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“We had no roses at our wedding,” he said, still absently; “but there are roses at Christmas.” He raised his hand to the white flowers she wore, and touched them softly. “White roses, too, for a wedding,” he said.

“Good night!” she said again.

“And you will go to your mother to-morrow by the 9.17 train, or the 10.5, if the trains run the same as on Sunday. And I am to forgive you, and shake hands before we part. Well, well!”

He took the hand she held out, caught the other, and stood holding them, his grey eyes seeking hers. Her head thrown back, her hands stretched out, she looked at him from arm’s length.

“Dear!” he said.

A mute glance questioned him. Then lashes longer than Sylvia’s veiled the dark eyes.

He spoke again. “Dear!”

“You know you hate me,” she said.

He raised her hands to his lips.

“Have you forgotten Sylvia?”

“Absolutely, thank God! And you—I—after all, we are married, though there were no roses at our June wedding.”

Again her eyes questioned mutely.


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He leaned forward and touched the Christmas roses with his lips. Then he dropped her hands and caught her by the shoulders.

“Oh! foolish, foolish, foolish people!” he said. “We two are man and wife. My wife! my wife! my wife! We are, aren’t we?”

“I suppose we are,” she said, and her face leaned a little towards his.

“Well, then!” said he.

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Feb., 1885. parties. But where the interested party is the wealthiest and most powerful class, able to pay for “patriotic” articles by the yard, and “patriotic” speeches by the hour, “patriotism” is apt to assume the form of a chronic endemic. Such it is to-day, and as such, mocks the futile efforts of the well-meaning but singularly ingenious clique of middle-class philanthropists, who are naïve enough to take the governmental ring at its word when it pretends its only object in undertaking “expeditions” to be the rescue of “Christian heroes” or the relief of garrisons, which have no right to be in a position to want relieving. War, jingoism—otherwise patriotism—are indeed past cure while the economic basis of society remains unchanged, but only so far; and hence we call on all sincere friends of peace to leave their tinkering “peace societies” and join our Socialist League, remembering that all commercial wars—and what modern wars are not directly or indirectly commercial?—are the necessary outcome of the dominant civilisation. We conjure them to reflect that such wars must necessarily increase in proportion to the concentration of capital in private hands—i.e., in proportion as the commercial activity of the world is intensified, and the need for markets becomes more pressing. Markets, markets, markets! Who shall deny that this is the drone-bass ever welling up from beneath the shrill bawling of “pioneers of civilisation,” “avengers of national honour,” “purveyors of gospel light,” “restorers of order;” in short, beneath the hundred and one cuckoo cries with which the “market classes” seek to smother it or to vary its monotony? It seems well-nigh impossible there can be men so blind as not to see through these sickening hypocrises of the governing classes, so thin as they are.

But we would, above all, earnestly urge the workers in future to consider “patriotism” from this point of view. The end of all foreign policy, as of colonial extension, is to provide fields for the relief of native surplus capital and merchandise, and to keep out the foreigner. But how, we ask, does this benefit the workers at the best? They are allowed, maybe, the privilege of being shipped across seas, there to help to make the capitalist and land-grabber rich. Some few here and there may, indeed, succeed, in a colony which is quite new, in becoming wealthy exploiters in their turn. But the immense majority remain wage-slaves as before. In proportion to the advancing prosperity of the colony—as prosperity is conceived in the world of to-day—is its poverty. Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco, Chicago, and the leading Australian and new American cities generally, exhibit pre the same conditions as the cities of the Old World. And how it be otherwise, since the same causes are at work? To crown dependencies like India, which are held unblushingly as magazines for aristocratic and middle classes to plunder at their will, it is only  to barely allude in a socialist journal.

This, then, is the empire which the blood and sinew of the workers are squandered to maintain and extend. With room enough and to in the Irish Islands for all their inhabitants to live a comfortable life, ever fresh lands are sought for exploitation, ever now populations for pillage. It matters not even that colonies established could accommodate more than a hundred times their present inhabitants; still the vampire Imperialism sucks in fresh territory year by year. Populations to rob and enslave; markets to shoot bad wares into; lands to invest capital upon: to obtain these is the be-all and end-all of modern statesmanship. For this has the stock-jobbers' republic of France waged war successfully on Tunis, Madagascar, Tonquin, and China; for this does the congress sit at Berlin, partitioning the plunder of Central Africa in advance; for this does Bismarck seize Angra Pequena, New Ireland, and Samoa; for this the fanatic and heroic restorer of corrupt Chinese despotism reluctantly (?) consents to go to Khartoum on a pacific mission, collects a body of adventurers on his arrival, proceeds to attack the surrounding tribes, and then howls for British troops to protect him; for this, lastly, is Lord Wolseley sent with an expedition in response up the Nile.

And now a word as to the attitude of socialists toward the imperial question. For the socialist the word frontier does not exist; for his love of country, as such, is no nobler sentiment than love of class. The blustering “patriot,” big with England's glory, is precisely on a level with the bloated plutocrat, proud to belong to that great “middle class,” which he assures you is “the backbone of the nation.” Race-pride and class-pride are, from the standpoint of socialism, involved in the same condemnation. The establishment of socialism, therefore, on any national or race basis is out of the question. Tall talk about the “Anglo-Saxon race,” or “the great democracies of English-speaking peoples, in union with the more ancient democracy of England,” by combination and determined effort securing for themselves “the leadership in the social changes and reforms (sic) which are close at hand,” can but disgust the socialist who is at once logical and honest.

No, the foreign policy of the great internationalist socialist party must be to break up these hideous race monopolies called, beginning in each case at home. Hence everything which for the disruption and disintegration of the empire to which he belongs must be welcomed by the socialist as an ally. It is his duty to urge on any movement tending in any way to dislocate commercial relations of the world, knowing that every shock the mplex commercial system suffers weakens it and brings its  nearer. This is the negative side of the foreign policy of. The positive is embraced in a single sentence: to con the union of the several national sections on the basis of firm friendship, steadfast adherence to definite principle, and  to present a solid front to the enemy. E. BELFORT BAX

When a cause or a man is caricatured, there is hope for the cause or the man. Our cause has made enough stir in the stagnant and noisome pool of modern society to have reached even Punch. Nearly half a column of that decourously-dull periodical (Jan. 17th) containing one lonely joke, is devoted to the unconscious propaganda of our principles.

The same number contains a picture of the “middle-man sucking the life out of the hare”—what think you? The hare Proletariat? Nay, truly. The hare Free Trade. Think of the imagery, workers!

If Mr. Punch could read the signs of any other Times than that of Printing House Square, he would make his worn-out hare, the Worker, run to death by the greyhound Capital; for his middle-man whose foot rests on Profit, he would have Society itself; and the rising sun, labelled Trade, would be the sun of International Organisation of the working classes.

Two prices of 5 each have been offered for competition (loathsome word!) among the students under the University Settlement Scheme at Toynbee Hall, Cambridge Street, E. One is for an Essay on Sir Thomas More. The other is on “The Possibilities Productive Co-operation as a Solution of the Labour Question.” Among the books recommended to the competitors for the latter  Sedley Taylor's “Profit Sharing,” Henry George's “Progress and Poverty,” Ferdinand Lassalle's “Working Men's Programme;” Rob Owen's Report.

“An anthropologist,” writing in the Pall Mall, puts forward the vi arrived at, he states, after a wide study of the habits and constitution of aboriginal races, that the cause of the decadence and extinction of such races lines not so much in zymotic diseases or alcohol as in the unnatural clothing forced upon them by the missionary and trade. An earnest appeal is made in the connexion on behalf of the rude Papuan, an appeal which we fear has little chance against the laws commercial greed and swindling which form “civilisation.” The cruelty which forces tropical and sub-tropical races to sheathe themselves in European “shoddy,” as the “anthropologist” himself admits, is the necessary outcome of the “opening up” of their lands to that commercial enterprise of which the missionary is but the “religious” exponent.

Among this month's “protectorate” is one over the coast- Pondoland. The course;  like it. They are, ever, assured by the leading Lateral organ that the English Government is acting quite within its rights; that a “protectorate”  necessarily means annexation, &c., &c. The project was one the hearts of so many “civilisers and Christianisers” of savag of all times and of all countries. It is now adopted by the Government which has hitherto professed a lofty superiority to such ideas.

“Self-supporting Penny Diners” is one of the latest contradictions in which our middle-class philanthropists are indulging. The report of the meetings of a few of these “friends” of the poor on January 19th is sorry reading. “No unusual distress,” cry some of them, without a word of comment on the frightful condition of things that makes the distress existing “usual.” “Distress decidedly greater than usual,” whisper others.

There is a desire to keep out the pauperising element, of course, and, equally of course, and far more logically, a tendency to “convert the penny dinners into meals provided gratis.” The “desire” apparently is that of the philanthropists. The “tendency” is that of social evolution.

After all this report on the lines of that essentially bourgeois institution, the Charity Organisation Society, it is refreshing to hear that a Conference on “How to Improve the Condition of the Poor” was held Clerkwell on January 20th. Resolutions strongly condemning the actions of the Society, whose name is its condemnation, were passed.

“Fluctuations of Trade” is a fluid sort of phrase that covers a multitude of ignorances. This is, according to the capitalist press, the phrase in examination of the distress that is now stalking through the land.

Yet for one word of warning from the user of the phrase we should be grateful. To say that the perennial distress, with its occasional exacerbations, is even temporarily remediable by the Government finding work for the people, is to mislead.

“If the Socialistic dream is ever to be realised, it must be establishing such a complete re-organisation of society as can only be achieved by a long and laborious process.”—Weekly Dispatch, Jan. 18.


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 thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.

No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers at such an hour on such a road.

The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.


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Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the coping stones, orange wallflowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping—had fallen within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.

To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall’s denial had seemed absolute, unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid, showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance—a menace. But the thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell rustling on to the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a cat’s, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Then


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 he rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the sudden grasping of the rough stones, and sat astride on the wall.

He parted the leafy boughs and looked down; below him lay the stones that had fallen from the wall—already grass was growing upon the mound they made. As he ventured his head beyond the green leafage, the level light of the sinking sun struck him in the eyes. It was like a blow. He dropped softly from the wall and stood in the shadow of the tree—looking, listening.

Before him stretched the park—wide and still; dotted here and there with trees, and overlaid with gold poured from the west. He held his breath and listened. There was no wind to stir the leaves to those rustlings which may deceive and disconcert the keenest and the boldest; only the sleepy twitter of birds, and the little sudden soft movements of them in the dusky privacy of the thick-leaved branches. There was in all the broad park no sign of any other living thing.

The thief trod softly along under the wall where the trees were thickest, and at every step he paused to look and listen.

It was quite suddenly that he came upon


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 the little lodge near the great gates of wrought iron with the marble gate-posts bearing upon them the two gaunt griffins, the cognisance of the noble house whose lands these were. The thief drew back into the shadow and stood still, only his heart beat thickly. He stood still as the tree trunk beside him, looking, listening. He told himself that he heard nothing—saw nothing—yet he became aware of things. That the door of the lodge was not closed, that some of its windows were broken, and that into its little garden straw and litter had drifted from the open door: and that between the stone step and the threshold grass was growing inches high. When he was aware of this he stepped forward and entered the lodge. All the sordid sadness of a little deserted home met him here—broken crocks and bent pans, straw, old rags, and a brooding, dusty stillness.

“There has been no one here since the old keeper died. They told the truth,” said the thief; and he made haste to leave the lodge, for there was nothing in it now that any man need covet—only desolation and the memory of death.

So he went slowly among the trees, and


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 by devious ways drew a little nearer to the great house that stood in its walled garden in the middle of the park. From very far off, above the green wave of trees that broke round it, he could see the towers of it rising black against the sunset; and between the trees came glimpses of its marble white where the faint grey light touched it from the east.

Moving slowly—vigilant, alert, with eyes turning always to right and to left, with ears which felt the intense silence more acutely than they could have felt any tumult—the thief reached the low wall of the garden, at the western side. The last redness of the sunset’s reflection had lighted all the many windows, and the vast place blazed at him for an instant before the light dipped behind the black bar of the trees, and left him face to face with a pale house, whose windows now were black and hollow, and seemed like eyes that watched him. Every window was closed; the lower ones were guarded by jalousies; through the glass of the ones above he could see the set painted faces of the shutters.

From far off he had heard, and known, the plash-plash of fountains, and now he saw their white changing columns rise and fall


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 against the background of the terrace. The garden was full of rose bushes trailing and unpruned; and the heavy, happy scent of the roses, still warm from the sun, breathed through the place, exaggerating the sadness of its tangled desolation. Strange figures gleamed in the deepening dusk, but they were too white to be feared. He crept into a corner where Psyche drooped in marble, and, behind her pedestal, crouched. He took food from his pockets and ate and drank. And between the mouthfuls he listened and watched.

The moon rose, and struck a pale fire from the face of the house and from the marble limbs of the statues, and the gleaming water of the fountains drew the moonbeams into the unchanging change of its rise and fall.

Something rustled and stirred among the roses. The thief grew rigid: his heart seemed suddenly hollow; he held his breath. Through the deepening shadows something gleamed white; and not marble, for it moved, it came towards him. Then the silence of the night was shattered by a scream, as the white shape glided into the moonlight. The thief resumed his munching, and another shape glimmered after the first. “Curse the


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 beasts!” he said, and took another draught from his bottle, as the white peacocks were blotted out by the shadows of the trees, and the stillness of the night grew more intense.

In the moonlight the thief went round and about the house, pushing through the trailing briers that clung to him—and now grown bolder he looked closely at doors and windows. But all were fast barred as the doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.

There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing branches.

At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it; leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then climbing, creeping, swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next—swift, assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the last


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 tree—and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window with its leaves.

He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken, but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood, flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid wood of its floor.

He took out his thief’s lantern—high and slender like a tall cup—lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.

And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were spacious and empty—his lantern’s yellow light flashing into their corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was the house, that presently it seemed


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 to the thief that for many hours he had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs, opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke ever more insistently in his ears.

“But it is as he told me,” he said inwardly: “no living soul in all the place. The old man—a servant of this great house—he told me; he knew, and I have found all even as he said.”

Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself speaking in a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.

“The old man said it would be thus—all emptiness, and not profit to a man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! how our good deeds come home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town—how the great man had not gone, but lived here in hiding It is not possible. There is the silence of death in this house.”


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He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed to press upon him like a solid thing. “It is like a dead man on one’s shoulders,” thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and whispered again: “The old man said, ‘The door with the carved griffin, and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its heart.’”

With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of moonlight down the corridor.

And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.

And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were large and


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 lofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored—but these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the thief’s skill and craft, may come to be his.

He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed. He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving of chairs and presses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad sideboards flashed back to his lantern’s questionings the faint white laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve, suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed


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 between him and the poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a consoler, a friend.

And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble family—these were companions after his own heart.

He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head. The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour—not in unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow bar of the lantern’s light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table, and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang


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 the gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of this concentrated splendour.

He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand—the wax dripped warm over his fingers as he went—lighting one after another, the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight. Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass—wonderful, gleaming, iridescent.

The thief dropped the candle and threw his arms wide with a gesture of supreme longing.

“If I could carry it all away! All, all! Every beautiful thing! To sell some—the less beautiful, and to live with the others all my days!”

And now a madness came over the thief.


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 It has been owing in part to the great prosperity of almost every part of the country, the rents of almost all the estates of Great Britain having, since the time when this valuation was first established, been continually rising, and scarce any of them having fallen. The landlords, therefore, have almost all gained the difference between the tax which they would have paid, according to the present rent of their estates, and that which they actually pay according to the ancient valuation. Had the state of the country been different, had rents been gradually falling in consequence of the declension of cultivation, the landlords would almost all have lost this difference. In the state of things which has happened to take place since the revolution, the constancy of the valuation has been advantageous to the landlord and hurtful to the sovereign. In a different state of things it might have been advantageous to the sovereign and hurtful to the landlord.

As the tax is made payable in money, so the valuation of the land is expressed in money. Since the establishment of this valuation the value of silver has been pretty uniform, and there has been no alteration in the standard of the coin either as to weight or fineness. Had silver risen considerably in its value, as it seems to have done in the course of the two centuries which preceded the discovery of the mines of America, the constancy of the valuation might have proved very oppressive to the landlord. Had silver fallen considerably in its value, as it certainly did for about a century at least after the discovery of those mines, the same constancy of valuation would have reduced very much this branch of the revenue of the sovereign. Had any considerable alteration been made in the standard of the money, either by sinking the same quantity


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 So little a part of all these things could he bear away with him; yet all were his—his for the taking—even the huge carved presses and the enormous vases of solid silver, too heavy for him to lift—even these were his: had he not found them—he, by his own skill and cunning? He went about in the rooms, touching one after the other the beautiful, rare things. He caressed the gold and the jewels. He threw his arms round the great silver vases; he wound round himself the heavy red velvet of the curtain where the griffins gleamed in embossed gold, and shivered with pleasure at the soft clinging of its embrace. He found, in a tall cupboard, curiously-shaped flasks of wine, such wine as he had never tasted, and he drank of it slowly—in little sips—from a silver goblet and from a green Venice glass, and from a cup of rare pink china, knowing that any one of his drinking vessels was worth enough to keep him in idleness for a long year. For the thief had learnt his trade, and it is a part of a thief’s trade to know the value of things.

He threw himself on the rich couches, sat in the stately carved chairs, leaned his elbows on the ebony tables. He buried his hot


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 face in the chill, smooth linen of the great bed, and wondered to find it still scented delicately as though some sweet woman had lain there but last night. He went hither and thither laughing with pure pleasure, and making to himself an unbridled carnival of the joys of possession.

In this wise the night wore on, and with the night his madness wore away. So presently he went about among the treasures—no more with the eyes of a lover, but with the eyes of a Jew—and he chose those precious stones which he knew for the most precious, and put them in the bag he had brought, and with them some fine-wrought goldsmith’s work and the goblet out of which he had drunk the wine. Though it was but of silver, he would not leave it. The green Venice glass he broke and the cup, for he said: “No man less fortunate than I, to-night, shall ever again drink from them.” But he harmed nothing else of all the beautiful things, because he loved them.

Then, leaving the low, uneven ends of the candles still alight, he turned to the door by which he had come in. There were two doors, side by side, carved with straight lilies, and between them a panel


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 wrought with the griffin and the seven roses enwreathed. He pressed his finger in the heart of the seventh rose, hardly hoping that the panel would move, and indeed it did not; and he was about to seek for a secret spring among the lilies, when he perceived that one of the doors wrought with these had opened itself a little. So he passed through it and closed it after him.

“I must guard my treasures,” he said. But when he had passed through the door and closed it, and put out his hand to raise the tattered tapestry that covered it from without, his hand met the empty air, and he knew that he had not come out by the door through which he had entered.

When the lantern was lighted, it showed him a vaulted passage, whose floor and whose walls were stone, and there was a damp air and a mouldering scent in it, as of a cellar long unopened. He was cold now, and the room with the wine and the treasures seemed long ago and far away, though but a door and a moment divided him from it, and though some of the wine was in his body, and some of the treasure in his hands. He set about to find the


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 way to the quiet night outside, for this seemed to him a haven and a safeguard since, with the closing of that door, he had shut away warmth, and light, and companionship. He was enclosed in walls once more, and once more menaced by the invading silence that was almost a presence. Once more it seemed to him that he must creep softly, must hold his breath before he ventured to turn a corner—for always he felt that he was not alone, that near him was something, and that its breath, too, was held.

So he went by many passages and stairways, and could find no way out; and after a long time of searching he crept by another way back to come unawares on the door which shut him off from the room where the many lights were, and the wine and the treasure. Then terror leaped out upon him from the dark hush of the place, and he beat on the door with his hands and cried aloud, till the echo of his cry in the groined roof cowed him back into silence.

Again he crept stealthily by strange passages, and again could find no way except, after much wandering, back to the door where he had begun.


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And now the fear of death beat in his brain with blows like a hammer. To die here like a rat in a trap, never to see the sun alight again, never to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern, but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed round the dead body of him.

“I had better have been born a fool,” said the thief.

Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.

Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain the fear of death beating like a hammer.

It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the insistent silence, that he saw at last


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 a light—and it was the light of day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was morning, then, and he was a free man.

He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it—a courtyard where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on them.

As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day, and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely overhead.

As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He


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 started back and looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman’s hair. And just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman’s hands, and her golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.

The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down the steps and through the maze of vaulted passages—fled in the dark, and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure, and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his lantern and with all his thief’s craft to find the way out, and had sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the dewy park.

He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a twisted ribbon over the


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 great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.


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 of silver to a lower denomination, or by raising it to a higher; had an ounce of silver, for example, instead of being coined into five shillings and twopence, been coined, either into pieces which bore so low a denomination as two shillings and sevenpence, or into pieces which bore so high a one as ten shillings and fourpence, it would in one case have hurt the revenue of the proprietor, in the other that of the sovereign.

In circumstances, therefore, somewhat different from those which have actually taken place, this constancy of valuation might have been a very great inconvenience, either to the contributors or to the commonwealth. In the course of ages such circumstances, however, must, at some time or other, happen. But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality. Every constitution, therefore, which it is meant should be as permanent as the empire itself, ought to be convenient, not in certain circumstances only, but in all circumstances; or ought to be suited, not to those circumstances which are transitory, occasional or accidental, but to those which are necessary, and therefore always the same.

A tax upon the rent of land which varies with every variation of the rent, or which rises and falls according to the improvement or neglect of cultivation, is recommended by that sect of men of letters in France, who call themselves the Economists, as the most equitable of all taxes. All taxes, they pretend, fall ultimately upon the rent of land, and ought therefore to be imposed equally upon the fund which must finally pay them. That all taxes ought to fall as equally as possible upon the fund which must finally pay them, is certainly true. But without entering


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 into the disagreeable discussion of the metaphysical arguments by which they support their very ingenious theory, it will sufficiently appear, from the following review, what are the taxes which fall finally upon the rent of the land, and what are those which fall finally upon some other fund.

In the Venetian territory all the arable lands which are given in lease to farmers are taxed at a tenth of the rent.

The leases are recorded in a public register which is kept by the officers of revenue in each province or district. When the proprietor cultivates his own lands, they are valued according to an equitable estimation, and he is allowed a deduction of one-fifth of the tax, so that for such lands he pays only eight instead of ten per cent of the supposed rent.

A land tax of this kind is certainly more equal than the land tax of England. It might not, perhaps, be altogether so certain, and the assessment of the tax might frequently occasion a good deal more trouble to the landlord. It might, too, be a good deal more expensive in the levying.

Such a system of administration, however, might perhaps be contrived as would, in a great measure, both prevent this uncertainty and moderate this expense.

The landlord and tenant, for example, might jointly be obliged to record their lease in a public register. Proper penalties might be enacted against concealing or misrepresenting any of the conditions; and if part of those penalties were to be paid to either of the two parties who informed against and convicted the other of such concealment or misrepresentation, it would effectually deter them from combining together in order to defraud the public revenue. All


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 the conditions of the lease might be sufficiently known from such a record.

Some landlords, instead of raising the rent, take a fine for the renewal of the lease. This practice is in most cases the expedient of a spendthrift, who for a sum of ready money sells his future revenue of much greater value. It is in most cases, therefore, hurtful to the landlord. It is frequently hurtful to the tenant, and it is always hurtful to the community. It frequently takes from the tenant so great a part of his capital, and thereby diminishes so much his ability to cultivate the land, that he finds it more difficult to pay a small rent than it would otherwise have been to pay a great one. Whatever diminishes his ability to cultivate necessarily keeps down, below what it would otherwise have been, the most important part of the revenue of the community. By rendering the tax upon such fines a good deal heavier than upon the ordinary rent, this hurtful practice might be discouraged, to the no small advantage of all the different parties concerned, of the landlord, of the tenant, of the sovereign, and of the whole community.

Some leases prescribe to the tenant a certain mode of cultivation, and a certain succession of crops during the whole continuance of the lease. This condition, which is generally the effect of the landlord's conceit of his own superior knowledge (a conceit in most cases very ill-founded), ought always to be considered as an additional rent, as a rent in service instead of a rent in money. In order to discourage the practice, which is generally a foolish one, this species of rent might be valued rather high, and consequently taxed somewhat higher than common money rents.

Some landlords, instead of a rent in money, require a


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 cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming; omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of his young brother when he left home for the wars.

This was why he cursed. The curse was mild—it was indeed less a curse than an invocation.


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“Defend us from women,” he said; “above all from the women who think they know.”

The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated to the chord of agony.

“There’s no fool like an old fool,” said John Selwyn Selborne. He had thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when their time came would not do.

He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the Brydges woman. And to-day the boy sailed. John Selborne sighed. Twenty-two, and off to the wars, heart-whole. Whereas he had been invalided at the very beginning of things and now, when he was well and just on the point of rejoining—the motor-car and the Brydges woman! And as for heart-whole ... the Brydges woman again.

He fell asleep. When he awoke there was full sunshine and an orchestra of awakened birds in the garden outside. There was tea—there were letters. One was from


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 Sidney—Sidney, who had left him not twelve hours before.

He tore it open, and hurt his shoulder in the movement.

“,” said the letter, “I wanted to tell you last night, but you seemed so cheap, I thought I’d better not bother you. But it’s just come into my head that perhaps I may get a bullet in my innards, and I want you to know. So here goes. There’s a girl I mean to marry. I know she’ll say Yes, but I can’t ask her till I come back, of course. I don’t want to have any humbug or concealing things from you; you’ve always been so decent to me. I know you hate jaw, so I won’t go on about that. But I must tell you I met her first when she was serving in a tobacconist’s shop. And her mother lets lodgings. You’ll think this means she’s beneath me. Wait till you see her. I want you to see her, and make friends with her while I’m away.”

Here followed some lover’s raptures, and the address of the lady.

John Selborne lay back and groaned.

Susannah Sheepmarsh, tobacconist’s assistant, lodging-house keeper’s daughter, and Sidney Selborne, younger son of a house


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 whose pride was that it had been proud enough to refuse a peerage.

John Selborne thought long and deeply.

“I suppose I must sacrifice myself,” he said. “Little adventuress! ‘How easy to prove to him,’ I said, ‘that an eagle’s the game her pride prefers, though she stoops to a wren instead.’ The boy’ll hate me for a bit, but he’ll thank me later. Yalding? That’s somewhere on the Medway. Fishing? Boating? Convalescence is good enough. Fiction aid us! What would the villain in a book do to come between fond lovers? He would take the lodgings: at least he would try. And one may as well do something.”

So he wrote to Mrs Sheepmarsh—she had rooms to let, he heard. Terms? And Mrs Sheepmarsh wrote back; at least her reply was typewritten, which was a bit of a shock. She had rooms. They were disengaged. And the terms were thus and such.

Behold John Selwyn Selborne then, his baggage neatly labelled with his first and second names, set down on the little platform of Yalding Station. Behold him, waggonette-borne, crossing the old stone bridge and the golden glory of the Leas, flushed with sunset.

Mrs Sheepmarsh’s house was long and low


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 and white. It had a classic porch, and at one end a French window opened through cascades of jasmine to a long lawn. There were many trees. A middle-aged lady in decent black, with a white cap, and white lace about her neck, greeted him with formal courtesy. “This way,” she said, and moved for him to follow her through a green gate and down a shrubbery that led without disguise or pretence straight away from the house. It led also to a little white building embowered in trees. “Here,” said the lady. She opened the door. “I’ll tell the man to bring your luggage. Good evening”

And she left him planted there. He had to bend his head to pass under the low door, and he found himself in a tiny kitchen. Beyond were a sitting-room and two bedchambers. All fitted sparsely, but with old furniture, softly-faded curtains, quiet and pleasant to look upon. There were roses in a jug of Grès de Flandre on the gate-table in the sitting-room.

“What a singular little place!” he said. “So these are the lodgings. I feel like a dog in a kennel. I suppose they will throw me a bone by-and-by—or, at any rate, ask me what kind of bones I prefer.”


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He unpacked his clothes and laid his belongings in the drawers and cupboards; it was oddly charming that each shelf or drawer should have its own little muslin bag of grey lavender. Then he took up a book and began to read. The sunset had died away, the daylight seemed to be glowing out of the low window like a tide, leaving bare breadths of darkness behind. He lighted candles. He was growing hungry—it was past eight o’clock.

“I believe the old lady has forgotten my existence,” he said, and therewith opened his cottage door and went out into the lighter twilight of the garden. The shrubbery walks were winding. He took the wrong turning, and found himself entering on the narrow lawn. From the French window among the jasmine came lamplight—and voices.

“No servant, no food? My good mother, you’ve entertained a lunatic unawares.”

“He had references.”

“Man cannot live by references alone. The poor brute must be starving—unless he’s drunk.”

“Celia! I do wish you wouldn’t”

John Selborne hastening by, put a period to the conversation by boots crunching heavily


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 and conscientiously on the gravel. Both voices ceased. He presented himself at the lamp-lit oblong of the window.

Within that lamplight glowed on the last remnants of a meal—dinner, by the glasses and the fruit. Also on the lady in the cap, and on a girl—the one, doubtless, who had evolved the lunatic idea. Both faces were turned towards him. Both women rose: there was nothing for it but advance. He murmured something about intrusion—“awfully sorry, the walks wind so,” and turned to go.

But the girl spoke: “Oh, wait a moment. Is this Mr Selwyn, mother?”

“My daughter, Miss Sheepmarsh—Mr Selwyn,” said the mother reluctantly.

“We were just talking about you,” said the girl, “and wondering whether you were ill or anything, or whether your servant hasn’t turned up, or something.”

“Miss Sheepmarsh.” He was still speechless. This the little adventuress, the tobacconist’s assistant? This girl with the glorious hair severely braided, the round face, the proud chin, the most honest eyes in the world? She might be sister to the adventuress—cousin, perhaps? But the room, too—shining


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 mahogany, old china, worn silver, and fine napery—all spoke of a luxury as temperate as refined: the luxury of delicate custom, of habit bred in the bone; no mushroom growth of gross self-indulgence, but the unconscious outcome of generations of clear self-respect.

“Can we send anything over for you?” the elder lady asked. “Of course we”

“We didn’t mean by ‘entirely private’ that we would let our tenant starve,” the girl interrupted.

“There is some mistake.” Selborne came to himself suddenly. “I thought I was engaging furnished apartments with er—attendance.”

The girl drew a journal from a heap on the sofa.

“This was the advertisement, wasn’t it?” she asked.

And he read:

“Four-roomed cottage, furnished, in beautiful grounds. Part of these are fenced in for use of tenant of cottage. And in the absence of the family the whole of the grounds are open to tenant. When at home the family wish to be entirely private.”

“I never saw this at all,” said Selborne desperately. “My—I mean I was told it was furnished lodgings. I am very sorry I


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 have no servant and no means of getting one. I will go back to London at once. I am sorry.”

“The last train’s gone,” said Miss Sheepmarsh. “Mother, ask Mr Selborne to come in, and I’ll get him something to eat.”

“My dear,” said the mother, “surely Mary”

“My dear mother,” said the girl, “you know Mary is having her supper.”

The bewildered Selborne presently found himself seated at the white-spread, silver-sparkling table, served with food and drink by this with the honest eyes. He exerted himself to talk with the mother—not of the difference between a lodger and a tenant, but of music, art, and the life of the great world.

It was the girl who brought the conversation down from the gossip of Courts and concert-rooms to the tenant’s immediate needs.

“If you mean to stay, you could have a woman in from the village,” said she.

“But wouldn’t you rather I went?” he said.

“Why should we? We want to let the cottage, or we shouldn’t have advertised it.


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 I’ll get you some one to-morrow. Mrs Bates would be the very thing, mother. And you’ll like her, Mr Selwyn. She’s a great dear”

Sure enough, the next morning brought a gentle, middle-aged woman to “do for” Mr Selwyn. And she did excellently. And three slow days passed. He got a boat and pulled up and down the green willow-fringed river. He tried to fish; he read somewhat, and he thought more. And he went in and out of his cottage, which had its own private path debouching on the highway. Many times a day he went in and out, but he saw no more the red hair, the round face, and the honest eyes.

On the fourth day he had nursed his interest in the girl to a strong, well-grown sentiment of curiosity and attraction. Coming in at his own gate, he saw the mother leaving hers, with sunshade and cardcase—an afternoon of calls evidently setting in.

Now or never! The swift impulse took him, and before he had time to recall the terms of that advertisement, he had passed the green fence of division, and his feet were on the wandering ways of the shrubbery. He felt, as he went, a glow of


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 gratitude to the fate which was rewarding his care of his brother’s future with an interest like this. The adventuress?—the tobacconist’s assistant?—he could deal with her later.

Through the garden’s green a gleam of white guided—even, it seemed, beckoned.

He found the girl with the red hair and the honest eyes in a hammock swung between two cedars.

“Have pity on me,” he said abruptly.

She raised her eyes from her book.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said. “I am so glad. Get a chair from under the weeping ash, and sit down and talk.”

“This turf is good enough for me,” said he; “but are you sure I’m not trespassing?”

“You mean the advertisement? Oh, that was just because we had some rather awful people last year, and we couldn’t get away from them, and mother wanted to be quite safe; but, of course, you’re different. We like you very much, what we’ve seen of you.” This straightforward compliment somehow pleased him less than it might have done. “The other people were—well, he was a butterman. I believe he called himself an artist.”

“Do you mean that you do not like persons


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 who are in trade,” he asked, thinking of the tobacconist’s assistant.

“Of course I don’t mean that,” she said; “why, I’m a Socialist! Butterman just means a person without manners or ideals. But I do like working people better than shoppy people, though I know it’s wrong.”

“How can an involuntary liking or disliking be wrong?” he asked.

“It’s snobbish, don’t you think? We ought to like people for what they are, not for what they have, or what they work at.”

“If you weren’t so pretty, and hadn’t that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you’d be a prig,” he said to himself. To her he said: “Roughly speaking, don’t you think the conventional classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?”

“No,” she answered roundly.

And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.


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“Dearest,” said the girl, “I can’t help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I’m twenty-six. I’ve always talked to people if I liked them—even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren’t wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he’s a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you—that and his references. Don’t worry, there’s a darling. Just be nice to him yourself. He’s simply a godsend in a place like this.”

“He’ll fall in love with you, Celia,” said the mother warningly.

“Not he!” said the daughter. But the mother was right.

Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he


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 rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments—those days that passed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books—and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia’s idea: its rent was merely for “luxuries.” He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the “luxuries” were Celia’s—the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.

And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin—of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist’s assistant.

It was on an evening when the level sunbeams


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 turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. “Have you,” he asked, looking into her face, “any relation who is in a shop?”

“No,” said she; “why?”

“I only wondered,” said he coldly.

“But what an extraordinary thing to wonder!” she said. “Do tell me what made you think of it.”

“Very well,” he said, “I will. The person who told me that your mother had lodgings, also told me that your mother had a daughter who served in a shop.”

“Never!” she cried. “What a hateful idea!”

“A tobacconist’s shop,” he persisted; “and her name was Susannah Sheepmarsh.”

“Oh,” she answered, “that was me.” She spoke instantly and frankly, but she blushed crimson.

“And you’re ashamed of it,—Socialist?” he asked with a sneer, and his eyes were fierce on her burning face.

“I’m not! Row home, please. Or I’ll take the sculls if you’re tired, or your shoulder hurts. I don’t want to talk to you


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 any more. You tried to trap me into telling a lie. You don’t understand anything at all. And I’ll never forgive you.”

“Yes, you will,” he said to himself again and again through the silence in which they plashed down the river. But when he was alone in his cottage, the truth flew at him and grappled him with teeth and claws. He loved her. She loved, or had loved—or might have loved—or might love—his brother. He must go: and the next morning he went without a word. He left a note for Mrs Sheepmarsh, and a cheque in lieu of notice; and letter and cheque were signed with his name in full.

He went back to the old life, but the taste of it all was gone. Shooting parties, house parties, the Brydges woman even, prettier than ever, and surer of all things: how could these charm one whose fancy, whose heart indeed, wandered for ever in a green garden or by a quiet river with a young woman who had served in a tobacconist’s shop, and who would be some day his brother’s wife?

The days were long, the weeks seemed interminable. And all the time there was the white house, as it had been; there were mother and daughter living the same dainty,


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 dignified, charming life to which he had come so near. Why had he ever gone there? Why had he ever interfered? He had meant to ensnare her heart just to free his brother from an adventuress. An adventuress! He groaned aloud.

“Oh, fool! But you are punished!” he said; “she’s angry now—angrier even than that evening on the river, for she knows now that even the name you gave her to call you by was not the one your own people use. This comes of trying to act like an ass in a book.”

The months went on. The Brydges woman rallied him on his absent air. She spoke of dairymaids. He wondered how he could ever have found her amusing, and whether her vulgarity was a growth, or had been merely hidden.

And all the time Celia and the white house were dragging at his heart-strings. Enough was left of the fool that he constantly reproached himself for having been, to make him sure that had he had no brother, had he met her with no duty to the absent to stand between them she would have loved him.

Then one day came the South African


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 rent in kind, in corn, cattle, poultry, wine, oil, etc., others again require a rent in service. Such rents are always more hurtful to the tenant than beneficial to the landlord. They either take more or keep more out of the pocket of the former than they put into that of the latter. In every country where they take place, the tenants are poor and beggarly, pretty much according to the degree in which they take place. By valuing, in the same manner, such rents rather high, and consequently taxing them somewhat higher than common money rents, a practice which is hurtful to the whole community might perhaps be sufficiently discouraged.

When the landlord chose to occupy himself a part of his own lands, the rent might be valued according to an equitable arbitration of the farmers and landlords in the neighborhood, and a moderate abatement of the tax might be granted to him, in the same manner as in the Venetian territory; provided the rent of the lands which he occupied did not exceed a certain sum. It is of importance that the landlord should be encouraged to cultivate a part of his own land. His capital is generally greater than that of the tenant, and with less skill he can frequently raise a greater produce. The landlord can afford to try experiments, and is generally disposed to do so. His unsuccessful experiments occasion only a moderate loss to himself. His successful ones contribute to the improvement and better cultivation of the whole country. It might be of importance, however, that the abatement of the tax should encourage him to cultivate to a certain extent only. If the landlords should, the greater part of them, be tempted to farm the whole of their own lands, the country (instead of sober and industrious tenants, who are bound by their


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 mail, and it brought a letter from his brother, the lad who had had the sense to find a jewel behind a tobacconist’s counter, and had trusted it to him.

The letter was long and ineffective. It was the postscript that was vital.

“I say, I wonder whether you’ve seen anything of Susannah? What a young fool I was ever to think I could be happy with a girl out of a shop. I’ve met the real and only one now—she’s a nurse; her father was a clergyman in Northumberland. She’s such a bright little thing, and she’s never cared for any one before me. Wish me luck.”

John Selborne almost tore his hair.

“Well, I can’t save him across half the world! Besides”

At thirty-seven one should have outgrown the wild impulses of youth. He said this to himself, but all the same it was the next train to Yalding that he took.

Fate was kind; at Yalding it had almost always been kind. The glow of red firelight shone out over the snow through the French window among the brown jasmine stalks.

Mrs Sheepmarsh was out, Miss Sheepmarsh was at home. Would he step this way?


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He stepped into the presence of the girl. She rose from the low chair by the fire, and the honest eyes looked angrily at him.

“Look here,” he said, as the door closed between them and the maid-servant, “I’ve come to tell you things. Just this once let me talk to you; and afterwards, if you like, I can go away and never come back.”

“Sit down,” she said coldly. “I don’t feel friends with you at all, but if you want to speak, I suppose you must.”

So then he told her everything, beginning with his brother’s letter, and ending with his brother’s letter.

“And, of course, I thought it couldn’t be you, because of your being called Celia; and when I found out it really was you, I had to go away, because I wanted to be fair to the boy. But now I’ve come back.”

“I think you’re the meanest person I ever knew,” she said; “you thought I liked your brother, and you tried to make me like you so that you might throw me over and show him how worthless I was. I hate you and despise you.”

“I didn’t really try,” he said miserably.

“And you took a false name to deceive us.”

“I didn’t: it really is my second name.”


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“And you came here pretending to be nice and a gentleman, and” She was lashing herself to rage, with the lash of her own voice, as women will. John Selborne stood up suddenly.

“Be quiet,” he said, and she was quiet. “I won’t hear any more reproaches, unless Listen, I’ve done wrong—I’ve owned it. I’ve suffered for it. God knows I’ve suffered. You liked me in the summer: can’t you try to like me again? I want you more than anything else in the world. Will you marry me?”

“Marry you,” she cried scornfully; “you who”

“Pardon me,” he said. “I have asked a question. Give me no for an answer, and I will go. Say yes, and then you may say anything else you like. Yes or no. Shall I go or stay? Yes or no. No other word will do.”

She looked at him, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing with indignation. A world of scorn showed in the angle of the chin, the poise of her head. Her lips opened. Then suddenly her eyes met his, and she knew that he meant what he said. She covered her face with her hands.


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“Don’t—don’t cry, dear one,” he said. “What is it? You’ve only to choose. Everything is for you to decide.”

Still she did not speak.

“Good-bye, then,” he said, and turned. But she caught at him blindly.

“Don’t—don’t go!” she cried. “I didn’t think I cared about you in the summer, but since you went away, oh, you don’t know how I’ve wanted you!”

“Well,” he said, when her tears were dried, “aren’t you going to scold me?”

“Don’t!” said she.

“At least tell me all about my brother—and why he thought you would be so ready to marry him.”

“That? Oh, that was only his conceit. You know I always do talk to people in railway carriages and things. I suppose he thought it was only him I talked to.”

“And the name?”

“I—I thought if I said my name was Susannah he wouldn’t get sentimental.”

“You ‘took a false name to deceive him’?”

“Don’t—oh, don’t!”

“And the tobacco shop?”


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“Ah—that rankles?” She raised her head to look at him.

“Not it,” he answered coolly. “I simply don’t believe it.”

“Why? But you’re quite right. It was a woman in my district in London, and I took the shop for her for three days, because her husband was dying, and she couldn’t get any one else to help her. It was—it was rather fun—and—and”

“And you wouldn’t tell me about it, because you didn’t want me to know how proud you were of it.”

“Proud? Ah, you do understand things! The man died, and I had given her those three days with him. I wasn’t proud, was I?—only glad that I could. So glad—so glad!”

“But you let my brother think”

“Oh yes, I let him think it was my trade; I thought it might make him not be silly. You see, I always knew he couldn’t understand things.”

“Celia?”

“Yes?”

“And have you really forgiven me?”

“Yes, yes, I forgive you! But I never should have if There’s mother at the


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 front door. Let me go. I want to let her in myself.”

“If?”

“Let me go. If”

“If?”

“If you hadn’t understood and”

“Yes?”

“If you hadn’t come back to me!”


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 own interest to cultivate as well as their capital and skill will allow them) would be filled with idle and profligate bailiffs, whose abusive management would soon degrade the cultivation, and reduce the annual produce of the land to the diminution, not only of the revenue of their masters, but of the most important part of that of the whole society.

Such a system of administration might, perhaps, free a tax of this kind from any degree of uncertainty which could occasion either oppression or inconvenience to the contributor; and might at the same time serve to introduce into the common management of land such a plan or policy as might contribute a good deal to the general improvement and good cultivation of the country.

The expense of levying a land tax, which varied with every variation of the rent, would no doubt be somewhat greater than that of levying one which was always rated according to a fixed valuation. Some additional expense would necessarily be incurred both by the different register offices which it would be proper to establish in the different districts of the country, and by the different valuations which might occasionally be made of the lands which the proprietor chose to occupy himself. The expense of all this, however, might be very moderate, and much below what is incurred in the levying of many other taxes, which afford a very inconsiderable revenue in comparison of what might easily be drawn from a tax of this kind.

The discouragement which a variable land tax of this kind might give to the improvement of land, seems to be the most important objection which can he made to it. The landlord would certainly be less disposed to improve, when the sovereign, who contributed nothing to the expense, was


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 to share in the profit of the improvement. Even this objection might perhaps be obviated by allowing the landlord, before he began his improvement, to ascertain, in conjunction with the officers of revenue, the actual value of his lands, according to the equitable arbitration of a certain number of landlords and farmers in the neighborhood, equally chosen by both parties; and by rating him according to this valuation for such a number of years, as might be fully sufficient for his complete indemnification. To draw the attention of the sovereign toward the improvement of the land, from a regard to the increase of his own revenue, is one of the principal advantages proposed by this species of land tax. The term, therefore, allowed for the indemnification of the landlord, ought not to be a great deal longer than what was necessary for that purpose, lest the remoteness of the interest should discourage too much this attention. It had better, however, be somewhat too long than in any respect too short. No incitement to the attention of the sovereign can ever counterbalance the smallest discouragement to that of the landlord. The attention of the sovereign can be at best but a very general and vague consideration of what is likely to contribute to the better cultivation of the greater part of his dominions. The attention of the landlord is a particular and minute consideration of what is likely to be the most advantageous application of every inch of ground upon his estate. The principal attention of the sovereign ought to be to encourage, by every means in his power, the attention both of the landlord and of the farmer, by allowing both to pursue their own interest in their own way, and according to their own judgment, by giving to both the most perfect security that they shall enjoy the full recompense of their own industry;


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 and by procuring to both the most extensive market for every part of their produce, in consequence of establishing the easiest and safest communications both by land and by water, through every part of his own dominions, as well as the most unbounded freedom of exportation to the dominions of all other princes.

If by such a system of administration a tax of this kind could be so managed as to give, not only no discouragement, but, on the contrary, some encouragement to the improvement of land, it does not appear likely to occasion any other inconvenience to the landlord, except always the unavoidable one of being obliged to pay the tax.

In all the variations of the state of the society, in the improvement and in the declension of agriculture; in all the variations in the value of silver, and in all those in the standard of the coin, a tax of this kind would, of its own accord and without any attention of government, readily suit itself to the actual situation of things, and would be equally just and equitable in all those different changes. It would, therefore, be much more proper to be established as a perpetual and unalterable regulation, or as what is called a fundamental law of the commonwealth, than any tax which was always to be levied according to a certain valuation.

Some States, instead of the simple and obvious expedient of a register of leases, have had recourse to the laborious and expensive one of an actual survey and valuation of all the lands in the country. They have suspected, probably, that the lessor and lessee, in order to defraud the public revenue, might combine to conceal the real terms of the lease. Domesday-book seems to have been the result of a very accurate survey of this kind.


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 “ is it really true? Are you going to govern the Fortunate Islands?”

“I am, indeed—or rather, to be accurate, I am going to deputy-govern them—I mean, father is—for a year.”

“A whole year!” he said, looking down at her fan. “What will London do without you?”

“London will do excellently,” she answered—“and that’s my pet fan, and it’s not used to being tied into knots.” She took it from him.

“And what shall I do without you?”

“Oh! laugh and rhyme and dance and dine. You’ll go out to the proper number of dinners and dances, and make the proper measure of pretty little speeches and nice little phrases; and you’ll do your reviews, and try to make them as like your editor’s as you can; and you’ll turn out your charming little


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 rondeaux and triolets, and the year will simply fly. Heigho! I’m glad I’m going to see something big, if it’s only the Atlantic.”

“You are very cruel,” he said.

“Am I? But it’s not cruel to be cruel if nobody’s hurt, is it? And I am so tired of nice little verses and pretty little dances and dainty little dinners. Oh, if I were only a man!”

“Thank God you’re not!” said he.

“If I were a man, I would do just one big thing in my life, even if I had to settle down to a life of snippets and trifles afterwards.”

Her eyes were shining. They always glittered, but now they were starry. The drifted white folds across her breast stirred to her quickened breath.

“If you loved me, Sybil, I could do something great!” said he.

“But I don’t,” she said—“at any rate, not now; and I’ve told you so a dozen times. My dear Rupert, the man who needs a woman to save him isn’t worth the saving.”

“What would you call a big thing?” he asked. “Must I conquer an empire for you, or start a new religion? Or shall I merely


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 get the Victoria Cross, or become Prime Minister?”

“Don’t sneer,” said she; “it doesn’t become you at all. You’ve no idea how horrid you look when you’re sneering. Why don’t you? Oh! but it’s no good! By the way, what a charming cover Housman has designed for your Veils and Violets! It’s a dear little book. Some of the verses are quite pretty.”

“Go on,” said he, “rub it in. I know I haven’t done much yet; but there’s plenty of time. And how can one do any good work when one is for ever sticking up one’s heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at? If you’d only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!”

“May I refer you to my speech—not the last one, but the one before that.”

He laughed; then he sighed.

“Ah, my Pretty,” he said, “it was all very well, and pleasant enough to be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now”

“How often,” she asked calmly, “have I told you that you must not call me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now”


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“Look here,” he said, leaning towards her, “there’s not a soul about; they’re in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once—it can’t matter to you—and it will mean so very much to me.”

“That’s just it,” she said; “if it didn’t mean”

“Then it shan’t mean anything but good-bye. It’s only about eight years since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion.”

She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she looked at him.

“Very well,” she said suddenly.

“No,” he said; “I won’t have it unless it does mean something.”

There was a silence. “Our dance, I think?” said the voice of one bending before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom she had been hiding.

Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed more than once. “I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,” she said; “and I wish—yes, I do wish he had. I don’t suppose he’ll care a bit for me when I come back.”


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So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father’s park from her father’s rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday had seen his own jovial return.

“Do you all the good in the world, my boy. ’Pon my soul, you have a tired sort of look, as if you’d got some of these jolly new diseases people have taken to dying of lately—appendi-what’s-its-name, you know, and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So long! You take my tip.”

What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill—tired, bored, and nothing seemed worth while.


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 He drove to a doctor friend, who punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back, looked grave, and said: “Go to Strongitharm—he’s absolutely at the top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it’s better to know where we are. You go to Strongitharm.”

Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.

Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends—disappeared suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should have gone on imitating.

The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his advice.

“He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: ‘Go round the world; there’s nothing like it,’ and, by Jove! he went. Now, that’s the kind of man I like—knows good advice when he gets it, and acts on it right off.”


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So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil’s questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think—there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me—and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory—and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie’s, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found him. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it—all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig—and—she turned the


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 pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this for her—because of what she had said.

Arrived at the publisher’s, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of “Work While it is Yet Day,” nor the name of him; and it was abundantly evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.

Sybil’s prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was very nice and kind, but he could not give his client’s name without his client’s permission.

The disappointment was bitter.


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“But I’ll send a letter for you,” he tried to soften it with.

Sybil’s self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.

“I do want to see him most awfully,” she said, “and I know he wants to see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know”

She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent did.

“Look here,” he said smartly, “I’ll wire to him at once; and if he says I may, I’ll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?”

Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went back.

The literary agent smiled victory.

“The answer is ‘Yes,’” he said, and handed her a slip of paper—

“Have you a time-table?” asked she.

The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every


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 one was talking about—the great book—and her heart was full to overflowing of joy and pride and other things.

The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.

She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the station with him. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in empty houses.

Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She was not unconscious of these facts.

Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil’s lips were half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must shine on his face when he saw her—Her—the unattainable, the unapproachable, at his


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 very door. But her smile died away, for his face was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.

“You!” he said.

And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: “Yes, me.” There was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house, the tangle of the untidy garden. “Mayn’t I come in?” she asked.

“Yes; oh yes, come in!”

She crossed the threshold—the doorstep was dank with green mould—and followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the hills.

He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back to the fireless grate.

“You are very, very pretty,” he said suddenly. And the explanation of his disappearance


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 suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But she was not afraid. When all a woman’s thoughts, day and night for a year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the fear in her eyes.

“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “Sybil, I’m very glad you came. Come to think of it, I’m very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I did for any one.”

Sybil’s hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really—was it through her that he was

“Come out,” she said. “I hate this place; it stifles me. And you’ve lived here—worked here!”

“I’ve lived here for eleven months and three days,” he said. “Yes, come out.”

So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.

“Now,” she said, throwing off her hat and


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 curling her green, soft draperies among the long grass. “Come and sit down and tell me”

He threw himself on the grass.

“Sure it won’t bore you?” he asked.

She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not hold hers.

“I seem to remember,” he said, “the last time I saw you—you were going away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I told you—or, anyway, I thought to myself—that there was plenty of time for that. I’d always had a sort of feeling that I could do something great whenever I chose to try. Well—yes, you did go away, of course; I remember perfectly—and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and he said I’d only got about a year to live. So then I began to think.”

Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.

“And I thought: Here I’ve been thirty years in this world. I’ve the experience of twenty-eight and a half—I suppose the first little bit doesn’t count. If I’d had time, I meant to write another book, just to show exactly what a man feels when he knows


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 he’s only got a year to live, and nothing done—nothing done.”

“I won’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t look ill; you’re as lean as a greyhound, but”

“It may come any day now,” he went on quietly; “but I’ve done something. The book—it is great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the things you had seen and known and felt were wasted—lost—going out with you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking everything you might have done with you.”

“The book is great,” she said; “you have done something.”

“Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James’s Street, and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she was little, and she had gone away and wasn’t fond of me any more. Oh, Sybil—I feel like a lunatic—I mean you, of course; but you never cared. And I went to a house agent’s and got the house unfurnished, and I bought the furniture—


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 there’s nothing much except what you’ve seen, and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I’ve lived alone in that house, and I’ve written that book, with Death sitting beside me, jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, ‘Hurry up; I’m waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you’ll have done nothing, nothing, nothing.’”

“But you’ve done the book,” said Sybil again. The larch and the garden beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted. Her own agony—that could be dealt with later.

“I’ve ridden myself with the curb,” he said. “I thought it all out—proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn’t play the fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I’ve done it. The book will live—every one says it will. I shan’t have lived for nothing.”

“Rupert,” she said, “dear Rupert!”

“Thank you,” he said forlornly; “you’re


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 very kind.” And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.

“Oh, Rupert, why didn’t you write and tell me?”

“What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things—even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade.”

She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her—that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that—have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Don’t believe what?”

“That you’re going to die.”

He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.

Then he said: “I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven’t buried


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 my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn’t love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!”

He threw out his hands, and they lay along the grass. His face went down into the tangled green, and she saw his shoulders shaken with sobs. She dragged herself along the grass till she was close to him; then she lifted his shoulders, and drew his head on to her lap, and clasped her arms round him.

“My darling, my dear, my own!” she said. “You’re tired, and you’ve thought of nothing but your hateful book—your beautiful book, I mean—but you do love me really. Not as I love you, but still you do love me. Oh, Rupert, I’ll nurse you, I’ll take care of you, I’ll be your slave; and if you have to die, I shall die too, because there’ll be nothing left for me to do for you.”

He put an arm round her. “It’s worth dying to hear that,” he said, and brought his face to lie against her waist.

“But you shan’t die. You must come back to London with me now—this minute. The best opinion”


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“I had the best,” he said. “Kiss me, my Pretty; oh, kiss me now that it does mean something! Let me dream that I’m going to live, and that you love me.”

He lifted his face, and she kissed him.

“Rupert, you’re not going to die. It can’t be true. It isn’t true. It shan’t be true.”

“It is; but I don’t mind now, except for you. I’m a selfish beast. But this is worth it all, and I have done something great. You told me to.”

“Tell me,” she said, “who was the doctor? Was he really the best?”

“It was Strongitharm,” he said wearily.

She drew a long breath and clasped him closer. Then she pushed him away and sprang to her feet.

“Stand up!” she said. “Let me look at you!”

He stood up, and she caught him by the elbows and stood looking at him. Twice she tried to speak, and twice no voice obeyed; then she said softly, huskily: “Rupert, listen! It’s all a horrid dream. Wake up. Haven’t you seen the papers? Strongitharm went mad several months ago. It was drink. He told all his patients they were going to die of this new disease of his that he’d invented. It’s all


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 his madness. You’re well—I know it. Oh, Rupert, you aren’t going to die, and we love each other! Oh, God is very good!”

He drew a long breath.

“Are you sure? It’s like coming back from chloroform; and yet it hurts, and yet—but I wrote the book! Oh, Sybil, I shall never write another great book!”

“Ah yes, you will—you shall,” she said, looking at him with wet eyes.

“I have you,” he said. “Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never write another great book.”

And he never has.

But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he loves her the more for her folly.


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 “, do let me have him in the carriage with me; he won’t hurt any one, he’s a perfect angel.”

“Angels like him travels in the dog-box,” said the porter.

Judy ended an agonised search for her pocket.

“Would you be offended,” she said, “if I offered you half-a-crown?”

“Give the guard a bob, Miss.” The hand curved into a cup resting on the carriage window, answered her question. “It’s more’n enough for him, being a single man, whereas me, I’m risking my situation and nine children at present to say no more, when I”

The turn of a railway key completed the sentence.

Judy and the angel were alone. He was a very nice angel—long-haired and brownly-


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 black—his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the eyes.

“How could they try to part us,” she asked, “when there’s only us two left?”

Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the question: “How could they?”

The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.

A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was aggrieved and aggrieving—Alcibiades had tried to bite him—and Judy was on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be driven to her aunt’s suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.

Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into the winter dusk.


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“There’ll be tea, anyhow,” sighed Judy, recklessly overpaying the cabman.

Inside the house where the lights were, the Aunt was surrounded by a dozen ladies of about her own age and station; “Tabbies” the world might have called them. All were busy with mysteries of many coloured silks and satins, lace and linen; at least all held such in their hands. The gathering was in fact a “working party” for the approaching bazaar. But the real work of bazaars is not done at parties.

“Yes,” the Aunt was saying, “so nice for dear Julia. I’m truly glad that she should begin her visit with a little gaiety. In parting or sorrow we should always seek to distract the mind, should we not, dear Mrs Biddle?”

“The young are all too easily distracted by the shows of this world,” said dear Mrs Biddle heavily.

And several ladies murmured approval.

“But you can’t exactly call a church bazaar the shows of this world, can you?” urged the Aunt, sitting very upright, all black and beady.

“It’s the thin end of the Rubicon sometimes,” said Mrs Biddle.