you
+the new Lady Hammerton!"
+
+There was a moment of wondering silence. Milly's pulses beat, for she
+felt Ian Stewart's eyes upon her. Neither he nor any one else there had
+ever quite realized before what capacities for beauty lay hid in the
+subdued young face of Milly Flaxman. She had nothing indeed of the
+charm, at once subtle and challenging, of the lady above there. She,
+with one hand on the gold head of a tall cane, looking back, seemed to
+dare unseen adorers to follow her into a magic, perhaps a fatal
+fairyland of mountain and waterfall and cloud; a land whose dim mists
+and silver gleams seemed to echo the gray and the white of her floating
+garments, its autumn leaves to catch a faint reflection from her hair,
+while far off its sky showed a thin line of sunset, red like the border
+of her veil. Milly's soft cheeks and lips were flushed, her eyes bright
+with a mixture of very innocent emotions, as she stood with every one's
+eyes, including Ian Stewart's, upon her.
+
+But in a minute the Master took up Mrs. Shaw's remark.
+
+"No," he said, emphatically; "not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
+new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."
+
+"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
+great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.
+
+"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
+who saw that Milly was feeling shy.
+
+When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
+there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
+speech.
+
+"My mother," he said--and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
+fact that the Master had had a mother--"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
+the twenties. She was often at Bath."
+
+The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
+other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
+had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
+intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:
+
+"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
+us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."
+
+The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
+longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
+hands on his little round knees. Then he said:
+
+"She was a raddled woman."
+
+And his pupils knew he had finished speaking. What he had said was
+disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
+it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
+whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
+Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
+strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.
+
+"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
+very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
+adored her to the last."
+
+The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
+one did, he uttered again:
+
+"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."
+
+Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.
+
+"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."
+
+"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
+fervently.
+
+The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.
+
+"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
+he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
+discussion was closed. Then he turned to Sanderson and made some remark
+about a house which Sanderson's College, of which he was junior bursar,
+was selling to Durham.
+
+Fletcher, the only married man present, mourned inwardly over his own
+masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she
+would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical
+matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage
+with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who
+shared his tastes, and, above all, who adored him. David Fletcher felt
+himself pitiably unequal to the task, although he was as anxious as his
+wife was that Stewart should marry Milly. Did not all their friends wish
+it? It seemed to them that there could not be a more suitable couple. If
+Milly was working so terribly hard to get her First in Greats, it was
+largely because Mr. Stewart was one of her tutors and she knew he
+thought a good deal of success in the Schools.
+
+There could be no doubt about Milly Flaxman's goodness; in fact, some of
+the girls at Ascham complained that it "slopped over." Her clothes were
+made on hygienic principles which she treated as a branch of morals, and
+she often refused to offer the small change of polite society because it
+weighed somewhat light in the scales of truth. But these were foibles
+that the young people's friends were sure Ian Stewart would never
+notice. As to him, although only four and thirty, he was already a
+distinguished man. A scholar, a philosopher, and an archaeologist, he had
+also imagination and a sense of style. He had written a brilliant book
+on Greek life at a particular period, which had brought him a reputation
+among the learned and also found readers in the educated public. His
+disposition was sweet, his character unusually high, judged even by the
+standard of the academic world, which has a higher standard than most.
+Obviously he would make an excellent husband; and equally obviously, as
+he had no near relations and his health was delicate, it would be a
+capital thing for him to have a home of his own and a devoted wife to
+look after him. Their income would be small, but not smaller than that
+of most young couples in Oxford, who contrived, nevertheless, to live
+refined and pleasant lives and to be well-considered in a society where
+money positively did not count.
+
+But if Fletcher did not succeed in forwarding this matrimonial scheme in
+the dining-room, his wife succeeded no better when the gentlemen came
+into the drawing-room. She rose from a sofa in the corner, leaving Milly
+seated there; but Mr. Toovey made his way straight to Miss Flaxman,
+without a glance to right or left, and bending over her before he seated
+himself at her side, fixed upon her a patronizing, a possessive smile
+which would have made some girls long for a barbarous freedom in the
+matter of face-slapping. But Milly Flaxman was meek. She took Archibald
+Toovey's seriousness for depth, and as his attentions had become
+unmistakable, had several times lain awake at night tormenting herself
+as to whether her behavior towards him was or was not right. Accordingly
+she submitted to being monopolized by Mr. Toovey, while Ian Stewart
+turned away and made himself pleasant to an unattractive lady-visitor of
+the Fletchers', who looked shy and left-alone. When Mrs. Fletcher tried
+to effect a change of partners, Ian explained that he found himself
+unexpectedly obliged to attend a College meeting at ten o'clock. In a
+place where there are no offices to close and business engagements are
+liable to crop up at any time in the evening, there was no need for
+extravagance of apology for this early departure.
+
+He changed his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking
+dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar
+mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp
+November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of
+night, on whatever corner of earth he might chance to find it descended,
+remained always a romantic, mysterious thing, setting his imagination
+free among visionary possibilities, without form, but not for that void.
+The road between the railing of the parks and the row of old lopped
+elms, was ill-lighted by the meagre flame of a few gas-lamps and hardly
+cheered by the smothered glow of the small prison-like windows of Keble,
+glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except
+the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old
+elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there
+was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate
+whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks,
+from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and
+osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to
+the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice made up of many
+whispers, each imperceptible, or almost imperceptible in itself; whisper
+of water and dry reeds, of broken twigs and dry leaves fluttering to the
+ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some
+slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under
+the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be
+secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he
+go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything
+familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what,
+secret, strange, and perhaps terrible.
+
+Such fancies, though less crystallized than they must needs be by words,
+floated in the penumbra of his mind, coming to him perhaps with the
+blood of remote Highland ancestors, children of mountains and mist. His
+reasonable self was perfectly aware that should he go, he would find
+nothing in the open fields at that hour except a sleeping cow or two,
+and would return wet as to the legs, and developing a severe cold for
+the morning. But he heard these far-off whisperings of the night
+playing, as it were, a mysterious "ground" to his thoughts of Milly
+Flaxman. The least fatuous of men, he had yet been obliged to see that
+his friends in general and the Fletchers in particular, wished him to
+marry Milly, and that the girl herself hung upon his words with a
+tremulous sensitivity even greater than the enthusiastic female student
+usually exhibits towards those of her lecturer. In the abstract he
+intended to marry; for he did not desire to be left an old bachelor in
+college. He had been waiting for the great experience of falling in
+love, and somehow it had never come to him. There were probably numbers
+of people to whom it never did come. Should he now give up all hope of
+it, and make a marriage of reason and of obligingness, such as his
+marriage with Miss Flaxman would assuredly be? Thank Heaven! as her
+tutor he could not possibly propose to her till she had got through the
+Schools, so there were more than six months in which to consider the
+question.
+
+And while he communed thus with himself, the mysterious whispers of the
+night came nearer to him, in the blackness of garden trees, ancient
+trees of College gardens brooding alone, whispering alone through the
+dark hours, of that current of young life which is still flowing past
+them; how for hundreds of years it has always been flowing, and always
+passing, passing, passing so quickly to the great silent sea of death
+and oblivion, to the dark night whose silence is only sometimes stirred
+by vague whispers, anxious yet faint, dying upon the ear before the
+sense can seize them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Parties in Oxford always break up early, and Milly had a good excuse for
+carrying her aching, disappointed heart back to Ascham at ten o'clock,
+for every one knew she was working hard. Too hard, Mr. Fletcher said,
+looking concernedly at her heavy eyes, mottled complexion, and the
+little crumples which were beginning to come in her low white forehead.
+Her cousins, however, had more than a suspicion that these marks of care
+and woe were not altogether due to her work, but that Ian Stewart was
+accountable for most of them.
+
+The Professor escorted her to the gates of the Ladies' College; but she
+walked down the dark drive alone, mindful of familiar puddles, and
+hearing nothing of those mysterious whispers of night which in Ian
+Stewart's ears had breathed a "ground" to his troubled thoughts of her.
+
+She mounted the stairs to her room at the top of the house. It was an
+extremely neat room, and by day, when the bed was disguised as a sofa,
+and the washstand closed, there was nothing to reveal that it served as
+a bedroom, although a tarnished old mirror hung in a dark corner. The
+oak table and pair of brass candlesticks upon it were kept in shining
+order by Milly's own zealous hands.
+
+Milly found her books open at the right place and her writing materials
+ready to hand. In a very few minutes her outer garments and simple
+ornaments were put away, and clothed in a clean but shrunk and faded
+blue dressing-gown, she sat down to work. The work was Aristotle's
+_Ethics_, and she was going through it for the second time, amplifying
+her notes. But this second time the Greek seemed more difficult, the
+philosophic argument more intricate than ever. She had had very little
+sleep for weeks, and her head ached in a queer way as though something
+inside it were strained very tight. It was plain that she had come to
+the end of her powers of work for the present--and she had calculated
+that only by not wasting a day, except for a week's holiday at Easter,
+could she get through all that had to be done before the Schools!
+
+She put Aristotle away and opened Mommsen, but even to that she could
+not give her attention. Her thoughts returned to the bitter
+disappointment which the evening had brought. Ian Stewart had been next
+her at dinner, but even then he had talked to her rather less than to
+Mrs. Shaw. Afterwards--well, perhaps it was only what she deserved for
+not making it plain to poor Mr. Toovey that she could never return his
+feelings. And now the First, which she had looked to as a thing that
+would set her nearer the level of her idol, was dropping below the
+horizon of the possible. Aunt Beatrice always said--and she was
+right--that tears were not, as people pretended, a help and solace in
+trouble. They merely took the starch out of you and left you a poor
+soaked, limp creature, unfit to face the hard facts of life. But
+sometimes tears will lie heavy and scalding as molten lead in the brain,
+until at length they force their way through to the light. And Milly
+after blowing her nose a good deal, as she mechanically turned the pages
+of Mommsen, at length laid her arms on the book and transferred her
+handkerchief to her eyes. But she tried to look as though she were
+reading when Flora Timson came in.
+
+"At it again, M.! You know you're simply working yourself stupid."
+
+Thus speaking, Miss Timson, known to her intimates at Ascham as "Tims,"
+wagged sagely her very peculiar head. A crimson silk handkerchief was
+tied around it, turban-wise, and no vestige of hair escaped from
+beneath. There was in fact none to escape. Tims's sallow, comic little
+face had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes on it, and her small figure was
+not of a quality to triumph over the obvious disadvantages of a tight
+black cloth dress with bright buttons, reminiscent of a page's suit.
+
+Milly pushed the candles farther away and looked up.
+
+"I was wanting to see you, Tims. Do tell me whether you managed to get
+out of Miss Walker what Mr. Stewart said about my chances of a First."
+
+Tims pushed her silk turban still higher up on her forehead.
+
+"I can always humbug Miss Walker and make her say lots of indiscreet
+things," Tims returned, with labored diplomacy. "But I don't repeat
+them--at least, not invariably."
+
+There was a further argument on the point, which ended by Milly shedding
+tears and imploring to be told the worst.
+
+Tims yielded.
+
+"Stewart said your scholarship was A 1, but he was afraid you wouldn't
+get your First in Greats. He said you had a lot of difficulty in
+expressing yourself and didn't seem to get the lead of their philosophy
+and stuff--and--and generally wanted cleverness."
+
+"He said that?" asked Milly, in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though
+to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know--not to go on
+hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery in the end, no
+doubt."
+
+There was such a depth of despair in her face and voice that Tims was
+appalled at the consequence of her own revelation. She paced the room in
+agitation, alternately uttering incoherent abuse of her friend's folly
+and suggesting that she should at once abandon the ungrateful School of
+_Literae Humaniores_ and devote herself like Tims, to the joys of
+experimental chemistry and the pleasures of practical anatomy.
+
+Meantime, Milly sat silent, one hand supporting her chin, the other
+playing with a pencil.
+
+At length Tims, taking hold of Milly under the arms, advised her to "go
+to bed and sleep it off."
+
+Milly rose dully and sat on the edge of her bed, while Tims awkwardly
+removed the hair-pins which Mrs. Shaw had so deftly put in. But as she
+was laying them on the little dressing-table, Milly suddenly flung
+herself down on the bed and lay there a twisted heap of blue flannel,
+her face buried in the pillows, her whole body shaken by a paroxysm of
+sobs. Tims supposed that this might be a good thing for Milly; but for
+herself it created an awkward situation. Her soothing remarks fell flat,
+while to go away and leave her friend in this condition would seem
+brutal. She sat down to "wait till the clouds rolled by," as she phrased
+it. But twenty minutes passed and still the clouds did not roll by.
+
+"Look here, M." she said, argumentatively, standing by the bed. "You're
+in hysterics. That's what's the matter with you."
+
+"I know I am," came in tones of muffled despair from the pillow.
+
+"Well!" Tims was very stern and accented her words heavily,
+"then--pull--yourself--together--dear girl. Sit up!"
+
+Milly sat up, pressed her handkerchief over her face, and held her
+breath. For a minute all was quiet; then another violent sob forced a
+passage.
+
+"It's no use, Tims," she gasped. "I cannot--cannot--stop. Oh, what
+would--!" She was going to say, "What would Aunt Beatrice think of me if
+she knew how I was giving way!" but a fresh flood of tears suppressed
+her speech. "My head's so bad! Such a splitting headache!"
+
+Tims tried scolding, slapping, a cold sponge, every remedy inexperience
+could suggest, but the hysterical weeping could not be checked.
+
+"Look here, old girl," she said at length, "I know how I can stop you,
+but I don't believe you'll let me do it."
+
+"No, not that, Tims! You know Miss Burt doesn't--"
+
+"Doesn't approve. Of course not. Perhaps you think old B. would approve
+of the way you're going on now. Ha! Would she!"
+
+The sarcasm caused a new and alarming outburst. But finally, past all
+respect for Miss Burt, and even for Lady Thomson herself, Milly
+consented to submit to any remedy that Tims might choose to try.
+
+She was assisted hurriedly to undress and put to bed. Tims knew the
+whereabouts of the prize-medal which Milly had won at school, and
+placing the bright silver disk in her hand, directed her to fix her eyes
+upon it. Seated on her heels on the patient's bed, her crimson turban
+low on her forehead, her face screwed into intent wrinkles, Tims began
+passing her slight hands slowly before Milly's face.
+
+The long slender fingers played about the girl's fair head, sometimes
+pressed lightly upon her forehead, sometimes passed through her fluffy
+hair, as it lay spread on the pillow about her like an amber cloud.
+
+"Don't cry, M.," Tims began repeating in a soft, monotonous voice.
+"You've got nothing to cry about; your head doesn't ache now. Don't
+cry."
+
+At first it was only by a strong effort that Milly could keep her
+tear-blinded eyes fixed on the bright medal before her; but soon they
+became chained to it, as by some attractive force. The shining disk
+seemed to grow smaller, brighter, to recede imperceptibly till it was a
+point of light somewhere a long way off, and with it all the sorrows and
+agitations of her mind seemed also to recede into a dim distance, where
+she was still aware of them, yet as though they were some one else's
+sorrows and agitations, hardly at all concerning her. The aching tension
+of her brain was relaxed and she felt as though she were drowning
+without pain or struggle, gently floating down, down through a green
+abyss of water, always seeing that distant light, showing as the sun
+might show, seen from the depths of the sea.
+
+Before a quarter of an hour had passed, her sobs ceased in sighing
+breaths, the breaths became regular and normal, the whole face slackened
+and smoothed itself out. Tims changed the burden of her song.
+
+"Go to sleep, Milly. What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly."
+
+Milly was sinking down upon the pillow, breathing the calm breath of
+deep, refreshing slumber. Tims still crouched upon the bed, chanting her
+monotonous song and contemplating her work. At length she slipped off,
+conscious of pins-and-needles in her legs, and as she withdrew, Milly
+with a sudden motion stretched her body out in the white bed, as
+straight and still almost as that of the dead. The movement was
+mechanical, but it gave a momentary check to Tims's triumph. She leaned
+over her patient and began once more the crooning song.
+
+"Go to sleep, M.! What you want is a good long sleep. Go to sleep,
+Milly!"
+
+But presently she ceased her song, for it was evident that Milly Flaxman
+had indeed gone very sound asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Tims was proud of the combined style and economy of her dress. She was
+constantly discovering and revealing to an unappreciative world the
+existence of superb tailors who made amazingly cheap dresses. For two
+years she had been vainly advising her friends to go to the man who had
+made her the frock she still wore for morning; a skirt and coat of tweed
+with a large green check in it, a green waistcoat with gilt buttons, and
+green gaiters to match. In this costume and coiffed with a man's wig, of
+the vague color peculiar to such articles, Tims came down at her usual
+hour, prepared to ask Milly what she thought of hypnotism now. But there
+was no Milly over whom to enjoy this petty triumph. She climbed to the
+top story as soon as breakfast was over, and entering Milly's room,
+found her patient still sleeping soundly, low and straight in the bed,
+just as she had been the preceding night. She was breathing regularly
+and her face looked peaceful, although her eyes were still stained with
+tears. The servant came in as Tims was looking at her.
+
+"I've tried to wake Miss Flaxman, miss," she said. "She's always very
+particular as I should wake her, but she was that sound asleep this
+morning, I 'adn't the 'eart to go on talking. Poor young lady! I expect
+she's pretty well wore out, working away at her books, early and late,
+the way she does."
+
+"Better leave her alone, Emma," agreed Tims. "I'll let Miss Burt know
+about it."
+
+Miss Burt was glad to hear Milly Flaxman was oversleeping herself. She
+had not been satisfied with the girl's appearance of late, and feared
+Milly worked too hard and had bad nights.
+
+Tims had to go out at ten o'clock and did not return until
+luncheon-time. She went up to Milly's room and knocked at the door. As
+before, there was no answer. She went in and saw the girl still sound
+asleep, straight and motionless in the bed. Her appearance was so
+healthy and natural that it was absurd to feel uneasy at the length of
+her slumber, yet remembering the triumph of hypnotism, Tims did feel a
+little uneasy. She spoke to Miss Burt again about Milly's prolonged
+sleep, but Miss Burt was not inclined to be anxious. She had strictly
+forbidden Tims to hypnotize--or as she called it, mesmerize--any one in
+the house, so that Tims said no more on the subject. She was working at
+the Museum in the early part of the afternoon, only leaving it when the
+light began to fail. But after work she went straight back to Ascham.
+Milly was still asleep, but she had slightly shifted her position, and
+altogether there was something about her aspect which suggested a
+slumber less profound than before. Tims leaned over her and spoke
+softly:
+
+"Wake up, M., wake up! You've been asleep quite long enough."
+
+Milly's body twitched a little. A responsive flicker which was almost a
+convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident,
+however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from
+the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her
+Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance of the
+tweed frock with green waistcoat and gaiters, put the kettle on the
+fire. Then she went down-stairs to fetch some bread and butter and an
+egg, wherewith to feed the patient when she awoke.
+
+She had not long left the room when the slumberer's eyes opened
+gradually and stared with the fixity of semi-consciousness at a stem of
+blossoming jessamine in the wall-paper. Then she slowly stretched her
+arms above her head until some inches of wrist, slight and round and
+white, emerged from the strictly plain night-gown sleeve. So she lay,
+till suddenly, almost with a start, she pulled herself up and looked
+about her. The gaze of her wide-open eyes travelled questioningly around
+the quiet-toned room which two windows at right angles to each other
+still kept light with the reflection of a yellow winter sunset. She
+pushed the bedclothes down, dropped first one bare white foot, then the
+other to the ground and looked doubtfully at a pair of worn felt
+slippers which were placed beside the bed, before slipping her feet into
+them. With the same air as of one assuming garments which do not belong
+to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked
+to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from
+it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of
+somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius.
+With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the
+western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the
+garden of the College, bounded by an old gray wall which divided it from
+the straggling street; beyond that, a mass of slate roofs. But a certain
+glory was on the slate roofs and all the garden that was not in shadow.
+For away over Wytham, where the blue vapor floated in the folds of the
+hills, blending imperceptibly with the deep brown of the leafless woods,
+sunset had lifted a wide curtain of cloud and showed between the gloom
+of heaven and earth, a long straight pool of yellow light.
+
+She leaned out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be
+pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had
+made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her
+amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of
+an angel in some old Florentine picture.
+
+Miss Burt in galoshes and with a wrap over her head was coming up the
+garden. She caught sight of that vision of gold and pale blue in the
+window and smiled and waved her hand to Milly Flaxman. The vision
+withdrew, trembling slightly as though with cold, and closed the
+window.
+
+Tims came in, carrying a boiled egg and a plate of bread and butter.
+Tims put down the egg-cup and the plate on the table before she relaxed
+the wrinkle of carefulness and grinned triumphantly at her patient.
+
+"Well, old girl," she asked; "what do you say to hypnotism now? Put
+_you_ to sleep, right enough, anyhow. Know what time it is?"
+
+The awakened sleeper made a few steps forward, leaned her hands on the
+table, on the other side of which Tims stood, and gazed upon her with
+startling intentness. Then she began to speak in a rapid, urgent voice.
+Her words were in themselves ordinary and distinct, yet what she said
+was entirely incomprehensible, a nightmare of speech, as though some
+talking-machine had gone wrong and was pouring out a miscellaneous stock
+of verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest without meaning or cohesion.
+Certain words reappeared with frequency, but Tims had a feeling that the
+speaker did not attach their usual meaning to them. This travesty of
+language went on for what appeared to the transfixed and terrified
+listener quite a long time. At length the serious, almost tragic,
+babbler, meeting with no response save the staring horror of Tims's too
+expressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
+which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
+smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
+ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
+nightmare. But she pulled herself together and determined to show
+presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
+ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.
+
+"Sit down, Milly," she said--and the use of her friend's proper name
+showed that she felt the occasion to be serious--"and don't speak again
+till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
+bit confused now, you know."
+
+The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
+from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
+herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
+with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
+understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
+and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
+finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
+cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
+methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
+which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
+her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
+more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
+moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
+Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
+from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
+her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain that
+Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
+than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
+speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
+been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
+in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
+length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
+any use.
+
+She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
+upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
+teetotaller; all the more reason, thought Tims, why a dose of alcohol
+should give her nerves and circulation a fillip, only she must not know
+of it, or she would certainly refuse the remedy.
+
+Pocketing the bottle and flourishing the teapot, Tims mounted again to
+Milly's room. Her patient, who had spent the time wandering about the
+room and examining everything in it, as well as she could in the
+fast-falling twilight, resumed her position in the chair as soon as she
+heard a step in the passage, and greeted her returning keeper with an
+attractive smile. Tims uttering words of commendation, slyly poured some
+brandy into one of the large teacups before lighting the candles.
+
+"Now, my girl," she said, when she had made the tea, "drink this, and
+you'll feel better."
+
+Milly leaned forward, her round chin on her hand, and looked intently at
+the tea-service and at the proffered cup. Then she suddenly raised her
+head, clapped her hands softly, and cried in a tone of delighted
+discovery, "Tea!"
+
+"Excuse me," she added, taking the cup with a little bow; and in two
+seconds had helped herself to three lumps of sugar. Tims was surprised,
+for Milly never took sugar in her tea.
+
+"That's right, M., you're going along well!" cried Tims, standing on the
+hearth-rug, with one hand under her short coat-tails, while she gulped
+her own tea, and ate two pieces of bread and butter put together. Milly
+ate hers and drank her tea daintily, looking meanwhile at her companion
+with wonder which gradually gave way to amusement. At length leaning
+forward with a dimpling smile, she interrogated very politely and quite
+lucidly.
+
+"Pardon me, sir, you are--? Ah, the doctor, no doubt! My poor head, you
+see!" and she drew her fingers across her forehead.
+
+Tims started, and grabbed her wig, as was her wont in moments of
+agitation. She stood transfixed, the teacup at a dangerous angle in her
+extended hand.
+
+"Good God!" she ejaculated. "You are mad and no mistake, my poor old
+girl."
+
+The "old girl" made a supreme effort to contain herself, and then burst
+into a pretty, rippling laugh in which there was nothing familiar to
+Tims's ear. She rose from her chair vivaciously and took the cup from
+Tims's hand, to deposit it in safety on the chimney piece.
+
+"How silly I was!" she cried, regarding Tims sparklingly. "Do you know I
+was not quite sure whether you were a man or a woman. Of course I see
+now, and I'm so glad. I do like men, you know, so much better than
+women."
+
+"Milly," retorted Tims, sternly, settling her wig. "You are mad, you
+need not be bad as well. But it's my own fault for giving you that
+brandy. You know as well as I do that I hate men--nasty, selfish,
+guzzling, conceited, guffawing brutes! I never wanted to speak to a man
+in my life, except in the way of business."
+
+Milly waved her amber head gracefully for a moment as though at a loss,
+then returned playfully, "That must be because the women spoil you so."
+
+Tims smiled sardonically; but regaining her sense of the situation, out
+of which she had been momentarily shocked, applied herself to the
+problem of calling back poor Milly's wandering mind.
+
+"Sit down, my girl," she said, abruptly, putting her arm around Milly's
+body, so soft and slender in the scanty folds of the blue dressing-gown.
+Milly obeyed precipitately. Then drawing a small chair close to her,
+Tims said in gentle tones which could hardly have been recognized as
+hers:
+
+"M., darling, do you know where you are?"
+
+Milly turned on her a face from which the unnatural vivacity had fallen
+like a mask; the appealing face of a poor lost child.
+
+"Am I--am I--in a _maison de sante_?" she asked tremulously, fixing her
+blue eyes on Tims, full of piteous anxiety.
+
+"A lunatic asylum? Certainly not," replied Tims. "Now don't begin
+crying again, old girl. That's how the trouble began."
+
+"Was it?" asked Milly, dreamily. "I thought it was--" she paused,
+frowning before her in the air, as though trying to pursue with her
+bodily vision some recollection which had flickered across her
+consciousness only to disappear.
+
+"Well, never mind that now," said Tims, hastily; "get your bearings
+right first. You're in Ascham College."
+
+"A College!" repeated Milly vaguely, but in a moment her face
+brightened, "I know. A place of learning where they have professors and
+things. Are you a professor?"
+
+"No, I'm a student. So are you."
+
+Milly looked fixedly at Tims, then smiled a melancholy smile. "I see,"
+she said, "we're both studying--medicine--medicine for the mind." She
+stood up, locked her hands behind her head in her soft hair and wailed
+miserably. "Oh, why won't some kind person come and tell me where I am,
+and what I was before I came here?"
+
+Tears of wounded feelings sprang to Tims's eyes. "Milly, my beauty!" she
+cried despairingly, "I'm trying to be kind to you and tell you
+everything you want to know. Your name is Mildred Flaxman and you used
+to live in Oxford here, but now all your people have gone to Australia
+because your father's got a deanery there."
+
+"Have they left me here, mad and by myself?" asked Milly; "have I no one
+to look after me, no one to give me a home?"
+
+"I suppose Lady Thomson or the Fletchers would," returned Tims, "but you
+haven't wanted one. You've been quite happy at Ascham. Do try and
+remember. Can't you remember getting your First in Mods. and how you've
+been working to get one in Greats? Your brain's been right enough until
+to-day, old girl, and it will be again. I expect it's a case of collapse
+of memory from overwork. Things will come back to you soon and I'll help
+you all I can. Do try and recollect me--Tims." There was an unmistakable
+choke in Tims's voice. "We have been such chums. The others are all
+pretty nasty to me sometimes--they seem to think I'm a grinning, wooden
+Aunt Sally, stuck up for them to shy jokes at. But you've never once
+been nasty to me, M., and there's precious few things I wouldn't do to
+help you. So don't go talking to me as though there weren't any one in
+the world who cared a brass farthing about you."
+
+"I'm sure I'm most thankful to find I have got some one here who cares
+about me," returned Milly, meekly, passing her hand across her eyes for
+lack of a handkerchief. "You see, it's dreadful for me to be like this.
+I seem to know what things are, and yet I don't know. A little while ago
+it seemed to me I was just going to remember something--something
+different from what you've told me. But now it's all gone again. Oh,
+please give me a handkerchief!"
+
+Tims opened one of Milly's tidy drawers and sought for a handkerchief.
+When she had found it, Milly was standing before the high
+chimney-piece, over which hung a long, low mirror about a foot wide and
+divided into three parts by miniature pilasters of tarnished gilt. The
+mirror, too, was tarnished here and there, but it had been a good glass
+and showed undistorted the blue Delft jars on the mantel-shelf, glimpses
+of flickering firelight in the room, amber hair and the tear-bedewed
+roses of a flushed young face. Suddenly Milly thrust the jars aside,
+seized the candle from the table, and, holding it near her face, looked
+intently, anxiously in the glass. The anxiety vanished in a moment, but
+not the intentness. She went on looking. Tims had always perceived
+Milly's beauty--which had an odd way of slipping through the world
+unobserved--but had never seen her look so lovely as now, her eyes wide
+and brilliant, and her upper lip curved rosily over a shining glimpse of
+her white teeth.
+
+Beauty had an extraordinary fascination for Tims, poor step-child of
+nature! Now she stood looking at the reflection of Milly without
+noticing how in the background her own strange, wizened face peered dim
+and grotesque from the tarnished mirror, like the picture of a witch or
+a goblin behind the fair semblance of some princess in a fairy tale.
+
+"I do remember myself partly," said Milly, doubtfully; "and yet--somehow
+not quite. I suppose I shall remember you and this queer place soon, if
+they don't put me into a mad-house at once."
+
+"They sha'n't," said Tims, decisively. "Trust to me, M., and I'll see
+you through. But I'm afraid you'll have to give up all thought of your
+First."
+
+"My what," asked Milly, turning round inquiringly.
+
+"Your First Class, your place, you know, in the Final Honors School,
+Lit. Hum., the biggest examination of the lot."
+
+"Do I want it very much, my First?"
+
+"Want it? I should just think you do want it!"
+
+Milly stared at the fire for a minute, warming one foot before she spoke
+again. Then:
+
+"How funny of me!" she observed, meditatively.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Tims's programme happened to be full on the following day, so that it
+was half-past twelve before she knocked at Milly's door and was
+admitted. Milly stood in the middle of the room in an attitude of
+energy, with her small wardrobe lying about her on the floor in
+ignominious heaps.
+
+"Tell me, Tims," said Milly, after the first inquiries, "are those
+positively all the clothes I possess?"
+
+"Of course they are, M. What do you want with more?"
+
+"Are they in the fashion?" asked Milly, anxiously.
+
+Tims stared.
+
+"Fashion! Good Lord, M.! What does it matter whether you look the same
+as every fool in the street or not?"
+
+"Oh, Tims!" cried Milly, laughing that pretty rippling laugh so strange
+in Tims's ears. "I was quite right when I made a mistake, you're just
+like a man. All the better. But you can't expect me not to care a bit
+about my clothes like you, you really can't."
+
+Tims drew herself up.
+
+"You're wrong, my girl, I'm a deal fonder of frocks than you are. I
+always think," she added, looking before her dreamily, "that I was
+meant to be a very good dresser, only I was brought up too economical."
+Generally speaking, when Tims had uttered one of her deepest and truest
+feelings, she would glance around, suddenly alert and suspicious to
+surprise the twinkle in her auditor's eye. But in the clear blue of
+Milly Flaxman's quiet eyes, she had ceased to look for that tormenting
+twinkle, that spark which seemed destined to dance about her from the
+cradle to the grave.
+
+Presently she found herself hanging up Milly's clothes while Milly paid
+no attention; for she alternately stood before the glass in the dark
+corner, and kneeled on the hearth-rug, curling-tongs in hand. And the
+hair, the silky soft amber hair, which could be twisted into a tiny ball
+or fluffed into a golden fleece at will, was being tossed up and pulled
+down, combed here and brushed there, altogether handled with a zeal and
+patience to which it had been a stranger since the days when it had been
+the pride of the nursery. Tims the untidy, as one in a dream, went on
+tidying the room she was accustomed to see so immaculate.
+
+"There!" cried Milly, turning, "that's how I wear it, isn't it?"
+
+"Good Lord, no!" exclaimed Tims, contemplating the transformed Milly.
+"It suits you, M., in a way, but it looks queer too. The others will all
+be hooting if you go down-stairs like that."
+
+Milly plumped into a chair irritably.
+
+"How ever am I to know how I did my hair if I can't remember? Please do
+it for me."
+
+Tims smiled sardonically.
+
+"I'll lend you my hair," she said; "the second best. But _do_ your hair!
+You really are as mad as a hatter."
+
+Milly shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You can't? Then I keep it like this," she said.
+
+An argument ensued. Tims left the room to try and find a photograph of
+Milly as she had been.
+
+When she returned she found her friend standing in absorbed
+contemplation of a book in her hand.
+
+"This is Greek, isn't it?" she asked, holding it up. Her face wore a
+little frown as of strained attention.
+
+"Right you are," shrieked Tims in accents of relief. "Greek it is. Can
+you read it?"
+
+"Not yet," replied Milly, flushing with excitement, "but I shall soon, I
+know I shall. Last night I couldn't make head or tail of the books. Now
+I understand right enough what they are, and I know some are in Greek
+and some in English. I can't read either yet, but it's all coming back
+gradually, like the daylight coming in at the window this morning."
+
+"Hooray! Hooray!" shouted Tims. "You'll be reading as hard as ever in a
+week if I don't look after you. But see here, my girl, you've given me a
+nasty jar, and I'm not going to let you break your heart or crack your
+brain in a wild-goose chase. You can't get that First, you know; you're
+on a fairly good Second Class level, and you'd better make up your mind
+to stay there."
+
+"A fairly good Second Class level!" repeated Milly, still turning the
+leaves of the book. "That doesn't sound very exhilarating--and I rather
+think I shall do as I like about staying there."
+
+Tims began to heat.
+
+"Well, that's what Stewart said about you. I don't believe I told you
+half plain enough what Stewart did say, for fear of hurting your
+feelings. He said you are a good scholar, but barring that, you weren't
+at all clever."
+
+Milly looked up from her book; but she was not tearful. There was a curl
+in her lip and the light of battle in her eye.
+
+"Stewart said that, did he? Now if I were a gentleman I should
+say--'damn his impudence'--and 'who the devil is Stewart'; but then I'm
+not. You can say it."
+
+Tims stared. "Oh, come, I say!" she exclaimed. "I don't swear, I only
+quote. But my goodness, when you remember who Stewart is, you'll
+be--well, pained to think of the language you're using about him."
+
+"Why?" asked Milly, her head riding disdainfully on her slender neck.
+
+"Because he's your tutor and lecturer--and a regular tiptop man at Greek
+and all that--and you--you respect him most awfully."
+
+"Do I?" cried Milly--"did perhaps in my salad days. I've no respect
+whatever for professors now, my good Tims. I know what they're like.
+Here's Stewart for you."
+
+She took up a pen and a scrap of paper and dashed off a clever ludicrous
+sketch of a man with long hair, an immense brow, and spectacles.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Tims; "that's not a bit like him."
+
+She held the paper in her hand and looked fixedly at it. Milly had been
+wont seriously to grieve over her hopeless lack of artistic talent and
+she had never attempted to caricature. Tims was thinking of a young
+fellow of a college who had lately died of brain disease. In the earlier
+stages of his insanity, it had been remarked that he had an originality
+which had not been his when in a normal state. What if her friend were
+developing the same terrible disease? If it were so, it was no use
+fussing, since there was no remedy. Still, she felt a desperate need to
+take some sort of precaution.
+
+"If I were you, M.," she said, "I'd go to bed and keep very quiet for a
+day or two. You're so--so odd, and excited, they'd notice it if you went
+down-stairs."
+
+"Would they?" asked Milly, suddenly sobered. "Would they say I was mad?"
+An expression of fear came into her face, and its strangely luminous
+eyes travelled around the room with a look as of some trapped creature
+seeking escape.
+
+There was an awkward pause.
+
+"I'm not mad," affirmed Milly, swallowing with a dry throat. "I'm
+perfectly sensible, but any one would be odd and excited too who
+was--was as I am--with a number of words and ideas floating in my mind
+without my having the least idea where they spring from. Please, Tims
+dear, tell me how I am to behave. I should so hate to be thought queer,
+wanting in any way."
+
+Tims considered.
+
+"For one thing, you mustn't talk such a lot. You never have been one for
+chattering; and lately, of course, with your overwork, you've been
+particularly quiet. Don't talk, M., that's my advice."
+
+"Very well," replied Milly, gloomily.
+
+Tims hesitated and went on:
+
+"But I don't see how you're going to hide up this business about your
+memory. I wish you'd let me tell old B., anyhow."
+
+"I won't have any one told," cried Milly. "Not a creature. If only
+you'll help me, dear, dear Tims--you will help me, won't you?--I shall
+soon be all right, and no one except you will ever know. No one will be
+able to shrug their shoulders and say, whatever I do, 'Of course she's
+crazy.' I should hate it so! I know I can get on if I try. I'm much
+cleverer than you and that silly old Stewart think. Promise me, promise
+me, darling Tims, you won't betray me!"
+
+Tims was not weak-minded, but she was very tender-hearted and
+exceedingly susceptible to personal charms. She ought not, she knew she
+ought not, to have yielded, but she did. She promised. Yet in her
+friend's own interest, she contended that Milly must confess to a
+certain failure of memory from over-fatigue, if only as a pretext for
+dropping her work for a while. It was agreed that Milly should remain in
+bed for several days, and she did so; less bored than might have been
+expected, because she had the constant excitement of this or that bit of
+knowledge filtering back into her mind. But this knowledge was purely
+intellectual. With Tims's help she had recovered her reading powers, and
+although she felt at first only a vague recognition of something
+familiar in the sense of what she read, it was evident that she was fast
+regaining the use of the treasures stored in her brain by years of
+dogged and methodical work. But the facts and personalities which had
+made her own life seemed to have vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind."
+
+Tims, having primed her well beforehand, brought in the more important
+girls to see her, and by dint of a cautious reserve she passed very well
+with them, as with Miss Burt and Miss Walker. Tims seemed to feel much
+more nervous than Milly herself did when she joined the other students
+as usual.
+
+There were moments when Tims gasped with the certainty that the
+revelation of her friend's blank ignorance of the place and people was
+about to be made. Then Mildred--for so, despising the soft diminutive,
+she now desired to be called--by some extraordinary exertion of tact and
+ingenuity, would evade the inevitable and appear on the other side of
+it, a little elated, but otherwise serene. It was generally marked that
+Miss Flaxman was a different creature since she had given up worrying
+about her Schools, and that no one would have believed how much prettier
+she could make herself by doing her hair a different way.
+
+Miss Burt, however, was somewhat puzzled and uneasy. Although Milly was
+looking unusually well, it was evident that all was not quite right with
+her, for she complained of a failure of memory, a mental fatigue which
+made it impossible for her to go to lectures, and she seemed to have
+lost all interest in the Schools, which had so lately been for her the
+"be-all" as well as the "end-all here." Miss Burt knew Milly's only near
+relation in England, Lady Thomson, intimately; and for that reason
+hesitated to write to her. She knew that Beatrice Thomson had no
+patience with the talk--often silly enough--about girls overworking
+their brains. She herself had never been laid up in her life, except
+when her leg was broken, and her views on the subject of ill-health were
+marked. She regarded the catching of scarlet-fever or influenza as an
+act of cowardice, consumption or any organic disease as scarcely, if at
+all, less disgraceful than drunkenness or fraud, while the countless
+little ailments to which feminine flesh seems more particularly heir she
+condemned as the most deplorable of female failings, except the love of
+dress.
+
+Eventually Miss Burt did write to Lady Thomson, cautiously. Lady Thomson
+replied that she was coming up to town on Thursday, and could so arrange
+her journey as to have an hour and a half in Oxford. She would be at
+Ascham at three-thirty. Mildred rushed to Tims with the agitating news
+and both were greatly upset by it. However, Aunt Beatrice had got to be
+faced sometime or other and Mildred's spirit rose to the encounter.
+
+She had by this time provided herself with another dress, encouraged to
+do so by the money in hand left by the frugal Milly the First. She had
+got a plain tailor-made coat and skirt, in a becoming shade of brown;
+and with the unbecoming hard collar _de rigueur_ in those days, she wore
+a turquoise blue tie, which seemed to reflect the color of her eyes. And
+in spite of Tims's dissuasions, she put on the new dress on Thursday,
+and declined to screw her hair up in the old way, as advised.
+
+Accordingly on Thursday at twenty-five minutes to four, Mildred
+appeared, in answer to a summons, in the quiet-colored, pleasant
+drawing-room at Ascham, with its French windows giving on to the lawn,
+where some of the girls were playing hockey, not without cries. Her
+first view of Aunt Beatrice was a pleasant surprise. A tall, upstanding
+figure, draped in a long, soft cloak trimmed with fur, a handsome face
+with marked features, marked eyebrows, a fine complexion and bright
+brown eyes under a wide-brimmed felt hat.
+
+Having exchanged the customary peck, she waited in silence till Mildred
+had seated herself. Then surveying her niece with satisfaction:
+
+"Come, Milly," said she, in a full, pleasant voice; "I don't see much
+signs of the nervous invalid about you. Really, Polly," turning to Miss
+Burt, "she has not looked so well for a long time."
+
+"She's been much better since she dropped her work," replied Miss Burt.
+
+"Taking plenty of fresh air and exercise, I suppose"--Aunt Beatrice
+smiled kindly on her niece--"I'm afraid I've kept you from your hockey
+this afternoon, Milly."
+
+"Oh no, Aunt Beatrice, certainly not," replied Milly, with the extreme
+courtesy of nervousness. "I never play hockey now."
+
+Lady Thomson turned to the Head with a shade of triumph in her
+satisfaction.
+
+"There, Polly! What did I tell you? I was sure there was something else
+at the bottom of it. Steady work, methodically done, never hurt anybody.
+But of course if she's given up exercise, her liver or something was
+bound to get out of order."
+
+"No, really, I take lots of exercise," interposed Milly; "only I don't
+care for hockey, it's such a horrid, rough, dirty game; don't you think
+so? And Miss Walker got a front tooth broken last winter."
+
+Lady Thomson looked at her in a surprised way.
+
+"Well, if you've not been playing hockey, what exercise have you been
+taking?"
+
+"Walks," replied Milly, feebly, feeling herself on the wrong track; "I
+go walks with Ti--with Flora Timson when she has time."
+
+Aunt Beatrice looked at the matter judicially.
+
+"Of course, games are best for the physique. Look at men. Still, walking
+will do, if one takes proper walks. I hope Flora Timson takes you good
+long walks."
+
+"Indeed she does!" cried Milly. "Immense! She walks a dreadful pace, and
+we get over stiles and things."
+
+"Immense is a little vague. How far do you go on an average?"
+
+Mildred's notions of distance were vague. "Quite two miles, I'm sure,"
+she responded, cheerfully.
+
+Aunt Beatrice made no comment. She looked steadily and scrutinizingly
+at her niece, and in a kind but deepened voice told her to go up to her
+room, whither she, Lady Thomson, would follow in a few minutes, just to
+see how the Mantegnas looked now they were framed.
+
+As soon as the door had closed behind Mildred, she turned to Miss Burt.
+"You're right, in a way, Polly, after all. There is something odd about
+Milly, but I think it's affectation. Did you hear her answer? Two miles!
+When to my knowledge she can easily walk ten."
+
+Meantime, Mildred mounted slowly to her room. She had tidied it under
+Tims's instructions and had nothing to do but to sit down and think
+until Lady Thomson's masculine step was heard outside her door.
+
+Aunt Beatrice came in and laid aside her hat and cloak, showing a dress
+of rough gray tweed, and short--so far a tribute to the practical--but
+otherwise made on some awkward artistic or hygienic principle. Her
+glossy brown hair was brushed back and twisted tight, as Milly's used to
+be, but with different effect, because of its heaviness and length.
+
+"Why have you crammed up one of your windows with a dressing-glass?"
+asked Aunt Beatrice, putting a picture straight.
+
+"Because I can't see myself in that dark corner," returned Mildred,
+demurely meek, but waiting her opportunity.
+
+"See yourself! My dear child, you hardly ever want to see yourself, if
+you are habitually neat and dressed sensibly. I see you've adopted the
+mannish style. That's a phase of vanity. You'll come back to the
+beautiful and natural before long."
+
+Mildred leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.
+
+"I don't think so, Aunt Beatrice. I've settled the dress question once
+and for all. I've found a clean, tidy, convenient style of dress and I
+can't waste time thinking about altering it again."
+
+"You don't seem to mind wasting it on doing your hair," returned Aunt
+Beatrice, smiling, but not grimly, for she enjoyed logical fencing, even
+to her opponent's fair hits.
+
+"If I had beautiful hair like yours, I shouldn't need to," replied
+Mildred. "But you know how endy and untidy mine always was."
+
+Aunt Beatrice, embarrassed by the compliment, looked at her watch. "It
+seems as if we women can't escape our fate," she said. "Here we are
+gabbling about dress when we've plenty of important things to talk over.
+Miss Burt wrote to me that you were overworked, run down, nerves out of
+order, and all the usual nonsense. I'm thankful to find you looking
+remarkably well. I should like to know what this humbug about not being
+able to work means."
+
+"It means that--well, I simply can't," returned Mildred, earnestly this
+time. "I can't remember things."
+
+"You must be able to remember; unless your brain's diseased, which is
+most improbable. But I ought to take you to a brain specialist, I
+suppose."
+
+Milly changed color. "Please, oh please, Aunt Beatrice, don't do that!"
+
+Lady Thomson, in fact, hardly meant it; for her niece's appearance was
+unmistakably healthy. However, the threat told.
+
+"I shall if you don't improve. I can't understand you. Either you're
+hysterical or you've got one of those abominable fits of frivolity which
+come on women like drink on men, and destroy their careers. I thought we
+had both set our hearts on your getting another First."
+
+"But, Aunt Beatrice, they say I can't. They say I'm not clever enough."
+
+"Oh, that's what they say, is it?" Lady Thomson smiled in calm but deep
+contempt. "How do they explain the idiots who have got Firsts? Archibald
+Toovey, for instance?" Her eyes met her niece's, and both smiled.
+
+"Ah, yes! Mr. Toovey," returned Milly, who had met Archibald Toovey at
+the Fletchers', and converted his patronizing courtship into imbecile
+raptures.
+
+"But that quite explains your losing an interest in your work. Just for
+once, I should like to take you away before the end of term. We would go
+straight to Rome next Monday. We shall meet the Breretons there, and go
+fully over the new excavations and discoveries, besides the old things,
+which will be new, of course, to you. Then we will go on to Naples, do
+the galleries and Pompeii, and come back by Florence and Paris before
+Christmas. By that time you will be ready to settle down to your work
+steadily again and forget all this nonsense."
+
+Mildred's face had lighted up momentarily at the word "Rome." Then she
+sucked her under lip and looked at the fire. When Lady Thomson's
+programme was ended, she made a pause before she said, slowly:
+
+"Thank you so much, dear Aunt Beatrice. I should love to go, but--I
+don't think--no, I don't think I'd better. You see, there's the
+expense."
+
+"Of course I don't expect you to pay for yourself. I take you."
+
+"How very kind and sweet of you! But--well, do you know, you've
+encouraged me so about that. First, I feel now as though I could sit
+down and get it straight away. I will get it, Aunt Beatrice, if only to
+make that old Professor look foolish."
+
+Lady Thomson, though disappointed in a way, felt that Milly Flaxman was
+doing credit to her principles, showing a spirit worthy of her family.
+She did not urge the Roman plan; but content with a victory over "nerves
+and the usual nonsense," withdrew triumphant to the railway station.
+
+Tims came in when she was gone and heard about the Roman offer.
+
+"You refused, when Aunt Beatrice was going to plank down the dollars?
+M., you are a fool!"
+
+"No, Tims," Mildred answered, deliberately; "you see, I don't feel sure
+yet whether I can manage Aunt Beatrice."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Oxford is beautiful at all times, beautiful even now, in spite of the
+cruel disfigurement inflicted upon her by the march of modern vulgarity,
+but she has three high festivals which clothe her with a special glory
+and crown her with their several crowns. One is the Festival of May,
+when her hoary walls and ancient enclosures overflow with emerald and
+white, rose-color and purple and gold, a foam of leafage and blossom,
+breaking spray-like over edges of stone, gray as sea-worn rocks. And all
+about the city the green meadows and groves burn with many tones of
+color, brilliant as enamels or as precious stones, yet of a texture
+softer and richer, more full of delicate shadows than any velvet mantle
+that ever was woven for a queen.
+
+Another Festival comes with that strayed bacchanal October, who hangs
+her scarlet and wine-colored garlands on cloister and pinnacle, on wall
+and tower. And gradually the foliage of grove and garden, turns through
+shade of bluish metallic green, to the mingled splendor of pale gold and
+beaten bronze and deepest copper, half glowing and half drowned in the
+low, mellow sunlight, and purple mist of autumn.
+
+Last comes the Festival of Mid-winter, the Festival of the Frost. The
+rime comes, or the snow, and the long lines of the buildings, the
+fret-work of stone, the battlements, carved pinnacles and images of
+saints or devils, stand up with clear glittering outlines, or clustered
+about and overhung with fantasies of ice and snow. Behind, the deep-blue
+sky itself seems to glitter too. The frozen floods glitter in the
+meadows, and every little twig on the bare trees. There is no color in
+the earth, but the atmosphere of the river valley clothes distant hills
+and trees and hedges with ultramarine vapor. Towards evening the mist
+climbs, faintly veiling the tall groves of elms and the piled masses of
+the city itself. The sunset begins to burn red behind Magdalen Tower,
+all the towers and aery pinnacles rise blue yet distinct against it. And
+this festival is not only one of nature. The glittering ice is spread
+over the meadows, and, everywhere from morning till moonlight, the
+rhythmical ring of the skate and the sound of voices sonorous with the
+joy of living, travel far on the frosty air. Sometimes the very rivers
+are frozen, and the broad, bare highway of the Thames and the
+tree-sheltered path of the Cherwell are alive with black figures,
+heel-winged like Mercury, flying swiftly on no errand, but for the mere
+delight of flying.
+
+It was early on such a shining festival morning that Mildred, a willowy,
+brown-clad figure, came down to a piece of ice in an outlying meadow.
+Her shadow moved beside her in the sunshine, blue on the whiteness of
+the snow, which crunched crisp and thin under her feet. She carried a
+black bag in her hand--sign of the serious skater, and her face was
+serious, even apprehensive. She saw with relief that except the sweepers
+there was no one on the ice. A row of shivering men, buttoned up to the
+chin in seedy coats, rose from the chairs where they awaited their
+appointed prey, and all yelled to her at once. She crowned the hopes of
+one by occupying his seat, but the important task of putting on the
+bladed boots she could depute to none. Tims, whom no appeal of
+friendship could induce to shiver on the ice, had told her that Milly
+was an expert skater. She was, in fact, correct and accomplished, but
+there was a stiffness and sense of effort about her style, a want of
+that appearance of free and daring abandonment to the stroke of the
+blade once launched, that makes the beauty of skating. Mildred knew only
+that she had to live up to the reputation of a mighty skater, and was
+not sure whether she could even stand on these knifelike edges. She
+laced one boot, happy in the belief that at any rate there would be no
+witness to her voyage of discovery. But a renewed yelling among the men
+made her lift her head, and there, striding swiftly over the crisp snow,
+came a tall, handsome young man, with a pointed, silky black beard and
+fine, short-sighted black eyes, aglow with the pleasure of the frosty
+sun.
+
+It was Ian Stewart. The young lady whom he discovered to be Miss Flaxman
+just as he reached the chairs, was much more annoyed than he at the
+encounter. Here was an acquaintance, it seemed, and one provided with
+the bag and orange which Tims had warned her was the mark of the
+serious skater. They exchanged remarks on the weather and she went on
+lacing her other boot in great trepidation. The moment was come. She did
+not recoil from the insult of being seized under her elbows by two men
+and carefully planted on her feet as though she were most likely to
+tumble down. So far as she knew, she was likely to. But, lo! no sooner
+was she up than muscles and nerves, recking nothing of the brain's blind
+denial, asserted their own acquaintance with the art of balance and
+motion. Wondering, and for a few minutes still apprehensive, but
+presently lost in the pleasure of the thing, Mildred began to fly over
+the ice. And the dark, handsome man who had taken off his cap to her
+became supremely unimportant. Unluckily the piece of flood-ice was not
+endless and she had to come back. He was circling around an orange, and
+she, throwing herself instinctively on to the outside edge, came down
+towards him in great, sweeping curves, absorbed in the delight of this
+motion, so new yet so perfectly under her control. Ian Stewart,
+perceiving that the girl was absolutely unconscious of his presence,
+blushed in his soul to think that he had been induced to believe himself
+to be of importance in her eyes.
+
+"Miss Flaxman," he said, skating up to her, "I see you have no orange.
+Can't we skate a figure together around mine?"
+
+"I've forgotten all about figures," replied Mildred, with truth.
+
+"Try some simple turns," he urged. "There are plenty here," and he held
+up a book in his hand like the one she had found in her own black bag.
+But it had "Ian Stewart, Durham College," written clearly on the
+outside.
+
+"So that's Stewart!" thought Milly; and she could not help laughing at
+her own thoughts, which had created him in a different image.
+
+Stewart did not know why she laughed, but he found the sound and sight
+of the laugh new and charming.
+
+"It's awfully kind of you to undertake my education in another branch,
+Mr. Stewart," she answered, pouting, "in spite of having found out that
+I'm not at all clever."
+
+She smiled at him mutinously, sweeping towards the orange with head
+thrown back over her left shoulder. Momentarily the poise of her head
+recalled the attitude of the portrait of Lady Hammerton, beckoning her
+unseen companions to that far-off mysterious mountain country, where the
+torrents shine so whitely through the mist and the red line of sunset
+speaks of coming night.
+
+Stewart colored, slightly confused. This brutal statement did not seem
+to him to represent the just and candid account he had given Miss Walker
+of Miss Flaxman's abilities.
+
+"Some one's been misreporting me, I see," he returned. "But anyhow, on
+the ice, Miss Flaxman, it's you who are the Professor; I who am the
+pupil. So I offer you a fair revenge."
+
+Accordingly, Mildred soon found herself placed at a due distance from
+the orange, with Stewart equally distant from it on the other side.
+After a few minutes of extreme uneasiness, she discovered that although
+she had to halt at each fresh call, she had a kind of mechanical
+familiarity with the simple figures which he gave her.
+
+Stewart, though learned, was human; and to sweep now at the opposite
+pole to his companion, now with a swing of clasping hands at the centre
+of their delightful dance, his eyes always perforce on his charming
+partner, and her eyes on him, undeniably raised the pleasure of skating
+to a higher power than if he had circled the orange in company with mere
+man.
+
+So they fleeted the too-short time in the sparkling blue and white
+world, drinking the air like celestial wine.
+
+The Festival of the Frost had fallen in the Christmas Vacation, and
+Oxford society in vacation is essentially different from that of
+Term-time, when it is overflowed by men who are but birds of passage,
+coming no one inquires whence, and flitting few know whither. The party
+that picnicked, played hockey, danced and figured on their skates
+through the weeks of the frost, was in those days almost like a family
+party. So it happened that Ian Stewart met the new Miss Flaxman in an
+atmosphere of friendly ease that years of term-time society would not
+have afforded him. How new she was he did not guess, but supposed the
+change to be in his own eyes. Other people, however, saw it. Her very
+skating was different. It had gained in grace and vigor, but she was
+seldom seen wooing the serious and lonely orange around which Milly had
+acquired the skill that Mildred now enjoyed. On the contrary, she
+initiated an epidemic of frivolity on the ice in the shape of waltzing
+and hand-in-hand figures in general.
+
+Ian Stewart, too, neglected the orange and went in for hand-in-hand
+figures that season. Other things, too, he neglected; work, which he had
+never before allowed to suffer measurably from causes within his
+control; and far from blushing for his idleness, he rejoiced in it, as
+the surest sign of all that for him the Festival of Spring had come in
+the time of nature's frost.
+
+It was not only the crisp air, the frequent sun, the joyous flights over
+the ringing ice that made his blood run faster through his veins and
+laughter come more easily to his lips; that aroused him in the morning
+with a strange sense of delight, as though some spirit had awakened him
+with a glad reveille at the window of his soul. He, too, was in Arcady.
+That in itself should be sufficient joy; he knew he must restrain his
+impatience for more. Not till the summer, when the lady of his heart had
+ceased to be also his pupil, must he make avowal of his love.
+
+Mildred on her part found Stewart the most attractive of the men with
+whom she was acquainted. As yet in this new existence of hers, she had
+not moved outside the Oxford circle--a circle exceptional in England,
+because in it intellectual eminence, not always recognized, when
+recognized receives as much honor as is accorded to a great fortune or
+a great name in ordinary society. Stewart's abilities were of a kind to
+be recognized by the Academic world. He was already known in the
+Universities of the Continent and America. Oxford was proud of him; and
+although Mildred had no desire to marry as yet, it gratified her taste
+and her vanity to win him for a lover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Mildred had had no desire to spend her vacations with Lady Thomson, and
+on the ground of her reading for the Schools, had been allowed to spend
+them in Oxford. Tims, who had no relations, remained with her. She had
+for Mildred a sentiment almost like that of a parent, besides an
+admiration for which she was slightly ashamed, feeling it to be
+something of a slur on the memory of Milly, her first and kindest
+friend.
+
+Mildred had recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her
+former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work for her
+First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon
+her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native
+passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the
+mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness,
+vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the
+contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the
+"Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in
+contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been
+wont to express her ideas. But in the region of actual knowledge, she
+now and again perpetrated some immense and childish blunder, which made
+the teachers, who nursed and trained her like a jockey or a race-horse,
+tremble for the results of the Greats Examination.
+
+All too swiftly the date of the Schools loomed on the horizon; drew
+near; was come. The June weather was glorious on the river, but in the
+town, above all in the Examination Schools, it was very hot. The sun
+glared pitilessly in through the great windows of the big T-shaped room,
+till the temperature was that of a greenhouse. The young men in their
+black coats and white ties looked enviously at the girl candidate, the
+only one, in her white waist and light skirt. They envied her, too, her
+apparent indifference to a crisis that paled the masculine cheek. In
+fact, Mildred was nervous, but her nerves were strung up to so high a
+pitch that she was sensitive neither to temperature nor to fatigue, nor
+to want of sleep. And at the service of her quick intelligence and ready
+pen lay all the stored knowledge of Milly the First.
+
+On the last day, when the last paper was over, Tims came and found her
+in the big hall, planting the pins in her hat with an almost feverish
+energy. Although it was five o'clock, she said she wanted air, not tea.
+The last men had trooped listlessly down the steps of the Schools and
+the two girls stood there while Mildred drew on her gloves. The sun
+wearing to the northwest, shone down that curve of the High Street which
+all Europe cannot match. The slanting gold illumined the gray face of
+the University and the wide pavement, where the black-gowned victims of
+the Schools threaded their sombre way through groups of joyous youths in
+flannels and ladies in summer attire. On the opposite side cool shadows
+were beginning to invade the sunshine, to slant across the old houses,
+straight-roofed or gabled, the paladian pile of Queen's, the mediaeval
+front of All Souls, with its single and perfect green tree, leading up
+to the consummation of the great spire of St. Mary's.
+
+Already, from the tall bulk of the nave, a shadow fell broad across the
+pavement. But still the heat of the day reverberated from the stones
+about them. They turned down to the Botanical Gardens and paced that
+gray enclosure, full of the pride of branches and the glory of flowers
+and overhung by the soaring vision of Magdalen Tower. Mildred was
+walking fast and talking volubly about the Examination and everything
+else.
+
+"Look here, old girl," said Tims at last, when they reached for the
+second time the seat under the willow trellis, "I'm going to sit down
+here, unless you'll come to tea at Boffin's."
+
+"I don't want to sit down," returned Mildred, seating herself; "or to
+have tea or anything. I want to be just going, going, going. I feel as
+though if I stop for a minute something horrid will happen."
+
+Tims wrinkled her whole face anxiously.
+
+"Don't do that, Tims," cried Mildred, sharply. "You look hideous."
+
+Tims colored, rose and walked away. She suddenly thought, with tears in
+her eyes, of the old Milly who would never have spoken to her like
+that. By the time she had reached the little basin in the middle of the
+garden, where the irises grew, Mildred had caught her up.
+
+"Tims, dear old Tims! What a wretch I am! I couldn't help letting off
+steam on something--you don't know what I feel like."
+
+Tims allowed herself to be pacified, but in her heart there remained a
+yearning for her earlier and gentler friend--that Milly Flaxman who was
+certainly not dead, yet as certainly gone out of existence.
+
+It was towards the end of the last week of Term, and the gayeties of
+Commemoration had already begun. Mildred threw herself into them with
+feverish enjoyment. She seemed to grudge even the hours that must be
+lost in the unconsciousness of sleep. The Iretons, cousins from India,
+who had never known the former Milly, took a house in Oxford for a week.
+She went with them to three College balls and a Masonic, and spent the
+days in a carnival of luncheon and boating-parties. She attracted plenty
+of admiration, and enjoyed herself wildly, yet also purposefully;
+because she was trying to get rid of that haunting feeling that if she
+stopped a minute "something horrid would happen."
+
+Stewart meantime was finding love not so entirely beautiful and
+delightful a thing as he had at first imagined it. In his dreamy way he
+had overlooked the fact of Commemoration, and planned when Term was over
+to find Mildred constantly at the Fletchers' and to be able to arrange
+quiet days on the river. But if he found her there, she was always in
+company, and though she made herself as charming to him as usual, she
+showed no disposition to forsake all others and cleave only to him. He
+was not a dancing man, and suffered cruelly on the evenings when he knew
+her to be at balls, and fancied all her partners in love with her.
+
+But on the Thursday after Commemoration, the Fletchers gave a strawberry
+tea at Wytham, as a farewell festivity to their cousins. And Ian Stewart
+was there. With Mrs. Fletcher's connivance, he took Mildred home alone
+in a canoe, by the deep and devious stream which runs under Wytham
+woods. She went on talking with a vivacious gayety which was almost
+foolish. He saw that it was unreal and that her nerves were at high
+tension. His own were also. He did not intend to propose to her that
+day; but he could no longer restrain himself, and he began to speak to
+her of his love.
+
+"Hush!" she cried, with a vehement gesture. "Not to-day! oh, not to-day!
+I can't bear it!" She put her head on her knee and moaned again, "Not
+to-day, I'm too tired, I really am. I can't bear it."
+
+This was all the answer he could get, and her manner left him in
+complete uncertainty as to whether she meant to accept or to refuse him.
+
+Tims had been at the strawberry tea too, and came into Mildred's room in
+the evening, curious to know what had happened. She found Mildred
+without a light, sitting, or rather lying in a wicker chair. When the
+candle was lighted she saw that Mildred was very pale and shivering.
+
+"You're overtired, my girl," she said. "That's what's the matter with
+you."
+
+"Oh, Tims," moaned Mildred. "I feel so ill and so frightened. I know
+something horrid's going to happen--I know it is."
+
+"Don't be a donkey," returned Tims. "I'll help you undress and then you
+turn in. You'll be as jolly as a sandboy to-morrow."
+
+But Mildred was crying tremulously. "Oh, Tims, how dreadful it would be
+to die!"
+
+"Idiot!" cried Tims, and shook Mildred with all her might. Mildred's
+tiny sobs turned into a shriek of laughter.
+
+"My goodness!" ejaculated Tims; "you're in hysterics!"
+
+"I know I am," gasped Mildred. "I was laughing to think of what Aunt
+Beatrice would say." And she giggled amid her tears.
+
+Tims insisted on her rising from the chair, undressing, and getting into
+bed. Then she sat by her in the half-dark, waiting for the miserable
+tears to leave off.
+
+"Don't cry, old girl, don't cry. Go to sleep and forget all about it,"
+she kept repeating, almost mechanically.
+
+At length leaning over the bed she saw that Mildred was asleep, lying
+straight on her bed with her feet crossed and her hands laid on her
+bosom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+About noon on Friday Milly Flaxman awoke. She lay very quiet, sleepy and
+comfortable, her eyes fixed idly on a curve in the jessamine-pattern
+paper opposite her bed. The windows were wide open, the blinds down and
+every now and again flapping softly, as a capricious little breeze went
+by, whispering through the leafy trees outside. There seemed nothing
+unusual in that; she always slept with her windows open. But as her
+senses emerged from those mists which lie on the surface of the river of
+sleep, she was conscious of a balmy warmth in the room, of an impression
+of bright sunshine behind the dark blinds, and of noises from the
+streets reaching her with a kind of sharpness associated with sunshine.
+She sat up, looked at her watch, and was shocked to find how late she
+had slept. She must have missed a lecture. Then the recollection of the
+dinner-party at the Fletchers', the verdict of Mr. Stewart on her chance
+of a First, and her own hysterical outburst returned to her,
+overpowering all outward impressions. She felt calm and well now, but
+unhappy and ashamed of herself. She put her feet out of bed and looked
+round mechanically for her dressing-gown and slippers. Their absence was
+unimportant, for no sense of chill struck through her thin night-gown
+to her warm body, and going to the window, she drew up the blind.
+
+The high June sun struck full upon her, hot and dazzling, but not so
+dazzling that she could not see the row of garden trees through whose
+bare branches she had yesterday descried the squalid roofs of the town.
+They were spreading now in a thick screen of fresh green leaves. She
+leaned out, as though further investigation might explain the
+phenomenon, and saw a red standard rose in full flower under her window.
+The thing was exactly like a dream, and she tried to wake up but could
+not. She was panic-stricken and trembling. Had she been very, very ill?
+Was it possible to be unconscious for six months? She looked at herself
+in a dressing-glass near the window, which she had never placed there,
+and saw that she was pale and had dark marks under her eyes, but not
+more so than had been the case in that yesterday so strangely and
+mysteriously removed in time. Her slender white arms and throat were as
+rounded as usual. And if she had been ill, why was she left alone like
+this? She found a dressing-gown not her own, and went on a voyage of
+discovery. But the other rooms on her floor were dismantled and
+tenantless. The girls were gone and the servants were "cleaning" in a
+distant part of the College. She felt incapable of getting into bed
+again and waiting for some one to come, so she began dressing herself
+with trembling hands. Every detail increased the sense of strangeness.
+There were a number of strange clothes, ball-dresses and others,
+hanging in her cupboard, strange odds and ends thrust confusedly into
+her bureau. She found at length a blue cotton frock of her own, which
+seemed just home from the wash. She had twisted up her hair and was
+putting on the blue frock, when she heard a step on the stairs, and
+paused with beating heart. Who was coming? How would the mystery be
+resolved? The door opened and Tims came in--the old Tims, wrinkled face,
+wig, and old straw hat on one side as usual.
+
+"Tims!" cried Milly, flying towards her and speaking with pale lips.
+"Please, please tell me--what has happened? Have I been very ill?" And
+she stared in Tims's face with a tragic mask of terror and anxiety.
+
+"Now take it easy--take it easy, M., my girl!" cried Tims, giving her a
+great squeeze and a clap on the shoulder. "I'm jolly glad to see you
+back. But don't let's have any more of your hysterics. No, never no
+more!"
+
+"Have I been away?" asked Milly, her lips still trembling.
+
+"I should think you had!" exclaimed Tims. "But nobody knows it except
+me. Don't forget that. Here's a note for you from old B. Read it first
+or we shall both forget all about it. She had to go away early this
+morning."
+
+Milly opened the note and read:
+
+     "DEAR MILLY,--I am sorry not to say good-bye, but glad you
+     are sleeping off your fatigue. I want to tell you, between
+     ourselves, not to go on worrying about the results of the
+     Schools, as I think you are doing, in spite of your
+     pretences to the contrary. I hear you have done at least one
+     brilliant paper, and although I, of course, know nothing
+     certain, I believe you and the College will have reason to
+     rejoice when the list comes out.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "MARY BURT."
+
+"What does it mean?--oh, what can it mean?" faltered Milly, holding out
+the missive to Tims.
+
+"It means you've been in for Greats, my girl, and done first-rate. But
+the strain's been a bit too much for you, and you've had another
+collapse of memory. You had one in the end of November. You've been
+uncommonly well ever since, and worked like a Trojan, but you've not
+been quite your usual self, and I'm glad you've come right again, old
+girl. Let me tell you the whole business."
+
+Tims did so. She wanted social tact, but she had the tact of the heart
+which made her hide from Milly how very different, how much more
+brilliant and attractive Milly the Second had been than her normal self.
+She only made her friend feel that the curious episode had entailed no
+disgrace, but that somehow in her abnormal condition she had done well
+in the Schools, and probably touched the top of her ambition.
+
+"But I don't feel as though it had been quite straightforward to hide it
+up so," said Milly. "I shall write and tell Miss Burt and Aunt Beatrice,
+and tell the Fletchers when I go to them."
+
+"You'll do nothing of the kind, you stupid," snapped Tims. "You'll be
+simply giving me away if you do. What is the good? It won't happen
+again unless you're idiot enough to overwork yourself again. Very likely
+not then; for, as an open-minded, scientific woman, I believe it to have
+been a case of hypnotism, and in France and the United States they'd
+have thought it a very interesting one. But in England people are so
+prejudiced they'd say you'd simply been out of your mind; although that
+wouldn't prevent them from blaming me for hypnotizing you."
+
+While Tims spoke thus, there was a knocking without, and a maid
+delivered a note for Miss Flaxman. Milly held it in her hands and
+studied it musingly before opening the envelope. Her pale, troubled face
+colored and grew more serious. Tims had not mentioned Ian Stewart, but
+Milly had not forgotten him or his handwriting. Tims knew it too. She
+restrained her excitement while Milly turned her back and stood by the
+window reading the note. She must have read them several times over, the
+two sides of the sheet inscribed with Stewart's small, scholarly
+handwriting, before she turned her transfigured face towards the
+anxiously expectant Tims.
+
+"Tims, dear," she said at length, smiling tremulously, and laying
+tremulous hands on Tims's two thin shoulders--"dear old Tims, why didn't
+you tell me?"
+
+"Tell you what?" asked Tims, grinning delightedly. Milly threw her arms
+round her friend's neck and hid her happy tears and blushes between
+Tims's ear and shoulder.
+
+"Mr. Stewart--it seems too good to be true--he loves me, he really does.
+He wants me to be his wife."
+
+Most girls would have hugged and kissed Milly, and Tims did hug her, but
+instead of kissing her, she banged and slapped her back and shoulders
+hard all over, shaking the while with deep internal chuckles. It hurt,
+but Milly did not mind, for it was sympathy. Presently she drew herself
+away, and wiping her damp eyes, said, smiling shyly:
+
+"He's never guessed how much I care about him. I'm so glad. He says he
+doesn't wonder at my hesitation and talks about others more worthy to
+love me. But you know there isn't any one except Mr. Toovey. Poor Mr.
+Toovey! I do hope I haven't behaved very badly to him."
+
+"Never mind Toovey," chuckled Tims. "Anyhow, Milly, I've got a good load
+off my mind. I didn't half like having put that other girl into your
+boots. However, you've come back, and everything's going to be all
+right."
+
+"All right!" breathed Milly. "Why, Tims, darling, I never thought any
+one in the world could be half so happy as I am."
+
+And Tims left Milly to write the answer for which Ian Stewart was so
+anxiously waiting.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The engagement proceeded after the manner of engagements. No one was
+surprised at it and every one was pleased. The little whirlpool of talk
+that it created prevented Milly's ignorance of the events of the past
+six or seven months from coming to the surface. She lay awake at night,
+devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But
+she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an
+unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state,
+and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since
+the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that
+quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him
+about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to
+bring to light unsuspected sides of a personality. But he laughed at
+hypnotism as a mixture of fraud and hysteria. So with many searchings of
+heart, she dropped the subject.
+
+She was staying at the Fletchers' and saw Ian every day. He was all that
+she could wish as a lover, and it never occurred to her to ask whether
+he felt all that he himself could have wished as such. He was very fond
+of Milly and quite content with her, but not perfectly content with
+himself. He supposed he must at bottom be one of those ordinary and
+rather contemptible men who care more for the excitement of the chase
+than for the object of it. But he felt sure he was really a very lucky
+fellow, and determined not to give way to the self-analysis which is
+always said to be the worst enemy of happiness.
+
+Miss Flaxman had been the only woman in for Greats, and as a favor she
+was taken first in _viva voce_. The questions were directed to probing
+her actual knowledge in places where she had made one or two amazing
+blunders. But she emerged triumphant, and went in good spirits to
+Clewes, Aunt Beatrice's country home in the North, whither Ian Stewart
+shortly followed her. Beyond the fact that she wore perforce and with
+shame, not having money to buy others, frocks which Lady Thomson
+disapproved, she was once more the adoring niece to whom her aunt was
+accustomed. And Lady Thomson liked Ian. She never expected men to share
+her fads.
+
+In due time came the announcement of the First, bringing almost as many
+congratulatory letters as the engagement. And on August 2d Milly sailed
+for Australia, where she was to spend two or three months with her
+family.
+
+In October the newspapers announced that the marriage of Miss Mildred
+Beatrice Flaxman, eldest daughter of the Dean of Stirling, South
+Australia, with Mr. Ian Stewart, Fellow of Durham College, Oxford, would
+take place at Oxford in the second week in December.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped
+chamber-maid of the Hotel du Chalet made the statement to the manager,
+who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired
+yesterday, pauvre petite!"
+
+The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:
+
+"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman
+went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want
+sanveeches when one sleeps."
+
+"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping
+like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her
+duties.
+
+The _dejeuner_ was over, and those guests who had not already gone out
+for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and
+staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions
+and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
+died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
+a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
+But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning,
+startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
+varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
+was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
+painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
+room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
+been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
+slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
+other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
+her sitting up on the bedside.
+
+"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"
+
+A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
+anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
+power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
+unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
+flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
+strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
+Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
+allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
+nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
+been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
+not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
+audible cry she sprang to her feet.
+
+"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"
+
+The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
+plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
+might have been heard in the corridor.
+
+"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
+capable of it."
+
+Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
+thinking.
+
+"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
+am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
+somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"--she was
+thinking of Milly--"How I should like to strangle her!"
+
+She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs,
+propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
+snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
+only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
+was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
+prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
+photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
+that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
+from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
+was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
+with a veil of fine lace.
+
+"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
+from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
+for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"
+
+But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
+indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
+must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
+was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
+thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
+of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
+combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
+on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
+out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
+on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
+ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
+falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
+deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
+cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
+blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
+and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
+against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
+secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
+looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
+Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
+for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
+any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
+lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey.
+Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
+climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
+knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
+on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
+smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
+Archibald Toovey.
+
+Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
+towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
+her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
+into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
+those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
+something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
+by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
+been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old--disappointed,
+that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
+happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
+falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
+himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
+the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
+hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
+returned to him in one delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
+the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
+the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
+laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
+endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
+his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
+at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
+and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
+his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
+received no apology.
+
+Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
+eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
+kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
+walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
+quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
+thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
+anxiety about his safety and indulging another on the subject of his wet
+feet. A smile of tender amusement visited his lips as he took hold of
+the door-handle. Exactly as he touched it, the key on the other side
+turned. The lock had been stiff, but it had shot out in the nick of
+time, and he found himself brought up short in his impulsive career and
+hurtling against a solid barrier. He knocked, but no one answered. He
+could have fancied he heard panting breaths on the other side of the
+ill-fitting door.
+
+"Mayn't I come in, darling?" he asked, gently, but with a shade of
+reproach in his voice.
+
+"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of
+coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He
+paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women
+were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget
+that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and
+devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in
+this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference.
+
+"Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?"
+
+"Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then
+after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?"
+
+Ian smiled to himself as he answered:
+
+"My feet are wet. I want to change."
+
+He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said
+to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door
+to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of
+anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause:
+
+"I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if
+you'll wait."
+
+He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and
+shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always
+put away his things for him and should have known where to find them.
+The door opened a chink and the shoes and stockings came flying through
+on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine
+strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but
+fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and
+stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the
+smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that
+women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been
+uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than
+content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of
+hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her
+that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young
+wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the
+crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those
+tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our
+personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power
+of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that--very
+fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware--he
+did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive
+that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings
+with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a
+complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus
+advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the
+enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible
+transformations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms
+which they believe to be moly; but the true moly is not easy to
+distinguish. And he hoped that he and Milly, in their different ways,
+had found and were both wearing the milk-white flower. Yet he knew that
+this was a matter which must be left to the arbitrament of time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+On their return to Oxford the young couple were feted beyond the common.
+People who had known Milly Flaxman in earlier days were surprised to
+think how little they had noticed her beauty or guessed what a fund of
+humor, what an extraordinary charm, had lurked beneath the surface of
+her former quiet, grave manner. The Master of Durham alone refused to be
+surprised. He merely affirmed in his short squeak that he had always
+admired Mrs. Stewart very much. She was now frequently to be found in
+the place of honor at those dinners of his, where distinguished visitors
+from London brought the stir and color of the great world into the
+austere groves, the rarefied atmosphere of Academe.
+
+Wherever she appeared, the vivid personality of Mrs. Stewart made a kind
+of effervescence which that indescribable entity, a vivid personality,
+is sure to keep fizzing about it. She was devoutly admired, fiercely
+criticised, and asked everywhere. It is true she had quite given up her
+music, but she drew caricatures which were irresistibly funny, and was a
+tremendous success in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
+everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her house,
+although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
+the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
+destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
+good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
+Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
+extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
+brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
+principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
+of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
+ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
+that the _aura_ surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
+Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
+a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
+her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
+others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
+her manners or her character.
+
+To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
+where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
+a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
+adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
+housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
+were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
+midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to reflect
+that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
+complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
+happiness.
+
+Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
+the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
+he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
+time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
+seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
+agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
+Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
+Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
+country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low and Dieppe would
+cost too much. For the first time he opposed Mildred's wishes, and to
+her surprise she found him perfectly firm. There was no quarrel, but
+although she was silent he felt that she did not yield her opinion and
+was displeased with him.
+
+Late at night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive
+imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry,
+scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the
+"sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage
+as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and
+do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe
+and pen, hoping to find her still awake. But she was already sound
+asleep. The room was dark, but he saw her by the illumination of
+distant lightning, playing on the edge of a dark and sultry world. His
+appointed task was not yet done and he returned to the study, a long,
+low, dark-panelled room, looking on the garden. The windows were wide
+open on the hushed, warm, almost sulphurous darkness, from which frail
+white-winged moths came floating in towards the shaded lamp on his
+writing-table. He sat down to his papers and by an effort of will
+concentrated his mind upon them. Habit had made such concentration easy
+to him as a rule, but to-night, after half an hour of steady work, he
+was mastered by an invading restlessness of mind and body. The cause was
+not far to seek; he could hear all the time he worked the dull, almost
+continuous, roar of distant thunder. All else was very still, it was
+long past midnight and the town was asleep.
+
+He got up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished
+pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of
+nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled
+and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long
+trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot
+as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before
+it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its cavernous
+chimneys, deep cellars, and enormous unexplored walls, filling it with
+strange, whispering sounds, as of half articulate voices, here menacing,
+there struggling to reveal some sinister and vital secret. The blast
+died away, but it seemed to have left those voices still muttering and
+sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such
+various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the
+wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which
+had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the
+night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at
+times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or
+superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves--never before so strongly, so
+over-masteringly as to-night. A blue blaze of crooked lightning
+zigzagged down the outer darkness and seemed to strike the earth but a
+little beyond the garden wall. Following on its heels a tremendous clap
+of thunder burst, as it were, on the very chimneys. The solid house
+shook to its foundations. But the tide of horrible, irrational fear
+which swept over Ian's whole being was not caused by this mere
+exaggerated commonplace of nature. He could give no guess what it was
+that caused it; he only knew that it was agony. He knew what it meant to
+feel the hair lift on his head; he knew what the Psalmist meant when he
+said, "My bones are turned to water." And as he stood unable to move,
+afraid to turn his head, abject and ashamed of his abjectness, he was
+listening, listening for he knew not what.
+
+At length it came. He heard the stairs creak and a soft padding footstep
+coming slowly down them; with it the brush of a light garment and
+intermittently a faint human sound between a sigh and a sob. He did not
+reflect that he could not really have heard such slight sounds through a
+thick stone wall and a closed door. He heard them. The steps stopped at
+the door; a hand seemed feeling to open it, and again there was a
+painful sigh. The physical terror had not passed from him, but the
+sudden though that it was his wife and that she was frightened or ill,
+made him able to master it. He seized the lamp, because he knew the
+light in the hall was extinguished, rushed to the door, opened it and
+looked out. There was no one there. He made a hasty but sufficient
+search and returned to the study.
+
+The extremity of his fear was now passed, but an unpleasantly eery
+feeling still lingered about him and he had a very definite desire to
+find himself in some warm, human neighborhood. He had left the door open
+and was arranging the papers on his writing-table, when once again he
+heard those soft padding feet on the stairs; but this time they were
+much heavier, more hurried, and stumbled a little. He stood bent over
+the table, a bundle of papers in his hand, no longer overcome by mortal
+terror, yet somehow reluctant once more to look out and to see once
+more--nothing. There was a sound outside the door, louder, hoarser than
+the faint sob or sigh which he had heard before, and he seized the lamp
+and turned towards it. Before he had made a step forward, the door was
+pushed violently back and his wife came in, leaning upon it as though
+she needed support. She was barefooted and dressed only in a long
+night-gown, white, yet hardly whiter than her face. Her eyes did not
+turn towards him, they stared in front of her, not with the fixed gaze
+of an ordinary sleep-walker, but with purpose and intensity. She seemed
+to see something, to pursue something, with starting eyes and
+out-stretched arms; something she hated even more than she feared it,
+for her lips were blanched and tightened over her teeth as though with
+fury, and her smooth white forehead gathered in a frown. Again she
+uttered that low, fierce sound, like that he had heard outside the door.
+Then, loosing the handle on which she had leaned, she half sprung, half
+staggered, with uplifted hand, towards an open window, beyond which the
+rush of the thunder shower was just visible, sloping pallidly across the
+darkness. She leaned out into it and uttered to the night a hoarse,
+confused voice, words inchoate, incomprehensible, yet with a terrible
+accent of rage, of malediction. This transformation of his wife, so
+refined, so self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost
+animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a
+phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he
+had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank
+rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate--"My husband!
+Mine! Mine!"--but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words
+as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she drooped, half
+kneeling on the deep window-seat, half fallen across the sill. He sprang
+to catch her, but not before her forehead had come down sharply on the
+stone edge of the outer window. He kneeled upon the window-seat and
+gathered her gently in his arms, where she lay quiet, but moaning and
+shuddering.
+
+"My husband!" she wailed, no longer furious now but despairing. "Ian! My
+love! Ian! My life!--my life! My own husband!"
+
+Even in this moment it thrilled him to hear such words from her lips. He
+had not thought she loved him so passionately. He lifted her on to a
+deep old sofa at the end of the room, wrapped her in a warm Oriental
+coverlet which hung there, and held her to his heart, murmuring love and
+comfort in her cold little ear. It seemed gradually to soothe her,
+although he did not think she really awoke. Then he put her down,
+lighted the lamp outside, and, not without difficulty, carried her up to
+bed. Her eyes were half closed when he laid her down and drew the
+bedclothes over her; and a minute or two later, when he looked in from
+his dressing-room, she was evidently asleep.
+
+When he got into bed she did not stir, and while he lay awake for
+another hour, she remained motionless and breathing regularly. He
+assured himself that the whole curious occurrence could be explained by
+the electrical state of the atmosphere, which had affected his own
+nerves in a way he would never humiliate himself by confessing to any
+one. Those mysterious footsteps on the stairs which he had heard,
+footsteps like his wife's yet not hers; that hand upon the door, that
+voice of sighs, were the creation of his own excited brain. In time he
+would doubtless come to believe his own assurances on the point, but
+that night at the bottom of his heart he did not believe them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Next morning, if Ian himself slept late, Milly slept later still. The
+strained and troubled look which he had seen upon her face even in sleep
+the night before, had passed away in the morning, but she lay almost
+alarmingly still and white. He was reassured by remembering that once
+when they were in Switzerland she had slept about sixteen hours and
+awakened in perfect health. He remained in the house watching over her,
+and about four o'clock she woke up. But she was very pale and very
+quiet; exhausted, he thought, by her strange mental and physical
+exertions of the night before.
+
+She came down to tea with her pretty hair unbecomingly twisted up, and
+dressed in a brownish-yellow tea-gown, which he fancied he remembered
+hearing her denounce as only fit to be turned into a table-cloth. He did
+not precisely criticise these details, but they helped in the impression
+of lifelessness and gloom that hung about her. It was a faint, gleamy
+afternoon, and such sun as there was did not shine into the study. The
+dark panelling looked darker than usual, and as she sat silent and
+listless in a corner of the old sofa, her hair and face stood out
+against it almost startling in their blondness and whiteness. She was
+strangely unlike herself, but Stewart comforted himself by remembering
+that she had been odd in her manner and behavior, though in a different
+way, after her long sleep in Switzerland. After he had given her tea, he
+suggested that they should walk in the garden, as the rain was over.
+
+"Not yet, Ian," she said. "I want to try and tell you something. I can
+do it better here."
+
+Her mouth quivered. He sat down by her on the sofa.
+
+"Must you tell me now?" he asked, smiling. "Do you really think it
+matters?"
+
+"Yes--it does matter," she answered, tremulously, pressing her folded
+hands against her breast. "It's something I ought to have told you
+before you married me--but indeed, indeed I didn't know how dreadful it
+was--I didn't think it would happen again."
+
+He was puzzled a moment, then spoke, still smiling:
+
+"I suppose you mean the sleep-walking. Well, darling, it is a bit
+creepy, I admit, but I shall get used to it, if you won't do it too
+often."
+
+"Did I really walk?" she asked--and a look of horror was growing on her
+face. "Ah! I wasn't sure. No--it's not that--it is--oh, don't think me
+mad, Ian!"
+
+"Tell me, dearest. I promise I won't."
+
+"I've not been here at all since you've been living in this house. I've
+not seen you, my own precious husband, since I went to sleep in
+Switzerland, at the Hotel du Chalet--don't you remember--when we had
+been that long walk up to the glacier and I was so tired?"
+
+Stewart was exceedingly startled. He paused, and then said, very gently
+but very firmly:
+
+"That's nonsense, dearest. You have been here, you've been with me all
+the time."
+
+"Ah! You think so, but it was not _I_--no, don't interrupt me--I mean to
+tell you, I must, but I can't if you interrupt me. It was awfully wrong
+of me not to tell you before; but I tried to, and then I saw you
+wouldn't believe me. Do you remember a dinner-party at the Fletchers',
+the autumn before we were engaged--when Cousin David had just bought
+that picture?"
+
+"That portrait of Lady Hammerton, which is so like you? Yes, I remember
+it perfectly."
+
+"You know I wanted my First so much and I had been working too hard, and
+then I was told that evening that you had said I couldn't get it--"
+
+"Silly me!"
+
+"And I felt certain you didn't love me--"
+
+"Silly you!"
+
+"Don't interrupt me, please. And I wasn't well, and I cried and cried
+and I couldn't leave off, and then I allowed Tims to hypnotize me. We
+both knew she had no business to do it, it was wrong of us, of course,
+but we couldn't possibly guess what would happen. I went to sleep, and
+so far as I knew I never woke again for more than six months, not till
+the Schools were over."
+
+"But, my darling, I skated with you constantly in the Christmas
+Vacation, and took your work through the Term. I assure you that you
+were quite awake then."
+
+"I remember nothing about it. All I know is that some one got my First
+for me."
+
+"But, Mildred--"
+
+"Why do you call me Mildred? That's what they called me when I woke up
+last time; but my own name's Milly."
+
+Stewart rose and paced the room, then came back.
+
+"It's simply a case of collapse of memory, dear. It's very trying, but
+don't let's be fanciful about it."
+
+"I thought it was only that--I told you, didn't I, something of that
+sort? But I didn't know then, nobody told me, that I wasn't like myself
+at all those months I couldn't remember. Last night in my sleep I
+knew--I knew that some one else, something else--I can't describe it,
+it's impossible--was struggling hard with me in my own brain, my own
+body, trying to hold me down, to push me back again into the place,
+whatever it was, I came out of. But I got stronger and stronger till I
+was quite myself and the thing couldn't really stop me. I dare say it
+only lasted a few seconds, then I felt quite free--free from the
+struggle, the pressure; and I saw myself standing in the room, with some
+kind of white floating stuff over my head and about me, and I saw myself
+open the door and go out of the room. I wasn't a bit surprised, but I
+just lay there quiet and peaceful. Then suddenly it came to me that I
+couldn't have seen myself, that the person, the figure I had seen go
+out of the door was the other one, the creature I had been struggling
+with, who had stolen my shape; and it came to me that she was gone to
+steal you--to steal your heart from me and take you away; and you
+wouldn't know, you would think it was I, and you would follow her and
+love her and never know it was not your own wife you were loving. And I
+was mad with anger; I never knew before what it meant, Ian, to be as
+angry as that. I struggled hard to get up, and at last I managed it, and
+I came down-stairs after her, but I couldn't find her, and I was sure
+that she had gone and had taken you away with her. And you say I really
+did come down-stairs."
+
+"Yes, darling, and if you had been awake instead of asleep, as you
+obviously were, you would have seen that this nightmare of yours was
+nothing but a nightmare. You would have seen that I was alone here,
+quietly arranging my papers before going to bed. You gave me a fright
+coming down as you did, for there was a tremendous thunderstorm going
+on, and I am ashamed to say how queer my own nerves were. The electrical
+state of the atmosphere and a very loud clap of thunder just overhead,
+account for the whole business, which probably lasted only a few seconds
+from beginning to end. Be reasonable, little woman, you are generally
+the most reasonable person I know--except when you talk about going to
+Dieppe."
+
+Milly gave him a strange look.
+
+"Why am I not reasonable when I talk about going to Dieppe?"
+
+He drew her to him and kissed her hair.
+
+"Never mind why. We aren't going to excite ourselves to-day or do
+anything but make love and forget nightmares and everything
+disagreeable."
+
+She drew herself away a little and looked with frightened eyes in his.
+
+"But I can't forget, Ian, that I don't remember anything that has
+happened since we were on our honeymoon in Switzerland. And now we are
+in Oxford, and I can see it's quite late in the summer. How can I forget
+that somehow I am being robbed of myself--robbed of my life with you?"
+
+"Wait till to-morrow and you'll remember everything right enough."
+
+But Milly was not to be convinced. She was willing to submit on the
+question of last night's experiences, but she assured him that Tims
+would bear her out in the assertion that she had never recovered her
+recollection of the months preceding her engagement. Ian ceased trying
+to convince her that she was mistaken on this point; but he argued that
+the memory was of all functions of the brain the most uncertain, that
+there was no limit to its vagaries, which were mere matters of nerves
+and circulation, and that Dr. Norton-Smith, the nerve and brain
+specialist to whom he would take her, would probably turn out to have a
+dozen patients subject to the same affliction as herself. One never
+hears of half the ills that flesh is heir to until the inheritance falls
+to one's own lot.
+
+Milly was a common-sense young woman, and his explanation, especially as
+it was his, pacified her for the time. The clouds had been rolling away
+while they talked, the space of deep blue sky overhead growing larger,
+the sunshine fuller. There was a busy twittering and shaking of little
+wings in the tall pear-tree near the house, where the tomtits in their
+varied liveries loved to congregate. July was not far advanced and the
+sun had still some hours in which to shine. Ian and Milly went out and
+walked in the Parks. The tennis-club lawns were almost deserted, but
+they met a few acquaintances taking their constitutional, like
+themselves, and an exchange of ordinary remarks with people who took her
+normality for granted, helped Milly to believe in it herself. So long as
+the blank in her memory continued, she could not be free from care; but
+she went to sleep that night in Ian's arms, feeling herself protected by
+them not only from bodily harm, but from all those dreadful fears and
+evil fantasies that "do assault and hurt the soul."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Ian had been so busy persuading Milly to view her own case as a simple
+one, and so busy comforting her with an almost feminine intuition of
+what would really afford her comfort, that it was only in the watches of
+the night that certain disquieting recollections forced their way into
+his mind. It was of course now part of his creed that he had loved Milly
+Flaxman from the first--only he had never known her well till that
+Christmas Vacation when they had skated so much together. Later on, such
+disturbing events as engagement and marriage had seemed to him enough to
+explain any changes he had observed in her. Later still, he had been too
+much in love to think about her at all, in the true sense of the word.
+She had been to him "all a wonder and a wild desire."
+
+Now, taking the dates of her collapses of memory, he made, despite
+himself, certain notes on those changes. It is to be feared he did not
+often want to see Miss Timson; but on the day after Milly's return to
+the world, he cycled out to visit her friend. Tims was spending the
+summer on the wild and beautiful ridge which has since become a suburb
+of Oxford. It was doubtful whether he would find her in, as she was
+herself a mighty cyclist, making most of her journeys on the wheel,
+happy in the belief that she was saving money at the expense of the
+railway companies.
+
+The time of flowers, the freshness of trees, and the glory of gorse and
+broom was over. It was the season of full summer when the midlands,
+clothed with their rich but sheenless mantle of green, wear a
+self-satisfied air, as of dull people conscious of deserved prosperity.
+But just as the sea or a mountain or an adventurous soul will always
+lend an element of the surprising and romantic to the commonest corner
+of earth, so the sky will perpetually transfigure large spaces of level
+country, valley or plain, laid open to its capricious influences. Boars
+Hill looks over the wide valley of the narrow Og to the downs, and up to
+where that merges into the valley of the Upper Thames. By the sandy
+track which Ian followed, the tree still stood, though no longer alone,
+whence the poet of _Thyrsis_ looking northward, saw the "fair city with
+her dreaming spires"; less fair indeed to-day than when he looked upon
+it, but still "lovely all times," in all its fleeting shades, whether
+blond and sharp-cut in the sunshine or dimly gray among its veiling
+trees. The blue waving line of the downs, crowned here and there by
+clumps of trees, ran far along the southwestern horizon, melting
+vaporously in the distance above "the Vale, the three lone weirs, the
+youthful Thames." Over the downs and over the wide valley of ripening
+cornfields, of indigo hedgerow-elms and greener willow and woodland, of
+red-roofed homesteads and towered churches, moved slowly the broad
+shadows of rolling clouds that journeyed through the intense blue above.
+Some shadows were like veils of pale gray gauze, through which the world
+showed a delicately softened face; others were dark, with a rich,
+indefinable hue of their own, and as they moved, the earth seemed to
+burst into a deeper glow of color behind them. Close by, the broken
+hill-side was set here and there with oak and thorn, was everywhere deep
+in bracken, on whose large fronds lay the bluish bloom of their
+maturity. It all gained a definiteness of form, an air of meaning by its
+detachment from the wide background floating behind.
+
+Following steep and circuitous lanes, Ian arrived at the lodging-house
+and found Tims on the porch preparing to start on her bicycle. But
+flattered and surprised by his visit, she ordered tea in the bright
+little sitting-room she was inhabiting. He was shy of approaching the
+real object of his visit. They marked time awhile till the thunderstorm
+became their theme. Then he told something of Milly's sleep-walking, her
+collapse of memory; and watched Tims meantime, hoping to see in her face
+merely surprise and concern. But there was no surprise, hardly concern
+in the queer little face. There was excitement, and at last a flash of
+positive pleasure.
+
+"Good old M.!" she observed. "I'm glad she has got back; though I'm a
+bit proud of the other one too. I expect you feel much the same, old
+boy, don't you?"
+
+The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
+He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
+joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."
+
+"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
+in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! _I_ don't
+want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
+of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
+on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."
+
+"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"--there was a note of
+impatience in Ian's voice--"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
+as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
+how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
+her work, but on the whole it improved."
+
+"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
+remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
+and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
+babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
+asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
+the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
+old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
+difference?"
+
+Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the
+stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
+to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
+far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
+paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
+unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
+courtship and marriage.
+
+"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
+only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
+Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."
+
+"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
+right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
+no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
+what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."
+
+Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
+have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
+sympathy.
+
+"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
+particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
+medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"
+
+"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
+gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
+you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
+which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
+clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
+The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
+whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
+independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
+but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
+stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
+Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm--I'm fond of
+them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
+difference."
+
+Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.
+
+"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.
+
+They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
+Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
+hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
+hat.
+
+"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
+"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
+for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
+on earth did she?"
+
+He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
+everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
+the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
+memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
+diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty
+months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
+experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified--his own surprise,
+almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
+after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
+even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
+marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
+the Hotel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant
+nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to
+be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his
+sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only
+saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from
+Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his
+undeviating course.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Milly, too, had not been without a sharp reminder that the leaves in her
+life so blank to her, had been fully inscribed by another. She hardly
+yet felt mistress of the house, but it was pleasant to rest and read in
+the low, white-panelled drawing-room, which lowered awnings kept cool,
+although the afternoon sun struck a golden shaft across the flowering
+window-boxes of its large and deeply recessed bow-window. The whole room
+was lighter and more feminine than Milly would have made it, but at
+bottom the taste that reigned there was more severe than her own. The
+only pictures on the panels were a few eighteenth century colored
+prints, already charming, soon to be valuable, and one or two framed
+pieces of needlework which harmonized with them.
+
+Presently the door-bell rang and a Mr. Fitzroy was announced by the
+parlor-maid, in a tone which implied that she was accustomed to his
+name. He looked about the age of an undergraduate and was
+extraordinarily well-groomed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being
+in a riding-dress. His sleek dark hair was neatly parted in the middle
+and he was clean shaven, when to be so smacked of the stage; but his
+manners and expression smacked of nothing of the kind.
+
+"I'm awfully glad to find you at home, Mrs. Stewart," he said. "I've
+been lunching at the Morrisons', and, you know, I'm afraid there's going
+to be a row."
+
+The Morrisons? They lived outside Oxford, and Milly knew them by sight,
+that was all.
+
+"What about?" she asked, kindly, thinking the young man had come for
+help, or at least sympathy, in some embarrassment of his own.
+
+"Why, about your acting Galatea. Jim Morrison's been a regular fool
+about it. He'd no business to take it for granted that that was the part
+I wanted Mrs. Shaw for. Now it appears she's telling every one that
+she's been asked to play the lead at the Besselsfield theatricals; and,
+by Jove, he says she is to, too!"
+
+Milly went rather pale and then quite pink.
+
+"Then of course I couldn't think of taking the part," she said, gasping
+with relief at this providential escape.
+
+Mr. Fitzroy in his turn flushed. He had an obstinate chin and the cares
+of stage-management had already traced a line right across his smooth
+forehead. It deepened to a furrow as he leaned forward out of his low
+wicker chair, clutching the pair of dogskin gloves which he held in his
+hand.
+
+"Oh, come, I say now, Mrs. Stewart!" and his voice and eye were
+surprisingly stern for one so young. "That's not playing fair. You
+promised me you'd see me through this show, and you know as well as I
+do, Mrs. Shaw can no more act than those fire-irons."
+
+"But I--" Milly was about to say "I've never acted in my life"--when she
+remembered that she knew less than any one in her acquaintance what she
+had or had not done in that recent life which was not hers. "I shouldn't
+act Galatea at all well," she substituted lamely; "and I shouldn't look
+the part nearly as well as Mrs. Shaw will."
+
+"Excuse me, Mrs. Stewart, but I'm certain you're simply cut out for it
+all round, and you told me the other day you were particularly anxious
+to play it. You promised you'd stick to me through thick and thin and
+not care a twopenny--I mean a straw--what Jim Morrison and Mrs. Shaw--"
+
+In the stress of conversation they had neither of them noticed the
+tinkle of the front-door bell. Now the door of the room, narrow and in
+the thickness of an enormous wall, was thrown open and Mrs. Shaw was
+announced.
+
+Fitzroy, forgetful of manners in his excitement, stooped forward and
+gripping Milly's arm almost hissed:
+
+"Remember! You've promised me."
+
+The words filled Milly with misery. That any one should be able to
+accuse her of breaking a promise, however unreal her responsibility for
+it, was horrible to her.
+
+Mrs. Shaw entered, no longer the seraph of twenty months ago. She had
+latterly put off the aesthetic raiment she had worn with such peculiar
+grace, and her dress and coiffure were quite in the fashion of the
+hour. The transformation somewhat shocked Milly, who could never help
+feeling a slight austere prejudice against fashionably dressed woman.
+Then, considering how little she knew Mrs. Shaw, it was embarrassing to
+be kissed by her.
+
+"It's odd I should find you here, Mr. Fitzroy," said Mrs. Shaw, settling
+her rustling skirts on a chintzy chair. "I've just come to talk to Mrs.
+Stewart about the acting. I'm so sorry there's been a misunderstanding
+about it."
+
+Her tone was civil but determined, and there was a fighting look in her
+eye.
+
+"So am I, Mrs. Shaw, most uncommonly sorry," returned Fitzroy, patting
+his sleek hair and feeling that his will was adamant, however pretty
+Mrs. Shaw might be.
+
+"Of course, I shouldn't have thought of taking the part away from Mrs.
+Stewart," she resumed, glancing at Milly, not without meaning, "but Mr.
+Morrison asked me to take it quite a fortnight ago. I've learned most of
+it and rehearsed two scenes already with him. He says they go capitally,
+and we both think it seems rather a pity to waste all that labor and
+change the part now."
+
+Fitzroy cast a look at Mrs. Stewart which was meant to call up
+reinforcements from that quarter; but as she sat there quite silent, he
+cleared his throat and begun:
+
+"It's an awful bore, of course, but I fancy it's about three weeks or a
+month since I first asked Mrs. Stewart to play the lead--isn't it, Mrs.
+Stewart?"
+
+Milly muttered assent, horribly suspecting a lie. A flash of indignant
+scorn from Mrs. Shaw confirmed the suspicion.
+
+"Mrs. Stewart said something quite different when I spoke to her about
+it at tennis on Friday. Didn't you, Mildred?" she asked.
+
+Milly crimsoned.
+
+"Did I?" she stammered. "I'm afraid I've got a dreadfully bad
+memory--for--for dates of that kind."
+
+Mrs. Shaw smiled coldly. Mr. Fitzroy felt himself deceived in Mrs.
+Stewart as an ally. He had counted on her promised support, on her wit
+and spirit to carry him through, and her conduct was simply cowardly.
+
+"The fact is, Mrs. Shaw," he said, "Jim Morrison's not bossing this show
+at all. That's where the mistake has come in. My aunt, Lady Wolvercote,
+is a bit of an autocrat, don't you know, and she doesn't like us fellows
+to arrange things on our own account. If she knew you I'm sure she'd see
+what a splendid Galatea you'd make, but as it is she's set her heart on
+getting Mrs. Stewart from the very first."
+
+Had he stopped here his position would have been good, but an indignant
+instinct, urging him to push the reluctant Mrs. Stewart into the proper
+place of woman--that natural shield of man against all the social
+disagreeables he brings on himself--made Fitzroy rush into the fatal
+detail.
+
+"My aunt told you so at the Masonic; didn't she, Mrs. Stewart?"
+
+Milly, under the young man's imperious eye, assented feebly, but Mrs.
+Shaw laughed. She perfectly remembered Mildred having mentioned on that
+very occasion that she did not know Lady Wolvercote by sight.
+
+"I'm afraid I've come just a few minutes too soon," she said, dryly.
+"You and Mr. Fitzroy don't seem to have talked things over quite
+enough."
+
+The saying was dark and yet too clear. Milly, the meticulously truthful,
+saw herself convicted of some horrible falsehood. She blushed violently,
+gasped, and rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Mr. Fitzroy
+ignoring the insinuation, changed his line.
+
+"The part we really wanted you to take, Mrs. Shaw, was that of a nymph
+in an Elizabethan masque which Lumley has written, with music by Stephen
+Bampton. It's to be played in the rose garden and there's a chorus of
+nymphs who sing and dance. We want them to look perfectly lovely, don't
+you know, and as there can't be any make-up to speak of, it's awfully
+difficult to find the right people."
+
+Mrs. Shaw disdained the lure and mentally condemned his anxiously civil
+manner as "soapy."
+
+"I shall ask Mr. Morrison to go to Lady Wolvercote at once," she said,
+"and see whether she really wishes me to give up the part. Time's
+getting on, and he says he won't be able to have many more rehearsals."
+
+There was a sound as of a carriage stopping in the street below, the
+jingling of bits, and a high female voice giving an order. Fitzroy,
+inwardly exasperated by Mrs. Shaw's resistance and the abject conduct of
+his ally, sprang to his feet.
+
+"I believe that's my aunt!" he exclaimed. "She wants me to call at
+Blenheim on the way home, and I suppose the Morrisons told her where I
+was."
+
+He managed to slip his head out between the edge of an awning and the
+mignonette and geraniums of a window-box.
+
+"It's my aunt, right enough. May I fetch her up, Mrs. Stewart?" He was
+down the stairs in a moment and voluble in low-voiced colloquy with the
+lady in the barouche.
+
+Lady Wolvercote was organizing the great fancy fair for the benefit of
+the County Cottage Hospitals, and had left the dramatic part of the
+programme to her nephew to arrange. She was a tall, slight woman, of the
+usual age for aunts, and pleasant to every one; but she took it for
+granted that every one would do as she wished--naturally, since they
+always did in her neighborhood. As she stumbled up the stairs after
+Charlie Fitzroy--it was a dark staircase and narrow in proportion to its
+massive oak balusters--she felt faintly annoyed with him for dragging
+her into the quarrels of his middle-class friends, but confident that
+she could manage them without the least trouble.
+
+Milly was relieved at the return of Mr. Fitzroy with his aunt. She had
+had an unhappy five minutes with Mrs. Shaw, who had been saying cryptic
+but unpleasant things and calling her "Mildred"; whereas she did not so
+much as know Mrs. Shaw's Christian name.
+
+Seeing Mrs. Shaw, beautiful, animated, well-dressed, and Milly neatly
+clothed, since her clothes were not of her own choosing, but with her
+hair unbecomingly knotted, the brightness of her eyes, complexion, and
+expression in eclipse, Lady Wolvercote wondered at her nephew's choice.
+But that was his affair. She began to talk in a rather high-pitched
+voice and continuously, like one whose business it is to talk; so that
+it was difficult to interrupt without rudeness.
+
+"So you're going to be kind enough to act Galatea for us at our fancy
+fair, Mrs. Stewart? We want it to be a great success, and Lord
+Wolvercote and I have heard so much about your acting. My nephew said
+the part of Galatea would suit you exactly; didn't you, Charlie?"
+
+"Down to the ground," interpolated, or rather accompanied, Fitzroy. "We
+shall have the placards out on Wednesday, and people are looking forward
+already to seeing Mrs. Stewart. There'll be a splendid audience."
+
+"Every one has promised to fill their houses for the fair," Lady
+Wolvercote was continuing, "and the Duke thinks he may be able to get
+down ----," she mentioned a royalty. "You're going to help us too,
+aren't you, Mrs. Shaw? It's so very kind of you. We've got such a pretty
+part for you in a musical affair which Lenny Lumley wrote with somebody
+or other for the Duchess of Ulster's Elizabethan bazaar. There's a
+chorus of fairies--nymphs, Charlie? Yes, nymphs, and we want them all
+to be very pretty and able to sing, and there's a charming dance for
+them. I'm afraid that silly boy, Jim Morrison, made some mistake about
+it, and told you we wanted you to act Galatea. But of course we couldn't
+possibly do without you in the other thing, and Mrs. Stewart seems quite
+pointed out for that Galatea part. Jim's such a dear, isn't he? And such
+a splendid actor, every one says he really ought to go on the stage. But
+we none of us pay the least attention to anything the dear boy says, for
+he always does manage to get things wrong."
+
+Mrs. Shaw had been making little movements preparatory to going. She had
+no gift for the stage except beauty, but that produces an illusion of
+success, and she took her acting with the seriousness of a Duse.
+
+"I'm sorry I didn't know Mr. Morrison's habits better," she replied.
+"I've been studying the part of Galatea a good deal and rehearsing it
+with him as well. Of course, I don't for a moment wish to prevent Mrs.
+Stewart from taking it, but I've spent a good deal of time upon it and
+I'm afraid I can't undertake anything else. Of course, it's very
+inconvenient stopping in Oxford in August, and I shouldn't care to do it
+except for the sake of a part which I felt gave me a real opportunity--"
+
+"But it's a very pretty part we've got for you," resumed Lady
+Wolvercote, perplexed. "And we were hoping to see you over at
+Besselsfield a good deal for rehearsals--"
+
+It seemed to her a "part of nature's holy plan" that the prospect of
+Besselsfield should prove irresistibly attractive to the wives of
+professional men.
+
+"Thanks, so much, but I'm sure you and Mr. Fitzroy must know plenty of
+girls who would do for that sort of part," returned Mrs. Shaw.
+
+Milly here broke in eagerly:
+
+"Please, Lady Wolvercote, do persuade Mrs. Shaw to take Galatea; I'm
+sure I sha'n't be able to do it a bit; and I would try and take the
+nymph. I should love the music, and I know I could do the singing,
+anyhow."
+
+She rose because Mrs. Shaw had risen and was looking for her parasol and
+shaking out her plumes. But why did Mr. Fitzroy and Mrs. Shaw both stare
+at her in an unvarnished surprise, touched with ridicule on the lady's
+side?
+
+"No, no, Mrs. Stewart, that won't do!" cried he, in obvious dismay. At
+the same moment Mrs. Shaw ejaculated, ironically:
+
+"That's very brave of you Mildred! I thought you hated music and were
+never going to try to sing again."
+
+She and Fitzroy had both been present on an occasion when Mildred, urged
+on by Milly's musical reputation, had committed herself to an experiment
+in song which had not been successful.
+
+"Thank you very much," Mrs. Shaw went on, "for offering to change, but
+of course Lady Wolvercote must arrange things as she likes; and, to
+speak frankly, I'm not particularly sorry to give the acting up, as my
+husband was rather upset at my not being able to go to Switzerland with
+him on the 28th. No, please don't trouble; I can let myself out.
+Good-bye, Lady Wolvercote; I hope the fair and the theatricals will be a
+great success. Good-bye, Mr. Fitzroy, good-bye."
+
+Lady Wolvercote's faint remonstrances were drowned in the adieus, and
+Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly
+into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing
+with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage
+had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a
+public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard
+Fitzroy's bitter remarks on Mrs. Shaw--not forgetting Jim Morrison--or
+Lady Wolvercote exclaiming in a voice almost dreamy with amazement:
+
+"Really it's too extraordinary!"
+
+"I'm very sorry Mrs. Shaw won't take the part," said Milly, clasping and
+unclasping her slender fingers, "for I know I can't do it myself."
+
+Fitzroy was protesting, but she forced herself to continue: "You don't
+know what I'm like when I'm nervous. When we had _tableaux vivants_ at
+Ascham I was supposed to be Charlotte putting a wreath on Werther's urn,
+and I trembled so much that I knocked the urn down. It was only
+card-board, so it didn't break, but every one laughed and the tableau
+was spoiled."
+
+Fitzroy and his aunt cried out that that was nothing, a first
+appearance; any one could see she had got over that now. Pale, with
+terrified eyes, she looked from one to the other of her tormentors, who
+continued to sing the praises of her past prowess on the boards and to
+foretell the unprecedented harvest of laurels she would reap at
+Besselsfield. The higher their enthusiasm rose, the more profound became
+her dejection. There seemed no loop-hole for escape, unless the earth
+would open and swallow her, which however much to be desired was hardly
+to be expected.
+
+The ting of a bicycle-bell below did not seem to promise assistance, for
+cyclists affected the quiet street. But it happened that this bicycle
+bore Ian to the door. He did not notice the coronet on the carriage
+which stood before it, and assumed it to belong to one of the three or
+four ladies in Oxford who kept such equipages. Yet in the blank state of
+Milly's memory, he was sorry she had not denied herself to visitors,
+which Mildred had already learned to do with a freedom only possible to
+women who are assured social success. Commonly the sight of a carriage
+would have sent him tiptoeing past the drawing-room, but now, vaguely
+uneasy, he came straight in. He looked particularly tall in the frame of
+the doorway, so low that his black hair almost touched the lintel;
+particularly handsome in the shaded, white-panelled room, into which the
+dark glow of his sunburned skin and brown eyes, bright with exercise,
+seemed to bring the light and warmth of the summer earth and sky.
+
+Milly sprang to meet him. Lady Wolvercote was surprised to learn that
+this was Mrs. Stewart's husband. She had no idea a Don could be so
+young and good-looking. Judging of Dons solely by the slight and
+slighting references of her undergraduate relatives, she had imagined
+them to be weird-looking men, within various measurable distances of the
+grave.
+
+"Lady Wolvercote and Mr. Fitzroy want me to act Galatea at the
+Besselsfield theatricals," said Milly, clinging to his sleeve and
+looking up at him with appealing eyes. "Please tell them I can't
+possibly do it. I'm--I'm not well enough--am I?"
+
+"We're within three weeks of the performance, sir," put in Fitzroy.
+"Mrs. Stewart promised she'd do it, and we shall be in a regular fix now
+if she gives it up. Mrs. Shaw's chucked us already."
+
+"Yes, and every one says how splendidly Mrs. Stewart acts," pleaded Lady
+Wolvercote.
+
+Stewart had half forgotten the matter; but now he remembered that
+Mildred had been keen to have the part only a week ago, and a little
+pettish because he had advised her to leave it alone, on account of Mrs.
+Shaw. Now she was hanging on him with desperate eyes and that worried
+brow which he had not seen once since he had married her.
+
+"I'm extremely sorry, Lady Wolvercote," he said, "but my wife's had a
+nervous break-down lately and I can't allow her to act. She's not fit
+for it."
+
+"Ah, I see--I quite understand!" returned Lady Wolvercote. "But we'd
+take great care of her, Mr. Stewart. She could come and stay at
+Besselsfield."
+
+Fitzroy's gloom lifted. His aunt was a trump. Surely an invitation to
+Besselsfield must do the job. But Stewart, though apologetic, was
+inflexible. He had forbidden his wife to act and there was an end of it.
+The perception of the differences between the two personalities of Milly
+which had been thrust to-day on his unwilling mind, made him grasp the
+meaning of her frantic appeals for protection. He relieved her of all
+responsibility for her refusal to act.
+
+Lady Wolvercote observed, as she and her nephew went sadly on their way,
+that Mr. Stewart seemed a very, very odd man in spite of his presentable
+manners and appearance; and Fitzroy replied gloomily that of course he
+was a beast. Dons always were beasts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+The diplomatic incident of the theatricals was not the only minor
+trouble which Milly found awaiting her. The cook's nerves were upset by
+a development of rigid economy on the part of her mistress, and she gave
+notice; the house parlor-maid followed suit. No one seemed to have kept
+Ian's desk tidy, his papers in order, or his clothes properly mended. It
+was a joy to her to put everything belonging to him right.
+
+When all was arranged to her satisfaction: "Ian," she said, sitting on
+his knee with her head on his shoulder, "I can't bear to think how
+wretched you must have been all the time I was away."
+
+Ian was silent a minute.
+
+"But you haven't been away, and I don't like you to talk as though you
+had."
+
+Wretched? It would have been absurd to think of himself as wretched now;
+yet compared with the wonderful happiness that had been his for more
+than half a year, what was this "house swept and garnished"? An empty
+thing. Words of Tims's which he had thought irritating and absurd at the
+time, haunted him now. "_You don't mean to say you haven't seen the
+difference?_" He might not have seen it, but he had felt it. He felt it
+now.
+
+There was at any rate no longer any question of Dieppe. They took
+lodgings at Sheringham and he made good progress with his book. Yet not
+quite so good as he had hoped. Milly was indefatigable in looking up
+points and references, in preventing him from slipping into the small
+inaccuracies to which he was prone; but he missed the stimulus of
+Mildred's alert mind, so quick to hit a blot in logic or in taste, so
+vivid in appreciation.
+
+Milly meantime guessed nothing of his dissatisfaction. She adored her
+husband more every day, and her happiness would have been perfect had it
+not been for the haunting horror of the possible "change" which might be
+lurking for her round the corner of any night--that "change," which
+other people might call what they liked, but which meant for her the
+robbery of her life, her young happy life with Ian. He had taken her
+twice to Norton-Smith before the great man went for his holiday.
+Norton-Smith had pronounced it a peculiar but not unprecedented case of
+collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the
+consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time,
+rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would,
+he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs.
+Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young
+woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to bring to the
+doctor's notice the changes in character and intelligence that had
+accompanied the losses of memory, he found his remarks set aside like
+the chatter of a foolish child.
+
+If maternity would indeed exorcise the Invader, Milly had lost no time
+in beginning the exorcism. And she did believe that somehow it would;
+not because the doctor said so, but because she could not believe God
+would let a child's mother be changed in that way, at any rate while she
+was bearing it. To do so would be to make it more motherless than any
+little living thing on earth. Milly had always been quietly but deeply
+religious, and she struggled hard against the feeling of peculiar
+injustice in this strange affliction that had been sent to her. She
+prayed earnestly to God every night to help and protect her and her
+child, and the period of six or seven months, at which the "change" had
+come before, passed without a sign of it. In April a little boy was
+born. They called him Antonio, after a learned Italian, a friend and
+teacher of Ian's.
+
+The advent of the child did something to explain the comparative
+seclusion into which Mrs. Stewart had retired, and the curious dulling
+of that brilliant personality of hers. The Master of Durham was among
+the few of Mrs. Stewart's admirers who declined to recognize the change
+in her. He had been attracted by the girl Milly Flaxman, by her gentle,
+shy manners and pretty face, combined with her reputation for
+scholarship; the brilliant Invader had continued to attract him in
+another way. The difference between the two, if faced, would have been
+disagreeably mysterious. He preferred to say and think that there was
+none; Mrs. Stewart was probably not very well.
+
+Milly's shyness made it peculiarly awkward for her to find herself in
+possession of a number of friends whom she would not have chosen
+herself, and of whose doings and belongings she was in complete
+ignorance. However, if she gave offence she was unconscious of it, and
+it came very naturally to her to shrink back into the shadow of her
+household gods. Ian and the baby were almost sufficient in themselves to
+fill her life. There was just room on the outskirts of it for a few
+relations and old friends, and Aunt Beatrice still held her honored
+place. But it was through Aunt Beatrice that she was first to learn the
+feel of a certain dull heartache which was destined to grow upon her
+like some fell disease, a thing of ceaseless pain.
+
+She was especially anxious to get Aunt Beatrice, who had been in America
+all the Summer Vacation, to stay with them in the Autumn Term as Lady
+Thomson had been with them in May, and Milly did not like to think of
+the number of things, all wrong, which she was sure to have noticed in
+the house. Besides, what with theatricals and other engagements, it was
+evident that a good many people had been "in and out" in the Summer
+Term--a condition of life which Lady Thomson always denounced. Milly was
+anxious for her to see that that phase was past and that her favorite
+niece had settled down into the quiet, well-ordered existence of which
+she approved.
+
+Aunt Beatrice came; but oh, disappointment! If it had been possible to
+say of Lady Thomson, whose moods were under almost perfect control,
+that she was out of temper, Milly would have said it. She volunteered no
+opinion, but when asked, she compared Milly's new cook unfavorably with
+her former one. When her praise was anxiously sought, she observed that
+it was undesirable to be careless in one's housekeeping, but less
+disagreeable than to be fussy and house-proud. She added that
+Milly--whom she called Mildred--must be on her guard against relaxing
+into domestic dulness, when she could be so extremely clever and
+charming if she liked. Milly was bewildered and distressed. She felt
+sure that she had passed through a phase of which Aunt Beatrice ought to
+have disapproved. She had evidently been frivolous and neglectful of her
+duties; yet it seemed as though her aunt had been better pleased with
+her when she was like that. What could have made Aunt Beatrice, of all
+women, unkind and unjust?
+
+In this way more than a year went by. The baby grew and was
+short-coated; the October Term came round once more, and still Milly
+remained the same Milly. To have wished it otherwise would have seemed
+like wishing for her death.
+
+But at times a great longing for another, quite another, came over Ian.
+It was like a longing for the beloved dead. Of course it was mad--mad!
+He struggled against the feeling, and generally succeeded in getting
+back to the point of view that the change had been more in himself, in
+his own emotional moods, than in Milly.
+
+October, the golden month, passed by and November came in, soft and
+dim; a merry month for the hunting men beside the coverts, where the
+red-brown leaves still hung on the oak-trees and brushwood, and among
+the grassy lanes, the wide fresh fields and open hill-sides. No ill
+month either for those who love to light the lamp early and open their
+books beside a cheerful fire. But then the rain came, a persistent,
+soaking rain. Milly always went to her district on Tuesdays, no matter
+what the weather, and this time she caught a cold. Ian urged her to stop
+in bed next morning. He himself had to be in College early, and could
+not come home till the afternoon.
+
+It was still raining and the early falling twilight was murky and brown.
+The dull yellow glare of the street-lamps was faintly reflected in the
+muddy wetness of pavements and streets. He was carrying a great armful
+of books and papers under his dripping mackintosh and umbrella. As he
+walked homeward as fast as his inconvenient load allowed, he became
+acutely conscious of a depression of spirits which had been growing upon
+him all day. It was the weather, he argued, affecting his nerves or
+digestion. The vision of a warm, cosey house, a devoted wife awaiting
+him, ought to have cheered him, but it did not. He hoped he would not
+feel irritable when Milly rushed into the hall as soon as his key was
+heard in the front door, to feel him all over and take every damp thread
+tragically. Poor dear Milly! What a discontented brute of a husband she
+had got! The fault was no doubt with himself, and he would not really be
+happy even if some miracle did set him down on a sunny Mediterranean
+shore, with enough money to live upon and nothing to think of but his
+book. Mildred used to say that she always went to a big dinner at Durham
+in the unquenchable hope of meeting and fascinating some millionaire who
+had sense enough to see how much better it would be to endow writers of
+good books than readers of silly ones.
+
+With the recollection there rang in the ears of his mind the sound of a
+laugh which he had not heard for seventeen months. Something seemed to
+tighten about his heart. Yes, he could be quite happy without the
+millionaire, without the sunny skies, without even the pretty,
+comfortable home at whose door he stood, if somewhere, anywhere, he
+could hope to hear that laugh again, to hold again in his arms the
+strange bright bride who had melted from them like snow in
+spring-time--but that way madness lay. He thrust the involuntary longing
+from him almost with horror, and turned the latch-key in his door.
+
+The hall lamp was burning low and the house seemed very chilly and
+quiet. He put his books down on the oak table, threw his streaming
+mackintosh upon the large chest, and went up to his dressing-room, to
+change whatever was still damp about him before seeking Milly, who
+presumably was nursing her cold before the study fire. When he had
+thrown off his shoes, he noticed that the door leading to his wife's
+room was ajar and a faint red glow of firelight showed invitingly
+through the chink. A fire! It was irresistible. He went in quickly and
+stirred the coals to a roaring blaze. The dancing flames lit up the
+long, low room with its few pieces of furniture, its high white
+wainscoting, and paper patterned with birds and trellised leaves. They
+lit up the low white bed and the white figure of his sleeping wife. Till
+then he had thought the room was empty. She lay there so deathly still
+and straight that he was smitten with a sudden fear; but leaning over
+her he heard her quiet, regular breathing and saw that if somewhat pale,
+she was normal in color. He touched her hand. It was withdrawn by a
+mechanical movement, but not before he had felt that it was warm.
+
+A wild excitement thrilled him; it would have been truer to say a wild
+joy, only that it held a pang of remorse for itself. So she had lain at
+the Hotel du Chalet when he had left her for that long walk over the
+crisp mountain snow. And when he had returned, she--what She? No, his
+brain did not reel on the verge of madness; it merely accepted under the
+compulsion of knowledge a truth of those truths that are too profound to
+admit of mere external proof. For our reason plays at the edge of the
+universe as a little child plays at the edge of the sea, gathering from
+its fringes the flotsam and jetsam of its mighty life. But miles and
+miles beyond the ken of the eager eye, beyond the reach of the alert
+hand, lies the whole great secret life of the sea. And if it were all
+laid bare and spread at the child's feet, how could the little hand
+suffice to gather its vast treasures, the inexperienced eye to perceive
+and classify them?
+
+Alone in the firelit, silent room, with this tranced form before him,
+Ian Stewart knew that the woman who would arise from that bed would be a
+different woman from the one who had lain down upon it. By what
+mysterious alchemy of nature transmuted he could not understand, any
+more than he could understand the greater part of the workings of that
+cosmic energy which he was compelled to recognize, although he might be
+cheated with words into believing that he understood them. Another woman
+would arise and she his Love. She had been gone so long; his heart had
+hungered for her so long, in silence even to himself. She had been dead
+and now she was about to be raised from the dead. He lighted the
+candles, locked the doors, and paced softly up and down, stopping to
+look at the figure on the bed from time to time. Far around him, close
+about him, life was moving at its usual jog-trot pace. People were going
+back to their College rooms or domestic hearths, grumbling about the
+weather or their digestions or their colds, thinking of their work for
+the evening or of their dinner engagements--and suddenly a door had shut
+between him and all that outside world. He was no longer moving in the
+driven herd. He was alone, above them in an upper chamber, awaiting the
+miracle of resurrection.
+
+In the visions that passed before his mind's eye the face of Milly,
+pale, with pleading eyes, was not absent; but with a strange hardness
+which he had never felt before, he thrust the sighing phantom from him.
+She had had her turn of happiness, a long one; it was only fair that
+now they two, he and that Other, should have their chance, should put
+their lips to the full cup of life. The figure on the bed stirred,
+turned on one side, and slipped a hand under the pure curve of the young
+cheek. He was by the bed in a moment; but it still slept, though less
+profoundly, without that tranced look, as though the flame of life
+itself burned low within.
+
+How would she first greet him? Last time she had leaned into the clear
+sunshine and laughed to him from the cloud of her amber hair; and a
+spirit in his blood had leaped to the music of her laugh, even while the
+rational self knew not it was the lady of his love. But however she came
+back it would be she, the Beloved. He felt exultantly how little, after
+all, the frame mattered. Last time he had found her, his love had been
+set in the sunshine and the splendor of the Alpine snows, with nothing
+to jar, nothing to distract it from itself. And that was good. To-day,
+it was opening, a sudden and wonderful bloom, in the midst of the murky
+discomfort of an English November, the droning hum of the machinery of
+his daily work. And this, too, was good.
+
+Yes, it was better because of the contrast between the wonder and its
+environment, better because he himself was more conscious of his joy. He
+sat on the bed a while watching her impatiently. In his eyes she was
+already filled with a new loveliness, but he wanted her hair, her amber
+hair. It was brushed back and imprisoned tightly in a little plait tied
+with a white ribbon--Milly's way. With fingers clumsy, yet gentle, he
+took off the ribbon and cautiously undid the plait. Then he took a comb
+and spread out the silk-soft hair more as he liked to see it, pleased
+with his own skill in the unaccustomed task. She stirred again, but
+still she did not wake. He was pacing up and down the room when she
+raised herself a little on her pillow and looked fixedly at the opposite
+wall. Ian held his breath. He stood perfectly still and watched her.
+Presently she sat up and looked about her, looked at him with a faint,
+vague smile, like that of a baby. He sat down at the foot of the bed and
+took her hand. She smiled at him again, this time with more definite
+meaning.
+
+"Do you know who it is, sweetheart?" he said in a low voice. She nodded
+slightly and went on smiling, as though quietly happy.
+
+"Ian," she breathed, at length.
+
+"Yes, darling."
+
+"I've been away a long, long time. How long?"
+
+He told her.
+
+She uttered a little "Ah!" and frowned; lay quiet awhile, then drew her
+hand from Ian's and sat up still more.
+
+"I sha'n't lie here any longer," she said, in a stronger voice. "It's
+just waste of time." She pushed back the clothes and swung her feet out
+of bed. "Oh, how glad I am to be back again! Are you glad I'm back, Ian?
+Say you are, do say you are!"
+
+And Ian on his knees before her, said that he was.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Ian was leaning against the high mantel-piece of his study. Above it,
+let into the panelling, was an eighteenth-century painting of the Bridge
+and Castle of St. Angelo, browned by time. He was wondering how to tell
+Mildred about the child, and whether she would resent its presence. She,
+too, was meditating, chin on hand. At length she looked up with a sudden
+smile.
+
+"What about the baby, Ian? Don't you take any notice of it yet?"
+
+He was surprised.
+
+"How do you know about him?"
+
+She frowned thoughtfully.
+
+"I seem to know things that have happened in a kind of way--rather as
+though I had seen them in a dream. But they haven't happened to me, you
+know."
+
+"Was it the same last time?"
+
+"No; but the first time I came, and especially just at first, I seemed
+to remember all kinds of things--" She paused as though trying in vain
+to revive her impressions--"Odd things, not a bit like anything in
+Oxford. I can't recall them now, but sometimes in London I fancy I've
+seen places before."
+
+"Of course you have, dear."
+
+"And the first time I saw that old picture there I knew it was Rome, and
+I had a notion that I'd been there and seen just that view."
+
+"You've been seeing pictures and reading books and hearing talk all your
+life, and in the peculiar state of your memory, I suppose you can't
+distinguish between the impressions made on it by facts and by ideas."
+
+Mildred was silent; but it was not the silence of conviction. Then she
+jumped up.
+
+"I'm going to see Baby. You needn't come if you don't want."
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"I'm afraid it's too late. Milly doesn't like--" He broke off with a
+wild laugh. "What am I talking about!"
+
+"I suppose you were going to say, Milly doesn't like people taking a
+candle into the room when Baby is shut up for the night. I don't care
+what Milly likes. He's my baby now, and he's sure to look a duck when
+he's asleep. Come along!"
+
+She put her arm through his and together they climbed the steep
+staircase to the nursery.
+
+Mildred had returned to the world in such excellent spirits at merely
+being there, that she took those awkward situations which Milly had
+inevitably bequeathed to her, as capital jokes. The partial and external
+acquaintance with Milly's doings and points of view which she had
+brought back with her, made everything easier than before; but her
+derisive dislike of her absent rival was intensified. It pained Ian if
+she dropped a hint of it. Tims was the only person to whom she could
+have the comfort of expressing herself; and even Tims made faces and
+groaned faintly, as though she did not enjoy Mildred's wit when Milly
+was the subject of it. She gave Milly's cook notice at once, but most
+things she found in a satisfactory state--particularly the family
+finances. More negatively satisfactory was the state of her wardrobe,
+since so little had been bought. Mildred still shuddered at the
+recollection of the trousseau frocks.
+
+Once more Mrs. Stewart, whose social career had been like that of the
+proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement
+was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active
+brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to take up more
+serious interests.
+
+It seemed wiser, too, to make no sudden break with Milly's habits.
+Still, Emma, the nurse, opined that Baby got on all the better since
+Mrs. Stewart had become "more used to him like"--wasn't always changing
+his food, taking his temperature, wanting him to have bandages and
+medicine, forbidding him to be talked to or sung to, and pulling his
+little, curling-up limbs straight when he was going to sleep. He was a
+healthy little fellow and already pretty, with his soft dark
+hair--softer than anything in the world except a baby's hair--his
+delicate eyebrows and bright dark eyes. Mildred loved playing with him.
+Sometimes when Ian heard the tiny shrieks of baby laughter, he used to
+think with a smile and yet with a pang of pity, how shocked poor Milly
+would have been at this titillation of the infant brain. But he did not
+want thoughts of Milly--so far as he could he shut the door of his mind
+against them. She would come back, no doubt, sooner or later; and her
+coming back would mean that Mildred would be robbed of her life, his own
+life robbed of its joy.
+
+At the end of Term the Master of Durham sent a note to bid the Stewarts
+to dine with him and meet Sir Henry Milwood, the rich Australian, and
+Maxwell Davison, the traveller and Orientalist. Ian remarked that
+Davison was a cousin, although they had not met since he was a boy.
+Maxwell Davison had gone to the East originally as agent for some big
+firm, and had spent there nearly twenty years. He was an accomplished
+Persian and Arabic scholar, and gossip related that he had run off with
+a fair Persian from a Constantinople harem and lived with her in Persia
+until her death. But that was years ago.
+
+When the Stewarts entered the Master's bare bachelor drawing-room, they
+found besides the Milwoods, only familiar faces. Maxwell Davison was
+still awaited, and with interest. He came, and that interest did not
+appear to be mutual, judging from the Oriental impassivity of his long,
+brown face, with its narrow, inscrutable eyes. He was tall, slight,
+sinewy as a Bedouin, his age uncertain, since his dry leanness and the
+dash of silver at his temples might be the effect of burning desert
+suns.
+
+Mildred was delighted at first at being sent into dinner with him, but
+she found him disappointingly taciturn. In truth, he had acquired
+Oriental habits and views with regard to women. If a foolish Occidental
+custom demanded that they should sit at meat with the lords of creation,
+he, Maxwell Davison, would not pretend to acquiesce in it. Mildred, to
+whom it was unthinkable that any man should not wish to talk to her,
+merely pitied his shyness and determined to break it down; but Davison's
+attitude was unbending.
+
+After dinner the Master, his mortar-board cap on his head, opened the
+drawing-room door and invited them to come across to the College Library
+to see some bronzes and a few other things that Mr. Davison had
+temporarily deposited there. He had divined that Maxwell Davison would
+be willing to sell, and in his guileful soul the little Master may have
+had schemes of persuading his wealthy friend Milwood to purchase any
+bronzes that might be of value to the College or the University. Of the
+ladies, only Mildred and Miss Moore, the archaeologist, braved the chill
+of the mediaeval Library to inspect the collection. Davison professed to
+no artistic or antiquarian knowledge of the bronzes. They had come to
+him in the way of trade and had all been dug up in Asia Minor--no, not
+all, for one he had picked up in England. Nevertheless he had succeeded
+in getting a pretty clear notion of the relative value of his
+bronzes--the Oriental curios with them it was his business to
+understand. He could not help observing the sure instinct with which
+Mrs. Stewart selected what was best among all these different objects.
+She had the _flair_ of the born collector. The learned archaeologists
+present leaned over the collection discussing and disputing, and took no
+notice of her remarks as she rapidly handled each article. But Davison
+did, and when at length she took up a small figure of Augustus--the
+bronze that had not come from Asia Minor--and looked at it with a
+peculiar doubtful intentness, he began to feel uncomfortable.
+
+"Anything wrong with that?" he asked, in spite of himself.
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davison, please ask some one who knows! I don't. Only I--I seem
+to have seen something like it before, that's all."
+
+Sanderson, roaming around the professed archaeologists, took the bronze
+from her hands.
+
+"I'll tell you where you've seen it, Mrs. Stewart. It's engraved in
+Egerton's _Private Collections of Great Britain_. I picked that up the
+other day--first edition, 1818. I dare say the book's here. We'll see."
+
+Sanderson took a candle and went glimmering away down the long, dark
+room.
+
+"What can this be?" asked Mildred, taking up what looked like a glass
+ball.
+
+"Please stand over here and look into it for five minutes," returned
+Davison, evasively. "Perhaps you'll see what it is then."
+
+He somehow wanted to get rid of Mildred's appraisal of his goods.
+
+"Mr. Davison, your glass ball has gone quite cloudy!" she exclaimed, in
+a minute or two.
+
+"That's all right. Go on looking and you'll see something more," he
+returned.
+
+Presently she said:
+
+"It's so curious. I see the whole room reflected in the glass now, but
+it's much lighter than it really is, and the windows seem larger. It all
+looks so different. There is some one down there in white."
+
+Sanderson came up the room carrying a large quarto, open.
+
+"Here's your bronze, right enough," he said, putting the book down on
+the table. "It's under the heading, _Hammerton Collection_."
+
+He pointed to a small engraving inscribed, "Bronze statuette of
+Augustus. _Very rare._"
+
+"But some fellow's been scribbling something here," continued Sanderson,
+turning the book around to read a note written along the margin. He read
+out: "'A forgery. Sold by Lady Hammerton to Mr. Solomons, 1819. See case
+Solomons _versus_ Hammerton, 1820.'"
+
+The turning of the book showed Mildred a full-page engraving entitled,
+"The Gallery, Hammerton House." It represented a long room somewhat like
+the one in which they stood, but still more like the room she had seen
+in the crystal; and in the middle distance there was a slightly sketched
+figure of a woman in a light dress. Half incredulous, half frightened,
+she pored over the engraving which reproduced so strangely the image she
+had seen in Maxwell Davison's mysterious ball.
+
+"How funny!" she almost whispered.
+
+"You may call it funny, of course, that Lady Hammerton succeeded in
+cheating a Jew, which is what it looks like," rejoined Sanderson, bent
+on hunting down his quarry; "but it was pretty discreditable to her
+too."
+
+"Not at all," Maxwell Davison's harsh voice broke in. "That was
+Solomons's look out. I sha'n't bring a lawsuit against the fellow who
+sold me that Augustus, if it is a forgery. A man's a fool to deal in
+things he doesn't understand."
+
+"What is this glass ball, Mr. Davison?" asked Miss Moore, in her turn
+taking up the uncanny thing Mildred had laid down.
+
+"It's a divining-crystal. In the East certain people, mostly boys, look
+in these crystals and see all sorts of things, present, past, and to
+come."
+
+Miss Moore laughed.
+
+"Or pretend they do!"
+
+"Who knows? It isn't of any interest, really. The things that have
+happened have happened, and the things that are to happen will happen
+just as surely, whether we foresee them or not."
+
+Miss Moore turned to the Master.
+
+"Look, Master--this is a divining-crystal, and Mr. Davison's trying to
+persuade me that in the East people really see visions in it."
+
+The Master smiled.
+
+"Mr. Davison has a poor opinion of ladies' intelligence, I'm afraid. He
+thinks they are children, who will believe any fairy tale."
+
+Davison had drawn near to Mildred as the Master spoke; his eyes met hers
+and the impassive face wore a faint, ironical smile.
+
+"The Wisdom of the West speaks!" he exclaimed, in a low voice. "I'd
+almost forgotten the sound of it."
+
+Then scrutinizing her pale face: "I'm afraid you've had a scare. What
+did you see?"
+
+"I saw--well, I fancy I saw the Gallery at Hammerton House and my
+ancestress, Lady Hammerton. It was burned, you know, and she was burned
+with it, trying to save her collections. I expect she condescended to
+give me a glimpse of them because I've inherited her mania. I'd be a
+collector, too, if I had the money."
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"You should take Ian to the East," returned Davison. "You could make
+money there and learn things--the Wisdom of the East, for instance."
+
+Mildred, recovering her equanimity, smiled at him.
+
+"No, never! The Wisdom of the West engrosses us; but you'll come and
+tell us about the other, won't you?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Maxwell Davison settled in Oxford for six months, in order to see his
+great book on Persian Literature through the press. His advent had been
+looked forward to as promising a welcome variety, bringing a splash of
+vivid color into a somewhat quiet-hued, monotonous world. But there was
+doomed to be some disappointment. Mr. Davison went rather freely to
+College dinners but seldom into general society. It came to be
+understood that he disliked meeting women; Mrs. Stewart, however, he
+appeared to except from his condemnation or rule. Ian was his cousin,
+which made a pretext at first for going to the Stewarts' house; but he
+went because he found the couple interesting in their respective ways.
+Some Dons, unable to believe that a man without a University education
+could teach them anything, would lecture him out of their little
+pocketful of knowledge about Oriental life and literature. Ian, on the
+contrary, was an admirable producer of all that was interesting in
+others; and in Davison that all was much. At first he had tried to keep
+Mrs. Stewart in what he conceived to be her proper place; but as time
+went on he found himself dropping in at the old house with surprising
+frequency, and often when he knew Ian to be in College or too busy to
+attend to him.
+
+He had brought horses with him and offered to give Mildred a mount
+whenever she liked. Milly had learned the rudiments of the art, but she
+was too timid to care for riding. Mildred, on the other hand, delighted
+in the swift motion through the air, the sensation of the strong
+bounding life almost incorporated with her own, and if she had moments
+of terror she had more of ecstatic daring. She and Davison ended by
+riding together once or twice a week.
+
+Interesting as Mildred found Maxwell Davison's companionship, it did not
+altogether conduce to her happiness. She who had been so content to be
+merely alive, began now to chafe at the narrow limits of her existence.
+He opened the wide horizons of the world before her, and her soul seemed
+native to them. One April afternoon they rode to Wytham together. The
+woods of Wytham clothe a long ridge of hill around which the young
+Thames sweeps in a strong curve and through them a grass ride runs
+unbroken for a mile and a half. Now side by side, now passing and
+repassing each other, they had "kept the great pace" along the track,
+the horses slackening their speed somewhat as they went down the dip,
+only to spring forward with fresh impetus, lifting their hind-quarters
+gallantly to the rise; then given their heads for the last burst along
+the straight bit to the drop of the hill, away they went in passionate
+competition, foam-flecked and sending the clods flying from their
+hurrying hoofs.
+
+A mile and a half of galloping only serves to whet the appetite of a
+well-girt horse, and the foaming rivals hardly allowed themselves to be
+pulled up at the edge of a steep grassy slope, where already here and
+there a yellow cowslip bud was beginning to break its pale silken
+sheath. At length their impatient dancing was over, and they stood
+quiet, resigned to the will of the incomprehensible beings who
+controlled them. But Mildred's blood was dancing still and she abandoned
+herself to the pleasure of it, undistracted by speech. Beyond the
+shining Thames, wide-curving through its broad green meadows, and the
+gray bridge and tower of Eynsham, that great landscape, undulating,
+clothed in the mystery of moving cloud-shadows, gave her an agreeable
+impression of being a view into a strange country, hundreds of miles
+away from Oxford and the beaten track. But Maxwell's eyes were fixed
+upon her.
+
+The wood about them was just breaking into the various beauty of spring
+foliage, emerald and gold and red; a few trees still holding up naked
+gray branches among it; here and there a white cloud of cherry blossom,
+shining in a clearing or floating mistily amid bursting tree-tops below
+them. They turned to the right, down a narrow ride, mossy and winding,
+where perforce they trod on flowers as they went; for the path and the
+wood about it were carpeted with blue dog-violets and the pale soft
+blossoms of primroses, opening in clusters amid their thick fresh
+foliage and the brown of last year's fallen leaves. The sky above wore
+the intense blue in which dark clouds are seen floating, and as the
+gleams of travelling sunshine passed over the wooded hill, its colors
+also glowed with a peculiar intensity. The horses, no longer excited by
+a vista of turf, were walking side by side. But the beauty of earth and
+sky were nothing to Maxwell, whose whole being was intent on the beauty
+of the woman in the saddle beside him; the rose and the gold of cheek
+and hair, the lithe grace of the body, lightly moving to the motion of
+her horse.
+
+She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.
+
+"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to
+you."
+
+"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on
+her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"
+
+"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you
+condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm
+learning the proper way for a woman to talk."
+
+"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've
+covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."
+
+"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat?
+Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What
+he'd feel!"
+
+She laughed delightedly.
+
+"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose path,' you see, and
+they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're
+not afraid of anything."
+
+"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and--most butlers."
+
+Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.
+
+"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you
+better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's
+because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty
+things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you,
+you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."
+
+"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them
+out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"
+
+He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her
+horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced
+herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task
+accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently
+she turned towards him, brightening.
+
+"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer
+without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free
+feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could
+jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and
+nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one
+chose. But I can't explain what I mean."
+
+"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean
+is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an
+air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it!
+None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be
+the life for you."
+
+It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous
+soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her
+wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom,
+travel, and motion--all that really was as the breath of life to her--it
+fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that
+sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once
+excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment
+she had turned to him with a challenging smile.
+
+"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."
+
+"So it is--for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less
+mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake--which causes such a deal
+of unnecessary misery and waste in the world--the mistake of supposing
+that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey.
+You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's
+bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to
+wish them to distort themselves to fit it."
+
+"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so
+glad."
+
+"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you
+oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to
+the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as
+you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You
+daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice
+it is to ride with your hat off."
+
+They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to
+Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field
+to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods
+from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the
+horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred
+did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.
+
+"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as
+she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show
+him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet
+smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind
+her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its
+head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs
+drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a
+minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from
+each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most
+Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the
+hind-quarters of his big horse lifting powerfully under him, as it sped
+with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and
+vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed,
+seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business,
+she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the
+long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by
+which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in
+hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew
+past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the
+gate.
+
+"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her
+whip at him.
+
+Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and
+anxiety.
+
+"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her.
+"You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate,
+pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off
+yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do
+you're a poor horse-woman."
+
+He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly
+because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
+hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
+only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
+interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
+they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
+his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale
+as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
+that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
+lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
+brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
+and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
+when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
+the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together,
+through flying scuds of rain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one
+which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people,
+who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to
+whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the
+by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out
+of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not
+precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but
+in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she
+found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in
+Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a
+free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he
+constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions
+might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good
+sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the
+shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides
+involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did
+not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was
+only a dislike to her being somebody else's slave. He was a despot at
+heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women.
+Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her,
+maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she
+had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered
+whether her strange interest in the society of a man for whom she had no
+affection, could be that. She did not feel towards Ian as an ordinary
+wife might have done, yet his feelings and interests weighed much with
+her. Milly, too, she must necessarily consider, but she did that in a
+different, an almost vengeful spirit.
+
+One evening Ian, looking up from his work, asked her what she was
+smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it
+was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit
+within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning
+Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell
+Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the
+biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however Tims might affirm the contrary,
+Mildred had a fixed impression that Milly could be in a rage.
+
+The fire-game was hastening to its close; but before Mildred could prove
+herself a real mistress of the dangerous element, the sleep fell upon
+her.
+
+Except a sensation of fatigue, for which it was easy to find a reason,
+there was no warning of the coming change. But Ian had dreams in the
+night and opened his eyes in the morning with a feeling of uneasiness
+and depression. Mildred could never sleep late without causing him
+anxiety, and on this morning his first glance at her filled him with a
+dread certainty. She was sleeping what was to her in a measure the sleep
+of death. He had a violent impulse to awaken her forcibly; but he feared
+it would be dangerous. With his arm around her and his head close to
+hers on the pillow, he whispered her name over and over again. The
+calmness of her face gradually gave way to an expression of struggle
+approaching convulsion, and he dared not continue. He could only await
+the inevitable in a misery which from its very nature could find no
+expression and no comforter.
+
+Milly, unlike Mildred, did not return to the world in a rapture of
+satisfaction with it. The realization of the terrible robbery of life of
+which she had again been the victim, was in itself enough to account for
+a certain sadness even in her love for Ian and for her child. The
+hygiene of the nursery had been neglected according to her ideas, yet
+Baby was bonny enough to delight any mother's heart, however heavy it
+might be. Ian, she said, wanted feeding up and taking care of; and he
+submitted to the process with a gentle, melancholy smile. Just one
+request he made; that she would not spoil her pretty hair by screwing it
+up in her usual unbecoming manner. She understood, studying a certain
+photograph in a drawer--what drawer was safe from Milly's tidyings?--and
+dressed her hair as like it as she knew how, with a secret bitterness of
+heart.
+
+Mildred had found a diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to
+her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had
+continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought
+might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the
+two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of
+union between them. Their indivisibility in the eyes of the world made
+their external interests inevitably one. New friends and acquaintances
+Mildred had noted down, with useful remarks upon them. She was not
+confidential on the subject of Maxwell Davison, but she gave the bare
+necessary information.
+
+It was now late in the Summer Term and her bedroom chimney-piece was
+richly decorated with invitation cards. Among others there was an
+invitation to a garden-party at Lady Margaret Hall. Milly put on a fresh
+flowered muslin dress, apparently unworn, that she found hanging in one
+of the deep wall-cupboards of the old house, and a coarse burnt-straw
+hat, trimmed with roses and black ribbon, which became her marvellously
+well. All the scruples of an apostle of hygienic dress, all the
+uneasiness of an economist at the prospect of unpaid bills, disappeared
+before the pleasure of a young woman face to face with an extremely
+pretty reflection in a pier-glass. That glass, an oval in a light
+mahogany frame, of the Regency period, if not earlier, was one of
+Mildred's finds in the slums of St. Ebbes.
+
+She walked across the Parks, where the Cricket Match of the season was
+drawing a crowd, meaning to come out by a gate below Lady Margaret Hall,
+the gardens and buildings of which did not then extend to the Cherwell.
+In their place were a few tennis-grounds and a path leading to a
+boat-house, shared by a score or more of persons. While she was still
+coming across the grass of the Parks, a man in flannels, very white in
+the sun, came towards her from the gate for which she was making. He
+must have recognized her from a long way off. He was a striking-looking
+man of middle age, walking with a free yet indolent stride that carried
+him along much faster than it appeared to do.
+
+Milly had no idea who the stranger was, but he greeted her with: "Here
+you are at last, Mildred! Do you know how much behind time you are?"--he
+took out his watch--"Exactly thirty-five minutes. I should have given
+you up if I hadn't known that breaking your promise is not among your
+numerous vices, and unpunctuality is."
+
+Who on earth was he? And why did he call her by her Christian name?
+Milly went a beautiful pink with embarrassment.
+
+"I'm so sorry. I thought the party would have just begun," she replied.
+
+"You don't mean to say you want to keep me kicking my heels while you go
+to a confounded party? I thought you knew I was off to Paris to-night,
+after that Firdusi manuscript, and I think of taking the Continental
+Express to Constantinople next week. I don't know when I shall be back.
+Surely, Mildred, it's not a great deal to ask you to spare half an hour
+from a wretched party to come on the river with me before I go?" It
+struck Maxwell as he ended that he was falling into the whining of the
+Occidental lover. He was determined that he would clear the situation
+this afternoon; the more determined because he was conscious of a
+feeling odiously resembling fear which had before now held him back from
+plain dealing with Mildred. Afraid of a woman? It was too ridiculous.
+
+Milly, meanwhile, felt herself on firmer ground. This must be Ian's
+cousin, Maxwell Davison, the Orientalist. But there was nothing nomadic
+in her heart to thrill to the idea of being on the Cherwell this
+afternoon, in London this evening, in Paris next morning, in
+Constantinople next week.
+
+"Of course I'll come on the river with you," she said. "I'm sorry I'm
+late. I'm afraid I--I'd forgotten."
+
+Forgotten! How simply she said it! Yet it was surely the veriest
+impudence of coquetry. He looked at her slowly from the hat downward, as
+he lounged leisurely at her side.
+
+"War-paint, I see!" he remarked. "Armed from head to heel with all the
+true and tried female weapons. They're just the same all the world
+over--'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose,'--though no doubt you
+fancy they're different. Who's the frock put on for, Mildred? For the
+party, or--for me?"
+
+Milly was conscious of such an extreme absence of intention so far as
+Maxwell was concerned, that it would have been rude to express it. She
+went very pink again, and lifting forget-me-not blue eyes to his
+inscrutable ones, articulated slowly:
+
+"I'm sure I don't know."
+
+Her eyes were like a child's and a shy smile curved her pink lips
+adorably as she spoke. Such mere simplicity would not in itself have
+cast a spell over Maxwell, but it came to him as a new, surprising phase
+of the eternal feminine in her; and it had the additional charm that it
+caused that subjugated feeling resembling fear, with which Mildred could
+inspire him, to disappear entirely. He was once more in the proper
+dominant attitude of Man. He felt the courage now to make her do what he
+believed she wished to do in her heart; the courage, too, to punish her
+for the humiliation she had inflicted upon him. Six months ago he would
+have had nothing but a hearty contempt for the man who could beat thirty
+yards of gravel-path for half an hour, watch in hand, in a misery of
+impatience, waiting on the good pleasure of a capricious woman.
+
+Meantime he laughed good-humoredly at Milly's answer and began to talk
+of neutral matters. If her tongue did not move as nimbly as usual, he
+flattered himself it was because she knew that the hour of her surrender
+was at hand.
+
+Milly knew the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer
+days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and
+how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves.
+How, when the big doors were opened on to the raft and the slowly
+moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the
+running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there
+in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one
+of the barred doors, took it out to the water. Mildred would have felt a
+half-conscious aesthetic pleasure in watching his movements,
+superficially indolent but instinct with strength. Milly had not the
+same aesthetic sensibilities, and she was still disagreeably embarrassed
+at finding herself on such a familiar footing with a man whom she had
+never seen before. Then, although she followed Aunt Beatrice's golden
+rule of never allowing a question of feminine dress to interfere with
+masculine plans, she could not but feel anxious as to the fate of her
+fresh muslin and ribbons packed into a canoe. Maxwell, however, had
+learned canoeing years ago on the Canadian lakes, and did not splash.
+His lean, muscular brown arms and supple wrists took the canoe rapidly
+through the water, with little apparent effort.
+
+It was the prime of June and the winding willow-shaded Cherwell was in
+its beauty. White water-lilies were only just beginning to open silver
+buds, floating serenely on their broad green and red pads; but prodigal
+masses of wild roses, delicately rich in scent and various in color,
+overhung the river in brave arching bowers or starred bushes and
+hedgerows so closely that the green briers were hardly visible. Beds of
+the large blue water forget-me-not floated beside the banks, and above
+them creamy meadow-sweet lifted its tall plumes among the reeds and
+grasses. Small water-rats swam busily from bank to bank or played on the
+roots of the willows, and bright wings of birds and insects fluttered
+and skimmed over the shining stream.
+
+The Cherwell, though not then the crowded waterway it has since become,
+was usually popular with boaters on such an afternoon. But there must
+have been strong counter-attractions elsewhere, for Milly and Davison
+passed only one, a party of children working very independent oars, on
+their way to the little gray house above the ferry, where an old
+Frenchman dispensed tea in arbors.
+
+There was a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe
+and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It
+was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a
+person who had rights over her--a tone which before he had been more
+willing than able to adopt; but now the bit was between his teeth.
+Perhaps absorbed in his own intent, he hardly noticed how little she
+answered; but he did notice every point of her beauty as she leaned back
+on the cushions in the light shade of her parasol, from the soft
+brightness of her hair to the glimpse of delicate white skin which
+showed through the open-work stocking on her slender foot.
+
+When they were in the straight watery avenue between green willow walls,
+which leads up to the ferry, he slackened the pace.
+
+"And what are you going to do next week?" he asked, as one of a series
+of ironical questions.
+
+"A great deal; much more than I care to do. I'm going up to town to see
+the new Savoy opera, and I'm going to a dance, and to several
+garden-parties, and to dine with the Master of Durham."
+
+"Quite enough for some people; but not for you, Mildred. Think of
+it--year after year, always the same old run. October Term, Lent Term,
+Summer Term! A little change in Vacations, say a month abroad, when you
+can afford it. You aren't meant for it, you know you're not, any more
+than a swallow's meant for the little hopping, pecketing life of a
+London sparrow."
+
+"Indeed, I don't see the likeness either way. I'm quite happy as I am."
+
+He smiled mockingly.
+
+"Quite happy! As it's very proper you should be, of course. Come,
+Mildred, no humbug! Think how you'd feel if you knew that instead of
+going to all those idiotic parties next week you were going to
+Constantinople."
+
+"Isn't it dreadfully hot at this time of year?"
+
+"I like it hot. But at any rate one can always find some cool place in
+the hottest weather. How would you like to go in a caravan from Cairo to
+Damascus next autumn?"
+
+"I dare say it would be delightful, if the country one passed through
+were not too wild and dangerous. But Ian would never be able to leave
+his work for an expedition like that."
+
+Maxwell smiled grimly.
+
+"I'd no idea you'd want him. I shouldn't. Do be serious. If you fancy
+I'm the sort of man you can go on playing with forever, you're most
+confoundedly mistaken."
+
+Milly was both offended and alarmed. Was this strange man mad? And she
+alone with him on the river!
+
+"I don't know what you mean," she said, coldly.
+
+"Don't you?" he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile--"Well, I
+know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women,
+but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you,
+except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a set
+of trained, accomplished hypocrites!"
+
+Indignation overcame fear in Milly's bosom.
+
+"We are nothing of the kind," she said. "How can you talk such
+nonsense?"
+
+"Nonsense? I suppose being a woman you can't really be logical, although
+you generally pretend to be so. Why have you pranked yourself out, spent
+an hour I dare say in making yourself pretty to-day? For what possible
+reason except to attract the eyes of a crowd of men, young fools or
+doddering old ones--"
+
+Milly uttered an expression of vehement denial, but he continued:
+
+"Or else to whet my appetite for forbidden fruit. But there's no 'or'
+about it, is there? Most likely you had both of those desirable objects
+in view."
+
+Milly was not a coward when her indignation was aroused. She took hold
+of the sides of the canoe and began raising herself.
+
+"I don't know whether you mean to be insulting," she said; "but I don't
+wish to hear any more of this sort of thing. I'd rather you put me out,
+please."
+
+"Sit down," he said, with authority--the canoe was rocking
+violently--"unless you're anxious to be drowned. I warn you I'm a very
+poor swimmer, and if we upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my
+being able to save you."
+
+Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save
+herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.
+
+"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.
+
+They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire
+rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage,
+and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and
+the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his
+shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some
+inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to
+Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the
+rope and on.
+
+"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision,
+after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my
+manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring
+you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send
+you on a field-walk in that smart frock and shoes--" he smiled at her,
+and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his
+smile--"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all
+these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years
+that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial
+conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must
+remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come
+right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be
+stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to
+recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of
+Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core.
+And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined,
+but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."
+
+Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick
+to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument,
+but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary,
+that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized
+in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in
+her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in
+opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent
+towards the turning paddle, hardly heard what she was saying. He was
+paddling fast and considering many things.
+
+They came to where the river ran under a narrow grass field, rising in
+a steep bank and shut off from the world by a tall hedge and a row of
+elms, that threw long shadows down the grass and were reflected in the
+water. A path led through it, but it was little frequented. On the other
+side was a wide, green meadow, where the long grass was ripening under
+rose-blossoming hedges, and far beyond was the blueness of distant hills
+and woods. Maxwell ran the bow of the canoe into a thick bed of
+forget-me-nots, growing not far from the bank. He laid the dripping
+paddle aside, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his head in his
+hands for a minute or more. When he turned his face towards her it was
+charged with passion, but most of all with a grave masterfulness. He had
+been sitting on a low seat, but now he kneeled so as to come nearer to
+her, and, stretching out his long arms, laid a hand, brown,
+long-fingered, smooth, on her two slight, gray-gloved ones.
+
+"Mildred," he said, and his voice seemed to have lost its harshness,
+"I've brought you here to make you decide what you are going to do with
+me and with yourself. I want you--you know I want you, but I don't come
+begging for you as an alms. I say, just compare the life, the free,
+glorious life I can give you, and the wretched, petty round of existence
+here. Come with me, won't you? Don't be afraid I shall treat you like a
+slave; I follow Nature, and Nature made you a queen. Come with me
+to-night, come to Paris, to Constantinople, to all the East! Never mind
+about love yet, we won't talk about that, for I don't really flatter
+myself you love me; I'm only sure you don't love Ian--"
+
+Milly had listened to him so far, drawing herself back to the farthest
+end of the canoe, half petrified with amazement, half dominated by his
+powerful personality. At these words her pallor gave way to a scarlet
+flush.
+
+"How dare you!" she cried, in a voice tremulous with indignation. "How
+dare you talk to me like this? How dare you name my husband? You brought
+me out here on purpose to say such things to me? Oh, it's abominable,
+it's disgraceful!"
+
+There was no room for doubt as to the sincerity of her indignation.
+Maxwell drew back and his face changed. There were patches of dull red
+on his cheeks, almost as though he had been struck, and his narrow eyes
+glittered. Looking at him, Milly felt physical fear; she thought once
+more of insanity. There was a silence; then she spoke again.
+
+"Put me on to the bank here, please. I'll walk back."
+
+"I shall let you go when I choose," returned he, in a grating voice. "I
+have something to say to you first."
+
+He paused and his frown darkened upon her. "You asked me how I 'dared.'
+Dare! Do you take me for a dog, to be chained up and tantalized with
+nice bits, and hardly allowed to whine for them? I say, how dare you
+entice me with your beauty--it's decked out now for me--entice me with
+all your beguiling ways, your pretence of longing to go away and to live
+the free life in the East as I live it? Now, when you've made me want
+you--what else have you been aiming at? You pretend to be surprised, you
+pretend even to yourself, to be dreadfully shocked. What damned humbug!
+With us only the dancing-girls venture to play such tricks as you do,
+and they daren't go too far, because the men are men and wear knives.
+But here you proper women, with your weakness unnaturally protected, you
+go about pretending you don't know there's such a thing in the world as
+desire--oh, of course not!--and all the while you're deliberately
+exciting it and playing upon it."
+
+Mildred had been right in saying that the gentle Milly could be in a
+rage; though it was a thing that had happened to her only once or twice
+before since her childhood. It happened now. Anger, burning anger,
+extinguished the fear that had held her silent while he was speaking.
+
+"It's false!" she cried, with burning face and blazing eyes. "It's
+disgraceful of you to say such things--it's degrading for me to have to
+hear them. I will get away from you, if I have to jump into the river."
+
+She started forward, but Maxwell, with his tall, lithe body and long
+arms, had a great reach. He leaned forward and his iron hands were upon
+her shoulders, forcing her back.
+
+"Don't be a fool," he said, still fierce in eye and voice.
+
+Her lips trembled with fury so that she could hardly speak.
+
+"Do you consider yourself a gentleman?"
+
+He laughed scornfully.
+
+"I don't consider the question at all. I am a man; you are a woman, and
+you have presumed to make a plaything of me. You thought you could do it
+with impunity because we are civilized, because you are a lady; for
+bar-maids and servant-girls do get their throats cut sometimes still.
+Don't be frightened, I'm not going to kill you, but I mean to make you
+understand for once that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that
+they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better
+animal--"
+
+He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation.
+Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed,
+and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly
+on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook
+lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough
+to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to
+pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she
+bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently,
+but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell
+looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not
+stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow,
+through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When
+she was half-way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and
+instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:
+
+"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I
+sha'n't."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit
+for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from
+that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from
+any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked
+after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives
+were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in
+the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had
+been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for
+him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness
+will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our
+lives are made up of mere to-morrows--if Shakespeare had not happened to
+put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of
+imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But
+even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly
+regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that
+demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she
+lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real
+delight, and that it was well she should have nothing to spend in
+ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share.
+Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and
+Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her
+bric-a-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese
+ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor
+miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the
+horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after
+that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow,
+a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind.
+Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the
+colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid
+existence.
+
+In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern
+towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately
+as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual
+personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with
+the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen
+in her nursery days.
+
+Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a
+Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian,
+and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the
+wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the
+evening that Ian expected her to go to bed at once; but she followed
+him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on
+the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some
+perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an
+address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in
+London.
+
+Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old,
+high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate
+tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with
+gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of
+dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife
+sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into
+nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the
+inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:
+
+"I've got something awful to tell you."
+
+Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot
+chair.
+
+"What about? Tony?"--for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had
+reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.
+
+"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."
+
+Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he
+liked Tony.
+
+"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"
+
+"Nothing--but oh, Ian! I--hate even to speak of such a thing--"
+
+"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."
+
+"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he--he made love to
+me."
+
+The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.
+
+"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then,
+after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a
+cad."
+
+"He--he wanted me to run away with him."
+
+Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.
+
+"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.
+
+"But it's worse--it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me.
+I--_I_ of course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the
+garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said
+all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up
+for him--"
+
+"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still
+coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't.
+I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl,
+but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous
+happening."
+
+"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said
+he knew I didn't love you--that _I_ didn't love _you_, my own darling
+husband. Some one, some one--must be responsible for his thinking that.
+How do I know what happens when--when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a
+creature who doesn't love you!"
+
+Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, but there was a faint flush
+on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to
+a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled
+apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of
+grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.
+
+"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length.
+"Don't give me pain by imagining evil about--about yourself. You could
+never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that
+a man could wish his wife to be."
+
+He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft
+face between his hands kissed her forehead.
+
+"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it
+any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so
+bad to-morrow morning."
+
+But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back
+against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.
+
+"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's
+not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil
+spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me!
+I've always tried to be good."
+
+There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's
+case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as
+another, whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat
+down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon
+him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a
+nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung
+herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.
+
+"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in
+God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you
+away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked
+spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take
+possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O
+Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."
+
+Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in
+evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he
+said, quietly:
+
+"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little
+more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition,
+like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand?
+Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to
+be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it
+worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."
+
+"At first I thought it was like that--an eclipse of memory. But now I
+feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I.
+To-night Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to
+find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the
+frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was
+reminded of--that fearful night when I came back and saw--something. I
+am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."
+
+Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.
+
+"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."
+
+"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how
+any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like
+her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing
+happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the
+lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I
+could bear it better if--But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you
+left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who
+deceives you, and--"
+
+"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are
+absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."
+
+There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard
+before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new
+to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.
+
+"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me
+tell you what she is?"
+
+He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered
+with cold deliberation:
+
+"I cannot cease to love my own wife because--because she's not always
+exactly the same."
+
+They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa.
+The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped
+from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again
+slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place
+in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of
+an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls
+and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a
+bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark
+doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two,
+or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously
+flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of
+life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant
+with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in
+flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the
+stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and
+since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and
+fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with
+blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The
+scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of
+physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes from
+blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.
+
+Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical
+contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with
+passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress.
+He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness
+of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class,
+and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If
+his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities
+which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any
+such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position
+of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has
+affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was
+not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no
+severance.
+
+He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow
+Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself.
+Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession
+of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange
+tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the
+thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among
+the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as
+peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he
+were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life,
+it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an
+overwrought brain.
+
+There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is
+almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart
+found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And
+at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle,
+appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and
+carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had
+taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a
+hobble. Meditative, he looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. No
+artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that
+round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality
+and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and
+benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger
+man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose
+counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.
+
+When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar
+to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and
+saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table,
+he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such
+a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him
+to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his
+old pupil with silent benevolence.
+
+"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very
+bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more
+than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always
+been good to her as well as to me."
+
+"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you
+married wisely."
+
+"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she--we didn't
+quite grasp--its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of
+those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see
+involved real and extraordinary variations in her character--a change,
+in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to
+Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him
+without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a
+silence. At length the Master said:
+
+"I suspect we don't understand women."
+
+"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great
+difference in my wife at various times?"
+
+"Not more than I feel in myself--not of another character, that is. We
+live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing
+about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your
+wife's quite normal, really."
+
+"But the memory alone, surely--"
+
+"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You
+remember meeting Sir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young
+clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and
+went sheep-farming in Australia, where he made his fortune."
+
+"But his personality?" asked Stewart, with anxiety. "Was that changed?"
+
+"Certainly. A colonial sheep-farmer is a different person from a young
+Don just in orders."
+
+"I don't mean that, Master. I mean did he rise from his bed with ideas,
+with feelings quite opposite to those which had possessed him when he
+lay down upon it? Did he ever have a return of the clerical phase,
+during which he forgot how he became a sheep-farmer and wished to take
+up his old work again?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+There was a pause. The Master played with his gold spectacles and sucked
+his under lip. Then:
+
+"Take a good holiday, Stewart," he said.
+
+Stewart's clear-cut face hardened and flushed momentarily. "These are
+not fancies of my own, Master. Cases occur in which two, sometimes more
+than two, entirely different personalities alternate in the same
+individual. The spontaneous cases are rare, of course, but hypnotism
+seems to develop them pretty freely. The facts are there, but English
+scientists prefer to say nothing about them."
+
+The Master rose and trotted restlessly about.
+
+"They're quite right," he returned, at length. "Such ideas can lead to
+nothing but mischief."
+
+"Surely that is the orthodox theologian's usual objection to scientific
+fact."
+
+The Master lifted his head and looked at his rebel disciple. For
+although he was an officiating clergyman, he and the orthodox
+theologians were at daggers drawn.
+
+"Views, statements of this kind are not knowledge," he said, after a
+while, and continued moving uneasily about without looking at Stewart.
+
+Stewart did not reply; it seemed useless to go on talking. He recognized
+that the Master's attitude was what his own had been before the iron of
+fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped
+that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his
+judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He
+sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking
+the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him.
+To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the
+hard sofa would have seemed an oddly assorted pair. Stewart's length of
+frame, the raven black of his hair and beard, the marble pallor of his
+delicate features, made the little Master look smaller, pinker, plumper
+than usual; but his face, radiating wisdom and affection, was more than
+beautiful in the eyes of his old disciple.
+
+"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always
+think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let
+me speak to you now as a father might--and probably wouldn't."
+
+Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.
+
+"You are young, but your wife is much younger. A man marries a girl
+many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of
+responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the
+same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much
+greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more
+help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you
+have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but
+she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She
+lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have
+nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to
+hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do
+not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that
+your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her
+happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of
+mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them.
+So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you
+will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of
+accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason
+and Religion are the only true guides."
+
+The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses
+which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The
+spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was,
+as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.
+
+He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout
+sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about
+twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the
+beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile,
+because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to
+be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost
+which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying
+physiology in London and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of
+life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of
+cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a
+comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however,
+she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women
+poorer than herself to benefit by it.
+
+She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious
+illness of her next-door neighbor--Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a
+small post in the British Museum--had prevented her from visiting Oxford
+during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have
+been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper
+to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going
+sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly
+neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which
+she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her
+long neglect of her friend.
+
+It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burt was still at Ascham and
+Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the
+Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned
+towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded
+her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss
+about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed
+to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when
+she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and
+dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse
+happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months,
+was sitting on the drawing-room floor.
+
+The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a
+gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept
+working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a
+knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her
+skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected
+picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the
+box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to
+hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until
+it jumped up with a bang--a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles,
+and scarlet snout--to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune.
+Then Tony, be sure, would laugh until he rolled from side to side. Mummy
+never responded to his wishes now, but Daddy had pleaded for the
+Jack-in-the-box to be spared, and sometimes when quite alone with Tony,
+would play the monkey-game in his inferior paternal style, pleased with
+such modified appreciation as the young critic might bestow upon him.
+
+"I'm sorry Baby's so troublesome," apologized the distressed Milly, for
+the third time lifting Tony up and replacing him in a sitting posture,
+with his picture-book. "I'm trying to teach him to sit quiet, but I'm
+afraid he's been played with a great deal more than he should have
+been."
+
+"To tell the truth, I thought so the last time I was here," replied Aunt
+Beatrice. "But he's still young enough to be properly trained. It's such
+waste of a reasonable person's time to spend it making idiotic noises at
+a small baby. And it's a thousand times better for the child's brain and
+nerves for it to be left entirely to itself."
+
+Tony said nothing, but his face began to work in a threatening manner.
+
+"I perfectly agree with you, Aunt Beatrice," responded Milly, eagerly.
+
+Lady Thomson continued:
+
+"Children should be spoken to as little as possible until they are from
+two to two and a half years old; then they should be taught to speak
+correctly."
+
+Milly chimed in: "Yes, that's always been my own view. I do feel it so
+important that their very first impressions should be the right ones,
+that the first pictures they see should be good, that they should never
+be sung to out of tune and in general--"
+
+Apparently this programme for babies did not commend itself to Tony;
+certainly the first item, enjoining silent development, did not. His
+face had by this time worked the right number of minutes to produce a
+roar, and it came. Milly picked him up, but the wounds of his spirit
+were not to be immediately healed, and the roar continued. Finally he
+had to be handed over to the parlor-maid, and so came to great happiness
+in the kitchen, where there were no rules against infantile
+conversation. Milly was flushed and disturbed.
+
+"Baby has not been properly brought up," she said. "He's been allowed
+his own way too much."
+
+"Since you say so, Milly, I must confess I noticed in the spring that
+you seemed to be bringing the child up in an easy-going, old-fashioned
+way I should hardly have expected of you. I hope you will begin now to
+study the theory of education. A mother should take her vocation
+seriously. I own I don't altogether understand the taste for frivolities
+which you have developed since you married. It's harmless, no doubt, but
+it doesn't seem quite natural in a young woman who has taken a First in
+Greats."
+
+Milly's hands grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at
+her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had
+ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had
+befallen her; yet she did it.
+
+"The person you saw here last spring wasn't I. Oh, Aunt Beatrice! Can't
+you see the difference?"
+
+Lady Thomson looked at her in surprise:
+
+"What do you mean? I was speaking of my visit to you in March."
+
+"And don't you see the difference? Oh, how hateful you must have found
+me!"
+
+"Really, Mildred, I saw nothing hateful about you. On the contrary, if
+you want the plain truth, I greatly prefer you in a cheerful,
+common-sense mood, as you were then, even if your high spirits do lead
+you into a little too much frivolity. I think it a more wholesome, and
+therefore ultimately a more useful, frame of mind than this causeless
+depression, which leads you to take such a morbid, exaggerated view of
+things."
+
+Every word pierced Milly's heart with a double pang.
+
+"You liked her better than me?" she asked, piteously. "Yet I've always
+tried to be just what you wanted me to be, Aunt Beatrice, to do
+everything you thought right, and she--Oh, it's too awful!"
+
+"What do you mean, Mildred?"
+
+"I mean that the person you prefer to me as I am now, the person who was
+here in March, wasn't I at all."
+
+The fine healthy carnation of Lady Thomson's cheek paled. In her calm,
+rapid way she at once found the explanation of Milly's unhealthy,
+depressed appearance and manner. Poor Mildred Stewart was insane. Beyond
+the paling of her cheek, however, Lady Thomson allowed no sign of shock
+to be visible in her.
+
+"That's an exaggerated way of talking," she replied. "I suppose you mean
+your mood was different."
+
+Milly was looking straight in front of her with haggard eyes.
+
+"No; it simply wasn't I at all. You believe in the Bible, don't you?"
+
+"Not in verbal inspiration, of course, but in a general way, yes,"
+returned Lady Thomson, puzzled but guarded.
+
+"Do you believe in the demoniacs? In possession by evil spirits?"
+
+Milly was not looking at vacancy now. Her desperate hands clutched the
+arms of her chair, as she leaned forward and fixed her aunt with hollow
+eyes, awaiting her reply.
+
+"Certainly not! Most certainly not! They were obviously cases of
+epilepsy and insanity, misinterpreted by an ignorant age."
+
+"No--it's all true, quite literally true. Three times, and for six
+months or more each time, I have been possessed by a spirit that cannot
+be good. I know it's not. It takes my body, it takes the love of people
+I care for, away from me--" Milly's voice broke and she pressed her
+handkerchief over her face. "You all think her--But she's bad, and some
+day she'll do something wicked--something that will break my heart, and
+you'll all insist it was I who did it, and you'll believe I'm a wicked
+woman."
+
+Lady Thomson looked very grave.
+
+"Mildred, dear," she said, "try and collect yourself. It is really
+wicked of you to give way to such terrible fancies. Would God permit
+such a thing to happen to one of His children? We feel sure He would
+not."
+
+Milly shook her head, but the struggle with her hysterical sobs kept her
+silent. Lady Thomson walked to the window, feeling more "upset" than she
+had ever felt in her life. The window was open, but an awning shut out
+the view of the street. From the window-boxes, filled with pink
+geraniums and white stocks, a sweet, warm scent floated into the room,
+and the rattle of the milkman's cart, the chink of his cans, fell upon
+Lady Thomson's unheeding ears. So did voices in colloquy, but she did
+not particularly note a female one of a thin, chirpy quality, addressing
+the parlor-maid with a familiarity probably little appreciated by that
+elegantly decorous damsel.
+
+Milly had scarcely mastered her tears and Lady Thomson had just begun to
+address her in quiet, firm tones, when Tims burst unannounced into the
+room. Her hat was incredibly on one side, and her sallow face almost
+crimson with heat, but bright with pleasure at finding herself once more
+in Oxford.
+
+"Hullo, old girl!" she cried, blind to the serious scene into which she
+was precipitated. "How are you? Now don't kiss me"--throwing herself
+into an attitude of violent defence against an embrace not yet
+offered--"I'm too hot. Carried my bag myself all the way from the
+station and saved the omnibus."
+
+Lady Thomson fixed Tims with a look of more than usually cold
+disapproval. Milly proffered a constrained greeting.
+
+"Anything gone wrong?" asked Tims, after a minute, peering at Milly's
+tear-stained eyes with her own short-sighted ones.
+
+Milly answered with a forced self-restraint which appeared like cold
+deliberation.
+
+"Aunt Beatrice thinks I'm mad because I say I'm not the same person she
+found in my place last March. I want you to tell her that it's not just
+my fancy, but that you know that sometimes a quite different person
+takes my place, and I'm not responsible for anything she says or does."
+
+"Yes, that's a solemn Gospel fact, right enough," affirmed Tims.
+
+Lady Thomson could hardly control her indignation, but she did, although
+she spoke sternly to Tims.
+
+"Do I understand you to say, Miss Timson, that it's a 'solemn Gospel
+fact'--Gospel! Good Heavens--that Milly is possessed by a devil?"
+
+Tims plumped down on the sofa and stared at Lady Thomson.
+
+"Possessed by a devil? Good Lord, no! What do you mean?"
+
+"Mildred believes herself to be possessed by an evil spirit."
+
+Tims turned to Milly in consternation.
+
+"Milly, old girl! Come! Poor old Milly! I never thought you were so
+superstitious as all that. Besides, I know more about it than you do,
+and I tell you straight, you mayn't be quite such a good sort when
+you're in your other phase, but as to there being a devil in it--well,
+devil's all nonsense, but if that were so, I should like to have a devil
+myself, and the more the merrier."
+
+Milly turned on her a face pale with horror and indignation. Her eyes
+flashed and she raised a remonstrating hand.
+
+"Hush!" she cried. "Hush! You don't know what dreadful things you're
+saying. I don't know exactly what this spirit is that robs me of my
+life; I'm only sure it's not Me and it's not good."
+
+"Whatever may be the matter with you, Mildred," said Lady Thomson, "it
+can't possibly be that. I suppose you have suffered from loss of memory
+again and it's upset your nerves. Why will people have nerves? I should
+advise you to go to Norton-Smith at once."
+
+Milly's tears were flowing again but she managed to reply:
+
+"I've been to Dr. Norton-Smith, Aunt Beatrice. He doesn't seem to
+understand."
+
+"He doesn't want to," interjected Tims, scornfully. "You don't suppose a
+respectable English nerve-doctor wants to know anything about
+psychology? They'd be interested in the case in France, or in the United
+States, but they wouldn't be able to keep down Milly Number Two."
+
+"Then what use would they be to me?" asked Milly, despairingly. "I can
+only trust in God; and He seems to have forsaken me."
+
+"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful
+way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds
+dreadfully mad."
+
+"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager
+confidence.
+
+"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't
+bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like,
+only--only it isn't true."
+
+Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its
+simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant
+boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old
+houses--the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had
+been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched
+his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the
+unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he
+heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room.
+He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the
+extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.
+
+"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what
+becomes of Personal Immortality?"
+
+Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality
+was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian,
+which she did effusively.
+
+"Hullo!" he remarked, cheerfully, when her effusion was over. "No Milly
+and no tea!"
+
+"We don't want either just yet," returned Lady Thomson. "I'm terribly
+anxious about Mildred, Ian, and Miss Timson has not said anything to
+make me less so. I want a sound, sensible opinion on the state of
+her--her nerves."
+
+Ian's brow clouded.
+
+"Tell me frankly, do you notice so great a difference in her from time
+to time, as to account for the positively insane delusion she has got
+into her head?"
+
+"What do you mean, Aunt Beatrice?" asked Ian, shortly, sternly eying
+Tims, whom he imagined to have let out the secret.
+
+"Mildred has made an extraordinary statement to me about not being the
+same person now as she was in March. Of course I see she--well, she is
+not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very
+different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it
+into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how
+you could have allowed her to come to that state of--of mental
+aberration, without doing anything."
+
+Ian was silent. He looked gaunt and sombrely dark in the low,
+awning-shaded room, with its heavy beams and floor of wavelike
+unevenness.
+
+"You'll have to put her under care next, if you don't take some steps.
+Send her for a sea-voyage."
+
+"I'd take her myself if I thought it would do her any good," said Tims.
+"But I'll lay my bottom dollar it wouldn't."
+
+"I'm afraid I think Miss Timson's view of the matter as insane as
+Milly's," returned Lady Thomson, tartly.
+
+Ian lifted his bowed head and addressed Tims:
+
+"I should like to know exactly what your view of the matter is, Miss
+Timson. We need not discuss poor Milly's; it's too absurd and also too
+painful."
+
+"It's no doubt a case of disintegration of personality," replied Tims,
+after a pause. "Somewhere inside our brains must be a nerve-centre
+which co-ordinates most of our mental, our sensory and motor processes,
+in such a manner as to produce consciousness, volition, what we call
+personality. But after all there are always plenty of activities within
+us going on independent of it. Your heart beats, your stomach
+digests--even your memory works apart from your consciousness sometimes.
+Now suppose some shock or strain enfeebles your centre of consciousness,
+so that it ceases to be able to co-ordinate all the mental processes it
+has been accustomed to superintend. What you call your personality is
+the outcome of your memory and all your other faculties and tendencies
+working together, checking and balancing each other. Suppose your centre
+of consciousness so enfeebled; suppose at the same time an enfeeblement
+of memory, causing you to completely forget external facts: certain of
+your faculties and tendencies are left working and they are co-ordinated
+without an important part of the memory, without many other faculties
+and tendencies which checked and balanced them. Naturally you appear to
+yourself and to every one else a totally different person; but it's not
+a new personality really, it's only a bit of the old one which goes on
+its own hook, while the rest is quiescent."
+
+"This is the most abominably materialistic theory of the human mind I
+ever heard," exclaimed Lady Thomson, indignantly. "The most degrading to
+our spiritual natures."
+
+Ian leaned against the high, carved mantel-piece and pushed back the
+black hair from his forehead.
+
+"I'm not concerned with that," he replied, deliberately, discussing
+this case so vitally near to him with an almost terrible calmness. "But
+I can't feel that this disintegration theory altogether covers the
+ground. There is no development of characteristics previously to be
+found in Milly; on the contrary, the qualities of mind and character
+which she exhibits when--when the change comes over her, are precisely
+the opposite of those she exhibits in what I presume we ought to call
+her normal state."
+
+"There must be some reason for it, old chap, you know," returned Tims;
+"and it seems to me that's the line you've got to move along, unless
+you're an idiot and go in for devils or spiritualistic nonsense."
+
+"I believe I've followed what you've been saying, Miss Timson," said
+Lady Thomson, in her fullest tones; "and I can assure you I feel under
+no necessity to become either a materialist or an idiot in consequence."
+
+Ian spoke again.
+
+"I don't profess to be scientific, but I do seem to see another possible
+line, running parallel with yours, but not quite the same. It's evident
+we can inherit faculties, characteristics, from our ancestors which
+never become active in us; but we know they must have been present in us
+in a quiescent state, because we can transmit them to children in whom
+they become active. Mildred's father and mother, for example, are not
+scholars, although her grandfather and great-grandfather were; yet in
+one of her parents at least there must be a germ of the scholar's
+faculty which has never been developed, because Mildred has inherited
+it. Now why can't we develop all the faculties, the germs of which lie
+within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount
+of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole
+desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient
+vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit.
+Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the
+flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which
+it usually flows most strongly; its course is diverted and it fertilizes
+tracts of our brain and nervous system which before have been lying
+quiescent, sterile. If we lose the memory of our former lives, and if at
+the same time hereditary faculties and tendencies, of the existence of
+which we were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically
+new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we
+regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones
+sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt
+this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing
+to say on the question."
+
+"It certainly has not," commented Lady Thomson, decisively. "I ought to
+know what Science is, considering how often I've met Mr. Darwin and
+Professor Huxley. Hypnotism and this kind of unpleasant talk is not
+Science. It's only a new variety of the hocus-pocus that's been imposing
+on human weakness ever since the world began. I'd sooner believe with
+poor Milly that she's possessed by a devil. It's less silly to accept
+inherited superstitions than to invent brand-new ones."
+
+"But we've got to account somehow for the extraordinary changes which
+take place in Milly," sighed Ian, wearily.
+
+The light lines across his forehead were showing as furrows, and Tims's
+whole face was corrugated.
+
+"No hocus-pocus about them, anyway," she said.
+
+"There's a great deal of fancy about them," retorted Lady Thomson. "A
+nervous, imaginative man like you, Ian, ought to be on your guard
+against allowing such notions to get hold of you. It's so easy to fancy
+things are as you're afraid they may be, and then you influence Milly
+and she goes from bad to worse. I think I may claim to understand her if
+any one does, and all I see is that she gives way to moods. At first I
+thought it was a steady development of character; but I admit that when
+she is unwell and out of spirits, she becomes just her old timid,
+over-conscientious self again. She's always been very easily influenced,
+very dependent, and now--I hardly like to say such a thing of my own
+niece--but I fear there's a touch of hysteria about her. I've always
+heard that hysterical people, even when they've been perfectly frank and
+truthful before, become deceitful and act parts till it's impossible to
+tell fact from falsehood with regard to them. I would suggest your
+letting Mildred come to me for a month or two, Ian. I feel sure I should
+send her back to you quite cured of all this nonsense."
+
+At this point Milly came in. Ian stretched out his hand towards her with
+protective tenderness; but even at the moment when his whole soul was
+moved by an impulse of compassion so strong that it seemed almost love,
+a spirit within him arose and mocked at all hypotheses, telling him that
+this poor stricken wife of his, seemingly one with the lady of his
+heart, was not she, but another.
+
+"Aunt Beatrice was just saying you ought to get away from domestic cares
+for a month or two, Milly," he said, as cheerfully as he could.
+
+Lady Thomson explained.
+
+"What you want is a complete change; though I don't know what people
+mean when they talk about 'domestic cares.' I should like to have you up
+at Clewes for the rest of the Long. Ian can look after the baby."
+
+Milly smiled at her sweetly, but rather as though she were talking
+nonsense.
+
+"It's very kind of you, Aunt Beatrice, but Ian and I have never been
+parted for a day since we were married; I mean not when--and I don't
+feel as though I could spare a minute of his company. And poor Baby,
+too! Oh no! But of course it's very good of you to think of it."
+
+"Then you must all come to Clewes," decided Aunt Beatrice, after some
+remonstrance. "That'll settle it."
+
+"But my work!" ejaculated Ian in dismay. "How am I to get on at Clewes,
+away from the libraries?"
+
+"There are some things in life more important than books, Ian," returned
+Lady Thomson.
+
+"But it won't do a penn'orth of good," broke in Tims, argumentatively.
+"I don't pretend to have more than a working hypothesis, but whoever
+else may prove to be right, Lady Thomson's on the wrong line."
+
+Lady Thomson surveyed her in silence; Ian took no notice of her remark.
+He was looking before him with a sadness incomprehensible to the
+uncreative man--to the man who has never dreamed dreams and seen
+visions; with the sadness of one who just as the cloudy emanations of
+his mind are beginning to take form and substance sees them scattered,
+perhaps never again to reunite, by some cold breath from the relentless
+outside world of circumstance. He made his renunciation in silence;
+then, with a quiet smile, he turned to Lady Thomson and answered her.
+
+"You're very kind, Aunt Beatrice, and quite right. There are things in
+life much more important than books."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+So the summer went by; a hot summer, passed brightly enough to all
+appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in
+expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an
+anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the
+optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow
+was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the
+quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole
+attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning tenderness
+towards himself and Tony, was that of a woman who feels the stamp of
+death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would
+sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to
+tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was
+different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could
+love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian,
+who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation
+of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the
+Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the
+perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.
+
+To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was
+almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care,
+which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its
+native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and
+terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other
+life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet
+held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not
+to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden
+life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the
+man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would
+be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta
+of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an
+illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between
+the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never
+felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his
+marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had
+gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.
+
+One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a
+spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there
+also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech
+she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.
+
+It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for people who have
+been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her
+melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice
+of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table
+with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright
+flower-beds on the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by
+its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.
+
+"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I
+suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a
+long letter."
+
+"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for
+his wife.
+
+Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It
+held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of
+foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been
+scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written
+anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was
+writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own
+handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own
+eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.
+
+"I--I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.
+
+"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written?
+You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say
+tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that when that
+happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I
+recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."
+
+"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly.
+"She always follows your advice, you know. It--it's only scrabbles."
+
+He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely
+puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had
+written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made
+out: "You are only miserab ..."--the words were interspersed with really
+illegible scrawls--"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want
+to ... Mild ..."
+
+Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"
+
+He scribbled with his pencil: "You."
+
+She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."
+
+Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at
+odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was
+really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she
+exclaimed:
+
+"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go
+dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."
+
+Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt
+Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth
+garments, passed with its usual vigorous gait across the burning
+sunlight on the lawn and broad gravel walk, to disappear under the
+awning of a French window. Milly, very pale, had closed her eyes and her
+hands were clasped. She trembled, but her voice and expression were calm
+and even resolute.
+
+"The evil spirit is trying to get possession of me in another way now,"
+she said. "But with God's help I shall be able to resist it."
+
+Ian too was pale and disturbed. It was to him as though he had suddenly
+heard a beloved voice calling faintly for help.
+
+"It's only automatic writing, dear," he replied. "You may not have been
+aware you were writing, but it probably reflects something in your
+thoughts."
+
+"It does not," returned she, firmly. "However miserable I may sometimes
+be, I could never wish to give up a moment of my life with you, my own
+husband, or to leave you and our child to the influence of this--this
+being."
+
+She stretched out her arms to him.
+
+"Please hold me, Ian, and will as I do, that I may resist this horrible
+invasion. I have a feeling that you can help me."
+
+He hesitated. "I, darling? But I don't believe--"
+
+She approached him, and took hold of him urgently, looking him in the
+eyes.
+
+"Won't you do it, husband dear? Please, for my sake, even if you don't
+believe, promise you'll will to keep me here. Will it, with all your
+might!"
+
+What madness it was, this fantastic scene upon the well-kept lawn, under
+the square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the
+maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply
+with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before
+answering her with a meaningless half-laugh:
+
+"Of course I'll promise anything you like, dear."
+
+He put his arms around her and rested his face upon her golden head.
+
+"Will!" she whispered, and the voice was one of command rather than of
+appeal. "Will! You have promised."
+
+He willed as she commanded him.
+
+The triple madness of it! He did not believe--and yet it seemed to him
+that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from
+below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her
+enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to
+his brow, and the sweat stood upon it.
+
+Aunt Beatrice's masculine foot crunched the gravel. She stood there
+dressed and ready for the drive, beckoning them with her parasol. They
+came across the lawn holding each other by the hand, and Milly's face
+was calm, even happy. Aunt Beatrice smiled at them broadly with her
+large, handsome mouth and bright brown eyes.
+
+"What, not had enough of spooning yet, you foolish young people! The
+carriage will be round in one minute, and Milly won't be ready."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+There is a joy in the return of every season, though the return of
+spring is felt and celebrated beyond the rest. The gay flame dancing on
+the hearth where lately all was blackness, the sense of immunity from
+the "wrongs and arrows" of the skies and their confederate earth, the
+concentration of the sense upon the intimate charms which four walls can
+contain, bring to civilized man consolation for the loss of summer's
+lavish warmth and beauty. Children are always sensible of these opening
+festivals of the seasons, but many mature people enjoy without realizing
+them.
+
+To Mildred the world was again new, and she looked upon its most
+familiar objects with the delighted eyes of a traveller returning to a
+favorite foreign country. So she did not complain because when she had
+left the earth it had been hurrying towards the height of June, and she
+had returned to find the golden boughs of October already stripped by
+devastating winds. The flames leaped merrily under the great carved
+mantel-piece in her white-panelled drawing-room, showing the date 1661,
+and the initials of the man who had put it there, and on its narrow
+shelf a row of Chelsea figures which she had picked up in various
+corners of Oxford. The chintz curtains were drawn around the bay-window
+and a bright brass _scaldino_ stood in it, filled with the yellows and
+red-browns, the silvery pinks and mauves of chrysanthemums. The ancient
+charm, the delicate harmony of the room, in which every piece of
+furniture, every picture, every ornament, had been chosen with an
+exactness of taste seldom found in the young, made it more pleasurable
+to a cultivated eye than the gilded show drawing-rooms into which wealth
+too commonly crowds a medley of incongruous treasures and costly
+nullities.
+
+It was a free evening for Ian, and as it was but the second since the
+Desire of his Eyes had returned to him, his gaze followed her movements
+in a contented silence, as she wandered about the room in her slight
+grace, the whiteness of her skin showing through the transparency of a
+black dress, which, although it was old, Milly would have thought
+unsuitable for a domestic evening. When everything was just where it
+should be, she returned to the fire and sank into a chair thoughtfully.
+
+"How I should like some rides," she said; "but I suppose I can't have
+them, not unless Maxwell Davison's still in Oxford."
+
+Ian's face clouded.
+
+"He's not," he returned, shortly; and knocked the ashes out of his pipe,
+hesitating as to how he should put what he had to say about Maxwell
+Davison.
+
+Mildred put her hand over her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
+Suddenly the silence was broken by a burst of rippling laughter. Ian
+started; his own thoughts had not been so diverting.
+
+"What's the joke, Mildred?"
+
+"Oh, Ian, don't you know? Max made love to Milly and she--she bit him!
+Wasn't it frightfully funny?" She laughed again, with a more inward
+enjoyment.
+
+"I didn't know you bit him, although he richly deserved it; but of
+course I knew he made love to you. How do you know?"
+
+"It came to me just now in a sort of flash. I seemed to see him--to see
+her, floundering out of the canoe; and both of them in such a towering
+rage. It really was too funny."
+
+Ian's face hardened.
+
+"I am afraid I can't see the joke of a man making love to my wife."
+
+"You old stupid! He'd never have dared to behave like that to me; but
+Milly's such an ass."
+
+"Milly was frightened, shocked, as any decent woman would be to whom
+such a thing happened. She certainly didn't encourage Maxwell; but she
+found an appointment already made for her to go on the river with him.
+No doubt she took an exaggerated view of her--of your--good God,
+Mildred, what am I to say?--well, of your relations with him."
+
+Mildred had closed her eyes. A strange knowledge of things that had
+passed during her suppression was coming to her in glimpses.
+
+"I know," she returned, in a kind of wonder at her own knowledge.
+"Absurd! But Max did behave abominably. I couldn't have believed it of
+him, even with that silly little baa-lamb. Of course she couldn't manage
+him. She won't be able to manage Tony long."
+
+"Please don't speak of--of your other self in that way, Mildred. You're
+very innocent of the world in both your selves, and you must have been
+indiscreet or it would never have occurred to Maxwell to make love to
+you."
+
+Ian was actually frowning, his lips were tight and hard, the clear
+pallor of his cheek faintly streaked with red. Mildred, leaning forward,
+looked at him, interested, her round chin on her hands.
+
+"Are you angry, Ian? I really believe you are. Is it with me?"
+
+"No, not with you. But of course I'm angry when I think of a fellow like
+that, my own cousin, a man who has been a guest in my house over and
+over again, being cad enough to make love to my wife."
+
+Mildred was smiling quietly to herself.
+
+"How primitive you are, Ian!" she said. "I suppose men are primitive
+when they're angry. I don't mind, but it does seem funny _you_ should
+be."
+
+He looked at her, surprised.
+
+"Primitive? What do you mean?"
+
+"What difference does it make, Max being your cousin, you silly old boy?
+You'd hardly ever seen him till last winter. Clans aren't any use to us
+now, are they? And when a man's got a house of his own, as Max had, or
+even a hotel, why should he be so grateful as all that for a few decent
+meals? He's not in the desert, depending on you for food and protection.
+Anyhow, it seems curious to expect him to weigh little things like that
+in the balance against what is always said to be such a very strong
+feeling as a man's love for a woman."
+
+Men often deplore that they have failed in their attempts fundamentally
+to civilize Woman. They would use stronger language if Woman often made
+attempts fundamentally to civilize them.
+
+"Please don't look at me like that," Mildred said, tremulously, after a
+pause. And the tears rushed to her eyes.
+
+Ian's face softened, as leaning against the tall white mantel-piece he
+looked down and met the tear-bright gaze of his beloved.
+
+"Poor sweetheart!" he exclaimed. "You're just a child for all your
+cleverness, and you don't half understand what you're talking about. But
+listen to me--" He kneeled before her, bringing their heads almost on a
+level. "I won't have any more affairs like this of Maxwell's. I dare say
+it was as much my fault as yours, but it mustn't happen again."
+
+She dabbed away two tears that hung on her eyelashes, and looked at him
+with such a bright alluring yet elusive smile as might have flitted
+across the face of Ariel.
+
+"How can I help it if Milly flirts? I don't believe I can help it if I
+do myself. But I can tell you this, Ian--yes, really--" Her soft white
+arms went about his neck. "I've never seen a man yet who was a patch
+upon you for cleverness and handsomeness and goodness and
+altogetherness. No! You really are the very nicest man I ever saw!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+In spite of the deepening dislike between the two egos which struggled
+for the possession of Mildred Stewart's bodily personality, they had a
+common interest in disguising the fact of their dual existence. Yet the
+transformation never occurred without producing its little harvest of
+inconveniences, and the difficulty of disguising the difference between
+the two was the greater because of the number of old acquaintances and
+friends of Milly Flaxman living in Oxford.
+
+This was one reason why, when Ian was offered the headship of the
+Merchants' Guild College in London, Mildred encouraged him to take it.
+The income, too, seemed large in comparison to their Oxford one; and the
+great capital, with its ever-roaring surge of life, drew her with a
+natural magnetism. The old Foundation was being reconstructed, and was
+ambitious of adorning itself with a name so distinguished as Ian
+Stewart's, while at the same time obtaining the services of a man with
+so many of his best years still before him. Stewart, although he could
+do fairly well in practical administration, if he gave his mind to it,
+had won distinction as a student and man of letters, and feared that,
+difficult as it was to combine the real work of his life with
+bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to
+combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But
+he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment
+of others, less informed or less judicious than himself. He found it
+impossible to believe that the opinion of the Master of Durham was not
+better than his own; and his old friend and tutor was strongly in favor
+of his accepting the headship. His most really happy and successful
+years had been those later ones in which he had shone as the Head of the
+most brilliant College in Oxford, a man of affairs and, in his
+individual way, a social centre. Accordingly he found it impossible to
+believe that it might be otherwise with Ian Stewart. The majority of
+Ian's most trusted advisers were of the same opinion as the Master,
+since the number of persons who can understand the conditions necessary
+to the productiveness of exceptional and creative minds is always few.
+Besides, most people at bottom are in Martha's attitude of scepticism
+towards the immaterial service of the world.
+
+Lady Thomson voiced the general opinion in declaring that a man could
+always find time to do good work if he really wanted to do it. She
+rejoiced when Ian put aside the serious doubts which beset him and
+accepted the London offer. Mildred also rejoiced, although she regretted
+much that she must leave behind her, and in particular the old panelled
+house.
+
+This was, however, the one part of Oxford that Milly did not grieve to
+have lost, when she awoke once more from long months of sleep, to find
+herself in a new home. For she had grown to be silently afraid of the
+old house, with the great chimney-stacks like hollowed towers within it,
+made, it seemed, for the wind to moan in; its deep embrasures and
+panelling, that harbored inexplicable sounds; its ancient boards that
+creaked all night as if with the tread of mysterious feet. Awake in the
+dark hours, she fancied there were really footsteps, really knockings,
+movements, faint sighs passing outside her door, and that some old
+wicked life which should long since have passed away through the portals
+of the grave, clung to those ancient walls with a horrible tenacity,
+still refusing the great renunciation of death.
+
+It was true that in the larger, more hurried world of London it was
+easier to dissimulate her transformations than it had been in Oxford.
+The comparative retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by
+her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns--which more and
+more encroached upon those of the original personality--the strong,
+intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common
+body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against
+which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover
+with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her
+young heart of its happiness; and for that very reason it grew deeper
+and more envenomed.
+
+That Ian should love her evil and mysterious rival as though they two
+were really one was horrible to her. Even her child was not unreservedly
+her own, to bring up according to her own ideas, to love without fear of
+that rival. Tony was like his father in the sweetness of his
+disposition, as well as in his dark beauty, and he accented with
+surprising resignation the innumerable rules and regulations which Milly
+set about his path and about his bed. But although he was healthy, his
+nerves were highly strung, and it seemed as though her feverish anxiety
+for his physical, moral, and intellectual welfare reacted upon him and
+made him, after a few weeks of her influence, less vigorous in
+appearance, less gay and boylike than he was during her absence. Ian
+dared not hint a preference for the animal spirits that Mildred
+encouraged, with their attendant noise and nonsense, considered by Milly
+so undesirable. But one day Tims observed, cryptically, that "A watched
+boy never boils"; and Emma, the nurse, told Mrs. Stewart bluntly that
+she thought Master Tony wasn't near so well and bright when he was
+always being looked after, as he was when he was let go his own way a
+bit, like other children. Then a miserable fear beset Milly lest the
+boy, too, should notice the change in his mother; lest he should look
+forward to the disappearance of the woman who loved him so passionately,
+watched over him with such complete devotion, and in his silent heart
+regret, invoke, that other. It was at once soothing and bitter to her to
+be assured by Ian and by Tims that they had never been able to discover
+the least sign that Tony was aware when the change occurred between the
+two personalities of his mother.
+
+Two years passed in London, two years out of which the original owner
+enjoyed a total share of only nine months; and this, indeed, she could
+not truly have been said to have enjoyed, since happiness was far from
+her. Death would have been a sad but simple catastrophe, to be met with
+resignation to the will of God. What resignation could be felt before
+this gradual strangulation of her being at the hands of a nameless yet
+surely Evil Thing? Her love for Ian was so great that his sufferings
+were more to her than her own, and in the space of those two years she
+saw that on him, too, sorrow had set its mark. The glow of his good
+looks and the brilliancy of his mind were alike dulled. It was not only
+that his shoulders were bent, his hair thinned and touched with gray,
+but his whole appearance, once so individual, was growing merely
+typical; that of the middle-aged Academic, absorbed in the cares of his
+profession. His real work was not merely at a stand-still, but a few
+more such years and his capacity for it would be destroyed. She felt
+this vaguely, with the intuition of love. If the partnership had been
+only between him and her, he surely would have yielded to her prayer to
+give up the headship of the Merchants' Guild College after a set term;
+but he put the question by. Evidently that Other, who cared for nothing
+but her own selfish interests and amusements, who spent upon them the
+money that he ought to be saving, would never allow him to give up his
+appointment unless something better offered. It was not only her own
+life, it was the higher and happier part of his that she was struggling
+to save in those desperate hours when she sought around her for some
+weapon wherewith to fight that mortal foe. She turned to priests,
+Anglican, Roman Catholic; but they failed her. Both believed her to be
+suffering under an insane delusion, but the Roman Catholic priest would
+have attempted to exorcise the evil spirit if she would have joined his
+Communion. She was too honest to pretend to a belief that was not hers.
+
+When she returned from her last vain pilgrimage to the Church of the
+Sacred Heart and stood before the glass, removing a thick black veil
+from the pale despair of her face, she was suddenly aware of a strange,
+unfamiliar smile lifting the drooped lines of her lips--an elfish smile
+which transformed her face to something different from her own. And
+immediately those smiling lips uttered words that fell as unexpectedly
+on her ears as though they had proceeded from the mouth of another
+person.
+
+"Never mind," they said, briskly. "It wouldn't have been of the least
+use."
+
+For a minute a wild terror made her brain swim and she fled to the door,
+instinctively seeking protection; but she stayed herself, remembering
+that Ian, who was sleeping badly at night, was now asleep in his study.
+Weak and timid though she was, she would lay no fresh burden on him, but
+fight her battle, if battle there was to be, alone.
+
+She walked back deliberately to the glass and looked steadily at her
+own reflection. Her brows were frowning, her eyes stern as she had never
+before seen them, but they were assuredly hers, answering to the mood of
+her own mind. Her lips were cold, and trembled so that although she had
+meant solemnly to defy the Power of Evil within her she was unable to
+articulate. As she looked in the glass and saw herself--her real
+self--so evidently there, the strange smile, the speech divorced from
+all volition of hers which had crossed her lips, began to lose reality.
+Still her lips trembled, and at length a convulsion shook them as
+irresistible as that of a sob. Words broke stammeringly out which were
+not hers:
+
+"Struggle for life--the stronger wins. I'm stronger. It's no use
+struggling--no use--no use--no use!"
+
+Milly pressed her lips hard against her teeth with her hands, stopping
+this utterance by main force. Her heart hammered so loud it seemed as
+though some one must hear it and come to ask what was the matter. But no
+one came. She was left alone with the Thing within her.
+
+It may have been a long while, it may have been only a few seconds that
+she remained standing at her dressing-table, her hands pressed hard
+against her convulsed mouth. She had closed her eyes, afraid to look
+longer in the glass, lest something uncanny should peer out of it. She
+did not pray--she had prayed so often before--but she fought with her
+whole strength against the encroaching power of the Other. At length she
+gradually released her lips. They were bruised, but they had ceased to
+move. It was she herself who spoke, low but clearly and with
+deliberation:
+
+"I shall struggle. I shall never give in. You think you're the stronger.
+I won't let you be. I'm fighting for my husband's happiness--do you
+hear?--as well as my own. You're strong, but we shall be stronger, he
+and I, in the end."
+
+There was no answer, the sense of struggle was gone from her; and
+suddenly she felt how mad it was to be talking to herself like that in
+an empty room. She took off the little black toque which sat on her
+bright head with an alien smartness to which she was now accustomed, and
+forced herself to look in the glass while she pinned up a stray lock of
+hair. Beyond an increased pallor and darker marks under her eyes, she
+saw nothing unusual in her appearance.
+
+It was five o'clock, and Ian would probably be awake and wanting his
+tea. She went softly into the study and leaned over him. Sleep had
+almost smoothed away the lines of effort and worry which had marred the
+beauty of his face; in the eyes of her love he was always the same
+handsome Ian Stewart as in the old Oxford days, when he had seemed as a
+young god, so high above her reach.
+
+She went to an oak table behind the sofa, on which the maid had set the
+tea-things without awakening him, and sat there quietly watching the
+kettle. The early London twilight began to veil the room. Ian stirred on
+the sofa and sat up, with his back to her, unconscious of her presence.
+She rose, vaguely supposing herself about to address some gentle word
+to him. Then suddenly she had thrown one soft hand under his chin and
+one across his eyes, and with a _brusquerie_ quite unnatural to her
+pulled him backwards, while a ripple of laughter so strange as to be
+shocking in her own ears burst from her lips, which cried aloud with a
+defiant gayety:
+
+"Who, Ian? Guess!"
+
+Ian, with a sudden force as strange to her as her own laughter, her own
+gay cry, pulled her hands away, held them an instant fast; then,
+kneeling on the sofa, he caught her in his long arms across the back of
+it, and after the pressure of a kiss upon her lips such as she had never
+felt before, breathed with a voice of unutterable gladness: "Mildred!
+Darling! Dearest love!"
+
+A hoarse cry, almost a shriek, broke from the lips of Milly. The woman
+he held struggled from his arms and stared at him wildly in the veiling
+twilight. A strange horror fell upon him, and for several seconds he
+remained motionless, leaning over the back of the sofa. Then, groping
+towards the wall, he switched on the electric light. He saw it plainly,
+the white mask of a woman smitten with a mortal blow.
+
+"Milly," he uttered, stammeringly. "What's the matter? You are ill."
+
+She turned on him her heart-broken look, then pressing her hand to her
+throat, spoke as though with difficulty.
+
+"I love you very much--you don't know how much I love you. I've tried
+so hard to be a good wife to you."
+
+Ian perceived catastrophe, yet dimly; sought with desperate haste to
+remember why for a moment he had believed that that Other was come back;
+what irreparable thing he had said or done.
+
+Meantime he must say something. "Milly, dear! What's gone wrong? What
+have I done, child?"
+
+"You've let her take you--" She spoke more freely now, but with a
+startling fierceness--"You've let her take you from me."
+
+"Ah, the old trouble! My poor Milly! I know it's terrible for you. I can
+only say that no one else really exists; that you are always you
+really."
+
+"That's not true. You don't believe it yourself. That wicked creature
+has made you love her--her own wicked way. You want to have her instead
+of me; you want to destroy your own wife and to get her back again."
+
+The cruel, ultimate truth that Milly's words laid bare--the truth which
+he constantly refused to look upon, in mercy to himself and
+her--paralyzed the husband's tongue. He tried to approach her with vague
+words and gestures of affection and remonstrance, but she motioned him
+from her.
+
+"No. Don't say you love me; I can't believe it, and I hate to hear you
+say what's not true."
+
+For a moment the fierce heart of Primitive Woman had blazed up within
+her--that fire which all the waters of baptism fail to quench. But the
+flame died down as suddenly as it had arisen, and appealing with
+outspread hands, as to some invisible judge, she wailed, miserably:
+
+"Oh, what am I to do--what am I to do? I love you so much, and it's all
+no use."
+
+Ian was as white as herself.
+
+"Milly, my poor girl, don't break our hearts."
+
+He stretched his arms towards her, but she turned away from him towards
+the door, made a few steps, then stopped and clutched her throat. He
+thought her struggling with sobs; but when once more, as though in fear,
+she turned her face towards him, he saw it strangely convulsed. He moved
+towards her in an alarmed silence, but before he could reach her and
+catch her in his arms, her head drooped, she swayed once upon her feet,
+and fell heavily to the ground.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+"Now be reasonable Tims. You can be if you choose."
+
+Mildred was perched on a high stool in Tims's Chambers, breathing spring
+from a bunch of fresh Neapolitan violets, grown by an elderly admirer of
+hers, and wearing her black, winter toque and dress with that invincible
+air of smartness which she contrived to impart to the oldest clothes,
+provided they were of her own choosing. Tims, who from her face and
+attitude might have been taken for a victim of some extreme and secret
+torture, crouched, balancing herself on the top rail of her fender. She
+replied only by a horrible groan.
+
+"Who do you suppose is the happier when Milly comes back?" continued
+Mildred.
+
+"Well--the brat."
+
+"Tony? He doesn't even know when she's there; but by the time she's done
+with him he's unnaturally good. He can't like that, can he?"
+
+"Then there's Ian, good old boy!"
+
+"That's humbug. You know it is."
+
+"But it's Milly herself I really care about," cried Tims. "You've been a
+pig to her, Mil. She says you're a devil, and if I weren't a scientific
+woman I swear I should begin to believe there was something in it."
+
+"No, Tims, dear," returned Mildred with earnestness. "I'm neither a pig
+nor a devil." She paused. "Sometimes I think I've lived before, some
+quite different life from this. But I suppose you'll say that's all
+nonsense."
+
+"Of course it is--rot," commented Tims, sternly. "You're a physiological
+freak, that's what you are. You're nothing but Milly all the time, and
+you ought to be decent to her."
+
+"I don't want to hurt her anyhow," apologized Mildred; "but you see when
+I'm only half there--well, I am only half there. I'm awfully rudimentary
+and I can't grasp anything except that I'm being choked, squeezed out of
+existence, and that I must make a fight for my life. Any woman becomes
+rudimentary who is fighting for her life against another woman; only
+I've more excuse for it, because as a scientist you must see that I can
+only be in very partial possession of my brain."
+
+Tims had pulled her wig down over her eyes and glared at space. "That's
+all very well for you," she said; "but why should I help you to kill
+poor old M.?"
+
+"Do try and understand! Every time she comes back she's more and more
+miserable; and that's not cheerful for Ian either, is it? Now, through
+that underhand trick of rudimentary Me--you see I don't try to hide my
+horrid ways--she knows Ian adores me and, comparatively speaking,
+doesn't care two straws about her. That will make her more miserable
+than she has ever been before. She'll only want to live so that I
+mayn't."
+
+"I don't see how Ian's going to get on without her. _You_ don't do much
+for him, my girl, except spend his money."
+
+"Of course, that's quite true. I'm not in the least suited to Ian or his
+life or his income; but that's not my fault. How perverse men are!
+Always in love with the wrong women, aren't they?"
+
+Tims's countenance relaxed and she replied with a slight air of
+importance:
+
+"My opinion of men has been screwed up a peg lately. Every now and then
+you do find one who's got too much sense for any rot of that kind."
+
+Mildred continued.
+
+"Ian's perfectly wretched at what happened; can't understand it, of
+course. He doesn't say much, but I can see he dreads explanations with
+Milly. He's good at reserve, but no good at lies, poor old dear, and
+just think of all the straight questions she'll ask him! It'll be
+torture to both of them. Poor Milly! I've no patience with her. Why
+should she want to live? Life's no pleasure to her. She's known a long
+time that Tony's really jollier and better with me, and now she knows
+Ian doesn't want her. How can you pretend to think Milly happy, Tims?
+Hasn't she said things to you?"
+
+"Yes," groaned Tims. "Poor old M.! She's pretty well down on her luck,
+you bet."
+
+"And I enjoy every minute of my life, although I could find plenty to
+grumble at if I liked. Listen to me, Tims. How would it be to strike a
+bargain? Let me go on without any upsets from Milly until I'm forty. I'm
+sure I sha'n't care what happens to me at forty. Then Milly may have
+everything her own way. What would it matter to her? She likes to take
+time by the forelock and behaves already as though she were forty. I
+feel sure you could help me to keep her quiet if only you chose."
+
+"If I chose to meddle at all, I should be much more likely to help her
+to come back," returned Tims, getting snappish.
+
+"Alas! I fear you would, Tims, dear, in spite of knowing it would only
+make her miserable. That shows, doesn't it, how unreasonable even a
+distinguished scientific woman can be?"
+
+This aspersion on Tims's reasoning powers had to be resented and the
+resentment to be soothed. And the soothing was so effectually done that
+Tims owned to herself afterwards there was some excuse for Ian's
+infatuation.
+
+But Tims had no desire to meddle, and the months passed by without any
+symptoms of the change appearing. It seemed as if Mildred's hold upon
+life had never been so firm, the power of her personality never so fully
+developed. She belonged to a large family which in all its branches had
+a trick of throwing up successful men and brilliant women. But in
+reaction against Scottish clannishness, it held little together, and in
+the two houses whence Mildred was launched on her London career, she
+had no nursery reputation of Milly's with which to contend.
+
+One of these houses was that of her cousin, Sir Cyril Meres, a
+fashionable painter with a considerable gift for art, and more for
+success--success social and financial. His beautiful house, stored with
+wonderful collections, had a reputation, and was frequented by every one
+of distinction in the artistic or intellectual world--by those of the
+world of wealth and rank who were interested in such matters, and the
+yet larger number who affected to be interested in them. For those
+Anglo-Saxon deities, Mammon and Snobbery, who have since conquered the
+whole civilized globe, had temporarily fallen back for a fresh spring,
+and in the eighties and early nineties Culture was reckoned very nearly
+as _chic_ as motoring in the first years of the new century.
+
+Several painters of various degrees of talent attempted to fix on canvas
+the extraordinary charm of Mrs. Stewart's appearance. Not one of them
+succeeded; but the peculiar shade of her hair, the low forehead and
+delicate line of the dark eyebrows, the outline of the mask, sometimes
+admired, sometimes criticised, made her portrait always recognized,
+whether simpering as a chocolate-box classicality, smiling sadly from
+the flowery circle of the Purgatorio, or breaking out of some rough mass
+of paint with the provocative leer of a _cocotte_ of the Quartier Latin.
+
+The magnetism of her personality defied analysis, as her essential
+beauty defied the painter's art. It was a magnetism which surrounded her
+with an atmosphere of adorations, admirations, enmities--all equally
+violent and irrational. Her wit had little to do with the making of her
+enemies, because it was never used in offence against friends or even
+harmless acquaintances; only against her foes she employed it with the
+efficiency and mercilessness of a red Indian wielding the tomahawk.
+
+The other family where she found her niche awaiting her was of a
+different order. It was that of the retired Indian judge, Sir John
+Ireton, whose wife had chaperoned her through a Commemoration the summer
+she had taken her First in Greats. Ireton was not only in Parliament,
+but his house was a meeting-place where politicians cemented personal
+ties and plotted party moves. Milly in her brief appearances, had been
+of use to Lady Ireton, but Mildred proved socially invaluable. There
+were serious persons who suspected Mrs. Stewart of approaching politics
+in a flippant spirit; but on certain days she had revealed a grave and
+ardent belief in the dogmas of the party and a piety of attitude towards
+the person of its great apostle, which had convinced them that she was
+not really cynical or frivolous.
+
+Lady Augusta Goring was the most important conquest of the kind Milly
+had made. She was the only child of the Marquis of Ipswich, and one of
+those rather stupid people whose energy of mind and character is often
+mistaken by themselves and others for cleverness. Lady Augusta was
+handsome in a dull, massive way, and so conscientious that she had
+seldom time to smile. Her friends said she would smile oftener if her
+husband caused her less anxiety; but considering who George Goring was
+and how he had been brought up, he might have been much worse. Where
+women were concerned, scandal had never accused him of anything more
+flagrant than dubious flirtations. It was his political intrigues,
+constantly threatening unholy _liaisons_ in the most unthinkable
+directions; his sudden fits of obstinate idleness, often occurring at
+the very moment when some clever and promising political scheme of his
+own was ripe for execution, which so unendurably harassed the staid
+Marquis and the earnest Lady Augusta. They were highly irritating, too,
+to Sir John Ireton, who had believed himself at one time able to tame
+and tutor the tricksy young politician.
+
+The late Lord Ipswich had been a "sport" in the Barthop family; a black
+sheep, but clever, and a well known collector. Accidental circumstances
+had greatly enriched him, and as he detested his brother and successor,
+he had left his pictures to the nation and all of his fortune which he
+could dispose of--which happened to be the bulk--to his natural son,
+George Goring. But his will had not been found for some weeks after his
+death, and while the present Marquis had believed himself the inheritor
+of the whole property, he had treated the nameless and penniless child
+of his brother with perfect delicacy and generosity. When George Goring
+found himself made rich at the expense of his uncle, he proposed to his
+cousin Lady Augusta and was accepted.
+
+Mildred was partly amused and partly bored to discover herself on so
+friendly a footing with Lady Augusta. Putting herself into that passive
+frame of mind in which revelations of Milly's past actions were most
+often vouchsafed to her, she saw herself type-writing in a small,
+high-ceilinged room looking out on a foggy London park, and Lady Augusta
+seated at a neighboring table, surrounded by papers. Type-writing was
+not then so common as it is now, and Milly had learned the art in order
+to give assistance to Ian. Mildred was annoyed to find herself in danger
+of having to waste her time in a mechanical occupation which she
+detested, or else of offending a woman whom her uncle valued as a friend
+and political ally.
+
+It was a slight compensation to receive an invitation to accompany the
+Iretons to a great ball at Ipswich House. There was no question of Ian
+accompanying her. He was usually too tired to care for going out in the
+evening and went only to official dinners and to the houses of old
+friends, or of people with whom he had educational connections. It did
+not occur to him that it might be wise to put a strain upon himself
+sometimes, to lay by his spectacles, straighten his back, have his beard
+trimmed and appear at Mildred's side in the drawing-rooms where she
+shone, looking what he was--a husband of whom she had reason to be
+proud. More and more engrossed by his own work and responsibilities, he
+let her drift into a life quite apart from his, content to see her world
+from his own fireside, in the sparkling mirror of her talk.
+
+Ipswich House was a great house, if of little architectural merit, and
+the ball had all the traditional spectacular splendor common to such
+festivities. The pillared hall and double staircase, the suites of
+spacious rooms, were filled with a glittering kaleidoscopic crowd of
+fair and magnificently bejewelled women and presumably brave, certainly
+well-groomed and handsome men. The excellence of the music, the masses
+of flowers, the number of great names and well-advertised society
+beauties present, would subsequently provide material for long and
+eulogistic paragraphs in the half-penny press and the Ladies' Weeklies.
+
+Mildred enjoyed it as a spectacle rather than as a ball, for she knew
+few people there, and the young political men whom she had met at her
+uncle's parties were too much engaged with ladies of more importance, to
+whom they were related or to whom they owed social attention, to write
+their names more than once on her programme. One of these, however,
+asked her if she had noticed how harassed both Lord Ipswich and Lady
+Augusta looked. Goring's speech, he said, at the Fothering by-election
+was reported and commented upon in all the papers, and had given
+tremendous offence to the leaders of his party; while the fact that he
+had not turned up in time for the ball must be an additional cross to
+his wife, who made such a firm stand against the social separation of
+married couples.
+
+When Mildred returned to her uncle she found him the centre of a group
+of eminent politicians, all denouncing in more or less subdued tones the
+outrageous utterances and conduct of Goring, and most declaring that
+only consideration for Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta prevented them from
+publicly excommunicating the hardened offender. Others, however, while
+admitting the outrage, urged that he was too brilliant a young man to be
+lightly thrown away, and advised patience, combined with the
+disciplinary rod. Sir John was of the excommunicatory party. Later in
+the evening he disappeared into some remote smoking or card-room, not so
+much forgetting his niece as taking it for granted that she was, as
+usual, surrounded by friends and admirers of both sexes. But a detached
+personality, however brilliant, is apt to be submerged in such a crowd
+of social eminences, bound together by ties of blood, of interests, and
+of habit, as filled the salons of Ipswich House. Mildred walked around
+the show contentedly enough for a time, receiving a smile here and a
+pleasant word there from such of her acquaintances as she chanced upon,
+but practically alone. And being alone, she found herself yielding to a
+vulgar envy of richer women's clothes and jewels. Her dress, with which
+she had been pleased, looked ordinary beside the creations of great
+Parisian _ateliers_, and the few old paste ornaments which were the only
+jewels she possessed, charming as they were, seemed dim and scant among
+the crowns and constellations of diamonds that surrounded her. Her pride
+rebelled against this envy, but could not conquer it.
+
+More gnawing pangs, however, assailed her presently, the pangs of
+hunger; and no one offered to take her in to supper. The idea of taking
+herself in was revolting; she preferred starvation. But where could
+Uncle John have hidden himself? She sought the elderly truant with all
+the suppressed annoyance of a chaperon seeking an inconsiderate flirt of
+a girl. And it happened that a spirit in her feet led her to the door of
+a small room in which Milly and Lady Augusta had been wont to transact
+their business. A curious feeling of familiarity, of physical habit,
+caused her to open the big mahogany door. There was no air of public
+festivity about the room, which was furnished with a substantial, almost
+shabby masculine comfort. But oh, tantalizing spectacle! Under the
+illumination of a tall, crimson-shaded, standard lamp, stood a little,
+white-covered table, reminding her irresistibly of a little table in a
+fairy story, which the due incantation causes to rise out of the ground.
+A small silver-gilt tureen of soup smoked upon it and a little pile of
+delicate rolls lay beside the plate set for one. But alas! she might
+not, like the favored girl in the fairy story, proceed without ceremony
+to satisfy her hunger at the mysterious little table.
+
+A door immediately opposite that of the small sitting-room opened
+noiselessly, and a young man entered with a light, quick step. He saw
+Mildred, but for a second or so she did not see him. He was at her side
+when she looked around and their eyes met. They had never seen each
+other before, but at that meeting of the eyes a curious feeling, such as
+two Europeans might experience, meeting in the heart of some dark
+continent, affected them both.
+
+There was something picturesque about the young man's appearance, in
+spite of the impeccable cut and finish of his dress-suit and the waxed
+ends of his small blond mustache. His hair was of a ruddy nut-brown
+color, and had a wave in it; his bright hazel eyes seemed exactly to
+match it. His face had a fine warm pallor, and his under lip, which with
+his chin was somewhat thrust forward, was redder than the lip of a
+child. It was perhaps this noticeable coloring and something in his port
+which made him, in spite of the correct modernity of his dress, suggest
+some seventeenth-century portrait.
+
+"Forgive my passing you," he said, at length; "but I'm starving."
+
+"So am I," she returned, hardly aware of what she was saying. Some
+strange, almost hypnotic attraction seemed to rivet her whole attention
+on the mere phenomenon of this man.
+
+"By Jove! Aren't they feeding the multitude down there?" he asked,
+nodding in the direction of the supper-room.
+
+"Of course," she answered, with the simple gravity of a child, her blue
+eyes still fixed upon him. "But I can't ask for supper for myself, can
+I?"
+
+Her need was distinctly material; yet the young man confronting her
+white grace, the strange look in her blue eyes, had a dreamlike feeling,
+almost as though he had met a dryad or an Undine between two of the
+prosaic, substantial doors of Ipswich House. And as in a dream the most
+extraordinary things seem familiar and expected, so the apparition of
+the Undine and her confidence in him seemed familiar, in fact just what
+he had been expecting during those hours of fog off the Goodwins, when
+the sirens, wild voices gathering up from all the seas of the world, had
+been screaming to each other across the hidden waters. That same inner
+concentration upon the mere phenomenon of a presence, an existence,
+which had given the childlike note to Mildred's speech, froze a
+compliment upon his lips; and they stood silent, eying each other
+gravely. A junior footman appeared, carrying a bottle of champagne in a
+bucket, and the young man addressed him in a vague, distracted tone,
+very unlike his usual manner.
+
+"Look here, Arthur, here's a lady who can't get any supper."
+
+The footman went quite pink at this personal reproach. He happened to
+have heard some one surmise, on seeing Mildred roaming about alone, that
+she was a newspaper woman.
+
+"Please sir," he replied, "I don't know how it's happened, for her
+Ladyship told Mr. Mackintosh to be sure and see as the newspaper ladies
+and gentlemen were well looked after, and he thought as they'd all had
+supper."
+
+It seemed incredible that Mildred should not have heard this reply,
+uttered so close to her; but though it fell upon her ears it did not
+penetrate to her mind.
+
+"Bring up supper for two, Arthur," said Goring, in his usual decisive
+tone. "That'll do, won't it?" he added, and turned to Mildred, ushering
+her into the room. "You'll have supper with me, I hope? My name's
+Goring; I'm Lord Ipswich's son-in-law and I live in his house; so you
+see it's all right."
+
+The corollary was not evident; but the mention of the name brought
+Mildred back to the ordinary world. So this was George Goring, the
+plague of his political party, the fly in the ointment of a respectable
+Marquis and his distinguished daughter. She had not fancied him like
+this. For one thing, she did not know him to be younger than his wife,
+and between the careworn solidity of Lady Augusta and this vivid
+restless personality, the five actual years of difference seemed
+stretched to ten.
+
+"I'm convinced it's all right, Mr. Goring," she replied, throwing
+herself into a chair and smiling at him sparklingly. "It must be all
+right. I want my supper so much I should have to accept your invitation
+even if you were a burglar."
+
+Goring, whose habit it was to keep moving, laughed as he walked about,
+one hand in his trousers pocket.
+
+"Why shouldn't I be a burglar? A burglar, with an assistant disguised as
+a footman, sacking the bedrooms of Lord Ipswich's house while the ball
+proceeds? There's copy for you! Shall I do it? 'Mr. George Goring's
+Celebrated Black Pearls Stolen,' would make a capital head-line. Perhaps
+you've heard I'd do anything to keep my name in the newspapers."
+
+"It certainly gets there pretty often," returned Mildred, politely; "and
+whenever it's mentioned it has an enlivening effect."
+
+The footman had reappeared and they were unfolding their dinner-napkins,
+sitting opposite each other at the little table.
+
+"As how, enlivening?"
+
+"Like a bit of bread dropped into a glass of flat champagne."
+
+"You think my party's like champagne? Why, it couldn't exist for a
+moment if it sparkled."
+
+"I was talking of newspapers, not of your party; though there's no doubt
+you do enliven that."
+
+"Do I? Like what? No odiously inoffensive comparisons, if you please."
+
+"Well, I have heard people say like--like a blister on the back of the
+neck."
+
+Goring laughed. "Thanks. That's better."
+
+"The patient's using language, but he won't really tear it off, because
+he knows that would hurt him more, and the blister will do him good in
+the end, if he bears with it."
+
+"But there's the blister's side to it, too. It's infernally tiring for a
+blister to be sticking on to such a fellow everlastingly. It'll fly off
+of itself before long, if he doesn't look out. Hullo! What am I saying?
+I suppose you'll have all this out in some confounded paper--'The Rebel
+Member Returns. A Chat with Mr. Goring'--Don't do that; but I'll give
+you some other copy if you like."
+
+"You're very kind in giving me all this copy. What shall I do with it?
+Shall I keep it as a memento?"
+
+"No, no. You can sell it; honor bright you can."
+
+"Can I? Shall I get much for it? Enough money to buy me a tiara, do you
+think?"
+
+"Do you really want to wear the usual fender? Now, why? I suppose
+because you aren't sufficiently aware how--" he paused on the edge of a
+compliment which seemed suddenly too full-flavored and ordinary to be
+addressed to this strangely lovely being, with her smile at once so
+sparkling and so mysterious. He substituted: "How much more
+distinguished it is to look like an Undine than like a peeress."
+
+Mildred seemed slightly taken aback.
+
+"Why do you say 'Undine?'" she asked, almost sharply. "Do I--do I look
+as if I came out of a Trafalgar Square fountain with fell designs on
+Lord Ipswich?"
+
+"Of course not. But--I can't exactly define even to myself what I mean,
+only you do suggest an Undine to me. To some one else you might be
+simply Miss--Forgive me, I don't know your name."
+
+He had not even troubled to glance at her left hand, and when the "Mrs."
+was uttered it affected him oddly. It was one of the peculiar
+differences between her two personalities that, casually encountered,
+Mildred was as seldom taken for a married woman as Milly for an
+unmarried one.
+
+"Do I look as if I'd got no soul?" she persisted, leaning a little
+towards him, an intensity that might almost have been called anxiety in
+her gaze.
+
+He could even have fancied she had grown paler. He, too, became serious.
+His eyes brightened, meeting hers, and a slight color came into his
+cheeks.
+
+"Quite the contrary," he answered. "I should say you had a great
+deal--in fact, I shall begin to believe in detachable souls again. Fancy
+most people as just souls, without trimmings. It makes one laugh. But
+your body looks like an emanation from the spirit; as though it might
+flow away in a white waterfall or go up in a white fire; and as though,
+if it did, your soul could certainly precipitate another body, which
+must certainly be like this one, because it would be as this is, the
+material expression of a spirit."
+
+She listened as he spoke, seriously, her eyes on his. But when he had
+done, she dropped her chin on her hand and laughed delightedly.
+
+"You think I should be able to grow a fresh body, like a lobster growing
+a fresh claw? What fun!"
+
+There was a sound without, not of the footman struggling with dishes and
+plates and the door-handle, but of middle-aged voices.
+
+Instinctively Goring and Mildred straightened themselves and looked
+polite. Lord Ipswich and Sir John Ireton, deep in political converse,
+came slowly in and then stopped short in surprise. Mildred lost not a
+moment in carrying the war into their country. She turned about and
+addressed her uncle in a playful tone, which yet smacked of reproof.
+
+"Here you are at last, Uncle John! I thought you'd forgotten all about
+me. I've been walking miles in mad pursuit of you, till I was so tired
+and hungry I think I should have dropped if Mr. Goring hadn't taken
+pity upon me and made me eat his supper."
+
+Sir John defended himself, and Lord Ipswich was shocked to think that a
+lady had been in such distress in his house; although the apparition of
+Goring prevented him from feeling it as acutely as he would otherwise
+have done. His pleasant pink face took on an expression of severity as
+he responded to his son-in-law's somewhat too cheerful greeting.
+
+"Sorry to be so late, but we were held up by a fog at the mouth of the
+Thames."
+
+"It must have been very important business to take you all the way to
+Brussels so suddenly."
+
+"It certainly wouldn't wait. I heard there was a whole set of Beauvais
+tapestries to be had for a mere song. I couldn't buy them without seeing
+them you know, and the big London and Paris dealers were bound to chip
+in if I didn't settle the matter pretty quick. I'm precious glad I did,
+for they're the finest pieces I ever saw and would have fetched five
+times what I gave for them at Christie's."
+
+"Ah--really!" was all Lord Ipswich's response, coldly uttered and
+accompanied by a smile more sarcastic than often visited his neat and
+kindly lips. Sir John Ireton and Mildred, aware of the delicate
+situation, partly domestic and partly political, upon which they were
+intruding, took themselves away and were presently rolling through the
+empty streets in the gray light of early morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Not long afterwards Mildred received a letter the very address of which
+had an original appearance, looking as if it were written with a stick
+in a fist rather than with a pen between fingers. It caught her
+attention at once from half a dozen others.
+
+     "DEAR MRS. STEWART,--Yesterday I was at Cochrane's studio
+     and he told me Meres was the greatest authority in England
+     on tapestry, and also a cousin of yours. Please remember (or
+     forgive) the supper on Tuesday, and of your kindness, ask
+     him to let me see his lot and give me his opinion on mine.
+     Cochrane had a folly he called a portrait of you in his
+     studio. I turned its face to the wall; and in the end he
+     admitted I was right.
+
+     "Yours sincerely,
+
+     "GEORGE GORING."
+
+Accordingly, on a very hot day early in July, Goring met Mildred again,
+at Sir Cyril Meres's house on Campden Hill. The long room at one end of
+which stood the small dining-table looked on the greenness of a lawny,
+lilac-sheltered garden, so that such light as filtered through the green
+jalousies was green also. There was a great block of ice somewhere in
+the room, and so cool it was, so greenly dim there, that it seemed
+almost like a cavern of the sea. Mildred wore a white dress, and, as
+was the fashion of the moment, a large black hat shadowed with
+ostrich-feathers. Once more on seeing her he had a startled impression
+of looking upon an ethereal creature, a being somehow totally distinct
+from other beings; and for lack of some more appropriate name, he called
+her again in his mind "Undine." As the talk, which Cyril Meres had a
+genius for making general, became more animated, he half lost that
+impression in one of a very clever, charming woman, with a bright wit
+sailing lightly over depths of knowledge to which he was unaccustomed in
+her sex.
+
+The party was not intended to number more than eight persons, of whom
+Lady Thomson was one, and they sat down seven. When Sir Cyril observed:
+"We won't wait any longer for Davison," Mildred was too much interested
+in Goring's presence to inquire who this Davison might be.
+
+She sparkled on half through luncheon to the delight of every one but
+Miss Ormond the actress, who would have preferred to play the lead
+herself. Then came a pause. A door was opened at the far end of the dim
+room, and the missing guest appeared. Sir Cyril rose hastily to greet
+him. He advanced without any apologetic hurry in his gait; the same
+impassive Maxwell Davison as before, but leaner, browner, more
+silver-headed from three more years of wandering under Oriental suns.
+Mildred could hardly have supposed it possible that the advent of any
+human being could have given her so disagreeable a sensation.
+
+Sir Cyril was unaware that she knew Maxwell Davison; surprised to hear
+that he was a cousin of Stewart's, between whom and himself there
+existed a mutual antipathy, expressing itself in terms of avoidance. His
+own acquaintance with Davison was recent and in the way of business. He
+had had the fancy to build for the accommodation of his Hellenic
+treasures a room in imitation of the court of a Graeco-Roman house which
+he had helped to excavate in Asia Minor. He had commissioned Davison to
+buy him hangings for it to harmonize with an old Persian carpet in cream
+color and blue of which he was already possessed. Davison had brought
+these with him and a little collection of other things which he thought
+Meres might care to look at. He did not know the Stewarts had moved to
+London, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find himself seated at the
+same table with Mildred; he had not forgotten, still less forgiven, the
+lure of her coquetry, the insult of her rebuff.
+
+Lady Thomson was next him and questioned him exhaustively about his book
+on Persian Literature and the travels of his lifetime. Miss Ormond took
+advantage of Mrs. Stewart's sudden silence to talk to the table rather
+cleverly around the central theme of herself. Goring conversed apart
+with Mrs. Stewart.
+
+Coffee was served in the shrine which Sir Cyril had reared for his Greek
+collection, of which the gem was a famous head of Aphrodite--an early
+Aphrodite, divine, removed from all possible pains and agitations of
+human passion. The room was an absurdity on Campden Hill, said some,
+but undeniably beautiful in itself. The columns, of singular lightness
+and grace, were of a fine marble which hovered between creamy white and
+faint yellow, and the walls and floor were of the same tone, except for
+a frieze on a Greek model, very faintly colored, and the old Persian
+carpet. In fine summer weather the large skylight covering the central
+space was withdrawn, and such sky as London can show looked down upon
+it. The new hangings which Maxwell Davison had brought with him were
+already displayed on a tall screen, and his miscellaneous collection of
+antiquities, partly sent from Durham College, partly lately acquired,
+were arranged on a marble bench.
+
+"I shouldn't have brought these things, Sir Cyril," he said; "if I'd
+known Mrs. Stewart was here. She's got a way of hinting that my most
+cherished antiquities are forgeries; and the worst of it is, she makes
+every one believe her, including myself."
+
+Mildred protested.
+
+"I don't pretend to know anything about antiquities, Mr. Davison. I'm
+sure I never suspected you of a forgery, and if I had, I hope I
+shouldn't have been rude enough to tell you so."
+
+Maxwell Davison laughed his harsh laugh.
+
+"Do you want me to believe you can't be rude, Mrs. Stewart?"
+
+"I'm almost afraid she can't be," interposed Lady Thomson's full voice.
+"People who make a superstition of politeness infallibly lose the higher
+courtesy of truth."
+
+Here Sir Cyril Meres called Davison away to worship at the shrine of the
+Aphrodite, while Goring invited Mrs. Stewart into a neighboring corridor
+where some tapestries were hanging.
+
+The divining crystal was among the objects returned from Oxford, and had
+been included in the collection which Davison had brought with him, on
+the chance that the painter might fancy such curiosities. When Goring
+and Mildred returned from their leisurely inspection of the tapestries,
+Miss Ormond had it in her hand, and Lady Thomson was commenting on some
+remark of hers.
+
+"I've no doubt, as you say, it has played a wicked part before now in
+Oriental intrigues. But of course the poor crystal is perfectly innocent
+of the things read into it by rascals, practising on the ignorant and
+superstitious."
+
+"Sometimes, perhaps, Lady Thomson," returned Miss Ormond; "but sometimes
+people do see extraordinary visions in a crystal."
+
+Lady Thomson sniffed.
+
+"Excitable, imaginative people do, I dare say."
+
+"On the contrary, prosaic people are far more likely to see things than
+highly strung imaginative creatures like myself. I've tried several
+times and have never seen anything. I believe having a great deal of
+brain-power and emotion and all that tells against it. I shouldn't be at
+all surprised now if Mrs. Stewart, who is--well, I should fancy, just a
+little cold, very bright and all that on the surface, you know--I
+shouldn't wonder if she could crystal-gaze very successfully. I should
+like to know whether she's ever tried."
+
+"I'm sure she's not," replied Lady Thomson, firmly. "My niece, Mrs.
+Stewart, is a great deal too sensible and well-educated."
+
+"Mrs. Stewart can't honestly say the same for herself," interposed
+Davison; "she gazed in this very crystal some years ago and certainly
+saw something in it."
+
+Miss Ormond exclaimed in triumph. Mildred froze. She did not desire the
+role of Society Seer.
+
+"What did I see, Mr. Davison?" she asked.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Nothing of importance. You saw a woman in a light dress. Perhaps it was
+Lady Hammerton the collector, originally guilty, you remember, in the
+matter of the forged Augustus."
+
+"Mildred had only to peep in any glass to see Lady Hammerton, or some
+one sufficiently like her," observed Meres.
+
+"That idea was started when David Fletcher picked up the fancy picture
+which he chose to call a portrait of Lady Hammerton," cried Lady
+Thomson, who was just taking her leave. "Such nonsense! I protest
+against my own niece and a scholar of Ascham being likened to that
+scandalous woman."
+
+Cyril Meres smiled and stroked his soft, silvery beard.
+
+"Quite right of you to protest, Beatrice. Still, I'm glad Lady Hammerton
+didn't stick heroically to her Professor--as Mildred here does. We
+should never have been proud of her as an ancestress if she had."
+
+"Heroically?" repeated Maxwell Davison under his breath, and laughed.
+But the meaning of his laugh was lost on every one except Mildred. She
+flushed hotly at the thought of having to bear the responsibility of
+that ridiculous scene on the Cherwell; it was humiliating, indeed. She
+took up the crystal to conceal her chagrin.
+
+"Do please see something, Mrs. Stewart!" exclaimed Miss Ormond.
+
+"What sort of thing?"
+
+"Anything! Whatever you see, it will be quite thrilling.
+
+"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart," petitioned Goring, wandering towards the
+crystal-gazer. "I should so like to thrill Miss Ormond."
+
+"It's no good your trying that way," smiled the lady, playing fine eyes.
+"It's only shadows that are thrilling in the crystal; shadows of
+something happening a long way off; or sometimes a coming event casts a
+shadow before--and that's the most thrilling of all."
+
+"A coming event! That's exactly what I am, a tremendous coming Political
+Event. You ask them in the House," cried Goring, thrusting out his chin
+and aiming a provocative side-smile at a middle-aged Under-Secretary of
+State who discreetly admired Miss Ormond.
+
+"Modest creature!" ejaculated the Under-Secretary playfully with his
+lips; and in his heart vindictively, "Conceited devil!"
+
+"Please see me, Mrs. Stewart!" pleaded Goring, half kneeling on a chair
+and leaning over the crystal.
+
+"I do," she returned. "I'd rather not. You look so distorted and odd;
+and so do I, don't I? Dreadful! But the crystal's getting cloudy."
+
+"Then you're going really to see something!" exclaimed Miss Ormond. "How
+delightful! Come away directly, Mr. Goring, or you'll spoil everything."
+
+Sir Cyril and Davison looked up from some treasure of Greek art. The
+conversation was perfunctory, every one's curiosity waiting on Mildred
+and the crystal.
+
+"Don't you see anything yet, Mrs. Stewart?" asked Miss Ormond at length,
+impatiently.
+
+"No," replied Mildred, hesitatingly. "At least, not exactly. I see
+something like rushing water and foam."
+
+"The reflection of clouds overhead," pronounced the Under-Secretary,
+dogmatically, glancing upward.
+
+"I'm sure it's nothing of the kind," asserted Miss Ormond. "Please go on
+looking, Mrs. Stewart, and perhaps you'll see a water-spirit."
+
+"Why do you want her to see a water-spirit?" asked Davison, ironically.
+"In all countries of the world they are reckoned spiteful, treacherous
+creatures. I was once bitten by one severely, and I have never wanted to
+see one since."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Davison! Are you serious? What do you mean?" questioned Miss
+Ormond.
+
+Mrs. Stewart hastily put down the crystal. "I don't want to see one,"
+she said; "I'm afraid it might bring me bad luck, and, besides, I can't
+wait for it, I've got several calls to make before I go home, and I
+think there's a storm coming." She shivered. "I'm quite cold."
+
+Miss Ormond said that must be the effect of the crystal, as the
+afternoon was still oppressively hot.
+
+Goring caught up with Mrs. Stewart in the gravel drive outside the house
+and walked through Kensington Gardens with her. It seemed to them both
+quite natural that they should be walking together, and their talk was
+in the vein of old friends who have met after a long separation rather
+than in that of new acquaintances. When he left her and turned to walk
+across Hyde Park towards Westminster, he examined his impressions and
+perceived that he was in a state of mind foreign to his nature, and
+therefore the butt of his ridicule; a state in which, if he and Mrs.
+Stewart had been unmarried persons, he would have said to himself, "That
+is the woman I shall marry." It would not have been a passion or an
+emotion that would have made him say that; it would have been a
+conviction. As it was, the thing was absurd. Cochrane had told him, half
+in jest, that Mrs. Stewart was a breaker of hearts, but had not hinted
+that her own was on the market. Her appearance made it surely an
+interesting question whether she had a heart at all.
+
+And for himself? He hated to think of his marriage, because he
+recognized in it the fatal "little spot" in the yet ungarnered fruit of
+his life. He was only thirty, but he had been married seven years and
+had two children, both of them the image of all the Barthops that had
+ever been, except his own father. In moments of depression he saw
+himself through all the coming years being gradually broken, crushed
+under a weight of Barthops--father-in-law, wife and children--moulded
+into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one
+but himself knew the weakness of his character--explosive, audacious in
+alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or
+hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to
+resist constant domestic pressure--the unconscious pressure of radically
+opposed character. The crowd applauds the marriage of such opposites
+because their side almost always wins; partly by its own weight and
+partly by their weight behind. But the truth is that two beings opposed
+in emotional temperament and mental processes are only a few degrees
+more able to help and understand each other in the close union of
+marriage than the two personalities of Milly Stewart in the closer union
+of her body.
+
+From one point of view it was Goring's fatal weakness to have a real
+affection for his father-in-law, who was a pattern of goodness and
+good-breeding. Consequently, that very morning he had promised Lord
+Ipswich to walk in the straightest way of the party, for one year at
+least; and if he must slap faces, to select them on the other side of
+the House. Nevertheless, if he really wished to give sincere
+gratification to Lord Ipswich and to dear Augusta, he must needs give
+up his capricious and offensive tactics altogether. These things might
+give him a temporary notoriety in the House and country, but they were
+not in the traditions of the Ipswich family, which had held a high place
+in politics for two hundred years. The Marquis said that he had always
+tried to make George feel that he was received as a true son of the
+family and heir of its best traditions, if not of its name. There had
+been a great deal of good faith on both sides. Yet now a solitary young
+man, looking well in the frock-coat and tall hat of convention, might
+have been observed stopping and striking the gravel viciously as he
+reflected on the political future which his father-in-law was mapping
+out for him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Sir James Carus, the well-known scientist, had for some time been
+employing Miss Timson in the capacity of assistant, and spoke highly of
+her talents. She began to have a reputation in scientific circles, and
+owing to her duties with Carus she could not come to the Stewarts' as
+often as she had formerly done. But she preserved her habit of
+dismissing the parlor-maid at the door and creeping up to the
+drawing-room like a thief in the night.
+
+On the day following Sir Cyril Meres's luncheon-party she arrived in her
+usual fashion. The windows were shaded against the afternoon sun, but
+the sky was now overcast, and such a twilight reigned within that at
+first she could distinguish little, and the drawing-room seemed to her
+to be empty. But in a minute she discerned a white figure supine in a
+large arm-chair--Mildred, and asleep.
+
+She had a writing-board on her knee, and a hand resting on it still held
+a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir
+when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a
+something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which
+suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly might
+even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a mixed emotion.
+
+"Good old Milly! Poor old girl!" she breathed to the white figure in the
+arm-chair. "Don't be in a hurry! You won't find it all beer and skittles
+when you're here."
+
+It seemed to her that a slight convulsion passed over the sleeper's
+face.
+
+Tims seated herself on a low chair, in the attitude of certain gargoyles
+that crouch under the eaves of old churches, elbows on knees, chin on
+hands, and fixed her eyes in silence on her silent companion. In spite
+of her work along the acknowledged lines of science, she had pursued her
+hypnotic studies furtively, half in scorn and half in fear of her
+scientific brethren. What would she not have given to be enabled to
+watch, to comprehend the changes passing within that human form so close
+to her that she could see its every external detail, could touch it by
+the out-stretching of a hand! But its inner shrine, its secret place,
+remained barred against those feeble implements of sense with which
+nature has provided the explorative human intelligence. Its content was
+more mysterious, more inaccessible than that of the remotest star which
+yields the secret of its substance to the spectroscope of the
+astronomer.
+
+Tims's thoughts had forsaken the personal side of the question, when she
+was recalled to it by seeing the right hand in which the stylograph had
+been lying begin to twitch, the fingers to contract. There was no
+answering movement in the face--even when the sleeper at length firmly
+grasped the pen and suddenly sat up. Tims rose quickly, and then
+perceived, lying on the writing-board, a directed envelope and a
+half-finished note to herself. She slipped the note-paper nearer to the
+twitching hand, and after a few meaningless flourishes, it wrote slowly
+and tentatively:
+
+"Tims--Milly--cannot get back. Help me ... Save Ian. Wicked creature--no
+conscience--"
+
+Here the power of the hand began to fail, and the writing was terminated
+by mere scrawls. The sleeper's eyes were now open, but not wide. They
+had a strange, glassy look in them, nor did she show any consciousness
+of Tims's presence. She dropped the pen, folded the paper in the same
+slow and tentative manner in which she had written upon it, and placed
+it in the directed envelope lying there. Then her face contracted, her
+fingers slackened, and she fell back again to the depths of the chair.
+
+"Milly!" cried Tims, almost involuntarily bending over her. "Milly!"
+
+Again there was a slight contraction of the face and of the whole body.
+
+At the moment that Tims uttered Milly's name, Ian was entering the room.
+His long legs brought him up to the chair in an instant, and he asked,
+without the usual salutation:
+
+"What's the matter? Has--has the change happened?"
+
+His voice unconsciously spoke dismay. Tims looked at him.
+
+"No, not exactly," she articulated, slowly; and, after a pause: "Poor
+old Milly's trying to come back, that's all."
+
+She paused again; then:
+
+"You look a bit worried, old man."
+
+He tossed back his head with a gesture he had kept from the days when
+the crest of raven-black hair had been wont to grow too long and
+encroach on his forehead. It was grizzled now, and much less intrusive.
+
+"I'm about tired out," he said, shortly.
+
+"Look here," she continued, "if you really want Milly back, just say so.
+She's kind of knocking at the door, and I believe I could let her in if
+I tried."
+
+He dropped wearily into a chair.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Miss Timson, don't put the responsibility on me!"
+
+"I can't help it," returned Tims. "She's managed to get this through to
+me--" She handed Milly's scrawled message to Ian.
+
+He read it, then read it again and handed it back.
+
+"Strange, certainly."
+
+"Does it mean anything in particular?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders almost impatiently and sighed.
+
+"Oh no! It's the poor child's usual cry when she's here. She's got it
+into her head that the self she doesn't know is frightfully wicked, and
+makes me miserable. I've tried over and over again to convince her, but
+it's all nonsense."
+
+He thought to himself: "She is coming back still full of this mortal,
+heart-rending jealousy, and we shall have more painful scenes."
+
+"Well, it's your business to say what I'm to do," insisted Tims. "I
+don't think she'd have troubled to write if she'd found she could get
+back altogether without my help; but the other one's grown a bit too
+strong for her. Do you want Milly back?"
+
+The remorseless Tims forced on Ian a plain question which in his own
+mind he habitually sought to evade. He leaned back and shaded his eyes
+with his hand. After a silence he spoke, low, as if with effort:
+
+"I can't honestly say I want the change to happen just now, Miss Timson.
+It means a great deal of agitation, a thorough upheaval of everything.
+We have an extremely troublesome business on at the Merchants'
+Guild--I've just come away from a four hours' meeting; and upon my word
+I don't think I can stand a--domestic revolution at the same time. It
+would utterly unfit me for my work."
+
+He did not add that he had been looking forward to receiving helpful
+counsel from Mildred, with her clear common-sense, seasoned with wit.
+
+Tims wagged her head and stared in his face.
+
+"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated, slowly.
+
+Miss Timson still possessed the rare power of irritating Ian Stewart. He
+grew restive.
+
+"I suppose I am a selfish brute. Men always are, aren't they? But, after
+all, my wife enjoys life in her present state at least as much as she
+does in the other."
+
+"Not for the same reason, dear boy," returned Tims. "Old M., bless her,
+just lives for you. You don't imagine, do you, that Mildred cares about
+you like that?"
+
+Ian flushed slightly, and his face hardened.
+
+"One can't very well discuss one's wife's feeling for one's self," he
+said. "I believe I have every reason to be happy, however things are.
+And I very much doubt, Miss Timson, whether you can really effect the
+change in her in any way. At any rate, I'd rather you didn't try,
+please. I'll have her moved to her room, where she'll most likely sleep
+till to-morrow."
+
+Tims bent over the sleeper. Then:
+
+"I don't believe she will, somehow. You'd better leave her with me for
+the present, and I'll let you know if anything happens."
+
+He obeyed, and in a minute she heard the front door close after him.
+Tims sat down in the chair which he had vacated.
+
+"Poor old M.!" she ejaculated again, presently, and added: "What idiots
+men are! All except old Carus and Mr. Fitzallan. He's sensible enough."
+
+Her thoughts wandered away, until they were recalled by the door opening
+a mere chink to let a child slip into the room--a slim, tall child, in a
+blue smock--Tony. His thick, dark hair was cropped boywise now, and the
+likeness of the beautiful, sensitive child face to Ian's was more
+marked. It was evident that in him there was to be no blending of
+strains, but an exact reproduction of the paternal type.
+
+Tims was in his eyes purely a comic character, but the ready grin with
+which he usually greeted her was replaced to-day by a little,
+inattentive smile. He went past her and stood by the sofa, looking
+fixedly at his mother with a grave mouth and a slight frown on his
+forehead. At length he turned away, and was about to leave the room as
+quietly as he had come, when Tims brought him to a stand-still at her
+knee. He held up an admonishing finger.
+
+"Sh! Don't you wake my Mummy, or Daddy 'll be angry with you."
+
+"We sha'n't wake her; she's too fast asleep. Tell me why you looked so
+solemnly at her just now, Tony?"
+
+Tony, his hands held fast, wriggled, rubbed his shoulder against his
+ear, and for all answer laughed in a childish, silly way. Such is the
+depth and secretiveness of children, whom we call transparent.
+
+"Did you think Mummy was dead?"
+
+"What's 'dead'?" asked Tony, with interest, putting off his mask of
+inanity.
+
+"People are dead when they've gone to sleep and will never wake again,"
+returned Tims.
+
+Tony thought a minute; then his dark eyes grew very large. He whispered
+slowly, as though with difficulty formulating his ideas:
+
+"Doesn't they _never_ wake? Doesn't they wake up after ever so long,
+when peoples can't remember everything--and it makes them want to cry,
+only grown-up people aren't 'lowed?"
+
+Tims was puzzled. But even in her bewilderment it occurred to her that
+if poor Milly should return, she would be distressed to find in what a
+slovenly manner Tony was allowed to express himself.
+
+"I don't know what you mean, Tony. Say it again and put it more
+clearly."
+
+Tims had around her neck a necklace composed of casts of coins in the
+British Museum. She did not usually wear ornaments, because she
+possessed none, except a hair-bracelet, two brooches, and a large gold
+cross which had belonged to her late aunt. Tony's soft, slender fingers
+went to the necklace, and ignoring her question, he asked: "Why have you
+got these funny things round your neck, Auntie Tims?"
+
+"They're not funny. They're beautiful--copies of money which the old
+Greeks used to use. A gentleman gave it to me." Tims spoke with a grand
+carelessness. "I dare say if you're a good boy he'll tell you stories
+about them himself some day. But I want you to explain what it was you
+meant to say about dead people. Dead people don't come back, you know."
+
+Tony touched her hand, which lay open on her knee, and played with the
+fingers a minute. Then raising his eyes he said, plaintively:
+
+"I do so want my tea."
+
+Once more he had wiped the conversational slate, and the baffled Tims
+dismissed him. He opened the door a little and slipped out; put his dark
+head in again with an engaging smile, said politely, "I sha'n't be away
+_very_ long," and closed the door softly behind him. For that soft
+closing of the door was one of the things poor Milly had taught him
+which the little 'peoples' did contrive to remember.
+
+The sleeper now began to stir slightly in her sleep, and before Tony's
+somewhat prolonged tea was over, she sat up and looked about her.
+
+"Is that Tims?" she asked, in a colorless voice.
+
+"Yes--is it you, Milly?"
+
+"No. What makes you think so?"
+
+"Milly's been trying to come back. I suppose she couldn't manage it."
+
+"Ah!"--there was a deep satisfaction in Mildred's tone now; "I thought
+she couldn't!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+George Goring and Mildred Stewart did not move in the same social set,
+but their sets had points of contact, and it was at these that Goring
+was now most likely to be found; especially at the pleasant bachelor
+house on Campden Hill. Mrs. Stewart walked in the Park every morning at
+an unfashionable hour, and sometimes, yet not too often for discretion,
+Goring happened to be walking there too. All told, their meetings were
+not very numerous, nor very private. But every half-hour they spent in
+each other's company seemed to do the work of a month of intimacy.
+
+July hastened to an end, but an autumn Session brought Goring up to town
+in November, and three months of absence found him and Mildred still at
+the same point. Sir Cyril Meres was already beginning to plan his
+wonderful _tableaux-vivants_, which, however, did not come off until
+February. The extraordinary imitative talent which his artistic career
+had been one long struggle to disguise, was for once to be allowed full
+play. The _tableaux_ were to represent paintings by certain
+fellow-artists and friends; not actual pictures by them, but pictures
+which they might have painted, and the supposed authors were allowed a
+right of veto or criticism.
+
+A stage of Renaissance design, which did not jar with the surrounding
+architecture, was erected in the depth of the portico at the end of the
+Hellenic room.
+
+The human material at Meres's command was physically admirable. He had
+long been the chosen portrait-painter of wealth and fashion, and there
+was not a beauty in Society, with the biggest "S," who was not delighted
+to lend her charms for his purpose. The young men might grumble for
+form's sake, but at the bottom of their hearts they were equally
+sensible to the compliment of being asked to appear. It was when it came
+to the moulding of the material for artistic purposes, that the trouble
+began. The English have produced great actors, but in the bulk they have
+little natural aptitude for the stage; and what they have is discouraged
+by a social training which strains after the ideal composure, the few
+movements, the glassy eye of a waxwork. Only a small and chosen number,
+it is true, fully attain that ideal; but when we see them we recognize
+with a start, almost with a shudder, that it is there, the perfection of
+our deportment.
+
+Cyril Meres was, however, an admirable stage-manager, exquisite in tact,
+in temper, and urbane patience. The results of his prolonged training
+were wonderful; yet again and again he found it impossible to carry out
+his idea without placing his cousin Mrs. Stewart at the vital point of
+his picture. She was certainly not the most physically beautiful woman
+there, but she was unrivalled by any other in the grace, the variety,
+the meaning of her gestures, the dramatic transformations of her
+countenance. She was Pandora, she was Hope, she was Lady Hammerton, she
+was the Vampire, and she was the Queen of Faerie.
+
+There is jealousy on the amateur stage as well as on the professional,
+and ladies of social position, accustomed to see their beauty lauded in
+the newspapers, saw no reason why Mrs. Stewart should be thrust to the
+front of half of the pictures. Lady Langham, the "smart" Socialist, with
+whom George Goring had flirted last season, to Lady Augusta's real
+dismay, was the leading rival candidate for Mildred's roles. But Lady
+Langham never guessed that Mrs. Stewart was the cause of George Goring's
+disappearance from the list of her admirers, and she still had hopes of
+his return.
+
+The _tableaux_ were a brilliant success. Ian was there on the first
+evening, so was Lady Augusta Goring. Lady Langham, peeping through the
+curtains, saw her, and swept the horizon--that is, the circle of black
+coats around the walls--in vain for George Goring. Then Lady Augusta
+became audible, saying that in the present state of affairs in the House
+it was quite impossible for Mr. Goring to leave it, even for dinner, on
+that evening or the next. Nevertheless, on the next evening, Lady
+Langham espied George Goring in the act of taking a vacant chair near
+the front, next to a social _protegee_ of her own. She turned and
+mentioned the fact to a friend, who smiled meaningly and remarked, "In
+spite of Lady Augusta's whip!"
+
+Mildred, passing, caught the information, the comment, the smile. During
+the rehearsals for the _tableaux_, she had heard people coupling the
+names of Goring and Lady Langham, not seriously, yet seriously enough
+for her. A winged shaft of jealousy pierced at once her heart and her
+pride. Was she allowing her whole inner life to be shaken, dissolved by
+the passing admiration of a flirt? Her intimate self had assurance that
+it was not so; but sometimes a colder wind, blowing she knew not whence,
+or the lash of a chance word, threw her into the attitude of a chance
+observer, one who sees, guesses, does not know.
+
+Meantime George Goring had flung himself down in the only vacant chair
+he could see, and careless of the brilliant company about him, careless
+even of the face of Aphrodite herself, smiling divinely, unconcerned
+with human affairs, from a far corner he waited for the curtain to go
+up. His neighbor spoke. She had met him at the Langhams last season.
+What a pity he had just missed Lady Langham's great _tableau_, "Helen
+before the Elders of Troy"! There was no one to be compared to Maud
+Langham, so beautiful, so clever! She would have made her fortune if she
+had gone on the stage. Goring gave the necessary assent.
+
+The curtain went up, exhibiting a picture called "The Vampire." It was
+smaller than most and shown by a curious pale light. A fair young girl
+was lying in a deep sleep on a curtained bed, and hovering, crawling
+over her with a deadly, serpentine grace, was a white figure wrapped in
+a veiling garment that might have been a shroud. Out of white cerements
+showed a trail of yellow hair and a face alabaster white, save for the
+lips that were blood red--an intent face with a kind of terrible beauty,
+yet instinct with cruelty. One slender, bloodless hand was in the girl's
+hair, and, even without the title, it would have been plain that there
+was a deadly purpose in that creeping figure.
+
+"Isn't it horrid?" whispered Goring's neighbor. "Fancy that Mrs. Stewart
+letting herself be made to look so dreadful!"
+
+"Who?" asked Goring, horrified. He had not recognized Mildred.
+
+"Why, the girl on the bed's Gertrude Waters, and the Vampire's a cousin
+of Sir Cyril Meres. A horrid little woman some people admire, but I
+shouldn't think any one would after this. I call it disgusting, don't
+you?"
+
+"It's horrible!" gasped George; "it oughtn't to be allowed. What does
+that fellow Meres mean by inventing such deviltries? By Jove, I should
+like to thrash him!"
+
+The neighbor stared. It was all very well to be horrified at Mrs.
+Stewart, but why this particular form of horror?
+
+"Please call me when it's over," said Goring, putting his head down
+between his hands.
+
+What an eccentric young man he was! But clever people often were
+eccentric.
+
+In due course the _tableau_ was over, and to the relief of one
+spectator at least, it was not encored. The next was some harmless
+domestic scene with people in short waists. George Goring looked in vain
+for Mildred among them, longing to see her, the real lovely her, and
+forget the horrible thing she had portrayed. Lady Langham was there, and
+his neighbor commended her tediously, convinced of pleasing.
+
+There followed a large and very beautiful picture in the manner of a
+great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer,
+meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of
+the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was
+coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while
+Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp
+across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge.
+He appeared suddenly to have beheld her, pausing above him before
+descending the heathery bank that edged the wood; and looking in her
+face, to have entered at once into the land of Faerie. The pose, the
+figure, the face of the Faerie Queen were of the most exquisite charm
+and beauty, touched with a something of romance and mystery that no
+other woman there except Mildred could have lent it. The youth who
+personated Thomas the Rhymer was temporarily in love with Mrs. Stewart
+and acted his part with intense expression. Goring, shading his eyes
+with his hand, fixed them upon her as long as he dared; then glanced at
+the Rhymer and was angry. He turned to his chattering neighbor and
+asked:
+
+"Who's the chap doing Thomas? Looks as if he wanted a wash."
+
+"I don't know. Nobody particular, I should think. Wasn't it a pity they
+didn't have Lady Langham for the Faerie Queen? I do call it absurd the
+way Sir Cyril Meres has put that pert, insignificant cousin of his
+forward in quite half the pictures--and when he might have had Maud
+Langham."
+
+Goring threw himself back in his chair and laughed his quite loud laugh.
+
+"'A mad world, my masters,'" he quoted.
+
+His neighbor took this for Mr. Goring's eccentric way of approving her
+sentiments. But what he really meant was: What a strange masquerade is
+the world! This neighbor of his, so ordinary, so desirous to please,
+would have shuddered at the notion of hinting to him the patent fact
+that Lady Augusta Goring was a tiring woman; while she pressed upon him
+laudations of a person to whom he was perfectly indifferent, mingled
+with insulting comments on the only woman in the world for him--the
+woman who was his world, without whom nothing was; on her whose very
+name, even on these silly, hostile lips, gave him a strong sensation,
+whether of pain or pleasure he could hardly tell.
+
+After the performance he constrained himself to go the round of the
+ladies of his acquaintance who had been acting and compliment them
+cleverly and with good taste. Lady Langham of course seized the lion's
+share of his company and his compliments. He seemed to address only a
+few remarks of the same nature to Mrs. Stewart, but he had watched his
+opportunity and was able to say to her:
+
+"I must leave in a quarter of an hour at latest. Please let me drive you
+back. You won't say no?"
+
+There was a pleading note in the last phrase and his eyes met hers
+gravely, anxiously. It was evident that she must answer immediately,
+while their neighbors' attention was distracted from them. She was pale
+before under her stage make-up, and now she grew still paler.
+
+"Thanks. I told Cousin Cyril I was tired and shouldn't stay long. I'll
+go and change at once."
+
+Then Thomas the Rhymer was at her elbow again, bringing her something
+for which she had sent him.
+
+The green-room, in which she resumed the old white lace evening-dress
+that she had worn to dine with her cousin, was strewn with the delicate
+underclothing, the sumptuous wraps and costly knick-knacks of wealthy
+women. She had felt ashamed, as she had undressed there, of her own poor
+little belongings among these; and ashamed to be so ashamed. As she had
+seen her garments overswept by the folds of the fair Socialist's white
+velvet mantle, lined with Arctic fox and clasped with diamonds, she had
+smiled ironically at the juxtaposition. Since circumstances and her own
+gifts had drawn her into the stream of the world, she had been more and
+more conscious, however unwillingly, of a longing for luxuries, for rich
+settings to her beauty, for some stage upon which her brilliant
+personality might shine uplifted, secure. For she seemed to herself
+sometimes like a tumbler at a fair, struggling in the crowd for a space
+in which to spread his carpet. Now--George Goring loved her. Let the
+others keep their furs and laces and gewgaws, their great fortunes or
+great names. Yet if it had been possible for her to take George Goring's
+love, he could have given her most of these things as well.
+
+Wrapped in a gauzy white scarf, she seemed to float rather than walk
+down the stairs into the hall, where Thomas the Rhymer was lingering, in
+the hope of finding an excuse to escort her home. She was pale, with a
+clear, beautiful pallor, a strange smile was on her lips and her eyes
+shone like stars. The Queen of Faerie had looked less lovely, meeting
+him on the edge of the wood. She nodded him good-night and passed
+quickly on into the porch. With a boyish pang he saw her vanish, not
+into the darkness of night, but into the blond interior of a smart
+brougham. A young man, also smart--her husband, for aught he
+knew--paused on the step to give orders to the coachman, and followed
+her in. A moment he saw her dimly, in the glare of carriage-lamps, a
+white vision, half eclipsed by the black silhouette of the man at her
+side; then they glided away over the crunching gravel of the drive, into
+the fiery night of London.
+
+"Do you really think it went off well?" she asked, as they passed
+through the gates into the street. George was taking off his hat and
+putting it down on the little shelf opposite. He leaned back and was
+silent a few seconds; then starting forward, laid his hand upon her
+knee.
+
+"Don't let's waste time like that, Mildred," he said--and although he
+had never called her so before, it seemed natural that he should--"we
+haven't got much. You know, don't you, why I asked you to drive with
+me?"
+
+She in her turn was silent a moment, then meeting his eyes:
+
+"Yes," she said, quite simply and courageously.
+
+"I thought you could hardly help seeing I loved you, however blind other
+people might be."
+
+Her head was turned away again and she looked out of the window, as she
+answered in a voice that tried to be light:
+
+"But it isn't of any consequence, is it? I suppose you're always in love
+with somebody or other."
+
+"Is that what people told you about me?"--and it was new and wonderful
+to her to hear George Goring speak with this calmness and
+gravity--"You've not been long in the world, little girl, or you'd know
+how much to believe of what's said there."
+
+"No," she answered, in turn becoming calm and deliberate. "When I come
+to think of it, people only say that women generally like you and that
+you flirt with them. I--I invented the rest."
+
+"But, good Heavens! Why?" There was a note of pain and wonder in his
+voice.
+
+She paused, and his hand moved under her cloak to be laid on the two
+slender hands clasped on her lap.
+
+"I suppose I was jealous," she said.
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Absurd child! But I'm a bit of an ass that way myself. I was jealous of
+Thomas the Rhymer this evening."
+
+"That brat!"
+
+She laughed low, the sweet laugh that was like no one else's. It was
+past midnight and the streets were comparatively quiet and dark, but at
+that moment they were whirled into a glare of strong light. They looked
+in each other's eyes in silence, his hand tightening its hold upon hers.
+Then again they plunged into wavering dimness, and he resumed, gravely
+and calmly as before, but bending nearer her.
+
+"If I weren't anxious to tell you the exact truth, to avoid
+exaggeration, I should say I fell in love with you the first time I met
+you. It seems to me now as though it had been so. And the second
+time--you remember it was one very hot day last July, when we both
+lunched with Meres--I hadn't the least doubt that if I had been free and
+you also, I should have left no stone unturned to get you for my wife."
+
+Every word was sweet to her, yet she answered sombrely:
+
+"But we are not free."
+
+He, disregarding the answer, went on:
+
+"You love me, as I love you?"
+
+"As you love me, dearest; and from the first."
+
+A minute's silence, while the hands held each other fast. Then low,
+triumphantly, he exclaimed: "Well?"
+
+Her slim hands began to flutter a little in his as she answered all that
+that "Well" implied.
+
+"It's impossible, dear. It's no use arguing about it. It's just waste of
+time--and we've only got this little time."
+
+"To do what? To make love in? Dear, we've got all our lives if we
+please. We've both made a tremendous mistake, we've both got a chance
+now of going back on it, of setting our lives right again, making them
+better indeed than we ever dreamed of their being. We inflict some loss
+on other people--no loss comparable to our gain--we hurt them chiefly
+because of their bloated ideas of their claims on us. I know you've
+weighed things, have no prejudices. Rules, systems, are made for types
+and classes, not for us. You belong to no type, Mildred. I belong to no
+class."
+
+She answered low, painfully:
+
+"It's true I am unlike other people; that's the very reason, why--I--I'm
+not good to love." There was a low utterance that was music in her ears,
+yet she continued: "Then, dear friend, think of your career, ruined for
+me, by me. You might be happy for a while, then you'd regret it."
+
+"That's where you're wrong. My career? A rotten little game, these House
+of Commons party politics, when you get into it! The big things go on
+outside them; there's all the world outside them. Anyhow, my career, as
+I planned it, is ruined already. The Ipswich gang have collared me; I
+can't call my tongue my own, Mildred. Think of that!"
+
+She smiled faintly.
+
+"Temporary, George! You'll soon have your head up--and your tongue
+out."
+
+"Oh, from time to time, I presume, I shall always be the Horrid Vulgar
+Boy of those poor Barthops; I shall kick like a galvanized frog long
+after I'm dead. But--I wouldn't confess it to any one but you, dear--I'm
+not strong enough to stand against the everlasting pressure that's
+brought to bear upon me. You know what I mean, don't you?"
+
+"Yes. You'll be no good if you let the originality be squeezed out of
+you. Don't allow it."
+
+"Nothing can prevent it--unless the Faerie Queen will stretch out her
+dearest, sweetest hands to me and lead me, poor mortal, right away into
+the wide world, into some delightful country where there's plenty of
+love and no politics. I want love so much, Mildred; I've never had it,
+and no one has ever guessed how much I wanted it except you,
+dear--except you."
+
+Yes, she had guessed. The queer childhood, so noisy yet so lonely, had
+been spoken of; the married life spoke for itself.
+
+His arm was around her now, their faces drawn close together, and in the
+pale, faint light they looked each other deep in the eyes. Then their
+lips met in a long kiss.
+
+"You see how it is," he whispered; "you can't help it. It's got to be.
+No one has power to prevent it."
+
+But he spoke without knowledge, for there was one who had power to
+prevent it, one conquered, helpless, less than a ghost, who yet could
+lay an icy hand on the warm, high-beating heart of her subduer, and say:
+"Love and desire, the pride of life and the freedom of the world, are
+not for you. I forbid them to you--I--by a power stronger than the laws
+of God or man. True, you have no husband, you have no child, for those
+who seem to be yours are mine. You have taken them from me, and now you
+must keep them, whether you will or no. You have taken my life from me,
+and my life you must have, that and none other."
+
+It was against this unknown and inflexible power that George Goring
+struggled with all the might of his love, and absolutely in vain.
+Between him and Mildred there could be no lies, no subterfuges; only
+that one silence which to him, of all others, she dared not break.
+
+She seemed to have been engaged in this struggle, at once so sweet and
+so bitter, for an eternity before she stood on her own doorstep,
+latch-key in hand.
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Goring. So much obliged for the lift."
+
+"Delighted, I'm sure. All right now? Good-night. Drop me at the House,
+Edwards."
+
+He lifted his hat, stepped in and closed the carriage-door sharply
+behind him; and in a minute the brougham with its lights rolling almost
+noiselessly behind the big fast-trotting bay horse, had disappeared
+around a neighboring corner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house was cold and dark, except for a candle which burned on an oak
+dresser in the narrow hall. As Mildred dragged herself up the stairs,
+she had a sensation of physical fatigue, almost bruisedness, as though
+she had come out of some actual bodily combat. Her room, fireless and
+cold, was solitary, for Ian's sleep had to be protected from
+disturbance. Nevertheless, having loosened her wraps, she threw herself
+on the bed and lay there long, her bare arms under her head. The
+sensation of chill, her own cold soft flesh against her face, seemed to
+brace her mind and body, to restore her powers of clear, calm judgment,
+so unlike the usual short-sighted, emotionalized judgments of youth. She
+had nothing of the ordinary woman's feeling of guilt towards her
+husband. The intimate bond between herself and George Goring did not
+seem in any relation the accidental one between her and Ian Stewart. She
+had never before faced the question, the possibility of a choice between
+the two. Now she weighed it with characteristic swiftness and decision.
+She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his
+marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but
+that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she
+herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could
+she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer
+cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back again to the student's
+life, the only life that could bring him honor, and in the long run
+satisfaction. And that life would not be lonely, because Tony, so
+completely his father's child, would be with him. As for herself and
+George Goring, she had no fear of the future. They two were strong
+enough to hew and build alone their own Palace of Delight. Her intuitive
+knowledge of the world informed her that, in the long run, society, if
+firmly disregarded, admits the claim of certain persons to go their own
+way--even rapidly admits it, though they be the merest bleating strays
+from the common fold, should they haply be possessed of rank or fortune.
+The way lay plain enough before Mildred, were it not for that Other. But
+she, the shadowy one, deep down in her limbo, laid a finger on the gate
+of that Earthly Paradise and held it, as inflexibly as any armed
+archangel, against the master key of her enemy's intelligence, the
+passionate assaults of her heart.
+
+Mildred, however, was one who found it hard, if not impossible, to
+acquiesce in defeat. Two o'clock boomed from the watching towers of
+Westminster over the great city. She rose from her bed, cold as a marble
+figure on a monument, and went to the dressing-table to take off her few
+and simple ornaments. The mirror on it was the same from which that
+alien smile had peered twelve months ago, filling the sad soul of Milly
+with trembling fear and sinister foreboding. The white face that stole
+into its shadowy depths to-night, and looked Mildred in the eyes, was in
+a manner new to her also. It had a new seriousness, a new intensity, as
+of a woman whose vital energies, once spending themselves in mere
+corruscations, in mere action for action's sake, were now concentrated
+on one definite thought, one purpose, one emotion, which with an intense
+yet benign fire blended in perfect harmony the life of the soul and of
+the body.
+
+For a moment the face in its gravity recalled to her the latest
+photograph of Milly, a tragic photograph she did not care to look at
+because it touched her with a pity, a remorse, which were after all
+quite useless. But the impression was false and momentary.
+
+"No," she said, speaking to the glass, "it's not really like. Poor weak
+woman! I understand better now what you have suffered." Then almost
+repeating the words of her own cruel subconscious self--"But there's all
+the difference between the weak and the strong. I am the stronger, and
+the stronger must win; that's written, and it's no use struggling
+against the law of nature."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+George Goring was never so confident in himself as when he was fighting
+an apparently losing game; and the refusal of Mildred to come to him, a
+refusal based, as he supposed, on nothing but an insurmountable
+prejudice against doing what was not respectable, struck him as a stage
+in their relations rather than as the end of them. He did not attempt to
+see her until the close of the Easter Vacation. People began to couple
+their names, but lightly, without serious meaning, for Goring being
+popular with women, had a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a flirt.
+When a faithful cousin hinted things about him and Mrs. Stewart to Lady
+Augusta, she who believed herself to have seen a number of similar
+temporary enslavers, put the matter by, really glad that a harmless
+nobody should have succeeded to Maud Langham with her dangerous
+opinions.
+
+Ian Stewart on his side was barely acquainted with Goring. Sir John
+Ireton and the newspapers informed him that George Goring was a flashy,
+untrustworthy politician; and the former added that he was a terrible
+nuisance to poor Lord Ipswich and Lady Augusta. That such a man could
+attract Mildred would never have occurred to him.
+
+The fear of Milly's return, which she could not altogether banish, still
+at times checked and restrained Mildred. Could she but have secured
+Tims's assistance in keeping Milly away, she would have felt more
+confident of success. It was hopeless to appeal directly to the
+hypnotist, but her daring imagination began to conceive a situation in
+which mere good sense and humanity must compel Tims to forbid the return
+of Milly to a life made impossible for her. She had not seen Tims for
+many weeks, not since the Easter Vacation, which had already receded
+into a remote distance; so far had she journeyed since then along the
+path of her fate. Nor had she so much as wondered at not seeing Tims.
+But now her mind was turned to consider the latent power which that
+strange creature held over her life, her dearest interests; since how
+might not Milly comport herself with George?
+
+Then it was that she realized how long it had been since Tims had crept
+up the stairs to her drawing-room; pausing probably in the middle of
+them to wipe away with hasty pocket-handkerchief some real or fancied
+trace of her foot on a carpet which she condemned as expensive.
+
+Mildred had written her a note, but it was hardly posted when the door
+was flung open and Miss Timson was formally announced by the
+parlor-maid. Tony, who was looking at pictures with his mother, rose
+from her side, prepared to take a hop, skip, and jump and land with his
+arms around Tims's waist. But he stopped short and contemplated her
+with round-eyed solemnity. The ginger-colored man's wig had developed
+into a frizzy fringe and the rest of the coiffure of the hour. A large
+picture hat surmounted it, and her little person was clothed in a vivid
+heliotrope dress of the latest mode. It was a handsome dress, a handsome
+hat, a handsome wig, yet somehow the effect was jarring. Tony felt
+vaguely shocked. "Bless thee! Thou art translated!" he might have cried
+with Quince; but being a polite child, he said nothing, only put out a
+small hand sadly. Tims, however, unconscious of the slight chill cast by
+her appearance, kissed him in a perfunctory, patronizing way, as ladies
+do who are afraid of disarranging their veils. She greeted Mildred also
+with a parade of mundane elegance, and sat down deliberately on the
+sofa, spreading out her heliotrope skirts.
+
+"You can run away just now, little man," she said to Tony. "I want to
+talk to your mother."
+
+"How smart you are!" observed Mildred, seeing that comment of some kind
+would be welcome. "Been to Sir James Carus's big party at the Museum, I
+suppose. You're getting a personage, Tims."
+
+"I dare say I shall look in later, but I shouldn't trouble to dress up
+for that, my girl. Clothes would be quite wasted there. But I think one
+should always try to look decent, don't you? One's men like it."
+
+Mildred smiled.
+
+"I suppose Ian would notice it if I positively wasn't decent. But, Tims,
+dear, does old Carus really criticise your frocks?"
+
+For indeed the distinguished scientist, Miss Timson's chief, was the
+only man she could think of to whom Tims could possibly apply the
+possessive adjective. Tims bridled.
+
+"Of course not; I was thinking of Mr. Fitzalan."
+
+That she had for years been very kind to a lonely little man of that
+name who lived in the same block of chambers, Mildred knew,
+but--Heavens! Even Mildred's presence of mind failed her, and she
+stared. Meeting her amazed eye, Tims's borrowed smile suddenly broke its
+bounds and became her own familiar grin, only more so:
+
+"We're engaged," she said.
+
+"My dear Tims!" exclaimed Mildred, suppressing an inclination to burst
+out laughing. "What a surprise!"
+
+"I quite thought you'd have been prepared for it," returned Tims. "A bit
+stupid of you not to guess it, don't you know, old girl. We've been
+courting long enough."
+
+Mildred hastened to congratulate the strange bride and wish her
+happiness, with all that unusual grace which she knew how to employ in
+adorning the usual.
+
+"I thought I should like you to be the first to know," said Tims,
+sentimentally, after a while; "because I was your bridesmaid, you see.
+It was the prettiest wedding I ever saw, and I should love to have a
+wedding like yours--all of us carrying lilies, you know."
+
+"I remember there were green stains on my wedding-dress," returned
+Mildred, with forced gayety.
+
+Tims, temporarily oblivious of all awkward circumstances, continued,
+still more sentimentally:
+
+"Then I was there, as I've told you, when Ian's pop came to poor old M.
+Poor old girl! She was awfully spifligatingly happy, and I feel just the
+same now myself."
+
+"Well, it wasn't I, anyhow, who felt 'awfully spifligatingly happy' on
+that occasion," replied Mildred, with a touch of asperity in her voice.
+
+Tims, legitimately absorbed in her own feelings, did not notice it. She
+continued:
+
+"I dare say the world will say Mr. Fitzalan had an eye on my money; and
+it's true I've done pretty well with my investments. But, bless you! he
+hadn't a notion of that. You see, I was brought up to be stingy, and I
+enjoy it. He thought of course I was a pauper, and proposed we should
+pauper along together. He was quite upset when he found I was an
+heiress. Wasn't it sweet of him?"
+
+Mildred said it was.
+
+"Flora Fitzalan!" breathed Tims, clasping her hands and smiling into
+space. "Isn't it a pretty name? It's always been my dream to have a
+pretty name." Then suddenly, as though in a flash seeing all those
+personal disadvantages which she usually contrived to ignore:
+
+"Life's a queer lottery, Mil, my girl. We know what we are, we know not
+what we shall be, as old Billy says. Who'd ever have thought that a
+nice, quiet girl like Milly, marrying the lad of her heart and all that,
+would come to such awful grief; while look at me--a queer kind of girl
+you'd have laid your bottom dollar wouldn't have much luck, prospering
+like anything, well up in the Science business, and now, what's ever so
+much better, scrumptiously happy with a good sort of her own. Upon my
+word, Mil, I've half a mind to fetch old M. back to sympathize with me,
+for although you've said a peck of nice things, I don't believe you
+understand what I'm feeling the way the old girl would."
+
+Mildred went a little pale and spoke quickly.
+
+"You won't do that really, Tims? You won't be so cruel to--to every
+one?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't see why you're always to be jolly and have
+everything your own way. Oh, Lord! When I think how happy old M. was
+when she was engaged, the same as I am, and then on her
+wedding-day--just the same as I shall be on mine."
+
+Mildred straightened out the frill of a muslin cushion cover, her head
+bent.
+
+"Just so. She had everything _her_ own way that time. I gave her that
+happiness, it was all my doing. She's had it and she ought to be
+content. Don't be a fool, Tims--" she lifted her face and Tims was
+startled by its expression--"Can't you see how hard it is on me never to
+be allowed the happiness you've got and Milly's had? Don't you think I
+might care to know what love is like for myself? Don't you think I might
+happen to want--I tell you I'm a million times more alive than
+Milly--and I want--I want everything a million times more than she
+does."
+
+Tims was astonished.
+
+"But it's always struck me, don't you know, that Ian was a deal more in
+love with you than he ever was with poor old M."
+
+"And you pretend to be in love and think that's enough! It's not enough;
+you must know it's not. It's like sitting at a Barmecide feast, very
+hungry, only the Barmecide's sitting opposite you eating all the time
+and talking about his food. I tell you it's maddening, perfectly
+maddening--" There was a fierce vehemence in her face, her voice, the
+clinch of her slender hands on the muslin frill. That strong vitality
+which before had seemed to carry her lightly as on wings, over all the
+rough places of life, had now not failed, but turned itself inwards,
+burning in an intense flame at once of pain and of rebellion against its
+own pain.
+
+Tims in the midst of her happiness, felt vaguely scared. Mildred seeing
+it, recovered herself and plunged into the usual engagement talk. In a
+few minutes she was her old beguiling self--the self to whose charm Tims
+was as susceptible in her way as Thomas the Rhymer had been in his.
+
+When she had left, and from time to time thereafter, Tims felt vaguely
+uncomfortable, remembering Mildred's outburst of vehement bitterness on
+the subject of love. It was so unlike her usual careless tone, which
+implied that it was men's business, or weakness, to be in love with
+women, and that only second-rate women fell in love themselves.
+
+Mildred seemed altogether more serious than she used to be, and Milly
+herself could not have been more sympathetic over the engagement. Even
+Mr. Fitzalan, when Tims brought him to call on the Stewarts was not
+afraid of her, and found it possible to say a few words in reply to her
+remarks. Tims's ceremonious way of speaking of her betrothed, whom she
+never mentioned except as Mr. Fitzalan, made Ian reflect with sad humor
+on the number of offensively familiar forms of address which he himself
+had endured from her, and on the melancholy certainty that she had never
+spoken of him in his absence by any name more respectful than the plain
+unprefixed "Stewart." But he hoped that the excitement of her engagement
+had wiped out of her remembrance that afternoon when poor Milly had
+tried to return. For he did not like to think of that moment of weakness
+in which he had allowed Tims to divine so much of a state of mind which
+he could not unveil even to himself without a certain shame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The summer was reaching its height. The weather was perfect. Night after
+night hot London drawing-rooms were crowded to suffocation, awnings
+sprang mushroom-like from every West End pavement; the sound of music
+and the rolling of carriages made night, if not hideous, at least
+discordant to the unconsidered minority who went to bed as usual.
+Outside in the country, even in the suburbs, June came in glory, with
+woods in freshest livery of green, with fragrance of hawthorn and broom
+and gorse, buttercup meadows and gardens brimmed with roses. It seemed
+to George Goring and Mildred as though somehow this warmth, this gayety
+and richness of life in the earth had never been there before, but that
+Fate and Nature, of which their love was part, were leading them on in a
+great festal train to the inevitable consummation. The flame of life had
+never burned clearer or more steadily in Mildred, and every day she felt
+a growing confidence in having won so complete a possession of her whole
+bodily machinery that it would hardly be in the power of Milly to
+dethrone her. The sight of George Goring, the touch of his hand, the
+very touch of his garment, gave her a feeling of unconquerable life. It
+was impossible that she and George should part. All her sanguine and
+daring nature cried out to her that were she once his, Milly should not,
+could not, return. Tims, too, was there in reserve. Not that Tims would
+feel anything but horror at Mildred's conduct in leaving Ian and Tony;
+but the thing done, she would recognize the impossibility of allowing
+Milly to return to such a situation.
+
+Ian, whose holidays were usually at the inevitable periods, was by some
+extraordinary collapse of that bloated thing, the Academic conscience,
+going away for a fortnight in June. He had been deputed to attend a
+centenary celebration at some German University, and a conference of
+savants to be held immediately after it, presented irresistible
+attractions.
+
+One Sunday Tims and Mr. Fitzalan went to Hampton Court with the usual
+crowd of German, Italian, and French hair-dressers, waiters, cooks, and
+restaurant-keepers, besides native cockneys of all classes except the
+upper.
+
+The noble old Palace welcomed this mass of very common humanity with
+such a pageant of beauty as never greeted the eyes of its royal
+builders. Centuries of sunshine seem to have melted into the rich reds
+and grays and cream-color of its walls, under which runs a quarter of a
+mile of flower-border, a glowing mass of color, yet as full of delicate
+and varied detail as the border of an illuminated missal. Everywhere
+this modern wealth and splendor of flowers is arranged, as jewels in a
+setting, within the architectural plan of the old garden. There the dark
+yews retain their intended proportion, the silver fountain rises where
+it was meant to rise, although it sprinkles new, unthought-of lilies.
+Behind it, on either side the stately vista of water, and beside it, in
+the straight alley, the trees in the freshness and fulness of their
+leafage, stand tall and green, less trim and solid it may be, but
+essentially as they were meant to stand when the garden grew long ago in
+the brain of a man. And out there beyond the terrace the Thames flows
+quietly, silverly on, seeming to shine with the memory of all the
+loveliness those gliding waters have reflected, since their ripples
+played with the long, tremulous image of Lechlade spire.
+
+Seen from the cool, deep-windowed rooms of the Palace, where now the
+pictures hang and hundreds of plebeian feet tramp daily, the gardens
+gave forth a burning yet pleasant glow of heat and color in the full
+sunshine. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, having eaten their frugal lunch early
+under the blossoming chestnut-trees in Bushey Park, went into the
+Picture Gallery in the Palace at an hour when it happened to be almost
+empty. The queer-looking woman not quite young, and the little, bald,
+narrow-chested, short-sighted man, would not have struck the passers-by
+as being a pair of lovers. A few sympathetic smiles, however, had been
+bestowed upon another couple seated in the deep window of one of the
+smaller rooms; a pretty young woman and an attractive man. The young man
+had disposed his hat and a newspaper in such a way as not to make it
+indecently obvious that he was holding her hand. It was she who called
+attention to the fact by hasty attempts to snatch it away when people
+came in.
+
+"What do you do that for?" asked the young man. "There's not the
+slightest chance of any one we know coming along."
+
+"But George--"
+
+"Do try and adapt yourself to your _milieu_. These people are probably
+blaming me for not putting my arm around your waist."
+
+"George! What an idiot you are!" She laughed a nervous laugh.
+
+By this time the last party of fat, dark young women in rainbow hats,
+and narrow-shouldered, anaemic young men, had trooped away towards food.
+Goring waited till the sound of their footsteps had ceased. He was
+holding Mildred's hand, but he had drawn it out from under the newspaper
+now, and the gay audacity of his look had changed to something at once
+more serious and more masterful.
+
+"I don't like your seeming afraid, Mildred," he said. "It spoils my idea
+of you. I like to think of you as a high-spirited creature, conscious
+enough of your own worth to go your own way and despise the foolish
+comments of the crowd."
+
+To hear herself so praised by him made the clear pink rise to Mildred's
+cheeks. How could she bear to fall below the level of his expectation,
+although the thing he expected of her had dangers of which he was
+ignorant?
+
+"I'm glad you believe that of me," she said; "although it's not quite
+true. I cared a good deal about the opinion of the world before--before
+I knew you; only I was vain enough to think it would never treat me very
+badly."
+
+"It won't," he replied, his audacious smile flashing out for a moment.
+"It'll come sneaking back to you before long; it can't keep away.
+Besides, I'm cynic enough to know my own advantages, Mildred. Society
+doesn't sulk forever with wealthy people, whatever they choose to do."
+
+She answered low: "But I shouldn't care if it did, George. I want
+you--just to go right away with you."
+
+A wonderful look of joy and tenderness came over his face. "Mildred! Can
+it really be you saying that?" he breathed. "Really you, Mildred?"
+
+They looked each other in the eyes and were silent a minute; but while
+the hand next the window held hers, the other one stole out farther to
+clasp her. He was too much absorbed in that gaze to notice anything
+beyond it; but Mildred was suddenly aware of steps and a voice in the
+adjoining room. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan, in the course of a conscientious
+survey of all the pictures on the walls, had reached this point in their
+progress. The window-seat on which Goring and Mildred were sitting was
+visible through a doorway, and Tims had on her strongest glasses.
+
+Since her engagement, Tims's old-maidish bringing up seemed to be
+bearing fruit for the first time.
+
+"I think we'd better cough or do something," she said. "There's a couple
+in there going on disgracefully. I do think spooning in public such bad
+form."
+
+"I dare say they think they're alone," returned the charitable Mr.
+Fitzalan, unable to see the delinquents because he was trying to put a
+loose lens back into his eye-glasses. Tims came to his assistance,
+talking loudly; and her voice was of a piercing quality. Mildred,
+leaning forward, saw Mr. Fitzalan and Tims, both struggling with
+eye-glasses. She slipped from George's encircling arm and stood in the
+doorway of the farther room, beckoning to him with a scared face. He got
+up and followed her.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked, more curious than anxious; for an
+encounter with Lady Augusta in person could only precipitate a crisis he
+was ready to welcome. Why should one simple, definite step from an old
+life to a new one, which his reason as much as his passion dictated, be
+so incredibly difficult to take?
+
+Mildred hurried him away, explaining that she had seen some one she knew
+very well. He pointed out that it was of no real consequence. She could
+not tell him that if Tims suspected anything before the decisive step
+was taken, one of the safeguards under which she took it might fail.
+
+They found no exit at the end of the suite of rooms, still less any
+place of concealment. Tims and Mr. Fitzalan came upon them discussing
+the genuineness of a picture in the last room but one. When Tims saw
+that it was Mildred, she made some of the most dreadful grimaces she had
+ever made in her life. Making them, she approached Mildred, who seeing
+there was no escape, turned around and greeted her with a welcoming
+smile.
+
+"Were you--were you sitting on that window-seat?" asked Tims, fixing her
+with eyes that seemed bent on piercing to her very marrow.
+
+Mildred smiled again, with a broader smile.
+
+"I don't know about 'that window-seat.' I've sat on a good many
+window-seats, naturally, since I set forth on this pilgrimage. Is there
+anything particular about that one? I've never seen Hampton Court
+before, Mr. Fitzalan, so as some people I knew were coming to-day, I
+thought I'd come too. May I introduce Mr. Goring?"
+
+So perfectly natural and easy was Mildred's manner, that Tims already
+half disbelieved her own eyes. They must have played her some trick; yet
+how could that be? She recalled the figures in the window-seat, as seen
+with all the peculiar, artificial distinctness conferred by strong
+glasses. The young man called Goring had smiled into the hidden face of
+his companion in a manner that Tims could not approve. She made up her
+mind that as soon as she had leisure she would call on Mildred and
+question her once more, and more straitly, concerning the mystery of
+that window-seat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+On Monday and Tuesday an interesting experiment which she was conducting
+under Carus claimed Tims's whole attention, except for the evening
+hours, which were dedicated to Mr. Fitzalan. But she wrote to say that
+Mildred might expect her to tea on Wednesday. On Wednesday the post
+brought her a note from Mildred, dated Tuesday, midnight.
+
+     "DEAR TIMS,--I am afraid you will not find me to-morrow
+     afternoon, as I am going out of town. But do go to tea with
+     Tony, who is just back from the sea and looking bonny. He is
+     such a darling! I always mind leaving him, although of
+     course I am not his mother. Oh, dear, I am so sleepy, I
+     hardly know what I am saying. Good-bye, Tims, dear. I am
+     very glad you are so happy with that nice Mr. Fitzalan of
+     yours.
+
+     Yours,
+
+     M. B. S."
+
+So far the note, although bearing signs of haste, was in Mildred's usual
+clear handwriting; but there was a postscript scrawled crookedly across
+the inner sides of the sheet and prefixed by several flourishes:
+
+     "Meet me at Paddington 4.30 train to-morrow. Meet me.
+      M."
+
+Another flourish followed.
+
+The note found Tims at the laboratory, which she had not intended
+leaving till half-past four. But the perplexing nature of the
+postscript, conflicting as it did with the body of the letter, made her
+the more inclined to obey its direction.
+
+She arrived at Paddington in good time and soon caught sight of Mildred,
+although for the tenth part of a second she hesitated in identifying
+her; for Mildred seldom wore black, although she looked well in it.
+To-day she was dressed in a long, black silk wrap--which, gathered about
+her slender figure by a ribbon, concealed her whole dress--and wore a
+long, black lace veil which might have baffled the eyes of a mere
+acquaintance. Tims could not fail to recognize that willowy figure, with
+its rare grace of motion, that amber hair, those turquoise-blue eyes
+that gleamed through the swathing veil with a restless brilliancy
+unusual even in them. With disordered dress and hat on one side, Tims
+hastened after Mildred.
+
+"So here you are!" she exclaimed; "that's all right! I managed to come,
+you see, though it's been a bit of a rush."
+
+Mildred looked around at her, astonished, possibly dismayed; but the
+veil acted as a mask.
+
+"Well, this is a surprise, Tims! What on earth brought you here? Is
+anything the matter?"
+
+"Just what I wanted to know. Why are you in black? Going to a funeral?"
+
+"Good Heavens, no! The only funeral I mean to go to will be my own. But,
+Tims, I thought you were going to tea with Tony. Why have you come
+here?"
+
+"Didn't you tell me to come in the postscript of your letter?"
+
+Mildred was evidently puzzled.
+
+"I don't remember anything about it," she said. "I was frightfully tired
+when I wrote to you--in fact, I went to sleep over the letter; but I
+can't imagine how I came to say that."
+
+Tims was not altogether surprised. She had had an idea that Mildred was
+not answerable for that postscript, but Mildred herself had no clew to
+the mystery, never having been told of Milly's written communication of
+a year ago. She sickened at the possibility that in some moment of
+aberration she might have written words meant for another on the note to
+Tims.
+
+Tims felt sure that Milly wished her to do something--but what?
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked. "What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to stay with some friends who have a house on the river, and
+I'm going to do--what people always do on the river. Any other questions
+to ask, Tims?"
+
+"Yes. I should like to know who your friends are."
+
+Mildred laughed nervously.
+
+"You won't be any the wiser if I tell you." And in the instant she
+reflected that what she said was true. "I am going to the Gorings'."
+
+The difference between that and the exact truth was only the difference
+between the plural and the singular.
+
+"Don't go, old girl," said Tims, earnestly. "Come back to Tony with me
+and wait till Ian comes home."
+
+Mildred was very pale behind the heavy black lace of her veil and her
+heart beat hard; but she spoke with self-possession.
+
+"Don't be absurd, Tims. Tony is perfectly well, and there's Mr. Goring
+who is to travel down with me. How can I possibly go back? You're
+worrying about Milly, I suppose. Well, I'm rather nervous about her
+myself. I always am when I go away alone. You don't mind my telling them
+to wire for you if I sleep too long, do you? And you'd come as quick as
+ever you could? Think how awkward it would be for Milly and for--for the
+Gorings."
+
+"I'd come right enough," returned Tims, sombrely. "But if you feel like
+that, don't go."
+
+"I don't feel like that," replied Mildred; "I never felt less like it,
+or I shouldn't go. Still, one should be prepared for anything that may
+happen. All the same, I very much doubt that you will ever see your poor
+friend Milly again, Tims. You must try to forgive me. Now do make haste
+and go to darling Tony--he's simply longing to have you. I see Mr.
+Goring has taken our places in the train, and I shall be left behind if
+I don't go. Good-bye, old Tims."
+
+Mildred kissed Tims's heated, care-distorted face, and turned away to
+where Goring stood at the book-stall buying superfluous literature. Tims
+saw him lift his hat gravely to Mildred. It relieved her vaguely to
+notice that there seemed no warmth or familiarity about their greeting.
+She turned away towards the Metropolitan Railway, not feeling quite sure
+whether she had failed in an important mission or merely made a fool of
+herself.
+
+She found Tony certainly looking bonny, and no more inclined to break
+his heart about his mother's departure than any other healthy, happy
+child under like circumstances. Indeed, it may be doubted whether a
+healthy, happy child, unknowing whence its beatitudes spring, does not
+in its deepest, most vital moment regard all grown-up people as
+necessary nuisances. No one came so delightfully near being another
+child as Mildred; but Tims was a capital playfellow too, a broad
+comedian of the kind appreciated on the nursery boards.
+
+A rousing game with him and an evening at the theatre with Mr. Fitzalan,
+distracted Tims's thoughts from her anxieties. But at night she dreamed
+repeatedly and uneasily of Milly and Mildred as of two separate persons,
+and of Mr. Goring, whose vivid face seen in the full light of the window
+at Hampton Court, returned to her in sleep with a distinctness
+unobtainable in her waking memory.
+
+On the following day her work with Sir James Carus was of absorbing
+interest, and she came home tired and preoccupied with it. Yet her
+dreams of the night before recurred in forms at once more confused and
+more poignant. At two o'clock in the morning she awoke, crying aloud: "I
+must get Milly back"; and her pillow was wet with tears. For the two
+following hours she must have been awake, because she heard all the
+quarters strike from a neighboring church-tower, yet they appeared like
+a prolonged nightmare. The emotional impression of some forgotten dream
+remained, and she passed them in an agony of grief for she knew not
+what, of remorse for having on a certain summer afternoon denied Milly's
+petition for her assistance, and of intense volition, resembling prayer,
+for Milly's return.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The intense heat of early afternoon quivered on the steep woods which
+fell to the river opposite the house. The sunlit stream curved under
+them, moving clear and quiet over depths of brown, tangled
+water-growths, and along its fringe of gray and green reeds and grasses
+and creamy plumes of meadow-sweet. The house was not very large. It was
+square and white; an old wistaria, an old Gloire-de-Dijon, and a newer
+carmine cluster-rose contended for possession of its surface. Striped
+awnings were down over all the lower windows and some of the upper. A
+large lawn, close-shorn and velvety green, as only Thames-side lawns can
+be, stretched from the house to the river. It had no flower-beds on it,
+but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark
+shadows, and trellises and pillars overrun by a flood of roses of every
+shade, from deep crimson to snow white. The lawn was surrounded by
+shrubberies and plantations, and beyond it there was nothing to be seen
+except the opposite woods and the river, and sometimes boats passing by
+with a measured sound of oars in the rowlocks, or the temporary
+commotion of a little steam-launch. It looked a respectable early
+Victorian house, but it had never been quite that, for it had been
+built by George Goring's father fifty years earlier, and he himself had
+spent much of his boyhood there.
+
+Everything and every one seemed asleep, except a young man in flannels
+with a flapping hat hanging over his eyes, who stood at the end of a
+punt and pretended to fish. There was no one to look at him or at the
+house behind him, and if there had been observers, they would not have
+guessed that they were looking at the Garden of Eden and that he was
+Adam. Only last evening he and that fair Eve of his had stood by the
+river in the moonlight, where the shattering hawthorn-bloom made the air
+heavy with sweetness, and had spoken to each other of this their
+exquisite, undreamed-of happiness. There had been a Before, there would
+be an After, when they must stand on their defence against the world,
+must resist a thousand importunities, heart-breaking prayers, to return
+to the old, false, fruitless existence.
+
+But just for these days they could be utterly alone in their paradise,
+undisturbed even by the thoughts of others, since no one knew they were
+there and together. Alas! they had been so only forty-eight hours, and
+already a cold little serpent of anxiety had crept in among their roses.
+
+Before entrusting herself to him, Mildred had told him that, in spite of
+her apparent good health, she was occasionally subject to long
+trance-like fits, resembling sleep; should this happen, it would be
+useless to call an ordinary doctor, but that a Miss Timson, a well-known
+scientific woman and a friend of hers, must be summoned at once. He had
+taken Miss Timson's address and promised to do so; but Mildred had not
+seemed to look upon the fit as more than a remote contingency. Perhaps
+the excitement, the unconscious strain of the last few days had upset
+her nerves; for this morning she had lain in what he had taken for a
+natural sleep, until, finding her still sleeping profoundly at noon, he
+had remembered her words and telegraphed to Miss Timson. An answer to
+his telegram, saying that Miss Timson would come as soon as possible,
+lay crumpled up at the bottom of the punt.
+
+The serpent was there, but Goring did not allow its peeping coils
+thoroughly to chill his roses. His temperament was too sanguine, he felt
+too completely steeped in happiness, the weather was too beautiful. Most
+likely Mildred would be all right to-morrow.
+
+Meantime, up there in the shaded room, she who had been Mildred began to
+stir in her sleep. She opened her eyes and gazed through the square
+window, at the sunlit awning that overhung it, and at the green leaves
+and pale buds of the Gloire-de-Dijon rose. There was a hum of bees close
+by that seemed like the voice of the hot sunshine. It should have been a
+pleasant awakening, but Milly awoke from that long sleep of hers with a
+brooding sense of misfortune. The remembrance of the afternoon when she
+had so suddenly been snatched away returned to her, but it was not the
+revelation of Ian's passionate love for her supplanter that came back to
+her as the thing of most importance. Surely she must have known that
+long before, for now the pain seemed old and dulled from habit. It was
+the terrible strength with which the Evil Spirit had possessed her,
+seizing her channels of speech even while she was still there, hurling
+her from her seat without waiting for the passivity of sleep. No, her
+sense of misfortune was not altogether, or even mainly, connected with
+that last day of hers. Unlike Mildred, she had up till now been without
+any consciousness of things that had occurred during her quiescence, and
+she had now no vision; only a strong impression that something terrible
+had befallen Ian.
+
+She looked around the bedroom, and it seemed to her very strange;
+something like an hotel room, yet at once too sumptuous and too shabby.
+There was a faded pink flock wall-paper with a gilt pattern upon it, the
+chairs were gilded and padded and covered with worn pink damask, the bed
+was gilded and hung with faded pink silk curtains. Everywhere there was
+pink and gilding, and everywhere it was old and faded and rubbed. A few
+early Victorian lithographs hung on the walls, portraits of
+ballet-dancers and noblemen with waists and whiskers. No one had tidied
+the room since the night before, and fine underclothing was flung
+carelessly about on chairs, a fussy petticoat here, the bodice of an
+evening dress there; everywhere just that touch of mingled daintiness
+and disorder which by this time Milly recognized only too well.
+
+The bed was large, and some one else had evidently slept there besides
+herself, for the sheet and pillow were rumpled and there was a
+half-burnt candle and a man's watch-chain on the small table beside it.
+Wherever she was then, Ian was there too, so that she was at a loss to
+understand her own sinister foreboding.
+
+She pulled at the bell-rope twice.
+
+There were only three servants in the house; a housekeeper and two
+maids, who all dated from the days of Mrs. Maria Idle, ex-mistress of
+the late Lord Ipswich, dead herself now some six months. The housekeeper
+was asleep, the maids out of hearing. She opened the door and found a
+bathroom opposite her bedroom. It had a window which showed her a strip
+of lawn with flower-beds upon it, beyond that shrubberies and tall trees
+which shut out any farther view. A hoarse cuckoo was crying in the
+distance, and from the greenery came a twittering of birds and sometimes
+a few liquid pipings; but there was no sound of human life. The place
+seemed as empty as an enchanted palace in a fairy story.
+
+Milly's toilet never took her very long. She put on a fresh, simple
+cotton dress, which seemed to have been worn the day before, and was
+just hesitating as to whether she should go down or wait for Ian to
+come, when Clarkson, the housekeeper, knocked at her door.
+
+"I thought if you was awake, madam, you might like a bit of lunch," she
+said.
+
+Milly refused, for this horrible feeling of depression and anxiety made
+her insensible to hunger. She looked at the housekeeper with a certain
+surprise, for Clarkson was as decorated and as much the worse for wear
+as the furniture of the bedroom. She was a large, fat woman, laced into
+a brown cashmere dress, with a cameo brooch on her ample bosom; her hair
+was unnaturally black, curled and dressed high on the top of her head,
+she had big gold earrings, and a wealth of powder on her large, red
+face.
+
+"Can you tell me where I am likely to find Mr. Stewart?" asked Milly,
+politely.
+
+The woman stared, and when she answered there was more than a shade of
+insolence in her coarse voice and smile.
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell, madam. Mr. Stewart's not our gentleman here."
+
+Milly, understanding the reply as little as the housekeeper had
+understood the question, yet felt that some impertinence was intended
+and turned away.
+
+There was nothing for it but to explore on her own account. A staircase
+of the dull Victorian kind led down to a dark, cool hall. The front door
+was open. She walked to it and stood under a stumpy portico, looking
+out. The view was much the same as that seen from the bathroom, only
+that instead of grass and flower-beds there was a gravel sweep, and,
+just opposite the front door, a circle of grass with a tall
+monkey-puzzle tree in the centre. Except for the faded gorgeousness of
+the bedroom, the house looked like an ordinary country house, belonging
+to old people who did not care to move with the times. Why should she
+feel at every step a growing dread of what might meet her there?
+
+She turned from the portico and opened, hesitatingly, the door of a room
+on the opposite side of the hall. It was a drawing-room, with traces of
+the same shabby gorgeousness that prevailed in the bedroom, but
+mitigated by a good deal of clean, faded chintz; and at one end was a
+brilliant full-length Millais portrait of Mrs. Maria Idle in blue silk
+and a crinoline. It was a long room, pleasant in the dim light; for
+although it had three windows, the farthest a French one and open, all
+were covered with awnings, coming low down and showing nothing of the
+outer world but a hand's breadth of turf and wandering bits of creeper.
+It was sweet with flowers, and on a consol table before a mirror stood a
+high vase from which waved and twined tall sprays and long streamers of
+cluster-roses, carmine and white. It was beautiful, yet Milly turned
+away from it almost with a shudder. She recognized the touch of the hand
+that must have set the roses there. And the nameless horror grew upon
+her.
+
+Except for the flowers, there was little sign of occupation in the room.
+A large round rosewood table was set with blue glass vases on mats and
+some dozen photograph--albums and gift-books, dating from the sixties.
+But on a stool in a corner lay a newspaper; and the date on it gave her
+a shock. She had supposed herself to have been away about four months;
+she found she had been gone sixteen. There had been plenty of time for a
+misfortune to happen, and she felt convinced that it had happened. But
+what? If Ian or Tony were dead she would surely still be in mourning.
+Then on a little rosewood escritoire, such as ladies were wont to use
+when they had nothing to write, she spied an old leather writing-case
+with the initials M. B. F. upon it. It was one Aunt Beatrice had given
+her when she first went to Ascham, and it seemed to look on her
+pleasantly, like the face of an old friend. She found a few letters in
+the pockets, among them one from Ian written from Berlin a few days
+before, speaking of his speedy return and of Tony's amusing letter from
+the sea-side. She began to hope her feeling of anxiety and depression
+might be only the shadow of the fear and anguish which she had suffered
+on that horrible afternoon sixteen months ago. She must try not to think
+about it, must try to be bright for Ian's sake. Some one surely was with
+her at this queer place, since she was sharing a room with another
+person--probably a female friend of that Other's, who had such a crowd
+of them.
+
+She drew the awning half-way up and stood on the step outside the French
+window. The lawn, the trees, the opposite hills were unknown to her, but
+the spirit of the river spoke to her familiarly, and she knew it for the
+Thames. A gardener in shirt-sleeves was filling a water-barrel by the
+river, under a hawthorn-tree, and the young man in the punt was putting
+up his fishing-tackle. As she looked, the strangeness of the scene
+passed away. She could not say where it was, but in some dream or vision
+she had certainly seen this lawn, that view, before; when the young man
+turned and came nearer she would know his face. And the dim, horrible
+thing that was waiting for her somewhere about the quiet house, the
+quiet garden, seemed to draw a step nearer, to lift its veil a little.
+Who was it that had stood not far from where the gardener was standing
+now, and seen the moon hanging large and golden over the mystery of the
+opposite woods? Whoever it was, some one's arm had been fast around her
+and there had been kisses--kisses.
+
+It took but a few seconds for these half-revelations to drop into her
+mind, and before she had had time to reflect upon them, the young man in
+the punt looked up and saw her standing there on the step. He took off
+his floppy hat and waved it to her; then he put down his tackle, ran to
+the near end of the punt and jumped lightly ashore. He came up the green
+lawn, and her anxiety sent her down to meet him almost as eagerly as
+love would have done. The hat shaded all the upper part of his face, and
+at a distance, in the strong sunshine, the audacious chin, the red lower
+lip, caught her eye first and seemed to extinguish the rest of the face.
+And suddenly she disliked them. Who was the man, and how did she come to
+know him? But former experiences of strange awakenings had made her
+cautious, self-controlling, almost capable of hypocrisy.
+
+"So you're awake!" shouted George, still a long way down the lawn.
+"Good! How are you? All right?"
+
+She nodded "Yes," with a constrained smile.
+
+In a minute they had met, he had turned her around, and with his arm
+under hers was leading her towards the house again.
+
+"All right? Really all right?" he asked very softly, pressing her arm
+with his hand and stooping his head to bring his mouth on a level with
+her ear.
+
+"Very nearly, at any rate," she answered, coldly, trying to draw away
+from him.
+
+"What are you doing that for?" he asked. "Afraid of shocking the
+gardener, eh? What queer little dear little ways you've got! I suppose
+Undines are like that."
+
+He drew her closer to him as he threw back his head and laughed a noisy
+laugh that jarred upon her nerves.
+
+Milly began to feel indignant. It was just possible that a younger
+sister in Australia might have married and brought this extraordinary
+young man home to England, but his looks, his tone, were not fraternal;
+and she had never forgotten the Maxwell Davison episode. She walked on
+stiffly.
+
+"Every one seems to be out," she observed, as calmly as she could.
+
+He frowned.
+
+"You mean those devils of servants haven't been looking after you?" he
+asked. "Yet I gave Clarkson her orders. Of course they're baggages, but
+I haven't had the heart to send them away from the old place, for who on
+earth would take them? I expect we aren't improving their chances, you
+and I, at this very moment; in spite of respecting the gardener's
+prejudices."
+
+He chuckled, as at some occult joke of his own.
+
+They stooped together under the half-raised awning of the French window,
+and entered the dim, flower-scented drawing-room side by side. The young
+man threw off his hat, and she saw the silky ripple of his nut-brown
+hair, his smooth forehead, his bright-glancing hazel eyes, all the happy
+pleasantness of his countenance. Before she had had time to reconsider
+her dislike of him, he had caught her in his arms and kissed her hair
+and face, whispering little words of love between the kisses. For one
+paralyzed moment Milly suffered these dreadful words, these horrible
+caresses. Then exerting the strength of frenzy, she pushed him from her
+and bounded to the other side of the room, entrenching herself behind
+the big rosewood table with its smug mats and vases and albums.
+
+"You brute! you brute! you hateful cad!" she stammered with trembling
+lips; "how dare you touch me?"
+
+George Goring stared at her with startled eyes.
+
+"Mildred! Dearest! Good God! What's gone wrong?"
+
+"Where's my husband?" she asked, in a voice sharp with anger and terror.
+"I want to go--I must leave this horrid place at once."
+
+"Your husband?"
+
+It was Goring's turn to feel himself plunged into the midst of a
+nightmare, and he grew almost as pale as Milly. How in Heaven's name was
+he going to manage her? She looked very ill and must of course be
+delirious. That would have been alarming in any case, and this
+particular form of delirium was excruciatingly painful.
+
+"Yes, my husband--where is he? I shall tell him how you've dared to
+insult me. I must go. This is your house--I must leave it at once."
+
+Goring did not attempt to come near her. He spoke very quietly.
+
+"Try and remember, Mildred; Stewart is not here. He will not even be in
+England till to-morrow. You are alone with me. Hadn't you better go to
+bed again and--" he was about to say, "wait until Miss Timson comes,"
+but as it was possible that the advent of the person she had wished him
+to summon might now irritate her, he substituted--"and keep quiet? I
+promise not to come near you if you don't wish to see me."
+
+"I am alone here with you?" Milly repeated, slowly, and pressed her hand
+to her forehead. "Good God," she moaned to herself, "what can have
+happened?"
+
+"Yes. For Heaven's sake, go and lie down. I expect the doctor can give
+you something to soothe your nerves and then perhaps you'll remember."
+
+She made a gesture of fierce impatience.
+
+"You think I'm mad, but I'm not. I have been mad and I am myself again;
+only I can't remember anything that's happened since I went out of my
+mind. I insist upon your telling me. Who are you? I never saw you before
+to my knowledge."
+
+Her voice, her attitude were almost truculent as she faced him, her
+right hand dragging at the loose clasp of a big photograph album. Every
+word, every look, was agony to Goring, but he controlled himself by an
+effort.
+
+"I am George Goring," he said, slowly, and paused with anxious eyes
+fixed upon her, hoping that the name might yet stir some answering
+string of tenderness in the broken lyre of her mind.
+
+She too paused, as though tracking some far-off association with the
+name. Then:
+
+"Ah! poor Lady Augusta's husband," she repeated, yet sterner than before
+in her anger. "My friend Lady Augusta's husband! And why am I here alone
+with you, Mr. Goring?"
+
+"Because I am your lover, Mildred. Because I love you better than any
+one or any thing in the world; and yesterday you thought you loved me,
+you thought you could trust all your life to me."
+
+She had known the answer already in her heart, but the fact stated
+plainly by another, became even more dreadful, more intolerable, than
+before. She uttered a low cry and covered her eyes with her hand.
+
+"Mildred--dearest!" he breathed imploringly.
+
+Then she raised her head and looked straight at him with flaming eyes,
+this fair, fragile creature transformed into a pitiless Fury. She forgot
+that indeed an Evil Spirit had dwelt within her; George Goring might be
+victim rather than culprit. In this hour of her anguish the identity of
+that body of hers, which through him was defiled, that honor of hers,
+yes and of Ian Stewart's, which through him was dragged in the dust,
+made her no longer able to keep clearly in mind the separateness of the
+Mildred Stewart of yesterday from herself.
+
+"I tell you I was mad," she gasped; "and you--you vile, wicked man!--you
+took advantage of it to ruin my life--to ruin my husband's life! You
+must know Ian Stewart, a man whose shoes you are not fit to tie. Do you
+think any woman in her senses would leave him for you? Ah!--" she
+breathed a long, shuddering breath and her hand was clinched so hard
+upon the loose album clasp that it ran into her palm.
+
+"Mildred!" cried George, staggered, stricken as though by some fiery
+rain.
+
+"I ought to be sorry for your wife," she went on. "She is a splendid
+woman, she has done nothing to deserve that you should treat her so
+scandalously. But I can't--I can't"--a dry sob caught her voice--"be
+sorry for any one except myself and Ian. I always knew I wasn't good
+enough to be his wife, but I was so proud of it--so proud--and now--Oh,
+it's too horrible! I'm not fit to live."
+
+George had sunk upon a chair and hidden his face in his hands.
+
+"Don't say that," he muttered hoarsely, almost inaudibly. "It was my
+doing."
+
+She broke out again.
+
+"Of course it was. It's nothing to you, I suppose. You've broken my
+husband's heart and mine too; you've hopelessly disgraced us both and
+spoiled our lives; and all for the sake of a little amusement, a little
+low pleasure. We can't do anything, we can't punish you; but if curses
+were any use, oh, how I could curse you, Mr. Goring!"
+
+The sobs rising in a storm choked her voice. She rushed from the room,
+closing the door behind her and leaving George Goring there, his head on
+his hands. He sat motionless, hearing nothing but the humming silence of
+the hot afternoon.
+
+Milly, pressing back her tears, flew across the hall and up the stairs.
+The vague nightmare thing that had lurked for her in the shadows of the
+house, when she had descended them so quietly, had taken shape at last.
+She knew now the unspeakable secret of the pink and gold bedroom, the
+shabbily gorgeous bed, the posturing dancers, the simpering, tailored
+noblemen. The atmosphere of it, scented and close, despite the open
+window, seemed to take her by the throat. She dared not stop to think,
+lest this sick despair, this loathing of herself, should master her. To
+get home at once was her impulse, and she must do it before any one
+could interfere.
+
+It was a matter of a few seconds to find a hat, gloves, a parasol. She
+noticed a purse in the pocket of her dress and counted the money in it.
+There was not much, but enough to take her home, since she felt sure the
+river shimmering over there was the Thames. She did not stay to change
+her thin shoes, but flitted down the stairs and out under the portico,
+as silent as a ghost. The drive curved through a shrubbery, and in a
+minute she was out of sight of the house. She hurried past the lodge,
+hesitating in which direction to turn, when a tradesman's cart drove
+past. She asked the young man who was driving it her way to the station,
+and he told her it was not very far, but that she could not catch the
+next train to town if she meant to walk. He was going in that direction
+himself and would give her a lift if she liked. She accepted the young
+man's offer; but if he made it in order to beguile the tedium of his
+way, he was disappointed.
+
+The road was dusty and sunny, and this gave her a reason for opening her
+large parasol. She cowered under it, hiding herself from the women who
+rolled by in shiny carriages with high-stepping horses; not so much
+because she feared she might meet acquaintances, as from an instinctive
+desire to hide herself, a thing so shamed and everlastingly wretched,
+from every human eye. And so it happened that, when she was close to the
+station, she missed seeing and being seen by Tims, who was driving to
+Mr. Goring's house in a hired trap which he had sent to meet her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Milly took a ticket for Paddington and hurried to the train, which was
+waiting at the platform, choosing an empty compartment. Action had
+temporarily dulled the passion of her misery, her rage, her shuddering
+horror at herself. But alone in the train, it all returned upon her,
+only with a complete realization of circumstance which made it worse.
+
+It had been her impulse to rush to her home, to her husband, as for
+refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort
+in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to
+tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could
+she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of
+this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however
+homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man
+she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until
+to-morrow. She supposed the Evil Thing had counted on stealing home in
+time to meet him, and would have met him with an innocently smiling
+face.
+
+A moment Milly triumphed in the thought that it was she herself who
+would meet Ian and reveal to him the treachery of the creature who had
+supplanted her in his heart. Then with a shudder she hid her face,
+remembering that it was, after all, her own dishonor and his which she
+must reveal. He would of course take her back, and if that could be the
+end, they might live down the thing together. But it would not be the
+end. "I am the stronger," that Evil Thing had said, and it was the
+stronger. At first step by step, now with swift advancing strides, it
+was robbing her of the months, the years, till soon, very soon, while in
+the world's eyes she seemed to live and thrive, she would be dead; dead,
+without a monument, without a tear, her very soul not free and in God's
+hands, but held somewhere in abeyance. And Ian? Through what
+degradation, to what public shame would he, the most refined and
+sensitive of men, be dragged! His child--her child and Ian's--would grow
+up like that poor wretched George Goring, breathing corruption, lies,
+dishonor, from his earliest years. And she, the wife, the mother, would
+seem to be guilty of all that, while she was really bound,
+helpless--dead.
+
+The passion of her anger and despair stormed through her veins again
+with yet greater violence, but this time George Goring was forgotten and
+all its waves broke impotently against that adversary whose diabolical
+power she was so impotent to resist, who might return to-morrow, to-day
+for aught she knew.
+
+She had been moving restlessly about the compartment, making vehement
+gestures in her desperation, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming
+idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to
+thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought
+to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves
+of emotion--one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and
+timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over
+her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too
+in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind
+that this was the only thing to be done--she, usually so full of mental
+and moral hesitation. Let it be done quickly--now, while the spur of
+excitement pricked her on. The Thing seemed to have a knowledge of her
+experiences which was not reciprocal. How it would laugh if it
+recollected in its uncanny way, that she had wanted to kill herself and
+it with her, that she had had it at her mercy and then had been too weak
+and cowardly to strike! Should she buy some poison when she reached
+Paddington? She knew nothing about poisons and their effects, except
+that carbolic caused terrible agony, and laudanum was not to be trusted
+unless you knew the dose. The train was slowing up and the lonely river
+gleamed silverly below. It beckoned to her, the river, upon whose stream
+she had spent so many young, happy days.
+
+She got out at the little station and walked away from it with a quick,
+light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment.
+After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and
+humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's
+riddle, the way to victory.
+
+She knew the place where she found herself, for she had several times
+made one of a party rowing down from Oxford to London. But it was not
+one of the frequented parts of the river, being a quiet reach among
+solitary meadows. She remembered that there was a shabby little house
+standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had
+put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the
+neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had
+come upon it in exploring a backwater. It could not be far off.
+
+She walked quickly along the bank, turning over and over in her mind the
+same thoughts; the cruel wrong which now for so many years she had
+suffered, the final disgrace brought upon her and her husband, and she
+braced her courage to strike the blow that should revenge all. The act
+to which this fair-haired, once gentle woman was hurrying along the
+lonely river-bank, was not in its essence suicide; it was revenge, it
+was murder.
+
+When she came to the shabby little house where the boats lay under an
+unlovely zinc-roofed shed, she wondered whether she might ask for ink
+and paper and write to some one. She longed to send one little word to
+Ian; but then what could she say? She could not have seen him and
+concealed the truth from him, but it was one of the advantages of her
+disappearance that he need never know the dishonor done him. And she
+knew he considered suicide a cowardly act. He was quite wrong there. It
+was an act of heroic courage to go out like this to meet death. It was
+so lonely; even lonelier than death must always be. She had the
+conviction that she was not doing wrong, but right. Hers was no common
+case. And for the first time she saw that there might be a reason for
+this doom which had befallen her. Men regard one sort of weakness as a
+sin to be struggled against, another as something harmless, even
+amiable, to be acquiesced in. But perhaps all weakness acquiesced in was
+a sin in the eyes of Eternal Wisdom, was at any rate to be left to the
+mercy of its own consequences. She looked back upon her life and saw
+herself never exerting her own judgment, always following in some one
+else's tracks, never fighting against her physical, mental, moral
+timidity. It was no doubt this weakness of hers that had laid her open
+to the mysterious curse which she was now, by a supreme effort of
+independent judgment and physical courage, resolved to throw off.
+
+A stupid-looking man in a dirty cotton shirt got out the small boat she
+chose; stared a minute in surprise to see the style in which she, an
+Oxford girl born and bred, handled the sculls, and then went in again to
+continue sleeping off a pint of beer.
+
+She pulled on mechanically, with a long, regular stroke, and one by one
+scenes, happy river-scenes out of past years, came back to her with
+wonderful vividness. Looking about her she saw an osier-bed dividing
+the stream, and beside it the opening into the willow-shaded backwater
+which she remembered. She turned the boat's head into it. Heavy clouds
+had rolled up and covered the sky, and there was a kind of twilight
+between the dark water and the netted boughs overhead. Very soon she
+heard the noise of a weir. Once such a sound had been pleasant in her
+ears; but now it turned her cold with fear. On one side the backwater
+flowed sluggishly on around the osier-bed; on the other it hurried
+smoothly, silently away, to broaden suddenly before it swept in white
+foam over an open weir into a deep pool below. She trembled violently
+and the oars moved feebly in her hands, chill for all the warmth of the
+afternoon. Her boat was in the stream which led to the weir, but not yet
+fully caught by the current. A few more strokes and the thing would be
+done, she would be carried quickly on and over that dancing, sparkling
+edge into the deep pool below. Her courage failed, could not be screwed
+to the sticking-point; she hung on the oars, and the boat, as if
+answering to her thought, stopped, swung half around. As she held the
+boat with the oars and closed her eyes in an anguish of hesitation and
+terror, a strange convulsion shook her, such as she had felt once
+before, and a low cry, not her own, broke from her lips.
+
+"No--no!" they uttered, hoarsely.
+
+The Thing was there then, awake to its danger, and in another moment
+might snatch her from herself, return laughing at her cowardice, to that
+house by the river. She pressed her lips hard together, and silently,
+with all the strength of her hate and of her love, bent to the oars. The
+little boat shot forward into mid-stream, the current seized it and
+swept it rapidly on towards the dancing edge of water. She dropped the
+sculls and a hoarse shriek broke from her lips; but it was not she who
+shrieked, for in her heart was no fear, but triumph--triumph as of one
+who is at length avenged of her mortal enemy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the darkened drawing-room, the room so full of traces of all that had
+been exquisite in Mildred Stewart, Ian mourned alone. Presently the door
+opened a little, and a tall, slender, childish figure in a white smock,
+slipped in and closed it gently behind him. Tony stole up to his father
+and stood between his knees. He looked at Ian, silent, pale, large-eyed.
+That a grown-up person and a man should shed tears was strange, even
+portentous, to him.
+
+"Won't Mummy come back, not ever?" asked the child at last, piteously,
+in a half whisper.
+
+"No, never, Tony; Mummy won't ever come back. She's gone--gone for
+always."
+
+The child looked in his father's eyes strangely, penetratingly.
+
+"Which Mummy?" he asked.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invader, by Margaret L. Woods
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