"Lady Halifax says," he announced, taking immediate possession of Janet where she stood, and drawing her to a seat beside him on the lounge, "that the least we can do by way of reparation is to arrange our wedding-trip in their society. She declares she will wait any reasonable time; but I a.s.sured her delicately that her idea of compensation was a little exaggerated."

Janet looked at him with an, absent smile. "Yes, I think so," she said, but her eyes were preoccupied, and the lover in him resented it.

"What is it?" he asked. "What has happened, dear?"

She looked down at an open letter in her hand, and for a moment said nothing. "I don't know whether I ought to tell you; but it would be a relief."

"Can there be anything you ought not to tell me?" he insisted tenderly.

"Perhaps, on the other hand, I ought," she said reflectively. "It may help you to a proper definition of my character, and then--you may think less of me. Yes, I think I ought."

"Darling, for Heaven's sake don't talk nonsense!"

"I had a letter--this letter--a little while ago, from Elfrida Bell." She held it out to him. "Read it."

Kendal hesitated and scanned her face. She was smiling now; she had the look of half-amused dismay that might greet an ineffectual blow. He took the letter.

"If it is from Miss Bell," he said at a suggestion from his conscience, "I fancy, for some reason, it is not pleasant."

"No," she replied, "it is not pleasant."

He unfolded the letter, recognizing the characteristic broad margins and the repressed rounded perpendicular hand with its supreme effort after significance, and his thought reflected a tinge of his old amused curiosity.

It was only a reflection, and yet it distinctly embodied the idea that he might be on the brink of a further discovery. He glanced at Janet again: her hands were clasped in her lap, and she was looking straight before her with smilingly grave lips and lowered lids, which nevertheless gave him a glimpse of retrospection. He felt the beginnings of indignation, yet he looked back at the letter acquisitively; its interest was intrinsic.

"I feel that I can no longer hold myself in honor," he read, "if I refrain further from defining the personal situation between us as it appears to me. That I have let nearly three weeks go by without doing it you may put down to my weakness and selfishness, to your own charm, to what you will; but I shall be glad if you will not withhold the blame that is due me in the matter, for I have wronged you, as well as myself, in keeping silence.

"Look, it is all here in a nutsh.e.l.l. _Nothing is changed_.

I have tried to believe otherwise, but the truth is stronger than my will. My opinion of you is a naked, uncompromising fact I cannot drape it or adorn it, or even throw around it a mist of charity. It is unalterably there, and in any future intercourse with you, such intercourse as we have had in the past, I should only dash myself forever against it. I do not clearly see upon what level you accepted me in the beginning, but I am absolutely firm in my belief that it was not such as I would have tolerated if I had known. To-day at all events I am confronted with the proof that I have not had your confidence--that you have not thought it worth while to be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps that is d.a.m.ning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive.

It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves are not above reproach from any point of view. I find you adulterating what ought to be the pure stream of ideality with muddy considerations of what the people are pleased to call the moralities, and with the feebler contamination of the conventionalities--"

"I _couldn't_ smoke with her," commented Janet, reading over his shoulder. "It wasn't that I objected in the least, but it made me so very--uncomfortable, that I would never try a second time."

Kendal's smile deepened, and he read on without answering, except by pressing her finger-tips against his lips.

"I should be sorry to deny your great cleverness and your pretensions to a certain sort of artistic interpretation.

But to me the _artist bourgeois_ is an outsider, who must remain outside. He has nothing to gain by fellowship with me, and I--pardon me--have much to lose.

"So, if you please, we will go our separate ways, and doubtless will represent, each to the other, an experiment that has failed. You will believe me when I say that I am intensely sorry. And perhaps you will accept, as sincerely as I offer it, my wish that the future may bring you success even more brilliant than you have already attained." Here a line had been carefully scratched out. "What I have written I have written under compulsion.

I am sure you will understand that.

"Believe me,

"Yours sincerely,

"ELFRIDA BELL.

"P.S.--I had a dream once of what I fancied our friendship might be. It is a long time ago, and the days between have faded all the color and sweetness out of my dream--still, I remember that it was beautiful. For the sake of that vain imagining, and because it was beautiful, I will send you, if you will allow me, a photograph of a painting which I like, which represents art as I have learned to kneel to it."

Kendal read this communication through with a look of keen amus.e.m.e.nt until he came to the postscript. Then he threw back his head and laughed outright. Janet's face had changed; she tried to smile in concert, but the effort was rather piteous. "Oh, Jack," she said, "please take it seriously." But he laughed on, irrepressibly.

She tried to cover his lips. "_Don't_ shout so!" she begged, as if there were illness in the house or a funeral next door, and he saw something in her face which stopped him.

"My darling, it can't hurt--it doesn't, does it?"

"I'd like to say no, but it does, a little. Not so much as it would have done a while ago."

"Are you going to accept Miss Bell's souvenir of her shattered ideal? That's the best thing in the letter --that's really supreme!" and Kendal, still broadly mirthful, stretched out his hand to take it again; but Janet drew it back.

"No," she said, "of course not; that was silly of her.

But a good deal of the rest is true, I'm afraid, Jack."

"It's d.a.m.nably impudent," he cried, with, sudden anger.

"I suppose she believes it herself, and that's the measure of its truth. How dare she dogmatize to you about the art of your work! _She_ to _you_!"

"Oh, it isn't that I care about. It doesn't matter to me, how little she thinks of my aims and my methods. I'm quite content to do my work with what artistic conception I've got without a.n.a.lyzing its quality--I'm thankful enough to have any. Besides, I'm not sure about the finality of her opinion--"

"You needn't be!" Kendal interrupted, with scorn.

"But what hurts--like a knife--is that part about my insincerity. I _haven't_ been honest with her--I haven't!

From the very beginning I've criticised her privately.

I've felt all sorts of reserves and qualifications about her, and concealed them--for the sake of--of I don't know what--the pleasure I had in knowing her, I suppose."

"It seems to me pretty clear, from this precious communication, that she was quietly reciprocating," Kendal said bluntly.

"That doesn't clear me in the least. Besides, when she had made up her mind she had the courage to tell me what she thought; there was some principle in that. I--I admire her for doing it, but I couldn't, myself."

"Thank the Lord, no. And I wouldn't be too sure, if I were you, darling, about the unmixed heroism that dictates her letter. I dare say she fancied it was that, but--"

Janet's head leaped up from his shoulder. "Now you are unjust to her," she cried. "You don't know Elfrida, Jack.

If you think her capable of a.s.suming a motive--"

"Well, do you know what I think?" said Kendal, with an irrelevant smile, glancing at the letter in her hand. "I think she has kept a copy."

Janet looked at him with reproachful eyes, which nevertheless had the relief of amus.e.m.e.nt in them. "Don't you?" he insisted.

"I--dare say."

"And she thoroughly enjoyed writing as she did. The phrases read as if she had rolled them under her tongue.

It was a _coup_, don't you see?--and the making of a _coup_, of any kind, at any expense, is the most refined joy which life affords that young woman."

"There's sincerity in every line."

"Oh, she means what she says. But she found an exquisite gratification in saying it which you cannot comprehend, dear. This letter is a flower of her egotism, as it were--she regards it with natural ecstasy, as an achievement."

Janet shook her head. "Oh no, no" she cried miserably.

"You can't realize the--the sort of thing there was between us, dear, and how it should have been sacred to me beyond all tampering and cavilling, or it should not have been at all. It isn't that I didn't know all the time that I was disloyal to her, while she thought I was sincerely her friend. I did! And now she has found me out, and it serves me perfectly right--perfectly."

Kendal reflected for a moment, and then he brought comfort to her from his last resource.