I.

Theodore Vellan had been out of England for more than thirty years. Thirty odd years ago the set he lived in had been startled and mystified by his sudden flight and disappearance. At that time his position here had seemed a singularly pleasant one. He was young—he was seven- or eight-and-twenty; he was fairly well off—he had something like three thousand a year, indeed; he belonged to an excellent family, the Shropshire Vellans, of whom the titled head, Lord Vellan of Norshingfield, was his uncle; he was good-looking, amiable, amusing, popular; and he had just won a seat in the House of Commons (as junior member for Sheffingham), where, since he was believed to be ambitious as well as clever, it was generally expected that he would go far.

Then, quite suddenly, he had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and left England. His motives for this unlikely course he explained to no one. To a few intimate friends he wrote brief letters of farewell. 'I am off for a journey round the world. I shall be gone an indefinite time.' The indefinite time ended by defining itself as upwards of thirty years, for the first twenty of which only his solicitor and his bankers could have given you his address, and they wouldn't. For the last ten he was understood to be living in the island of Porto Rico, and planting sugar. Meanwhile his uncle had died, and his cousin (his uncle's only son) had succeeded to the peerage. But the other day his cousin, too, had died, and died childless, so that the estates and dignities had devolved upon himself. With that, a return to England became an obligation; there were a score of minor beneficiaries under his cousin's will, whose legacies could not, without great delay, be paid unless the new lord was at hand.

II.

Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow—at Bowden's Hotel, in Cork Street,' and asking when he might come to her. She had answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night,' to which he had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.

She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates together at Oxford. She thought of the three handsome, happy, highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church, and Vellan—not in politics, she could never understand his political aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his character—but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead, and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events, for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache. Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all things, gentle—with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief element of his charm—his gentleness, which was really a phase of his modesty. 'He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful and kind,' she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his gentleness, his modesty, his kindness. Oh, but he was no milksop. He had plenty of spirit, plenty of fun; he was boyish, he could romp. And at that, a scene repeated itself to her mind, a scene that had passed in this same drawing-room more than thirty years ago. It was tea-time, and on the tea-table lay a dish of pearl biscuits, and she and her husband and Vellan were alone. Her husband took a handful of pearl biscuits, and tossed them one by one into the air, while Vellan threw back his head, and caught them in his mouth as they came down—that was one of his accomplishments. She smiled as she remembered it, but at the same time she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

'Why did he go away? What could it have been?' she wondered, her old bewilderment at his conduct, her old longing to comprehend it, reviving with something of the old force. 'Could it have been...? Could it have been...?' And an old guess, an old theory, one she had never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again presented itself interrogatively to her mind.

The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall, white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands. It took her a little while to realise who it was. With an unthinking disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.

Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a middle-aged lady in a cap.

III.

After dinner he would not let her leave him, but returned with her to the drawing-room, and she said that he might smoke. He smoked odd little Cuban cigarettes, whereof the odour was delicate and aromatic. They had talked of everything; they had laughed and sighed over their ancient joys and sorrows. We know how, in the Courts of Memory, Mirth and Melancholy wander hand in hand. She had cried a little when her husband and her brother were first spoken of, but at some comic reminiscence of them, a moment afterwards, she was smiling through her tears. 'Do you remember so-and-so?' and 'What has become of such-a-one?' were types of the questions they asked each other, conjuring up old friends and enemies like ghosts out of the past. Incidentally, he had described Porto Rico and its negroes and its Spaniards, its climate, its fauna and its flora.

In the drawing-room they sat on opposite sides of the fire, and were silent for a bit. Profiting by the permission she had given him, he produced one of his Cuban cigarettes, opened it at its ends, unrolled it, rolled it up again, and lit it.

'Now the time has come for you to tell me what I most want to know,' she said.

'What is that?'

'Why you went away.'

'Oh,' he murmured.

She waited a minute. Then, 'Tell me,' she urged.

'Do you remember Mary Isona?' he asked.

She glanced up at him suddenly, as if startled. 'Mary Isona? Yes, of course.'

'Well, I was in love with her.'

'You were in love with Mary Isona?'

'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm afraid.'

She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face, luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair—Mary Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was professional. She came into it for an hour or two at a time now and then, to play or to give a music lesson.

'Yes,' he repeated; 'I was in love with her. I have never been in love with any other woman. It seems ridiculous for an old man to say it, but I am in love with her still. An old man? Are we ever really old? Our body grows old, our skin wrinkles, our hair turns white; but the mind, the spirit, the heart? The thing we call "I"? Anyhow, not a day, not an hour, passes, but I think of her, I long for her, I mourn for her. You knew her—you knew what she was. Do you remember her playing? Her wonderful eyes? Her beautiful pale face? And how the hair grew round her forehead? And her talk, her voice, her intelligence! Her taste, her instinct, in literature, in art—it was the finest I have ever met.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' Mrs. Kempton said slowly. 'She was a rare woman. I knew her intimately,—better than any one else, I think. I knew all the unhappy circumstances of her life: her horrid, vulgar mother; her poor, dreamy, inefficient father; her poverty, how hard she had to work. You were in love with her. Why didn't you marry her?'

'My love was not returned.'

'Did you ask her?'

'No. It was needless. It went without saying.'

'You never can tell. You ought to have asked her.'

'It was on the tip of my tongue, of course, to do so a hundred times. My life was passed in torturing myself with the question whether I had any chance, in hoping and fearing. But as often as I found myself alone with her I knew it was hopeless. Her manner to me—it was one of frank friendliness. There was no mistaking it. She never thought of loving me.'

'You were wrong not to ask her. One never can be sure. Oh, why didn't you ask her?' His old friend spoke with great feeling.

He looked at her, surprised and eager. 'Do you really think she might have cared for me?'

'Oh, you ought to have told her: you ought to have asked her,' she repeated.

'Well—now you know why I went away.'

'Yes.'

'When I heard of her—her—death'—he could not bring himself to say her suicide—'there was nothing else for me to do. It was so hideous, so unutterable. To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the old people, was quite impossible. I wanted to follow her, to do what she had done. The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as far from myself, as I could.'

'Sometimes,' Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, 'sometimes I wondered whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such connection with Mary's death—it followed it so immediately. I wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her. But I couldn't believe it—it was only because the two things happened one upon the other. Oh, why didn't you tell her? It is dreadful, dreadful!'

IV.

When he had left her, she sat still for a little while before the fire.

'Life is a chance to make mistakes—a chance to make mistakes. Life is a chance to make mistakes.'

It was a phrase she had met in a book she was reading the other day: then she had smiled at it; now it rang in her ears like the voice of a mocking demon.

'Yes, a chance to make mistakes,' she said, half aloud.

She rose and went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, turned over its contents, and took out a letter—an old letter, for the paper was yellow and the ink was faded. She came back to the fireside, and unfolded the letter and read it. It covered six pages of note-paper, in a small feminine hand. It was a letter Mary Isona had written to her, Margaret Kempton, the night before she died, more than thirty years ago. The writer recounted the many harsh circumstances of her life; but they would all have been bearable, she said, save for one great and terrible secret. She had fallen in love with a man who was scarcely conscious of her existence; she, a little obscure Italian music teacher, had fallen in love with Theodore Vellan. It was as if she had fallen in love with an inhabitant of another planet: the worlds they respectively belonged to were so far apart She loved him—she loved him—and she knew her love was hopeless, and she could not bear it. Oh, yes; she met him sometimes, here and there, at houses she went to to play, to give lessons. He was civil to her: he was more than civil—he was kind; he talked to her about literature and music. 'He is so gentle, so strong, so wise; but he has never thought of me as a woman—a woman who could love, who could be loved. Why should he? If the moth falls in love with the star, the moth must suffer.... I am cowardly; I am weak; I am what you will; but I have more than I can bear. Life is too hard—too hard. To-morrow I shall be dead. You will be the only person to know why I died, and you will keep my secret.'

'Oh, the pity of it—the pity of it!' murmured Mrs. Kempton. 'I wonder whether I ought to have shown him Mary's letter.'

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