It was only when he was sitting opposite to Lily in a first class compartment that Michael began to wonder if their sudden arrival would create a kind of consternation at Hardingham. He managed to reassure himself when he looked at her. The telegram might have puzzled Stella, but in meeting Lily she would understand his action. Nevertheless, he felt a little anxious when he saw the Hardingham brougham waiting outside the little station. The cold drive of four miles through the still, misty evening gave him too long to meditate the consequences of his action. Impulse was very visibly on trial, and he began to fear a little Stella’s judgment of it. The carriage-lamps splashed the hedgerows monotonously, and the horses’ breath curled round the rigid form of the coachman. Trees, hedges, gates, signposts went past in the blackness and chill. Michael drew Lily close, and asked in a whisper if she were happy.

“It makes me sleepy driving like this,” she murmured. Her head was on his shoulder; the astrakan collar was silky to his chin. So she traveled until they reached the gates of the park: then Michael woke her up.

There was not time to do much but dress quickly for dinner when they arrived, though Michael watched Stella’s glances rather anxiously.

Lily put on a chiffon frock, of aquamarine, and, though she looked beautiful in it, he wished she had worn black: this frock made her seem a little theatrical, he fancied; or was it the effect of her against the stern dining-room, and nothing whatever to do with the frock? Stella, too, whom he had always considered a personality of some extravagance, seemed to have grown suddenly very stiff and conventional. It used always to be himself who criticized people: Stella had always been rather too lenient. Perhaps it was being married to Alan; or was Lily the reason? Yet superficially everything seemed to be going all right, especially when he consoled himself by remembering the abruptness of Lily’s introduction. After dinner Stella took Lily away with her into the drawing-room and left Michael with Alan. Michael tried to feel that this was what he had expected would happen; but he could not drive away the consciousness of a new formality brooding over Hardingham. It was annoying, too, the way in which Alan seemed deliberately to avoid any reference to Lily. He would not even remind Michael of the evening at the Drury Lane pantomime, when he had met her five or six years ago. Perhaps he had forgotten driving home in a cab with her sister on that occasion. Michael grew exasperated by his talk about cricket pitches; and yet he could not bring himself to ask right out what Alan thought of her, because it would have impinged upon his pride to do so. In about ten minutes they heard the sound of the piano, and tacitly they agreed to forego the intimacy of drinking port together any longer.

Stella closed the piano with a slam when they came into the drawing-room, and asked Lily if she would like some bridge.

“Oh, no. I hate playing cards. But you play.”

It was for Michael a nervous evening. He was perpetually on guard for hostile criticism; he was terribly anxious that Lily should make a good impression. Everything seemed to go wrong. Games were begun and ended almost in the same breath. Finally he managed to find a song that Lily thought she remembered, and Stella played her accompaniment very aggressively, Michael fancied; for by this time he regarded the slightest movement on her part or Alan’s as an implication of disapproval. Lily was tired, luckily, and was ready to go to bed early.

When Stella came down again, Michael felt he ought to supplement the few details of his telegram, and it began to seem almost impossible to explain reasonably his arrival here with Lily. An account of Tinderbox Lane would sound fantastic: a hint of Lily’s life would be fatal. He found himself enmeshed in a vague tale of having found her very hard up and of wishing to get her away from the influence of a rather depressing home. It sounded very unconvincing as he told it, but he hoped that the declaration of his intention to marry her at once would smother everything else in a great surprise.

“Of course, that’s what I imagined you were thinking of doing,” said Stella. “So you’ve made up your quarrel of five years ago?”

“When are you going to get married?” Alan asked.

“Well, I hoped you’d be able to have us here for a week or so, or at any rate Lily, while I go up to town and find a place for us to live.”

“Oh, of course she can stay here,” said Stella.

“Oh, rather, of course,” Alan echoed.

Next morning it rained hard, and Michael thought he saw Stella making signs of dissent when at breakfast Alan proposed taking him over to a farm a couple of miles away. He was furious to think that Stella was objecting to being left alone with Lily, and he retired to the billiard-room, where he spent half an hour playing a game with himself between spot and plain, a game which produced long breaks that seemed quite unremarkable, so profound was the trance of vexation in which he was plunged.

A fortnight passed, through the whole of which Alan never once referred to Lily; and, as Michael was always too proud to make the first advance toward the topic, he felt that his friendship with Alan was being slowly chipped away. He knew that Stella, on the other hand, was rather anxious to talk to him, but perversely he avoided giving her any opportunity. As for Lily, she seemed perfectly happy doing nothing and saying very little. Obviously, however, this sort of existence under the shadow of disapproval could not continue much longer, and Michael determined to come to grips with the situation. Therefore, one morning of strong easterly wind when Lily wanted to stay indoors, he proposed a walk to Stella.

They crossed three or four fields in complete silence, the dogs scampering to right and left, the gale crimsoning their cheeks.

“I don’t think I care much for this country of yours,” said Michael at last. “It’s flat and cold and damp. Why on earth you ever thought I should care to live here, I don’t know.”

“There’s a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of the wind there.”

Michael resented Stella’s pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a fortnight.

“I hate badly trained dogs,” he grumbled when Stella turned round to whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.

“So do I,” she agreed.

It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was easier in the shelter of the wood.

“I don’t think I’ve properly thanked you for having us to stay down here,” he began.

Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:

“Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?” she demanded.

Her use of the word “business” annoyed him: it crystallized all the offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly attitude these two weeks.

“I shall be delighted to talk about this ‘business.’ Though why you should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don’t quite know.”

“Do you want me to speak out frankly⁠—to say exactly what I think of you and Lily and of your marrying her? You won’t like it, and I won’t do it unless you ask me.”

“Go on,” said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers. It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood. Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it difficult to discomfit Sylvia.

“Go on, I’m waiting for you to begin,” Michael repeated.

“Straight off, then,” she said, “I may as well tell you that this marriage is impossible. I don’t know where you found her again, and I don’t care. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me what she had been, if I thought she had a chance of ever being anything else. But, Michael, she’s flabby. You’ll hate me for saying so, but she is, she really is! In a year you’ll admit that; you’ll see her growing older and flabbier, more and more vain; emptier and emptier, if that’s possible. Even her beauty won’t last. These very fair girls fall to pieces like moth-eaten dolls. I’ve tried to find something in her during this fortnight. I’ve tried and tried; but there’s nothing. You may be in love with her now, though I don’t believe you are. I think it’s all a piece of sentimentalism. I’ve often teased you about getting married, but please don’t suppose that I haven’t realized how almost impossible it would be, ever to find a woman that would stand the wear and tear of your idealism. I’m prepared to bet that behind your determination to marry this girl there’s a reason, a lovely, unpractical, idealistic reason. Isn’t there? You’ve been away with her for a weekend, and have tortured yourself into a theory of reparation. Is that it? Or you’ve fallen in love with the notion of yourself in love at eighteen. Oh, you can’t marry her, you foolish old darling.”

“Your oratory would be more effective if you wouldn’t keep whistling to that infernal dog,” said Michael. “If this marriage is so terrible, I should have thought you’d have forgotten there were such animals as cocker-spaniels. It’s rubbish for you to say you’ve tried to find something in Lily. You haven’t made the slightest attempt. You’ve criticized her from the moment she entered the house. You’re sunk deep already in the horrible selfishness of being happy. A happy marriage is the most devastating joint egotism in the world. Damn it, Stella, when you were making a fool of yourself with half the men in Europe, I didn’t talk as you’ve been talking to me.”

“No, you were always very cautiously fraternal,” said Stella. “Ah, no, I won’t say bitter things, for, Michael, I adore you; and you’ll break my heart if you marry this girl.”

“You won’t do anything of the kind,” he contradicted. “You’ll be whistling to spaniels all the time.”

“Michael, it’s really unkind of you to try and make me laugh, when I’m feeling so wretched about you.”

“It’s all fine for you to sneer at Lily,” said Michael. “But I can remember your coming back from Vienna and crying all day in your room over some man who’d made a fool of you. You looked pretty flabby then.”

“How dare you remind me of that?” Stella cried, in a fury. “How dare you? How dare you?”

“You brought it on yourself,” said Michael coldly.

“You’re going to pieces already under the influence of that girl. Marry her, then! But don’t come to me for sympathy, when she’s forced you to drag yourself through the divorce court.”

“No, I shall take care not to come to you for anything ever again,” said Michael bitterly. “Unless it’s for advice when I want to buy a spaniel.”

They had turned again in the direction of the Hall, and over the windy fields they walked silently. Michael was angry with himself for having referred to that Vienna time. After all, it had been the only occasion on which he had seen Stella betray a hint of weakness; besides, she had always treated him generously in the matter of confidences. He looked sidelong at her, but she walked on steadily, and he wondered if she would tell Alan that they had been nearer to quarreling than so far they had ever been. Perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable with marriage. Chains of sympathy and affection forged to last eternally were smashed by marriage in a moment. He had heard nothing said about Stella’s music lately. Was that also to vanish on account of marriage? The sooner he and Lily left Hardingham, the better. He supposed he ought to suggest going immediately. But Lily would be a problem until he could find a place for her to live, and someone to chaperone her. They would be married next month, and he would take her abroad. He would be able to see her at last in some of the places where in days gone by he had dreamed of seeing her.

“I suppose you wouldn’t object to keeping Lily here two or three days more, while I find a place in town?” said Michael. It only struck him when the request was out how much it sounded like asking for a favor. Stella would despise him more than ever.

“Michael,” Stella exclaimed, turning round and stopping in his path. “Once more I beg you to give up this idea of marriage. Surely you can realize how deeply I feel about it, when even after what you said I’m willing actually to plead with you. It’s intolerable to think of you tied to her!”

“It’s too late,” said Michael. “I must marry her. Not for any reasons that the world would consider reasons,” he went on. “But because I want to marry her. The least you can do for me is to pretend to support me before the world.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! It’s all wrong. She’s all wrong. Her people are all wrong. Why, even Alan remembers them as dreadful, and you know how casual he is about people he doesn’t like. He usually flings them out of his mind at once.”

“Oh, Alan’s amazing in every way,” said Michael. He longed to say that he and Lily would go by the first train possible, but he dreaded so much the effect of bringing her back to London without any definite place to which she could go, that he was willing to leave her here for a few days, if she would stay. He hated himself for doing this, but the problems of marriage and Lily were growing unwieldy. He wished now that he had asked his mother to come back, so that he could have taken Lily to Cheyne Walk. It was stupid to let himself be caught unprepared like this. After all, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave Lily and Stella together for a bit. As he was going to marry her and as he could not face the possibility of quarreling with Stella finally, it would be better to pocket his pride.

Suddenly Stella caught hold of his arm.

“Look here,” she said. “You absurd old Quixote, listen. I’m going to do all in my power to stop your marrying Lily. But meanwhile go up to town and leave her here. I promise to declare a truce of a fortnight, if you’ll promise me not to marry her until the middle of April. By a truce I mean that I’ll be charming to her and take no steps to influence her to give you up. But after the fortnight it must be war, even if you win in the end and marry her.”

“Does that mean we should cease to be on speaking terms?”

“Oh, no, of course; as a matter of fact, if you marry her, I suppose we shall all settle down together and be great friends, until she lands you in the divorce court with half a dozen corespondents. Then you’ll come and live with us at Hardingham, a confirmed cynic and the despair of all the eligible young women in the neighborhood.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Lily,” said Michael, frowning.

“The truce has begun,” Stella declared. “For a fortnight I’ll be an angel.”

Just before dusk was falling, the gale died away, and Michael persuaded Lily to come for a walk with him. Almost unconsciously he took her to the wood where he and Stella had talked so angrily in the morning. Chaffinches flashed their silver wings about them in the fading light.

“Lily, you look adorable in this glade,” he told her. “I believe, if you were a little way off from me, I should think you were a birch tree.”

The wood was rosy brown and purple. Every object had taken on rich deeps of quality and color reflected from the March twilight. The body of the missel-thrush flinging his song from the bare oak-bough into the ragged sky, flickered with a magical sublucency. Michael found some primroses and brought them to Lily.

“These are for you, you tall tall primrose of a girl. Listen, will you let me leave you for a very few days so that I can find the house you’re going to live in? Will you not be lonely?”

“I like to have you with me always,” she murmured.

He was intoxicated by so close an avowal of love from lips that were usually mute.

“We shall be married in a month,” he cried. “Can you smell violets?”

“Something sweet I smell.”

But it was getting too dusky in the coppice to find these violets themselves twilight-hued, and they turned homeward across the open fields. Birds were flying to the coverts, linnets mostly, in twittering companies.

“These eves of early Spring are like swords,” Michael exclaimed.

“Like what?” Lily asked, smiling at his exaggeration.

“Like swords. They seem to cut one through and through with their sharpness and sweetness.”

“Oh, you mean it’s cold,” she said. “Take my arm.”

“Well, I meant rather more than that, really,” Michael laughed. But because she had offered him her arm he forgot at once how far she had been from following his thoughts.

Michael went up to London after dinner. He left Lily curled up before the fire presumably quite content to stay at Hardingham.

“Not more than a fortnight, mind,” were Stella’s last words.

He went to see Maurice next morning to get the benefit of his advice about possible places in which to live. Maurice was in his element.

“Of course there really are very few good places. Cheyne Walk and Grosvenor Road, the Albany, parts of Hampstead and Campden Hill, Kensington Square, one or two streets near the Regent’s Canal, Adelphi Terrace, the Inns of Court and Westminster. Otherwise, London is impossible. But you’re living in Cheyne Walk now. Why do you want to move from there?”

Michael made up his mind to take Maurice into his confidence. He supposed that of all his friends he would be as likely as any to be sympathetic. Maurice was delighted by his description of Lily, so much delighted, that he accepted her as a fact without wanting to know who she was or where Michael had met her.

“By Jove, I must hurry up and find my girl. But I don’t think I’m desperately keen to get married yet. I vote for a house near the Canal, if we can find the right one.”

That afternoon they set out.

They changed their minds and went to Hampstead first, where Maurice was very anxious to take a large Georgian house with a garden of about fifteen acres. He offered to move himself and Castleton from Grosvenor Road in order to occupy one of the floors, and he was convinced that the stable would be very useful if they wanted to start a printing press.

“Yes, but we don’t want to start a printing press,” Michael objected. “And really, Mossy, I think twenty-three bedrooms more than one servant can manage.”

It was with great reluctance that Maurice gave up the idea of this house, and he was so much depressed by the prospect of considering anything less huge that he declared Hampstead was impossible, and they went off to Regent’s Park.

“I don’t think you’re likely to find anything so good as that house,” Maurice said gloomily. “In fact, I know you won’t. I wish I could afford to take it myself. I should, like a shot. Castleton could be at the Temple just as soon from there.”

“I don’t see why he should bother about the Temple,” said Michael. “That house was rather bigger.”

“You’ll never find another house like it,” Maurice prophesied. “Look at this neighborhood we’re driving through now. Impossible to live here!”

They were in the Hampstead Road.

“I haven’t any intention of doing so,” Michael laughed. “But there remains the neighborhood of the canal, the neighborhood you originally suggested. Hampstead was an afterthought.”

“Wonderful house!” Maurice sighed. “I shall always regret you didn’t take it.”

However, when they had paid off the cab, he became interested by the new prospect; and they wandered for a while, peering through fantastic railings at houses upon the steep banks of the canal, houses that seemed to have been stained to a sad green by the laurels planted close around them. Nothing feasible for a lodging was discovered near Regent’s Park; and they crossed St. John’s Wood and Maida Vale, walking on until they reached a point where at the confluence of two branches the canal became a large triangular sheet of water. Occupying the whole length of the base of this triangle and almost level with the water, stood the garden of a very large square house.

“There’s a curious place,” said Michael. “How on earth does one get at it?”

They followed the road, which was considerably higher than the level of the canal, and found that the front door was reached by an entrance down a flight of steps.

“Ararat House,” Michael read.

“Flat to let,” Maurice read.

“I think this looks rather promising,” said Michael.

It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house, under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion. The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.

They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes, there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.

They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling and walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors into the drawing-room.

As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must live here.

It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and the cameos of Théophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with orient gewgaws; Barbey d’Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a corner Villiers de l’Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts with whom Michael had identified it.

“But this is like a scene in a pantomime,” Maurice exclaimed.

It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of nymphs and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of black and yellow lozenges.

“It’s hideous,” Maurice exclaimed.

The housekeeper stood aside, watching impersonally.

“Hideous but rather fascinating,” Michael said. “Look at the queer melancholy light, and look at the view.”

It was, after all, the view which gave the character of romance to the room. Eight French windows, whose shutters one by one the housekeeper had opened while they were talking, admitted a light that was much subdued by the sprays of glossy evergreen outside. Seen through their leaves, the garden appeared to be a green twilight in which the statues and baskets of chipped and discolored stone had an air of overthrown magnificence. The housekeeper opened one of the windows, and they walked out into the wilderness, where ferns were growing on rockeries of slag and old tree-stumps; where the paths were smeared with bright green slime, with moss and sodden vegetation. They came to a wider path running by the bank of the canal, and, pausing here, they pondered the sheet of dead water where two swans were gliding slowly round an islet and where the reflections of the house beyond lay still and deep everywhere along the edge. The distant cries of London floated sharply down the air; smuts were falling perpetually; the bitter March air diffused in a dull sparkle tasted of the city’s breath: the circling of the swans round their islet made everything else the more immotionable.

“In summer this will be wonderful,” Michael predicted.

“On summer nights those swans will be swimming about among the stars,” Maurice said.

“Except that they’ll probably have retired to bed,” Michael pointed out.

“I wonder if they build their nests on chimney-tops like storks,” Maurice laughed.

“Let’s ask the housekeeper,” Michael said solemnly.

They went back into the drawing-room, and more than ever did it seem exactly the room one would expect to enter after pondering that dead water without.

“Who lives in the other flats?” Michael inquired of the housekeeper.

“There’s four others,” she began. “Up above there’s Colonel and Mrs.⁠ ⁠…”

“I see,” Michael interrupted. “Just ordinary people. Do they ever go out? Or do they sit and peer at the water all day from behind strange curtains?”

The housekeeper stared at him.

“They play tennis and croquet a good deal in the summer, sir. The courts is on the other side of the house. Mr. Gartside is the gentleman to see about the flat.”

She gave Michael the address, and that afternoon he settled to take Number One, Ararat House.

“It absolutely was made to set her off,” he told Maurice. “You wait till I’ve furnished it as it ought to be furnished.”

“And we’ll have amazing fêtes aqueuses in the summer,” Maurice declared. “We’ll buy a barge and⁠—why, of course⁠—the canal flows into the Thames at Grosvenor Road.”

“Underground⁠—like the Styx,” said Michael, nodding.

“Of course, it’s going to be wonderful. We must never visit each other except by water.”

“Like splendid dead Venetians,” said Michael.

The fortnight of Lily’s stay at Hardingham was spent by him and Maurice in a fever of decoration. Michael bought oval mirrors of Venetian glass; oblong mirrors crowned with gilt griffins and scallops; small round mirrors in frames of porcelain garlanded with flowerbuds; so many mirrors that the room became even more mysteriously vast. The walls were hung with brocades of gold and philamot and pomona green. There were slim settees the color of ivory, with cushions of primrose and lemon satin, of cinnamon and canary citron and worn russet silks. Over the parquet was a great gray Aubusson carpet with a design of monstrous roses as deep as damsons or burgundy; and from the ceiling hung two chandeliers of cut glass.

“You know,” said Maurice seriously, “she’ll have to be very beautiful to carry this off.”

“She is very beautiful,” said Michael. “And there’s room for her to walk about here. She’ll move about this room as wonderfully as those swans upon the canal.”

“Michael, what’s happened to you? You’re becoming as eccentric as me.” Maurice looked at him rather jealously. “And, I say, do you really want me to come with you to King’s Cross tomorrow afternoon?”

Michael nodded.

“After you’ve helped to gather together this room, you deserve to see the person we’ve done it for.”

“Yes, but look here. Who’s going to stay in the flat with her? You can’t leave her alone until you’re married. As you told me the story, it sounded very romantic; but if she’s going to be your wife, you’ve got to guard her reputation.”

Michael had never given Maurice more than a slight elaboration of the tale which had served for Stella; and he thought how much more romantic Maurice would consider the affair if he knew the whole truth. He felt inclined to tell him, but he doubted his ability to keep it to himself.

“I thought of getting hold of some elderly woman,” he said.

“That’s all very well, but you ought to have been doing it all this time.”

“You don’t know anybody?”

“I? Great scott, no!”

They were walking toward Chelsea, and presently Maurice had to leave him for an appointment.

“Tomorrow afternoon then at King’s Cross,” he said, and jumped on an omnibus.

Michael walked along in a quandary. Whom on earth could he get to stay with Lily? Would it not be better to marry at once? But that would involve breaking his promise to Stella. If he asked Mrs. Gainsborough, it would mean Sylvia knowing where Lily was. If, on the other hand, he should employ a strange woman, Lily might dislike her. Could he ask Mrs. Ross to come up to town? No, of course, that was absurd. It looked as if he would have to ask Mrs. Gainsborough. Or why not ask Sylvia herself? In that case, why establish Lily at Ararat House before they were married? This marriage had seemed so very easy an achievement; but slowly it was turning into an insoluble complex. He might sound Sylvia upon her attitude. It would enormously simplify everything if she would consent; and if she consented she would, he believed, play fair with him. The longer Michael thought about it, the more it seemed the safest course to call in Sylvia’s aid. He was almost hailing a hansom to go to Tinderbox Lane, when he realized how foolish it would be not to try to sever Lily completely from the life she had been leading in Sylvia’s company. Not even ought he to expose her to the beaming laxity of Mrs. Gainsborough.

Michael had reached Notting Hill Gate, and, still pondering the problem which had destroyed half the pleasure of the enterprise, he caught sight of a Registry for servants. Why not employ two servants, two of the automatons who simplified life as it was simplified in Cheyne Walk? Then he remembered that he had forgotten to make any attempt to equip the kitchen. Surely Lily would be able to help with that. He entered the Registry and interviewed a severe woman wearing glasses, who read in a singsong the virtues of a procession of various automatons seeking situations as cooks and housemaids.

“What wages do you wish to give?”

“Oh, the usual wages,” Michael said. “But I rather want these servants today.”

He made an appointment to interview half a dozen after lunch. He chose the first two that presented themselves, and told them to come round to Ararat House. Here he threw himself on their mercy and begged them to make a list of what was wanted in the kitchen. They gave notice on the spot, and Michael rushed off to the Registry again. To the severe woman in glasses he explained the outlines of the situation and made her promise to suit him by tomorrow at midday. She suggested a capable housekeeper; and next morning a hard-featured, handsome woman very well dressed in the fashion of about 1892 arrived at Ararat House. She undertook to find someone to help, and also to procure at once the absolute necessities for the kitchen. Miss Harper was a great relief to Michael, though he did not think he liked her very much; and he made up his mind to get rid of her, as soon as some sort of domestic comfort was perceptible. Lily would arrive about four o’clock, and he drove off to King’s Cross to meet her. He felt greatly excited by the prospect of introducing her to Maurice, who for a wonder was punctually waiting for him on the platform.

Lily evidently liked Maurice, and Michael was rather disappointed when he said he could not come back with them to assist at the first entry into Ararat House. Maurice had certainly given him to understand that he was free this afternoon.

“Look in at Grosvenor Road on your way home tonight,” said Maurice. “Or will you be very late?”

“Oh, no, I shan’t be late,” Michael answering, flushing. He had a notion that Maurice was implying a suspicion of him by his invitation. It seemed as if he were testing his behavior.

Lily liked the rooms; and, although she thought the Carpaccio bedroom was a little bare, it was soon strewn with her clothes, and made thereby inhabitable.

“And of course,” said Michael, “you’ve got to buy lots and lots of clothes this fortnight. How much do you want to spend? Two hundred⁠—three hundred pounds?”

The idea of buying clothes on such a scale of extravagance seemed to delight her, and she kissed him, he thought almost for the first time, in mere affection without a trace of passion. Michael felt happy that he had so much money for her to spend, and he was glad that no one had been given authority to interfere with his capital. There flashed through his mind a comparison of himself with the Chevalier des Grieux, and, remembering how soon that money had come to an end, he was glad that Lily would not be exposed to the temptation which had ruined Manon.

“And do you like Miss Harper?” he inquired.

“Yes, she seems all right.”

They went out to dine in town, and came back about eleven to find the flat looking wonderfully settled. Michael confessed how much he had forgotten to order, but Lily talked of her dresses and took no interest in household affairs.

“I think I ought to go now,” said Michael.

“Oh, no, stay a little longer.”

But he would not, feeling the violent necessity to impress upon her as much as possible, during this fortnight before they were married, how important were the conventions of life, even when it was going to be lived in so strange a place as Ararat House.

“Oh, you’re going now?” said Miss Harper, looking at him rather curiously.

“I shall be round in the morning. You’ll finish making the lists of what you still want?”

Michael felt very deeply plunged into domestic arrangements, as he drove to Grosvenor Road.

Maurice was sitting up for him, but Castleton had gone to bed.

“Look here, old chap,” Maurice began at once, “you can’t possibly marry that girl.”

Michael frowned.

“You too?”

“I know all about her,” Maurice went on. “I’ve never actually met her, but I recognized her at once. Even if you did know her people five years ago, you ought to have taken care to find out what had happened in between. As a matter of fact, I happen to know a man who’s had an affair with her⁠—a painter called Walker. Ronnie Walker. He’s often up here. You’re bound to meet him some time.”

“Not at all, if I never come here again,” said Michael, in a cold rage.

“It’s no use for you to be angry with me,” said Maurice. “I should be a rotten friend, if I didn’t warn you.”

“Oh, go to hell!” said Michael, and he marched out of the studio.

“I’ll die first,” retorted Maurice, grinning.

Maurice came on the landing and called, begging him to come up and not to be so hasty, but Michael paid no attention.

“So much for 422 Grosvenor Road,” he said, slamming the big front door behind him. He heard Maurice calling to him from the window, but he walked on without turning his head.

It was a miserable coincidence that one of his friends should know about her. It was a disappointment, but it could not be helped. If Maurice chattered about a disastrous marriage, why, other friends would have to be dropped in the same way. After all, he had been aware from the first moment of his resolve that this sort of thing was bound to happen. It left him curiously indifferent.

A week passed. There were hundreds of daffodils blooming in the garden round Ararat House; and April bringing an unexpected halcyon was the very April of the poets whose verses haunted that great rococo room. Every day Michael went with Lily to dressmakers and worshiped her taste. Every day he bought her old pieces of jewelry, old fans, or old silver, or pots of purple hyacinths. He was just conscious that it was London and the prime of the Spring; but mostly he lived in the enchantment of her presence. Often they walked up and down the still deserted garden, by the edge of the canal. The swans used to glide nearer to them, waiting for bread to be thrown; and Lily would stand with her hair in a stream of sunlight and her arms moving languidly like the necks of the birds she was feeding. Nor was she less graceful in the long luminous dusks under the young moon and the yellow evening star that were shining upon them as they walked by the edge of the water.

For a week Michael lived in a city that was become a mere background to the swoons and fevers of love. He knew that round him houses blinked in the night and that chimney-smoke curled upward in the morning; that people paced the streets; that there was a thunder of far-off traffic; that London was possessed by April. But the heart of life was in this room, when the candles were lit in the chandeliers and he could see a hundred Lilies in the mirrors. It seemed wrong to leave her at midnight, to leave that room so perilously golden with the golden stuffs and candle-flames. It seemed unfair to surprise Miss Harper by going away at midnight, when so easily he could have stayed. Yet every night he went away, however hard it was to leave Lily in her black dress, to leave in the mirrors those hundred Lilies that drowsily were not forbidding him to stay. Or when she stood under the portico sleepily resting in his arms, it was difficult to let her turn back alone. How close were their kisses wrapped in that velvet moonlessness! This was no London that he knew, this scented city of Spring, this tropic gloom, this mad innominate cavern that engorged them. The very stars were melting in the water of the canal: the earth bedewed with fevers of the Spring was warm as blood: why should he forsake her each night of this week? Yet every midnight when the heavy clocks buzzed and clamored, Michael left her, saying that May would come, and June, and another April, when she would have been his a year.

The weather veered back in the second week of the fortnight to rawness and wet. Yet it made no difference to Michael; for he was finding these days spent with Lily so full of romance that weather was forgotten. They could not walk in the garden and watch the swans: of nothing else did the weather deprive him.

Two days before the marriage was to take place, Mrs. Fane arrived back from the South of France. Michael was glad to see her, for he was so deeply infatuated with Lily that his first emotion was of pleasure in the thought of being able now to bring her to see his mother, and of taking his mother to see her in Ararat House among those chandeliers and mirrors.

“Why didn’t you wire me to say you were coming?” he asked.

“I came because Stella wrote to me.”

Michael frowned, and his mother went on:

“It wasn’t very thoughtful of you to let me know about your marriage through her. I think you might have managed to write to me about it yourself.”

Michael had been so much wrapped up in his arrangements, and apart from them so utterly engrossed in his secluded life with Lily during the past ten days, that it came upon him with a shock to realize that his mother might be justified in thinking that he had treated her very inconsiderately.

“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me,” he admitted. “But life has been such a whirl lately that I’ve somehow taken for granted the obvious courtesies. Besides, Stella was so very unfair to Lily that it rather choked me off taking anybody else into my confidence. And, mother, why do you begin on the subject at once, before you’ve even taken your things off?”

She flung back her furs and regarded him tragically.

“Michael, how can you dare to think of such trivialities when you are standing at the edge of this terrible step?”

“Oh, I think I’m perfectly levelheaded,” he said, “even on the brink of disaster.”

“Such a dreadful journey from Cannes! I wish I’d come back in March as I meant to. But Mrs. Carruthers was ill, and I couldn’t very well leave her. She’s always nervous in lifts, and hates the central-heating. I did not sleep a moment, and a most objectionable couple of Germans in the next compartment of the wagons-lits used all the water in the washing-place. So very annoying, for one never expects foreigners to think about washing. Oh, yes, a dreadful night and all because of you, and now you ask most cruelly why I don’t take my things off.”

“There wasn’t any need for you to worry yourself,” he said hotly. “Stella had no business to scare you with her prejudices.”

“Prejudices!” his mother repeated. “Prejudice is a very mild word for what she feels about this dreadful girl you want to marry.”

“But it is prejudice,” Michael insisted. “She knows nothing against her.”

“She knows a great deal.”

“How?” he demanded incredulously.

“You’d better read her letter to me. And I really must go and take off these furs. It’s stifling in London. So very much hotter than the Riviera.”

Mrs. Fane left him with Stella’s letter.

Long’s Hotel,

April 9.

Darling Mother,

When you get this you must come at once to London. You are the only person who can save Michael from marrying the most impossible creature imaginable. He had a stupid love-affair with her, when he was eighteen, and I think she treated him badly even then⁠—I remember his being very upset about it in the summer before my first concert. Apparently he rediscovered her this winter, and for some reason or other wants to marry her now. He brought her down to Hardingham, and I saw then that she was a minx. Alan remembers her mother as a dreadful woman who tried to make love to him. Imagine Alan at eighteen being pursued!

Of course, I tackled Michael about her, and we had rather a row about it. We kept her at Hardingham for a month (a fortnight by herself), and we were bored to death by her. She had nothing to say, and nothing to do except look at herself in the glass. I had declared war on the marriage from the moment she left, but I had only a fortnight to stop it. I was rather in a difficulty because I knew nothing definite against her, though I was sure that if she wasn’t a bad lot already, she would be later on. I wrote first of all to Maurice Avery, who told me that she’d had a not at all reputable affair with a painter friend of his. It seems, however, that he had already spoken to Michael about this and that Michael walked out of the house in a rage. Then I came up to town with Alan and saw Wedderburn, who knew nothing about her and hadn’t seen Michael for months. Then we got hold of Lonsdale. He has apparently met her at Covent Garden, and I’m perfectly sure that he has actually been away with her himself. Though, of course, he was much too polite to tell me so. He was absolutely horrified when he heard about her and Michael. I asked him to tell Michael anything he knew against her, but he didn’t see how he could. He said he wouldn’t have the heart. I told him it was his duty, but he said he wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of Michael’s face when he told him. Of course, the poor darling knows nothing about her. You must come at once to London and talk to him yourself. You’ve no time to lose. I’ll meet you if you send me a wire. I’ve no influence over Michael any more. You’re the only person who can stop it. He’s so sweet about her. She’s rather lovely to look at, I must say. Lots of love from Alan and from me.

Michael was touched by Lonsdale’s attitude. It showed, he thought, an exquisite sensitiveness, and he was grateful for it. Stella had certainly been very active: but he had foreseen all of this. Nothing was going to alter his determination. He waited gloomily for his mother to come down. Of all antagonists she would be the hardest to combat in argument, because he was debarred from referring to so much that had weighed heavily with him in his decision. His mother was upstairs such a very short time that Michael realized with a smile how deeply she must have been moved. Nothing but this marriage of his had ever brought her downstairs so rapidly from taking off her things.

“Have you read Stella’s letter?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Well, of course you see that the whole business must be stopped at once. It’s dreadful for you to hear all these things, and I know you must be suffering, dearest boy; but you ought to be obliged to Stella and not resent her interference.”

“I see that you feel bound to apologize for her,” Michael observed.

“Now, that is so bitter.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I feel rather bitter that she should come charging up to town to find out things I know already.”

“Michael! You knew about Lonsdale?”

“I didn’t know about him in particular, but I knew that there had been people. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to marry her.”

“But you’ll lose all your friends. It would be impossible for you to go on knowing Lonsdale, for instance.”

“Marriage seems to destroy friendships in any case,” Michael said. “You couldn’t have a better example of that than Stella and Alan. I daresay I shall be able to make new friends.”

“But, darling boy,” she said pleadingly, “your position will be so terribly ambiguous. Here you are with everything that you can possibly want, with any career you choose open to you. And you let yourself be dragged down by this horrible creature!”

“Mother, believe me, you’re getting a very distorted idea of Lily. She’s beautiful, you know; and if she’s not so clever as Stella, I’m rather glad of it. I don’t think I want a clever wife. At any rate, she hasn’t committed the sin of being common. She won’t disgrace you outwardly, and if Stella hadn’t gone round raking up all this abominable information about her you would have liked her very much.”

“My dearest boy, you are very young, but you surely aren’t too young to know that it’s impossible to marry a woman whose past is not without reproach.”

“But, mother, you⁠ ⁠…” he stopped himself abruptly, and looked out of the window in embarrassment. Yet his mother seemed quite unconscious that she was using a weapon which could be turned against herself.

“Will nothing persuade you? Oh, why did Dick Prescott kill himself? I knew at the time that something like this would happen. You won’t marry her, you won’t, will you?”

“Yes, mother. I’m going to,” he said coldly.

“But why so impetuously?” she asked. “Why won’t you wait a little time?”

“There’s no object in waiting while Stella rakes up a few more facts.”

“If only your father were alive!” she exclaimed. “It would have shocked him so inexpressibly.”

“He felt so strongly the unwisdom of marriage, didn’t he?” Michael said, and wished he could have bitten his tongue out.

She had risen from her chair, and seemed to tower above him in tragical and heroic dignity of reproach:

“I could never have believed you would say such a thing to me.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” he murmured. “It was inexcusable.”

“Michael,” she pleaded, coming to him sorrowfully, “won’t you give up this marriage?”

He was touched by her manner so gently despairing after his sneer.

“Mother, I must keep faith with myself.”

“Only with yourself? Then she doesn’t care for you? And you’re not thinking of her?”

“Of course she cares for me.”

“But she’d get over it almost at once?”

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

“Do you trust her? Do you believe she will be able to be a good woman?”

“That will be my lookout,” he said impatiently. “If she fails, it will be my fault. It’s always the man’s fault. Always.”

“Very well,” said his mother resignedly. “I can say no more, can I? You must do as you like.”

The sudden withdrawal of her opposition softened him as nothing else would have done. He compared the sweetness of her resignation with his own sneer of a minute ago. He felt anxious to do something that would show his penitence.

“Mother, I hate to wound you. But I must be true to what I have worked out for myself. I must marry Lily. Apart from a mad love I have for her, there is a deeper cause, a reason that’s bound up with my whole theory of behavior, my whole attitude toward existence. I could not back out of this marriage.”

“Is all your chivalry to be devoted to the service of Lily?” she asked.

He felt grateful to her for the name. When his mother no longer called her “this girl,” half his resentment fled. The situation concerned the happiness of human beings again; there were no longer prejudices or abstractions of morality to obscure it.

“Not at all, mother. I would do anything for you.”

“Except not marry her.”

“That wouldn’t be a sacrifice worth making,” he argued. “Because if I did that I should destroy myself to myself, and what was left of me wouldn’t be a complete Michael. It wouldn’t be your son.”

“Will you postpone your marriage, say for three months?”

He hesitated. How could he refuse her this?

“Not merely for your own sake,” she urged; “but for all our sakes. We shall all see things more clearly and pleasantly, perhaps, in three months’ time.”

He was conquered by the implication of justice for Lily.

“I won’t marry her for three months,” he promised.

“And you know, darling boy, the dreadful thing is that I very nearly missed the train owing to the idiocy of the head porter at the hotel.”

She was smiling through her tears, and very soon she became her stately self again.

Michael went at once to Ararat House, and told Lily that he had promised his mother to put off their marriage for three months. She pouted over her frocks.

“I wish you’d settled that before. What good will all these dresses be now?”

“You shall have as many more as you want. But will you be happy here without me?”

“Without you? Why are you going away?”

“Because I must, Lily. Because⁠ ⁠… oh, dearest girl, can’t you see that I’m too passionately in love with you to be able to see you every day and every night as I have been all this fortnight?”

“If you want to go away, of course you must; but I shall be rather dull, shan’t I?”

“And shan’t I?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“Perhaps.”

“I shall write every day to you, and you must write to me.”

He held her close and kissed her. Then he hurried away.

Now that he had made the sacrifice to please his mother, he was angry with himself for having done so. He felt that during this coming time of trial he could not bear to see either his mother or Stella. He must be married and fulfill his destiny, and, after that, all would be well. He was enraged with his weakness, wondering where he could go to avoid the people who had brought it about.

Suddenly Michael thought he would like to see Clere Abbey again, and he turned into Paddington Station to find out if there were a train that would take him down into Berkshire at once.