THE LETTER BOOK.

A STORY.

BY MRS. HENRY DUDENEY.

CHAPTER I.

IT was twelve o'clock, and the children were out of school, so that the quadrangle was full of ugly squeaks and flutters-a poultry yard, but not nearly so spiritual. There was certainly something more ethereal about birds in their panoply of feathers and the pride of their scarlet combs than about these slum children-trooping in and hitting each other and blubbering and laughing.

Isabel from her high window looked down at a tangled, fluttering heap of small humanity-at the fly of faded frocks and torn pinafores, at the twinkle of wind-roughened legs. She looked down, from a height, as men and women have looked down and will at great drama: Victory or some deep Tragedy that sinks beneath speechthese are the things that people view from a height.

She looked. There was nothing of maternity or tenderness in her glance, neither was there that broad expression of benevolent and abstract interest in one's own race which is the tempered consolation of some-the consolation of those who have missed the sweet touch of a big personal Love. Isabel hated her own race-when it was ugly. Bits left over from the gaudy stuff that long ago made Pagans had made her, and had set her in a Christian land, in an era of dun-coloured Philanthropy. There was in her long, sombre glance at the children simply a sort of savage submission to Fate. Her eyes, so blank, were yet alive with an insistent and most delicate agony. Her eyes were the only part of her that ever truly told to a seer. They baffled common people, who, never seeing anything, believe that they have discovered all. These are the fools who would tear the veil from Heaven.

Looking down, from steep, vague height, she reflected that poultry were a thousand times lovelier than these miniature men and women who already displayed the ugly signs of adolescence peculiar to their type. You could see what they would be when they grew up: you could sort out the born loafers from the ones that were going to succeed; those of them who would rise to the social pinnacle of a shop all their own; those in whom there was a little seed of mysticism, and who, in default of better expression, would preach at street-corners and give away poor little leaflets and become

arrogant, latter-day evangelists. There was no humility about religion nowadays; it had gone ugly, just like everything else—the world was a hag. Isabel sat blankly staring down.

She saw from the square casement, set like an eagle's nest, those who would drift into the ranks of the unemployed, those who would come to sit on Councils, those who would emigrate-and sow national ugliness into the virgin soil of some new country. In that small sordid crowd so far beneath she thought she caught, in a flash, in the wink of an eye, the dreadful shadow of a rope.

In little girls she saw the coming mothers-in those who shook or flung a dolly: they always beat the dolly, this was the one caress they knew. She marked the shrews and the sluts and the-Others. Yes, there were those others who would sink to an even worse fate than unimaginative maternity. Perched up here, high in the model dwelling, one saw life on many sides, and the quadrangle was a mimic world.

Without doubt birds were a thousand times more instinct of the God who made them than these sordid little creatures shouting and fretting in the wicked east wind-a wind that crept in at every chink it pervaded the place, it seemed to strike a tooth at every bone one had. There was no escape-it filled every corner, just as a dead body, lying alone and defenceless in a shut-off room, yet makes its presence felt in all the rooms.

Birds! Isabel let her dusty head lean on her hand-a hand of swollen sinews, stretched skin and veins predominant. The noisy quad, so far beneath, receded into rose colour. As for her! She was standing in spring sunshine on the edge of a country pond, and on the other side of it was a rooster, just a proud barn-door cock. She could see the creature, his head uplifted, his vivid wattles swinging, his scarlet comb swelling to the joyful day. A spring day! And the little, voluptuous wind, thrilling of summer soon to come, had fluttered his tail-feathers and made of each one a separate burnished plume. Never had she seen such colour as the sun made of that fowl's feathers. The green and gold and sheen of him!

Her eyes lived; they softened; delicious languor filled them; they were young eyes gone astray in the head of an old woman. Her lips were tender, charming, coquettish. She stood on the edge of the country pond and marked the majesty of God's bird.

What a morning that had been, what a phase of living; one might have known it could not, could not last. What meetings of rapture, what tearing agonies of parting! And they had taken everything with the acute and comic seriousness of lovers, she and Felix. They had stood, fingers linked and interwoven, moving softly, at the edge of the water. They had watched the bird, and laughed. and admired and thrilled, and pressed the gaily-feathered creature, as they pressed everything else, into the service of their own glowing romance. They had thanked God for him; he gave to the morning

the ultra-perfect touch. They had been just like children, happy enough to run and shout and clap.

They quite believed that some day they would have just what they wanted most-the only thing that mattered: life together, an exquisite, unbroken pageant of wedded nights and days. There was ugliness in the hope, but this they did not realise. Lovers are at once more beautiful and more brutal than the rest of the world. And lovers never see that life so rarely gives. Life is an imp, a coquette; it dangles the dear delight in front of you, then switches it clean away.

Life had not given, had never meant to give. Isabel lifted her head; love in her eyes died down to sickliness. She came, with a thud as it were, back from the pond; she could no longer see the bird, nor could she see the sensuous, swinging branches of the trees, the tangled promise of brown hedges, the rhythmic swing of vermilion-pointed catkins. She saw nothing save, staring within, her bare room, and, gazing without and far down, the writhing heap of children in the quadrangle. And yet she knew that the pond and the burnished bird and the swelling joy of spring had been true life; and that to-day and all the days made just a dream -a drab, dry phase to be scrambled through somehow.

And when you had scrambled through, life was going to begin again; you took it up where you had left it off-only it would be deleted of everything that hurt. She had hurt so much in her passage through the world that her heart was perfectly worn out with aching; in the end it would go out on strike, suddenly, without any warning. She did not care how soon; she wished it had more enterprise, this weary heart of hers. Once quiet its beat and she would take up life again and look long; look wild and eternally deep into Felix's eyes. How beautifully tell-tale those long looks of theirs had been! Her chin dropped again, she-sheremembered.

He would be waiting for her somewhere, quite close. Likely on the edge of the pond, or in that field of cowslips, all tipsy yellow scent, or in the sun close to the perfumed haystack, or in the orchard, on some brown autumn morning when the long ladder leaned through murk against the russet tree. Best, she would like him to wait on the great thrown elm-trunk at the end of the lane. She could see the lane, their lane; broad, grassy spaces dipping backwards towards a wood-a little track that wound like a sash. Once, soon after their final parting, while the wound bled, she had gone to the lane and played beautiful make-believe. To pretendthe sweet, childish quality which is the consolation and the anguish of the poet! And although she had known that she might search the world around and nowhere, nowhere find him-yet it had been real. And a labouring man emerging from the thin wood had made her mad heart jump.

Their love had been so pretty, had boasted so many exquisite occasions. She could not quite be sure, after all, where she most longed to meet him. How ardently she sat yearning, here by the high window, for that wordless moment when she would fall forward on his breast. A first caress of any fulness. They had been idealists, she and Felix; in this respect their history was notable in the record of fallible lovers.

It was so cold to-day; it was a perfect devil, this day-it conserved all that there was of evil. The wind from the east swept up as it came along all the sins it found in the swirling streets. London! A place full of Sin, but more of Ugliness. Isabel was thinking, as Felix had thought. Her gestures, sitting there all by herself, were the very gestures he had used. Tragic, petulant Felix! He had so trounced out at ugliness, and all his life had been set to it: the ugliness of poverty, of ill-health, of failure, of mismating.

Isabel laughed out loud. And then when he was dead he sprang into a sudden quaint fame; he became an aristocrat of Literature. They set him in his little niche, the Fools! That was the accursed way of one's contemporaries: they killed you off and then paid court to you; they had served all the saints and geniuses so. Felix was by way of being a classic now. He stood immutable-on a thin book of verse, which suddenly they declared held immortal quality; on a handful of wild essays, on a bunch of novels, on a play which nobody could stage. He was a classic, a cult; he was the fashion with what was called the "thoughtful public." The thoughtful public, the general public, the public! Her lip curled; you could sort them out-like eggs. Meredith was at one end and the halfpenny feuilleton at the other. Felix was a classic. Fools, fools, fools! Why did they not declare themselves before they broke his heart?

Joy starved in her bosom. She was cold, she was hungry; worse, she was dirty. She suffered the unbreakable agony of the shabby-genteel-of patches, of cheap blouses, of garments chopped out by the thousand, to fit all bodies without fitting one. And yet! Had ever anyone been more royally loved? Yet here she sat, an old woman; more, an old maid. She was the mark for married women and young girls; she was everything opposed to romance and fancy-yet! A poet had loved her; a rare poet, so they were beginning to say. She it was who ran through all that he had ever written. And then! She laughed again; laughed until the naked room chimed in. And then people, fools, babbled wisely of his ideal marriage. His wife, worthy, noisy woman, had never inspired one line. She had nagged and fussed; had prompted his worst, money-making projects-which never made a pennyhad worn him to death. His wife, through an official relative, had tried to get him a post under Government, with the remark that

he could write poetry in the evenings; and she had been on the point of success when he perversely died. That had been just like Felix!

His wife! And yet she had been a good woman, a fine womanin her way; with a vein of stolid, noble endurance. Longing as she so frankly did for white curtains and a villa, perhaps with a canary shrieking in a green cage-her ideal being a fixed income. and a rigid observance of Sunday-she must have suffered very much. And it was not exactly her fault that he had married her. The fault was with his temperament; the sensitive desire of a poet to idealise.

His wife! She had been noble-or was it merely unimaginative? She had allowed their friendship, regarded it as quite natural, because they were of the same calling. Perhaps at the silent, pathetic back of things she had hoped there might be money in it. And they had known so fiercely all through that they were not friends and never could be: shrank from that cold, steady state. His wife! And now she also was dead; everything and everybody was dead, save children screaming in the quadrangle and women scolding on the stairs.

The room was most bitterly, bitterly cold, and nothing mattered but bread and coal. Isabel would have given a great deal for the shine of one sovereign in her palm. She put up her hands and pushed back the reedy, seedy wisps of hair. How Felix had adored her hair; the massive black droop of it, the way it tucked and twined about her ears. It was thin now, every hair did some separate duty; it had gone dusty grey-as if someone had tipped a bag of flour over coal.

She stared up, clasped hands making a portico above her brows, at the top drawer of a deal press-an ugly thing that was a fixture. Her room at the top of the model dwelling was hideous with convenience-pipes, a sink, gas, presses, a coal bunk. In the top drawer of the press was Treasure. It might be turned into money— now. In literature you must seize the psychological moment.

She stood up, stiff with cold, her nose red, her hands blue. She was a dusty little old maid to look upon, and yet a poet had loved her once. Good heavens! how he had loved her! Even before she opened the drawer of the press his idolatrous phrases began to sing. She knew his letters nearly by heart, and, bringing them out with reverence, with the ashes of her passion beginning to redden, she carried them to the handful of faint fire.

She touched and caressed them; there was nothing to stingneither weariness nor dishonour. He had loved her up to his very last breath, and he had loved her-clean.

There were many letters; they covered years, they expressed all moods, they conserved the air of the four seasons. The freshness of them, the yearning and ardent desire never flagged from the first letter to the last.