Prisoners | Page 8

once more? That was the crux.
In novels if a woman needs the help of the chivalrous man ever
kneeling in the background, she sends him a ring. Fay looked earnestly

at her rings. But Michael might not understand if she sent him one, and
if the duke intercepted it he would certainly entirely misconstrue the
situation.
Fay sat down at her writing-table, and got out her note-paper. Truth
compels me to state that it was of blue linen, that it had a little gilt
coronet on it, and that it was scented.
She thought a long time. At least she bit the little silver owl at the end
of her pen for a long time. She tore up several sheets. At last she wrote
in her large, slanting, dashing handwriting:
"I know that we must part. You are right and I wish it too. It is all like a
terrible dream, and what will the awakening be?" (Fay did not quite
know what she meant by this, but it impressed her deeply as she wrote
it, and a tear dropped on "the awakening" and made it look like
"reckoning." She was not of those, however, who having once written
one word ever think it can be mistaken for another; and really
reckoning did quite as well as awakening.) "But I must see you once
before you go. I have something of urgent importance to say to you." (It
was not clear to Fay what the matter of importance was. But has not
everyone in love laboured daily under a burden as big as Christian's, of
subjects which demand instant discussion, or the bearer may fall into a
state of melancholia? Fay was convinced as she wrote that there was
something she ached to say to him: and also the point was to say
something that would bring him.) "Don't fail me. You have never failed
me yet. You left me before when it was right we should part. Did I try to
keep you then? Did I say one word to hold you back?" (Fay's heart
swelled as she wrote those words. She saw, bathed in a new light, her
own courage and uprightness in the past. She realised her extraordinary
strength of character. She had not faltered then.) "I did not falter then. I
will not do so now, though this time is harder than the first." (It
certainly was.) "You have to come to my little party on Thursday with
your chief. I cannot speak to you then. I am closely watched. When the
others have gone come back through the gardens. The door by the
fountain will be unlocked, and come up the balcony steps to my
sitting-room. The balcony window will be open. You know that I should

not ask you to do this unless it was urgent. Will you fail me at the last?
For we shall never meet again, Michael!"
Fay closed the note, directed it, pinned it into the lace of her inmost
vest--the wife of an Italian distrusts pockets and postal
arrangements--and then wept her heart out, her vain, selfish little heart,
which for the first time in her life was not wholly vain, nor wholly
selfish. Perhaps it was not her fault if she was cruel. It takes many
steadfast years, many prayers, many acts of humble service before we
may hope to reach the place where we are content to bear alone the
brunt of that pang, and to guard the one we love even from ourselves.
CHAPTER III
There will no man do for your sake, I think, What I would have done
for the least word said. I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread.
--A. C. SWINBURNE.
A witty bishop was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of
his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly alike,
and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which
archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It
would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the
episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where
we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without laying
ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church, that
when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not
infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is
in a parlous condition.
Yet many women had said that Michael was exactly like every other
young man. And to all except the very few who knew him well he
certainly did appear to be--not an individual at all--but only an
indistinguished unit of