Title:      The Old Ladies (1924)
Author:     Hugh Walpole
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          March 2004
Date most recently updated: March 2004

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"The old ladies were soon forgotten in the pursuit of more exciting personal ties. . . . They sat in a row deserted."

--Henry Galleon.

TO

ETHEL

WHOSE GOODNESS TO THE WEAK

THE AGED AND THE LONELY

IS AS UNOBTRUSIVE AS IT IS MAGNIFICENT

The Old Ladies is the only novel that I have ever written without taking thought first. The manner of it was in this wise. I had already worked at several chapters of a long and complicated novel and my mind was entirely absorbed by it. I went to stay with my parents in Switzerland. At the pension we were all greatly interested in a lady who, quite plainly, disliked her fellow human beings. She was tall, stout, slow in movement, with a pale face and black hair. She spoke to no one. She had her meals at a table alone and, once and again, would look up and stare, fixedly and accusingly, at her fellow-pensioners. We thought that she must have some secret sorrow. One day, towards the end of a meal, she rose suddenly from the table as though to leave the room but stopped beside a pretty girl sitting near to us. She said something and smiled, then bent forward and touched the beads of a very fine amber necklace which the girl was wearing.

She continued to speak, she continued to smile, but her eyes were fixed, with a hungry desire, on the amber beads. For a moment I thought that she would tear them from the young lady's neck. All the while she smiled politely. Then with a little bow she released the necklace and went out. At that moment The Old Ladies was born in my brain. I began it that night and for six weeks after wrote in a kind of frenzy.

I have myself been always a passionate lover of things, a collector, a kind of greedy magpie. I have been ashamed of this weakness in myself and admired those to whom possessions mean nothing. I tell myself that I could lose, or give away, my books and pictures to-morrow and not miss them. In a fashion I think I could, for I realise by now how infinitely more precious people are than things: I know too that I was as happy when I possessed fifty books as I am now when I have seven thousand, and I am sure that in an ideal state everything should be in common. But that things have an active, breathing life of their own experience has taught me. Henry James wrote a wonderful novel, The Spoils of Poynton, on this subject, and I think that I had it in mind when I was feverishly trying to catch up with my old ladies. But I had very soon forgotten everything in their reality. Every novelist knows more about his characters than he has any room, or indeed any right, to tell, but I have never known so much about any of mine as I did about May Beringer and Agatha Payne--Agatha Payne led me into strange places. Her earlier life in London, for instance, would make a remarkable book had one the courage to write it. I have been told, during my writing life, two exactly opposite things--one that my attitude to life is that of a good-natured family nurse, the other that I have a passion for crime, sadism, and eccentric behaviour! Perhaps both criticisms are true, but one does not choose one's characters--I remember that Meredith said that the Egoist was himself and everybody else. So, I suppose, it is true that every character that a novelist creates has his or her origin in the novelist's own individuality. According to the fashion of the time I should, I suppose, be prouder of my evil characters than of my good. At least I have noticed that they are always more critically applauded. I have no hesitation in saying that I am proud of Agatha Payne. She is true, she is real, she is alive--so alive that, as I am writing this little foreword now, I am not sure that she is not standing near the window, her eyes greedily fixed upon the piece of red amber on my table . . . She has wanted it for a very long time. . . .

H. W.

1934

Quite a number of years ago there was an old rickety building on the rock above Seatown in Polchester, and it was one of a number in an old grass-grown square known as Pontippy Square.

In this house at one time or another lived three old ladies, Mrs. Amorest, Miss May Beringer, and Mrs. Agatha Payne. They were really old ladies, because at the time of these events Mrs. Amorest was seventy-one, Miss Beringer seventy-three, and Mrs. Payne seventy. Mrs. Amorest and Mrs. Payne were wonderfully strong women for their age, but Miss Beringer felt her back a good deal.

It was a windy, creaky, rain-bitten dwelling-place for three old ladies. Mrs. Payne lived in it always; although she had fine health her legs were weak and would suddenly desert her. What she hated above anything else in life was that she should be ludicrous to people, and the thought that one day she might tumble down in Polchester High Street, there in front of everybody, determined her seclusion. She was a proud and severe woman was Mrs. Payne.

Mrs. Amorest and Mrs. Payne had lived in these rooms for some time. Miss Beringer was quite a newcomer--so new a comer in fact that the other two ladies had not as yet seen her. The lodgers on that top floor of the house had the same charwoman, Mrs. Bloxam, and she came in at eight in the morning, cooked the three breakfasts, stayed until ten and tidied the rooms. After ten o'clock the three old ladies were alone on their floor of the house, very nearly alone indeed in the whole building, because the second floor had been a store for furniture but was now deserted, and the ground floor was the offices of a strange religious sect known as the "Fortified Christians." The only "Fortified Christian" ever seen was a pale dirty young man with a blue chin who sometimes unlocked a grimy door, sat down at a grimier table, and wrote letters. Mrs. Amorest had once met him in the ground-floor passage, and it had been like meeting a ghost.

Mrs. Amorest herself stayed indoors a good deal, because three pair of stairs were a great number for an old lady, however strong she might be.

She looked an old lady of course with her snow-white hair, her charming wrinkled face, and her neat compact little body. She had also eyes as bright as the sea with the sun on it, and a smile both radiant and confiding. But she was like many other English old ladies, I suppose. I suppose so, because she never attracted the least attention in Polchester when she walked about. Nobody said, "Why, there goes a charming old lady!"

She had never known a day's illness in her life. When she had borne her son, Brand, she had been up and about within a week of his birth. And yet she had none of that aggressive good health that is so customary with physically triumphant people. She never thought about it as indeed she very seldom thought about herself at all.

Another thing that one must tell about Mrs. Amorest is that she was very poor. Very poor indeed, and of course she would not have lived in that draughty uncomfortable room at the top of the old house had it not been so.

She liked comfort and pretty things, and she had been well acquainted with both when her husband had been alive. Her husband, Ambrose Amorest, had been a poet, a poet-dramatist ("Tintagel," A Drama in Five Acts, Elden Foster, 1880; and "The Slandered Queen," A Drama in Five Acts, Elden Foster, 1883, were his two best-known plays). For a while things had gone well with them. Amorest had inherited from his father. Then quite suddenly he had died from double pneumonia, and it had been found that he had left nothing at all behind him save manuscripts and debts. A common affair. Every novel dealing with poets tells the same story. Brand, the only child, had at the age of eighteen gone off to seek his fortune in America. For a while things had gone well with him, then silence. It was now three years since Mrs. Amorest had heard from him.

Indeed, the old lady was now very thoroughly alone in the world. Her only relation living was her cousin Francis Bulling, who also lived in Polchester. It was because of him, in the first place, that she had come to Polchester; she thought that it would be like home to be near a relation, the only one she had. But it had not been very much like home. Mrs. Bulling had not liked her; and even after Mrs. Bulling's death, when Cousin Francis had been a grim old man, sixty-eight years of age, tortured with gout and all alone in his grim old house, he had not wanted to see her.

He was rich, but he had never given her a penny; and then, one day, when she came to see him (she never thought of the money but felt it her duty occasionally to do so), he had laughed and asked her what she would do with twenty thousand pounds a year.

She had said that she did not know what she would do, and he had said that he might as well leave it to her as to any one else. She had tried not to think of this, but money was the one power that forced her sometimes to think of herself. She had so very little, and it was dwindling and dwindling because, kind Mr. Agnew her solicitor explained to her, her investments weren't paying as well as they did. She knew very little about investments. Her view of money in general was that one must never get into debt. She paid for everything as she got it, and if she couldn't afford something there and then, she didn't get it. From quarter to quarter the sum had to stretch itself out, and kind Mr. Neilson at the Bank wanted it to stretch, she was sure, as far as it could, but, powerful man though he was, he couldn't work miracles.

Although she thought every one kind and most people nice she was not a fool. She was not blind to people's faults, but she selected their virtues instead. She felt that she was an old woman with nothing interesting, amusing, or unusual about her, and therefore did feel it very obliging of any one to take an interest in her. It could not truthfully be said that many people did. She had her pride, and she did not like her friends to see her poverty, and so she did not ask them to her room. On the other hand, she did not wish to accept hospitality without returning it.

Then, even though you are very strong, if you are over seventy and a woman, you have only a limited store of energy. Mrs. Amorest was often weary, and sometimes felt that she COULD not face THOSE STAIRS!

In her dreams at night the stairs figured, long-toothed, dragon-scaled, fiery to the foot--her demons!

But when she had reached her room, then all was well. In these years she had grown fond of that room. Once, when investments had behaved more nobly and she could ask her friends to visit her, it had been a very gay room indeed. She had always liked pretty things, and had inherited from her earlier, more prosperous married life certain fine pieces of furniture. In the right-hand corner of the room was her bed, and in front of the bed a screen of old rose-coloured silk. There were three old chairs also fashioned in rose colour, a rug of a rich red brown, a little gate-legged table, and on her wash-hand stand her jug and basin were of glass, and the little water jug had around it a wreath of briar-rose. She had, too, a bookcase with twelve volumes of Macmillan's Magazine, some stories by Grace Aguilar and Mrs. Craik, and Tennyson's complete works in eight volumes; also the four books published by her husband, one of poems and three of plays.

Her chiefest treasures were on her mantelpiece, a faded photograph of Brand aged twelve in football clothes--"such a sturdy little chap" was the phrase she had used in the old days when there had been visitors--and a drawing of her husband, a thin figure with hair flowing, a cape flung over his right shoulder and a book held prominently in the hand. "A rather weak face" that same visitor might have thought, but to Mrs. Amorest, rich in intimate memories, perfection; perfect in physical beauty, in spiritual significance, in human sympathy.

The room was a large one, and might seem to the superficial observer chill and spare. The chest of drawers and the cupboard where Mrs. Amorest kept her clothes could not cover sufficiently the farther wall space. The windows were not large. Mrs. Payne had the view right over the Pol and the country beyond. Mrs. Amorest had chimney-pots and not a glimpse of the Cathedral. Miss Beringer had the Cathedral, but her room was a pound a year more than Mrs. Amorest's.

Mrs. Amorest would not have a fire until the winter had really closed in, and the difficult days were such as these in November when it could be so cold and so wet and so wild and yet it was not truly winter. To-day was not a bad day; a pale ghostly light was over the world, the sky was scattered with tatters of white cloud as though for a celestial paper-chase, and the smoke from all the chimneys blew wildly in the wind.

Mrs. Amorest noticed these things as she prepared to go out. The Cathedral had struck (very faintly heard from here) two o'clock, the sun suddenly made a struggle and threw a faint primrose glow upon the remains of Mrs. Amorest's little luncheon--a coffee cup, a tumbler, a plate with crumbled biscuit, and a half-empty sardine tin. Three water biscuits, one sardine, and a cup of coffee, and Mrs. Amorest felt fortified for the rather difficult visit to her Cousin Francis that she was about to pay.

As she arranged her bonnet over her beautiful white hair in front of the misted looking-glass she was suddenly aware that she was going to like this visit to her cousin less than any that she had ever paid him. She would like it less for two reasons; one that he was very ill, and that she would therefore be in the hands of his housekeeper, Miss Greenacre, who both disliked and despised her; the other that kind Mr. Neilson had written to her to tell her that there were only Ten Pounds Four Shillings and Fivepence to her credit in the bank, and Quarter Day was yet far distant, and that therefore the thought of Cousin Francis's money was more dominant in her brain than it had ever been before.

She didn't wish it to be so. As she stood there, twisting the purple strings of her bonnet in her thin beautiful fingers, she thought how wicked she must be to have this in her mind!

But as you grew older you seemed to have less and less power to keep things out of your mind. You were being punished perhaps for looseness of thought in your earlier days. You had been too happy and careless then and must pay now. It was the one remnant of Mrs. Amorest's strict puritan upbringing that she felt that God did not intend His servants to be too consciously happy. And yet with her, all her life, happiness would keep breaking in. Probably she must pay for that now.

She gave a little sigh as she turned away from the window. She was still wickedly hungry. That was the punishment for being physically so blooming, that you had always so healthy an appetite. She looked for a moment covetously at the sardine tin. One more sardine, one more biscuit? Then resolutely shook her head, and as was her way often when she was alone her face broke into smiles. How ridiculous to have such an appetite with her small body! Now if she had been Mrs. Payne . . . !

And perhaps if she were in a kindly mood Miss Greenacre would offer her some tea with some of those nice sponge fingers that Cousin Francis had. She was not really greedy, but she liked sponge fingers.

Before she went out she listened for a moment, her head cocked on one side like an enquiring bird. How silent the house was! Like a dead-house. The wind was playing through it like a musician plucking a note from a board there, a stair here, an ill-fitting window somewhere else. But the house itself gave no sound.

Mrs. Payne too--how silent she was! There in her room day after day, thinking, thinking--of what? Of her past, one must suppose. After seventy the past was of so much more importance than the present. And the new tenant, Miss Beringer, how quiet she was! She had been there for three days now and Mrs. Amorest had not yet seen her. "A nice-spoken lady," Mrs. Bloxam had said, "and fond of talking." Tall and thin and dressed in pale green, a strange costume for one of her years. And having decided this with a thought of cheerful approbation for her own grey silk, Mrs. Amorest started down the stairs.

Cousin Francis lived in a large stone house on the other side of the river. It was shortest if you dropped down into Seatown, crossed the wooden bridge by the mill and walked through the fields, but Mrs. Amorest avoided Seatown when she could. She hated to see the distress and poverty that she could do nothing to improve; and although a stout optimistic lady had once told her confidently that "the poor were always happy. They had none of the troubles that weighed on the rich," she couldn't altogether believe it. They had none of the same troubles certainly, but she herself had known for too long what it was to worry about every penny, and deny yourself everything comfortable and easy, to believe eagerly in poverty.

So to avoid Seatown she crossed the Market-place and the bottom of the High Street and turned to the left over Tontine Bridge, skirted the river for a little way and then climbed the wooded path to Cousin Francis's large white gates.

She was tired and weary and anxious to-day. Do what she would she could not beat down her anxiety. Passing through the streets as unobtrusively as possible, she would nevertheless have rejoiced had there been only somebody to raise a hat or smile a smile. There was nobody at all; she mattered to nobody. In that whole town there was not a soul who cared whether she lived or died, and realising that in the sharp November wind she gave a little shiver. Her legs ached to-day and her brain ached. That particular ache in the brain came directly from her effort to keep her thoughts in order and to bring them into some sort of consecutive discipline. Her thoughts to-day were like mice behind the wainscoting--tap tap, scratch scratch--there for a moment and then gone. Some stockings that must be mended; a discoloration of Mrs. Bloxam's eye that, said Mrs. Bloxam, had been caused by tripping over a coalscuttle, but was derived, Mrs. Amorest feared, straight from Mr. Bloxam's fist; strange Mrs. Payne with her old discoloured purple velvet and her bushy eyebrows; and there go Mrs. Combermere and Miss Ellen Stiles! How strong and self-confident they look! Mrs. Amorest had not been always a shy woman. In those days in Cheltenham when Mr. Harland and Mr. Crackanthorpe had come to stay over Sunday, she had acted hostess bravely, although she could never like the things that they liked, thought the books that they read and wrote quite horrible if the truth be known. Her husband had never been able to change her artistic tastes. But she had not shrunk from Mr. Harland, had indeed chaffed him a little, but now were Mrs. Combermere to stay and speak to her she would tremble all over and stammer most-like, and have no words of her own! And yet how happy she would have been! What an event in her day! Once, at a party at the Dean's, she had been introduced to Mrs. Combermere. But that seemed long ago. The time for parties at the Dean's was past and gone; for one thing she had no clothes, for another some one might one day call on her and spy out the nakedness of the land, for another. . . .

She shivered again as she crossed the Tontine Bridge.

Then she beat up her spirits. What was happening to her? How unlike her to lose her courage! It must be that tiresome Ten Pounds Four Shillings and Fivepence that was worrying her. Never mind that. She had been in worse troubles than that ere now and God the Father had always come to her aid. He would come to her aid again. As she looked up to the cloud-streaked sky, a sky into which a faint orange glow was slowly stealing, she felt, as on so many thousands of occasions she had felt before, the presence of a large protecting friend Who put His arm out towards her and drew her up, and smiling said, "How could you ever have doubted . . .?"

Nevertheless she doubted once again as she walked up Cousin Francis's grim and desolate drive. Cousin Francis had that property, peculiar to certain natures, of bestowing the colour of his personality on everything and everybody close to him. His garden, the rooms of his house, his housekeeper, his secretary, his Irish terrier, his two gardeners, all of them were wind-bitten and desolate. With all his money he did not know what comfort was, nor colour, nor gentleness, nor the "laughter and the love of friends." His own gaunt and rocky body with its high cold forehead, its naked eyes and projecting teeth, its long legs and iron-grey hands, held no comfort for any human soul. Even his dog did not care for him.

The house was like a gaol with its barricaded windows and cold ugly walls. Mrs. Amorest pealed the iron bell and then waited, her heart beating beneath her thin grey silk. There was a fine view of Polchester from here, the Cathedral riding triumphantly on high, the houses and fields piled up at its feet, and now suddenly the sun burst its bonds and great swaths of golden glory enwrapped the scene. Mrs. Amorest stood entranced and did not hear the door open and the voice of the maid.

She turned and, blushing, said, "Oh, I beg your pardon. How is Mr. Bulling to-day?"

"A little better, mum."

"Oh, I'm glad of that! I wonder if I might see him for a moment?"

"If you'll step in, mum, I'll enquire."

Mrs. Amorest stepped in and was left alone in the large stone hall with its empty fireplace, its grim portrait of Mr. Bulling as Mayor of Drymouth, and its shining wooden chairs.

She looked very small in that high cold place, and Miss Greenacre, Mr. Bulling's housekeeper, might be forgiven perhaps for looking all about her for quite a while before she saw that there was anybody there. Miss Greenacre was long and thin and white and ribbed like a stick of asparagus. She had the air of one who has so many important things in mind that personal contact with her must be always three times removed. And especially for Mrs. Amorest she was removed into almost disappearing distance.

Having found her, she only said "Good afternoon," biting her words as she offered them as though to see whether they rang true or no.

"I came to enquire after Mr. Bulling," said Mrs. Amorest. She was often timid with Miss Greenacre. How fervently she wished that she was not, and the more fervently she wished it the more timid she was.

"I wonder whether I might see him for a moment?"

"Well now, that depends," said Miss Greenacre, looking down upon Mrs. Amorest with a considering air as though she were a colour waiting to be matched.

"He wasn't so well this morning, but since he's had his dinner--well, he's brightened up considerable."

Mrs. Amorest might be timid, but she refused to be patronised by any one.

"I wonder whether you would mind," she said quite sharply, "letting him know that I am here?"

Miss Greenacre entered into the game with steely zest.

"Do you know, I believe he's just dropped off--about five minutes back. It wouldn't be well to wake him, would it?"

"I think he would like to see me," said Mrs. Amorest. "If you wouldn't mind making sure whether he's asleep or not."

"Well now . . . I wonder. . . ."

She stood there biting her finger and considering. Mrs. Amorest had a sudden burning ambition to pick up a large bronze of Neptune near the door and hurl it at her. Would she then snap in two or bend? The thought of her surprise made a little smile hover about Mrs. Amorest's lips. She got up.

"Would you mind," she said very firmly indeed, "asking whether Mr. Bulling will see me?"

And to her great surprise Miss Greenacre suddenly turned and went.

Alone once more, Mrs. Amorest abruptly sat down again. She was more weary than she had known. Her legs now really were not strong. That walk had exhausted her more than it had ever done before, and a sudden fear, confronting her not for the first time, whispered to her that the day was coming when she would be like Mrs. Payne--alone up there at the top of that silent house forgotten by all the world, slowly more helpless, more lonely, more--

She bit her lip because her chin trembled. Her chin was always giving her away. It seemed the least stable part of all her anatomy.

"Miss Greenacre shan't see that I'm worried," was her thought, and Miss Greenacre did not, returning just then to say that Mr. Bulling was awake and would see Mrs. Amorest.

Up the heavy oak staircase the two women went, through passages that glimmered under the guttering gas with bad oil paintings of heavy seas and buttercup meadows, and so into the long high bedroom, dark and close and smelling of medicine.

Mrs. Amorest had often visited her cousin in bed before, and was accustomed to the shining forehead, the long cold nose, the pale bony hands. Propped up against his pillows, he peered out at her like a large malevolent bird. His bed was canopied with heavy dark red curtains. On the table beside the bed was a lamp with a green shade and a row of medicine bottles. Mrs. Amorest, coming forward, noticed none of these things in her sudden discovery that he had changed terribly for the worse since her last sight of him.

Her heart was touched: the maternal was roused in her. He was suffering, and there was no one really to care for him. That horrible Miss Greenacre could not be called anything. How uncomfortable he looked! She longed to turn the pillows, to smooth the sheets, to turn the shade so that the light was not in his eyes! But even with that impulse she realised that Miss Greenacre, watching her, would say to herself, "Ah, there goes another after his money!" And was it not true? Only on her way to this house . . . So the impulse was checked and she stood there in her purple bonnet and grey silk, smiling a little, and at last timidly saying:

"And how are you, Cousin Francis, to-day?"

"Worse; that's the way I am," he growled from the bed; then raising his voice, "All right, Greenacre. You can leave us. I know you'd like to overhear every word we're going to say, but you can listen behind the keyhole and you won't hear a thing."

How terrible, thought Mrs. Amorest, to treat any one like that and to call her "Greenacre." Could I ever endure it, she wondered, if I were in that position? No, indeed, I could not. But the lady did not appear discomforted. She gave Mrs. Amorest one haughty glance and departed.

"Sit down, sit down, Cousin Lucy. And take off your bonnet. I like to see your hair." This last remark was in a softer tone. It encouraged Mrs. Amorest, who took off her bonnet and laid it on the table near the medicine bottles, then brought a chair and sat down close to the bed.

"Come to see how the poor old man's getting along? To see how fast he's dying and when his money's going to be divided?"

Mrs. Amorest's pale cheeks flushed. "It wouldn't be true, Cousin Francis," she said, "to say that I haven't thought about your money, because I have, and reproached myself for doing so. But I haven't thought greatly about it, and I would have come to visit you if you hadn't a penny in the world. I would have come indeed more often than I have done."

"Well, that's honest," he answered. "More honest than most of them. I'm glad you've come to-day. It's probably the last time you'll see me."

"I hope indeed not."

"But indeed it is. I'm dying, and I'm frightened of it. I've been a man all my life that's never needed anybody. I never needed a woman or a friend. My mind was given to the making of money and I made it, and now it seems a shame that I can't take any of it with me. Sometimes, when the pain's bad, I want it all to end as quickly as may be, but when the pain goes, there I am again thinking of the money and wondering how I can make the most of it in the little time that's left. But I'm lonely, Cousin Lucy, mighty lonely. All my life I never thought to be, but that is the truth now I'm here. I'm lonely and naked at the last."

Mrs. Amorest said what she could, but her mind was fixed on the desire to arrange his pillow, to smooth his hair from his forehead, to do something that would make him comfortable. His long cold fingers kept plucking at the sheets, his eyes were never still. But she would not do anything lest he should think that she wanted his money.

"What would you say to it if I were to leave you a thousand pounds a year?" he asked her.

"I should be thankful to you," she answered him. "I have not many years to live, but I would find out my boy and we could live together again."

"Where is your boy?"

"I don't know." Against her will tears gathered in her eyes. "I haven't heard now for a considerable time."

"Aye, he's forgotten you, I've no doubt. So you're all alone?"

"Yes, I'm quite alone."

"It must have tired you coming up here to see me?"

"Yes, it was tiring."

"How old are you now?"

"I was seventy-one last March."

"Were you now? We're both old dodderers. Are you afraid of death?"

"No, Cousin Francis."

"And why not?"

"My Heavenly Father will care for me in that as He has cared for me in everything else."

"Cared for you, you say, when He has left you all alone in your old age?"

"I am not alone while He is with me."

"Well, I don't understand all that religious nonsense. But what if it should be true, after all? Who can tell? Nobody knows."

There was a silence between them, a long silence. Then the man said:

"You're a good woman, Cousin Lucy--the best of all of them that come here. I'll give you a thousand pounds a year. On my oath, I will. I'll see Agnew about it to-morrow."

Mrs. Amorest turned very pale. Then she said faintly: "Thank you, Cousin Francis."

"Is that all you've got to say? I like that too. You're not a false one like the others. Let me feel your hair."

She came closer to the bed, and he put his hand on her white hair and very slowly stroked it. They sat for a long time, he stroking her hair. Then suddenly his hand fell away and she saw that he was asleep.

She gently put on her bonnet and stole out of the room.

Darkness gathers swiftly in November, and below the rock the lights of the Seatown slum gaily flickered. There came up to the black walls of the houses some shadow of the last pale afterglow of the sunset, and motion was sent spinning through the evening air by the shrill, discordant notes of a cornet that some one in Seatown was enjoying.

In Pontippy Square there was no life. The tides of Polchester had passed it by. The old houses once, in eighteenth-century years, fashionable and alive, had sunk their chins into their breasts and so slept. Used largely once for warehouses, they were now, like No. 19, where lived the old ladies, let out in pieces to occasional lodgers. It was the shabbiest inch of all the genteel districts of the town.

In the Square there were only two lamps, and these at opposite corners, so that the space before No. 19 was unlighted. The pavement here, too, was broken and grass-grown, so that it made a splendid trap for the unwary. After dusk, to navigate the holes and broken stones, then to find the door, to turn the round iron knob, to discover the stair-rail, and then successfully to start upwards into the forbidding dark, was no mean feat of seamanship, and, for an old lady, it was dangerous indeed.

Some years before an old lodger had been discovered by the milkman in the morning at the bottom of the 27 stairs with her neck and many bones broken. She had fallen a full flight. She haunted, poor old wispy-haired crumpled lady, the Square after dusk. She always had with her a little sniffing dog. You could feel him sniffing at your trousers or skirts.

The silence of Pontippy Square was another matter of note. The sniffing of a ghostly little dog could indeed be heard miles away if you chose to listen for the sound. But silent though the Square might be, once within the house with the heavy old door closed behind you, you sank deep, deep into a well of oblivion. You might climb the stair with the hope perhaps of discovering it livelier if you went higher. But the silence follows you. When, out of breath, on the third floor now, you pause and listen, it is only the hammering of your heart that you hear. Silence everywhere.

Mrs. Payne's room was the first on the right of the stairs. If you opened the door and looked in after dusk (a liberty very rarely taken by any one), the first things that you noticed were the two big red candlesticks and a large piece of faded orange silk hanging over a cupboard opposite the door. It was a large room and curiously jumbled with odds and ends. On the round table there was a sewing basket of pink silk, a china dish with oranges, a black-haired doll in a green dress, and two packs of cards scattered on the shabby red table-cloth. The candles in the red candlesticks gave but a faint light, and you must look well before you saw in addition to a bed a chest of drawers and the cupboard with the orange silk across it, a large black rocking-chair, a cuckoo clock, and a big oil painting of an aquarium scene--a very large picture this, with green shining water and large fish with open mouths. There was also a stuffed bird with crimson wings in a glass case.

After these things, your eyes now accustomed to the uncertain light, you perceived their mistress. Mrs. Payne was a large, stout, and shapeless woman. She had hair of a deep black and her cheeks were highly coloured. She had fine dark eyes. She looked an old gipsy woman, and perhaps she had gipsy blood in her--foreign blood, for sure. She would be rocking herself in her chair, lying back in it wearing her soiled red wrapper and her shabby crimson shoes. She was not a cleanly old woman. Her splendid hair, as black now as forty years ago, was tumbled about her head carelessly, and stuck into it, askew, was a cheap black comb studded with glass diamonds. Her colour was swarthy, brown under the deep red of her cheeks, and there was a faint moustache on her upper lip. But she must have been handsome once, a fine bold girl in those years long ago. Quite shapeless now, her fat dirty arms naked under the wrapper, her body as it lolled back in the chair boneless. Once and again she yawned, then felt in a dirty paper bag on the table near to her for a thick slab of nougat that she crumbled idly in the bag, then ate fragments, licking slowly her fingers. Her face was expressionless. Her large black eyes stared out into the room vacantly.

As she licked her fingers she kicked one foot idly in the air. But she was not vacant. She knew what she was about. When the cuckoo burst his little door and cried that it was seven o'clock she would rise, totter across to the cupboard, produce a plate, a cup, a loaf of bread, butter, jam. She would make herself a cup of thick rich cocoa (the kettle had been long on the fire), and she would eat many pieces of thick bread and raspberry jam, and then a hunk of black dark plum-cake.

She would eat sitting up at the table, staring in front of her, her lips making a large smacking sound of satisfaction. Then once again she would lick her fingers slowly, elaborately. Then once again totter back to her chair, lie on it and rock, tossing her shabby red shoes in air.

Totter! Yes, because the only sign of age was in those legs of hers. They alone had deserted her. They would betray her in a moment, the knees failing, and she must cling to the table to save herself from falling. She hated her legs--they had betrayed her--and in the dark recesses of her mind she would imagine how she might punish them, punish them without hurting herself, just as though they were separate personalities.

But on the whole she was not ill-contented, nor did she bear humanity a grudge. She did not dislike this life of hers. She had always been lazy, taking what came nonchalantly. She had taken Wilfred Payne and his miserable mother; she had taken a lover and his brutal desertion of her; she had taken a child that had not been her husband's (and he had never known); she had taken its death; she had taken the Roman Catholic religion for the lights and the incense; she had taken her husband's death and her own subsequent poverty; she had taken the job of companion to an old fool widow of a Polchester merchant; she had taken the widow's decease (without leaving her a farthing) and her own subsequent penury; she had taken Pontippy Square and the cold and silent room there; she had taken her absolute loneliness and isolation--everything she had taken with a luxurious sensual indifference. Her two passions--and they were in their basis one--were for food and bright colours.

For food her longing was both active and indolent. Active because she would take trouble that Mrs. Bloxam should keep her well supplied in cake and jam and nougat. She spent all that she had on these foods, and in her slothful brain there was a kind of wonder that she could purchase so much of this for so little. Her digestion did not apparently suffer.

Her passion for bright colours was a deeper longing. It had always been so. As a tiny child she had cried after a reel of coloured thread and had begged for a shining marble. And this had gathered strength perhaps because her husband and mother-in-law had sternly forbidden it. Theirs was the Nonconformist mind and vision: grey stone, drab clothes, uncoloured minds. She had hated her husband for many reasons, but chiefly because he had thrown a gay hat of hers into the fire. She would lie in bed beside him devising tortures for his soft and rounded limbs. But that was many years ago. She had long forgotten him. The past appeared to her a succession of bright and shining images. Her husband was not one of these. She did not think connectedly of her past at all. Old people do not. To the old the past comes in a series of pictures, not of necessity connected, here intensely vivid, there dim and blurred--a green field, a quiet evening, an angry quarrel, some loving face, some sharp disappointment--and all, vivid or blurred, dispassionately removed. No call for action any more. Quiescence. And then a strange wonder that to those about them these scenes so real, so actual, mean nothing, stir no reaction.

But Mrs. Payne did not wonder. She had no audience for her memories; only Mrs. Amorest who seemed to her a silly old thing, incredibly old, stupidly active, an egoist in her sense of her importance.

With this matter of activity Agatha Payne was always intending to be "on the move" one day soon. Nothing forced her to stir. Her monthly allowance was paid to her by a lawyer in Birmingham. He paid her rental for her room. The rest was in Mrs. Bloxam's hands, and Mrs. Bloxam might cheat her if she willed, so long as she brought her what she desired.

But Mrs. Bloxam did not cheat her. She had a strange tenderness towards her two old ladies. When, before the arrival of Miss Beringer, there had been two old ladies and one old gentleman, she had been yet more tender towards the old gentleman, and were there now three old gentlemen her tenderness would have known no bounds. She did prefer the other sex and always had. But, as she said to Mr. Bloxam, you couldn't help but be sorry for the two old things. She liked Mrs. Amorest the better of the two; there was something in Mrs. Payne's lazy indifference that frightened her, and then "her liking sweet things the way she did." Like a child. But then if it hadn't been sweet things it would have been drink, and that, as Mrs. Bloxam only too absolutely knew, was "another kettle of fish." Mrs. Bloxam, too, was honoured by Mrs. Payne's trust in her, and would take real trouble over the commissions she gave her, going "quite a way" up the High Street to find the raspberry jam that she preferred. But whereas Mrs. Amorest was a "real sweet old lady," and should have been "a Duchess in her own right if all had their proper due," Mrs. Payne was "not quite. . . . Well, you know. Shouldn't wonder if she went queer in the 'ead any day."

Mr. Bloxam, when he was sober enough to realise things, couldn't see what Mrs. Bloxam was about wasting her time with those old women. It wasn't as though she got anything for it--but Mrs. Bloxam felt like a mother to them, twenty years younger though she was. She felt, too, a certain power. She liked to see Mrs. Amorest's eager smile when she called her in the morning, and to feel Mrs. Payne's dependence on her. "If they 'adn't got me surely to goodness I don't know who they would 'ave and that's the truth. Poor old dears."

About Miss Beringer she had not as yet made up her mind. Miss Beringer had been there but a week. And then there was the fox-terrier. "Pip." A silly name for a dog.

It was not to be expected that Mrs. Payne considered Mrs. Bloxam as a separate identity. Had Mrs. Bloxam been a stick of nougat or a piece of brightly coloured silk then Mrs. Payne would have desired to possess her, and her sluggish brain would have suddenly awakened to the intention of possessing her, and from that, coil after coil unwinding, she would have entered on the campaign of possessing her with the pertinacity and determination of Napoleon advancing upon Russia.

It was fortunate indeed for her that she did not leave her room. The sight of a gay vase or a jewelled trinket in a shop window might have drawn her into committal of some crime.

I have said that physically she was still a strong woman, and the weakness in her knees was more imagined than real. But she did occasionally suffer from a strange pain in the head. This was not exactly a headache; it was rather a kind of limiting of her consciousness, a constriction of the brain, as though cords were tightening over her brows and forbidding her to think. When this came upon her she was scarcely aware of what she did, moving, apparently, under the orders of some commanding personality.

It was as though some one whispered to her "Go and do this," and she then moved hypnotically. It must be repeated that she was not essentially an unkindly woman. Now that she was old and alone strange thoughts and desires possessed her. She wished ill to no one, but she moved in a world that had been largely created out of her own lingering and possessing imagination.

The picture of the fish in the green tank of water that had been her father's, that she had known ever since, as a little child, she had gazed up at it hanging in the Birmingham dining-room, had become part of her real and active world. She moved inside it as truly as she moved about the room, and the fish, especially the large one with the silver scales and the long swinging tail, left their watery confines and swam about her room slowly opening and shutting their jaws lazily swerving in their upward or downward course.

So, too, the black-haired doll with the green dress, Miranda. Miranda had three dresses--this green one, one of ruby colour, and one of dark purple. Mrs. Payne would change the dresses from time to time and, with the change, the whole room would seem to alter. When the ruby dress was worn sunlight seemed to strike the room. The very fish were glad and Miranda, perched up against the red candlesticks, smirked her satisfaction.

There were also the cards. With these Mrs. Payne played a game of her own, a kind of Patience maybe, but also a kind of fortune-telling; so that as she gazed at the king and queen of hearts and then lying beside them found the black, rich, thick ten of clubs, her heart beat strongly and awful destinies seemed to close about the room, and her eyes would stare far beyond those confining walls, and dynasties would rock, and the very stars would shake and quiver.

Then she would smile darkly to herself, knowing so much more of fate than the people about her.

On the evening of Mrs. Amorest's visit to her cousin she was thus playing at her cards when the door opened and the old lady entered. Mrs. Amorest had had her evening meal and had felt then an irresistible desire to talk to some one. Endeavour to control it as she might, the promise of her cousin that afternoon excited her so deeply that she was shaken through and through. One thousand pounds a year! To find her boy again, to spend the little time on this earth remaining to her with him! To see him with her own eyes happy! And it was only with this sudden wonderful promise that she realised how hard things had of late been and how, deep in her subconsciousness, the fear of some tragedy, the cessation of her money, or the running into debt and the consequent disgrace, had played upon her. But now! One thousand pounds a year! And he had meant it! she could still feel the touch of his hand upon her hair. How good he was, how kind! How many people had misjudged him!

She did not want to bother poor old Agatha Payne--she always thought of her as at least twenty years older than herself--with all her private affairs, but she must see somebody, be kind to somebody too, because tonight she wished well to all the world.

She knocked on the door, then timidly stepped forward. The cards had just come out badly, meaning nothing, pretending nothing, and Agatha Payne was therefore glad to see a friend.

In a way she liked Lucy Amorest although she despised her. Poor old thing, so lonely and deserted!

She gazed up confusedly, staring through the dim light and seeing a large green fish swerve just above Mrs. Amorest's head and disappear.

"Ah, my dear! Come along!" she said.

Her voice was bass and masculine. She rose very slowly from the table, leaving the cards upon the cloth. She moved to the rocking-chair, slowly sinking down into it. A very small fire flickered in the grate. On the other side of this there was a shabby red arm-chair from which the stuffing burst, now here, now there, like a pale disease.

Mrs. Amorest sat down in this as on many occasions she had done before. She seemed very small and very slight beside the large fat woman, rocking, one heel in air, opposite to her.

Agatha Payne gazed at her with sombre eyes.

"You have not been out, I suppose?" said Mrs. Amorest. This was a genteel fiction always maintained between them, that to-day it was true that Mrs. Payne had not gone out, that yesterday also she had remained within, but that to-morrow, all being well, would certainly see her in the open air.

"No," said Mrs. Payne, "I have not been out. It was in no way the kind of day for me. Cold and dark. Mrs. Bloxam has kindly done my shopping for me."

"I went and paid a visit to my cousin," said Mrs. Amorest, smiling, as though she would intimate that there was far more in that visit than she could expressly say.

But Agatha Payne was a bad one for secrets. She was occupied too deeply in pursuing the strange perplexing windings of her own brain to follow closely the possibilities of another.

One thing she always did--she overlooked Mrs. Amorest and was discontented that she refused to have anywhere about her a bright spot of colour. That grey dress and plain hair and quiet little face irritated her. Poor little old thing, she would think, how old and shrivelled up she is. She's not long for this world!

And the sense to-night that Lucy Amorest was pleased about something--it mattered not what--irritated her still more. What right had she to be pleased with her poverty and mean way of dressing? So, very soon, she was in an irritable temper, muttering to herself and kicking in air her red-heeled shoe.

"And so you've begun a fire!" said Mrs. Amorest brightly. "Well, I'm sure it's time, and yet I can't make up my mind to it. I said to Mrs. Bloxam this morning that I thought to-morrow I really would start one. And yet I don't know. The winter hasn't truly come, has it? And we may get quite a number of warm days yet."

Mrs. Payne, lying back shapeless in her chair, began:

"I'm sorry for you, Lucy. There's that cousin of yours, rich as he is, does nothing for you, and your boy been gone for years, no one knows where. I'm glad my child died. She would only have been a grief to me."

"He'll come back, Brand, I mean." Mrs. Amorest spoke confidently. "I feel to-night as though everything is going to turn out well. Don't you feel that way sometimes?"

"Brand? Is that your boy's name? Queer name."

"It was my husband who wished it. I think it's a nice name."

"Well, I don't think much of your Brand. Why doesn't he write and tell you what he is doing? Perhaps he's dead."

Mrs. Amorest knew well that Agatha Payne was doing her best to be provoking. She had on many occasions been through just this same conversation before, and when she had been tired, hungry, and lonely it had been difficult not to burst into tears. But she was accustomed now, and to-night she was too truly happy to care.

"I know that he's not dead," she answered. "Brand was the kind of boy who would never own that he was beaten. It was always the same, in cricket and in football. He'll tell me where he is when he's made his fortune. I'm expecting to hear any day now."

"You've been expecting to hear any day ever since I've known you," said Agatha Payne. "You're a patient woman."

Slowly, from the sluggish levels of her mind curiosity was arising. What was making Lucy Amorest so happy to-night? What news had she received? Had some fortune come to her?

The fish swam slowly back into their deep green tank; she sat up in her chair, and with her hands on the arms and her heavy breast bulging beneath her wrapper she looked attentively at her companion.

"What's the matter with you, Lucy?" she asked. "You've had some good news."

"Well, in a way I have," Mrs. Amorest confessed. "And yet it's not news exactly. My cousin spoke to me in a very kindly way this afternoon."

"Did he say he'd leave you something in his will?" asked Mrs. Payne, her interest growing very sharply.

"He did say something," answered Mrs. Amorest, smiling a little. "Of course he may have meant nothing by it. I certainly mustn't rely on it."

"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Payne, leaning now eagerly forward. "What did he say he'd leave you?"

"Well, he said a thousand pounds a year!"

Mrs. Payne sank back into the chair.

"A thousand pounds! A thousand pounds a year!" Her large black eyes widened and extended. "Why, Lucy, that's a fortune!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Amorest faintly, "it is. And that's why I don't want to rely on it. It's only what he said, of course."

"And was there any one else there when he said it?"

"No, there wasn't. We were quite alone, and he was very kind indeed. I have never known him so nice."

Agatha Payne stared. A thousand pounds a year! And to be given to that poor little mouse who had only a few years to live at the best. What would she do with a thousand pounds a year? Whereas the things that Agatha Payne might do . . . the gay, glorious, coloured, glittering things that she might buy! And there suddenly came into her head the idea that she herself would have some of this money that was coming to Lucy Amorest. She was a weak, good-natured, little creature was Lucy Amorest. She would give anything away. She would do anything for anybody.

Her heart beat. It was strange, perhaps, that with her passion for gay things she had not, long ago, spent more than she had and encumbered herself with debt. But an odd laziness held her captive, and perhaps also the old house had thrown some spell over her. It had forbidden her perhaps to leave it. Old houses can do such things. They can impregnate human souls with their own subtle poison and with bricks and beams of wood and flakes of mortar wall in the human body as surely as in the cruel past errant wives and sinning nuns were confined.

Here was something beneath her hand. She smiled, and a grim forbidding smile it was.

"That's right, Lucy. Don't you count on it. You come to me and we'll talk it over. There's nothing like a little plan. Nothing."

Mrs. Amorest was frightened. She did not know why. It had been foolish of her to say anything at all about the money. It had been, in a way, betraying the confidence of her cousin.

She was tired, and needed the security of her own room.

"I think I'll go to bed now," she said. "It's late."

Mrs. Payne smiled once more. "You come in again and we'll talk it over," she said.

Mrs. Amorest said good-night and went.

She hurried into her room, lit her lamp, and began to undress. She took the photograph of her boy from the mantelpiece and kissed it. Then she knelt down and said her prayers.

Miss May Beringer was poorer than either Mrs. Amorest or Mrs. Payne. She was not only very poor, but she had to confront the possibility of having, in some six months or so, no money whatever. Literally no money. Nothing.

She was as absolutely alone in the world as it was possible for any one to be--at least she would have been so had it not been for her dog Pip.

People talk of poverty and they talk of loneliness, and in a majority of cases do not understand the true meaning of either word. People also talk of "the working classes" and their hardships. Very seldom do you hear anything about the "poor gentlewoman classes" and their hardships. The poor gentlewomen of this world do, in every civilised country, by their unselfish and heroic lives, constitute a large proportion of the future citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Verily, they need that Paradisal promise.

Miss Beringer was one of those unfortunate women who have never been wanted by anybody. Neither her father nor mother, none of her numerous brothers and sisters, no relation near or distant--none of these wanted her.

She was the daughter of a doctor of Exeter City. She had been always, with her heavy hooked nose, faint eyebrows, pale pasty complexion and long lanky body, very homely. Nor were the defects of her person excused by the brilliance of her accomplishments. She was born and bred into a period when the daughters of Great Britain were expected neither to spin nor to sew but only to wait, in patient eagerness, for the day when a gentleman would ask them in marriage.

It was obvious from the very first that it was unlikely that any one would beg for May's hand, because she was plain and awkward and also because she had three sisters older than herself. Her unfortunate father and mother killed themselves in the attempt to win that unceasing battle that great progeny and small incomes force upon so many virtuous and upright citizens. Two of May's sisters married, one died, two brothers went to the Colonies, one was killed in China and one vanished into the depths of America. May, at the age of forty, found herself with an income of one hundred and fifty pounds a year, alone in the world. That was thirty years ago--thirty years of being wanted by nobody, thirty years of finding that ends were never quite meeting, thirty years of absurdities, hopes, enthusiasms, disappointments, confusions. Confusions most of all.

May Beringer was unfortunately a stupid woman. A stupid woman with a kind and generous heart, than that there is nothing more aggravating, exasperating, touching, and pathetic to be found in the human kingdom. Her stupidity was not altogether her own fault. In the first place she had never had any education. Her mother and father had not wished that "their girls" should go to a rough day-school where they would assuredly learn rude habits from rough day-girls. A governess had therefore been supplied, and because finances were so low only the poorest kind of governess could be afforded, and because the family was so large even the finest kind of governess would have been unable to deal with the situation adequately. May Beringer, therefore, had learnt nothing save that Oliver Cromwell executed Charles I. and that the Amazon was a river in America, and of these two facts she was not very certain. Moreover, she was quite unaware that she was ill-educated. Facts in the days when she was a girl were divided into divisions of the Improper, the Masculine, and the Unnecessary. With the first of these she must, of course, have nothing to do, the second she left to the men, the third were waste of time. She was therefore never challenged as to her ignorance. She was not in the least a modern girl of her time. She read only the idlest fictions, played all games very badly, and when she found that her ideas refused to clarify sufficiently for coherent conversation, took refuge in giggling silence.

Beneath all this her heart was warm, eager, and sentimental. She longed to be good and kind and generous. She did not care whether people liked her or no, all that she wished was to be allowed to like them. She adored her father and mother, loved her brothers and sisters indiscriminately, and felt romantic passions for every man who came to their house. She did not expect a proposal of marriage. She had been told very often by her frank and careless brothers and sisters that she was plain, awkward, and stupid. She had from the very earliest age developed a terror of almost everything and everybody. Her very shyness and gaucherie made her timid, and then as she was conscious of her mistakes her shyness increased.

She felt that she might be very brilliant and amusing could she only arrange her ideas in order, but always something unfortunate came in the way--she sat down when she ought to stand up, spoke when she should be silent, smiled when she should have frowned.

Then her body was clumsy, untidy. Do what she would her clothes were for ever in disorder.

She lived alone in Exeter from the years of forty to sixty. She occupied the upper part of a little house near the Cathedral, and it was there that she spent the happiest part of her life. She managed on her tiny income because her father's solicitor saw that she received it in moderation, a little at a time; he paid her rent; he also let it be understood in the principal shops of the town that she was not to be permitted to run up accounts. She had at first a gay and fanciful fashion of going into a shop, looking around her happily, and then saying, "Oh, I'll have that! Would you kindly send it this afternoon?" The shopmen kindly agreed, but it was not sent, and by the following day she had quite forgotten that she had ever ordered it.

She was happy during this time in her two rooms, in her few friends, and, latterly, in the friend whom she adored, Jane Betts. It was essential to her nature that she should adore some one, and if there was no one positively close at hand then she would choose some one out of the illustrated papers or one of the Royal Family.

Jane Betts was younger than she, daughter of a retired Colonel, a bright jolly woman of thirty or so, to whom life was a joke and everything a cause for wonder. She accepted the affection of May Beringer with amused acquiescence, and then suddenly, on a day, perceived something touching and even beautiful in this plain elderly woman's devotion. Where another would have been wearied or bored Jane was moved and grateful. Something serious entered into her life that had never been there before.

There followed for May Beringer the six glorious months of her life, the only truly happy time that she was ever to know. It is for ever marvellous what happy love can do for the divine soul and the awkward human body. Had fate willed it and the friendship lasted, May Beringer might have known transformation. Already, guided by the gentle hints of her friend, awkwardness was leaving her, comeliness was approaching her, a novel orderliness was mastering her poor confused brains, happiness shone from her eyes, people were beginning to say that "she wasn't so bad after all."

It was during the Christmas of that happy six months that Jane gave her friend that piece of red amber that was afterwards to play so important a part in May's life. It became, of course, her most cherished possession.

Then, alas, a large red-faced Colonel arrived from India on leave, saw Jane, fell instantly in love with her in spite of her thirty years, proposed and was accepted. That was a terrible day when Jane told her friend of what had occurred, and May Beringer showed in the fashion with which she received the news the stuff of which she was beginning to be made. She said that all that she wished was that Jane should be happy: she was sorry indeed that Jane was going so far, but that, of course, neither seas nor the passing of the years should ever divide them. Unfortunately, seas and long absences are more powerful separators than friends and lovers in the full flood of their romantic ideals will honestly realise. Moreover, the red-faced Colonel did not appreciate his darling Jane's friend. It was the one thing in his darling Jane that he could not understand, that she should care for that "old giggling scarecrow." And then, unfortunately, May perceived that he did not like her, and forgetting her hard-won control only a few nights before Jane's departure lost her temper and called the Colonel names. After that followed floods of tears, urgent agonising demands for forgiveness, touching reconciliations. But it may be that Jane left Exeter feeling that her good old May might in the passing of the years have become something of a good old nuisance.

It was after Jane's departure that May Beringer "took to dogs." She suddenly discovered, as many other human beings have discovered both before and since, that dogs are marvellously unaware of faults and deficiencies only too obvious to all one's friends and acquaintances, that they bear one no grudges, that when you have lost your temper and behaved abominably they take your sins upon them and ask for your forgiveness, that they have no irony nor cynicism, that they are not pessimistic, and the sight of a bone or a cat or a pat on the head is enough to make them believe that all is well with the world, and that do you but treat them kindly they will prefer you to all other human beings whatever and will exhibit that same preference in a most flattering and self-justifying manner.

To a woman of May Beringer's sentiment a dog was the perfect solution. She was not, however, by nature adapted to look after dogs successfully. For some years dogs inevitably died under her hand, and she passed through a series of soul-searching griefs swearing that she would never have another, that Gyp or Tray or Fido was surely the very last. But dog succeeded dog, and apartment succeeded apartment, landladies invariably liking the Fido or the Gyp of the moment less than did their adoring mistress.

Then, finding Exeter difficult, expensive, and the perpetual echo of Jane's dear voice, she moved into the country. She went to St. Lennan, a small seaside resort on the coast of North Glebeshire. At first it seemed that here she had met good fortune. She was now sixty years of age but was strong and healthy. She took two rooms on the sea-front from a kindly widow who had no objections at all to dogs and indeed preferred them. The winter months in North Glebeshire are bleak and wild indeed, but May Beringer threw herself into the clerical work of the parish with eager enthusiasm. She adored the clergyman and slaved for him. The clergyman was at first grateful, but soon it became apparent that Miss Beringer was a breeder of disputes and a begetter of quarrels. She wanted things her own way, and, in spite of her timidity, was touchy and sensitive to a fault. Moreover, she could not be relied on to carry anything forward to completeness. Her eagerness was not balanced by forethought nor her devotion by clear thinking.

So, after a year or two, May Beringer found herself isolated once more, and abandoned to the company of a few old maids like herself, her landlady and her dog. She did not complain. She was always only too ready to admit that everything was her own fault.

She had acquired a passion for St. Lennan. There was something about its wind-swept sandy shore, about the fashion in which the hard green breakers split suddenly into jade and foam, slipping down into silky splendour, something in the naked line of houses, the low bare hill, the circling arm of the dim white shore that won her heart. It was cold, it was chill, but it was her own.

In the summer it was not hers. Never at any time a popular resort, there were nevertheless during the summer months families sufficient for her to feel that she was old and ugly and unwanted. Then the dog of the moment was always in trouble at that time, lured by little girls, tempted by little boys, above all excited and bemused by the presence of other dogs.

Every morning about mid-day, weather foul or fair, May Beringer might be seen robed in a long green jacket and wearing a large hard hat stuck through with a large sharp pin, striding along the shore, a small dog tethered to her with a chain. She liked small dogs, but not too small, and fox terriers were her favourites. She had, ere this, by sheer force of necessity learnt something of their proper care. They were not, as a rule, very healthy animals, and wore a strange air of bewilderment, fostered, one may imagine, by the puzzling moods to which their mistress was subject, slapping them one moment and hugging them the next.

It was when she was sixty-five and had been at St. Lennan some five years that she received the dog, Pip. She received him as a puppy from the landlady, who felt that she had not been, in the past, altogether kind to the queer and lonely old woman. Pip seemed from the beginning to understand better than any of his predecessors the purposes for which he was born into this world. He was not a handsome dog, and one coal-black ear, the rest of his body being white, gave him rather a ludicrous appearance. Nor was he intelligent. His mind was, strangely like his mistress's, compact of fear and confusion. They say that animals resemble very frequently their masters, or, maybe, masters their animals. There was, as Pip developed into maturer years, a quite ludicrous resemblance to his mistress. His body was lanky and ill-controlled like hers, his mind, as I have said, confused and panic-stricken, and he had exactly the same loving and eager heart. He was more fortunate than his mistress in this, that there was no question as to the true altar of his devotion. He loved one and one alone, he saw in her no absurdities, no oddities, no stupidities. It is true that he must often have been puzzled by her moods, but just as Mrs. Amorest was always assured that God's actions, whatever they might be, were for the best, so felt Pip about his mistress.

He was, during the years at St. Lennan, a happy dog. Except for those few weeks in the summer he might run riotously along that unending beach pursuing imaginary cats, sticks, and bones, barking at the breakers as they rolled towards him, confident in his own fine security, returning to those warm rooms where his beloved mistress awaited him, where there was food and warmth and unfailing affection.

In her sixty-eighth year May Beringer met upon the sands a wise old gentleman with silvery hair and a benevolent cape who talked with her in the kindest fashion. They spoke together day after day. He was, it appeared, a professor of Oxford University. He liked her very much and discovered her to be most intelligent and far-seeing. It was the month of June and the days were warm.

She told him everything of her life, speaking even to him of her beloved Jane. He became, after a short interval, so warm a friend that he begged to know whether her money were properly invested. The old solicitor friend of her family was dead. The son, who had succeeded to his father's position, took in the old lady less personal an interest, and it was not long before the kind old professor with the silvery hair had invested her money so carefully for her that she was never to see any of it again. Most of it--luckily not all. There remained to her some hundred and fifty pounds.

The shock to her when she discovered what had occurred added to the confusion of her already confused brain. She could not understand how so charming an old man could have done anything so cruel. She wrote to him again and again, but, of course, received no reply. The thing that hurt her the most was not the loss of her money, but that she had confided to him so many intimacies about her friendship with dear Jane.

She cried about that in the dark silences of the over-long night.

Something had to be done. She collected what remained of her fortune and had the confused idea of going to Polchester and finding there some work. What work? Governess, perhaps. It was true that she was now seventy, but she was strong and active. At least in St. Lennan there was no work to be found. Her heart failed her did she positively visualise to herself what work, any work at her age, would mean, so she did not visualise it; she simply ordered her few pieces of furniture to be packed and sent to a Polchester depository, said farewell to her kind landlady, and departed, Pip chained to her side.

Arrived in Polchester she stayed for a while in rooms at the top of Orange Street, but these were expensive; she had her own bits of furniture; where was the cheapest place?

The cheapest place was Pontippy Square.

The first vision of the bare room at the top of that old tumbling house frightened her, but the rent was so small that she felt that it would be wicked to refuse it. She would be here, too, her own mistress--no one could interfere with her. She was told that two other ladies were tenants on this same floor. She would have company if she wished. Real ladies like herself.

Only she said nothing about dogs. Were dogs allowed? She did not enquire. Here surely no one would interfere with her, but on the whole it was safer not to enquire. So she settled in. The depository sent up her possessions--her old dark blue carpet with the large ink spot in one corner and showing the threads in another corner where a youthful Pip had gnawed it, her bed, her round mahogany table, her four mahogany chairs, her two dark blue arm-chairs, her bookcase, her two oil paintings "after Cuyp," and her chest of drawers. She had also her photographs of her father, her mother, a family group, Jane Betts, and Pip. She had her two Venetian vases--and her piece of red amber.

This was a very fine piece. It stood in the middle of the mantelpiece, shining and gleaming. Jane Betts had seen it, that famous Christmas, in the shop windows of an Exeter antiquarian and, feeling very tender towards her "dear silly old May," had gone in and bought it. "It will warm you, my dear," she said when she gave it to her, "always keep you warm like my affection. Never lose it or sell it. My heart is inside it!"

You know how sentimental people can be! Jane Betts was, in her nature, something of a cynic, and her marriage with the red-faced Colonel made her in after life yet more cynical, but those months of friendship with May Beringer touched, for a moment, her truest, sincerest affection. She did not know it, but she was never again to care for any one so deeply as she did for that ugly, awkward, lanky old woman.

So did this chunk of amber enshrine both their affections. It was shaped square like a little block of wood, and this block was surmounted with a carved red amber dragon. It had in it the most lovely lights and colours, that flashed and trembled from the deepest Venetian red to the fairest honey gold.

When the shimmer of the fire or the light of the lamp caught it, it did indeed seem to be stirring with the fire of its own heart. The dragon raised its head, his eyes shot flame.

For May Beringer it was simply the heart of her life. There, enshrined in that lovely thing, was all the happiness of her days. So long as that remained to her she could not, as dear Jane had said, be altogether cold and chill.

Pip settled into the new room very easily. He had his cushion in the corner near the fire; he gave his mistress one look to see whether she really intended that it was here that they were going to live, and then when he saw that that was so, behaved as though he had never known any other home.

May Beringer knew not a single soul in Polchester. Never before in her life had she been in a place where she knew nobody. She missed the kind landlady of St. Lennan very badly, but guarded herself against talking to strangers, being warned by her experience with the silver-haired gentleman.

But she liked the town greatly. It reminded her of Exeter, and yet there were not associations with dear Jane at every step. She was soon a familiar figure up and down the High Street and at the Cathedral services. She was remarkably straight-backed and tall for her years, and people called her "the old Grenadier."

There was something comic about her, with her sallow face, her hooked nose, her old-fashioned garments, and the fox terrier trotting at her side. People always noticed her and wondered who she was. A little cracked, they thought she must be.

"Grenadier" was in fact the very last thing to call her. I said in my first account of her that she had always been frightened of everything; now, with her old age, her fears had accumulated upon her. Alone in this strange town, with no friend in the world, it was natural enough that she should know fear. There is a fear that comes upon lonely old people that is like no other fear. It is a fear bred of loneliness--the sight and sound of all these hurrying multitudes pressing in upon you, hurrying past you, looking with hard, careless eyes into yours. You are near the end of your days, you have lived all your life upon the earth, and this is what it has come to, that there is not a living soul who needs you or thinks of you. Death is approaching, and there will be no one to be with you at the last. It were surely better that you had never been born.

In May Beringer's case there was this to be added, that soon--in six months' time or so--she would have no money. Unless she obtained some work what would happen to her? Work! As she looked at the crowds that passed her in the High Street and the Market-place she did not know how she would ever begin to ask for work. Had she been a peasant there would be things that she would have learnt to do. Like Mrs. Bloxam, she might have gone out charing. But because she was born a lady she could do nothing. Nothing.

Mrs. Bloxam was her one comfort. That kindly woman, after the first day or two and her natural reaction against a "messy dog"--when she had observed too that Pip, the animal, was not a bad dog at all, very clean in his habits and devoted to his mistress--decided that the poor old maid needed her services quite as badly as did the other two old women--more, indeed, because Mrs. Amorest had a quiet, assured courage of her own, and Mrs. Payne, although she was "that queer you never would believe unless you saw her," nevertheless had her own private sources of satisfaction. No, "that poor old Miss Bellringer" needed her the most.

Mrs. Bloxam spent more than her fair share of time in that house, as her husband was for ever telling her. She had plenty of other work to be busy over, and more paying work too, but her "old ladies" were her chiefest charge. "Poor old sillies," she called them--"living all alone top of that shaking old house--shouldn't like--" she half-apologised to her husband. He when sober admired her and when drunk abused her, whatever she did, so that his opinion was of no very great value.

But her furrowed crimson face, her large round features, her charwoman straw hat stuck askew on one side of her head, her queer hoarse laugh as though she had a tankard of ale in front of her mouth, her way of standing, her thick legs spread, her head back, her hands on her ample hips--all these things were soon jewels beyond price to May Beringer, who, in no time at all, was telling her everything about her life even to the intimacies of her friendship with dear Jane.

At this point she always cried a little, and even Mrs. Bloxam rubbed one eye with the back of her hand, that was of the texture of alligator skin.

"To see that poor old dear sitting up in bed with her grey hair all about her face, with her old green muffler round her throat--poor worm!--you can't but pity her."

"You'm too soft-'earted--that's what's the matter with you, Jennifer," said Mr. Bloxam, sober for the moment. But Mrs. Bloxam was no angel, and to see her in one of her tempers was to be reminded of the Homeric ages. But May Beringer saw her at her best--for the time being, at any rate.

It was not until the second Sunday after her arrival in Pontippy Square that May Beringer met Mrs. Amorest and Mrs. Payne.

It was a cold Sunday morning. From her bed May Beringer could see the sun like a red orange above the grey roofs of the houses. The houses were threaded with white frost, the smoke rose against the grey sky a greyer shadow, and the limbs of the one tree were silver-lined.

Did she move her head the sun appeared also to move and to rock in friendly greeting, and because the glass of the window was rough and coarse-grained the sun swelled as though with sudden ribaldry and then ran thin and tight like a drawn string.

It was warm in bed and cosy and faintly the bells could be heard. Two sparrows came hopping to the window and then a robin. Very soon her breakfast would come in and she could give them something. She had told Mrs. Bloxam that she would always have a boiled egg on Sunday as an extra to the toast and potted meat that was her customary fare.

At the thought of the egg she smiled and sat up in bed, bending over to the chair for her green sweater; she tied the arms of this tightly round her neck, allowing the body of it to fall over her breast, then she looked for the piece of amber and saw that it was there secure although scarcely visible in the dim light. Then she looked through the window again and saw the faintest thread of pale blue break the grey. So it would be a fine day. A fine clear frosty Sunday! Could anything be nicer?

A moment later Pip was at the door welcoming Mrs. Bloxam, who arrived carrying pressed against her mountainous bosom a tray, and her black bonnet with black bugles (her Sunday wear) was pushed to the back of her head and her face was all smiles.

"Now, here's a nice Sunday sirprise, my dear," she shouted (she always shouted at her old ladies although they were none of them deaf). "There's that kind woman giving you one of her sausages this morning."

"What woman?" asked Miss Beringer.

"Why, to be sure, Mrs. Hamorest of course. I'd 'ardly been in 'er room two minutes when she says, 'Mrs. Bloxam,' she says, 'there's a sausage more than I can manage,' she says. 'I've been wondering whether Miss Bellringer' (Mrs. Bloxam's perversions were always of kindly intention) 'would like one,' she says. 'Of course, I 'aven't exactly called on 'er, but we're all friends in this 'ouse,' she says, 'or I'm sure we ought to be. You just ask 'er, Mrs. Bloxam. I know Mrs. Payne don't care for sausages,' she says: 'it's just waste giving them to 'er.' 'Why, mum,' I says to 'er, 'Miss Bellringer looks just the sort of lady to relish a sausage, and it's a friendly feeling in you, mum,' I says, 'and if Sunday isn't a day to be friendly on, where will we all be?' I says. Poor worm! and 'er looking so pretty sitting up in bed with 'er kind thoughts and 'er snow-white 'air and 'er pretty little ways. So I just brought it along, miss, feelin' sure you'd relish it, and I've cooked it to a turn in Mrs. Hamorest's frying-pan--you just wait, my pretty, your turn's coming. Almost 'uman, miss, isn't 'e? More 'uman than some, I'm thinking." During this time Mrs. Bloxam was arranging Miss Beringer's bed, patting and pushing the pillows, smoothing the sheets, and setting the tray so that it sat evenly over Miss Beringer's lap. When that lady saw the tea, the egg, the buttered toast, the crisp and bursting sausage, her pale face flushed. Not a bad beginning to a pleasant Sunday. And she must go in and thank Mrs. Amorest. She was longing for a friend. She ached to love somebody again. Mrs. Bloxam entertained her with gossip, giving her detailed horrors out of the Sunday News with infinite relish and gusto, lit the fire, tidied the room, took away the tray again, and departed.

Then May Beringer sank back into slumber again, the easy slumber of the old, and lying there, the green muffler yet tied about her neck, so pale she was and still that it might have been death that held her.

The clock ticked on, the dog also slept, there was not a sound in the house. Then when it was nearly two o'clock, a coal fell out of the dying fire and crashed upon the grate, Pip woke and barked, up Miss Beringer started thinking the house on fire. She looked at the clock, and seeing how late it was, was soon out of bed. She washed in water icy cold, put on the warmest underclothing she had, and that was not warm enough. But she had been given by the landlady at St. Lennan a grey knitted woollen waistcoat, and this was a great comfort to her now. Her best clothes were her dark red jacket and skirt. The skirt was short both for the period and her age, but they were not yet faded and they were warm. She stared at herself in the little looking-glass over the wash-hand stand and was pleased. She looked young for her age, she thought. She was strong and healthy. It was not so absurd that she should find work as governess and companion.

For a moment her fears left her. She was brave and optimistic and happy. Full of this spirit she went out, Pip closely at her heel, crossed the passage, and knocked on Mrs. Amorest's door.

"Come in," said a little faint voice, and, entering, she was at once charmed--charmed with the neatness and tidiness of the room, some red-brown chrysanthemums in a thin silver vase, the old rose-coloured chairs, the blue and silver scene beyond the window, the orange fire faint like paper beneath the winter sun that flooded the place, and then the little woman with her snow-white hair, her beautiful hands, and the smile that shone in her eyes as, turning, she saw her visitor.

"It must be Miss Beringer," she said, coming forward.

"Yes, it is," said May Beringer, her long body trembling with interest and excitement. "I had to come in and just thank you for being so generous, as I am sure indeed you have been, to a perfect stranger and one whom you've never seen in your life before and have no reason at all to be kind to."

Miss Beringer always said everything twice or three times. It seemed to make her statement more definite.

"You will sit down, won't you?" Mrs. Amorest asked, drawing one of the armchairs near to the fire. "Because we are such very near neighbours we must know one another a little."

"I'm sure that's very kind of you," said May Beringer breathlessly. "I sound as though I'd been running up a whole flight of stairs, don't I? but I haven't really. It's only my nervousness. I'm always shy at meeting any one for the first time. I've always been so ever since a child, and indeed I can't remember a time when I wasn't nervous. As quite a little girl I was as shy as anything."

"You mustn't be shy with me," said Mrs. Amorest gently. "I'm a very unalarming person. What a delightful dog!"

"Yes, isn't he? I've always been partial to dogs. I've had dogs as companions for years and years. In fact, I'm never without a dog. His name's Pip!"

"Pip! What a nice name! Come here, Pip! Come and make friends."

Pip came, seeing that his mistress wished him to do so, but no one was very real to him save his mistress. However, he licked Mrs. Amorest's hand and then lay down, his head on his paws, waiting until his mistress should wish to move.

The two ladies considered one another. While talking amiably they were taking in one another's points. Each was thinking the other really old and pitying a little, but each needed a friend.

It was nevertheless very soon evident that May Beringer would be clay in the hands of Mrs. Amorest, and when that old lady realised that it was so there came into her heart not contempt (she felt contempt for no human being) but a little sigh, perhaps of regret. What she wanted was some one stronger than herself, some one on whose opinion she could rely, some one who would give her true and wise advice. It was very soon evident that May Beringer would be no projector of wise advice!

They talked a little, keeping their own confidences, and soon a silence fell. It was then that Mrs. Amorest said, "Now, I wonder. I had been thinking of going to the Cathedral service this afternoon. Would you care to come too?"

As soon as she said it she wished that she had not, for reasons that were, for her, weak and snobbish. Poor Miss Beringer would attract attention walking into the Cathedral: her face was odd, her clothes were odd, and Mrs. Amorest was sure that her walk would be odd. Mrs. Amorest, absolutely courageous though she was, hated to attract attention by any eccentricity. She hoped that Miss Beringer would decline, but at once, when she saw the light in Miss Beringer's eyes and heard the happiness in her voice as she said, "Thank you. I'll most certainly come. I'll go with you with pleasure," she was glad that she had suggested it. She thought to herself, "Poor old thing, she must be terribly lonely," and at that very same moment May Beringer was thinking to herself, "Poor old thing, I'm sure she's as lonely as anything. It must be wonderful to have some one to go with."

So they went very happily together, slowly down the stairs because the stairs were dark although it was early afternoon, and then slowly through the streets because it was a cold and frosty afternoon. That at any rate was the reason that they gave to one another. The real reason was that their limbs were not so strong nor so active as they had been.

They still did not give one another any confidences, May Beringer having in her mind always the old man with the silvery hair, and Mrs. Amorest because, in spite of her recent rashness with Agatha Payne, she was very good at keeping her own counsel.

Nevertheless, by the time that they had reached the high Cathedral door they were very good friends: May Beringer because she wanted some one to love willy-nilly, and Mrs. Amorest because she was touched by May Beringer's apparent helplessness. Within the quiet of the Cathedral they were happy indeed. They sat in the back of the nave unnoticed by anybody, and although the seats might have been more comfortable (and why, indeed, are they not more comfortable?) they were very glad to sit down and rest.

Mrs. Amorest knew the Cathedral by heart. She liked always to have the same place in the nave, almost the place where she was now sitting; thence she could see to her right framed between two pillars the window that had the pictures of the boy Christ, Christ with His mother, Christ playing with the boys by the river-side, Christ in the workshop, and the others.

She loved the colours, mistily purple and green and olive, but she loved it also for its subject, thinking of her own son, as she loved to do, when he had been small and helpless and divinely in need of her. Those days seemed to her but of yesterday, and closing her eyes she could see the bright blue Glebeshire skies and the sharp jagged teeth of the rocks, the valley running to the very lap of the sand, the white cottage set like a determined foot on the brow of the patient hill; Ambrose working at his poetry in the upstairs room with the slanting roof, and Brand in the garden crawling across the tiny plot of green to pull the cat's tail. . . .

All that she would see, and much more, as the organ wandered from pillar to pillar as though it were searching for her, and suddenly the clergyman's voice rose cutting the dimness and calling her to her prayers. She was never so near to her son as in that church, and while she stayed, her eyes closed, a hand seemed to be laid upon her brow and a voice to whisper to her that all was well with her and that she must be at peace.

She did not fear; she feared nor man nor woman nor life nor death--only God. But to-day instinctively as she sat there she realised that the woman next to her was compact of fear. She did not know how she had realised it, but this was true, and once again, as in her room, a little tremor of irritation shook her. She did not care for helpless people. Never in her life had she done so. She admired nothing so much as independence and courage, and perhaps that was the one lesson that life still had to teach her--tenderness for the weak. There was nothing she had admired so much in her son as his independence. She admired it also in old Agatha Payne.

But here was a woman who would, she foresaw, in no time at all, be depending upon her, wanting her advice, her assistance, her authority. Poor old thing! Mrs. Amorest, as they rose together to listen to the anthem, felt kindly indeed, and, because the anthem was Wesley's "Wilderness," her whole maternal being rose up in poor Miss Beringer's service. So much can familiar music do!

Miss Beringer, for her part, was not thinking overmuch of her companion. She was thinking of the comfort that it was to sit down, but the seats were hard, and there was a nice cosy light over everything--pretty place--pretty place--sleepy, sleepy--strangely sleepy . . . and then jerked awake to hear, far far away, the reading of the First Lesson.

No, she did not consider Mrs. Amorest very deeply, save that she wanted to love her. She wanted to love somebody, quickly, immediately, somebody of her own class with whom she could go for walks, and somebody, too, whom one could depend upon, somebody who would find work for her and advise her, and also somebody who would allow her to have her own way when she wanted it.

This old lady seemed really what she needed--old, of course, poor old dear, but then that was so pleasant for Miss Beringer to be of use to some one who needed her.

"The Wilderness and the Solitary Place . . ." sang the choir. At once May Beringer saw the long white stretch of the St. Lennan sands, the gulls wheeling with discordant cries through the grey air:

The Wilderness and the Solitary Place
Shall be glad--glad--glad--

 

Her legs were aching. Just below the knee there was a strange grinding pain. She looked about her to see whether any one were sitting down. No one immediately close to her, and Mrs. Amorest as straight as a stick, her little head up like a bird's--a stick and a bird! A stick and a bird!

"The Wilderness and the Solitary Place." Truly the pain that had crept up now into her knees was too bad to be borne. She sat down. Mrs. Amorest did not turn her head, but May Beringer would like to have whispered, "It is not because I am truly tired, but I have to-day a pain in my knee. I can stand as well as you, but to-day I have a pain. Any one might have it."

And then she fell asleep, quite suddenly, and dreamt of Jane Betts. The general murmur of prayer which seemed to her in her dream to be the rustle of mice in the straw--she was about to call out to Jane "Take care, dear! Look out for the mice!"--aroused her. She slipped down upon her knees. They hurt her badly, and the wooden prayer-stool cut into her very bone. She could not think of her prayers because of the pain, but vaguely behind the pain ran the mice scampering about in her head. Afraid of what? Of the cat perhaps. A large dark cat with green eyes. She shuddered, and fear came down upon her like a large grasping hand, and she was glad that she could feel Mrs. Amorest's shoulder against her.

They walked home through the velvet-frosted dark. The dark, studded with stars and lights on the hills like the eyes of innumerable animals watching. Not cats, because they were not green, but tigers and lions, lions and tigers.

She explained this to Mrs. Amorest. They were walking very slowly because they were both extremely tired, but they would not mention this.

"They are like the eyes of lions and tigers," May Beringer said.

But Mrs. Amorest was thinking of the money that her cousin was going to leave her, and she did not hear. One thousand pounds! One thousand pounds! What might she not do? She and Brand together. . . .

"Yes," she said, "don't they sing beautifully? Especially that boy. . . . There's something about a boy's voice that always makes me want to cry. Silly, of course. . . ."

Poor old thing! She was deaf then as well as old! Poor old thing! When May Beringer spoke next she shouted, but still Mrs. Amorest's mind was distant, and they arrived in Pontippy Square in silence, two very very weary old women.

Slowly, slowly they mounted the stairs, stopping on every landing for breath; and it was as though when they stood there they were listening for some one or something. They could hear only the beating of their hearts.

Arrived on their own floor May Beringer, breathless, gasped, "I always make a cup of tea about this time. I wonder whether you would come and drink it with me?"

Mrs. Amorest said that she would be delighted. "A minute to take my hat off."

When, later, she came into May Beringer's room she exclaimed with pleasure, "What nice things you have!" May Beringer's heart went out, bursting with love, to the dear old thing looking so charming there in the middle of the floor, with her neat little figure, her beautiful hair, her sparkling eyes. Here was some one to love indeed!

Mrs. Amorest admired everything,--the blue carpet, the round mahogany table, the four mahogany chairs, the arm-chairs, the bookcase, the pictures after Cuyp,--especially the bookcase.

"I do love reading, don't you, Miss Beringer? What have you got here? Mrs. Henry Wood! She writes good stories, I think. And those volumes of Good Words. I shall ask you to lend me one some day. And Sir Walter Scott. My husband always used to say that Sir Walter Scott had the true romantic spirit, although a little old-fashioned of course. But then my husband was more modern than I was. As of course he would be, being a writer. He wrote plays and poetry, and was very well known in his time. Very well known indeed. Ah! I see you have Tennyson. Don't you love 'The Idylls of the King'? I do. That one about Guinevere is such a beautiful tale, I think, but sad, of course. Terribly sad. But then they did wrong, poor things, and it was right that they should be punished. Still, I can never help but be sorry for them a little. Tennyson was such a noble poet, I think. Perhaps a little too noble sometimes. Don't you think people can be too noble, Miss Beringer, just now and again?"

Mrs. Amorest's eyes twinkled as she straightened herself after looking at the bookcase. That was what her husband used to call "her wicked, sarcastic side"--the side of her that he had never understood, so that she had been forced to drive it under during their married life, but even now, after all these years, it would on occasion break out.

She moved around admiring everything, while May Beringer saw to the kettle. She saw then the piece of red amber. She stopped where she was, lost in wonder.

"Oh dear! What a beautiful thing!"

"Yes," said May Beringer, her voice awed and reverent, "that was given me by my dearest friend."

"How wonderful! I really never have seen anything so beautiful. May I pick it up for a moment?"

"Certainly. Do look at it." May Beringer's voice shook with pride.

When Mrs. Amorest had it in her hand she was pleased indeed. She loved beautiful things, but beautiful things were always so remote, behind shop windows, in museums or picture-galleries, always ticketed and catalogued, and above your head a notice that said "Don't touch."

When her hands closed about this and she felt its coldness and its strength, when she held it up to the light and saw the shaft of gold strike through to its very heart, when she saw the liquid bubbles of rich ruby red that danced in the cleft of thick, honey-coloured, misted fibre, when she saw the dragon with his flaming head and gold-flashing claws, when she felt its sturdiness and independence and form, she could only say and exclaim, as she replaced it reverently on the mantelpiece:

"You are fortunate to have it! It lights up all the room."

May Beringer was pleased! To praise her red amber was to praise her Jane Betts, and to bring straight back there into the room all that warm friendship and love, all those happy days. The kettle was boiling. The biscuits were spread upon the blue plate, the bread and butter was cut. They sat down happily to the round mahogany table.

"I have had a strange pain in my knee to-day," said May Beringer. "I think it must be the frost. I wonder whether the frost can have given me a pain in my knee. I really never have anything the matter with me. As a rule there's nothing the matter with me at all."

"Well," said Mrs. Amorest, "I don't wonder. This sudden cold weather can give any one anything. Now have you any Elliman's? Because I've always found that rubbing in a little Elliman's last thing at night is quite wonderful. Now if you haven't any I'd be only too glad--"

There was a knock on the door. Both ladies were startled. "Come in," said Miss Beringer.

The door slowly opened, then there was an interval during which nothing happened save that Pip drew back towards his mistress, growling. Then Mrs. Payne came forward. To Miss Beringer, unprepared for her, she must have been amazing enough. She was wearing her old red wrapper and her crimson shoes. Through her hair was stuck the black comb with the glass diamonds. Her shapeless body, her large heavy bosom, her high colour--one of the raggle-taggle gipsies indeed, hemispheres apart from the two Englishwomen who sat there looking at her.

She had been going to speak, her mouth had opened, a smile had been preparing, but at the instant of entering she had been transfixed, even as Lot's wife on looking back to the accursed cities of the Plains. She stared, her eyes, large and black and piercing, were held as though by the glory of the Lord; she put her hand up to her breast and, breathing deeply, seeing neither of the women in front of her nor anything in the room save the mantelpiece and its contents, gazed.

It had been unusual enough for her to leave her room. The cause had been the enthralling excitement of Mrs. Amorest's money. For days now she had considered it, and with every day and with every hour of every day the thing had grown more dominating.

If that old woman was going to be left one thousand pounds a year she would have some of it--a lot of it, half of it, more than half of it. The old woman was without a friend in the world, nor would she have a relation when her cousin died--you could not count that son of hers who, sure enough, had abandoned her for ever.

No; all that Agatha Payne had to do was to increase her influence, to make the old woman fond of her. Already she was fond of her; that was proved by the many occasions on which she came to visit her, but Agatha Payne must make her more fond of her. She must be very friendly and agreeable and neighbourly. . . . All day she had been forcing herself to be neighbourly, but her laziness was difficult to subdue. It was a cold day, although the sun was shining, and bed was very agreeable. As you went on through life, bed became more and more agreeable. But at last, around four in the afternoon, Agatha Payne had forced herself out slowly; as she washed and lazily put on a few clothes her brain crept round and round the thought of Lucy Amorest's money like a cat around a bird's cage.

She thought neither easily nor readily. Did she begin to think deeply, that pain bound itself about her head. She would sit before the old red tablecloth letting the cards slip through her fingers--knave of diamonds, four of hearts, queen of clubs, seven of hearts, three of clubs--and the fish would come swimming out of the green tank and would circle lazily about her head. Always she saw Lucy Amorest's money, like a fish larger than all the others and with dazzling scales of gold swimming just in front of her. She would put out her hand to touch it, but with a swerve of its tail it would be away, out of her reach, just above her head.

At last she became active enough to determine on a visit. She would go and see Lucy Amorest. So with a flick of her eye sending the fish back into the tank again and leaving the cards loose on the table under the guardianship of Miranda, she opened the door, shuffled across the hall, and knocked.

There was no answer from Mrs. Amorest's room. She knocked again. Still no answer. Where could the old woman be? She opened the door and looked in. No one there. She closed it and stood, licking her finger, considering. She would not be out, it was late now and dark. Ah, the other old lady, the new tenant! And suddenly the fear struck her that perhaps this new tenant, this Miss Bellringer or whatever Mrs. Bloxam said her name was, might also have her designs on Lucy Amorest's money.

Lucy Amorest had told her--why then should she not also tell Miss Bellringer? Agatha Payne's face grew angry and troubled. Let them just try, those two! She'd show them! Already it seemed to her that she had a right to Lucy Amorest's money, to part of it at any rate. Let any one come in and deprive her of what was truly hers and she would show them!

It was with the sudden determination that they were at this very moment plotting together in there that she moved towards the third door farther down the passage (the one that had until lately concealed the life, hopes, and last torments of old red-faced Mr. Hopper, dead of double pneumonia) and knocked. Some one said "Come in," and she entered. It was immediately after that that the critical moment of her life came to her. She had been expecting to see nothing but two old women gossiping together; rather than that she saw, straight before her, as though it had been placed there for her especial glory, the heart and centre of all the colour of the world. The lamplight, the leaping fire illumined it. Ruby and crimson and amber, blood red and honey gold, threaded with flame and clouded with smoky bronze, the pedestal and the dragon came to her. From that instant of their mutual greeting they were one. Far back, deep set in her gipsy ancestry, she had been arrayed as a queen and colour of flame and fire, and running splendour had been her rightful dower.

Now she clutched her soiled wrapper about her breasts and lusted for possession as never in her lazy, sensuous, imaginative life she had lusted before.

Mrs. Amorest, looking upwards, felt something strange in her gaze. It was strange that she should be here at all. But she did the honours. "Miss Beringer," she said, "this is Mrs. Payne who lives with us on this floor."

Agatha Payne came forward. Miss Beringer awkwardly rose, and, as she always did when she was nervous, giggled. Agatha Payne spoke in her deep thick voice:

"I am glad to meet you."

"You'll have some tea, won't you?" said Miss Beringer. "I'll fetch another cup. You must want some tea, I'm sure. I'll get a cup in a moment." She went to the cupboard and Agatha Payne settled down into the vacant chair, her eyes still on the mantelpiece.

"We've been to the Cathedral," said Mrs. Amorest amiably, "and we've enjoyed it so much. They had that anthem about the Wilderness that I always like. A boy sang so well. Have you been out, Mrs. Payne?"

"No, I have not." Mrs. Payne smiled and did her best to look amiable. "Now don't you go out overtiring yourself. It would never do for you to be knocked up. We can't have you ill."

"Oh, really," said Mrs. Amorest, laughing, "I am very well indeed. I never was better. I did feel a little bit tired when I first came in, but I'm quite rested now. Miss Beringer's tea has done me a world of good."

Miss Beringer had brought another cup and Mrs. Payne had her tea. Her chair was too small for her. She billowed around it. Her eyes never left the mantelpiece.

"That's a beautiful thing you have there," she said at last.

"Oh, my piece of amber," said Miss Beringer nervously. "Yes, that's my piece of amber, my most precious possession. It was given me years ago by my dearest friend. I'm so glad you like it."

"I do like it," said Mrs. Payne, breathing deeply and staring at it so fixedly that you might think that she hoped to draw it to her, magnet-wise. "I do like it."

"I'm so glad you do," said Miss Beringer. "It's been much admired. Every one likes it. They say I could get a great deal of money for it if I wished to sell it. It's worth a lot of money, I believe."

"Do you think you would sell it if you were offered a large sum?" asked Agatha Payne.

"Oh dear no!" said Miss Beringer. "Nothing would induce me. It was a present from my dearest friend. The greatest friend of my life gave it to me. I would never sell it. Nothing would induce me."

Agatha Payne slowly rose. Her knees were trembling with excitement. "May I look at it closer?" she asked.

"Why, certainly," said Miss Beringer. "Please do."

Agatha Payne went close to the mantelpiece.

"May I have it in my hands a moment?" she asked.

"Yes, certainly," said May Beringer.

She took it, held it in both hands and stood there brooding over it, exactly as though she had been an old gipsy vagrant telling fortunes. The cool texture of it, so different from its warm burning colour, stole through into the secret places of her heart. She felt, as she held it, that it was hers, that it had always been hers for ever and for ever and for ever.

She put it back, very tenderly, and her lips moved as though she had been bidding it a momentary farewell. Slowly she came back to the other two women. She sat down again and finished her tea. They talked a little, Pip slept, snapping at imaginary flies in his dreams. A silence fell and the old ladies sat, staring in front of them, lost also in their dreams.

Then Agatha Payne departed. She turned for a moment at the door and looked back at the mantelpiece.

When she was gone Miss Beringer broke out:

"Oh, I don't like her at all! Mrs. Amorest, do you like her? Don't you think there's something queer? There's something very odd about her indeed!"

Mrs. Amorest said, "Poor old thing! She lives so much alone. She's old and all by herself. We ought to be kind to her."

"Oh, I don't know," said Miss Beringer in great agitation, "I don't think I can be kind to her. I don't like her at all, I really don't. Did you see the queer way she looked at me?"

"She always looks a little strange," said Mrs. Amorest. "She has those big black eyes."

"It wasn't only those eyes," said Miss Beringer. "No, it certainly wasn't only those eyes. I'm sure she's going to do me a mischief. I know she is. And did you see the way she held my piece of amber? Just as though it was hers. I'm sure she'll steal it from me."

"Dear Miss Beringer," said Mrs. Amorest, "please don't disturb yourself. Mrs. Payne is a good woman. I know she is. I've known her for a long time. There's nothing to be afraid of."

"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure," said Miss Beringer. "I'm sure I don't know. It's very kind of you to say so, but I'm sure I don't know. I've always been afraid of something all my life. It seems to be my destiny. It's my fate to have something to be afraid of. I'm sure I don't like being under the same roof with her. She'll do something to me in my sleep."

Mrs. Amorest consoled her as best she could, but in her heart was a little scorn for this silly, frightened woman, and a foreboding that she herself would have a tire sometime with such a companion. She said goodnight kindly and, moved by her own good heart, bent forward and kissed the other's withered cheek.

"Don't you worry, dear," she said. "Have a good sleep and you'll find you won't be thinking of it in the morning."

But Miss Beringer did think of it. After Mrs. Amorest's departure she went to her door and locked it. Then she called Pip to her and sat with the dog straddled upon her lap, staring wide-eyed into the fading fire and every once and again giving a little shiver.

It was a seasonable Christmas that year. Enough snow fell, then enough frost came, and then the sun shone. If it did not shine, at least it rode a circle of crimson fire through the heavens and, before the frost but after the slime of preparatory fogs, fragments of its fire splashed the High Street and spread in pools across the Precincts floor.

As I have intimated in other chronicles, Polchester of the old days was an enclosed town. The Riviera was unknown to it and the Garden of Allah a dream with Omar. Though London might call to the richer citizens on one occasion or another, at Christmas time every one stayed at home and, more wonderful yet to our modern disillusion, enjoyed family parties with Christmas trees, plum puddings, stockings, and the waits invited into the hall. It is not true, however, that the weather was any more romantic then than it is to-day; there were just as many rainy and muggy and foggy and dirty and dismal skies, and Glebeshire, warmer than any other part of the British Isles, has never had an intimate acquaintance with crisp and shining snow. About once in twenty years there are snowfalls, frosts, and blue skies, and how happy then every one is and how eagerly every one hands down the year to an envious posterity!

This was such a year, and ten days before Christmas the frost came and held, the powdered snow remained jewelled and resplendent, the sun looked down from a sky as delicately blue as an egg-shell and laughed to see the fun. And fun there was!

Magnet's toy-shop in the Market Cloisters had a Father Christmas, a true and veritable Father Christmas to be seen with two crimson cheeks and long snow-white beard any afternoon between two and four. Jeremy Cole so beheld him, and his sisters Mary and Helen, and the Dean's son Ernest, and the Fisher girls, and little Tommy Chawner. He did not say much, but he moved between the dolls and the trains, the balls and the soldiers, as only Santa Claus could move, with an authority, a benignity, a ripe wisdom that no impostor could have been clever enough to feign!

Every one did their best. In the Market-place there was a Punch and Judy with a thick-set jolly-faced man in charge, and he might have been that very same Garrick, friend of Maradick, whose history has been elsewhere narrated. I don't say he was, and I don't say he wasn't. Half-way up the High Street, Gummridge's the stationers had a whole Christmas tree in their window. Here was a stumbling-block to the whole High Street traffic. It was quite impossible to get any child--any perambulator baby indeed--past that window. It was a tree frosted, coloured, and shining, hung about with every glittering bauble, shaped to a perfect pinnacle of exquisite symmetry. But best of all was the window of Hunt & Griffin, the General Store, for here, for the first time in Polchester history, was a whole front window given over to pageantry, to none other than the scene in the life of Cinderella when, despondent beside the fire, she is amazed by the sudden apparition of her peaked-hatted Godmother. There is the fire and there Cinderella, there the pots and pans, the brick floor, and the huge kitchen rafters, there the Godmother, and there beyond the snow-lined window-pane the vision of the gold coach and the snow-white ponies. So great was the confusion outside this window that had this occurred in these traffic-haunted times the show must have been forbidden, but in those lucky days nobody minded, nobody cared. Let the children have a good time, Christmas comes but once a year, and even Mrs. Sampson, although her neuralgia was at its height, could not but admit that the window made a happy display.

The town rang during those days with laughter. Propter Hill outside the town had just enough snow on it to allow of tobogganing, and Pol Fields, having been flooded, gave for a whole wonderful fortnight the most marvellous skating. The town rang with laughter and the ringing of bells. The Cathedral let itself go and burst into perpetual peals of merriment to the great annoyance of late sleepers, dyspeptics, and ruminating essayists. There was fun everywhere, apples and oranges in the Market-place, and carols up and down the streets after dark.

It was the best Christmas that Polchester had known for many a day past or would know for many a day to come.

Mrs. Amorest was one who had always enjoyed a seasonable Christmas. To her as to every old person Christmas was filled with sad memories, but she had a wonderful gift of enjoying fun at the moment of its occurrence, and being aware that she was so enjoying it, and because the fun in her life had been neither frequent nor extravagant very small occurrences amused and excited her.

This was the happiest Christmas known to her for many a day. Struggle as she might not to think of the money coming to her, she could not keep it out of her consciousness. She told herself again and again (and when she was alone in her room she repeated the words aloud sometimes) that she must not place too strong a reliance on her cousin's promise. "He may have altered his mind the next moment. It's silly to believe him." Nevertheless the solemnity of his words, the caress of his hand as it rested on her head--these things were difficult to dismiss.

And the happiness that came from the promise was also difficult to dismiss. She was naturally happy. Give her the least excuse and she must be happy. Although she believed that God did not intend that human beings should be very happy because they were in this world for the training of their souls, and souls were better trained by sorrow than by joy, nevertheless an imp of happiness would continue to jump in her heart and stir her little world with his discordant cries of joy. Joy at what? A kindly action, a splash of sun across the street, a barrel-organ round the corner, a stained-glass window, an apple, and a piece of cheese. She could not keep down her spirits as, being a penniless, lonely old widow of over seventy, she should.

And, this Christmas, she lost completely her self-control. She adored above everything else in the world the spending of money, perhaps for the very reason that she never had very much to spend. She had never been able to believe that statement often written in the papers that millionaires did not know what to do with their money. Did not know! Why, she could spend a million pounds quite easily at Gummridge's alone! But there! The newspapers were never to be trusted. She liked greatly to be given things, but still better was it herself to make presents. The excitement of giving some one something he or she wanted was intense, to watch the opening of the parcel, to see the stare of pleasure and surprise, to hear the exclamation, to feel the affection flowing out--was there any luxury in life like it?

And it was a luxury that, of late, she had been compelled to deny herself. Last Christmas she had given Agatha Payne half a dozen pocket-handkerchiefs, Mrs. Bloxam a piece of ribbon, and her cousin a pocket-book. Worst sorrow of all, it was impossible to send Brand anything. No use to throw parcels out into the void. The best she could do was to write two letters, one a month in advance, and this she sent to the only address she had, something in California, and then one on Christmas Eve, such as she had always written to him at Christmas time. This she also sent out to California, but she wrote it because for a moment it brought him closer to her--she felt, with his photograph up there in front of her, as though she had him with her in the room. These were all but poor substitutes for reality, and, cheat ourselves as we may, our subconscious selves refuse to be deceived. Mrs. Amorest knew nothing about her subconscious self, but she did know that after last Christmas she had a miserable sense of inadequacy and frustrated purpose. She had made nobody happy. Even Mrs. Bloxam had disappeared into the intimacies of her family to emerge two days later with a black eye and a bruised cheek. This year she would fling her cap over the mill. She had prospects. She did not face them finally, those prospects, did not take them, hold them in front of her, look them in the eyes and say to them as one always ought to do to prospects, "Now, are you sound and healthy? Have you got heart and lungs and legs and arms and a good stiff back?" No, she merely reported on them--she heard that they were good and healthy and promised very well indeed! Then she went ahead.

The plan came to her in the middle of the night, or rather in one of those early morning hours when the first cock crows and the hidden despair raises its abominable head. Lying there in the early morning she drove her despairs away and considered Miss Beringer. Poor Miss Beringer! What a frightened, nervous, trembling creature she was! She would like to do something for her! She would like well to give her a happy Christmas! And Agatha Payne, too. It was then that the idea came to her.

At first she was frightened of it. It would demand energy and persistence. And had she money enough? Money in the future would not do. She examined her purse and found that she had sufficient did she use part of next quarter's rent. She trembled at that, but she was sure that kind Mr. Agnew, when he knew of the promise that her cousin had made to her, would not hesitate to advance her. . . .

She trembled. Her heart warned her. Her cheeks were flushed and she had a guilty air. But she held to her purpose, and once she had begun she did not look back. Once she had begun she could not look back. She moved, during those frosty coloured days, about the town, the very spirit of adventure. She found that she must go quietly. The excitement tired her, and sometimes she would, in a moment, feel so weary that she could not get to the top of the High Street, and on one occasion when she was at the top she could not go down again and had to take refuge in the shop of Mr. Bennett, the grand bookseller. There she sat, greatly alarmed, on a chair in the very middle of the shop with busts of Byron and Walter Scott looking down on her and a grand smell of Russia leather and old vellum in her nostrils, and the complete works of George Eliot at her elbow. Old Mr. Bennett was very kind to her although she told him at once that she was not there to buy anything, and who should come in at that very moment but Archdeacon Brandon himself, magnificent, handsome, superb, ordering somebody "on the Psalms" with the air of a king and a conqueror. She looked around her with the hope of seeing some of her husband's plays, and when she did not would have liked to ask Mr. Bennett whether he kept them in stock, but her courage failed her and she could only thank him very much and slip out of the shop as quietly as possible. Fortunately she did not hear the Archdeacon's question: "And who was that shabby little woman?" He asked out of all kindness, feeling it his duty as the father of the flock to keep his eye upon all the inhabitants of the town.

She tried to keep her head about her purchases. She found, as many another has found before and after her, that the best things were always the most expensive. And then when it came to the central purchase of all, to the core, the heart, the kernel, the pinnacle, the pièce de résistance, the raison d'être, and any other foreign phrase that you prefer, she found that here expense was inevitable. Try as you would, it must cost more than you had supposed. Of course she only wanted a small one, but even the small ones. . . . And then at the last, two days before Christmas, she found in the Market-place, in a corner behind the old woman under the green umbrella, the very thing, a darling, a perfect specimen, a miracle, and, when she enquired of the nice round-faced man whose possession it was, she found that it was only . . . well, less than the experience of the last two days had led her to believe possible, although more, a good deal more, than she had originally intended. She bought it, and ordered that it should be sent to her room, blushing a little in spite of herself as she named the address. She gave her name very carefully, begging him to be watchful that it should not be sent to any other room by mistake, and he promised her, saying that he would himself bring it.

He did in fact arrive with it when she was there, and she liked h