Her face softened as there came out clearly to her the real picture of Jimmy that always kept itself somewhere between her eyes and her brain.

Ah, there were men of talent and fashion, who did not hesitate to make merry, who were more or less good, more or less anti-pathetic, and for whom society never had a word of reproach--but Jimmy! distinguished and charming, with every taste and means to gratify them, with--so to put it--the woman of his heart at his very doors--how did he live? Why, for everybody in the world but for himself. And through it all, in spite of the fact that he appeared blindly to shut his eyes against their mutual love, he lived for her. Oh, he was the best, the best!

She listened as she stood there for the hum of the motor which might tell her he was coming back. She wanted to ask him to tell her the truth about The Dials. She wanted, above all else, to see him again.

She remembered them, one by one, the happy occasions they had caught and made the most of, and each after the other they became lovely harbors where like ships her thoughts lay at anchor. Penhaven was certainly one of the best. She congratulated herself that she had conceived that day, and without any blame she acknowledged it to herself, that if Jimmy had only wished it they would have been there together now.

She had taken her chair again and sat back deeply in the great fauteuil. The brocade made a dark-hued background against which her head, frankly thrown back, defined its charming lines. Her bare arms folded across her breast, her foot swinging gently to and fro, she continued to muse and dream, and as she thought of Bulstrode, to love him.

Some one came in and piled up the fire and slipped out, but no message was brought her to tell her what had become of her host and her friend.

The long sympathetic silence beginning at the fireside flowed through the vast rooms and corridors, and out into the night, down the lanes and the road until its completeness and tonelessness were broken by the memory of the bells of Penhaven, as she and Jimmy had heard them whilst they rang the angelus in the close. And the discordant note of The Dials was drowned, confused and lost in her intense listening to the Penhaven bells. Some chord or other, or some fine spring touched as she so thought on, brought back to her the fact of the despatch upstairs, which if it had any, had an imperative importance. Falconer had sent it from Palm Beach where he had gone to get rid of a troublesome grippe. He did not, in the few lines which told he was seedy and had put off his sailing, suggest that she should go back.

But he would not resent her return, she knew that, he would probably treat her decently for at least a fortnight.

"I don't know a creature," she praised herself, "who would have stayed on with Jack, and nothing but Jimmy has helped me to stick it out. If he really loved me would he have let me go on as I have gone on? I don't know. Unless he loved me could he have helped me at all? I think not."

Round the figure of her friend there began to group, as if for some special purpose, the kindnesses and charities she had seen him display.

One by one she added up his gifts and benefits until the poor and outcast and forgotten and despised claimed all of them to be his friends; they gathered round him and in place of the categoric histories of self-love and indulgence, of pa.s.sion that had in more or less degree characterized the men of her set, these things came till the dawn of them and the light of them made his figure shine. How, she thought, could he ever have been what he so wonderfully is, if he had lived for himself or been anything but the best? Upstairs, in her room, a few hours before, the mark of silver on her hair had been a whip to urge on her rebellion; to tell her to seize and make the most of the fleeting time, to warn her of the age which when her beauty and her youth were gone, was all that could remain for them both. But now there began to blow across her soul a freshness. She had indeed been drawing long breaths in her husband's absence, but free as they were they left her stifled and panting, as if to get the oxygen she had been obliged to climb too far. Now, on the contrary, she was lifted as by wings, and whilst they fluttered about her she breathed evenly yet fully, and the air on the heights was something better than wine.

There is an unspoiled enjoyment in the thing which has never given us pain. It may be a sensual and ecstatic prerogative of pa.s.sion to make the object suffer, but there is a different sense of happiness in that which never does harm or hurt or wrong to the thing it loves. So she could think of Bulstrode, without pain, without regret, without reproach. And if the ardor and pa.s.sion in her became suffused and slowly paled, there was a starry brightness, a beauty in her face and in her eyes such as Bulstrode, when he came in to find her waiting, had never seen before.

With every mile of the short run from The Dials back to the castle, Mrs. Falconer's friend had been preparing himself for his meeting with the woman he had left some few hours before. All his emotions culminated in a high, swinging excitement. The fact that he was going back alone to find Mary Falconer there, was the big motif, and as he thought of the dark, charming envelope the castle made, holding the treasure she was, keeping her there for him, his heart beat so high that he knew there was nothing more for him to feel. The ecstasy he had witnessed in the little house his chivalry had purchased, the meeting of the husband and wife, come together there after so much unhappiness, put it poignantly to him that sterile love is a very unsatisfactory thing indeed. And if the highest quality of gallantry is to consider a woman's honor before her love, it at least makes real happiness--so he felt then--impossible in the world.

One false swerve of the motor at the pace they were going, and there would not be any more problems to solve. If he died now he might justly say that he had not lived, he had not lived! Who would give him back what he had missed? The motto on the dials repeated itself to him: _Utere dum licet_.

He pushed into the castle on his arrival, hurried to dress, and went downstairs. It seemed to him as he put aside the portieres, that these curtains were at last all there was between himself and her, that he was going home, coming home at last; that ways he had for years seen approaching, met at length to-night here. It was with the very clear realization of the culmination of the time that Bulstrode went in to find his friend.

He had stopped to make himself irreproachable, and expected to find her waiting and friendly and lovely. What, had he found her anything else?

But as rising from her chair, the scarf slipping back from her bare shoulders, she put out her hand and greeted him, the dazzling sense that breaks on a man's consciousness when he finds himself alone with the woman he loves, proved for a second that he had need of all his control. He could not speak.

"Jimmy!" she exclaimed, "you're as white as a ghost! You look as though you'd been to a wake; and I don't believe you've had a mouthful of dinner."

He remembered that it might be polite to apologize to her for the entire desertion of the household.

"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"

"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't so much matter as did the fact that he had not, whatever festivities he had honored, dined. Shouldn't they have something here together before the fire?

"I seem," she said, "to have a blighting effect upon my host."

"My friend Westboro' is the happiest man in Glousceshire."

"Which means that he has found his d.u.c.h.ess?"

"He has found his d.u.c.h.ess."

When her friend entered the room, by the light on his face like the brightness of the morning as he caught sight of her, Mary Falconer saw that for Jimmy Bulstrode she was still the one woman in the world. In the relief that this knowledge brought her she half attempted to play with what had been her suspicions, and to tease him, but this mood pa.s.sed.

"That's a horrid old parson they chose to have me dine with," she said.

"He told me dreadful scandals but I think now that I see through them all. The d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro' has been living incognita at The Dials, hasn't she, and her husband at last found her there?"

Bulstrode acknowledged that she had read the drama correctly. And Mary Falconer laughed.

"Yes, evidently the d.u.c.h.ess has a strong dramatic sense; she's very romantic, isn't she?"

And the man absently exclaimed: "Oh, I dare say, I dare say." Then turning to her with unusual vehemence: "Do, for Heaven's sake leave them and everybody. I want to forget them all."

He threw up his hand with a sort of supplication. He had seated himself on a tapestried stool close beside the chair she had taken again. Using her Christian name for one of the rare times in his life, he pleaded: "Can't we leave all other people, Mary, can't we?"

She looked at him startled and said that their host seemed pretty effectually to have left _them_, rising from her chair with the words, and crossing the room to one of the long windows, drew back the curtain.

The cold gla.s.s against which she pressed her cheek sent a shock through her, but she stayed for a second close to the pane as if she would implore the newer transport, the stiller transport, of the icy cold to transfuse her veins.

The changed temperature had chased away the fog, and the night spread its serene beauty over the park, where the moonlight lay along the terrace like snow. Far down the slope rose the outlines of the bare trees, and the wide landscape shone and shone until it finally was lost in the mists.

Bulstrode had followed over and stood by Mary Falconer's side, and the scene before him seemed full of joy, full of gifts, full of largesse.

The ornament on the woman's bosom stirred with her breathing, shot a million fine sparkles, and below it the spray of mistletoe rose and fell, rose and fell.

He put his hand out and took the spray and fastened it in his b.u.t.tonhole, saying that the mistletoe was above her head.

His voice, one she had never heard, made her unwisely turn to meet his eyes, to shake with the emotion of the adventurer trembling on the edge of the precipice; just to hang over which, and to shudder, he has climbed high. She put her hand out between them, holding him back.

"I've had a telegram from my husband. He's very ill. He's in Palm Beach and I'm going over to him next week."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I've had a telegram from my husband"]

Falconer's name was sovereign for breaking spells as far as Jimmy was concerned, but the wife's phrase this time gave him only a more violent revelation of his cruel hope. She went on:

"It's not alarming, but with a heart like Jack's, anything might happen. It's only when I'm with him that he keeps up any sort of shape."

The fact of his holding in his the hand that she had put out to keep him from her, did not serve to aid in a serene continuation of her plans, and the silence became a burden which if she did not herself lift would crush her.

She said hurriedly: "And you will help me to go."

And then Bulstrode spoke: "No," he said, "Oh, no."

For the briefest s.p.a.ce she yielded to what he meant and was at last wicked enough and human enough to promise to do. But she had on this solemn evening--for it had so been--come too far, gone up too high to drag down all the way with him on a single word. In supremest happiness, however, at what he said and how he said it, she gave a little soft laugh, and although she was under the mistletoe, she felt that she looked down on him, loving him so much more that in adorable weakness he had suddenly grown small and dear.

"Oh, Jimmy," she whispered, "how heavenly of you, but you can't go back on ten years in one week. You can't, you know! You've thrown me like a giant so _far_, I've gone right on up."

Still looking at her he shook his head as she repeated: "You'll help me, you'll help me! You can't go back!"

"I _can_ go back," he said deeply, "_on everything and everybody in the world_."

At the frank simple words, and the sense of what they meant, at the sound of his new voice, it was as if all the d.y.k.es at last were down; and strong, bright, but most beautiful, the sea came rushing in. As she saw him coming toward her and knew that in a moment more she would be in his arms, and that at his first touch she would let everything go, she found one word to say and it proved only to be his name:

"Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!"