"In that case it will be the easier for you to shake hands and say we part friends."

"I cannot do what you ask," she said. "I might forgive had the injury been to me alone; but I cannot forget all you said about my husband, who would not have turned a dog from his door, let alone a man he had known for years. And you never wrote through all the weary months that followed to say you were sorry--you never came or sent to know whether he was living or dead--whether we were starving or had plenty. I can say with all my heart, I hope you will never through your own experience know what we suffered; but I cannot say we part friends. I cannot say I shall ever feel as a friend towards you."

"I think you will, nevertheless, Mrs. Mortomley," he said quietly. "I think if you knew all I have suffered recently, all I was suffering when Leonora told me that night you were in the house, you would not be so hard on me now; but I cannot argue the matter with a woman who has fought her husband's battle so bravely and so persistently. There was a time when I did not like you, when I thought your husband had made a mistake in marrying you, when I regarded my wife's affection for you as an infatuation, and would have stopped the intimacy had it been possible; but I tell you now I find myself utterly in error. Regarding life from my present standpoint, I think Archie Mortomley richer in being your husband than I should consider him had he a fine business or thousands lying idle at his bankers. One can but be happy. Looking back, I believe I may honestly say since I came to man's estate, I have never known a day's true happiness."

"It is to come," she said eagerly; "there are, there must be years of happiness in store for you and Lenny."

"I do not think there ever can for either of us," he answered, and having said this he rose wearily, and would have passed out through the door but that Dolly stopped him.

"Do not go away without eating something," she said. "We have not much to offer, but still--"

"I cannot eat salt with a woman who feels herself unable to forgive me,"

he interrupted. "Good-bye, Mrs. Mortomley. I need not tell you to love my wife all the same, for I know she has been staunch to you through every reverse."

And he was gone. Down the walk Dolly watched his retreating figure; along the dusty high-road she watched the man who was ruined pass slowly away, and then she relented. It seemed to come to her in a moment that, in this as in other things, she was but the steward of the man she had married so long as he was unable to see to his affairs for himself, and she knew he would in an instant have held out the right hand of fellowship to Mr. Werner.

I remember once being much impressed by this expression used concerning a girl recently married.

"She is exactly suited to him; but many men would not care to give their honour into her keeping."

Now this remark had no reference to any divorce scandal possible with the woman. So far as such matters are concerned, any one who had ever known her, might safely have made affidavit she was and would be as utterly without reproach as without fear; but there is another, and if one may say so, without fear of censure, higher sense in which a woman holds her husband's honour in her hand, and that was the sense in which the remark was made.

Just and courteous towards her tradespeople, a gentlewoman in her dealings with servants, not keen and sharp with porters and cab-drivers, considerate to the governess, a stranger within her gates--beyond all things fair in her dealings with her husband's friends--all these points ought not, I think, to be forgotten when one speaks of a man's honour held by a woman.

For truly, she can fail in no single incident I have mentioned without casting a shadow on the judgment of the man who chose her, and it is more than probable Dolly thought this too, for ere Mr. Werner had got a hundred yards from the gate she had sped down the walk, and was flying along the road after him.

"Mr. Werner!" she cried panting.

And then he stopped and retraced his steps towards her.

"I cannot bear it," she said.

And he noticed she had to sit down on the bank by the wayside to recover her breath.

"I cannot endure, when you are so unhappy, to be hard, as you call it. I know Archie would be vexed if he knew I refused to be friends with you.

So please, Mr. Werner, do come back and have some fruit and milk--and I do forgive you from my heart."

"There is something else, Dolly," he observed.

Sooner or later it came natural to all men and all women when nature asserted itself, to call Mortomley's poor Dolly by her Christian name.

"What else?" she asked. "Oh! I remember, and I am afraid that is a great deal easier. I do hope God will forgive you too, and us all, and I pray he will make you and my dear Lenny very happy in the future."

He stood, with her hand clasped in his, looking at her intently.

"You will not be sorry for this hereafter," he said at last. "When the evil day comes to you which must come to all, you may be glad to remember the words you have spoken this minute. Thank you very, very much. No," he added, in answer to a request that he would return to Wood Cottage; "I have had pleasant tidings spoken to me, and I will leave with their sound in my ears. Good-bye. When you say your prayers to-night do not forget to remember me."

CHAPTER IX.

THE NEW YELLOW.

All that night, after saying her prayers--in which she remembered Mr.

Werner and his wife, and all other people who were in sore distress--Mrs. Mortomley lay awake, a strange sense of trouble oppressing her.

It was like the old bad times come back again; it was a return of the later evil days at Homewood, to lie in the semi-darkness of the summer night and think of Mr. Werner ruined, Mr. Werner beggared.

How would his wife bear it? Dolly knew her friend pretty well, yet she could not answer this question to her own satisfaction. Mrs. Werner was a noble, generous-hearted, unselfish woman, and yet Dolly comprehended in some vague, instinctive sort of way that wealth and position and social consideration were very dear to this fresh bankrupt's wife.

There are some people who do not much care whether they walk or drive through the world's thoroughfares; indeed, there are those who, given the choice, would prefer to walk. Now Mrs. Werner's mind was not so ill-regulated an one as all this comes to. Most emphatically she liked her carriages and horses and servants, and all the luxuries money can purchase. She had married for these things, as Mrs. Mortomley understood perfectly, and Dolly did not think--no, she did not, that Leonora would be satisfied to relinquish them.

Further, Mr. Werner had always set himself up as such a model of business capacity and business prudence, that he really had no right to fall into difficulties; certainly not to continue to flounder through difficulties as, according to his own confession, had been the case for years.

He had been living a lie, just one of the things Dolly knew his wife would find it most difficult to forgive. Had he told her duty demanded the sacrifice, she might--Mrs. Mortomley understood--have agreed to live in a house at twenty pounds a year, and wear print dresses, and be extremely strict about the tea and sugar, but she could not have done this with a good grace.

Nevertheless, Dolly believed she could have borne that better than the consciousness that the rich raiment she purchased, the luxurious dinner she provided, the rare wines they drank, had been paid for by a man all the time virtually bankrupt--a man keeping up an appearance so as to obtain fresh credit, and defer the striking of that hour of reckoning which could now be deferred no longer.

Mrs. Mortomley loved Mrs. Werner, and she did not love Mr. Werner, yet certainly her sympathies were that night with the man rather than with the woman.

One's affections are not perhaps strong for the naughty boy who is always persecuting one's cat, and stoning one's dog, and slaying one's chickens, or stealing one's fruit, and yet, when the wicked little wretch comes to grief and goes home with a battered face and cut shins, one's heart is more one with him than with the strong-minded mother, a strict disciplinarian, who we know will lecture or beat him for his sins, as the case may be.

I do not say it is right, for I cannot think it is, that our sympathies should generally be with the evil-doer, but it is very difficult not to feel sorry for the man who, being down, is struck his bitterest blow by those of his own household; and Dolly--well, Dolly did not think if she were in Mr. Werner's shoes she would like to tell the unvarnished truth to Leonora.

Upon the whole Dolly decided he was wise to go abroad, instead of remaining to face the domestic difficulty. "He will write to her," she thought, "tell her all, and she will be very indignant, and think about honour and honesty, and all the rest of it; but she will not, if he is wise, know where to address a letter to him at present. Then she will grow anxious, both about him and the future of the children, and at the end of six months I give her this parcel, when the whole affair is settled and she need feel no scruples about taking the money, and then she will feel touched to remember he thought of her, and then she will relent and we will find out where he is; perhaps he may write now and then to me, and she will go to him, or he will come back to her, my poor dear Lenny!"

Having completed which pleasing programme of the Werners' future, Mrs.

Mortomley ought to have gone to sleep, but she could not do so, and towards four o'clock she became so intolerant of her own wakefulness that she rose and, stealing into the room where Lenore lay fast asleep, dressed herself noiselessly and went downstairs, and, letting herself out, walked across the road and along a footpath leading to the Lea, which crossed the field in which stood the shed where she had established her factory.

Not a likely-looking building, and yet it is in the least pretentious factories that fortunes are made,--successes won; and Mrs. Mortomley thanked God every time she looked across the meadow and beheld the red-tiled roof which covered the "Hertfordshire Colour Works" that Lang had so strenuously and--as it turned out--so wisely advised her to establish.

The name of Mortomley had a certain power still, and, though the business letters were signed in Dolly's scrawl, "D. Mortomley," people did not stop to inquire whether it was an A or a D who was able to supply them with the colours they required.

Neither was the new company worse thought of because they were able to supply so very little. The public, always liable to be gulled, did not attribute this to any paucity of means of production, but rather to the extent of orders received by the "Hertfordshire Colour Company." Acting under Lang's advice, Dolly had taken the business bull by the horns, and the moment she had settled upon a residence, a neat circular informed all the customers whose names Lang could recollect, or Dolly wring at intervals out of her husband's intermittent memory, that future orders intended for Mortomley and Co. should be addressed to Newham, Herts.

Further, she amazed Mr. Swanland by giving directions at the post-office that all letters intended for her husband should be forwarded to that address; and as no fewer than three other persons had applied for the letters, each claiming a right in them, the post-office was somewhat perplexed. First, Mr. Swanland, who, after Dolly had proved to him by chapter and verse that he could claim no letters after the expiration of three months from the meeting of creditors, was forced to strike his flag; secondly, the Thames Street clerk, who had--being trusted by Mr.

Swanland--been opening the town letters and suppressing them during the time when the accountant had a right to their possession, and who, so far as I know, is opening and suppressing them to this day; and, third, Hankins, who, being a modified sort of blackguard, made all right with the postmen who delivered at Homewood by representing himself as Mr.

Mortomley's chief in absence, and forwarded some letters and retained others.

Dolly never got a tithe of the letters; the battle was one beyond her strength to fight, but it was a battle any accountant worth his salt would have prevented ever being necessary.

Still, in spite of all, the Mortomleys were prospering. The business was a very poor and a very small affair, but, after paying Lang, who was not a cheap coadjutor, and deducting all expenses, Dolly, even in those early days, felt she could safely take a pound a week out of the returns; and, my dear readers, I can assure you that if you have ever known what it is to look nothing a year in the face, you would be very thankful indeed to be able to reckon upon fifty-two pounds as a certainty.

And so Dolly regarded the red-tiled shed gratefully, and did her work in it carefully, for still, as her husband's substitute, she had her work to do. The special amount of water required, the final grains of the special ingredient that shed a lustre over the Mortomley colours! hers it was to add those trifles which ensured success. Had the manipulation been confided to any other, the secret must have passed out of Mortomley's keeping.

Was not she faithful to her trust! Lang himself never could tell when the magic touch was given which illumined the colours they sent to market. Sometimes in the twilight, sometimes when the moonbeams streamed through the skylights, sometimes in the early, early morning, but always in due and proper time, Dolly took her slight but all-important share of the labour, and she did so on the morning after her interview with Mr.

Werner.