She did not let his arm go when she had drawn him away from that perilous edge; she held it closely pressed against her side, and when he looked at her he saw that her face was white and changed. The great precipice above them swayed a little to her eyes – she dared not look at the precipice below. She held his arm closely and more closely, folding both hands on it. The foreman was saying something. Neither of them heard what it was, only both caught the concluding words:

"Perhaps you'd like to see the place, sir."

"Thank you," said Edward, mechanically, "and then I think we must leave you. It's been most kind of you to show us all this; we've been most interested."

Her heart was beating in so wild an ecstasy of thanksgiving for an unspeakable horror escaped, his heart was beating in so passionate and proud and humble a recognition of what her touch on his arm confessed, that neither of them heard the foreman's words or guessed at the meaning of what he was calmly and coldly telling them. Only afterward the memory of his words came back, bringing with it understanding. They were led across a flat wilderness of splintered slate toward the tall cliff from which now and then came the noise like thunder which blasting-powder makes when it does its work. They two, hardly conscious of anything but that they held each other – the one who had been in danger, safe; the other passionately grateful for that other's safety; and the endangered one, passionately sensible of her passionate gratitude, heard not a word that the foreman spoke, though he spoke all the time.

"You are here; I hold you safe; but, oh, if I had lost you!" her heart was singing to a breathless, syncopated measure.

"You cared; you cared as much as this. If I had fallen over that perilous edge… Oh, but you care, you care! It is as much as this to you," his heart sang, keeping time to hers.

It was a trance of mutual meeting emotion such as they had not yet known. In that one moment, when he walked the narrow edge of that precipice and when she had seen the precipice for the horror it was, she learned more than in all her life before. And he, in the moments that followed, knew, beyond possibility of mistake or misunderstanding, what it was that she had learned. If only they could have walked straight out of that quarry into the world of stream and mountain, the world where you are only two – but the foreman was there, walking and talking, and at last stopping and saying:

"This is where it happened."

And they came out of their dream to find themselves close to the slate cliff at whose base lay great blocks of slate newly fallen, and to see the flat slate flakes at their feet, brown and wet.

"Where what happened?" Edward asked, vaguely.

"What I've been telling you about," said the foreman, aggrieved. "Where one of our workmen was killed just now, blasting; that's his blood what you're standing in," said he.

Then, indeed, she clung to his arm. "Take me away," she whispered. "Oh, why does everything turn horrible like this? It's like a horrible dream. Let's get away. Give him something and let's get away."

"It's not my fault," said the foreman, in very injured tones. "She said she'd like to see it. I wondered, at the time, but there's no accounting for females, is there?"

They got away from the place – out of the quarry and into the road. They found the stream that flows from the waterfall under Snowdon, and the flagged path that lies beside the stream. They passed along it, she still clinging to his arm. Presently a smooth, mossy rock invited them, and before either of them knew it they were seated there, side by side, and she was weeping on his shoulder.

He did not need her whispered words that broke a long silence – "Thank God, you're safe" – to tell him what he had to think, nor what, from that hour, he had to live for.

"But, oh," she said at last, lifting her face from his coat-sleeve, "what a horrible day! We've struck a streak of horrible things. Let's go back to the south, where things aren't like this."

"We'll go to-night, if you like," he said.

"Yes," she answered, eagerly, "yes. But this isn't the end. I feel there's something more coming – I felt it at Chester. It wasn't only that thing I couldn't tell you – something's going to happen to separate us."

"Nothing can – but you," he said, hugging to his heart all that her admission implied.

"I feel that something will," she said.

And he, for all that he laughed at her fears and her predictions, with pride and joy swelling in his heart till they almost broke the resolution of quiescence, of waiting, of submitting his will to her will, yet felt in those deep caves that lie behind the heart, behind the soul, behind the mind of man, the winds of coming misfortune blow chilly.

It was no surprise to either of them to find at the hotel a telegram for Mrs. Basingstoke:

Aunt Alice much worse. Please come at once

It was signed with the name of the aunt whose dog-cart had run over Charles, and beneath whose legs Charles had experienced his miraculous resurrection from death.

There was no reason to mistrust this telegram as they had mistrusted the advertisement. But she said to herself, "There! That's because of what I said at Warwick."

They caught the last train to London that night, and through the long, lamp-lit journey Charles no longer lay between them. The white, bullet head lay on her lap – but on her other side was Edward, and her shoulder and his touched all the way, even as, on the journey to Warwick, he had dreamed of their touching. They spoke little; it seemed as though everything had been said. Only when her head drooped against his shoulder and he knew that she had fallen asleep he felt no sense of daring, no doubts as to his rights or her resentments when he passed his arm around her and rested his chin on her soft hair, gazing straight before him in the flickering half-light while she slept – oh, dreams come true – upon his breast.

XVIII

LONDON

IT was very late when they parted on the door-step of the house in Hyde Park Square.

"I don't know how to let you go," he said, and took both her hands, regardless of the cabman's stony attention. "I shall just go back to my rooms in Montague Street – Thirty-seven; I've written it down for you. And, look here, I won't come and see you and I won't bother you, but if you want me I'll be there. You must just do what you want to do."

What she wanted to do was to jump into the waiting taxicab and go back with him into that world of fine and delicate adventure where were blue skies, gold sun, green leaves, the mystery of mountains, the sparkle of water, and the velvet of old lawns; and, for each in the soul of the other, a whole world of unexplored wonder and delight.

What she said was: "Thank you. I will write and tell you what happens. Good-by – oh, good-by. I feel as though I ought to ask you to forgive me."

"For what?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said, "but – no – I don't know; but you do understand that I couldn't stay away when she asked for me. She's the only person in the world, except you, that I – that ever – Good-by!"

There was a moment of hesitation which, later, in the recollection of it, thrilled them both. Then the cabman had the satisfaction, such as it was, of seeing one of his fares raise to his lips the fingers of the other. Then the knocker sounded softly, the heavy door opened and received her into a warmly lamp-lit hall, closed again, and left him alone.

When he reached Montague Street rain was falling and a chill wind blew. He had not been expected and his rooms were dusty and disheveled. Intensely quiet, too; through the roar of London far below one could almost hear the silence of these deserted rooms where, day by day, while he had been out in the beautiful bright world, the dim dust had slowly settled down.

It was characteristic of him that he lit a big fire and carried his bedding out and spread it in the growing glow and warmth. "I'm not going to risk a cold in the head at this crisis of my affairs," he told himself, "even if she doesn't care – and Heaven knows how she can! I needn't make myself a ridiculous and disgusting object in her eyes."

To the same end he set the kettle on the fire and made hot coffee for himself. When, at last, he turned into well-aired sheets he found that he could not sleep.

"Confound the coffee!" he said, and tried to attribute to that brown exotic elixir the desperate sense of futility and emptiness which possessed him. His mind assured him that there was nothing the matter with him but coffee; but his heart said: "You won't see her in the morning. You won't spend the day with her to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next." And his heart cursed the mock marriage and all the reservations and abstentions that it demanded. "If she had been really my wife – " If she had been really his wife he would have called three times a day to know how things were with her. He would have seen her, held her hands, felt again the confiding droop of her head on his shoulder. But as it was – She had consented to the mock marriage, he knew, because she did not desire to give him any rights, not even the right to ring at her aunt's front door and ask for Mrs. Basingstoke.

He fell asleep at last, and dreamed that they had taken an unfurnished flat in a neolithic cave and that he had killed a bear and was dragging it home to show her. The bear seemed to be not quite dead, for it was growling, and its weight on his back awoke him, to find that Charles had thought his master's shoulders a convenient site for slumber. He sleepily had it out with Charles, and when he slept again he dreamed that he and she had decided to live in a captive balloon. She was already installed, but he could find no ladder long enough to reach her. She was laughing down at him and showering pink rose-leaves on his up-turned face when he woke to find Charles conscientiously licking his ears. This time he found energy to get up and put a closed door between himself and Charles, and then he dreamed that he had arranged to meet her under the clock at Charing Cross Station, and that the Government had just decided to establish uniformity in railway stations, and had called every station Charing Cross, and had, moreover, furnished each station with six hundred and sixty-six clocks, which all ticked louder than Big Ben. He awoke, and it was morning, and there were no clocks ticking, but from beyond the door came the measured thump-thump-thump of Charles's tail on the floor of the sitting-room. So all night he had dreamed of her, yet never once seen her.

"If I believed in omens – " he said, and rang, to make known his return to the people of the house.

While his sitting-room was being put in order he went down to Covent Garden and came back with his arms full of roses and white lilies, which he set up in mugs and pots of Grès de Flandre and old brass and green Bruges ware.

"I wish you'd only 'a' told me, sir," said his landlady, kindly but aggrieved. "I wouldn't have had you come home and find the place all of a mess like this, not for a pound, I wouldn't. But you never wrote nor nothing, and the dust it do incriminate so. But if you're going out for the day I'll make it all as clean as a whistle by this evening. It's a twelve-hour job, so it is. If I'd only known you was to be expected."

"But you didn't know," said Edward, "and it's not going to be a twelve-hour job, but a two-hour job. I'll go out for two hours, and when I come back I sha'n't know the place, shall I? You'll work like a good fairy. I know you."

"Go on with you, sir," she advised. "You will have your joke."

"I was never more serious. You see, a lady might call." He voiced in words what he had not dared to voice in his heart.

"Oh, if it's a lady," said the landlady – and through the tired, ridged, gray, London face something pretty and immortally young stirred and sparkled – "

the

young lady, sir, if I might make so bold?"

"You've hit it, Mrs. Jilks," he said – "

the

lady. If she comes before I come back – but I don't think she will – beg her to wait and say I'll be back by noon. Come on, Charles."

He went and sat in Regents Park and tried to fancy himself once more in the deep peace of the Welsh Hills till Charles had a difference of opinion with a Cocker spaniel and dreams were set to flight.

He went back, hoping against hope that he might find her there. She was not there, nor did she come. Why should she? In the middle of the afternoon came a letter; it had no beginning. It said:

I had a stiff and stifling interview with my aunt – the one Charles came to life under the knees of in the cart. She was as horrid as any one could possibly be. She reproached me for marrying a pauper, and said I'd better have stuck to the piano-tuner unless you were he in disguise! I was as dumb as a mule – indeed, I almost felt my ears beginning to lie back, as mules' ears do when they've decided they aren't going to, whatever it is. Presently I got it out of her that Aunt Alice's attack is very serious. If she gets over it she's to go to Switzerland; there's an old school friend out there that she loves, and who wants frightfully to have her there. So then I shall be able to come back, and we'll go out together again and see the world. You won't worry about me, will you? Because this house is quite the lap of. And you know that I wouldn't have broken off our mock-wedding tour for anything in the world except for her – because.. but you know all that. Give my love to Charles.

"Yours sincerely" was crossed out, and a postscript added:

I don't know how to end this letter. I won't end it. I'll just put something at the end to show that this isn't the end – of our times together, I mean.

(To be continued.)

He thought it the prettiest, wittiest ending in the world.

His room was neat as a new pin, as Mrs. Jilks had promised. The roses and the lilies made it what Mrs. Jilks called a perfect bower. "Any one could tell," she assured him, "that it was

the

young lady you was expecting. Why, it's like a wedding already! She's sure to come soon, sir, and I'll have the kettle on the boil and make her a nice cup of tea the minute she comes."

But she did not come, and he had the nice cup of tea alone, unless you count Charles, who ate seven large doughnuts – seven for sixpence – in seven great gulps – with no resultant modification of his natural high spirits. Another day went by, and another, and she did not come. Edward realized that she would not come, and that he had been a fool ever to half hope that she would.

He drugged the empty hours with shopping. He wandered about London buying things – the oddest things. He bought a pair of cut-crystal lusters and the skin of a leopard, a

papier-mâché

fire-screen and a string of amber beads six feet long. He sent the amber to her in a sandalwood box cunningly carved and inlaid with ivory and ebony and silver. That was on the first day. Her second letter thanked him for it:

How did you know that yellow was my fortunate color? I was born under the sign of the lion, so a fortune-teller told me, so all yellow stones are lucky for me. I am so sorry that you have to be in London in the summer. Wouldn't you like to go into the country? Auntie is a little better.

So then he went out and bought the topaz brooch that he had thought of buying when he first saw it in that jolly little shop in Vigo Street. And he sent her that with the topaz necklace he had bought in Warwick.

They are beautiful and I love them, but you are not to be extravagant. I should like to write you a long letter, but auntie gets restless if I'm not sitting beside her. She's really getting better, but I'm afraid it will be several weeks.. and she keeps asking me not to leave her. I wish I could ask you to come here, to see me. There are lots of odd minutes, when she's asleep. But my other aunt would certainly be hateful to you – and I couldn't stand that.

Again and again he asked himself why he had promised, voluntarily promised, not to call at the house. What had he been thinking of? He had been thinking of her, of course; he had wanted to make things easy for her. He had at least made them very hard for himself. He missed her every hour of the day; he would not have believed that he could have missed anything so much.

The time crawled by; the hours were long and the days interminable. Even buying things – a luxury in which he allowed himself considerable latitude – could not possess the empty spaces in a life that had been filled with her presence.

And to her, moving gently in the curtained stillness of the sick-room, among the medicine-bottles and the apparatus of sickness as the rich know it, holding the thin hand that came out of a scented, soft bed to cling to hers, it seemed that either this ordered quietude was a dream, or else that nothing in the last few weeks was true, had been true, could ever be true again. The escape, the flight, the Medway days, the reckless mock marriage, the life of fine and delicate adventure, the blue sky, the green leaves, the mystery of mountains, the sparkle of water, and the velvet of old lawns, the constant and deepening comradeship of a man of whose existence a month ago she had not so much as dreamed – could these be real – all these which she had renounced to come to the sick woman who longed for her – had these really been hers – could they ever be hers again?

Suffering had broken down the consistent unselfishness of a lifetime, and the aunt clung to her as children cling, frightened in the dark. "You won't leave me," she said, over and over again. "Your husband won't mind. It won't be for long."

"Of course I'll not leave you," she said, and wondered at the thrill her aunt's words gave her and the pang she felt as she uttered her own.

Every day while the aunt slept she crept away and went out into the air – the first day into bright sunshine which was unbearable; after that into the quiet, lamp-lit dusk of the square at night. The London night was so unlike night on the Welsh Hills that it seemed a medium that could not torment her with memories. Whereas the sunshine was the same sunshine which had lain like a benediction in that far country of delight. The lilacs and snowberries in the square inclosure, which were dried and dusty by day, borrowed from the kindly twilight the air of fresh groves, and among their somber shadows she walked as in some garden of dusky enchantments, where, alone with her dreams and her memories, she could weave, out of the past and the future, a web of glory to clothe the cold walls of the empty room which, she began to perceive, life without Edward was, and must be.

It was on the third evening, as she stood, fumbling with the key of the garden, she knew that some one stood on the pavement just behind her, and, turning sharply, was face to face with Mr. Schultz.

He raised his hat and smiled at her; held out a hand, even. She was child enough to put her two hands behind her, and woman enough to hope that he hated to see her do it. She was surprised to find herself alert and alive to the interest of the encounter; not afraid at all, only interested. Gone was the panic terror which had overwhelmed her in the Kenilworth dungeon. Anger and resentment remained, but stronger than either was curiosity, so she stood with her hands behind her, looking at him.

"Oh, very well," he said; "just as you like. I want a few words with you."

"I don't want to talk to you," she said, and locked the square gate again.

"Couldn't we walk around the garden once or twice?" he asked. "I know you don't want to talk to me, but I want to talk to you. I'm sorry if I upset you that day in the ruins, but it's nothing to the way your dog upset me. I had to have it cauterized, besides doing completely for the only decent suit I had with me. Besides, you hit me, you know, with your parasol. Come, don't bare malice. I don't. Call it quits and open the square door."

Now you may think it was quite easy for her to turn her back on Mr. Schultz and go back to her aunt's house, leaving him planted there, but it was not really easy, because she wanted something of the man, and if she turned her back with sufficient firmness it might be that she would never see him again. What she wanted was the remission of the promise she had made him, unasked and of her own initiative – the promise that she would not tell Edward of that day in the dungeon.

"I can't open the square gate for you," she said. "If you've really anything to say, you can say it here. I can spare you three minutes," she added, conclusively.

"Then let's walk around outside the railings. It's better than standing here; it won't look so odd if any one comes along who knows you," he said, and it seemed strange to her that he should have so much consideration for her. She was pleased. Her soul was of the order that delights to find others better than her mind had led her to expect. There are people, as you know, to whom it is always somewhat of a disappointment to find that any one is not so black as their fancy painted him. She turned and they walked slowly along the pavement that encircles the railings of the square garden.

"Well?" she said, "you said you had something to say to me."

"Yes, lots," he told her. "I was just trying to think which to say first. You know you've upset me a good deal. Oh, I forgive you, but it ought to be mutual. Yes, I'll put that first – I want us to forgive each other – forgive and forget and not bear grudge."

"Very well," she said, coldly. "I forgive you, but – "

He interrupted her before she could make the request that was on her lips. "That'll do," he said. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to tell you how it was that I acted like a fool. I admit I acted like a fool," he added, handsomely. "I don't suppose I shall ever see you again and I don't want you to go on thinking me a perfect beast. I'd rather you didn't, though I know I was one that day, and I don't know why, but I would, even if I'm never to set eyes on you again. Well, you see, it's like this: I dare say it'll sound silly to you, but even when I was at school I always wanted to do something noble – romantic, you know – rescuing ladies in distress, like Scott's novels, and things like that. I know it's too rotten for words, nowadays, what with machinery and telegraphs and radium and things, but that's what I used to think. And when I came up with you on the Seaford Road with no hat on and your poor little satin shoes all dusty and splitting, I thought, by Jove! my boy, here's your chance! And I did behave all right that day, didn't I?"

His voice was wistful, and she said, eagerly: "You were very, very kind. No one could have been nicer and more – more – "

"Respectful, eh? Well, I meant to be. I felt respectful; I do still. And you won't mind me saying I felt like a knight and you were the lady. I don't mean that you aren't a lady now, but you see what I mean, and you can't blame me if I thought it would all end in me and you being – well – you and me living happy ever after, the same as they do in books."

Enchanted by the revelation, she said, "Indeed, I don't blame you," more earnestly than she meant to do.

"Don't be too kind to me," he said, grimly. "I know it doesn't mean anything, but it puts a man out. Well, then

came along, and you said he was your brother, and anybody could see with half an eye that he wasn't your brother; and I felt I'd been made a fool of, a complete, particular, first-class fool, and that put my back up. And I saw that things don't happen like they do in books. And I hadn't, somehow, thought you'd say anything that wasn't true."

She felt her face burn, and realized for the first time that in their brief and stormy acquaintance he had not been the only one to blame, and that, anyhow, it was she who had taken the first false step.

"I oughtn't to have told you a lie," she said, and added ingenuously, "especially after you'd been so kind; but I didn't know what to do – it seemed so difficult to explain." She could not tell him how difficult, nor why.

"Oh, that's all right," he said. "I should have said the same myself. It wasn't exactly a lie. It's a thing most people wouldn't make any bones about, only I thought you were different, that's all. And that was one of the things that made me feel it was fair to hunt you down, if I could – tit for tat, so to speak – and, besides, it was fun trying to see what I

could

find out. Then there's another thing I must tell you, I used to think it would be fun to be other things out of books – highwaymen and detectives and things – and I got a lead when I saw you at Cookham. After that I tracked you down like any old Sherlock Holmes, and I'm afraid at Kenilworth I behaved more like a highwayman than a respectable solicitor – for that's what I am."

"That's forgiven and forgotten," she told him.

"Well, I tracked you to Warwick, and when I saw your name in the visitors' book – Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke – "

"But it wasn't – "

"It was, I assure you. Well, when I saw that I didn't know what to think, but I saw, however it was, it was all up with me; but I didn't want to see it, so I followed you to Kenilworth, and got a chance I didn't expect to behave like a cad and an ass, and behaved like them. But I don't think you know how pretty you are – and I didn't believe you were married, and all the things I'd thought while I was driving you to Tunbridge came up into my head and turned themselves inside out, somehow, and I felt what a fool I'd been, and I lost my head. And then you told me you wouldn't tell him, for fear he should hurt me; and that's really what I came here to say. That's what I can't stick. I can take care of myself. I want you to tell him anything you like – see? Here's my card – and he can write to me, and I'll meet him anywhere he likes and let's see who's the best man. To set out to be a knight and all that, and end up with hiding behind a woman – and you to be the woman – no, I really can't stick it. So will you tell him?"

"I'll tell him everything," she said, "and he won't want to see who's the best man, and I don't want him to want it. And I don't want you to, either. You were a very kind knight-errant – but you weren't such a very good detective, or you'd have found out – "

"What?"

"I'll tell you, if you'll promise to give up wanting to find out who's the best man. Will you?"

"I'll do anything you like as long as you don't think I'm afraid of him, and don't let him think it, either. I don't think much of him, and I don't know whether you'll believe it, but it was that as much as anything set me to the detective business. I wanted to – to – I thought you wanted looking after. And then I acted like a brute – but I won't go on about that. Now tell me what it was I didn't find out?"

She pulled a little pale-silk bag from her pocket and took out a stiff folded paper and gave it to him. By the light of the next gas-lamp he unfolded it; it was a long slip, partly printed, partly written. It was, in fact, the "marriage certificate" which had been obtained in order to quiet her family and to make poss