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had carved out a successful legal career. His father appreciated success and respected the law. It was true the law was not always amenable to force, but on the whole it usually protected the rights of those who had most of them and you could not override it when it went against you. Mr. Arden listened

to Henry, even when he differed from him, with more patience than he usually found convenient.

"If she comes from a good family, she must have relatives," he said severely; "all good families have relatives. It 's pure nonsense for Tony to make himself responsible for an invalid bride. I don't approve of it at all. You may tell him so from me. I sha'n't accept it. Why should I? It 's not the kind of thing an eldest son should do. What 's to become of the place? Tony is as selfish as if he were a scatter-brained young fool, and he has n't the excuse of being one. Does n't he know at his age he ought to have children?"

"But Henry says, dear," interposed Mrs. Arden, gently, "that it's a really dangerous operation and that it is not likely that Miss Costrelle will live long after it, and then dear Anthony could marry again."

"That makes it worse," declared Mr. Arden. "It sounds to me like adding murder to matrimony. I don't want to sit and wish for a poor girl to die, and I don't like re-marriages. The whole thing is both silly and shocking. I shall have no hand in it."

"You hear what your father says, Henry," said Mrs. Arden, with an air of finality, which always soothed her husband. "I should n't say any more about it until after tea."

But when tea-time came Mr. Arden had had a further conversation with his wife a conversation in which, after a good deal of heated repetition, on Mr. Arden's part, a few suggestions on Mrs. Arden's, which he had come to feel were his own, had softly permeated the repetitions. They ran as follows: Anthony was of age, he could really do what he liked; therefore opposition was useless, particularly as it had never been known to answer with Anthony. It was almost certain the girl would die, and dead girls are not aggressive. They need not

say anything very definite until after the operation. If it was successful, and the girl got better, she did belong to a good family; if she did n't get better, she would n't belong to any family.

Anthony was not asking them for money. He had said nothing about settlements. The squire hated settlements. You had to tie up your money and then keep your hands off it. He would n't have to do this in the circumstances, and he could n't have got out of doing it in any other. A message founded on these facts was produced at tea-time, which could easily be presented to Anthony in the light of acquiescence.

"He's of age," Mr. Arden said reluctantly, "and I can't stop him making a fool of himself. Tell him from me that we sha'n't come to the marriage,—the whole thing is very disagreeable and odd, but if the girl gets better, she can come here to convalesce. Pannell 's his home, and I sha'n't keep him or his wife out of it."

Mrs. Arden hid in the shrubbery and preceded Henry to the dog-cart.

"I remember Miss Costrelle quite well," she said, with a curious little flush on her face; "I thought her quite fascinating. Of course I know she 's not suitable for Tony's wife, poor dear. It's a pity she is so-so French, but I can't help feeling sorry she is ill. Give them both my love, Henry.”

Henry did not give the whole of this message, either; he thought it was rash. He seldom gave the whole of any message.

He offered to write to Daphne, but Anthony had done this for himself. He wrote:

I know you once understood and loved Kitty. I did n't when I was with you; I only saw what the world had done to her and I blamed her for it. It's so hard not to blame people for their scars. Anyway, you'll forgive her now if she hurt you, for she is under the harrow. I can't lift it off; I can stand by her, that is all.

I have found a way of doing it which perhaps you won't understand; but if anybody can understand, you will. I dare n't look ahead at any future, but I suppose instinct, or whatever it is that pushes us forward to help each other, will keep me up to the mark. Laurence operates on Friday; I shall assist,

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Henry settled all the details of the marriage. Bishops and chaplains in his hands were as malleable as butter. There were no impediments.

Kitty had been so exhausted after her day at Kew that Anthony had insisted on her remaining in bed until the morning of her marriage. He had succeeded in keeping her out of pain.

Kitty enjoyed the rest of lying in bed and looking at her new room. It was a quiet, pretty room. The windows overlooked the Carmelites' garden on the other side of the narrow street.

It was not a large garden, but there were trees in it, and Kitty took a great interest in the Carmelites.

"I

"Monks are the kind of men I don't know," she explained to Anthony. do so wish I could have one to talk to! I want to ask them what it feels like to live all day long under a rule and never to know what God made the world for. For I suppose He did rather mean it for men and women to live in, did n't He? And yet I admire them; it's rather fine to shut yourself behind a wall into a stone church because you think it pleases anybody, even God. I wonder if there 's some kind of trick

about prayer. Do you think there is, and that's why they can go on for such an awfully long time and not mind being bored? Peckham prays, too; but she takes off her stays first, and prays in her dressing-gown. Do you think God hears her and the monks as well? It must be rather nice for Him, I should think, that some people don't pray. Peckham expects to get answers. Do the monks?"

Anthony said he thought they did, but probably not the same kind of an

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tion come from? There's always an outside as well as an inside, is n't there? And if God made the outside, He could put the idea into you from it, could n't He? You must start a ball of wool somewhere."

Anthony wanted to go on with the subject, for it surprised him to see that Kitty had lit on a connected form of reasoning. But she broke off immediately, as if she was afraid of anything deeper than a chance question.

"I'm so glad you like Peckham," she said softly. "I think I 've got an awfully nice family now-you and Peckham and Henry. Henry came to ask me this morning if I wanted a red carpet. He said I could n't have a carpet without a carriage or a carriage without a carpet. I do like Henry's mind. I told him we were going to walk down the little alley to the church, so he said we could n't have a carpet, but we might have bells afterward, if we liked."

The walk to St. Mary Abbotts was a mere stone's-throw from Duke Lane, but Kitty's strength was only in her mind. Her eyes laughed, and she pretended that when she paused to look into the tiny square or at the quaint shop-windows of Church Walk she was doing it for fun and not because her breath had failed her.

She had wanted to walk, because she said it would seem more like the country. She lingered as they came to the open doorway of the church beneath the trees. They could look up the long nave of the church toward the altar.

Henry had had it beautifully decorated with lilies and white lilac. Kitty had not thought of the actual marriage before. She had thought of her dress, which was the color of autumn leaves, of lunch at the Carlton, and the fun of the way Henry had dealt with the bishop; but the grave service under its white shrine of flowers came to her unexpectedly. She had a wave of sudden fear; her face remained impassive, and the gravity that settled down upon her seemed merely appropriate to the hour, but her heart beat against her side like an imprisoned bird.

It was the emptiness of the church which disconcerted Kitty. There was

no one there but Peckham and Henry in a seat in front of the altar. A verger with a duster stood in a distant corner, and an expectant curate put his head round the door from the vestry to see if they had arrived.

Peckham was on her knees, and her black bonnet, with its single red rose, looked as if it were being shaken byconcealed emotion. Henry's face was a blank. He was prepared for anything, and his entire consciousness rose to hide the signs of his preparation. Kitty might faint, Anthony might start some dreadful skeptical fad. They might be late; they ought not to have walked in together. The situation bristled with irregularities, and it depended upon Henry's face to make it look as regular as possible.

Anthony was entirely preoccupied with how much Kitty could stand and whether he could n't persuade her afterward to give up lunching at the Carlton. The service passed over his head without any significance whatever except that of length.

As Kitty turned toward him to make her answering troth, her eyes widened a little, and her lips stiffened. She had forgotten the great words, but they raised suddenly in her heart a storm of memory. Dick had said them to her, long ago, by the bridge he had built across their gardens: "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health."

Anthony wavered and disappeared before her eyes, and Dick came in his place, Dick, who was all her early life, -and held in his hands her rich, untouched, and perfect memories.

Anthony stood only for broken things, for hours of pain and indecision, for her incomplete and torturing emergencies, and for her blind hours of shame. She laid her small hand firmly on the rails until the pain shot up her arm into her shoulder. The pain brought back the figure of Anthony. He stood looking down at her with reassuring, watchful eyes.

Death and innocence and Dick took no part in this marriage, but a love that was stronger than youth and innocence stood by her and would stand by her to the end.

Kitty had given Dick her riches without counting the cost. She turned now with an unflinching spirit to give to Anthony her poverty; and for this gift, too, though it was all she had, she did not count the cost.

CHAPTER XXVI

ANTHONY felt that he knew Kitty in the church; she was there in his world, a part of the act that bound them. He was not sure of her thoughts, but he was sure of her attitude. Outside the church she ceased to belong to him. When he suggested under his breath that they should give up the Carlton, her amazed eyes met his in a flash of hostility.

"Give up lunching with papa?" she exclaimed. "But he 's ordered it!"

Anthony had touched by accident on one of Kitty's laws. She had so few that it was not surprising he should have failed to recognize their existence. But the law of pleasure is at least as strong in its compulsion to its votaries as any other law. Business appointments never disturbed Kitty. You kept them if you remembered them and if you had nothing better to do; but social engagements, which were meant to be an exchange of pleasure, were inviolate. Inconvenience, suffering, fate even, bowed before a luncheon party. You could n't put off what was meant to amuse. It might even bore you; but if you 'd promised, you 'd promised.

The intention was, after all, there, and the intention was sacred.

Henry understood this immediately. "If you had thought it would be too much for her," he said a little reproachfully to Anthony, "you should have telephoned overnight to Mr. Costrelle."

"It won't be too much for me," said Kitty, impatiently; "I shall like it. It will be great fun after that stuffy, old, black church.

The flowers were charming, Henry. I like to be drenched in lilies. I could get drunk on the scent of them, could n't you? They 're the leastinnocent flower in the world, and yet every one gets taken in by them, especially in church. The curate had adenoids. I dare say he could n't help it, but I hate men with adenoids. This is

what the troth, or whatever it was called, sounded like."

Kitty imitated the curate to perfection. Henry laughed, and Anthony wondered where the Kitty was who at the moment of those uttered words had looked afraid. She had not been thinking of the curate's adenoids then.

He was absorbed in his thoughts of .Kitty's remaining hours. Did she realize how few there were, or know the awful curtain which would come down between the Kitty as she was today and the Kitty she was to be to-morrow? He wanted every moment of her held in the privacy of their small house, dedicated to their love and understanding, and he felt a bitter rebellion against the artificial public hours that she had claimed instead.

It was a harsh, unlovely day. London had a look of dirty cold, the houses were pinched into mere shelters, the raw air pursued and baffled the passers-by, forcing them into an irritated consciousness of their errands. There was no color anywhere. The gray of the sky was dead and unluminous, the streets a greasy brown. Their motor skidded and shuffled through the traffic like a sleep-walker, blind to everything but its own passage.

Henry talked cheerfully of possible skating. At present it was too damp, but the temperature was falling fast; a good hard frost.

He hoped Kitty and Anthony were not going to fall out on their wedding day; neither of them made any suitable response to the possibility of frost. These hasty rushes into marriage usually ended in bad temper.

in

Henry congratulated himself wardly on his escapes from matrimony. They had never been narrow escapes. He had foreseen the danger a long way off, but they had been complete. People were likely to turn out unsatisfactory at close quarters, especially women. Women were romantic, and when they were married they were incessant, and it took a very strong digestion to stand incessant romance. That was the worst of marriage; you could n't turn away from it with a good conscience.

Of course Anthony had made the situation a great deal more difficult than

it need have been. Miss Costrelle was perfectly charming, but none of her charms were domestic, and all of them were undoubtedly a shade too obvious. She reminded Henry of a picture in the Wallace Collection. It was a portrait of Perdita Robinson with a muff. Perdita Robinson had n't been very domestic, either.

Kitty smiled across at him.

"I know what you 're thinking of," she said alarmingly. "You 're like the man in the Bible who thanked God he was n't as other men were. You know the proper kind of a wife is a bother, and the kind of wife who would n't be a bother that 's me, you know, Tony-is n't a proper kind of wife at all. Confess you were thinking something like that, Henry."

"Few men can be so fortunate as Anthony," replied Henry with skilled irrelevancy; but he was glad when they reached the Carlton.

If Kitty had been guilty of a gust of bad temper, it left her as she entered the hotel. The big, smart lounge was like home to her. She drew in a long breath of the slightly stale, slightly scented air as if it refreshed her. She knew exactly how to hold herself in public. She was more conscious than any Englishwoman is by nature, and more trained than any Englishwoman allows herself to be to hide her consciousness. Her studied spontaneity gave an impression of perfect ease, which is the seal of the true artist.

The Carlton was Kitty's sphere; in a moment she had seen and mastered the human material in the lounge. No other woman there held men's eyes as Kitty held them. She moved slowly, with little pauses, in exactly the right space and light. With each brief phrase she threw at Henry or Anthony she was aware first of its effect upon them, and then in the widening circles of a disturbed pool she noted the further effect spreading throughout the room.

Mr. Costrelle rose slowly from behind a palm and greeted his guests phlegmatically. His eyes ran over Kitty with a steady critical appreciation. Anthony saw with a pang of pure surprise that at the moment it mattered more to Mr. Costrelle that Kitty should be dressed

properly than that she should n't look ill. She did not look ill to the ordinary spectator, who failed to take account of the carefully hidden signs. She was made up with finished and unerring skill. Her picture hat, with its thick, shaded plumes of dull pale pink, softened the outlines of her face. She carried her head as if she had never known physical fatigue.

Kitty had what other women missed, the art of personality. Nothing that she did miscarried, and no movement of her fine, supple body was without significance. To-day she was more alive than Anthony had ever seen her; differently alive, for it was not the life of her inner self: it was the directed energy of a trained workman performing his task.

Mr. Costrelle led them to the table he had prepared for them. He had chosen the most public and visible spot in the

room.

Kitty sat down with her back to the light, and smiled at him across a bowl of mauve and pale pink carnations. Her smile was like a signal between two trained performers.

Mr. Costrelle had done his part. The meal was perfect. He had ordered a few dishes, each one the best and most delicate of its kind. He had chosen two sound wines, and crowned them with the Château Yquêm, which lay in a basket beside him.

It was now Kitty's turn to play hers. She must be entertaining enough to keep everything going, and not so absorbing as to interfere with a due appreciation of the food. She must make each man feel at his best for not too long at a time, and without interfering with the attractions of the other men. She must also make all the other women in the room jealous and their men envious.

Anthony, with his heart on the rack, watched her with grim concern. Everything in the big, spacious room was utterly unreal to him: its little tables, its flowers, its groups of well-dressed people. Their idleness, their privileges, their evocation of temporary tastes, revolted and amazed him.

For years he had lived hard and thought continuously, he had seen pain and struggled with it as the man in the

Laocoon struggles with the presence of the coiled serpent; and these people lived dead against the image of pain, even when, as in Kitty's case, it hung poised above them ready to strike; they blinded themselves against the issues of life. They spent money and time and strength on expensive clothes and foods and endless reiterations of unnecessary, unenlightening words.

Sometimes Anthony caught a clever phrase. Mr. Costrelle and Kitty herself were often inadvertently witty, but they had not set out to be, and they never let it go very far. They wanted to entertain, but they had n't any notion of sticking to an idea; it did not seem to them very entertaining to stick to anything for long.

Kitty sat there discussing a notorious career with clipped expert phrases,the career of a woman she did n't know, a mere bagatelle out of a newspaper,and she was within a few hours of the sharpest of personal struggles, she was even now menaced by acute and driving pain. Anthony saw the shadow of it in her eyes, and heard in the faint hardness of her laughter, the effort of her self-control.

They were wasting their few hours, that tiny margin left to them, on a dish called "les jeunes demoiselles," a careful preparation of shell-less crawfish in a cream sauce. Kitty's eyes rested on Anthony for a moment, but only with the genial audacity with which they passed on to Henry. They had no message for him. She acquiesced in the jeunes demoiselles.

A smart, good-looking man, whose attention had been riveted on their table for some time, rose, and crossed the room to speak to Kitty. His eyes had a look in them which was like the sudden assertion of a claim.

"What luck!" he exclaimed as he reached them. "Who in the world would have expected you here?"

"And why not here?" asked Kitty, with a veiled challenge in her laughing eyes. "It 's very jolly and comfortable and not unknown, I believe, as a European resort. You know my father, don't you? This is my husband-Captain Arden. Sir Frederick Stair.”

The claim in Sir Frederick's eyes

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