“How can that be?” Sir Chichester exclaimed in despair.  “How can it be?”

CHAPTER XXIX

JENNY PUTS UP HER FIGHT

Stella, the undisciplined!  She had flung out of the rank and file, as long ago Sir Charles Hardiman had put it, and to this end she had come, waywardness exacting its inexorable price.  Harry Luttrell, however, was not able to lull his conscience with any such easy reflections.  He walked with Martin Hillyard apart in the garden.

“I am to blame,” he cried.  “I took on a responsibility for Stella when I went out of my way to do one kind, foolish thing....  Yet, she would have killed herself if I hadn’t—­as she has done five years afterwards!...  I couldn’t leave her when I had brought her home ... she was in such misery!... and it couldn’t have gone on....  Old Hardiman was right about that....  It would have ended in a quarrel when unforgivable words would have been used....  Yet, perhaps, if that had happened she wouldn’t have killed herself....  Oh, I don’t know!”

Martin Hillyard had never seen Harry Luttrell so moved or sunk in such remorse.  He did not argue, lest he should but add fuel to this high flame of self-reproach.  Life had become so much easier as a problem with him, so much inner probing and speculation and worry about small vanities had been smoothed away since he had been engaged day after day in a definite service which was building up by a law deduced here, an inspired formula there, a tradition for its servants.  The service, the tradition, would dissolve and blow to nothing, when peace came again.  Meanwhile there was the worth of traditional service made clear to him, in an indifference to the little enmities which before would have hurt and rankled, in a freedom from doubt when decision was needed, above all in a sort of underlying calm which strengthened as his life became more turbulently active.

“It’s a clear principle of life which make the difference,” he said, hesitating, because to say even so much made him feel a prig.  “Stella just drifted from unhappiness to unhappiness——­”

But Harry Luttrell had no attention to give to him.

“I simply couldn’t have gone on,” he cried.  “It wasn’t a question of my ruin or not....  It was simply beyond me to go on....  There were other things more powerful....  You know!  I once told you on the river above Kennington Island....  Oh, my God, I am in such a tangle of argument—­and there she is up there—­only thirty, and beautiful—­such a queer, wayward kid—­’like a child sleeping.’”

He quoted Sir Chichester’s phrase, and hurried away from his friend.

“I shall be back in a little while,” he muttered.  His bad hour was upon him, and he must wrestle with it alone.

Martin Hillyard returned to the hall, and found Sir Chichester with the doctor, a short, rugged Scotsman.  Dr. McKerrel was saying: