Catherine’s lips were tightly set as she turned from the shadows of St. Antonia’s elms, where the sunlight made a moving fret of gold upon the grass. The sky was a broad canopy of blue above the town, the wooded hills about it far and faint with haze. To Catherine the summer stillness of the place, the dim blazoned windows of the church, the wreathing smoke, the circling pigeons, were parts of a quaint and homely tenderness that made her realize the more the repellent coldness of the house she had just left.

She had come by one conviction through her visit, the conviction that those two intellectualists hungered to humiliate her and her husband. Mrs. Betty’s eyes had betrayed too much. She would be content with nothing but sensational head-lines, and the discussion of “the scandal” in every Roxton home. The brain behind that ethereal yet supercilious face knew no flush of feeling for a rival in distress. The pair were exulting over the chance James Murchison had given them, and the wife had realized it with a bitter flooding up of loyalty and love.

Catherine had made her plans before she reached the glare of Lombard Street. She had left her husband sitting in the darkened room, the blinds drawn down over his humiliation and self-shame. Her heart grieved in her for the strong man whose sensitive consciousness had been paralyzed by the realization of his own irrevocable blunder. Her pity left him undisturbed, like a sick man needing rest. Inglis had taken the work for the whole day, for Catherine had interviewed him in the surgery, and shocked the theorist by imparting a portion of the truth to him.

“Incredible!” had been Mr. Inglis’s solitary remark, and Catherine’s heart had blessed him for that single adjective.

As she passed the house in Lombard Street, her face seemed overshadowed for the moment by the unpropitious heaviness of her thoughts. The vision of her husband’s pale and troubled face saddened her more utterly than any regretfulness her pride might feel. Nor did she pass her home unchallenged, for at the barred but open window of the nursery, a ripple of gold in the sunlight bathed her daughter Gwen’s round face,

“Muvver, muvver!” and a doll’s red pelisse was waved over the window-sill. Catherine felt all her womanhood yearn longingly towards the child.

“Muvver. I’ve spelled a whole page. Daddy’s gone out. May I come wid you?”

Catherine shook her head, her eyes very bright with tenderness under her blue sunshade. How little the child realized the grim beneathness of life!

“No, dear, no. I shall be back soon. Ask Mary to take you for a walk in the meadows,” and she passed on with a lingering look at the red pelisse and the golden curls.

Porteus Carmagee, white as to waistcoat, brown as to face, jumped up briskly from his well-worn leather chair when his head clerk announced Mrs. Catherine Murchison. The lawyer, despite his eccentricities, was a keen and tenacious man of business, the emphasis of whose advice might have impressed an audience more cynical than the English House of Commons. He had a habit of snapping at his syllables with a vindictive sincerity that stimulated nervous clients suffering from the neurasthenia of indecision.

“What!—a professional visit? My dear Kate, this is a most portentous event; all my musty deeds must blush into new pink tape. Sit down. Do you want damages against your washerwoman for spoiling the underlinen? Believe me—I have been asked to advise on such questions. Ah, and how did your husband like my port?”

An inward shudder swept through Catherine. The memories of that night at Marley Down were brutally vivid to her, like the bizarre dreams of a feverish sleep remembered in the morning. Porteus had been the innocent cause of all this misery. Tell him she could not, that his very kindness had brought her husband to the brink of ruin.

“We ought to have thanked you”—and the words clung to her throat. “James has had one of his attacks of nervous depression and an endless amount of worry.”

Porteus Carmagee’s keen brown eyes sparkled with intentness as he watched her face. She looked white, uneasy, haggard about the mouth, like one who has suffered from the strain of perpetual self-repression. Catherine had always moved before him as a serene being, a woman whose face had symbolized the quiet splendor of an evening sky. He had often quoted her as one of the few people in the world whose happiness displayed itself in the beauty of radiant repose. The stain of suffering on her face was new to him, and the more remarkable for that same reason.

“You speak of worries, Kate. Am I to be concerned in them as a fatherly friend?”

She tried to give him one of her happy smiles.

“You see—I have to run to you—because I am in trouble.”

The pathetic simplicity of her manner touched him.

“My dear Kate,” and his voice lost its usual snappishness, “how can I serve you—as a friend? It is not usual to see you worried.”

“You know James has been overworked.”

“Have I not lectured the rogue on a dozen different occasions?”

“Yes, yes, I know; and he was ill at Marley Down on Sunday, in the little place where I had hoped to give him rest. Oh, Porteus, how brutal the responsibilities of life can be at times! Inglis, our assistant, sent for him to attend a serious case. James’s sense of duty dragged him away from Marley. He went, braved a critical operation, and—”

She faltered, her face aglow, as though the very loyalty of her love made the confession partake of treachery. The wrinkles about Porteus Carmagee’s eyes seemed to grow more marked.

“And made a mess of it, Kate, eh?”

His brusquerie passed with her as a characteristic method of concealing emotion.

“Yes.”

“Ugh!” and he jerked one leg over the chair; “confound his sense of duty, risking his reputation to ease some old woman’s temper.”

Catherine looked at him with a quivering of the lips.

“Porteus, you can’t blame him. It seems hard that one slip may undermine so much.”

“Why ‘undermine’?—why ‘undermine’? The law does not expect infallibility.”

“I know—but then—the man died.”

“Who? What man?”

“Farmer Baxter, of Boland’s Farm.”

“A fool who has been eating himself to death for years.”

Catherine spread her open hands with the look of a pathetic partisan.

“James was not in a fit state to meet the strain. The wife quarrelled with him after the operation, and refused to let him continue the case.”

“My dear, inferior females always quarrel!”

“And we have enemies.”

“So had the saints, and plenty.”

“It was Parker Steel—”

Porteus Carmagee sat up briskly in his chair, his wrinkled face twitching with intelligence.

“Now we are growing vital. Well, I can forecast that gentleman’s procedure.”

“Steel was called in, and the man died.”

“Most natural of mortals!”

“He performed a post-mortem with Dr. Brimley, of Cossington, at the widow’s request. As a result he has refused to give a death certificate and has written to the coroner. And Mrs. Baxter has instructed Cranston to institute an action against us for malpraxis and incompetence.”

Porteus Carmagee sat motionless for a moment, his legs tucked under his chair, his brown face suggestive of the ugliness of some carved medi?val corbel.

“I flatter myself that I recognize the inspiring spirit, Kate,” he said, at last.

“Betty Steel.”

“That’s the lady; we have learned to respect our capabilities, Mrs. Betty—and I.”

He pushed his chair back, established himself on the hearth-rug, and began the habitual rattling of his bunch of keys.

“Well, Kate, you want me to act for you.”

“If you will.”

“If I will? My dear girl, don’t insult my affection for you all. I must confess that I like to feel vindictive when I undertake a case. No city dinner could have made me more irritable, vulpine, and liverish in your service.”

Catherine’s eyes thanked him sufficiently, but they were still brimming with questioning unrest.

“Porteus, tell me what you think.”

“My dear Kate, don’t worry.”

“How can I help worrying?”

The brown and intelligent face, like the face of a sharp and keen-eyed dog, lit up with a peculiar flash of tenderness for her.

“Come, Kate, I am not a full-blooded optimist, as you know, but your woman’s nature makes the affair seem more serious than it is. Your husband was overworked, and ill at the time, yet these people insisted—I take it—on his assuming the full responsib............