Mrs. Maxon Protests. Hope Anthony

forgive?"

      Maxon broke out in natural impatience at the incomprehensible. "On my honour, I don't understand what she's got to complain of. I took her from a poor home, I've given her every luxury, she shares my career – I needn't use mock modesty with you, Frank – I've given her absolute fidelity – " He ended with a despairing wave of his hands.

      Attlebury neither argued nor rebuked. "Is there anybody who has influence with her – whom she likes and relies on?"

      "I should hate anybody else being dragged into it – except you, of course. I asked her to come to you."

      "Oh, I know I'm suspect. I should be no good." He smiled contentedly. "Nobody you can think of?"

      "Well, the man she consulted about it was Hobart Gaynor." His tone was full of grudging dislike of such a consultation.

      "Hobart Gaynor? Yes, I know him. Not a bad choice of hers, Cyril, if she felt she had to go to some one. Not quite our way of thinking, but a very good fellow."

      "Why is he to poke his nose into my affairs?"

      "Come, come, she poked her pretty nose into his office, no doubt, and probably he'd much rather she hadn't. I've experience of ladies in distress, Cyril. I am, in fact, as the Great Duke said of authors – when he was Chancellor of Oxford, you know – much exposed to them."

      "I didn't come here to discuss Hobart Gaynor."

      "I hope we sometimes do wiser things than we come to do – or what's the good of a talk? Let's discuss Hobart Gaynor in the light of – say – an ambassador, or a go-between. You're looking very formidable, Cyril. Did you often look at Mrs. Maxon like that? If so, I hope she'd done something really wicked. Because, if she hadn't, you did."

      For just that moment the note of rebuke and authority rang clear in his voice. The next, he was the friend, the counsellor, the diplomatist again.

      "Let Gaynor go to her with a message of peace. Bygones to be bygones, faults on both sides, a fresh start, and so on."

      Cyril Maxon had felt the rebuke; he bowed his head to it. But he fretted terribly.

      "I can't bring myself to speak to him about it."

      "Let me. She's your wife, you know. If she went wrong, mightn't you feel that some effort of yours would – well, have made the difference?"

      "What am I to tell him to say?"

      "Let me tell him what to say – you try to honour my draft when it's presented. Perhaps – God knows – we're fighting for her soul, Cyril, and we shall be asked how we've borne ourselves in the fight, shan't we?"

      Cyril Maxon was always ready to own that he might have been wrong – to own it to God or to God's representative; he hated owning it to a fellow-creature uninvested with prerogatives. Attlebury had skilfully shifted the venue and changed the tribunal. A man may be sure he is right as against his wife – or vice versâ. Who dares enter an unqualified 'Not Guilty' before High Heaven's Court? There some count in the indictment is sure to be well laid and well proven.

      "I think I know my faults," he said, in a complacent humility.

      Attlebury's smile became more jovial still. "O learned gentleman!"

      The disciple still held the natural man under control. Maxon smiled, if sourly.

      "I may have been exacting."

      "You may have been an ass," sprang to the clergyman's lips, but stayed unuttered. "Allowances, Cyril, allowances!" he murmured gently. "We all have to work through allowances."

      "Do as you like, Frank. I want the thing put straight. You know I do. I think I ought to have from her an expression of – well, of regret."

      "Won't coming back convey it?" Attlebury smiled. "In fact, rather forcibly?"

      Left alone, the priest indulged himself in a bout of one of his diversions – the contemplation of the folly of his disciples. Not folly in believing in him and his authority – on that he was unimpeachably sincere. What moved his satiric vein was that they all had to be gulled – and were all gullible. Before they could be made better, they all had to be persuaded that they were better than they were already. Miserable offenders? Certainly. But with "potentialities"? Even more certainly – and to an unusual degree. No question of breaking the bruised reed – it must be put in splinters. And the smoking flax would be revived with a dash of kerosene. That Pope had been entirely wrong about Tannhäuser; he should have told him that his recent doings did not represent his true self. There is joy over a sinner that repenteth. To Attlebury there was excitement in one that might. He knew it, he chid himself for it; the glory was not in him or to him. But the sporting instinct was deep – a cause of sore penitence, and of unregenerate perpetual amusement at himself.

      "I'd like to beat these free-thinking beggars!" A.M.D.G.? He prayed on his knees that it might be so – and so exclusively – that the Reverend Francis Attlebury might look for and gain no advancement, no praise, not even the praise of God, but might still say "I am an unprofitable servant," and still believe it.

      Besides all this – right down in the depths of his being – came the primitive rivalry of man to man – obstinate in the heart of the celibate priest. "Dear old Cyril is a fool about women. He doesn't know a thing about them." This phase of thought was sternly repressed. It is not a branch of knowledge on which it behoves a man – not even a clergyman – to flatter himself. In the first place it is wrong; in the second – or same – place, dangerous.

      Thus great forces began to deploy into line against little Winnie Maxon, holding her assertion of freedom to be grave scandal and offence. There was the Family, embodied in her lawfully wedded husband; there was nothing less than the Church Catholic, speaking inexorably in Mr. Attlebury's diplomatic phrases; the Wisdom of the World, its logic, its common sense, were to find expression – and where better expression? – in the sober friend, the shrewd lawyer, the moderate man Hobart Gaynor. Could she hurl defiance at these great allies? If she did, could she look for anything save utter and immediate defeat? Just one little woman, not very strong, not very wise, with really no case save a very nebulous hazy notion that, whatever they all said, it was too bad that she should be miserable all her life! The allies would tell her that many people were miserable all their lives, but (they would add) nobody need be. Between them they had a complete remedy. Hers was the blame, not theirs, if she would not swallow it.

      At Shaylor's Patch, as the summer days passed by in sunshine and warm flower-scented breezes, where she was comforted, petted, made much of, where an infinite indulgence reigned, she was swallowing something quite different from the medicine that the allies proposed for her treatment. She was drinking a heady new wine. She was seeing with new eyes, travelling through new lands of thought and of feeling. Her spirit rejoiced as in a great emancipation – in being allowed, at last, to move, to live, to find itself, to meet its fellows, to give thanks to a world no longer its taskmaster, but the furnisher of its joys and the abetter in its pleasures. Of what should she be afraid in such a mood, of what ashamed? At Shaylor's Patch it seemed that rebellion might not only be admirable, as it often is, but that it would be easy – which it is very seldom.

      For the real Great World – that amalgam of all the forces of the three allies, that mighty thing which so envelopes most people from the cradle to the grave that their speculations stray beyond it no more – and often much less – than their actions – this great thing had hardly a representative among all who came and went. These folks belonged to various little worlds, which had got as it were chipped off from the big one, and had acquired little atmospheres and little orbits of their own; from time to time they collided with one another, but nobody minded that – neither planet seemed a pin better or worse for the encounter. Each was inhabited by a few teachers and a body of disciples sometimes not much more numerous; teachers and disciples alike seemed very busy, very happy, and (to be frank) in many cases agreeably self-satisfied. Afraid of the big world – lest they should come into collision with that and be shattered to miserable atoms? Not a bit of it! For, you see, the big world was, for all its imposing and threatening appearance, really moribund, whereas they were young, vigorous, growing. Paralysis had set in in the Giant's legs. He could not catch them. Presently the disease would reach his heart. He would die, and