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THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW
SIX WOMEN
SELF AND THE OTHER
THE ETERNAL FIRES
FIVE NIGHTS
THE LIFE SENTENCE
ANNA LOMBARD
    (500,000 copies)
SIX CHAPTERS OF A MAN'S LIFE
TO-MORROW?
PAULA
THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T
A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE
THE RELIGION OF EVELYN HASTINGS
LIFE OF MY HEART

THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION

BY

VICTORIA CROSS

Author of "Life's Shop Window," "Six Women," etc., etc.

NEW YORK THE MACAULAY COMPANY

Copyright, 1912, by VIVIAN CORY GRIFFEN

Copyright, 1914, by VIVIAN CORY GRIFFEN

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER                               PAGE
   I. HOME                              11

  II. IN THE WAYS OF DELIGHT            43

 III. THE GIFT                          77

  IV. OUT OF THE STAGNANT HARBOUR      124

   V. CLEAR WATERS                     145

  VI. PARADISE OR ----?                172

 VII. WITH THE GREAT RIVER             196

VIII. THE LIONS OF THE DESERT          223

  IX. IN THE DARK WATCHES              249

   X. THE REACTION                     285

  XI. VAE VICTIS                       296

 XII. DAWN                             305

THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION

CHAPTER I

HOME

She lay in a quiet corner of the Rectory Garden, looking up at the
majestic white clouds, that sailed across the blue of the summer
sky, like Viking ships under full sail, speeding along over the deep
blue of a limitless ocean. How glorious they were! How wonderful to
contemplate these summer nimbi, in their immaculate, fleecy whiteness,
in their shadowy recesses, in their glistening summits. They were
pure and radiant, even as the girl's soul was, and by their affinity
with it they seemed to call it up to them, to lift it up away from
the sordid Rectory, with its harsh, unloving father, its dejected,
stupid mother, its quarrelling daughters; away from the horrible
village, full of vice, squalor and disease; away from the narrow
stone church, in which a yet narrower creed was weekly preached. Away
from all these, to the contemplation of the pure and the beautiful,
these glorious clouds called her, and she loved them, the friends and
companions of her thoughts through many a lonely hour. Now, in the
hush of a hot afternoon, she lay very still under the gold rain of the
laburnum-trees, looking up at the towering snowy masses in a rapture of
delight.

Stossop Rectory lay, in its old-fashioned country grounds, inland
from the sea about two miles on the south coast of Devon, and a very
beautiful old place it was, long and low, containing many rooms, and
having a deep gabled roof of Titian-red, that showed above the wealth
of white and delicately pink roses that veiled its face; and if the
Rectory from without looked the typical, peaceful English home, so
within was it the really typical English home, full of disunion,
pettiness, quarrelling, hatred and discontent. The English are perhaps
of all humanity the greatest humbugs; they love, more than anything
in the world, pretence; and the farther away the reality is from the
sham they create out of their imagination the more dearly they love the
sham; hence those amazing pictures of the domestic hearth, the happy,
rosy-cheeked children, the smiling mother, the loving, protective
father; the gentle temper, the sunny cheerfulness, the air of rest and
peace and safety pervading all. Has anyone ever been the inmate of, or
the visitor to, such a home? Let all who read these lines recall their
recollections of home, their own and those they have seen. Whoever
it was who wrote "Home, Sweet Home," one feels the author must have
been an orphan and brought up at a school. The home in reality is the
place where everyone feels they can display their bad temper and their
bad manners, as they can wear their oldest, ugliest clothes and their
surliest expressions. The heroic manly brothers of the story-book spend
their time in pulling their sisters' hair and kicking them under the
table; the gentle sisters hate them secretly in return; the father
grumbles at his wife, the wife scolds the servants; and so the dreary
round of home life goes on. The boys escape from it as soon as they
can; the girls rebelliously long to follow; the unhappy wife and mother
hopes vaguely for some relief that never comes; the father cherishes
in his heart the memory of his last visit to town, _on business_, and
looks forward eagerly to the next, enlivening the dull and stupid time
that intervenes by bullying his wife.

Such is the average home, and such was it at Stossop Rectory, and,
but for the enchanted garden, Regina Marlow, the Rector's youngest
daughter, who was of totally different stamp and mould from the rest of
the family, could never have supported life in it at all.

Some really golden moments in Mrs. Marlow's life, in which the
Rector had no part--being away on one of his business visits to
town--accounted for Regina. She was the child of love and passion, as
the others were of distaste and dislike, for Mrs. Marlow entertained
for her husband that solid dislike which is the basis of most marital
relations. And the elder daughters, conceived and nurtured in it,
had hate engrained in every fibre of their bodies. It showed in the
spiteful gleams of their eyes, in the downward turn of their mouths,
in their incessant wrangling with each other. Beautiful they were,
for Mrs. Marlow was beautiful, but the nine months of inward revolt
from her husband that she had suffered in each case while they were
being fashioned within her, of her blood and her bone and her brain,
had given them both the terrible curse of the hating soul. But Regina,
born of love, of that sweet tenderness like the spring zephyr, of that
wild passion like a summer storm, that the gods have given to man to
illumine the darkness of the earth, Regina showed love and joy in every
line of her face and form. Her mouth was always smiling; its curves
were upwards, not downwards. Her voice was soft with all the notes of
love and sex in it; her eyelids were sweetly arched; her blue eyes
overflowed with tenderness and smiles; her soul was filled to the brim
with what the Rector would have termed the "grace of God," and not
untruly, since God is love. All through Regina's creation her mother
had dwelt on love and on its sacred memories, and naturally enough the
embryo conceived and reared in love and loving thoughts came into the
world fitted out and equipped for love. Ah, how little do women think
of the evil they commit when they give themselves to husbands they
do not love! The hideous crime it is, blacker than any, to give life
to beings burdened with evil souls, do they ever think of it? That
hate they feel for the father, do they not realise how it bears fruit
in the evil tempers and passions of the child? Mrs. Marlow, deep in
her inmost heart, always thought of Regina, the gay, loving, radiant
Regina, as the child of sin. No small voice ever whispered to her that
the elder children, fretful, vicious, unhealthy, malicious, reflections
of her own state of mind when bearing them, were children of a greater
sin--against themselves, against society, against the human race.

She never thought about these things; she believed herself to be a
thoroughly good woman, who had sinned once in her life, but sincerely
repented.

She had dismissed her lover; she had turned a deaf ear to the
passionate entreaties of the man who really wanted her, and had
remained to do her duty to her husband, who would have been so thankful
to be free from her--duty, which consisted, according to her ideas, in
counting his shirts when they came home from the wash, presiding over
the flannel club he had started in the village, seeing that he had
three meals a day and that the Rectory was cleaned up twice a year, and
disliking him extremely the whole time.

Year by year her face hardened and her intellect diminished under
the cramping influence of the hating habit; now and then the lines
of her mouth would soften and her eyes glow tenderly as she thought
of Regina's father, but she immediately chased the warmth of love
out of her heart as most improper, and hastened off to fold her
husband's clothes or put his books in order, with the proper feeling of
repulsion, hatred and disgust to which she was accustomed.

Whether such a state of living and being would really be acceptable to
the one who said, Love one another, and Blessed are the pure in heart,
she never stopped to ask herself. That she would have been accounted by
him the "whitened sepulchre" never occurred to her.

Regina's presence she could not bear, the girl reminded her too vividly
of what she was always trying vainly to forget; and so, while her
mother busied herself more and more with old women's charities and
parochial meetings, Regina was left more and more to her own studies,
and for her pleasures to the enchanted garden. The enchanted garden
belonged to an unoccupied villa by the sea called "The Chalet." The
owner had left it in charge of a caretaker and a gardener, but had
begged the Rector to visit both house and garden occasionally and see
that things were kept in good order. The Rector being very busy had
gradually allowed this duty to devolve on Regina, who possessed herself
of the keys, made friends with the gardener, and undertook to report on
the property from time to time to the owner. In this way a great joy
had come into her life. She fell in love with the garden at first sight
of it, and her visits there soon became a passion of delight to her. In
both winter and summer the garden was almost equally beautiful. From
its extraordinarily sheltered position no winds could get into it to
riot there. Rain and snow to fall upon its velvet ground had to filter
through a maze of foliage which neither withered nor fell through all
the dizzy circle of the seasons. The garden was sunk slightly below
the level of the green, grassy, sheltered and little-frequented road
that lay on one side of it, and from which it was screened by masses of
tamarisks grown into splendid trees and banks of wild red roses, the
tree stems of which were as thick as a man's arm; on the other side of
the garden, enclosing all the magic space, was a low stone balustrade,
and through its interstices glittered the dancing blue of the sea; over
the balustrade, and far above it, towered great aloes, with their spiky
leaves, and auricarias, and more red climbing roses, and ever here and
there their gentle sprays parted and let through them a vision of the
wide sea and the blue and violet lines of distant hills on a far-off
coast. In the centre of the garden rose in its stately majesty a single
palm, and stretched its benign and glorious branches widely and evenly
on every side, catching the rosy light of the dawn, the red glow of
the afternoon and the crimson of the sunset through the procession of
the hours; for the garden lay to the south, and the sun made it his
resting-place through all the golden day; beneath the palm, cool in
its shade, lay green turf, emerald-coloured, velvety, wonderful; and
on this without order, except the gracious order of nature, stood at
wide intervals standard rose-trees bearing blossoms of every shape and
hue--white and amber and cream, red, crimson to blackness, blush-pink
like a maiden's cheek, yellow and deep orange--and all of them were
scented. Unlike the over-cultivated roses of some rich man's garden,
where excessive culture has induced extravagant size at the expense of
the flower's natural mystic charm, its perfume, these flowers were all
comparatively small, but rich both in colour and fragrance. So sweet
was the breath of the roses that for half-a-mile before one reached
the garden its divine scent drifted out to the wayfarer and, as in
Damascus, the whole air and every breeze whispered of the rose.

To Regina these rose-trees standing on the green grass, not in lines,
or rows or circles, not in beds nor borders, seemed less like plants
than living figures; they seemed to her fancy to stand like beautiful
girls in a ballroom waiting for their partners to dance with, and the
perfume diffused by them in the air seemed like the music of their
innocent conversation. She never tired of watching them and noting the
graceful attitudes in which they stood, and how sometimes two or three
would bend together as if to murmur their confidences.

Round the great oval of the green turf, with its standing roses, ran a
narrow path, and this towards the western end of the garden met other
little paths, and these all ran, together or separately, now side by
side, now widely diverse through thickets of tamarisk, aloe and rose,
under other thick branching palms, where it was so dark at noon under
tangled creeper and vine that it seemed like evening; and yet, dark
though they were, all these winding, hidden paths led at last out to
the porphyry balustrade and the glittering purple sea.

The effect of this garden on Regina's artistic, poetic, beauty-loving
nature was like magic. However sad or irritated, nervous, ill or
angry she might be when she came there, once the gate of the garden
was passed a deep peace fell upon her. All here was silence, rest and
fragrance; the perfect harmony of light and shade, the mystic presence
of beauty; and all her cares and troubles, and the annoyances of the
petty world in which she lived, fell from her; her soul seemed to
unfurl its wings and soar through radiant spaces, and everything was
forgotten but the beauty of the earth and the glory of light and colour
and the laugh of the joyous sea.

To the girl lying gazing up at the white clouds this Sunday afternoon
the thought of the garden came sweetly, and she got up and shook out
the folds of her cambric gown and took the winding path through the
Rectory garden which led to the old road to the coast. She had no
hat, and through the lace of her white parasol the sun streamed down
warmly on her thick and waving hair, hair itself sun-coloured and
light-filled, and on the pale rose of her cheeks and the blue of her
eyes softly shaded by their curling lashes. Tall, erect and graceful,
in the first glory of her youth, Regina Marlow walked that afternoon
with the step and carriage that her name implied. As she walked, she
was thinking; she had a small black scholarly-looking book clasped in
her hand, but to-day she was not thinking of her studies: her thoughts
clustered round an approaching event which was coming to disturb the
even discomfort of the Rectory, and which had been the sole topic of
conversation at luncheon that day. A friend of the Rector, a junior
chum of his in Oxford days, had been invited and was coming to stay at
Stossop with them, and Regina wondered very much within herself whether
he would be interesting or not. She had heard that he was immensely
rich, but that did not interest her at all, though the whole family
had nearly fallen into a violent quarrel amongst themselves as to the
exact amount of his income and the number of his country houses, much
to Regina's amusement, who could not see what it mattered to them
whether he were once or three times a millionaire. She had heard that
he had travelled a great deal, which attracted her, but chiefly, she
understood, for sport, which repelled her. That he was a very brilliant
individual, much sought after, courted and fêted in society, impressed
her, but only vaguely, since the world of men and their judgments and
opinions were very far away from Stossop.

Her query to the Rector as to his appearance had been answered by: "Oh
yes; Everest was the best-looking fellow at Oxford," a phrase that left
her equally uninformed, since she had no idea what the men at Oxford
were like. If they resembled the average individual she saw at Stossop,
the Rector's words would not necessarily mean much. And out of this
chaotic non-knowledge of him in her mind, and from the incessant
chatter of her sisters about him, a very splendid and glowing vision
of the stranger had gradually grown up, and she looked forward to this
evening, when he was going to arrive, with a joyous sense of elation
and interest which was impersonal in its nature and very different from
the anxious, calculating hopes that inspired the rest of the family.

To Regina's intense and secret amusement she saw that her sisters had
quite made up their minds that Everest Lanark, his unusual rent-roll
and indeterminable number of country houses, should be captured by
one or other of them; and the Rector, while professing to be entirely
disinterested, really fell in with this idea, while her mother openly
exerted herself about the girls' wardrobes, and fussed over their new
evening dresses, warning them against burning their complexions, and
urging them to practise their drawing-room songs before his arrival.
To Regina's keen intelligence the idea that a man of large resources,
of wide travel, of immense experience, who had reached the age of
forty-six or seven, untouched by all the beauty that, according to
all accounts, had always been at his feet, should immediately succumb
to the attractions of an ordinary, country girl, without rank, title,
wealth or any of those things to which he was accustomed--without
talent or charm of any sort except youth and a pretty face--seemed
improbable in the extreme.

For her sisters Regina felt that sort of marvelling wonder that the
naturally clever and gifted individual feels for the ordinary person,
and which is far greater than any admiring wonder that the limited
brain of the ordinary person can conceive for the clever one.

Why did they not do something--and something well--she often asked
herself. They did nothing, and wanted to do nothing; they knew nothing,
and wanted to know nothing.

To Regina, always learning, always acquiring, always thinking, always
doing something, it seemed truly marvellous.

In the Rectory there was a splendid library, full of books in all kinds
of languages, treating of all countries, religions and philosophies;
yet neither of the elder girls had opened one of them. They hardly
realised that any other religion than the Christian existed, barely
knew whether the world was round or square, knew no language but their
own, had no conception of what was conveyed by the words Roman Empire,
and had never heard of Troy. They played a very little on the piano
and sung a little less, badly and out of time. They went to church
regularly and visited the poor, because their parents insisted on their
doing it, in their quality of the Rector's daughters, and Regina often
wondered what the "poor" thought of them. The rest of the time they
spent reading some novel that dealt exclusively with English life, for
they could not understand any other; fashioning and refashioning their
costumes, and hoping vaguely for the wealthy individuals they thought
they deserved to come to the Rectory and insist on marrying them!

To Regina, who was up with the light of the dawn to read and study
and work, who had absorbed already the learning of a quarter of the
library, who had mastered Greek and Latin and read in five modern
languages besides, though she had no opportunity of speaking them, who
played really well and was endued with a natural gift for painting, the
ignorance and apathy of her sisters were beyond understanding.

She did not know that her own splendid health and energy, her capacity
for hard work and concentration, her quick and eager mind, all came
from that golden source: the passionate love that had formed her being.
Had she known the heavy handicap laid upon her sisters at their birth
she would have pitied them even more than she did now, and wondered at
them less.

By the time she reached the garden the sun was low in the sky and
great bars of yellow light fell all across the vivid green amongst the
standing roses. She opened and closed the gate very softly, for the
birds were singing, and the white doves that belonged to the Chalet
were cooing, and she did not want to jar upon the concert. She entered
silently, and slowly walked round the winding paths, her whole being
lifted up and expanding in the peace and fragrance and beauty of this
radiant solitude.

How many afternoons and evenings had she not walked there alone! And
now, to-morrow perhaps, she would bring the stranger there to see it.
Would he feel the enchantment of it as she did, she wondered, or would
he say, as her father had done: "Those roses, you know, Regina, ought
to be in beds; it's absurd having them all over the place like this."

That should be the test, she thought: if he said anything like that,
or if he suggested that the wild tamarisks should be cut down or
thinned out, she would not care about him.

It was a curious fact that, in all her reverie concerning him, it never
once occurred to her to picture what his feelings might be for her: she
was wholly absorbed in wondering what her feelings might be towards
him. So far in her experience with men, and it had not been very wide
or deep, she had found them uniformly fall in love with her, and she
had grown to accept this, without paying much attention to it, as a
common habit of theirs, like smoking.

The doctor had wanted her to marry him and preside over the village
dispensary; the curate had wanted her to marry him and manage coal
clubs and write his sermons for him all the rest of her life; the Latin
master had wanted her to marry him and take his boys' class in Greek
verse, and the same master's assistant had wanted her to marry him and
run away to London with him; but to all of these Regina had said a very
gentle No, though her heart had beat at their words and her colour
had come and gone uncertainly, for she unconsciously responded to all
love as the bell responds to the vibration of the note to which it is
attuned.

Regina, naturally, never spoke to anyone of these offers and refusals,
but they gradually became known in the village, as everything is always
known in an English village. When the grumpy doctor became more surly
and grumpy than ever; when the Latin master took to caning his boys
every day instead of every week; when the curate came to church whiter
than his surplice, with dark rings under his eyes, and the assistant
master went away to town and shot himself in his lodgings there, it was
all put down to Regina, and her conduct in having had four proposals
was called "disgraceful" by the ladies in the village who had not had
one, and were twice and three times her age.

The curate asked her if it was not very miserable for a woman to feel
she was making a man unhappy, and Regina had answered very truly: "Yes;
but she gets accustomed to it." She could not marry them all, and had
she married one the other three would still have been unconsoled. So,
when she was being abused and reproached for her heartlessness, she
simply went away to the enchanted garden and tried to forget about all
of them. Her sisters' strange conceit in themselves prevented them from
owing her any ill-will for these events.

They fancied that Regina's lovers did not aspire to them; that, while
good enough for her, they would not dare to lift their eyes to the
beautiful elder daughters of the Rector, the real fact being that none
of the four men would have burdened his life with either of the silly,
weakly, useless creatures.

Regina, lying with her cheek pressed to the bright green turf, listened
in silence to the wild beating of her heart, as she thought of love.
"Surely it must mean more than they think and make of it," she told
herself when the memory of these men recurred to her. And she leaned
most towards the young master, because he had given up his life for
love, but, greatly though his enthusiastic mind had pleased her, his
face and figure had not, and she did not regret him.

She would look up to the roses leaning over her and repeat to them
some Greek lines that fascinated her: "Oh, children, what is this
that men call love?" And the roses seemed to quiver and bend lower
over her to hear the answer: "Love is not love alone, but indeed
is known by many names; it is unbridled violence; it is unslaked
thirst; it is intolerable anguish; it is unbounded joy; it is endless
lamentation," and as a breath stirred in the garden the trees seemed
to throw high their blossoms on the scented breeze in a wild and gay
response: "Whatever it is, good or ill, we wait for it, worship it,
live for it, die for it." This seemed their song to the girl, and the
white doves took it up and echoed it, and the thrushes warbled it in
their passionate throats, and the nightingales in the dark parts of
the garden trilled out in warm melody the same notes: "Wait for it,
worship it, live for it, die for it," and the girl heard it, with a
wonderful elation and triumph filling her, for she knew that whatever
gift the gods might have denied her in this life they had bestowed the
supreme one of all--the power to love, and to inspire love. It was
this intuitive knowledge of the great power within her, the limitless
capacity for devotion, the aptitude for love, that, paradoxical as it
may seem, had kept her from love so far.

She knew that somewhere in the world there must be men who possessed
beauty and strength and grace and intellect, all that she loved; and
one of these would call up in her that same wild elation, that keen
rush of adoration, the vivid joy, that she felt under the sky at
sunset, when it arrayed itself in its most glorious colours, or in the
garden, when the roses poured over her their fragrance, or in Exeter
Cathedral, when the roll of melody from the organ seemed to catch up
her breathless soul and carry it away to unknown spheres. She felt
in fact that need of her being to worship which, in the young and
innocent, is the first knowledge of love. And as her reason revolted
from worshipping the doctor or the curate or the Latin master or the
assistant master, she knew that she did not love, and she would not
marry them. For before a clever and well-awakened mind can give itself
over to the worship of any object, either that object must be worthy of
the worship, or it must so dazzle the senses of the worshipper, throw
such a magic glamour around itself, that it appears to be worthy of
it; Regina had never seen anyone yet who could capture her reason or
dazzle her senses, and now the query came before her, floating hazily,
cloud-like on the horizon of her thoughts, would this new-comer to the
Rectory bring with him the power of the sunset skies and the cathedral
music?

For a whole fortnight nothing had been talked of except the approaching
visit. It had engrossed the entire household. The finest bedroom
in the Rectory, with a little sitting-room opening out of it, had
been assigned to the guest, and to these rooms the occupants of
the house had carried their various treasures, sometimes openly,
sometimes surreptitiously. Mrs. Marlow had contributed her favourite
lounging-chair from her boudoir, Miss Marlow had lent her silver
clock, and Miss Violet Marlow her set of silken cushions from her own
sofa, and many more pretty and graceful objects had travelled that way
for many days, till the family really felt that their guest would be
pleased with the little suite, even accustomed as he was, in their
imagination, to be surrounded by tokens of fabulous wealth. Regina that
morning had herself placed on the dressing-table as her contribution
two lovely roses of perfect shape and hue, in a slender vase of
gilded crystal, but Miss Marlow having come in and noticed the divine
fragrance filling all the air, and recognising her sister's vase, had
seized the golden roses by their heads, torn them out of the water and
flung them into the garden, just as Regina was passing underneath. She
looked up with a glance of amused irony rather than anger. Such little
amenities were not uncommon in the Rectory home.

"You have no business to interfere with his rooms," Miss Marlow called
from the window. "We don't want flowers in here, dropping their leaves
and making the place untidy."

Regina raised her shoulders a little and passed on in silence, having
stooped and gathered up the glorious blossoms, so fresh that they were
little hurt by the fall, and they were now blooming in her room. A
smile was on her face as she pursued her way. She would wear them that
night at dinner and he should admire them on her instead of on his
table, that was all.

She walked now from end to end of the garden, thinking of the morrow or
the next day, when she would bring him there. All was in perfect order;
she had never seen it look more lovely, and she leant at last with a
sigh of contentment on the balustrade, gazing across the purple expanse
of the sea, to the hazy golden outlines of the distant coast.

How the thrushes sang, till the whole air quivered about her with
melody. And but for love they would never sing at all, and but for
love the roses would have no scent, the doves would not coo, the trees
would have no blossom and no fruit. What a wonderful gift it is to the
world, she thought, this love!--the author of everything pleasing and
beautiful, the source of eternal life. No wonder that through all the
ages men have worshipped it and sung of it, and poured out all the
powers of their brain to magnify it. And yet the never-ending pæan
chanted throughout the centuries is but a feeble and inadequate whisper
of its greatness. Man's voice being human is not attuned to sing
fittingly of what is divine. Men realise that life comes from love, but
how many realise that also all the decoration of life comes from it!
Even if we could exist without love, with it we must give up the beauty
of women, the fragrance of flowers, the melody of birds, the charm of
the human voice, the power of the brain.

These are not separate entities, they are simply the effects of the
power of love.

A silver clash of bells, softened by distance, came from the church
tower across the bay, and slowly, regretfully, Regina took her arm
from the balustrade. She could not stay longer in the garden now, but
to-morrow!

Through the wonderful golden light of a June afternoon she took her
way slowly homeward, across the hay meadows and fields of standing
corn, by many little cross cuts that she knew, and arrived at the
Rectory about an hour before the time for their guest to arrive. She
went straight to her own room to dress; she was saved any embarrassing
choice of toilettes, for she had only two, one her best, the other
a plain black net, and she would not wear black to receive him. Her
sisters had a maid between them, but she never cared for anyone to
help her, or to be dependent on anyone for such essential things as
dressing and hair-doing. She took out a white dress and laid by it
her only jewels--some pearls left her by her grandmother--and the two
tea roses. That was all she had to aid her, but Regina knew it was
enough. She washed her face in the hottest water, so that it came out
clear and white, with a warm glow in the cheeks, and then piled up
loosely, so that all its natural waves had their full play, the shining
masses of her hair. Then the dress over her head by one quick movement
and fastened down her bosom, and at the waist, under veils of tulle;
the roses slipped in her hair and belt; the pearls clasped round her
throat, and she had finished dressing. She was ready, and free to sit
down and look at her vision in the glass, which she did.

How bright her eyes were!--they looked like great sapphires; and how
red her lips! People might easily think they were painted. The skin,
how transparent and soft, like the untouched petal of a white anemone.
And her arms, they gleamed, milk-colour, amongst the tulle.

Beyond her window the light was fading in the deep rose of the west;
pale violet shadows were stealing up from the copse and enveloping
all the garden with the peace of evening. As her glance wandered from
her own bright face to the serene outside, a feeling came to her
that that day closed a definite period of her life. Eighteen years
were now accomplished--years of thought, of work, of learning, of
contemplation, and they were over. The thought brought no sadness with
it, only joy. Whatever the next period of time brought with it, she
was ready, eager to go forward, to meet the embrace of life. That it
might mean merely the staying on and on at home in Stossop, as it had
done for nearly thirty unhappy girls in the village, never occurred to
her. Intuitively she knew she would escape from the narrow, cramping
existence of her home. It was only the way and the manner of escape
that, she felt, was unknown to her.

Full of dominant energy, fear of that way or manner never touched her.
Of such are the elect of the world. The poor, ignorant, helpless,
wilting mass of Stossop's spinsters is but extravagant Nature's waste
material thrown out on the dust-heaps of time.

The light crush of the gravel under carriage wheels came to her ears,
footsteps outside her door and on the stairs, voices ascending from
the garden. She heard the commotion, and very softly stole out of her
room to the oak rail round the well, that went down straight to the
hall below, and looked over. The guest was arriving. The footman was
bringing in some light luggage. She could see her father and mother
both standing there by the door, waiting, and catch a glimpse of her
sisters close by the drawing-room door. No one thought of, or noticed,
her, and she leant over the balustrade facing the entrance. Then he
came in and she saw him. Much as she had expected, much as report had
led her to expect, the reality was more than she had ever pictured.
Straight and tall, with a wonderful elegance of figure that not even
travelling clothes could conceal, he entered the hall and took off his
hat, standing without it as he greeted her parents. Entranced, the girl
looked down upon the perfectly shaped head, with its mass of thick
black hair, waving a little as it rose from the smooth, wide forehead,
on which, to her downward view, the eyebrows seemed extraordinarily
dark and striking, the eyes she could not see, but the fine, straight,
beautifully carved nose and chin, the turn of the head on the
long neck, the line of the cheek, the colour of the skin, a warm,
transparent tan, all seemed to the dazzled eyes of the girl to make up
a vision of remarkable beauty; she heard him speaking, and the quiet,
well-bred tones came up to her as something totally different from any
voice she had ever heard, from the curate's sanctimonious twang, from
the doctor's brusque, curt utterances, from the Latin master's guttural
pedantry. Musical, even, perfect, like sounds from another world, the
waves of air carrying his voice came up to her.

He stood talking, while his valet brought in what seemed to the girl a
great deal of yellow hand-luggage and put it down in the hall. Then she
saw her mother motion to her sisters, and they came up, looking very
beautiful, as Regina thought, without a touch of envy. She did not fear
their beauty, and merely rejoiced that he should see what presentable
sisters she had. Miss Marlow was in pale pink satin, against which her
brown head, twined round with pearls, contrasted well. Violet Marlow
wore a dark blue muslin, like the ultramarine of the sea, and her
blond hair and snowy skin seemed fair as its foam. Regina saw the
look of interest flash across the man's face as he turned to them; she
noted her parents' pride as the presentation was made. Then there was
more light talking and laughter, and Regina simply marvelled at the
sweetness of her sisters' voices. Was that the same organ as the one
with which Jane Marlow had called to her from the window? Was Violet's
voice now really the same as the one with which she wrangled and argued
over the Rectory dinner-table every night? Then she ceased to notice
them, and her ears went back to listening to the man's quiet replies,
while her eyes drank and drank of all the grace and wonder of his
presence. Then suddenly there was a movement towards the stairs, her
parents stood aside, the girls drew back, and Everest, followed by his
valet, came upstairs.

Regina, soundless as a white shadow, turned away and went back into her
room, softly closing the door. Her eyes were suffused, yet shining like
stars on a rainy night; her face was full of colour; her breast rose
and fell so rapidly that all her white muslin drapery quivered.

"How wonderful, how delightful he is," she murmured to herself. "It is
nice to know there are human beings like that, that they are not all
hideous and harsh-voiced, and humpy-backed, and badly dressed as they
are in Stossop. He is perfect, and he has come here, and I can love
him."

To meet one that you can love; what a privilege that is. She stood for
some time thinking over that, lost in the contemplation of that great
truth. It is so easy for a woman to find those that will love her,
so difficult to find one she can love. For woman being the superior
animal in every way, in beauty, in vitality, in intellect and charm,
almost any woman is good enough for a man, whereas there is only one
man here and there that is good enough for a woman.

After a pause, she moved over to her long glass and looked at herself.
She was quite satisfied. There was nothing more to do, and she threw
herself into an easy-chair, and called up that vision of him behind her
closed lids as he entered her cordially hated home.

When the gong sounded she went down, and as they were all assembled in
the dining-room, and she was the last to enter, all eyes turned upon
her as she did so. She hesitated for a moment by the door, and Everest
thought, with a sudden startled interest, what an attractive picture
she made. Her soft, snow-white draperies fell about a figure tall and
slender and supple, harmonious in all its lines as a beautiful melody
is in its sounds. Three rows of glistening pearls encircled a round
throat, whiter than themselves; above was her pink-tinted face, crowned
by its fair clustering hair. But the arresting power was in her eyes;
excited, pleased, animated, they were wide open, full of light and
fire, and as he rose and approached her they gazed upon him with a sort
of rapture.

Her two sisters glanced at her in angry surprise, and then at each
other.

Her father got up and presented Everest blandly: "Regina, this is Mr.
Everest Lanark. My youngest daughter, Regina."

Everest took a very soft, warm hand in his for a moment, and while he
did so, the fragrance of the glorious tea-rose blossoms, one in her
hair, another at her breast, came to him; his eyes fell on them, and
always afterwards her image, in his mind, was associated with those
golden roses.

A moment later they were all seated at the table: Everest on the right
of Mrs. Marlow and next to Miss Marlow, and opposite Miss Violet Marlow
and the Rector, Regina at the end of the table, on his side, where he
could not well see her, except by bending forward.

She did not care. She was quite content. The dinner went admirably.
Everest, pleased at the proximity of so much youthful beauty, and with
a really clever if extremely narrow man, in the Rector opposite, to
talk to, appeared quite to enjoy it. At its conclusion the four women
rose; the men were left together.

Everest did not drink much, but he tried the Rector's old claret; he
did not smoke either, but his host did, so Everest took a cigarette
with him.

Regina slipped away up to her own room. She was afraid to risk being
alone in the drawing-room with her sisters, lest her roses should be
torn off, her hair pulled down or her toilette suffer in some way
at their hands. Before the Rector they usually kept up some outward
seemliness of conduct. So she waited until she heard Everest and
her father come out of the dining-room and enter the drawing-room
before she descended. She found Everest already seated between her
two sisters, and she passed over to a far corner of the room to a low
chair by the piano, and sat down there. She thought Everest would not
be the man she felt sure he was if he could stand long the united
conversational powers of Jane and Violet Marlow.

Little scraps of their talk came over to her and amused her: "strips of
flannel," "had to keep her bed for a week, and mother took her guava
jelly every day." Regina guessed that Everest was being entertained
with an account of some of Stossop's sick poor.

He glanced her way many times, and she fancied a weary look grew upon
his face, as the poor continued very sick, and Miss Marlow's methods of
treating their various ailments became more and more detailed. Neither
sister allowed the conversation to pause for a moment, and when one
showed signs of failing the other took it up with commendable energy.
But few things in this world prevented Everest from doing what he
wanted to do, and certainly two country girls talking to him was not
one of them. He wanted to approach Regina and speak to her, and as he
found the sisters would not stop their chatter he rose in the middle of
it.

"I want to speak to your sister for a moment," he said merely, and left
them, crossing the room to where Regina sat, and drawing an easy-chair
close to hers. She looked up, and the same enthusiastic welcome shone
in her eyes as on his presentation.

"What were you doing all day?" he asked, letting his eyes rest on
the youthful fairness of the throat, where the pearls gleamed in the
lamplight. He felt quite confident he would not be bored with the
Stossop poor in this quarter.

"I went to church in the morning, which I hate, and which always makes
me realise what wretched things all these religions are. Then after
lunch I lay for quite a long time in the garden, gazing at the white
nimbi in the sky. That helps a little to counteract the effect of the
church service. Then I walked to the sea, and visited a rose garden
there. It is perfectly beautiful--it has a magic I cannot explain; you
must come and see it yourself. I looked over all the roses, and then I
sat down and read till the sunset came and disturbed me. I had to look
at that, and then I walked home to dress for dinner."

She spoke lightly, easily, her warm, ardent gaze on his face, her soft
lips smiling. Her tones were like music. Her way of talking quite
different from the heavy, assiduous speechifying of her sisters.

"What were you reading?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the brilliant,
changing, responsive countenance.

"I was finishing the _Cyclops_: it is not a good play, but I have read
all Euripides except that, and I wanted to complete him."

She spoke quite simply, and without any affectation or desire
to impress him. Things one does oneself rarely seem very great
accomplishments to oneself, and Regina had read Greek for so long that
a new play seemed no more than a new novel to her.

"Do you read it in the original?" Everest asked, raising the dark
arches of his brows, and to the girl, as she met his admiring gaze from
under them, it seemed as if he were lifting her heart out of her bosom
with them.

She laughed. "Yes, I don't like translations at all. Ever since I
saw that Byron had translated Catullus' Ode to Juventus as an Ode to
'Eleanor' I have fled from all of them."

"You seem to be tremendously clever!"

"Am I?" she asked, smiling up at him. "I am so glad you think so. I
am very fond of learning and all the arts. Are you? Painting, music,
poetry, sculpture. They are the soul of life, I think. What should we
do without them? Think if we had only in life the Church, dusters and
the poor!"

Everest laughed, and so did she. "It does sound an awful combination!
Yes, I think with you art is the one thing that brings a little heaven
on earth. It is the only true religion, the only true elevator of that
poor wretch--man. I am never so happy, and I never feel so good and so
charitable, as when I am painting."

"Do you paint?" asked Regina, with a fiery interest in her glowing
eyes. "So do I. What are your subjects, and what do you paint
in?--water colours or oil?"

"Oils. I do anything that catches my fancy--a head, a figure, a
landscape, anything that is a little unusual. I hate the commonplace."

"In Africa I suppose you found so many subjects that were unusual:
tropical trees and wonderful plants and beautiful black women."

Everest looked back at the delicately coloured face, of which her
interest and excitement made the skin glow more transparently every
minute.

"You have great intuition to feel that the women are beautiful," he
answered; "most people just group them all together under the name of
blacks, and are so blind mentally and physically as not to be able to
see their beauty. There is a race in the Soudan, of which the beauty
could not be surpassed. The colour is coal-black, but form and line
are perfect, both in face and body. Then another race has absolutely
perfect forms, though the face is of the negro type. Never anywhere
else could one see more gloriously modelled shoulders and arms than
those women have."

At that moment the footman brought in coffee, and while they were
taking it the Rector came up, and the talk became general.

Soon after Everest rose, with the excuse that he must not disturb their
early country hours, and said "Good-night." Regina, watching him as he
got up and stood, felt an electric wave of pleasure pass through her
from head to foot. The well-cut and fitting evening clothes displayed
all the admirable lines of his figure. The slimness and the grace of
it were a revelation to her. The light from the centre swinging lamp,
falling on the pale well-bred face, showed its perfection of carving,
its look of power and intellect. As he said good-night to her, she
gazed upon him, wide-eyed and in silence, and Everest, reading her
thoughts, felt amused and pleased.

When he reached his rooms he turned the key in the lock and then threw
himself into the arm-chair by the open window. The soft air of the June
night came in, full of fragrance, from the Rectory garden. In the copse
beyond, the nightingales here and there burst into little trills and
long calls, and then were silent again, preparing for their unbroken,
tireless melody of the later hours. Everest sat very still in his
chair, one hand hanging idly over its arm, his even brows contracted,
thinking. Before coming down to the Rectory he had made up his mind
very decidedly that he would not allow this visit to draw him into
any complicated ties with the daughters of the house. Marriage was
far from his wishes or plans at that moment, and any relations with
anybody almost equally distasteful, since they would rob him of that
peace of mind and rest which his doctor had told him were essential,
and which he had come to the country rectory to find. He had heard that
the Misses Marlow were handsome girls of the ordinary type, and the
ordinary type, he knew, had no attraction for him. Certainly after the
conversation of the evening, he was convinced of his perfect safety
with either Jane or Violet. But Regina; at the first meeting of the
eyes, at the sight of that sweet enthusiasm of admiring welcome in
hers, at the touch of her hand, full of electric fire, he had realised
instantly that there was every danger here. And so strongly did this
feeling envelop him again when they said good-night that he felt
inclined, now, to summon his valet, and tell him to repack everything
for a return journey on the morrow. But the thought of the surprise,
the disappointment, the hurt feeling he would occasion checked him.

His gaze wandered round his apartment. His quick eyes told him at once
how much personal care and pains had been bestowed on the room, to give
it the particular air of welcoming comfort it possessed.

It was not the hands of servants that had looped up so gracefully with
bows of lilac ribbon the curtains of his bed, nor arranged all those
books of reference and the latest weekly papers on his writing-table.

He took up idly the silver pen, put ready in the inkstand tray,
and saw it had "Violet" engraved upon it, and a handsome leather
blotting-book, filled with every writing necessity, even to stamps of
many denominations, bore its owner's monogram, "J. M."

These things spoke to him, though many men might not have even noticed
them, and many others only noticed them to jeer. How kindly old John
Marlow had received him; and his wife--what pains she had taken
probably in thinking out that excellent dinner they had given him, and
the girls were all so pretty and fresh and eager to please.

It would go against the grain of Everest's nature to wound them all by
suddenly leaving. Whatever excuses he made, they would still believe
his departure was due to some error of their own. But an intuitive
voice within him warned him that if the Devon coast was just the place
to eradicate the traces of African fever, from which he was suffering,
Stossop Rectory and Regina were not the best adjuncts to it.

As he sat there, undecided, in the silence, the soft sound of a
casement above his own being set open came to him, and without any
particular intent or reason in his mind he rose and went to his own
window and looked out. The moon had just climbed above the copse, and
sent a warm, pale light across the sleeping garden. Everest looked
up, and there above him was the girl who was in his thoughts. She had
opened her window, apparently to look at the night, for her face was
turned towards the rising moon, and, quite unconscious, seemingly,
of any spectator, she leaned a little forward. Of her face Everest
could see nothing except the under part of her chin, but the light
fell full on the round column of her neck, upon the white expanse of
her bosom, upon the perfect arms supporting her, as her hands clasped
the sill. Its pale radiance invested the dazzling whiteness of the
skin with a peculiar and mystic brilliance, and, accustomed though
he was to women's beauty in any and every form, Everest drew in his
breath sharply with surprised admiration. She had taken off her evening
dress, and the low bodice she now wore possessed only two narrow straps
holding it to the shoulders, and passed below the snowy swell of the
breast, leaving it and the soft modelling of the arms and shoulders
all revealed. Yet the silver light, falling down and over and round
her, seemed to clothe her in shining armour. To any man, even to the
most material, it must have seemed a vision more of heaven than of
earth, and to Everest, with his artist's eye and mind, the sight had
a magic and a charm he could hardly define to himself. Silent, almost
breathless, he stood watching her, as silent and absorbed she herself
stood watching the moon slowly mount in the purple sky.

Then suddenly she turned her head and looked down, why, Everest could
not tell, since he had made no sound. For one instant their eyes met.
He saw the beautiful arms bend at the elbows, with the change of
position; the face, a dark oval now, as it turned downwards, hung over
his; he saw the silver light illuminate all the masses of the fair
hair round it, for one second, that leapt by him into eternity all too
quickly; then she vanished noiselessly. The casement remained open,
but the light fell now only on its glittering panes. For a long time
the man waited by the window, his heart beating hard, but she did not
come back, and at last he turned away to his room and commenced his
undressing. The nightingales, perfectly attuned, now began to pour out
in the stillness the raptures of their song. Everest's face was dark
as he moved about the room.

All resolve, all desire to go on the morrow had left him. A new and a
stronger one was waking in his veins.

He turned down the lamp burning beneath its pretty, rose-coloured shade
and got into the bed, so carefully prepared for him, with lace-edged
sheet and silken coverings.

As he laid his head down, on the pillow trimmed by Miss Marlow's own
hands a murmur passed his lips:

"Well, I'll stay, and risk it."

CHAPTER II

IN THE WAYS OF DELIGHT

The next morning Everest, after a troubled and restless night, found
himself the first in the breakfast-room, and when the door opened
it was Regina who came in. She was dressed in a morning cotton of
rose-colour, and either by contrast to that, or from emotion, her face
looked pale as their eyes met and he took her hand in his.

"You were all in silver armour last night when I saw you," he said
gently, "like an image of Diana." The colour came then in soft waves to
her cheeks and beat there; her gaze seemed locked in his and could not
get away.

"Diana was a horrid and cruel divinity, I like her least of any of
them; Venus was kinder," she murmured.

"Well, you must be Venus to me," returned Everest, smiling down upon
her; his face had a gentle, tender expression, the tones of his voice
were very soft, and the girl's heart beat to suffocation as she heard
them.

She could not answer. Just then the door opened and the Rector, with
the entire family group behind him, appeared in the doorway. Everest
and Regina moved a little apart, their hands, which had remained in
each other's, fell to their sides. Everest moved forward to greet his
host.

"Glad to see you are an early riser," remarked the Rector genially.
"Did you sleep well?"

"No, I can't say I did, there are so many disturbing influences in the
country: nightingales and church clocks and all sorts of things; then
when I did go to sleep I dreamt, which I never do in town."

"What did you dream about?" asked Jane Marlow. She looked very pretty
this morning in a fresh white cambric, with a green ribbon round her
slim throat.

"Of silver images," replied Everest, and his eyes went to Regina, who
stood by her place at the table. She looked down as she heard these
words; a tremor went through her whole frame.

"How funny dreams are, they never seem to correspond to anything one
has seen or done in the day, do they?" replied Jane, and Everest
answered calmly, "Hardly ever."

The coffee was brought in and they all closed round the table while the
Rector began to say grace.

Breakfast was generally a most unpleasant meal at the Rectory. From the
last word of the long grace at the beginning, to the first word of the
long grace at the end, it was a series of surly, grumbling wrangles,
in which everyone showed their early-morning ill-humour to the utmost.
Mrs. Marlow, according to the Rector, had always done something wrong:
either she was late, or she had had the coffee made too weak, or too
strong, or the housemaid had not called him early enough, or too early,
or his bath was cold. Mrs. Marlow generally argued out the respective
points, until she was clearly proved in the right, or at least her
husband was reduced to an exhausted silence. Then the two sisters had
various complaints to make, or else the continuation of some personal
quarrel begun upstairs absorbed them.

Regina, for herself, took no part in either the grace or the wrangling.
To her the first seemed rendered ludicrous by the Rector gabbling over
it, in a tremendous hurry, that he might begin abusing his wife; and
further, if the Creator gave them their breakfast, He presumably gave
them everything else, and of His gifts she would not certainly have
picked out this detestable breakfast to thank Him for. She would sooner
have thanked Him, sitting before her easel in solitude: "For what I am
about to paint," for the powers He had given her, than for what she was
about to eat in hostility at the table.

She used to sit quite silent, while the waves of querulous, complaining
or angry voices rose and fell round her, and when she had finished
her meal, which she naturally did long before the others, since so
much disputing takes time, she would sit looking through the window,
watching the robins at their singing matches on the lawn, and longing
to be away with her painting or music, her Latin or Greek, or in the
enchanted garden, out of earshot at least of her amiable family and
their incessant discussion of things that to her view mattered so
little.

She wondered to-day how the meal would go, because she believed they
were not bad-mannered enough to quarrel before a guest, and she was
astonished to find that the conversation, as a matter of fact, was kept
up entirely between her and Everest. For the latter, with a strenuous
resolve to ban the sick poor at breakfast, steered away from Miss
Marlow's opening remarks on almshouses, and plunged resolutely into the
heart of Africa, continuing the conversation with Regina which had been
interrupted last night.

Regina had read much on Africa, and followed the history of many
explorers through Uganda, and wandered with many authors in the pigmy
forests and by the Great Lakes. Consequently, although she made some
mistakes, she had a good general knowledge of the subject, and her
eager enthusiasm, her perfect attention, her quick comprehension, made
her a naturally good and easy talker on any subject.

As the rest of the family knew absolutely nothing about Africa, except,
as regards the Rector, that it was a country "full of black heathen,"
as regards the mother, "that it was a swampy, unhealthy place, where
there were snakes and one got fever and things," and as regards the
sisters, that it was one of the places where "missions were sent to
cannibals," they remained out of the conversation and sat silent,
listening in wonder to the brilliant talk flying across the table, much
of which they could barely comprehend.

After breakfast, when they had all risen, the Rector claimed Everest to
go with him to see his model cottages, recently erected in the village,
and Everest, grateful for having escaped the sick poor at breakfast,
felt it his duty to put up with some poor now, since his host wished
it, and consented pleasantly.

"What are we going to do this afternoon?" he asked.

He put the question in a general way, but his eyes sought Regina, who
turned hers aside with a singing gladness in her heart.

Miss Marlow answered him:

"We are going to drive you over to Lady Delamere's for tea--we start
from here about three."

"I'll join you outside, Everest," called the Rector from the door. "I
have to look into my study for half-a-minute."

Everest nodded and went up to his own room for his hat. Coming down he
met Regina alone, on the stairs, and paused.

"You are coming this afternoon?" he asked.

She was by a long window, through which the sun fell on her. Her face
looked just like a rose, in its pink and white colour, as she lifted it
towards him, standing two or three steps above her.

"No," she answered, smiling, "mother and Jane and Violet are going, and
the carriage holds only four comfortably."

"You and I could walk?" suggested Everest promptly.

Regina laughed outright as the picture of her sisters' faces came
before her, as they would look if, when the carriage was starting,
Everest left his seat to walk with her.

"Oh, no," she said; "we could not do that. My sisters have set their
hearts on taking you with them to the Delameres'."

"Well, where are you going then?" he asked.

"I shall go, I think, to the enchanted garden--it is such a lovely day."

"How nice that sounds! The enchanted garden! I wish I were coming there
too."

"Why do you wish it?"

"I don't know. One cannot always trace the birth and growth of one's
desires." Regina gazed at him as he stood there, one hand on the
banister rail, thinking how truly wonderful he was in his difference
from all the other men she had ever seen. The crowded country church
on Sundays, what a mass of more or less ungainly, shambling, shuffling
figures it contained, representatives of the middle-aged or old
inhabitants; and the young men seen on the cricket and football ground,
how fat and round and stodgy they looked, or else how thin and weedy,
leaning over, as it were, the hollow of their own chests!

But here in Everest's case how all was changed! It was difficult to
say whether the strength or grace of his figure left the greater
impression on the eye, so perfectly were the two united in it. It was
a form beautifully planned out by Nature, which the ceaseless activity
of its owner had enhanced. It suggested potential energy; the balance
and the poise of it, whether in action or repose, were always perfect.
It had that curious symmetry, that look of its perfect adaptability to
every possible movement, that one sees in the wild animal while at the
height of its beauty and power. To Regina's mind came, as she looked
at him, the thought of the slim and graceful fox, treading deftly with
its sure, trim feet the edge of the covert, with all that tremendous
power of swift, enduring speed locked in its beautiful, sinuous body.
And again the red deer of Exmoor occurred to her, with their splendid
carriage, their proud beauty of line, their clean-cut elegance of form.

Everest was forty-six, but so lightly had the feet of the years
touched him in their flight over him that he looked hardly more than
twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His hair had not a single white strand in
it, nor had the dark moustache that flowed in a straight line across
his face, not pulled downwards nor twisted up, and of which some of
the threads glowed with a red-gold sheen on their blackness, if the
sun struck across them. Very few lines marked the clear, warm tan of
the skin; the teeth were even, perfect, untouched by dentistry. Life
and experience had added power and intellect to the face, had deepened
the mental charm without, as yet, taking from its physical beauty. Out
of the beautiful youth he had been at eighteen, Nature had built up
through all these years one of her masterpieces, and it seemed that she
was so pleased with it, now that it had reached its perfection, that
even she, fidget though she is, always doing and undoing, was loath to
begin her task of pulling it all to pieces.

Regina gazed and gazed upon him in silence that was thrilled through
and through with joy, for to the artist there is no delight more keen
than looking on what is beautiful and perfect, and Everest asked her
with a little smile of what she was thinking.

"Of an Exmoor deer that I saw standing, once, on a little tor at
sunrise, surveying the sleeping moor," she said slowly and in a low
tone, and then went on up the stairs, as she heard doors shutting, and
steps approaching from below.

Everest passed on down. The beautiful imagery of her words won his
quick, artistic sense, and, little conceited as he was, the flattery
from the fresh, girlish lips pleased him. He went on, feeling well
able to grapple even with the model cottages and the sick poor.

Regina in her room could do nothing; she tried to read, but she
only heard his voice speaking; she turned to the paintings, but she
hardly saw them: his face hung before her. Finally she descended to
the drawing-room and sought to play, but her hands dropped from the
keyboard, and she sat silent, gazing before her.

So, she remembered, had she felt once before in her life, when Nature's
voice first called to her to leave her dolls and playthings and begin
to prepare herself for her life's work.

How well she remembered that day, when first the scales of childhood
had fallen from her eyes, and her dolls, formerly living things,
had been seen for the first time as they were: bits of rag and wood
and stone. How she remembered the keen wonder she had felt, the
astonishment that she could play no more!

Then had come the period of fierce intelligence, the appetite and
desire for work, the longing to know and to expand the brain. For
since Nature has made woman to be not only the mother but the nurse
of the child, and it is the mother's brain and not the father's that
is transmitted to the child, she gives to the female, with the first
development of sex, this sharp desire for knowledge, for learning, for
mental endowment, so that it may be duly passed on to the offspring.
Hence that overwhelming thirst for mental work, for study, which is
so common in the developing girl for these few years in her life,
so unusual in the male, who rarely learns, except for material and
worldly considerations. And as Nature's voice had peremptorily called
her from her playthings, and forced her to her studies, so now, her
time for study being over, Nature again summoned her to leave her
accomplished duties, and prepare herself for the new ones in store for
her.

Nature was strong in Regina; she was its child. The cramped artifices
of civilisation had not got hold of her and stifled out of her the
breath of Nature. So after a time she abandoned all work, finding it
impossible, and sat gazing out of the window, thinking.

At luncheon, Everest, having quite made up his mind as to his
afternoon's programme, which was to include other items besides the
Delamere call, took comparatively little notice of Regina, and talked
chiefly to the Rector on model cottages, and their morning's inspection.

The Rector delightedly expounded his views, which seemed to Everest to
have for their aim the increasing dependence of the poor upon the rich,
the incompetent upon the capable, the weak and idle upon the strong and
industrious, and the undermining of what thrift the poor possessed by
removing the urgent necessity for it.

The model cottages were to be practically free, with only a nominal
rent; old people were to be kept by the parish; sick people were to
be tended gratis; young people were to be encouraged to marry early
and bring into the world large families for their neighbours to
keep; chance immorality was to be avoided at all costs, and punished
mercilessly; large broods of infants, no matter from what drunken,
vicious, idle parents, were to be favoured and cared for out of the
money of the honest and sober, provided only the brood was born in
wedlock, and the father and mother had the sanction of the Church.

Finally he gleefully totted up the subscriptions he had dragged out
of the unwilling hands of the hard-working and thrifty portion of
the villagers, for his doors, his windows, his model baths, his new
sinks, and only lamented that he was still short a hundred pounds for
finishing the hearths.

Everest, to whom this exposition of views had been intensely repellent,
felt relieved that the point of asking for charity, up to which he felt
sure the Rector was slowly working, had been reached at last, and said
immediately:

"Oh, well, you must count on me for the remaining hundred for the
fireplaces. I will give you the cheque after luncheon."

The Rector flushed with pleasure. How convincing his arguments had been!

"My dear Everest, it's most good of you. I assure you it will take a
load off my mind. I really feel ashamed to go and beg any more from my
parishioners, though I must say, hard pressed for money as they are,
and hard as they have to work for it, they seldom refuse me."

Regina, sitting opposite them both, and watching the pale, severe
gravity that had come over the handsome countenance, knew that Everest
was giving that hundred, not because he cared whether the very unmodel
cottagers in their model cottages had hearths or not, nor whether the
tribes of sickly infants that they had no right to bring into the world
at all, since they could not keep them, were warmed by his fires or
not, but simply because it was Regina's father who asked him, and
because Regina herself sat opposite him, and another link was looped up
in that golden chain that was slowly forging in life's furnace to bind
her to him.

"All the same you know I don't think you are right, John," Everest
answered easily, in his light, polished tones. "You think you are
alleviating poverty, but in reality you are creating it. The dread of
dying in the workhouse when they are old is the only stimulus to a
great many to work at all while they are young; take that away, and put
old vagabonds in free model cottages, what inducement do you give to
the young vagabond to work? And what reward have you for the honest,
sober hard worker if you take his savings to help keep his idle and
drunken brother? It seems to me you actually put a premium on idleness
and vice, and rob honesty and virtue to do it. Then as regards your
idea of morality, I think that the poor, hard-working, healthy girl,
who, without marriage, brings one healthy child into the world, and
works all her life to keep it, as many of them do, is a less deadly
enemy to society than those wretched, improvident couples who rush into
marriage and keep producing more and more unfit humanity, for which
there is no use, and which other people at their own self-sacrifice
have to support."

The Rector's large face gradually grew purple as he listened; he was
a very heavy eater and drinker, and all his superabundant blood went
up to his head in boiling wrath if anyone attacked his particular and
exceedingly narrow outlook upon sexual subjects. Here, he had to choke
down his feelings as best he could, for he would not, on any account,
quarrel with Everest. Moreover the cheque was promised but not yet
written. He cleared his throat many times, and nervously broke up the
toast crusts lying at his left hand, before replying.

"I know your views are peculiar," he said at last; "they were at
Oxford; I am afraid you hardly give due importance to the Sacraments of
the Church. Er ... have we all finished? Then let us say grace."

Everest's eyes met Regina's and a little flash passed between them, an
instant's glance that was very dear to them both. She loved him for
every word he had uttered, and Everest knew that his views were hers,
by the glad eager look on her face as she listened to him.

He knew each time he sat down to the table that his host was opposed
to him in every opinion, and that the others had no opinions at all.
It was only Regina, with her quick, active mentality, her rapid
perceptions, that was with him, on every subject, and somehow the
knowledge seemed very sweet to him, and to draw them very closely
together.

Luncheon over, the elder girls went up to change their toilettes, and
Everest and Regina stepped through the long windows out upon the lawn.
It was a wonderful day. After a cold and stormy spring, summer had come
in with that perfect glory, that golden radiance, that rescue England's
reputation from entire ruin.

The sky, of the palest, most delicate blue, showed tiny dapplings of
pearly white against its sapphire clearness; all the air seemed dancing
with a golden sheen, and in it seemed to hang, like a canopy, the scent
of flowers, of the pink and white snow of the May not yet over, of the
laburnum already in blossom.

"What a heavenly day!" Everest exclaimed. "I wish you were coming with
us this afternoon."

"So do I, as you are going," she answered, looking up at him,
delighting in the sensation of walking beside him and seeing that dark
brilliant face above her. "But I know my sisters will like it best as
it is. I shall go to the garden and think about you instead."

"Of me? A poor subject, I am afraid. You were better off with the
_Cyclops_."

"I can't get interested in it now. Do you know, I tried everything this
morning: Greek and Latin and painting, and I tried to play; it was all
no good. I had to just sit still and think about you."

Everest looked at her, but she met his gaze quite openly and simply.
Her eyes were innocent, frank, ingenuous. There seemed no design on
her part to flatter him. She merely appeared to feel no necessity for
concealing what she thought. She admired him and said so, she thought
about him and said so. That was all. There was none of the veiled
would-be seduction of the women he was accustomed to.

Praise and adulation so absolutely transparent, so obviously honest,
has an irresistible power. It ceases to be flattery; it becomes homage,
and has its effect on the recipient, as incense has upon the senses.

"I shall be sorry if my coming here has interrupted your work and
lessened your powers," he answered, and his voice had grown suddenly so
sad and grave that Regina exclaimed:

"Oh, never be sorry for me that you have come! If you knew how
perfectly happy I am. Your visit here and your companionship is to me
just as if the sun or moon had come down to walk about with me."

Everest laughed outright.

"Either might be a most dangerous companion, it seems to me," he
answered, and Regina laughed with him.

"But think of the honour and the experience, the novelty, the joy of
it! It would be well worth being burned alive for, I think!"

Everest did not answer for a moment. His laugh died away, and she
thought his face looked pale and grave in the sunlight. Just then the
Rector's voice came to them calling Everest, and Regina drew away
towards the copse.

"Good-bye, then. I am going to the garden. I hope you will enjoy your
afternoon." And as he turned back to his host, she disappeared in the
soft green shadows of the wood.

She walked quickly, and could have well run or danced, she felt so
full of life and joy; the breeze was soft, it came to her cheek like a
caress. The wood seemed full of music; small birds were warbling in it
everywhere and calling to each other across the leafy screen of green;
the leaves themselves quivered and rustled and murmured in the warm and
scented air.

Regina for the past few years had been happy in the knowledge of her
youth and power to please, and now that love had come to her also,
it seemed as if her heart, her whole system, could not contain her
delight. For she knew within herself that though nothing had been
said, and though his acquaintance with her could be measured by hours,
Everest was going to love her just as the doctor and the master and the
assistant master and the curate had done. There was the same curious
softening of all his face when he looked at her as she had seen in
theirs, the same velvet edge to his tones when he spoke to her, as she
had heard from them. And while their love was useless to her, because
she could not return it, for this man she felt she could, and was ready
to feel a passionate adoration, to pour out her life in love for him,
and so know the supreme happiness that Nature holds in this life for
a woman. To be loved is nothing, to love is something, to love and
be loved is everything. Critical and sensitive about every point in
another, as she was, so that the least deviation from her standard of
beauty or intellect would have spoiled the perfection of her feeling,
she could find nothing wanting in Everest; in all her dearest dreams
and visions no ideal had ever been invested with greater charm than the
living man now had for her. And it seemed to her like a miracle in her
favour that, of all the men that might have come to her home, he had
been the one to do so.

To be merely in the same room with him, to see and hear him talking to
another, to study him as he leant back in an arm-chair, reading, and
watch the slender brown hand, that she knew had such power, hold a book
or newspaper, seemed to make her whole being vibrate with delight; and
he admired her, wondered at her, liked to match his learning and his
talk with her, was interested in, sought her; soon, she knew, he would
desire and love her. And the price of it all? What would it be? Her
feet, that had been dancing so merrily over the green moss, stopped
suddenly; a trembling seized all her limbs and a chill came over her in
the soft sunny air. She sank on an old log, by the winding path, both
hands pressed over her heart to still its beating. In these moments she
knew, whatever the price, she must pay it.

When the time came for him to ask anything from her, she must give it.
She knew beforehand she could not resist him, could not refuse or deny
to this man anything, because of the glorious pleasure of the giving,
pleasure that would compensate her for everything, for life itself, if
won....

She was very pale as she sat there and shivered, for love is absolutely
merciless and inexorable, and counts out its moments of supreme delight
against the drops of its victim's life-blood, and she knew this. All in
a moment, in the midst of her happy triumph, the thought of his wealth
and position, so far above her own in its powers and possibilities,
had reared itself up in her mind, like a great wall towering over her,
menacing to crush her. She hated it; it separated him from her. If he
had only been poor, like the young master, who had had nothing but
his life, which he had laid down at her feet! How perfect then her
happiness might have been! The meanest, commonest existence, shared
with Everest, would have been as if it were wrapped in cloth of gold
to her. Tiny rooms, poor living, hard working, what would she have
cared? Had he said: "Marry me and come to a lonely tent in the burning
Soudan," she would have said: "Yes," oh, how gladly! As she would have
said it had he asked her to marry him and share a prison, or hell
itself. But some instinct told her that Everest would not want to marry
her, that a man with that accumulated wealth and vast inheritance would
not enter marriage merely for the sake of passion; that he would need
other conditions, which she vaguely felt she did not fill.

And even if in the blindness of love he offered it, would it be her
part, would it be right to accept it?

Suppose in the awakening, after, from that blinding dream that passion
is, she saw that he regretted?

How it would rend her, heart and soul, to think that she, who would
cast down her life like a mantle, for him to walk over, did he wish it,
had brought him a burden of regret!

The thought hurt and stung her; it bit deeply into her brain. She
rose and hurried on with quick steps to the garden, as if seeking its
protection from these thoughts, that pursued her like living things.

Whatever happened, she thought, she would be content as long as no
suffering through her fell on him. Nothing would she take, nothing
would she accept from him, that meant loss or sacrifice to himself. On
that she was quite resolved.

To a woman's passion is always added the wonderful instinct of maternal
love. In all its wildness, in all its demands, there is still that
guiding, underlying impulse to shield, to protect, to guard, to
encircle with tender care the man she loves, and in Regina, now that
she loved, this instinct rose to its full strength, and pervaded all
her heart and soul. She herself and all that happened to her was of no
moment. At all costs Everest was to be considered; his happiness kept
safe and sacred in her hands.

Her quick walking soon brought her to the garden and the sea. As
she unlocked the gate she noticed how the summer heat of the last
twenty-four hours had called the laburnum into bloom. The whole garden
glowed golden with it! On every side it gleamed and shone like amber
rain, falling amongst the other foliage. Never had she seen it look so
beautiful in its contrast with the pale blue of the sky, never had the
rich yellow tint of it been so perfect. Rejoiced, she walked round all
the narrow winding paths. She longed to show the garden to Everest, and
it seemed as if it had arrayed itself in its most radiant and glorious
dress in honour of his coming.

The standard rose-trees made of the centre a mass of vivid colour;
the May was all in bloom, and the wild tamarisk threw up against the
azure light a perfect foam of pink blossom. The perfumes from all the
different flowering plants and trees floated mingling in the still
and sheltered air like the strains of melody, wandering through and
interwoven in a musical harmony; and the hum of the happy bees, the
call of the nesting birds, the coo of the doves, rose and fell sweetly
above the low murmur and ripple of the sea. Anxious and foreboding
thoughts slipped from her mind; as always here, she relapsed joyously
into reflecting simply upon Everest, upon his personality that so
called to her own, upon the delight of his having come there, and all
that wonder and rapture lying hidden in the heart of life to which her
eyes were being opened.

She found her way to a little rustic seat beneath the palm at last, and
there sat down, amongst the maze of roses, only wanting one thing to
complete her happiness--his presence there.

The hot hours of the noonday went softly past, and the day hastened
to array itself in fresh beauty to meet the sunset; the light began
to deepen, the sky to flush with rose, the air to grow heavier with
fragrance.

Those birds that were still singing, not yet exhausted by their nesting
cares, gave out their last floods of melody before the approach of
evening.

Suddenly as she sat there she heard a step on the gravel, and started.
This was her sacred ground; no one had a right to come there; but she
guessed whose step that was, firm and light and springing like the
tread of a deer.

She sprang up, her heart leaping with joy, and through the drooping,
swaying palm branches saw the slim figure she expected approaching, and
the light falling sideways across the dark and handsome face.

She went forward to meet him, making no effort to conceal the joy and
pleasure shining in her eyes.

"How lovely this is! I am so glad you have come! How did you get in?"

"By the gate."

"But I locked it."

Everest laughed. "Locked gates are nothing to me. I jumped over it!"

"How splendid!" she said, gazing at him, her soft azure eyes full of
admiration. "That high, spike-topped gate! I wish I had seen you. And
how did you get here? How did you find the garden?"

"I walked here from the Delameres'."

"Walked! It's fifteen miles to their house."

"Well, what is fifteen miles?" he answered, smiling down into her
upraised face. "Nothing, after fifty miles a day of cross country, as
I have often had to do; and as to finding you, in comparison with the
interior of Africa, Stossop's geography is pretty easy."

"How wonderful you are," she said softly, "and I am so glad you are
here. I wanted to show you my garden. What do you think of it?"

"It is a beautiful place. It seems like those magic gardens one reads
of. One can't believe it's just ordinary England."

"It is perfect to me now you are here. I was wishing so much for you to
come."

"It must have been that which drew me here to you--darling."

He had not meant to use that word, nor any endearing term, but it
passed his lips almost unconsciously; she did look such a darling in
her pretty summer dress, with her fresh, pink-tinted face all aglow
with her ardent, enthusiastic welcome of himself. And he knew, as he
looked at the lovely, youthful form, that there was the spirit of a
lioness within. She was a thing of life and light and fire; full to the
brim, like himself, of ardent energy and power. There was no doll-like,
sawdust body here, with brains of wool, as many of the women had had
whom he had known, lovely though their outsides had been.

She attracted him violently, irrepressibly; there was an all-compelling
magnet in each slender finger, as he touched her hand.

Nature does not take long in setting up her wondrous all but
unbreakable current of electricity when she has brought together two
individuals suitable to mate with each other, and just like that other
common form of electricity which holds the hands relentlessly to a
battery so that their owner has no power to lift or stir a finger, so
does this other magnetic current sweep round its two captives, binding
them together without will or power to move asunder.

At the word "darling" a quiver passed over Regina's face and she looked
away as if she had not heard.

It is the part of virginity to flee from passion, and instinctively it
fulfils its part as long as passion pursues. If there is any pause in
the chase, virginity kindly stops and waits, till passion is ready to
take up the pursuit, when it promptly flies again.

So Regina, with her pulses leaping with joy and her feet on air, and
seeing the garden about her, all transfigured with a new glory, at the
sound of that word in his voice looked away instinctively and seemed
not to have heard.

They walked round the green turf, the roses nodding in the gently
moving air and throwing their perfume on to it, under the thick wild
unpruned tamarisk, that looked like the softest feathers against the
glowing sky, under the swaying palms that threw shadow and sunlight
alternatively down on them, and then on by those little dark green
winding paths where the air was still and warm and dusk laden with the
scent of the rose and the vital life-giving salt breath of the sea.

They spoke a little, mostly in praise of the beauty around them, or of
the doves flying in circles overhead, or of the wild calling note of
the nightingale that came from the thickets, and both were intensely
happy in the beauty and proximity of the other and because of the magic
steel-like ring that nature was drawing tighter and tighter round them,
each moment forcing them towards each other.

As last, before them, through the crossing and re-crossing of delicate
lines of branch and leaf, they saw the gleam of purple and the glitter
of the sea. Regina quickened her steps a little and reached first the
porphyry balustrade and leant over with a little cry of delight as her
eyes caught all the radiance gathering in the western sky and all the
jewelled light flung on the opposite coast, where peak and headland lay
in lines of velvet blue under a golden haze.

"Oh, look how lovely this is," she said, as Everest came and stood
beside her. "I have a painting of it that I did on an evening like
this. I should like to show it to you."

"Did you paint this?" he said. "It is a difficult subject. What a lot
you have learnt in your few short years of life! You seem to know so
much, and then to be only eighteen; you are a revelation to me."

A little smile played over her face, irradiated by the mellowing light
as she looked up at him.

"I am so glad," she said simply. "I should like to please you. To me
you are the most wonderful, beautiful and perfect person I have ever
seen."

"Regina." He was very near her now, one arm came round her shoulder.
Ah, that touch, how it moved her, the first touch of that being she so
admired, how it vibrated through her, body and mind, from head to foot.
She recognised the strength and force of the arm, yet how gentle and
reverent its contact was with her now. How strange it is that amongst
a hundred men who might touch a woman and leave her wood and stone to
them there is perhaps just one whose slightest contact may give her
that extreme ecstasy!

She did not move from him, only looked up with all the fires of the
sunset in her eyes. The face that she would have chosen out of all
the world hung just above her; the man that she would have chosen out
of all the world was there beside her, seeking her. She had no other
thought than to please him, to yield to his empire. At any cost, at any
sacrifice of herself, at the price of her life, if necessary, she was
dedicated, consecrated to him; worship, adoration was in her face and
in her heart as she looked up at him. It is the spontaneous impulse in
all virgin love, and those women who have not felt it for their lovers
have missed love's soul.

Everest bent down and kissed her, and in all her after years Regina
could never recall a higher pinnacle of joy to which she had climbed
than was reached in that first kiss. The very purity of it, the first
expression of her whole ardent, unstained soul, the etherealised
emotions of awe and wonder of devotion that went through it, lifted it
out of the range of earthly things. Regina's kiss, full of passionate
enthusiasm as it was, was still like the burning kiss of the young
nun upon her rosary, as the strains of the anthem bear away her soul
to heaven. Everest understood her perfectly, practised as he was in
these matters, and being himself of that sensitive timbre that made
him respond easily to and comprehend every grade of varying emotion in
another.

People had called him dissipated and reckless, simply because he had
always been unconventional and lived according to the laws of his own
conscience instead of the laws of the world. But all his pleasures had
been of the refined and delicate order, things of the mind and soul as
well as the body--the pleasures of the wild poetic Celtic nature rather
than of the coarse and brutal Saxon. The mere wallowing of the body in
physical indulgence, whether of drunkenness, overeating, or other vice,
was unknown to him. The excitable brain, the refined and sensitive
mind, in his case must be charmed and captured before pleasure could
begin.

It was to these that Regina in her innocent and unveiled admiration
so appealed, and his touch was very tender and gentle as he drew her
wholly into his arms up against his breast, and the girl yielded,
silent, submerged in that overwhelming first delight of love, that no
after one can wholly surpass. So they stood for a few minutes in the
light, both feeling the happiness of the world was absolutely complete.

Then the man relaxed his clasp suddenly and put her away from his arms
in the same decisive way he had drawn her into them. His face was very
pale and set as he turned from her and leaned over the balustrade,
looking away to the gorgeous fires of the west.

Regina stood quite silent, passive, shaken with happiness, voiceless.

He had put her away from him, swept over by some feeling she did not
understand, but she yielded to that as obediently as when he had drawn
her to him. It was a delight to watch him, and her fascinated eyes
strayed over him as he leant beside her; and behind him, growing deeper
and fiercer every moment, burned the red flare of the sunset.

After a long silence, in which Regina had studied the fine outline
of his head and neck, the small ear, the dear arm in the light grey
sleeve, the fine linen of the cuff enclosing the smooth and supple
wrist, he said:

"I should be so interested in your paintings, when may I see them?"

"It is rather difficult," she answered, in a low tone. "I don't think
my people would like me to bring them to the drawing-room, they don't
really care about any of those things."

There was a pause for a moment, then he said, turning to her:

"Would you like to bring them to my sitting-room after dinner, some
time when the others are gone to bed?"

"Yes, I could do that," she answered simply. He saw she was thinking at
the moment only of her work, and the unconventionality of such a visit
did not oppress her, was not even near her mind.

"We must go now," she said regretfully, "or we shall be late. I think,"
she added slowly, "we had better not go back together. Will you go home
and I will follow by the short cut to the house. My sisters know that
I spend a great deal of my time here, but they would not like it if
they thought that you came. They would want to come here too, and then
all the peace and beauty I enjoy would be spoiled. Do you see?"

"Perfectly," said Everest, smiling, as they turned from the sea to the
scented shades of the garden.

"This place has always been for you alone and now it is to be for us
alone. We will share it with no one and tell nobody of our comings and
goings."

He spoke lightly, jestingly, but both felt that the pact they had made
was a serious one, a pact for companionship in hidden solitude in this
magic, intoxicating place.

The paths were very narrow between the encroaching foliage of flowering
shrubs on every side, and they had to walk closely together, sometimes
touching each other in the soft violet shade beneath the overhanging
trees, and each time her fair head and rose cheek moved near him he
longed to draw her into his arms and kiss her again, but he would not
yield to the impulse, and almost in silence they passed on through the
groves till they were near the high gate by which he had entered.

"Will you jump it again?" she said, smiling up at him.

"No; I have no inclination now," he answered. "There is nothing I want
on the other side."

The girl coloured and laughed at the implied compliment. Bending down
and putting the key in the gate, she opened and pushed it. It swung
wide, giving access to the quiet road, full now of a luminous rose dusk
beneath its arching trees.

"Shall I see you and the pictures this evening?" he asked.

"Yes, I will bring them," she answered, and just at that moment, over
their heads in the thickets of climbing rose, a nightingale burst into
its loud throbbing, commanding call. They listened, hesitating, while
the mad, impatient beat of it vibrated through the quiet air, and far
off somewhere in the woods, after an interval, came back an answering
call.

Then he passed through the gate and the girl stood watching him,
delighting in the beauty of his quick and easy walk down the shadowy
road. When he had vanished she turned back and went by the winding path
to the centre palm, and there, beneath its protecting boughs, she threw
herself down, laying her face against the bosom of the springing turf.

"I was right, I was right," she murmured to herself. "It is more
beautiful than music, than the sunset skies, than the golden light on
the palms, than the play of the moonbeams; and it is like them all.
Bright as the sunlight, mysterious as the ocean, wonderful as the
fragrance of the rose, that is what they call love, and I have it, I
have found it in its perfection. What happiness! What good fortune!"
She lay still and silent, wrapped round and round in a strange soft
delight, lulled as if in some half-waking dream by the cooing of the
doves above her, the wave of the tamarisk in the hot air, the low
murmur of the sea.

The doves came down near her, finding her so still. They were very
tame, for she came there to feed them all through the winter, and she
heard the twinge of its lovely wings as one almost brushed her cheek.

She turned and stretched out her hand to it. "Bird of Venus," she said
softly, "Erasmie peleia, come and talk to me." And the dove let her
gather it up to her breast and put her lips on its sleek head. "Born of
love and for love, I love you," she murmured to it. "Did you see him
kiss me this evening? Oh, dove! how wonderful that was." She pressed
her warm hands on the shoulders of the bird and kissed it again. Then
she opened her clasp and let it go, for she could not bear to constrain
it, but the bird only fluttered as far as her feet and stayed there
beside her, pecking in the grass.

Regina looked up to the sky through the palm leaves. It was deeply
flushed now, even to the zenith, and strangely luminous.

"For their paradise, the Mohammedans thought of beauty and women--that
is, love--and the Christians thought of the rapture of music and the
ecstasy of adoration, and that is love too; the idea underlying both is
the same, and neither could think of anything better than that."

She was a little late for dinner, but everybody else was the same, and
the Rector never stormed nor swore at his family before strangers.
Moreover he was in a particularly good temper, as in addition to
Everest's cheque he had picked up another good donation for the
cottages from Lady Delamere. So the dinner was quite a cheerful meal
and passed over in good temper and gaiety.

At ten-thirty Everest was sitting in his sitting-room expecting
Regina. The room was lighted by large swinging lamps depending from
the ceiling, so that the light was good and well diffused; on the
table stood a spray of white roses in a vase, for Everest was fond of
flowers, and as he had not found any put in his room he had gathered
some in the Rectory garden and brought them in himself.

The window stood open and the scent of the climbing flowers all around
the sill filled the air with fragrance.

He sat idle, thinking of Regina and the strong, fearless, self-reliant
sort of character she had. How simply and easily she had assented to
his invitation to come to his room to show her pictures! Just as a man
would do. She seemed to be entirely without that mincing, mawkish way
so many girls and women have, that silly, hesitating questioning about
every trifle. Shall I? Ought I? Is it proper? Will it seem this or that?

Regina gave him the idea of being absolutely innocent and upright, and
therefore candid and fearless; never accustomed to consider or trouble
about the opinions of others. He felt that about her own actions she
would only ask herself, Is it right? Whereas most people do not care in
the least about that, all they ever ask themselves is, What will others
think? How will it seem? Will it be found out? And this attracted him
in her greatly.

At a little after the half-hour he heard her step outside and went to
open the door for her. She came in with a smile, both hands full of her
paintings, clasping them to her.

Everest pulled forward some chairs, and together they set the sheets
up, leaning against the backs where the light fell best upon them.
There were about twenty paintings in water-colour and they found
places for most of them. Then Everest retreated to the point from where
he could see them best and considered them in silence.

He was surprised. He had expected something more of the ordinary young
lady's drawing-room decorations, though he felt sure that all Regina
created would be artistic and beautiful. But here he saw at once it was
a special talent that he was looking at, that here was no question of a
little skill acquired with a drawing-master's aid. Here were no copies
of rustic cottages, nor yet the inevitable mill, water-wheel and bridge.

Each picture was strong, vivid, with its own marked stamp upon it, and
a challenging originality was in them all. The tones of colour, the
effects of light were marvellous; sunset and dawn, the radiance of the
late afternoon, the deep shades of approaching night--all were here
rendered in their idealised, sublimated form, showing, as the artist
always seeks to show, the essence of beauty.

Regina stood beside him, also looking at the pictures. He divined that
she was quite lost in their contemplation, that his own presence for
the moment was a secondary thing. This also proves the artist, for to
him even the height of passion is less than the height of his artistic
attainment.

"What do you think of them?" she asked, after a silence.

"I think they are quite beautiful; they are surprising. You have a
magnificent gift."

Regina flushed and trembled with pleasure. Hitherto her art had given
her intense joy as she recognised the worth in her creations. But now
she felt that intenser joy of bringing it forward to another and
seeing its effect on him, for the first time. The praise that we know
ourselves is true! What a delight it brings with it. That this man whom
she so admired and longed to please should be interested in her work,
surprised at its excellence, made her heart beat and her eyes dance.

Everest was greatly interested. An artist himself, he saw directly the
difficulties of the subjects she had chosen, and the talent that was
necessary to overcome them as she had done. He picked up first one and
then another, looking at them from a distance to see the general effect
and examining them closely to consider the workmanship, and the girl
sat silent, watching him, as he handled her sacred work that was so
dear to her and that had never been before any eyes for judgment until
now. Her sisters and mother knew that she painted, and had seen her
work occasionally in her room, but knowing and caring nothing about
such things they had not heeded it.

Now she sat absorbed, watching him and the beautifully coloured work
glowing in his hands.

"They are all wonderfully done. As you have had no lessons, and never
been taught, it simply means you have a great genius for it," he said,
laying down the last sheet and looking over to where she sat, a sweet
picture herself in her white dinner dress, gazing so earnestly at him
with her lustrous eyes, her rose-hued face supported on her hand, her
milky, dimpled elbow leaning on the chair arm.

"I am so glad," she said softly. "I hoped it might be so, for when I go
to Exeter and see exhibitions of painting there, and the things they
sell in the shops, somehow I feel that mine are--well, different."

"They are quite different, and very much better than the ordinary
water-colour--this is a most difficult subject, and perfectly done." He
lifted a painting of the enchanted garden. All across the foreground
waved boldly the mass of wild flowering tamarisk; admirably thrown
back, the garden and its wealth of roses was seen behind and beyond,
far off across the hazy blue of the sea burned the sunset sky in
softest crimson.

"I should like to have that in my gloomy London rooms."

"Would you really?" she answered, all her face glowing. "Do then accept
it. I am so proud and honoured and delighted. Do, please, choose any
one you like, or more than one. They would all be yours if you wished
it."

"This one appeals to me specially, and I shall never part with it,
because it is the scene of our first kiss," Everest said, in a low
tone, and rose with the picture in his hand to make space for it on the
mantelpiece. As he did so he took a velvet case from before the glass
and laid it on the table. It was just by Regina, and she glanced at it.

"What a beautiful face," she said, as the miniature of a girl's head
with a delicate, cameo-like profile met her eyes.

"That? Yes; it's my cousin. She is considered very pretty," answered
Everest from the mantelpiece; where he was installing her painting.

A little chill came over Regina as she looked; the cold, perfect face
seemed to hold her gaze. His cousin's! Her portrait here! Suddenly his
life, his far-off existence that was all so vague to her, had put out a
hand and claimed him.

She sat silent, and Everest turned from the hearth, closed the frame
and laid it on a side-table. Regina's painting now sat enthroned before
the glass. The whole room was bright with pictures. Windows seemed open
everywhere in the walls through which one saw vivid skies and seas and
waving trees. They spoke about them all in turn; two artists together
with fresh work to view will sit and talk all night over it if left
undisturbed.

It struck twelve by her sister's silver clock on his table, before
either of them noticed how the time had gone.

She sprang up from her chair and gathered the paintings together.

"How wrong of me to stay so late! And you came here to get well and
keep early hours; I am so sorry."

She was going, and Everest rose from his seat and saw her flushed with
excitement and pleasure, a joyous, shining vision in the lamplight. The
colour came suddenly to his own face, the dark eyes lit up, he made a
movement towards her.

"Regina, one good-night kiss."

She looked back at him standing under the light. Just behind him, near
the closed panels of the door into his room, over his shoulder she
saw the open casement standing wide to the mysterious, all-sheltering
night. She hesitated, and suddenly Everest turned aside.

"No, it is better not; you are my guest this evening. Good-night, my
sweet."

Regina backed towards the door and softly, silently vanished through
it. With flying, noiseless feet she ran up the stairs to her own room
and there, laying the paper sheets on the bed, threw herself on her
knees beside it with her head on her outstretched arms.

THE GIFT

For some days Everest and Regina had no opportunity of meeting in the
enchanted garden. The family had the idea that their guest was to be
entertained and amused, and set themselves to their self-imposed task
with commendable thoroughness. He was driven out to afternoon teas,
escorted to flower-shows, taken to garden-parties; lawn-tennis was
arranged for the morning; rides in the wood or motorboat excursions
on the sea for the afternoon; and though Regina took no part in a
great many of these various diversions, still the same roof was
sheltering them both, they saw each other constantly, and almost always
at breakfast the conversation was entirely theirs. In this way the
passion between them grew and grew; all the more steadfastly as it was
impossible for them to gratify their strenuous wish to be alone in each
other's society, to know the joy again--the "divine joy," as Plato
describes it, "of the kiss and the touch."

Regina grew to admire him more and more as their talks together
revealed his views and opinions; his wonder at the logical clearness
of her mind, the extent of her reading, the leaping quickness of her
intellect, increased with each day, and as his passions had always a
large share of mentality in them this brilliance of her brain attracted
him as much as her soft colour or her waving hair. Every day as she
talked with him across the breakfast-table, or listened to him, with
wide, interested, reverent eyes, he longed to press those bright lips
and draw the dear clever head down on his shoulder.

At last, after some days of unintermittent social gaiety, he said to
the Rector, when they were alone: "Look here, John, I don't want you to
exert yourself to provide these sorts of amusements for me. I can have
all this in town. You know I came here to rest and be quiet and get rid
of the fever. I like it best when I can just stroll about in the woods
and have nothing to do."

"You're perfectly free to do just what suits you best," returned the
Rector, "don't let anyone worry you. The girls are going to some
garden-party this afternoon, I believe, but don't let them drag you
there if you don't care about it."

"I think I will really stay away this time," Everest answered. "I
should like to stroll somewhere in the country this afternoon and so
get some exercise."

It fell out accordingly that the feminine portion of the family,
exclusive of the youngest daughter, drove away to the garden-party
after luncheon, the Rector went to the village to inspect his schools
and Everest was left alone to walk down to the sea, to the enchanted
garden, to Regina.

She was there waiting for him under the blossom-laden trees, in
her prettiest of pale green dresses, and without any speech at all
they rushed into each other's arms, and kissed, driven by a wild
instinctive, self-preservative longing to make an exchange of that
electricity, that had been stored up in each of them for many days,
increasing every hour, and, since it was denied any outlet, burning
into their own heart and brain, and consuming their vitality.

Those sweet, glad kisses restored the balance of electricity between
them and seemed to fill them with new life and energy. It was such a
lovely day, where should they go, what should they do? And when Everest
suggested walking somewhere, the girl was ready with ideas and plans,
like an orderly laying the new route before the colonel.

"Let us walk if you like along the sands to the next village. There is
a dear little inn in the bay where we can have tea and then come round
by the wood home. Would you like that?" she asked, gazing up to his
handsome face, the skin of which looked so cool and clear in the green
light of the garden--green light which intensified the darkness of his
eyes in their downward gaze upon her.

"Very much," he answered simply; and so they started, descending from
the garden by a little gate in the porphyry balustrade, and a steep
flight of steps to the hard glistening sands, to walk to Heddington,
a small sunlit village lying far back in the bay. That walk, how it
remained always in the girl's memory!--that happy walk along those
glittering sands, at the border of the purple sea. How her dancing feet
carried her along beside him! She felt so joyously conscious of her
youth and health. She knew that the sloping sunbeams turned her hair
into gold beneath her straw hat, that the purple of the sea and the
blue of the sky got into her eyes, and that he was pleased with her
as his gaze met hers. And their talk; what a splendid thing it was;
its newness, its range over so many themes delighted her. The talk of
Stossop always stayed in Stossop, and wearied the girl to death by its
inane repetitions, but their talk wandered all over the world and took
them with it and up and down the centuries from Palæolithic times, and
sometimes it called up visions of Indian coral and they almost looked
to see it in the Devon sea, and sometimes it made a distant group of
black rocks seem like an ancient caveman fighting a bear. And yet
it was all so light and laughter-filled, with none of the pedagogic
solemnity of the half-educated person, trying to show the half of him
that knows and keep concealed the half which is ignorant.

Everest never talked like a schoolmaster, but as an artist--in
pictures; and Regina had nothing of the schoolmistress in her, only
that true, deep thirst for knowledge, that had carried her down into
the depths of the heaviest learning and from which she had emerged, her
brain brilliant and shining, her language full of beauty and supple and
keen.

To both, the moments seemed to race by like a golden stream. They
hardly seemed to have left the red steps of the garden before they
found themselves at Heddington, and Everest ordered tea for them to be
brought out on the creeper-covered terrace, that hung over the shining
sea.

When they first turned the angle of rock, and came into the small,
white-sanded bay and saw the inn just in front of them, in its bridal
veil of white roses, the girl sighed and stayed still.

"Oh, I am so sorry to think our walk is over!"

Everest came close to her, slipped his hand through her arm and pressed
it.

"Why should you be sorry, darling?" he asked. "We are not going to part
here. We shall still be together."

There was a tender accent, a stress of deep feeling in his voice. Her
eyes looked up to his face, her breath came and went quickly. She was
not to be sorry--and he was not--because they were still together.

So the great fact was voiced between them, and they became aware of the
pressing desire, the colossal wish, beside which everything else became
insignificant, the wild, passionate longing in each--to be together.

"I know," she said falteringly, after a pause, "but I am so sorry to
think that half the time is gone. We are that much nearer to it being
over," and from that minute she felt inclined to catch at each moment
going by; all of them were wonderful, precious moments, and they shone
in her memory afterwards, like golden stars, in the dark nights of her
future.

The moment when they entered the cramped dark hall of the inn, where
a mysterious blue light reigned, owing to the blue paper covering the
glass of the end window, and giving effectively, yet economically, the
idea of a stained-glass casement. This blue light, in its novelty,
called fresh pleasure to her mind, as she saw the reflection of her own
face in the hall mirror float mistily and lily-like in it.

The moment when, emerging on the terrace, they sat down under the
canopy of rose, looking out towards the sea, now calm, only slightly
tremulous, all pink and silver in the quiet bay, and she heard
Everest ordering tea for them, with every luxury imaginable added
for her, she knew for her, since he rarely took cakes and chocolates
and strawberries and cream; and the moment when they sat silent and
very near together, looking at each other over the empty tea-cups, and
drinking in the peace and sweetness, the calm of all about them.

What a pity to have to go back to the Rectory. Overhead a little
window, embowered in roses, looked out upon the sea. That window
belonged to a room that the voluble innkeeper had offered Everest if
they wanted to stay the night. What a pity that they couldn't stay at
the little inn and sit side by side on its terrace, looking out to a
pink and silver distance for ever and ever! Such thoughts were in their
minds, equally in the man's as in the girl's; with such little simple
pleasures does cunning Nature amuse her cleverest children, for these
little things, these tiny golden seconds, are bridges leading over to
the great, the greatest things in life.

And the walk back inland, through the great green woods, was a rapture
too, though pierced by pain, as each step brought them nearer home.

Their talk went on, bright, inspiring talk, never personal, never
petty, but always on the wide, open fields, in the broad plains of
thought and intellect; for these two were absolutely alike in their
abhorrence of the common and the commonplace, the mean, the small and
the trivial, and they were also very singularly akin in all emotions
and modes of thought, in their estimation of man, in their view of him
as the blot upon creation, as Nature's mistake, in their estimation
of his rapacity and cruelty, his infinite littleness and stupidity.
They were alike too in their love for the animal world, for all the
gracious, sweet and lovely lives about us on this earth, that man, in
his stupendous imbecility, dares to say were created for him to trample
upon.

In this connection, the girl asked him suddenly if it were true that
he had shot much in Africa, and Everest replied: "I used to shoot a
good deal, but I never liked it, except as an exhibition of skill, and
as one gets older one sees more and more into the horror of taking
innocent and beautiful lives for one's own amusement." And Regina loved
him more than ever for this speech.

Their minds in their kinship were like two eagles, that, flying from
different quarters, had suddenly met and, happy in companionship, after
lonely travel, soared upwards to the blue zenith together.

The difference in age was hardly perceptible between them. Everest had
been at eighteen just like Regina now, and Regina at forty-six would be
like Everest now, and so they met and talked on equal ground, as a man
soliloquises with himself.

Everest did not seek to kiss her until they came to the border of the
home copse where they must part. There he drew her into a close, long
embrace and she threw her arms about his neck and kissed him back as
she had not ventured to do till now--their talk had drawn them so near
to each other. Then white and breathless she ran from him through the
mossy copse and so home and upstairs, and Everest later slowly crossed
the lawn to the Rectory and his own rooms, entering by the long French
windows.

For many days after this, they met in the enchanted garden, and Regina
lived in paradise.

Everest was supposed to need exercise, and every afternoon took a walk
to the sea unaccompanied. The two elder girls were not good walkers
enough to be able to go with him, and after a hint from their father
forbore to press their own or other society upon him, but, as he spent
the entire morning and evening in their company, left him undisturbed
in the afternoon, to sleep if he felt touches of fever returning on
him, or to walk where the fancy took him.

Though they did not know it, it always took him to the Chalet and
its garden. Every day the girl in her new-found emotions, in her joy
and pride and innocent happiness, grew more lovely. Her eyes shone
more brightly, her skin grew more exquisitely transparent; but it was
not the same with Everest; the sense of the Future gripped him too
strongly, and sleepless, troubled nights brought back the fever. Daily
his cheek grew paler, and except when talking, or under the influence
of some emotion, his face did not have the same animation, nor his eyes
the same brilliance, as when he came.

One afternoon when they met in the garden she saw at once that
something was oppressing him. His face was white, and the usually calm
lines of the brows were contracted with pain.

"My darling, I cannot stay here," he said, after their first long kiss.
"You must not ask me, sweetest one. It is killing me, and it is too
dangerous for you. This garden seems to alter everything.... When I am
here, I forget the world of men outside, in which, after all, vile as
it is, we have to live. I must go, Regina, before it is too late."

"It is too late," she answered, in a low voice. "Oh, Everest, if you
knew what I shall feel when you go. It is so dreadful, so impossible,
to give you up.... All the rest of my life must be wretched.... I have
only this time, these wonderful days, while you are here, to be happy
in.... Don't shorten them. Stay with me a little longer...!"

And in the still magic shade of the garden, Everest promised to stay,
because it seemed to him, too, that it was impossible to leave her, and
all the world, the hateful, ridiculous, jarring world, seemed far away,
non-existent, under those fragrant roses, where the nightingales sang
and Nature held full sway.

But that same night, at home, in his room, the idea came again very
sharply before him that his duty was either to go away or to offer to
marry Regina.

It was treacherous, cruel, dishonourable to stay any longer, unless he
did that; he had stayed too long as it was, he knew; but that was done
now. He could not help it, all he could do was to go at once, before
things were still worse. Mechanically, he began to put a few things
together that he always packed himself. Then he stopped, and sat down
again. Suppose he just followed his own desires, and did not trouble
about anything else?... Suppose he married Regina, and gave himself up
to golden weeks of wandering with her?... There was no reason why he
should not. He was free to marry if he chose. But the permanence of it,
the insane laws of the thing frightened him, as it had done all his
life.

He sat silent, looking down at the floor, thinking deeply; everything
grows so much more complicated and difficult to decide as one grows
older. One loses that saving narrowness of view that, in youth,
prevents one from seeing more of a project than the side presented
to one, and so simplifies one's course of conduct. In youth, too,
everything seems so permanent; that clears away another difficulty.
In love matters it makes everything remarkably easy.... We love, and
our passion is certain to last for ever and ever. Then, it is fairly
easy to arrange for it. But as we grow older we see that nothing is
permanent. Everything is moving, shifting, changing, and the whole
difficulty of man arises from the fact that he will shut his eyes to
this universal truth. He makes institutions and laws, which would
only be good and serviceable if our emotions, our passions, ourselves
were lasting and changeless instead of being the victims of constant
metamorphoses, and consequently man's life is a perpetual and fruitless
struggle to adapt these solid, permanent and unelastic inventions to
the restless varying of his life and his being.

Thus do we bid him build the solid rock house of marriage--where?--upon
the shifting sands of his passions and emotions.

Can we expect it to be a success?

Everest knew that he loved Regina now, that he passionately longed for
and desired her; and the feeling seemed so strong, so deeply rooted
that it might well last for the traditional "ever." ... But experience
told him that, of the many, many passions and loves he had felt before,
all had varied, and shifted, and changed, and in due course, from one
ailment or another, languished, sickened and died.

And on their death he had been free. But in this case he was
considering, when they died, he would be enveloped, shackled in the
chains of marriage! He thought of all his married friends.... There was
not one who did not envy him his freedom, and yet most of them must
have felt at some time that same stress of emotion for their wives as
he felt for Regina now. He sprang to his feet suddenly.

"No! No! I will not be so foolish as to be led into it! In town, in a
few weeks, I may have forgotten her altogether."

He recommenced collecting his letters and papers with feverish vigour.
He knew he must go, and he would do so the day after to-morrow. His
resolve was quite genuine, and he looked out the up-trains himself in
Miss Marlow's ready laid hand-book, and packed his writing-case and
small trunks.

But Nature, who doesn't mind in the least about marriage, but is very
keen on carrying out those matters which really concern her, is not to
be put off by a human being just packing his suit-case.

The following afternoon, when Everest started from the Rectory for his
walk seawards, as he left the grounds, he met the curate coming up from
the village, and as he greeted him the young man joined him.

"I'm going to visit a parishioner who lives in a little cottage on the
beach. Are you going that way? If so, we might walk down together."

Everest assented pleasantly, though on that particular day no man's
company was particularly welcome to him. His whole excitable nature was
now strung up to one painful and horrible duty: the wrenching himself
away from a woman that he loved with certainly the best and highest
passion he had ever felt in his life. His blood seemed all on fire,
and running the wrong way in his veins; his teeth seemed on edge; all
his nerves shaken. But he showed none of this: he looked to the curate
singularly calm, quiet and self-possessed.

For a few minutes they spoke on indifferent subjects, and then the
young man said suddenly:

"You are making quite a long stay in Devon?"

There was a sort of questioning note in his voice, and Everest, not
having spoken to anyone yet of his resolved departure, merely answered:

"Yes; it is very lovely here."

There was a silence, in which Everest felt sure the curate was
gathering strength to address him on some subject of special import,
and his mind went immediately to village schools, the poor and
subscriptions, but, to his amaze, when the curate spoke, it was
of--Regina!

"I expect you have great opportunities of talking with her, have you
not?"

To which Everest replied frankly, wondering what was coming:

"Yes, we have talked a great deal."

"Has she ever," the curate coughed nervously, "told you about me?" he
said at last.

Everest's surprise grew.

"Not beyond mentioning your name and your services to her father, I
think," he answered.

"She never mentioned, I suppose, that I ... I was anxious ... I
proposed to marry her?"

"No; certainly not. I never heard it," returned Everest promptly and
emphatically.

A wave of hot emotion, he could not tell exactly of what kind, but
certainly surprise and anger mixed in it, came over him as he heard
another man speak of Regina, and reveal his attitude towards her, speak
of marriage with her! She was his ... his ... his.... How dare the
curate talk of her!... She was wholly Everest's, his own property. She
belonged solely, utterly to him, and then the memory came: he was going
to leave her, _he_ was going away, he was leaving her to herself, to
Stossop, to the people here, to this ... curate!

In a whirl of anger he heard the next words:

"She refused me," uttered the young man faintly. "You see," he
continued, "she is so very young, I think perhaps she hardly knows her
own mind, and I, of course, have no chance of being very much with her
or pleading my cause. I thought it was just possible, since you are
with her so much, you could put in a word for me. A girl is so much
influenced sometimes by what an older man says. He has the weight of a
father, and yet more than the influence of a father, because he comes
from the outside. He's a stranger. Regina would listen, I think, to all
you said.... I want her to consider things a little, to consider how
lonely a woman's life is, unmarried...."

The curate's voice went on, but Everest lost what he was saying in the
angry maze and swirl of his own thoughts.

So this was what he was driving at! It was not flannel clubs, nor coal
tickets, nor choir classes now; it was not subscriptions this time. He
was being asked to persuade Regina--his Regina--to marry another man,
this man--this limited, narrow-minded, microscopic curate!

Then he became aware that the man was talking of Regina herself,
telling him how wonderful she was, so unlike the other sisters, so
unlike anyone he had ever known, and drawn on by Everest's quiet,
apparently sympathetic attention he began to dilate on his own love for
her, his ardent desire for her happiness.

"And do you think a girl like Regina Marlow would be happy as a
clergyman's wife?" interrupted Everest mildly.

Inwardly he was furious at the tone of proprietorship that
unconsciously crept into the curate's voice.

"I think she would when she had settled down," he answered. "I know
she is very original, and has all sorts of fancies, now, but that soon
disappears. When once a girl is married, and face to face with her
duties in life, her children, her home, her regular employment steady
and settle her."

A silent rage consumed Everest as he heard this speech, delivered
in the rather pompous tones that the curate, without meaning to be
offensive, generally slipped into.

That morning, when he had been thinking of that alternative to his
going--marrying Regina--deep in his heart had been the idea of
children. Never before in his life had he met a woman by whom he
would so gladly have had sons as by her. It was just that steel-like
sharpness of the brain, that clear, unclouded intellect, that swiftness
of motion, that agility of limb, that vital force of energy in body
and mind, that he would like to see in his sons--if he had them. That
soul of a lioness, that frank, brave, upright nature she had revealed
to him, is not a very modern type. It reminded him more of the old
Roman spirit that lived in Regulus and Lucretia, and this thought had
swayed him very near indeed to the idea of marriage. Only again, to his
sensitive, comprehensive brain, the thought of maternity brought the
idea of sacrifice, and it showed how deeply really his love for the
woman had gone, that he shrank from anything which would involve her
in suffering and danger. He felt he could not bear the thought of this
gay, beautiful, radiant creature, risking, and perhaps giving up, her
life, so full of powers for artistic creation, for his sake, through
the gratification of his passion in bearing children to satisfy his
ambitions.

And this had carried his mind away again from marriage; it made the
matter more complex still. If he married, it was essential for his
property that his wife should have children, but he saw suddenly now,
and for the first time, what an ordeal loomed before him in giving over
a woman, whom he loved as much as he loved Regina, to suffering and to
danger.

Perhaps the ancient Greeks were influenced by this same feeling when
they married women merely to have and rear their children, while giving
their love and devotion and life companionship to others.

And now, here, when he, Everest, whom the girl loved, and who had such
great compensations to give in return for all he asked from a woman,
hesitated and contemplated the extreme of sacrifice, that this sacred
life might be left undisturbed, while he was planning to leave her, to
tear himself from her, for her sake, this wretched man at his side was
quietly talking of her duties, the tasks she was to be forced into,
the quiet, humdrum, irksome life she was to be bound to, the risks
of maternity she was to face, to gratify him, that he might enjoy to
the full this lovely flower, which Everest held too sacred to gather
himself! It was no use to leave her! If he did, this man, or some other
like him, would force her into an odious existence, such as was here
sketched out.

His heart seemed to swell with fury, as he thought of it, dark mists of
rage rose over his brain, darkening his mental vision.

"I am sure I shall win her in time," the voice went on at his side.
"All that is wanted is persistence, determination.... That young
Markham, who shot himself in London, it was a wrong thing to do, of
course--and so foolish! If he had come back here, and persisted, he
might have won her, just as I firmly believe I shall win her."

And in answer to a question of Everest's, he was taken through the