The interloper was established between Kingston and Gundred

The interloper was established between Kingston and Gundred, and the purely formal nature of their marriage might have been clear even to themselves. They fell apart without wrench or difficulty, and on Gundred a heavy sense of loneliness settled like a cloud. She it was that suffered most from the separation, for she had not her husband’s compensations. All these years she had lived in the happiness of what she believed to be perfect intimacy with Kingston, sharing his hopes, his wishes, his thoughts; now, in a flash, she was made to guess that she had merely shared the outer aspects of his life, that the fancied beautiful completeness of their union was merely the band of tolerance strengthened through the long years by custom. Now that the elasticity of the tie that bound them was put to too great a stretch, it flew asunder, and, in the rebound, struck Gundred a stinging blow. It was not, of course, to be expected of her that she should realize the situation clearly, or face the true state of the case with any perspicacious candour. All she felt was felt dimly, instinctively, half-consciously; not even to herself would she admit what she felt, or analyze the solitude that seemed gathering round her. But very vaguely, in the introduction of Ivor Restormel, she understood that she herself must somehow have failed—could not be quite all to her husband that she had imagined herself, must at some point have fallen short of the perfect wife’s proper performance. This uncomfortable perception, which caught her in her tenderest spot, she made haste to burke and bury in the depths of her consciousness. But its ghost occasionally walked; and, though she did the best for herself by insisting daily on her husband’s unjustifiable cruelty and the blackness of the influences that had seduced him, yet she could never wholly escape that faint instinct of failure which was the one thing that her efficiency-worshipping nature most passionately dreaded.

The days went by in a strain that was wholly absurd, but also wholly unpleasant. Examining things in the light of healthy, normal experience, Gundred could not even tell herself that she had a grievance. She still feared and disliked the presence of Ivor Restormel, with a fear which no reason could account for, but which no reason could dispel. But in every way the boy was perfectly harmless and even pleasant. Gundred, in her heart of hearts had expected that her instinct would immediately be justified on closer acquaintance by discovering that Ivor Restormel took drugs, or read French novels, or had a tendency to gambling and kleptomania. She watched him carefully, in public and in private, secretly and openly, hoping that some such development might force her husband to recognise the soundness of her intuitions, and get rid of the undesirable immigrant. However, none of these idiosyncrasies could be brought to light, observe she never so minutely. The boy was just an ordinary, nice, healthy boy; there was nothing vague or mysterious or neurotic about him; his personality had no strong colours anywhere, was altogether mild, unformed, healthy in its growth. And yet Gundred, recognising all this, could not help shrinking from him, shrinking from him more eagerly day by day, with a vigour of feeling not by any means wholly attributable to her anger against Kingston for disobeying her wishes in this matter. Among the weak points of her character a lack of honesty could not always be counted; she frankly acknowledged to herself that no fault could be found with Ivor Restormel. Good, kind, companionable, nice-minded, he appeared to be everything that she herself, by all the rules of her code, should most warmly have liked and approved. This only made it the odder, therefore, that she should feel against him so unconquerable a secret dislike. Gundred almost felt as if it were not the boy himself that she disliked, but some deep corner of his character which she seemed to have known and dreaded for many years. She divined in him a lurking enmity of which his own innocent and sunny nature was altogether unconscious. But Gundred pulled herself up short at this point, and refused to indulge in any such vain fantasies. People, it is well known, do not contain these dual personalities; if Gundred dreaded this boy, who, to all seeming, was everything sane and wholesome, her feeling could have nothing to do with any nonsensical superstition, but would certainly—if not sooner, then later—be disastrously shown to have been founded on fact, by the discovery of its object’s carefully hidden iniquity. Gundred, as the days went by, withdrew herself more and more wholly from her husband’s life. Now she no longer took even a formal share in it. She stood outside and watched for her opportunity to strike at the intruder. That neither Kingston nor Gundred any longer felt how completely they were removed from each other in itself revealed the secret weakness which all these years had underlain the smooth, firm surface of their relations. Each, it appeared, could do perfectly well without the other, and only feel the separation as a matter for indignant pride.

The interloper, meanwhile, was quite unconscious of the hidden passions that were seething round him. Ivor Restormel had a happy temperament that only looked for the best in everything. Reasons and explanations did not interest him, nor had he much subtlety to discern any animosity that did not take the form of a blow in the eye. So long as he was not made to enter the smoke-haunted rooms of Brakelond he was inclined simply and wholly to enjoy himself. What it all meant he had no idea, nor what he had done to attract so smooth and pleasant a life as seemed to be opening out before him. Occasionally he had a very faint suspicion that Lady Gundred, for some reason, did not entirely approve of him. But, then, she was always so mild and remote in manner, so it must only be his fancy; after all, he had done absolutely nothing to annoy her; and, anyway, what was the good of bothering? So he took the pleasures that the gods provided, without question or cavil, and began to enjoy the surroundings to which he had been so suddenly, so unexpectedly, transplanted. He had inherited a love of beauty, comfort, calm; the change from a penurious life spent between a third-rate Oxford college and a dingy little house in the Banbury Road, among people no less distasteful than the lives they led—the change from all this to the large serenity of Brakelond was restful and delicious in the extreme. Here voices were never raised in queribund tones; here all the little difficulties of life were kept in oblivion, and existence went on oiled wheels along a gentle, placid course. Lady Gundred might be a little chilly and undemonstrative, but, at any rate, she was always smooth; she never fussed or grew peevish, was never worried about the details of housekeeping. Ivor Restormel loved the unquestioning quiet of his new life. As for his host, well, there he was altogether baffled.

Mr. Darnley seemed at once indifferent and enthusiastic about his new secretary. At one moment he would talk eagerly, almost affectionately; and then, again, he would be perfectly indefinite and tame in tone. Ivor could not make it out at all; did Mr. Darnley like him or not? Surely he must—surely he must even have taken a strange, violent fancy to him. Otherwise, why should Mr. Darnley have made such rapid advances; why should he have been so anxious to get him over to Brakelond; why should he have been in such haste to offer him the secretaryship, and so keen that he should take it? All these things were proof of liking, if anything in the world could ever be. Yet Ivor Restormel could never feel wholly satisfied, after all, that his host had any personal feeling for him. In himself he even seemed to bore Mr. Darnley. Ivor was quite acute enough to see before long that Mr. Darnley took very little interest in him personally. And this made the whole relation incalculably strange. Why saddle yourself, why go out of your way to saddle yourself with a person for whom you do not intrinsically care two straws? Ivor began to think that he even noticed a certain animosity sometimes in his host’s attitude towards him. It almost seemed as if by talking in his own person, of his own concerns, that he was annoying and disappointing Mr. Darnley. What could this mean? Mr. Darnley appeared to be always watching him, always listening for some chance word from him. And then, all of a sudden, Mr. Darnley’s interest would kindle and flame. Warmth would come into his manner, and Ivor would get the sensation of being acutely liked. And then, in a moment, perhaps, his talk would wander outside the range of its listener’s interest. Mr. Darnley would shake his head with a sort of desperate irritation, the light would die out of his eyes, and his demeanour become cold, and sometimes even savage. Evidently the talker must have somehow cheated him, must have ceased to say the things he wished to hear. But what were those things? Ivor Restormel spurred himself to unaccustomed subtlety; he disliked this sensation of being, as it were, only spasmodically and vicariously cultivated. His face and manners generally made him friends without difficulty; he was piqued by their apparent failure to give him any victory over a man whom they had seemed to lead so unresistingly captive at first sight.

Ivor exerted himself to ensure Mr. Darnley’s approval, and carefully marked the moments which held his employer’s enthusiasm and the subjects that provoked it. Apparently, though, any talk of his own life and ideas was of no interest, or very little, to Mr. Darnley. And how can one capture people’s friendship if they are obviously bored by everything that concerns one’s self? No; not quite everything. Ivor soon found that any talk about his particular private weaknesses was always sure to rouse Mr. Darnley to a subdued, secret fury of eagerness. As soon as Ivor dropped any chance apologetic word about the terrors that he had so strangely inherited, and as long as he continued telling of them, so long, and so long only, did Mr. Darnley seem to have an interest and a liking for him—an interest wonderfully keen, a liking deep and strong. And then, if he took advantage of this evident friendship to go on to other matters, then the evident friendship would immediately chill off and vanish into an annoyed indifference. Mr. Darnley could not be touched by conversation on any other topic. But that one topic was always sure of the most instant success; it had only to hint its presence in the dialogue for Mr. Darnley’s whole zeal to leap to the alert. Mr. Darnley even seemed to be always watching for its appearance, and, what was strange and even exasperating, would put up with hours of Ivor’s conversation in the obvious hope that sooner or later the one matter of interest would crop up into the talk. It is annoying to find one’s company cherished only for the sake of conversation on one particular subject, and Ivor began deliberately to avoid the topic, as much from hurt vanity as from personal pride.

Then the situation developed even more oddly, for Mr. Darnley would hardly let the boy out of his sight. He must be always at his side, always putting up with what clearly failed to interest him, in the persistent hope that as the delay grew longer and more wearisome, so the reappearance of the one interesting topic must be coming nearer and growing surer. He clung to Ivor’s company, although it plainly had no intrinsic value for him, anxious not to lose a moment of it, for fear the moment of true speech should come and pass without his knowledge. Ivor, sweet-natured as he was, showed his resentment at the topsy-turvy situation by talking persistently of things that concerned himself, his daily life, or his employer’s. And it was even amusing, had it not been rather humiliating, to notice how Mr. Darnley chafed beneath the interminable ordeal, yet would not lose an instant of it, lest in that instant the thing he was looking for so passionately should poke its head up and vanish again unnoticed. But Ivor, for sheer pride, would indulge him but seldom. Besides, it happened that the one thing which Kingston wished to hear was also, naturally enough, the one thing that Ivor least wished to tell. For the boy was acutely ashamed of those idiotic instincts of terror with which his premature birth had left him. The one thing worse than those terrors themselves was the humiliation of acknowledging them. So he was doubly reluctant to gratify the morbid curiosity of the older man.

Kingston, in fact, was paying very heavily for the indulgence of his long desire. The situation, to him, was one persistent agony of expectation, always straining, always being disappointed. Now at last he understood the punishment that he had earned. For, by his own wish, he was doomed to call, and call for ever, to something that could never hear. The dead was free, but the living was still bound, was more tightly bound than ever in that bond of desire which is at once the pet pleasure and the dreadful agony of all who enter it. And a dreary agony it was; Isabel was there, within his reach almost, but for ever beyond his reach. No cry could rouse her, no appeal restore her personality to life. And yet, mysteriously but certainly, she was there once more; once more clothed in flesh, once more gazing out of human eyes and speaking with a human voice. Nevertheless, for all the good he could have of his prayer’s gratification, she might still have been dead bones and dust of the earth. For she could not hear him, could not recognise him, and the irony of her deaf, blind presence at his side was a torment far more keen than all the long years of her absence. He ravened and battered against the iron wall of her unconsciousness, and for ever was beaten back, sickened, bruised and bleeding from the violence—the eternally fruitless violence—of his effort to stir her recollection. Her memory slept for ever in the dead past; only the immortal part of her still lived, and was incurably deaf to any human call. She did not hear him, she could not hear him; never, never, all down the ages could she hear him again. The irremediable separation was only made more ghastly, more appalling, by the tantalizing proximity of her. He could see her, hear her, know her well. And all the knowledge was not only profitless, but an aggravation of his misery. He saw now what a fool he had been to tie himself anew in the bondage of desire; an eternal parting would have been far less painful, far less maddeningly cruel, than this grim and nugatory reunion.

Again and again he battled fiercely to win the recognition that he knew in his heart of hearts to be for ever beyond his reach. He was incessantly trying to lead Ivor Restormel into some discussion of his secret terrors, hoping that so Isabel’s voice might speak once more, and possibly, in time, Isabel’s self be aroused again. But the task was hard, and Ivor reluctant to be made the mouthpiece of that inmost self of his whose identity—whose very existence, even—he never suspected. And then it was that Kingston found himself hating the boy. The boy stood between himself and Isabel; for ever must stand between himself and Isabel. And yet the boy contained the secret treasure—was, in a worldly sense, the secret treasure; he could not have the one for a neighbour without putting up with the presence of the other, without keeping the boy for ever at his side, and tolerating endlessly the revelations of the boy’s uninteresting personality. Kingston approved of the young fellow well enough in himself; he was amiable, kind, pleasant to look at and talk to. In ordinary circumstances Kingston would have liked him and never thought twice about him. Now, however, his liking was complicated by a resentment that at times deepened into something like hate. The boy was keeping so much from him. It was not the boy’s fault, of course, yet that did not make the situation any easier to bear. He alternately liked and disliked him with a vigour for which the boy’s own personality was entirely innocent.

He was always laying traps for him, watching him, trying to stir up the spirit that possessed him. Gladly would Kingston have pierced between Ivor and the secret thing that inhabited him. The one he valued not at all, or only as containing the other which he now valued above everything in the world, for ever beyond his reach though it was. He resented the boy’s body, his beauty, his young developing nature which, sooner or later, might be expected to conquer those old dim memories and achieve the ultimate death of the Isabel he had known those twenty years before. If he could have set free the sleeping soul he would gladly have seen its new body break up and die. He hated that new body, which made so impermeable a wall between himself and the vanished thing he had so vainly found again. He looked on Ivor Restormel as an unarmed burglar might look on an impregnable safe in which lies the diamond of his ambition. The safe is precious and desirable because of the diamond inside, but, in so far as it makes the diamond impregnable, is doubly detestable for the very fact that the diamond is inside. And in Kingston’s case the problem was even crueller; for the burglar may, with long labour, break the safe and attain the diamond. Kingston, in breaking the safe, would by the same action cause the diamond to vanish once more. As things stood, the safety—at all events, the continued proximity—of the diamond depended entirely on the continued security and inviolate condition of the safe.

He began soon, in his difficulty, to read up the countless Oriental cases of prenatal memory. There, in the East, souls that have been parted by bodily death are reunited in another shape, and know each other and are happy. There the great facts of life, of that shadowy fallacy that we call death, are clearly known and understood. But here we are still driven by phantom fears, and troubled by that which has no real existence except in our own weakened imaginations. Our memories are too closely trammelled by false teaching, too little practised and experienced, to pass intact across the blank interval of physical death. At the best it is only an occasional glimpse we carry on into another life, and even so those glimpses come but rarely, and fade as our earthly life advances to maturity again. More people have these glimpses, it is true, than ever dare to acknowledge them; but they are little understood and never fairly made use of. It is to the East we must go to see how little account the trained soul makes of physical death. There, through innumerable ages, the light has been seen, and memory has been educated from hour to hour and from day to day until at last the soul finds it as easy to recall the events of a hundred years ago as those of last night or this morning. Kingston studied the many cases that the Eastern Gospel gives us, and which Western science is just beginning to discern anew. Always he hoped against hope that they would give him some key to unlock the house of memory. Yes, the mortal body is just that—a house of memory, a jerry-built house at best. But the lock is stern and stark. What key is there, what jemmy, what crowbar, that can prevail on the lock that guards the house of memories, can prevail, at least, without wrecking the house and letting the memories go free once more?

Kingston had no hope that he could find such a key. The old Eastern stories showed the glorified free memory as the possession only of the free glorified soul that has escaped the bondage of desire. When desire has passed away, then the uncontaminated soul knows no barrier of time or space. But in the kingdom of desire are all the burning pains and limitations which desire provides to scourge its devotees in the very moment of their seeming satisfaction. To eyes desirous, life is narrowed to a thing of the moment; it is only from the high places of enlightenment that the opened eye of the Real Self can wander over all the fields of existence, and see the nullity of death, the eternity of truth and holiness, from bodily life to bodily life, until at last the great goal is gained. Kingston saw himself helpless now in the grip of the passion he had invoked. Nothing could satisfy it, nothing could release him from it. Nothing but the death of his body, and even that release seemed now to his awakening intelligence to be but problematical. He began to wonder what could be the end of this fantastic tangle. Days went by, and he found himself more tightly chained to the agony of his perpetual disappointment in Ivor Restormel, more cruelly hungry for the satisfaction which lay for ever in his sight and beyond his reach, more and more fiercely stung by the misery that he himself had brought upon himself.

He grew into a sense of drifting towards a catastrophe; the strain, the torment could not be prolonged indefinitely without the sudden snap of his endurance. Some thunderclap of fate must break up the dreadful stagnation of this nightmare. As the time passed, and his efforts brought him no nearer to fulfilment, made it increasingly plain that he could never come any nearer to fulfilment, he felt the growing imminence of doom. This companion who was no companion, his desire had evoked It from the shadows, soon It must go back into the shadows from which he had called It, having first accomplished fully the punishment of his selfishness. He watched the human Ivor Restormel with a curious consciousness of watching a thing unearthly, a thing moving amid darkness towards a great darkness not so very far away. This boy, so much alive, so content with life, was not in reality alive at all. He was just a shadow, a faint film of personality, by comparison with the old living thing that lurked in him. Vague and indeterminate as his own character was, he was the penalty, made incarnate, of Kingston’s own selfishness; he was the eidolon of the past projected into the present in order to tantalize and damn the soul that had desired it. Built of clouds, he must pass back ere long, swiftly, tragically into cloudland, and that reality behind the clouds, that living fragment far down in the shadowy personality of the boy, must pass onwards again on its upward way—that strange immortal essence which once had been Isabel. And this foreknowledge of the end, this sensation of drifting daily more and more hurriedly towards something terrible, impelled him to cherish with a more and more eager passion this presence that had been vouchsafed to him, however incomplete, however unsatisfying he might find it.

Each hour brought him nearer now to the last that should ever be. He bent himself sternly, in the lessening time that was his, to the desperate task of awakening recollection in a soul where recollection slept for ever. Less and less did he see or think of Ivor Restormel, more and more ardently, more and more despairingly, of the thing that dwelt in Ivor Restormel, the thing that soon must leave its habitation to pass elsewhere again. He sought the boy’s presence more and more persistently, would never spare him out of his sight, exacted more and more of his conversation. And all the while he was caring less and less for the boy, his words, or his utterance. Now that he had found out what it was that had attracted him to the boy, he was ceasing to see the boy himself at all, to hear his earthly voice. All Kingston’s attention was fixed on the glimpses that he could hope to get of the secret presence he divined, his ears were open only to those occasional flashes of memory that spoke in Ivor Restormel out of that remote past beyond the grave. He must make the dreadful most of the short time that was left him. It was but little he could hope to make, but the time, he felt, was running rapidly out towards its end.

Gundred saw everything. Gundred understood nothing. That her husband grew keener and keener to monopolize Ivor Restormel she saw, and righteous anger became fiercer within her. That Kingston should so slight her company as obviously and vehemently to prefer that of a person against whom she had most solemnly warned him, was matter enough and to spare for just wrath. Gundred grew colder and colder in manner, lived more and more aloof, felt stronger and stronger in her consciousness of justified dread. That Kingston clung every moment to the side of his secretary she noticed; that, in reality, he did not care two straws about his secretary she could hardly be expected to discern. The plain and sufficing fact was that he never seemed happy, never at his ease, unless Ivor Restormel were with him, and even then he very rarely seemed perfectly satisfied either. Gundred saw that there was something unusual and mysterious about this friendship that in some ways scarcely seemed a friendship at all, yet made such tremendous claims on time and company.

Gundred, scanning the situation from her retirement, came deliberately to the conclusion that Kingston’s evident infatuation was the result of some malign influence. Nothing else could account for his restless attraction towards Ivor Restormel, combined so frequently with obvious boredom and annoyance when in his company; nothing could so completely explain the apparent innocuousness of Ivor himself, as compared with the instinct of repulsion that Gundred always felt towards him, and felt more fanatically from day to day. Gundred knew that she was not capable of unjust or disorderly feelings. And, if she disliked people, it meant that they deserved to be disliked. And if no reason for such a dislike could be discovered anywhere in Ivor Restormel’s personality, well, that only made it more clear that Gundred’s infallible instinct was founded on her perception in him of some evil supernatural influence, possessing him and working through him. The idea grew and fermented in her brain, and heroic remedies began to suggest themselves. No one, in these dreadful latter days, could seriously doubt that the Evil One was abroad. What more credible than that he should have picked out for attack a soul like her husband’s, which Gundred knew to be weak in doctrine, and saw to be not impeccable in practice? Gundred grew in the certainty that, whether Ivor Restormel knew it or no, he was filled with unhallowed powers that were exerting a wicked force on the man whom he had so uncannily attracted from the first.

All her life’s course had led Gundred along placid, sunny ways, and her nature, through those years, had revealed only the peace and serenity of true refinement. And now, at last, at the touch of this righteous jealousy, there began to stir in her the fierce old blood of Queen Isabel, the stern harsh passions of the Mortimers. The fanatic stirred in its long sleep, and Gundred felt herself inspired to lead a domestic crusade against the Powers of Darkness. At any cost her husband must be saved. In old days an Earl of March had, by his laudable zeal in persecution, elicited commendatory letters from Queen Mary. His spirit now awoke in Gundred, and she realized in herself the strength to act mightily in a noble cause.

In every way this undesirable intruder, who seemed so amiable and pleasant and desirable, was having the most untoward effect on Kingston’s mind and morals. Had he not caused a hitherto blameless and obedient husband to revolt against his wife’s righteous dominion after twenty years of harmony, and to cast her wishes defiantly beneath his feet? And now it became obvious that Kingston was suffering in other ways. She saw him to be a dabbler in things best left alone, in things unhallowed, Satanic, dreadful. Of his attendance on spirit-circles Gundred luckily knew nothing, otherwise, in her determination to be old-fashioned by contrast with the hysterical occultism that now obtains, she would probably have wished to call in an exorcist. But even in his reading he had strayed into improper paths. The strangest things he was now for ever studying—Eastern books and mystical fantasies of the most unsettling description. The weirdest of these he made a point of reading to Ivor Restormel, and Gundred, who generally insisted on being by, noticed that he seemed to read eagerly, challengingly, as if in momentary expectation that the matter would elicit some answering flash of some kind or another from the boy. It never did, and the readings, therefore, always broke off short with a shrug of disappointment and even of disgust; but Gundred divined a soul in peril from the very attempt he made. It was surely an incantation he was practising, an invocation to the mysterious evil thing that haunted Ivor Restormel. She presented a bold front to such dangers, and would not be kept away from the readings.

Kingston one Sunday evening seemed absorbed in his dubious books, while Gundred sat at her knitting, an employment by which she piously signalized the Sabbath. All through the week she did fine needlework, but on Sunday she put away her embroideries and conscientiously knitted comforters for the Deep-sea Fishermen. But suddenly Kingston looked up from his page, and began to read in a curious tone of watchful defiance, addressing his secretary, who was inoffensively engaged with a newspaper. ‘Listen to this, Ivor,’ he began, ‘listen to this, and tell me what you think of it.’ Gundred, in her observant silence, noted that her opinion was not asked, and her wrath grew greater and more righteous, chalking up yet another item to the Evil One’s account. ‘“Once upon a time,”’ read Kingston, ‘“many thousands of years ago, there came a great Buddha to a city in India. He was a great and glorious Buddha, but the time is so very far away now that even his name has passed into Nirvana, and cannot be recalled. But all the people in the city wrought their hardest to do him honour. From the King and his nobles downward everyone gave his richest silks and rugs to line the road of the Holy One’s arrival, and in all their land there was not a widow or a little child so poor that they had not some bright pebble or piece of cloth to do their small homage to the Incarnate Perfection. Only one shepherd lad, from the jungle beyond, had nothing to give. He was young and strong and very beautiful, and his whole soul cried out in worship of the Buddha. The most splendid jewel in the world, the most priceless tapestry and cloth of gold, he would not have thought good enough for the honouring of the Holy One; and yet he had nothing, no treasure, however humble, that he could throw beneath the blessed feet. He, that would have given half the world, had not so much as a handful of painted shells. So his heart was very heavy within him, and sadly did he draw near to the city on the appointed day. And on his road there met him a maiden, lovely and gracious, that wore in her hair a flower. But this was such a flower as the boy had never seen before. It was altogether radiant and heavenly, splendid beyond the imagination of man to conceive. It grew in a cluster of seven blooms, and the fragrance of it filled the jungle. If he could only have this wonderful thing to offer to the Heavenly Visitor, then, indeed, thought the boy, he would at least have done no dishonour to the Light that his heart honoured above all else on earth. ‘Maiden,’ he said, ‘for what price will you sell me the flower that you wear in your hair?’ And she answered that for a very great price she would sell him two blossoms from the cluster. And once again his heart was daunted, for the price she asked was more than anything that he could hope to get together in a long laborious life. He shook his head. ‘I had desired,’ he replied, ‘to do fitting honour to the Holy One, but I see now that that hope is beyond me.’ Then the maiden took the blossom from her hair and held it out towards him, for her eyes were opened. ‘My Lord,’ she answered to the peasant lad, ‘my sight is unsealed, and I can see. Very many years hence—a thousand years hence—I see that you, in the fullness of time, even you yourself shall become a revealed Buddha here on earth. Take this flower of mine, then, without money and without price, but promise me only that in that far day I may stand at your right hand and be near you in your glory.’ And the boy smiled and gave her his word. So after all he had his offering to lay before the Blessed One, and his heart was satisfied. And the maiden went her way through life, and on through the many deaths that lay beyond. And he also, the peasant lad, died in the ripeness of his age, and lived and died through many generations, advancing always on the upward road. And at length the time was accomplished, and the maiden’s prophecy fulfilled. For the peasant lad became the Spotless One, the Buddha Sakhya-Muni, High and Holy, altogether Blessed and Perfect, the Best Friend of All the World. And in that day, the maiden found herself again, and came at last to her reward. For she was the Lady Yasodhara, his wife, the first of all the sacred women that trod the happy way and entered into light....”’

Kingston ceased, his voice filled with interrogation, pausing eagerly for Ivor’s opinion, hoping against hope that that opinion might be more illuminating than he felt it would be. Again and again had he tried to kindle that dormant consciousness with scenes like this, always keenly hoping that they would touch some chord of understanding far down in the hidden depths of the boy’s dual personality. But the hope was never to be fulfilled; he knew it was never to be fulfilled, yet each fresh disappointment was sharper and more wounding than the last. Kingston paused for a comment on the story. None came. After a pause he demanded one.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what did you think of that, Ivor?’

The boy looked up; his attention, though formally yielded to Kingston’s reading, had, in reality, been surreptitiously concentrated on the sporting column of the paper he held in his hand.

‘What did I think of it?’ he repeated a trifle vaguely. ‘Oh, not half bad. Quite a decent bit of writing. But awful rot, sir, of course.’

Kingston vibrated with acute annoyance. Thus, for the thousandth time, the gate of possibilities had been slammed brutally in his face by the uninteresting shadowy, rudimentary soul that shared Ivor Restormel’s body with that wonderful immortal dead. He gazed at the boy with positive hatred in his eyes. In a spasm of irritation Kingston turned towards his wife.

‘And you, Gundred,’ he inquired, ‘what do you think of it? Evidently Ivor hasn’t the faintest notion what it is all about. It says nothing to him. Does it say anything to you?’

‘Very dreadful and unchristian,’ said Gundred firmly, but mildly. ‘I wonder you can bear to read such things. I am sure it cannot be good for Mr. Restormel to hear them.’

Kingston might talk if he pleased of ‘Ivor,’ Gundred pointed her disapproval by adhering rigidly to the formal mode of address, and would never accord her enemy the favour of any more friendly appellation.

‘Mr. Restormel,’ she repeated decisively, ‘could not be expected to see anything in such irreverent nonsense.’

Kingston could not trust himself to answer her, nor to make any further remark on the abysmal stupidity of the boy who stood so perpetually between him and the memory of Isabel. Hurriedly turning over the pages, he began to read that most wonderful scene in history, the second meeting of the triumphant Buddha with Yasodhara his wife, after those many years of parting and glorification. Both the world’s great Buddha stories contain the tragedy of a woman; but the tale of the Indian Princess, widowed through long earthly years of the man she loved, and then, in the end, reunited with the Perfected Incarnation of Holiness, is even more tremendous, if less physically poignant, than that of the Mother who stood on Calvary. Mystical, majestic, splendid, is the crowning moment in the life of Yasodhara, and Kingston read the words that relate it with a passionate sense of the truth that they convey. Then he fell silent.

‘Very pretty, dear,’ said Gundred. ‘Would you pick up my wool for me? Thanks. But I do think one might find something more profitable to read on Sundays. I think one ought to make Sunday different somehow, from other days, and not read novels and things like that. One should only read real things on Sundays—yes?’

She slipped into sight the volume with which she occasionally beguiled the devout labours of her knitting. With a gentle little air of excellence she laid it down again unostentatiously, but so that the gilt lettering showed along its cover. It was the ‘Life of Bishop Boffatt,’ by Three Nieces, with a ‘Foreword’ from Archdeacon Widge.

Gundred, however, was too good a wife to make useless difficulties.

Gundred, however, was too good a wife to make useless difficulties. As her husband had invited this young man, this young man must clearly be endured. After all, the visit would soon be over, and she herself need not put in more than a bare appearance. To tell the truth, she was not quite easy as to her own attitude in the matter. It could not be altogether right to conceive such violent antipathies, and she was painfully surprised to find herself entertaining such a feeling. She told herself that there could be no smoke without fire, and that sooner or later her infallible female instinct would be found justified. But until it should be so found justified, she was far too conscientiously good a woman to be happy in the indulgence of an unreasonable hatred. Accordingly, she deliberately suppressed her annoyance, and made it her penance to receive Ivor Restormel on the morrow with her usual quiet grace. The effort brought its own reward; dislike him mysteriously, instinctively, she still did and always would, but there was no longer the uncomfortable vehemence about the feeling. She could tolerate him, though she could not make him welcome.

Ivor Restormel walked over in the afternoon. Gundred gave him tea and then left him to her husband’s care, on the plea of a post to catch. Kingston took his guest into the new wing that had been built on the promontory after the fire, and proceeded to question him and talk to him more exhaustively than had been possible the night before amid the exigencies of a party, no matter how scandalously disregarded. There was no beginning about their friendship, it seemed to Kingston, no breaking of new ground. It was simply the picking up of a dropped thread where it had fallen. The feeling was strange and almost uncanny, the more so that it was evidently not shared by Ivor Restormel. He received his host’s overtures with diffidence, seemed ill at ease, at a loss to understand the warmth of his treatment. Mr. Darnley was nothing more to him than a chance acquaintance of the night before. As the dialogue went forward, too, the visitor’s uneasiness became more and more marked. His face took on a strange look of strain and anxiety; in his speech could be heard from time to time that note of abstraction which can be heard in a voice whose owner is trying hard to keep up a conversation, while his mind is fixed far away on the contemplation of unpleasant private matters. Kingston watched the expression of his guest’s eyes, the curious hunted fear that his whole manner began to suggest, and again experienced more strongly than ever the mysterious feeling of having seen that manner, that strained expression, somewhere before. His memory must be playing him the maddest tricks; for he could have sworn that this boy was well known to him in every detail of face and disposition; yet by now it was clearly proved—as clearly proved, at least, as anything in this world could ever be—that the two had never met, and never even set eyes on each other before. But Kingston still hoped against hope that a chance discovery in the dialogue might reveal some hint or glimpse of a former meeting, however brief, partial, trifling. Thus, and thus alone, could his instinct be justified.

But, as the conversation went forward, the visitor’s uneasiness grew keener and more unsettling. At last it could no longer be controlled.

‘I should awfully like to see some more of the Castle,’ he said. ‘You said something last night about showing me the pictures.’

But the boy’s evident wish to move was too interesting to be gratified. Kingston saw it, could not understand it, meant to understand it.

‘Oh, there will be heaps of time,’ he replied. ‘You must come over again some afternoon. But it takes at least a day to see the Castle thoroughly. We may just as well stay here peacefully. Really, these are the most comfortable rooms in the whole building, although they are quite modern.’

‘Modern, are they?’ answered young Restormel. It was a silly answer, and betrayed the inattention of his mind. For the rooms were too obviously modern for any comment on the fact to be other than fatuous.

‘Yes, they were only built about—yes, twenty years ago.’

Ivor Restormel leapt to his feet. His anxiety culminated, seemed mysteriously confirmed. His eyes were filled with a horror he was trying to conceal. ‘Surely,’ he stammered, ‘these are not the rooms that were restored after the——’

‘After the fire? Yes. This was where the old wing stood.’

‘I thought so; I knew they must be,’ replied Ivor Restormel with forced calm. ‘And they have not got rid of the smell yet. I noticed it as soon as I got inside.’

‘The smell! What smell?’ asked his host, amused by this odd notion of his visitor’s, and sniffing about for the aroma of dead rats.

‘The smell of fire,’ said Ivor Restormel, speaking in a low voice, as of a thing too dreadful to be talked of in normal tones. ‘The whole place is full of the smell of fire. Don’t you notice it, Mr. Darnley? I suppose nothing can be on fire now? No; it is the stale old smell of a fire that has been out for a long time—the sharp, beastly smell of charred wood and burnt stone. I know it so well.’ He shivered against his will.

Kingston was startled at this strange new development. He had heard nothing of Ivor Restormel’s hidden horror. Gundred had disliked the whole subject too much to tattle about it. Kingston was astounded at the sudden fantastic anxiety of his guest, the perturbation of his manners, his evident discomposure. So vivid was Ivor Restormel’s apprehension that it even impressed itself on Kingston. The host inhaled the air sharply. There was not the faintest suggestion of fire or smoke. The room was sleepily fragrant with potpourri from the old perforated jade censer on the corner table. Otherwise there was nothing in the air. And yet it was evident that Ivor Restormel was dodging some secret terror that was almost on the point of breaking covert and declaring itself.

‘You have got a most wonderful imagination,’ said Kingston at last. ‘There is no smell of fire here. On my word, there isn’t. There couldn’t be. The fire was put out twenty years ago, hang it all! The smell of it could not very well be hanging about here still.’

‘No; I suppose not,’ answered the other, obviously quite unconvinced.

Then, lamely, hesitatingly, he explained the reasons why the memories of the catastrophe at Brakelond had become so closely involved with his own life, and what a troublesome legacy it had left him through the shock that his mother had suffered. Kingston was more and more stirred.

‘I never heard anything more extraordinary,’ he replied. ‘Suggestion, I suppose it must be. And this room makes you feel uncomfortable even now, I can see, and you manage to smell fire where there has been no fire for twenty years. And yet you have no more recollections?’

‘Recollections? I don’t quite know what there could be for me to recollect.’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, when I first saw you on the road, I had a vague and yet a very strong feeling that you and I have met before, and known each other quite well. I imagine that was all a mistake? See if you can’t remember any previous meeting between us, though. It would be interesting if you could, for my instinct was quite extraordinarily clear on the point, though my memory seems to say accurately and definitely that I had never seen your face till I passed you in the car yesterday afternoon.’

Ivor Restormel shook his head positively, and made haste to answer in the negative. The question did not interest him in the least. The one feeling of which he was conscious was his tyrannous need of getting away from those serene and pleasant modern rooms, which, to his excited fancy, seemed full of horrid ghosts.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I am pretty well certain we can never have met before. I was brought up abroad, you see, by my mother, after they sold Restormel. And the last two or three years I have been living at Oxford. I have not been to London or anywhere where we could have met. No—no.... I say, I am a most awful idiot to-day. I can’t imagine what has come over me,’ he cried abruptly. ‘But this jolly room of yours—well, it feels to me horribly uncanny. You say there is no fire, and of course there isn’t; yet the smell is in my nostrils and my throat all the time, choking and stifling me. Did you ever hear such rot? Do you mind if we go out in the garden or somewhere? I’m not often taken like this, please believe me. I have never felt anything like this in my life. I told you how I hate and dread fire, though I have never suffered from it; but nothing has ever given me such an awful impression of fire as I feel here to-day.’

He had been standing ever since he rose from his chair, or walking uneasily from end to end of the room. Now he stood in front of his host, gazing at him with eyes which, for all his tongue’s pretence at ease, were filled with a haunting dread. Kingston was deeply moved by the spectacle of this fighting terror before him. The terror moved his pity, the courage of its victim moved his admiration. And, behind everything else lay the curiosity that this manifestation woke in him. But he could no longer disregard his visitor’s eagerness to be gone elsewhere. He rose from the window-seat.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I cannot understand it. Yes, let us go, if you wish. We might take a turn in the garden. I would not have brought you in here if I had had the slightest idea that you feel like this. But I never could have believed that such a stretch of imagination was possible.’ Kingston broke off, studying the controlled fear in the young man’s face. Then he abruptly began again. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘do tell me exactly what it is you see and feel that gets on your nerves so. I cannot understand it.’

Ivor Restormel glanced round the room. Under Gundred’s supervision it had been rebuilt in a cool and placid modern style. Everything in it was pretty, graceful, harmonious. The walls were panelled in white; flowers were standing about in tall blue glasses. The big windows admitted shafts of soft afternoon light through their drawn white blinds, and the whole impression was one of fragrant, comfortable peace.

But Ivor Restormel’s eyes saw something very different.

After a pause he answered, huskily, in broken, difficult tones:

‘You will think me more of an ass than you do already,’ he replied. ‘I suppose it must be my mother’s stories that account for it. But, besides the awful smell of burning here, I seem to see a horrible wreckage of charred ruins. Oh, I can see these walls and all the jolly decorations. And yet, somehow, when I look again they are not there any longer. There is only the shell of some other building, something all fallen in and blistered and blackened with fire. Great heaps of ashes and bleached rubbish are piled high between what is left of the walls. The whole place is choking with the stale fumes of smoke. And the rooms are open to the grey sky far overhead; and grey drifts of rain come dashing in from time to time on the smouldering masses.’

Kingston watched his visitor’s face with an amazement that bereft him of words.

‘By God!’ he said slowly, wondering where his thoughts would lead him in the next few minutes. ‘By God! you describe it exactly as if you had been here twenty years ago.’

Ivor Restormel shook his head fiercely, as if trying to shake off some horrid, persistent memory.

‘I feel as if I had,’ he replied suddenly. ‘I feel just as if I had been here twenty years ago, worse luck. The moment I came into the room I saw it all. I felt—oh, well, I felt that I must have been here in the ruins ever so long ago, and had the worst time here that anyone ever had—as if I had been tied by the leg here, somehow, and pinned down in damnable terror and pain.’

‘Come along out of it,’ said Kingston quietly, after a pause. He dared not trust himself to say more. An idea had been born in his brain—born, or called once more to life?—an idea so wild, so fantastic, that he hardly dared to entertain it. And yet, in the depths of his heart, he knew that it was the truth. In silence he led the way towards the Castle, while his visitor tried to impress upon his unheeding ears a dozen apologies for the gross and idiotic folly of which his nerves had made him guilty.

As soon as he was out of the fateful room all his self-possession seemed to have returned, and he could not account for the sudden vertigo of terror that had haunted him there. What had come over him he could not imagine. Mr. Darnley must certainly think him the most confounded idiot. What must Mr. Darnley think of anyone who could let himself be made such a rude, mannerless idiot of by a sort of hysterical schoolgirl qualm? The whole thing was too asinine for words. He had no excuse to make.

And all the time Mr. Darnley said nothing, heard nothing of his guest’s protestations. This beautiful nervous boy had no interest for Kingston Darnley; he did not care what he said or felt or looked like. But the terror that haunted Ivor Restormel was not his; the mysterious attraction that filled him was not his own. Somewhere, deep down in his being, lived Something that had felt that terror, Something that exercised that attraction over Kingston, Something that called to Kingston as an old friend. And that Something, Kingston knew it, heard it calling to him imperiously out of the eternal past. It was the Something that had once carried the name and shape of Isabel. There was no mistaking it. Now at last Kingston understood what it was that had gripped him yesterday on the road, what inexplicable summons of old friendship. The dead had come back to him after many years. But clothed in alien flesh, forming part of a new personality, shut off from recognition by the barriers of the body. For in this boy lived only the one fragmentary recollection of the final catastrophe. Nothing in Kingston’s soul, no call of ancient kinship, no appeal to bygone pledges, could penetrate to the ears of that secret self. The dead had come back, known to him, but incapable of knowing him again. How could he wake memory in that changed thing which had returned, at once the same, and yet so different, in its freedom from that bond which once had made them one, and now, still as strong as ever in the hold it had over himself, had broken and fallen away for ever from the other soul it had gripped? Kingston looked at his visitor with a feeling that drew near to hatred. This stranger held the thing he still loved. The body and the shape of it was an irrelevant, a maddening accident; it was the secret thing that Kingston called to, the secret thing that was prevented from hearing by this new personality in which it had clothed itself. Kingston felt a sharp grudge against Ivor Restormel, his body, his brain, his beauty. That body, that brain, that beauty made the locked casket that imprisoned the living dead. And yet, inasmuch as Ivor Restormel was the shrine of that lost passion, he was, on the other hand, ineffably precious and sacred. He could not be let go. The boy himself was less than nothing; but what he held was more than everything.

Ivor Restormel thought his host justifiably offended, and tried to mitigate the effect of his own silly rudeness. But his pleasant chatter fell on unheeding ears, and he began to think that he had alienated Mr. Darnley beyond reconciliation. And no wonder. Who could be expected to put up with a puling idiot like that? Ivor Restormel mentally kicked himself, and felt that he would gladly have vindicated his character by returning into those haunted rooms. Without having any special wish to please either of the Darnleys, he was one of those people who always like to be popular, and grow faintly unhappy when they fail to make a favourable impression. He did all he could to mollify his host, and was distressed, though not surprised, to find all his efforts fall flat. In ordinary circumstances he would not have minded so much; but now he felt that he really owed Mr. Darnley some extra pleasantness, if only to make up for having just made so egregious an ass of himself. He tried his level best to set matters right; but for a long time he got no answer—or at most an absent-minded monosyllable. Kingston was not yet equal to conversing with this tiresome young interloper who had come between himself and the dead, while, at the same time, revealing at last to him the return of the lost. They walked in silence up and down the garden together, while Gundred watched them from an upper window, disliking the visitor as much as ever, and wondering when in the world he would begin to think about going.

‘Wanted to see the pictures, didn’t you?’ said Kingston abruptly at last, cutting, regardless, into something that the other was saying.

Ivor Restormel felt more and more out of place. Evidently he would do well to say good-bye. However, he could not escape from this civility of his host, however perfunctory. So he followed Kingston as he strode into the Castle, paying no attention to the boy at his heels. Gradually Kingston was beginning to recover his composure and face the inevitable. This wonderful secret certainty of his must be cherished and acted on, though already he began to taste something of the pain that had been foretold him, from incessant yearning knowledge of a thing that could not recognise him in turn, and could never recognise him again. The door between them was of locked iron—a vain agony to beat against. And yet it was not an agony that he could spare himself, for, though the door was of locked iron for ever, yet behind it dwelt the thing he had sought for so long. He saw now the irony of his fate. But nothing could divert its course. Ivor Restormel found his host growing calmer and more courteous again. Soon he was even cordial, and the tension of the situation seemed at an end. The two men passed through the picture-gallery, giving a share of attention to every picture, though each, in reality, was busy with his own thoughts, Ivor feeling the satisfaction of successful effort, and Kingston foreboding the anguish of an effort that could never be successful. At last they had gone the length of the gallery, and stood before the old panel of Queen Isabel.

‘Here is the She-wolf,’ said Kingston pleasantly. ‘Don’t you think she looks her name? Isabel of France and England.’

The younger man laughed uneasily.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘An evil lady, I suppose? It is curious what a horror I have of the very name. Isabel—it seems to stand to me for everything I hate most in the world, fire included. I must have some beastly memory somewhere connected with the name of Isabel, but I cannot lay my hands upon it.’

The little artless admission roused Kingston to the highest point of excitement. He must penetrate to the secret haunt of that soul which had such clear flashes of recognition. The task must not be hopeless. He turned almost savagely upon his guest.

‘Restormel,’ he said, ‘what do you mean by that? For God’s sake, think—think hard, and tell me what you mean by that. Think, man, think.’

The vehemence of his attack, however, had no effect upon the younger man. Kingston had hoped that by its sheer sudden intensity it must inevitably strike a chord of memory, must inevitably rouse up the sleeping soul with its cry of eagerness. But it failed—failed utterly, and his mood fell back baffled.

‘I’d tell you if I could,’ protested Ivor. ‘But, upon my soul, I can’t. It is just another of my idiotic crazes. I wish I had not told you now. It only makes one seem more of an ass than one did before. Anyhow, I think I must be getting back to Restormel, Mr. Darnley. Thanks so much for letting me come over. I have awfully enjoyed seeing the Castle. Will you say good-bye for me to Lady Gundred?’

‘Look here,’ said Kingston, suddenly kindled to anxiety by this threat of departure—‘look here. What are you going to do, Restormel, when you leave the Hoope-Arkwrights? I mean, what are your plans in life?’

‘Mine? Oh, well, I hardly know. I have got to make some money somehow. There isn’t a penny-piece for us to live on. I shall have to be a clerk, or something of the kind, I imagine. My mother sent me to Oxford because she wanted me to make my living by teaching. But it does not seem that there is much chance of that nowadays. The world swarms with tutors and masters.’

Kingston saw his chance. It was unthinkable that this recovered joy of his life should be allowed to pass away again immediately, leaving him in the darkness that he had endured for twenty years. He could not bear the thought of parting with Ivor Restormel. The very notion was a pain.

‘But look here,’ he said abruptly, ‘why not come to us and be my secretary, and do tutor to my son Jim, perhaps, in the holidays? I am sure we should all get on capitally together, and, honestly, I don’t think that you could easily pick up anything much better. And we’d do our best for you. What do you say?’

Ivor, confounded at this sudden proposition, the last thing that he had expected after his behaviour of that afternoon, lost himself in thanks and self-depreciation. Kingston would hear of no such hesitations.

‘We might just as well settle it now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to consider much, or think over—that is, if you really care to try this kind of work. You know about us, and we know about you; and, so far as we are concerned, I don’t see that anything could possibly have fallen out more conveniently.’

‘But I—do you think I should be able to do what you want?’ asked Ivor Restormel. ‘Remember, please, I have never attempted anything of the sort before. You may not find me what you like, after all.’

‘One knows that sort of thing as well at the end of five minutes, very often, as at the end of five years. I am quite certain that you are exactly the sort of fellow we want. I knew it the first moment we met. So don’t make any more difficulties or apologies, but just say that you will come to us.’

‘But of course, if you really think—well, I shall be delighted, of course.’

‘That’s right. And there’s no particular reason for putting things off, is there? So come to us as soon as you can. To-morrow, or the day after. You won’t want to stay much longer with those Hoope-Arkwright people. And I should like you to get accustomed to us and the place before we go off to my place in Yorkshire and our son Jim comes home.’

And so, after a few more faint demurrings, Ivor Restormel, bewildered and dazed by the rapid development of events, found himself pledged to take up his residence at Brakelond with the least possible delay. Matters being thus settled to Kingston’s satisfaction, he allowed his visitor to depart, and then began to brace himself to the task of breaking his latest plan to Gundred.

The good wife neither raves nor flouts. But, if she be good enough, she has the power of being quite wonderfully disagreeable in a mild and dutiful manner. Gundred had never countered Kingston with any ill-bred vehemence, but by now he knew that on occasions she could don a pious resignation inexpressibly hard to bear. Some such display, he was afraid, might greet his announcement, for, to his experienced eye, it was already plain that she did not approve of Ivor Restormel. Her sweetness to him had had a certain glacial tone which Kingston well knew. He anticipated that she might make difficulties.

But events were moving too rapidly for Gundred’s orderly habit of mind. She was too much taken aback when she heard the arrangement that her husband had made to offer any coherent or valid opposition. A vague passion of wrath possessed her, and her anger lost half its efficacy with all its usual crushing calm. For Gundred, the imperturbably gentle and correct, so far forgot herself as to combat Kingston’s plan with violent obloquy. Never before had he seen her unreasonable, or hysterically bellicose; and the unusual spectacle, so far from compelling his sympathy, only hardened his decision by its contrast with her usual well-regulated temper. Had a glimpse of the past been vouchsafed to him, after all these years, that he should now forego the agonizing joy of it, simply because his wife chose to abandon herself to a groundless antipathy against a young man, a perfect stranger, in whom she, of all people, could certainly not discern that inmost inhabitant whose presence gave him so strong a claim on Kingston? No, her foolishness justified him in disregarding her opposition.

As for Gundred, she lost her head, lost it completely, in the complete surprise that overwhelmed her. Imagining that a meal or so at Brakelond would mark the extent of her husband’s ridiculous fancy for the boy against whom her instinct so urgently warned her, she had been content to allow matters their course, considering resistance unnecessary. And now, while she acquiesced, matters had suddenly grown to such a pitch that resistance was no longer possible. The situation had passed beyond her control. At first she could hardly believe that Kingston really meant to disregard her hostility. Hitherto, through all their married life, husband and wife had never seriously clashed. A quiet tolerance towards each other’s plans had marked their relations. In fact, neither had really been sufficiently excited over the other’s actions ever to make a fuss. They trusted each other, and lived in the amity of confident indifference. Ideal as their union had been, though, it had been the union of two parts, not fused, but cemented; now at last, after twenty years, surged up the hot water of opposition, and in the moment of trial the cement revealed itself by melting. At a touch the two lives fell apart, and were separate once more. The revelation was a shock to Gundred.

‘Kingston,’ she cried, ‘I tell you, I distrust that young man. I cannot think what you mean by proposing to have him in the house. The very moment I set eyes on him I felt that there was something wrong about him. A woman’s instinct is never mistaken, Kingston.’

‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, Gundred,’ answered her husband. ‘Have you anything definite to say? If so, say it, by all means, and we’ll think no more of the matter. But if you have not, don’t dishonour yourself by making scenes and abusing a young fellow of whom you know nothing but what is perfectly good.’

‘And Jim?’ replied Gundred, taken at a disadvantage, and stripped in an instant of the lovely calm that usually clothed her like a Paquin frock—‘my Jim? Am I to see my only child, Kingston, handed over to the company of a man against whom I have the very strongest feelings of fear and horror? Kingston, I tell you I look on that young man with positive fear and horror. Have I ever said anything like this before about anyone else? Do you think I am mad enough and unchristian enough to take prejudices like this without a reason? But it is stronger than I am, this feeling. It is so strong that I feel it would be wicked to disregard it. It is Heaven’s warning to us all. I know that it speaks the truth, Kingston; don’t be so obstinate.’

Knowing in his secret heart what secret tie it was that bound him to the occupant of Ivor Restormel’s personality, Kingston could not but feel it strange and impressive that Gundred should have conceived so violent and instinctive animosity against the young fellow. Could it be a blind feeling of jealousy, recrudescent from the past? Anyhow, it was the very devil and all of an inconvenience. And, as no sort of wrong was meditated to Gundred, as no sort of wrong was possible, Kingston saw clearly that her unreasonableness not only allowed him, but enjoined him, in her own interests, to take a firm way of dealing with these hysterical passions. Had she been cool and staid as usual, he would have found the situation much more difficult to cope with; as it was, her dishevelled zeal gave him the advantage, and enabled him to assume the high position of one who has right and reason on his side.

‘Hang it all, Gundred,’ he protested. ‘What a piece of work to make about nothing! One would have thought you would have been only too glad to help an old neighbour’s son. You are generally so keen to do what you can for people. Do try and get over these absurd fancies. Do you suppose I am not just as anxious as you are that Jim shall be kept out of undesirable hands? Come, you don’t think me a fool, I hope? You don’t imagine that I should pick out a scoundrel for a whim? I tell you, I like this young fellow; I like him more than I can say. He attracts me strongly; I am sure we shall find him a great addition.’

Gundred looked up at him with righteous wrath in her eyes. ‘He must have bewitched you,’ she said, devoutly and sincerely. ‘The Forces of Evil sometimes have the most awful power. Oh, Kingston, listen to me. Be wise, and repent in time. Oh, I never thought it would come to this. Why, why did we ever dine with those dreadful people?’

‘Gundred, you are either hysterical or medieval. And in either case, really one cannot argue with you. I have never seen you like this before. Poor boy! can you soberly think him an emissary of the devil?’ Kingston laughed.

But Gundred, among many other antiquated notions in which she took pride, retained a most steadfast belief in the bodily existence of Satan. To be old-fashioned in manners, mind, morals—in everything but clothes—was her especial glory. In London she claimed to be conspicuous by her old-world excellencies. When she met, or heard—for they did not frequent her set—of other Dukes’ wives and daughters who were frivolous and freethinking and modern, Gundred took pride in asserting the obvious fact that she was not as they, that she continued to give a rare and beautiful example of pristine decorum to her order. Her friends might find the spectacle dull, but they could never deny that it was edifying. And among the old-fashioned adornments with which she persisted in decking her habit of mind, her belief in the Powers of evil, of witchcraft and possession, were given not the least important place. She described herself complacently as an old-fashioned Christian, and never passed a palmist’s placard in Bond Street without feeling that the law ought to have more scruples about allowing a witch to live. Now, accordingly, she primmed her lips fiercely at Kingston’s scepticism.

‘All I know is,’ she answered, ‘that these warnings are sent us for our good, and that the Powers of Evil are for ever round us, seeking whom they may devour. Kingston, will you, or will you not, pay attention to what I say?’

By this time her truculent attitude had dissipated her husband’s last lingering scruples. Looked at very minutely, very casuistically, perhaps it was not perfectly fair to force upon Gundred someone she disliked, simply because he himself desired to keep watch and communion with the precious personality that dwelt within the object of her hostility, and probably was the unknown cause of it. But nothing of all this could Gundred possibly know, for one thing; and, for another, her attitude had become so grotesquely exaggerated and defiant that no husband of any sense or spirit could be justified in giving way to it. Why, the situation was preposterous and transpontine to an intolerable degree. His own sudden fantastic instinct had been strange and grotesque enough, in all conscience; but Gundred’s fury of opposition lent yet a further touch of grotesqueness which removed the whole episode into the domain of mystical melodrama. Why, they might be living in a novel of Lytton or Mortimer Collins, instead of in a very comfortable and orderly present into which had suddenly flashed a gleam of romance out of an equally comfortable and orderly past. Kingston would not recognise his own instinct as anything abnormal, and was bent on keeping all suggestion of the abnormal out of his human relations. The prenatal memory, he knew, was not only a fact, but a fact—at any rate, in the East, where memory and its training are better understood than over here—of no uncommon occurrence. There was nothing strange in the fact that in this boy of twenty, there should still be lurking some fragmentary elements of the woman whose martyrdom and courage he reincarnated. Kingston would not decorate the situation with any romantic glamour; it was a plain, indisputable occurrence, and his whole life should insist on treating it as a matter of course. In his violent resolve to keep the young fellow close at hand there was no sentiment, no idiotic feeling of attachment for the young man himself, or any objectionable nonsense of that kind. The young fellow was of no account at all. Kingston’s wish to secure his continued presence must be put down simply prosaically, solely, to his recognition of the fact that in the boy’s personality the lost Isabel sometimes spoke again, and therefore his company was doubly and trebly desirable; but only for what it conveyed, not in the least for what it was. And, all this being so, Kingston was the more irritated by the instinctive knowledge of the truth that Gundred’s absurd behaviour seemed to hint at, the more bent on resenting it, ignoring it, and, by determination in his own way, crushing out the signs of resistance that she was so vehemently showing.

‘Oh, let’s have no more of this, Gundred,’ he exclaimed. ‘You do not know what you are saying. I am exceedingly sorry to annoy you, but you know you would despise yourself and me if I gave way to such ridiculous nightmares. You will see things quite differently to-morrow. Do try and look at the matter more sensibly.’

‘Man sends sense,’ cried Gundred, ‘and God sends instincts. Listen to God, Kingston, or you will be sorry for it.’

He shrugged his shoulders cruelly.

‘There is no coping with religious exaltation,’ he answered coldly, with a weary feeling that this woman at his side was quite alien to him in all her thoughts and ways.

Gundred rose. ‘If that is what you call it,’ she replied, with more of her habitual dignity, ‘I think there is no more to be said.’

‘I agree with you. There is nothing more to be said.’

‘And this young man, Ivor Restormel, he is to come here in a day or two?’

‘Yes,’ answered Kingston. ‘I settled it all up with him this afternoon.’

‘And you absolutely refuse to give me what I ask for?’ went on Gundred, returning now, after the heat of the conflict, to the impressive calm of her usual manner. She was preparing a new attack.

‘My dear Gundred,’ answered her husband, more gently now that he saw her more amenable, and therefore more worthy of consideration, ‘I will gladly spend the rest of my life doing what you wish, as long as you ask me for things I can in decency do.’

‘Ah,’ replied Gundred, ‘that is what people always say. They will do everything in the world to please one, except the only thing one asks them for. That is never reasonable or right.’

‘Well, it certainly was not in this case, now, was it, Gundred—honestly, now, was it? You asked me to throw this wretched young man over, to break my promise to him, to upset all his plans, to cast him adrift again after I had offered him our help. And why? All simply because you had been bored at the Hoope-Arkwrights’ tedious dinner, and eaten something which disagreed with you, and made you look on all the world with a bilious, peevish eye, and on your luckless dinner-neighbour in particular. For that is what it all comes to, you know; that is what your wonderful edifice of instincts and suspicions and righteous qualms is founded on.’

‘Yes; you may sneer,’ answered Gundred coolly, regaining her supremacy with her self-control. ‘It is always very easy to sneer. Well, I see that you must have your way; you will not listen to me. Somehow, I feel that there is something in the boy that stands between us—something that has been between us, somehow, for a long time, though we did not know it, and has now come to life again, or wakened up and set to work moving us apart. That may be my fancy, perhaps. I know I am upset. I am surprised and shocked. I expected better, happier things of you, Kingston. But this I will say, that if you won’t listen to what you call my foolish instincts, you will be very sorry for it some day. God will certainly punish you for disregarding the clear message that He sent you through me. And this obstinacy of yours will bring its own penalty in time. I know it. I know what you are doing is altogether wrong. And, as your wife, I shall put up with it. But day and night I shall pray God to remove this dreadful thing from our home. I shall pray that something may open your eyes.’

Kingston smiled uneasily, to disguise the impression that her appeal was making on his mood. ‘My dear Gundred,’ he said. ‘Pray by all means. The prayers of a good woman can never bring harm or pain.’

‘Not even if you love the harm? Not even if you are wedded to the harm?’ asked Gundred. ‘Perhaps they might divorce you from the harm, and then that separation might be painful.’

‘Oh, don’t talk as if you meant to put poison in poor Ivor Restormel’s soup,’ cried Kingston, to relieve the tension of the situation. He did not, however, in his own conscience feel altogether easy. The more bent was he, therefore, on laughing down his wife’s denunciations.

‘God chooses His own instruments for His own purposes,’ answered Gundred earnestly. Then she rose, her demeanour filled with tranquil decision, with a stern majesty of protest that stirred again a twinge of remorse in her husband’s heart. Was it she that was foolish, or was it he that was selfish? After all, no sort of harm was planned against her, no disloyalty of any kind, no cooling of affection. If here and there a boy’s chance words contained the spirit of a long-dead woman, well, what was that to Gundred—especially as she could never know it? And his indulgence in the secret pleasure of those words could give no reasonable pain to her. And yet, so long as they did give her pain, did it very much matter whether the pain were reasonable or not, as far as the inflictor’s innocence or guilt was concerned? For what pain in the world is reasonable, if one looks far into the causes and the future of things? Kingston made haste to conclude that his actions could not possibly be expected to have reference to any silly feelings of Gundred’s that might engender pain in her, as the result of their own incalculable developments. Perhaps he made himself too many excuses, defended himself too vehemently, was in too great haste to declare himself convinced by his own arguments. He accepted Gundred’s last words without any symptom of yielding.

And she who, up to the last moment, had never thought that her big guns could be fired without effect, was left helpless, defeated, plunged in the bathos of the situation.

‘Good-night,’ she said, quietly disguising the black bruise that her heart had sustained.

Had Kingston suspected it, he might, perhaps, have softened. But Gundred by now was once more the cool, self-righteous little faultless person he had always known. Her serene rectitude of voice and manner annoyed him.

‘Good-night,’ he answered with equal coolness. Husband and wife went to their several rooms, after the first real quarrel of their married life. Innocently, ignorantly, Ivor Restormel had come between them—or, rather, the Thing that lived again in him had stirred again, as Gundred had divined, to intervene, as once before, between the two stranger-souls who, in the flesh, were contented husband and wife.

Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was a large

Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was a large, short woman, genial and comfortable, always anxious to give pleasure and make herself popular. Her husband had made a great deal of money some years since in ways that were characterized by his friends as energetic, and by his enemies as shady. However, nothing very definite had ever been said against him, so that the charitable could avail themselves, uncontaminated, of his wealth, and make a merit of their willingness to tolerate its owner. In himself, he was a quiet and obscure little man, who left the ordering of daily existence entirely in the hands of his wife; and she, without vulgarity or snobbishness, had a passion for being liked, for being surrounded by pleased, approving people. In the neighbourhood of Brakelond she had already achieved general favour; she was everywhere hailed as a ‘dear good woman’; the lavish appointments of the house, the excellence of the cook and cellar, accomplished only less than her own real kindliness, and the surrounding families all ended by accepting the new-comer with a good grace, until at last only Brakelond held itself aloof. And now even Brakelond was about to surrender. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright, however devoid of sycophantic feelings, could not but feel that the occasion was a great one. Lady Gundred Darnley, virtual Duchess of March and Brakelond, was very much the sovereign of the county, no less by position than by choice, and her first ceremonial appearance at the Hoope-Arkwright’s board was beyond question an event of the highest importance. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright had ordered her best dinner, donned her best gown and her heartiest smile; she was genuinely happy, and meant that the festival should be a complete success. Gundred, at this moment driving towards the house in a blessed glow of conscious benevolence, could not feel the favour of her visit more than did Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright.

‘Joe dear,’ said the gratified hostess to her husband, as they stood together in the empty drawing-room before the arrival of their guests—‘Joe dear, you will take Lady Gundred, of course. Remember what an interest she has in the schools and Church bazaars. And don’t talk about the Duke, whatever you do. She does not like it. There is nothing—well, positively wrong with the poor Duke, but still, one says as little about him as one can.’

Mr. Hoope-Arkwright promised obedience. His wife looked around her with complacency, surveying all the rich perfections of the room. ‘I do think she will find the place improved,’ she remarked.

The Hoope-Arkwrights’ treatment of the old house that they had bought from the ruined Restormels had been drastic, though reverent. They had altered everything, and sternly pretended to have altered nothing, after the habit of new-comers who have passed from the first crude stage, of destruction, unto the second crude stage, of imitation. All the old quaintnesses and beauties had been left, but they had all been elaborated, done up, polished, painted, exaggerated, until they hardly knew themselves, and wore the uneasy look of things that had been put up yesterday for effect. The old house was now like the stage-setting of an old house; everything wore the painful flamboyancy, the assertive archaism of the theatre, neat, shining, obtrusive as a new pin. The armoured figures on the stairs and in the long oaken hall now carried electric lamps in their mailed fists, and this combination of practical modern contrivance with respect for antiquity was not only typical of all the other improvements but also a ceaseless matter of pride to the new owners of Restormel. Their complacence and their contrivance were equally characteristic. The same spirit pervaded the house and made it spick and span, bristling with expensive conveniences from attic to cellar. The long parlour in which Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright now stood in expectation of her guests was a great low room panelled in oak, with leaded casements of dim glass. At least, this is what it had been. Now it had Art-Nouveau windows with cushioned seats, and a broad white cornice, behind whose rim lurked electric lights in plutocratic abundance, shedding a pale, diffused glare, as of a ghostly day. The scene they shone on was no longer ancient, but ‘antique.’

Everything was overdone; everything was in that strenuous good taste which is the worst taste of all. The oaken settles, so carved, so polished, were blatantly unconvincing in their very eagerness to convince; oaken tables here and there carried silver photograph-frames and silver bowls of roses. In their devout attempt to preserve inviolate the antiquity of the house, the Hoope-Arkwrights had scorned the introduction of a carpet, and the expanse of the floor was now an artificial skating-rink of parquet, so new and glossy that it might have served as a mirror, over whose surface were scattered a few desolate islets of rug that slid treacherously away beneath unwary feet, carrying their victim in a helpless slide across the room. Under the tables sat monstrous great green china cats, painted all over with little roses in patterns and ribbons. Their emerald eyes of glass glared grimly forth from each lair, and their presence added a neat note of modern art to the pristine simplicity of the other decorations.

As Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright gazed approvingly around, the door opened, and two young men came in. One was short and pleasant and plump—clearly the son of the house; the other was slender, tall, and dark, of remarkable beauty, both of feature and build. His hostess welcomed him warmly.

‘I do hope you are not tired after that long walk, Mr. Restormel,’ she said; ‘I am sure you will be glad of your dinner. The air does give one an appetite, doesn’t it? I have only walked as far as the garden to-day, but I declare I feel as famished as a wolf.’

The kind lady screwed up her comfortable features into fanciful imitation of a famished wolf. The young man smiled.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t often get tired with walking. And then think what I had to look forward to at the end of it.’

Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright looked conscious for a moment.

‘Ah yes,’ she replied with some feeling. ‘I am afraid we are dreadfully thoughtless, Mr. Restormel. It must be dreadful for you to come back here and find a lot of new people kicking about in your own house, as it were; I do hope you’ll try not to think about it. When Jack told me how he had met you at Oxford, and who you were, and all about you, I declare I felt quite shy and uncomfortable at the thought of asking you to pay us a visit. And to arrive just to-night, too, when we have got a sort of little dinner-party too. I am sure you must find it very trying.’

The handsome boy smiled down at her again. She was evidently in anxiety that he should be happy and set at his ease, though her methods lacked subtlety. He accepted her sympathy, but diverted her conversation.

‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘we come and go, all of us, and it never does to bother about what one cannot help. Anyhow, I am sure Restormel never had jollier, kinder people in it than it has now. Tell me, Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright, who is coming to dinner to-night?’

‘What, has not Jack told you?’ cried the hostess, with a little inflection of pride, turning to her son. ‘Well, there are Sir Nigel Pope and his new second wife, and the Martin Massingers with two sisters, and the Archdeacon and Mrs. Widge, who are staying with them, and the Lemmingtons, and the Goddards, and the Pooles—yes, and the Darnleys—from Brakelond, you know, Lady Gundred and her husband.’

‘Oh, Lady Gundred. Of course I have heard all about them. My mother used to see a good deal of her at one time, before the place was sold.’

‘Oh yes, how stupid I am! I am always forgetting that you know all the people about far better than we do, though only by hearsay, most of them. Yes, of course you know about dear Lady Gundred. You will be next her at dinner, on the other side from my husband. What a comfort! You will be able to talk to her about old times. I am afraid you will be in starvation corner, by the way, Mr. Restormel, but I thought—even before I remembered that you knew her—that you would not mind that if you were next to dear Lady Gundred.’

‘You must remember,’ answered young Restormel, ‘that the place was sold when I was only six months old, so I cannot feel that I have any very intimate acquaintance with Lady Gundred. Tell me some more about her; what is she like?’

‘The sweetest and best of women, Mr. Restormel. And so pretty. Quite extraordinary, for she must be—what?—well over thirty, certainly, and yet she looks quite like a young girl still. Fair, you know, with a delightful complexion and lovely golden hair, and that kind of beautiful little figure which never alters. Yes, she must certainly be over thirty. She has got a son who can’t be less than fifteen. Jack, surely Jim Darnley is quite fifteen?’

Young Hoope-Arkwright glanced up from the photograph-book with which he was beguiling the time.

‘What, Jim Darnley? Oh yes, fifteen, at least.’

‘There you are. And his mother looks like his sister still. He is the dearest boy, Jim Darnley—the simplest, most unaffected creature. And, of course, he will be Duke of March and Brakelond one of these days, when his grandfather dies. They are sure to revive the title for him. But he might be just anybody, and his mother the same. I have always wondered why she does not make her husband take her own name. But no; she is such a really good woman that she thinks a wife ought always to stick to her husband’s name. That shows you what she is. And such a worker of all good kind works, indefatigable among the poor and the sick—for ever sending out soup and boots and blankets, you know. Her life is quite made up of kindnesses. They very, very seldom dine out, the Darnleys, in the country, so that you are lucky to meet them here like this to-night. Her husband is a very nice man too. I am sure you will like them both immensely. But of course she is the most interesting of the two.’

At this point the other guests began to arrive, and Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was forced to abandon her dialogue with young Restormel. She introduced him rather perfunctorily to one or two of the new arrivals, taking pains to slur over his name until she should have the opportunity of explaining his identity quietly to them at dinner or afterwards; then she turned to her hospitable duties, and Jack Hoope-Arkwright carried off his friend into one of the windows, where they stood laughing and talking together while the guests gradually gathered. Then, after a few moments, Ivor Restormel and his host came back towards the hearth to look at some photograph or ornament that stood on the primitive oak table that stood close by, and thus it was that they were once more close at the hostess’s side when at last, in a significant pause, the butler re-entered. His appearance suggested an archbishop of sporting tendencies, and he evidently cultivated a nice sense of drama. His voice boomed sonorous as he announced:

‘Mr. and Lady Gundred Darnley.’

Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright moved forward a step or two.

Minute but majestic, the Lady Gundred Darnley proceeded up the room, panoplied in perfections, and giving exactly the proper amount of smiles, of exactly the proper kind, in exactly the proper way, to all the proper people. At her heels came Kingston, but nobody cared to look twice at him. Lady Gundred was the star of the evening; as she entered, she had the double consciousness of not only conferring great pleasure, but of conferring it in the handsomest and most ungrudging manner. For in the plenitude of her generosity she had decided that it was her duty not to fob off poor, kind Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s dinner with one of her second-best frocks; and now she reaped the reward of her efforts in the general gaze of delight that greeted her appearance in one of her smartest gowns, looking incredibly crisp and young in a beautifully-built harmony of pale blue and pale gold. The frock set the crown upon the favour of her coming. It was, indeed, very rarely that the Darnleys dined out in the neighbourhood of Brakelond, and therefore Gundred was the more ready to emphasize the approval that her coming was to bestow on Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright in the eyes of all the county. Dear woman, how good she had been about that bazaar! how loyally she had turned away her Liberal gardeners! She well deserved not only to be dined with, but to be dined with in one of one’s decent gowns. And then one might ask her to tea at Brakelond, and show her the pictures. Gundred showed herself sweet and kind in the highest degree, as Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright made her welcome. Her manner always had a tranquil friendliness and a grace so instinct with placidity that only the most discerning could have discerned her underlying pride, in her demeanour’s very negation of pride. Here and there, perhaps, an acute onlooker might guess that her gentleness was founded on an intense arrogance unsuspected even by its possessor, on a self-esteem so tremendous as to have passed beyond all hint of self-assertion into a Nirvana of apparent unself-consciousness. An ingenious friend in London, indeed, had once said that, though Gundred’s manner and signature unfailingly wore the proper style of ‘Gundred Darnley,’ yet that, reading between the lines, both of manner and signature, one could always see that it really ran, ‘Gundred March and Brakelond.’ However, her pride was far too cardinal a point of doctrine to be made the theme of declamation; Gundred never obtruded it, never lowered its dignity by insisting on it, never allowed it to make her offensive, except in minute and subtle ways. Now, as she pressed Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s hand and commended her kindness, the hostess felt that never had she met anyone so pleasant and cordial and delightfully unaffected.

Then Gundred raised her eyes and looked round her to see who else might be in the room. She saw Sir Nigel, saw the Lemmingtons, saw the Archdeacon and his wife; she was glad that Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright had chosen such unexceptionable people to be witnesses of Brakelond’s condescension. Then her gaze moved on. The next moment she saw somebody whom instantly, inexplicably, she disliked as she had never before disliked anyone at first sight. Cool and gracious, Gundred was the last person in the world to feel unusual emotions; but now, as she looked at a tall dark young man—a boy of about twenty, he seemed, remarkably beautiful and attractive—her soul started proudly away in a flurry of instinctive repulsion. He was unpleasant, that good-looking youth, altogether unpleasant and odious. She had no notion why this feeling swept so completely across her mood; it took entire possession of her. Quickly she averted her eyes, and glanced round the uneventful circle of the other guests. They, for their part, quite unsuspicious of Lady Gundred’s sudden outburst of dislike, were concentrating their admiration on the calm grace of her manner, so exquisitely civilized and concise. Passions must always be very far from that serene pleasantness of demeanour. And meanwhile Gundred was busy thinking how displeasing that young man was, while with soft smiles she responded to Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright’s compliments. But suddenly the hostess became conscious of someone at her side. She turned towards the handsome dark boy, and before Gundred could see what was to happen, had brought him forward. ‘Let me introduce you to Lady Gundred Darnley,’ she said. The young man made a motion as if to put out his hand. Gundred instantly responded by taking that cruel revenge which is always in a woman’s power on such occasions. She ignored the hand, gave a glacial little smile and a glacial little bow. The young man seemed slightly astonished at this chill, and his eyes met hers for a moment. They were splendid eyes, those of his—cool, deep, grey, kindly. They glanced with wonder into the ice of Gundred’s stare, and in that moment she felt his gaze intolerable, saw things that she mysteriously hated and dreaded in those grey depths. For once in her life Gundred’s composure was faintly ruffled. She dropped her glance, and faintly blushed with annoyance. This is what one got by being generous and dining with presumptuous people like the Hoope-Arkwrights. Under her calm, imperturbably smiling exterior Gundred was gravely annoyed. She moved backwards, away from this unwelcome introduction. Her movement produced a change in the arrangement of the crowd. Kingston stepped forward, and came into sight of the tall, slender figure with which his wife had seemed to be talking. Already he had had a strong conviction that he knew the back; now that he saw the face, he recognised the wayfarer whom he had passed on his road that afternoon. And once again, tyrannous, overwhelming, came the certainty of old acquaintance. Before, however, he could start a conversation, dinner was announced, and Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright began to marshal her guests in procession. Gundred hailed the release with joy, and passed out with gentle majesty at the head of the cortège.

What, then, was her indignation when, having settled herself at her host’s right, delicately removed her gloves, unfolded her napkin, untied the little bundle of pastry faggots that lay before her knotted up with blue ribbon, she turned towards her other neighbour, and discovered that he was no other than the strange, beautiful young man for whom she had conceived so unusually sudden a dislike. She hated strong emotions, and very rarely indulged them, but this one was beyond her control—a matter of instinct. In the first flash of revelation, she felt convinced that this beautiful boy was a corrupter of youth, a contemner of religion, everything that was bad and horrible; she plumed herself immediately on the nice discernment that enabled a Christian woman to divine such things, and made a virtue of the hostility she harboured. Talk to such a creature she would not. She turned quickly upon her host, and initiated the usual introductory conversation on the beauty of the table decorations.

The dinner-table was of a piece with the rest of the restored house. It was so aggressively old as to be obviously new. It was of that ancient oak which is for ever modern; and, in deference to primitive simplicity, it wore no cloth. Glass and silver gleamed down its long narrow stretch, and in the middle ranged a hedge of roses and orchids embowered in ferns. Electric light was not permitted to mar its harmony with any suggestion of modernity. Candles in plain old silver candlesticks illuminated the table and its guests, shedding a soft and discreet glamour of pink from beneath their shades of crimson paper. Gundred commented amiably on the beautiful effect attained.

Mr. Hoope-Arkwright, who left such details to his wife and the decorators, made what reply he could, and the conversation flowed placidly along the lines that Gundred loved, developing in the way that showed her social aptitudes at their best.

‘My wife says that electric light does not do for a dinner-table,’ explained Mr. Hoope-Arkwright. ‘Too harsh a light it sheds, she tells me. I don’t understand such things myself, but everyone says the candles and their pink shades are very becoming.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Gundred; ‘one always likes a soft gentle light. And so clever of dear Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright not to have a tablecloth. All the glass and silver shows up so well. Such wonderful taste she has.’

‘Well, I always like a tablecloth myself, you know—seems cleaner, somehow; but Maggie says it is not the thing in a house like this.’

‘Such a delightful house—yes? And I do think you and dear Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright have been so tactful about it—altering nothing, as it were, and yet improving everything, and making it so comfortable. It was very different in the poor Restormels’ time. I can remember what it was like then.’

Mr. Hoope-Arkwright saw that she had not grasped her other neighbour’s identity, and as personal explanations are not easy unless one has the tact to shout them, so that their object may have no suspicion who is meant, he preferred to turn the conversation into other channels. ‘Are you fond of flowers, Lady Gundred?’ he asked.

In such temperate dialogues Gundred particularly shone. She was especially valuable in London for her power of flowing endlessly and amiably on about matters which could never possibly interest or stimulate anybody, or arouse difficulties of any sort. She was felt to be a thoroughly safe guest. So Mr. Hoope-Arkwright’s question gave her a most favourable opportunity for the display of her favourite qualities, and she seized upon the topic with joy.

‘Oh yes,’ she answered; ‘I have always been devoted to flowers. Such a comfort they are—yes? Quiet friends, I always say. One could not live without them.’

‘Roses, now—do you care particularly for roses?’ pursued Mr. Hoope-Arkwright.

‘Oh, the queen of flowers,’ she made haste to reply. ‘But, do you know, I can never quite care for a rose that has no scent. There is something unnatural about it—no? But these of yours are perfectly lovely, and how sweet! Do you find the soil good for them here?’

‘Well, as to that I can hardly tell you. I leave such matters to my wife and the gardener. But they are fine fellows, as you say.’

‘Quite like little pink cabbages—yes? Only so very, very beautiful, of course. How one loves a rose! And they go so well with the orchids too. So nice to be able to grow orchids.’

‘Yes, they do run into money, orchids do. You would be astonished at the prices some of them fetch.’

Gundred thought this a vulgar ostentation, and assumed her mildly pious air. ‘And I dare say, after all, not half so beautiful as many a dear little flower of the hedgerows?’ she replied. ‘Money means so little—yes? I often feel that one’s greatest pleasures are those which cost us least. The lovely lights on the hills, the roseate hues of early dawn—these are the joys which no money can buy. How thankful one ought to be to Heaven for giving us all these healthy pleasures—yes?’

Neither Mr. Hoope-Arkwright nor Gundred herself had any exhaustive experience of early dawn and its roseate hues. But the sentiment was improving and laudable. The host, however, was inclined to be prosaic.

‘Well,’ he answered, ‘one need not sniff at money, either, Lady Gundred. Where would one be without it?’

‘Ah, where indeed?’ sighed Gundred; ‘and yet one never has enough. But one always likes to feel that there is something higher than money, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright—yes? Money can give you all these beautiful flowers, and this delightful house, but can money give happiness, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright?’

‘Anyway, money can give us most of the things that make up happiness.’

‘Not a tender, loving heart, Mr. Hoope-Arkwright. Not a childlike faith and simplicity,’ replied Gundred pathetically. ‘And without these what is life? Our only real happiness lies in doing what one can for others. And that, I always feel, is the most real and precious use of money—yes?’

Mr. Hoope-Arkwright’s most characteristic activities had hitherto lain rather in doing others than in doing things for them. Also, he had very different views on the use of money from those so correctly enunciated by Gundred. So he preserved a discreet silence on the point, and listened unprotesting while she proceeded to enlarge on the more idyllically beautiful possibilities of life. He inserted ‘Ah yes,’ and ‘Ah no,’ at intervals into the interstices of her remarks, and cast about for an early opportunity of taking refuge with his other neighbour. Mr. Hoope-Arkwright did not really share his wife’s hospitable instincts, and he did not care two straws about Lady Gundred Darnley—or, for that matter, about Lady Anybody Anything. ‘To do the civil’ he saw to be his duty, but the moment that dinner was half over and his duty duly discharged, he meant to indemnify himself for his endurance of this dull, pretty woman and her boring platitudes by having a good time with his other partner, Sir Nigel Pope’s second wife, a young woman of a gay and kindred spirit. Accordingly, when the roast peacock had arrived, he seized his moment with great promptitude.

‘Now, that is what I call quite poetic,’ he exclaimed, when Gundred had finished by saying that she thought a good, useful life was like some fragrant flower. ‘What do you think, Lady Pope?’

Lady Pope made a prompt, flashing reply, and in another moment was engaged in a warm duologue with her host; Gundred was left out in the cold. She felt a certain annoyance at being dropped like this. Her self-complacence would not, of course, let her know that she had been dropped. She knew that she had been giving poor dear Mr. Hoope-Arkwright one of the pleasantest half-hours of his life—a little uplifting talk with a really refined woman—but still it was just a trifle tiresome that he should have so very keen a sense of duty. Evidently it was only the strictest sense of duty that had made him change partners so precisely at the halfway house of the meal; but Gundred would have been better pleased if he had not allowed his sense of duty to be quite so minute and intrusive. Very proper and right, of course, yet almost too scrupulously right and proper to be altogether tactful. Then it suddenly occurred to her that she in turn ought to talk to her horror on the other side. No, that she would not. Duty and right themselves should not compel her. She stared stonily before her, eating the peacock with wrathful and mincing precision. She would hear no preliminaries on her right. She gazed straight out across the table. Far off she saw her husband looking at her. Watchful interest and curiosity filled his expression as he glanced from her neighbour to herself. Perhaps he was wondering why she was not talking to him. Duty clearly commanded her to. But for once in her life correct, decorous Gundred would be deaf to the call which she usually heard and obeyed so sedulously. She nibbled at a pastry faggot, and kept a stern silence. Her neighbour made two attempts at conversation, but she answered so coldly as to nip them both in the bud. Then, abruptly, her attention was caught and riveted. The pink candle-shade in front of her was tilting to one side, threatening every moment to take fire. She looked anxiously round to her host for help, but he was by now far too deeply engaged with Lady Pope. Gundred gazed in annoyance at the paper shade. Surely it was beginning to smoulder? Ever since the catastrophe at Brakelond Gundred had disliked fire hardly less than the burned child, and now her untutored desires would have prompted her to get up and move away. But she had the martyr-like courage of her breeding and conventions. She sat there in suspense, smiling, calm, and altogether smooth to look at. However, there was no need, after all, to feel so helpless. She must inevitably appeal to the young man on her right. Speech had become a necessity, though always a distasteful one. Besides, after all, how absurd to let even so strong an instinct make one uncivil! Gundred fought down her reluctance bravely, and turned to her neighbour.

‘Do you think,’ she asked firmly, though in a low, rather strained voice, ‘that you could lower that shade a little? Do you see, I believe it will catch fire in a moment—yes?’

No answer followed her appeal. In astonishment she repeated it, and raised her eyes to her enemy’s face. She was astounded by what she saw there. She herself had been put out, even alarmed for a minute by the imminent fate of the candle-shade; but her neighbour’s gaze was fixed on the point of peril in a set white pallor of pure terror. Never in her life had she seen such an agony of dread on any human countenance. The young man, so beautiful, so lithe, so strong, was a monstrous coward. His face was rigid with fear, his eyes staring horribly. The sight was indecent in its nude revelation of weakness. In an instant all Gundred’s courage came back to her, and at the same moment her hatred for her neighbour was mitigated by a cold ferocity of contempt. He was still evil and hateful, but now he was contemptible also. He, a man, to be so terrified of a little burning candle-shade! At that same moment the shade tilted further, caught, and flamed. Gundred was conscious that her neighbour’s hands clenched upon his chair in a convulsive jerk of fright. Calmly, firmly she reached forth her arm, and crushed the blazing paper into a blackened flake. Servants came running to sweep up the ashes, and Mr. Hoope-Arkwright confounded himself in apologies for his neglect. Gundred showed herself perfectly amiable to her host, but on her other neighbour she would have no mercy.

‘I saw it was going to catch,’ she said gently, ‘and I asked Mr.—this gentleman, to put it out. But he cannot have heard me, I think.’ She included both men in her remarks, and spoke in soft, far-reaching tones that could not escape their attention. Mr. Hoope-Arkwright made some polite rejoinder, gave her a few compliments, then went back to his dialogue with Lady Pope. Gundred, reinstated in her own self-esteem, turned to see what effect her cut had had upon the coward. Had he winced beneath the lash? Yes, evidently he had. Gundred was justly pleased. Heaven had made her the instrument of his well-merited punishment. And now he was trying to make excuses. She would listen, so as the better to slight them. She offered a coldly acquiescent air as he began to speak.

‘I am sorry,’ he said in a slow, hesitating voice, hardly yet restored to equanimity. ‘I am afraid I heard you perfectly.’

Gundred would see no courage in the confession. It was mere effrontery. ‘Yes?’ she replied. There was a pause. ‘Yes?’ repeated Gundred cruelly, demanding an answer.

The young man went on, speaking with difficulty. Gundred felt a keen joy in thus dragging the coward through a confession of his cowardice. To be a man and a coward—that was not punishment enough. He should also know what a woman thought of him.

‘I ... well, the long and the short of it is, I can’t face fire,’ continued the hesitating, painful voice.

‘You would not make a good soldier—no?’ rejoined Gundred, with a pinched little smile.

‘Oh, in that way I hope I should be all right. It is flame and smoke and burning that I cannot face. All my life I have had the fear. I suppose everyone has a secret horror in their lives. Fire is mine. I have suffered from it always. You don’t know what it is. It is something far worse than fear. I am not really afraid of the fire. I knew how ridiculously harmless that little burning shade would be, but it was the fire, the flame that made me—well, made me almost sick with a shrinking—a sort of supernatural repulsion that I cannot explain.’

‘How very unfortunate!’ answered Gundred, deliberately cool and incredulous in tone. ‘It must be so very inconvenient—yes? People are sadly apt to misunderstand, don’t you find?’

The young man, however, was a worm only in his tendency to turn. He flushed, seeing clearly the hard malice of her mood. ‘Very few, thank Heaven,’ he answered, ‘have ever had the opportunity of misunderstanding. You have been especially unlucky, and so have I.’

‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ replied Gundred, politely demurring.

‘I must, obviously,’ he went on. ‘You see, one bears one’s secret horror, whatever it may be, quite alone, telling nobody about it. But sometimes, once or twice in one’s life, some cursed accident drags it to the surface, and the horror becomes too bad to bear, and an outsider gets a glimpse of it. I have been unfortunate in the moment of my accident, and in the person who saw it, and there is no more to be said: that is all.’

The young man, the coward, the unmentionable, seemed actually to be snubbing the brave, the serene, the faultless Lady Gundred Darnley. This must instantly be put a stop to.

‘One does not like to believe that any man can have a fear too bad to bear—no?’ inquired Gundred, very gently and softly, as if asking for the sake of information.

The victim had clearly had enough of this persecution. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘when one comes to think of it, I suppose you are yourself more or less responsible for my fears, if anyone is.’

Gundred gave him a blank blue stare.

‘I?’ she questioned in amazement, as if the very suggestion were an insolent piece of irreverence.

The young man was not abashed, however, and proceeded to make his position good.

‘You had a ghastly fire at Brakelond many years ago,’ he answered. ‘Somebody was burnt—a cousin of yours, I think. Well, that fire was a great shock to my mother, and upset her dreadfully. I was the result, and I am the incarnation of her terrors.’

Gundred hesitated in her enmity, and her manner changed.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said; ‘but I did not quite catch your name before dinner. But from what you have just said, are you—surely you must be——’

‘I am Ivor Restormel,’ said the enemy. ‘I was born about twelve hours after your fire at Brakelond. So you cannot wonder that I carry the traces of it in my life, as it were. And so, you see, I was right: you are in some way responsible for my dread of fire. Wasn’t it a careless servant who set light to the old wooden wing of Brakelond? Well, if it had not been for that careless servant, I should not have had any dread or shrinking from fire.’

‘Really,’ said Gundred, hardly heeding him, ‘this is wonderfully interesting. Then you are poor dear Mary Restormel’s son? I used to know your mother so well in the days before you were born. And then the place was sold, of course, to these Hoope-Arkwrights, and I never saw much of poor dear Mary again. But how very strange to meet you here—yes?’

Gundred was always faithful to her traditions and her memories. The stranger came immediately into the hallowed circle of Gundred’s own class, and no longer suffered the condemnation of the outsider. In her heart of hearts, Gundred, perhaps, would never surmount her first mysterious sense of repulsion; but anger, disdain, reproof must at once be very much modified in the case of a person who now stood revealed as no longer an unhallowed, nameless member of the Hoope-Arkwright world, but as poor dear Mary Restormel’s son, with the right divine to Gundred’s sympathetic loyalty. Her strong and dutiful esprit de corps even prompted her to something resembling an apology.

‘Of course I had no notion who you were,’ she said. ‘What you tell me is a perfect explanation. How very dreadful for you, though! But I quite understand your feeling—a simple instinct. Yet, of course, until one knew who you were, it did seem a little strange—yes?’

Ivor Restormel had ceased to take much interest in the question.

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘one is always meeting odd things in life. I only wish I had escaped that particular oddity. However, I do all I can to get the better of it, and in a way I have succeeded. I can face flame more than I could, though it still gives me the same supernatural creepy feeling. What I have suffered, too, in seeing women smoke is more than I can express.’

‘Not at all a nice habit, I think,’ replied Gundred. ‘Somehow, it never seems appropriate or ladylike—no?’

‘Oh, it is not that I mind, but the possibilities are so horrible. A man wears rough tweeds and things. No spark could settle on them. But think of the innumerable frills and fluffs and films that a woman has floating all round her nowadays. A chance spark, and the dropping of a red cigarette-end, and—ah! it doesn’t bear thinking of.’

He broke off, shuddering, and Gundred could see that at the bare notion of such a catastrophe the old white, shivering terror had laid hold of him. She had heard before of these strange, inherited passions, prenatal, ineradicable, but this was the first instance she had ever met with, and it filled her with interest now that she realized that its victim was a man of her own order, and as such, of course, not to be classed in the common rank of cowards. Her subconscious fear and dislike of Ivor Restormel still held their place in her mind, but they had retired to the background of her thought for the moment, leaving room for the curiosity that his identity and his idiosyncrasy aroused.

‘So very dreadful,’ she murmured, ‘for your poor mother. I had not realized that dear Mary had been so much upset by that awful fire. You know, Mr. Restormel, I feel as if we were quite old friends, you and I. As you say, I cannot help feeling, after all, that we have got some of the responsibility to bear for the odd feelings that you have inherited. You have had quite a distressing legacy from those old wooden rooms at Brakelond—yes?’

Laudably, deliberately friendly, Gundred raised her neat smile to meet Ivor Restormel’s gaze. He was looking at her full, with his deep grey eyes, true and honest, and altogether pleasant. Yet, as she met their glance, suddenly the instinctive hostility surged up into Gundred’s mind with redoubled strength. Fear and dislike seized her. She could not bear that glance, could not tolerate her neighbour’s presence. She turned away her head with a sensation of almost terrified hostility. What was this imperious repulsion that now held her—the first emotion that had ever threatened to pass the limits of her self-control? She could not understand it; never before had she felt anything even remotely resembling this blind, paradoxical dislike. Perhaps, years since, her bitter memories of Isabel had been tinged with the same unreasoning horror, but those far-off qualms had been faint and colourless compared with the vehement feeling now aroused in her by this beautiful and harmless stranger. She stiffened herself to show a firm front; self-contempt began to stir in her. Why, had it come to this, that she, Lady Gundred Darnley, the model of deportment and nice tact, now wished publicly to violate her own code, to be rude and inconsiderate to a person who on all counts, as being unobjectionable, a fellow-guest, and an equal, claimed her consideration and her courtesy? Such a lapse could never be permitted. She must fight down this folly, and be kind to Ivor Restormel through the rest of this nightmare meal. Then she would leave the house as soon as she could, and pray Heaven that she might never set eyes on him again.

Ivor Restormel saw something strange in her manner, but took no heed. He did not in the least care what Lady Gundred Darnley might choose to think of him. He felt confident that he could in no way have offended her; further than that his interest in her attitude did not go. The secret dislikes of one’s acquaintances are incalculable. It is both hopeless and useless to take such things into one’s consideration. One can but watch one’s own behaviour to keep it clear of offence, and then leave the rest to Providence.

‘Brakelond must be wonderfully beautiful,’ continued Ivor Restormel, amiably manufacturing conversation in the pause made by Gundred’s sudden lapse into silence, ‘judging by the view of it from here. I have never seen anything so fairy-like and splendid. I suppose you have rebuilt the burnt part long ago? All wood, you say it was? Yes, I have heard so much of that old wing that I feel as if I knew it well, every step and winding of it. Ugh! what a ghastly death-trap!’ Again he shuddered at his vivid recollections of a place he had never seen.

Any criticism on her family or its possessions always roused Gundred to polite animosity. Now the feeling came to her rescue, and armed her against this dreadful young man who seemed so pleasant and innocuous.

‘It was very interesting and wonderful,’ she answered reprovingly. ‘We all loved it. But, of course, wood is always rather a peril—yes? Oak panelling is most delightful, but one cannot help feeling it a responsibility.’

‘I hate the very idea of it,’ replied the other with fervour. ‘Why, whenever I think of those wooden rooms at Brakelond, I can smell that horrible cold, old, acrid smell of a burnt-out ruin—the horrible smell of charred wood, which gets into one’s nostrils and one’s throat. Sometimes in my life I have had to meet that smell, and whenever I get a whiff of it, I always have a vision of the wing at Brakelond, all wrecked and blackened and fallen in, haunted by the dreadful acid fumes of stale fire and smoke.’

Gundred might have protested further against the quite uncalled-for vigour of Ivor Restormel’s memory, but at that moment Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was making efforts to capture her attention from behind a bower of odontoglossums. She smiled her acquiescence, made some indifferent remark to her neighbour, and rose to head the departing procession. Thank Heaven, the ordeal was over, and she had come out of it safely, without any more loss of self-respect than was involved in the conception of so incalculable an instinct of hostility. Gundred felt her self-complacency returning. She knew that it does not matter what sentiments one may entertain, so long as one gives no sign of entertaining them. One’s private blemishes are one’s own private concern alone, provided that one does not let one’s clothes slip down and reveal them to the world.

Her husband, meanwhile, at the other end of the table had proved but a tame and uninteresting companion to Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. His attention throughout the meal had been fixed at every possible moment on Gundred’s right-hand partner. For whole long minutes he scanned that keen, handsome face. Where had he seen it before? Why did he find it so very much more attractive than even its own intrinsic beauty warranted? He stared at it, analyzed it, dissected its features. No, collectively and separately they were quite new to him. He grew more and more confident that he had never met the young fellow before; otherwise he must have remembered him. It was not a face to be forgotten. No, he had never seen it before. And yet the imperious conviction grew and deepened in him that that face was worn by no stranger—that he and the boy at the end of the table were in some mysterious way the oldest of intimate friends. Many years before he had felt the same passion of recognition when he at last understood what it was he felt for Isabel; now the same haunting sense of old acquaintance returned to him, and held him in a firm and inexorable grip. As soon as the women had all left the room, he carried round his glass, and settled himself decisively at Ivor Restormel’s side, thereby upsetting all the post-prandial arrangements, which had been meant to make him the prey of more interesting and conspicuous men among the guests.

‘We met on the road this afternoon, I think,’ said Kingston; ‘or, rather, I passed you. You refused to accept a lift.’

Ivor Restormel smiled back at him.

‘It was awfully good of you,’ he replied. ‘I have never been offered a lift by a motor before. But, you see, I was so close to Restormel, it would hardly have been worth while.’

‘Are you staying here?’ inquired Kingston, more and more strongly drawn to this new acquaintance.

‘Yes; Jack Hoope-Arkwright is a great friend of mine. We are at Oxford together. And, besides, I belong here in a sort of way. The place used to be my people’s. I am Ivor Restormel.’

The name instantly brought back to Kingston’s mind that deadly accident which had eventually been the secondary cause of Isabel’s death. He shuddered. But the link of recollection thus forged seemed to bind him more closely to young Restormel. The boy had an inexplicably strong fascination. He was pleasant, he was good-looking, he was well built; but there was something else. He was more attractive than all these good qualities could have made him. Kingston took an increasing pleasure in hearing him speak.

‘I remember all about you,’ answered the older man. ‘My wife used to know your mother well. It was my wife you have been sitting next to. Perhaps she told you how she used to know your people.’

Kingston knew Gundred’s devoted loyalty to all old friends and neighbours, and was anxious to impress Ivor Restormel’s identity upon her, foreseeing that it would incline her favourably to his sudden plan of seeing as much as possible of the young fellow.

‘Yes, Lady Gundred soon recognised who I was. But I am afraid she was a little disappointed in me. I think I could see it.’

Kingston was slightly alarmed. He knew Gundred’s prejudices of old—soft and mild as milk; hard, ineluctable as iron.

‘Oh, nonsense!’ he replied, with more anxiety than the occasion appeared to warrant. ‘My wife is always a little cool and non-committal when she meets people for the first time. You will soon get accustomed to her.’

It never occurred to him that he was apparently explaining his wife, more or less apologetically, to a total stranger. Ivor Restormel was puzzled. His beauty had already made him many sudden friends, had immensely helped him on his way through life, predisposing everyone in his favour; but it had never yet kindled such a fire of zeal as seemed to be developing in Mr. Darnley. He was inclined to be cautious in acceptance, and during the rest of the meal gave careful, quiet answers to Kingston’s advances. But Kingston had not the faintest interest in the boy’s beauty, nor, precisely, in the boy himself. It was the acquaintance, the old friend in him, that Kingston divined so keenly, and was eager to investigate more fully. The vehement attraction that he felt towards Ivor Restormel was something, so to speak, impersonal, something quite unconnected with the boy’s pleasant manners or agreeable face. It was an attraction towards something deep and hidden in the young fellow’s personality, and the attraction grew stronger and clearer with every minute of their dialogue.

At last the time came to go into the drawing-room. The men rose, and drifted in knots towards the door. Kingston, as he went, retained possession of young Restormel, despite the evident anxiety of Mr. Hoope-Arkwright and Sir Nigel to have a word with Lady Gundred’s husband.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘How long are you staying with the Hoope-Arkwrights? Come over to Brakelond, will you? Come over to-morrow. I should like you to see the place.’

Ivor Restormel accepted the unexpected invitation with thanks. Jack Hoope-Arkwright, following in their wake, wondered at the precipitate friendliness of Mr. Darnley. Such sudden hospitality was by no means in the traditions of Brakelond. A long preliminary purification was generally necessary before Lady Gundred considered her friends well tested enough to be invited to the Castle. And here was Ivor Restormel, after half an hour’s acquaintance, not only asked, but pressed to come, and to come as soon as possible. Times were changing indeed. It had taken the Hoope-Arkwrights three years to know the Darnleys, and eight to be dined with by them.

The rest of the evening passed without event. Gundred, however, gradually grew displeased with her surroundings. At first she had duly been throned on the best sofa, and listened to in silent admiration while she pronounced on the weather, the decadence of decorum in the servants’ hall, and the proper management of cooks. But ere long Lady Pope, whom, in her mind, Gundred characterized as a pushing young person, had begun to cut in frivolously, irreverently, with jokes and stories. Gundred, who had a faint instinct that all wit was more or less vulgar, did her best to repress these interruptions; but her efforts were vain, and soon even her devout hostess was listening and laughing at Lady Pope’s sallies. Lady Gundred was left rather out of the picture, and her authoritative comments on cooks began to lose their hold on the general attention. Then when the men appeared it was even worse. Lady Pope became the centre of a court; even those who came to make their dutiful obeisance to Lady Gundred passed hastily on, after a few pallid words about the weather, to join the cheerful crowd round the younger woman. Then games were played, largely at Lady Pope’s instigation; and Gundred, who would have disliked any proposal that sprung from one whom she now felt herself compelled to regard, however disdainfully, as a rival, had, further, personal reasons for disapproving this development. For she sang; and she expected, accordingly, to be asked to sing. Her music was waiting outside to be fetched; it would have been obviously proper of Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright to press her most important guest to perform. But apparently everyone preferred the thoughtless gaiety of this unprofitable evening to hearing Lady Gundred discoursing Chaminade in her neat and well-drilled little flute of a voice, which, as her friends said in extenuation, was so truly wonderful for a woman of forty.

Finally, to add to all these annoyances, she saw her husband neglecting everyone else in the room to talk to that young man for whom she had conceived such a repulsion. She would rather, even, have seen him spending the time in attendance on that forward Lady Pope. But Kingston was so distressingly friendly. Actuated by many collaborating motives, Gundred made haste to ask for her carriage, and showed every sign of imminent departure, much to the distress of hospitable Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright felt that the evening had not been altogether satisfactory since dinner. Lady Pope had evidently shone excessively; and the light of Lady Gundred Darnley had been thereby most unjustly dimmed. It grew plain that Lady Gundred was a little put out. Gaiety and dignity were hard to combine. Lady Pope offered the gaiety; Lady Gundred the dignity. And the two ambitions were irreconcilable; for it was already clear that Lady Gundred could not amuse—certainly not while Lady Pope was of the party. Grievously did Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright regret that she had infused the gay and sparkling element of the young woman into what she had meant to be the serene if soporific delights of a dinner made illustrious by the presence of March and Brakelond. But it was now too late for regret, and no entreaties could soften Lady Gundred’s determination to go.

‘Thanks so much,’ said Gundred sweetly. ‘Such a delightful evening. We have enjoyed ourselves so much. But we must really think of the horses. Good-night, Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright. Good-night—good-night—good-night.’

Scattering bows and farewell condescension like a queen, the Lady Gundred Darnley moved towards the hall. Kingston obediently followed her, and soon the door of the brougham was shut upon them, and they were off. Gundred smoothed out her flounce with a certain pettishness unusual to her calm temperament.

‘A dreadful house,’ she said decisively, ‘so horribly rich and new—and the most vulgar and trying people. One wonders how even the Hoope-Arkwrights contrive to collect such a crew. Surely, Kingston, I could not have heard you asking one of them to come to Brakelond? Just as we were leaving. It must have been my fancy, of course.’ She was sitting very upright, rigid with rectitude, her pale lips compressed, her pale eyes gleaming scornfully. Kingston felt like a guilty child.

‘Only young Restormel,’ he said. ‘You will like him, Gundred. I am sure you will like him immensely. He is one of the most attractive people I have ever met. After all, he is an old neighbour of yours, not like the Hoope-Arkwrights and the rest of their friends. I made him promise to come over to-morrow. And then, later on, he might come to stay with us for a bit. I should like you to see more of him, Gundred. He will be someone for you to help and befriend.’

A very long silence, leaden and ominous, filled the brougham. Then Gundred spoke, in a bland, deliberate low voice.

‘Really, Kingston,’ she said, ‘you are almost trying at times.’

Her husband felt himself annihilated. This, from Gundred, was very heavy rebuke. He made no answer, and they drove on to Brakelond without another word.