It was a cheerless February day, dark and slaty overhead, dusty below.  In the East End streets paper and straw, children’s curls, girls’ pinafores and women’s skirts were driven back and forward by a bitter wind; there was an ugly light on ugly houses, with none of that kind trickery of mist or smoke which can lend some grace on normal days even to Commercial Street, or to the network of lanes north of the Bethnal Green Road.  The pitiless wind swept the streets ­swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize upon their own.

In one of these side streets stood a house larger than its neighbours, in a bit of front garden, with some decrepit rust-bitten-railings between it and the road.  It was an old dwelling overtaken by the flood of tenement houses, which spread north, south, east, and west of it.  Its walls were no less grimy than its neighbours’; but its windows were outlined in cheerful white paint, firelight sparkled through its unshuttered panes, and a bright green door with a brass knocker completed its pleasant air.  There were always children outside the Vicarage railings on winter evenings, held there by the spell of the green door and the firelight.

Inside the firelit room to the left of the front pathway, two men were standing ­one of whom had just entered the house.

“My dear Penrose! ­how very good of you to come.  I know how frightfully busy you are.”

The man addressed put down his hat and stick, and hastily smoothed back some tumbling black hair which interfered with spectacled eyes already hampered by short sight.  He was a tall, lank, powerful fellow; anyone acquainted with the West-country would have known him for one of the swarthy, gray-eyed Cornish stock.

“I am pretty busy ­but your tale, Herbert, was a startler.  If I can help you ­or Barnes ­command me.  He is coming this afternoon?”

Herbert French pointed his visitor to a chair.

“Of course.  And another man ­whom I met casually, in Pall Mall this morning ­and had half an hour’s talk with ­an American naval officer ­an old acquaintance of Elsie’s ­Captain Boyson ­will join us also.  I met him at Harvard before our wedding, and liked him.  He has just come over with his sister for a short holiday, and I ran across him.”

“Is there any particular point in his joining us?”

Herbert French expounded.  Boyson had been an old acquaintance of Mrs. Roger Barnes before her marriage.  He knew a good deal about the Barnes story ­“feels, so I gathered, very strongly about it, and on the man’s side; and when I told him that Roger had just arrived and was coming to take counsel with you and me this afternoon, he suddenly asked if he might come, too.  I was rather taken aback.  I told him that we were going, of course, to consider the case entirely from the English point of view.  He still said, ‘Let me come; I may be of use to you.’  So I could only reply it must rest with Roger.  They’ll show him first into the dining-room.”

Penrose nodded.  “All right, as long as he doesn’t mind his national toes trampled upon.  So these are your new quarters, old fellow?”

His eyes travelled round the small book-lined room, with its shelves of poetry, history, and theology; its parish litter; its settle by the fire, on which lay a doll and a child’s picture-book; back to the figure of the new vicar, who stood, pipe in hand, before the hearth, clad in a shabby serge suit, his collar alone betraying him.  French’s white hair showed even whiter than of old above the delicately blanched face; from his natural slenderness and smallness the East End and its life had by now stripped every superfluous ounce; yet, ethereal as his aspect was, not one element of the Meredithian trilogy ­“flesh,” “blood,” or “spirit” ­was lacking in it.

“Yes, we’ve settled in,” he said quietly, as Penrose took stock.

“And you like it?”

“We do.”

The phrase was brief; nor did it seem to be going to lead to anything more expansive.  Penrose smiled.

“Well, now” ­he bent forward, with a professional change of tone ­“before he arrives, where precisely is this unhappy business?  I gather, by the way, that Barnes has got practically all his legal advice from the other side, though the solicitors here have been cooeperating?”

French nodded.  “I am still rather vague myself.  Roger only arrived from New York the day before yesterday.  His uncle, General Hobson, died a few weeks ago, and Roger came rushing home, as I understand, to see if he could make any ready money out of his inheritance.  Money, in fact, seems to be his chief thought.”

“Money?  What for?  Mrs. Barnes’s suit was surely settled long ago?”

“Oh, yes ­months ago.  She got her decree and the custody of the child in July.”

“Remind me of the details.  Barnes refused to plead?”

“Certainly.  By the advice of the lawyers on both sides, he refused, as an Englishman, to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Court.”

“But he did what he could to stop the thing?”

“Of course.  He rushed out after his wife as soon as he could trace where she had gone; and he made the most desperate attempts to alter her purpose.  His letters, as far as I could make them out, were heart-rending.  I very nearly went over to try and help him, but it was impossible to leave my work.  Mrs. Barnes refused to see him.  She was already at Sioux Falls, and had begun the residence necessary to bring her within the jurisdiction of the South Dakota Court.  Roger, however, forced one or two interviews with her ­most painful scenes! ­but found her quite immovable.  At the same time she was much annoyed and excited by the legal line that he was advised to take; and there was a moment when she tried to bribe him to accept the divorce and submit to the American court.”

“To bribe him!  With money?”

“No; with the child.  Beatty at first was hidden away, and Roger could find no traces of her.  But for a few weeks she was sent to stay with a Mrs. Verrier at Philadelphia, and Roger was allowed to see her, while Mrs. Barnes negotiated.  It was a frightful dilemma!  If he submitted, Mrs. Barnes promised that Beatty should go to him for two months every year; if not, and she obtained her decree, and the custody of the child, as she was quite confident of doing, he should never ­as far as she could secure it ­see Beatty again.  He too, foresaw that she would win her suit.  He was sorely tempted; but he stood firm.  Then before he could make up his mind what to do as to the child, the suit came on, Mrs. Barnes got her decree, and the custody of the little girl.”

“On the ground of ‘cruelty,’ I understand, and ’indignities’?”

French nodded.  His thin cheek flushed.

“And by the help of evidence that any liar could supply!”

“Who were her witnesses?”

“Beatty’s nurse ­one Agnes Farmer ­and a young fellow who had been employed on the decorative work at Heston.  There were relations between these two, and Roger tells me they have married lately, on a partnership bought by Mrs. Barnes.  While the work was going on at Heston the young man used to put up at an inn in the country town, and talk scandal at the bar.”

“Then there was some local scandal ­on the subject of Barnes and Mrs. Fairmile?”

“Possibly.  Scandal pour rire!  Not a soul believed that there was anything more in it than mischief on the woman’s side, and a kind of incapacity for dealing with a woman as she deserved, on the man’s.  Mrs. Fairmile has been an intrigante from her cradle.  Barnes was at one time deeply in love with her.  His wife became jealous of her after the marriage, and threw them together, by way of getting at the truth, and he shilly-shallied with the situation, instead of putting a prompt end to it, as of course he ought to have done.  He was honestly fond of his wife the whole time, and devoted to his home and his child.”

“Well, she didn’t plead, you say, anything more than ‘cruelty’ and ‘indignities’.  The scandal, such as it was, was no doubt part of the ’cruelty’?”

French assented.

“And you suspect that money played a great part in the whole transaction?”

“I don’t suspect ­the evidence goes a long way beyond that.  Mrs. Barnes bought the show!  I am told there are a thousand ways of doing it.”

Penrose smoked and pondered.

“Well, then ­what happened?  I imagine that by this time Barnes had not much affection left for his wife?”

“I don’t know,” said French, hesitating.  “I believe the whole thing was a great blow to him.  He was never passionately in love with her, but he was very fond of her in his own way ­increasingly fond of her ­up to that miserable autumn at Heston.  However, after the decree, his one thought was for Beatty.  His whole soul has been wrapped up in that child from the first moment she was put into his arms.  When he first realized that his wife meant to take her from him, Boyson tells me that he seemed to lose his head.  He was like a person unnerved and bewildered, not knowing how to act or where to turn.  First of all, he brought an action ­a writ of habeas corpus, I think ­to recover his daughter, as an English subject.  But the fact was he had put it off too long ­”

“Naturally,” said Penrose, with a shrug.  “Not much hope for him ­after the decree.”

“So he discovered, poor old fellow!  The action was, of course, obstructed and delayed in every way, by the power of Mrs. Barnes’s millions behind the scenes.  His lawyers told him plainly from the beginning that he had precious little chance.  And presently he found himself the object of a press campaign in some of the yellow papers ­all of it paid for and engineered by his wife.  He was held up as the brutal fortune-hunting Englishman, who had beguiled an American heiress to marry him, had carried her off to England to live upon her money, had then insulted her by scandalous flirtations with a lady to whom he had formerly been engaged, had shown her constant rudeness and unkindness, and had finally, in the course of a quarrel, knocked her down, inflicting shock and injury from which she had suffered ever since.  Mrs. Barnes had happily freed herself from him, but he was now trying to bully her through the child ­had, it was said, threatened to carry off the little girl by violence.  Mrs. Barnes went in terror of him.  America, however, would know how to protect both the mother and the child!  You can imagine the kind of thing.  Well, very soon Roger began to find himself a marked man in hotels, followed in the streets, persecuted by interviewers; and the stream of lies that found its way even into the respectable newspapers about him, his former life, his habits, etc., is simply incredible!  Unfortunately, he gave some handle ­”

French paused a moment.

“Ah!” said Penrose, “I have heard rumours.”

French rose and began to pace the room.

“It is a matter I can hardly speak of calmly,” he said at last.  “The night after that first scene between them, the night of her fall ­her pretended fall, so Roger told me ­he went downstairs in his excitement and misery, and drank, one way and another, nearly a bottle of brandy, a thing he had never done in his life before.  But ­”

“He has often done it since?”

French raised his shoulders sadly, then added, with some emphasis.  “Don’t, however, suppose the thing worse than it is.  Give him a gleam of hope and happiness, and he would soon shake it off.”

“Well, what came of his action?”

“Nothing ­so far.  I believe he has ceased to take any interest in it.  Another line of action altogether was suggested to him.  About three months ago he made an attempt to kidnap the child, and was foiled.  He got word that she had been taken to Charlestown, and he went there with a couple of private detectives.  But Mrs. Barnes was on the alert, and when he discovered the villa in which the child had been living, she had been removed.  It was a bitter shock and disappointment, and when he got back to New York in November, in the middle of an epidemic, he was struck down by influenza and pneumonia.  It went pretty hard with him.  You will be shocked by his appearance.  Ecco! was there ever such a story!  Do you remember, Penrose, what a magnificent creature he was that year he played for Oxford, and you and I watched his innings from the pavilion?”

There was a note of emotion in the tone which implied much.  Penrose assented heartily, remarking, however, that it was a magnificence which seemed to have cost him dear, if, as no doubt was the case, it had won him his wife.

“But now, with regard to money; you say he wants money.  But surely, at the time of the marriage, something was settled on him?”

“Certainly, a good deal.  But from the moment she left him, and the Heston bills were paid, he has never touched a farthing of it, and never will.”

“So that the General’s death was opportune?  Well, it’s a deplorable affair!  And I wish I saw any chance of being of use.”

French looked up anxiously.

“Because you know,” the speaker reluctantly continued, “there’s nothing to be done.  The thing’s finished.”

“Finished?” French’s manner took fire.  “And the law can do nothing!  Society can do nothing, to help that man either to right himself, or to recover his child?  Ah!” ­he paused to listen ­“here he is!”

A cab had drawn up outside.  Through the lightly curtained windows the two within saw a man descend from it, pay the driver, and walk up the flagged passage leading to the front door.

French hurried to greet the new-comer.

“Come in, Roger!  Here’s George Penrose ­as I promised you.  Sit down, old man.  They’ll bring us some tea presently.”

Roger Barnes looked round him for a moment without replying; then murmured something unintelligible, as he shook hands with Penrose, and took the chair which French pushed forward.  French stood beside him with a furrowed brow.

“Well, here we are, Roger! ­and if there’s anything whatever in this horrible affair where an English lawyer can help you, Penrose is your man.  You know, I expect, what a swell he is?  A K. C. after seven years ­lucky dog! ­and last year he was engaged in an Anglo-American case not wholly unlike yours ­Brown v. Brown.  So I thought of him as the best person among your old friends and mine to come and give us some private informal help to-day, before you take any fresh steps ­if you do take any.”

“Awfully good of you both.”  The speaker, still wrapped in his fur coat, sat staring at the carpet, a hand on each of his knees.  “Awfully good of you,” he repeated vaguely.

Penrose observed the new-comer.  In some ways Roger Barnes was handsomer than ever.  His colour, the pink and white of his astonishing complexion, was miraculously vivid; his blue eyes were infinitely more arresting than of old; and the touch of physical weakness in his aspect, left evidently by severe illness, was not only not disfiguring, but a positive embellishment.  He had been too ruddy in the old days, too hearty and splendid ­a too obvious and supreme king of men ­for our fastidious modern eyes.  The grief and misfortune which had shorn some of his radiance had given a more human spell to what remained.  At the same time the signs of change were by no means, all of them, easy to read, or reassuring to a friend’s eye.  Were they no more than physical and transient?

Penrose was just beginning on the questions which seemed to him important, when there was another ring at the front door.  French got up nervously, with an anxious look at Barnes.

“Roger!  I don’t know whether you will allow it, but I met an American acquaintance of yours to-day, and, subject to your permission, I asked him to join our conference.”

Roger raised his head ­it might have been thought, angrily.

“Who on earth ?”

“Captain Boyson?”

The young man’s face changed.

“I don’t mind him,” he said sombrely.  “He’s an awfully good sort.  He was in Philadelphia a few months ago, when I was.  He knows all about me.  It was he and his sister who introduced me to ­my wife.”

French left the room for a moment, and returned accompanied by a fair-haired, straight-shouldered man, whom he introduced to Penrose as Captain Boyson.

Roger rose from his chair to shake hands.

“How do you do, Boyson?  I’ve told them you know all about it.”  He dropped back heavily into his seat.

“I thought I might possibly put in a word,” said the new-comer, glancing from Roger to his friends.  “I trust I was not impertinent?  But don’t let me interrupt anything that was going on.”

On a plea of chill, Boyson remained standing by the fire, warming his hands, looking down upon the other three.  Penrose, who belonged to a military family, reminded himself, as he glanced at the American, of a recent distinguished book on Military Geography by a Captain Alfred Boyson.  No doubt the same man.  A capable face, ­the face of the modern scientific soldier.  It breathed alertness; but also some quality warmer and softer.  If the general aspect had been shaped and moulded by an incessant travail of brain, the humanity of eye and mouth spoke dumbly to the humanity of others.  The council gathered in the vicarage room felt itself strengthened.

Penrose resumed his questioning of Barnes, and the other two listened while the whole miserable story of the divorce, in its American aspects, unrolled.  At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife ­avoided naming her, indeed, as much as possible.

But when the tale was done he threw back his head with sudden animation and looked at Boyson.

“Is that about the truth, Boyson?  You know.”

“Yes, I endorse it,” said the American gravely.  His face, thin and tanned, had flushed while Barnes was speaking.

“And you know what all their papers said of me ­what they wished people to believe ­that I wasn’t fit to have charge of Beatty ­that I should have done her harm?”

His eyes sparkled.  He looked almost threateningly at the man whom he addressed.  Boyson met his gaze quietly.

“I didn’t believe it.”

There was a pause.  Then Roger sprang suddenly to his feet, confronting the men round him.

“Look here!” he said impatiently.  “I want some money at once ­and a good lot of it.”  He brought his fist down heavily on the mantelpiece.  “There’s this place of my uncle’s, and I’m dashed if I can get a penny out of it!  I went to his solicitors this morning.  They drove me mad with their red-tape nonsense.  It will take some time, they say, to get a mortgage on it, and meanwhile they don’t seem inclined to advance me anything, or a hundred or two, perhaps.  What’s that?  I lost my temper, and next time I go they’ll turn me out, I dare say.  But there’s the truth.  It’s money I want, and if you can’t help me to money it’s no use talking.”

“And when you get the money what’ll you do with it?” asked Penrose.

“Pay half a dozen people who can be trusted to help me kidnap Beatty and smuggle her over the Canadian frontier.  I bungled the thing once.  I don’t mean to bungle it again.”

The answer was given slowly, without any bravado, but whatever energy of life there was in the speaker had gone into it.

“And there is no other way?” French’s voice from the back was troubled.

“Ask him?” Roger pointed to Boyson.

“Is there any legal way, Boyson, in which I can recover the custody and companionship of my child?”

Boyson turned away.

“None that I know of ­and I have made every possible inquiry.”

“And yet,” said Barnes, with emphasis, addressing the English barrister, “by the law of England I am still Daphne’s husband and that child’s legal guardian?”

“Certainly.”

“And if I could once get her upon ground under the English flag, she would be mine again, and no power could take her from me?”

“Except the same private violence that you yourself propose to exercise.”

“I’d take care of that!” said Roger briefly.

“How do you mean to do it?” asked French, with knit brows.  To be sitting there in an English vicarage plotting violence against a woman disturbed him.

“He and I’ll manage it,” said the quiet voice of the American officer.

The others stared.

“You?” said French.  “An officer in active service?  It might injure your career!”

“I shall risk it.”

A charming smile broke on Penrose’s meditative face.

“My dear French, this is much more amusing than the law.  But I don’t quite see where I come in.”  He rose tentatively from his seat.

Boyson, however, did not smile.  He looked from one to the other.

“My sister and I introduced Daphne Floyd to Barnes,” he said steadily, “and it is my country, as I hold, ­or a portion of it ­that allows these villainies.  Some day we shall get a great reaction in the States, and then the reforms that plenty of us are clamouring for will come about.  Meanwhile, as of course you know” ­he addressed French ­“New Yorkers and Bostonians suffer almost as much from the abomination that Nevada and South Dakota call laws, as Barnes has suffered.  Marriage in the Eastern States is as sacred as with you ­South Carolina allows no divorce at all ­but with this licence at our gates, no one is safe, and thousands of our women, in particular ­for the women bring two-thirds of the actions ­are going to the deuce, simply because they have the opportunity of going.  And the children ­it doesn’t bear thinking of!  Well ­no good haranguing!  I’m ashamed of my country in this matter ­I have been for a long time ­and I mean to help Barnes out, coûte que coûte!  And as to the money, Barnes, you and I’ll discuss that.”

Barnes lifted a face that quivered, and he and Boyson exchanged looks.

Penrose glanced at the pair.  That imaginative power, combined with the power of drudgery, which was in process of making a great lawyer out of a Balliol scholar, showed him something typical and dramatic in the two figures: ­in Boyson, on the one hand, so lithe, serviceable, and resolved, a helpful, mercurial man, ashamed of his country in this one respect, because he adored her in so many others, penitent and patriot in one: ­in Barnes, on the other, so heavy, inert, and bewildered, a ship-wrecked suppliant as it were, clinging to the knees of that very America which had so lightly and irresponsibly wronged him.

It was Penrose who broke the silence.

“Is there any chance of Mrs. Barnes’s marrying again?” he asked.

Barnes turned to him.

“Not that I know of.”

“There’s no one else in the case?”

“I never heard of anyone.”  Roger gave a short, excited laugh.  “What she’s done, she’s done because she was tired of me, not because she was in love with anyone else.  That was her great score in the divorce case ­that there was nobody.”

Biting and twisting his lip, in a trick that recalled to French the beautiful Eton lad, cracking his brains in pupil-room over a bit of Latin prose, Roger glanced, frowning, from one to the other of these three men who felt for him, whose resentment of the wrong that had been done him, whose pity for his calamity showed plainly enough through their reticent speech.

His sense, indeed, of their sympathy began to move him, to break down his own self-command.  No doubt, also, the fatal causes that ultimately ruined his will-power were already at work.  At any rate, he broke out into sudden speech about his case.  His complexion, now unhealthily delicate, like the complexion of a girl, had flushed deeply.  As he spoke he looked mainly at French.

“There’s lots of things you don’t know,” he said in a hesitating voice, as though appealing to his old friend.  And rapidly he told the story of Daphne’s flight from Heston.  Evidently since his return home many details that were once obscure had become plain to him; and the three listeners could perceive how certain new information had goaded, and stung him afresh.  He dwelt on the letters which had reached him during his first week’s absence from home, after the quarrel ­letters from Daphne and Miss Farmer, which were posted at intervals from Heston by their accomplice, the young architect, while the writers of them were hurrying across the Atlantic.  The servants had been told that Mrs. Barnes, Miss Farmer, and the little girl were going to London for a day or two, and suspected nothing.  “I wrote long letters ­lots of them ­to my wife.  I thought I had made everything right ­not that there ever had been anything wrong, you understand, ­seriously.  But in some ways I had behaved like a fool.”

He threw himself back in his chair, pressing his hands on his eyes.  The listeners sat or stood motionless.

“Well, I might have spared my pains.  The letters were returned to me from the States.  Daphne had arranged it all so cleverly that I was some time in tracing her.  By the time I had got to Sioux Falls she was through a month of her necessary residence.  My God!” ­his voice dropped, became almost inaudible ­“if I’d only carried Beatty off then! ­then and there ­the frontier wasn’t far off ­without waiting for anything more.  But I wouldn’t believe that Daphne could persist in such a monstrous thing, and, if she did, that any decent country would aid and abet her.”

Boyson made a movement of protest, as though he could not listen any longer in silence.

“I am ashamed to remind you, Barnes, ­again ­that your case is no worse than that of scores of American citizens.  We are the first to suffer from our own enormities.”

“Perhaps,” said Barnes absently, “perhaps.”

His impulse of speech dropped.  He sat, drearily staring into the fire, absorbed in recollection.

Penrose had gone.  So had Boyson.  Roger was sitting by the fire in the vicar’s study, ministered to by Elsie French and her children.  By common consent the dismal subject of the day had been put aside.  There was an attempt to cheer and distract him.  The little boy of four was on his knee, declaiming the “Owl and the Pussy Cat,” while Roger submissively turned the pages and pointed to the pictures of that immortal history.  The little girl of two, curled up on her mother’s lap close by, listened sleepily, and Elsie, applauding and prompting as a properly regulated mother should, was all the time, in spirit, hovering pitifully about her guest and his plight.  There was in her, as in Boyson, a touch of patriotic remorse; and all the pieties of her own being, all the sacred memories of her own life, combined to rouse in her indignation and sympathy for Herbert’s poor friend.  The thought of what Daphne Barnes had done was to her a monstrosity hardly to be named.  She spoke to the young man kindly and shyly, as though she feared lest any chance word might wound him; she was the symbol, in her young motherliness, of all that Daphne had denied and forsaken.  “When would America ­dear, dear America! ­see to it that such things were made impossible!”

Roger meanwhile was evidently cheered and braced.  The thought of the interview to which Boyson had confidentially bidden him on the morrow ran warmly in his veins, and the children soothed him.  The little boy especially, who was just Beatty’s age, excited in him a number of practical curiosities.  How about the last teeth?  He actually inserted a coaxing and inquiring finger, the babe gravely suffering it.  Any trouble with them?  Beatty had once been very ill with hers, at Philadelphia, mostly caused, however, by some beastly, indigestible food that the nurse had let her have.  And they allowed her to sit up much too late.  Didn’t Mrs. French think seven o’clock was late enough for any child not yet four?  One couldn’t say that Beatty was a very robust child, but healthy ­oh yes, healthy! ­none of your sickly, rickety little things.

The curtains had been closed.  The street children, the electric light outside, were no longer visible.  Roger had begun to talk of departure, the baby had fallen fast asleep in her mother’s arms, when there was another loud ring at the front door.

French, who was expecting the headmaster of his church schools, gathered up some papers and left the room.  His wife, startled by what seemed an exclamation from him in the hall outside, raised her head a moment to listen; but the sound of voices ­surely a woman’s voice? ­died abruptly away, and the door of the dining-room closed.  Roger heard nothing; he was laughing and crooning over the boy.

    “The Pobble that lost his toes
    Had once as many as we.”

The door opened.  Herbert stood on the threshold beckoning to her.  She rose in terror, the child in her arms, and went out to him.  In a minute she reappeared in the doorway, her face ashen-white, and called to the little boy.  He ran to her, and Roger rose, looking for the hat he had put down on entering.

Then French came in, and behind him a lady in black, dishevelled, bathed in tears.  The vicar hung back.  Roger turned in astonishment.

“Mother!  You here?  Mother!” ­he hurried to her ­“what’s the matter?”

She tottered toward him with outstretched hands.

“Oh Roger, Roger!”

His name died away in a wail as she clasped him.

“What is it, mother?”

“It’s Beatty ­my son! ­my darling Roger!” She put up her hands piteously, bending his head down to her.  “It’s a cable from Washington, from that woman, Mrs. Verrier.  They did everything, Roger ­it was only three days ­and hopeless always.  Yesterday convulsion came on ­and this morning ­” Her head dropped against her son’s breast as her voice failed her.  He put her roughly from him.

“What are you talking of, mother!  Do you mean that Beatty has been ill?”

“She died last night.  Roger ­my darling son ­my poor Roger!”

“Died ­last night ­Beatty?”

French in silence handed him the telegram.  Roger disengaged himself and walked to the fireplace, standing motionless, with his back to them, for a minute, while they held their breaths.  Then he began to grope again for his hat, without a word.

“Come home with me, Roger!” implored his mother, pursuing him.  “We must bear it ­bear it together.  You see ­she didn’t suffer” ­she pointed to the message ­“the darling! ­the darling!”

Her voice lost itself in tears.  But Roger brushed her away, as though resenting her emotion, and made for the door.

French also put out a hand.

“Roger, dear, dear old fellow!  Stay here with us ­with your mother.  Where are you going?”

Roger looked at his watch unsteadily.

“The office will be closed,” he said to himself; “but I can put some things together.”

“Where are you going, Roger?” cried Lady Barnes, pursuing him.  Roger faced her.

“It’s Tuesday.  There’ll be a White Star boat to-morrow.”

“But, Roger, what can you do?  She’s gone, dear ­she’s gone.  And before you can get there ­long before ­she will be in her grave.”

A spasm passed over his face, into which the colour rushed.  Without another word he wrenched himself from her, opened the front door, and ran out into the night.