after his mistaken marriage. The lines of the poet in whom he had read most of late fell from his lips like an original personal cry: "Oh, I could lie down like a tired child, And thus Billy found him, his head on the desk, his shoulders heaving convulsively. "Matt!" he cried timidly. "Well!" in muffled accents. "She's gone to her room and locked herself in. She says you're not to come near her any more ever." A long silence. "But I daresay it'll blow over, Matt. This is not the first time she's been taken like that, though you've not been here to bear it." A longer silence. Billy cudgelled his brain to rouse his brother. "I saw Ruth Hailey a month ago," he said at last. This time he succeeded in evoking an indifferent monosyllable. "Yes?" "Yes. She called here to see us-she was in London. She had got our address from Abner Preep before leaving America. I gave her the address of your studio, but she said she was uncertain whether she would have time to look you up. She seems to be secretary to Mrs. Verder, the Woman's Rights woman, goes about with her everywhere. Linda Verder's lectures-you remember them at the St. James's Hall in July. She's in Scotland now, and later on, Ruth writes to me (for I asked her to correspond with me a little), they're going to Paris for a course, under the patronage of the American Embassy. They'll stay in Paris some time, as Linda Verder wants a rest badly, and has a lot of American friends there. Then they go to Australia and New Zealand. Curious, isn't it?" "How did she look?" "Ruth? Oh, she's gone off a good deal, to my thinking. She must be getting pretty old now-about as old as you, which is young for a man, but old for a woman. But her eyes are fine, and there's a sweetness-I can't describe it. She says she used to teach Sunday-school in the States, and, though she enjoys travelling about, regrets having had to give up her class. Fancy! She used to be such a smart girl, too, and I should have thought the deacon had disgusted her with religion. You know she won't have anything to do with him." "Is he still alive?" "Oh, he's just as spry as ever. His father's curled up his toes, though. Old Hey had the old man from Digby to live with him, and they used to go at it hammer and tongs." Billy could extract no further answer. But he would not let his brother go that night, insisting he must sleep with him as usual in the spare bed in his bedroom. About nine o'clock Rosina sent a specially nice supper for two down to the study. Matthew roused himself to eat a morsel to keep Billy company, and then, before going to his sleepless couch in Billy's room, bethought himself of whiling away the time by answering some letters which had been bulking his inner coatpocket for days. One of these was a reverential request for an autograph, addressed from a fine-sounding country house, and backed by the compulsive seduction of a stamped envelope. His emotions were exhausted. He wrote apathetically, "Yours truly, Matthew Strang," writing very near the top of the notepaper for fear of fraud, and cutting off the Camden Town heading. The celebrity was at home for once. CHAPTER VI A DEVONSHIRE IDYLL THE old-fashioned yellow coach, top-heavy with pyramidal luggage, rattled along the Devonshire coast, striking its apex against over-arching boughs, and Matthew Strang sat on the box-seat, forgetting London in the prospect of Eleanor Wyndwood and in the view of white and red houses scattered like wild flowers about a steep green hill overhanging the curve of a lovely bay. For Rosina had continued obdurate and invisible; she had sent up breakfast from the kitchen without appearing, and with an irritating air of cooking for a gentleman-boarder, and he, fretful and anguished after a wretched wakeful night, had fled, snarling even at Billy, who would have stayed him further. The remembrance of her cantankerousness and of his own ill-humour had accompanied him all the way to Devonshire, but the sight of the sea-rolling vast and green and sun-dimpled-the wrinkled unaging sea, had calmed him. His burdens fell from him. The last vapours of London, the torpid miasma of the packed streets, the cabbage-odours of Camden Town, were blown afar; he drew deep breaths of the delicious air. How lucky it was Rosina had shied at the suggestion which he had thrown out on the reckless impulse of a desperate moment! How could they possibly live together any more? To draw the same atmosphere with her was stifling; and at the thought his deep inspirations took on a new voluptuousness of freedom regained. Decidedly he had not counted the cost when the quixotic proposal sprang to his lips. For that atmosphere meant death to his soul-nothing less; death to all his new stirrings and yearnings-asphyxiation to his Art. Ah! the good salt air, let it blow on his free forehead, let it play among his early-greying locks. Let it whisper the brave dreams of youth till the nimble blood tingles and the eyes are wet with tears. Let him feel the freshness of morning, though the sun is hastening westward, and the best of the day is spent. The coachman blows his horn, and the hills are filled with the echoes of romance. Away with the clogging mists and the moral fogs of the town, away with the moody vision of a narrow-souled virago in a grey house in a drab labyrinth, and ho! for the enchanted cliffs and waters, where loveliness broods like light over earth and sea, and a spirit that is half a woman and half the soul of all beauty waits with swelling bosom and kindling eyes. O the bonny horses, the spanking quartette, how they sweep round the curves and dash down the dales, and how gallantly the ruddy-faced driver holds them in the hollow of his hand! What delightful villages, primitive as the rough stone of which they are built, what quaint old hostels and archaic streets steeped in the mingled scent of the sea and the moors. Here be old-world orchards, here be cosy cottages and sweet homely gardens, gay with nasturtiums and hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, with roses and pansies. Ta-ra! Ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-ra! The driver airily salutes the afternoon. Over the ferny walls of the Devonshire lanes, the outside passengers behold the red crags perching picturesquely on the seafront like petrified monsters of an earlier era, and the trail of redder gold quivering across the great water; the wind rises and flecks the shimmering green as with a flock of skimming sea-birds. O the beauty of the good round earth, the beauty forgotten and blotted out in the reeking back-streets of great cities! O gracious privilege of the artist, to seize a moment of the flowing loveliness of all things; to pass it through the alembic of his soul, and give it back transfigured and immortal. "To feel Beauty growing under one's hand." The words were Eleanor's-they chimed celestially in his ears, not as words, but as her words, stored up as in a phonograph with every dainty intonation, but with their music sweetened rather than deadened. All she had ever said to him he could recall as from a box of heavenly airs. Every syllable had the golden cadence of poesie. To love her was to be young again, fit for every high emprise, sensitive to every tremor of fantasy and romance. "Stiff collar-work that, sir." The driver's tongue was clattering tirelessly-of his horses, which, more sensible than men, wouldn't touch a drop more than was good for them; of his life on the box from boyhood, his easygoing content, his pioneer daughter, the first in those parts to wear spectacles; his pleasure in seeing gentlefolk come down to circulate the money, his scorn of chapel-goers; but Matthew Strang's private phonograph was performing with equal indefatigability, and his spirit leapt incessantly from one to the other, touched to a large geniality for horn-blowing humanity. The sun was sinking royally in the sea, like a Viking in his burning vessel, when the coach obligingly drew up with a flourish of the horn and a scattering of chickens and a barking of dogs at the farm where Herbert had his headquarters. He was disappointed not to find Herbert there to receive him, as he had telegraphed his advent; but just as he was comfortably installed and was beginning to wonder whether he should start dining alone, that ever-young gentleman galloped up, flushed with health and sun and exercise, and, leaping from his horse, gave Matthew such hearty greeting, that the painter had a grateful sense of being welcomed to an ancient seignorial home by a bluff and hospitable squire. "I've been working at the portrait," Herbert explained, ascending to his room with his hand affectionately on the shoulder of Matthew, who was thus forced to remount the stairs. "Of course I keep my painting kit at their place. And a jolly old place it is, with the sea cleaning the doorsteps, or pretty nearly. They're beastly comfortable, with their London servants and carriages, and they've a motherly old person who seems a combination of cook and chaperon, and turns out delicious dishes, and they've taken on a native girl to help them—a sweet simple creature with cheeks like strawberries and cream. Do you remember the lady who said strawberries and cream needed only to be forbidden to be an ecstasy? These are forbidden. Oh, don't look glum, I haven't indulged. Forbidden fruit is out of season. tired of it. It's generally canned. It's generally canned. And I have had too much of the foreign brands-ugh! I can see the litter of broken tins. I'm developing a healthy taste for the fresh-growing article, without any prohibitive tariff." I'm Matthew turned to grasp his friend's hand silently, as though sealing some compact. He felt it was Eleanor whose magnetism had uplifted Herbert to that reverence for womanhood he himself had always entertained. It was impossible to live under her spell and remain coarse. And, paradoxically enough, he was glad Herbert was living on a higher plane-it strengthened him in his own purely spiritual devotion to the beautiful friend of his soul. How stupid to have hesitated; how commonplace and ignoble to have gone to see Rosina for fear of Eleanor's influence upon him. Like the old Roman, he had lost a day. And he had uselessly harrowed his soul to boot. And yet, perhaps, not altogether uselessly, he reflected consolingly. The visit had laid the ghost of remorse; the full daylight had been turned upon the situation; he had seen beyond reach of further doubt that he was not to blame for it; that he was the victim of the blind tragedy of circumstance. True, the full daylight had also revealed that Rosina was taking the situation |