One afternoon about a week later, Edward Ambrose rang up No. 50, Queen Street, on the telephone to ask if Mary was at home. In reply he was told by Silvia that Mary had gone for a few days to Greylands to the Ellises, but her mother would be very glad if Edward would come and see her as she wished particularly to have a little talk with him. Edward certainly did not wish particularly to have a little talk with Lady Pridmore at that moment, but there was no way out of it. Thus in no very amiable frame of mind he drove to Queen Street.

Lady Pridmore was alone in the drawing-room. She received Edward with the grave cordiality that she reserved for favorites.

"It is very nice of you to come, Edward. Ring for some tea."

That was like her, when she knew quite well he never took tea.

"We are dreadfully worried about Mary."

That was like her again. She was always dreadfully worried about something, although nothing in wide earth or high heaven had the power really to upset her. But Edward for some reason was not feeling very sympathetic towards the Lady Pridmores of the world just now.

"And we blame you."

"Me?"

"Yes, we blame you. It was you who first brought that young man, Mr. Harper, to the house."

This was not quite in accordance with the facts. Still, there would be no point in saying so. Ambrose, therefore, contented himself with asking, "Well, what of him?" with as much politeness as he could muster in order to cover a growing impatience.

"It is not well, Edward, it is very far from well," said Lady Pridmore aggrievedly. "As I say, we are all dreadfully worried. Mr. Harper turned up here again one day last week, the first time for a year. And he saw Mary alone. Silvia and I were out – at – dear me! – but it doesn't matter – "

"Quite so," murmured the courteous Edward.

"Otto met him coming in as he went out."

"Well?"

"Well, as I say, Mary and Mr. Harper were together a long time and somehow – I'm sorry to tell you this – she has seemed quite ill ever since."

Edward expressed regret.

"And Dr. Claughton strongly advised a change."

"I am very sorry," he said gravely.

"She is so overstrung that she has had to have sleeping drafts. It is by Dr. Claughton's advice she has gone down to Woking."

"But what reason have you to connect all this with Mr. Harper?"

"The evening he saw her she didn't come down to dinner. Now I would like you to tell me a little more about – about Mr. Harper. You brought him here, you know. Otto says he is not altogether … Do you think that?"

"Had I thought for a moment that he was not a desirable acquaintance I should not have brought him here." This was a shameless begging of the question; it was not he who had brought the young man there.

"I'm glad to hear you say that," said Lady Pridmore with feeling. "That is exactly what I said to Otto. I wish you would tell me all you know about this Mr. Harper."

"I am afraid I can only tell you one thing about him."

"Yes," said Lady Pridmore encouragingly!

"At the present moment he is very dangerously ill. The doctors take a very grave view of his case."

Lady Pridmore was grieved to hear that, but it fully confirmed what she had surmised.

What had she surmised?

"I am quite sure that something rather dreadful took place here a week ago."

Ambrose felt that was most probable.

"I wish you would tell me, Edward," said Lady Pridmore, "what in your opinion it was that happened."

The retort on the tip of Edward's tongue was, "How the devil should I know!" but fortunately he didn't allow it to pass. He contented himself with silence.

"I want to see Mary most particularly," he said, after a pause. "I think I'll send her a telegram to say that I am coming by the first train tomorrow."

"Do," said Lady Pridmore. "That will cheer her up."

III

He sent a telegram as he returned sadly to his rooms. He was in a miserable frame of mind. Somehow he was hating life, but he was now fully bent upon one thing, and no peace could be his until he had done it.

After dinner came an answer to say Mary would be very glad to see him. He sat smoking endless pipes, until he realized that it would soon be too late to go to bed if he was to catch an early train.

On arrival at Woking, Mary was at the station with her friend's car. She looked ill, he thought, but she seemed very glad to see him. At first they found little to say. Indeed, it was not until they had decided to use a fine morning in walking to Greylands, had sent on the car and taken to the road, that they were able to talk in the way they wished.

"I suppose you don't quite know why I've come?" said Ambrose.

"No, I frankly don't," said Mary, "but at least, Edward, it is always very, very good to see you."

Ever since she could remember, he had ranked as the chief of her friends, and that accounted, perhaps, for a certain attitude of mind towards him. But in all the years they had known each other, in all the hours they had spent in each other's company, never had they seemed so intimate as in this walk together. And there was a very clear reason why this should be so. Never had each felt such a need of the other's perceptiveness.

It was not for him to ask what had happened a week ago at that last interview in Queen Street. But she told him voluntarily.

"I had promised to help him," she said, growing pale at the recollection. "And he came to me and told me all … all the facts and the circumstances … things that not I and not you, Edward … could ever have guessed."

"You were not able to do what he asked?"

"No, I simply was not. I simply couldn't. I meant to help him. I wanted to. Perhaps … perhaps I ought to have … but … but it was an abyss he showed me … you don't know…"

They walked on in silence a little way.

"… A year ago, I made a pledge. And he counted on it. I think that is why he told me the whole dreadful story. Had I not been a coward, I should never have…"

"You judge yourself too hardly. He asked too much."

"It should not have been too much. I ought to have been able to help him. At least … I ought not to have sent him away as I did."

"Assuming it were not too late, do you think you could help him now?"

"But it is too late." She was evading the question.

"It is not the view I take myself. I saw both doctors yesterday, and they have very little hope of a recovery. But you and I are not bound to agree with them."

"What can we do … in the face of such an opinion?"

"We can have faith."

"But the doctors?"

"It is a purely mental case. The mind is the key of the whole matter."

"Yes, I know … I know."

"No doctor, however expert, can ever say anything positively in regard to the mind, provided the brain is not damaged."

"Isn't it bound to be?"

"They do not say that … and there is our hope. It is a special case. We must always remember this man is different from other people. It is my firm belief that it is in your power to save him. The view may be entirely mistaken, but it is my own personal conviction."

A new Edward Ambrose was speaking. Here were a strength and a force which until that moment he had not known how to show her. It may have been that the occasion had never arisen, or perhaps the conventional timidity of his kind had never permitted it.

"I – I don't altogether understand," she said, faintly.

"You took away his belief. And I ask you to give it him back again."

She walked dully by his side, striving as well as she could to represent to herself the strange words he had used in a form she could accept.

"You do understand, Mary?"

"Isn't it too late?"

Tormenting fears were again upon her.

"It may be. Certainly the doctors think the balance of probability against it. But I firmly hold that such a view is not for those who know this poor sailorman. I cannot help thinking that no one is allowed to get so far along the road in the face of such paralyzing odds without there being still some hope of putting the thing through."

They stood in the middle of the road, looking at each other.

"I … I think you are right. You understand him so much better than I."

"That we can neither of us believe." He spoke with a queer laugh. "But if I am asking you to give too much, you mustn't blame me. You have always taught me to ask too much." His voice tailed off in the oddest way. "But this time I don't ask for myself."

She was crying. "I was never the woman that you thought me. Or that I thought myself."

She stood a moment, the tears running down her cheeks.

"You must go to that poor mariner," he said, with odd suddenness, trying now for the first time in all the long years to impose his will upon hers. "He has a very wonderful cargo on board. You and I – we owe it to each other and perhaps to future generations – to see that it comes into port."

Such a tone was startling. She had never heard it before. A new and very potent voice was speaking.

"There is no time to lose." This was Edward Ambrose raised to a higher power. "Every hour is going to count. If it is still possible, go and offer him a refuge from the storm."

She stood irresolute. But already she had begun to waver. A masculine nature in its new and full expression was turning the scale.

"If we go back at once," he said, "there will be time to catch the twelve o'clock train from Woking. You can telegraph to your maid. And Catherine Ellis will understand. Or you can write and explain."

Either the call was stronger than her weakness, or she had underrated the forces within herself. For suddenly she turned round and they began to retrace their steps along the road they had come.

Good walking gave them time for the midday train to Waterloo. Upon arrival at that terminus, shortly before one, they drove to a nursing home in Fitzroy Square.

Permission had already been obtained by Ambrose for Mary Pridmore to see Henry Harper. It was felt that her presence at his bedside could do no harm, although there was very little hope that it could do good. At any rate, the nurse who received them made no difficulties about admitting her. Ambrose took leave of Mary on the doorstep in the casual rather whimsical way he affected in all his dealings with her, and then drove heroically to his club.

IV

The Sailor lay breathing heavily. He was still just able to keep on keeping on. But in spite of the darkened room and the blindness of his eyes, he knew at once that she had come to him … the incarnation of the good, the beautiful, and the true … gray-eyed Athena, with the plumes in her helmet.

His prayer had been heard, his faith had been answered. He knew she had come to him, this emanation of the divine justice and the divine mercy, even before her lips had breathed his name … that name which through eons of time, as it seemed, he had been striving to fix in the chaos that once had been his brain.

V

It was rather less than a year later that Edward Ambrose, seated in his favorite chair in his rooms in Bury Street, knocked out the ashes of a last pipe before turning in. He had already given a startled glance at the clock on the chimney piece, and had found it was a quarter past three in the morning.

The truth was he had been oblivious of the flight of time for a good many hours. And the cause of this lapse was a bulky bundle of manuscript which was still on his knees. It had come to him from abroad with a letter the previous day. And having read the last page and having cleared the debris from his pipe, he yet returned the pipe, empty as it was, to his mouth and then read the letter again.

It said:

MY DEAR EDWARD,

In praying you to accept the dedication of what to you and none other I venture to call an epic of that strange and terrible thing, the unsubduable soul of Man, I make one more demand on your patience. I feel that only a very brave man could father such a thing as this poor mariner. It is not that he has not proved to be a stouter fellow than could ever have been hoped. To say otherwise would be black ingratitude to those who sought him out on the open sea and brought him safely into port. If his book is more than was to have been expected, it is yet less than the future promises now that other new, or shall we say recovered worlds, are continually opening to the gaze of the astonished sailorman as with Athena by his side he roams the shores of his native Ithaca.

Drink deep, O muse, of the Pierian spring,

Unlock the doors of memory.

If this prayer is heard, on a day Ulysses may proclaim in native wood-notes wild the goodness of the living God, and hymn the glories of a universe that man, ill-starred as he may be, is powerless to defile. Even if such power is not granted to the mariner, he will yet have a happiness he had not thought possible for mortal men to know. And she who had Wisdom for her godmother, I hope and pray she is also happy in self-fulfillment. If this is a fatal egotism, I am not afraid to expose it to you. The mariner is not so blind that he does not see that it is a more developed, a far higher form of our species who sits with his old pipe in his favorite chair in Bury Street, St. James', frowning over this ridiculous letter. You and she begin where he leaves off. What virtue both must have inherited! And who shall dare to say how terribly a man may be punished for lack of virtue in his ancestors.

We send you our blessing and our affection.

H.H.

Having reread this letter, Edward Ambrose turned again to the concluding pages of the manuscript still lying upon his knees. The clock on the chimney piece struck four, but no heed was paid to it. The empty pipe was still between his teeth when finally he exclaimed: "Yes, it's wonderful … very wonderful. It is even more wonderful than I had hoped."

He then took the pipe from his mouth and found the stem was bitten right through.