And she didn't like it. She couldn't understand the Adventure point of view. It was, to her, immoral, indecent. I went easily along and then, one day, all the romance went out of it--clean--like a pricked bubble.

When young Stephen died I suddenly saw that life was real--naked--ugly, not romantic a bit. Then it all fell to pieces like a house of cards. It's easy enough to be brave when you're attacking a cardboard castle--it's when you're up against iron that your courage is wanted. It failed me. I've funked it. I'm going to run away."

He could see that Norah Monogue's whole life was in the vigour with which she opposed him--

"No, no, no. To give it up now. Why, you're only thirty--everything's in front of you. Listen. I know you took Clare crookedly, I saw it in the beginning. In the first place you loved her, but you loved her wrong.

You've been a boy, Peter, all the time, and you've always loved like a boy. Don't you know that there's nothing drives a woman who loves a man more to desperation than that that man should give her a boy's love?

She'd rather he hated her. Clare could have been dealt with. To begin with she loved you--all the time. Oh! yes, I'm as certain of it as I can be of anything. I know her so well. But the unhappiness, the discomfort--all the things, the ugly things, that her mother was emphasising to her all the time--frightened her. Knowing nothing about life she just felt that things as they were were as bad as things could be. It seems extraordinary that any one so timid as she should dare to take so dangerous a plunge as running off to another man.

"But it was just because she knew so little about Life that she could do it. This other man persuaded her that he could give her the peace and comfort that you couldn't. She doesn't know--poor thing, poor thing--what it will mean, that plunge. So, out of very terror, she took it. And now--Oh! Peter, I'm as certain as though I could see her, she's already longing for you--would give anything to get back to you. This has taught her more than all the rest of her life put together. She was difficult--selfish, frightened at any trouble, supersensitive--but a man would have understood her. You wanted affection, Peter--from her, from me, from a lot of people--but it was always because of the things that it was going to bring to you, never because of the things that you were going to give out. You'd never grown up--never. And now, when suddenly the real world has come to you, you're going to give it up."

"I don't give it up," he said to her--"I shall write--I shall do things--"

She shook her head. "You've told me. I know what that means." Then almost below her breath--"It's horrible--It's horrible. You mustn't do it--you must go back to London--you must go back--"

But at that he rose and faced her.

"No," he said, "I will not. I've given the other things a chance--all these years I've given them a chance. I've stood everything and at the end everything's taken away from me. What shall I go back to? Who wants me? Who cares? God!" he cried, standing there, white-faced, dry-eyed, almost defying her--"Why should I go? Just to fail again--to suffer all that again--to have them take everything I love from me again--to be broken again! No, let them break the others--I'm done with it...."

"And the others?" she answered him. "Is it to be always yourself? You've fought for your own hand and they've beaten you to your knees--fight now for something finer--"

She seemed as she appealed to him to be shining with some great conquering purpose. Here, with her poor body broken and torn, her spirit, the purer for her physical pain, confronted him, shamed him, stretched like a flaming sword before the mean paths that his own soul would follow.

But he beat her down. "I will not go back--you don't know--you don't understand--I will not go."

III

The little dusty Minstrels' Gallery saw a good deal of him during these days. It was a lonely place at the top of the hotel, once intended to be picturesque and romantic for London visitors, but ultimately left to its own company with its magnificent view appreciated by no one.

Here Peter came. Every part of him now seemed to be at war with every other part. Had he gone straight to Scaw House with bag and baggage and never left it again, then the Westcott tradition might have caught him when he was in that numbed condition--caught him and held him.

Now he had stayed away just long enough for all the old Peter to have become alive and active again.

He looked back upon London with a great shuddering. The torment that he had suffered there he must never undergo again. Norah was now the one friend left to him in the world. He would cut himself into pieces to make these last days of hers happy, and yet the one thing that could give her happiness was that he should promise to go back.

She did not understand--no one could understand--the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift--to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive--all this had come to him.

She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once more. To go back a failure--to be pointed out as the man whose wife left him because she found him so dull--to hear men like young Percival Galleon laughing at his book--to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a living--to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world--to break out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of debauch ... how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody knew nor cared!

And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance that Norah Monogue had held in his life.

Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He'd just do anything in the world for her!--anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down he paced the little Minstrels' room, with its dusty green chair and its shining floor--"I just can't stand it all over again!"

But every time that he went in to see her--and he was with her continually--made his resistance harder. She didn't speak about it again but he knew that she was always thinking about it.

"She's worrying over something, Westcott--do you happen to know what it is?" the doctor asked him. "It's bad for her. If you can help her about it in any way--"

The strain between them was becoming unbearable. Every day, when he went in to sit with her, they would talk about other things--about everything--but he knew that before her eyes there was that picture of himself up at Scaw House, and of the years passing--and his soul and everything that was fine in him, dying.

He saw her growing daily weaker. Sometimes he felt that he must run away altogether, go up to Scaw House and leave her to die alone; then he knew that that cruelty at any rate was not in him. One day he thought her brutal and interfering, another day it seemed that it was he who was the tyrant. He reminded himself of all the things that she had done for him--all the things, and he could not grant her this one request.

Then he would ask himself what the devil her right was that she should order his life in this way?... everyday the struggle grew harder.

The tension could not hold any longer--at last it broke.

IV

One evening they were sitting in silence beside her window. The room was in dusk and he could just see her white shadow against the dim blue light beyond the window.

Suddenly she broke down. He could hear her crying, behind her hands.

The sound in that grey, silent room was more than he could bear. He went over to her and put his arms round her.

"Norah, Norah, please, please. It's so awfully bad for you. I oughtn't to come if I--"

She pulled herself together. Her voice was quite calm and controlled.

"Sit over there, Peter. I've got to talk to you."

He went back to his chair.

"I've only got a few more weeks to live. I know it. Perhaps only a few more days. I must make the very utmost of my time. I've got to save you...."

He said nothing.

"Oh! I know that it must all have seemed to you abominable--as though I were making use of this illness of mine to extort a promise from you, as though just because I'm weak and feeble I can hold an advantage over you. Oh! I know it's all abominable!--but I'll use everything--yes, simply everything--if I can get you to leave this place and go back!"

He could feel that she was pulling herself together for some tremendous effort.

"Peter, I want you now just to think of me, to put yourself out of everything, absolutely, just for this half-hour. After all as I've only a few half-hours left I've got that right."

Her laugh as she said it was one of the saddest things he'd ever heard.

"Now I'm going to tell you something--something that I'd never thought I'd tell a soul.

"I've not had a very cheerful life. It hasn't had very much to make it bright and interesting. I'm not complaining but it's just been that way--" She broke off for a moment. "I don't want you to interrupt or say anything. It'll make it easier for me if I can just talk out into the night air, as it were--just as though no one were here."

She went on: "The one thing that's made it possible, made it bearable, made it alive, has been my love for you. Always from the first moment I saw you I have loved you. Oh! I haven't been foolish about it. I knew that you'd never care for me in that kind of way. I knew from the very first that we should be pals but that you'd never dream of anything more romantic. I've never had any one in love with me--I'm not the kind of woman who draws the romance out of men.

"No, I knew you'd never love me, but I just determined that I'd make you, your career, your success, the pivot, the centre of my life.

"I wasn't blind about you--not a bit. I knew that you were selfish, weak, incredibly young about the world. I knew that you were the last person in existence to marry Clare--all the more reason it seemed to me why I should be behind you. I was behind you so much more than you ever knew. I wonder if you've the least idea what most women's lives are like. They come into the world with the finest ideals, the most tremendous energies, with a desire for self-sacrifice that a man can't even begin to understand. Then they discover slowly that none of those things, those ideals, those energies, those sacrifices, are wanted. The world just doesn't need them--they might as well never have been born.

Do you suppose I enjoyed slaving for my mother, day and night for years?

Do you suppose that I gladly yielded up all my best blood, my vitality, to the pleasure of some one who never valued it, never even knew that such things were being given her? Before you came I was slowly falling into despair. Think of all the women who are haunted by the awful thought--'The time will come when death will be facing me and I shall be forced to own that for any place that I have ever filled in the world I might never have been born.' How many women are there who do not pray every day of their lives, 'God, give me something to do before I die--some place to fill, some work to carry out, something to save my self-respect.'

"I tell you that there is a time coming when women will force those things that are in them upon the world. God help all poor women who are not wanted!

"_I_ wasn't wanted. There was nothing for me to do, no place for me to fill... then you came. At once I seized upon that-God seemed to have sent it to me. I believed that if I turned all those energies, those desires, those ambitions upon you that it would help you to do the things that you were meant to do. I was with you always--I slaved for you--you became the end in life to which I had been called.