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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: Dr. and Mrs. Gold, an electronic edition
Author: Barnett, Edith A.
Publisher: Swan, Sonnenschein & CO.
Place published: London
Date: 1891
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Front cover of Barnett's "Dr. and Mrs. Gold"Dr. and Mrs. GoldTHE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESSDR. AND MRS. GOLD  AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A CAUSE BY  EDITH A. BARNETT "I do not know if all matter will be found to be made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen,at last; but the world of manner and actions is wrought of one stuff,and beginning where we will, we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments."—EMERSON LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN &
CO. PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1891DR. AND MRS. GOLDCHAPTER IThe stream of life goes northward up Tottenham Court Road on summer afternoons. Five o'clock, and still more six o'clock, brings visions of tea and rest to weary men and women, boys and girls. And among the many streamlets that flow into the main current there is always one that comes from the eastward, not far from Oxford Street. By twos and threes it keeps on steadily. It is made up of women, youngish women, at this hour of the day. The men turn out of the Museum later. It keeps itself distinct from the main tide of business until far up the road. Is it the tinge of learning or of study that one distinguishes it by? Is it the faint fluttering of long thin strips of printed paper, or the occasional flourish of a lead pencil? Is it a smudge of paint on a skirt, or a trace of overflowing inkpots on an ungloved thumb? Is it the sight of hair ruffled for art's sake, or for comfort's sake during long hours of elbows on the table? Is it—ah! who can tell what it is that clings to the women students, worshippers of the written or the painted word, whereby we distinguish them from other women who tramp along that straight, unaristocratic road evening after evening all the year round; whether the sun is sinking over towards Harrow, or whether it has set long ago, or whether its slanting beams greet them and bathe them in light and love as they turn the corner and mix with the throng that goes northward.A few years ago—the date is of no consequence—one day in early summer, when the sun was still high behind the houses, two girls turned into the road together. I call them girls, though perhaps they were already women in years, because they had, and especially one of them had, a frail, slim figure, and a habit of giving way to all comers that does not last through a lengthened experience of student-life in London. As they continually waited for one another they advanced but slowly; and presently they were overtaken by a third reader, who carried books and papers with a determined air, cleaving a rapid way along the crowded pavement. One of our earlier acquaintances bowed as she passed."Who's that?" said her companion. "I didn't know you knew her. I've often seen her about this last year, and wondered who she was.""George Thompson told me about her. I know her a little. Her name's Clara David. They say her father died in Siberia. The Gilman-Turners picked her up somewhere, and have her to their house. They always have queer people. Mrs. Gilman-Turner says it makes her parties go off, and Ada Gilman-Turner told me that she's revolutionary and a red republican—this Clara David, I mean—and that she's writing for the papers to earn bread and cheese.""She's clever, I suppose," said the younger girl. "She's a queer-looking mortal; and how she covers the ground! I don't think I want to know her. I should be afraid she'd explode under my eyes.""She has exploded pretty often, I expect. I don't know how George Thompson came to be sent for, but he was sent for to see her mother, when the two first came over here together. She was ill, and she's dead since—the mother, you know. And this Clara David's all alone, hasn't any belongings at all. George says she was put in prison once, in Russia or Germany or somewhere, and that she had hairbreadth escapes, and ate some papers to hide them, and that she arrived in England with no clothes and no money, and lived in a garret. But you never know if George means you to believe all he says. I don't suppose it's true. I told him he'd read it in a penny dreadful.""It doesn't sound likely," said the younger girl. "Doesn't seem to fit in with Tottenham Court Road; greys and drabs do best to paint with here. You'd want plenty of scarlet and orange to bring out that story well. Besides, I shouldn't think she'd be alive to tell the tale, should you? The paper, and ink and that, would poison her, wouldn't it?" she added, for, like many of her craft, she had a most matter-of-fact mind. "See! here's our turn." And they went westward, where presently they will find the colours less dingy and dull, and the world brighter.Going northward the world does not soon become brighter. That there is sunshine far ahead, one knows; as indeed there is at the end of most pathways of man's making; but it needs faith to believe in it through the dreary waste of small houses and shops that stretch out in that direction. You lose the trace of students soon after the tram starts: only a few of the more plodding or enthusiastic continue to remind you of their existence by reading in the car.Clara David did not read. She counted her money, then gazed long and earnestly over the head of a working man who sat opposite. When the tram stopped, she turned down a side street and went into an eating shop, where was a cauliflower, a couple of smoked herrings, and a metal teapot in the window. The stout, middle-aged woman, who was resting behind the counter during a slack hour, greeted her as an old customer."Good evening, miss! I thought we should have you in this afternoon. Tea is it, miss?" She touched a bell on the table, and a girl in a smutty apron appeared in the open doorway."Tea, and bread and butter, please, Mrs. Snoad. And I'm rather hurried for time.""And won't you take nothink with yer tea, miss? Here's a beautiful pork chop as Halice'll cook yer in a minute. Jest one nice one as is left from the dinners. Or a herring, now, for a relish, or a slice of this 'am. The gents this morning said it was a hextry good 'un.""No; just bread and butter, thank you.""There now, miss. You look tired to death, that you do. You'd better sit down to a good piece o' meat. We'll say 4d. for it, for it's the last one I got left, and I done well with that loin o' pork this morning. You look in tomorrow, or the hend o' the week, and pay for it, miss.""Thank you, Mrs. Snoad, but I'm going out to-night to a party, and I shall get supper for nothing. It would be wasteful to eat a chop now and spoil my appetite. But you're empty to-night, or am I early?""Hearly you are, miss. You come 'ere a hour later and you'll find the place full. Makes their teas and suppers together, does our gents. They don't get their suppers for nothing, you take your hoath. Blessed if I'd care to feed some of 'em at two shillings a 'ead."Here tea came, and Mrs. Snoad relapsed into silence. She had not too much breath to talk with, and talk was part of her stock-in-trade, spent with economy to keep her customers amused while they waited."No message from my landlady, Mrs. Snoad? I was out last night, speaking at a meeting, and I haven't seen her to-day.""There now. If I 'adn't a forgotten. And Mrs. Vast looked in so particular when she went out to do her bit o' shopping. No; she didn't leave no message. But she says to me: ' Martha, if Miss David should drop in to-night, do you tell her as how there's a letter for her with immediate wrote on the outside '. And I said I'd tell you first thing, and I forgot it.""It's no matter, Mrs. Snoad. I am going straight home as it happens."Then the customer gathered up her books and went. Turning and turning again, with many a sharp glance to left and right, as if she had forgotten that in free England peaceable citizens are not spied on in the streets, Clara soon reached home. It is a small three-storied house, built for private occupation but at the time when Clara lived there the lower window showed a large sheet of white calico, on which was stencilled in black: "Mrs. Lavinia Vast, Milliner and Dressmaker. Ladies' and Children's own materials made up. Weekly Payments taken." Below this notice you could see a rusty black dress and a few trimmed hats inviting customers. Aprons, children's frocks, and pinafores filled up corners, and below was a pile of knitted stockings, from which I learned that Mrs. Vast found it necessary to turn a penny any way that she could, and to refuse no orders. Drab Venetian blinds at the first floor window were a good deal broken, and hung askew; but the lodger at the top indulged in the luxury of clean white curtains and a couple of geraniums.Mrs. Vast was on the doorstep, with her mouth full of pins, taking in an order from a servant girl who had not got leave to come out. She was a tall woman, spare, with pronounced features and iron-gray hair. There was an air of combat about her; and if you could have seen her struggling with a refractory dress body, or haggling at the butcher's stall for her piece of Sunday's meat, you would perhaps think that her talents would have been wasted on an easy life. But if you believed that Mrs. Vast's struggles were for means of livelihood alone, you would have made a great mistake. Among her struggles was one long one to obtain books; and her back parlour contained many a bargain, the price of which had been squeezed out of Saturday's shopping. A few atheistic publications of a mild and antiquated type, and a couple of volumes in calf on the state of France before and during the Revolution, were among the best thumbed. She lived alone, and her imagination was active. I can understand how deeply interested she was in every detail of her lodger's career and work, and how she half regretted that things did not permit of a struggle with the police to conceal Clara David's identity. She planned many smart retorts to the myrmidons of the law, framed on the model of Foxe's Martyrs (which belonged to her mother, and which she thought she had outgrown), and of a modern story book written concerning the French Revolution period. But plotting in London is dull work, sadly wanting dramatic embellishment; Mrs. Vast was quite right to clothe her myrmidons with waving plumes, and to let them carry halberds. The policeman's helmet and truncheon are incongruous trappings for the stately drama. She thinks she shows her independence by accosting her lodger (for whom she has profound admiration) by her Christian name. "Good evening, Clara David," she says and nods, in spite of the pins, as Clara goes upstairs.On Mrs. Vast's drawing-room floor was, probably is still, a large room that had been used as a show-room by Mrs. Vast's prosperous predecessor, when the neighbourhood was more fashionable. Clara had fitted it up with a few benches and desks, a table or two much spotted with ink, a couple of old easy-chairs and a hearth rug. A pot on the mantelpiece had some peonies in it, and above, hanging on the wall, was a portrait of a man with a young face and white hair, looking out over the room as if he would control its occupants. But the room for the present was empty, except for Clara, who stood looking into the man's face. The high words that came in gusts through the wall only meant that the piano-tuner next door was quarrelling with his wife.Clara did not stand long. She pulled up the Venetian blinds, fastening one torn strip of webbing with a large pin, shook the inkpots, dragged some exercise books from under a heap of newspapers, and had just taken that urgent letter from the shelf when there came a knock at the door, then another, and another. The large room was used as a school or classroom, and these were the pupils. The first comers were a pretty-looking English work-girl with a stoop and a white face; a tall dark man of Polish birth, such as may be seen among all coteries of revolutionaries; a British workman, tall, fair, and hard-handed; and another, short and sandy. Most of them brought books or papers and exchanged them with Clara or with one another. And there was a bundle of papers and pamphlets, come by post, that she distributed among them. Then they fell to work: the Pole studied English, and the sandy-haired workman German; the tall fair man strove to master some elementary mathematics; and the work-girl, whom they called Polly Mart, turned listlessly the pages of an arithmetic book until Clara was ready to attend to her.They had worked for an hour or more when the stairs creaked under a light quick step, and all the pupils turned their heads towards the door. "Good evening to you all," said the new comer, in a clear, incisive voice, as he pulled off his coat. "Sorry I couldn't get here till just at your usual time for breaking up. How do the mathematics get on, Knight? Ah! here's the last number of the Social Regenerator. Do for you to read on your way home."Then he came across the room and shook hands with Clara. "I have an engagement to-night," he said, dropping his voice on a lower note. "I must have half-an-hour's chat with you before I go." Then he turned to the pupils with a very pleasant air of comradeship: "We all learn of Miss David. Her experience and knowledge gained under her father's tuition"—here he glanced at the portrait over the mantelshelf—"cannot be dispensed with in these critical times."It might have been noticed that the large fair man, whom they called Knight, displayed little alacrity in putting up his books. The others appeared to remember that it is pleasant out of doors on fine summer evenings, and that Fins-bury Park is within a walk.Polly Mart lingered a minute or two after the books were shut and put things tidy. Then she Whispered: "Shall I look in to-morrow, miss, and do your bit o' needlework? I can spare an hour or so, being Saturday."The late comer smiled, showing a row of small, white, pointed teeth. "Each according to ability," he said. "That is as it should be, Polly. You show us all the more excellent way." Polly blushed, and wondered if the gentlemen were laughing at her.Then the large man made his request. "I was going to put your blinds straight, miss. They looks very bad from the road of a day when the sun's shining. I put the things in my pockets handy when I cleaned myself. But not if it's ill-convenient to you to-night.""Do do them, Mr. Knight!" Clara said. "It won't take long, will it? Dr. Gold shall talk German to me if he has State secrets to tell."Tom Knight hesitated. He spent his life in putting up blinds in one corner of a house while men and women who were not of his class talked in another corner, in language that he did not follow. He came here for variety. He loved to escape from his mates and from his garrulous old mother to spend his evenings in Clara's large front room. The other pupils were no great friends of his. The Pole was a foreigner, and Tom Knight was secretly in favour of a heavy tax on foreign workmen. Tom Knight decided to go. But he was not pleased with himself; and he did not so much as thank Polly Mart, who opened the door and slipped out into the street behind him.Clara's companion sank into the large easy chair with a sigh. "And now for our chat, my dear Miss David," he said, as he handed her his cigarette case. She helped herself as a matter of course, and presently they were both enveloped in clouds of smoke, she standing on the hearthrug with one elbow on the mantelshelf, he reclining at his ease in the chair.Tobacco smoke is said to conduce to thought, but it is not the thought that bubbles over into words. The silence lasted for some minutes. Clara had a fine figure; and in that easy attitude was a restful sight for a wearied man. And she, who ruled supreme over her pupils, was taking a holiday, and enjoyed handing over her authority for a brief season, even on her own hearthrug."And how did your meeting go off last night, Dr. Gold?" she asked, presently. "Was that what you wanted to talk to me about?""There was stormy discussion," the man replied. "Some fellows got in determined to make a row. But we were there in great force, and I got ten minutes' silence to reply." He smoked on for a few seconds, and added as an afterthought: "The fellow who made the row was put outside, and I heard he got his head broken. Served him right; but I wish it had been one of our own people. Martyrs should always suffer on the right side." And Dr. Gold smiled again, showing his small, white, pointed teeth beneath a black moustache.The woman did not smile. Her eyes flashed instead somewhat angrily. "I wish our people would see that it is not for us to stifle discussion," she said. "We all work only that truth may prevail, and the more freedom for expression of opinion the more certain is the downfall of the present social tyranny. It is for them, not for us, to break the heads of the men who know no better. When I see that sort of thing I want to help on the wrong side."The man sighed, took his cigarette from his lips, and appeared to be thinking deeply. Over his face flitted an expression of sorrow and sympathy. "That is what we thoughtful ones must always feel. But I fear that our revolution will not be sprinkled with rose water, any more than the revolutions that are past and gone. You do not know the British workman, my dear Miss David. When you have lived a few years longer among us you will find how slow he is to move with an idea, and how much faster the idea takes root if he is allowed to break some-body's head on its behalf before he quite understands what it is. We must work with the material that we have, and if any change is to come in our time we must not be too careful as to means." He glanced round the room and looked at Clara. "This is a poor place for you to be in, and poor work for you to be at. You're worthy of something better.""It's as good as I've ever had. Since I first remember, I've never lived in one place or one country for any length of time. Sometimes mother and I were left behind, but we didn't often have lodgings as good as these. They are a great deal better than Polly Mart can get. I don't want anything more for myself. And I can wait, even for the others, if only things will be better some day.""That is one of the points we have agreed to differ on," was the reply. "I mean to see things improved in my lifetime. What are we to wait for? All these wretched creatures will dead and forgotten before we are, and thou-sands more like them. Listen! there's Chellon next door, beating his wife! Do you hear the children's voices chiming in? What good is it to them that you've a school next door, and that Knight and Polly and all the rest of them are gaining knowledge at your expense?""'Through knowledge all good things come,'" she said softly, as if she were repeating the words of the portrait over her head. "But you are right; it comes very slowly. As to my pupils: you know it was agreed that I could get more hold of these men by teaching them than in any other way. They come to learn mathematics and such like; but they borrow books and talk to me. Mathematics is the least that they learn. Have you had any news from Paris? Some of us think that I could do better work over there.""Nothing fresh. But I'll look in again tomorrow night. I have to go to the Gilman-Turners, and it is late. It is well to keep in with the monied folk. Funds are low at headquarters, and we find brains but not money.""Then I shall meet you," she said; "I am going there also. I shall not know many people, but, as you say, it is our duty to go. If they see us they must at least recognise the fact of our existence. The sight of us familiarises them with the idea of social reform. We creep a few steps forward."Dr. Gold lit a fresh cigarette and went on foot to the corner of the street. He rattled some coins in his pocket, hailed a hansom, and, as he jumped into it, said within himself: "She's an uncommonly able woman, and in good hands! A little too rigid in her principles, but that might mend. And, after all, thorough-going principles are what the public believes in, or thinks it does. They may be turned to excellent account. Two together, we might climb up a good way."Clara David proceeded to make her toilet. From the ottoman on which the newspapers were thrown she took out a black velvet dress, and a small piece of old point lace. She opened a folding door, and in a tiny back room, half closet, half kitchen, set some water to boil over a gas stove while she reduced her abundant black curly hair to something like order. Over the bed hung another portrait, of a stout, middle aged lady, gentle and sad, arrayed in the identical piece of old point lace and a black velvet dress. The lady in the portrait wore jewels round her neck and rings on her fingers; but these had been devoted to the Cause long ago.The black velvet dress had, like its owner, passed through many vicissitudes, but they made a brave show together when Clara called to Mrs. Vast from the top of the stairs: "I've got my latch-key, and I'll be home about twelve".Mrs. Vast was proud of her lodger who went out in a black velvet dress to grand houses, and she retired to the parlour to finish an urgent order in cheerful spirits. "And a good thing I persuaded her to let me do up that black velvet," she said to herself. "And very glad I am that she gave it into good hands, for it's a good dress even now, and there's many would have scrimped it for to keep the pieces. But not me. ' Each according to his ability,' I say. And I make no doubt that when Clara David gets her due, and the good times come, she'll have a house at the West End, and well she'll grace it. And she's not one to turn her back on her friends: it's many a good piece of stuff I'll have the handling of then." So Mrs. Vast consoled herself as the night wore on, and she stitched and snipped the maid servant's afternoon gown. From which it may be supposed that Mrs. Vast, in spite of all her reading, believed, as do many others, in levelling up rather than in levelling down.CHAPTER IITHE Gilman-Turner's parties are popular. I do not think I can say as much for each member of the family, taken singly. The chief characteristic of Mr. Gilman-Turner is, that he makes in the city the money that is lavishly spent on these occasions; and his wife is credited with a sharp tongue and a short temper. Some say that she gets these parties together, and that, whether you like her or not, she must be a clever woman to do it; others say that Miss Gilman-Turner is the attraction, and that it is her will and pleasure to fill the house with celebrities such as one meets nowhere else. Whoever does it, it is done, and done well.Ada studied art for a term or two at a well-known studio, and affects the costume of the profession. As Paul Reuban says (and everyone allows that he is the best judge of women's dress in town just now), she shows thereby her taste, for she has not much style of her own, and that sort of thing sets her off. Ada has also written a novel. All her friends have read it, and it is supposed to have been a success. Not even Ada's friends dare ask on what terms it was published. No one knows better than Ada how to repress undue familiarity, and it is understood that money is to her an absolutely uninteresting topic. She will give you a five-pound note if you happen to be in her favour; and she can have plenty more for the asking, for she is an only child, and chief among her admirers are her fond papa and mamma.A young lady in this position is well able to fill her drawing-rooms with celebrities, should she so desire; and everyone knows that everyone is ready to come to a house frequented by people who are worth meeting.Even if the Gilman-Turners are not in your set, it is well worth while to go occasionally if you can spare the time. There is Madame——(you know whom I mean), about whom that case was on last year. There is that M.P., of whose opinions folks speak with bated breath in all strictly orthodox houses. The conversation is sure to turn on one or other of them at one or two of the next half-dozen dull dinner-parties you go to. Just let out that you met the person in question, and that you have first-hand information to give, though it be only as to the colour of the woman's hair, or the cut of the man's clothes. "Not at a house to which I habitually go," you will, of course, add, especially if you are talking with old-fashioned or ultra-particular people, though these are the hearers who will best enjoy your information if you serve it up palatably.Everyone is to be met at the Gilman-Turners: solid men from the city, ponderous matrons from the country, poor people whom the Gilman-Turners have helped, rich people who are not very ready to follow their example, students, artists, actors, writers, rising and risen doctors and barristers, are packed so tight, on the first Thursday in the month all through the season, that you have much ado to find your way to your hostess, and nothing short of a manoeuvre or a fight gets you to Ada's side. Nevertheless, when Clara arrived, there was Dr. Gold, faultlessly attired, smiling, talking, and making himself most agreeable to the heiress. Clara could see him through the open doorway. Our Polish acquaintance, Mr. Barratry, was there, also in the doorway, looking supremely uncomfortable, although Mrs. Gilman-Turner had thoughtfully provided him with German conversation in the form of a young and learned lady in spectacles. The Gilman-Turners always keep a supply of linguists on hand, and they are expected to make themselves useful."But, my dear Ada, I couldn't make any-thing of him. I really could not. His German is so very peculiar. And he was so frightened I thought he meant to run away. He really is not quite tame enough. Next season, perhaps, if he isn't sent to Siberia before then, he may do. There's something rather awful about him. He never laughs. I'm not sure that he even smiled. I like queer people. You know I do. But he is really not a lion. He is only a bear."Barratry put his heels together, and bowed low to Clara. But she had no idea of wasting her evening on a man who was on her side already. She spied in a corner an acquaintance, none other than the student in Tottenham Court Road, and made straight for her."See! She's coming this way. The dynamite lady! Introduce me,do!" whispered the frail little person who was clinging as usual to her friend's side."Miss David—Jessie Sanderson," said the friend, promptly, as she shook hands and made room for the new comer to sit down.Jessie screwed herself an inch or two further into the depths of a big arm chair and laughed nervously. It is one thing to be introduced to a revolutionary person, and another to sit down beside her and open a conversation. She was not sure that she felt comfortable. Jessie chose instinctively the softly picturesque. The grand appealed faintly to her sense of pleasure. The strong oppressed her. Sunshine and warm balmy air, or, failing these, a glowing fire and plenty of velvet cushions, were the things she needed for development. And what a revolutionary person did, or where she went to, was not to be imagined. This large-limbed, robust young woman in black made an uncongenial atmosphere like an east wind blowing, and the east wind is apt to bring our little asperities into view."I'm almost afraid to sit next you, Miss David," she said. "Constance Thompson told me you go in for reforming us all, and I'm sure we don't want to be reformed. We are very happy as we are. It's rather dreadful, don't you think?"Clara turned, and the glance of her black eyes was rather dreadful for a simple little girl whose experience of life had meant simply playtime and petting. "Oh! don't, Miss David!" she said, and her voice rose to a sharp note. "We are not so very wicked. We don't want to be good."What were they to say to one another, these two who had not a thought nor an experience in common? Jessie's unattainable ideal of duty centred in rising early on winter's mornings; the struggle of life embodied itself in the endeavour to get a more accurate outline, or a colour more resembling the old masters, on the canvas that she called "work". She was very kindly, very pretty, very childlike, docile to live with, making (it may be) the best use she could of narrow opportunities.But to Clara she seemed an embodiment of the things that ought not to be. Ada Gilman-Turner at least did something with her wealth; some of the women round served their generation as matrons and housewives. But this small, nerveless, aimless, open-eyed person, with limp, white hands, fit for nothing but to carry rings, what right had she to life, and love, and luxury? Who was she that she should drag out a useless existence on the earnings of the poor? Clara knew the women who toil, while she, and such as she, live idle. For one moment Clara determined to tell her of these women, to see whether even she might not be forced, if not to work for her living, yet to see the futility of her self-satisfied existence. But Clara had learned some wisdom in the schools of adversity, and Jessie was entirely unconscious that any sane person could disapprove of her conduct. She called her pictures "work," and took to herself much praise for diligence."If you know what it is to reach the good, you know more than I do," Clara said, disdainfully, and looked out over the room."Oh! no; my pictures are not good," Jessie hastily made reply. "And the one that I have in the European Gallery is not my best; indeed it is not. I didn't mean that."Constance Thompson was greatly amused. They all petted Jessie, and made a plaything of her. A plaything may properly be put in an undignified position so long as it comes to no harm.Mrs. Gilman-Turner effected a diversion. She knew, as a good general should, how to display her forces to the best advantage, and she had been mentioning Clara David as an object of interest to a young and enterprising barrister, known to indulge in ultra-radical views. And pretty Jessie Sanderson was a person not to be dispensed with at a charitable fête that Ada was getting up on behalf of the "Home for Deserted Children ".Other people had noticed the queer contrast presented by the two women. Ada and Dr. Gold had exchanged their half-dozen phrases, and she felt that duty called her elsewhere: favours must be divided equally if peace is to reign."Look, Dr. Gold!" she said; "you or I must interfere. Miss David must be trying to talk social economy to Jessie Sanderson. The poor child looks quite scared. And I have a hard day's work for her to-morrow. She is going to recite at my charity fête, and to help with the tableaux vivants, and I positively can't spare her. Next week Miss David may say what she likes. Ah! there is mother with Mr. Blackman. Do go and talk to Jessie, doctor; you do know her, don't you?"Dr. Gold, as he passed, bowed and smiled to Clara. "You know the doctor?" said Mr. Blackman. "He is one of us," said Miss David. "He is one of the most capable workers that we have here in England.""Indeed." rejoined Mr. Blackman, and he scanned the lady as he spoke. Something in his tone struck Clara's attention, and she looked up. "You know Dr. Gold also?" she enquired."By reputation only. He was a man of my year at the University, and we prophesied great things of him. Most men thought he was the most brilliant man of his year. They said he could have taken anything that he liked. It was a disappointment when he left without doing anything particular.""Success in the schools doesn't mean much, I think.""Not everything, of course," said Mr. Blackmail, with some hesitation, for he had begun what promised to be a successful career by success in the schools. "But not to succeed sometimes means a good deal. And a good degree is worth something in every profession. Where did he take his doctorate? I hear everyone calling him 'Dr. Gold' now.""In Germany; I don't know where. I knew him afterwards, a short time before my father died. He was very good to me when first I came to England.""Ah! to be sure," said Mr. Blackman. "I have only known him in England. I heard that he had altered his views on social matters—as indeed we all have nowadays. I understood that he had come under the influence of August David. I was not aware that he was your father. He died young. The world sustained a great loss in the death of so original a thinker. I have read his works myself with profound sympathy.""He was my step-father," Clara answered, "but more than a father to me, and I have always gone by his name. He thought very highly of the doctor's talent, though he was dying when they met. We have many who sympathise profoundly, but few who give up the chance of a career for the cause.""And Dr. Gold did that?""To be sure. Have you not said that at your University he could have taken what he liked? We have spoken of that together. How could he take prizes under a system that is all which we are most concerned to terminate?""No doubt. You are better informed than I," Mr. Blackman said, courteously. "As I said, my acquaintance is not personal." And again Clara was conscious of an enquiring look, a look up and down, such as makes each of us consider the secrets of our heart. Jessie would have remembered that her frock was an old one, made up again, and that her necklace was not exactly the right colour to set off her white neck. Clara remembered a secret enquiry officer whom she had successfully baffled three days before her father's death.Mr. Blackmail decided that Clara knew more than she pretended to know, and that after all she was not quite——well! these social reform persons are not, you know. They generally belong to the people. He fetched Clara a sandwich and a glass of claret, and presently went off to another lady's side."My dear Miss Jessie, I am sent to take care of you. Miss Gilman-Turner says that if you don't have a strawberry ice at once you will not be able to sustain the fatigues of tomorrow. I fear my friend Miss David has been a trifle oppressive."The doctor took the vacant chair, and Jessie smiled her sweetest greeting."Oh! thank you, Dr. Gold. She is rather terrible, isn't she? I may say that, though she is a friend of yours?""You may say anything you like; it is sure to be charming, so that you will let me sit here and protect you against further terrors.""She was quite angry with me, she was indeed I thought she was going to scold me because I don't preach sedition, strife, murderings, and all that sort of thing. But I don't believe in them, though I suppose she does. It's much nicer to be contented and to go on as we are.""Much," asserted the Doctor. "And so I propose that we leave that ice until some of the people are gone. It is cool here now. We won't follow the multitude to do vain things. We will sit here and talk.""Talk about Miss David? If you are a friend of hers, do you know what she believes in? I don't, and I can't find anyone who does. But she must believe in something, you know. Constance Thompson says she was shut up in prison, and ate some papers to get out, but that's nonsense, of course. People don't do those things now. Constance must have read that in a shilling dreadful."Jessie's mind was perturbed. She could not readily think of anything else. It did not cross her imagination that Clara's beliefs could have any personal interest for her, but it is amusing to hear about things. She would have listened to the story of Clara's life as we listen to tales about the manners and customs of an existing race of savages.Dr. Gold had no intention of expounding Clara's creed to his present auditor. "I don't know anything about the prison, Miss Jessie. It sounds very harrowing. But I am coming to the fête tomorrow, and I want to know what time you will be there, and what you are going to wear in your part. Green? Yes; green is your colour. And, if I might suggest, a faint suspicion of pearl gray and a touch of rose pink. It would suit your complexion exactly. Amateurs are generally too cautious and commonplace in their combinations of colours. There is no skilful blending of The eye is fatigued and the brain excited when the motif of the piece is tranquil, and the excitement of brilliant colour is wanting where one would gladly welcome its aid. I have been advising Miss Gilman-Turner to try more striking background for her tableau. What one should have is a leading idea and carry it through; and Miss Gilman-Turner is not restful—as you are. I beg your pardon; I speak from the artist's point of view: you understand me?"So Jessie was lured away from the unrestful topic of personal beliefs.But as she was going home in a hansom with her self-constituted guardian, Constance Thompson, that young lady, who had strong opinions and no hesitation in expressing them, chose to take her to task."I can't think how you can like that doctor, Jessie. I looked at him to-night when he was talking to YOU and Ada, and I think he is horrid.""I didn't say I did like him. Hut he came and talked to me, and how could I help it? He might have gone away if he'd liked.""He doesn't look straight at people, and there's something the matter with his teeth. They are so very white, and they are all pointed like an animal's. I think he could tear one in pieces. I'm sure he's no good," the guardian continued, pursuing her own statements without any regard to her ward's reply."You have such fancies, Constance, you really do. And I don't think it's quite nice to notice a man's teeth. I think it is awfully uncharitable to judge anyone like that. A man can't help how he looks. And I'm sure he's very clever and knows about everything. Mrs. Gilman-Turner wouldn't have him there if he weren't nice.""Who says he can't help how he looks? He can help not being nice, I suppose. He wasn't born with that face. I'm sure he's no good. I shall ask George.""Yes, but George isn't everybody's cousin," Jessie said, unconsciously skipping over unfathomed problems of inborn depravity. " You can't expect everyone to ask his leave before they speak to a man. He's nearly perfect, dear, but not quite.""George is a man, and he hears about things. I'm sure you've often been glad to have George to do things for us.""So I have. And so I will again. But Dr. Gold is coming to the fete, and if he's not quite nice, you know, I'd rather not hear till afterwards. I must talk to him. He's a friend of Ada's. I think Ada likes him.""I daresay. Ada can take care of herself. She has got a father. I don't suppose she likes Dr. Gold any better than half-a-dozen others. You know there are always a lot of them about. And when one disappears two or three more come."They passed the doctor while they spoke of him. He was walking to the station with Clara, who would have felt that a shilling for a hansom was a shilling from the Cause so long as she had strength and youth.Half-an-hour later the Gilman-Turners were discussing the party in family trio."Ada, my dear, Mrs. Turner, I don't think much of that doctor. Who brought him? Goode tells me he met him at some German baths.""I really don't remember, father. He has been here a good many times. And I meet him at a good many houses." Ada was surveying herself from top to toe in the glass, seeing what ravages the evening had wrought in her costume. She took a flower from a vase on the mantelshelf, and laid it on her dress. "I think we'll have pink next time, mother; pink and green. I don't fancy this yellow is a success."Mrs. Gilman-Turner had every confidence in her daughter's taste for the future, but she never allowed that there had been any failure in the past. She said as much. Then she reverted to the previous question: "I met Dr. Gold at Baroness Grün's concert, papa. The baroness introduced him to me. And I've always found him most agreeable and well-mannered. I'm sure he is twenty times as useful as Mr. Goode, who has nothing to say for himself. Dr. Gold noticed that I was in pain the other day at the show, and has been most kindly advising me for my sciatica. One might be in agonies, and Mr. Goode would never see.""Ah! well, my dear. Well! well! I merely mentioned it." And Mr. Gilman-Turner retired to rest to gather strength for more money-making in the City.CHAPTER IIISUMMER wore on. The delicate green of the trees had long been dusty and gray, and everyone who is anyone was out of town. Ada Gilman-Turner was renewing her youth in Scotland; Jessie Sanderson was writing rapturously of scenes and sketches in Brittany; and the doctor was spreading the faith in France, or so he said. Some friends of mine thought they saw him in a Paris theatre, and it was reported that he was in brilliant company at Trouville. There is, doubtless, need for the spread and the cultivation of faith in both those resorts. Clara was still in London, working for life and the Cause through the long hot mornings, working late through the hot nights when her scholars had gone home. They were more at leisure now that the fine ladies and gentlemen were away holiday-making.Slack seasons are not all unwelcome to those who are inspired with a greed for book-learning; and Clara's big front room, though it seemed like a furnace to me when the sunshine streamed down on the windows through the August afternoons, was cool in comparison with Tom Knight's mother's stuffy parlour and little bedroom behind; its atmosphere was sweet in comparison with the reeking odours that streamed up the staircase of the buildings.Tom Knight came as often as Clara's school was open, and made rapid progress in many kinds of learning. He learned to look forward and to take pleasure in doing so: he learned that few of his mates could share his aspirations, and that not one of them could talk like the tall woman in black, whose picture filled most of Tom's waking hours: he learned that the literature of his class is poor food for a man who wants to get on, that the working man is the victim of base circumstances, that the rich are careless of everything but their own comfort, that in the good time coming the men who make the money will also spend it. He was not yet an adept at thinking out a proposition, and these things he learned, as beginners learn many things, by rote. When he did any thinking on his own account, he ran in the grooves of the present dispensation; and rewards (for a man who studied mathematics, and put money by, and stuck to his work, and got successive rises of wage—a man who certainly had more good stuff in him than the managing partner) took the form of a nice villa out of town, of a good dinner every day, and of a companion tall and strong, with curly black hair, with fathomless wisdom, solely devoted to that man's profit and advancement, and with the grandest dress in the world.Tom Knight nourished personal ambition. His school hours were not devoted to the study of logic, and even school logic might not have helped him to picture life altogether different from the only life that he knew.Have I not said, besides, that Tom Knight was tall, broad shouldered, and fair, and that, under the influence of the new hopes and the new learning, he had begun to hold himself as a man does who fixes his eyes above his own level and beyond the opposite house? Clara David was proud of her pupil. She loved to hear how he bore himself as a propagandist among his mates, and found in his aptitude and docility a compensation for many of her disappointments. For a slack time is not without drawbacks and disappointments to those whose weekly income is earned at the precarious trade of reporting, translating, and hack-work for the smaller newspapers. There are no meetings to report when everyone is out of town, no concerts when all the world is away. The spinning of original ideas out of a tired brain in the dog-days is not conducive to lightness of spirits. And study requires a cool head, and means an outlay of personal capital that brings no return for a considerable term of years.Had Clara known England better, I do not doubt but that she would have packed her bag and taken a modest holiday; but she knew no more than the names of a few English counties; and she had some vague notions of tyrannical landlords overshadowing life, of narrow-minded parsons who find means to persecute non-church goers, of down-trodden and ignorant peasantry dead to all sense of their own industry and worth. England was a vast factory as she wrote and spoke of it—a factory with the medley called London in its midst. So she stayed, and grew sallower and thinner as the days went on; poorer also, as she gave out continually, and got little back from her class.Now and again she wandered as far as the park; but Clara was not given to walk for pleasure, and she came back tired out. Walking alone, she had no escape from her own thoughts; and she twisted all the sights that she saw there into illustrations of her own theories of life, until her brain was so crowded with sorrow and pity for the things that are, that she could neither settle to work nor write her newspaper articles when she came in again. The dirty little children seemed happy enough rolling and scrambling on the short turf or the gravel; but they knew no better, and even they were undersized and pale. The artisans and their wives and sweethearts wandered gravely along the paths with no idea of the possible joyousness of life. Yet she felt—or she fancied that she felt—that they turned to look after her and pity her because she was alone, a fine personable young woman in black who doubtless had a history. They credited her—so she fancied—with a vulgar tale of disappointed love, as if any loss within the borders of one's own life could be compared, for the weight and the misery of it, with the load of grief just beyond one's reach for lifting, that the whole world groans and labours under in these evil times. To these men and women she was giving her life. And then her thoughts wandered to the quiet Ger-man town where, under prim rows of plane trees, in another garden among men and women walking, she had said good-bye to the man whom she loved, and had let him go alone to toils and hardships and imprisonment at the world's end. All that for the Cause; and now nothing but the Cause remained, or ever would remain, for her; though the Cause would surely fail to reach these dull men and women in her time. After all, what can a woman do alone? All the wisdom of the ancients would make but little show if they were shut up in a woman's mind and the woman were imprisoned in a London back street. Who knows what she does or thinks? She can speak, but to how few! She can write, but who will publish! Only one life more to sacrifice among countless thousands.The fierce desire to live one's own term out, come what may to the rest, is a temptation that assails all the strong natures. After all, how do we know what the rest feel? We can only be sure of ourselves. To die like an animal cannot be so hard to the animals—or to their next of kin among the humans. Only the gods live for ever, and only the heroes, sons of the gods, crave for life. And Clara did not think of any life beyond the life she saw. To waste her power in longing for what she had determined could not be was temptation that she did not succumb to. The life that she devoted to the Cause, the love that for a very brief season had brightened it, were, so far as she trusted, all that she had.It was chiefly physical, no doubt; but the end of that hot summer saw Clara given over to depression. And the sense of failure, the sense of loneliness, made her more accessible, lifted her off the heights of learning, set her nearer to Tom Knight's love. Tom Knight acknowledged to himself in so many words that he wanted Clara for a wife, and that if he could win her, no work should be too hard for him to do, no tricks of his trade too difficult for him to master, no theories as to the equality of his fellow workmen and himself too untrue for him to accept.And he planned a notable scheme. You must see that Tom was a good deal hampered by his partial knowledge of a code of manners other than that affected by his class. If he had thought (as most men do) that all human beings saw eye to eye with himself in the etiquette of courting, the matter would have been easy, though it might have had a sad and sudden ending. And if his knowledge, instead of his ignorance, had been complete, he would have advanced along the commonplace lines of everyday lovers. As it was, he struck out a line for himself. He had already made Clara several presents of his own workmanship. He had brought her whole market bunches of flowers—all solid blossom, and no green stuff to make up the size; which Clara put in the pot beneath the portrait, hoping that Tom was beginning to understand her hero. He had heard, many times repeated, the little that Mrs. Vast knew about her lodger. He wore a new suit of clothes, and had even bought a pair of gloves, like Dr. Gold's, though he had only ventured to put them on after his mother had gone to bed. But all this was too impersonal.Tom Knight had one relation of whom he was proud; one, and one only, who would, he thought, grace his board in the prosperous days to come. She was a Board School mistress with a good and a rising salary. She was always willing to walk out with Tom on holiday afternoons, and she listened sympathetically when he assumed the part of mentor, passing on to her the wise schemes of reform that he had learned overnight from Clara. She had an ingrained belief in the natural inequality of mankind, and still more of womankind, based on experience of her fellow-scholars and pupils; but she did not quarrel with Tom on that account; she liked Tom the better because he was taking to education, and she had entire confidence in her own powers of keeping ahead of the rest, whatever might be the future conditions of racing.Tom's plan was to take this cousin and Clara up the river and to have a day's pleasuring. The cousin suggested a fourth. "Two's company and three's none," she said, looking into Tom's blue eyes. Tom was gazing into futurity, as his way was at that time, and assented. Who should the fourth be? Tom did not want another gentleman; Bessie had misgivings as to the wisdom of inviting another lady. Finally, they decided on a friend of Bessie's, a Miss Poppett, who was keeping company with a young man and would bring him with her."And they'll pay for themselves, Tom, so you won't be at any more expense," Bessie said."All right," says Tom, highly delighted that things were going so well. "And I'll stand treat for you, Bess."That night Tom waited when the class was out, and preferred his request to his mistress."It's been rare and hot," he began, turning his hat round, and standing in the middle of the room."Very hot," assented Clara."I was wishing to ask you about something.""Won't you sit down?" said Clara."We are all thinking you want a holiday, and a breath of fresh air. You're looking rare and pale. We can't afford to lose you, Miss." Tom had gripped the brim of his hat tight, and got all this out at a burst, as shy men do. There was a ring in his voice that touched Clara's loneliness. It was comforting to be told that some of them wanted her, for mathematics are dry feeding for the heart. "Oh! you needn't be afraid. I am tough. I am not going to die yet. There's plenty of work to be done first. You'll know all I can teach you long before that," Clara asserted, cheerfully."Don't talk about dying, Miss," Tom entreated. "If we was to kill you first, there's some of us wouldn't care much about living on afterwards, I'm thinking. We're going to take a day's holiday, and I know you like to see everything that is going on. There's nothing doing at our place, and its fine on the river this time of year. I've been many times. Mrs. Vast says——""Oh! don't let us take Mrs. Vast," Clara exclaimed. "She's so dull.""I was thinking of taking my cousin Bessie. She's doing well, they tell me, at Babbage Street School. And she works hard in school-time. And there's a friend of her's who's in business." And so it was settled.Tom came to fetch Clara in the early morning, not sure whether he hoped or feared that he should meet some of his mates by the way. He carried for Clara a bunch of sweet-smelling flowers from the greengrocer's in the main road, and another like it was stuck in his own buttonhole, for he had quite a pocketful of loose silver and copper towards the day's expenses, and it was a delicate attention to begin with thus early in the day. They rode on the top of the omnibus down to the river, Tom proudly paying the pennies when the conductor came round.Bessie and her friend were waiting for them, gay and fresh, in clean cotton frocks, and hats with flowers that completely eclipsed Tom's purchases. And when the young man appeared, just as the boat started, he had had the civility to bring a posy for both of the young ladies, whereupon Bessie's friend said she should be jealous, and pretended to snatch Bessie's posy away from her, and Bessie sheltered herself behind Tom.Clara was outside these amenities, comparing this with the last steamboat excursion she had taken hundreds of miles—it seemed like hundreds of years—away. How long would it last, and the rivers flow on to the sea! But the pleasure of movement, and the air blowing cool against one's face, is excellent medicine for a sore heart, and the passengers on the boat were gay and bright, dressed in their best, and good spirits are infectious. It seemed more possible to help these people than the toilers in the streets. Directly the burden of toil was lifted for a moment they were hopeful and joyous. Clara told herself that circumstances make folks what they are in the dingy streets, but alter the circumstances, and all is well.Tom, as he timidly sat down beside her, asked if she had been up the river before, by way of opening conversation, and he could not have spoken better, for Clara, thinking back to that other steamboat trip, told stories without end of her foreign life, and on the deck of that river steamer they travelled over half the Continent of Europe. Bessie was in her element, for she had a store of information about many countries, though she had never crossed the Channel; and Bessie's friend, Miss Poppett, had seen all these towns, and carried herself so bravely through the conversation that her young man was filled with pride.Miss Poppett was forewoman at a milliner's not far from the Babbage Street School, and presently it came out how she had travelled so far."I was living with Gilman-Turners then," she explained. "My aunt is housekeeper there now, and is up in Scotland with the family. A beautiful place they have, by all accounts. My aunt has her rooms to herself, and her own maid, and her table kept like any lady's. I'm always welcome there when Gilman-Turners are in town."Clara noticed the name of Oilman-Turner, but. it did not interest her to hear more of them. And if Tom had not been so ill-advised as to snub the young woman, this pleasant water-party would have come and gone without remark. Tom said, severely: "Miss David visits at Gilman-Turners. You'd better take care what you say.""She'll have to visit them some time before she knows as much about the family as I do," Miss Poppett retorted. "And I've nothing to say but what everyone may hear. Perhaps Miss David knows that there's been a rare turn up about Miss Gilman-Turner's marriage.""Not I," Clara said. "I don't know her at all well. I've only been there sometimes. They are away, taking a holiday, as we are. And I hope they are enjoying it as well.""It's a Dr. Gold or some such name," Miss Poppet pursued her topic, "has been after her a long time, and Mr. Gilman-Turner, he won't have it. And a very good thing for the gentleman, whoever he is, for she's an heiress in her own right. My aunt told me about it last time I saw her. And she don't like it; for if Miss Ada was married they wouldn't keep half the company they do, and it wouldn't be half such a good place for her. But there! I don't understand those sort of young ladies. They take up with very different sort of men to what I would if I had all their chances." And she tossed her head as who should say that it was not for want of taste that she had been so easily suited. But this little demonstration was meant for the public: she was not a bad-hearted girl, and she squeezed her lover's hand in secret to make up for it."That may be," said Clara, speaking with what I may, for want of a better name, call a touch of her scholastic manner. "No two are alike. Now we know this Dr. Gold, Mr. Knight and I, and we like him very much."Whether Tom Knight would have stated his feeling about the doctor in the same words is doubtful. But Bessie's friend was annoyed that she was not allowed to keep any of her grand acquaintance for herself."Well! there's no accounting for taste, Miss David. But some of us prefer an unmarried man, or a wife that's dead and buried in the nature of things. And, if all I hear's true, he's got a wife living, and that's what the row was about.""You are misinformed," said Miss David; and Tom Knight spoke up in hope: "I don't fancy you're right there"."It's nothing to me if he has twenty wives," cried the little milliner. "I never was in the habit myself of keeping company with people as don't hold themselves straight. But my cousin comes from that part of the country where his poor wife lives, and knows her well.""England's a large place," said Tom, soothingly. "You may depend upon it you've made a mistake. There's other men of the same name, Miss Poppett.""It ain't my mistake, anyhow," Miss Poppett continued, who had not thought of saying so much when she began, but was not to be baulked of a good story when once she was well on the track. "That was what my aunt said: ' You may depend upon it, it's another man'. And Miss Parkins, as was Miss Ada's maid then, fetched the photographs out of the drawing-room (they were all at the theatre, and safe not to be home till eleven and past), and there he was, sure as life. My cousin Adelaide had dropped in, and she used to see him when he was courting the year before he was married. And there's not many men looks like he does, be their names what they may, Mr. Knight. But, there! I'm sorry I spoke if he's a friend of yours. It's no concern of mine, I'm sure."Nor of mine," said Clara. "If it is as you say, it would be more to the purpose to speak to Miss Gilman-Turner.""Not I," laughed Miss Poppett. "Lose a good place or a good customer, and get no thanks for my pains! No; if you live in a big house, the first thing you've got to do is to keep a still tongue in your head. There'd be fine goings on if we was to tell upstairs all we know downstairs. Let the ladies take care of themselves, I say. It's best for all parties.""It seems to me," put in the schoolmistress, "that you ought to speak, whether you lose your place or not. A married man! I never heard such a thing in my life! And think of his poor wife, too! What a brute he must be! Why, I'd lose my place twenty times over sooner than not show him up."Because Clara had said she knew and liked the man, she was expected to pronounce judgment, and they all looked at her and waited, Tom Knight anxiously expecting."I do not know anything of the circumstances of the case," she said. "And I am not fond of ' showing my friends up,' as you say. A man has a right to personal liberty in things that concern himself. And I do not understand your way of judging from outside."No one followed the drift of her thought, and her own perception of where it would lead to was, perhaps, not very clear. The schoolmistress had declared for duty heedless of consequences, and that had always been Clara's faith. The milliner opined that it is best to be on the safe side, and Clara despised her for it. Nevertheless, she felt that she had pronounced judgment against the schoolmistress, and that she also would "keep a still tongue" to Ada Gilman-Turner, as the milliner had done. "Duty leads us in various paths," she added, wishing them all to perceive that whatever she thought, she thought on conscientious grounds.Then the milliner, hearing the word "duty," felt that the argument was going against her."It's a queer sort of duty that makes a man think of taking two wives at once," she said. "But foreigners do have queer ways, as we all know, and it makes all the difference what you are brought up amongst. Perhaps I've seen too much of foreign nations to think of taking up with 'em. Though I ain't one to talk much about duty myself." And the milliner rose, wishing to end the debate with these crushing last words, and slipped her hand under her young man's arm."Pack o' nonsense," said Tom, beginning to lose his temper in the vain effort to find in his brain some answering thought to Clara's judgment. "The law'd have something to say to a man as took up with two wives at once. Did you never hear of bigamy, Miss Poppett?""Did you never hear that there's one law for rich and another for poor?" Miss Poppett rapped out promptly, and she walked along the deck of the boat."Let's go too, Tom," said the schoolmistress, whose daily work had accustomed her to smooth over disputes; and Tom thought his cousin Bessie had spoken up and spoken well on a matter about which, for young women, and particularly for one's own relations, there could be no practical difference of opinion. Clara, on the water, was beset by her own shadow as she had been on land. She had been foolish to come, more foolish still to allow the young woman to run on into such ridiculous tales. Ignorant folk never know anything more than the outside of a story; but it is the personality within the story that makes it bright or dark, sordid or magnificent. What one man does for greed and is damned for it, another does for conscience sake, and opens out a path of liberty where all men may follow and breathe freer. What did the milliner or the schoolmistress know—how little even Tom understood—of the things that vexed her soul day after day? The doctor understood, and could explain everything. Why should she vex herself with idle gossip? The grand thing was that he could help the Cause on, as he had helped her. And if he could possess himself of the Gilman-Turner money, the tide might turn even in her life-time. She floated on to the foreign river and heard her father and the dear friend of old days talking on and on, but always despondent. "We can but live as long as we can, and die when we must. Ours is the regiment that falls in the valley. The others will pass over on level ground some day." Would the "some day" come in her time? Would she too fall in the valley? It seemed to her that she could almost feel herself crushed down among her comrades, unable even to cry out that she too had suffered and died for the Cause, while the others and the doctor with Ada Gilman-Turner, hand in hand, passed over pleasantly. But when she thought of that other woman, whom they called the doctor's wife, she thought of her as one of the enemies on the hill side, as one of the army called "society" that stands shoulder to shoulder and thrusts men and women down into the dark valley.Long before they came to Hampton Court, Tom Knight had forgotten his dissatisfaction with Clara's judgment. "It was not for her," he said to himself, "to think exactly as commonplace women—schoolmistresses, milliners, and such like—must." His vexation turned against his cousin Bessie, who attached herself to Tom and prevented any private conversation between him and Clara. Tom was angry with Bessie for taking so much and knowing so much botany and history; Clara was nowhere beside her; and to Tom's bewilderment did not seem interested in those branches of learning, she who so often said all good things come by learning. What sort of learning did she mean?Tom's opportunity came after they landed at the pier on the homeward journey. On the top of the omnibus, in the cool of the evening, he found himself alone with Clara, and he asked her point-blank: "Don't you never think about getting married, Miss David?" Clara had been thinking a good deal about the matter that day, first as regarded herself, second as regarded Tom. Only she never united the two ideas. She had decided that on the whole, men being as they are, perhaps she ought not to be too disappointed if Tom followed the common lot of all men, and married his cousin."I thought you knew already what my opinions on that subject are, Mr. Knight," she said, smiling. "I think on the whole I should be glad if you married. You might do better work for the Cause married than single, and that is the great thing. But I hope your wife would not hold you back."It was not encouraging from our standpoint, because we know what each had in mind. Tom Knight, possessed by his own idea, took heart. "I'm thinking," he said, "if you and me was to think about getting married, it might do. I'm a rough fellow, but I'm not one as can't learn. We don't like to see you working so hard, and it's a poor place, is Mrs. Vast's. I could soon do better for you than that. There ain't no reason that I knows of why I shouldn't get on like the best of them, and you drive your carriage before we've done. Come now, what do you think?""Think," cried Clara, so loud that Tom feared lest the omnibus driver should hear, "I couldn't think of such a thing. It's out of the question; impossible. We should both be miserable.""Sorry I spoke," said Tom, somewhat nettled, and then his good sense reasserted itself. "But there! you're took aback. I know you ain't one, after all you've taught us, to be going back on a man on account of his not being what they call a gentleman. Suppose you and me was to walk together for a bit, Sundays, or when we could get out. We might talk about it again presently."CHAPTER IVBEFORE the end of September, Dr. Gold was in town. He seldom wrote letters, and Clara did not expect any. But one evening Clara was sitting alone with a heap of papers before her, and the doctor walked in as if he had not been away for a day."Well! and how has the world been using you this beautiful summer weather? I thought I should find you at home, as this is school night. But where ace the scholars?""They haven't been so often lately. Mr. Knight and I didn't agree about something, and he has absented himself since. They were most of them his friends who used to come, and they have stayed away too.""They'll come again when the weather is cooler. They'll have cooled down, too," the doctor said, lightly, for the matter did not seem very important to him. "London is even hotter than Paris.""Ah I you've been in Paris?" Clara asked eagerly, longing for a budget of fresh ideas."I have been in Paris, and the fraternity all send you greeting. Villet thinks of coming to London presently: there are so many of them there just now. And Meulon gave me this to be translated. I told him you could do it better than anyone in London."Clara unrolled a closely-written manuscript. "When is it to be done?" she asked."As soon as can be. There is to be a meeting next week, and we want to have it in type before then.""Will to-morrow night do?""Say to-morrow afternoon by post-time. But can your own work wait?""My work must wait, if there's anything better to be done. And I am sorry to say there is not much doing just now. I am gathering materials for the winter. Will you look that over and see if it will do? And I will look at Meulon's thing meanwhile." Dr. Gold took the proofs handed to him, and, pencil in hand, began to run them through. "Excellent!" he said. "Only here and there you have not got quite your own meaning. See! I will jot down a few notes on a scrap of paper. But it is excellent. I hope you get your money out of the papers.""Yes; generally I do. Some of the papers know you can't make them pay in coin, and so they pay in fair words and promises, which are so good for the rent. Mrs. Vast is very good, and I had to ask her to wait last week.""The villains!" exclaimed the doctor. "Tell me who the fellow was, and I'll have it out with him. It makes me mad to think of those men living on the fat of the land, and cheating the women whose brains furnish ideas for them.""It was only two or three German reviews, doctor. Nothing of any account. Only a few shillings at the best. If there were nothing worse than that in the way of tyranny——""Don't speak of it," said the doctor. "I have just come from Paris, and the stories of the men and women out there are worse than any that we have at home. You heard of Jeanne Coulot?""I only heard that she died.""Well! I won't repeat it. Only three or four of us know how bad it was. And whoever else wants encouragement to work on while life lasts, it is not you, Miss David.""No, indeed!" she said. "Jeanne is to be envied if she raises up more workers. And she was quite young, too. I knew her once, years ago.""I undertook a large piece of work on the strength of the horror of it," the doctor said, in his clear, impressive voice. "It shall be a monument to Jeanne, who lies in Perè-la-Chaise with not even a headstone to cover her. We were all too poor to raise it, and the best monument Jeanne can have is the salvation of other women.""What is the work to be? Can I help in it?" Clara asked."No, indeed. I thought of asking you, but now I see the work you have before you, now that you have undertaken Meulon's paper, I will manage alone.""Meulon's paper is well-intentioned, and I will do it, though it will not help us far. I will find time for both.""Miss David, if all the workers were like you, society would soon be shaking. How can we repay you?"''The brotherhood do not repay—except injuries and to their enemies," she said. 'And it would be a bad thing if I let my daily work stand in the way of a service to you, since but for you no one would have trusted me with it in your big, busy London. I could only have died to inspire you all, like Jeanne.""God forbid!" said the doctor."I don't suppose he troubles himself," said Clara, lightly. "Jeanne died, anyhow. And now what do you want me to do?""I am troubled about an article that I promised," Dr. Gold said, without further parley. "There are some statistics that must be verified, and that means a good many hours at the Museum. There is no one I could trust it to. It is a rare gift, above all for a woman, to have accuracy and intelligence enough, and yet to be willing to efface herself. And I don't want the thing altered; only the facts must be correct: the public would not find it out if they weren't, but the editor might. If you would do that for me I could go home and begin my magnum opus without loss of time.""I will do it. You may come for it tomorrow night, and you shall have both ready. I am used to work under orders, you know. It is like old days"; and Miss David glanced at the portrait, as she was wont to do in her happier moments."What a private secretary you would make!" the doctor exclaimed, enthusiastically. "Had I such an one, the Cause of Causes should be nearer its triumph. And that, I know, is all you care for. I do not wrong you by thinking that you work for me."He went away, relieved not only of his manuscripts, but also of some weight on his mind. He had stayed out of town a few days longer than he had intended, being detained, no doubt, as he hinted, by urgent and private affairs in Paris. The verification of facts was never a pleasant task to him, nor did he carry a store of facts about with him, as he did of ideas more or less original. A resort to that repository of reported facts, the British Museum, is not to most men's taste when a holiday has been curtailed. And everyone who has acquaintance with literary matters knows that to entrust to a third person a rough draught of an original article on a timely topic is not always a safe proceeding. Yet had not a friendly editor solemnly warned him that he must in future be a little more careful about matters of fact?"Your stuff is just what we want, my dear fellow; and I tell you, candidly, I can't put my hand on another man who can do it half as well. But any fool can get up the facts of a case. I wonder you don't keep a hack of your own. It ought to be worth your while." Dr. Gold was thinking of the editor's counsel when he made the polite speech about the private secretary. In all London there could be no one who would suit him so well. Unfortunately, there were a few obstacles in the way. No one knew better than he that a fixed income of a hundred and fifty pounds a year is soon spent by a gentleman who likes to live with comfort, and the literary earnings of many of us are but precarious. To be sure this private secretary would ask nothing better than to earn her own salary; indeed, well directed, so clever and capable a woman should earn much more than that, her talents at present going much to waste. Dr. Gold decided that the salary of the secretary might be managed without trenching on his own fixed income.Meditating on such matters, he passed a public-house with the name of G. Turner over the door. He shrugged his shoulders, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and set his teeth, scowling fiercely. "She has enough to save me from all this wretched hack-work, and the Cause might go to the devil. If it were not for that woman!" he added, enigmatically. "Three of them!" and he laughed to think how his path in life was beset. Then, as his hands thrust down felt certain coins: "After all, I have that woman's money. And I am free," he added. He remembered the magnum opus, and fell to considering his plan for the same, as he set his face southwards."Hullo!" called a voice behind him. "Who'd a thought o' meetin' you in this outlandish place? You must be up to some queer game or other. Come on and have a game o' billiards and a drink, and tell us all about it. Town's beastly dull. There's not a soul in it, and nothing in the papers. You look as if you were goin' to do a murder, doctor, to wake us all up a bit.""Get out, do! There's a good fellow. I'm busy.""Nowhere to get to, 'pon my life. Not a creature stirring. Come on. It's early enough yet. Do your business afterwards."Dr. Gold played billiards, as he did many things, well. And if you play billiards with a man clumsier than yourself, you can earn much more money in a given time than if you set out the plan of a magnum opus on paper. Though it may not be well to play on purpose to gain money, still, if your opponent insists upon playing, and can well afford to lose, how then? Billiards and other games of skill or chance are not wrong in themselves—so divines are not yet tired of telling us. Where does the wrong come in? Not in the spending of the money, for a pound that has changed hands near a billiard-table buys as many good things and spreads the Cause of Causes as far as a pound new and clean from the Mint. And the Cause wants money badly: everyone's Cause does.Clara had no temptation to play billiards. She was seized by the lowlier temptation to go to sleep long before Meulon's paper was turned into English. It was uninteresting and not very well put. Clara, in spite of her sleepiness, contrived to turn several sentences more neatly as the small hours struck one after another. Mrs. Vast had an urgent order to complete, but her light was out long before Clara's. And nevertheless, as the shopkeepers in Tottenham Court Road were setting out their windows next morning (and earlier hours are kept in the Road than in many of the streets near by), Clara passed by towards the reading-room with the doctor's notes in her hand, happier and more hopeful than she had been for many a long day, thinking of the magnum opus that she was writing vicariously.CHAPTER VMISS DAVID had not many happy moments; and it does seem hard that Constance Thompson should have chosen that same afternoon to lie in wait for her in the porch of the Museum and (as she put the case) "to have it out with her". It will be remembered that Constance Thompson had not liked the doctor on an earlier acquaintance, and had not approved of his talking with little Jessie Sanderson. But Jessie and Clara have nothing in common, and it does not follow that because a companion is unfitting for one he is also unfitting for the other. Miss Thompson is neither the official nor the self-constituted guardian of all her contemporaries. She told me afterwards, when we discussed the matter, that she had suspected how things were going, and that she was determined Clara David should not sin with her eyes shut. But Con-stance's one foible is faith in her own powers of prophecy, and her most aggravating propensity is to be wise after the event. Perhaps she is apt to use rather hard words. We did not then—many of us do not even now—choose to say that Clara David was tempted to sin, except in the general way in which we all describe ourselves as sinners, which carries no sting. I think myself, though Constance never said so, that there is in some minds an extreme desire to read the next chapters of the stories that are being written by all our friends. We know what a rush there is to see the new numbers of the magazines, how eager we are to learn how the hero and heroine are progressing, and what they intend to do. We should not like to wait for this month's instalment of the story, we should dislike above all things to miss out the chapters where the hero decides to do the deed and the heroine's motives are laid out at length. Yet this waiting and skipping is just what we have to put up with in real-life stories. I always felt that it irked Constance Thompson. It may be that, having got to the end of one exciting chapter, she wanted to read the next, and even to make the story as a whole end happily according to her own canons of taste and righteousness.The two young women got through the formalities of the umbrella department and marched off side by side through the big gates. They began talking of their holidays, as is the custom in September."I am home early, for I have work to do," said Constance."And I haven't been away, for I also have work," rejoined Clara."After all, London is the best place to live in," Constance said. "But it has been terribly hot. Didn't you want to go away?""For many reasons," Clara asserted."I should want to go for every reason, though I've never been in London through the summer. It's a blessing to get away from the people you see all the year round.""They got away from me, so it came to the same thing," Clara said. " The reading-room has had no one in it that you would know.""No; I suppose not. All the schools were empty. But you can't get away from people. The world is fearfully small sometimes. By-the-bye,—I met some people whom I think you know up in the North.""I didn't know any of my friends were so much in the fashion. The Gilman-Turners are in Scotland, I heard.""So they are," Constance said. "I heard from Ada Gilman-Turner about a fortnight ago. No; the lady I met was Mrs. Gold. You know the doctor, don't you?"Clara had not breathed the air of conspiracy for nothing. The "by-the-bye," followed by a slight pause and then a hurry forward, with which Constance unconsciously introduced the subject, served to put her on her guard. She answered carelessly:—"Well, yes, I know him. He has interest in the literary world, and he got me work when I came to England.""I heard him speak at a meeting in favour of woman suffrage. He's a very good speaker of a sort, but I never liked him," Constance said."Yes; he is interested in the cause of women, I know," Clara went on.Miss Thompson was warming to her subject."It's enough to make one turn Tory, and never let women go out walking alone, or learn their alphabet, to think that a man like that pretends to help women on. He must be the most horrible humbug that ever was heard of. Not that I ever liked him. He looks like a bad man, I think.""Do you think the cause of women is so strong that we can afford to refuse help because it is offered by a man whose face does not please us?" Clara looked at her companion, laughing slyly."Oh! it's not that. So long as I only thought he looked horrid, I shook hands with him, and was civil to him. One meets him at the Gilman-Turners, you know. But never again, even if I do meet him. "He will regret the loss of your friendship deeply, no doubt.""He probably dislikes me as much as I dislike him. But I don't think you'll see him dangling after Ada any more. The Gilman-Turners know. It's disgraceful, really.""It won't make much difference to me whether he goes there or not," Miss David said; "but I shall probably shake hands with him elsewhere, or at least I may do so. You haven't told me yet why I am to refuse him that honour, Miss Thompson.""Why, he's got a wife down in the country, a wife and child, down in——where I was staying with my aunt," Constance explained."Is that a crime, Miss Thompson? I thought it was a virtue here in England.""Did you know, then? I don't know about England, but it seems to me that in any country it is disgraceful to marry a wife, and then desert her and live on her money.""That is the fault of your English law which makes such a thing possible," Clara said, sententiously. "But I happen to know that Dr. Gold lives by literary work.""And I happen to know that he doesn't," Constance contradicted; "at least not altogether. He married this girl eight or ten years ago. She was pretty then, they say, and she had a few hundreds a year, and all her people were against it because he's a man of no family, and her people are very well connected. But she would marry him, and he made her wretched, and now she pays him something like half her little income to keep out of her way. And if half they say of him is true, he's not fit company for any decent woman."Clara paused, and shifted her manuscript and a book under her arm. "You see," she began, "it does not absolutely follow, as a matter of course, that the conventional English way of looking at marriage is the right way.""Perhaps not," Constance admitted; "but a man must be a brute to act like that, anyway.""To act what way? If they are both happier apart, why would it be less like a brute to live together? In these matters it seems to me better to give to both men and women full liberty of action. Want of freedom in contract is what women suffer so much from."But if Clara was persistent in drawing off the discussion towards abstract theory, Constance was not less determined to keep to the main facts of the particular case."Freedom? It's a queer sort of freedom," she said. "The good ones don't want it, and the bad ones take it, anyhow. But I daresay she's glad to be rid of him at any price, if you mean that, though it doesn't follow that a man worth his salt would pocket the price. It seems to me that what some women suffer so much from is that some men want to take all they can get and give nothing back. She did fall in love with the man, and all the money was hers, and he took the money and never cared a straw for her. And now she has to live on the edge of a sixpence, and to keep the child, and all the neighbourhood looks askance at her, and he spends her money—it's just as well not to know how, I daresay—in town.""The lady has a whole-hearted champion, at any-rate," Clara said. "I wish you would speak like that against tyranny in the mass.""I don't care for things in the mass," Constance declared. "It's much better to sweep your own doorstep clean than to go preaching about the dirt on other people's stairs. When I see anyone ill-used I want to go in and save them.""But most of all you want to punish the ill-user?''"I daresay I do. Don't you? At any rate I shall try to punish this doctor by telling everyone I know. I can't think how he has kept it so dark. No one seems to know. The worst is his taking that money."Perhaps it was as well that the two women came to the corner and parted. Constance Thompson remembered an hour or two later that she had said much and listened to little. If she had wished to read the next chapter of Clara David's story, she was disappointed; though, unawares, she helped to write a great part of that chapter.It did not occur to Miss Thompson that there could be much difference of opinion between two women as to the right and wrong of this question, the main facts being once proven. Given a man and wife, there is something very wrong somewhere if they are discovered in residence at opposite ends of England. And when the woman is living quietly and poorly among her own people, while the man is known in London society, and takes no pains to show that he is not a bachelor, the obvious conclusion to be drawn is that one may shake hands with the wife but not with the man.To Clara, on the contrary, it was rather in favour of any person that he or she ventured to break the laws of conventional morality. She had been born and bred in an atmosphere of antagonism to present conditions. She assumed that things as they are want altering for the better (as indeed they do); and she knew (as we all know) that an unjust law is often first discussed when some individual, bolder than the rest, dares its penalty for conscience sake. We all stand on a firm basis of truth: it is what we erect on that basis that so frequently totters and falls when the sun shines down and the world rolls on its course.Constance Thompson expected that Clara would dispute the truth of her statements, and was prepared to prove them chapter and verse. It never occurred to Clara to do anything of the kind. The outline of the story did not appear to her as anything out of the common way of life. Her attitude towards law and conventionality was expectant. If good cause were shown, she would keep the law, or follow in the conventional path; but the burden of proof lay, to her thinking, on the law's side. At all times she had been poor, solitary, hardworking; and yet she never thought of submitting herself to other people's ideas, or of devoting her talents and her industry to any cause but that of rebellion against tyrannies as they are.It is necessary to explain Clara David's views at length. As for Constance, her attitude towards the law is our own, and we all understand it. Law, from our point of view, is no enemy, but a protector and friend. When a policeman turns the corner of the street, Constance and I are confident and happy; it seems to us that we can gain nothing but good from the law's representative. But there are among my friends some who run down a side alley rather than meet a policeman, although they are at the time innocent of offence as a baby: they think of Law as a stern personage who is for ever interfering with a man's desire to enjoy life after his own fashion.But there are points where those touch who begin at opposite sides of an opinion. Constance and Clara became of one mind as they thought of the money part of the transaction. Here it was that Clara wished to dispute facts, and told herself repeatedly that all the world is interested in maligning men who desire to institute any reform. And she was hurt because Dr. Gold had left her to hear this story by chance, instead of telling her the truth. Secrets should be guarded jealously from all the world, but not from one's friends and chosen comrades. When each knows enough of every other to bring him to justice, what are a few domestic secrets more or less?Clara turned into Mrs. Snoad's to get some dinner, and to think over the matter. She had not been sitting ten minutes when Dr. Gold walked in. "You here!" she exclaimed. "I am surprised!""I thought I might meet you," said the doctor. "I have often heard you speak of Mrs. Snoad. And we have business together."Mrs. Snoad is a comfortable person, nowise given to conspiracy or projects of reform: but conspirators and reformers eat, like the rest of the world; and if they are clean and quiet, and pay their bills, they are better customers than many. Miss David did not spend as much money as some do, but she came regularly, and lodging with Mrs. Vast, who was an old friend of Mrs. Snoad's, she belonged, as it were, to the family. The doctor's credentials, as Miss David's friend, were all-sufficient. They sat at one table, and Dr. Gold ordered for himself the most luxurious meal that Mrs. Snoad could produce. He praised Mrs. Snoad's cooking, and declared that at his club chops were not produced to greater perfection. "It is easy to see, Mrs. Snoad, that you have not lived all your life at this end of London," he said.Mrs. Snoad smiled, for she liked it to be known that she had been in good service before she took up with Snoad. "I shall look in again next week. Be sure you have something nice for me." Dr. Gold had come out without his purse, but he hoped that would not inconvenience Mrs. Snoad. Miss David would be surety for him. He regretted his carelessness; he had never been a good man of business.Mrs. Snoad's smiles sank out of sight, for folks had tried several times before to talk her out of the price of a meal."You shall owe it to me, not to Mrs. Snoad," Clara said, and Mrs. Snoad's smiles rose again to the surface, and she enjoyed the compliment to her cooking as soon as she knew she had not to pay for it."It is pay-day to-morrow, Miss David," Dr. Gold told her, as they walked home together. "My quarter's income is due, slender but useful. Will you dine with me again, but not at good Mrs. Snoad's? You have played hostess to-night; it is my turn to-morrow. We will go to the play afterwards. This time of year there is not much going on, but we will find something."Barratry was in Clara's room as they entered."Good heavens, man! What's amiss?" cried the doctor. Barratry was sitting by the table, leaning on his arms, with his back to the light, and the face that he raised to meet them was set, and grim, and haggard."Don't ask him," Clara said in a low voice in English. "He has been here before like this. He's nearly starving, I expect."She went up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder."You have not been to see me for a long time," she said."What has become of you, and where, have you been all this time? Do you forget that I am the sister of you all, and you want a sister in this great, hot London?"She spoke in German, and it was in German that the man answered her. But his gesture was more eloquent than his words, for he threw open a closely-buttoned coat that he wore."Poor fellow!" Clara said, again in English. "Has he come to that? He can't speak English, and he has so very little to do, and everyone has been out of town." Then she spoke in German again: " Barratry, some of us must suffer for the Cause, and it is always harder to suffer than to work. But you ought to come and tell me how things are going with you; I have to suffer too, and it is not so hard together. The doctor has been telling me of Jeanne Coulot. She is happier than we, for she is dead. Doctor, talk to him for ten minutes; tell him the news from Paris. I will get him some supper, and then we will work."By the time she set food before him, Jeanne Coulot's sad story had so inspired Barratry with courage that he would fain not have eaten, but Clara bade him fall to for the good of the Cause.Meanwhile the doctor watched."You are a good woman, Clara," he said.Barratry's English reached so far as that."Good!" he said, smiling. "Sister to Barratry," and he reached up a hand, which, to say the truth, was not of the cleanest."Now you are back you must get Barratry some work, doctor," she said; and Barratry, his wits brighter for feeding, understood that also, and re-echoed: "Work, yes. Work for Barratry."Then the two sat down to the translation of Meulon's paper, and to the notes, and Barratry smoked one of the doctor's cigarettes."Can I not help?" he said presently. "Is there nothing to copy, nothing?"Clara looked at Dr. Gold."Here is a manuscript, Barratry, that has come from the comrades in Paris. They sent it to me to translate. The doctor wants this copy, and I should have one to keep. Will you copy it for me?""What will I not do for our sister?" Barratry answered." I will take it with me. I will work all night.""No, no; not that. There is no hurry. It is only the translation that must go to press. Begin here now, and come again to finish to-morrow. We have missed you these many nights.""But it is cowardly; it is not true," Barratry burst out when he had worked for ten minutes or so. "Not thus will the good time come. Your writers seem to think that revolutions grow gentle and quiet out of the earth like summer flowers. It will be storm and hurricane, and the world swept bare of all that now reigns. And you, and I, and all of us will go down into the darkness. Only a few will live through the time, and they will build up in peace out of the ruins. But all that we now have must go first. It is a foundation altogether rotten.""Poor Barratry!" Clara said, gently. "He has seen so much trouble. Only the bad side of the world has ever been turned to him. But, Barratry, we are working to save what we can that is good. You know that some of us think that here in England the conditions are such that the good time may come without so fearful a storm. We are building a breakwater, and when the storm comes the waves will dash themselves on it in vain, and we shall come out when the storm is over, and build up the world in harmony and brotherly love.""The conditions of life are not altogether against us in this country, Barratry, as they are no doubt elsewhere," added Dr. Gold. "The new era will begin here in England. Society is already strongly disposed in our favour. Your own presence here, our work, shows what English sentiment is.""You English," retorted Barratry, "you always believe that you are the centre of the world. They only permit us here because your society is so much against us that we carry on no propaganda worth living for. Society likes to hear of us, that is true, but only as she likes to go to your garden of wild animals, and to hear what those animals do when they are at home, and whether they can distinguish between one colour and another. England is as cold as ice. I see the people starving all down the street, and I starve with them. I only do not drink nor make a beast of myself as they do, and so I suffer more and starve slower. And I am strong and active. I ask only to work, and there is work everywhere waiting to be done. No; I am tired of your England. I escaped with my life; but life, what is it? It is nothing. I am going back to my country; and what remains of me I will spend in trying to call forth the storm.""But how can you get back, Barratry? If you were to go by sea, it might be done, but overland there is money wanted.""See!" Barratry exclaimed, and he held out his hand with a gold piece or two in it; "that is for my journey; it will soon be enough for starting.""My good fellow, you told us you were starving," said the doctor."I will have no secrets from comrades, from my sister here," Barratry said, defiantly, as he threw back his head. "If they knew—those men who go up and down our streets—they would murder me for the gold's sake. And one will not die the death of a dog. When I came here with my life in my hand and threw myself on the mercy of the fraternity in London, I said to myself that I would not be imprisoned here instead of there, for to escape from one prison to another would be useless. The half of all that I earned I put by here. If the other half did not suffice, that did not matter. Life is nothing, but to be free is all. I have earned nothing these last clays, but the store is untouched. A patriot must first master himself, and only afterwards the world.""There was no need for that, comrade. Good men are scarce, and if you had starved to death we should have had one less on our side. Means would have been found to send you back had you been called for.""Besides, Barratry, for such a purpose you have means of your own," added Dr. Gold."And did I not spend and waste in my boyhood more than I can ever repay?" demanded he. "How can I take from the people more of their hard-earned money? I am in debt to them yet, and now eat the bread of idleness, and every day fall deeper into debt to the commonwealth. I will be beholden to no fraternity. I am free to judge of the strength of my own call, and I am called now, and I go.""But not to-night. Barratry. You will come again. Come and talk to me first, and you shall finish the writing or not as you please.""I will finish," Barratry said; "but not now. The pain of life is upon me, and that manuscript is like fuel to fire. But I would copy the sentence of my own execution for you, my sister.""What a firebrand," said the doctor, as the door closed behind him. "Does he often favour you with this kind of oration?""He is not often like this; he has many moods. Often he is gentle as can be," Clara answered. "But is he not noble? He alone, of all the men that I know, has given up money, and position, and culture, and all that men love for the sake of the Cause. We were brought up in it, and it is like the breath of our life.""I was not brought up in it," corrected the doctor. "I have been but a very half-hearted brother for most of my life, until I met you. Such value as I have for the Cause must be credited to your account. In the present state of things there is no particular good in giving up money to which one is entitled by law. If it went to the workers, well and good; but it goes to the Government or to some other collection of drones. What is not for us in the struggle, is against us. We must work with the materials that we have at command. And Barratry would do better work if he stayed in his country, and kept in with the authorities, and remitted to headquarters the money to which he is entitled. Barratry is a good fellow, but his money would be of more worth to us than he is ever likely to be. He is too hot-headed for practical work.""I don't see exactly where is the fault in your argument, doctor; and yet I feel that Barratry is right in not taking the money."Dr. Gold smiled and bowed. "If you see no flaw in my argument you may be sure there is none. For you have more logical acumen than any woman I know.""Don't you feel, Dr. Gold, that, right or wrong, with a thousand men as much in earnest as Barratry, our Cause would be won?""Indeed I do not. Nothing would surprise me less than to hear that Barratry had gone out of his mind or blown his brains out, especially if he continues to starve himself for the sake of an idea.""His mother was out of her mind, so they say," Clara said, gravely. "She put an end to herself in sheer misery.""Ah; that is just what I should have thought.""He is so solitary," Clara pleaded. " He broods over his miseries. I see him seldom, and he knows scarcely anyone else in London.""Many of us would be better men and more powerful workers for the Cause if we had you to counsel and advise us, Miss David," Dr. Gold spoke sadly. "There are so few women who exercise any power in political matters. I do not think that Barratry is to be pitied more than the rest of us who see too little of you.""Poor Barratry," said Miss David once again. "I do pity him, all the same, more than the rest of you. He has hindered us from our work terribly, however, and I wanted to show you the notes I have taken. I made a fair copy, and it only needs running through to see that it is all right.""You must have worked all night, Miss David., How can I thank you enough? You ought to be doing better work than this.""I worked all day. That is nothing. And I worked a few hours after you went away last night. It is only what most workers do, to work all day long. I thought that was what you wanted of me.""And I have already sketched out the plan of the work that I contemplate," said the doctor. "I know that you did it to help that on, not to help me. The materials will not all be gathered in England. I shall have to visit many places on the continent and in the colonies. To do the work well, more than one worker is needed. But perhaps I can begin and others will complete."With that Dr. Gold took his leave; and Clara, who had been at work all day long, tried in vain to sleep. This great work would be paid for at a considerable price if Dr. Gold was going away to gather material. Over and over again she repeated the argument that told so well in favour of taking all the money to which one may legally lay claim.As for the doctor, he posted Clara's manuscript to the editor with a note, and going home set out before morning an elaborate plan of the great work. Chapters and headings were there complete, with an important-looking list of authorities to be consulted, of enquiries to be conducted, of ideas to be worked out. It was, in a way, double; one side being headed by the doctor's own initials, and the other with a blank atop.When he had finished it, he did it up for post, and put a letter inside:—"You will receive herewith a very sketchy plan for the great work on social matters of which we stand (in my opinion) in great need. It wants much alteration and condensation; I shall be glad to have your advice, especially on the German section, which, as you see, I have left, for the most part, blank."That I shall need considerable help in preparing the work for press, even after the materials are collected, is certain; but if the commonwealth needs my labours, the help will be forthcoming. On the plan, overleaf, I have drawn up a list of the parts or subjects where I feel myself weak. It is one step towards finding help to realise exactly what help one wants.""It is exactly what I could do," said Clara to herself when the letter reached her next morning. "Perhaps I could not spend my life better. After all, Barratry is right. Life is nothing, except to sacrifice it. And it would take a hundred lives like mine to make any impression here."CHAPTER VIDURING the month of September all London comes back from holiday-making, and serious work of all sorts begins again with a rush. Slack times are over, with their trials and their advantages. We meet our friends and acquaintances in the street, and reflect that, on the whole, London is a pleasant place of abode; not by any means that solitary and dusty wilderness that it appeared in our eyes only a month ago."A telegram, my dear," said Mrs. Vast, standing in the doorway, with a couple of threaded needles stuck like daggers in the bosom of her gown and a sprinkling of snippings all over her. " Reply paid. And it's a mercy you're in, for ten to one I couldn't have attended to it if you'd been out."During the last weeks, for want of better company perhaps, Clara David had become more intimate with the dressmaker, who liked to believe that she was consulted by her lodger on important affairs, personal and social."They want me to go to the north for a couple of days, Mrs. Vast. Someone has fallen ill, and they want me to take a meeting at a club. I shall say 'yes'.""Well, and I wouldn't be one to hinder you," commented Mrs. Vast, as though she thought her opinion had been asked, "for to my mind you've been wanting a change these many weeks. Though clubs is what I haven't much opinion of, for young women in particular. Most times they meets in public-houses, which is what no young woman nor man either has a call to frequent. And them clubs the gentlemen has at the West End might as well meet at public-houses, by all I hear of the drinking and card-playing that goes on there.""This isn't a public-house," Clara explained, laughing. "And I'm not going to play cards, you may be sure. Nor is it a club of fine gentlemen. See here! It's at Radington; but I don't know where that is.""Bless your life!" cried Mrs. Vast. "And I've been to Radington many's the time when I was a girl, though that's a many years ago, and they do say it's greatly altered. There's the boy waiting, and I'm so full of work I haven't time to turn round. Give me the paper, and I'll tell you all about it to-night if you'll step downstairs."Towards evening Clara stepped downstairs accordingly."Well, Mrs. Vast, I've come to hear all you can tell me about Radington," she said, as she stood on the threshold of the little back room where Mrs. Vast did her needlework."Sit you down, do," responded Mrs. Vast. "I've been thinking about that very place all this day. We used to go in there for shopping when I was a girl, and it was at Mrs. Pearce's in the High Street that I bought the silk shawl you've seen me wear. Gave a pound for it, I remember. That's many a long day since."Clara sat down in the place of honour, by the side of a small fire lighted rather for the sake of Mrs. Vast's flat-irons than for Mrs. Vast's personal comfort. The broken springs of the chair were imperfectly concealed by a lumpy cushion stuffed with dress clippings, and Mrs. Vast's sewing machine and her large table for cutting out occupied the pleasantest parts of the room, and were always in the way of those who did not choose to sit over the fire or in the draught of either door.The same encroachment of business premises on available space had taken place in the back yard, where little more than a shaft of brickwork remained between the houses. The wall had been whitewashed to catch such light as there was; but even this cheerful background, and a broken waterbutt that occupied the foreground of the picture, did not transform Mrs. Vast's living and working room into anything but a dark and dismal apartment.And it was not unnatural that she dwelt fondly on the days when, as a girl, she had driven into Radington in her father's cart, and had been In a position to carry her custom to the best shop in the town.Reminiscences of the cathedral and the tall trees in the palace garden, of the new post office, of the railway station, of the factories, and of the local magnates, did not come quite so readily to Mrs. Vast's mind. But they came gradually, in response to leading questions from Clara David; and I fear that Mrs. Vast, looking back to old, forgotten times, reproduced, as we generally do, many of her old, forgotten opinions and ways of thinking as well as the old, forgotten facts and episodes, and that her conversation accorded but indifferently with her professions of faith in more recent and less happy years."I shall begin to suspect you with your friends among the bishops and the squirearchy," Clara told her. "I wonder you don't go and live among them, and make frocks for the bishop's lady and the squire's daughters, instead of working for us who are only of the people.""Ah! my dear. That's a long story, and won't do you no good to hear, nor me to tell. I shan't never go back again, and I'm getting on. All the same, there's not many lives a better life than our old Squire; and it's easy talking against squires and such like when you don't know them. It's these dirty, ramping fellows and girls in the streets that I want to put an end to, and the prices that's so high poor folks can't live. It goes into somebody's pocket, I know.""No doubt about that," Clara assented."And it isn't the bishop nor the squire," Mrs. Vast pursued her argument, "for they was there always; and well I remember the time when butter and meat was no more than sixpence a pound in the market at Radington, there."Clara smiled. It was impossible to argue with a woman in such a humour."And when you come back you'll tell me all about it?" Mrs. Vast begged, "for I shan't never see it no more, unless they let us come back after we're dead to look on the old places."This time Clara laughed outright."The thought of the bishop is bad for your mind, evidently," she said. "I did think we were past that kind of foolish fancy. If you mean to see Radington, save up your money and see it now, while you're alive and are yourself.""Ah! well, Clara David, it's only a way of speaking," Mrs. Vast, said apologetically. "It ain't likely I shall ever have the money to go. And it don't do no harm that I knows on to fancy things if they're a comfort to you. That's what they taught us down there, when we was children. And thinking of the old times brought it back with the rest. But I don't know as ever we got much good out of it; and I didn't think to come to this when I was young."Mrs. Vast stitched on for a few moments, turning over something in her mind. Then she said:——"There's one thing you can do for me, Clara David," and with much fulness of detail, as to the time and place of her mother's dying illness and mode of burial—none of which concerns us here, or interested Miss David—she begged Clara to go and see her mother's grave and to put some flowers on it. "For, you know, Clara David, there's nothing else left of her, and I don't like to think she's lying untidy?" Mrs. Vast put a question into her voice. She intended Clara to suggest that something else was left of the old mother. Clara talked well, and put things in a way to make them seem different. But on this occasion Clara found nothing to say. An old country-woman who had made butter and cheese all her life, and who (except in Mrs. Vast's fond eyes) had nothing remarkable about her one way or another,—how can one say that she lives on in her good works? It seems absurd, seeing that the butter and cheese were eaten long ago. And Mrs. Lavinia Vast herself (who, in one sense, might be accounted as another deed) was not altogether successful. Who shall say that the world is not as well off without Mrs. Vast? She died last year, and I don't know that anyone misses her. Clara had once, on a similar occasion, suggested that the old lady lived on in her daughter Lavinia, and it had been quite an affront to Lavinia Vast. If she had ever misquoted the poets she would have said something about "not enriching me and makes her poor indeed ".Clara, like many of her associates, thought much of graves, and of their careful tending. The worship of ancestry fills up many gaps left by the fading out of the faith that superseded it. And the fraternity have more than their share of graves, for they are a short-lived company. Some die in prison, some of care and worry; some are harried to death, some die of dulness and disappointment, being forgotten. Whatever be the cause, they seldom live long.Clara promised. "That is a small thing to do for you, Mrs. Vast," she said. "And if, as you say, West Moston is so near, I can go there on Sunday morning."CHAPTER VIIMISS DAVID took the omnibus southwards towards Euston on the autumn morning with hope springing strong in her heart. Here was something new to do, something worth doing, something that if it repeated itself would bring good results to the Cause If all the clubs in the north, so many and so influential as they are, had but listened to Clara years ago, who can tell what we should have become by this time!She planned as she drove along how, in the time to come, locomotion should be otherwise, and above all how a languid woman in a silk dress should be made to work—at some very simple kind of work, because, having idled so long, she would not be fit to do any other—and how she would find herself below the needlewoman in rusty black, who was taking home a bundle of work in a cotton wrapper. It seemed odd that both women should be entirely unconscious of Clara's thought, for the force of her indignation should have sufficed to send a "brain wave" through any skull. And when she came to the station, and took a third-class ticket to Radington, no one seemed to be aware that a passenger was on the way who would break down all officialdom and confiscate entire the property of the London and North-Western Railway. In England reformers have trials peculiar to the country. Clara travelled with a curate, not a pampered tithe-paid parson such as one reads of, but a spare, blue-eyed young man who laid down his book to talk to a small boy, whose mother was rather overdone with a baby and a basket. Clara had never had to do with a child in her life, and it did not occur to her that the pacification of the boy was any business of hers. Then the mother got out, taking basket and children with her, by the curate's aid; and when he came back to his corner he smiled in a friendly fashion and offered Clara the Saturday Review. It is not a publication that Clara admires, but she took it, offering to the curate in return her own paper, whose name I will not divulge lest I should incur blame. "I wonder how he will like that?" Clara said to herself, and prepared arguments for use. But the curate read and smiled, smiled and read again, and presently he got out of the train, so that the arguments were wasted.And where Clara went further will not be stated precisely, for Radington is not to be found by that name on any map, nor among the cathedral cities of England.A stout man, with broad shoulders, the bluest of blue eyes, and light hair shaping itself without much aid from art or scissors, was standing in the crowd on the platform."I've come to meet you myself, Miss David. I'm our secretary. And did you get on all right on the journey? Rather a long journey. Been to these parts before, perhaps?" Clara shook hands and said "no," that part of England was strange to her."We've got you rooms with a widow woman. Her husband worked up at our place. Will you go there now, or will you take a turn round the town? Being Saturday, I can go with you; and it's market-day, you'll see our people what we work amongst. I daresay you'll find the people up here different to what you're accustomed to in your parts."Clara said she should like to see the market and the people, but for her part she had found people vary according to their conditions, which led her to suppose that the ground-stuff of all was much alike."Now that," said the blue-eyed man, as they set out to walk down a paved street swarming with foot-passengers, "that is a word that your German writers use continually. I don't know of any English word that we can take for the meaning.""You read German?" Clara said, feeling that some such remark was expected of her."No. I know a few words, but foreign languages are not in our way. English 'll carry you all over the world, further than I'm likely to go. All the books that are worth reading are translated, I expect.""You read translations then?"The secretary explained that he had read the works of Hegel, and Kant, and some others besides, in the intervals of his work, though he had not such a good chance as the cotton-workers, who read during work-time. "I read all the new books nowadays," he said. "We get them at our library. Most of what's good comes up our way. But when I was a youngster we had to buy second-hand, and it was when the books had been out some time that we got them cheap. We've nearly four hundred members and a good library.""Do all your members read?'' Clara asked."Most of them read a bit," the secretary explained, ready enough to give information on his favourite topic. "But there's some kinds of work don't seem to make readers of the men. They seem to want rougher play when they get a holiday. I'm our secretary. We look to you, Miss David, to screw them up a bit tonight and to-morrow afternoon."They passed groups of men at intervals along the pavement and at the corners of the street; and girls, by twos and threes, hurried past them. To some the secretary nodded; he classified all with unfailing precision. Ironworkers, odd-jobbers, carters, cotton-spinners, biscuit-makers, girls from the carpet factory: he sorted them one from another by some token known only to himself, as a woman sorts skeins of wool.Inside the market building he stopped to explain again. "This new building's only just open," he began, "and some of the women don't like it yet. They'd rather sit and sell down the sides of the street as their mothers did before them. It's always the women we have most trouble with. They don't want to change.""I don't want to change myself," Clara said and laughed. "It's a good thing that we know how to keep on till we've got what we want."The secretary laughed too. It is a valuable quality in a speaker to be able to take folks up quickly and contrariwise, and the secretary remembered that there had been "words" at the committee when Miss David's name was sent in substitution for that of the speaker who had fallen ill. Certain members of committee didn't want a woman, certain others objected to a foreigner. The secretary trusted she might not be too old and fat, and the senior member said he didn't want to be talked to by "a young thing as was sucking pap long after he'd learned his dooty "."You speak English very well, Miss David. Some members thought they wouldn't understand you.""There'll be no trouble about that," Clara said. "English is as much my native tongue as any other. We are all internationals. Though, if they don't happen to like what I say, it will be convenient for them not to understand.""Not they," responded the secretary, promptly. "If they don't like what you say they'll let you know pretty quick. Our people up here are different to the people down in the South, in the part where you come from. There's always plenty of discussion afterwards, but most on Sunday afternoons when the ladies are not present. It's men and women to-night, you know.""Yes; they told me that," Clara said. "So you don't have the women on Sundays?""Most of the women that hasn't got young children goes to Sunday School," the secretary said. "That'll seem strange to you, for down in the south, where you come from, it's only the children that goes to Sunday School. Here there's men and women grown, grandmothers some of them.""Yes, it does seem strange,'' Clara assented. "I'm not much accustomed to Sunday scholars of any age in the part where I come from." And then she added, with a touch of satire: "To tell the truth, we do not in London usually think that Sunday scholars are capable of very advanced views "."Perhaps not," said the secretary, shortly. He wanted Clara to understand that up there in the North they did not consider themselves in want of any guidance from London. "London folks have their own ways, and they ain't always ours. Some of us up here remember that to advance isn't always what you want. If you've lost your way it don't always further you to set off running. You've got to find out first which way you run. And I don't see how these 'advanced' men, as they call themselves, can all of 'em be advancing on the right road, because they are going all sorts of contrary ways. We think up here we've got longer heads than what some of these south-country folks have got, though I've got no friends hatters down there to tell me the truth of it." And the secretary laughed at his own small joke, looking at Miss David to see how she took his earnest."I gather that you don't hold very advanced views yourself, Mr. Jones?" Clara enquired.But the secretary was before all things official. "Our members like to hear all that's going on," he said. "If you only hear what one side's got to say you can't tell which way to advance, and you can't keep standing always here in Radington. It's a very stirring place. And ours is generally reckoned the most flourishing of all the clubs except two. Speakers always tell me they like our people, and we have most of the best here one time or another. If they can please our people they can please any, so they say."He said this with an air of patronage, meaning Clara to know that they were accustomed to good things there, and that she must do her best."Then I'll call for you at seven, Miss David. Me and my wife'll be walking down. My wife's going to ask you to step in to tea with us to-morrow evening. She can't to-night, on account of getting the children to bed, and Saturday nights they do a bit of tubbing. I don't understand much about it myself, but that's what my wife says. And she don't interfere in my work, so I let her be. And I daresay you'll like to be getting your speech up a bit."So they once more shook hands at the widow woman's door.It is one of a long row of one-storied, red-bricked, slate-roofed houses: there are nearly two hundred of them all alike. Tradesmen's carts, drawn by a horse or driven by a boy, go up and down at all hours of the day; but the most familiar form of wheeled vehicle in Clamp Street is, without doubt, the perambulator, the usual draught animal being a small girl. Both sides of the street are alike, so the outlook is the same whichever side you live. As for sun, the Clamp Street people seldom see it; for they come there to be near the factory, and there is much smoke from the tall chimneys, except when work is slack, and then they are all too miserable and too eager looking for smoke to begin again to notice whether there is sunshine or not. And as slack time, if it comes at all, generally comes in winter, the north country sun is not powerful enough to force itself on attention. On Saturday afternoons, and still more on Saturday evenings, there is plenty of foot traffic in Clamp Street, less noisy than the traffic soon after daylight, and conducted by a crowd in gayer hues. If you care to get up any morning to see the women going to work you find them in clogs and shawls; but it is not the fashion for any except the children, and those the poorest, to go in clogs, or in any head gear save a flower-trimmed hat on Saturdays and Sundays.At first the houses all look exactly alike. Only after long observation do you find the character of the inmates written, in many cases, on the dressing of the parlour window. Wonderful things under glass shades are still the height of fashion in Clamp Street, though some who have pretensions to cultivation prefer to fill up the triangular gap left by the parting of the stiff lace curtains with a couple of gaily-bound books laid crosswise, or with an inkstand on a wool mat of vivid hue. At one or two houses the curtains are not white, and a couple of baby faces flattened against the lower panes lead one to look beyond, and even to guess from the appearance of the room whether the tenants are not yet genteel enough, or have become too genteel, to keep a best parlour. But such windows are rare, for Clamp Street does not vary in colour, either of mind or matter; and those who sink below or rise above that point in the social scale where best parlours are considered necessary, leave the neighbourhood.The widow woman's parlour window was adorned in a manner by no means unique in Clamp Street, but yet sufficiently difficult of attainment to be a good deal admired. There was not the usual glass case, but a stuffed dog, naked, as one may say: a dog that in life had apparently been a black and tan terrier, having lost much of its hair and many of the niceties of canine form in the process of stuffing. The curtains were well drawn down, and the light that entered beneath them shone round the outline of the animal into the small room. There was a glass over the mantelshelf, and a wedding cake ornament under a glass shade, wonderfully well preserved considering the widow's age. Opposite the window was a sofa covered in green and red stripes, and above that piece of furniture a large portrait of a man in a gilt frame. The gilt frame was so much the most important part of the whole that one is compelled to mention it first. The man shone with a good colour and gloss, fine brown hair and whiskers, and beautiful red cheeks, and he had white, long-fingered hands, such as one seldom sees in Clamp Street. As for the rest of the furniture, colour and brilliancy were chiefly considered; but the room was so dark that Clara made out its combinations only by degrees. Tea was laid on an immense tray that nearly covered the small round table."I thought you'd like your tea. A cup of tea's refreshing after a journey. Mr. Jones, that's the secretary, said I should have to find you for this day or two, so I've bought you a few things in. I'll mask the tea while you're taking off your bonnet upstairs."Clara took off her bonnet, and presently returned to the society of the dog. She wanted to draw the curtains back and look out of the window. Conventionalities of all kinds irked her, and the atmosphere of the room seemed intolerably heavy. Besides, even at the risk of alienating from her at once the sympathy of all dog-lovers, I must allow that she hated dogs, both the dead and the live varieties. She was no misanthrope, as not a few dog-lovers are; and, in spite of her many disappointments, preserved always an urgent faith in the human race collectively. It was unbearable that the sun and light wanted for the life of a human being should be blocked out by a stuffed dog. The thing was horrible to her; and, besides, she was sure it—smelt! She laid her powerful hand on the lace curtain, gripping it tightly, and with the other she pushed the little table and the dog away.The widow woman had come in with the teapot, and a stack of buttered toast, and a muffin, and, having set them down, employed herself in twitching the tea things first to one side and then to another. She had no particular excuse for staying, but she could not leave her household gods unprotected."Kind o' company, isn't he, Miss?" she began at last, with one hand planted on her hip and the other waving slightly in the direction of the dog. "Me and him lived together many years, alive and—as you see him; and a wouldn't have anything 'appen to him for all a could see. A'm fond o' dorgs; most of us is hereabout, but a hean't got noa man to work for me, and a doan't see how a could a kept the dorg there if he'd a-been a live. They eats a deal, does dorgs o' that soort."Clara turned away from the window. It was necessary to ingratiate herself with the people. All that she said or did would be reported for the credit or discredit of the Cause. But to share even a temporary home with a dog is not usually counted among the certificates of martyrdom."The secretary is going to call for me at seven," she said, as much to comfort herself as to inform her landlady. She sat down to the big black tray, the buttered toast, the muffin, the big loaf, and the quarter of a pound of pale-coloured butter showing the marks of the knife that had buttered the toast. I daresay it was more comfortable than Mrs. Snoad's eating-house.The high-coloured portrait on the wall smiled at her, and the dog's glass eye caught a ray of light and gleamed. Opposite on the wall she saw, as she raised her eyes, the text of Scripture, printed in gold, with a border of roses: "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice "."I've brought you the paper, Miss," said the landlady. "There's the notice of your meetings you'll like to see. And I daresay you'll have heard o' that murder as was done near by here last week. They say they've caught the man. Poor thing! and my brother-in-law's cousin knew her well." As she spoke she went to the window, straightened and shook out the crushed curtain, and moved the dog back into its place. "If you're wanting anything you'll just call," she said, as she shut the door behind her."I doubt we shan't have a full room, Miss David," said the secretary as they walked towards the club-room under umbrellas. "You see it's got abroad that our speaker is ill, and they don't know you. Our women don't care to turn out of a night, not them that has a husband and children, unless they know what they're coming to; and its a wet night."''They'll know me in future," Clara returned, hopefully. "To-morrow we'll have more.""And to-morrow we've telegraphed for a gentleman to help you," said the secretary, getting a little mixed in time and tenses. "You see we didn't know how you'd take with the people here, and some of our members don't hold with having ladies to address the club of a Sunday afternoon. The reply's just come to say he'll be here. So you can each have half an hour or so, or, if you begin—it should be ladies first, you know," the secretary smiled and his wife laughed outright at his small pleasantry—"you can keep along as long as you find you've got hold of the meeting. Perhaps you know the gentleman.""You haven't told me who he is yet," said Clara, annoyed that they should have settled this without consulting her, yet seeing no way of protest."Dr. Gold. My wife here doesn't like him, no more don't a good many ladies hereabouts. But I tell her they've got you to please them this time, and he's a rare good speaker, is the doctor.""You don't like him neither, you know you don't, Job," put in Mrs. Secretary, who, though she was holding her skirts half up to her knees and was carrying a baby and an umbrella, stepped out bravely and was nowise at a loss for breath. "It no good pretendin' 'long o' me.""And why don't the ladies like him, Mr. Secretary," Clara said, feeling that she had more in common with this man than with his wife."Well, you see," said the secretary, with a short laugh, "a good many of our ladies know Dr. Gold's wife and child by sight. You might chance to see her any day driving in with the old Squire, that's her cousin.""And I call it brazen-faced," added Mrs. Secretary, " his coming down here on her doorstep. There's plenty of other gentlemen glad enough to come, I'm sure, Job; you pays 'em well.""My wife don't care to take up with new fangled notions, Miss David," said the secretary. "I tell her that according to the doctor's opinions a man ain't bound to stick to his wife after he's tired of her. I'm going to take up with them notions myself when I'm tired of her and the kids. There's four of them, and it's a'most too many sometimes."He looked at Clara to point the joke. She noticed how he dropped into the vernacular as he talked to his wife."Go along, Job. I'm ashamed of you. And before ladies, too." retorted Mrs. Secretary. Then she addressed herself to the baby. "Likely, ain't it, Judy? Dad's agoin' to leave us. Fine out he'd make of it, wouldn't he, old woman?""I don't know what you are thinking of doing to-morrow," said the secretary. "We've all sorts among our members, and I think I may say here in Radington we've churches and chapels of all sorts, and as good preachers as most.""I've promised to go to a place called West Moston to see a friend's grave," Clara said. "I suppose I can get a train and be back in time for the afternoon meeting." Then she added, determined not to give in to any kind of unadvanced idea: "I'm not in the habit of going to church or chapel at any time ". Mrs. Secretary looked at her husband from under the umbrella. He knew as well as if she had put it into words that the look meant: "I don't think much of this kind of woman, and you may depend upon it I'm right". Jostling along, three together on a crowded pavement, the secretary was sometimes alongside his wife, who forged steadily ahead, and then for a while he dropped back to Clara."West Moston, did you say? Well, there now, Job! She mustn't tell Dr. Gold, must she? That's near where his wife lives. Oh! yes; there's trains plenty; only you've got to go early o' Sundays. Dave can tell about that, I say, Job.""Dave, that's my wife's brother, is courting a young woman over at West Moston," the secretary explained, for he knew manners, and felt that it was unbecoming to make secret allusions before company. "Dave'll be there to-night. He's on the amusements' committee. She should have a goodish bit o' money, Dr. Gold's wife. The old Squire owns a lot o' property about there. But you never told us if you knew Dr. Gold. My wife broke in so fast. She's always bound to go off if you mention his name.""Yes; I know him very well indeed. He's an old friend of mine," said Clara with emphasis; and she said it so decidedly that Mrs. Secretary looked out again from under the umbrella, although her husband had fallen a few steps behind."There now, Kitty. It's lucky you're not goin' to club to-morrow. Miss David'll tell him what you said to a surety.""And she's welcome," retorted Kitty. "He's no friend o' mine, and he's welcome to know it. But it's you men I blame, inviting him here, and his name up all over the town for his wife to see.""It isn't up this time, anyhow, old woman," Job said, soothingly, for he knew to a hair's breadth when his Kitty had had enough chaffing."And that's no fault o' yours, anyway. You can't get anything printed and posted unless you've time," retorted she, going off on a side issue, as is said to be the way with women.It was not such a bad meeting, after all. The amusements' committee and the political committee were introduced to Miss David in the little room behind the platform, where the officials had the privilege of hanging up their hats. And, as the secretary observed in the fulness of his experience, "showery evenings are not always the worst for meetings, on account of the wet underfoot being bad for your boots and that, so that you're better off in the meeting than what you are about the streets. Our pavements about here's a bit rough, and holds the water; different to what you have in London and the parts you come from. I reckon we're close-fisted up here, and don't want to pay no more rates for road-making than we can help.""There's a revival meeting on over the way," put in a broad-shouldered man with a dahlia in his button-hole. "That'll take some of our people off. There's a black chap and a woman from Australia preaching.""Your young woman's in a listenin', Tom. You'd best goa too!" This sally, from a short man with a wizened face and sharp eyes, was greeted with laughter; for Tom was nigh on thirty, and the one gay bachelor among them all."The young women listenin' to that kind o' stuff ain't o' my sort, thank ye," said Tom with emphasis; for, being a bachelor, he was not indifferent, as his mates were, to the opinion of a lady-lecturer, and he thought Clara might mistake the fun for earnest."I hope you bean't goin' to give it us too hot to-night," an elderly man took occasion to say in a low voice across the corner of the table. "We had a young person down here a month or two ago, and she pretty nigh scared most o' the women. You can take more of it in if you draw it mild. And women-folk don't read what's going on like what we do.. They've got the kids to tend like, and they haven't got the time. I doan't know what your opinions are, and I doan't want to know. But there's room for all, and no one hain't got no call to interfere with other folks' religions, accordin' to me.""I hope you're setting out to give it them strong and plain, Miss David," said Tom, as soon as the elderly man, who was treasurer, had withdrawn into a corner with the secretary to discuss the finance of the evening. "I'm one of the go-ahead sort, I am. I ain't a family man myself, and I ha' got no wife nor kids to make me back out o' what my mind's set to do. These women want rousing up, and so do some o' the men. You tell 'em the truth. You look as if you could. ' Truth's a mighty weapon,' as the books tell us, and if you slash about with it you're bound to bring some of 'em down."Clara brightened as he spoke. His ideas, if not his ways of putting them, seemed exactly as her own. "It will be a long time before the strong ones of the earth are roused up to the point of wishing only to gain in order to give more to the weaker brethren. It must be bad enough to be weak, without suffering poverty as a punishment for it." She looked up into the face of the strong man. "So few people understand that it is a joy to give to the utmost of our ability. And what we give has nothing to do with what we receive; that is measured by our need."Tom shook his head doubtfully. "Well, I don't know about that," he said. "Maybe you'd best not go into that to-night. Some o' my mates would'nt do much if they weren't afraid of a hungry belly. And if I can earn my carriage and pair, I've a right to drive in it, say I. It's them as haven't earned, the capitalists, I want to go for."There are times when even the divinely-inspired fail of any possession to which they dare give the name of truth, and such a moment had come to Clara, whose inspiration was at least not recognised by herself as in any way divine. She had heard so much of the manufacturing towns of England. Things had gone wrong at home, and they had all decided that the future of the Cause lay in the hands of Anglo-Saxons. London had been disappointing, and the events of life there often petty and mean, but still there had been the great towns of the North to believe in, the towns full of working men and women, who hold, for good or evil, so large a part of England's future In their keeping. London is a town by itself: no one believes in the London artisan as the man of the future. He is oppressed by his wealthy and cultured neighbours, by the crowds of travellers who come to London to spend money, by the influx of foreigners and wayfarers, oppressed even by the many repetitions of himself. Do not think to find out in London what the working man loves; he imitates, he is not original there. But up in the North the working man has things pretty much his own way. His shops occupy the leading thoroughfares, his clubs come out in light of day instead of hiding in back streets, his factories greet you at every turn; and he himself, with all his family, is perpetually in evidence, now on the pavement in wooden clogs, presently in a carriage and pair, but never sufficiently pressed upon by the outside world to be anything but himself.All this is much to be commended. Nevertheless, a first sight of a manufacturing town is apt to chill the heart, even the heart of those who expect the workman's paradise to be painted in sober hues. For the town is sure to be dirty and gloomy, and the pervading odour of soot, machine oil, and women's shawls takes time to get used to. Trees and plants never get used to it; they die in the effort: and so the boulevards, neatly planted with rows of trees, are sure to be missed by a foreigner, who has these among his fixed ideals of a workman's paradise. The prosperity of the men, their self-content, is depressing. It is only on a first view, no doubt, but still on a first view one cannot help feeling that if the future is to bring an endless repetition of such places as these, it would be better to die soon.If ordinary folk—those who are not enamoured of any Cause—feel this disappointment, they can find many means of comforting themselves. But to Clara it was as if she had toiled on and on over a desert, believing always in the existence of a fair city, with streams of water. Suddenly finding herself there, she saw that it was a desert, little less arid than the rest, and the water-springs such as dry up and leave men thirsting."The working man" and "the working woman" are persons easy to romance about. We all know (from frequent telling) that he has a keen sense of justice, and that when he gets power he will exercise it in righteousness. As for her, she has the virtues of a mediæval saint, and the nineteenth-century virtues of cleanliness and industry into the bargain. The apotheosis of humanity is seen to be near at hand when we gaze on these embodied perfections. But when we gaze upon John Smith it seems possible that he might err, like other mortals, even in matters of good faith. He does err continually, poor fellow, on points of good manners. And Arabella Smith, whom he married out of the mill, if she be a saint, presents the singular spectacle of a saint in tawdry and torn clothing, by talking loudly, and she picks her back teeth with her finger nail. And the many babies of this heroic pair are dirty and presuming. If only the race would exist en masse, and not in individuals, how easy the reformer's task would be!CHAPTER VIIIMANUFACTURING towns do not rise early on Sunday mornings. Dave had offered to escort Miss David if she would wait till eleven or twelve o'clock, but even to see his sweetheart he was not inclined to start till nine. The making of a Sunday toilet takes time, and a man does not run and hurry to catch the train in his best clothes. Since it was clearly impossible for Miss David to wait till that time, Dave determined to go in a brake with a pair of horses, and with some of his mates. On a fine October day it is a pleasant means of locomotion, and it is well to go sweethearting in a stylish fashion, for money will never be so plentiful again after the sweethearting is over.Clara walked through the deserted streets in the cold October morning, and tried to forget the petty annoyances of the night before. The cool air blowing about her face came straight off the moorland, and there were, as yet, no smoking chimneys to befoul it. The streets were littered with bits of paper and straw, here and there apple-peelings and nutshells, even a leaf or two, for scavengers must have Sunday rest like their fellow-townsfolk, and though Saturday's market is over and cleared away by twelve, there is nothing to prevent the purchasers of market-produce from consuming it in the streets at any hour out of the twenty-four.Church-bells were for the most part stopped. Only here and there one tinkled out an intimation that it was not yet too late to find an entrance under its roof.The train was nearly empty. One or two passengers in their Sunday clothes sauntered up leisurely, and, after surveying Clara in detail and evident surprise, got into another carriage. Clara did not belong to any known class of the aborigines. Presently a couple of girls came along and went through the same preliminary process."It's young woman what t' had at club last night. Never see such a guy in my life," Clara heard with painful distinctness through the aperture where the lamp was not.It was a strange feature in Clara's character that she would not have been in the least annoyed by a similar remark from a woman of the upper classes: but these working women were her chosen ones, and she had (as most lovers have) a conception of their personality not in the least founded on fact. She wanted these women to believe in her, wanted to convince them of the truth. She began to wonder if it would be wiser to make a more elaborate toilet, to endeavour to allure these girls by the one thing they seemed to care for, in order to keep them for their own good. To such women as Clara—perhaps to more women than we think—fine clothes are valueless except as means to an end: all material objects have a relative, not any actual, value. But while she planned, and thought of talking to Mrs. Vast, who would be only too glad to further the Cause in that way, she was brought up short by a remembrance of the slenderness of her resources. Grand toilets, whatever their value, have always their price.Clara got to West Moston as the clock was striking ten. The solitary porter's manner was not intended to encourage Sunday travelling, and in reply to Clara's enquiry for an omnibus to the town, he retorted snappishly that the "men had something else to do than to drive down there of a Sunday morning, when as like as not there wasn't even a third," and for his part he thought this morning train might as well be cut off, to let a man go to chapel where he was wanted to lead off the singing. "Can't miss t' way. It's straight as you go, and you'll see church right afore. Cimetery? Hain't comin' there yet awhiles. A was christened and married in t' old church, and father before me, and it'll last out my time when I come to lay alongside 'em."The rain of the night before must have been heavy in West Moston, attracted, no doubt, by the hill tops that lay to the right, capped with gray cloud. And a half-hour's walk on muddy roads with the wind blowing in one's teeth is long and fatiguing to feet only accustomed to town pavements.Gray stone walls on either side the road with a few slate-roofed shippens for cattle also in gray stone: a gray farm house or two standing half-a-mile or so away, where the ground rises at the foot of the hills; a single cottage at the corner—that is all the sign of life you may see on the road from West Moston to the station, and the whole is set in meadows where a grayish tinge is washed over the green. When you come to the village there are several clusters of houses, and a row of villas that they call "The Terrace," and a paved street, short and irregular. On weekdays the few little village shops lend a little colour and variety to the scene. But, on the whole, Sunday, half an hour before church, is as lively a time as you can chance upon in West Moston. The women have packed the children off to school some time ago, and come to their gates to exchange greetings with their neighbours or with passers-by, and to breathe the air of leisure before they go indoors to prepare Sunday's dinner. The men group themselves and smoke or gossip with their hands in their pockets, until, just as eleven is going to strike, some of them get drawn in by the stream that sets churchwards, or by the eddy round the corner where the meeting-house stands. Terriers of many breeds and of no breed loiter at their masters' heels, the younger ones running oft occasionally to enjoy the fun of hunting the ducks, which, so long as they are left in peace, have a fine time in the pond after rain.A waggonette, drawn by two stout horses and packed full of passengers, rattles past at a good pace, and sets down its load at the churchyard gate, and a chaise or two turns into the inn yard where the one-armed ostler is preparing for a busy morning.The women looked and nodded at one another as Clara passed, and the men took their pipes out of their mouths to see her the better; for though West Moston is a sizable place, and though many people walk over to church there on a Sunday because the music is good, yet none know better than your born countryman how to detect at a glance "a person coming from other parts, not hereabouts".Into the churchyard, then into the church, and Clara found the sexton and a couple of younger men pulling the bells. She marched straight up to him, and with secular step and secular voice inquired where old Mrs. Tom Vast was buried. She had no intention of wounding the old man's feelings. She had so seldom been in a church that it never occurred to her to make any difference in her usual behaviour. If anyone had told her that an average English-woman modifies her gait and voice if she goes into an empty church, and modifies it still more on Sundays when the bells are ringing, she would just have stared, probably shrugged her shoulders, not in the least knowing what was meant.If you have to speak to a man who is ringing a bell, you must speak up or he doesn't hear. Clara spoke up, and two or three women who were sitting in a pew at the other end of the church turned round to look at her. The sexton's wits were slow; and he thought all questions addressed to him at that hour meant, or ought to mean, a sitting for the service."Vast's pew? There's nobody o' that name have a sitting. They sets in t' free seats, here at back." And he went on ringing. Clara spoke up again, and again the people in front turned round to look at her."Graves?" replied the sexton. "I don't know nothing about graves this time o' day. Sunday mornings bean't times for graves, except you've got a buryin', and then you've got to accommodate your time to vicar's.""Can't you show me old Mrs. Vast's grave when you've done ringing that bell? I'm not come to be buried, nor yet to sit inside here this fine morning," Clara said in her clearest voice.By this time one of the younger ringers had gone away, and some more worshippers were dropping in."Bean't you?" said the sexton, ironically. "Well, I be. P'raps you'll step outside instead of disturbin' folks as a' come here to worship. Seems to me you might have learnt manners. I bean't deaf this fine mornin', I bean't."The sexton told his wife of the encounter while he had his dinner, embellishing the story with a smartly-turned sentence or two that came into his mind during the sermon."Poor thing," said the sexton's wife, as she set the pudding on the board. "There was one o' Vast's went away years ago; Lavinia was her name, I mind me. She warn't never like the old lot; took up with notions, she did, and we never heard no more of 'er. You spoke up sharp to er, that er did, Dan'l."Clara went into the churchyard and turned aside from the stream of parishioners to get behind the church out of their way. She did not quite know what to do next, for West Moston churchyard is large and old, and to find a tombstone that has nothing particular to distinguish it from some hundreds of others, when the grass is long and wet, is a task that might baffle even a country-woman. And Clara was quite ignorant of the conditions of country life. She did not know who to ask. The whole village appeared to be streaming into church, and by the time they came out again she would be on her way to the station. So she stood uncertain with her back to the church wall, looking out over a wilderness of more or less neglected graves.Presently she saw a tall woman in mourning making her way towards her, stepping in and out among the mounds as one who was doing an accustomed task. She held a dead wreath of flowers in her hand, and her face was a very sad one, though rather as if she were suffering from sorrow long gone by, than from any temporary sentiment of loss. Clara determined to ask her for Mrs. Vast's resting-place. But the woman did not wait to be accosted."Are you looking for anything? You are a stranger here, I think? Can I help you?" she said, courteously."I want to find the grave of one Mrs. Tom Vast, who died thirty years ago. There is a tombstone, I believe. The sexton refused to direct me."The lady laughed, with a low, ringing laugh. "Old Dan Taylor! He was ringing the bell, you see. He is apt to be extra-official and punctilious on Sunday mornings. But I am glad you met me, for you would scarcely find it alone. It is over in that corner, behind the tree. I will come and show you. The five minutes' bell has only just begun."Lavinia Vast had spoken of a nice new tombstone, but she had forgotten how time goes on, and how fast the record of the dead is obliterated, even though their friends spare no expense to the stone mason in the first blush of grief."It is very much grown over, I am sorry to see," the lady said. "We keep the churchyard as well as we can, but it is large, and it is not easy, especially at this time of year. You could scarcely have known Mrs. Vast. I only just remember her a very old woman, much broken down by sorrow, living and dying quite alone.""I know her daughter in London. Mrs. Lavinia Vast begged me to come, as I was in the neighbourhood." Clara spoke stiffly, as she was wont to do with well-dressed strangers, and her companion remembered some far-off story about a daughter of old Mrs, Vast's, and, reckoning quickly back, wondered if this were a grand-daughter."I do not think that there are any Vasts here now who are more than very distantly related to old Mrs. Vast. They were farmers, and very well placed; but they are all gone now. Some are in America, I believe.""So I have understood," Clara said, more stiffly still; for the single hour that she had passed in this country place was near and unpleasant, and for both reasons assumed undue proportions; and she said to herself that now she quite understood why English country folk are so ready to leave their birthplace. She even thought kindly of Lavinia's peculiarities, now that she had seen West Moston. "Poor Mrs. Lavinia," she said, "she is a good woman, and she will be grieved to hear that her old mother 'lies so untidy,' as she says."Again some dim memory of Mrs. Lavinia's past must have flitted over the lady's mind as she corrected: "If she has not always been a good woman, it is not for us to judge her. Tell her that you met one of the ladies from the Hall, and that her mother's grave shall be made quite tidy in the course of the week. I must go now, or I shall be late," and "one of the ladies from the Hall" picked her way once more between the mounds, and disappeared behind the belfry.Clara took from her breast a bunch of flowers that she wore, and laid them on the old woman's grave. Then she plucked a few blades of long grass, and a twig from the tree near by, and tied them up in a bunch with a couple of red bramble leaves that had crept over the wall. "Poor Mrs. Lavinia," she said to herself. "This is the best I can do for her. There are flowers on the other graves that would gladden her heart, if only I could tell her that they came from her mother's grave. What a pity one has to be true!"Next she went on a tour of inspection round the churchyard, noting the texts of Scripture and the doggerel verses. They seemed to her frankly absurd. Expressions of fixed opinion about things that (as she said) no one can know anything about, struck her as being extremely arrogant and superstitious; and the hope of future meetings, as to which most of the inscriptions spoke, were manifestly (in her opinion) hypocritical. "I'm sure those fat women and clumsy men who are now posturing inside there would be a good deal perturbed if their dead friends took them at their word, and came back—met them on the path coming out, for instance."The rain clouds had rolled back for the time, and sun shone brightly in the corner where the lady had stood when first Clara saw her. Clara made her way in that direction. She had got to the furthest corner of the churchyard, away from the church, and through an open window came the sound of music—rising, falling, a melody with a martial ring about it, inspiriting men forward to fight and to fall fighting in the Holy War. Something had prompted the vicar to choose for that one occasion this modern hymn, instead of one of the older-fashioned chorales that his own musical soul loved. And the congregation took it up, and sang with spirit—they do sing well in that part of the world; and as the last notes ended Clara found herself standing before a tiny white cross, and beneath it a circle of fresh flowers."To suffer yet to endure, remembering eternity," she said, with her eyes flashing and her head up, looking over the low gray wall where the red brambles grew, away through the trees and to the blue sky beyond, and the bluer hills where a broad streak of sunshine revealed the golden red glories of the faded bracken. "They don't understand their own emblem. They think that goodness is rewarded by a carriage and pair, and by the fine clothes that they have carried into their church. They think that because we are poor, because so many of us die early, therefore we are wrong. But it will last; the good Cause can never die: the consequences of all that we do and dare live for ever in the life of the world."The cross was a tiny one: "George, aged three," was written on it, and then some reference to a text of Scripture that meant nothing to Clara. But the sight of the little grave, of so many graves, quieted Clara's fiery spirit. There is a limit set to the hardest, to the loneliest life. She sat down on the low wall, in a place where the falling branch of a tree, blown off in the autumn gales, had broken it; and took a book, much torn and worn, from her pocket, and began to read. And the book told over and over again of the good time coming, of a future when all men shall love one another, and each shall work for his neighbour's good as heartily as for his own. The positive assurance of things that are prophesied as certain, under conditions that no one can know anything about, did not shock her here. She now called it "reasoning from present cause to future effect," which at least sounds explanatory. And as her eyes rested on the church she heard the sound of many feet and the rustling of garments, as the people rose in a body and settled themselves for the sermon. "How much better is the new teaching than the old superstitions," she thought. "All this posturing and sermonising is waste of time. They had much better be out here in the sunshine, working to make the world happier, or listening to something that will really teach them."She could not hear the text given out, and of course she never knew that the old clergyman on that day (by what has always seemed to me a singular coincidence) began his discourse with a sort of half apology for his choice of a much-worn text, one that everyone thinks he can understand; even the children cannot remember when they learned it, so long ago: "Whatsoever ye will that men do unto you——"Some time before the sermon was ended Clara got down from the wall, and set off to walk to the station. The fresh air blowing off the hills freshened her intelligence, and set her thinking vigorously in the direction of her afternoon's discourse. Every now and again she slackened pace, or even stood still, to devote, as it were, all her physical as well as all her mental powers to the unravelling of some chain of thought, or to the securing of some shadowy fancy that flitted across her mind, and showed no inclination to take on definite forms of words or to abide.And so it happened that the sound of wheels came behind her louder and louder, and the laden waggonette passed at a good pace. Clara stayed by the side of the road to let it go by. Townsfolk, accustomed to the sharp dividing line between foot and carriage passengers, often think that they will be run over where no such protection exists. And probably she was getting a little tired with her long walk, and long journey of the day before, and looked a little wistfully after the carriage. Be that as it may, a minute later an open chaise drew up beside her, and the woman in mourning—"one of the ladies from the Hall"—spoke to her."You look tired, and the roads are very heavy. Will you let me give you a lift? We are going towards the station."The lady lifted up the corner of her carriage rug, as though the possibility of a refusal had not occurred to her.Nor was Clara inclined to refuse. Very possibly she took the small civility for more than it was worth, for in towns we often have to preach, as practical illustrations of a new creed, those customs of neighbourliness that flourish as a matter of course among country folk. It was a new experience for Clara, for that kind of conveyance does not flourish in town, nor indeed in any part of Clara's native land. A demure small boy sat behind with his arms folded, taking stock of the stranger. He knew in a moment, by the way Miss David got into his mistress's chaise, that she had not ridden in a carriage so often as his mistress had. And Miss David, who was really unconscious of all the small items—very unimportant items if you will—that build the walls between one class of women and another here in England, was at that moment thinking that if she were to spend a few more mornings in West Moston she could teach the people a great deal that they do not know.The pony needed skilful driving, and the two women were little inclined to talk. The lady in black was practically applying the sermon. "It is hard to know what one should do in great things," she told herself, "but I'm sure I should like a lift if I were tired. I daresay Cousin Geoffrey would say it was part of my quixotic notions. I wonder who and what she is. I don't think she is quite a lady."Presently they came to a turn in the road. "That is your way to the right," she said, and pulled up short, and the small boy stood at the pony's head in the twinkling of an eye. "You'll not have far to walk now. And you'll give my message to Miss Vast." Then the small boy let go the bridle, and the pony, thinking of Sunday dinner, was off and out of sight in no time.A woman, with her sleeves turned up, came out and leaned over the gate. It was the only cottage within earshot, and passers-by were not numerous."I thought she were a coomin' in," she remarked, "though it 'ud be sommut new, her coomin' o' Sundays.""And who is the lady?" Clara asked. "She was coming from church, and she was kind enough to give me a ride.""Her allus goa to church o' Sunday moornin'. That's nought out o' the common," the woman rejoined. "Rain or fine she's allus past this door twice o' a Sunday moornin'.""Who is she? Do you know?" Clara repeated."O' course I do. There's ne'er a body as doan't know her about here. She's a good woman if ever there was one. But she ha' seen a peck o' troubles. That's young Mrs. Gold, cousin to t' old Squire."CHAPTER IXDR. GOLD appeared at the club just five minutes after the advertised time of beginning. He did not trouble the committee with any explanations or excuses, did not pretend to any great regret. So much time of one man is always balanced against so much more (or less) of the time of another. The mode of reckoning is not likely to be otherwise in any state of society as yet suggested. And in this case it happened that a couple of hundred men, more or less, had each waited five minutes for Dr. Gold. They had subscribed, let us say, an hour and a half out of their lives, and the doctor had saved a few minutes of his. We will suppose that his business was as urgent as you please. And if the balance does not in your opinion swing even, I can assure you that it was not weighed down on the men's side in the doctor's.The gray-haired treasurer was fussing to and fro between the platform and the door; for he was to take the chair on this occasion, and he believed that he had some weighty and valuable words to address to the meeting. His ideas were original so long as they remained in his mind, but they slid off on a well-worn track as he was leading them out, and he found himself saying what he had said to the club a hundred times before: as a man in a dream believes that he is listening to beautiful music, the like of which was never heard, and suddenly wakes to find that the maid is ringing the calling-bell or raking the cinders out of the grate. The pathos of the situation was not apparent to the club; it shuffled its feet and coughed, and said, "hear! hear!" loudly when he spoke of his words being few; while the doctor, sitting well in front of the platform, nursed one foot and stared at the gas burner.Then, before she had realised that the chairman had arrived at his peroration, Clara was called up, and greeted with an applause that served for the relief of pent-up feelings among the audience, rather than for the encouragement of the speaker. For north-country folk are cautious, desperately afraid of committing themselves to an opinion before they are sure that it is justified. And Clara was worn, a little anxious, and disdained to appeal to the feelings of her hearers by any personal adornment or grace of manner. Nevertheless there is nothing so strong—take the adjective which way you will—as personal vigour, and among a manufacturing population physical strength and a steadfast "pose" are less common and, therefore, more attractive than they are among such people as hunters or fisherfolk. And for that reason Clara, who has been sometimes labelled "clumsy," but never "weakling," by unfriendly critics, made a favourable impression on the men as they clapped and stamped, a still more favourable one as they quieted down and took another look before she began to speak.Dr. Gold took his eyes off the gas, and watched her. After a while, with a true instinct, he took his eyes off her, and fixed them on the audience. For he had not come there to hear what Miss David had to say; he knew that by heart long ago; but to see how far she was able to pass her ideas into the minds of the men who sat listening.Clara had not come back uninspired by her meditation among the tombs. Study the laws of harmony and composition as we may, we can find but a few notes that chime in unison with every human heart. Love and marriage, life and death, the birth of children, the tender care of women, the universal call to work, and to suffer—everyone knows of these things; and is there anyone who knows of anything more?Clara spoke of the sorrows and hardships of life, and each man felt that she was describing his own case. And then she told, in fuller detail, of the sorrows she herself had seen, and of the many hardships endured by brave men and innocent children in distant corners of the world, and each man knew that he had much to be thankful for. Then her thoughts wandered back to the old days in the quiet town, and to the parting under the straight-clipped plane trees; and she bade them remember how a few men, here and there one or two, had seen all this misery, and, knowing that it could not be a part of the world's great order, had set themselves to find out where the fault lay. And then she went on to sketch a rapid picture of our modern society; with broad black strokes she sketched; and threw into bold relief all the inequalities of things, and in the foreground placed the heaps of miserable people in whose hands is no chance of happiness. If she did not know much of what is generally understood by "society," at least her hearers knew less, and were entirely uncritical in that direction. She is neither the first nor the last artist who has made a "hit" with a picture, the subject of which was evolved out of a vivid imagination. With such a subject as Clara's, one. need not be a great artist in order to paint a picture that shall make men turn away sickened, and then turn again to look with hands clenched and eyes lighted with the fire of battle. Clara was an artist in her own material. And, be it remembered, the artist always selects, leaving aside what does not suit his purpose. He is no artist, whatever else he may be, who presents things exactly as they are, out of proportion, unfinished, incongruous, telling no complete story.Last of all, Clara told them of her vision of things to come. Men and women of this century thirst for visions, and anyone is sure of a patient hearing who will tell of a good time coming. Like the visions of the most of her fraternity, it was a strange jumble of the material and the spiritual: the rate of wages and the abolition of coin cropped up among the old-fashioned Christian graces, and no one could foretell if the later teaching on heredity or the incidence of original sin would form the backbone of the next sentence.But it is not the wisdom of the preacher so much as his enthusiasm of belief that sways the multitude, and men composing a club, whose chief function is to talk or to listen to talk, are always a little sceptical as to the reality of fine sentiments. A generation that talks distrusts mere words: perhaps that is why we are not content with the message of our teachers, and hanker so persistently after the details of their private lives.It was Dr. Gold's turn next, and when he, an old and tried favourite of the club, told of Miss David's life-long devotion to the Cause; of how she worked early and late, befriending the desolate, teaching the ignorant; then the club let go a volume of enthusiasm such as now and again enters into the soul of an orator and makes him a greater man.As lor what the doctor said, it matters little. He never pretended to be an orator, but he had a marvellous faculty for setting out complicated figures or abstruse facts so that the simplest could not fail to understand. It used to be impossible to listen to Dr. Gold, in his best days, no matter what he talked about, without getting one's mind clearer. For many of our heads are like top drawers full of valuable papers that no one has taken the trouble to set in order, and the man who can arrange the contents of our drawers is worth far more to us than he who crams in yet another paper or two.Dr. Gold made up his mind that night as he heard Clara speak. She must in future belong to him. To do him justice, he did not come to this determination from altogether base motives. He did actually believe that Clara, and Clara alone, could enable him to fulfil his destiny, and his destiny had been held up before him as a bright and worthy object ever since his boyhood. All men had believed in him; and he had believed in himself. A few men believed in him still; and he had not yet ceased to believe in himself, though, as yet, he had done little to support that belief. It is an everyday experience that men look for great results from intellectual faculty, without taking into consideration the presence or absence of that force of character without which intellect is apt to behave as an inert mass, tossed to and fro by the forces of nature. Dr. Gold was one of those self-analytical persons who reckon up their own probabilities in a provoking fashion; and he perceived, not only that he had failed to do anything with his life hitherto, but also that he would continue to fail if the balance of circumstances remained untouched. Yet, knowing that he possessed intellectual power in no stinted proportion, he thought that with Clara's life thrown into the scale he would succeed, and after that continue to succeed. He pictured himself doing great work, honoured as a great man among the coming conditions. He liked the prospect of the honour; his late social rebuffs had hurt him sorely—so sorely that he never brought himself to mention them; and, so far as I know, no one ever heard any true account of his dealings with the Gilman-Turners. He was able to perceive all the moral grandeur and glory of the regeneration of society about which he could speak so well. The doctor's is, I think, a fairly common type of character in these days, when to possess a sympathetic appreciation of the words of all the prophets is accounted part of our ordinary instruction, and when to sit down among the good things of this world is allowed to be the best reward of all honest striving. Nowadays everyone has a conscience cultivated to the pitch of preferring ten thousand a year as a reward for following the right, rather than the same ten thousand as a consequence of doing wrong. All the philosophers count an easy conscience among the pleasures for which men strive, and an unsatisfied conscience among the pains to be avoided. Dr. Gold was a bit of a philosopher himself, and was sufficiently well acquainted with his own conscience to know that it would refuse to lie easy unless he fulfilled that high and noble destiny in which he and his friends had for so many years steadfastly believed.He decided to take Clara's life into his own. Perhaps some people will think the better of him because I am able to explain his desire as a piece of intellectual, rather than physical, selfishness. For man is a many-sided thing, and at one time one side of his being cries out loudly, at another time another: some men get confused by the clamour: but Dr. Gold has, through it all, a keen and clear perception of himself, whereby he has often been enabled to gratify his needs in the face of much opposition.A club meeting, however long and prolix the speakers may be, cannot last for ever; happy those who, like the doctor, have some means of employing their minds as soon as their own share in it is ended.The meeting broke up, and the doctor hurried into his coat, refusing to be entertained by the committee's conversation or the secretary's tea. One might have thought that Clara's society would have drawn him to the tea-party; but Dr. Gold, having made up his mind, was not apt to be disquieted as to future results of that process. The secretary's tea-party promised no great enjoyment, and the doctor never did anything that bored him, on principle. He found means to say a few words to Clara and to ask where she was staying. Then he lighted his cigar and went to his hotel; and the rest of the party dispersed their various ways by twos and threes.All the compliments of the committee, all the respectful attentions of the secretary, were insufficient to rouse Clara from a fit of despondency. Just because she had done so well, at the moment when the force of her own faith had moved the souls of her hearers, she had perceived some truth far beyond what she had put into words, infinitely beyond what her hearers could have understood had she said it. And so she was profoundly dissatisfied with herself. She knew the North-country temper so little that she even mistook the compliments of the committee for empty civilities. The secretary did indeed tell her that North-country folk are apt to tell truths whether acceptable or the reverse, but she scarcely heard what he said. And amongst all that company of men who were not of her class, not of her way of thinking, it was impossible that she should be for one moment unconscious of the one man whose life did touch hers, or of the words that she read and re-read, reading into them each time some different meaning: "She's a good woman if ever there was one. That's young Mrs. Gold." And again, cut in square black letters: "George, aged three ".CHAPTER XA TEA-PARTY In the North is a serious business, characteristic also, inasmuch as these homely functions are, like the towns that the working man owns, not tinged by any desire to copy the manners and customs of another class. Tea is tea; and it is set out and consumed with a single eye to the appetites and the comfort of men and women who never dined late in their lives. There is no paltering with facts such as you may sometimes see in other parts of England, where the wives have lived in service, and, more or less consciously, frame their company-teas on the model of the dainty five o'clock repast. In the North tea has two features: it is solid, and it is oleaginous. A round tower of buttered toast stood in the middle of Mrs. Secretary's round table, which was of convenient size, so that all the guests, being bidden to "mak' theirsel's at hoam," could, by making a long arm, reach a bit and drag it out from top or bottom according as they preferred much butter or little. Tea cakes with currants in them, also hot and buttered, stood at the four corners, and thin bread and butter, for those who desired temporary change, filled up the space between. There were a couple of glass dishes filled with jam, and a pile of plates and teaspoons for jam-eaters only. When the hostess has to wash up as well as to provide, it is a wise custom that the tea-saucer shall be made to do duty as far as possible, in order to save work. Lastly, there was a large cake, very black and plummy, but that stood idle till towards the end of the meal, when the toast-tower was broken into confusion and had all but disappeared. The tea was standing on the fender, had stood for half an hour or so to draw before the company came in, and was served black and hot in an immense metal teapot, covered with a gorgeous tea-cosy in crewels that Mrs. Secretary had received from her mother at Christmas, and set great store by.It is humiliating to know that even the great ones of the earth are influenced by very small things. We live for a Cause, yet we live by food and drink. We go and travel in foreign countries with an earnest desire to learn and to see, and to become more useful to our generation; and in the midst of it all we find ourselves longing to come back home again, because the food is not what we are accustomed to, or because we find it impossible to get washed as we wish.Clara was thoroughly tired out. And when we are tired out—it may be only for a few hours as she was, or it may be with the toils of a long and weary life—we always long to rest ourselves by going back to the old familiar ways of childhood. She wanted her mother to talk about nothing particular in German; she longed for a dry brōdchen and a cup of coffee instead of the bitter tea and greasy toast; she found the room unbearably small and close, and contrasted it with the pleasant hall where the party could have met in her own land, listening to music, eating leisurely, sitting out in the open, instead of devouring in haste, and making the air resound with re-discussions of the afternoon's topics.An only child herself, and accustomed from babyhood to the society of her stepfather and his friends, she had never liked children; and the secretary not only had five boys and girls of his own, who joined in the conversation in shrill treble, but had among his guests a smartly-dressed young woman whom they called Sally, with an infant some months old; these two worked out practically, without two thoughts on on the matter, Clara's theories on the advantage of naturalness and the drawbacks of conventional manners. A prophet and reformer ought to be above everyday weaknesses, ought at least to be able to foretell events enough to withdraw into seclusion when circumstances are against the development of the prophetic character. The guests at the tea-party thought Miss David was proud, had heard that people are proud in that part of the country where Miss David came from; and Mrs. Secretary was quite unhappy because the guest of the evening did not enjoy the fare, which had cost that excellent little woman a good many hard-earned shillings as well as considerable thought and planning.Tom, the bachelor, accompanied Miss David to the widow woman's. He wished to be asked in for a chat. For all the world he would not have had it known that he hankered after the society of women above his own class; that his day-dream was to get on in the world, so that he could marry a lady; and that he surreptitously read novels of manners—Tom had no idea of giving them that name, however—in order to familiarise himself with the habits and customs of the people to whom he intended one day to belong.But Clara wished to be alone, and already had determined to write another discourse that night, in which she would set down all the good things that she had left unsaid in the afternoon.The widow-woman was in a bad humour. She wished to lock up and go to chapel, and Miss David did not come in as early as she was expected. She was bonneted ready to start, and suggested that Miss David should go to chapel also: finally it was decided that Miss David should mind the house with the assistance of a neighbour's little girl, who would sit in the kitchen.Clara sat down with a fold of paper before her to write; but the clatter on the pavement, and the noise of voices coming through the thin walls, filled her brain and shattered every idea in its birth. The little girl, as soon as the widow-woman's back was turned, slipped out into the yard to play with other children. And so it befel that a ring, and another, and yet a third, even more peremptory, at the widow-woman's door, were unanswered. At last Clara pushed away the blank papers and went to see what was the matter, and on the doorstep found Dr. Gold, prepared to give up the quest and to return to his hotel."All alone!" said the doctor, not without satisfaction, as he threw himself into the one arm-chair. "What a place to be sure! You should have come to the hotel; but then you would not have known what sort of horrors the British workman surrounds himself with when he is in funds. What colours! What ornaments!"There are moments when the grotesque or the trifling assumes an importance that does not properly belong to it. The brain loses its sense of perspective."It is terrible," Clara said; "I don't know how to bear it. One hears so much of the North-country folk. I had hoped in them more than I knew, when things go wrong. Is this the best that we have been able to produce after all these years of work? They have the instincts of totally-uneducated people, and their talk is only of that one wretched little club and its doings. I feel as if I should be stifled."Dr. Gold looked up over a cloud of smoke at the woman standing before him. The lamp on the table gave a poor, flickering light: the only thing powerful about it was the smell of the oil. He could see little more than the rather massive outline of her figure thrown into greater distinctness by the gilt frame round the portrait. It is a curious fact that, while he almost invariably sat in an easy chair if he had anything to say, she, especially if she were excited or agitated, might always be found standing."Poor fellows," the doctor replied, softly, as he carefully knocked the ash off his cigar, "you are hard on them all to-night. They are excellent in their way, and are helping the Cause more than they know. But their social festivities are impossible, and at the end of a meal of tea and buttered toast one is inclined to let the world go to the devil in its own way. One goes through that kind of thing once or twice for the sake of one's education, to learn all one can about the material one has to work with. Once or twice is enough. One knows all about it then.""Oh! it's not that," Clara burst out in reply. "What do I care for tea and buttered toast?" She was reproaching herself bitterly for caring so much.Dr. Gold never reproached himself: to do so was against all his theories. "We are all creatures of circumstance, my dear Miss David," he said. "We are as we are made by our conditions, and even buttered toast has its place among the rest. These colours, for instance: you and I bring to them eyes trained to see in a clear atmosphere. We see with our minds as well as our eyes, and we know that all the colours of the rainbow only combine well in rainbows and other such ethereal arrangements.These rooms are not exactly ethereal." The doctor shifted his position in the big chair. "In this murky atmosphere they never could find out anything about combinations of colour for themselves, and it is not yet part of the Board School curriculum.""It makes one wonder," Clara said, "—seeing this dull place, with no atmosphere about it, and with men and women and children all gray and grim—it makes one wonder if they can be, in any sense, leaders of the new thought. Doesn't it strike you sometimes that their mental eyes must be as much obscured as their physical ones?""It never strikes me that these men are 'leaders' in any sense of the word," the doctor said, smiling as men smile who hold a joke single-handed against the world. But they are earnest and excellent followers. They are trained to live and work together in masses,—and each man counts one on a division. It is these great trades and great towns that give us speakers power. Men who work alone, and work singly at trades day after day, are apt to break out into unexpected originalities: each one has to be won over by himself, from his own weak side. You can't work on masses as you can here. Your speech this afternoon, 'twas first-rate. But it would have done no permanent good in a collection of originals.""I don't think it did much good as it was," Clara said, feeling, nevertheless, somewhat comforted. "I forgot everything that I wanted most to say.""That's always the case. If you were satisfied, you might be sure you'd no reason to be. That was a capital point you made about the imaginary man who parted from all he loved beneath the plane-trees. These fellows don't know a plane-tree from an oak, but I could see they thought it true of some blue-bloused John Smith like themselves.""Oh! don't let us talk about the meeting any more," Clara cried. "I am tired of it all. Tell me about your great work, and how that is progressing."She let her hand fall from the mantelpiece as she spoke, and it struck against the edge of that tattered book, still in her pocket, the book she had read on the churchyard wall, and she clutched it tight on the side where the doctor could not see.Dr. Gold threw his cigar-end into the fire. "I came to tell you, to consult about that," he told her. "I thought we should have a quiet evening. Sit down, do; have a cigarette, and we'll talk it out. You had my sketch. You know the plan of work. We need not go over that. You see that much of my material must be gathered in America and in various countries in Europe, and that it is a work to last over some years.""Yes," Clara said. She had sat down on the other side of the ricketty table, placing her elbows on it, and she could not say any more for fear of a gasp in her voice. She was des-perately tired, and would willingly have put off settling the question that she knew to be before her."My difficulties are a want of acquaintance with the languages of modern Europe," the doctor went on, "and to some extent a want of acquaintance with the habits of the countries. When I have travelled it has often been in uncongenial, conventional company." Before Clara's mind rose at once the form of the lady in black. "I think I may add, for I wish to set the case fairly before you—no good comes of concealment—that I may fail if I work alone, through want of persistence. I haven't your persistent enthusiasm, Miss David. I have not your knowledge of languages. I have not, and never shall have, your knowledge of your own country. I know as little of it as you knew of London when first you came here. And to accomplish our great work as it should be accomplished, needs a profound knowledge of many lands. That is the case as it stands against my accomplishment of the task. But I say 'our' great work, because I have come to ask you if you will be a sharer in it, if you will bring to the partnership all that I lack. The question is—Can we either of us do better for the Cause than by joining ourselves together for this work?"Dr. Gold paused, and Clara was silent. All that he said pointed to arguments familiar to all members of Clara's fraternity: temporary unions of the kind that he suggested were not uncommon in fact, and were discussed every day in their newspapers and books.The orator's power depends, I think, less upon his possession of one burning idea, than upon his habit of seeing all that he knows vividly portrayed in pictures. We can all describe well what we see, at the time that we see it; but we see only sometimes, he always. Clara saw young Mrs. Gold, said to be so good a woman, grave and gracious, with her black robes outlined against the gray church wall: and then she saw Felix Schmidt, waiting for her beneath the plane-trees, while the sun set at the end of the long straight road where the plums hung on either side ripe for gathering—waiting for her still, it might be, within the walls of some prison."I cannot, I cannot, doctor," she said; "anything but that."This is a very old story told of a man and a woman. She had all she wanted, and she would not willingly lose it—counsel, intellectual companionship, a friend who had seen another side of life: she asked to stay there and to go no further. He wanted to pursue the path, and as yet neither to stay nor to go back."If you were as other women, I would not ask it," the doctor said. "No one knows better than I do that most women have one dearest thing—it may be some foolish superstition, or it may be what they call their honour—but one dearest thing that they would not give up to save the world from ruin. They always keep back part of the price. Most women, even those who profess to work for the Cause, love themselves better than the Cause when it comes to the point. But you are not like them. You are one of the few who see that life is only meant to be used. And, therefore, your opinion is worth abiding by. If you bid me leave this work, I shall do so. The Cause can succeed without my help.""Not that!" Clara cried. "If my bidding is worth anything, I bid you go on, but alone or with another helper, not with me. The work does not really need my help. This is a thing that I cannot do. You can accomplish alone any work that you choose to undertake."Dr. Gold rose. There was no one to notice that he set his white, pointed teeth hard, and that, as he looked at Clara, there came into his eyes a gleam—it may have been the reflection from the lamp as he moved—that had not shone there as he spoke of the Cause."If that is your ultimatum," he said, "I have no more to say. Of course, I may, as you suggest, do some part of the work alone. I confess that I am deeply disappointed to find that we cannot discuss this question calmly and dispassionately, putting any idea of what we like aside, and considering only how we may best serve the Cause. I think back with regret to the days when your father was there to advise us all. He alone seemed able to sweep his life clear of personal considerations." Dr. Gold has a genius for putting his case effectively.Clara spoke again. "Everything in the world, I think, is personal, one way or another. My father was not impersonal at all, but very personal indeed, in his relations towards me, and towards mother, and a few others. It is easy to talk about sweeping personal considerations aside if one does not care."The doctor changed his tone. "Do you think I do not care?" he said. "Do you not know that you are not the same to me as other women? I do care immensely about this work, about the success of our Cause. Clara, do not you keep back part of the price. Clara, come." At the repeated sound of her name she looked up. For a moment Dr. Gold thought the victory was his, that he had conquered by the use of a very old, very strong weapon. But, though I do not pretend that the personal element introduced into the conversation had no influence on a lonely life like Clara's, I am sure that Dr. Gold did not for long years after that—if even he ever will—gauge the strength of purpose of the woman whose life he so calmly proposed to hold within his own."I have been to West Moston," she said, slowly. "I have seen Mrs. Gold."Yet, as soon as she said it, she felt that she had spoken to no purpose. Even her father, who, being happily married himself, was more strict in his views on marriage than many of his disciples, had not held that the marriage tie was, under all circumstances, either binding or indispensable. What did she know of the details of this particular case? Yet, unless you have some rule that applies in all cases, details are a necessary preliminary to judgment.Nevertheless, the doctor went white in the face, and set his teeth once more. "Ah! so!" he began. "That is a strange coincidence—if it was a coincidence?""Entirely so," Clara affirmed. "I went to see old Mrs. Vast's grave. You know Lavinia Vast, my landlady. Mrs. Gold spoke to me in the churchyard. She was very kind, very helpful. But I did not know till afterwards who she was.Duelling is not yet out of fashion in England. It is only that the weapons are changed. Most of our quarrels are settled by single combat, and he who is most expert, not he who has the most righteous cause, is apt to come out victor. And the vanquished crawls off wounded to recover as best he may. I have often thought that things would go fairer if seconds could be provided for these modern duels to see that the rules of fair play are observed. Extreme rapidity of decision, and long practice in this particular kind of duel, had made Dr. Gold a most dangerous opponent. He had wounded many a woman before now, and he himself had come off with scarcely a scratch. He asked himself whether this coveted object were worth its price. There are plenty of women in the world, and if the great work were not written, what then? There are openings without number for a clever fellow who has the gift of words written and spoken. All this in a second, to be succeeded by a desire to see the end of it. Among the women in the world there are not many like Clara; and to feel himself posed as the embodiment of Duty, while Inclination drew in an opposite direction, was a new experience to Dr. Gold, who had often represented Inclination, and in that guise lured his victims away from Duty.Dr. Gold had had the worst of the last round, and during the pause he looked his adversary over, deciding where to plant the next blow. It was open to him to explain the situation with regard to Mrs. Gold, to tell a long story of his own inexperience years ago, and of the impossibility of the wife he had foolishly chosen. He might even have adopted' a melodramatic style, and pointed out how the churchyard was connected with the burial of his dearest hopes. Many women would have succumbed to such handling.It was also open to him to find out how much Clara knew, and to conduct the argument in dialogue—quick parry and thrust till one or other combatant fell exhausted. But that is not always a wise method of fighting a woman, when you have the choice of weapons. Many men in his place would have confined themselves to the main question, leaving the details of his particular case aside: the feet of most opponents become entangled before they come to an end of the marriage question.Dr. Gold did none of these things: great workers always choose simple methods."Miss David," he said, "I am heartily glad. I need explain nothing to you now. For you know what a misfortune is mine. You know how cruelly the incidence of an unjust law presses upon me. People who do not know all this, wonder why I have not done more with my life. Since I was a child I have been told that I had power and ability beyond the rest. And hitherto I have done nothing with it. There is the reason. We were saying just now that every man is what his conditions allow him to be. These are my conditions. I implore you to take your courage in your hands and to alter them for me. The conditions are merely artificial, a sort of social accident. But I can't break through them alone. I can't work alone. No man can. Perhaps a few women can, but you are not one of them. You are often terribly lonely. And your powerlessness to help on the solidarity of the race, in any adequate way, presses on you like a stone. These men care each one for himself more than for any Cause. And when we see our way to a great work, why are we to be held back by any artificial barriers?""I do not know that I am called to help in this work," Clara said. "I do not know that I am the fit person to do it. There are other people, men and women too, who would help you better than I can.""Pardon me, Miss David. Barring you, there is no one. There are men who could do the mechanical part of the work, no doubt. That there are women who would come to me if I held out my hand, is also true. But no man on earth can do for me, and through me for the Cause, what you can do if you will. And as for the women, you can never guess how far they are from raising a man to any higher level. Ah, Miss David, we can break through the laws of the land, but the laws of nature break us if we strike against them. And from the beginning men have owed their salvation—or their perdition—to women. The dual life is the perfect life."Dr. Gold convinced himself of the truth of each word as he spoke it. And no one will say that there was not a great deal of sound truth in his remarks. The passionate cry to something outside himself for salvation was but an echo of the cry of all humanity. Never for any length of time had he lost sight of a good higher than that which he reached; as yet he had never fallen low without knowing that he had so fallen. But a man comes to speedy death if he feeds on the best of foods mixed with a small amount of poison; and the doctor's blighting belief in circumstances prevented him from grasping the good he saw, or from absorbing into his own life enough of it to enable him to stand and to reach on higher. Good outside ourselves, however close it may be, profits us nothing until we make a part of it our own. Dr. Gold had as yet shown no evidence of such power of absorption.But one has to know a man very intimately before one can draw a line between his power of intellectually appreciating the good and his power of practically following it. Fine words without fault or flaw habitually gain for us a larger meed of approval than fine actions, which are, in the nature of things, often flawed and faulty. The power of expressing ourselves in words is cultivated in us from our youth; not so the power of expressing ourselves in deed.As Dr. Gold spoke, setting forth in his clear tones Clara's own views of life, the feeling that the thing was impossible grew fainter. She was alone in the world. No one cared what became of her. If she let the doctor go, very likely she would in all her life never have again so good an opportunity of benefiting the Cause. The other men, Ned Knight, Job Jones, and the rest, were, as Dr. Gold said, good followers but not leaders. Sacrifice of all kinds seemed natural to her in her present mood. She was inclined to take a profoundly sad view of life. Those who are incapable of seeing the sadness and horror of life never have force enough to turn reformer. The reformer's fire is oftenest kindled in the flames of hell.And then, in her present overwrought state, the man's personality dominated her as it never would have done had she been less tired. All that she had given out at the meeting was gone from her for the time, though it might return fourfold in the near future. Perhaps Dr. Gold reckoned upon this when he decided to call that night.Meanwhile the neighbour's child had found it cold in the backyard, and, creeping into the kitchen, had found it lonely there. She remembered that on grand occasions she had been privileged to look at, and even to touch, the stuffed dog in the parlour window, and she thought that the privilege might be granted her once more if she made friends with the lodger during the widow woman's absence.So she crept along the passage, and, hearing voices, thought that the widow woman had come back early, and that her quest was vain. There was a crack above the hinge on the door, where, peeping through, she saw Clara sitting by the table with her head in her hands, and a strange man scolding her. That the child did not understand what was said by the man who scolded, only made the situation more natural. She watched to see what would come next, then grew frightened, but watched still until she heard the widow woman's latch-key fumbling in the lock, and ran to open the door as quickly and as quietly as she could.And that was how it came about that Clara was spared the trouble of an immediate reply; for the widow woman, hearing "words" in her parlour, burst open the door without ceremony, and standing in the doorway in her best suit of black, a large hymn-book under one arm and her umbrella clasped tight in her hand, the child peering from behind her skirts—in that prosaic attitude the widow woman, all unconscious, seized the shears of fate and spoke: "Is there anything you're wantin', Miss, before I sets down to my supper?"CHAPTER XIDURING the long hours of the night Clara saw the problem that was placed before her in another light. She did not sleep, for she had but a short time to make up her mind. Dr. Gold was returning to London by the express train on Monday morning, and he had left her with the understanding that they would meet at the station. She had no valid excuse for breaking the appointment, and yet she saw very plainly what her answer would be if she kept it. Suppose she waited for a later train, the doctor would probably wait also, or come to meet her. He was not a person to be baffled by a slight difficulty of that kind. She might go earlier, but the widow woman was in bed and could not very readily be informed of a change of plan. And where could Clara go to? If she went to Lavinia Vast's, the doctor would follow her. And there was not in the whole of England anyone to whom she felt she could go, and, throwing herself into her friend's arms, ask for counsel and calm. Never before had her loneliness seemed so great. The morning before, in the quiet churchyard, she had enjoyed an hour of peace, but even that memory was tainted now by the thought of young Mrs. Gold so graciously befriending the stranger; who was in fact no stranger at all, and the stream of whose life had come so perilously near her own.Hour after hour she worked through the same considerations, backwards and forwards. Should she take the later train? Could she take the earlier? If she did not go to London, where could she go? How strange it was that Mrs. Gold should have spoken to her! Was Mrs. Gold as good a woman as she was said to be? Should she take train with the doctor and put young Mrs. Gold out of her mind? But Mrs. Gold refused to be thus put away. She remained consciously present to Clara, who, in her fatigue and sleeplessness, lacked the power to pursue any train of thought, but saw always again and again the same imaginary pictures of herself, now with the doctor, now with Mrs. Gold, now alone, doing first one thing and then another. And when at last she fell into a doze it was only to be wakened again, while the light was gray and scanty, by the clatter of clogs over the stones and the chatter of girls' voices, as the workers turned out to the mill. But the doze, or the sound of the women, started. Clara on another thought. All her deepest and most abiding sympathies were stirred by daily workers—above all, by women workers. And now that she could not see them, could not be fretted by their personal habits, she was able to clothe them in her tenderest ideal of womanhood. She longed for the sympathy of women, of a woman, felt that a woman might understand her difficulties, remembered all the fine devotion shown by women labouring for the Cause. It was not true, as the doctor had said, that women keep back part of the price. Some do, but not the good women. They know, if no one else does, that life itself and all that life holds are only meant to use for the good of the whole. Clara did not for a moment fail to perceive that to help the doctor in his work meant giving the whole of her life to his service. And by some extraordinary perversion of reason—which, perhaps, is not uncommon among women of any creed—she made herself believe that if she had wanted to go to him she would have been compelled not to do so. The magnitude of the sacrifice in some sense justified it.Then once more she recurred to the ideal good woman. With a mind such as Clara's to conceive an idea is to personify it, and somehow, insensibly, the ideal good woman shaped herself as tall, clad in black, finally appeared in the form of young Mrs. Gold.The clattering of the clogs had ceased some minutes ago; the bell at the factory had rung its call and was still. The hours went on. Intermittent noises came and went in the street. The day grew clearer and lighter, and the first rays of sunlight shone through Clara's window. As the day rose Clara's purpose rose too. She would get away from the town and from the doctor by one and the same stratagem. She would go back to West Moston, and would look once more out of the churchyard and across the blue hills whence the clear light had shone into her soul the day before. Standing there, all the future had seemed so plain; all the sacrifices of her life had given out so sweet an odour. Under like conditions would not the same clearness of vision return? And, wherever the doctor might seek for her, it would certainly not be in West Moston. No one would dream of her being there again. And she could easily let it be understood that she had gone to do some further errand for Lavinia Vast in her native place. The habit of concealing her movements had grown up with her, and it was a matter of course to leave the widow woman supposing that she had gone to the London station instead of to the branch line, and to put her London address in a conspicuous place in case the doctor should call.Experiences are not to be repeated. Seeking for the old track, we turn ourselves round and round and trample it out; and so, ever after, when we wander near the beginning of the old and beautiful path, we find only our own trampled footprints in a wearisome circle, and the memories that the spot recalls are only those of our old disappointment. And so it was with Clara. West Moston in its Monday clothing is never a very sightly object. It has always seemed to me that the women call in shriller tones across the street, and that the men are more inclined to cuff the children or kick the dogs. Perhaps the children and dogs are more aggravating, because they also try to hark back to the Sunday rest: Sunday feelings sought as luxury, not used as an inspiration, are apt to result in bitterness.When West Moston is further tried by drenching rain on a Monday morning any explosion of temper or low spirits is excusable. The carters go hour after hour ill sheltered by an old sack thrown across their shoulders, and the children come in wet and quarrelsome from school, to make all dirty the place that mother cleaned so carefully on Saturday afternoon. The sunshine of the early morning had all ended in this. Anyone used to the country might have foretold that it would be so; but Clara was a townswoman, and had not seen sky enough to learn weather-wisdom. By the time she reached the churchyard the rain was coming down steadily, and not a glimpse of the blue hills could be caught. The relief of seeing some fixed point in the world, that she could hang her tired spirit on, was more unattainable than ever. After her sleepless night, blown and beaten by wind and rain, she looked a sufficiently woebegone object. She wandered through the grass once more to old Mrs. Vast's grave, rather for the sake of seeming to have an object on her journey, than because she had any longer a pleasurable sentiment therein. It was pitiful to lay down in the long grass under the beating rain a wreath of autumn flowers that she had brought from Radington. Already they were spoiled and miserable looking.Not knowing where to go afterwards, she turned into a small inn near the churchyard gate, where she had seen the one-armed ostler busied among the chaises the day before. The landlady came out to look at her with her spectacles on the end of her nose and a book and pencil in her hand. A visitor on a Monday morning was rare, not too welcome, for on Monday there are many things to do that can't be put off. So early in the season there was no fire in the bar parlour, but one of the maids offered to dry Clara's cloak in the kitchen and to bring her some bread and cheese. Clara asked that a glass of beer should be brought also, whereat the landlady looked askance, for Eng-lish ladies do not step into public houses and ask for beer in the middle of the day.Everything was gloomy and uncomfortable, and it tended to still further depress Clara. She had hailed with pleasure the invitation to speak at Radington, and the affair had not come up to her expectation. So far from wishing it to be the precursor of other similar invitations, she shrank from the idea. West Moston had been added on her own account, and, so far, that was worse. If she stayed on in England alone, gave up the doctor and his work, there would be an endless succession of trips like these—if she had good fortune! Chilly and miserable, she paid her small score, and set off through the rain to walk to the station. The landlady offered to send her in a trap for a few shillings, but she had already spent all she could spare on the wreath and the double railway journey. As she neared the station the rain held off for a while, and there seized her once again a horror lest, putting herself in the train, she should rush on her fate. She turned away from the station road, and walked on and on in the direction she had seen the pony-carriage take the day before. She had no one to confide in; she had nothing to trust; and in such cases, in moments of extraordinary bewilderment, the solitary-minded are apt to be guided by signs of nature, by portents, by superstitions, by what we call accident. Faith brings its own fulfilment. Believing ourselves to be the sport of circumstances, we become so.She met the woman to whom she had spoken the day before, carrying home a basin in a cloth from her husband's dinner, and asked the way to young Mrs. Gold's. The woman said that her "James's Polly lived there housemaid, and had a right good mistress; a friend to us all, and to all them that wants befriending hereabouts. Never thinks of hersel', that she doan't. There's not many like her, worse luck." Clara trudged on again for a quarter of a mile, and knocked, according to direction, at a door with a flowery porch, one of a small cluster of houses, with a tiny school-house opposite, and a road beyond winding up the hill.She was shown into a tiny parlour, exquisitely clean and neat, with spotless white curtains and paint, an old china bowl of flowers in the window, a card-plate on the table, books in a rack, bits of old china everywhere.She took up a book while she was waiting, then another, and found titles and contents of a religious character; then she turned over the cards and saw the name of Lady D——, who is well known in that county, and of a clergyman or two. At once she began to forget the common interests of womanhood, and to accentuate the differences of rank and faith. Doubtless, this Mrs. Gold was an impossible woman, one who gloried in condemning to eternal flames all those who are unable to share her own creed. Do not be too indignant, orthodox readers! Do you not class all persons together who stand sufficiently far off from your own Christianity? Socialists, free-thinkers, atheists,—has it ever occurred to you that wide gulfs often roll between them? Only the shepherd knows his sheep apart: he spends his life among them, and loves them: to us they are all alike, all uninteresting, all—in a word—just sheep!Mrs. Gold had gone out between the showers, and the little maid had to fetch her from the bottom of the garden."She wouldna give her name, mum," James's Polly had said. "Said you wouldna know her name, only when you saw her." And Mrs. Gold, accustomed to see all sorts of neighbours on all sorts of errands, came in at once.Nothing more could be needed to prove to any unbiassed observer—but there was none—that Dr. Gold was possessed by a fatal perversity in judging of his own interests than the sight of these two women, each of whom he steadfastly purposed for the space of some months to guide his own life by. He had wrecked the older woman's life to no good end for himself. What will he do with the younger? The tragedy of the situation was thrown away. Mrs. Gold advanced with outstretched hand, recognising her companion of the day before, recognising also a weary, harassed woman, and thought only of some simple help."Mrs. Vast's grand-daughter," she said. "What can I do for you?"That there was a shade of patronage in Mrs. Gold's gentle voice, I do not doubt. James's Polly afterwards declared that she couldn't for the life of her tell whether the visitor was a lady or not, she was "that untidy about the head, and her petticoats were that draggled". Mrs. Gold probably did not ask herself the question. Women such as Mrs. Gold are always neat. You never by any chance could apply to them the word "draggled". People who saw Mrs. Gold during the few miserable years that she spent with the doctor, have told me that she was, even then, neat and dainty in her ways, bringing into the successive lodgings where she was located, a little air of home. As for me, I know the pattern of Mrs. Gold's old china by heart, and I have never seen her in any place where a tiny piece or two did not soon appear on the mantelshelf. That bowl with the late roses in it, is mended on the other side: the doctor broke it one Sunday afternoon when he was specially enraged with his wife; probably he had had too much to drink at the time. I can imagine how she would gather up the pieces. A spray of rose-leaves gathered from the cottage porch hide the join very comfortably now. But that is by the way."I want you to do nothing for me, thank you," Clara replied. "It is about Dr. Gold that I came to speak.""Dr. Gold?" said his wife. "Did he send you to me?" Mrs. Gold was mystified by the appearance of the stranger. She was not of the sort of woman that Dr. Gold had generally been found to admire. And how came she to be mixed up with old Mrs. Vast? For the Vasts are a respected family, whose lives lie far apart from such as the doctor and his associates."He did not send me. He does not know I am here. I judged it better to come and see you face to face."Had it been to do with any other person Mrs. Gold would probably have immediately decided that the woman was crazy. But her relations with the doctor had been so tragic, so unexpected, so utterly different from anything else that she had ever heard of, that nothing seemed too unlikely to be true. The two women had not sat down in the beginning of the interview, and it was out of the question now."If you have anything to say you had better go on and say it at once," Mrs. Gold said."I am no relation of Mrs. Vast's," Clara began. "I am Clara David. My stepfather was August David. You will have heard of him.""I think not. But it is no matter," said Mrs. Gold, to whom the name conveyed no idea whatever."He died a few years ago. Dr. Gold was much in his company the year before he died.""Indeed," Mrs. Gold assented.Clara was gaining time. She knew many women, but not one like this Mrs. Gold, so placid, so exquisitely neat, with her golden hair plaited round her head like a coronet, and her sweeping black robes."Dr. Gold has been working for the Cause. Some of our leaders think that he might do great things if he were only kept straight. He wants a woman by his side, or he will fail and the Cause will suffer. And the women with whom he is friends don't help him; they drag him back. And we want good men and good speakers now more than at any time, or justice will never come to the workers and the women. The luxury of the rich gets worse every year, and there are so few to work. You have suf-fered injustice through the tyranny and the want of elasticity in the law. And so I have come to you. They say you are a good woman. Help to save him, won't you?"For one moment—no longer—Mrs. Gold thought that her prayers were answered. We could scarcely exist through long years of waiting if we had not the employment of weaving our fancies into solid texture. Mrs. Gold prayed, sometimes believed, that her erring husband would come back to her some day for shelter and safety; though it were only in the evening of life, though he were broken down, ill, worthless to every other creature on earth, he would yet be penitent and in need of all that she could give. And then, would not the right have triumphed at last? Under the influence of the fancy she clasped her hands, and made a half step forward as though to greet the penitent.Then dimly, as in the remembrance of a horrible dream, she saw the dreary lodgings where she had passed the greater part of her short married life, remembered the long, dark, solitary evenings, the erratic goings and comings of the men who dropped in to smoke and drink, the pennilessness and misery of it all, remembered also the child. Seeing the prim, peaceful parlour that she had made for her own soul to abide in, one could understand what she must have suffered when the roots of her life were torn up."You are talking about what you cannot understand," Mrs. Gold said. "Dr. Gold must make a home first before I can go to him. There is no cause in the world that is worth sacrificing a child for. And you perhaps are unaware how little Dr. Gold's way of life is fit for a child to share."Clara shrugged her shoulders impatiently."I have not asked you to go to him," she said. To balance the welfare of a single child, any child, against the advancement of the Cause of collective humanity seemed to her absurd. "As for me, I have never had what you call 'a home' since I was born. I can live wherever the work calls me. I have no home now, so I have nothing to hold me back on that side." Clara looked somewhat scornfully round the little parlour, as we are all apt to look on what we take to be the embodied temptations of other women."It is a great loss; one that can never be made up to you. I am very sorry for you," Mrs. Gold said, gravely.The door opened, and a child ran into the room, ran to her mother, and grasped her with both arms round the knees. "Cousin Jack's come, driving his new horse," she cried, in shrill tones. "He wants you to come and look, and I want you too so very badly. He says he'll take me down the road in his cart if you'll say I may." Then she turned her back on her mother, and, leaning against her, faced the stranger. "Oh! ain't you going away soon? I wish you would," she said, earnestly."Hush! hush! Pansie," Mrs. Gold said.The eyes of the two women met. Clara had looked for a fixed point in life, and she had it before her. No theories or ideas could undo the fact of the child's existence, and her striking resemblance to her father. Mrs. Gold took the child by the hand and put her out of the room in James's Polly's keeping, sending a message to Cousin Jack at the door. When she came back it was she who spoke:—"I am not likely to see you again. I do not know if anything I can say will hold you back from what you have determined to do. But you have your life to live. You have, as we all of us have, some work to do, and though I do not understand why you come here, nor why you wanted to see me, I suppose you thought it would in some way make your duty clearer to you."Clara's murmur passed for assent."Women often think that they can save a man if they sacrifice themselves. No one was ever yet saved so. It is a plan that always fails. Because, as I think, it is only so long as we stand on the highest pinnacle of truth and purity possible for us, that we have any power to reach out and draw another up. If we step down we lose our power. Sacrifice all that you have of material good: you may do service with it. But keep yourself, as you would keep any other human being to whom you owed a duty."It is very well known that on some subjects no one seeks advice until the issue is practically decided. Clara wished to be fortified in her own opinions, not converted to another woman's. So she said: "We evidently do not agree on such matters. We are not likely to, however long we discuss them. It is true, as I have heard it said, that some women always keep back part of the price when they think they want to do good work. As I keep back nothing, I shall succeed where you failed. It is not to you who have failed that I need come to learn my duty. I believe that, given right conditions, every man develops towards good. The environment makes the man,"Mrs. Gold flushed with anger, then she bit her lip, looked over her strange visitor's head and out of the window, and spoke in a clear, even voice, as though she were dragging the words from some secret hiding-place one by one."Yes; given right conditions, we develop towards good, if we have it in us to develop at all. What I mean is that if a man—or a plant—is alive, and you give it air, and water, and sunshine, it will grow and will be beautiful. But if it is dead, you may put it where you will, and it makes no difference. We must have some spiritual life in us. Without that, under a paving-stone or in a sunny window, we are only acted upon, we do not act; and to be acted upon, without any power in ourselves, means decay, not development, not growth. And I think—God forgive me for saying so to you; you seem troubled and worn and you are young yet—I think that you have to do with a dead thing here. You must fail."Then Mrs. Gold executed a surprising movement. Suddenly she wondered why she had talked to this woman for so long, for she surely was no nice woman, there was nothing nice about her. She walked to the door, opened it: "I think I need not trouble you further, Miss—Miss David," she said. And Clara, to her own astonishment, found herself obeying Mrs. Gold's imperious gesture, found herself outside the door with some excellent retort upon her lips about Dr. Gold's being very much alive. Later on she laughed and took comfort in remembering that Mrs. Gold had got a good deal mixed among her similes. It was a fair return for being sent out of the house.Mrs. Gold also wondered why Miss David went so readily at her bidding. But to me it looks like one instance of the truth that in personal encounter, skill and training in the arts of life—what we often call good breeding—almost invariably determine the victory.CHAPTER XIIWET, cold, and disconcerted, Clara travelled back to London. She came in late, had to wait long on the road, and Lavinia Vast was standing on the doorstep, wondering what had become of her, an hour or more before she appeared."Lord a' mercy, Clara David, you do look bad!" she cried, as her lodger came in, bag in hand. "And there, I declare, I've let the fire out. There's not a spark left. I've been looking for you all the day, thinking of my poor old mother; and how did she look? Handsome grave, isn't it? I'll boil a drop of water over the gas. Come in, and tell me about it."Clara sat down in the back parlour while Lavinia Vast boiled the kettle."There is a tombstone, to be sure, as you told me, Mrs. Vast," she said, wondering if she might give the message from "one of the ladies of the Hall," or if her visit to Mrs. Gold would have hindered the performance of the promise. Then she remembered that Mrs. Vast would never go to West Moston to see, and gave it, carefully suppressing names. She bore in silence Mrs. Vast's running wonder as to who the lady might be. At last the tea was made. Mrs. Vast could never bring herself to believe that her lodgers preferred any earthly comfort to that offered by a cup of tea, and the deeper her sympathies the more urgently she pressed that luxury on the afflicted in mind or body. She had no knowledge of illness, and thought Miss David was only tired with her journey; tired, as she herself often was when she sat up all night dressmaking. Such fatigue, often repeated, tells upon a woman in the long run; I think I said before that Lavinia Vast died last year; but at the time it is nothing more than a few hours of sleep will set right.Clara was destined to have another sleepless night. Shivering and dosing, waking and shivering again; impossible fancies coursing through her brain as she lay awake, only to be succeeded by yet more impossible fancies if she slept for a few minutes: so the hours wore on, and the clock on the neighbouring church struck them one after another on a cracked bell. She longed for light to work and to forget; but when light came she was further from work and forgetfulness than ever, because, as anyone but Mrs. Vast would have foreseen, she was too ill to stand, and crept back to bed again to be seized by a set of fancies more troublesome than those that went before. For she told herself plainly that she could not possibly be ill: there was no place in the world for her to be ill in. Lavinia Vast had her own work to do, and the boy who took down the shutters, and the woman who "cleaned up" occasionally, when Mrs. Vast's needlework orders warranted the extravagance, were both of them impossible 



viewed as sick-nurses.  There are hospitals, but where, or how to be got at, Clara was too tired to think.  All her searchings of mind about Dr. and Mrs. Gold were swallowed up in present discomfort.  Only the quiet and neatness of Mrs. Gold's home, the long sweeping black gown, reminding Clara of the deaconess she had seen by sick beds as a child, began to take on another aspect : they seemed comforting, not irksome.it was not till mid-day that Mrs. Vast came, cup of tea in hand, to say that she thought Clara had overslept herslf, and it was a pity to wake her.  She stayed a few minutes to speak of her poor old mother again, and t say that she had determined which of the ladies from the Hall had sent that message : "The colonel - Mr. James, as we called him - died out in India, and I make no doubt but that Mr. Geoffrey, that was the old squire's eldest son, had the little girl home to the Hall."The blades of grass and the two bramble-



leaves did not please Lavinia. They interfered with her ideal of her old mother's grave. She said to herself that Clara David was too clever to do like other people, and had foreign notions that came in the way of a proper nosegay. The shop-bell rang, and she hurried away.When evening came, and next morning, and Clara was no better, Mrs. Vast rose to the occasion, in so far that she sent for the charwoman, and told her to look in every morning, and she ran upstairs as often as she could spare time, to say a few kindly words, or to do, as she phrased it, " a hand's turn for the poor thing ". One night she contrived to make an immense mustard-plaster, and to apply it, and the charwoman, after considerable outlay of time and beef, produced a cup of gray liquid that they called beef-tea. Then they both thought that they had accomplished wonders.Clara took very little notice of anything. She made up her mind that she was going to die, like Jeanne Coulot, and, on the whole, it seemed the easiest and pleasantest thing that could happen. The great work ceased to occupy so large a place in the horizon.Towards the end of the week Mrs. Vast asked her patient for money: "Which you are well aware you're welcome to all I can do for you, but there's the rent coming due, and illness costs money, not to say the woman for extra cleaning".Clara had her desk brought, and took out two sovereigns."That is all I have until I am well enough to work again," she said. "Perhaps I shall be better soon." Then she turned over with her face to the wall, and appeared to dismiss the subject.Mrs. Vast became thoughtful and struck out a plan. Since Clara had been ill, Ned Knight, and Mr. Barratry, and a few others, hearing of it, had looked in to inquire after the invalid at evening. Mrs. Vast hoped she might have a few minutes with each in private."Which you are well aware, Mr. Knight, as Clara David have give away to one and another both time and money. And here she is, stretched on the bed of sickness, and she says to me: 'Mrs. Vast, here's two pound, and it's all I have until such time as I can earn some more'. And well you know, Mr. Knight, your poor mother enjoying such bad health as she does and all, as illness can't be got over unless there's money. The poor thing's welcome to what I can do for her, but it ain't easy to pay rent and keep house over your head at the best."For Mr. Barratry, as a foreigner ill conversant with the British tongue, she designed no such flights of eloquence."Money, that's wanting. Money. Yes. That's what I say. She've give it all away so long as she had health and strength." Mrs. Vast showed him the pound still remaining—one had already been changed at the shop—and she went through some pantomime of eating.Barratry's English was growing fast."You are good, Mrs. Vast," he said, bowing with a courtly air that quite overcame the dressmaker. "Miss David is my friend. I bring money for her use."Mrs. Vast's plan was not yet complete. Locking up the house late at night, she ran round to Mrs. Snoad's, and so worked on her feelings and her vanity, praising her cooking, and describing the invalid's symptoms; "and you know, Martha, as long as she had money, she was always one to spend it with you," that Mrs. Snoad promised a jugful of beef-tea every day. As Lavinia pulled her latch-key out of her pocket, she said to herself contentedly: "If it don't go on too long we shall do now "; and went to bed happy.One day, when Clara was getting better, she begged for pen and paper to write."I must earn a trifle, or I shall be too deeply in your debt, Mrs. Vast," she said.Mrs. Vast gave the implements as desired; "for perhaps it'll amuse her, poor dear, and make the time pass," she said to herself; but she added aloud:—"Don't you trouble yourself with that writing, Clara David, no more'n you've a mind to. There's money, a plenty, I've got. There's them as won't let you want for anything, as well you know."Pen and paper slipped from Clara's fingers as soon as Mrs. Vast was gone. Hearing there was no need to work, she put no force on herself to do it. Her social creed forbade her to heap up riches; and living from hand to mouth seemed to her rather a duty than a crime. Hence it was a matter of course that he who had health and strength should have helped her who had, for the time, neither. But though, in theory at least, the help came as a matter of course, a sudden spring of gratitude towards the doctor, who was, without doubt, her helper, filled her heart. The horrible loneliness slipped off her. She felt that she belonged to some one, that there was some one worth getting well for. And she began to mend more rapidly; so that when Dr. Gold chanced to call, many days later, she was up and well enough to see him.Clara asked immediately after the great work."I hope it is progressing. One has time to think when one is ill; and I have found myself possessed of many thoughts that will work in. You have helped me to get well. I do not think I could have recovered if I had had to worry over ways and means. And now that I am well you shall have all the help I can give."Dr. Gold dimly perceived some misunderstanding, for he had done as little as a man could do to relieve her of any burden; since some one had come forward, however, there was no good in disclaiming a share."Well, well," he said, "we are all brothers. Each one of us is bound to take from or give to another. There is therefore no credit in giving, no shame in receiving. We won't talk about that." So Clara thought she knew better than before that Dr. Gold had given; and the conversation passed on.Clara wanted to talk of the future, of the towns they would visit, and the work they would do; but as she talked she coughed now and again, and flushed readily, so that the doctor, who was reasonable above all things, began to say within himself: "Would a semi-invalid suit him as partner? Would it not be wise to break the plan off short? There must be something wrong in the health of a family where one woman is left alone in the world before she is thirty." Finally, he insisted on sending a medical man to see Clara, saying that he was shocked to know that she had not seen one sooner. When she spoke of expense, he exclaimed warmly: "What is that by the side of your health?" reflecting, as he spoke, that it would be easy to get a man to attend her without fee. Asked if she had any preference for one man over another, she begged to see Dr. George Thompson, who had attended her mother a year or two ago.Dr. George Thompson's verdict was altogether favourable. He prescribed change of air and nourishing food, which Mrs. Vast, whose stores were constantly replenished, promised readily to supply. He also took occasion to see his cousin: "Look here, Con, he said, "I want you to do something for one of my patients. You know Miss David? Just go and look her up. She seems to have no woman belonging to her except an old dressmaker. Yes; I know all about that"—Constance was beginning a fragmentary explanation about Dr. Gold—"I don't suppose you'll see him, and if you do, he won't hurt you. Do go, there's a good girl. You know you like to see all sorts of people. These are new specimens for your menagerie." And Dr. George Thompson departed hastily, for he was a busy man, and his practice grew apace.So Constance Thompson went northwards on many of these autumn afternoons, and made great friends with the dressmaker, who dated a decided improvement in her little business from those visits. In loyal obedience to her cousin she tried her best to get on with Clara David. On one occasion she met Dr. Gold there, and stubbornly sat him out, remarking afterwards that she "knew Clara David would be glad to have some one else there until he went, for he's a horrid man, as every one knows, and Clara David is really a good woman, though she and I don't see things in general eye to eye. It happened to be very inconvenient to stay so long, for I had an engagement in the evening, and it is a world's end place. But one must' do unto others——' you know. And that's what I'd have thanked another girl to do for me."Constance did more than this, for she begged one of Ada Gilman-Turner's many bank-notes, and gave it into Lavinia Vast's open hand. She was too shy to tell Clara, who felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into the doctor's debt. And Dr. Gold called every day to be thanked for what he had not done, and to drink deep draughts of Clara's fervid belief in the Man and the Cause.CHAPTER XIIIYoung Mrs. Gold had sent Pansie for a walk, and was sitting sewing in the window when a stout, thickset man of nearly sixty turned in at the gate. She ran out to greet him: "Dear Cousin Geoff," she said, "come in and talk to me, I am alone".But Cousin Geoff had something on his mind, and he preferred to disburden himself of it in the place where he felt most at home. In a garden, however small, you can turn away from a woman when you fear you have inadvertently hurt her; you can take a turn up and down the walk to give her time; you can find a thousand objects to interest you, or to talk about, outside the main stream of discourse; in short, there are, in a garden, many ways of making things easier for your companion; whence it may be seen that Cousin Geoff—or "the Old Squire," as men mostly call him—was not given to duels of the kind that Dr. Gold was so expert in.Mrs. Gold put on her hat, and went down her garden with the Squire to look at a couple of young apple trees that he had caused to be planted last year. They had both looked at them often before, but perhaps not since the two or three apples had been gathered and laid by in a safe place."A very good sort, Theodora," the Squire said. "You'll find them good till Christmas. Not fit to eat yet, you know." But he had told her that before, and he was not given to finesse—had a heavy hand at it. So he went on to business. "That fellow, your—I'm very sorry to have to mention it to you, Theo,—Dr. Gold, I mean, was at Radington last week, spouting at some club they've got there. Puddiworth told me. He has a cousin in Radington." Puddiworth was the Squire's head gardener, and had known and loved both the Squire and Theo for many a long year."Yes, I know," Theo said very gravely."He has not dared to come here to molest you?" the Squire asked, seized with a sudden dread."No," Theo answered, and wondered what the Squire would say if he knew who had come. "Dear Cousin Geoff, he will never come here again. You may be sure of that. There is nothing more that I have that he wants."Here the Squire took a turn along the walk, though more to relieve his own feelings than to shield Theodora's. He cut off the tops of several sturdy groundsel plants with his stick, and having said "scoundrel," and muttered something about horsewhips several times under his breath, came back to where Theo was waiting for him."Theo, my dear child," he said, "I came here on purpose to say something to you this morning. I met Pansie out in the village, and it is a grand opportunity, for that child's ears are sharp." Cousin Geoff could not love Pansie on account of her likeness to her father. "I've been enquiring, and Jack's been a good deal in town, you know, and—well, one way and another, there needn't be any difficulty in getting rid of the man once for all. We will try and forget him, my dear. We have all made mistakes in our lives. We'll wipe this out and begin again—dig up the border and plant something fresh in it. Because the old sowing was a failure, there is no reason why we should not have a fair crop of flowers yet." And the squire turned to look at the apple-trees, and at a bed just dug over for autumn sowing. "Jack and I want you, Theo. I am getting an old man, and Jack loves the old place, and he bade me say that Pansie shall run wild in the Hall gardens, as you and he used to do, and she'll get her rosy cheeks again."Theo answered him very gently, knowing what it had cost him to deliver the message about Pansie. "Dear Cousin Geoff," she said, "sometimes it is too late to hope for fair flowers. The season for sowing them has gone by. And as for my poor little Pansie, sometimes I think that her rosy cheeks will never blossom again, and that it is best so. She can never be strong, and often I think that it will be very hard for her to be good. It is hard enough for any one of us. And I did not set her a very good example, Cousin Geoff," she added, wishing to take all her own share of blame."A better child never lived," Cousin Geoff declared. "I only wish she were more like you and less like——. But there, I don't want to talk about Pansie. Will you take our advice and shake yourself free from this man? It is absurd your impoverishing yourself to pay him this money. If half I hear's true, bread and water's too good for him. If I were a younger man!"—and the squire switched a twig from the nearest tree."Dear Cousin Geoff," the woman pleaded again, and laid her hand on his arm, for my sake don't talk so. He is my husband, you know, little Pansie's father.""Husband be——!" but the squire stopped. "Well, in the eyes of the law I suppose he is now, so long as you don't move in the matter. But you can't care for a brute who has treated you like that."Theo looked away over the low wall, over the apple-trees where the brown leaves were hanging, over the garden folding itself together for winter rest, away to the hills shrouded from peak to valley in thick mist. When she spoke again her voice trembled."You see, I have made a great mistake in my life, and as the years go on I see it plainer and plainer. Sometimes, when I think of all that I meant to do with my life, and of the little that I have done, it is almost too bitter to bear. I do not want to see—Dr. Gold again, the only Dr. Gold that there is in the world. Sometimes I think that I hate him, and that he has spoilt my life, and it is only by praying hard that I can keep such thoughts away. No one can spoil our lives if we don't help to spoil them for ourselves, you know. But, dear Cousin Geoff, I wonder if I can make you understand? There seems to be another Dr. Gold, the one I used to know years ago, my husband, whom I know I shall never see again as long as I live, and I would give all that I have in the world to see him again just for five minutes.The woman's voice rose almost to a cry, and the squire turned his face resolutely towards the greenhouse wall. Presently she went on quietly as before: "I know that he must have lived once, were it only for a moment, because but for that I could not have known him. And when you all told me that Dr. Gold was—what he is, I would not believe, for I thought that I could make him into his best self, that I could undo the truth for my own benefit. We all think that when we are young, and that is how we get punished so grievously."It is only a fancy, my dear," the squire told her, "You can't waste all your life on a fancy. You live too much alone and think of these things. It is not good for a young thing. We want your company, Jack and I do. What message am I to take him back?""I haven't any message for Jack except my love; and Pansie shall come and play in the Hall garden to-morrow if it is fine. Do you know, Cousin Geoff, when I was young I thought all men were as good and true as you and Jack are. You see I had never known any one but you and Jack. Perhaps I might have succeeded as other women do if I had married any one very good. But, then, so all women must, I think. And I chose my own lot. I would have my own way. I wanted the impossible. And I have failed. And life does not come over again. But sometimes I think that because I have had to learn and to bear so much, I can help other people better. I don't understand it all, but then I don't expect to. I don't even understand how to grow apples and flowers as you do, Cousin Geoff, "said Theo, smiling. So why should I expect to understand what's so much more difficult? But you tell me to dig one day, and to sow the next, and to watch, and wait, and water, and have patience, and the flowers will come. Perhaps my life is like that, and if I go on and have patience, flowers will come some day, as you say, Cousin Geoff." And Theo almost laughed as she ended her little sermon. "It doesn't do to forget, Cousin Geoff, though people often do, that the hills are there all the same, and the sun somewhere behind them, though we can't see either just at present."The rain began to fall, slow and fine, and they went into the house.CHAPTER XIV"MRS. VAST, I have some news to tell you. You have been very good to me, and I have to go away." Clara spoke from the threshold of the dismal back-parlour, where Mrs. Vast was sitting at work."Well! there, I knew it would come, Clara David. As my old mother used to say to me, 'Don't you never get too fond of anything or you may be sure it will go from you'." Mrs. Vast hitched her spectacles on her nose and sewed on with haste."You have been very good to me, dear Mrs. Vast," Clara said again. "I am not going away for always, only for a time.""I hope it means a rise, that's all," Mrs. Vast commented. "Of course we all knew you were too good for this place. That nice young lady coming to and fro, I hope she's going to do something for you. A little more pay and a little less work, Clara David, is what I should like to see you at, now you're stronger.""I don't know about less work, but it's a different sort of work," Clara explained. "I am going abroad with Dr. Gold, I can't quite tell where. And I'm not telling everybody.""To be sure not!" exclaimed Mrs. Vast, and she pulled her spectacles off, and stopped her work. "Well! there, I am glad; though I don't want to lose you none the more. But it wasn't fit for you to live here, so lonesome as it is, and you've got your life before you, and want someone to take care of you. And I've got nothing to do this next week or two, and I'll set my mind to the wedding-dress. And so it's the doctor! I might have thought of it, him coming so often. Shall it be white, were you thinking?""Oh! it's not anything of that kind," Clara said. "We are going to work together, he and I. But it's no question of marrying or a wedding-dress.""Mrs. Vast's face fell." Don't you do it, Clara David. Don't you, now. You'll rue the day if you do. Just to think of it, and him coming to the house so often, too! Well, I didn't think he was that sort, nor you neither.Clara thought it wise to put, if possible, a sudden end to the conversation. "You will perhaps find another lodger as soon as you can," she said, "for I am going to start next week.""Then make him marry you, Clara David. There's the Registrar handy, and you're master and mistress too this week. There's no telling what you'll be the week after. If he won't marry you, there's plenty more, I know of, that would.""But I don't wish to marry Dr. Gold, nor will he marry me. We can work, for the present, better together than apart. What is the good of talking against social tyranny if we are to be bound by it?""There's nothing comes o' talking, most times," Mrs. Vast retorted. "Things is dull. It's always cotton frocks for mornings, and now and again a bit o' stuff you can see daylight through. You can talk till you're black in the face, and begin again next morning same as if you'd held your tongue. Talking don't cost nothing, and you want something to help pass the time.""I hope I have the courage of my convictions, Mrs. Vast. But as my mind's made up, we need not waste time talking—even though talking does pass the time."Clara turned to go; but Mrs. Vast had tended her patiently through many a long day, and Mrs. Vast's tears were dropping large and slow from the end of her nose. There, there, she said, "I'm an old fool for my pains, and I shall get into a fine fuss if I spoil my work. Won't stand no showers, this stuff won't. It's the way all the girls goes.""This is absurd, Mrs. Vast," Clara said, nettled at being included among "all the girls" whose ways deviate from propriety. "I know what I am doing, and I am old enough to take care of myself. Dr. Gold and I are not like common people, who have no aims beyond their own gratification.""They all says that beforehand," remarked Mrs. Vast, dryly. "'Never mind about the rest, my dear; it's different for you and me.' Ah! haven't I heard it! And as for being old enough, it ain't that'll save you. The older they are the worse they are, as often as not.""Thank you, Mrs. Vast," Clara said, keeping her temper under control with difficulty. "You've been good to me, and I don't want to quarrel. We don't understand one another, and it is useless to pursue the conversation. Your work-girls have different ideals, but they don't concern me. A wedding dress hasn't much to do with my conception of a true marriage.""Stop a minute, Clara David!" Mrs. Vast cried. "You shan't go like that. And I'll tell you what I've never breathed to any living soul. It's not my girls makes me speak; it's me, me that was took in just as you're going to be took in now. And I quarrelled with my dear mother over the man, as wasn't fit to black her shoes. But he talked beautiful; I can hear him now. 'Those laws are made for other people, not for two that love one another like you and me.' I was half through my time with a good dressmaker then, and it wasn't these here common frocks we made neither. And so, through not finishing my time, I've come to this. He gave me a five-pound note when the baby died, and it's well, poor lamb, as she's gone."Mrs. Vast was dry-eyed now. The tears she had shed for that girl called Lavinia Vast were ended long ago. She spoke as if it were of someone else, of a distant connection whom she had known well in bygone days. "I don't know but what it served me right, though I'd like to have made him feel a bit of it too.""Was that your own story, Mrs. Vast? Why do you tell it to me?""It might be your own story, Clara David. Don't you do it, now! You'll rue the day."This wandering round to the starting point of a conversation is annoying to us all. "You said that at the beginning, Mrs. Vast," Clara said, sharply, "and I told you I had made up my mind. I am sorry for you, though why you need have quarrelled with your mother because you followed the dictates of your own conscience, I don't see. That is part of tyranny, not of right."But Mrs. Vast had come to that time of life when we see things with our mother's eyes. "Don't tell me!" she cried. "That's no conscience, but her own wilful ways. She thought she'd gain something, and be a fine lady; and a girl gets puffed up with pride when a fine gentleman says he'll go to the bad if she don't rescue him.""It wouldn't be the first man, nor is it likely to be the last, who is rescued by a woman," Clara said, allowing herself to be drawn into general statements, because it was impossible to make Mrs. Vast understand that a Cause, and not any man, stood first in her thoughts."May be not." Mrs. Vast's tone qualified her assent even more than her words. "But I notice that that kind of saving comes most times to them as would save themselves anyhow, with or without. Most of us thinks we could easy be good if we had all we want. It would come easier to me to be good if I had a thousand pounds. There was that girl; she wouldn't have had no dressmaking to leave if she'd been a fine lady, and money behind her."At this speech Clara felt quite annoyed with Mrs. Vast for conducting her side of the argument so unskilfully."Just so, Mrs. Vast," she said. "It is all a matter of accident and poverty. You say yourself that if money were more equally divided the girl would have been blameless. Why should you reproach yourself years afterwards over a sin that society caused? We all spend our lives the best way we know how."And then Mrs. Vast saw that it was time to say her say—burn her boats, as it were—and end the conversation, if even she ended, at the same time, her friendship with her lodger."Clara David, I didn't say anything of the kind," she declared, impressively, "and when you've lived as long as I have you'll find out that I'm right. If you'd got a pocket full of money, and more to come when that was done, you wouldn't be so ready to go off with a man as won't give you his name. And I wish you had, that I do. All the same, you'd want to please yourself some other way, and you'd think, like the most of 'em does, as all the wisdom in the world's left for them to find out as soon as their frocks is made long. Well! we've got to have our learning, and most of us has to pay for it. If all them as went before was a parcel of tom-fools, it's only what you might expect, seeing as we come o' the same stock."Barratry came to say good-bye."So you know that we are going?" Clara asked."I am going," Barratry answered. "I am in prison here, and there must be work to do yonder.""Then it is 'good-bye' for us both," Clara said. "Will our paths cross again? Shall you come to Germany?""I cannot tell," replied Barratry. "Who can tell in these days? I shall go where I am sent by the inward witness. But what do you do in Germany?""We are to gather facts about the condition of our people, to gather facts, Dr. Gold and I." Clara rearranged some pens in an old inkstand, trying them one after another on her thumb, and laying them out on the table, as she had often done for her scholars. Then she raised her head, and looked Barratry full in the face. "We can do better work for the Cause together. We shall lose him altogether if there is no one to stand by his side. And one's life is nothing.""You are right," Barratry said, as impassively as if he were discussing the weather. Life is nothing, and after life—bah! still less, perhaps. But the Cause is great, and one man's life is as nothing to it. We could spare him.""Ah! no!" Clara cried, with an accent of pain. "He is the one we cannot spare. No one of us can do the work that he could do if only he kept on. There is no one who has his genius, no one who has his clear head, no one who knows as he does how to appeal to the cultivated people here in England. He has the learning of the schools. And we must gain them to our side. Mob-orators we have plenty of. If he were but such as these I would let him go.""And Felix Schmidt?" Barratry put in.Clara caught her breath. "That is over," she said. "I shall not see him again. I could not go with him then. I was needed elsewhere.""You will not see him again. No. Schmidt is dead.""Dead! And they never let me know. And I have been free these many years. I might have gone to him.""Not in prison," Barratry said, gently. "You could not have gone to him there. News came to us through a friend. It was last summer.""And he sent us no message, nothing?""Only a word. It was a message to us all: 'Persevere'. That was all. And he died months ago."There was a long pause. Then Clara took from a drawer in the old writing table, where Barratry had written many English exercises, the tattered book that we have seen before, and from between its leaves a faded photograph."That is all I have," she said. "It is his book. It has not succeeded as it should, but some day fame will come to him. Some day his face will be known by all the world. Till then we must 'persevere,' Barratry, you and I."Barratry drew himself up. "Have you made up your mind, Fräulein?" he said. "For, if you have not, I would bid you, for Schmidt's sake, to turn back. It is not one man that will save us, and what is this Englishman that you should spend yourself to gain him?""It is not myself, Barratry. It is only all I have left of myself. But the message came in time, and I shall ' persevere'. The future of the Cause lies in Englishmen and in Englishmen's hands. Wish me success, Barratry, with our work!"In stately military fashion he stooped to kiss her hand."I wish you success, Fräulein. But most of all I wish you courage. For there is much courage needed on the road you set out upon. We shall not meet again, I think. They do not often let us come back from the country I am bound for. Give me one keepsake, Fräulein. You have been sister to me, and with all my heart I wish you courage to 'persevere'."So Barratry went down the crazy staircase for the last time, with one of Clara's books—just a book of poetry that would raise no suspicion if it were found on him—and a halfdead flower from the pot beneath the portrait between its leaves.CHAPTER XVSo, amid a thick cloud of warning, Clara took her own way. But no one knew better than Dr. Gold, having once gained the victim's consent to the sacrifice, how to make the steps towards the altar as easy and as pleasant as might be."We will take our pleasure until we go," he declared. "It is the fault of us reformers that life is too strenuous. We only know one range of melodies, and they are all in the minor key. If we are to hold up the mirror to future generations we must know what pleasure is as well as pain. We look forward to a time when every man will have leisure, and it is as much a duty to know how to rest as how to work.""But this is all rest. I haven't done a day's work for a month or more," Clara would expostulate."We will make up for lost time, presently. You haven't taken a week's holiday for a century or more," and Dr. Gold mimicked Clara's expostulatory tones. "The great work shall be the better for it."They went to theatres and galleries; they walked in the Park where the leaves were already fallen; they dined at tables more luxurious than Mrs. Snoad's. And on the day when Barratry came to bid good-bye Clara was beginning to pack up her effects, and the doctor was away on business.She was looking brighter and gayer than Barratry had seen her look before, and it seemed to him that his dead comrade, Schmidt, was already forgotten. Physical well-being and mental distraction tell rapidly on a woman's looks, and the doctor had reason to congratulate himself on his treatment.On the morning that Clara was going away, the cab already at the door, and her boxes already on it, Mrs. Vast took in a letter. Barratry sent her a ring that had been his mother's, and a pound or two in money. "it is better you should have it," he wrote. "I can do nothing in this country or another. Circumstances are too strong for me. The storm must come. The rest of my store of money has at least helped to keep you alive, and it could be given to no better work, my sister. Keep this and tell no one, not even him. So long as you have money, you are free, you can escape. As for me, I escape without it. My own hand will open, me a way. Let us 'persevere'."Disregarding Barratry's request—are there any so regardless of outsiders as a man and woman who fancy that they are two against the world?—Clara gave the letter to Dr. Gold."I cannot tell what he means," she said. "Is he going to work a passage to some Russian port? Does he tell the truth? Or does he not know what he says? You sent me the money that kept me alive, you know."Dr. Gold took the letter and the money. Barratry always was a madman, Clara mia. The only thing sensible in the letter is his saying that money could not be better spent than in saving you. Why should I tell you where it came from? Barratry will do no good work. He is too unreasonable. And we want all we have for the pursuit of our great work."Before they had crossed the sea men came into Barratry's room and found him dead by his own hand, and they took him up and buried him in a place where such strangers are laid, and they said his true name was Barratry. But that is for those who know no better. Such an impossible name as it is too!If Barratry's letter brought the first disillusion into Clara's partnership, we may be quite sure it was only the first. People who watched the beginning of the doctor's career, looking from outside, wonder that Dr. and Mrs. Gold (many persons call Clara by that name now) have done no better work, that their names are unknown to the majority of English philanthropists, who, nevertheless, look with respect on so many of their fraternity. For us it is no occasion of wonder.The power of prophecy has always come through much abstinence and spiritual communion, in retirement from the world; and Mrs. Gold was a true prophet when she said that Clara would fail—fail, that is, in the task she set herself. For Dr. Gold is just such a man as he always was. Sometimes he does a little brilliant work, or takes for a day the position of leader. Presently he wanders away into pleasant paths, and leaves Clara to hold in her hands the threads that he has spun. And the flashes of inspiration are more and more rare, the fits of vacillation longer. There are times when Clara wonders if he will ever do more than use his clearness of vision for the arrangement of petty details of business.Sometimes he leaves her; often he talks of leaving her."It may be," he says, "that you and I have done our work together, and we should do better work in other partnership. What do you think, Clara? For some reason or another we have not done all we meant to do."She never opposes him, because she knows that he cannot cut himself adrift. So far as one can see, for good or for ill, those two are separable only by death.The best that one can say is that Clara David has got more work out of the doctor than anyone succeeded in getting in earlier days; but it has the air of work done under compulsion, as it probably is—the compulsion exercised by a will propelled by a sense of duty over a will drawn by love of self. There is none of the passion or the faith that moves the world.And the payment that the doctor looked for, the honour and glory, the sense of a destiny fulfilled, has never come, nor is it likely to come. That is a crop that must be sown in faith, and reaped after long years of patient waiting, oftenest by one not the sower. It is seldom a crop that pays. The world's climate is too precarious.As for the others, they are all living still; still in a state of becoming, according to the rules of our planet. Ned Knight, when he found that Clara and the doctor had gone off together, received such a shock that he gave up mathematics and politics, together with all manner of speculations on social problems. He applied himself fervently to business, and presently married his cousin Bessie, who has a very good chance of driving her own carriage before she is an old woman.Folks are beginning to forget this story, or to take for granted that young Mrs. Gold is dead. But she lives on in the cottage at West Moston with Pansie and James's Polly, always alone, always Mrs. Gold. No one watches the papers more carefully than she for stray notices of the doctor's doings. But they are rare, for the papers that she reads do not concern them-selves with the doings of men of his sort. And we may be sure that the old Squire and his son Jack always carefully conceal from her any print where her name is given wrongfully to another woman. THE ENDABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS