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jealousy. He knew as if by instinct that it was not wise to leave these two handsome young people together; he had a queer little disagreeable sensation whenever they spoke to one another or looked at one another. Whenever Trafford and Marjorie found themselves in a group, there was Magnet in the midst of them. He knew the value of his Marjorie, and did not mean to lose her....

Being jointly baffled in this way was oddly stimulating to Marjorie’s and Trafford’s mutual predisposition. If you really want to throw people together, the thing to do – thank God for Ireland! – is to keep them apart. By the fourth day of this emotional incubation, Marjorie was thinking of Trafford to the exclusion of all her reading; and Trafford was lying awake at nights – oh, for half an hour and more – thinking of bold, decisive ways of getting at Marjorie, and bold, decisive things to say to her when he did.

(But why she should be engaged to Magnet continued, nevertheless, to puzzle him extremely. It was a puzzle to which no complete solution was ever to be forthcoming....)

XI

At last that opportunity came. Marjorie had come with her mother into the village, and while Mrs. Pope made some purchases at the general shop she walked on to speak to Mrs. Blythe the washerwoman. Trafford suddenly emerged from the Red Lion with a soda syphon under each arm. She came forward smiling.

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“I say,” he said forthwith, “I want to talk with you – badly.” “And I,” she said unhesitatingly, “with you.”

“How can we?”

“There’s always people about. It’s absurd.” “We’ll have to meet.”

“Yes.”

“I have to go away to-morrow. I ought to have gone two days ago. Where can we meet?”

She had it all prepared.

“Listen,” she said. “There is a path runs from our shrubbery through a little wood to a stile on the main road.” He nodded. “Either I will be there at three or about half-past five or – there’s one more chance. While father and Mr. Magnet are smoking at nine.... I might get away.”

“Couldn’t I write?” “No. Impossible.”

“I’ve no end of things to say....”

Mrs. Pope appeared outside her shop, and Trafford gesticulated a greeting with the syphons. “All right,” he said to Marjorie. “I’m shopping,” he cried as Mrs. Pope approached.

XII

All through the day Marjorie desired to go to Trafford and could not do so. It was some minutes past nine when at last with a swift rustle of skirts that sounded louder than all the world to her, she crossed the dimly lit hall between din-

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ing-room and drawing-room and came into the dreamland of moonlight upon the lawn. She had told her mother she was going upstairs; at any moment she might be missed, but she would have fled now to Trafford if an army pursued her. Her heart seemed beating in her throat, and every fibre of her being was aquiver. She flitted past the dining-room window like a ghost, she did not dare to glance aside at the smokers within, and round the lawn to the shrubbery, and so under a blackness of trees to the gate where he stood waiting. And there he was, dim and mysterious and wonderful, holding the gate open for her, and she was breathless, and speechless, and near sobbing. She stood before him for a moment, her face moonlit and laced with the shadows of little twigs, and then his arms came out to her.

“My darling,” he said, “Oh, my darling!”

They had no doubt of one another or of anything in the world. They clung together; their lips came together fresh and untainted as those first lovers’ in the garden.

“I will die for you,” he said, “I will give all the world for you....”

They had thought all through the day of a hundred statements and explanations they would make when this moment came, and never a word of it all was uttered. All their anticipations of a highly strung eventful conversation vanished, phrases of the most striking sort went like phantom leaves before a gale. He held her and she clung to him between laughing and sobbing, and both were swiftly and conclusively assured their lives must never separate again.

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XIII

Marjorie never knew whether it was a moment or an age before her father came upon them. He had decided to take a turn in the garden when Magnet could no longer restrain himself from joining the ladies, and he chanced to be stick in hand because that was his habit after twilight. So it was he found them. She heard his voice falling through love and moonlight like something that comes out of an immense distance.

“Good God!” he cried, “what next!” But he still hadn’t realized the worst.

“Daffy,” he said, “what in the name of goodness – ?” Marjorie put her hands before her face too late.

“Good Lord!” he cried with a rising inflection, “it’s Madge!” Trafford found the situation difficult. “I should explain – “ But Mr. Pope was giving himself up to a towering rage.

“You damned scoundrel!” he said. “What the devil are you doing?” He seized Marjorie by the arm and drew her towards him. “My poor misguided girl!” he said, and suddenly she was tensely alive, a little cry of horror in her throat, for her father, at a loss for words and full of heroic rage, had suddenly swung his stick with passionate force, and struck at Trafford’s face. She heard the thud, saw Trafford wince and stiffen. For a perfectly horrible moment it seemed to her these men, their faces queerly distorted by the shadows of the branches in the slanting moonlight, might fight. Then she heard Trafford’s

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voice, sounding cool and hard, and she knew that he would do nothing of the kind. In that instant if there had remained anything to win in Marjorie it was altogether won. “I asked your daughter to meet me here,” he said.

“Be off with you, sir!” cried Mr. Pope. “Don’t tempt me further, sir,” and swung his stick again. But now the force had gone out of him. Trafford stood with a hand out ready for him, and watched his face.

“I asked your daughter to meet me here, and she came. I am prepared to give you any explanation – “

“If you come near this place again – “

For some moments Marjorie’s heart had been held still, now it was beating violently. She felt this scene must end. “Mr. Trafford,” she said, “will you go. Go now. Nothing shall keep us apart!”

Mr. Pope turned on her. “Silence, girl!” he said. “I shall come to you to-morrow,” said Trafford. “Yes,” said Marjorie, “to-morrow.”

“Marjorie!” said Mr. Pope, “will you go indoors.” “I have done nothing – “

“Be off, sir.”

“I have done nothing – “

“Will you be off, sir? And you, Marjorie – will you go indoors?”

He came round upon her, and after one still moment of regard for Trafford – and she looked very beautiful in the moonlight with her hair a little disordered and her face alight – she turned to precede her father through the shrubbery.

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CHAPTER THE FOURTH

CRISIS

I

Crisis prevailed in Buryhamstreet that night. On half a dozen sleepless pillows souls communed with the darkness, and two at least of those pillows were wet with tears.

Not one of those wakeful heads was perfectly clear about the origins and bearings of the trouble; not even Mr. Pope felt absolutely sure of himself. It had come as things come to people nowadays, because they will not think things out, much less talk things out, and are therefore in a hopeless tangle of values that tightens sooner or later to a knot....

What an uncharted perplexity, for example, was the mind of that excellent woman Mrs. Pope!

Poor lady! she hadn’t a stable thing in her head. It is remarkable that some queer streak in her composition sympathized with Marjorie’s passion for Trafford. But she thought it such a pity! She fought that sympathy down as if it were a wicked thing. And she fought too against other ideas that rose out of the deeps and did not so much come into her mind as cluster at the threshold, the idea that Marjorie was in ef-

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fect grown up, a dozen queer criticisms of Magnet, and a dozen subtle doubts whether after all Marjorie was going to be happy with him as she assured herself the girl would be. (So far as any one knew Trafford might be an excellent match!) And behind these would-be invaders of her guarded mind prowled even worse ones, doubts, horrible disloyal doubts, about the wisdom and kindness of Mr. Pope.

Quite early in life Mrs. Pope had realized that it is necessary to be very careful with one’s thoughts. They lead to trouble. She had clipped the wings of her own mind therefore so successfully that all her conclusions had become evasions, all her decisions compromises. Her profoundest working conviction was a belief that nothing in the world was of value but “tact,” and that the art of living was to “tide things over.” But here it seemed almost beyond her strength to achieve any sort of tiding over....

(Why couldn’t Mr. Pope lie quiet?)

Whatever she said or did had to be fitted to the exigencies of Mr. Pope.

Availing himself of the privileges of matrimony, her husband so soon as Mr. Magnet had gone and they were upstairs together, had explained the situation with vivid simplicity, and had gone on at considerable length and with great vivacity to enlarge upon his daughter’s behaviour. He ascribed this moral disaster, – he presented it as a moral disaster of absolutely calamitous dimensions – entirely to Mrs. Pope’s faults and negligences. Warming with his theme he had employed a number of homely expressions rarely heard by decent women except in these sacred intimacies, to express the deep indigna-

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tion of a strong man moved to unbridled speech by the wickedness of those near and dear to him. Still warming, he raised his voice and at last shouted out his more forcible meanings, until she feared the servants and children might hear, waved a clenched fist at imaginary Traffords and scoundrels generally, and giving way completely to his outraged virtue, smote and kicked blameless articles of furniture in a manner deeply impressive to the feminine intelligence.

Finally he sat down in the little arm-chair between her and the cupboard where she was accustomed to hang up her clothes, stuck out his legs very stiffly across the room, and despaired of his family in an obtrusive and impregnable silence for an enormous time.

All of which awakened a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness in Mrs. Pope’s mind, and prevented her going to bed, but did not help her in the slightest degree to grasp the difficulties of the situation....

She would have lain awake anyhow, but she was greatly helped in this by Mr. Pope’s restlessness. He was now turning over from left to right or from right to left at intervals of from four to seven minutes, and such remarks as “Damned scoundrel! Get out of this!” or “My daughter and degrade yourself in this way!” or “Never let me see your face again!” “Plight your troth to one man, and fling yourself shamelessly – I repeat it, Marjorie, shamelessly – into the arms of another!” kept Mrs. Pope closely in touch with the general trend of his thoughts.

She tried to get together her plans and perceptions rather as though she swept up dead leaves on a gusty day. She knew that the management of the whole situation rested finally on

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her, and that whatever she did or did not do, or whatever arose to thwart her arrangements, its entire tale of responsibility would ultimately fall upon her shoulders. She wondered what was to be done with Marjorie, with Mr. Magnet? Need he know? Could that situation be saved? Everything at present was raw in her mind. Except for her husband’s informal communications she did not even know what had appeared, what Daffy had seen, what Magnet thought of Marjorie’s failure to bid him good-night. For example, had Mr. Magnet noticed Mr. Pope’s profound disturbance? She had to be ready to put a face on things before morning, and it seemed impossible she could do so. In times of crisis, as every woman knows, it is always necessary to misrepresent everything to everybody, but how she was to dovetail her misrepresentations, get the best effect from them, extract a working system of rights and wrongs from them, she could not imagine....

(Oh! she did so wish Mr. Pope would lie quiet.)

But he had no doubts of what became him. He had to maintain a splendid and irrational rage – at any cost – to anybody.

II

A few yards away, a wakeful Marjorie confronted a joyless universe. She had a baffling realization that her life was in a hopeless mess, that she really had behaved disgracefully, and that she couldn’t for a moment understand how it had happened. She had intended to make quite sure of Trafford – and then put things straight.

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