An Imaginative Woman

After Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

When William Marchmill had finished looking for lodgings at the well-known watering-place of Solentsea in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had walked along the shore, and Marchmill followed them there.

“How far you’ve gone!” Marchmill said, when he came up to his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children were considerably further ahead with the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the thoughts into which the book had thrown her. “Yes,” she said, “you’ve been such a long time. I was tired of staying in the hotel.”

“Well, I have had trouble to find rooms. Will you come and see if what I’ve chosen on will do? There is not much room, I am afraid; but I couldn’t find anything better. The town is rather full.”

The couple left the children and nurse to continue their walk, and went back together.

Well-balanced in age, matched in personal appearance, and having the same domestic requirements, this couple differed in temper, though even here they did not often clash. They did not have common tastes. Marchmill considered his wife’s likes and interests silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband was a manufacturer of weapons in a city in the north, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was sensitive and romantic. Ella, shrank from detailed knowledge of her husband’s business whenever she thought that everything he manufactured was for the destruction of life. She could only recover her balance by thinking that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for killing animals almost as cruel to others in their species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never considered this occupation of his as any objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting married at all cost, which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had married William and had passed the honeymoon. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon something in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it was rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; was everything to her or nothing.

She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had pitied her husband for want of refinement, pitying herself, and daydreaming, which perhaps would not much have disturbed William if he had known of it.

Her figure was small, elegant, she was dark-eyed, and quick in movement. Her husband was a tall, long-faced man, with a brown beard; he was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her. He spoke short sentences, and was highly satisfied that weapons were a necessity.

Husband and wife walked till they had reached a house, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and had a small garden in front, stone steps led up to the porch.

The landlady, who had been watching for the gentleman’s return, met them and showed the rooms. Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the house; but as it was small, they would take it only if they could have all the rooms.

The landlady was disappointed. She wanted the visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said. But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a bachelor gentleman. As he kept on his apartment all the year round and was a very nice and interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to turn him out for a month because of them. “Perhaps, however,” she added, “he might offer to go for some time.”

They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel to look for other lodgings. Hardly had they sat down to tea when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had offered to give up his rooms for three or four weeks.

“It is very kind, but we won’t inconvenience him in that way,” said the Marchmills.

“O, it won’t inconvenience him!” said the landlady. “You see, he’s a different sort of young man from most – dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy – and he cares more to be here when there’s not a soul in the place, than now in the season. He’s going to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.”

The Marchmill family moved into the house next day, and it seemed to suit them very well. After lunch Mr. Marchmill walked toward the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having sent the children to the shore, looked round the rooms more closely.

In the small back sitting room, which had been the young bachelor’s, she found a lot of books.

“I’ll make this my own little room,” said Mrs. Marchmill to the landlady, “because the books are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have very many. He won’t mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?”

“O, dear no, ma’am. Yes, he has a good many. You see, he is a poet – yes, really a poet – and he has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on.”

“A Poet! O, I did not know that.”

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner’s name written on the title-page. “Dear me!” she continued; “I know his name very well – Robert Trewe – of course I do; and his writings! And it is his rooms we have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?”

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own history will best explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a writer, she had during the last year or two begun writing poems, in an attempt to find to express her painful emotions caused by the routine of daily life and of bearing children to a weapons manufacturer. These poems, under male pseudonym, had appeared in various small magazines, and in two cases in rather well-known ones. In one of the well-known ones the page which had her poem at the bottom had at the top a few verses by this very man, Robert Trewe. After that Ella, otherwise “John Ivy,” had watched with much attention the appearance of verse of Robert Trewe.

Trewe’s verse contrasted with that of most other poets. With sad and hopeless envy Ella Marchmill often read the rival poet’s work, always so much stronger than her own lines. She imitated him, and her inability to reach his level sent her into fits of depression. Months passed away thus, till she observed that Trewe had collected his pieces into a volume, which was published, and was praised, and had a sale quite sufficient to pay for the printing.

This suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her pieces also and making up a book of her verses. Her husband paid for the publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but nobody talked of it, nobody bought it.

The author’s thoughts were interrupted by the discovery that she was going to have a third child, and her failure as a poet had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might have done if she had more time for thinking. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more than a mother and wife, and lately she had begun to feel the old dissatisfaction once more. And now by chance she found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She rose from her chair and searched the rooms with the interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his verse was among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the landlady, and asked her again about the young man.

“Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.” Mrs. Hooper was not surprised at Mrs. Marchmill’s interest in her tenant. “Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits him, and he likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though he is such a good, kind young fellow that people would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him. You don’t meet kind-hearted people every day.”

“Ah, he’s kind-hearted… and good.”

“Yes. ‘Mr. Trewe,’ I say to him sometimes, ‘you are rather out of spirits.’ ‘Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,’ he’ll say. ‘Why not take a little change?’ I ask. Then in a day or two he’ll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and he comes back all the better for it.”

“Ah, indeed! His is sensitive, no doubt.”

“Yes. Still he’s odd in some things… But we get on very well.”

This was the beginning of a series of conversations about the poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: lines in pencil on the wallpaper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.

“O! let me look,” said Mrs. Marchmill, as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.

“These,” said Mrs. Hooper, “are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. I believe that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some line in his head, and puts it down there on the wall not to forget it by the morning. Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before. I think it was done only a few days ago.”

“O, yes!..”

Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished Mrs. Hooper to go away. She realised it was personal interest rather than literary and wanted to read the lines alone.

Ella’s husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing without his wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. Thus, while the manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air, the life of Ella was monotonous enough, she spent some hours each day in bathing and walking up and down the shore. But the poetic impulse grew strong, she was burnt by an inner flame and hardly noticed what was going on around her.

She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of verses, and spent a great deal of time in attempting to write something like that, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element in the magnetic attraction Mr. Trewe had for her was so much stronger than the intellectual one and she could not understand it. She lived among his things and his verses; but he was a man she had never seen.

In the natural way of passion, her husband’s love for her had not survived, except in the form of friendship, any more than her own for him. Being a woman of strong emotions, she required something to support her feelings. By chance she got this material, which was far better than chance usually offers.

One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, where they took a coat. Mrs. Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and put it in the closet again. Ella went later in the afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, took the coat, and put it on, with the hat belonging to it.

“It might inspire me to rival him, even though he is a genius!” she said.

Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to look at herself in the glass. His heart had beaten inside that coat, and his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never reach. The idea of her weakness beside him made her feel quite sick. Before she took the things off her the door opened, and her husband entered the room.

“What the devil – ”

She blushed, and took them off.

“I found them in the closet here,” she said, “and put them on as a joke. What else do I have to do? You are always away!”

“Always away? Well…”

That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself have some tender feelings for the poet, so ready was she to speak about him.

“You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,” she said; “and he has just sent a note to say that he is going to call tomorrow afternoon to look up some books of his that he wants. May he take them from your room?”

“O, yes!”

“You could very well meet Mr. Trewe then, if you’d like to!”

She went to bed dreaming about him.

Next morning her husband observed: “I’ve been thinking of what you said, Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much attention. Perhaps it’s true. Today I’ll take you with me on board the yacht.”

For the first time in her life Ella was not glad at such an offer. She stood thinking. The desire to see the poet she was now in love with did not let her accept the offer.

“I don’t want to go,” she said to herself. “I can’t bear to be away! And I won’t go.”

She told her husband that she had changed her mind and would rather stay at home. He did not mind, and went away.

For the rest of the day the house was quiet, as the children had gone out to the shore. There was a knock at the door.

Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up. She rang the bell.

“There is some person waiting at the door,” she said.

“O, no, ma’am. He’s gone long ago. I answered it,” the servant replied, and Mrs. Hooper came in herself.

“So disappointing!” she said. “Mr. Trewe not coming after all!”

“But I heard him knock!”

“No; that was somebody looking for lodgings. I tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch to say I needn’t get any tea for him, as he would not require the books, and wouldn’t come to take them.”

Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his verse, so heartbroken she was. When the children came in, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.

“Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of – the gentleman who lived here?” She was shy in mentioning his name.

“Why, yes. It’s in the frame in your own bedroom, ma’am.”

“No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.”

“Yes, but he’s behind them. As he went away he said: “Cover me up from those strangers that are coming. I don’t want them to look at me, and I am sure they won’t want me to look at them.” So I put the Duke and Duchess in front of him. If you take ’em out you’ll see him under. Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it! He didn’t think the next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you.”

“Is he handsome?” she asked timidly.

“I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn’t. I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, such as you’d expect a poet to be.”

“How old is he?”

“Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I think.”

Ella was a few months over thirty herself; but she did not look so much. Though quite young, she was entering that stage of life in which emotional women begin to suspect that last love may be stronger than first love. She thought of Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had gone down the Channel with his friends in the yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella walked about the shore with the children, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room. On learning that her husband was to be absent that night she had not rushed upstairs and opened the picture-frame, but waited till she could be alone, and the occasion could be made more romantic by silence, candles, sea and stars outside.

The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was not yet ten o’clock. She now made her preparations, reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest verses. Next she took the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, and took out the portrait.

It was a striking face. The large dark eyes described by the landlady showed his misery, they looked out from beneath well-shaped brows as if they were reading your face, and were not happy at what they saw.

Ella murmured in her tenderest tone: “And it’s you who’ve so cruelly beaten me so many times!”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she touched the photograph with her lips. Then she laughed nervously.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three children, to let herself think of a stranger in this manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the same thoughts and feelings as hers.

“He’s nearer my soul, he’s closer to real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table and re-read those of Robert Trewe’s verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true. Then she read the lines on the wallpaper beside her head. There they were – phrases, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas so intense, so sweet, that it seemed as if she heard his breath.

“Forms more real than living man” were, no doubt, the thoughts which had come to him at night, when he could let himself have no fear of criticism. And now her hair was where his arm had been; she was sleeping on a poet’s lips.

While she was dreaming, she heard her husband’s heavy step on the stairs.

“Ell, where are you?”

With an instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been doing, she put the photograph under the pillow just as he opened the door.

“O, I beg your pardon,” said William Marchmill. “Have you a headache? I am afraid I have disturbed you.”

“No, I’ve not got a headache,” said she. “Why did you come?”

“Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I didn’t want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else tomorrow.”

“Shall I come down again?”

“O, no. I’m as tired as a dog. I’ve had a good dinner, and I shall go to bed. I want to get out at six o’clock tomorrow if I can… I shan’t disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you get up.” And he came into the room.

While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the photograph further out of sight.

“Sure you’re not ill?” he asked, bending over her.

“No, only wicked!”

“Never mind that.” And he kissed her. “I wanted to be with you tonight.”

Next morning Marchmill woke up muttering to himself. “What the deuce is this that’s been crackling under me so?” He searched round him and found something. Through her half-opened eyes Ella saw it was Mr. Trewe.

“Well, I’m damned!” her husband exclaimed.

“What, dear?” said she.

“Ha! ha!”

“What do you mean?”

“Some fellow’s photograph – a friend of our landlady’s, I suppose. I wonder how it came here.”

“I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped then.”

“O, he’s a friend of yours?”

“He’s a clever man!” she said, her gentle voice trembling. “He is a rising poet – the gentleman who had two of these rooms before we came, though I’ve never seen him.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never seen him?”

“Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.”

“O, well, I must be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I can’t take you today dear.”

That day Mrs. Marchmill asked if Mr. Trewe would call at any other time.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hooper. “He’s coming this week to stay with a friend near here till you leave. He’ll be sure to call.”

Marchmill returned quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to do – in three days.

“Can we stay a week longer?” she asked. “I like it here.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you might leave me and the children!”

“And I’ll have to come for you! No: we’ll all return together; and we’ll go to North Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you’ve three days more.”

It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose talent she had an admiration. Yet she decided to make a last effort; and having learned from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely place not far from the town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the boat from the pier the following afternoon.

What a useless journey it was! Ella did not know where the house stood, and when she thought she had found it, and asked a passer-by if he lived there, the answer was that he did not know. And if he lived there, how could she call upon him? How crazy he would think her. She returned to the town, reaching home for dinner.

At the last moment, unexpectedly, her husband said that he would have no objection to her and the children staying on till the end of the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt herself able to get home without him; and Marchmill went off the next morning alone.

But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.

On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family left the place which had produced such strong emotions in her. On the train, heavy-hearted, she tried to read, and cried instead.

Mr. Marchmill was in business, and he and his family lived in a large new house, which stood in rather large grounds a few miles outside the city. Ella’s life was lonely here; and she had a lot of time for lyric composition. She had hardly got back when she saw a piece by Robert Trewe in her favourite magazine, which must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea, for it contained the very lines she had seen on the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared they were new. Ella seized a pen impulsively and wrote to him as a brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter on his triumphant expression of thoughts that moved his soul.

To this address there came an answer in a few days – a note, in which the young poet wrote that, though he did not know Mr. Ivy’s verse very well, he recalled some very promising pieces of his; that he was glad to get a letter from Mr. Ivy, and would certainly look with much interest for his verse in the future.

He had replied; he had written to her with his own hand from that very room she knew so well, for he was now back again in his lodgings.

The correspondence was continued for two months or more, Ella Marchmill sending him from time to time some of her best pieces, which he very kindly accepted, though he did not say he read them, and he did not send her any of his own in return. Ella would have been more hurt at this if she had not known that Trewe thought that she was a man.

Yet the situation was unsatisfactory. Something told her that, if he only saw her, matters would be different. She thought of telling him she was a woman, to begin with, but something happened to make it unnecessary. A friend of her husband’s, the editor of the most important newspaper in their city, who was having dinner with them one day, observed during their conversation about the poet that his (the editor’s) brother the landscape-painter was a friend of Mr. Trewe’s, and that the two men were at that very moment in Wales together.

Ella knew the editor’s brother. The next morning she sat down and wrote, inviting him to stay at her house for a short time on his way back, and to bring with him, if possible, his companion Mr. Trewe, whom she was anxious to meet. The answer arrived after some days. Her correspondent and his friend Trewe accepted her invitation on their way to the south, which would be on such and such a day in the following week.

Ella was happy. Her scheme had succeeded; her beloved though as yet unseen was coming.

But it was necessary to consider the details of receiving him. This she did most carefully, and waited for the day of his visit.

It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door and the editor’s brother’s voice in the hall. Although she was a poetess, she took the trouble to dress in a fashionable robe of rich material, in the Greek style just then in fashion among ladies of an artistic and romantic temper, which had been made by Ella’s Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in London. Her visitor entered the room. She looked behind him; nobody else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God, was Robert Trewe?

“O, I’m sorry,” said the painter, after the first words had been spoken. “Trewe is an odd fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He said he’d come; then he said he couldn’t. He’s rather dirty. We’ve been walking a few miles, you know; and he wanted to get home.”

“He – he’s not coming?”

“He’s not; and he asked me to make his apologies.”

She wanted to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes out.

“When did you p-p-part from him?” she asked.

“Just now, in the road over there.”

“What! he has actually gone past my gates?”

“Yes. When we got to them – handsome gates they are, too – when we came to them we stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me goodbye and went on. The truth is, he’s a little depressed just now, and doesn’t want to see anybody. He’s a very good fellow, and a warm friend, but a little gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much of things. His poetry is rather too erotic and passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he has been upset by the Review that was published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at the station by accident. Perhaps you’ve read it?”

“No.”

“So much the better. O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those articles written to order. But he’s upset by it. That’s just Trewe’s weak point. He lives so much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would if he were in the middle of fashionable or commercial life. So he didn’t come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and monied.”

“But he knows there is sympathy here! Has he never said anything about getting letters from this address?”

“Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy – perhaps a relative of yours, he thought, visiting here at the time?”

“Did he – like Ivy, did he say?”

“Well, I don’t think that he took any great interest in Ivy.”

“Or in his poems?”

“Or in his poems – so far as I know.”

Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in their writer.

The landscape-painter never realised from her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not himself.

The painter had been gone only a day or two when, while sitting upstairs alone one morning, she looked through the London paper, and read the following paragraph:

“SUICIDE OF A POET – Mr. Robert Trewe, who has been known for some years as one of our rising lyrists, committed suicide at his lodgings at Solentsea on Saturday evening by shooting himself with a revolver. Readers hardly need to be reminded that Mr. Trewe recently attracted the attention of a much wider public than had known him before, by his new volume of verse ‘Lyrics to a Woman Unknown,’ which has been welcomed in these pages, and which has been criticised in the Review. It is supposed, that the article has conduced to the sad act, as a copy of the Review was found on his writing-table; and he has been observed to be depressed since the article appeared.”

The paper also published his letter to a friend:

“Dear – , Before these lines reach your hands I shall be free from the trouble of seeing, hearing, and knowing more of the things around me. I will not trouble you by giving my reasons for the step I have taken, though they were sound and logical. Perhaps if I had a mother, or a sister, or a female friend tenderly devoted to me, I might think worth continuing my life. I have long dreamt of such a devoted female creature, as you know; and she inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman. There is no real woman behind the title. She has remained to the last unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this so that no real woman were to blame as the cause of my death. Tell my landlady that I am sorry but I shall soon be forgotten. R. TREWE.”

Ella sat for a while motionless, then rushed into her room and fell upon her face on the bed.

Her grief shook her to pieces; and she lay in sorrow for more than an hour. Broken words came every now and then from her: “O, if he had only known of me – known of me – me!.. O, if I had only once met him – only once; and kissed him – let him know how I loved him! Perhaps it would have saved his dear life!… But no – it was not allowed! God did not allow; and happiness was not for him and me!”

From this moment on her life was barren.

She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in the papers the sad account of the poet’s death, and as she had been much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay at Solentsea, she asked Mrs. Hooper to obtain a small portion of his hair, and send it her as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in the frame.

By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been asked. Ella cried over the portrait; she tied the lock of hair with white ribbon and put in her bosom, and she kissed it every now and then.

“What’s the matter?” said her husband, looking up from his newspaper on one of these occasions. “Crying over something? A lock of hair? Whose is it?”

“He’s dead!” she murmured.

“Who?”

“I don’t want to tell you, Will, just now!” she said.

“O, all right.”

He walked away; and when he got down to his factory in the city Marchmill thought of it again.

He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the house where they had stayed at Solentsea. Having seen the volume of poems in his wife’s hand, and heard fragments of the landlady’s conversation about Trewe when they were her tenants, he at once said to himself, “Why of course it’s he! How the devil did she get to know him?”

Then he went on with his daily affairs. By this time Ella at home had made a decision to attend the funeral. Thinking very little now what her husband or any one else might think of her, she wrote Marchmill a note, saying that she was called away for the afternoon and evening, but would return on the following morning. This she left on his desk, and having given the same information to the servants, went out of the house on foot.

When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants looked anxious. The nurse told him that her mistress’s sadness during the past few days had been such that she feared she had gone out to drown herself. Marchmill thought that she had not done that. He drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket for Solentsea.

It was dark when he reached the place. He asked the way to the cemetery, and soon reached it. The man told him where one or two funerals on the day had taken place. He walked in the direction and saw someone beside a newly made grave. She heard him, and sprang up.

“Ell, how silly this is!” he said indignantly. “Running away from home – I’ve never heard such a thing! How could you, a married woman with three children and a fourth coming, go losing your head like this over a dead lover!”

She did not answer.

“I hope it didn’t go far between you and him. I won’t have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?”

“Very well,” she said.

He conducted her out of the cemetery. It was impossible to get back that night; and he took her to a miserable little hotel close to the station which they left early in the morning.

The months passed, and neither of them dared start a conversation about this episode. Ella seemed to be often sad. The time was approaching when she would have the fourth baby.

“I don’t think I shall get over it this time!” she said one day.

“Pooh! what childish fear! Why shouldn’t it be as well now as ever?”

She shook her head. “I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.”

“And me!”

“You’ll soon find somebody to fill my place,” she murmured, with a sad smile. “I am not going to get over it this time,” she repeated. “Something tells me I shan’t.”

This view of the situation was rather a bad beginning; and, in fact, six weeks later, in May, she was lying in her room, pulseless and bloodless, and the baby for whose unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own was fat and well. Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:

“Will, I want to speak to you – about you know what – that time we visited Solentsea. I can’t tell how I could forget you so, my husband! But I thought you were unkind; that you neglected me; that you weren’t up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above it – ”

She could get no further then; and she died a few hours later, without having said anything more to her husband about her love for the poet.

But when she had been dead a couple of years it happened one day that, in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to destroy before his second wife entered the house, William Marchmill found a lock of hair in an envelope, with the photograph of the poet, and a date was written on the back in his wife’s hand. It was the time they had spent at Solentsea.

Marchmill looked long and thoughtfully at the hair and portrait, for something struck him. Bringing the little boy who had been the death of his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee, held the lock of hair against the child’s head, and set up the photograph on the table behind, so that he could closely compare the features of the two faces. By a trick of Nature there was undoubtedly strong likeness to the man Ella had never seen; the dreamy expression of the poet’s face was like the child’s, and the hair was of the same colour.

“I’m damned if I didn’t think so!» murmured Marchmill. “Then she had an affair with that fellow at the lodgings! Let me see: the dates – the second week in August… the third week in May. Yes… yes… Get away, you poor little brat! You are nothing to me!”