"Well--anywhere then. If I'm well enough to go to the Riviera, I'm--"

"You're not well enough to go to the Riviera."

"What makes you think that?" she asked gravely.

He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension!

She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him!

He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her--confused, overwhelming thought--an agony of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats.

What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone.

CHAPTER XVIII

A MIRACLE

In the afternoon of the following day Tyson was sitting with Molly in the dining-room when he was told that Captain Stanistreet had called and had asked to see him. "Was he--?" Yes, the Captain was in the drawing-room.

Tyson was a little surprised at the announcement; for though the shock of the fire had somewhat obscured his recollection of the events that preceded it, Molly had unfortunately recalled them to his memory. But he had clean forgotten some of the details. Consequently he was more than a little surprised when Stanistreet, without any greeting or formality whatsoever, took two letters from his pocket and flung one of them on the window-seat.

"That's your letter," he said. "And here's the answer."

He laid Molly's little note down beside it.

Tyson stared at the letters rather stupidly. That correspondence was one of the details he had forgotten. He also stared at Stanistreet, who looked horribly ill. Then he took up Molly's note and examined it without reading a word. It was crumpled, dirty, almost illegible, as if Louis had thrust it violently into his pocket, and carried it about with him for weeks.

"If you really don't know what it means," said Stanistreet, "I'll tell you. It means that your wife had only one idea in her head. She didn't understand it in the least, but she stuck to it. She thought of it from morning till night, when other women would have been amusing themselves; thought of it ever since you married her and left her. Unfortunately, it kept her from thinking much of anything else. There were many things she might have thought of--she might have thought of _me_. But she didn't."

"Thanks. I know that as well as you. Did it ever occur to you to think of her?"

"I shouldn't be here if I hadn't thought of her."

"Oh--" Tyson stepped over to the empty fireplace. It was the only thing in the room that was left intact.

His att.i.tude suggested that he was lord of the hearth, and that his position was indestructible.

"Since you considered your testimony to my wife's character so indispensable, may I ask why you waited five weeks to give it?"

Tyson could play with words like a man of letters; he fought with them like the City tailor's son.

"You post your letters rather late. I left town an hour after I got hers."

"It was the least you could do."

"Then I got ill. That also was the least I could do. But I did my best to die too, for decency's sake. Needless to say, I did not succeed."

"I see. You thought of yourself first, and of her afterwards. What I want to know is, would you have thought of me, supposing--only supposing--you could have taken advantage of the situation?"

"No. In that case I would not have thought of you. I would have thought of her."

"In other words, you would have behaved like a scoundrel if you'd got the chance." The twinkle in Tyson's eyes intimated that he was enjoying himself immensely. He had never had the whip-hand of Stanistreet before.

"I would have behaved like a d.a.m.ned scoundrel, if you like. But I wouldn't have left her. Not even to marry and live morally ever after.

I can be faithful--to another man's wife."

The twinkle went out like a spark, and Tyson looked at his hearth. It was dangerous to irritate Stanistreet, for there was no end to the things he knew. So he only said, "Do you mind not shouting quite so loud. She's in there--she may hear you."

She had heard him; she was calling to Nevill. He went to her, leaving the door of communication unlatched.

"Is that Louis?" she asked. Tyson muttered something which Stanistreet could not hear, and Molly answered with an intense pleading note that carried far. "But I _must_ see him."

He started forward at the sound of her voice. I believe up to the very last he clung to the doubt that was his hope. But Tyson had heard the movement and he shut the door.

The pleading and muttering went on again on the other side. Heaven only knew what incriminating things the little fool was saying in there! As Stanistreet waited, walking up and down the empty room, he noticed for the first time that it _was_ empty. Only the other day it had been crammed with things that were symbols or monuments of the foolishness of Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Now ceiling and walls were foul with smoke, the gay white paint was branded and blistered, and the floor he walked on was cleared as if for a dance of devils. But it was nothing to Stanistreet.

It would have been nothing to him if he had found Mrs. Nevill Tyson's drawing-room utterly consumed. There was no reality for him but his own l.u.s.t, and anger, and bitterness, and his idea of Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

Presently Tyson came back.

"You can go in," he said, "but keep quiet, for G.o.d's sake!"

Stanistreet went in.

Tyson looked back; he saw him stop half-way from the threshold.

It was only for a second, but to Stanistreet it seemed eternity. From all eternity Mrs. Nevill Tyson had been lying there on that couch, against those scarlet cushions, with the blinds up and the sun shining full on her small, scarred face, and on her shrunken, tortured throat.

She held out her hand and said, "I thought it was you. I wanted to see you. Can you find a chair?"

He murmured something absolutely trivial and sat down by her couch, playing with the fringe of the shawl that covered her.

"Did I hear you say you had been ill?" she asked.

He leant forward, bending his head low over the fringe; she could not see his face. "I had inflammation of something or other, and I went partially off my head--got out of bed and walked about in an east wind with a temperature of a hundred and two, decimal point nine."

"Oh, Louis, how wicked of you! You might have died!"

"No such luck."

"For shame! I've been ill too; did you know? Of course you didn't, or else you'd have come to ask how I was, wouldn't you? No, you wouldn't.

How could you come when you were ill?"

"I would have come. I didn't know."

"Didn't you? Oh, well--we had a fire here, and I was burnt; that's all.