CHAPTER XVIII

She drew back as soon as she saw him, but Stonor had looked round. His face darkened as he stood there an instant, silently challenging her. Not a word spoken by either of them, no sound but the faint, muffled sobbing of the girl, who sat with hidden face. With a look of speechless anger, the man went out and shut the doors behind him. Not seeing, only hearing that he had gone, Jean threw her arms out across the table in an abandonment of grief. The other woman laid on a chair the hat and cloak that she was carrying. Then she went slowly across the room and stood silent a moment at Jean's side.

'What is the matter?'

The girl started. Impossible for her to speak in that first moment. But when she had dried her eyes, she said, with a pathetic childish air—

'I—I've been seeing Geoffrey.'

'Is this the effect "seeing Geoffrey" has?' said the other, with an attempt at lightness.

'You see, I know now,' Jean explained, with the brave directness that was characteristic.

The more sophisticated woman presented an aspect totally unenlightened.

'I know how he'—Jean dropped her eyes—'how he spoiled some one else's life.'

'Who tells you that?' asked Miss Levering.

'Several people have told me.'

'Well, you should be very careful how you believe what you hear.'

'You know it's true!' said the girl, passionately.

'I know that it's possible to be mistaken.'

'I see! You're trying to shield him—'

'Why should I? What is it to me?'

'Oh-h, how you must love him!' she said with tears.

'I? Listen to me,' said Vida, gravely. As she drew up a chair the girl rose to her feet.

'What's the use—what's the use of your going on denying it?' As she saw Vida was about to break in, she silenced her with two words, 'Geoffrey doesn't.' And with that she fled away to the window.

Vida half rose, and then relinquished the idea of following the girl, seemed presently to forget her, and sat as one alone with sorrow. When Jean had mastered herself, she came slowly back. Not till she was close to the motionless figure did the girl lift her eyes.

'Oh, don't look like that,' the girl prayed. 'I shall bring him back to you.'

She was on her knees by Vida's chair. The fixed abstraction went out of the older face, but it was very cold as she began—

'You would be impertinent—if—you weren't a romantic child. You can't bring him back.'

'Yes, yes, he—'

'No. But'—Vida looked deep into the candid eyes—'there is something you can do—'

'What?'

'Bring him to a point where he recognizes that he is in our debt.'

'In our debt?'

Vida nodded. 'In debt to Women. He can't repay the one he robbed.'

Jean winced at that. The young do not know that nothing but money can ever be paid back.

'Yes,' she insisted, out of the faith she still had in him, ready to be his surety. 'Yes, he can. He will.'

The other shook her head. 'No, he can't repay the dead. But there are the living. There are the thousands with hope still in their hearts and youth in their blood. Let him help them. Let him be a Friend to Women.'

'I understand!' Jean rose up, wide-eyed. 'Yes, that too.'

The door had opened, and Lady John was coming in with Stonor towering beside her. When he saw the girl rising from her knees, he turned to Lady John with a little gesture of, 'What did I tell you?'

The moment Jean caught sight of him, 'Thank you!' she said, while her aunt was briskly advancing, filling all the room with a pleasant silken rustling, and a something nameless, that was like clear noonday after storm-cloud or haunted twilight.

'Well,' she said in a cheerful commonplace tone to Jean; 'you rather gave us the slip! Vida, I believe Mr. Stonor wants to see you for a few minutes, but'—she glanced at her watch—'I'd like a word with you first, as I must get back. Do you think the car'—she turned to Stonor—'your man said something about recharging—'

'Oh, did he? I'll see about it.' As he went out he brushed past the butler.

'Mr. Trent has called, miss, to take the lady to the meeting,' said that functionary.

'Bring Mr. Trent into my sitting-room,' said Jean hastily, and then to Miss Levering, 'I'll tell him you can't go to-night.'

Lady John stood watching the girl with critical eyes till she had disappeared into the adjoining room and shut the door behind her. Then—

'I know, my dear'—she spoke almost apologetically—'you're not aware of what that impulsive child wants to insist on. I feel it an embarrassment even to tell you.'

'I know.'

'You know?' Lady John waited for condemnation of Jean's idea. She waited in vain. 'It isn't with your sanction, surely, that she makes this extraordinary demand?'

'I didn't sanction it at first,' said the other slowly; 'but I've been thinking it over.'

Lady John's suavity stiffened perceptibly. 'Then all I can say is, I am greatly disappointed in you. You threw this man over years ago, for reasons, whatever they were, that seemed to you good and sufficient. And now you come in between him and a younger woman, just to play Nemesis, so far as I can make out.'

'Is that what he says?'

'He says nothing that isn't fair and considerate.'

'I can see he's changed.'

'And you're unchanged—is that it?'

'I'm changed even more than he.'

Lady John sat down, with pity and annoyance struggling for the mastery.

'You care about him still?'

'No.'

'No? And yet you—I see! There are obviously certain things he can give his wife, and you naturally want to marry somebody.'

'Oh, Lady John,' said Vida, wearily, 'there are no men listening.'

'No'—she looked round surprised—'I didn't suppose there were.'

'Then why keep up that old pretence?'

'What pret—'

'That to marry at all costs is every woman's dearest ambition till the grave closes over her. You and I know it isn't true.'

'Well, but—' Her ladyship blinked, suddenly seeing daylight. 'Oh! It was just the unexpected sight of him bringing it all back! That was what fired you this afternoon. Of course'—she made an honest attempt at sympathetic understanding—'the memory of a thing like that can never die—can never even be dimmed for the woman.'

'I mean her to think so.'

'Jean?'

Vida nodded.

'But it isn't so?'

Lady John was a little bewildered.

'You don't seriously believe,' said Vida, 'that a woman, with anything else to think about, comes to the end of ten years still absorbed in a memory of that sort?'

Lady John stared speechless a moment. 'You've got over it, then?'

'If it weren't for the papers, I shouldn't remember twice a year there was ever such a person as Geoffrey Stonor in the world.'

'Oh, I'm so glad!' said Lady John, with unconscious rapture.

Vida smiled grimly. 'Yes, I'm glad, too.'

'And if Geoffrey Stonor offered you—er—"reparation," you'd refuse it?'

'Geoffrey Stonor! For me he's simply one of the far back links in a chain of evidence. It's certain I think a hundred times of other women's present unhappiness to once that I remember that old unhappiness of mine that's past. I think of the nail and chain makers of Cradley Heath, the sweated girls of the slums; I think,' her voice fell, 'of the army of ill-used women, whose very existence I mustn't mention—'

Lady John interrupted her hurriedly. 'Then why in heaven's name do you let poor Jean imagine—'

Vida suddenly bent forward. 'Look—I'll trust you, Lady John. I don't suffer from that old wrong as Jean thinks I do, but I shall coin her sympathy into gold for a greater cause than mine.'

'I don't understand you.'

'Jean isn't old enough to be able to care as much about a principle as about a person. But if my old half-forgotten pain can turn her generosity into the common treasury—'

'What do you propose she shall do, poor child?'

'Use her hold over Geoffrey Stonor to make him help us.'

'To help you?'

'The man who served one woman—God knows how many more—very ill, shall serve hundreds of thousands well. Geoffrey Stonor shall make it harder for his son, harder still for his grandson, to treat any woman as he treated me.'

'How will he do that?' said the lady coldly.

'By putting an end to the helplessness of women.'

'You must think he has a great deal of power,' said her ladyship, with some irony.

'Power? Yes,' answered the other, 'men have too much over penniless and frightened women.'

'What nonsense! You talk as though the women hadn't their share of human nature. We aren't made of ice any more than the men.'

'No, but we have more self-control.'

'Than men?'

Vida had risen. She looked down at her friend. 'You know we have,' she said.

'I know,' said Lady John shrewdly, 'we mustn't admit it.'

'For fear they'd call us fishes?'

Lady John had been frankly shocked at the previous plain speaking, but she found herself stimulated to show in this moment of privacy that even she had not travelled her sheltered way through the world altogether in blinkers.

'They talk of our lack of self-control, but,' she admitted, 'it's the last thing men want women to have.'

'Oh, we know what they want us to have! So we make shift to have it. If we don't, we go without hope—sometimes we go without bread.'

'Vida! Do you mean to say that you—'

'I mean to say that men's vanity won't let them see it, but the thing's largely a question of economics.'

'You never loved him, then!'

'Yes, I loved him—once. It was my helplessness that turned the best thing life can bring into a curse for both of us.'

'I don't understand you—'

'Oh, being "understood"! that's too much to expect. I make myself no illusions. When people come to know that I've joined the Women's Union—'

'But you won't'

'—who is there who will resist the temptation to say "Poor Vida Levering! What a pity she hasn't got a husband and a baby to keep her quiet"? The few who know about me, they'll be equally sure that, not the larger view of life I've gained, but my own poor little story, is responsible for my new departure.' She leaned forward and looked into Lady John's face. 'My best friend, she will be surest of all, that it's a private sense of loss, or lower yet, a grudge, that's responsible for my attitude. I tell you the only difference between me and thousands of women with husbands and babies is that I am free to say what I think. They aren't!'

Lady John opened her lips and then closed them firmly. After all, why pursue the matter? She had got the information she had come for.

'I must hurry back;' she rose, murmuring, 'my poor ill-used guests—'

Vida stood there quiet, a little cold. 'I won't ring,' she said. 'I think you'll find Mr. Stonor downstairs waiting for you.'

'Oh—a—he will have left word about the car in any case.'

Lady John's embarrassment was not so much at seeing that her friend had divined the gist of the arrangement that had been effected downstairs. It was that Vida should be at no pains to throw a decent veil over the fact of her realization that Lady John had come there in the character of scout. With an openness not wholly free from scorn, the younger woman had laid her own cards on the table. She made no scruple at turning her back on Lady John's somewhat incoherent evasion. Ignoring it she crossed the room and opened the door for her.

Jean was in the corridor saying good-bye to the chairman of the afternoon.

'Well, Mr. Trent,' said Miss Levering in even tones, 'I didn't expect to see you this evening.'

He came forward and stood in the doorway. 'Why not? Have I ever failed?'

'Lady John,' said Vida, turning, 'this is one of our allies. He is good enough to squire me through the rabble from time to time.'

'Well,' said Lady John, advancing quite graciously, 'I think it's very handsome of you after what she said to-day about men.'

'I've no great opinion of most men myself,' said the young gentleman. 'I might add, or of most women.'

'Oh!' Lady John laughed. 'At any rate I shall go away relieved to think that Miss Levering's plain speaking hasn't alienated all masculine regard.'

'Why should it?' he said.

'That's right.' Lady John metaphorically patted him on the back. 'Don't believe all she says in the heat of propaganda.'

'I do believe all she says. But I'm not cast down.'

'Not when she says—'

'Was there never,' he made bold to interrupt, 'a misogynist of my sex who ended by deciding to make an exception?'

'Oh!' Lady John smiled significantly; 'if that's what you build on!'

'Why,' he demanded with an effort to convey 'pure logic,' 'why shouldn't a man-hater on your side prove equally open to reason?'

'That aspect of the question has become irrelevant so far as I'm personally concerned,' said Vida, exasperated by Lady John's look of pleased significance. 'I've got to a place where I realize that the first battles of this new campaign must be fought by women alone. The only effective help men could give—amendment of the law—they refuse. The rest is nothing.'

'Don't be ungrateful, Vida. Here is this gentleman ready to face criticism in publicly championing you—'

'Yes, but it's an illusion that I, as an individual, need a champion. I am quite safe in the crowd. Please don't wait for me and don't come for me again.'

The sensitive dark face flushed. 'Of course if you'd rather—'

'And that reminds me,' she went on, unfairly punishing poor Mr. Trent for Lady John's meaning looks, 'I was asked to thank you, and to tell you, too, that they won't need your chairmanship any more—though that, I beg you to believe, has nothing to do with any feeling of mine.'

He was hurt and he showed it. 'Of course I know there must be other men ready—better known men—'

'It isn't that. It's simply that we find a man can't keep a rowdy meeting in order as well as a woman.'

He stared.

'You aren't serious?' said Lady John.

'Haven't you noticed,' Miss Levering put it to Trent, 'that all our worst disturbances come when men are in charge?'

'Ha! ha! Well—a—I hadn't connected the two ideas.'

Still laughing a little ruefully, he suffered himself to be taken downstairs by kind little Miss Dunbarton, who had stood without a word waiting there with absent face.

'That nice boy's in love with you,' said Lady John, sotto voce.

Vida looked at her without answering.

'Good-bye.' They shook hands. 'I wish you hadn't been so unkind to that nice boy.'

'Do you?'

'Yes; for then I would be more sure of your telling Geoffrey Stonor that intelligent women don't nurse their wrongs indefinitely, and lie in wait to punish them.'

'You are not sure?'

Lady John went up close and looked into her face with searching anxiety. 'Are you?' she asked.

Vida stood there mute, with eyes on the ground. Lady John glanced nervously at her watch, and, with a gesture of perturbation, hurriedly left the room. The other went slowly back to her place by the table.

The look she bent on Stonor as he came in seemed to take no account of those hurried glimpses at the Tunbridges' months before, and twice to-day when other eyes were watching. It was as if now, for the first time since they parted, he stood forth clearly. This man with the changed face, coming in at the door and carefully shutting it—he had once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day, beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened fastidiousness—mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple, and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the part of one who once had been so near—something that lames advance and hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the need of justifying their presence and defending their value.

As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the past grew plainer.

However ludicrous the result may look in the last analysis, it is clear that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching to their graves.

But the shining superiority of the man seemed to be a little dimmed for the woman sitting there. The old face and the new face, she saw them both through a cloud of long-past memories and a mist of present tears.

'Well, have they primed you?' she said very low. 'Have you got your lesson—by heart at last?'

He looked at her from immeasurable distance. 'I am not sure that I understand you,' he said. He waited an instant, then, seeing no explanation vouchsafed, 'However unpropitious your mood may be,' he went on with a satirical edge in his tone, 'I shall discharge my errand.'

Still she waited.

Her silence seemed to irritate him. 'I have promised,' he said, with a formality that smacked of insolence, 'to offer you what I believe is called "amends."'

The quick change in the brooding look should have warned him.

'You have come to realize, then—after all these years—that you owed me something?'

He checked himself on the brink of protest. 'I am not here to deny it.'

'Pay, then,' she said fiercely—'pay.'

A moment's dread flickered in his eye and then was gone. 'I have said that, if you exact it, I will.'

'Ah! If I insist, you'll "make it all good"! Then, don't you know, you must pay me in kind?'

He looked down upon her—a long, long way. 'What do you mean?'

'Give me back what you took from me—my old faith,' she said, with shaking voice. 'Give me that.'

'Oh, if you mean to make phrases—' He half turned away, but the swift words overtook him.

'Or, give me back mere kindness—or even tolerance! Oh, I don't mean your tolerance.' She was on her feet to meet his eyes as he faced her again. 'Give me back the power to think fairly of my brothers—not as mockers—thieves.'

'I have not mocked you. And I have asked you—'

'Something you knew I should refuse. Or'—her eyes blazed—'or did you dare to be afraid I wouldn't?'

'Oh, I suppose'—he buttressed his good faith with bitterness—'I suppose if we set our teeth we could—'

'I couldn't—not even if I set my teeth. And you wouldn't dream of asking me if you thought there was the smallest chance.'

Ever so faintly he raised his heavy shoulders. 'I can do no more than make you an offer of such reparation as is in my power. If you don't accept it—' He turned away with an air of 'that's done.'

But her emotion had swept her out of her course. She found herself at his side.

'Accept it? No! Go away and live in debt. Pay and pay and pay—and find yourself still in debt—for a thing you'll never be able to give me back. And when you come to die'—her voice fell—'say to yourself, "I paid all my creditors but one."'

He stopped on his way to the door and faced her again. 'I'm rather tired, you know, of this talk of debt. If I hear that you persist in it, I shall have to—' Again he checked himself.

'What?'

'No. I'll keep to my resolution.'

He had nearly reached the threshold. She saw what she had lost by her momentary lack of that boasted self-control. She forestalled him at the door.

'What resolution?' she asked.

He looked down at her an instant, clothed from head to foot in that indefinable armour of unapproachableness. This was a man who asked other people questions, himself ill-accustomed to be catechised. If he replied it was a grace.

'I came here,' he said, 'under considerable pressure, to speak of the future. Not to reopen the past.'

'The future and the past are one,' said the woman at the door.

'You talk as if that old madness was mine alone; it is the woman's way.'

'I know,' she agreed, to his obvious surprise, 'and it's not fair. Men suffer as well as we by the woman's starting wrong. We are taught to think the man a sort of demi-god. If he tells her, "Go down into hell," down into hell she goes.'

He would not have been human had he not resented that harsh summary of those days that lay behind.

'Make no mistake,' he said. 'Not the woman alone. They go down together.'

'Yes, they go down together. But the man comes up alone. As a rule. It is more convenient so—for him. And even for the other woman.'

Both pairs of eyes went to Jean's door.

'My conscience is clear,' he said angrily. 'I know—and so do you—that most men in my position wouldn't have troubled themselves. I gave myself endless trouble.'

She looked at him with wondering eyes. 'So you've gone about all these years feeling that you'd discharged every obligation?'

'Not only that. I stood by you with a fidelity that was nothing short of Quixotic. If, woman-like, you must recall the past, I insist on your recalling it correctly.'

'You think I don't recall it correctly?' she said very low.

'Not when you make—other people believe that I deserted you!' The gathering volume of his righteous wrath swept the cool precision out of his voice. 'It's a curious enough charge,' he said, 'when you stop to consider—' Again he checked himself, and, with a gesture of impatience, was for sweeping the whole thing out of his way, including that figure at the door.

But she stood there. 'Well, when we do just for five minutes out of ten years—when we do stop to consider—'

'We remember it was you who did the deserting. And since you had to rake the story up, you might have had the fairness to tell the facts.'

'You think "the facts" would have excused you?'

It was a new view. She left the door, and sat down in the nearest chair.

'No doubt you've forgotten the facts, since Lady John tells me you wouldn't remember my existence once a year, if the papers didn't—'

'Ah!' she interrupted, with a sorry little smile, 'you minded that!'

'I mind your giving false impressions,' he said with spirit. As she was about to speak he advanced upon her. 'Do you deny'—he bent over her, and told off those three words by striking one clenched fist into the palm of the other hand—'do you deny that you returned my letters unopened?'

'No,' she said.

'Do you deny that you refused to see me, and that when I persisted you vanished?'

'I don't deny any of those things.'

'Why'—he stood up straight again, and his shoulders grew more square with justification—'why I had no trace of you for years.'

'I suppose not.'

'Very well, then.' He walked away. 'What could I do?'

'Nothing. It was too late to do anything.'

'It wasn't too late! You knew, since you "read the papers," that my father died that same year. There was no longer any barrier between us.'

'Oh, yes, there was a barrier.'

'Of your own making, then.'

'I had my guilty share in it, but the barrier'—her voice trembled on the word—'the barrier was your invention.'

'The only barrier I knew of was no "invention." If you had ever known my father—'

'Oh, the echoes! the echoes!' She lay back in the chair. 'How often you used to say, if I "knew your father." But you said, too'—her voice sank—'you called the greatest "barrier" by another name.'

'What name?'

So low that even he could hardly hear she answered, 'The child that was to come.'

'That was before my father died,' Stonor returned hastily, 'while I still hoped to get his consent.'

She nodded, and her eyes were set like wide doors for memory to enter in.

'How the thought of that all-powerful personage used to terrorize me! What chance had a little unborn child against "the last of the great feudal lords," as you called him?'

'You know the child would have stood between you and me.'

'I know the child did stand between you and me.'

He stared at her. With vague uneasiness he repeated, 'Did stand—'

She seemed not to hear. The tears were running down her rigid face.

'Happy mothers teach their children. Mine had to teach me—'

'You talk as if—'

'—teach me that a woman may do that for love's sake that shall kill love.'

Neither spoke for some seconds. Fearing and putting from him fuller comprehension, he broke the silence, saying with an air of finality—

'You certainly made it plain you had no love left for me.'

'I had need of it all for the child.' Her voice had a curious crooning note in it.

He came closer. He bent down to put the low question, 'Do you mean, then, that after all—it lived?'

'No. I mean that it was sacrificed. But it showed me no barrier is so impassable as the one a little child can raise.'

It was as if lightning had flashed across the old picture. He drew back from the fierce illumination.

'Was that why you—' he began, in a voice that was almost a whisper. 'Was that why?'

She nodded, speechless a moment for tears. 'Day and night there it was between my thought of you and me.'

He sat down, staring at her.

'When I was most unhappy,' she went on, in that low voice, 'I would wake thinking I heard it cry. It was my own crying I heard, but I seemed to have it in my arms. I suppose I was mad. I used to lie there in that lonely farmhouse pretending to hush it. It was so I hushed myself.'

'I never knew—'

'I didn't blame you. You couldn't risk being with me.'

'You agreed that, for both our sakes—'

'Yes, you had to be very circumspect. You were so well known. Your autocratic father, your brilliant political future—'

'Be fair. Our future—as I saw it then.'

'Yes, everything hung on concealment. It must have looked quite simple to you. You didn't know the ghost of a child that had never seen the light, the frail thing you meant to sweep aside and forget'—she was on her feet—'have swept aside and forgotten!—you didn't know it was strong enough to push you out of my life.' With an added intensity, 'It can do more!' she said. She leaned over his bowed figure and whispered, 'It can push that girl out!' As again she stood erect, half to herself she added, 'It can do more still.'

'Are you threatening me?' he said dully.

'No, I am preparing you.'

'For what?'

'For the work that must be done. Either with your help or that girl's.'

The man's eyes lifted a moment.

'One of two things,' she said—'either her life, and all she has, given to this new Service; or a ransom if I give her up to you.'

'I see. A price. Well—?'

She looked searchingly at him for an instant, and then slowly shook her head.

'Even if I could trust you to pay the price,' she said, 'I'm not sure but what a young and ardent soul as faithful and as pure as hers—I'm not sure but I should make a poor bargain for my sex to give that up for anything you could do.'

He found his feet like a man roused out of an evil dream to some reality darker than the dream. 'In spite of your assumption, she may not be your tool,' he said.

'You are horribly afraid she is! But you are wrong. She's an instrument in stronger hands than mine. Soon my little personal influence over her will be merged in something infinitely greater. Oh, don't think it's merely I that have got hold of Jean Dunbarton.'

'Who else?'

'The New Spirit that's abroad.'

With an exclamation he turned away. And though his look branded the idea for a wild absurdity, sentinel-like he began to pace up and down a few yards from Jean's door.

'How else,' said the woman, 'should that inexperienced girl have felt the new loyalty and responded as she did?'

'"New," indeed!' he said under his breath, 'however little "loyal."'

'Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit up the world. It had been there since the world began—waiting to do away with the dark. So has the thing you're fighting.'

'The thing I'm fighting'—and the violence with which he spoke was only in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register—'the thing I'm fighting is nothing more than one person's hold upon a highly sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope'—he made a gesture of impotence.

'It only remains for me to show her that your true motive is revenge.'

'Once say that to her, and you are lost.'

He stole an uneasy look at the woman out of a face that had grown haggard.

'If you were fighting for that girl only against me, you'd win,' she said. 'It isn't so—and you will fail. The influence that has hold of her is in the very air. No soul knows where it comes from, except that it comes from the higher sources of civilization.'

'I see the origin of it before my eyes!'

'As little as you see the beginnings of life. This is like the other mysterious forces of Mother Earth. No warning given—no sign. A night wind passes over the brown land, and in the morning the fields are green.'

His look was the look of one who sees happiness slipping away. 'Or it passes over gardens like a frost,' he said, 'and the flowers die.'

'I know that is what men fear. It even seems as if it must be through fear that your enlightenment will come. The strangest things make you men afraid! That's why I see a value in Jean Dunbarton far beyond her fortune.'

He looked at her dully.

'More than any other girl I know—if I keep her from you, that gentle, inflexible creature could rouse in men the old half-superstitious fear—'

'Fear! Are you mad?'

'Mad!' she echoed. 'Unsexed'—those are the words to-day. In the Middle Ages men cried out 'Witch!' and burnt her—the woman who served no man's bed or board.

'You want to make the poor child believe—'

'She sees for herself we've come to a place where we find there's a value in women apart from the value men see in them. You teach us not to look to you for some of the things we need most. If women must be freed by women, we have need of such as—' Her eyes went to the door that Stonor still had an air of guarding. 'Who knows—she may be the new Joan of Arc.'

He paused, and for that moment he seemed as bankrupt in denunciation as he was in hope. This personal application of the new heresy found him merely aghast, with no words but 'That she should be the sacrifice!'

'You have taught us to look very calmly on the sacrifice of women,' was the ruthless answer. 'Men tell us in every tongue, it's "a necessary evil."'

He stood still a moment, staring at the ground.

'One girl's happiness—against a thing nobler than happiness for thousands—who can hesitate? Not Jean.'

'Good God! can't you see that this crazed campaign you'd start her on—even if it's successful, it can only be so through the help of men? What excuse shall you make your own soul for not going straight to the goal?'

'You think we wouldn't be glad,' she said, 'to go straight to the goal?'

'I do. I see you'd much rather punish me and see her revel in a morbid self-sacrifice.'

'You say I want to punish you only because, like other men, you won't take the trouble to understand what we do want—or how determined we are to have it. You can't kill this New Spirit among women.' She went nearer. 'And you couldn't make a greater mistake than to think it finds a home only in the exceptional or the unhappy. It is so strange to see a man like you as much deluded as the Hyde Park loafers, who say to Ernestine Blunt, "Who's hurt your feelings?" Why not realize'—she came still closer, if she had put out her hand she would have touched him—'this is a thing that goes deeper than personal experience? And yet,' she said in a voice so hushed that it was full of a sense of the girl on the other side of the door, 'if you take only the narrowest personal view, a good deal depends on what you and I agree upon in the next five minutes.'

'You recommend my realizing the larger issues. But in your ambition to attach that poor girl to the chariot-wheels of Progress'—his voice put the drag of ironic pomposity upon the phrase—'you quite ignore the fact that people fitter for such work, the men you look to enlist in the end, are ready waiting'—he pulled himself up in time for an anti-climax—'to give the thing a chance.'

'Men are ready! What men?'

His eyes evaded hers. He picked his words. 'Women have themselves to blame that the question has grown so delicate that responsible people shrink for the moment from being implicated in it.'

'We have seen the shrinking.'

'Without quoting any one else, I might point out that the New Antagonism seems to have blinded you to the small fact that I for one am not an opponent.'

'The phrase has a familiar ring. We have heard it four hundred and twenty times.'

His eyes were shining with anger. 'I spoke, if I may say so, of some one who would count. Some one who can carry his party along with him—or risk a seat in the cabinet over the issue.'

'Did you mean you are "ready" to do that?' she exclaimed.

'An hour ago I was.'

'Ah! an hour ago!'

'Exactly! You don't understand men. They can be led; they can't be driven. Ten minutes before you came into the room I was ready to say I would throw in my political lot with this Reform.'

'And now?'

'Now you block my way by an attempt at coercion. By forcing my hand you give my adherence an air of bargain-driving for a personal end. Exactly the mistake of the ignorant agitators in Trafalgar Square. You have a great deal to learn. This movement will go forward, not because of the agitation outside, but in spite of it. There are men in Parliament who would have been actively serving the Reform to-day—as actively as so vast a constitutional change—'

She smiled faintly. 'And they haven't done it because—'

'Because it would have put a premium on breaches of decent behaviour and defiance of the law!'

She looked at him with an attempt to appear to accept this version. What did it matter what reasons were given for past failure, if only the future might be assured? He had taken a piece of crumpled paper from his pocket and smoothed it out.

'Look here!' He held the telegram before her.

She flushed with excitement as she read. 'This is very good. I see only one objection.'

'Objection!'

'You haven't sent it.'

'That is your fault.' And he looked as if he thought he spoke the truth.

'When did you write this?'

'Just before you came in—when she began to talk about—'

'Ah, Jean!' Vida gave him back the paper. 'That must have pleased Jean.'

It was a master stroke, the casual giving back, and the invocation of a pleasure that had been strangled at the birth along with something greater. Did he see before him again the girl's tear-filled, hopeless eyes, that had not so much as read the wonderful message, too intent upon the death-warrant of their common happiness? He threw himself heavily into a chair, staring at the closed door. Behind it, in a prison of which this woman held the key, Jean waited for her life sentence. Stonor's look, his attitude, seemed to say that he too only waited now to hear it. He dropped his head in his hand.

When Vida spoke, it was without raising her eyes from the ground.

'I could drive a hard-and-fast bargain with you; but I think I won't. If love and ambition both urge you on, perhaps—' She looked up a little defiantly, seeming to expect to meet triumph in his face. Instead, her eye took in the profound hopelessness of the bent head, the slackness of the big frame, that so suddenly had assumed a look of age. She went over to him silently, and stood by his side. 'After all,' she said, 'life hasn't been quite fair to you.' At the new thing in her voice he raised his heavy eyes. 'You fall out of one ardent woman's dreams into another's,' she said.

'Then you don't—after all, you don't mean to—'

'To keep you and her apart? No.'

For the first time tears came into his eyes.

After a little silence he held out his hand. 'What can I do for you?'

She seemed not to see the hand he offered. Or did she only see that it was empty? She was looking at the other. Mere instinct made him close his left hand more firmly on the message.

It was as if something finer than her slim fingers, the woman's invisible antennæ, felt the force that would need be overcome if trial of strength should be precipitated then. Upon his 'What can I do?' she shook her head.

'For the real you,' he said. 'Not the Reformer, or the would-be politician—for the woman I so unwillingly hurt.' As she only turned away, he stood up, detaining her with a hold upon her arm. 'You may not believe it, but now that I understand, there is almost nothing I wouldn't do to right that old wrong.'

'There's nothing to be done,' she said; and then, shrinking under that look of almost cheerful benevolence, 'You can never give me back my child.'

More than at the words, at the anguish in her face, his own had changed.

'Will that ghost give you no rest?' he said.

'Yes, oh, yes.' She was calm again. 'I see life is nobler than I knew. There is work to do.'

On her way to the great folding doors, once again he stopped her.

'Why should you think that it's only you these ten years have taught something to? Why not give even a man credit for a willingness to learn something of life, and for being sorry—profoundly sorry—for the pain his instruction has cost others? You seem to think I've taken it all quite lightly. That's not fair. All my life, ever since you disappeared, the thought of you has hurt. I would give anything I possess to know you—were happy again.'

'Oh, happiness!'

'Why shouldn't you find it still?'

He said it with a significance that made her stare, and then?—

'I see! she couldn't help telling you about Allen Trent—Lady John couldn't!'

He ignored the interpretation.

'You're one of the people the years have not taken from, but given more to. You are more than ever—You haven't lost your beauty.'

'The gods saw it was so little effectual, it wasn't worth taking away.'

She stood staring out into the void. 'One woman's mishap—what is that? A thing as trivial to the great world as it's sordid in most eyes. But the time has come when a woman may look about her and say, What general significance has my secret pain? Does it "join on" to anything? And I find it does. I'm no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the way.' With difficulty she controlled the shake in her voice. 'I'm one who has got up bruised and bleeding, wiped the dust from her hands and the tears from her face—and said to herself not merely: Here's one luckless woman! but—here is a stone of stumbling to many. Let's see if it can't be moved out of other women's way. And she calls people to come and help. No mortal man, let alone a woman, by herself, can move that rock of offence. But,' she ended with a sudden sombre flare of enthusiasm, 'if many help, Geoffrey, the thing can be done.'

He looked down on her from his height with a wondering pity.

'Lord! how you care!' he said, while the mist deepened before his eyes.

'Don't be so sad,' she said—not seeming to see his sadness was not for himself. It was as if she could not turn her back on him this last time without leaving him comforted. 'Shall I tell you a secret? Jean's ardent dreams needn't frighten you, if she has a child. That—from the beginning it was not the strong arm—it was the weakest, the little, little arms that subdued the fiercest of us.'

He held out a shaking hand, so uncertain, that it might have been begging pity, or it might have been bestowing it. Even then she did not take it, but a great gentleness was in her face as she said—

'You will have other children, Geoffrey; for me there was to be only one. Well, well,' she brushed the tears away, 'since men have tried, and failed to make a decent world for the little children to live in, it's as well some of us are childless. Yes,' she said quietly, taking up the hat and cloak, 'we are the ones who have no excuse for standing aloof from the fight!'

Her hand was on the door.

'Vida!'

'What?'

'You forgot something.'

She looked back.

He was signing the message. 'This,' he said.

She went out with the paper in her hand.

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Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been corrected. Corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below:

page 7: hyphen removed

about that long'—he measured less than an inch on his minute fore-finger[hyphen removed]—'with long holes through so they

page 9: typographical error corrected

refusal to let attenion[attention] go was mitigated by something in the quietness,

page 17: hyphen removed

'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eye-glass.[hyphen removed]

page 36: hyphen added

kept watching with a kind of half-absent-[hyphen added]minded scorn

page 102: quotation typographical error corrected

Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading."[']

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next monster petition to Parliament asking for Woman's Suffrage."[']

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the vivid scarlet lips; almost spleepy[sleepy] the heavy-lidded eyes.

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Those of you who want to see women free, hold up your hands."[']

page 248: typographical error corrected 'We got a gryte deal to do with our wgyes[wyges], we women has.

page 250: quotation typographical error corrected

'Why didn't you stay where I left you?"['] he answered, without

page 252: added single quotation mark

a rich chuckle. 'She's a educatin' of us![']

page 258: added double quotation mark

"Look at this big crowd. W'y, we're all men! If the women want the vote, w'y ain't they here to s'y so?["] Well, I'll tell you w'y. It's because they've 'ad to get

page 260: typographical error corrected

in a turtle-esque fashion highty[highly] provocative,

page 265: quotation typographical error corrected

whose crime is, they ask for the vote?'["] But try as I would,

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Stonor as he came in seemed to take no acccount[account] of those

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for that moment he semed[seemed] as bankrupt in denunciation