and it seemed impossible that either should speak a word of politics.

«I ought to say,» said Tressady, pausing once more, as they moved together toward the door, «that I have not ultimately much hope for Mrs. Allison. If this entanglement is put aside there will be something else. Trouville itself in August, I should imagine, is a place of bonnes fortunes for the man who wants them, and Ancoats's mind runs to such things.»

He spoke with a curious eagerness, like one who pleads that his good will shall not be judged by mere failure or success.

Maxwell raised his shoulders.

«Nothing that can happen will in the least affect our gratitude to you,» he said quietly. «Gratitude!» muttered the young man under his breath. His lip trembled. He looked uncertainly at his companion. Maxwell offered his hand, not with any effusion, yet with a quiet cordiality and kindness that made his renewed words of thanks sound like a strange music in Tressady's ears.

WHEN the minister was once more alone he walked back to the window, and stood looking down thoughtfully on the gay pageant of the river. She was right-she was always right. There was nothing vile in that young fellow, and his face had a look of suffering it pained Maxwell to remember. Why had he personally not come to know him better? «I think too little of men, too much of machinery,» he said to himself despondently. «Unconsciously I leave the dealing with human beings far too often to her, and then I wonder that a man sees and feels her as she is!»

Yet as he stood there in the sunshine a feeling of moral relief stole upon him-the feeling that rewards a man who has tried to deal greatly with some common and personal strait. Some day, not yet, he would make Tressady his friend; he quietly felt it to be within his power.

Unless the wife! He threw up his hand and turned back to his writing-table. What was to be done with that letter? Had Tressady any knowledge of it? Maxwell could not conceive it possible that he had. But, no doubt, it would come to his knowledge, as well as Maxwell's reply.

For he meant to reply, and as he glanced at the clock on his table he saw that he had just half an hour before his clergyman visitor arrived. Instantly, in his methodical way, he sat down to his task, laboring it, however, with toil and difficulty when it was once begun.

The few words he ultimately wrote ran as follows:

DEAR LADY TRESSADY: Your letter was a great surprise and a great pain to me. I believe you will recognize before long that you wrote it under a delusion, and that you have said in it both unkind and unjust things of one who is totally incapable of wronging you or any one else. My wife read your letter, for she and I have no secrets. She will try to see you at once, and I trust you will not refuse to see her. She will prove to you, I think, torture, for which she has no responsibility, but that you have been giving yourself quite needless for which she is none the less sorrowful and dis

tressed.

I have treated your letter in this way because it is impossible to ignore the pain and trouble which drove you to write. I need not say that if it became necessary for me to write or act in another way, I should think only of my wife. But I will character, and I cannot believe that you will mistrust to the effect upon you of her own words and construe the generosity that prompts her to go to

you.

Is it not possible, also, that your misunderstanding of your husband may be, in its own way, as grave as your misunderstanding of Lady Maxwell? Forgive an intrusive question, and believe me, Yours faithfully,

MAXWELL.

He read it anxiously over and over; then took a hasty copy of it, and finally sealed and sent it. He was only half satisfied with it. How was one to write such a letter without argument or recrimination? The poor thing had a vulgar, spiteful little soul; that was clear from her outpouring. It was also clear that she was miserable; nor could Maxwell disguise from himself that in a sense she had ample cause. From that hard fact, with all its repellent and unpalatable consequences, a weaker man would by now have let his mind escape, would, at any rate, have begun to minimize and make light of George Tressady's act of the morning. In Maxwell, on the contrary, after a first movement of passionate resentment which had nothing whatever in common with ordinary jealousy, that act was now generating a compelling and beneficent force that made for healing and reparation. Marcella had foreseen it, and in her pain and penitence had given the impulse. For all things are possible to a perfect affection working through a nature at once healthy and strong.

Yet when Maxwell was once more established in his room at the Privy Council, overwhelmed with letters, interviews, and all the routine of official business, those who had to do with him noticed an unusual restlessness in their even-tempered chief. In truth, whenever

his work left him free for a moment all sorts of questions would start up in his mind: «Is she there? Is that woman hurting and insulting her? Can I do nothing? My love! my poor love!»

BUT Marcella's plans so far had not prospered. When George Tressady, after hastily despatching his most urgent business at the House, drove up to his own door in the afternoon just in time to put his things together and catch the dining-train to Paris, he found the house deserted. The butler reminded him that Letty, accompanied by Miss Tulloch, had gone to Hampton Court to join a river party for the day. George remembered; he hated the people she was to be with, and instinct told him that Cathedine would be there.

A rush of miserable worry overcame him. Ought he to be leaving her?

Then, in the darkness of the hall, he caught sight of a card lying on the table. Her card! Amazement made him almost dizzy, while the man at his arm explained.

«Her ladyship called just after luncheon. She thought she would have found my lady in-before she went out. But her ladyship is coming again, probably this evening, as she wished to see Lady Tressady particularly.» Tressady gave the man directions to pack for him immediately; then took the card into his study, and stood looking at it in a tumult of thought. Ah! let him begone-out of her way! Oh, heavenly goodness and compassion! It seemed to him already that an angel had trodden this dark house, and that another air breathed in it.

A gush of hope welled in his heart. He ran up-stairs to make his last preparations, wrote a few lines to Letty describing Mrs. Allison's plight and the errand on which he was bound, and in half an hour was at Charing Cross.

XX.

«DID you ring, my lady?»

«Yes. Kenrick, if Lady Maxwell calls to see me to-night, you will say, please, that I am particularly engaged, and unable to receive any one.»

Letty Tressady had just come in from her river party. Dressed in a delicate gown of lace and pale-green chiffon, she was standing beside her writing-table with Lady Maxwell's card in her hand. Kenrick had given it to her on her arrival, together with the message which had accompanied it, and she had taken a few minutes to think it over. As she gave the man his order, the energy of the small

figure as it half turned toward the door, the brightness of the eyes under the white veil she had just thrown back, no less than the emphasis of her tone, awakened in the butler the clear perception that neither the expected visit nor his mistress's directions were to be taken as ordinary affairs. After he left the drawing-room Grier passed him on the stairs. He gave her a slight signal, and the two retired to some nether region to discuss the secrets of their employers.

Meanwhile Letty, having turned on the electric light in the room, walked to the window and set it half open behind the curtain. In that way she would hear the carriage approaching. It was between eight and nine o'clock. No doubt Lady Maxwell would drive round after dinner.

Then, still holding the card lightly in her hand, she threw herself on the sofa. She was tired, but so excited that she could not rest

first, by the memory of the day that had just passed, still more by the thought of the rebuff she was about to administer to the great lady who had affronted her. No doubt her letter had done its work. The remembrance of it filled her with an uneasy joy. Did George know of it by now? She did not care. Lady Maxwell, of course, was coming to try to appease her, to hush it up. There had been a scene, it was to be supposed, between her and her stiff husband. Letty gloated over the dream of it. Tears, humiliation, reproaches -she meted them all out in plenty to the woman she hated. Nor would things end there. Why, London was full of gossip! Harding's paragraph-for of course it was Harding'shad secured that. How clever of him! Not a name, not a thing that could be taken hold of, yet so clear! Well, if she, Letty, was to be trampled on and set aside, at any rate other people should suffer too.

So George had gone off to France, leaving her alone, without "good-by.» She did not believe a word of his excuse; and if it were true, it was only another outrage that he should have thought twice of such a matter at such a crisis. But it was probably a mere device of his and hers-she would find out for what.

Her state of tension was too great to allow her to stay in the same place for more than a few minutes. She got up and went to the glass before the mantelpiece. Taking out the pins that held her large Gainsborough hat, she arranged her hair with her hands, putting the curls of the fringe in their right place, fastening up some stray ends. She had given orders, as we have seen, to admit no one, and

was presumably going to bed; nevertheless her behavior was instinctively the behavior of one who expects a guest.

When, more or less to her satisfaction, she had restored the symmetry of the little curled and crimped head, she took her face between her hands, and stared at her own reflection. Memories of the party she had just left, of the hot river, the slowly filling locks, the revelry, the champagne, danced in her mind--especially of a certain walk through a wood. She defiantly watched the face in the glass grow red, the eyelids quiver. Then, like the tremor from some volcanic fire far within, a shudder ran through her. She dropped her head on her hands. She hated-hated him! Was it to-morrow evening she had told him he might come? She would go down to Ferth.

Wheels in the quiet street! Letty flew to the window like an excited child, her green and white twinkling through the room.

A brougham, and a tall figure in black stepping slowly out of it. Letty sheltered herself behind a curtain, held her breath, and listened.

Presently her lower lip dropped a little. What was Kenrick about? The front door had closed, and Lady Maxwell had not reëntered her carriage.

She opened the drawing-room door with. care, and was stooping over the banisters when she saw Kenrick on the stairs. He seemed to be coming from the direction of George's study.

<<What have you been doing?» she asked him, in a hard under-voice, looking at him angrily. I told you not to let Lady Maxwell in.»

"I told her, my lady, that you were engaged, and could see no one. Then her ladyship asked if she might write a few lines to you and send them up, asking when you would be able to see her. So I showed her into Sir George's study, my lady, and she is writing at Sir George's desk.»

«You should have done nothing of the sort,» said Letty, sharply. «What is that letter? »

She took it from his hand before the butler, somewhat bewildered by the responsibilities of his position, could explain that he had just found it in the letter-box, where it might have been lying some little time, as he had heard no knock.

She let him go down-stairs again to await Lady Maxwell's exit, and herself ran back to read her letter, her heart beating; for the address of the sender was on the envelope.

When she had finished she threw it down, half suffocating.

«So I am to be lectured and preached to besides-good heavens!-in his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig-odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her her! And she is actually down-stairs, writing to me in my own house!»>

She locked her hands, and began stormily to pace the room again. The image of her rival, only a few feet from her, bending over George's table, worked in her with poisonous force. Suddenly she swept to the bell and rang it. A door opened down-stairs. She ran to the landing.

«Kenrick! »

«Yes, my lady. She heard a pause and the soft rustle of a dress.

«Tell Lady Maxwell, please,»-she struggled hard for the right, the dignified tone,that if it is not too late for her to stay I am now able to see her.>>

She hurried back into the drawing-room and waited. Would she come? Letty's whole being was now throbbing with one mad desire. If Kenrick let her go!

But steps approached; the door was thrown

open.

Marcella Maxwell came in timidly, very pale, her dark eyes shrinking from the sudden light of the drawing-room. She was bareheaded, and wore a long cloak of black lace over her white evening dress. Letty's flash of thought as she saw her was twofold: first, hatred of her beauty; then triumph in the evident nervousness with which her visitor approached her.

Without making the slightest change of position, the mistress of the house spoke first. << Will you please tell me,» she said, in her sharpest, thinnest voice, «to what I owe the honor of this visit?»

Marcella paused half-way toward her hostess.

«I read your letter to my husband,» she said quietly, though her voice shook, “and I thought you would hardly refuse to let me speak to you about it.»

«Then perhaps you will sit down,» said. Letty, in the same voice; and she seated herself.

If she had wished to heighten the effect of her reception by these small discourtesies she did not succeed; rather, Marcella's self-possession returned under them. She looked about simply for a chair, brought one forward within speaking distance of her companion, moving once more in her thin, tall

grace, with all that unconscious dignity which Letty had so often envied and admired from a distance.

But neither dignity nor grace made any bar to the emotion that filled her. She bent forward, clasping her hands on her knee.

"Your letter to my husband made me so unhappy-that I could not help coming,» she said in a tone that was all entreaty, all humbleness. «Not of course-that it seemed to either of us a true or just account of what had happened, she drew herself up gently, «but it made me realize-though, indeed, I had realized it before I read it-that in my friendship with your husband I had been forgetting-forgetting those things-one ought to remember most. You will let me put things, won't you, in my own way, as they seem to me? At Castle Luton Sir George attracted me very much. The pleasure of talking to him there first made me wish to try to alter some of his views to bring him across my poor people -to introduce him to our friends. Then, somehow, a special bond grew up between him and me with regard to this particular struggle in which my husband and I»-she dropped her eyes that she might not see Letty's heated face have been so keenly interested. But what I ought to have felt-from the very first was that there could be, there ought to have been, something else added. Married people she spoke hurriedly, her breath rising and falling-«are not two, but one; and my first step should have been to come-and --and ask you to let me know you too-to find out what your feelings were, whether you wished for a friendship-that-that I had perhaps no right to offer to Sir George alone. I have been looking into my own heart,»-her voice trembled again,-«and I see that fault, that great fault. To be excluded myself from any strong friendship my husband might make would be agony to me.» "The frank, sudden passion of her lifted eyes sent a thrill even through Letty's fierce and hardly kept silence. « And that I wanted to say to you first of all. I wronged my own conception of what marriage should be, and you were quite, quite right to be angry.»

Well, I think it's quite clear, is n't it, that you forgot from the beginning George had a wife?» cried Letty in her most insulting voice. That certainly can't be denied. Anybody could see that at Castle Luton.»>

Marcella looked at her in perplexity. What could suggest to her how to say the right word, touch the right chord? Would she be able to do more than satisfy her own conscience, and then go, leaving this strange

day?»

The little face, convulsed with passion, raised an intolerable distress in Marcella.

«Yes; he came to see me,» she said, her dark eyes, full of pain,-full, too, once more of entreaty,-fixed upon her interrogator. «But do let me tell you! I never saw any one in deeper trouble-trouble about you- trouble about himself.»

Letty burst into a wild laugh.

«Of course! No doubt he went to complain of me-that I flirted-that I ill-treated his mother-that I spent too much money—and a lot of other pleasant little things. Oh, I can imagine it perfectly! Besides that, I suppose he went to be thanked. .Well, he deserved that. He has thrown away his career to please you; so if you did n't thank him you ought! Everybody says his position in Parliament now is n't worth a straw, that he must resign-which is delightful, of course, for his wife. And I saw it all from the beginning; I understood exactly what you wanted to do at Castle Luton; only I could n't believe then-I was only six weeks married->>

A wave of excitement and self-pity swept over her; she broke off with a sob.

Marcella's heart was wrung. She knew nothing of the real Letty Tressady. It was the wife as such, slighted and set aside, that appealed to the imagination, the remorse, of this happy, this beloved woman. She rose quickly, she held out her hands, looking down upon the venomous little creature who had been pouring these insults upon her.

«Don't-don't believe such things,» she said, with sobbing breath. «I never wronged you consciously for a moment. Can't you believe that Sir George and I became friends because we cared for the same kind of questions? because I-I was full of my husband's work and everything that concerned it? because I liked to talk about it to win him

friends? If it had ever entered my mind that such a thing could pain and hurt you->>

"Where have you sent him to-day? » cried Letty, peremptorily interrupting her, while she drew her handkerchief fiercely across her eyes.

Instantly Marcella was aware of the difficulty of explaining her own impulse and Maxwell's action.

«Sir George told me,» she said, faltering, «that he must go away from London immediately to think out some trouble that was oppressing him. Only a few minutes after he left our house we heard from Mrs. Allison that she was in great distress about her son. She came, in fact, to beg us to help her find him. I won't go into the story, of course; I am sure you know it. My husband and I talked it over. It occurred to us that if Maxwell went to him-to Sir George-and asked him to do us and her this great kindness of going to Ancoats and trying to bring him back to his mother, it would put everything on a different footing. Maxwell would get to know him as I had got to know him. One would find a way to silence the foolish, unjust things that have been said-I suppose -I don't know-->>

She paused, confused by the difficulties in her path, her cheeks hot and flushed. But the heart knew its own innocence. She recovered herself; she came nearer:

"If only, at the same time, I could make you realize how truly, how bitterly, I had felt for any pain you might have suffered; if I could persuade you to look at it all-your husband's conduct and mine-in its true light, and to believe that he cares-he must carefor nothing in the world so much as his home as you and your happiness!»

The nobleness of the speaker, the futility of the speech, were about equally balanced. Candor was impossible, if only for kindness' sake. And the story, so told, was not only unconvincing, it was hardly intelligible, even, to Letty. For the two personalities moved in different worlds, and what had seemed to the woman who was all delicate impulse and romance the right and natural course merely excited in Letty, and not without reason, fresh suspicion and offense. If words had been all, Marcella had gained nothing.

But a strange tumult was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in this mingling of self-abasement with an extraordinary moral richness and dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out

again so as to hold her own bewilderment at bay:

« What right had you to send him awayto plan anything for my husband without my consent? Oh, of course you put it very finely; I dare say you know about all sorts of things I don't know about. I'm not clever; I don't talk politics. But I don't quite see the good of it, if it's only to take husbands away from their wives. All the same, I'm not a hypocrite, and I don't mean to pretend I'm a meek saint. Far from it. I've no doubt that George thinks he's been perfectly justified from the beginning, and that I have brought everything upon myself. Well, I don't care to argue about it. Don't imagine, please, that I have been playing the deserted wife all the time. If people injure me it 's not my way to hold my tongue; and I imagine that, after all, I do understand my own husband in spite of Lord Maxwell's kind remarks.» She pointed scornfully to Maxwell's letter on the table. «<But as soon as I saw that nothing I said mattered to George, and that his whole mind was taken up with your society, why, of course I took my own measures. There are other men in the world, and one of them happens to amuse me particularly at this moment. It's your doing and George's, you see, if he does n't like it.»

Marcella recoiled in sudden horror, staring at her companion with wide, startled eyes. Letty braved her defiantly, her dry lips drawn into a miserable smile. She stood, looking very small and elegant, beside her writingtable, her hand, blazing with rings, resting lightly upon it, the little hot, withered face alone betraying the nerve tension behind.

The situation lasted a few seconds; then, with a quick step, Marcella hurried to a chair on the farther side of the room, sank into it, and covered her face with her hands.

Letty's heart seemed to dip, as it were, into an abyss; but there was a frenzied triumph in the spectacle of Marcella's grief and tears.

Marcella Maxwell thus silenced, thus subdued! The famous name, with all that it had stood for in Letty's mind of things to be envied and desired, echoed in her ear, delighted her revenge. She struggled to maintain her attitude.

« I don't know why what I said should make you so unhappy," she said coldly, after a pause.

Marcella did not reply. Presently Letty saw that she was resting her cheek on her hand and gazing before her into vacancy. At last she turned round, and Letty could satisfy herself that in truth her eyes were wet.

<< Is there no one,» asked the full, tremulous