of two people meant for each other. There were no children of the Delaney marriage; and in his belief the husband had enjoyed too long a companionship he had never truly deserved.
So Lady Rose faced her husband, told him the truth, and left him. She and Dalrymple went to live in Belgium, in a small country-house some twenty or thirty miles from Brussels. They severed themselves from England; they asked nothing more of English life. Lady Rose suffered from the breach with her father, for Lord Lackington never saw her again. And there was a young sister whom she had brought up, whose image could often rouse in her a sense of loss that showed itself in occasional spells of silence and tears. But substantially she never repented what she had done, although Colonel Delaney made the penalties of it as heavy as he could. Like Karennine in Tolstoy's great novel, he refused to sue for a divorce, and for something of the same reasons. Divorce was in itself impious, and sin should not be made easy. He was at any time ready to take back his wife, so far as the protection of his name and roof were concerned, should she penitently return to him.
So the child that was presently born to Lady Rose could not be legitimized.
Sir Wilfrid stopped short at the Park end of Bruton Street, with a start of memory.
"I saw it once! I remember now--perfectly."
And he went on to recall a bygone moment in the Brussels Gallery, when, as he was standing before the great Quintin Matsys, he was accosted with sudden careless familiarity by a thin, shabbily dressed man, in whose dark distinction, made still more fantastic and conspicuous by the fever and the emaciation of consumption, he recognized at once Marriott Dalrymple.
He remembered certain fragments of their talk about the pictures--the easy mastery, now brusque, now poetic, with which Dalrymple had shown him the treasures of the gallery, in the manner of one whose learning was merely the food of fancy, the stuff on which imagination and reverie grew rich.
Then, suddenly, his own question--"And Lady Rose?"
And Dalrymple's quiet, "Very well. She'd see you, I think, if you want to come. She has scarcely seen an English person in the last three years."
And as when a gleam searches out some blurred corner of a landscape, there returned upon him his visit to the pair in their country home. He recalled the small eighteenth-century house, the "château" of the village, built on the French model, with its high mansarde roof; the shabby stateliness of its architecture matching plaintively with the field of beet-root that grew up to its very walls; around it the flat, rich fields, with their thin lines of poplars; the slow, canalized streams; the unlovely farms and cottages; the mire of the lanes; and, shrouding all, a hot autumn mist sweeping slowly through the damp meadows and blotting all cheerfulness from the sun. And in the midst of this pale landscape, so full of ragged edges to an English eye, the English couple, with their books, their child, and a pair of Flemish servants.
It had been evident to him at once that their circumstances were those of poverty. Lady Rose's small fortune, indeed, had been already mostly spent on "causes" of many kinds, in many countries. She and Dalrymple were almost vegetarians, and wine never entered the house save for the servants, who seemed to regard their employers with a real but half-contemptuous affection. He remembered the scanty, ill-cooked luncheon; the difficulty in providing a few extra knives and forks; the wrangling with the old bonne-housekeeper, which was necessary before serviettes could be produced.
And afterwards the library, with its deal shelves from floor to ceiling put up by Dalrymple himself, its bare, polished floor, Dalrymple's table and chair on one side of the open hearth, Lady Rose's on the other; on his table the sheets of verse translation from Æschylus and Euripides, which represented his favorite hobby; on hers the socialist and economical books they both studied and the English or French poets they both loved. The walls, hung with the faded damask of a past generation, were decorated with a strange crop of pictures pinned carelessly into the silk--photographs or newspaper portraits of modern men and women representing all possible revolt against authority, political, religious, even scientific, the Everlasting No of an untiring and ubiquitous dissent.
Finally, in the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black hair, its large, jealous eyes, its elfin hands, and the sudden smile with which, after half an hour of silence and apparent scorn, it had rewarded Sir Wilfrid's advances. He saw himself sitting bewitched beside it.
Poor Lady Rose! He remembered her as he and she parted at the gate of the neglected garden, the anguish in her eyes as they turned to look after the bent and shrunken figure of Dalrymple carrying the child back to the house.
"If you meet any of his old friends, don't--don't say anything! We've just saved enough money to go to Sicily for the winter--that'll set him right."
And then, barely a year later, the line in a London newspaper which had reached him at Madrid, chronicling the death of Marriott Dalrymple, as of a man once on the threshold of fame, but long since exiled from the thoughts of practical men. Lady Rose, too, was dead--many years since; so much he knew. But how, and where? And the child?
She was now "Mademoiselle Le Breton "?--the centre and apparently the chief attraction of Lady Henry's once famous salon?
"And, by Jove! several of her kinsfolk there, relations of the mother or the father, if what I suppose is true!" thought Sir Wilfrid, remembering one or two of the guests. "Were they--was she--aware of it?"
The old man strode on, full of a growing eagerness, and was soon on Lady Henry's doorstep.
"Her ladyship is in the dining-room," said the butler, and Sir Wilfrid was ushered there straight.
"Good-morning, Wilfrid," said the old lady, raising herself on her silver--headed sticks as he entered. "I prefer to come down-stairs by myself. The more infirm I am, the less I like it--and to be helped enrages me. Sit down. Lunch is ready, and I give you leave to eat some."
"And you?" said Sir Wilfrid, as they seated themselves almost side by side at the large, round table in the large, dingy room.
The old lady shook her head.
"All the world eats too much. I was brought up with people who lunched on a biscuit and a glass of sherry."
"Lord Russell?--Lord Palmerston?" suggested Sir Wilfrid, attacking his own lunch meanwhile with unabashed vigor.
"That sort. I wish we had their like now."
"Their successors don't please you?"
Lady Henry shook her head.
"The Tories have gone to the deuce, and there are no longer enough Whigs even to do that. I wouldn't read the newspapers at all if I could help it. But I do."
"So I understand," said Sir Wilfrid; "you let Montresor know it last night."
"Montresor!" said Lady Henry, with a contemptuous movement. "What a poseur! He lets the army go to ruin, I understand, while he joins Dante societies."
Sir Wilfrid raised his eyebrows.
"I think, if I were you, I should have some lunch," he said, gently pushing the admirable salmi which the butler had left in front of him towards his old friend.
Lady Henry laughed.
"Oh, my temper will be better presently, when those men are gone"--she nodded towards the butler and footman
