It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her brother and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness in Effie’s face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving up her dream, the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put out a hand towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one swift, heady leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and caught her in time to break her fall. Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before, lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie. “Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?” “I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him, and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t take that horsewhip with you, neither.” “No. I needn’t take it now.” So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it? Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. There’s the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, no, we didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently grateful. What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, and proud of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up to it.” He turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of bravery in others. “Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed. “I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald. “But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?” Stewart was silent. “Is she--dead?” Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat on, malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither ill nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.” CHAPTER XXIV--THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS |IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now. “I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to make a grandmother of me.”