From out the Vasty Deep | Page 5

glad to gather, reading between the lines of his note, that the

lady in question was well off. Varick was one of those men to whom
the possession of money is as essential to life as the air they breathe is
to most human beings. Till this unexpected second marriage of his he
had often been obliged to live on, and by, his wits.
Then, some months later--for she and Varick were not given to writing
to one another when apart, their friendship had never been of that
texture--she had received a sad letter from him saying that his wife was
seriously ill. The letter had implied, too, that he ought to have been told,
before the marriage had taken place, that his wife's family had been one
riddled with consumption. Blanche had written back at once--by that
time she was a good deal nearer home than Portugal, though still
abroad--asking if she could "do anything?" And he had answered that
no, there was nothing to be done. "Poor Milly" had a horror of
sanatoriums, so he was going to take her to some quiet place on the
south coast. He had ended his note with the words: "I do not think it
can last long now, and I rather hope it won't. It is very painful for her,
as well as for me." And it had not lasted very long. Seven weeks later
Miss Farrow had read in the first column of the Times the
announcement: "Millicent, only daughter of the late George Fauncey,
of Wyndfell Hall, Suffolk, and the beloved wife of Lionel Varick."
She had been surprised at the addition of the word "beloved."
Somehow it was not like the man she thought she knew so well to put
that word in.
That was just over a year ago. But when she had met Varick again she
had seen with real relief that he was quite unchanged--those brief
months of wedded life had not apparently altered him at all. There was,
however, one great difference--he was quite at ease about money. That
was all--but that was a great deal! Blanche Farrow and Lionel Varick
had at any rate one thing in common--they both felt a horror of poverty,
and all that poverty implies.
Gradually Miss Farrow had discovered a few particulars about her
friend's dead wife. Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a
rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art
world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before

Jacobean furniture had become the rage. After her father's death his
daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about the world with
a companion till she had drifted across her future husband's path at an
hotel in Florence.
"What attracted me," Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on
the only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche
Farrow, "was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity."
Blanche had looked at him a little sharply. She had never known Lionel
attracted by weakness or simplicity before. All women seemed
attracted by him--but he was by no means attracted by all women.
"Poor Milly didn't care for Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she
spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it's a delightful place, and I
hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it is now
let. 'Twon't be an easy job, for they're devoted to it."
Of course he had got them out very soon, for, as Blanche Farrow now
reminded herself, Lionel Varick had an extraordinary power of getting
his own way, in little and big things alike.
It was uncommonly nice of Lionel to have asked her to be informal
hostess of his first house party! Unluckily it was an oddly composed
party, not so happily chosen as it might have been, and she wondered
uneasily whether it would be a success. She had never met three of the
people who were coming to-night--a Mr. and Miss Burnaby, an
old-fashioned and, she gathered, well-to-do brother and sister, and their
niece, Helen Brabazon. Miss Brabazon had been an intimate friend,
Miss Farrow understood the only really intimate friend, of Lionel
Varick's late wife. He had spoken of this girl, Helen Brabazon, with
great regard and liking--with rather more regard and liking than he
generally spoke of any woman.
"She was most awfully kind to me during that dreadful time at
Redsands," he had said only yesterday. And Blanche had understood
the "dreadful time" referred to the last weeks of his wife's life. "I've
been to the Burnabys' house a few times, and I've dined there twice--an

infamously bad cook, but very good wine--you know the sort of thing?"
Remembering that remark, Blanche now