The sun-dial stood on the grass in front of, though at some little distance from, the principal entrance. For at White Turrets the ground immediately round the house was too much intersected by terraces, and on too many levels, to have any great unbroken expanse of lawn. And there, as she had said, Hertha was standing when, a few minutes later, Winifred joined her.

Even Miss Maryon’s short-sighted eyes were struck by her friend’s general look and bearing, Hertha was leaning against the old stone, in a tired attitude. She was pale, too, and as Winifred drew near she gave a slight shiver.

“Are you cold?” said the girl anxiously. “If you are, we can go indoors again at once.”

“No, thank you, I am not really cold,” Miss Norreys replied; “it is only the creeping-together feeling one has after a bad night. When I did fall asleep, I slept, I think, too heavily. I daresay it is a sort of nervousness. The air and moving about will do me good.”

She turned as she spoke, and followed by Winifred, walked quickly towards the side of the house.

“It is nicest on the terraces,” she said; “we can walk up and down, and talk quite undisturbed, and always find a seat if we want one.”

“Ye-es,” said Winifred, lagging a little. “But would you mind coming round to the other side? it is so much more cheerful and sunny.”

She was unusually deferential and subdued. “No,” said Hertha, with a touch of obstinacy, “I like the shady side best; I am not cold now. That walk with the aspens at the farther end is charming. And the others don’t like it – it is the haunted walk, isn’t it? So I may as well enjoy it while with you, who don’t mind nonsense of that kind.”

“But I do mind it, though in a different way,” said Winifred; “it irritates me more than I can express. I really can hardly tell you how I detest any allusion to that old story.”

“Really?” said Hertha, airily. “I think you should be above such feelings. It is inconsistent with your – well – your attitude to things in general. Here we are – let us show our defiance of such old wives’ tales by marching boldly up and down in the White Weeper’s own hunting-ground while we have our talk out.”

Winifred laughed a little, but constrainedly. Matter-of-fact as she was, she did not quite understand her friend this morning.

“Of course, I don’t really mind,” she said, “if you truly like this side best. And now will you tell me exactly what you have been vexed with me for, and in what way you have come to think less well of me than you used to do?”

Hertha felt somewhat surprised. After all, Winifred was not so dense as appeared. And “to be quite fair on her,” thought Miss Norreys, “she might have resented my changing to her without giving her my reasons and a chance of justifying herself to some extent.”

This reflection came at a good moment. It softened her tone to Winifred.

“Yes,” she said, “I will be entirely frank with you, and put before you the whole story of our acquaintance, and what I did to help you, from my point of view, which is likely, I much fear, to be that of others; and I certainly will not exaggerate things. For,” – and here a generous impulse made her add warmly – “I do trust you, Winifred. I trust your good intentions and your honesty of purpose, though I believe you deceive yourself; and self-deception is terribly insidious.”

She paused a moment, but the girl did not speak. Hertha glanced round her as if to gather strength and breath for what she had to say. How fair and charming a prospect it was! There was something almost unreal in the vivid clearness of the spring beauty all about – unreconcilable with the troubles and anxieties which yet one knew must be there behind it all.

But as Hertha’s gaze wandered farther, over to where, on the other side of some rising ground, the old church spire rose up into the blue, and the lazily curling smoke of the surrounding homesteads told of the human lives and interests close at hand, different thoughts arose in her mind. What infatuation was over the girl, or woman, beside her? Who could desire a more distinct field of usefulness than Winifred Maryon was deliberately rejecting? The awful problems relating to the poor of our overcrowded great cities must not be shirked by such as are wise enough to grasp them, but how thankful should be those whose duties in smaller spheres are clear and defined, lying among more normal conditions and along less conflicting paths!

She turned to her companion abruptly.

“Winifred, my dear child – my dear friend, if you don’t like to be called a child – I wish I understood you; that is at the root of it all. I cannot get at your motives, your way of looking at things.”

Winifred looked up – a frown, not of annoyance but of perplexity, lining her usually unruffled forehead; her blue eyes fixed on Hertha’s face with a touch of appeal which was almost piteous.

“Tell me,” she said, “tell me everything; I do want to know.”

And Miss Norreys did as she asked. She went back to the beginning of their acquaintance, and told her all, as it had affected her herself, as it had taken shape and colour, from her point of view. She spoke as simply as she could, and tried her best to be practical and matter-of-fact. For talking to Winifred was not like talking to Celia, who, young as she was, could take in the sense of a sentence before it was half expressed, who felt the spirit underlying and surrounding even the “commonest” commonplaces of life.

Winifred did not interrupt her. Now and then her colour rose a little; once or twice, as Hertha was not sorry to see, she winced, and seemed on the point of bursting out with some exclamation. And then, when Miss Norreys had come to the end of the first part of her story and stopped, the girl looked up.

“Yes,” she said, “I see how it must have looked to you, and I see, as I certainly did not before, that I was not perfectly ingenuous. To a certain extent I deceived you; at least, I allowed circumstances to deceive you and others, and I was glad of it, because it suited my purpose. But remember I did not start with any intention of deceiving you, and I thought I had a right to take advantage of the mistake when it arose; because, from my point of view, if my work was worth paying for, I had a right to the payment, don’t you see?” and she looked up anxiously.

“Perhaps so, but you had no right to the position, which alone made your earning payment possible. At least, you have no right to obtain it without explaining your circumstances,” said Hertha.

Winifred was silent.

“And,” Hertha went on, though sorry for the mortification she felt that her words must cause, “to tell the truth, I don’t think your work has been exactly worth paying for till now. Everything requires an apprenticeship; part of the idea of this society is to give girls who need to earn their livelihood a chance of fitting themselves to do so, by giving them the necessary apprenticeship gratis, and, more than that, by paying them from the first.”

Winifred grew crimson.

“I never thought of that,” she said. “I am perfectly ready, indeed I would much rather pay back what they have given me up to this. For I believe my work is, or will be from now, worth paying for.”

“Very likely,” said Hertha, but then she went on to lay the situation in two aspects before Winifred – her own clear home duties, so peculiar and unmistakable; and the wrong of taking advantage of the society to the prejudice of some other girl in real need of it.

The first of these Winifred began by disposing of glibly enough. The work of home was better done by Louise than by herself – better, well, not literally better – she knew she had a clearer head for figures, and a more ready grasp of things than her sister. But she was not nearly so patient and sweet tempered as Louise, she decided complacently: “Oh no, not nearly. I should try papa awfully.”

Hertha stared at her.

“And you would make your own shortcomings an excuse for neglecting duties?” she exclaimed. “What sophistry! What a vicious circle you are involving yourself in! Patience and self-control can be acquired. You speak as if your besetting sins belonged to you, like the colour of your eyes or the shape of your nose.”

Winifred did not reply.

“And my second point – that of taking what is not meant for you?” Hertha went on.

“That,” said Winifred, “is, I think, for the society to decide. Of course I am now quite ready to tell anything about my circumstances.”

In her turn Hertha was silent. She agreed with Winifred that the society should decide, and she felt considerably inclined to believe that the society had decided. For Mr Montague’s thick letter, though unopened, was in her pocket.

But the conversation was by no means at an end.

“Winifred,” said Miss Norreys again, “I have a great deal more to say to you – to tell you. But it would be such a satisfaction to me, and what matters infinitely more, to yourself afterwards, always – if you could now, without any further reason, try to see where your real duties lie.”

“I will try,” said Winifred, “but,” and at last the tears rose in her eyes, “I did so long for a wider, a fuller life.”

“You cannot have found the petty detail and often wearisome round of work at – Street very widening or inspiriting surely.”

“No, but I thought that would come. I was beginning to feel that something depended on me, that I had a post – a place. And I like the feeling of ‘London,’” she added naïvely.

Hertha smiled.

“Yes,” she said, “I know that, and you may still have it. I think you should be more in London than you have been.”

“There is Celia, too,” exclaimed Winifred.

“I am not forgetting her. But about yourself – you have put it in words. It is the sense of responsibility about home duties that has been wanting, and has made them unattractive and irksome. That will come, if you set your shoulder to the wheel. You will soon see that, as I do believe is the case, you will be able to do the work better than it has ever been done, and new developments and possibilities would open out. Why, with the experience you have acquired, you might work into the society’s hands down here – you might have a convalescent home, or a children’s holiday home.”

Winifred’s melancholy face brightened a little.

“I will think about it all,” she repeated, “and I will write anything you like to the society, or – but I hate troubling you – would not the best thing be for you to write to Mr Montague? And now, have you told me everything?”

“No,” said Hertha. They were now approaching the end where the aspens stood. Hitherto in their pacing up and down they had not gone so far, but this time Miss Norreys had purposely prolonged their walk a little. “No,” she said, stopping short and looking round her with a strange kind of curiosity, “I have something more to tell you – where does this path go to, or end, Winifred?” she broke off suddenly.

“Oh, I don’t know exactly. We never come this way,” the girl replied impatiently. “It goes along among the aspens, and then gets into a tangle. And some way further on there’s a brook that runs into a pond. It’s a wilderness sort of a place, and I hate it.”

Hertha looked at her.

“Winifred,” she said, “you have a sort of belief in the White Weeper story, otherwise you wouldn’t be so cross about it.”

“I have not, I have not indeed,” said Winifred earnestly. “But I don’t deny that the association is painful. It is said to have been down here near the pond that the unfortunate woman spent her last night at home before her husband drove her by his cruelty to take refuge in the convent at Cruxfield, where she died. And there is always a creepy, shivery feeling about here; the rest of the place is so open and bright.”

She could not repress a slight shudder as she spoke.

“Do come away,” she added.

“Not just for a moment. I want to tell you something here – on the very spot, from where – no, I will begin at the beginning,” said Miss Norreys.

And in a few minutes Winifred was in possession of the whole details of Hertha’s night’s experience.

She grew very pale, but listened without a word or gesture of interruption, till the end. Then she burst out:

“Oh, surely, surely,” she exclaimed, “it was a dream. It must have been.”

But Hertha shook her head.

“No,” she said, “it was no dream – nothing in the least resembling what we are accustomed to call dreams. A vision it may have been. Perhaps all ghostly visitations are visions. But I was awake when I saw it. I remember her face perfectly. If I were an artist I could paint it.”

“And it has impressed you very much?” said Winifred.

“Naturally.”

“And you have told no one but me? – thank you for that. It was good of you, for – of course they would associate it with me, with my being here.”

“They could scarcely do otherwise,” said Hertha, drily.

“It is strange,” said Winifred, as if thinking aloud. “Why, if such things are, why did she not appear to me?”

“Perhaps she cannot. Perhaps you are one who could not be made conscious of such a presence,” said Hertha. “Perhaps – ” But here she stopped, though with a little smile.

“Go on, do,” said Winifred.

“I was only going to say – don’t think me irreverent, but you are not easily ‘convinced against your will,’ Winifred. The verse about ‘Moses and the prophets’ came into my mind. I am not sure that you would give more heed to a ghost than to those who have already spoken.”

“Not as much,” said Winifred. “But what, then, has been the use of the poor White Weeper’s troubling herself and you about me?”

“To strengthen my hands, perhaps – in my prophetic capacity, to increase my conviction.”

“And what is that?”

“A very strong one – that harm will come of your persistence. Increased trouble and sorrow to others it will certainly cause. Listen, Winifred.”

And then she fired her last shot, by revealing to the girl Lennox Maryon’s confidence of the previous evening.

Winifred was not pale now. Her cheeks burned, her face grew crimson to the very roots of her hair.

“Louise!” she repeated, “Louise!”

Hertha felt rather provoked.

“Yes,” she said, “Louise. Your cousin is heart and soul devoted to her, and what wonder? She is charming and good, and often I almost think her beautiful. You have always underestimated her.”

“Then,” said Winifred, without directly replying, “I suppose he never really cared for me.”

“I am inclined to think he never did,” said Hertha. “But surely you should be very glad if it be so? You never cared for him.”

“No,” said Winifred, “never. But,” – and a curious expression came into her face – “I suppose it is very contemptible, but it may be a sort of horrid mortification. I don’t know how I feel about it. And yet – oh yes, I do love Louise, and I know she is an angel of goodness, and I’m very fond of Len, in his way. I love them all, but – I’m beginning to see it so plainly. None of them love me. I am out of it all – why was I the eldest? Why can’t I go away and make my own way as I planned?”

They were near a bench. Winifred flung herself upon it and burst into uncontrollable girlish sobs. She seemed to Hertha to have grown ten years younger, and never had Miss Norreys’ heart gone out to her so much as now.

For a minute or two she let her cry undisturbed, then she said very gently:

“My dear child, I think I understand you and the whole story. You have not sought their love in the past as you might have done, but you have it. You do not know how much they all love you. And – you are very fortunate – see how duty and affection are pointing the same way in your case. You have it now in your power to win love and gratitude such as fall to the lot of few, by simply doing right.”

“If it is right and done for that reason, I don’t deserve gratitude,” said Winifred, dejectedly.

“They will think so, anyway. And it will be a sacrifice of your own wishes to those of others. That should and will bring gratitude.”

Winifred sighed deeply.

“I will do it then,” she said, “and once I say a thing, I don’t go back from it. I will give it up. But please leave me alone about it for to-day. I will keep out of the way till I am all right again.”

They were not far from the house by this time.

“I will run in by one of the side doors, and get to my own room,” Winifred went on. “Will you forgive my leaving you here – and – and I want to thank you, but I don’t quite know how I feel.”

“Never mind about me. It is all right as far as I am concerned. I am very thankful,” said Hertha.

Winifred was turning away when another thought struck her.

“About Celia,” she said. “I did – unselfishly, I think – I did want to help her,” and the choke in her voice touched Hertha again.

“I know you did, and rightly, and you may take comfort in the thought that it will, after all, have been through you that Celia is to have the opportunities she needs. She is to come to me, to live with me for a time, till, as she expresses it, she can ‘test’ herself. That is to say, dear Winifred, she can now do so. Had you held out, she would never have consented to leave home.”

Through Winifred’s flushed and tear-stained face her blue eyes looked up at Hertha with perplexity.

“I don’t think I yet quite understand your point of view,” she said. “Tell me, is it because you think Celia has special gifts, or that I have special calls, that you advise us so differently?”

“Both,” Miss Norreys replied.

“But supposing I had had her gifts as well as my calls, what then?”

Hertha hesitated.

“I cannot really say,” she replied. “It would have been more difficult to decide. At least, it seems as if it would have been so. But imaginary positions are not what we have to deal with. And when there are what appear to be almost equally balanced claims upon us, as sometimes, though not often, occurs, well, perhaps in such a case it does not matter so very much, in the highest sense of all, which path we take if we do it heartily and conscientiously. You would not have been left in doubt long, I feel sure, if such had been your case.”

“And it is not, so we need not trouble about it,” said Winifred, practically. “But one thing more, as we have come upon this. Do you think all girls who are not literally forced to earn their bread should stay at home and lead the old routine humdrum lives – I mean, of course, those who have no great or special gifts? Have you no sympathy with all the feeling of the day about women?”

“The very greatest and deepest,” said Hertha. “But it is an immense subject, and cannot be treated in wholesale fashion. Individual lives differ so tremendously. All I can say about it roughly is that love of excitement and change and novelty should not be mistaken for real, deliberate desire to make the best and the most of the powers we have. And it should never be forgotten that ‘home’ is the place we are born into – in a very special sense woman’s own kingdom. Outside interests should radiate from and revolve round home – that is the ideal. When home has to be given up, it should be done regretfully, as a sad necessity, whereas the wish to escape from it is, I fear, in many cases nowadays, the great motive.”

“But girls are not alone to blame for that,” said Winifred. “Think what some parents are: tyrannical and selfish, scarcely allowing a daughter to have a mind or a soul of her own.”

“I know that some are like that,” said Hertha.

“If a girl does not marry, she is treated as if she had no right to have a self at all! But, where parents are reasonable, I doubt if any home-life need be narrow and stifling, and all the rest of it. Monotony is not necessarily an evil. There is immense monotony in all good work, at least in the qualifying one’s self for it. I think what makes home-life so trying and unsatisfying to so many unmarried women is the want of the sense of responsibility, the not feeling that it really matters, except for themselves, whether they are idle and frivolous or not. It is that sense of responsibility which makes even a dull, commonplace, married life attractive. The wife feels herself somebody, a centre.”

“Yes, I am sure it must be,” said Winifred. “But how is it all to be set right? There are so many girls who can’t marry nowadays, they say.”

“Well, they must bear it. Cheerful acceptance of evils, irremediable for us, though in the long run they may be set right again, is, after all, a very big part of our life’s work, is it not? And as to actual, practical work, ‘usefulness’ in the noblest sense, I have great faith in its coming to those who take at once whatever comes in their way. It is like capital. Money makes money, we are told. Well, I believe that doing work brings work to do. But I did not mean to preach like this.”

“I am glad of it. I will think about it,” said Winifred, gently.

Then she turned away towards the house, walking slowly, however, for she felt weak and faint from the violent weeping so rare to her. And the sun had been beating on her head more than she realised. Like many English people, Winifred did not know the danger of the spring sun – altogether she felt strangely unlike herself.

And Hertha did not keep her in sight, for she herself moved towards the front in search of a shady spot, where she might read Mr Montague’s letter undisturbed.