England, the heart of the countryside, freshened by December and drifted over by delicate breaths that are scarcely fog, and through which like a chrysanthemum seen behind ground glass the sun contrives to shine, the English country in December is one thing, London quite another.

Jimmy wandered across from Paddington to his destination, part of the time on foot, part of the time peering from a crawling hansom in immediate peril of collision with every other object that like himself lost bearings in the nightmarish yellow fog.

He fetched up before No. – , Portman Square, at mid-day, and rang the door bell of Lady Sorgham's town-house, and in his eagerness to find his friend did not ask himself how the time accorded with calling hours.

She was at home.

An insignificant footman told him this, and the gentleman reflected that it was astounding what the words, heard often in the course of ten years, meant to him still.

In the sitting-room, before a coal fire, a writing table at her side, a pen in her hand, he found Mrs. Falconer.

He sincerely struggled with an inability to speak at once, even the consoling how-d'-dos that cover for us a multitude of feelings, were not at his tongue's end.

The fire had burned away a few feet of fog and lighted lamps and candles shone pallidly through an obscurity about whose existence there could be no doubt.

The inmates of Lady Sorgham's thoroughly English and thoroughly comfortable drawing-room were aliens, possessing neither of them a hearthstone within range of several thousand miles. But no sooner had they greeted – Bulstrode triumphantly peering at her through both real and mental haze – shaken hands, and each found a seat before the grate, than an enchanting homeliness overspread the place. Bulstrode felt it and smiled with content to think she did as well, and remembered an occasion in America when they had both of them missed a train for some out-of-the-way place and found themselves side by side in a mid-country station to pass there three hours of a broiling afternoon. The flies and mosquitoes buzzed about them, the thermometer registered ninety degrees, but happy, cool and unruffled Mary Falconer, smiling up at him from her hard bench, had said:

"Jimmy, let's build here!"

"No one, Jimmy, is old" – Mrs. Falconer had once said to him on an occasion when a word regarding gray hairs had drifted into their conversation. Noticing the smooth reflection of the light along her hair, Bulstrode had spoken of its golden quality, and the lady had suddenly covered the strand with her hand; she knew that there ran a line she did not want him to see.

"No one is old, Jimmy, who has even the least little bit of future towards which he looks! It's only those people whose doors are all shut, whose window blinds are all drawn to, who, no matter which way they look, see no opening into a distance towards which they will want to go – only those people are old!"

And as for Bulstrode, if Mrs. Falconer's idea were right, he was a very young man still, for at the end of every path others opened and led rapidly away. Scene gave on to scene, dissolved and grew new again. Every door gave to rooms whose suites were delightful, indefinite, and all followed towards a future whose existence Bulstrode never doubted. But there were certainly times, as the days went methodically on, there were decidedly many times when it took all his faith and his spirit to endure the étape that lay between self and life. Such a little tranquil home as a certain property he had lately acquired was what he dreamed of sharing with Mrs. Falconer. He did not, with any degree of anxiety, ask himself whether or not it were dead men's shoes he was waiting for, and no clear, formulated thought of tangible events took existence in his mind. But he knew that he waited for his own.

It was with some such personal feeling that in something that looked like a future he might one day lead the woman he loved home, that he had taken any pleasure whatsoever in his involuntary purchase of the old property known as The Dials. The gray house down in Glousceshire in its half-forsaken seclusion, the lie of the land round it, its shut-offness from the world, its ancient beauty, had been a constant suggestion to him of a future dwelling, and the doors, the windows, the low-inviting rooms, the shadowy stairways, ingles, gables, terraces, the dials and sunken gardens, had appeared to him conceived, planned and waiting to be the settings for a life of his own. He wanted very much to tell Mrs. Falconer all about the lovely English country-seat.

In the room where they now talked, wreaths of fog filled the corners like spiders' dusty webs that poised and swung. The odor that stamps England hung in the mist, furthermore permeated with the scent of a bouquet at Mrs. Falconer's elbow and which at one moment of his visit Jimmy recognized for a lot of roses sent by parcel post from the Westboro' greeneries.

"Do you ever sew?" he asked her, and she admitted to a thimble which persistently, with a suggestion of reproach, turned up every now and then amongst her belongings; now falling out from a jewel box, then stowed away in a handkerchief case, out of place and continually reproachful: kept because it had been her mother's.

If he did not speak other than in a general way of the rather long visit he had been making to the Duke of Westboro' in Glousceshire, he did tell his friend all about The Dials and dwelt on the fascination that the old place possessed. The Dials was, in point of fact, very agreeably described to Mrs. Falconer, who looked it out on the map of Glousceshire, and Bulstrode's purchase (for he had legally gone in for it, the whole thing), was made to seem a very jewel of a property.

"It's as lovely as an old print," she said, "as good as a Turner. You're a great artist along your lines, Jimmy. Don't have it rebuilt by some more than designing architect in trouble, or landscape-gardened by some inebriated Adam out of charity. Leave it beautifully alone."

"Oh, I will," he assured her. "It shall tumble away and crush away in peace. You shall see it all, however," he assured, "for you really will come down for Christmas? You see, poor old fellow, Westboro's house is rather empty."

"Yes," nodded Mrs. Falconer.

"You see, every one else has gone back on him."

"Poor dear," sympathized the lady. "Of course we'll go down."

No matter to what extent he had thought of her, and it was pretty sure to be a wide one, her beauty struck him every time afresh. There was the fine exquisiteness of fin de race in Mary Falconer. Her father had been an Irishman born, and the type of his island's lovely women was repeated in his daughter's blue eyes, the set of her head and her arms; her taper and small-boned little wrists, her cool hands with the slender fingers told of muscle and moulding and completed the well-finished, well turned-out creature whose race it had taken generations to perfect. These distinctions her clever father bequeathed her as well as her laugh and her wit, her blue eyes and her curling hair.

Bulstrode stayed on in the dingy delightful room, until at an order of his hostess, luncheon was served them on a small table, and over the good things of an amazingly well-understood buffet and a bottle of wine, they were left alone. Bulstrode stayed on until the fog in the corners darkened to the blackest of ugly webs and choked the fire and clutched the candles' slender throats as if to suffocate the flame. Tea was served and put away and the period known as entre chien et loup at length stole up Portman Square alongside the fog and found Bulstrode still staying on…

Later, much later, when the lamps in the street and the square found themselves, with no visible transition, lighting night-time as they had lighted day – when the hansoms began to swing the early diners along to their destinations, a hansom drew up before No. – , Portman Square.

It was at the hour soft-footed London had ceased to roll its rubber tires down the little street, and only an occasional cab slipped by unheard. But a small hand cart on which a piano organ was installed wheeled by No. – , Portman Square, and stopped directly under the Sorghams' window and a man began to sing:

"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."

The creature was singing for his living, for his supper doubtless, certainly for his breakfast, but he chanced to possess a remarkable gift and he evidently loved his trade. The silence – wherein all London appeared to listen, the quiet wherein the magically suspended room had swung and swung until even Bulstrode's clear mind and good sense began fatally to blur and swing with the pendulant room – was broken into by the song.

And as Bulstrode moved and turned away his eyes from the woman's lovely face, she sighed and covered her own eyes with her hands. The small coffee table had been taken away. Mrs. Falconer was in a low chair leaning forwards, her hands lying loosely in her lap. The distance between the two his hand could have bridged in one gesture. The voice of the street singer was superb, liquid and sweet. He sang his ballad well.

"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."

Mrs. Falconer's guest rose.

"You'll come down for Christmas," he said, "and I'll meet you as we have arranged, to-morrow."

"Jimmy," she protested, "it's only ten o'clock."

"I must, however, go."

"Nonsense. Where will you pass the next hour and a half? There's not a cat in town."

"Nevertheless, I promised a man to meet him at the…"

"Jimmy!"

He had reached the door, making his way with a dogged determination and, like a man who has touched terra firma after months on a dancing brig, still not feeling quite sure of the land or its tricks.

"How you hurry from me," she said softly.

"Oh, I'm hurrying off," he explained brightly, "because I want to get hold of that chap out there and take him to supper, and to find out why he isn't on the operatic stage. He's got a jolly voice. Good night, good night."

He was gone from her with scant courtesy and a brusquerie she knew well, adored and hated! During these last years she had done her cruel best, her wicked best, to soften and change and break it down.

The curtains, as she drew them back, showed that the fog had for the most part lifted, and she was just in time to see the piano and the two musicians disappear in the mist which still tenaciously held the end of the street in shadow – a gentleman in long evening cloak and high hat hurried after the street people. The woman's face was tender as she watched the distinguished figure melt into the fog, and at her last glimpse of her friend she blew a kiss against the pane.

Bulstrode did not go back that night to Westboro'. He wired out that Mrs. Falconer and himself would be down for dinner the following day and he also wired for a motor to meet him some few miles from Penhaven Abbey, as the motor did the next day.

As he speeded towards Penhaven Bulstrode leaned towards the man who drove him.

"Stop first at the inn, will you, Bowles? I'll order tea there, and then drive on to the station at the Hants. It's the three o'clock from London we're to meet, you know, and we've just the time."

The Abbey and its clustering village hung on the hill side some fifteen lovely miles away to the south of them. And Bulstrode, who was at length obediently answering the call of it, and in response to the fancied bell of the entire country side, religiously hastening to whatever might reward him, settled himself back in his corner.

He saw the mist fly by him as his carriage cut out its way rapidly through Glousceshire. The air was not too cold in spite of the dampness, for the vapor rose high, and above and below it the atmosphere was clear.

Mrs. Falconer herself had chosen Penhaven as a place possible to drive over to as far as Bulstrode was concerned, and far enough away to stop over in, for tea. Bulstrode carried in his pocket the note of it, she had written out for him. It bore the arrivals of trains, the address of the inn; she had herself written this, recurring to a pretty fallacy she liked to indulge in that Jimmy forgot trains, missed them, and forgot rendezvous, and that he never really knew. Well, at all events, he was not likely to miss meeting this one. He had thought about nothing else since he left her in London and prepared for her as he was always preparing for her as one makes ready for the dearest guest at a feast.

The fact that not only had she divinely consented to the Penhaven scheme, but that she had herself arranged the whole thing, made the romance of the idea first appeal to herself and then readily to Bulstrode; the fact that she had been the creator of the little excursion that gave them to each other for several hours before what the castle had to offer them of surprise or dulness – did not in any measure rob the occasion of the charm of the imprévue for the lady herself. Nor did she in the least feel that it was any the less his because it was so essentially her own plan.

It proved either too cold or too late to see the cathedral, to see anything more than the close which, side by side, they had wandered through together a few moments before tea. Penhaven's distinguished gloom was not disturbed, and in their subterranean vaults lying all along their stones, the dukes and the abbés and the duchesses remained unlit in their stern crypts by the verger's candle on this Christmas Eve.

At the little vulgar inn (in a stuffy sitting-room a fire had spluttered for some quarter of an hour before the train arrived), Mrs. Falconer had made Jimmy his tea in a vulgar little bowl-like teapot, and as her hands touched the pottery's blue glaze served very well for a halo. As she buttered him slices of toast herself, and spread them with gooseberry jam and herself ate and drank and laughed and chattered, she had been, with the tea things about her and her sleeves turned back as she cut and buttered and spread, she had been with the roundness of her wrists and the suave grace of her capable hands, most adorably a woman, most adorably dear.

Her furs and coat laid aside, the hat at his asking laid aside in order, although he did not tell her so, that the air of home might be more complete for them. Vis-à-vis they had eaten together and laughed together and talked together till it grew later and later, and the motor waited without in the yard amongst the ravens and the ducks who peered from the straw of their winter quarters at the big awkward machine.

"Jimmy" … she had started when the crumbs and dishes had been cleared away, and for some seconds did not follow up his name with any other word. It was always Bulstrode who took wonderful care of the time. It was he who gave her her hat, its pins, her coat, her furs, her gloves, one by one, her muff last, his eyes on her, as each article slowly went to place, until her big white veil wound and wound and pinned and fastened and hid her. "Jimmy," she whispered, as he ruthlessly and definitely opened the door and the cold rushed in, "let's build here."

Still it was she who took all the blame of their tardy departure from the homely hospitality of the inn; she assured him that she could make a wonderful toilet and in an incredibly short time, and that for once she wouldn't be late for dinner at the castle.

"Not," Bulstrode assured her, "that it in the least matters, but the Duke, as likely as not, would choose to dine alone; he was a man of moods."

"In which case," she had stopped with her foot on the auto step, "Penhaven isn't a bad place for tea, and why wouldn't dinner at this perfect inn…"

But Bulstrode met her words with a shake of his head and a shrug of his shoulders, and helped her firmly into the motor and sat again by her side.

"I can't tell you," he said, "what will be going on at the castle. I haven't been back since I left it two days ago, and almost anything can have happened in that time. The Duchess of Westboro' herself, in the interval, may have gone back to her husband."

"Heavens!" Mrs. Falconer exclaimed, "in which case how horribly de trop we shall be."

But Bulstrode consoled her with the thought that if they were de trop they would at least be de trop ensemble.

Amongst the handful of letters waiting for her in her dressing-room at the castle there had been a despatch from America. Even this, and a hasty look at her mail had not succeeded in holding her attention or even carrying it beyond the house. Her husband had expected to land in Liverpool at the end of the coming week; he was to take her home with him. And until he arrived she was breathing, as she always did in his absence, deeply.

There had been no one to greet them as Bulstrode and herself came into the castle, and she had hurried to her rooms to begin without loss of time her boasted rapid toilet. The dress, whose harmony had impressed her host, the Duke, on a former visit at the castle, had been laid out for her; its sumptuous color overspread the bed. But the lady chose instead a white gown whose art of holding to her, and holding her, in its simple lines and splendid sheen, made its beauty.

There was much of the true woman in this entirely lovely creature, as she stood before her glass and saw herself, the best example of the really beautiful American. Her naturalness gave her a freedom, a frankness, a grace, a certain imperial set of the head.

Bulstrode had once said to the Duchess of Westboro' that a woman should above all "console." Mary Falconer would have known what he meant. That sex she gloriously represented! The sweetness and dearness of her. Well, there were few women no doubt like her. Jimmy hoped so for the sake of the race, for the sake of the hearts of other men. She was the ideal fireside of home, and when, as she had twice done, she bade him, as that time she had said, "Build here," he knew what she meant and felt, and that she herself was exquisitely home.

Leaning over her dressing-table she scrutinized not her face, whose ardent beauty seemed to bloom upon the glass, but her hair as it fell and rippled and flowed round her brows. Along the edge of one of the lustrous waves was a touch as if her powder puff had brushed her hair. Mrs. Falconer put up her hand, smoothed the line, then let it lie as it grew. It so declared itself to be the first unmistakable white. A gardener's basket full of roses and camelias, gardenias and carnations had been sent up for her; but under the diamond at her breast she chose rather to fasten in a spray of mistletoe with its pale, grape-like berries. A long green scarf fell over her arm and against the whiteness of her dress like a branch of spring verdure, and permitted by the fashion of the day, there shook and trembled in her ears long, pear-shaped pearls which, like her thimble, had been her mother's.

As she left the security of her room and fire for the corridors and the publicity of the lower rooms, for the first time in her life she had a sudden feeling of pruderie at the bare beauty of her neck and arms. She felt as if she were coming unclad into the street, and drew her scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what extravagant bent could the two men have gone?

"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."

Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector, whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her slender vis-à-vis presented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms, seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that even the dull eyes of her vis-à-vis not alone reflected, but confirmed, how lovely she was.

The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that he already knew its hearsays and its on dits and he knew when she asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery – for as she would she could not help falling into them even with this half-human creature – wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to descend to scandal; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.

"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty – "cannot, so it would seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples and warnings."

The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.

His hand touched the little liqueur glass. He picked it up and in a second of abstraction tried to drain its oily emptiness.

"Let me ring," said Mrs. Falconer, "and send for some more Benedictine, or better still, for some fine."

"No," he refused, and sedately put her right. "No more of anything, I think, unless it might be a bottle of soda. You spoke of lovely Glousceshire and then spoke of The Dials. Do you know the place?"

Only, she told him, by hearsay.

He solemnly supposed so; so he himself chiefly knew it, as indeed all the country side was growing to know it.

The eyes of the lady to whom the rector was retailing his little gossip were intently on him. But Mrs. Falconer in reality was not looking at him, neither did she at once find ready words to refute, to cast down, to blot out, his hideous suggestion that filled the room with it sooty blot.

Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type, now looked sharply at her companion.

The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives. Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in the comedies and dramas of her contemporains. But there are ways and channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another.

The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared, never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector was not able or sufficiently daring to affirm; with a cleverness worthy a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor might be.

"Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?"

She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him.

He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer; she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew. But she saw him leave her presence with relief.

When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it, and her chin in her hand.

Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly listened – was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and the carousel as well, she saw how wooden the horses were and that they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly re-instated what could never lose caste.

Oh, The Dials! She couldn't conceive what Jimmy had in reality, rashly, delightfully done there; what he had planted or installed, if he had planted or installed anything. But whatever the truth was, it was sure to be essentially right, as far as ethics went – she knew that at least. But Jimmy's delicacy and his heart were all too fine for the crude wisdom of the world or for her common-sense, which would have told him no doubt, had he cared to ask, that he was rash and wild.

She was prepared to hear that he had made some Magdalen a home in this prudish country place. At this possibility Jimmy's kindness and charity stood out graciously in strong contrast to the prudish judgment.

There were several long mirrors set in the panels of the room like lakes between green shores of old brocade, and they reflected her as she leaned forwards in her chair and looked about her, taking in the brightness of the perfect little room. It had been cut off from the wider, grander spaces for more intimate passages in the social course of events, but there was nothing newly planned in its colors and tapestries, its hangings and furnishings; the effect was sombre rather, the objects had the air of use, of having participated in past existences, and like faithful servants, they seemed to wait to serve perfectly new events.

The especial brightness of the room came from the gay festooning that had found its way throughout the castle. The mirrors were dark with the velvet rounds of hemlock from which the miserable face of scandal, the sardonic face of divorce, under the conditions of the present domestic situation might well grin satyr-like from the Christmas wreaths. No doubt there were lots of ghosts about, ready to stride, to flutter, or to walk; the American woman put their histories and their legends impatiently by.

The facile way in which the Duchess of Westboro' had slipped out from the chafing of domestic harness, the egotistical geste with which she had so widely thrown over her responsibilities, fetched Mrs. Falconer up to her own life, from whose problems indeed her husband's absence alone set her free. Her affairs had lately rapidly progressed, flying, whirling. The circles the event of her marriage had originally created, touched at last the farthest limit; there was nothing left for them now but to scatter. The vortex had rapidly narrowed down, was narrowing down, and nothing remained but a sole object in the bed of the clear water; and as Mary Falconer looked at it she knew that the thing was a stone.

"We spend," she had once said to Bulstrode, "half our lives forging chains, and the other half trying to make ourselves free." Hadn't she wrenched with all her might to be rid of hers? materially she still wore her bonds and moved with a ball.

As she had driven away from Charing Cross Station, a month ago, after seeing her husband aboard the Dover and Calais special, she had breathed – breathed – breathed – stretched her arms and hands out to London, felt on her eye and brow a dew that meant the very dawning of liberty broke for her, and that she was for the time at least blessed by it, and free.

The Sorghams' London house had opened its refuge wide for her, and she had gone into it like a child, to sleep and rest, and there she had grown up again, to begin to think and to plan, project and puzzle as those who grow up must do. She had never thought to such practical purpose as she did in these days, and never come so nearly reaching an end.

Just before dressing for dinner on this night, at the sensation the touch of her husband's telegram gave her, she realized how near to a not unusual decision she was, and when she put the envelope by with the rest of her mail, the part of her mind which she would not let herself look into was in confusion and doubt.

More effectively than Falconer's coming could have done, his few telegraphed words brought him to his wife's consideration. And the fantastic story of The Dials helped her, ridiculous as it was, burlesque as it was, to think; in the very humor of it, a shock, and helped her more reasonably to consider what otherwise her feelings would have turned to tragedy.

Jimmy's ecstasies about the place recurred to her with renewed cordiality. He had spent an hour at least describing it, and when he had finished with "A woman must be there, it is made for a woman," Mary Falconer had only seen herself in the frame that the old place presented. She exclaimed aloud: "Oh, no, no," and continued to affirm to herself that it was too fantastically absurd – "Jimmy!"