associations when
he ought to have led him. You know the rest of it. The boy was
desperate. He killed himself."

"When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible."

"No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden
causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him.
It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an
inveterate self-distrust."

"Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his
brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he
hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him
write his essays, and you--just be happy."

She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It
isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life
abroad I want for him. It would give him--well, it would give him what
it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once
Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the
bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a
curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more
meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be
suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her.

"That's not all," he said.

"All what?"

"That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he
really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old
distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once
proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go on proving."

"No," she declared, in nervous loyalty. She was like a bird fluttering
to save her nest. "No! You are wrong. I ought not to have talked about
him at all. I shouldn't to anybody else. Only, you are so kind."

"It's easy to be kind," said Jerome, gently, "when there's nothing else
left us."

She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he
subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty
that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by
admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other
man for being her accomplice.

"Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty."

But she had swung round to some comprehension of what he had a right to
feel.

"It makes one selfish," she said, "to want--to want things to come out
right."

"I know. Well, can't we make the