The Optimist by E. M. Delafield - HTML preview

 

III
 DAVID AND FLORA

(i)

“IT cannot be, my dear,” the Canon repeated. So inexorable was his voice, in all its kindness, that his daughter Flora felt that it could not, indeed be.

But it was Lucilla who had launched the “it” in question, and it was to Lucilla that the parental negative had been already addressed no less than three times.

“If I am thus patient with this strange persistence of yours, Lucilla,” said the Canon, his voice deepening after a fashion which indicated not at all obscurely that he might not continue to be patient very much longer, “if I am thus patient, it is because I do you the justice to believe that it is sisterly affection for our poor Valeria and her little one, and not a mere restless desire for change, that has induced you to put forward this astonishing proposal. But consider the folly and selfishness of this scheme, my child. You propose to spend money—which we can ill afford, any of us—and sacrifice time and strength in a wild rush overseas, an insensate dash through an unknown country, in search of your sister’s new home. No doubt you say to yourself ‘I am the winged Messenger of the Gods. I fly to take help and comfort to our erring one. I will assist this new little life that is coming into the world.’ You picture to yourself a triumphal progress—a rapturous welcome—the acclamations of a New World. But you deceive yourself, Lucilla. You deceive yourself grossly.”

Flora felt herself colouring as she bent over her needlework. A display of violent emotion as that into which Canon Morchard was now working himself by force of his own eloquence, was always distasteful to her, and she felt a vicarious shame for Lucilla, convicted of such presumptuous flights of fancy.

Flora was astonished at the calm of her sister’s reply, when it came.

“But I don’t, Father. I hadn’t any idea of doing anything but travelling to Canada in the ordinary way, and being with Val when her new baby arrives. You know, it is dreadfully soon after her first one, and she really isn’t——”

“Have a care, Lucilla! Who are you to question the time and seasons appointed by the All-seeing Wisdom for the bestowal of the infinite blessing of children?”

If Lucilla represented an infinite blessing to Canon Morchard, the fact was not over evident at the moment. His brow was thunderous as he gazed at her.

“It is Valeria’s own choice that has sent her into a far country. She might have been at our very gates, had she but willed it so.”

“Well,” said Lucilla reasonably. “I don’t think if Val had been so near us as all that, she would have written and begged one of us to come to her. It’s just because she’s out there, such a long way off, and with no one to help her, that she’s frightened. Why, she may not even be able to get a servant.”

“Poor child!” The Canon’s voice softened. “The way of transgressors is hard. But two wrongs never yet made a right, Lucilla. I recognize the generous impulse that moves you—if I spoke sharply just now, it was only from my intense wish to see you do justice to your own really noble character, my child. Believe me, your duty lies here, in the state to which it has pleased God to call you.”

Lucilla’s brows contracted slightly, after her short-sighted fashion, but it was not at all with an effect of vexation, but rather of some slight perplexity.

At last she said:

“Could Flora go?”

Flora, startled, looked at her father. For a moment it occurred to her that perhaps he would be willing to spare her. Her heart leapt at the thought of seeing Val, and Val’s babies. A vista of new experiences, of hitherto undreamed-of independence, startled even whilst it pleasantly excited her.

Then her father said: “My dear, of what are you thinking? Your zealous desire to befriend one sister makes you strangely inconsiderate of the other. Flora is neither accustomed to responsibility, nor is she very robust in health. Certainly, were it a clear question of duty, one could put all that aside—but the call would have to be unmistakable, the leading beyond all question. I can see no such indications here.”

Flora, quietly bent over her needlework once more, was ashamed of the realization that she was disappointed.

Inwardly, she offered instant expiation for the rebellious moment, consciously addressing herself to the personal Divinity by whom, she had always been taught, every hair of her head was numbered.

The reflection came, in immediate consolation, that she was not without her spiritual glory, by this very act of resignation.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” she thought.

The Canon had often quoted this to Flora, and indeed to any of his children who showed a desire for alien activities.

Flora might be said to have stood and waited for some time now. It occurred to her that if Lucilla went to Canada, responsibilities at home, other than passive ones, would become her own portion. The thought did not displease her. Flora, too, though far less consciously than Valeria, had sometimes glimpsed the sterility of her days.

“Lucilla, you know where to seek counsel, I believe,” said Canon Morchard gravely. “I make all due allowance for your natural, loving impulse towards our poor Valeria—all due allowance. If your heart bleeds for her, how much more does not mine? But there are times when we must do violence to our natural feelings and I believe that some such necessity is upon you now. Deny yourself, my daughter, and He will bless the sacrifice both to you and to our dear one far away.”

“But who will look after her when her baby is born?” said Lucilla reflectively.

“Lucilla, where is your trust?”

“Mostly in myself, I think,” said Lucilla gently. “I really shouldn’t feel it right not to go to Val, Father. I hope you will forgive me.” She spoke so gently, with so simple a note of sincere regret in her quiet voice, that the Canon, to Flora’s perceptions, appeared to overlook the slightly blasphemous implication in the first words of her sentence.

“No man is more averse than myself from tampering with another’s conscience,” he said, with gravity and displeasure. “You are no longer a child, Lucilla, but have a care lest self-will should blind you. I have long since warned you of the danger of self-complacency. I lay no commands upon you, but I do most earnestly beg, my child, that you will submit your own judgment to a higher Tribunal than any earthly one, before coming to any decision. Commune with your own heart, Lucilla, and be sure that self-seeking is not lurking under the guise of loving-kindness.”

The Canon went out of the room and Flora and Lucilla were left together.

It was evident that Lucilla saw no urgent necessity for complying with her father’s advice and communing with her own heart. She sat down at her writing-table, wrote for a few moments, and read over what she had written. Then she handed the half-sheet of notepaper to Flora.

It bore the announcement that a lady wishing shortly to travel to Canada, would give her services on the journey in return for part passage.

“But you mean to go, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I thought Father advised you to think it over?”

“I did think it over. Didn’t you hear me say just now that I should think it wrong not to go to Val?”

“You are setting your own judgment up above Father’s,” Flora pointed out coldly.

“I suppose so,” Lucilla assented, seeming rather surprised, as though such an aspect of the case had not hitherto presented itself to her.

Flora softened.

“I can’t help being glad you’re going to be with poor Val when she wants you. And oh, Lucilla! You’ll see little Georgie!”

“I know. I wish you could, too.”

“So do I.” She suddenly caught her breath. “Not that I should do what you’re doing, for a moment. I don’t see how you can, in direct opposition to Father’s advice.”

“I’m sorry you see it like that,” said Lucilla gently. “Now, Flora, as I may have to take my passage when I can get it, without much notice, I’d like to arrange one or two things with you. Would you like me to give Ethel a month’s notice? She’s a bad housemaid, but if you’d rather she stayed on till——”

“Lucilla, you talk as though it were all settled!”

“My dear, it is all settled. I told you that my mind was made up.”

“You know that Father will miss you most terribly? And, though he never speaks about it, he still grieves dreadfully over Adrian.”

“I know. That hasn’t really got anything to do with it, though, has it? If you keep on Ethel, you will have to make certain that she——”

“I can’t talk about Ethel now, Lucilla. I’ll do the best I can, if you really do go. Don’t think I’m unkind, please. I do understand that it must be a great temptation, after poor Val’s letter saying how much she wants you. I daresay if she’d written like that to me,” said Flora with an effort, “that I might have felt it dreadfully difficult to refuse to go to her.”

Lucilla paused on her way to the door, and looked at her sister with friendly, reflective interest.

“But you would have refused?”

“Isn’t it always safest,” said Flora diffidently, and yet with the implacable certainty of rightness, too, “isn’t it always safest, when there’s a choice—or what looks like a choice—to do whatever one likes least?”

“Lucilla!” called the Canon’s voice.

She opened the door.

“No, I shouldn’t call that a very good rule, myself. You’ll let me know about Ethel as soon as you can, won’t you? Her month’s trial will be up next Wednesday.”

“Lucilla!”

“I’m coming, Father.”

She went.

Flora let her work drop into her lap and folded her hands, allowing her thoughts to wander.

Could it be right to feel that the wrong-doing of another might prove to be one’s own opportunity, come at last? She felt herself to have striven for so long with the endeavour to prove faithful in that which was least, all the time stifling resentment that no greater, more heroic task should be set her. She had always felt herself to be “little Flora” to her father, a child, to be petted and sheltered, and in the minute introspection of a nightly examination of conscience, she had frequently to reproach herself bitterly for an ungrateful longing to emerge sometimes from the shielded into the shielding. If Lucilla went away, their father would be alone, deserted except for Flora. David was in India. He wrote very seldom, and then never of coming home. Even his letters to Flora herself, always his favourite sister, were neither confidential nor frequent. Val was married, in Canada, and was claiming Lucilla’s presence almost as a right. Adrian, in London, was the subject of daily intercession at St. Gwenllian but it was known to all his children that the Canon would not again receive Adrian at home until he should have severed all connection with the atheist, Hale.

How they had failed their father, all of them! Flora resolved passionately that she herself would never fail him. Prayer was the form of self-expression most natural to her, and she made ardent inward supplication that if Lucilla were permitted to follow her own way, good might come of it, and she herself prove worthy of her sacred filial charge. No such exaltation of spirit could be indulged in when Lucilla’s decision had been openly accepted, and her preparations begun.

She preserved all her usual even cheerfulness, and her conversation was rather more severely practical than before.

“Don’t let the key of the storeroom out of your own possession, Flossie, please. I’m sure both the maids are trustworthy, but it’s no use breaking rules.”

And:

“Remember not to order anything eggy when Mr. Clover comes to a meal. He can’t eat eggs.”

“I mean to do my very best for everyone while you’re away. But of course it won’t be the same for Father.”

“I expect it will, if you’re careful,” said Lucilla kindly. “Don’t let her put flavourings into everything, though—he can’t bear them.”

She seemed not at all preoccupied with less material considerations.

Even at the last, she bade them good-bye without any of that aspect of remorse which Flora privately considered that she ought to have worn.

The Canon was very kind and forbearing, and said at the last moment:

“I hope and believe that you children understand what is meant by large-mindedness, and that I myself am the last man in the world to deny to each individual the right of an independent judgment. You are acting according to your lights, Lucilla, and I am willing—nay, eager—to believe in the sincerity of your motives. God bless you, my dearest one, and prosper your mission.”

Lucilla’s farewell was affectionate, but not at all emotional, Flora was always undemonstrative by instinct, and it was only the Canon whose eyes were moist, and whose voice shook.

Nevertheless, he turned to his remaining child after a moment and spoke very firmly.

“You may wonder, little Flora, that I have no reproach for Lucilla. She is leaving home against my advice, against my wishes. I believe that she deceives herself. But Lucilla means well—she means well. As we go through life, we learn to be very tolerant, very patient, to understand better what is meant by forgiveness ‘unto seventy times seven’.”

He smiled at her.

“You and I must have some pleasant tête-à-tête evenings, Flora, now that we are left to bear one another company. I should like to rub up some of my old Italian lore. Shall we undertake some such task as Dante’s Paradiso for our leisure time?”

Flora assented, gratified.

Their days fell into a routine that suited her well, and although in her daily and nightly prayers Flora mentioned the names of both Adrian and Lucilla as candidates for Divine Mercy, she was not really conscious of any very earnest personal wish for the return of either to St. Gwenllian.

(ii)

“ON the 18th November, suddenly, at Bombay, David, beloved elder son of Canon Morchard of St. Gwenllian Vicarage....”

Owen Quentillian was away from Stear when he read the announcement, with a strong sense of shock.

Why should David Morchard die?

He wrote to the Canon, and also, after a little hesitation, to Flora Morchard.

As he half expected, Flora’s reply told him more than the Canon’s numerous pages.

“MY DEAR OWEN:

“Thank you for your letter. We knew that you would be sorry, and would understand what this must be to my father, and all of us. He is so brave and good, and everyone is kindness itself. We do not know anything at all except the bare fact, which was cabled from the Regimental headquarters, and it will probably be another three weeks before letters can reach us. If you like, I will write again when they do. We shall want to see you very much when you get back to Stear. Father speaks of you so often, as though it would be a comfort to him to see you again.

“Yours sincerely,
 “FLORA MORCHARD.”

The Canon’s minute legible handwriting covered several pages, and he, like Flora, but at far greater length, emphasized the kindness shown to him.

“My people here have shown feeling such as I dare hardly dwell upon, lest I overset altogether such composure as I may have won. Some of them, of course, remember our dear, dear fellow well, young though he was when he left us. But even those who never knew him speak such words as well-nigh break one’s heart with gratitude and pity and tenderness. I tell myself that whatever is, must be best, and yet, Owen, the longing, that I can only trust may not be repining, to have had but one day—one hour—together, before this blow fell! It was so long since we had spoken together! And sometimes I reproached him for his long silences, for the absence of the details that one longed for, in his letters home. How could I, ah, how could I, I now ask myself sadly, who will receive no more letters from him again. How one learns to be gentle, as the years go on, but the day comes when each unloving word, each selfish thought, comes back to break one’s heart! And yet, Owen, who could have thought that I should be left, who have seen nigh on three-score years, and that strong, gallant lad taken in the very strength of his manhood. Truly, God’s ways are not our ways.

“It does not bear writing of. We must have many long talks together, when you are with us again. What a contrast to that first visit of yours, Owen, when our numbers were yet unbroken, save indeed that first, great gap that only Lucilla and the dear lad who is gone, could realize. At least, their mother has one with her!

“When you first came to us after the war, it was to give us direct news of our beloved boy. I seem to remember some merry gatherings then, with Lucilla and Flora ‘making musik,’ and Valeria all fun and brightness—I can write of her freely, dear Owen, can I not—the old wound is healed now?—and Adrian still the veriest boy, the light and sunshine of the house.

“You will find change and stillness and emptiness about the old place, now. All are scattered, only Flora left in the empty nest. I can find no words to tell you what she has been, Owen. Friend, companion, daughter, comforter! Of all my children, Flora and Lucilla are the two who have never failed me, never failed their own higher selves. And Lucilla, as you know, is away from us at present. Poor child! What a punishment for her self-will in leaving us.

“Flora and poor Clover have spared me in every possible way these days, and whilst I have them, I can indeed never think myself wholly desolate. Letters will not reach us yet awhile from India, and one longs, and yet dreads, to receive them. There may be one from our poor lad himself—yet why do I call him ‘poor,’ when he is so far more blest than we who are left? We can only conjecture that cholera or fever struck him down, he said nothing of sickness in his last letter, and whatever it was must have come upon him with fearful suddenness. One can only hope and pray that the Infinite Mercy allowed him time to meet the dread King of Terrors as one knows that he would have wished to do, but all, all is in other hands than ours.

“I have said nothing of your letter, dear Owen, my heart is too full. Let me answer it in person. Both Flora and I look for your return with eagerness and hope to persuade you to come to us at least for a day or two. You knew our loved one, and it is not so long since you and he met. How I envy you that meeting now! We have heard of it all in detail, I know, but you will have patience, and go over it all once more with us. The only thing that gives one courage to face the present (saving always that far-reaching Comfort which one knows to be there, but which poor humanity cannot always feel) is a mournful, tender lingering over the past. Nor must you fear that I always weep, dear Owen—there is often absolute rest and joy in dwelling on the past happiness that one knows to be only a shadow and faint forecasting of the Joy that is to come.

“Bless you, dear fellow, and though I have said so little of thanks for all the sympathy and understanding in your dear letter, do not think of me as anything but profoundly touched and grateful.

“Sorrowfully and ever affectionately yours,
 “FENWICK MORCHARD.”

Quentillian folded the letter and put it away.

He mentally visualized the silent and grief-stricken house, and his heart contracted strangely.

Valeria had gone, and would come back no more. Her heart was given to her new life, to her new country. Lucilla was with her. Adrian—the Adrian of the Canon’s tender love and pride—had never been. David, who had not wanted to come home, who had left “long intervals” between his scanty letters—David was dead.

There was only Flora left at St. Gwenllian.

He thought that he could see her, remote and austere, either devoid of capability for human emotion, or regarding emotional display as rebellion against Heaven. He had never known which. Flora would move about the cold, silent house, and write the letters, and give the orders, and remember the sane, everyday things that must be done. She would be helped by the eager, anxious curate. Mr. Clover would remember things, too, but he would not, like Flora, accomplish them in silence. He would suggest, and remind, and humbly and timidly deprecate his own efforts.

Quentillian could see the Canon, too.

The Canon would spare himself nothing, but he would break down, with gusts of overwhelming sorrow and bitter remorse for his own want of resignation. He would write, and write, and write, in the lonely study, often blinded with tears, yet deriving his realest comfort from the outward expression of his grief.

Quentillian could accept that, now, could realize it as the interpretation of a sincerity at least as complete as his own.

Within the fortnight, he went to St. Gwenllian. It was all very much as he had pictured it to himself. Only Flora was a little, a very little, less remote than he had expected to find her.

He thought that she dreaded the arrival of the letters from India, and feared their effect upon her father.

When the mail did arrive, the letters were brief, and said that David Morchard had died in hospital of dysentery after three days’ illness. The colonel of the regiment wrote in praise of a career interrupted abruptly, and a parcel of effects was promised.

There was no more.

“Such letters have become so sadly common in the last few years,” said the Canon wistfully. “How can one hope that in each individual case the writer will realize the yearning with which one looks for one personal touch—one word to show that all was well.”

“Perhaps they will write from the hospital—the chaplain or the matron,—when they send the things,” Quentillian suggested.

He, too, was faintly disappointed and puzzled at the reticence of the letters.

Flora’s face, set in its sad composure, told him nothing of her feelings.

But the day following brought him enlightenment from Flora herself.

They were sent out for a walk together.

“Take her for a walk, dear Owen,” said the Canon solicitously. “Flora is pale, and cold. She has shut herself up too much of late. Go, my child, I shall do very well, and can find only too much to occupy me. Enjoy the fresh air.”

Flora made no protestations of inability to enjoy herself, nor any assumption of indispensability at home. It was the Canon, again, who suggested an errand to a distant cottage, and she acquiesced without comment.

It was a cold, grey day, with swiftly moving masses of cloud and a chill in the wind. Flora and Owen walked quickly, and at first neither spoke. Then Flora said:

“How much, exactly, were you a friend of David’s?”

His own surprise made Quentillian realize afresh how very seldom it was that Flora initiated any topic of a personal nature.

“We were not intimate,” he replied.

“It was more the time that you spent with us here, when you were a little boy, than anything else, that established a relationship between you?”

“I suppose it was.”

“I think you are very much interested in people, and Lucilla says that you are very observant,” said Flora, smiling a little. “Would you mind telling me, quite dispassionately, if David was popular with other men—the officers in his regiment, for instance?”

He did not understand at what her question aimed, but replied with unhesitating candour.

“I should say he was very popular. He was a good sportsman, and everyone liked him, although as far as I know he wasn’t a man of intimate friendships. That type isn’t.”

“No. You see, Owen, there have been no letters from people who were in India with him, although you say he was popular. Only just those few lines from the Colonel. And I was afraid before—and I’m afraid now—” She stopped.

“Of what?”

“That it wasn’t dysentery, or anything like that. That they’re keeping the truth from us out of pity, or to save some scandal. I—I can’t get it out of my mind, Owen.”

He heard her with something that was not altogether surprise. Subconsciously, he felt that his own uneasiness had been only dormant.

“Have you anything beyond intuition, to go upon?”

“No.”

“Why have you told me?”

He felt certain that she had not spoken merely in order to be reassured, nor in order to find relief. Speaking was no relief to Flora, so far as Owen could see.

“I want you to try and find out definitely.”

“Yes. And supposing I do, supposing that what you fear is true—” he hesitated.

“That David took his own life?” said Flora, shuddering. “Then, don’t you see, Owen, I shall have to tell Father—or else to make it absolutely certain that no one will ever tell him.”

“You can’t,” said Owen gently.

“But I must,” she told him, with the same intensity. “He’s had a great deal to bear already, and this would be worse than anything. Suicide is a mortal sin. Bodily separation, one can resign oneself to—he is resigning himself, poor Father, to separation from nearly all those whom he loves,—but suicide would mean eternal separation. It would be worse than anything—the loss of David’s soul.”

“I see.”

Quentillian did indeed see.

“Val, and Adrian, and David—they’ve all gone away from him,” said Flora. “Only he knows there is another life, so much more real and enduring than this one, to which he looks. It means everything to him. If David did do—that—then the hope of meeting him again, in eternity, is gone.”

Quentillian felt the force of her low-spoken, anguished statement.

“You are taking it for granted that a suspicion—which after all, rests on very little indeed—is true.”

“You see, if I am to safeguard my father from this thing, I can’t very well afford to wait and do nothing, just because there’s quite a big chance that it isn’t true at all. The chance that it is true, may be infinitesimal—the hundredth chance, if you like—but it’s that which I’ve got to think about, not the other. Optimism doesn’t carry one far enough, in preparing a line of defence.”

“I agree with you.”

“I don’t think that either you or I are optimists, Owen,” said Flora, faintly smiling.

“No.”

“That’s why I want you to help me. Can you make enquiries at any of the headquarter places in London where they might know something?”

“I can try.”

“Thank you very much,” said Flora, as though his unenthusiastic assent had closed the subject.

They went along the muddy road in silence.

It was from no sense that it was necessary to break it, that Quentillian spoke again at last.

“Will Lucilla come back to England at once?”

“I don’t think so. She promised to stay till the spring. You know Val has another little boy? I wish we could see them, but Father will never really be happy about Val, I’m afraid. He forgave her, long ago, but he doesn’t forget things, ever, I don’t think.”

“I don’t consider that the Canon had anything to forgive,” said Quentillian in tones of finality.

“But he does.”

If Quentillian had expected a certain meed of recognition for the magnanimity of his point of view, he was not destined to be gratified. Flora spoke rather as one giving utterance to an obvious platitude.

“Is Val happy?”

“Very. She has exactly what she always really wanted. Sometimes they have a servant, but most of the time she does everything herself, and has occasional help. She is so happy with the two little boys, too, all her letters are about them, and about the house, and all they’re doing to improve it. She’s got the life that she was really meant for, and after all, isn’t that what makes happiness?”

“I suppose it is. She was meant for the primitive things, you think?”

“Lucilla always said so. There is the cottage, Owen. Will you wait outside, or come in?”

“I should like to come in with you.”

Life was inartistic, Quentillian reflected whimsically, while Flora delivered her father’s message to a middle-aged woman in an apron.

To accord with all literary conventions, there should have been a sick child in the cottage, and Flora’s tender soothing of its fretfulness should have proved a revelation of the unfulfilled maternal instinct within her.

But there was no sick child to provide a clou for Quentillian’s observations in psychology, and he was by no means assured of Flora’s powers of soothing. Rather would she urge the silence of resignation.

He was convinced that never in her life had Flora Morchard been the centre of a pretty picture. That her personality seldom dominated any scene was not, he felt, from any conscious effacement, but from an innate and instinctive withdrawal of her forces to some unseen objective, to her infinitely worth while. He reflected with dismay on his own undertaking to make enquiries concerning the death of David Morchard. But he did not think that Flora, whatever the result of the enquiries, would be dismayed. Dismay implied mental disarray, a quality of taken-abackness. Flora, as she would herself have told him, was strong in a strength not her own.

They walked back together almost in silence.

“Your little expedition did Flora good,” the Canon told Quentillian that evening. “I am grateful to you, dear fellow, very grateful. Let us see something of you still, from Stear. It means a great deal to us both. There must not be ‘good-bye’ between us, save for the beautiful old meaning of the word, ‘God by you.’ God by you always, dear Owen.”

Quentillian went to London, made no discoveries at all, and wrote to Flora.

She replied, thanking him, in the briefest of notes. A week later he received another letter from her.

“MY DEAR OWEN:

“The Indian mail came in yesterday, and brought me a letter from David, written a week before he died. He asked me to break it to my father that a Major Carey, in his regiment, was on his way home to take divorce proceedings against his wife, citing David as co-respondent. David asked me in the letter to do anything I could for Mrs. Carey, as she is by herself, with no relations in England. The case was to be undefended, and David had decided to leave the Army and come to England as soon as possible to marry Mrs. Carey. I gather that he was very unhappy, especially at having to leave the regiment. I still do not know whether he found a dreadful solution to the whole question, in taking his own life.

“Mrs. Carey has written to Father, a strange note, which he showed me. She says nothing of the divorce proceedings, but only writes as a great friend of David’s, imploring to be allowed to see us. Naturally, Father is only too anxious to see her, and as she says that she is on her way to Scotland at once, we are coming to London on the 10th so as to meet her.

“I have told Father nothing whatever of David’s letter to me. I cannot imagine that Mrs. Carey will want to make the facts known to him, but I shall be able to judge better when I have seen her, which I have decided to do, by myself, before the appointment with Father.

“I can arrange this a great deal better with your help than without it, therefore will you come and see us on the evening we arrive—Thursday the 10th, at about six o’clock, Carrowby’s Hotel?

“Please destroy this letter.

“Yours sincerely,
 “FLORA MORCHARD.”

Quentillian, as he read Flora’s unvarnished statements, felt a sensation as of being appalled.

He could not believe that Flora, fanatically single-minded as her determination to shield her father from the knowledge of the truth might be, had any conception of the difficulties that probably lay before her, and he asked himself also whether she had in any degree realized what the consequences must be to the Canon, far more than to herself, of a deception that should break down half way.

His absolute conviction of Flora’s inflexibility, and his own strong sense of the impertinence, in both the proper and the colloquial sense of the word, of offering unasked advice, were not enough to restrain him from the mental composition of several eloquent and elaborate expositions of opinion. But they sufficed to restrain him from transferring the eloquence to a sheet of notepaper.

He went to Carrowby’s Hotel, to keep the appointment summarily made by Flora.

“You dear man!”

The Canon’s exclamation of pleasure rang through the dingy hotel sitting-room in which Quentillian found them. He always showed the same pleasure in seeing Owen, and Owen’s old sense of inadequacy had insensibly given place to a rather remorseful gratitude.

“Is this the doing of Flora? She told me that she should notify you of our coming, but it is good to meet with a friend’s face so early. Our stay is to be a very brief one. I have to return home for the Sunday. I cannot leave all in Clover’s hands. Besides, I trust there will be no need. You know the errand on which we are come?”

“I told him in my letter,” said Flora.

“This lady, this Mrs. Carey, had seen much of our dear fellow in India and her letter is full of feeling—full of feeling. She heard nothing of our tragedy until she landed in England. It seems that she had been in ill-health for some time, she writes of complete prostration, and is on her way to Scotland now. So you will understand our hasty journey hither. Has it not indeed been with us, ‘Ask and ye shall receive’? Flora, here, knows what my yearning has been for one word with those who knew him, who had been with him recently. And behold! it has been given unto me, ‘full measure, heaped up, pressed down and running over’.”

The Canon leant back. He looked very tired and old.

“Do you see her tomorrow morning, sir?”

“We go to her, Owen. She is good enough to receive us on Saturday morning, and I understand that she leaves that evening. Tomorrow I have a conference in the afternoon, but the morning is our own.”

He gazed wistfully at Owen.

“I had thought of a memorial window to the beloved David, and this is an opportunity which may not come again. I have the name of a place to which I half thought of going, if it be not too trying for little Flora.”

“Let me accompany you,” said Quentillian.

It was evidently what the Canon wished.

“Will you, dear lad? I own that I should be glad of your arm, aye, and your presence. Flora is overwrought and overtired.”

She did indeed look very ill, not at all to Quentillian’s surprise.

“She has been taking too much thought for me, dear child,” said the Canon, Quentillian could not help thinking with more truth than he realized. “I wish Flora to take some rest. Let the expedition tomorrow be yours and mine, Owen. Tell me, my daughter, what time am I free?”

“Tomorrow morning, till twelve o’clock. Your conference is at two.”

“Flora is my deputy secretary,” said the Canon smiling. “I trust it all to her, and her memory is unfailing. She is indeed my right hand.”

“Will you come at ten o’clock tomorrow, Owen, and start from here?” said Flora abruptly.

He assented, determined to obtain an opportunity of speaking to her alone. If he was to assist Flora in a scheme of concealment against which he inwardly revolted strongly, he must at least know of what that scheme consisted. His indignation waxed in proportion to his anxiety, until Flora said to him with deliberation:

“Ought we to keep you any longer, Owen? I’ll ring for the lift.” The suggestion took them both out of the room, and she closed the door after her.

“What is it you’re doing?” said Quentillian, his urgency too great for a choice of words.

She leant against the passage wall, white and rather breathless, but spoke low and very distinctly, as though to impress her facts upon him.

“Listen—I want you to be quite clear about it. The appointment with Mrs. Carey is for tomorrow—Friday morning. I’m going to her house. I’m certain from her letter, that she’s not a woman to be trusted. I don’t know why she wants to see us, but I think it’s to tell us things—things about David. I shall know when I’ve seen her.”

“But your father thinks the appointment is for Saturday?”

“I told him it was. I wrote the letter to arrange it.”

“And how are you to prevent his going there on Saturday?”

“She leaves for Scotland on Friday night.”

“You know that for certain?”

“Of course I do, Owen. One doesn’t leave these things to chance. But I shall telephone on Saturday and find out if she’s really left.”

“I still don’t understand altogether. How can you explain to the Canon that this lady isn’t there, when he goes by appointment to see her?”

“I shall have made a mistake. I’m keeping his engagements written down for him. And I shall have written down this engagement for Saturday, instead of for Friday. He will go exactly one day too late.”

“Flora, you can’t do it.”

She lifted tired eyes to his face, overwrought to the point of fanaticism.

“Don’t waste time. Only tell me if I can count on you. All I want you to do is to keep Father out, with you, tomorrow morning. I shall be at Mrs. Carey’s at half-past ten and I promise to be back here before one o’clock.”

“Suppose this lady is not what you think her, and you find that she will be—discreet—is your father to be disappointed of his hopes of seeing her?”

“I may be able to arrange something. Perhaps she’d put off going to Scotland, and see him on Saturday after all. It would be all right then, wouldn’t it? Or I might even be able to tell her the whole thing,” said Flora wistfully. “It isn’t very likely, though.”

He did not think that it was.

“You see, you didn’t see her original letter, and I did. It was the letter of a very hysterical person. She might say almost anything, I imagine and—well, there’s a good deal that mustn’t be said, isn’t there?”

It was incontrovertible, but Quentillian said roughly:

“I detest maneuvering, it’s utterly unworthy of you. All this juggling with dates and letters——”

“It’s no use doing things by halves,” said Flora stubbornly. “Yes or no, Owen, are you going to back me up if necessary?”

“If I say no, will it deter you from going through with this insane performance?”

“Of course it won’t.” She actually smiled. “What would be the sense of making up one’s mind if it’s to be unmade again just because one’s friends don’t agree with one?”

“Very well.” He shrugged his shoulders as one in desperation.

She evidently accepted it as the assent, however ungracious, that he meant it to be.

“Thank you very much,” said Flora with brief finality.

(iii)

FLORA followed Mrs. Carey’s maid upstairs, feeling as though the beating of her heart were causing each breath she drew to crowd thickly upon the next one.

Mrs. Carey’s house—she supposed it was Mrs. Carey’s house—was a very tiny one indeed, and looked tinier by reason of the number of pictures, draperies, and flowers that covered every available corner of the steep staircase and the small landing.

The drawing-room was small, too, and so dark that the maid turned on the rose-shaded electric lights as she ushered Flora into the empty room.

“Mrs. Carey isn’t down yet. I’ll tell her you’re here, m’m.”

“Mrs. Carey is expecting me. Please say that it is Miss Morchard.”

The maid went away.

“Unpunctual,” reflected Flora. “She said half-past ten.”

She gazed round the room, which confirmed the impression of Mrs. Carey’s personality that Flora had already received from her pale mauve notepaper, her methods of expressing herself in writing, and that which she knew of her relations with David Morchard.

Nearly everything in the room was rose-colour, except the walls, which were grey, and laden with sketches, brackets, and a shelf on which stood innumerable framed and unframed photographs, nearly all of them of men.

A minute writing-table, set corner ways, overflowed with papers, and more photographs, including one that Flora recognized instantly, although it had never been sent to St. Gwenllian.

The chair in front of the table supported a number of illustrated papers.

“Untidy,” was Flora’s next verdict.

She had resolutely closed the avenues of her mind to emotion and speculation alike. The habits of observation, which she mentioned in private spiritual consultation with her father as her own tendency towards a lack of charity, she knew subconsciously to possess a steadying effect.

A quantity of cigarette ash in a small receptacle, presumably placed there on the previous evening, and a general atmosphere of unopened windows, did not serve to modify Flora’s already unenthusiastic judgments.

Neither did Mrs. Carey’s delay in making her appearance.

When she at last came in, it was difficult to see what could possibly have delayed her, since she had apparently only stepped out of bed into a wadded silk kimono, a lace boudoir cap, and fur-bordered bedroom slippers.

She looked younger than Flora had expected her to be, and her little pallid face was pretty enough, with violet semi-circles under big, light blue eyes and a general air of fragility. Although nearly as tall as Flora herself, she was slight enough to produce an effect of daintiness, the adjective that Flora immediately felt certain would appeal to her most.

A short, thick plait of fair hair fell over her shoulders, and a certain babyish plaintiveness of utterance made Flora think of Olga Duffle.

“I’m sure you’re David’s sister,” said Mrs. Carey, to which proof of intuition her visitor offered no reply, thinking the fact sufficiently self-evident.

“Oh, do sit down. You must forgive me coming in like this, but I’m not strong, and I arrived worn out after an awful voyage—and then to get this news! Do you smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

“Do you mind if I do? I smoke too much, but my nerves are in an awful state. A doctor friend of mine—the dearest thing—made me promise faithfully never to inhale, but I’m afraid I do. It was the ship’s doctor, on the way home, as a matter of fact. There were one or two nice men on board, but the women were dreadful. Miss Morchard, I should think other women generally confide in you, don’t they, and like you most awfully. Now, I’m not enormously popular with other women. I don’t mean that I haven’t got women-friends, devoted ones, who’d do anything in the world for me—but most of my very best pals have been men. It’s funny, isn’t it? Your brother was one of my dearest friends.”

The blue eyes looked warily at Flora.

“That’s why I felt I had to see you, and oh! you are so like him! It’s hardly like talking to a stranger at all!”

It certainly was not, Flora reflected.

“I feel I’m so dreadfully in the dark—I know nothing. Only the awful, awful fact. When I got the cable—it was cabled to me, by a dear friend at Government House—when I read it, I simply didn’t believe it. I said, ‘It can’t be true.’ But it was.”

Flora did not feel it incumbent upon her to reply.

“When your father got my letter, I daresay he was astonished, but I’m frightfully impulsive, Miss Morchard, and I felt I must know more or I should go mad. That’s why I begged you to let me see you. I’m a thoroughly unconventional woman, as you may perhaps have guessed, and I always act on impulse.”

Flora looked at the frightened, furtive little face, and wondered what purpose and what concealment lay behind the flood of words.

“I’m going to be perfectly frank with you, because I feel I can trust you. May I call you Flora? My name is Maisie—a silly little name, isn’t it, but my friends all say it suits me. I don’t know why. Tell me, did David write to you about me? He said he was going to, but it was such a—such a short time before——”

Mrs. Carey’s tongue moistened her lips as though they were dry.

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever lived abroad, but if you haven’t, you don’t know what the East is like for people who have to live there. There’s a frightful amount of slander and gossip going on, and people put a wicked construction on all sorts of innocent things. It’s awful. It used to make me simply miserable. You see, live and let live has always been my motto. I like to go my own way, and have my own friends, and not do any harm to anybody, but simply be happy in my own little way. After all, it’s what God meant for all of us, isn’t it? But in India one can’t do that. My dear, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like. I went out when I was awfully young—I was married at twenty—and I know for a fact that the most beastly things have been said about me. You see, I feel I can tell you this quite frankly, Flora, because of your being David’s favourite sister. I know you’ll understand, and that I can trust you.”

Again that anxious, furtive glance was shot at her from under Mrs. Carey’s long lashes.

“I’ve had heaps of men friends, of course—especially in the Regiment. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, and own up that one or two of them got rather silly, and fancied themselves in love with me. That wasn’t my fault, was it? I just wanted to be friends, you know. A nice woman can do such a lot for young men. I couldn’t help it—possibly—if they went and fancied themselves in love with me. Now could I? But would you believe it, people—it was mostly women, I must say, and some of them actually called themselves my friends—went and invented the most disgusting lies about me. Out of jealousy, you know. I was a good ten years younger than any of them, as it happened, and you’d have thought the Colonel’s wife, or anyone like that, might have wanted to mother me a little bit. (I lost my own mother when I was only fourteen, and had a rotten time at home.) But instead of that, my dear, instead of that, they simply spread these filthy stories about me and all my best friends. However, I don’t want to go into all that. It was soon after I first went out, and of course nobody who really knew me believed for an instant that there was anything in it. They heard something about it at Government House, you know, and the Governor was simply furious, I believe. My friend in the Secretariat told me about it. The Governor said that Mrs. Carey was the only real lady in the place, as well as being the prettiest woman in India. Of course, that may have been nonsense, because I happen to know that he did like me most awfully—personally, I mean—but I know I was most awfully touched at his taking up the cudgels for me like that. It showed what the people who really mattered thought of me, didn’t it, and after all, the Governor of a place does represent the King, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Flora.

It was the first appeal to which she had felt able to give any assent.

“You said that so like David!” cried Mrs. Carey clasping her hands together. “We were the greatest friends, and he used to come to me about everything. I used to tell him to marry....”

Another pause, and another look.

“I always want my young-men friends to marry. That just shows, doesn’t it, what nonsense it is for anyone to talk as though there were anything wrong about it? I don’t know whether your brother ever hinted anything to you, in his letters, about any horrid gossip. Between ourselves, he used to get angry, I know, at the things that were sometimes said, and of course he knew that I wasn’t—well, very happy. You’re not married, I know, so perhaps you won’t understand what it means to a woman, especially a very sensitive one, which I am, to have a husband who is jealous. I’m not blaming Fred, exactly, I suppose he can’t help it, and he was madly in love with me when we married. Of course, I was much too young and ignorant of life to marry, but I had an awfully unhappy home, and if it hadn’t been Fred, it would have been somebody else—men were always pestering me, somehow. Besides, people made mischief between us. How people can be wicked enough to come between husband and wife, I can’t think! I’ve been through hell once or twice in my life, I can tell you!”

Looking at the fear and the craftiness and the sensuality written on Maisie Carey’s small, ravaged face, Flora could believe it without difficulty.

“I don’t really know why I’m telling you all this, exactly. It’s not like me. I’m terribly reserved, really. But you’ve got such an awfully nice face, somehow, and you’re David’s sister. I can’t tell you how fond I was of David—we were just tremendous chums. It upset me awfully, that he should die in that sudden way.”

She began to cry in a convulsive, spasmodic way.

Flora still remained silent.

“I wish you’d tell me if he ever wrote anything to you about me,” sobbed Mrs. Carey.

In the midst of the tears which seemed to be really beyond her own control, Flora caught a glimpse as of a terrible anxiety. She suddenly knew that in the answer to that last, sobbed-out question lay, for Mrs. Carey, the crux of their interview.

“He did write,” said Flora. “But what he wrote is safe with me. It will never go any further.”

The figure in the gay silk kimono seemed to cower further back into the armchair, but there was no self-betraying exclamation.

“I suppose he told you about Fred and me?”

“And about himself too,” said Flora.

“Men are all alike! Why did he want to tell you?”

“So that I could tell my father and sister. David was afraid of Father.”

“Your father knows?” This time the note of alarm was undisguised.

“No. The letter was only found and posted after the ones that told us of David’s death. And I have told my father nothing.”

Mrs. Carey broke into vehement, hysterical speech.

“There’s nothing to tell! You people at home make such mountains out of molehills. I swear to you that there was nothing between us, that I never——”

Flora interrupted her.

“He told me everything,” she repeated. “He told me that the case would be undefended, and that he was coming home to marry you. So you see I know.”

“You! What can you, who’ve never married, never seen anything of life, know of things? You see evil where none exists—you’re like all these good and holy people ... intolerant....” Tears poured unchecked down her face, making streaks across the white powder. “You don’t even begin to know what I’ve gone through. My husband is a beast—a beast. You don’t know what that means.”

She flung herself backwards, almost prone, and wept hysterically.

“What are you going to do?” said Flora.

“Kill myself!”

The rhetorical answer came almost automatically.

Flora waited for a moment and then said very gently:

“As you say, I don’t know anything about these things, but perhaps you would tell me what you want. We might think of some way of making things better. And you can see for yourself that your secret—and David’s—is safe with me. I’ve deceived my father, sooner than let him guess. I don’t think he need ever know, now.”

“Why don’t you want him to know?” said Mrs. Carey with sudden curiosity that seemed to check her crying.

“It would make him very unhappy. He was proud of David and he thinks that David had a career before him. Perhaps you’ve read in books,” said Flora, speaking as though to a child, “about people thinking death is better than dishonour. Well, my father is like that.”

“He’s a parson, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Carey shrugged her shoulders.

“Where is your husband now?” Flora enquired. She felt that she could ask this woman questions without fear or rebuff, but she thought that it would be for her to disentangle the truth from the false in Mrs. Carey’s replies.

“Fred’s in Scotland. He’s staying with his mother. She’s a beastly old woman and I hate her. If she’d been a decent sort, you’d think she’d have used her influence to put things right between us, now wouldn’t you? But she’s never let Fred alone ever since we married. Always telling him tales about me, and saying I’m extravagant, and a flirt, and wanting to know why I’ve never had a baby. It’s not my fault if I’ve got rotten health, now is it? I’ve always been delicate. I’m sure I only wish I had got a child. It might have made Fred nicer to me, and I should have had something to care for.”

She began to cry again.

“I’m sure I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Perhaps you think I’m mad.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry for you,” said Flora truthfully.

“You’re a dear.” Mrs. Carey dropped the hostility out of her voice abruptly. “No one knows what I’ve gone through. And now about David—it’s simply awful!”

“Did you really mean to marry David, after your divorce?”

“I’d better tell you the whole story, I suppose,” said Mrs. Carey. She dried her eyes and her voice insensibly hardened from self-pity into tones of satisfaction.

“I suppose I’ve always been attractive to men. I can’t help it, after all. And I daresay I’ve played the fool, in my time—in fact I don’t deny it. But David and I were simply tremendous friends, to begin with. He was frightfully sorry for me, too. Everybody knew that Fred was simply hateful to me, and made a scene if I so much as went out riding with another man. He quite liked your brother, though, at first, I will say that for him. We used to have him to dinner pretty often, and one of the subalterns to make a fourth, and play Bridge. Well, I never guessed that your brother did more than just like me as a great friend, as heaps of men did—how could I? I used to advise him to marry, often and often. Some nice girl at home, who’d come out and look after him. Those boys all drink more than is good for them, out there, if they’ve no wife to look after them. And David used to talk nonsense about having no use for girls, and having met his ideal too late, but of course I never took it seriously. Heaps of men say things like that to one, now don’t they? We used to go out riding together a good deal, and of course I danced with him. (That’s another of the ways in which Fred is so frightfully selfish. He can’t dance himself ever since he was wounded in the war, so he hates me to.) Then people began to say the usual horrid things. The women out there are all cats, and besides, a good many of them wanted David for themselves. I didn’t take any notice. I think it’s so much more dignified not to, don’t you? As I said to the Colonel’s wife, when she had the impertinence to speak to me about it, I never have taken any notice of gossip, and I’m not going to begin now. I simply go my own way, and let people say what they choose. It doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got horrible minds. It’s themselves that are hurt by it, I always think, not me. But I think women are much braver and more unconventional than men, don’t you? David minded ever so much more than I did, when he found people were talking about us. Well, things were going from bad to worse between Fred and me, and one night he was so perfectly hateful to me that I got frightened. He was—not drunk, but not altogether sober. And I ran into the compound and down the road to David’s bungalow. He shared it with another man, but the other man was away shooting. You see, I was so frightened and upset that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just felt I must go to someone who’d take care of me.”

Mrs. Carey swallowed, as though something in her throat were hurting her, and lit another cigarette with a hand that trembled.

“It was a frightfully imprudent thing to do, I suppose, but I’ve never pretended to be a particularly prudent woman. I daresay I should have been much happier if I’d been less impulsive, all my life, but after all, one can’t change one’s nature, can one? Besides, I was nearly out of my mind. Fred came to find me next morning. I was far too miserable and terrified to go back to him that night. We had scene after scene, after that, and he threatened me with divorce proceedings.”

She glanced at her motionless auditor.

“I may have been a careless fool, and I’ll go as far as to say that I’ve flirted with other men, but it was wicked of Fred to think of such a thing as divorce—to ruin my reputation, and spoil David’s career.”

“Why was the case to be undefended?” said Flora steadily.

“Why—why, don’t you see, when it all came to a crisis, I told David how utterly wretched my whole life was, and how I couldn’t bear it and should kill myself, and we had to talk things over, and see what could be done with Fred, who was like a madman. And then it all came out—I mean David said I was the only woman he could ever care for, and if I was free, wouldn’t I marry him, and let him try to make up to me for everything.”

“Why was the case to be undefended?”

“It would make less of a scandal if it was all done quietly. I—I didn’t feel I could face the other.”

In the truth of that last assertion, Flora could believe absolutely.

“I think I know the rest,” she said. “David was going to send in his papers, and come home to England as soon as possible after you and Major Carey, and you’d promised to marry him when the decree had been made absolute.”

“How do you know those legal terms?” said Mrs. Carey, pouting like a child that is trying to show displeasure.

Flora did not pursue the irrelevance. She was following a chain of thought in her own mind.

“David was in love with this woman. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written and asked me to do anything I could for her. As for leaving the case undefended—well, they probably hadn’t got a defence to put up. He meant to marry her—probably wanted to marry her. Besides he’d have felt that he owed it to her. And though he was afraid of Father, and very unhappy about sending in his papers, and though he may have had glimpses of what she really is—David wasn’t the sort to let her down. He didn’t kill himself.”

The certainty came to Flora with a rush of relief so profound that she could almost have thanked little Mrs. Carey for unwittingly bringing her to it.

It was characteristic of her that, instead, she glanced at her watch and said:

“I can only stay another twenty minutes, and we shall probably not meet again. Are you going to Scotland tonight?”

“Indeed I am. Fred is there now, at his mother’s, telling her all sorts of horrible things about me, I suppose. They’ve both written to me.”

“What is your husband going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She began to cry again. “His mother, for once in her life, wants to patch things up between us. She’s one of your religious people, and she thinks divorce is awful.”

“I don’t know whether a divorce is still possible, now that David——”

Mrs. Carey broke into a sort of howl that, in its reminiscence of a beaten animal, made Flora feel sick.

“That’s just it—Fred is a beast! He thinks there were other people—other men—as well.”

“Oh,” said Flora, and shuddered violently.

“You’ve been rather a dear, so I don’t mind telling you that your brother is out of it now, whatever happened. Oh, I don’t know what’ll happen. I never cared for anybody like I did for David—never. I was ready to go through anything for him, and we could have started fresh somewhere, and no one would have thought anything of it. People aren’t so narrow-minded as they used to be. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved!”

Flora felt no inclination to point out to the unhappy woman the inconsistency of her various statements.

She even found it easy enough to believe that Maisie Carey for the moment thought herself to be speaking the truth when she said that David was the only man she had ever loved.

“I’m sorry for you,” she said gently. “And I’m grateful to you, because you’ve taken a great weight off my mind. My brother asked me to do anything I could for you. Is there anything?”

“I don’t know what you could do, I’m sure. It isn’t even as though you were married. Not that you haven’t been sweet to me, listening like this. You do believe in me, don’t you? Even if you hear beastly stories about me, ever, you’ll know they aren’t true, won’t you?”

She put out a hand that still trembled, to Flora, but she went on speaking rapidly, as though not daring to wait for an assent that might not come.

“You’re awfully like David, in some ways, you know. It’s been a comfort to see you. Don’t tell your father about my troubles. Just say I was a friend of David’s, you know. I’m glad he didn’t come with you. I hate parsons, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, and I’m so frightfully nervous and upset that I might have said anything. I wish you could have seen Fred—he always says I haven’t got any decent women-friends. Perhaps you could have made him give me another chance.”

“Don’t you think he will?”

“How do I know? He’s written me a horrid letter, and pages and pages of cant from my mother-in-law. I believe if I promised to live at their hateful place, right away in Scotland, and keep within my allowance, and never have any fun at all, Fred would chuck the army and manage the estate for his mother. Can you see me in thick boots and a billycock hat, trudging up and down those hills to go and carry tracts to some wretched old woman in a cottage?”

She laughed melodramatically.

“No,” said Flora, “I can’t see you doing that. But I shouldn’t think you’d have to. Couldn’t you come here, for part of the year?”

“I suppose I could. I don’t know. Fred got this house to please me, when we were first married. He’d have done anything for me, then. I little knew what a life he was going to lead me later on!”

Flora rose.

“I’ve got to go. I will burn the letter that David wrote me, about you. Only one person knows what was in it, besides myself, and he will never repeat it.”

“Was that your father?”

“No, oh, no. My father mustn’t know, ever.”

Flora paused for a moment, then judged that it would be useless to make any appeal to Mrs. Carey’s discretion. For her own sake, she might keep silence as to her relationship with David Morchard, and a fresh emotional disturbance would eventually displace the episode—to her, it could be no more—from her mind.

Mrs. Carey looked at her curiously.

“Of course, I remember you told me that your father didn’t know. Then are you engaged?”

“No,” said Flora, colouring slightly.

“All men are beasts—you’re quite right to have nothing to do with them. I’ve had such a rotten time, what with Fred’s jealousy, and other men never letting me alone, that I sometimes wish I’d stayed an old maid, like you,” said Mrs. Carey.

Flora recognized the impulse that sought to inflict a scratch, where Mrs. Carey’s self-revelation had left her vanity disturbed with the instinctive fear that she had not been taken at her own valuation.

She said good-bye to her.

“I’ll let you know what happens,” Mrs. Carey promised. “I feel you really do care, you know. I shall think of you when I’m taking that horrid journey tonight all the way to Scotland. Perhaps I really will settle down there, if Fred is willing to make it up, and if he lets me have a decent allowance, and part of the year over here.”

She no longer looked desperate, and she bent over the banisters and waved to Flora with the little handkerchief that was still drenched by the tears she had been shedding.

Flora did not suppose that she should ever hear from her. Impressions made upon Mrs. Carey seemed to be transient affairs.

She was conscious of nothing so much as of extreme physical fatigue, and the intense relief of her new certainty that David had not, after all, sought the last desperate remedy. She could be certain of that, now.

“Perhaps Owen won’t understand why I’m so positive of that now,” she reflected. “But after all, I knew David. She counted on him, and he’d promised to marry her. David would never have failed her deliberately—it wasn’t in him. And he was taken away from committing a frightful sin. Besides, who knows how much he repented, poor boy?”

Within a few yards of the hotel, Flora met Quentillian.

He turned and accompanied her to the door.

“David didn’t take his own life, Owen. It was what they said—he must have been taken ill suddenly.”

“You know for certain?”

“For certain.”

He told her that he understood her relief, but his next words were:

“And do you still think you were right, about going alone to this woman?”

“Whether I was right or not, I’m thankful I did. She would have broken my father’s heart. She was a sort of—emotion-monger. She’d have spared him nothing.”

“She spared you nothing, then, Flora?”

“It’s different, for me. I would do anything in the world, for my father’s sake. That’s my only excuse, possibly, for deceiving him.”

“Do you want excuses?”

“No, I don’t. You’re right,” she said gravely. “I’ve planned it all deliberately, and I’ve got to see it through.”

“I think you’re wrong, all along the line, and I want to talk it over with you. It will be a bitter disappointment to the Canon to be told that he has missed seeing Mrs. Carey.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re going to leave it at that?”

“Yes, more than ever. Owen, when do you go to Stear?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Then could you travel down with us tomorrow? We go by the three o’clock train. I think it may do him good, to have you, and you see, he’ll be thinking that the whole expedition has been a failure. It will be easier for both of us, if you’re there.”

“Very well, I’ll come.”

They parted, and Flora went to seek her father. Except from a certain curiosity, it could not be said that Quentillian looked forward to an agreeable journey.

By the time that he joined Canon Morchard and his daughter at the railway station, he was beginning to feel as though the whole of the involved deception perpetrated with such a conviction of righteousness by Flora, must have been a figment of imagination. One glance at the Canon’s sombre and pallid face dispelled the illusion.

Flora looked pallid also, but her expression was one of rapt intensity, as though only her own strange vision, that Quentillian felt to be so singularly perverted, were before her. She had, undeniably, shielded her father from knowledge that must have appalled him, and in that security, remained calm.

The Canon, out of his lesser awareness, had not, however, remained calm at all.

“I have been angry, Owen,” he admitted, as they paced the platform together, at the Canon’s own invitation. “My disappointment has been very bitter. This lady, this Mrs. Carey, the friend of my dear boy David, left for Scotland last night. I went to her house this morning, only to find her gone. Flora, whom I trusted, had made a mistake of incredible carelessness. I could not have believed it, in a matter which must touch us all so nearly, which lay so close to my own heart. Poor child, she has been highly tried of late, and I have thought her looking ill. I should not have trusted to her accuracy. Lucilla, who has been my right hand, my secretary ever since her childhood, could never have failed me thus. I forgot that her sister was younger, unaccustomed to the task, less to be relied upon. But it has been a cruel disappointment, and I vented my first grief upon the culprit. Is there no stage of the journey, Owen, when one can see the undisciplined impulse driven underfoot, the hasty word bridled? I, who have striven all my life, I have again shown anger and violence—to my own child!”

The Canon’s peculiar predilection for making an amateur confessor of Quentillian, was by force of repetition ceasing to seem anything but natural.

Quentillian said: “Flora looks overwrought, sir,” and inwardly hoped that the train would arrive shortly.

“Aye, poor Flora! She was David’s especial favourite, his best correspondent. This stroke has fallen heavily upon Flora, Owen. And I, who should have made all allowance, I turned against her! In my sharp disappointment, I uttered those strong expressions that come back to one, when the moment’s passion has cooled, as they must have sounded to the unhappy sinner by whom they were provoked.”

It was the same piteous round of self-reproach, remorse and profound depression to which Owen had so frequently listened. He hoped that he might be of some assistance, however, incomprehensibly to himself, in listening yet once again.

“I have written to Mrs. Carey. She must indeed have thought my behaviour strange, ungrateful, unnatural even. That matters little enough, yet it adds its feather weight to the burden—its feather weight to the burden. That I should have appeared careless, indifferent, where news of David was concerned! I, who would have given my heart’s blood, for one hour’s intercourse with him since he left us for the last time! Ah, well, it does not bear dwelling upon.”

Nevertheless, the Canon dwelt upon it until it became necessary to rejoining Flora and enter the train.

During the journey he remained silent, with a profound and unhappy silence. His manner towards his daughter was peculiarly gentle and melancholy.

Presently he leant back in the corner, the sad lines of his face relaxing, and slept.

Flora spoke to Quentillian in a low voice.

“I’m so glad he’s asleep. Last night I heard him walking up and down his room for such a long while.”

“He is very much distressed,” said Quentillian severely.

“I know.” She acquiesced apathetically in the truth of the statement.

“Do you know that he has written to Mrs. Carey?”

“Yes.”

“How are you going to prevent her replying, and exposing the fact that you have seen her?”

Flora whitened perceptibly, but she answered him with sudden spirit.

“You have no right to question me, Owen, or to demand explanations from me in that tone.”

“I have this right, that you have made me a passive partner in your extraordinary schemes.”

Owen, too, was conscious of a rising anger.

“I feel like a traitor to your father, Flora. What are you going to do next?”

“I am going to see it through,” said Flora doggedly. “At least you will admit that to do a thing like this by halves, is a great deal worse than useless. I have saved my father from what must have broken his heart.”

“You have done evil that good may come,” he quoted grimly.

“If you like to put it so.” Flora was inexorable.

“He has suffered too much already.”

“You mock your own God,” said Quentillian, with sudden, low vehemence. “You profess to believe in Him, to trust Him, and yet you deceive and manoeuvre and plot, sooner than leave your father to his dealings. I have small belief in a personal God, Flora, but I can see no justification in endeavouring madly to stand between another soul, and life.”

She gazed at him piteously.

“Do you think I am not unhappy—that I have not been torn in two? He was angry, Owen, when he thought I had made a mistake about the appointment, and oh, the relief of it! I should have welcomed it if he had hit me—I deserved it all, and far more besides. If I am doing wrong, I am suffering for it.”

Quentillian, looking at her haggard, tragic face, felt sure that she spoke literal truth.

“When does Lucilla come home?” he suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. Soon, I hope.”

Quentillian hoped so too. It seemed to him that only Lucilla’s normality could adjust to any sort of balance the mental atmosphere of St. Gwenllian.

Flora gazed at her father.

“Think what it would have been to him to know, now, that David had sinned, even that he contemplated going through the form of marriage, with that poor thing! The world’s standards of honour are not those of my father.”

“Nor yours either,” Quentillian had almost said, but he checked the cheap retort as it rose.

An impulse made him say instead:

“Promise me at least, Flora, that if this becomes too much for you, if it all breaks down, you will let me share it with you. You owe it to me, I think, having let me be partly responsible. Will you promise?”

“You are very good,” said Flora, her mouth quivering for the first time. “But I don’t mean to fail.”

It was evident enough that her whole being was strung up to the accomplishment of her purpose, and that she was incapable of seeing beyond it.

Quentillian, at his own station, parted from Canon Morchard and his daughter with the direst forebodings. Insensibly, he, too, had almost come to feel that anxious preoccupation with the Canon’s peace of mind that exercised the Canon’s daughters.

Within a fortnight of his return he went over to St. Gwenllian and found there no trace of catastrophe such as he had half expected, but the usual atmosphere of calm melancholy.

He had no conversation with Flora, but she told him briefly that there would be no correspondence between her father and Mrs. Carey, and Quentillian was left to surmise by what peculiar methods Flora had achieved her ends.

On the whole, he preferred not to dwell upon the subject. He had a certain unwilling respect for Flora, even if none for her casuistries, and he had no wish to dwell either upon her astonishing machinations or his own complicity.

(iv)

IN the spring Lucilla came back to St. Gwenllian.

The first time that Owen saw her was in the presence of the Canon.

In his relief at her return, Canon Morchard had evidently forgotten that he had thought it undutiful of her to go.

“You see I have my right hand once more,” he said fondly. “Owen here can tell you that you have been sadly missed, my daughter. Little Flora did her best, but she is not my housekeeper, my experienced secretary. Neither she nor our poor Valeria can equal Lucilla there.”

Quentillian took his advantage and asked Lucilla for news of Valeria. The Canon, habitually, seemed only too much inclined to view any mention of Valeria and her husband as a rank indecency in the presence of her quondam betrothed.

“Val is very well and very busy,” said Lucilla. “George is doing well, on the whole, though it’s a struggle, but the land there is wonderful. I should like to show you the photographs of their little farm, and the children.”

“Lucilla is our photographer,” said the Canon forbearingly, as though in extenuation of what Quentillian felt certain that he regarded as Lucilla’s indiscretion.

Not for the first time, Quentillian suspected that Lucilla was the only one of the Canon’s children able to contemplate the Canon by the light of a sense of humour, that detracted not at all from her affection and respect.

“They are not thinking of a visit to England, I suppose?”

“No. Expense is a consideration, and there are the children.”

“My grandsons!” said the Canon. “I should like a sight of my grandsons, but there could not be unalloyed joy in the meeting. Nay, I ask myself sometimes if there can be any unalloyed joy here below. Are not the warp and woof intermingled even in the nearest and dearest relationships? And the manner of poor Valeria’s leaving home was such as to make one’s heart ache, both for her and with her. But enough of reminiscences, my children. I am in no mood for them tonight. I wish to rest, and perhaps read. You may some of you remember a very favourite old story of mine,” said Canon Morchard genially. “That of the famous saying, ‘We are none of us infallible, not even the youngest.’”

This terrible pronouncement, however historical, seldom amused the juniors of its raconteur, and Flora and Lucilla only accorded to it the most perfunctory of smiles. Owen Quentillian remained entirely grave.

“No one has more admiration than myself for the quality of infallibility,” the Canon continued, humourously “(always provided that it is not that which is claimed by the Pope of Rome), but I must confess that I am not amongst those who take the modern craze for youthful intellectuals very seriously. This being so, dear Owen, you will forgive me in that I have not yet read anything of yours. Tonight I have a free hour—a rare treat—and I am going to rectify the omission. Will you read aloud to us of your work, or is that too much to ask?”

It was indeed too much to ask, Owen felt.

He could have read his own work aloud with comparative complacency to any critic capable of taking it seriously, but to Canon Morchard the slight, cynical epigrams, the terse, essentially unsentimental rationalism of Owen’s views upon God and man, must come either as wanton impertinence, or as meaningless folly.

It was impossible to suppose that the Canon would keep either opinion to himself, and Quentillian felt it unlikely that he would either find himself capable of listening to him tolerantly, or be given an opportunity for demolishing his views.

“I think I had rather not inflict my trivialities upon you at all, sir,” he remarked, with truth, and yet with an absence of sincerity of which he felt that Lucilla, at all events, was quite as well aware as he was himself.

“I assure you that I’m not worth reading.”

“I shall judge of that for myself,” said the Canon kindly. “Was there not something in that Review that was sent to you, Flora?”

“Yes,” said Flora unwillingly.

“Fetch it, my dear.”

Quentillian cast his mind over his more recent productions, and was invaded by a grim dismay.

His opinion of the Canon’s literary judgment, where writings not directly connected with Church matters were concerned, was of the slightest, but he disliked the thought both of the pain that the elder man would feel in reading that which would offend his taste, and of the remonstrance that he would certainly believe it his duty to make.

It was a relief to him when Flora returned without the Review, and said:

“There is someone who wants to speak to you in the hall, Father. I’m so sorry.”

The Canon rose at once.

“‘The man who wants me is the man I want’,” he quoted, and left the room.

When the door had closed behind him, Flora said to her sister, with a certain ruthless disregard of Quentillian’s presence that at least established the earnestness of her concern:

“What shall we do?”

“Nothing,” said Lucilla laconically.

“But we can’t let him see that Review. Adrian sent it to me—it’s got something in it by that man Hale. Father would hate the whole thing.”

Lucilla looked at Quentillian.

“He won’t like my article, and I should very much prefer him not to read it,” said the author candidly.

She smiled slightly.

“It’s the one on the Myth of Self-Sacrifice?”

Owen nodded.

“It might have been worse,” said Lucilla. “It might have been the one in which you said that the parental instinct was only another name for the possessive instinct. And now I come to think of it, that one was called The Sanctification of Domestic Tyranny, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” said Quentillian, in a tone which struck himself as being rather that of a defiant child to its nurse.

“Well, Father would have liked that even less than the Myth of Self-Sacrifice, I imagine.”

She spoke without acrimony, without, in fact, any effect at all of personal bias, but Quentillian said dispassionately:

“You dislike the modern school of thought of which my writings are a feeble example. May I ask why you read them?”

“But I don’t dislike it, Owen,” she returned with a calm at least equal to his own. “As for what you write, I think you’re very often mistaken, but that doesn’t prevent my being interested.”

Quentillian was slightly taken aback at being considered mistaken, and still more at being told so. He had always respected Lucilla, both morally and intellectually, and he would have preferred to suppose the admiration mutual.

“Owen, haven’t you got anything else that he could have to read?” broke in Flora.

“Nothing that he would—care for,” answered Quentillian, who had very nearly said “Nothing that he would understand.”

“Father has asked for the Review, Flossie, and you’d better get it. You needn’t work yourself up about it. He knows its general character quite as well as you do.”

“I don’t think he ought to be allowed to make himself needlessly unhappy,” said Flora obstinately.

“You can’t prevent it.”

“I suppose it would be wrong to say that I don’t know where the Review is?”

“It would be foolish, which is worse,” said Lucilla curtly. Her un-moral pronouncement closed the discussion.

Flora, looking grave and unhappy, left the room, and presently returned with the instrument of destruction, as she evidently regarded the production.

“Let us hope that Canon Morchard will continue to be detained,” said Quentillian, not altogether ironically.

Flora made no reply.

In less than a quarter of an hour’s time, the Canon came back again, picked up the Review and made a careful scrutiny of the table of contents.

“The Myth of Self-Sacrifice?” he enunciated, with a strongly-enquiring inflexion in his tone, as though prepared to receive the writer’s instant assurance that he was not responsible for so strange a heading.

Owen desired to leave the room, but was mysteriously compelled to remain in it, glancing at intervals at the all-too expressive face of his reader.

The Canon read very attentively, pausing every now and then to turn back a page or two, as though comparing inconsistencies of text, and sometimes also turning on a page or two ahead, as if desirous of establishing the certainty that a conclusion was eventually to be attained. His eyebrows worked as he read, after a fashion habitual with him.

There had been evenings when Flora had made the slightest of pencil sketches, hardly caricaturing, but embodying, this peculiarity, for her father’s subsequent indulgent amusement. But no such artistic pleasantry was undertaken tonight. The atmosphere did not lend itself to pleasantry of any kind.

At last the Canon closed the volume, laid it down, and removed his glasses with some deliberation.

“Dear lad, I am disappointed.”

“I was afraid you would be.”

“Is this quite worthy of you?”

Owen felt that a reply either in the affirmative or in the negative, would be equally unsatisfactory, and made none.

“You have adopted the tone of the day to an extent for which I was by no means prepared,” the Canon said gently. “I am sorry for it, Owen—very sorry. I think you have heard me speak before of my dislike for the modern note, that emphasises the material aspect, that miscalls ugliness realism, and coarseness strength. Forgive me, dear Owen, if I hurt you, but this—this trivial flippancy of yours, has hurt me.”

Owen had no doubt that Canon Morchard spoke the truth.

“How emphatically he belongs to the generation that took the errors of other people to heart,” Quentillian reflected.

He felt no great sympathy with such vicarious distresses.

“There is so much that is sad and bad in life, that one longs to read of happiness, and hope, and beauty,” said the Canon. “Why not, dear Owen, seek out and write of the ‘something afar from the sphere of our sorrow’?”

“Because to my way of thinking, only first-hand impressions are of any value. The only value that any point of view of mine can lay claim to, must lie in its sincerity.”

“Words, words! You delude yourself with many words,” said the Canon sadly, rousing in Quentillian a strong desire to retort with the obvious tu quoque.

“Do not misunderstand me, dear fellow—there is talent there—perversely exercised, if you will, but talent. I cannot but believe that life has many lessons in store for you, and when you have learnt them, then you will write more kindly of human nature, more reverently of Divine.”

Hope was once more discernible in the Canon’s voice and on his face, and as he rose he laid his hand affectionately upon the young man’s arm. “Hoping all things—believing all things,” he murmured, as he left the room.

Quentillian was left to the certainty that his brief exposition of his literary credo had entirely failed to convey any meaning to the Canon, and that the long list of the Canon’s optimistic articles of faith now included his own regeneration.

(v)

“FATHER, I think Flora looks ill.”

Canon Morchard gazed with concern at Lucilla as she made the announcement, and at once devoted himself to the anxious analysis that he always accorded to any problem affecting one of his children.

“I have thought her altered myself, by the great grief of last year. Spiritually, it has developed her, I believe. But there is a sustained melancholy about her, an absence of all hopeful reaction such as one looks for from youth, that is certainly not wholly natural. You, too, have observed it?”

“Yes.”

Lucilla had observed a great deal more besides, and she was at a loss for a definition of her secret, latent fears.

“Flossie has become very irritable,” she said at last, voicing the least of her anxieties.

“My dear, is that perfectly kind? Flora has had much to try her, and your own absence in Canada threw a great deal for which she is scarcely fitted, upon her shoulders. I do so want you to overcome that critical spirit of yours, dear Lucilla. It has very often disturbed me.”

Lucilla thought for a moment, and decided, without resentment as without surprise, that it would be of no use to say that her observation had not contained any of the spirit of criticism at all. She said instead:

“She doesn’t sleep well, and she is always up very early.”

“She is always at the early Celebration, dear child,” said the Canon tenderly. “Our Flora’s religion is a very living reality to her—more so than ever, of late, I think.”

“It’s a pity that it should make her unhappy, instead of happy.”

“What are you saying, Lucilla?” the Canon enquired in highly-displeased accents.

“It is perfectly true. She is very restless, and very unhappy, and the more she goes to church, the less it seems to satisfy her.”

“And who are you, to judge thus of another’s spiritual experiences? You mean well, Lucilla, but there is a materialism about your point of view that has long made me uneasy—exceedingly uneasy. You were encumbered with household cares very young, and it has given you the spirit of Martha, rather than the spirit of Mary. Leave Flora to my direction, if you please.”

“I should like her to see the doctor.”

“Has she complained of ill-health?”

“No, not at all. She resents being asked if she is well.”

“Most naturally. She is not a child. You take too much upon yourself, Lucilla, as I have told you before. Leave Flora’s welfare in Higher hands than ours, and remember that it is not the part of a Christian to anticipate trouble. Where is your faith?”

Lucilla was not unaccustomed to this enquiry, and did not deem any specific reply to be necessary. Whatever the whereabouts of that which the Canon termed her faith, it did not serve in any way to allay her anxiety.

She watched Flora day by day.

She saw her increasing pallor, her gradual loss of weight, the black lines that deepened beneath her eyes. Above all, she saw the mysterious sense of grievance, that most salient characteristic of the neurotic, gather round her sister’s spirit.

After a little while, she ceased to talk of her visit to Canada, of Valeria, and Valeria’s children, because she saw that Flora could not bear these subjects.

“She’s jealous,” thought Lucilla, with a sick pang of pity.

“I’m sorry for poor Val, living right away from civilization, and absorbed by commonplace things all the time,” said Flora.

She went to church more frequently than ever.

Lucilla wondered very often if anything had happened while she was away.

One day she asked Owen Quentillian.

“There was the shock of David’s death,” he said rather lamely.

“Yes. Father says it affected Flora terribly for a long while.”

“Do you find her much changed, then?”

“I find her very unbalanced,” said Lucilla with her usual directness.

“I think she is an unbalanced person,” Quentillian assented, levelly.

“I wish she could leave home for a time.”

But Flora, when this was suggested to her, said that she did not wish to leave home. Her manner implied that the suggestion hurt her.

At first the Canon was pleased, assuring Lucilla that the pleasant home-life at St. Gwenllian, even if robbed of its old-time joyousness, would best restore Flora to herself. But after a time, he, too, watched her with anxiety.

“Little Flora is not herself,” he began to say.

“Let me send for the doctor, Father,” Lucilla urged.

“We will see, my dear, later on. The unsettled weather is trying to us all just now—no doubt things will right themselves in a day or two, and we shall smile at our own foolish, faithless fears.”

Meanwhile, however, no one at St. Gwenllian evinced any desire to smile at anything, and Flora became subject to violent fits of crying.

Her dignity and her delicate reticence seemed alike to have deserted her. She cried in church, and sometimes she cried at home, regardless of the presence of her father and sister.

“My dear, what is it?” the Canon enquired at last, long after Lucilla had given up asking the same question in despair.

“Nothing,” said Flora.

“It is not right to prolong your sorrow for your dear one in this fashion,” said the Canon. “Can we not trust dear David to the Everlasting Arms, and fulfil our own appointed days here below?”

His daughter made no reply.

“This is reaction, Flora,” said Canon Morchard decisively. “When this heavy blow first fell upon us, you were my courageous daughter, my comforter—so far as that was humanly possible. Do not falter now—remember that whom He loveth, He chastizeth.”

“I do remember,” she said, her face a mask of misery.

“You are not well,” said the Canon tenderly. “I shall no longer allow you to exert yourself as you have been doing. Lucilla here will arrange that your class shall be temporarily given over to other management, and no doubt she can herself arrange to replace you at the choir-practices.”

“I can arrange it,” Lucilla said, “but——”

She looked at her sister.

Flora broke into a tempest of tears.

“Don’t take away what work I can do,” she sobbed out. “My life is useless enough, in all conscience.”

“Flora!” the Canon thundered. “Have a care! Such a thought is perilously near to being a blasphemous one.”

She hid her face in her hands.

“You are unstrung, my poor child,” said her father. He took to treating her almost as an invalid, and failed to perceive that his watchful and incessant solicitude produced upon Flora’s nerves an effect that was the very reverse of soothing.

“She ought to go right away from home,” said Lucilla to Quentillian. “But it’s difficult to suggest it again, she was so much upset when I spoke of it before. Will you try what you can do, Owen? She is a great deal more likely to listen to someone who is not one of the family. It’s one of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms of what?”

“Of hysteria,” said Lucilla succinctly, facing the word as she had already faced the fact.

Quentillian admired her directness, but it did not breed in him any desire to adopt the measure suggested, and speak to Flora.

At last, however, he did so. They had scarcely been alone together since the day when she had told him of her visit to Mrs. Carey.

“Is that business on your mind, Flora?”

He had thought for some time that it might be.

“What?”

“Mrs. Carey, I mean.”

She coloured deeply.

“I did what I thought right at the time, Owen. Is there any necessity to discuss it again?”

“Not if you don’t wish to, certainly. I had an idea that it might be a relief. I suppose no one knows besides ourselves?”

“No one. She never wrote to me, you know, and I feel sure she never will. She was the sort of person to be thoroughly absorbed by her impressions of the moment. I sometimes wonder what happened to her, in Scotland.”

“It is not very difficult to guess what will happen, sooner or later, from what you told me. People like Mrs. Carey live from one emotional crisis to another.”

She gave him a curious look.

“At least it’s living—not stagnation. That interview with Mrs. Carey seems like a dream, almost, nowadays—something quite apart from the rest of my life. I suppose it’s because it’s the only thing I’ve ever done entirely by myself, without any of the family knowing about it. I’ve never even seen anyone else at all like Mrs. Carey—it was impossible to get into touch with her, really. She was like a painted cardboard figure, with no back to it—nothing solid.”

“But you’ve turned down that page, now—it’s finished with?”

“Yes,” she said, looking down.

He had wondered whether that which he sometimes thought of as Flora’s Jesuitical plotting had come to prey upon her mind.

Evidently, if it did, he was not to be told so.

In the end he could think of no more subtle enquiry than:

“Why are you unhappy?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a trembling lip.

“I feel I’m of no use in the world. Wouldn’t you be unhappy, if you felt like that—that nobody really needed you in any way, and you had nothing to do?”

“Not in the least,” said Quentillian reflectively. “I am quite sure that nobody does need me, and it doesn’t distress me. As for having nothing to do, I imagine—if you will forgive me for saying so—that one can always find something if one looks far enough.”

“It’s different for a man.”

“Perhaps.”

Quentillian went away still undetermined whether Flora’s conduct of the affaire Carey was the cause or the result of her present deplorable condition.

That she had all the makings of a fanatic, he had long suspected, and the Canon’s determination to treat her as an invalid, in need of rest and complete inaction, seemed to him to be a singularly ill-advised one.

In spite of his disapproval of her methods, Quentillian had come to feel a certain affection for Flora, and he could not avoid a sense of complicity that drew him to her, even while it chafed his self-righteousness.

With an entire lack of originality, he informed Lucilla that he thought her sister would be better away from home.

“Well, so do I. But even to go away for a few weeks would only be a half-measure. Owen, I’m frightened about Flora—far more than I’ve ever been about anyone before.”

He could partly apprehend her meaning.

“Don’t you think that perhaps this—phase—is only another manifestation of the same spirit that made Val want to go and work somewhere?”

“In a sense, yes. You see, all the intellectual interests, and the mental appreciations, to which we were brought up, although those things did fill our days—at least before the war—were only superimposed on what Val and Flossie and Adrian really were, in themselves. Not essentials, I mean, to either of them.”

Quentillian wondered what Lucilla’s own essentials might be. She had given him no hint of them, ever, and yet he suspected her of an almost aggressive neutrality with regard to the imposed interests of which she had spoken.

The odd contradiction in terms seemed to him expressive of the difference that he felt certain existed between Lucilla’s daily life, and the personal, intimate standpoint from which she all the time regarded that life.

Something of the same ruthlessness of purpose that had once characterized Flora, he had always discerned in Lucilla, but he felt very certain that her essential sanity and humour would have kept her forever from the strange and tortuous means adopted by Flora to safeguard those interests of which she apparently felt herself to be a better judge than her Creator.

Lucilla would neither juggle with fate, nor see any justification for tampering with other people’s correspondence.

“Flora thinks, now, that she doesn’t want to go away from home.”

“It’s a pity, perhaps, that she didn’t go to Canada instead of you.”

“Yes, but you see Father didn’t really want either of us to go, and Flossie wouldn’t have disobeyed him.”

Flora’s conscience! Owen felt as impatient at the thought of it, as he had frequently felt before. He had, however, long ago sufficiently assimilated the atmosphere of St. Gwenllian to refrain from pointing out that Flora had been for some years of an age to act for herself, independently of the parental sanction. He did not, indeed, suppose that Lucilla needed to have anything so self-evident put before her.

“Do you think Flora would consent to see a doctor?”

“No.”

Miss Morchard’s unvarnished No-es and Yes-es always took him slightly by surprise, especially after any time spent with the Canon.

“The fact is,” said Lucilla vigorously, “that Flora needs something to occupy her mind. She is preying on herself, and unless something happens to take her out of herself, Owen, I think she will go mad.”

He instinctively paid the homage due to her habitual precision of expression, by taking the startling phrase literally.

“Have you told anyone?”

“Not yet.”

“But you must. If you really think that, you must tell the Canon so.”

“I know.” Her voice was rather faint, but she repeated, more strongly and with entire acceptance in her voice, “I know I must.”

It reminded him of the long past days when one of the St. Gwenllian children had been naughty, and the task of taking the culprit before the Canon had invariably, and as a matter of course, devolved upon Lucilla.

(vi)

“FLORA is treading the thorny way that saints have trodden. If your own spirituality, which is in its infancy—in its cradle, I may say—does not enable you to understand that via dolorosa, at least refrain from trivial interpolations and misrepresentations, Lucilla, I beg.”

Canon Morchard’s tone rather suggested commanding, than begging, and his large eyes seemed to flash with indignation as they looked, from beneath corrugated brows, at Lucilla.

She was rather paler than her usually colourless wont.

“I am afraid that Flora is suffering from a very common form of hysteria, father, and I thoroughly distrust any inspiration of hers in her present state of health.”

“She has told me herself that she is in her usual health, and that she positively objects to the idea of seeing a medical man. I see no reason for disbelieving her own statement.”

“Well, I do.”

“Lucilla, you forget yourself.”

Lucilla and the Canon looked at one another, each seeming momentarily to despair of the other.

At last Lucilla said:

“A little time ago, you thought she was ill, too.”

“Mind and body react upon one another, no doubt, and our little Flora is highly strung. I do not recognize it as being in any way incumbent upon me to explain to you my treatment of any soul in my charge, Lucilla, but I may say that I have now come to the conclusion that Flora’s malady was of the soul. With that, you must rest content.”

Lucilla did not rest content at all.

A philosophical acceptance of the inevitable had long been part of Miss Morchard’s life, but in the weeks that followed she came nearer to the futility of the spoken protest than ever before.

From seemingly eternal weeping, however, Flora presently passed to a tense exaltation of spirit that found its culmination in long hours spent upon her knees.

Lucilla made only one appeal to her.

“Flossie, won’t you tell me what’s happening? I can’t help knowing that you’ve been very unhappy.”

“I’m not unhappy now,” said Flora quickly. “At least, not like I was before. You know I’ve put myself absolutely under father’s direction, Lucilla? How wonderful he is!”

“He has made you happier?”

“Not he himself. He has shown me where to find peace, at last.”

“If you mean Church, I should have thought you’d known about it ever since you were born, very nearly.”

If the faint hint of impatient derision latent in her sister’s tone was perceptible to Flora, she showed no resentment at it.

She flushed deeply and looked earnestly at Lucilla.

“I wish I could make you understand. But some things are too sacred to be described, even if one could. The only thing I can say is that I was unhappy, I felt I was wasting my life, and that nobody cared. And I was full of remorse for a wrong I had done. I can’t tell you what it was, Lucilla, nor anyone else, ever, and I can’t undo it, now, but at least I can expiate it, and all my other failings.”

“Expiation?” Lucilla spoke the word unenthusiastically. “But if you can’t undo whatever it was you did—and really, Flossie, I can’t believe it was anything so very desperate—will it be a good plan to go on being miserable about it for the rest of your life, all to no purpose?”

“‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness,’” Flora replied gently.

Lucilla was left to apply the truth of the adage to her own condition of mind.

She was very unhappy about her sister.

Nevertheless, Flora had ceased to weep, and although she ate less than ever and rose early for the purpose of going to church, she looked rather less ill. Only the strained look in her eyes remained, ever increasing, to justify Lucilla’s feeling of sick dismay.

That it was entirely unshared by Canon Morchard, she knew already, but she was not altogether prepared for the announcement that he presently made.

“I am very happy about dear Flora—peculiarly and wonderfully so. What think you, Lucilla, of this? Flora is turning her thoughts towards the Sisterhood at St. Marychurch.”

It was never Miss Morchard’s way to respond over-emphatically to an invitation from her father to state her thoughts freely, experience having long since taught her what a tangled web we weave when first we practice speaking the truth inopportunely.

“Has she only just started the idea?”

“Nay, she tells me—and I can readily believe it—that the grace of God, according to its mysterious wont, has been working within her for a long while now. There has been a period of darkness for Flora, undoubtedly, but she is emerging more and more into the light—that light that shineth into the Perfect Day!”

The Canon seemed rather inclined to forget himself in profound musings.

“It implies losing her,” said Lucilla.

“Humanly speaking, yes, and it is hard to eradicate the human element. But once that is done—and done it shall be—what remains is altogether joyful. I shall see her go, if go she does, with feelings far other than those with which I saw our poor Valeria leave home!”

Lucilla thought so, too, and would emphatically have given the preference to Valeria’s method of inaugurating an independent career.

“I cannot be anything but glad that one of mine should be dedicated!” the Canon exclaimed, as though the exclamation broke from him almost irrepressibly.

“But does Flora mean to go away at once?”

“She wishes it greatly, and I should hardly feel justified in restraining her. Flora is not a child, and her own desire, as she says herself, is to feel that wayward, wayless will of hers at safe anchorage at last. Dear child, her one regret is for me.”

Tears stood in the Canon’s eyes.

“The grief of last winter greatly developed Flora, I believe. There has been a tendency to dreaminess, to a too great absorption in her music, that I confess has made me anxious in the past. But she speaks most rightly and nobly of her certainty that a call has come to her, and if so, it is indeed a vocation that must not be gainsayed. She is all ardour and anxiety to begin, and if all is well, she and I go to St. Marychurch to view the establishment there next week, and enter into the necessary arrangements.”

“What sort of life will it mean for her?”

“One of direct service, dear Lucilla, of shelter from the temptations of this world, of close personal union with Christ Himself, I trust. All indeed are not called to such union, but I believe with all my heart that our Flora is amongst the chosen few, and grievous though it be to lose her from our sadly diminished home-circle, I cannot but rejoice for her, and with her.”

The Canon’s voice trembled very much as he spoke, but his smile was one of single-hearted sincerity.

“But does she rejoice?” said Lucilla rather faintly.

“Indeed she does. I confess that Flora’s earnest desire for self-immolation, her ardent spirit, have taken me by surprise. She is of the stuff of which the martyrs were made. No austerity has any terrors for her—she is already far advanced upon the way of the mystic.”

Lucilla wrung her hands together.

“What is it, my dear one?” said her father gently.

She could not tell him. She felt unable to voice the terror and the profound distrust that possessed her at the thought of Flora, fanatically eager for discipline of her own seeking, finding in religious emotionalism an outlet for instincts that she had not dared, so far as Lucilla could judge, to call by their right name.

“One can only let other people go their own way, then?” she murmured, more to herself than to the Canon.

“Say, rather, the way appointed for them, dear Lucilla. Yours and mine may lie together yet awhile longer, I trust, but I am no longer young, and these repeated partings tell upon me. It is a sacrifice for you, too, to make, but let us do so cheerfully—aye, and right thankfully, too. Our little one has been chosen for the Bride of Heaven, as the beautiful old devotional phrase has it.”

Lucilla was only too conscious that the beautiful old devotional phrase awoke nothing in herself but a shuddering distaste.

She could not doubt, however, that its effect upon Flora was far otherwise.

Although she saw, as time went by, that no outside influence would have power to shatter the vision so clearly before the Canon’s eyes and to which he so unfalteringly directed Flora’s gaze, it brought to her a slight sense of personal relief when the Canon, after inditing a letter of his usual unbridled length and meticulous candour, informed her that he had besought Quentillian to spend at St. Gwenllian that which he emphasized as Flora’s last evening at home.

“It will make it easier for us all, to have that dearest of dear fellows amongst us. He is so truly one of ourselves, and yet the mere presence of someone who does not always form part of our familiar little circle, will prevent overmuch dwelling upon the tender associations of the past that are well-nigh beyond bearing, at such a time as this.”

Owen, laconic as Lucilla herself, made no attempt to conceal either his personal dislike of the solution to Flora’s problem, or his innate conviction of her complete right to any form of self-slaughter that she might select.

They exchanged no opinions, but he found occasion to say to her in private:

“One thing, Flora. Will you leave me to deal with the Mrs. Carey equation, if it ever comes to be necessary?”

“I hope it never will.”

“So do I. But make it your legacy to me, so that if ever it has to be thought of again, I may do as seems best to me.”

Flora smiled, her shadowy, tremulous smile.

“Wouldn’t you do that anyway?”

“Perhaps I should. But I would rather have your permission. And after all, you know, Flora—you won’t be able to pull strings from your Sisterhood.”

It was the last, almost the only, reference that he would permit himself, and both could smile at it faintly.

“Very well, Owen. I don’t want to remember it ever again, and I shall only think of Mrs. Carey now in one way.”

She lacked the Canon’s capacity for outward expression, even now, and her colour rose as she spoke.

Only in earnest and uncondemnatory intercession would Mrs. Carey find place again in Flora’s thoughts.

Owen knew it as well as though she had told him so.

The evening was mild and beautiful, and the Canon sat at the open window, leaning back as though greatly fatigued, and asked Flora for some music.

“Shall I sing?” she asked.

“Are you able to, my dear?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said earnestly, and Quentillian could surmise that she was instinctively eager for the form of self-expression most natural to her, as a vent for her own mingled emotions.

Her voice was more beautiful than ever, with a depth of feeling new to it.

Quentillian was indignant with himself when he found that this perfectly traditional setting for a pathetic situation was unmistakably affecting him.

The only light round them was that of the summer’s evening, and Flora’s voice came with strength and sweetness and purity from her scarcely-seen figure at the far end of the room, in well-remembered and intrinsically-exquisite melody. She was part of his childhood—she was going away—they would none of them ever again see Flora, as they had known her, any more....

Quentillian, in a violent endeavour to react from an emotion that he unsparingly qualified as blatant, turned his eyes away from the singer.

He looked at Lucilla, and saw that she sat very still. He reflected that for a face so sensitive, and possessed of so much latent humour, hers was singularly inexpressive of anything but acceptance. Nevertheless it was an acceptance that had its origin, most unmistakably, in a self-control acquired long since, rather than in an absence of any capacity for strong feeling.

He wondered, not for the first time, what her life had taught Lucilla.

He looked at Canon Morchard.

The Canon had closed his eyes and his face, on which the lines were showing heavily at last, was white with the grey pallor of age. Nevertheless he, too, showed the deep, essential placidity of a conscious acceptance, and for the first time Quentillian perceived a fundamental resemblance between the Canon and his eldest daughter.

As though aware of the scrutiny fixed upon him, the Canon opened his eyes, and smiled as they met Quentillian’s.

“That harmony will be lost to us for a time, perhaps,” he said softly. “But is it not a foretaste of that great Song of Praise that will have no ending, and in which all, all, will be able to join together? I think so, Owen.”

He turned his head slightly, his finger-tips joined together in the position habitual to him.

“Flora, my child, my dear daughter, will it be too much if I ask for ‘Lead, Kindly Light,’ as you have so often given it to us on long-ago Sundays when we have been all together—all together?”

For answer, she struck the opening chords very gently.

“Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom

“Lead thou me on

“The night is dark, and I am far from home

“Lead thou me on ...

.... “Till, the night is gone

“And with the morn those Angel faces smile

“Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.”

Flora’s voice was rapt and unfaltering.

Lucilla did not move, nor raise her eyes.

It was Owen Quentillian, poignantly and unwillingly conscious of pathos, who set his teeth in a profound and intense resentment at the obvious emotional appeal that he found himself unable to ignore.

He unspeakably dreaded the breakdown of the Canon’s composure that he foresaw, when Flora’s last note had died away into silence.

He could not look up.

“Flora!”

The Canon’s voice was steady and gentle.

“Thank you, my child. Bid me good-night, and go, now. You must have some rest, before your journey tomorrow.”

She came to him and he blessed and kissed her as usual, only letting his hand linger for a moment on her head as he repeated as though speaking to himself:

“And with the morn those Angel faces smile
“Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.”

“Good-night, Owen. Goodbye,” said Flora.

She left the room, and the Canon raised himself with difficulty from his low chair and said:

“I have some preparations to make for tomorrow. I will leave you for a little while.”

When he had gone, Owen felt the relaxation of his own mental tension.

For the first time, and with a sincerity that left him amazed, he found himself making use of the phrase that from others had so often aroused rebellion in himself:

“He is wonderful!”

Lucilla raised her eyes now, and looked full and gravely at Quentillian.

“Yes. I’m glad you see it at last, Owen.”

“At last?” he stammered, replying to her voice rather than to her words.

“He is very fond of you. He has always been very fond of you, ever since you were a little boy. And it has—vexed me—very often, to see that you gave him nothing in return, that, because he belongs to another school, and another generation, you have almost despised him, I think.”

Owen was conscious of colouring deeply in his sudden surprise and humiliation.

“Although you are so clever, Owen,” she said in the same grave, un-ironical tone, “it has seemed as though you are not able, at all, to see beyond the surface. I know that my father’s religious sentiment, sentimentality even, his constant outward expression of emotional piety, his guileless optimism, have all jarred upon you. But you have had no eyes for his pathetic courage, his constant striving for what he sees as the highest.”

“Lucilla—in justice to myself—although what you say may be true, if I have judged your father it has been far more on account of his children—of what I have seen of their lives.”

“You were not called upon to constitute yourself the champion of his children. Valeria, even, had no claim on your championship. It was not you whom she loved, and you, too, tried to make Val what she was never meant to be. When Val threw you over, if my father tried to force upon you what you could only see as the conventional beau geste of renunciation, it was because he was incapable of believing that you could have asked a woman to marry you without loving her, body and soul. His forgiveness of Val, whether you thought him entitled to forgive or not, lay between him and her. And when you speak of our lives, Owen, can’t you see that Val and Adrian and I, and perhaps in a way even Flora, too, have come to what we were meant for? No one can stand between another soul, and life, really.”

He was oddly struck by the echo of words that he had himself once used to Flora.

“You admit that he tried, to stand between you and life?”

“I do,” she said instantly. “But if he had succeeded, the fault would have been ours.”

She suddenly smiled.

“Isn’t it true that to face facts means freedom? That’s why I’m not an optimist, Owen. I am willing to face all the facts you like. But you, I think, in judging my father, have only faced half of them.”

“You find me intolerant!” he exclaimed, half-ironically. Never before had such an adjective been presented to his strong sense of his own impartiality, his detached rationalism.

“Not exactly. Only, I’m afraid—a little bit of a prig.”

She uttered the strange, unimposing accusation, not rudely, not unkindly, but almost mournfully.

“Christianity has been accused of intolerance very often, and with only too much reason, but those outside the Churches, who frankly claim to be agnostic, often seem to me to be the most intolerant of all, of what they look upon as superstition. Why should you despise my father for beliefs that have led him to lead an honourable life, and that have given him courage to bear his many sorrows?”

“You have said, yourself, that the facing of facts means freedom. I can see no freedom, and therefore no beauty, in living in illusion.”

“Not for yourself, perhaps. Illusions could never be anything but conscious, for you.”

“Nor for yourself, Lucilla,” he retorted swiftly.

“But how does that entitle us to despise another for holding them?” she demanded, quite as swiftly. Nevertheless Owen detected a lessening of severity, in so far as she had coupled them together in her speech.

“Tonight,” he said gravely, “I admired your father with all my heart.”

“I’m glad.”

On the words, the same as those with which Lucilla had begun their brief and rather amazing conversation, the Canon returned into the room.