Afterwards

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_Afterwards_

_By Kathlyn Rhodes_

_Author of "The Desert Dreamers," "The Will of Allah," "The Lure of the Desert," etc._

London: Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S. E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

_Prologue_

I

"Dr. Anstice"--the girl spoke slowly, and her voice was curiously flat--"how much longer have we--before dawn?"

Without replying, the man glanced at his watch; and when he spoke his voice, too, was oddly devoid of tone.

"I think--only an hour now."

"Only an hour." In the gloom of the hut the girl's face grew very pale. "And then----" She broke off, shuddering.

"Miss Ryder, don't think of it. After all, we need not give up hope yet. An hour--why, heaps of things may happen in an hour."

A wan little smile touched the girl's lips, and she came a step nearer her companion.

"Don't let us buoy ourselves up with false hopes," she said quietly. "In your heart you know quite well that nothing on earth can save us now. When the sun rises"--in spite of herself she shivered--"we shall die."

The man said nothing for a moment. In his heart he knew she spoke the truth; yet being a man he tried once more to reassure her.

"Miss Ryder, I won't allow that." Taking her hand he led her once more to the rude bench on which she had spent the night. "There _is_ a chance--a faint one, I admit, but still an undeniable chance."

"You mean----?" Although she tried to speak calmly he heard the tiny thrill of hope in her voice, and in his soul he wondered whether, after all, he were not acting cruelly in speaking thus.

"I mean our absence must have been noticed long ago. When we did not return in time for the picnic lunch or tea, someone must have wondered where we were; and it is quite possible we were seen to enter the Temple earlier in the day."

"That awful Temple!" The horror in her eyes made his heart beat pitifully over her. "If only I had not been so foolish as to insist on entering! You didn't know how dangerous it was to go in, but I did--at least, I knew something of the danger--and I would go ... and then--the uncanny silence, the sudden knowledge that we were not alone ... that something, _someone_ malignant, hateful, was watching us--and then those awful men who seized us ... oh!" The agony of remembrance was too much for her, and she sank back, half-fainting, against the wall.

"Miss Ryder, don't go over it all again!" Although it seemed certain that they had only an hour to live, Anstice could not bear to see her suffer now. "Don't let us think of what has happened--let us try to imagine that we are saved--as indeed we may be yet!" But he stole a glance out of the empty window-space as he spoke, and his heart sank to note the lightening of the Indian night's soft dusk.

"I think not." Her tone was calm, almost indifferent, but her apprehensive eyes belied her voice. "Dr. Anstice, you have not forgotten your promise? If ... if it comes to the worst, you--you won't let me fall into--_their_ hands?"

And then he knew that in spite of her endeavours to be brave, to face the impending fate heroically, she too had had her doubts throughout the long hours of their imprisonment--doubts as to whether death would indeed come to her with the merciful swiftness of a fanatic's bullet....

And because he shared her doubt, because he, too, had wondered whether he alone would be shot at dawn, while she, his companion in this horrible nightmare, were reserved for some far more ghastly fate, because of his wonder and his doubt Anstice rejoiced in the fact that he had it in his power to save her from the worst that could happen.

He had not given his promise-lightly; yet having given it he would fulfil it, if the God who seemed to have deserted them in their need should see fit to nerve him to the deed.

She was looking at him wistfully, with something of horror behind the wistfulness; and he could not bear to keep her waiting any longer for the assurance she craved.

"Yes," he said gently, and there was a tender note in his voice. "I will keep my word. You shall not fall into their hands. I promise you that."

She sighed faintly, and made room for him beside her on the rough seat.

"That is settled, then. And now, just for this last half-hour, let us pretend that we are in no danger, that we are waiting for our friends, the friends we ran away from at the picnic--yesterday."

Something in her own words startled her, and she broke off abruptly.

"Well?" He smiled at her. "Let us pretend. How shall we begin?"

"Was it only yesterday?" Her accent thrilled him through and through. "Did we really start out from my uncle's bungalow yesterday morning? How gay we were, weren't we--all the twenty of us ... you and I leading because our horses were the best and I knew the way...."

"Yes--and all the smart young officers looking daggers at me because I had carried you off!" His tone was admirably light.

"Nonsense!" Hilda Ryder actually laughed, and in the dim and gloomy hut her laughter sounded almost uncanny. "I'm sure no one was in the least envious! You see, we were new friends--and it is such a treat to meet someone new out here!"

"Yes. By Jove, we'd only met twice, hadn't we? Somehow I was thinking we were quite old friends, you and I! But as you say, I was a new-comer, this was my first visit to the East. Rather a change, India and the snows, from a slum in Shoreditch!"

"Shoreditch? Did you really live in a slum?"

"Rather--and quite enjoyed it!" He laughed at her incredulous face. "It was experience, you see--disease flourishes in many and divers forms down there, and although I couldn't contemplate staying there for ever, the time wasn't wasted."

"And then--you left your slum?"

"Yes. I wanted more time to myself." He threw back his head as he talked, and swept the curly black hair off his brow with an impatient hand. "You see I had visions--oh, purely futile ones, I daresay--but I had a great idea of finding a cure for a certain disease generally considered incurable----" He broke off suddenly.

"Well? You have found it?" Her tone was eager.

"Not yet--but I shall!" In his enthusiasm he had forgotten the present, forgotten the horror which was coming nearer with great strides as the morning brightened in the sky. He saw only the future--not the immediate future--death, with his back against the wall of the courtyard, his face turned to the rising sun; but the splendid, strenuous future, when after good years of toil, of experience, even of suffering, he should make the great discovery which should free mankind from one of its most grievous foes, and add a precious treasure to the scientific storehouse of the world....

"It's a difficult task--almost superhumanly difficult!" His black eyes snapped at the thought of the difficulties in the way. "But thank God I'm young and full of hope--the hope that belongs to youth--and with luck I believe I'll win through in the end...."

A sudden shaft of rosy light, striking slantwise through the windowless aperture in the wall, brought him to a standstill.

"Sunrise! My God--I--I'd forgotten!" In an instant the youth and enthusiasm were wiped out of his face as by a ruthless hand, and he started to his feet. "Miss Ryder, forgive me! I've been talking like a fool, and you sit there listening like an angel, while all the time----"

"Hush, please!" She laid her hand on his arm, and through the sleeve of his thin riding-suit he felt the chill of her slender fingers. "It isn't time--yet. Let us pretend until the last minute. You know--you haven't asked me what I intend--intended"--for a second she faltered--"to make of _my_ life!"

Inwardly cursing his own folly, Anstice sat down again beside her and took her hand in his as a brother might have done.

"Well, what is ... was...." He, too, bungled over the tense, but she pretended not to notice his confusion. "What are you going to be--or do? I hope your dreams are as wild as mine!"

"Not quite!" Her tone robbed the words of all offence. "Mine are very humble dreams, I'm afraid! You see"--for a second her voice shook, but she steadied it and continued to speak--"there's a man in Egypt whom I am--was--oh, what can I say?--whom I was to marry--some day."

"Really? You're engaged?" A fresh pang of pity shot through his heart.

"Yes. He's an engineer--in the Irrigation Department--and the best man in all the world!" For a moment love triumphed over death, and its glory illuminated the gloom of that fatal place of imprisonment with a hint of immortality. "That's _my_ ambition, Dr. Anstice--to love him and marry him, and be a true and faithful wife--and perhaps"--her voice sank a note--"perhaps in time to bear his children. That"--said Hilda Ryder, and now her eyes were full of dreams--"would be to me the most glorious destiny in the world!"

Her soft voice trembled into silence, and for the space of twenty heart-beats the two sat motionless, only their hands seeking the mutual comfort which their warm contact might well bring.

Then, with a sudden movement, Hilda Ryder sprang to her feet and crossed the mud floor to the aperture in the wall.

"Dr. Anstice, the sun is rising. I suppose--now--we have only a few minutes more to live."

He followed her across the floor and together they watched the dawning of the day which was to be the herald of death. With the inexorable swiftness of the East the sun was rushing into the sky in all his glory of scarlet and pearl, and in spite of the significance of his triumphal rising the two who watched him caught their breath at the rosy magnificence of his entry.

But Hilda's words must not go unanswered; and with a resolute squaring of his shoulders Anstice turned from the gorgeous world outside to the dimness of the hut.

"Yes," he said, rather slowly and deliberately. "I am afraid we have only a few minutes left--now."

Curiously, she cavilled at his choice of words.

"Why do you say--afraid?" He could not understand her tone. "You are not afraid to die--it's I who am such a pitiful coward that I daren't face death--out there in the sunlight."

"You're not a coward, Miss Ryder!" Impulsively he patted her shoulder, and in spite of everything his action thrilled her with a sense of comfort. "Why, all through this dreadful night you've behaved like a heroine, and if your courage fails you a little now--which I hardly believe--well, that's excusable, at any rate!"

"Have I been brave?" She looked at him with wide blue eyes like the eyes of a child. "I am glad of that, seeing it was I who led us into this by profaning--and making you profane--their Temple. I was afraid I had been dreadfully cowardly. I--I didn't feel brave, you know!"

"You poor little girl!" She was nearly as tall as he, a stately young woman, in truth, but suddenly he saw her as a frightened child. "You've been braver--much braver than I--and I wish to God I could have got you safely out of this! What do you say? Shall we break open the door and make a dash for it? We might win through--if the guards were taken by surprise----"

"Have you forgotten the high wall of the courtyard--and the great gates which can only be opened by three men?" He _had_ forgotten, and her reminder seemed to close the last avenue of escape. "No, Dr. Anstice, that's not the way out. But----" A sudden noise outside made her start, and her voice grew hoarse suddenly and broke. "Oh, you won't fail me, will you? You have my revolver safe?"

"Yes." It lay safely hidden in an inner pocket, its tiny size alone having prevented its discovery by alien hands. "I have it in my pocket. There's only one cartridge, but that will be enough if--if we have need of it."

"Thank you, Dr. Anstice." To his surprise and admiration she had regained her courage, the threatened collapse of the previous moment gone for ever. "Then I can wait quite calmly. But"--her blue eyes met his very fully--"you won't delay too long? The moment they come you will--do what you have promised?"

"Yes, dear." In that second he forgot that their acquaintance was barely a week old, forgot that Hilda Ryder was the promised bride of another man. In this moment all external circumstances were forgotten, and nothing remained but the fact that they were called upon to face death together, and that to him alone could the girl look for comfort and help in the bitter hour which faced them. And he knew that his hand must be steady to do her service; that he must guide her footsteps unfalteringly to the gate through which she must pass in all her radiant youth; must support and strengthen her with hand and voice so that she might look the dark angel fearlessly in the face and pass that frowning portal with unflinching step and dauntless mien.

In the hour of death he must help her to be true to herself, so that no craven fear should sully her proud soul, and with this high resolve he turned to her with the little word of endearment on his lips, and laid his hand on her arm with a touch of real affection.

"I will do what I have promised when the moment comes." He felt a little shiver run over her body and his hand tightened on her arm. "Dear, it will soon be over. Really you need not be afraid."

"Tell me"--she turned to him, and the look in her eyes thrilled him through and through--"does it _hurt_--death when it comes like--that?"

"No." He spoke firmly. "You must not think of that. It is all over in a second--and you know"--he hesitated--"after all, this life is not everything."

"No." A new light touched her eyes for a moment, a light brighter than that of the rising sun. "There is a life beyond, isn't there? My mother died three years ago, and I have missed her sorely," said Hilda Ryder simply. "Surely she will greet me--there. But"--for a moment a great human yearning shook her soul--"it's hard to leave this dear life behind ... the world is so wonderful, so lovely--I'm sure no other world can ever be half so beautiful as this."

A sudden clamour in the courtyard outside drove the colour from her cheeks, and instinctively she clung to him.

"Dr. Anstice, they're coming, aren't they? Is this--really--the end?"

For a second he listened, the blood running icily in his veins. Then he turned to her with a smile on his lips.

"Yes. I think they are coming--now. But"--his voice changed--"after all, there might be a chance--for you!"

Instead of reassuring her his words drove her to a white-lipped terror.

"You're not going to fail me now? Dr. Anstice, for the love of God, do as you promised--I will be brave, I will indeed--only don't let them take me--oh, don't!"

"It's all right, dear." He slipped his arm round her and drew her closely to him. "I won't fail you. I thought for a moment there might be a chance, but after all this is the better way."

"I knew you could be brave--for me," she said, very softly; and then, as a native voice outside the hut called an order, he felt her tremble in his arms. "They are coming--Dr. Anstice, let us say good-bye--or"--she actually smiled--"shall it be _au revoir_?"

"That, I think," he said steadily, holding the little revolver hidden in his hand as he spoke. "Dear, I'm going to do it now ... close your eyes, and then you will know nothing till you open them to see your mother's face."

A long sigh shook her from head to foot. Then she closed her eyes obediently.

"Thank you." They were the last words he heard her say as he raised the revolver; and the next moment the merciful deed was done, and Hilda Ryder was safe for ever from the vengeance of the fanatics whom she had all unwittingly enraged.

Then, as the door opened at last, and two grave-faced Indians entered and motioned to Anstice to accompany them into the courtyard, he went out unflinchingly into the sunlight to meet his fate.

II

Late that night two British officers sat on the verandah of a bungalow in the hills, discussing the tragedy which had happened at dawn.

"It's an appalling affair altogether," said the elder man, as he threw away his half-smoked cigar. "If we had been five minutes earlier we should have saved the girl, and the man would have been spared a lifetime's regret."

"Yes." The other officer, who was young and very human, spoke slowly, and his eyes were thoughtful. "It is a good deal worse for the man than the woman, after all. Shall you ever forgot his face when he realized that he was saved? And by Jove it was a near thing for him, too."

"Too near to be pleasant," rejoined his companion grimly. "Of course, no one but a lunatic would have allowed the girl to enter that Temple. Don't you remember that affair a couple of years ago, when two American fellows only just got out in time?"

"Yes." Young Payton's voice was dubious. "But you must remember, sir, Anstice was a new-comer, and didn't know the yarn--and it is just possible Miss Ryder didn't know it either. Or she may have over-persuaded him."

"Well, she's paid for her folly, poor girl." Colonel Godfrey rose. "Her uncle's off his head about it, and what the fellow she was to marry will say remains to be seen. I suppose he'll want an explanation from Anstice."

"Why, you don't mean he'll blame the man for doing what he did?" The young officer spoke boyishly. "After all, it was the only thing to do. Fancy, if the girl had fallen into the hands of those fanatics! Shooting would have been a merciful death compared to the life she might have had to endure."

"Of course, of course!" Colonel Godfrey rose and moved to the steps of the verandah, where he stood looking absently out over the moonlit world. "It was the only thing to do--and yet, what a tragedy it has all been! By the way, where is Anstice? I've not seen him since we came in."

"He's in hospital. Got a nasty swipe across the shoulder in the rough-and-tumble before we got away, and it gave Dr. Morris an excuse to shove morphia into him to keep him quiet a bit. Of course when he comes round I expect he'll be pretty sick about it all, but at least the poor devil has got a few hours' respite."

"That's a blessing, anyway. Wonder what he'll do after this. Sort of thing to ruin a man's nerve, what?"

"Probably take to drink--or drugs," said Payton succinctly. "Some chaps would put a bullet through their brains, but I don't fancy Anstice is the sort to do that."

"Don't you?" For a second Colonel Godfrey hesitated, still looking out over the garden to where the line of the eternal snows glimmered white and passionless in the splendid moonlight. "Yet you know, my boy, one could hardly blame a man for blowing out his brains after a tragedy of this sort. No." With a last glance at the mystery of the snows he turned back to the lighted verandah and took out his cigar-case. "I think one could not blame this fellow Anstice if he chose that way out." He selected a cigar with care. "After all, he must feel as though he had murdered the girl, and though I fully agree with you that there was nothing else to be done, still one can imagine how the memory of the deed will haunt the poor chap all his life."

"Yes." Rex Payton lifted his cap from the table and prepared to take his leave. "Well, good-night, sir. I think I'll just step across and see how he's getting on. By Jove, what a magnificent night. It's as bright as day out here."

"Yes. Let me know in the morning how things are going."

"Right you are, sir." With another hasty good-night Rex turned and strode away across the compound in search of the doctor.

"Still asleep, thank God," was Morris' report. "Give you my word I dread his awakening."

"Seems a pity he's got to wake at all," said Payton moodily. "Couldn't you have given him a double dose while you were about it, and put the poor devil out of his misery?"

"That's not the way we work," returned the other dryly. "There's been one--miscalculation--to-day, and we can't afford any more. If he likes to do it himself, when he comes round, that's a different matter. I don't think he will, somehow. He doesn't strike me as that sort. He'll face it out, I believe, though it will go hard with him in the doing."

"When will he be himself again?"

"I don't know. I shall keep him under as long as I dare. After all"--the doctor, who prided himself on his lack of emotion, for once betrayed a glimpse of the real humanity beneath the rather grim exterior--"he'll have to serve a life-sentence in the way of regret, and one can't grudge the poor wretch an hour or two's Nirvana."

And:

"By God, sir, I agree with you," was all Rex Payton could find to say.

III

One evening three weeks later Anstice sat in the smoke-room of a well-known hotel in Bombay waiting for the arrival of the one person in the world whom he might have been expected to avoid.

The P. and O. boat had docked that afternoon; and among the passengers was the man to whom Hilda Ryder had been engaged--the man to whom Anstice must answer for the deed done as the sun rose on that fatal morning twenty-one dawns ago.

The news of the girl's death had been cabled to the young engineer in Cairo immediately, followed by a letter from Colonel Godfrey relating so much of the affair as he himself knew; and in response had come a laconic message to the effect that Bruce Cheniston had sought and obtained leave, and would be in India at the first possible moment. He had been delayed by one or two accidents, but now he had really arrived; and Anstice had come down to meet him, knowing that before he himself could leave this fatal country there must be an explanation between the man who had loved Hilda Ryder, and the one who had been too hasty in carrying out a promise.

To say that he shrank from this interview would hardly be true. As a matter of fact, in the weeks which had elapsed since that fatal morning Anstice had wandered in a world of shadows. Nothing seemed real, acute, not even the memory of the thing he had done. Everything was mercifully blurred, unreal. He was like a man stunned, who sees things without realizing them; or a man suffering from some form of poison--from indulgence in _hashish_, for instance, when time and space lose all significance, and the thing which was and that which is become strangely and unaccountably interchangeable.

That there must be a reckoning between himself and Cheniston, Anstice vaguely knew. Yet he felt no dread, and very little curiosity as to the manner of their meeting; and although he recognized the fact that the man to whom Hilda Ryder had been engaged might well look on him with horror, inasmuch as his hand had sent her to her death, Anstice felt little interest in the matter as it concerned himself.

Possibly he was still feeling the effects of that morning's happening, although unaware of it. He had received a nasty wound--even now his shoulder was stiff and painful--and since he had discontinued the use of opiates he had had little or no sleep; but he was a man of good physique, and only an unaccustomed pallor and a few finely-drawn lines round his mouth betrayed the fact that he had suffered--was suffering still.

One or two men glanced at him curiously as he sat in a corner, gazing ahead of him with an unseeing stare; but only one man, a young officer called Trent, recognized him as the hero of the tragedy which had shaken the district of Alostan a few weeks earlier.

Being a talkative person he could not refrain from pointing Anstice out to his companion.

"See that chap over there--the tall fellow in grey?" Trent had been one of the picnic party which had ended in disaster; and although a good-hearted boy was thrilled with the importance of his own position. "Know who it is? Well, it's that chap Anstice--you remember, the fellow who shot that girl up in the hills when they were in a tight place."

"Oh! That the man?" The other, who was a portly civilian, looked at the unconscious Anstice with open interest. "Shocking affair, what? If he'd held his hand five minutes they would both have been rescued. Wasn't that it?"

"Yes. Looks a bit sick about it, doesn't he?"

"Um ... yes. Good-looking fellow, in a hard-bitten sort of way." The civilian looked Anstice over, approving the thin, well-cut face, the tall, loosely-built figure, the long hands lying idly on the arms of his chair. "Rather foreign-looking, with that black hair and those dark eyes, isn't he?"

"Yes. Looks years older than he did before it happened," said Trent, speaking the truth. "I expect, though, it _is_ the sort of thing to age one."

"Yes. What's he doing here? Going home?"

"Yes, but I fancy he's got an appointment with Cheniston first," explained the younger man importantly. "Boat got in this afternoon, and I expect Cheniston wants to hear the affair at first-hand."

"Daresay. Rather rough on the poor devil." The civilian, beneath his pompous exterior, had a kind heart. "Bad enough to have to shoot the girl first, without explaining it all afterwards. Hope to goodness the other chap lets him down lightly."

"Oh, well, he can't say much." Trent broke off abruptly. "Here is Cheniston ... by Jove, I wouldn't like to be Anstice at this moment."

Unconscious of the interest he was arousing, a young man had just entered the room. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered and bronzed, with a good-looking, square face and a resolute chin. Just now he was pale beneath his tan, and his eyes, which were narrow in shape and of a rather hard blue, were strained and anxious.

Inside the room, he looked uncertainly round; and the next moment Anstice rose slowly to his feet.

"You are Mr. Cheniston?" They might have been alone in a desert for all the notice he took of any onlookers. "I think you are looking for me. My name is Anstice."

Bruce Cheniston nodded abruptly.

"Yes. I'm Cheniston. We can't talk here. Will you come up to my room?"

"Thanks." He moved forward, and Cheniston turned to the door.

"This way. I'm some floors up--we'll take the lift."

In silence they made the ascent; and now to his own unwelcome surprise Anstice felt himself awaking from the merciful stupor in which he had been sunk for so many unnoticed days.

Suddenly he began to realize what this interview must mean to Cheniston; and the knowledge that he must tear the knife from his own wound in order to plunge it into the heart of the young man opposite him made him feel as though he were already inwardly bleeding to death.

From being vague and blurred his senses now became preternaturally acute. His surroundings were no longer dim and formless, rather everything grew inhumanly sharp and vivid. To the end of his life he would preserve an extraordinarily faithful recollection of the room into which Cheniston presently ushered him--the usual hotel bedroom in India, with high green walls, mosquito curtains, and an entire absence of all superfluities in the way of furniture or adornment.

On the floor lay a Gladstone bag, half open as the owner had carelessly left it; and Anstice found himself idly speculating as to whether the white and purple striped glory which protruded from it was a shirt or a pair of pyjamas....

His wandering thoughts were suddenly recalled to the affair of the moment; and the minor things of life were forgotten in the onrush of the vital things, the things which matter....

"Now, Dr. Anstice"--Anstice's professional instinct, so long in abeyance, warned him that the man's self-control was only, so to speak, skin-deep; and a quite unexpected and inexplicable rush of pity overwhelmed him as the cold voice went on speaking--"I think you will realize that I should like to hear your account of--of the affair that took place in that accursed Temple."

"I quite realize that." Anstice spoke slowly. "And I am ready to answer any questions you may like to ask."

"I--I think----" For a second Cheniston wavered, then spoke more humanly. "Won't you sit down? I should like, if I may, to hear the whole story from the beginning."

"I see. Well, you are quite within your rights in wishing to hear the story. No, I won't sit down, thanks. It won't take very long to tell."

Cheniston moved a step backwards and sat down on the edge of the bed, pushing the mosquito curtain impatiently aside. Then he took out his cigarette case, and, still with his steel-blue eyes on the other man's face, selected a cigarette which he held, unlighted, as he listened.

Standing in the middle of the floor, his hands in the pockets of his coat, Anstice began his story, and in spite of the fact that this man had robbed him of all that he held dear in life, Cheniston was forced to admit that at least he was proving himself no coward.

"When we set off on that fatal picnic"--Anstice took it for granted that his hearer knew the details of the occasion--"Miss Ryder and I went on ahead. We were both well mounted, and she was, as you know, a fearless horsewoman. We very soon out-distanced the others, and had gone a good way when Miss Ryder suggested we should visit a certain Temple of which it seems she had heard a great deal from a native servant. Had I known then, as I know now, the reputation of the place, and the intense hatred which the priests felt for any of the white races since that unlucky American affair"--he realized suddenly that he appeared to be excusing himself, and his manner hardened--"well, I can only regret that I allowed Miss Ryder to set foot in the place."

"You went?"

"Yes. It was only a few miles off the track, and we were so far ahead of the party that we should easily have had time to get to our original destination for lunch. Well, we went on, found the Temple, apparently deserted----"

"Apparently?" The question shot out like steel. "There was someone there?"

"Yes. We both realized at the same moment that we were not alone. You must understand that the place is half in ruins--it's a clever subterfuge of the priests to keep out intruders by pretending there is nothing there of interest. Most people turn back after a perfunctory look round; but in reality if one penetrates through one or two passages one comes to the Temple proper, where Heaven knows what rites go on."

"You reached it?"

"Yes. Thinking the place was merely a ruin I went on quite comfortably ... and suddenly we found ourselves in a sort of Holy of Holies ... a queer, pillared place with an enormous idol in a kind of recess--an altar, I suppose." His voice was tense. "It was at that moment we both realized someone was watching us, malignantly, from some unseen vantage-point. I turned to Miss Ryder to suggest, as quietly as possible, that we should retrace our steps, and found her, very pale, staring ahead of her with horror in her face."

"She had seen--something?"

"Yes. Afterwards she told me it was the glitter of the man's eyes ... he was looking through a kind of hole in the embroidered drapery behind the idol ... that had attracted her attention; and she was only too ready to fall in with my suggestion."

"You were--prevented?"

"Yes. As we turned towards the opening we found we were too late. Three tall fellows--priests, I suppose they were--had come up behind us, and as we moved they seized us ... two men held my arms--the third----" His voice broke.

"He--held Miss Ryder?"

"Yes. He wasn't rough with her." The words, which happened to be untrue, sounded painfully inadequate in his own ears. "They gave us no time to explain anything, but took us before the Chief Priest, or someone of the kind, and stated that we had been found desecrating the Temple by our unhallowed presence."

"You explained that you had done it in ignorance?"

"Of course. But"--he smiled rather cynically--"they had evidently heard that before. You know the Americans who got into trouble there had really laid a plot to carry away some memento of their visit, and they thought we were after loot of some kind, too, I suppose."

"They wouldn't listen?"

"Oh, yes, they listened all right while I tried, with Miss Ryder's help, to explain. She knew a few words of their tongue, and somehow a situation of that sort sharpens one's wits to the extent of helping one to understand a strange lingo. The upshot was we were blindfolded"--he saw Cheniston wince at the thought of the indignity to the girl he had loved--"and led away. Later we were placed in a conveyance of some sort, a bullock cart, I imagine, and driven for hours over some of the worst ground I've ever struck."

"Well?" The interest of the story was gripping the other man through all his horror, and his tone had lost its hostility for the moment. "And then?"

"Finally we were released, led into a small hut, our eyes were unbandaged, and we were informed that our fate was being deliberated, and the result would be made known to us at sunset."

"And at sunset----"

"At sunset we were sent for to the presence of a still more important personage, another High Priest, I suppose. We were taken into a kind of presence chamber, across the large courtyard, and found our friends of the morning, kow-towing to this still higher potentate. He didn't waste words on us. Through the miserable creature who had interpreted for us earlier, he made us understand that the penalty for setting foot in their holy place was death--by strangulation as a general rule----"

Cheniston's lips turned white, and his cigarette dropped to the floor; but though Anstice saw his agitation he paid no attention.

"But in consideration of the fact that we were English and one of us was a woman"--Cheniston uttered an involuntary exclamation--"our sentence was that we should be shot in the courtyard at sunrise."

"One moment." Cheniston's voice was harsh, and he moistened his lips before he spoke. "Weren't you armed? Couldn't you have--have made a fight for it?"

For the first time Anstice lost control of himself. The dark blood rushed to his brow and his eyes flashed with anger.

"Good God, man, do you suppose if I'd been armed we should have submitted tamely? As a matter of fact, the brutes who attacked us in the first place seized my revolver before I had a chance to draw it ... and though I'm pretty tough, when it came to a struggle with those Indian devils they were like steel--iron--anything you choose to compare them with."

"I know--their muscles are marvellous--especially the Hill-men." His tone held a note of apology. "Of course, if you had had half a chance--but"--suddenly his voice changed, grew suspicious--"you had a revolver, in the end?"

"Yes. Miss Ryder's. They did not suspect her of carrying a weapon, you see, and it was a tiny one her uncle had given her, more as a toy than as a serious protection."

"She couldn't get at it to use it?"

"No. We were bound as well as blindfolded, you know." He spoke grimly. "Luckily Miss Ryder had the presence of mind to say nothing about it till we were alone in the hut, our hands untied. Then she gave it to me, and we found to our dismay that there was only one cartridge left."

"How was that?" He spoke quickly, but there was no suspicion in his tone now.

"Miss Ryder explained that she had been practising shooting with her uncle and had forgotten to reload. But"--he paused--"even had it been fully charged, I'm afraid our fate would have been unchanged."

Cheniston rose suddenly, took a few aimless steps across the floor, and then sank down on the bed again almost in his former position. In front of him Anstice stood motionless, his hands, clenched now, still in his pockets, his eyes the only live feature in the grey pallor of his face.

"Well!" Suddenly he threw back his head with a restless gesture, as though the strain of the interview was beginning to tell on him. "After hearing our sentence we were taken back to our hut, there to await the moment of sunrise--of our death."

"They gave you no food?" The question was almost futile in its triviality; but Anstice answered it quite naturally.

"Oh, yes, we were given food of a sort. Luckily I had a little flask of brandy, and once--at midnight--I persuaded Miss Ryder to take a few drops. She was splendidly brave throughout."

There was a short silence. Both men felt that the crux of the interview was at hand; and each, in his way, was preparing himself for it.

"Well?" It was Cheniston who spoke first. "The night wore on, I suppose, and you saw no hope of escape? But didn't you guess your absence would be remarked upon?"

"Of course. And we hoped against hope that someone would remember the Temple."

"They did--in the end?"

"Yes, and made all possible speed to reach it. But by that time we had been taken away, there was no one to be seen, and of course all traces of us had absolutely disappeared."

"Then how did they find you in the end?"

"The native servant who had talked of the wonders of the Temple to Miss Ryder was aghast when he found what harm his talk had done. It seems she had cured his little boy of some childish illness, and he simply worshipped her in consequence. So he was wild to rescue her, and after dispatching parties of searchers in every likely direction he suddenly recollected hearing of some mysterious High Priest in a tiny village in the hills, which was so securely hidden from observation that very few people knew of its existence."

"Colonel Godfrey said he would never have reached it without the guidance of some native," said Cheniston thoughtfully. "Would that be the man himself?"

"Yes. It seemed his father had known the way and had told him in direst secrecy how to reach the village; and when the officers were ready to start he went with them, and by some stroke of luck hit the right road at once, although the directions were fearfully complicated."

"If only you had known----"

"Do you think I don't say that to myself day after day?" Anstice's brow was pearled with sweat. "If I had had the faintest idea there was any chance of a rescue----"

"I know, I know!" The other man moved restlessly. "Good God, man, I'm not condemning you"--Anstice flushed hotly--"I'm only saying what a pitiful mistake the whole thing was ... the tragedy might have been averted if only----"

"It's no use talking now." Anstice's tone was icy. "The thing's happened, the mistake is made and can't be unmade. Only, if you think _you_ could have let her fall into the hands of those fanatics--well, I couldn't, that's all."

"She ... she asked you to ... to save her from that?" He hung on the other man's answer as though his own life depended upon it.

"Yes. I shouldn't have ventured to shoot her without her permission, you know!" In a moment he repented of the ghastly pleasantry into which exasperation had led him. "Forgive me, Cheniston--the thing's got on my nerves ... I hardly know what I'm saying...."

Cheniston, who had turned a sickly white beneath his bronze, looked at him fiercely.

"I'm making all allowances for you," he said between his teeth, "but I can't stand much of that sort of thing, you know. Suppose you tell me, without more ado, the nature of the--the bargain between you."

Without more ado Anstice complied.

"Miss Ryder made me promise that if the sun should rise before any help came to us I would shoot her with my own hand so that she should not have to face death--or worse--at the hands of our enemies."

"You thought it might be--worse?"

"Yes. My father was a doctor in China at the time of the Boxer rising," said Anstice with apparent irrelevance. "And as a boy I heard stories of--of atrocities to women--which haunted me for years. On my soul, Cheniston"--he spoke with a sincerity which the other man could not question--"I was ready--no, glad, to do Miss Ryder the service she asked me."

Twice Cheniston tried to speak, and twice his dry lips refused their office. At last he conquered his weakness.

"You waited till the sun rose ... and then ... you were sure ... you did not doubt that the moment had come?"

"No. I waited as long as I dared ... the sun had risen and we heard the clamour in the courtyard outside...."

"And so----" Again his parched lips would not obey his bidding.

"When the men were at the very door of the hut I carried out my promise," said Anstice steadily. "She closed her eyes ... I told her to, so that she should not be afraid to see death coming ... and then ..." at the recollection of that last poignant moment a slow shudder shook him from head to foot, "... it was all over in a second. She did not suffer--of that, at least, you may be certain."

Cheniston's hand was over his eyes; and for a space the room was very still.

Then:

"And you--you went out, as you thought, to meet your own death?"

"Yes--and I wish to God I'd met it," said Anstice with an uncontrollable outburst of bitterness. "I endured the shame, the horror of it all in vain. You know what happened ... how just as the men were about to fire the rescuers burst into the courtyard.... My God, why were they so late! Or, being late, why did they come at all!"

Cheniston's blue eyes, which had been full of a natural human anguish, grew suddenly hard.

"You are not particularly grateful to your rescuers," he said. "Yet if they had been a few minutes later, you too would have been beyond their help."

Anstice was quick to notice the renewed hostility in the young man's tone.

"Just so." His manner, too, had changed. "But can you expect me to feel a very vivid gratitude to the men who restored my life to me, seeing with what memories that life must always be haunted?"

"Need you endure the haunting of those memories?"

The question, spoken quietly, yet with an obvious significance, took Anstice aback. For a moment he frowned, his dazed mind fumbling after the speaker's meaning.

"_Need_ I?" Suddenly he knew what Cheniston had meant to imply. "Ah--you mean a man may always determine the length of his days?"

Cheniston nodded, never taking his eyes off the other's face.

"I see. Well, suicide would be a way out, of course. But"--for a second his eyes hardened, grew stern--"I don't mean to take that way--unless life grows too much for me. A second--mistake"--he spoke slowly--"would not annul the first."

"No." Cheniston's face had lost all its boyishness; it looked haggard, unhappy, old. "Possibly not. But when one has made a mistake of so tragic a nature I should have thought one would have been only too ready to pay the price of one's miscalculation."

For a second Anstice stared at him silently.

"Just so," he said at last, very quietly, taking his hands out of his pockets for the first time. "The question is, What is the price? And do you really think that to repudiate a debt by running away from one's creditor, so to speak, is as satisfactory a settlement as to pay it coin by coin, each coin drawn from one's own heart's blood?"

This time it was Cheniston who stared at him in non-comprehension. Presently he said slowly:

"I think I understand. You mean the strongest man is the one who can stand up to any situation with which life confronts him; can pay a debt to the uttermost farthing though it may make him bankrupt in the doing. That is what you mean?"

"Yes," said Anstice steadily. "That is what I mean. God only knows what the price may be, and whether I shall have the coin in my treasury when I'm called on to pay ... if I am so called upon. And by the way"--his face hardened--"do I understand you to mean that I'm your debtor--that it is to you that the price may--one day--be paid?"

Cheniston made no reply. The hostility had suddenly died out of his eyes; and for a moment Anstice caught a glimpse of the man Hilda Ryder had loved.

"You know"--his square fingers played absently with his cigarette case--"I have loved Hilda Ryder all my life. We were brought up together as children; I was a few years older than she ... by the way, how old are you?"

Surprised, Anstice owned to his twenty-nine years.

"And I am twenty-six. Hilda was twenty-four last year. Well, all my life she has been the one--the only--woman in the world for me. We've been engaged four years; her people wouldn't sanction it till she was twenty, but we always knew we were made for one another, and Hilda used to say she would rather be my wife than marry the richest, the most famous man on earth!"

Suddenly Anstice heard her soft voice in his ear.

"To marry him ... perhaps in time to bear his children, would be to me the most glorious destiny in the world...."

A spasm of uncontrollable anguish convulsed his features for a moment; but Cheniston was too intent on his own self-revelation to notice.

"Life--without--Hilda seems impossible somehow." He laughed drearily. "We have always been so happy together ... I can't imagine going on without her."

He paused, but Anstice said nothing. He did not know what to say.

"I wonder--can I go on? Is it really required of me that I should continue to hang on to an existence which is absolutely devoid of all attraction, of all meaning?" He fixed his blue eyes on the other's face. "You're a doctor, aren't you?"

Anstice nodded.

"Yes."

"Well, I daresay it has happened in your experience that some poor devil doomed to a lifetime of torture, condemned, perhaps, to bear the burden of the sins of his ancestors, has begged you to furnish him with the means of escape ... there must be cases in which death is infinitely preferable to life, and a doctor must know plenty of safe ways of setting free the poor imprisoned wretch as one would free a miserable caged bird. Tell me, has such an experience ever come your way?" He spoke almost irritably now.

"Well," said Anstice, "and if it has? What then?"

"How have you answered such entreaties, I wonder? Even you can't pretend that life is always a sacred thing; that a man isn't sometimes justified in turning his back on the existence he never desired and yet has to endure." He paused, and his eyes held a queer blue glitter. "Well, have you nothing to say?"

"No," said Anstice resolutely, moving a step forward as he spoke. "On such a subject I have nothing to say--to you. If, as seems possible, you are suggesting that I should furnish either you or myself with an easy solution of the problem of our respective lives, I fear I must decline the suggestion. I'm a doctor, not a murderer, although"--suddenly he bit his lip and his face turned grey--"you, of all men, may be pardoned for thinking me ready to act as one."

The passing softness which had given him back his youth faded out of Cheniston's face; and when he spoke even his voice sounded years older.

"Well, it's no use talking, I suppose. After all"--his lip curled--"no man is dependent on another's good offices if he decides to cut short his sojourn on this delightful planet. Though it strikes me that if, as you say, you feel you owe me a debt, you might perhaps allow me to fix the method of payment."

He stopped short, taken aback by Anstice's imperious gesture.

"Look here, Cheniston." He spoke curtly, his eyes ablaze. "Life has given us both--me as well as you--a terrible jar. But you won't make things better by resenting what has happened. You have lost the woman you loved, but I have lost a good deal more. With the best intentions"--he smiled ironically at his own phrase--"I have ruined your life; and my own. I am ready to admit I owe you some reparation for the wrong I have quite innocently done you; and I am ready, also, to pay you any price in reason which you may ask, either now or in the future. But the price must be one which may decently be paid."

"I see." Cheniston spoke slowly. "I think, after all, we may shelve the question of payment between you and me. Personally I hope--you will forgive my frankness--that we may never be called upon to meet again. You see"--his voice broke, but he cleared his throat angrily and went on--"I can't help remembering that if you had waited Miss Ryder would still be alive."

Anstice was stung to a last impulse of self-defence.

"If I had waited--and the rescuers had not come, it is possible death would have been a merciful alternative to Miss Ryder's fate," he said. "I have tried to explain that what I did was done--as Miss Ryder would be the first to admit--for the best. But I see you are determined to look upon me as a criminal; and as I don't intend to excuse myself further, well, I will echo your hope that we may never meet again."

And without any further attempt at farewell Anstice turned on his heel and walked out of the room; leaving Bruce Cheniston staring after him with an expression of amazement not untinged with shame in his narrow blue eyes.

Book I

Chapter I

"If you please, sir, a telephone message has come for you from Cherry Orchard just now."

Anstice put down the paper he had been idly studying and looked at the maid.

"Cherry Orchard? That's the big house on the Littlefield Road, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir. It has just been reopened, cook tells me."

"Oh. And I am wanted there?"

"Yes, sir. At once, the message was."

"Very good. Tell Andrews to bring round the car immediately. And put dinner back a bit, Alice, please."

"Yes, sir." The trim maid hurried away, and Anstice rose to obey the summons, congratulating himself on the fact that the night was fine, and the Littlefield Road good going.

Ten minutes later he was on his way; and in due course arrived at his destination, a pretty old gabled house standing in a large and old-fashioned garden, from whose famous cherry trees the place derived its quaint name.

Six months earlier Anstice had bought a practice in the Midlands, on the death of its former owner; but this was the first time he had visited Cherry Orchard; and as he waited for his ring to be answered he remembered the maid's remark as to the recent reopening of the house with a slight feeling of curiosity as to its tenant.

He was not kept waiting long. An elderly manservant speedily appeared; and his face, which wore a worried expression, lightened as he saw Anstice standing on the steps.

"Thank God you've come, sir." The gratitude was so obviously sincere that Anstice felt glad he had not delayed his coming. "If you'll kindly go upstairs, sir--the housekeeper is waiting for you, I believe."

He relieved Anstice of his hat and coat with hands which shook; and at the same moment a swarthy, foreign-looking woman hurried forward with unmistakable eagerness.

"You are the doctor, sir? Then will you come up at once? My mistress is upstairs, and the sooner you see her the better."

Without wasting time in questioning her, Anstice motioned to the speaker to lead the way; which she did accordingly, hurrying up the black oak staircase at a surprising pace; and giving Anstice no time to do more than glance at the artistic treasures which were in evidence on every side.

She led him a few steps down a broad gallery, lighted by large and finely-designed windows; and paused outside a door, turning to him with an expression of appeal--he could call it nothing else--in her small but intensely bright eyes.

"You'll be very gentle with the poor lady, sir? You won't--won't fluster her?" She broke off suddenly, appeared as though about to say something more, then closed her lips as though she had thought better of the impulse, and opening the door invited Anstice to enter.

Somehow her last words had given Anstice a queer, but possibly justifiable, suspicion that he was about to encounter a _malade imaginaire_; and just for a second he felt a spasm of irritation at the stress which had been laid on the urgent need for haste.

All such thoughts fled, however, as his eyes fell on the face of the patient he had come to see; for here was no neurotic invalid, no hysterical sufferer who craved sympathy for quite imaginary woes.

On the bed drawn up in front of one of the big casement windows lay a young woman with closed eyes; and as he approached her side Anstice saw that it was not sleep but unconsciousness which claimed her at that moment.

"How long has she been like this?" He spoke sharply, one hand on the slender wrist.

"It's two hours since she was seized, sir." The woman's voice shook. "No sooner was my mistress in the house--she came home only to-day--than she fainted clean away. We brought her round, the maids and me, and she was better for a bit ... then up she would get to look after Miss Cherry, and off she went again. It's nearly half an hour ago ... and we got so anxious that Hagyard telephoned for you ... we thought it was the right thing to do."

"Quite the right thing." He was too intent on his patient to pay much attention to the woman's speech; but she was quite content to stand silent as he tried one means of restoration after another; and when, finally, his efforts were successful, both Anstice and the housekeeper breathed more freely.

"Your mistress ... her name, by the way...."

"Mrs. Carstairs, sir." She spoke with a tinge of reluctance, and even in the stress of the moment Anstice wondered why.

"Oh. Well, Mrs. Carstairs is coming round now, she will be herself in a moment or two. By the way, just go and fill a hot-water bottle, will you? It is chilly to-night, and Mrs. Carstairs will probably feel cold."

With a last look at her mistress the woman turned to obey; and Anstice moved back to the bed to find his patient's eyes open and fixed upon him with something of perplexity in their depths.

"Don't try to move just yet," he counselled her quickly. "You've had a bad faint, and must lie still for a little while. Do you feel better?"

"Much better, thank you." Her voice, though it sounded weak, was oddly deep in tone. "I suppose I fainted. Did they send for you?"

"Yes. Your servants were getting alarmed." He smiled. "But there is no need for alarm now. What you want is a long rest. You have been overtiring yourself, perhaps?"

A peculiar smile, which was mocking and yet sad, curved her lips for a moment. Then she said quietly:

"Perhaps I have overtired myself a little lately. But it was quite unavoidable."

"I see." Something about this speech puzzled Anstice, and for a moment he was rather at a loss to know what to say in reply.

She did not wait for him, however.

"Do you think I shall faint again? These faints are so unpleasant--really I don't think"--she paused, and when she resumed her voice sounded still deeper, with a true contralto note--"I don't think even death itself can be much more horrible. The sensation of falling, of sinking through the earth----"

She broke off, and he hastened to reply.

"I don't think you need anticipate any further trouble to-night. I suppose you have had your heart sounded?"

Again she smiled; and once more he could have sworn there was mockery in her smile.

"Yes. But I don't think my heart is wrong. It--it is due to other causes----"

She stopped abruptly as the door opened, and the woman came in, carrying the hot-water bottle for which she had been sent.

"That you, Tochatti?" She seemed to welcome the interruption. "Thank you so much." She let the servant fuss over her for a moment, then turned to Anstice. "You see," she said, "I am well looked after."

"I am glad you are," he rejoined promptly. "You know you are really in need of a little care at present. If you will allow me, I should like to sound your heart myself."

She acquiesced rather wearily; and having satisfied himself that the state in which he found her was due rather to weakness than to any specific disease, he turned to the strangely named woman, whom he now guessed to be a foreigner, and gave her a few directions for the night.

"I'll see to it, sir," she said quietly; and Anstice knew his orders would be faithfully carried out.

"Well, I can't do you any good by staying," he said, bending over the bed and holding out his hand. "But send for me if you want me, won't you? And I'll look in to-morrow to see how you are."

"One moment." Her hand in his felt strangely alive in spite of her recent unconsciousness. "Put on a little more light, please, Tochatti. I should like to see"--she spoke without any embarrassment--"to what sort of person I am indebted this evening."

When, the next instant, the room was flooded with light, Anstice had no scruples in looking at his patient with an interest which, though less openly expressed, was quite as strong as that with which she evidently intended to scrutinize him.

The first thing he noticed was that Mrs. Carstairs was young--probably not more than twenty-five. The next, that she looked as though she had recently gone through some nerve-racking experience; and the last, which came upon him with a shock of unjustifiable surprise, that she was more than commonly good-looking.

Her features, as he saw for the first time, were classical in outline, and the silky black hair which lay in heavy waves on her forehead shaded a brow which in contour was almost purely Greek. Her skin was of so thin and transparent a whiteness that her black eyebrows traced two inky lines across her face; and the almond shape of her sapphire blue eyes gave them a somewhat Oriental look, in spite of their eminently Western colouring.

When, in response to his stare, she vouchsafed a faint smile, he saw that the mouth which was sad in repose was fascinating when she smiled; and the white teeth which the smile displayed were perfect in shape and colour.

"Well?" Her deep voice took him so much aback that he absolutely started. "You've seen me--haggard wreck that I am--and I've seen you. So now we may consider our acquaintance inaugurated and say good-night."

"Certainly." He looked at her closely; and noted her extreme pallor. "I hope you will sleep--you look shockingly tired."

"I told you I was a wreck," she said, still with that inscrutable smile. "But if you will take me in hand I have no doubt I shall soon recover my ordinary rude health."

"I hope so." His tone was absent--he was wondering whether he had ever seen this woman before; and coming, finally, to the conclusion that he had not. "Well, I will leave you now, and hope to find you a great deal better in the morning."

"Thanks." She spoke wearily. "I'm sorry to have troubled you. Good-night."

In the hall the manservant waited, and Anstice, pitying his evident anxiety, spoke reassuringly to him as he took his coat. "Your mistress is much better now--with a little care she will soon be all right, I hope."

"Thank you, sir." The man's voice quivered with feeling. "We--we are all very anxious when our lady is not well."

"Of course." Anstice took the hat the servant held and moved to the door. "Is that nine striking? I didn't know it was so late."

Yet in spite of the lateness of the hour Anstice did not drive home at a particularly rapid pace. Something in the episode just closed had intrigued him, piqued his curiosity as well as stimulated his interest; and he was wondering, as he drove, what there was about his patient which suggested a mystery--something, at least, unusual unexpected, in her character or surroundings.

"She's uncommonly handsome--but so are heaps of women. Nice house, plenty of money, I should say, and of course she herself is well bred. Yet there is something odd about her--about her manner, rather. Looks at one queerly--almost quizzically--and yet when she smiled she looked extraordinarily sad." He turned a corner rather carelessly and a surprised motor-cyclist sounded his horn reproachfully. "I wonder--is she a widow? There was no sign of a husband, though I believe the servant said something about a child. Anyhow"--he had reached his own house now and slowed down before the gate--"I will see her to-morrow and perhaps learn a little more about her--if there is anything to learn. If not--well, women love to appear mysterious. There never was a woman yet who didn't long to rival the Sphinx and appear an enigma in the eyes of wondering men!"

And he went in to his belated dinner with a rather cynical smile on his lips.

Chapter II

Just as Anstice was starting out next morning an urgent telephone message came through, requesting his help at a suddenly imperative operation at a country house some miles distant.

Although he had been in the district only a few months, Anstice was already known to his professional brothers as a daring and skilful surgeon; and one man--the one who now called upon his services--was in the habit of wondering openly why so brilliant a man was content to bury himself in the country instead of seeking fame and fortune in some one of the big cities of the world.

There were those who could have given a very good guess at the reasons which led Anstice to shun notoriety and welcome the obscurity of Littlefield; but in the meantime Dr. Willows was left to wonder in vain; though his wonder was leavened with a genuine admiration for his colleague's skill, and a fervent gratitude for the other man's unwearying willingness to give his aid.

On receiving the message Anstice frowned.

"That you, Willows? Is it an urgent case? Oh--of course I'll come ... I must make a few arrangements first ... yes ... yes ... I'll be with you in half an hour, if that will do."

He hung up the receiver, and now his manner was alert and keen. There was about him none of the weariness, the indifference which too often characterized his demeanour, and led some of his patients to complain that he took no interest in them or in their sufferings. This was the man who before that fatal day in India had stood, so it was whispered, upon the threshold of a brilliant career--the man who, young, resourceful, scientific, had taken a very real and deep interest in every detail of his profession, and had led even the most cautious of his teachers to prophesy for him a life of unvarying success.

He even looked younger as he consulted his notebook this morning; and the shoulders which had begun to stoop ever so little were squared, the head held erect as he scanned the pages before him with quick, resolute eyes.

Luckily there was nothing very important on the morning list, no visits that could not be safely postponed till the afternoon; and one or two telephone messages soon put things straight and left him free to keep his appointment with Dr. Willows.

He had a moment's indecision over the case of his new patient at Cherry Orchard, but reflecting that if necessary they would probably ring him up, he judged it safe to put off his visit to Mrs. Carstairs till his return; and finally went out to his motor with an easy mind.

Returning home, fatigued but jubilant, at two o'clock, he applied himself to his lunch; and then attacked his afternoon's work with an energy engendered by the excellent results of the operation which he, in company with his friend, had performed that morning.

Being delayed on various pretexts, it was five o'clock before he found himself at the pretty house in its fragrant garden; and he rang the bell rather hastily, with an absurd feeling that the servants would look reproachfully on his tardy arrival.

The man seemed, however, to welcome him as he had done the previous night; and when, a second later, the queerly named Tochatti arrived, her face wrinkled into a discreet smile.

"Mrs. Carstairs up to-day?"

"She is in her room, sir. Will you come up, if you please?"

He followed her up the broad, shallow stairs, which this afternoon she took at a more moderate pace; and then she ushered him into the room he had visited before, falling back so that he went in alone.

Mrs. Carstairs was lying on a deep couch by one of the open windows, her white gown set off by vivid blue cushions; and as he advanced Anstice noticed that she looked even younger than he had judged her on the preceding night. Her air of utter exhaustion had vanished; and there was more colour in her lips, though her cheeks still retained their ivory transparency.

By her side was a little table bearing a tea-tray, and as Anstice shook hands, congratulating her at the same time on her restored appearance, she drew his attention to the teacups.

"I was just going to have some tea. Be nice and have some with me. Will you?"

"Thanks very much." He accepted promptly. "I've been busy all day and should enjoy a cup of tea. But first--are you really better this afternoon?"

"Yes, really." She spoke indifferently, as though the subject failed to interest her. "I should have gone out, I daresay, but I felt tired, or lazy, and succumbed to the charms of this delightful couch."

"You did quite right." He took the cup she held out to him and sat down in a chair beside the deep Chesterfield. "You know I think you must make up your mind to take care of yourself for a week or two."

"I can quite easily do that," Chloe Carstairs answered quietly. "I hardly think I shall find it difficult to do what the new-woman novels used to call 'living one's own life'--down here."

"Certainly there isn't much going on." Anstice was puzzled by her manner. "Do I understand that you 'belong' here, as the country folks say?"

She put down her cup rather suddenly, and faced him squarely, her blue eyes full of a resolution which added several years to her age.

"Dr. Anstice." Her deep voice had lost its richness and sounded hard. "I should like to tell you something of myself. Oh"--she laughed rather cynically--"I'm not going to bore you with a rhapsody intended to convey to you that I am a much misunderstood woman and all the rest of it. Only, if you are to see me again, I think I should like you to know just who and what I am."

Mystified, Anstice bowed.

"Whatever you tell me I shall be proud to hear--and keep to myself," he said.

"Thanks." Her manner had lost its slight animation and was once more weary, indifferent. "Well, first of all, have you ever seen me before?"

"No. Though I confess that something in your face seemed familiar to me last night."

"Oh." She did not seem much impressed. "Well, to put it differently, have you ever heard of me?"

"No," said Anstice. "To the best of my belief I have never heard your name before."

"I see. Well, I will tell you who I am, and what I am supposed to have done." No further warmth enlivened her manner, which throughout was cold, almost, one would have said, absent. "When I was eighteen I married Major Carstairs, a soldier a good many years older than myself. Presently I went out to India with him, and lived there for four years, coming home when our child was three years old."

She paused.

"I came here--this was my husband's old home--and settled down with Cherry. And when I had been in the parish a year or so, there was a scandal in Littlefield."

She stopped, and her mouth quivered into a faint smile.

"Oh, I was not the chief character--at first! It was a case in which the Vicar's wife won an unenviable notoriety. It seemed there had been a secret in her life, years before when she was a pretty, silly girl, which was known to very few besides her husband and, I presume, her own people. Now you would not think I was a sympathetic person--one in whom a sentimental, rather neurotic woman would confide. Would you?"

And looking at her, with her air of cold indifference, of complete detachment from the world around her, Anstice agreed that he would not expect her to be the confidante of such a woman.

"Yet within a month of our meeting Laura Ogden had confided her secret to me--and a silly, futile story it was." Her pale face looked disdain at the remembrance. "No harm, of course, was done. I kept her secret and advised her not to repeat what she had told me to anyone else in Littlefield."

"She followed your advice?" Anstice had no idea what was coming, but an interest to which he had long been a stranger was waking slowly in his heart.

"_Chi lo so?_" She shrugged her shoulders. "Afterwards she swore she had told no one but me. You see it appeared she very soon regretted having given me her confidence. It happened that shortly after she had told me her story we had--not a quarrel, because to tell you the truth I wasn't sufficiently interested in her to quarrel with her--but there was a slight coolness between us, and for some time we were not on good terms. Then--well, to cut a long story short, one day anonymous letters and post cards began to fly about the parish, bearing scurrilous comments on that unhappy woman's past history. At first the Vicar tried to hush up the matter, but as you may imagine"--her voice rang with delicate scorn--"everyone else thoroughly enjoyed talking things over and wondering and discussing--with the result that the Bishop of the Diocese heard the tale and came down to hold a private inquiry into the matter."

She stopped short and held out her hand for his cup.

"More tea? I haven't finished yet."

"No more, thank you." He rose, placed his cup on the tray and sat down again in silence.

"The Bishop suggested it was a matter for the police. The writer of those vile communications must be discovered and punished at all costs, he said. So not only the authorities but all the amateur detectives of both sexes in the neighbourhood went to work to find the culprit. And _I_ was the culprit they found."

"You?" For once in his life Anstice was startled out of his usual self-control.

"Yes. They fixed upon me as the anonymous writer of those loathsome scrawls; and the district was provided with a sensation after its own heart."

"But the idea's absurd--monstrous!" Looking at her as she leaned back among her cushions, with her air of delicate distinction, Anstice could hardly believe the story she was telling him.

"So I thought at first." Her blue eyes narrowed. "But in some marvellous manner they brought the charge home to me. I was the only one, they said, who knew the story. I had wormed it out of the silly woman, they alleged, and had then, owing to the subsequent coolness between us, traded upon my knowledge in order to drive her out of the place."

"But others must have known the story?"

"Yes. But I was the only one in Littlefield who knew it."

"So they said. But in reality----"

"In reality, of course, it was known to someone else. But that person took care to keep in the background. When once I had been suggested as the culprit a quantity of evidence was forthcoming to clinch the matter, so to speak. I was never particularly popular here, and people were quite ready to believe me capable of the deed." She smiled faintly. "I confess one or two things looked black for me--the letters were written on the kind of paper I used, and though of course the handwriting was disguised, there was, in one or two letters, an undeniable similarity to some of my writing."

"But your word--wasn't that sufficient?"

The apathy of her manner relaxed for one moment into a kind of cold amusement.

"Oh, I gave my word--at first--quite freely. Knowing nothing of the letters, of course I said so; but I was not believed. I confess everything was against me. Most of the letters were posted in the pillar box not a hundred yards from this house--but on one occasion when I had gone down to Brighton for a couple of days, one of those vile things bore the Brighton postmark."

"But----"

"Oh, I've nearly done." She glanced at the clock. "I am detaining you--you're in a hurry? Don't mind saying so--this delightful story can be continued in our next."

"Please go on." Anstice would not willingly have foregone the rest of the recital.

"Well, after various suspicious happenings, which I won't inflict upon you now, and after being interviewed by the Bishop, by detectives, by a hundred and one individuals who revelled in the case, I was accused, tried, and found guilty."

"Found guilty? Impossible!" He sprang up, quite unable to sit still another moment. Somehow he had not expected this climax.

"Yes. I was found guilty." Her voice held little expression. "And sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment. The judge who sentenced me informed me--and the world at large--that he deemed it expedient to 'make an example' of me--only he put it more legally--as an educated young woman, of apparent refinement, who had committed a crime connected generally with illiterate and ignorant persons of degenerate tendencies."

"But you--you never served the sentence--such a vindictive sentence, too!"

"Yes, I did." For the first time her face changed, a hint of tragedy appeared in her studiously passionless eyes. "You look surprised, but I assure you it is true. I served my sentence, and came out of prison exactly eight weeks ago."

"Eight weeks? But you have only just come here?"

"Yes. First I went down into Kent to stay with an old family friend who had taken charge of Cherry--my little girl--while I was"--she hesitated, then spoke with a directness he felt to be brutal--"in prison. I only came here yesterday, and I suppose the shock of finding myself back in my happy home"--he was sure she was speaking ironically now--"was too much for my--nerves."

"But, Mrs. Carstairs"--he looked down at her with perplexity in his face--"do I understand you to mean you have deliberately come back to live in the place which has treated you so shamefully?"

"Why not?" Her long, blue eyes were inscrutable. "I'm not ashamed of coming back. You see, I really don't care in the very least what these people say about me. I don't even bear them malice. Prison life is supposed to make one bitter, isn't it? You hear a lot about the 'prison taint,' whatever that may be. Well, I don't feel conscious of having sustained any taint. I have suffered a great wrong"--her contralto voice was quite unmoved as she made the assertion--"a very grievous injustice has been done to me; but now that the physical unpleasantness of the ordeal is over I don't feel as though I--my ego, my soul, if you like--had undergone any particular degradation."

"I suppose"--the question was forced from him by his interest in the human document she was spreading before his eyes--"I suppose what you call the physical unpleasantness is really hard to bear?"

He was sorry he had put the question as he saw the slow shudder which for a moment convulsed her immobility.

"Yes." For a second her voice was almost passionate. "I don't think I could make you understand the horror of that side of imprisonment. Most prison reformers, as I say, prate of the injury done to the soul of the prisoner. For my part--it if were worth while, which it isn't--I would always refuse to forgive those enemies who subjected my body to such indignities."

Her vehemence, so much at variance with her usual manner, made Anstice uneasy about her.

"See here, Mrs. Carstairs." He sat down on the couch beside her, and spoke persuasively. "You must promise me not to let your mind dwell on your terrible experience. Honestly, do you think it wise to stay here? Won't it be painful for you to live among the people who know you? Wouldn't it be better to go away for a short time, travel a little? There are plenty of places off the beaten track where you would be able to rest and get back your health and your spirits."

She turned to him with a hint of a kindlier manner than she had hitherto displayed.

"Dr. Anstice, to tell you the truth I don't want to travel. I shall be happier here, in my own home, with my old servants round me, able to do exactly as I choose from morning to night."

She hesitated a moment; then resumed in her former indifferent tone:

"You see, my husband, although he refuses to believe in my innocence, has handed over this house to me; and under my marriage settlement I have quite a large income----"

He interrupted her abruptly--

"Mrs. Carstairs, forgive me--did you say your husband refused to believe you innocent?"

"Yes. My husband--like the majority of the world--believes me guilty," said Chloe Carstairs.

Chapter III

The story he had heard on the occasion of his second visit to Cherry Orchard haunted Anstice for days. There was something so incongruous in the notion of this woman having served a sentence of imprisonment for an offence which, of all others, might well be supposed the most impossible for any decent person to commit; yet Anstice knew instinctively that Mrs. Carstairs had spoken the truth; and although for the last few years he had been far too much occupied with his own private grudge against Fate to spare any pity for the woes of others, he did feel a surprising sympathy for the young and apparently lonely woman whom the world had treated so cruelly.

That she was innocent of the crime with which she was charged, Anstice never doubted. Since the catastrophe which had altered his whole outlook on life, he had been inclined to be cynical regarding the good faith of mankind in general; but Mrs. Carstairs' manner had carried conviction by its very lack of emphasis. She had not protested her innocence--indeed, he could barely remember in what words she had given him to understand that she was not guilty of the loathsome deed; yet her very quietness, the very indifference of her manner as she told her story carried more weight than an avalanche of protestation would have done.

As a medical man Anstice was something of a student of physiognomy; and although Mrs. Carstairs' face was not one to be easily read, the shape of her brow and the classical outline of her features seemed to Anstice to preclude any possibility of the morbid and degenerate taint which must have inspired the communications of whose authorship she had been accused.

The very fact that she did not appear to care whether or no he believed in her strengthened Anstice's belief that she was an innocent and much-wronged woman; and in his mind he linked her with himself as one of the victims of an unfavourable and ruthless destiny.

After attending her for a week Anstice declared her to be in no further need of his services; and she acquiesced with the same air of half-weary graciousness with which she had welcomed his visits.

He noticed that she was rarely to be seen in the village or small town of Littlefield. Occasionally she would pass him on the road in a beautiful motor with which he supposed her husband to have endowed her, and at these times she had generally her small daughter, wrapped in furs, on the seat beside her.

Anstice's introduction to the latter took place about a fortnight after his last visit to Cherry Orchard in a professional capacity. It chanced that he was interested in a small Convalescent Home for Children which had recently been opened in the neighbourhood, and on one or two days had cut short his visit to Mrs. Carstairs on the grounds that his presence was required at the Home. Rather to his disappointment Mrs. Carstairs had not evinced the slightest interest in the scheme, and his surprise was proportionately great when, on one fine spring morning, he received a large bunch of beautiful daffodils from Cherry Orchard, with a rather carelessly worded request that he would give them to the Home if they were likely to be welcome there.

Anstice took the flowers with him on his morning visit, and the pleasure they gave and the gratitude with which they were received led him to snatch a moment on his way home to call upon the donor and thank her in person for her kindly gift.

As he turned his car in at the gate he hoard sounds of laughter, and a few words in a child's high-pitched voice; and when he was half-way up the drive he discovered from whence the merriment issued.

Just ahead of him was a motor-cycle, driven, it would appear, by a girl in a trim motoring-suit, while perched on the carrier at the back, in a fashion which made Anstice's blood run chill, was a small child whom he recognized as the daughter of the house, Cherry Carstairs, aged something less than six years.

The two were chattering and laughing, the driver sounding her horn in a delightfully irresponsible fashion, and both were much too intent on their progress and on the noise they were making to realize that a car was coming up the drive immediately behind them.

Instinctively Anstice slowed up, wishing the lively pair at Jericho; but luckily they had nearly reached the front door, and in another minute the motor-cycle had come to a standstill and the riders dismounted in safety.

"There--we've not come to grief, this time, have we, Cherry Ripe!" The elder girl spoke gaily. "And now we'll see what Mother has to say--oh!"

At that moment she beheld the car, which was coming to a standstill, and she looked at the man who drove it with a frankness which was curiously unselfconscious. At the same minute Mrs. Carstairs came slowly forward onto the steps, and Anstice, dismounting, approached her without doing more than glance at the girl-motorist.

"Good morning, Mrs. Carstairs. I have come to thank you for your lovely flowers." They shook hands as he spoke. "The Matron at the Home made me promise to come and convey her thanks to you at the first possible moment. That's my excuse for calling now!"

He had spoken more impulsively than usual, with a genuine desire to show his gratitude for her kindness; but there was no answering warmth in her voice, and, not for the first time, he felt chilled by her lack of response.

"I'm glad they liked them." Her tone was perfunctory. "But I'm afraid the gratitude is not due to me. It was my small daughter who was fired to enthusiasm by something Tochatti told her, and insisted on cutting the daffodils herself."

"I see." In spite of himself Anstice felt repulsed by her manner, which, made his warmly spoken gratitude appear superfluous. "Well, in any case the result is the same--delight in the wards and something beautiful and fragrant to lighten the children's sufferings."

"Pray tell Cherry--she will be pleased." Possibly Mrs. Carstairs had noted the stiffness of his speech, and in her languid way desired to soothe his feelings. "I forget if you have seen my little daughter. I must introduce you to her--and----" she turned to the young girl who stood by and laid a hand on her arm--"to her friend--and mine."

Anstice glanced towards the two who still stood, hand-in-hand, on the top step, and Mrs. Carstairs performed the ceremony of introduction in the deep, rich voice which was somehow part of her personality.

"Iris, let me introduce Dr. Anstice ... Miss Wayne."

Anstice bowed, but the girl held out her hand with a youthful friendliness which was attractive.

"How d'you do? I'm glad I didn't know your car was behind me as we came up the avenue. I don't mind what I meet, but I always hate things coming up behind my cycle," she said pleasantly.

"If you are in the habit of giving such youthful passengers rides I don't wonder you're nervous," he replied; and the girl opened her grey eyes widely.

"Nervous! I'm not!" She spoke indignantly. "But when your allowance is strictly limited, and you have to pay for repairs yourself, you don't want people running into you from the back and perhaps smashing up your pet Douglas!"

"I see." He smiled discreetly, and Mrs. Carstairs claimed his attention once more.

"And this"--she drew the child forward--"is Cherry."

"How are you?" Anstice, who was always polite to children, shook hands, and the child looked at him with a pair of very clear brown eyes.

"Quite well, thank you, my dear," she responded gravely, and Iris Wayne was secretly much diverted by the expression of astonishment which this form of address evoked in the face of the hearer.

"You like motoring?" Anstice felt constrained to keep up the conversation, and Cherry nodded calmly.

"Very much, my dear. Do you?"

"Yes...." Anstice experienced an overwhelming desire to repeat her endearing term, but luckily refrained. "This is my car--will you come for a ride with me one day?"

For a second Cherry regarded him with a pensive courtesy which was almost embarrassing. Then:

"With pleasure, my dear," she replied, and Iris laughed outright.

"You fickle child! And you have always declared you liked my motor better than any car that ever was seen!"

"So I do." Cherry looked up at her with unsmiling gravity. "But----"

"But now you must all come in and have lunch." Mrs. Carstairs turned to Anstice. "Dr. Anstice, you can spare us a little time, can't you? Lunch is quite ready, and Cherry, I'm sure, endorses my invitation!"

He hesitated, torn between a desire to accept and an uncomfortable suspicion that he could not afford the time.

"You will have to lunch somewhere, you know!" Her manner was a trifle warmer than usual. "And it will really save time to do it here!"

"My lunch is a very hurried affair as a rule," he said, smiling. "But if I may run away as soon as I've finished I'll be delighted to stay."

He felt a small hand slip into his as he spoke, and looked down, to meet Cherry's clear eyes.

"Do stay, my dear!" Her tone was a quaint imitation of her mother's, and before the twofold invitation Anstice's scruples were put to flight.

"I'll stay with pleasure," he said, patting the kind little hand; and with an air of satisfaction Cherry led him into the hall, her mother and Miss Wayne following their lead.

Once seated at the pretty round table, sweet with the fragrance of hyacinths in a big Swansea bowl, and bright with silver and glass, Anstice owned inwardly to a feeling of pleasure at his position. Although as a rule he loved his solitude, welcomed the silence of the old panelled house he had taken in Littlefield, and shunned those of his kind who had no direct need of his services, there were times when his self-sought loneliness weighed heavily upon his spirit, when the ghosts of the past, whose shrouded forms were ever present to remind him that he had made a fatal mistake on that bygone morning in India, were but poor company.

At first, during that first haunted year, when Hilda Ryder's face was ever before his eyes, her sad and tender accents in his ear, he had sought many and dubious ways of laying those same ghosts. It had seemed to him, during those dreadful days, that although some instinct within him forbade him to end his own life, none could doubt his right to alleviate his mental suffering by any means he knew; and when temporary oblivion, a blessed forgetfulness, could be purchased at the price of a pinprick, it seemed not only overscrupulous but foolish to forgo that Nirvana.

But that indulgence, too, had nearly ended in disaster; and for the last two years his only use for the alluring drug had been to alleviate the pain of others. Yet the struggle was a hard one; and he wondered sometimes, rather hopelessly, if he would have the strength to continue it to the bitter end.

But to-day, sitting in the pretty room, with the sun pouring in through the casement windows, widely opened to the green garden beyond, Anstice owned that for once life seemed to be in harmony with the beautiful spring world around.

As for Iris Wayne, he told himself presently that he had rarely seen a prettier girl! Although at present his admiration was quite impersonal, it was none the less sincere; and his approval of her grey eyes, set widely apart beneath her crown of sunny hair, of the delicately rounded face, the frank mouth, which disclosed teeth as white as milk, was enhanced by the fact that every line, every tint spoke of flawless health and a mind attuned to the simple, gracious things of life rather than those which are complex and hard to comprehend.

Looking from Iris, bright-eyed and alert, to Chloe, sitting at the head of her table in a white cloth gown which somehow looked elaborate in spite of its utter simplicity, Anstice was struck by the contrast between them. Although the difference in their actual ages was not great, they might well have been at different stages of life. For all her youth, all her grace, her black and white distinction, Chloe was a woman, and no one looking at her would have doubted that to her had come some of the most vital moments of a woman's life. But Iris Wayne was only a girl, an untried warrior in the battle of existence. The glance of her large and radiant eyes was far more akin to that of the child Cherry's brown orbs than to the serious, rather cynical regard which habitually dwelt in Mrs. Carstairs' sapphire-blue eyes; and in every look, every word, was the delicious freshness of a joyous youth. Yet he fancied there was something in the curve of her lips, in the shape of her head, which betokened strength of character as well as lightness of heart. He fancied that her mouth could be tender as well as gay, that her eyes might one day look into the eyes of a man with a promise in their depths of strong and steadfast womanhood.

It chanced presently that Anstice was offered some strawberries, floating in a delicious-looking syrup; and a glance at his hostess betrayed his half-humorous perplexity.

"I know it isn't the right season for strawberries," said Mrs. Carstairs with a smile. "But these are some of our own, bottled by a famous method of Tochatti's. Do try them and give us your opinion."

Anstice complied; and found them excellent.

"They are delicious," he said, "and bring summer very close. Don't you like them?" he asked Cherry, who was demurely nibbling a macaroon.

"No thank you, my dear," replied Cherry gravely. "They give me a pain in my head."

"Oh, do they?" Anstice was nonplussed by this extraordinary assertion, the grounds for which were not borne out by such medical skill as he possessed; but chancing to look across the table at Iris Wayne he found her dimpling deliciously at his perplexity.

"You look puzzled, Dr. Anstice!" She laughed outright. "You see you don't understand how it happens that a pain in the head is connected with strawberries!"

"I don't," he said, "but if you will kindly explain----"

"May I, Cherry?" She looked at the child with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes, and Cherry nodded.

"If you like, my dear. But _I_ think it's rather a silly story."

Notwithstanding this expression of opinion Iris entered forthwith into an explanation.

"You see, Dr. Anstice, Cherry came to stay with me last summer when the strawberries were ripe; and seeing the bed covered with netting--to keep off the birds"--she smiled--"she thought it very hard that the poor little things should not have their share."

"You had heaps and heaps for yourself," came a reproachful voice from the bottom of the table where Cherry sat in state.

"Certainly--until you came on the scene, Cherry Ripe! Well, Dr. Anstice, to cut a long story short, Cherry thought us so selfish and cruel to prevent the poor birds sharing our fruit that she slipped into the kitchen garden one very hot morning, and devoted a good hour to taking up the netting--with the result that the stooping down with the sun beating on her head gave her a touch of sunstroke."

"You forget I had eaten a few strawberries--just to encourage the birdies." Evidently Cherry liked accuracy in any statement, even when it militated against herself.

"Well, whether it was the sun or the strawberries, the fact remains Cherry was in bed for three days, and since then strawberries are _tabu_. Isn't it so, Mrs. Carstairs?"

"Yes, Iris." Chloe's voice was more weary than usual, as though the subject did not interest her; and suddenly Anstice remembered that during the previous summer she had been shut away from the beautiful world of sun and strawberries and roses red and white....

A moment later Chloe rose from the table; and Anstice stole a look at his watch as they passed into the hall.

As though she divined his action Chloe turned to him.

"You will spare time for a cup of coffee? We have not lingered over our lunch."

Anstice hesitated, and Cherry again added her entreaties to the invitation.

"Do stay a little longer, my dear. Iris will have to go in a minute, but I want her to sing me a song first."

"Do you sing, Miss Wayne?" Looking at her firm round throat and deep chest he thought it possible she sang well.

"Yes." She shook her head at Cherry. "But how can I sing after meringues and strawberries, you bad child?"

"You always say that," returned Cherry placidly. "And then you sing most bee-autifully!"

Iris coloured at this obviously genuine compliment and Anstice laughed outright.

"After that testimonial, Miss Wayne, I hope you don't expect me to run away without hearing you!" He turned to his hostess. "I will stay for a cup of coffee with pleasure, Mrs. Carstairs, and you will persuade Miss Wayne to sing, won't you?"

"Certainly." They were in the cool, hyacinth-scented drawing-room by now, and Chloe drew the girl towards the grand piano which stood by one of the big latticed windows. "Sing to us at once, Iris, before you have your coffee. Will you?"

"Of course I will." She seated herself as she spoke. "What shall it be? Cherry, you know all my songs. What do you want to-day?"

After due consideration Cherry gave her verdict for "the song about the lady in the wood;" and although both Mrs. Carstairs and Iris rallied her on the mournfulness of her choice, Cherry stuck to her guns; and to judge from the rapt expression in her big brown eyes as the singer prophesied the lonely and tragic fate of poor unhappy Melisande, the idea of that fate proved exquisitely soothing to the youthful listener.

Anstice's supposition had been correct. Iris Wayne could sing well. Her voice, a clear mezzo-soprano, had been excellently trained, and in its purity and flexibility gave promise of something exceptional when it should have attained its full maturity. She accompanied herself perfectly, in nowise hampered by the lack of any music; and when she had brought the song to a close, Anstice was sincere in his request for another.

"I've just got some new songs," said Iris, twisting round on the stool to face her hostess. "A book of Indian love-lyrics. Shall I sing you one of those?"

And without waiting for an answer she turned back and began to play an accompaniment which subtly suggested the atmosphere of the East, accentuated by the sound of the bells of some wayside Temple pealing through the dusty, sun-baked land.

"The Temple bells are ringing----"

With the first line of the song Anstice was back in the hideous past, back in the fatal Temple which had proved the antechamber to the halls of Death ... he heard again the chatter of native voices, smelt the odd, indescribable perfume of the East, felt the dread, the impotent horror of that bygone adventure in the ruined Temple of Alostan....

The drawing-room in which he sat, bright with chintz, sweet with the fragrance of hyacinths, faded away; and he saw again the dimly lighted hut in which he and Hilda Ryder had spent that last dreadful night. He heard her voice imploring him to kill her before the men should rush in upon them, saw the anguish in her eyes as she understood that no help was forthcoming from the world without; and he knew again the great and unavailing remorse which had filled his soul when he realized that Hilda Ryder had died too soon....

When the song ended he rose abruptly, and Chloe was startled by the change in his manner.

"I must really say good-bye, Mrs. Carstairs." He had not touched his coffee. "Many thanks for your hospitality." He shook hands with her and turned to Iris with something of an effort. "And many thanks for your songs, Miss Wayne." He tried to smile as they exchanged a handshake, but the attempt was a failure.

"I'll come to the steps with you, my dear," volunteered Cherry politely, and without further leave-taking Anstice went out into the hall, seized his hat, and stumbled towards the door, half-blinded by the pain of that terribly acute inward vision.

He took leave of Cherry with a hasty courtesy which would have hurt some children, but was not displeasing to the stately Cherry; and three minutes later he was driving down the avenue at a furious pace, in a vain endeavour to outstrip the phantoms which a girl's careless song had evoked from their place in the background of his thoughts.

* * * * *

After his abrupt departure Iris turned impulsively to her hostess.

"Mrs. Carstairs"--her voice was disturbed--"what was wrong with Dr. Anstice just now? Did my singing displease him? He got up and went so--so unexpectedly."

For a moment Chloe said nothing. Then:

"Don't you think you are rather too imaginative, Iris? Probably Dr. Anstice remembered some urgent case, and thought he ought to go at once."

"No. I don't think that was it." Iris sank down on to the cushioned window-seat and gazed thoughtfully ahead. "I think----I wonder if that last song could have any associations for him? Has he been in India?"

"I don't know." Chloe smiled faintly. "You must ask him, Iris. I suppose your father would send for him if he were ill, wouldn't he, now that Dr. Meade is really gone?"

"I suppose so." Iris spoke rather dreamily. "At first I thought he was quite old--at least forty," said the schoolgirl. "And then, when he talked to Cherry I was not really sure. I guessed he might be worried about professional things and look older than he was. And now----"

She broke off, and for a moment Chloe Carstairs made no rejoinder, though her blue, almond-shaped eyes held a slightly quizzical expression.

"And now"--she said at length--"what is your opinion now?"

"Now"--Iris spoke very slowly, and in her eyes was something of the womanly tenderness and strength whose possibility Anstice had divined--"I think he has the very saddest face I have ever seen in my life."

Chapter IV

Anstice was destined to renew his acquaintance with Iris Wayne sooner than he had anticipated.

On the Sunday afternoon following the little luncheon party at Cherry Orchard, he was tramping, pipe in mouth, over the golf-links when he saw her ahead of him, in company with an elderly gentleman whom he guessed must be her father.

She had just holed her ball by a deft stroke, and as he approached Anstice heard her utter an exultant exclamation.

"Very good, my dear." Her companion patted her arm. "A little more care and you will make quite a fair player."

"Fair player indeed!" Iris tossed her curly head disdainfully. "I'd have you know I can beat _you_ anyway, Daddy!"

As she spoke she recognized the approaching figure and her frank smile flashed out.

"Dr. Anstice--are you playing too?"

"No, Miss Wayne." He advanced and shook hands. "I'm taking my Sunday afternoon tramp. It's the only chance I get of walking in the week."

"Daddy, this is Dr. Anstice." Iris turned to the elderly man. "My father," she explained casually to Anstice, and Sir Richard Wayne held out his hand with a smile.

"You're not a golfer, Dr. Anstice?" Sir Richard was keen on the game.

"No, sir. I used to be a footballer in my hospital days, but"--for a second he hesitated--"I have had no time lately for any kind of game----"

"Well, golf's a grand game for an old buffer like me"--Sir Richard was a hale and well-set-up man who could afford to make such speeches--"but I daresay you younger men like something a bit more strenuous. My daughter here only plays with me now and then as a concession--she prefers tennis, or flying about on that precious motor-cycle of hers."

"Well, judging from what I have seen of Miss Wayne's riding I should say she is a very expert motor-cyclist," said Anstice; and Sir Richard nodded.

"Oh, she rides all right," he owned, "and she bothered me to such an extent that I simply had to give in to her. But it wasn't until she had been 'run in' for exceeding the speed limit in one of my cars and I'd had to sentence her from the Bench in my magisterial capacity that I did give in and buy her a Douglas."

"He fined me twenty shillings and costs!" Iris spoke with mock indignation. "How's that for meanness to your only daughter?"

"And paid the fine out of my own pocket--don't forget that!" Sir Richard chuckled. "Well, Dr. Anstice, if you're not in a hurry, walk round with us, will you? You aren't busy on a Sunday afternoon, I suppose?"

"Well, not very." In spite of himself Anstice felt a strange reluctance to part from his new friends. "I was going for a walk, as you see, and if I may come with you----"

So it fell out that for the first Sunday since he had arrived in Littlefield Anstice's walk was no solitary stroll, companioned only by his own moody or rebellious thoughts, but a pleasant interlude in a life which in spite of incessant and often engrossing work, was on the whole a joyless one.

This afternoon Iris Wayne looked little more than a schoolgirl in her short skirt and brightly coloured jersey, a cap pulled well down over her curls, which nevertheless rioted over her forehead in entrancing confusion. It was very evident that she and her father were on the best of terms; and if, as seemed probable, Sir Richard was proud of his pretty daughter, it was no less certain that she, on her side, thought her father the most wonderful of men.

The trio chatted pleasantly as they crossed the sunny golf links, and Sir Richard told himself that his impressions of this man, gathered from hasty visions of him about the village, or from the chatter of the countryside, impressions which had labelled him as a morose, sullen kind of fellow, had certainly been fallacious.

Reserved he might be; but although his manner was quiet and his smile a trifle sad, there was nothing morose about him to-day; and if his conversation was not particularly brilliant Sir Richard thought none the worse of him for that.

So pleased, indeed, was he with his new acquaintance that when they reached the Club House on the return journey he pressed the young man to accompany them home for a cup of tea.

"I'm sure your patients must cease from troubling on a Sunday afternoon at any rate," he said genially, "and you haven't anyone waiting for you at home, have you?"

With a rather melancholy smile Anstice admitted that there was no one waiting for him at home; and since Iris seconded her father's invitation with a kind little entreaty on her own account, he accepted their joint hospitality without further demur.

Greengates, the home of the Waynes, was a stately old house, more dignified, though perhaps less charming, than the fascinating Cherry Orchard; but its very dignity gave charm; and it formed a by no means incongruous background for this youngest and prettiest of its daughters. For all her youth and high spirits, Iris seemed to fit into the place as one born to it; and when she tossed aside her cap and sat down behind the massive silver tea-tray, her gold-brown curls shone against the oak panelling of the walls as the wild daffodils gleam golden against the massive brown trunks of the trees in whose shade they grow.

Lady Wayne had been dead for many years; and although Anstice gathered, from casual conversation between father and daughter, that a certain Aunt Laura made her home with them as a rule, it appeared that she was at present travelling in Switzerland, leaving Iris mistress of Greengates in her absence.

"I confess Iris and I rather enjoy a week or two to ourselves!" Sir Richard's eyes twinkled. "My sister is a thoroughly good sort, but she loves to manage people; and Iris and I are both of us constitutionally averse to being managed!"

"I manage Daddy without him knowing it," said Iris loftily; and Anstice could not refrain from an impulse to tease her a little.

"That is very clever of you, Miss Wayne," he said gravely, "and I'm sure your management must be most tactful. But--if you'll excuse me suggesting it--wouldn't it be cleverer still of you if you refrained from hinting as much to your father?"

"You mean the really clever women never let the men know they're doing it?" Her grey eyes laughed into his. "You are quite right, of course--but then I don't pretend to be clever. I don't think clever people--clever women, anyway--are ever happy."

"Don't you?" Somehow Anstice felt extraordinarily interested in the views of this very youthful woman. "May I be allowed to know what has driven you to that conclusion?"

"Oh, it's not exactly my own." Iris' eyes were honest as well as gay. "It was something Mrs. Carstairs said to me one day. _She_ is clever, you know--but her life has been made very unhappy."

Anstice, who had already wondered how much of Chloe Carstairs' history was known to the Waynes, glanced involuntarily at Sir Richard as Iris spoke the last words; and in the elder man's eyes he thought he saw a hint of trouble.

"I should judge Mrs. Carstairs to be a well-read woman," he said, endeavouring to change the subject while ostensibly pursuing it. "She has a good many books about her, though of course nothing like your collection here."

He glanced at the walls as he spoke, and Sir Richard took up the new topic easily.

"I don't know whether you are a reader, Dr. Anstice," he said, "but if so, and you're short of reading matter, don't hesitate to borrow some of our books. We've all sorts, eh, Iris?"

"Thanks very much. I'm not a great reader--haven't time; but your books look rather alluring," said Anstice, with a smile.

"We'll have a look round after tea," returned his host. "In the meantime pass your cup--this weather makes one thirsty."

After tea he rose and invited the younger man to scrutinize the shelves. Somewhat to his surprise Anstice found that the Greengates collection of books was a most comprehensive one, whole sections being devoted to science, biography, travel and so on; and he was fortunate enough to discover two recent biological works, which, owing to their somewhat prohibitive price, he had hitherto been unable to obtain.

"Like to borrow those tomes?" Sir Richard had noted the expression in his guest's face as he handled the volumes. "Well, take them, and anything else you like. No, I confess I don't care much about books myself. Most of these were my father's choice--he was a bit of a student in his later years, and my sister likes to keep up with the times and lets the booksellers send down books as they used to do. But you're welcome to any of 'em, I assure you."

He led his guest round the room, pointing out one or two favourites of his own; and while they were thus engaged, Iris, who had been feeding three lively Airedales with scraps of cake, came up to Anstice with outstretched hand.

"Will you excuse me, Dr. Anstice? I must go and get ready for church--we have service early here, you know."

Immediately Anstice attempted to take his own departure, fearing he had outstayed his welcome; but Sir Richard positively refused to let him go.

"No, no, don't hurry away. Stay and keep me company for a little while--my man can easily run you over in the car presently."

So it came about that after watching Iris' departure the two men turned back into the house, where Sir Richard led his visitor to his own cosy smoking-room and handed him a cigar.

"Light up," he said genially, "and try that chair. Dr. Anstice, now that my little girl has left us, I want to say something to you--to ask you a question, in fact."

Rather taken aback, Anstice expressed his willingness to answer any questions his host thought fit to ask; and Sir Richard plunged at once into the heart of the matter.

"I understand from Iris that you have been attending the lady living at Cherry Orchard. Oh!"--as Anstice's eyebrows rose--"I'm not asking you to violate professional secrecy. I only wished to be sure that you knew the true position of Mrs. Carstairs in this neighbourhood."

A moment's reflection showed Anstice that this man would hardly be likely to permit his young daughter to visit Cherry Orchard unless his opinion of Mrs. Carstairs were favourable; and his voice was non-committal as he answered.

"I have heard Mrs. Carstairs' story from her own lips, Sir Richard. She was good enough to relate it to me at an early stage of our acquaintance," he said; and this time it was the other man's eyebrows which betokened surprise.

"Indeed! I didn't expect that, or I would not have spoken. I thought you had probably heard a garbled account of the whole horrible affair from some of the Pharisees down here; and since I and my daughter are honoured by Mrs. Carstairs' friendship I wanted to be sure you didn't allow the weight of local opinion to prejudice you in any way."

"It's awfully good of you." For once Anstice spoke spontaneously, as he might have spoken before that fatal day which had changed him into another and a less impulsive person. "I may take it, then, that you and Miss Wayne believe in Mrs. Carstairs?"

"I believe in her as I'd believe in my own girl," returned Sir Richard emphatically. "Mind you, Chloe Carstairs isn't perfect--we none of us are. She has her faults--now. She's cynical and cold, a bit of a _poseuse_--that marble manner of hers is artificial, I verily believe--but I'm prepared to swear she had nothing to do with those vile letters."

"You have known her long?"

"Since she was a child. Her father was one of my best friends, and I knew Chloe when she was a tiny baby girl all tied up with blue ribbons. Carstairs met her first at my people's place in Surrey, and I was really pleased when he married the girl and brought her here."

"They lived here after their marriage?"

"Yes, for a short time only. Then they were off to India, and there they remained till her child was born, and she was faced with the old problem of the woman who marries a soldier."

"You mean--wife _versus_ mother?"

"Yes. Upon my soul, Anstice, I can't understand how a woman ever decides between the two claims. To hand over her baby to relations, or even strangers, must be like tearing the heart out of her bosom, and yet a woman wants her husband too--wants him especially when she is young--as Chloe was."

"Mrs. Carstairs decided for her child?"

"Yes. They kept her in India as long as they dared--longer than some people thought prudent--and then Chloe brought her home to the old place. Iris was at school then, but Chloe used to come in to see my sister and me frequently, and we congratulated ourselves that we'd got such a pleasant neighbour. You know Cherry Orchard is really the nearest house as the crow flies."

"I suppose it is; though I hadn't realized it. And then--the crash came?"

"Yes. When first those horrible letters began to fly about the parish they were put down as the work of some spiteful servant, dismissed for dishonesty, perhaps. But little by little Mrs. Carstairs' name began to be whispered in connection with them--no one knew how the rumour started, though I have always held the belief that the Vicar's wife herself was the first to suggest it."

"But Mrs. Carstairs and the woman were friends?"

"They had been--and in the first burst of friendship the foolish woman had poured out all her silly, sordid secrets to Chloe Carstairs, and then, possibly, repented having done so. They fell out, you see, and I suppose Mrs. Ogden, being a woman of a small and petty character herself, was only too ready to suspect her former friend. She swore, you know, that no one but Chloe could have known some of the details which were mentioned in the letters. I can't tell you how vile the whole thing was--and it was quite evidently the intention of the anonymous writer to drive Mrs. Ogden out of the parish by those libellous documents."

"But the matter was thoroughly sifted? And there could be no evidence against Mrs. Carstairs?"

"Well, when things had gone on for some time in a desultory kind of fashion--a letter here, another there, and then an interval of a few weeks--there came a perfect avalanche of the things, and the Vicar, although he had really wished to hush the matter up, was advised to take steps to find out the culprit."

"Even then I don't see how Mrs. Carstairs could be suspected----"

"Well, in a matter of this kind, when once a woman's name has been mentioned, it is very hard for her to clear herself. At first, guided, I confess, by me, she refused to take any notice of the affair. In the end, of course, she had to come forward to clear herself of a specific charge."

"But what weight had the evidence against her?"

"Well, certain curious things happened. It was found that the letters were all written on a particular kind of paper affected by Mrs. Carstairs for scribbling unimportant notes--household orders and so on--not by any means an uncommon paper, but still she was the only person in the village who bought it regularly. Then the handwriting, though it was scratchy and common-looking, did bear, in some words, a faint, very faint resemblance to hers; and once, when Chloe was away on a visit to Brighton, a letter came to the owner of Carr Hall, in the valley yonder, which had been posted at Hove. Then, as she may have told you, a trap was laid for her by some of the damned authorities"--he spoke heatedly--"she was supplied with marked paper; and sure enough the next letter which arrived was written on one of those identical sheets."

"But the servants--her servants would have had access to her paper?"

"Quite so; and that point was made much of by the defence. But when all the household was examined, it didn't seem a feasible theory that any of them was to blame."

"How many servants were there in the house?" Unconsciously Anstice's manner was that of a doctor interrogating a patient, and Sir Richard noted the fact with a quickly suppressed flicker of amusement.

"Four only. During Major Carstairs' absence Mrs. Carstairs wished to live quietly; and her staff consisted of a cook--a young Frenchman whose life Major Carstairs had once saved in a drunken brawl in Soho----"

"A Frenchman, eh?" Anstice habitually distrusted foreigners. "Mightn't he have been the guilty person?"

"He only knew enough English to discuss the _menu_ with his mistress," answered Sir Richard. "Chloe used to make us laugh by relating his mistakes; and even if he had wished to write the letters he could not possibly have done it. Besides, he returned to France for his military training in the very middle of all this, so he really can't be suspected."

"Well." In fairness Anstice could not condemn the Frenchman. "Who else was in the house?"

"A middle-aged housemaid who had lived with the Carstairs' all her life, and whose character was quite above suspicion. As a matter of course her writing was compared with that of the letters and was proved to have none of the characteristics of the anonymous handwriting. For another thing her sight was bad, and she couldn't write straight to save her life."

"I see. And what of the other two?"

"One was a pretty young girl who acted as maid to Mrs. Carstairs herself; and I admit at first it seemed that she was the most likely person to have been mixed up in the affair; for she was a flighty minx who wasn't too particular about her behaviour, and was generally engaged to two or three young men at once."

"Well?" From Sir Richard's manner Anstice gathered that there was no case against the pretty young minx; and the next words confirmed his supposition.

"Sad to say the poor girl caught a chill and died of pneumonia after only five days' illness, during which time the letter-writer was particularly active; and as the communications continued after her death, she must be counted out."

"Well," said Anstice, "that accounts for three of them. What about the fourth?"

"The fourth was an old servant of the other side of the family--Chloe's family--the woman they call Tochatti, who lives there still. She's half Italian, though she's lived the greater part of her life in England. Chloe's mother picked her up on her honeymoon, and she was Chloe's nurse. She has been a most devoted servant all the time, and I would almost as soon suspect Chloe herself as suspect the poor woman of working any harm to her adored young mistress."

Remembering the woman's solicitude on the occasion of his first visit to Cherry Orchard, Anstice was compelled to admit it was unlikely she was the culprit; and his impression was deepened by Sir Richard's next speech.

"As a matter of fact, it came out that the poor old thing couldn't even write her name. The other woman, Janet, was what she called a 'poor scollard', but Tochatti went one better, for she could neither write nor read. It appeared they had often teased her about it, and she had frequently flown into a rage when the other servants poked fun at her; but she certainly scored in the end!"

"Well, that disposes of the household," said Anstice rather regretfully. "But what about outdoor workers--gardeners and so forth?"

"There was only one gardener--and a boy--and neither could possibly have had access to Chloe's writing-table; added to which they both left Cherry Orchard during the critical time and took situations in different parts of the county. So they too had to be counted out."

"All this came out in court?"

"Yes. You see, had the matter rested between the party libelled and the libeller--if there is such a term--an action in the Civil Courts to recover damages would have met the case. But owing to the fact that practically everyone in the neighbourhood was victimized, and warnings, almost amounting to threats, issued to the Ogden woman's friends to have nothing more to do with her, the public were, so to speak, directly affected; and it was in the interests of the public that, finally, criminal proceedings were instituted."

"And in the end an intelligent jury brought in a verdict of guilty?"

"Yes. The case came on at Ripstone, five miles away, and of course excited no end of interest locally. To give them their due, the jury were very reluctant to bring in that verdict--but I assure you"--he spoke weightily--"when I heard the other side marshalling their facts, each one making the case look still blacker and more damning, I began to be afraid. Yes, I confess it, I began to feel very much afraid."

"And they brought her in guilty?"

"Yes, and the Judge sentenced her. I don't like to accuse one of His Majesty's judges of allowing his judgment to be prejudiced by personal feeling," said Sir Richard slowly; "but it has always seemed to me that Chloe's manner--her peculiarly detached, indifferent manner, as though the case did not interest her vitally--was in some subtle fashion an affront to the man. His remarks to her seemed to me unnecessarily severe, and he certainly did not err on the side of leniency."

"I should think not! Twelve months--why, it's an Eternity!"

"What must it have seemed to that poor girl!" Sir Richard spoke pitifully. "I used to fancy she would die in prison--I could not imagine how she could support the life in there, in those degrading surroundings. You know, not only had she been lapped in luxury, as they say, all her life, but, more important still, she had been used to boundless love and affection from all around her."

"You find her much altered?"

"Yes. I can't say exactly in what the alteration consists," returned Sir Richard thoughtfully. "It's not merely a surface thing--the change goes deeper than that. I called her _posee_ just now. Well, I don't know if that's the right word. Sometimes I think that frozen manner of hers isn't a pose after all, it's natural to her nowadays. She seems to be literally turned to stone by all she's gone through. Where she used to be all sympathy, all ardour, all life, now she's cold, frigid, passionless. The girl's barely twenty-five, but upon my soul she might be a woman of fifty for all the youth there is about her--except in her looks, and there I believe she's handsomer than ever!"

Anstice's cigar was smoked out; but there was one question he must ask before he took his leave.

"And her husband--Major Carstairs? He--I gather he was inclined to agree with the verdict?"

Sir Richard hesitated, and when he spoke there was a note of pain in his voice.

"I am sorry to say Carstairs could not bring himself to believe in his wife's innocence. He was in India at the time, you know, and only got home--on special leave--when the case was coming on. Heaven knows on what grounds he bases his doubts of her. One would have thought it impossible for a man to live with a woman like Chloe and not know her incapable of the deed. But human nature is a strange thing----" He broke off.

"I understand they do not contemplate keeping house together for the future?" Anstice hoped he was not appearing unduly curious, but Sir Richard's manner invited interest.

"No--though mind you, Carstairs has not left his wife because she was unfortunate enough to be convicted and sent to prison. He's not that sort. If he could have believed her innocent he would have stuck to her through thick and thin. As it is he gives her the house, a large allowance, which permits motor-cars and things of that kind, and since he is known to be in India a good many people don't know they are really living apart in a double sense."

"Yet he can't believe in her?"

"No--and that's why he will not live with her. In his own rather peculiar way he has a remarkably high code of honour, and since he genuinely believes her to be guilty it would doubtless be quite impossible for him to live with her again."

"I am rather surprised--seeing she must know his opinion of her--that she condescends to live in his house and take his money," said Anstice, voicing a question which had caused him a very real and acute wonder.

"I'm glad you have raised that point," said Sir Richard quickly. "She does it for the sake of the child, so that Cherry may have all the advantages of wealth. Chloe herself has nothing and Carstairs is a rich man; so it is an eminently proper arrangement, and in my opinion Chloe behaved like a sensible woman in agreeing to it."

He threw away his cigar, which had gone out as he talked.

"No--what I wonder at is that Chloe should deliberately choose to come back here where the whole story is known. It's not bravado, of that I'm certain, but it beats me altogether how she can do it, for as you know women can be uncommonly cruel sometimes, and these creatures here aren't by any means charitably disposed towards her."

"You allow Miss Wayne to visit her?"

"Yes--and I welcome her to my house on the rare occasions she honours me by entering it," said Sir Richard with evident sincerity; and Anstice felt oddly gratified by the other man's speech.

A clock striking seven brought him to his feet in genuine dismay.

"Seven o'clock! I'd no idea it was so late! Pray excuse me inflicting myself on you all this time."

"Must you go?" Sir Richard rose too, and stood regarding the tall, loosely built figure with something like admiration. "Well, you're a busy man, I know; and if you really must go I'll not detain you. But you'll come in again, won't you? Come to dinner--Iris shall send you a note--and drop in for a smoke any evening you're at liberty."

The invitation so heartily given was accepted with a pleasure to which Anstice had long been a stranger; and then he said good-bye to his kind host and left Greengates feeling that he had found two unexpectedly congenial friends in Iris Wayne and her father.

He had been deeply, genuinely interested in Sir Richard's story, that unhappy story in which Chloe Carstairs figured so tragically; yet as he made his way homewards between the blossoming hedgerows his mind dwelt upon another woman, a younger, happier woman than the pale mistress of Cherry Orchard. And the face which floated before his eyes in the starlit spring dusk was the laughing, grey-eyed face of Iris Wayne.

Chapter V

As the weeks passed Anstice's acquaintance with the Waynes ripened into something which he found strangely pleasant.

Although he had long ago decided that for him the simple human things of life, friendship, social intercourse with the world of men and women, were, since that bygone Indian morning, forbidden, even his acquired misanthropy was not proof against the kindly advances made to him by Sir Richard and his daughter.

Busy as he was, he still found time to accept some of their invitations to Greengates, and he and Sir Richard enjoyed a quiet chat over their cigars now and again when by chance he had an evening to himself.

On their side the Waynes found him, each in his and her own degree, an agreeable companion. Sir Richard approved of his quiet and reserved manner, and was not inclined to quarrel with his occasional fits of moodiness--for there were times when the ghosts which haunted him refused to be exorcised, and Anstice felt himself unfit, by reason of the handicap which Fate had imposed upon him, to mingle with the happy, the careless, the innocent ones of the earth.

To Sir Richard, kind-hearted, uncritical, undiscerning, such fits of silence, even of gloom, were natural enough in a man whose life was spent largely in the service of the sick and suffering among humanity. He was probably worried over some difficult case, Sir Richard concluded, when he found the younger man's conversation halting, his manner absent, or, on rare occasions, morose; and it must be noted that as a rule Anstice had too much respect for his friends to inflict these moods upon them. As for Iris, quicker of discernment than her father, of a more analytical turn of mind, she guessed that the changing moods which characterized her new acquaintance were not induced by any external or professional worries, but were the marks of a trouble far more serious, far more vital to the man himself. Of the nature of this trouble Iris had naturally no very clear idea, though now and again she considered the probability of him having been what she called, rather school-girlishly, crossed in love. But though her phraseology might be childish there was something purely womanly in the compassion with which she thought of Anstice; and on one occasion when a fit of melancholy had overcome him unexpectedly in her presence, he was startled, not to say dismayed, to notice something of this half-tender, half-impersonal pity in the soft, brooding glance of her eyes as they rested on him for a moment.

It was not with the Waynes alone that he grew more intimate as the days went by. A short time after his introduction to Greengates Anstice received a summons to Cherry Orchard, and on repairing thither found that his patient on this occasion was Cherry Carstairs. With all her demure dignity Cherry was at times possessed of a very spirit of perversity; and being, although of such tender years, absolutely devoid of fear, she had tried conclusions in secret with a shaggy pony in a field close by her home, with the result that, owing to the pony's stubborn refusal to allow her to climb upon his back, Cherry received a kick, more in sorrow than in anger, which snapped the bone in her tiny forearm, and sent her stumbling home, very pale and shaky, her dignity sadly in abeyance, to seek her mother.

Anstice, on arrival, soon had the small arm set and comfortably bandaged; and once safely in bed, although more upset than she wished anyone to imagine, Cherry regained her usual half-affectionate half-patronizing manner, and insisted upon Anstice sitting down beside her "for at least five minutes, my dear!"

With a smile, Anstice sat down as requested; and Cherry instantly began to question him on the subject of Greengates.

"Isn't it a fassynating house, my dear?" Cherry never employed a short word when she thought a long one fairly appropriate. "Have you seen Iris' bedroom?--all done in white and purple and green--and irises everywhere--on the walls and the curtains--just like a gorjus purple iris what grows in the garden?"

"No, I've not seen Miss Wayne's bedroom," owned Anstice rather hastily. "But it couldn't be prettier than this--why, those bunches of cherries on the wall are so life-like that I wonder the birds don't come in to make a meal of them!"

"Do you like them?" Cherry was openly gratified by his approval. "But I wish you could see Iris' room. She always takes me there to wash my hands and face, and the basin is all over irises too."

"Fassynating" as these details of Miss Wayne's domestic arrangements might be, Anstice judged it safer to switch his small patient on to another topic; and in an animated discussion as to the proper age at which a young lady might begin to ride a motor-bicycle--Cherry inclining to seven, Anstice to seventeen years--the promised five minutes flew swiftly away.

"You'll come again, my dear?" Cherry's anxiety to ensure his attendance was flattering, and he laughed and assured her he would visit her every day if she desired it.

As a matter of fact he did visit her with some regularity; for she managed, with a perversity known only to imps of a like nature, to catch a severe chill which puzzled her attendants, none of them knowing of a certain feverishly delightful ten minutes spent in hanging out of the window holding an interesting conversation with the gardener's boy below on the subject of broken bones. In any case, Anstice found it necessary to call at Cherry Orchard on several consecutive days; and during the child's illness and subsequent convalescence he was perforce obliged to come into contact with Mrs. Carstairs herself.

As a physiological study Chloe interested him strongly. Although she appeared genuinely fond of her little daughter and waited on her night and day with a solicitude which never varied, there was nothing in her manner to denote passionate affection, nor did the child appear to desire it. Even to Cherry her voice, rich and deep as it was, never softened; and she rarely used an endearing term. Yet Cherry appeared to be quite satisfied; and Anstice came to the conclusion that the child's fine instinct was able to pierce behind this apparent coldness to the warm human love which doubtless lay beneath.

One fact about Mrs. Carstairs he was not slow in discovering. With the exception of Iris Wayne and her father, Chloe appeared to be absolutely devoid of friends, even of casual acquaintances. The Littlefield people, who had been first surprised, then outraged, by her reappearance among them, had long since decided that for them Cherry Orchard was _tabu_; and although the Vicar, Mr. Carey, successor to the man whose wife had raised the storm in which Chloe Carstairs' barque had come to shipwreck, had called upon her, and endeavoured, in his gentle, courtly fashion, to make her welcome, his parishioners had no intention of following his example.

That Mrs. Carstairs felt her isolation in a social sense Anstice did not believe; but that she must feel very lonely at times, find the days very long and empty, he felt pretty well assured. She was not an accomplished woman in the usual sense of the word. He never found her playing the piano, or painting water-colour pictures as did so many of the women ha visited. She did not appear to care for needlework, and in spite of the books scattered about the house, he rarely saw her reading; yet all the while he had a feeling that had she desired to shine in any or all of the arts peculiar to women she would have no difficulty in doing so.

That she ordered her household excellently he knew from the glimpses he had obtained of her domestic life; but there again she was assisted by a staff of superior servants who all, from her personal attendant, the devoted Tochatti, down to the boy who cleaned the knives, worshipped their mistress with a wholehearted affection which held about it a touch of something almost resembling fanaticism.

One day Anstice did find her with a book in her hand; and on venturing to inquire into its contents was informed it was a well-known _Treatise on Chess_.

"Do you play?" he asked, rather astonished, for in common with many men he imagined chess to be almost purely a masculine pastime.

"Yes--at least I used to play once," she admitted slowly. "I can't very well indulge in a game nowadays. Even the grownup Cherry declines to play, though I hope in time I may incite her to learn!"

"I used to play--indifferently--once," Anstice said meditatively; and Chloe looked at him with a faint smile.

"Did you? Some day when you are not too busy will you drop in to tea and play a game with me?"

"I'd like to immensely." His tone was sincere, and Chloe's manner warmed ever so little.

"Can you stay now?" The hour was just on five; and Cherry, who had that day been promoted to tea downstairs, seconded the invitation as usual from her nest on the big Chesterfield.

"Do stay, my dear, and I'll help you to move all the funny little men and the castles!"

Anstice could not refuse this double invitation; and after a hasty cup of tea he and his hostess sat down to the board and set out the ancient ivory chessmen which were so well suited to the pretty, old-fashioned room in which the players sat.

To Anstice's quite unjustifiable surprise Chloe Carstairs played an admirable game. Her moves were clearly reasoned out, and she displayed a quickness of thought, a brilliance of man[oe]uvre, which soon convinced Anstice he was outplayed.

At the end of fifteen minutes Chloe had vanquished him completely; and while most of his men were reposing in the carved box at her elbow, the ranks of her army were scarcely thinned.

"I give in, Mrs. Carstairs!" He laughed and rose. "You won't think me unsporting if I run away now? I'm beat hollow, and I know it, but if you will condescend to play with me another day----"

"I shall look forward to another game," she said serenely; and Anstice departed, feeling he had been permitted to obtain another sidelight on her somewhat complex character.

Two days later he made another and rather disconcerting discovery, which set him wondering afresh as to the real nature of the woman who, like himself, had been the victim of a strangely vindictive fate.

The day was Sunday, and Cherry had been permitted the indulgence of breakfast in bed; so that Anstice interviewed his young patient in her own pink-and-white nest, where, attended by the faithful Tochatti, she gave herself innumerable airs and graces, but finally allowed him to examine her small arm, which was now practically healed.

"Mrs. Carstairs not up yet?" It was ten o'clock--but there was no sign of Cherry's mother.

"Yes, sir." Tochatti spoke slowly, her foreign accent more strongly marked than usual. "My mistress has a slight headache and is in her own room. She would like to see you before you go."

Accordingly, after a prolonged parting from Cherry, who shamelessly importuned him to neglect his other and less important patients, Anstice accompanied Tochatti to Mrs. Carstairs' sitting-room where its owner presumably awaited him.

The room itself was in its way as uncommon as its occupant, being furnished entirely in black and white. The walls were white, the carpet black. The chairs and couches were upholstered in black-and-white chintz, with a profusion of cushions of both hues, and the pictures on the white walls were etchings in black oak frames. On the mantelpiece was a collection of carved ivory toys of all kinds, with here and there an ebony elephant from Ceylon or Assam. The paint on doors and windows was black, yet in spite of the sombreness of the general scheme there was nothing depressing, nothing sinister in the finished effect.

Possibly because Chloe Carstairs was an artist--or a wise woman who knew the value of relief--one note of colour was struck in the presence of a huge china bowl filled with tulips of every conceivable shade of flame and orange and yellow and red; but with that exception black and white predominated, and when Chloe Carstairs rose from her low chair near the window and advanced towards him, she, too, carried out the subtle suggestion of the whole room.

Dressed in white, her silky black hair and blue eyes the only bits of colour about her, she looked paler than usual, and Anstice jumped to the conclusion she had sent for him to prescribe for her.

"Good morning, Dr. Anstice." Anstice, who hated shaking hands with most people, always liked her firm, cool handshake. "How is Cherry? You find her better?"

"Yes, she is really quite herself again, and her arm has healed most satisfactorily." He stood in front of her as he spoke, and studied her face carefully. "But you don't look very fit, Mrs. Carstairs. Can I do anything for you now that your little daughter has finished with me?"

She looked at him with a smile which was more melancholy than usual.

"I think not," she said slowly. "You see, I am not ill, only a little tired--tired with remembering days that are gone."

"Isn't that rather a fatal thing to do?" His own bitter memories gave him the clue to her state of mind. "No good ever comes of remembering sad things. I think the perfect memory would be one which would only retain the happiness of life. You know the old motto found on many sundials: 'I only record sunny hours.'"

"I don't agree with you," she said quietly. "It's the shadows which give value to the high lights, isn't it? And sometimes to remember dreadful things is a happiness in itself, knowing they are gone for ever. I can quite well bear to remember that horrible prison"--as always when speaking of it, her lips whitened--"because no power on earth can ever put me back there again."

"I don't think it can do you any good to dwell on such memories," he persisted. "If you are wise you will forget them. No wonder your head aches if you dwell on such unpleasant things."

She looked at him more fully, and in her eyes he read something which baffled him.

"You are quite right--and delightfully sane and sensible," she said. "But as a matter of fact, I wasn't really thinking of the prison to-day. You see, this is the anniversary of my wedding day, and my thoughts were not altogether sad ones."

He looked at her, nonplussed for the moment, and suddenly Chloe's face softened.

"Dr. Anstice, forgive me. The fact is, I had a bad night, and am all on edge this morning."

"Why do you sit in here?" asked Anstice abruptly. "It is a lovely morning--the sun is warm and there's no wind. Why not go out into your charming garden? Lie in a low chair and sleep--or read some amusing book. Is this a particularly engrossing one?"

He picked up the volume she had laid down at his entrance, and she watched him with a faint hint of mockery in her blue eyes. His face changed as he read the title.

"De Quincey's _Confessions_! Mrs. Carstairs, you're not interested in this sort of thing?"

"Why not?" Her manner was ever so slightly antagonistic. "The subject is a fascinating one, isn't it? I confess I've often felt inclined to try opium--morphia or something of the sort, myself."

"Morphia?" His voice startled her by its harshness. "Don't make a joke of it, Mrs. Carstairs. If I thought you really meant that----"

"But I do--or did." She spoke coolly. "I even went so far as to purchase the means of indulging my fancy."

"You did? But--forgive me--why?"

"Don't we all sigh for oblivion now and then?" She put the question calmly, looking him squarely in the face the while. "I have always understood that morphia is one of the roads into Paradise--a Fool's Paradise, no doubt, but we poor wretches can't always choose our heavens."

"Nor our hells!" He still spoke vehemently. "Yes, there are times in all our lives when oblivion, forgetfulness, seems very desirable, very alluring. But let me entreat you, Mrs. Carstairs, not to seek to enter Paradise by that devil's key!"

Her almond-shaped eyes grew still more narrow as she looked at him.

"I wonder why you speak so impressively," she said slowly. "As a doctor doubtless you are _au fait_ in the subject, yet your vehemence seems to imply----" She paused.

"As a doctor I've seen enough of the havoc the opium fiend plays in the lives of men--and women," he said steadily, "to realize the danger that lies in the insidious habit. I have seen women--women like you"--he had no idea of sparing her--"young, of good position and all the rest of it, who have slid into the deadly thing on the flimsiest of pretexts--and then, too late, have realized they are bound--for life--with fetters which cannot be broken."

"Yet the deadly thing is fascinating, isn't it? Else why do so many fall under its sway?"

"Fascinating?" With an inward shudder Anstice recalled those months after Hilda Ryder's death--those horrible, chaotic months when, in a vain endeavour to stifle thought, to deaden remorse, he had invoked the aid of the poppy, and by so doing had almost precipitated a moral catastrophe which should have been more overwhelming than the first. "For God's sake, Mrs. Carstairs, don't become obsessed by that idea. The morphia habit is one degrading slavery of mind and body, and only the miserable victims know how delusive are its promises, how unsatisfactory its rewards. What can you expect from a cult whose highest reward--the only thing, indeed, it has to offer you, is--oblivion?"

Chloe Carstairs did not reply. Instead, she turned away and moved across the room to a small black escritoire which stood against the white wall. Bending down she opened it, and after pressing a spring, released what appeared to be a secret drawer. From this she lifted out a little packet wrapped in white paper and sealed with red wax, and holding it in her hand she came slowly back to where Anstice stood, made vaguely uncomfortable by her curious, almost secretive manner.

"Dr. Anstice"--she held out the packet--"will you take charge of this for me? It is the key--what you called the devil's key just now--to the Paradise I have never had the courage to enter."

Anstice took the little parcel from her with something of sternness in his face.

"Yes, Mrs. Carstairs. But what, exactly, is this thing?"

"An hypodermic syringe and a supply of morphia," she informed him tranquilly. Then, as he pursed his lips into an involuntary whistle, she went on, with more than a hint of mockery in her manner: "Oh, I came by it quite honestly, I assure you! I didn't steal it from a doctor's surgery--I bought it at a chemist's shop in London."

"You did?"

"Yes, and I made the young man show me how to use it." She smiled rather ironically. "Naturally I was ignorant in the matter, and I didn't want to make a blunder in its use."

"Really? Well, Mrs. Carstairs, this is your property, but I wish I might persuade you to leave it in my keeping for the present."

"You think it would be safer there?" She looked at him as though considering the matter. "Well, I wonder?"

"You wonder--what?" He spoke dryly.

"Whether it _is_ safer with you. Of course, as a doctor you can get plenty of your own----"

"I shan't be tempted to steal yours for my private use," said Anstice a trifle grimly; and the Fates who rule the lives of men probably smiled to themselves over the fatuity of mankind.

"Well, I gave it to you myself, so you may as well keep it," said Chloe indifferently, as though already tired of the subject; and without more ado Anstice slipped the little white packet into his pocket, and took leave of its former owner before she had opportunity to change her mind on the subject.

He could not dismiss the figure of Chloe Carstairs from his thoughts as he went about his day's work. Intuitively he knew that she was a bitterly unhappy woman, that her life, like his own, had been rent in two by a cataclysm of appalling magnitude, such as visits very few human beings, and he told himself that this woman, too, had been down in the depths even as he had been. And no man, no woman, who has once known the blackness of the abyss, that "outer darkness" in which the soul sits apart in a horror of loneliness, can ever view the world again with quite the clear-eyed vision of the normal human being to whom, fortunately for the sanity of the race, such appalling experiences are mercifully unknown.

On a morning a week later Anstice received a note from Mrs. Carstairs.

"Dear Dr. Anstice,"

"My brother has unexpectedly written to offer himself for a couple of nights, and I shall be pleased if you will come to dinner this evening at half-past seven to meet him. I have invited Miss Wayne, so please complete our quartette if you can."

"Sincerely,"

"Chloe Carstairs."

For some moments Anstice sat inwardly debating the question, the note in his hand.

He had no engagement for the evening. The people of Littlefield, puzzled, perhaps a little piqued, by the aloofness of his manner, rarely invited him to their houses in anything but his professional capacity, though they called upon his services in and out of season; and Sir Richard Wayne and Mr. Carey, the gentle, courtly Vicar of the parish, were the only two men with whom he ever enjoyed an hour's quiet chat over a soothing pipe or cigar.

So that there was no reason why he should hesitate to accept Chloe Carstairs' invitation for that particular evening, yet hesitate he did, unaccountably; and when, after fifteen minutes indecision, he suddenly scribbled and dispatched an acceptance, the messenger had barely gone from his presence before he felt an unreasoning impulse to recall the letter.

What lay at the bottom of his strange reluctance to enjoy Chloe's hospitality he had not the faintest notion. He had no special aversion to meeting her brother, nor was he in any way reluctant to improve his acquaintance with Iris Wayne.... Did his heart, indeed, beat just a shade faster at the thought of meeting her? Yet something seemed to whisper that this invitation was disastrous, that it would set in train events which might be overwhelming in their sequence.

He tried, vainly, to banish the faint premonition of evil which had fallen upon him when he realized it was too late to recall his acceptance. Throughout the day it persisted, and when at length he went to his room to dress for the evening, he felt a strong inclination to excuse himself over the telephone on the plea of an urgent call to whose importance he could not turn a deaf ear.

Such an excuse would, he knew, pass muster well enough. A doctor can rarely be depended upon, socially, and when he was dressed he went downstairs with the intention of ringing up Cherry Orchard and regretting his inability to make a fourth at Mrs. Carstairs' dinner-table that night.

Yet at the last moment Fate, or that other Higher Power of which we know too little to speak with any familiarity, intervened to restrain his impulse, and with a muttered imprecation at his own unusual vacillation he turned away from the telephone and went out to his waiting car impatiently.

Arriving at Cherry Orchard, the elderly manservant relieved him of his coat with a deferential smile.

"I think I'm a little late, Hagyard." Anstice glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. "Or perhaps your clock's a bit forward."

"I daresay it is, sir." Hagyard accepted the suggestion with well-trained alacrity. "Miss Wayne has only been here a moment or two."

He threw open the door as he spoke and Anstice entered the drawing-room with a sudden unwelcome return of his premonition strong upon him.

Yet the room, with its shaded lamps, small wood-fire, and latticed windows open to the sweet spring twilight, looked peaceful enough. As usual there were masses of flowers about, tulips, narcissi, anemones; and the atmosphere was fragrant as Anstice went forward to greet his hostess, who stood by one of the casements with her guests beside her.

She came towards him with her usual slow step, which never, for all its deliberation, suggested the languor of ill-health; and as he began to apologize for his late arrival she smiled away his apologies.

"You're not really late, Dr. Anstice, and in any case we should have given you a few minutes' grace."

She stood aside for him to greet Iris, and as he shook hands with the girl Anstice's heart gave a sudden throb of pleasure, which, for the moment, almost succeeded in banishing that uncanny premonition of evil which had come with him to the very gates of Cherry Orchard.

She was very simply dressed in a frock of filmy grey-green chiffon whose colour reminded him of the spiky leaves of a carnation; but he had never seen her look prettier than on that mild spring night; and his eyes unconsciously softened as they dwelt upon her face for one fleeting moment.

Then as Chloe's soft, deep voice, introducing her brother, stole on his ear, he turned to greet the other man; and instantly he realized, too late, the meaning of that presentiment of ill which had haunted him all day; understood why the inner, spiritual part of him had bidden him refuse Chloe Carstairs' invitation to Cherry Orchard that night.

For the man who turned leisurely from the window to greet the new-comer was the man whom he had last seen in a green-walled bedroom in an Indian hotel, the man whom, by a tragic error, he had robbed of the woman he loved, from whom he had parted with a mutual hope that their paths in life might never cross again.

* * * * *

Mrs. Carstairs' brother was the man whom Hilda Ryder had loved, Bruce Cheniston himself.

Chapter VI

As a rule the psychological moments of life come and go so quietly that their passing attracts little notice. Quite minor happenings give rise to demonstrations of excitement, of joy, of loudly voiced approbation or disappointment. But the moments which really matter in a life, which mark an epoch or destroy a dream, pass as a rule so quietly that only those whose dreams are shattered, or whose lives have been touched with the glory of the immortal, know that for a brief instant Time has become interchangeable with Eternity; that in the space of sixty fleeting seconds whole cycles of life have been lived through, and a vast and yawning gulf, in thought, in feeling, in spiritual growth or mental outlook, has opened to divide this moment from the one which directly preceded it.

Such a moment was this one in which the two men who were bound together by so tragic a link came face to face in Chloe Carstairs' drawing-room.

Each had been quite sincere in his dread of any future meeting; but whereas Bruce Cheniston had been the victim of as cruel a circumstance a