Red Pottage (1899):

a machine-readable transcription

Cholmondeley, Mary (1859-1925)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Red Pottage

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Red Pottage

By

Mary Cholmondeley

"After the Red Pottage comes the exceeding bitter cry"

TO VICTORIA

Red Pottage

CHAPTER I

                    In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray'd by what is false within.

GEORGE MEREDITH.

        "I will get out," said Hugh Scarlett to himself, seeing no bars, but half conscious of a cage. "I will get out," he repeated, as his hansom took him swiftly from the house in Portman Square, where he had been dining, towards that other house in Carlton House Terrace, whither his thoughts had travelled on before him, outdistancing the Trip-Clip-Clop, Trip-Clip-Clop of the horse.

        It was a hot night in June. Hugh had thrown back his overcoat, and the throng of passers-by in the street could see, if they cared to see, "the glass of fashion" in the shape of white waistcoat and shirt front, surmounted by the handsome, irritated face of their owner, leaning back with his hat tilted over his eyes.

        Trip-Clip-Clop went the horse.

        A great deal of thinking may be compressed into a quarter of an hour, especially if it has been long eluded.

        "I will get out," he said again to himself with an impatient movement. It was beginning to weary him, this common-

place intrigue which had been so new and alluring a year ago. He did not own it to himself, but he was tired of it. Perhaps the reason why good resolutions have earned for themselves such an evil repute as paving stones is because they are often the result, not of repentance, but of the restlessness that dogs an evaporating pleasure. This liaison had been alternately his pride and his shame for many months. But now it was becoming something more, which it had been all the time, only he had not noticed it till lately--a fetter, a clog, something irksome, to be cast off and pushed out of sight. Decidedly the moment for the good resolution had arrived.

        "I will break it off," he said again. "Thank heaven not a soul has ever guessed it."

        How could any one have guessed it?

        He remembered the day when he had first met her a year ago, and had looked upon her as merely a pretty woman. He remembered other days, and the gradual building up between them of a fairy palace. He had added a stone here, she a stone there, until suddenly it became--a prison. Had he been tempter or tempted? He did not know. He did not care. He wanted only to be out of it. His better feelings and his conscience had been awakened by the first touch of weariness. His brief infatuation had run its course. His judgment had been whirled--he told himself it had been whirled, but it had really only been tweaked--from its centre, had performed its giddy orbit, and now the check-string had brought it back to the point from whence it had set out, namely, that she was merely a pretty woman.

        "I will break with her gradually," he said, like the tyro he was, and he pictured to himself the wretched scenes in which she would abuse him, reproach him, probably compromise herself, the letters she would write to him. At any rate he need not read them. Oh! how tired he was of the whole thing beforehand. Why had he been such a fool? He looked at the termination of the liaison as a bad sailor looks at an inevitable sea passage at the end of a journey. It must be

gone through, but the prospect of undergoing it filled him with disgust.

        A brougham passed him swiftly on noiseless wheels, and the woman in it caught a glimpse of the high-bred clean-shaved face, half savage, half sullen in the hansom.

        "Anger, impatience and remorse," she said to herself, and finished buttoning her gloves.

        "Thank heaven not a soul has ever guessed it," repeated Hugh fervently, as the hansom came suddenly to a standstill.

        In another moment he was taking Lady Newhaven's hand as she stood at the entrance of her amber drawing-room beside a grove of pink orchids.

        He chatted a moment, greeted Lord Newhaven, and passed on into the crowded rooms. How could any one have guessed it? No breath of scandal had ever touched Lady Newhaven. She stood beside her pink orchids, near her fatigued-looking, gentle-mannered husband, a very pretty woman in white satin and diamonds. Perhaps her blonde hair was a shade darker at the roots than in its waved coils; perhaps her blue eyes did not look quite in harmony with their blue-black lashes; but the whole effect had the delicate conventional perfection of a cleverly touched-up chromo-lithograph. Of course tastes differ. Some people like chromo-lithographs, others don't. But even those who do are apt to become estranged. They may inspire love, admiration, but never fidelity. Most of us have in our time hammered nails into our walls, which, though they now decorously support the engravings and etchings of our maturer years, were nevertheless originally driven in to uphold the cherished, the long since discarded chromos of our foolish youth.

        The diamond sun upon Lady Newhaven's breast quivered a little, a very little, as Hugh greeted her, and she turned to offer the same small smile and gloved hand to the next comer, whose name was leaping before him from one footman to another.

        "Mr. Richard Vernon."

        Lady Newhaven's wide blue eyes looked vague. Her hand hesitated. This strongly built, ill-dressed man, with his keen brown deeply scarred face and crooked mouth, was unknown to her.

        Lord Newhaven darted forward.

        "Dick!" he exclaimed, and Dick shot forth an immense mahogany hand, and shook Lord Newhaven's warmly.

        "Well," he said, after Lord Newhaven had introduced him to his wife, "I'm dashed if I knew who either of you were. But I found your invitation at my club when I landed yesterday, so I decided to come and have a look at you. And so it is only you, Cackles, after all"--(Lord Newhaven's habit of silence had earned for him the sobriquet of "Cackles")--"I quite thought I was going into--well, ahem!--into society. I did not know you had got a handle to your name. How did you find out I was in England?"

        "My dear fellow, I didn't," said Lord Newhaven, gently drawing Dick aside, whose back was serenely blocking a stream of new arrivals. "I fancy--in fact, I'm simply delighted to see you. How is the wine getting on? But I suppose there must be other Dick Vernons on my wife's list. Have you the card with you?"

        "Rather," said Dick, "always take the card with me since I was kicked out of a miner's hop at Broken Hill because I forgot it. 'No gentleman will be admitted in a paper shirt' was mentioned on it, I remember. A concertina and candles in bottles. Ripping while it lasted. I wish you had been there."

        "I wish I had." Lord Newhaven's tired, half-closed eye opened a little. "But the end seems to have been unfortunate."

        "Not at all," said Dick, watching the new arrivals with his head thrown back. "Fine girl that; I'll take a look at the whole mob of them directly. They came round next day to say it had been a mistake, but there were four or five cripples who found that out the night before. Here is the card."

        Lord Newhaven glanced at it attentively, and then laughed.

        "It is four years old," he said; "I must have put you on my mother's list, not knowing you had left London. It is in her writing."

        "I'm rather late," said Dick composedly, "but I am here at last. Now, Cack--Newhaven, if that's your noble name--as I am here, trot out a few heiresses, would you? I want to take one or two back with me. I say, ought I to put my gloves on?"

        "No, no. Clutch them in your great fist as you are doing now."

        "Thanks. I suppose, old chap, I'm all right? Not had on an evening-coat for four years."

        Dick's trousers were too short for him, and he had tied his white tie with a waist to it. Lord Newhaven had seen both details before he recognised him.

        "Quite right," he said hastily. "Now, who is to be the happy woman?"

        Dick's hawk-eye promenaded over the crowd in the second room, in the doorway of which he was standing.

        "That one," he said, "the tall girl in the green gown talking to the Bishop."

        "You have a wonderful eye for heiresses. You have picked out the greatest in London. That is Miss Rachel West. You say you want two."

        "One at a time, thanks. I shall take her down to supper. I suppose--er--there is supper at this sort of thing, isn't there?"

        "Of a kind. You need not be afraid of the claret; it isn't yours."

        "Catch you giving your best at a crush," retorted Dick. "The Bishop's moving. Hurry up."

CHAPTER II.

But as he groped against the wall, two hands upon him fell,
The King behind his shoulder spake: "Dead man, thou dost not well."

RUDYARD KIPLING.

        A woman in a pale green gown was standing near the open window, her white profile outlined against the framed darkness, as she listened with evident amusement to the tall, ill-dressed man beside her.

        Hugh's eyes lost the veiled scorn with which it was their wont to look at society and the indulgent patronage which lurked in them for pretty women.

        Rachel West slowly turned her face towards him without seeing him, and his heart leaped. She was not beautiful except with the beauty of health, and a certain dignity of carriage which is the outcome of a head and hands and body that are at unity with each other, and with a mind absolutely unconscious of self. She had not the long nose which so frequently usurps more than its share of the faces of the well bred, nor had she, alas! the short upper lip which redeems everything. Her features were as insignificant as her colouring. People rarely noticed that Rachel's hair was brown, and that her deep-set eyes were grey. But upon her grave face the word "Helper" was plainly written: and something else. What was it?

        Just as in the faces of seamen we trace the onslaught of storm and sun and brine, and the puckering of the skin

round the eyes that comes of long watching in half lights, so in some faces, calm and pure as Rachel's, on which the sun and rain have never beaten, there is an expression betokening strong resistance from within of the brunt of a whirlwind from without. The marks of conflict and endurance on a young face--who shall see them unmoved! The Mother of Jesus must have noticed a great difference in her Son when she first saw Him again after the temptation in the wilderness.

        Rachel's grave amused glance fell upon Hugh. Their eyes met, and he instantly perceived to his astonishment that she recognised him. But she did not bow, and a moment later left the nearly empty rooms with the man who was talking to her.

        Hugh was excited out of recognition of his former half-scornful, half-blasé self. That woman must be his wife. She would save him from himself, this cynical restless self which never remained in one stay. The half acknowledged weakness in his nature unconsciously flung itself upon her strength, a strength which had been tried. She would love him, and uphold him. There would be no more yielding to circumstances if that pure strong soul were close beside him. He would lean upon her, and the ugly bypaths of these last years would know him no more. Her presence would leaven his whole life. In the momentary insanity, which was perhaps after all only a prophetic intuition, he had no fears, no misgivings. He thought that with that face it was not possible that she could be so wicked as to refuse him.

        "She will marry me," he said to himself. "She must."

        Lady Newhaven touched him gently on the arm.

        "I dared not speak to you before," she said. "Nearly every one has gone. Will you take me down to supper? I am tired out."

        He stared at her, not recognising her.

        "Have I vexed you?" she faltered.

        And with a sudden horrible revulsion of feeling he remembered. The poor chromo had fallen violently from its

nail. But the nail remained--ready. He took her into the supper room and got her a glass of champagne. She subsided on to a sofa beside another woman, vaguely suspecting trouble in the air. He felt thankful that Rachel had already gone. Dick, nearly the last, was putting on his coat, arranging to meet Lord Newhaven the following morning at his club. They had been in Australia together, and were evidently old friends.

        Lord Newhaven's listless manner returned as Dick marched out. Hugh had got one arm in his coat. An instinct of flight possessed him, a vague horror of the woman in diamonds furtively watching him under her lowered eyelids through the open door.

        "Oh, Scarlett!" said Lord Newhaven, detaining him languidly, "I want three minutes of your valuable time. Come into my study."

        "Another crossbow for Westhope Abbey?" said Hugh, trying to speak unconcernedly, as he followed his host to a back room on the ground floor. Lord Newhaven was collecting arms for the hall of his country house.

        "No! much simpler than those elaborate machines," said the older man, turning on the electric light. Hugh went in, and Lord Newhaven closed the door.

        Over the mantel-shelf were hung a few old Japanese inlaid carbines, and beneath them an array of pistols.

        "Useless now," said Lord Newhaven, touching them affectionately. "But," he added, with a shade more listlessness than before, "Society has become accustomed to do without them, and does ill without them, but we must conform to her." Hugh started slightly, and then remained motionless. "You observe these two paper lighters, Scarlett? One is an inch shorter than the other. They have been waiting on the mantel-shelf for the last month, till I had an opportunity of drawing your attention to them. I am sure we perfectly understand each other. No name need be mentioned. All scandal is avoided. I feel confident you will not hesitate to

make me the only reparation one man can make another in the somewhat hackneyed circumstances in which we find ourselves."

        Lord Newhaven took the lighters out of the glass. He glanced suddenly at Hugh's stunned face, and went on:

        "I am sorry the idea is not my own. I read it in a magazine. Though comparatively modern it promises soon to become as customary as the much to be regretted pistols for two and coffee for four. I hold the lighters thus, and you draw. Whoever draws or keeps the short one is pledged to leave this world within four months, or shall we say five, on account of the pheasant shooting? Five be it. Is it agreed? Just so! Will you draw?"

        A swift spasm passed over Hugh's face, and a tiger glint leapt into Lord Newhaven's eyes, fixed intently upon him.

        There was a brief second in which Hugh's mind wavered, as the flame of a candle wavers in a sudden draught. Lord Newhaven's eyes glittered. He advanced the lighters an inch nearer.

        If he had not advanced them that inch Hugh thought afterwards that he would have refused to draw.

        He backed against the mantel-piece, and then put out his hand suddenly and drew. It seemed the only way of escape.

        The two men measured the lighters on the table under the electric light.

        Lord Newhaven laughed.

        Hugh stood a moment, and then went out.

CHAPTER III

Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband?

        Neither man moved within. Only one spoke. There was no other sound to deaden her husband's distinct low voice. The silence that followed his last word "Will you draw?" was broken by his laugh, and she had barely time to throw herself back from the door into a dark recess under the staircase before Hugh came out. He almost touched her as he passed. He must have seen her if he had been capable of seeing anything, but he went straight on unheeding. And as she stole a few steps to gaze after him, she saw him cross the hall and go out into the night without his hat and coat, the amazed servants staring after him.

        She drew back to go upstairs, and met her husband coming slowly out of the study. He looked steadily at her, as she clung trembling to the banisters. There was no alteration in his glance, and she suddenly perceived that what he knew now he had always known. She put her hand to her head.

        "You look tired," he said, in the level voice to which she was accustomed. "You had better go to bed."

        She stumbled swiftly upstairs, catching at the banisters, and went into her own room.

        Her maid was waiting for her by the dressing-table with its shaded electric lights. And she remembered that she had given a party, and that she had on her diamonds.

        It would take a long time to unfasten them. She pulled at the diamond sun on her breast with a shaking hand. Her husband had given it to her when her eldest son was born. Her maid took the tiara gently out of her hair, and cut the threads that sewed the diamonds on her breast and shoulders. Would it never end? The lace of her gown cautiously withdrawn through its hundred eyelet-holes knotted itself.

        "Cut it," she said impatiently. "Cut it."

        At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone. She flung herself face downwards on the sofa. Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which was natural to her.

        The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it as she would have made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.

        Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by being found out.

        Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city? Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the prophet's story about the ewe lamb. But apparently he remained serenely obtuse till the indignant author's "Thou art the man" unexpectedly nailed him to the cross of his sin.

        And so it was with Lady Newhaven. She had gone through the twenty-seven years of her life believing herself to be a religious and virtuous person. She was so accustomed to the idea that it had become a habit, and now the whole of her self-respect was in one wrench torn from her. The events of the last year had not worn it down to its last shred, had not even worn the nap off. It was dragged from her intact, and the shock left her faint and shuddering.

        The thought that her husband knew, and had thought fit to

conceal his knowledge, had never entered her mind, any more than the probability that she had been seen by some of the servants kneeling listening at a keyhole. The mistake which all unobservant people make is to assume that others are as unobservant as themselves.

        By what frightful accident, she asked herself, had this catastrophe come about. She thought of all the obvious incidents which would have revealed the secret to herself; the dropped letter, the altered countenance, the badly arranged lie. No. She was convinced her secret had been guarded with minute, with scrupulous care. The only thing she had forgotten in her calculations was her husband's character, if, indeed, she could be said to have forgotten that which she had never known.

        Lord Newhaven was in his wife's eyes a very quiet man of few words. That his few words did not represent the whole of him had never occurred to her. She had often told her friends that he walked through life with his eyes shut. He had a trick of half shutting his eyes which confirmed her in this opinion. When she came across persons who were, after a time, discovered to have affections and interests of which they had not spoken she described them as "cunning." She had never thought Edward "cunning" till to-night. How had he of all men discovered this--this.--She had no words ready to call her conduct by, though words would not have failed her had she been denouncing the same conduct in another wife and mother.

        Gradually "the whole horror of her situation," to borrow from her own vocabulary, forced itself upon her mind like damp through a gay wall-paper. What did it matter how the discovery had been made! It was made, and she was ruined. She repeated the words between little gasps for breath. Ruined! Her reputation lost! Hers--Violet Newhaven's. It was a sheer impossibility that such a thing could have happened to a woman like her. It was some vile slander which Edward must see to. He was good at that sort of thing. But no, Edward would not help her. She had committed--. She

flung out her hands panic-stricken, as if to ward off a blow. The deed had brought with it no shame, but the word--the word wounded her like a sword.

        Her feeble mind, momentarily stunned, pursued its groping way.

        He would divorce her. It would be in the papers. But no. What was that he had said to Hugh--"No names to be mentioned; all scandal avoided."

        She shivered and drew in her breath. It was to be settled some other way. Her mind became an entire blank. Another way! What way? She remembered now, and an inarticulate cry broke from her. They had drawn lots.

        Which had drawn the short lighter?

        Her husband had laughed. But then he laughed at everything. He was never really serious, always shallow and heartless. He would have laughed if he had drawn it himself. Perhaps he had. Yes, he certainly had drawn it. But Hugh? She saw again the white set face as he passed her. No, it must be Hugh who had drawn it--Hugh whom she loved. She wrung her hands and moaned, half-aloud:

        "Which? Which?"

        There was a slight movement in the next room, the door was opened, and Lord Newhaven appeared in the doorway. He was still in evening dress.

        "Did you call?" he said quietly. "Are you ill?" He came and stood beside her.

        "No," she said hoarsely, and she sat up and gazed fixedly at him. Despair and suspense were in her eyes. There was no change in his, and she remembered that she had never seen him angry. Perhaps she had not known when he was angry.

        He was turning away, but she stopped him.

        "Wait," she said, and he returned, his cold attentive eye upon her. There was no contempt, no indignation in his bearing. If those feelings had shaken him it must have been some time ago. If they had been met and vanquished in secret that also must have been some time ago. He took up an

"Imitation of Christ," bound in the peculiar shade of lilac which at that moment prevailed, and turned it in his hand.

        "You are overwrought," he said, after a moment's pause, "and I particularly dislike a scene."

        She did not heed him.

        "I listened at the door," she said in a harsh, unnatural voice.

        "I am perfectly aware of it."

        A sort of horror seemed to have enveloped the familiar room. The very furniture looked like well-known words arranged suddenly in some new and dreadful meaning.

        "You never loved me," she said.

        He did not answer, but he looked gravely at her for a moment, and she was ashamed.

        "Why don't you divorce me if you think me so wicked?"

        "For the sake of the children," he said, with a slight change of voice.

        Teddy, the eldest, had been born in this room. Did either remember that grey morning six years ago?

        There was a silence that might be felt.

        "Who drew the short lighter?" she whispered, before she knew that she had spoken.

        "I am not here to answer questions," he replied. "And I have asked none. Neither, you will observe, have I blamed you. But I desire that you will never again allude to this subject, and that you will keep in mind that I do not intend to discuss it with you."

        He laid down the "Imitation," and moved towards his own room.

        With a sudden movement she flung herself upon her knees before him and caught his arm. The attitude suggested an amateur.

        "Which drew the short lighter?" she gasped, her small upturned face white and convulsed.

        "You will know in five months' time," he said. Then he extricated himself from her trembling clasp and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

CHAPTER IV

        For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!

RUDYARD KIPLING.

        His mind cleared a little. Rachel's grave face stood out against a dark background--a background darker surely than that of the summer night. He remembered with self-contempt the extravagant emotion which she had aroused in him.

        "Absurd," Hugh said to himself, with the distrust of all sudden springs of pure emotion which those who have misused them rarely escape. And then another remembrance, which only a sleeping draught had kept at bay, darted upon him like a panther on its prey.

        He had drawn the short lighter.

        He started violently, and then fell back trembling.

        "Oh, my God!" he said involuntarily.

        He lay still, telling himself that this dreadful nightmare would pass, would fade in the light of common day.

        His servant came in noiselessly with a cup of coffee and a little sheaf of letters.

        He pretended to be asleep; but when the man had gone he put out his shaking hand for the coffee and drank it.

        The mist before his mind gradually lifted. Gradually, too, the horror on his face whitened to despair, as a twilight meadow whitens beneath the evening frost. He had drawn the short lighter. Nothing in heaven or earth could alter that fact.

        He did not stop to wonder how Lord Newhaven had become aware of his own dishonour, or at the strange weapon with which he had avenged himself. He went over every detail of his encounter with him in the study. His hand had been forced. He had been thrust into a vile position. He ought to have refused to draw. He did not agree to draw. Nevertheless he had drawn. And Hugh knew that if it had to be done again, he should again have been compelled to draw by the iron will before which his was as straw. He could not have met the scorn of those terrible half-closed eyes if he had refused.

        "There was no help for it," said Hugh, half aloud. And yet to die by his own hand within five months! It was incredible. It was preposterous.

        "I never agreed to it," he said, passionately.

        Nevertheless he had drawn. The remembrance ever returned to lay its cold hand upon his heart, and with it came the grim conviction that if Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would have carried out the agreement to the letter. Whether it was extravagant, unchristian, whatever might have been truly said of that unholy compact, Lord Newhaven would have stood by it.

        "I suppose I must stand by it, too," said Hugh to himself, the cold sweat breaking on his forehead. "I suppose I am bound in honour to stand by it, too."

        He suffered his mind to regard the alternative.

        To wrong a man as deeply as he had wronged Lord Newhaven; to tacitly accept.--That was where his mistake had been. Another man, that mahogany-faced fellow with the colonial

accent, would have refused to draw, and would have knocked Lord Newhaven down and half killed him, or would have been knocked down and half killed by him. But to tacitly accept a means by which the injured man risked his life to avenge his honour, and then afterwards to shirk the fate which a perfectly even chance had thrown upon him instead of on his antagonist! It was too mean, too despicable. Hugh's pale cheek burned.

        "I am bound," he said slowly to himself over and over again. There was no way of escape.

        Yesterday evening, with some intuition of coming peril, he had said "I will get out." The way of retreat had been open behind him. Now by one slight movement he was cut off from it for ever.

        "I can't get out," said the starling, the feathers on its breast worn away with beating against the bars.

        "I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with the bars which he was to know so well, the bars of the prison that he had made with his own hands.

        He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has met his eye every morning of his life, and finds it--gone. It was incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the abyss, struck against a fixed point, and clutching it came violently to a standstill.

        His mother!

        His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned and thrust the thought from him. It was too sharp. He could not stifle it.

        His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was out of all proportion to his offence. And like some malignant infectious disease

retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust, unjust, unjust.

        A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against Lady Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted him. This was undoubtedly true, though not probably the view which her guardian angel would take of the matter.

        Among the letters which the servant had brought him he suddenly recognised that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" &c. &c. He knew the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty fireplace, and put a match to it. He watched it burn.

        It was his first overt act of rebellion against her yoke, the first step along the nearest of the many well-worn paths that a man takes at random to leave a woman. It did not occur to him that Lady Newhaven might have written to him about his encounter with her husband. He knew Lord Newhaven well enough to be absolutely certain that he would mention the subject to no living creature, least of all to his wife.

        "Neither will I," he said to himself; "and as for her, I will break with her from this day forward."

        The little pink notes with the dashing twirly handwriting persisted for at week or two and then ceased.

        Hugh was a man of many social engagements. His first impulse, when later in the day he remembered them, was to throw them all up and leave London. But Lord Newhaven would hear of his departure, and would smile. He decided to remain and to go on as if nothing had happened. When the evening came he dressed with his usual care, verified the hour of his engagement, and went out to dine with the Loftuses.

CHAPTER V

        What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later.

Maxim of the Bandar-log--RUDYARD KIPLING.

        London bore the process with equanimity, and presently Sybell determined to raise the art of dinner-giving from the low estate to which she avowed it had fallen to a higher level. She was young, she was pretty, she was well born, she was rich. All the social doors were open to her. But one discovery is often only the prelude to another. She soon made the further one that in order to raise the tone of social gatherings it is absolutely necessary to infuse into them a leaven of "clever people." Further light on this interesting subject showed her that most of the really "clever people" did not belong to her set. The discovery which all who love adulation quickly make--namely, that the truly appreciative and sympathetic and gifted are for the greater part to be found in a class below their own--was duly made and registered by Sybell. She avowed that class differences were nothing to her with the

enthusiasm of all those who since the world began have preferred to be first in the society which they gather round them.

        Fortunately for Sybell she was not troubled by doubts respecting the clearness of her own judgment. Eccentricity was in her eyes originality; a wholesale contradiction of established facts was a new view. She had not the horrid perception of difference between the real and the imitation which spoils the lives of many. She was equally delighted with both, and remained in blissful ignorance of the fact that her "deep" conversation was felt to be exhaustingly superficial if by chance she came across the real artist or thinker instead of his counterfeit.

        Consequently to her house came the raté in all his most virulent developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions on difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither came unwittingly simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. And hither also on this particular evening came Rachel West, whom Sybell had pronounced to be very intelligent a few days before, and who was serenely unconscious that she was present on her probation, and that if she did not say something striking she would never be asked again.

        Doll Loftus, Sybell's husband, was standing by Rachel when Hugh came in. He felt drawn towards her because she was not "clever" as far as her appearance went. At any rate, she had not the touzled, ill-groomed hair which he had learned to associate with female genius.

        "This sort of thing is beyond me," he said mournfully to

Rachel, his eyes travelling over the assembly gathered round his wife, whose remarks were calling forth admiring laughter. "I don't understand half they say, and when I do I sometimes wish I didn't. But I suppose," tentatively, "you go in for all this sort of thing?"

        "I!" said Rachel astonished. "I don't go in for anything. But what sort of thing do you mean?"

        "There is Scarlett," said Doll with relief, who hated definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep. "Do you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ghost, doesn't he?"

        Rachel's interest, never a heavy sleeper, was instantly awakened as she saw Sybell piloting Hugh towards her. She recognised him--the man she had seen last night in the hansom and afterwards at the Newhavens. A glance showed her that his trouble, whatever it might be, had pierced beyond the surface feelings of anger and impatience, and had reached the quick of his heart. The young man, pallid and heavy-eyed, bore himself well, and Rachel respected him for his quiet demeanour and a certain dignity, which, for the moment, obliterated the slight indecision of his face, and gave his mouth the firmness which it lacked. It seemed to Rachel as if he had but now stood by a deathbed, and had brought with him into the crowded room the shadow of an inexorable fate.

        The others only perceived that he had a headache. Hugh did not deny it. He complained of the great heat to Sybell, but not to Rachel. Something in her clear eyes told him, as they told many others, that small lies and petty deceits might be laid aside with impunity in dealing with her. He felt no surprise at seeing her, no return of the sudden violent emotion of the night before. He had never spoken to her till this moment, but yet he felt that her eyes were old friends, tried to the uttermost and found faithful in some forgotten past. Rachel's eyes had a certain calm fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament but of past conflict, long waged, and barely but irrevocably won. A faint ray of comfort stole

across the desolation of his mind as he looked at her. He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which heaven itself could never be a home.

        In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner. He had imagined that she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation he found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was talking. Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted. His strained face relaxed. She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue. Her face had brightened.

        He had dreaded this dinner party, this first essay to preserve his balance in public with his frightful invisible burden, but he was getting through it better than he had expected.

        "I have come back to what is called society," Rachel was saying, "after nearly seven years of an exile something like Nebuchadnezzar's, and there are two things which I find as difficult as Kipling's 'silly sailors' found their harps 'which they twanged unhandily.'"

        "Is small talk one of them?" asked Hugh. "It has always been a difficulty to me."

        "On the contrary," said Rachel. "I plume myself on that. Surely my present sample is not so much below the average that you need ask me that."

        "I did not recognise that it was small talk," said Hugh with a faint smile. "If it really is I can only say I shall have brain fever if you pass on to what you might call conversation."

        It was to him as if a miniature wavelet of a great ocean somewhere in the distance had crept up to laugh and break at his feet. He did not recognise that this tiniest runlet which fell back at once was of the same element as the tidal wave which had swept over him yesternight.

        "But are you aware," said Rachel, dropping her voice a little, "it is beginning to dawn upon me, that this evening's gathering is met together for exalted conversation, and perhaps we ought to be practising a little. I feel certain that after dinner you will be 'drawn through the clefts of confession' by Miss Barker, the woman in the high dinner gown with orange velvet sleeves. Mrs. Loftus introduced her to me when I arrived as the 'apostle of humanity.'"

        "Why should you fix on that particular apostle for me?" said Hugh, looking resentfully at a large-faced woman, who was talking in an "intense" manner to a slightly bewildered Bishop.

        "It is a prophetic instinct, nothing more."

        "I will have a prophetic instinct, too, then," said Hugh, helping himself at last to the dish which was presented to him, to Rachel's relief. "I shall give you the--" looking slowly down the table.

        "The Bishop?"

        "Certainly not, after your disposal of me."

        "Well, then, the poet? I am sure he is a poet because his tie is uneven and his hair is so long. Why do literary men wear their hair long, and literary women wear it short? I should like the poet."

        "You shall not have him," said Hugh with decision. "I am hesitating between the bald young man with the fat hand and the immense ring, and the old professor who is drawing plans on the tablecloth."

        "The apostle told me with bated breath that the young man with the ring is Mr. Harvey, the author of 'Unashamed.'"

        Hugh looked at his plate to conceal his disgust.

        There was a pause in the buzz of conversation, and into it fell straightway the voice of the apostle like a brick through a skylight.

        "The need of the present age is the realisation of our brotherhood with sin and suffering and poverty. West

London in satin and diamonds does not hear her sister East London in rags calling to her to deliver her. The voice of East London has been drowned in the dance-music of the West End."

        Sybell gazed with awed admiration at the apostle.

        "What a beautiful thought," she said.

        "Miss Gresley's 'Idyll of East London,'" said Hugh, "is a voice which, at any rate, has been fully heard."

        The apostle put up a pince-nez on a bone leg and looked at Hugh.

        "I entirely disapprove of that little book," she said. "It is misleading and wilfully one-sided."

        "Hester Gresley is a dear friend of mine," said Sybell, "and I must stand up for her. She is the sister of our clergyman, who is a very clever man. In fact, I am not sure he isn't the cleverest of the two. She and I have great talks. We have so much in common. How strange it seems that she who lives in the depths of the country should have written a story of the East End."

        "That is always so," said the author of "Unashamed," in a sonorous voice. "The novel has of late been dwarfed to the scope of the young English girl (he pronounced it gurl) who writes from her imagination and not from her experience. What true art requires of us is a faithful rendering of a great experience."

        He looked round, as if challenging the world to say that "Unashamed" was not a lurid personal reminiscence.

        Sybell was charmed. She felt that none of her previous dinner-parties had reached such a high level as this one.

        "A faithful rendering of a great experience," she repeated. "How I wish Hester were here to hear that. I often tell her she ought to see life, and cultivated society would do so much for her. I found her out a year ago, and I'm always begging people to read her book, and I simply long to introduce her to clever people and oblige the world to recognise her talent."

        "I agree with you it is not yet fully recognised," said Hugh

in a level voice; "but if 'The Idyll' received only partial recognition, it was at any rate enthusiastic. And it is not forgotten."

        Sybell felt vaguely uncomfortable, and conceived a faint dislike of Hugh as an uncongenial person.

        The apostle and the poet began to speak simultaneously, but the female key was the highest and prevailed.

        "We all agree in admiring Miss Gresley's delicate piece of workmanship," said the apostle, both elbows on the table after the manner of her kind, "but it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering humanity--to our cause--when the books which pretend to set forth certain phases of its existence are written by persons entirely ignorant of the life they describe."

        "How true," said Sybell. "I have often thought it, but I never could put it into words as you do. Oh! how I agree with you and Mr. Harvey. As I often say to Hester, 'How can you describe anything if you don't go anywhere or see anything; I can't give you my experience. No one can.' I said that to her only a month ago, when she refused to come up to London with me."

        Rachel's white face and neck had taken on them the pink transparent colour that generally dwelt only in the curves of her small ears.

        "Why do you think Miss Gresley is ignorant of the life she describes?" she said, addressing the apostle.

        The author and the apostle both opened their mouths at the same moment, only to register a second triumph of the female tongue.

        Miss Barker was in her element. The whole table was listening. She shrugged her orange-velvet shoulders.

        "Those who have cast in their lot with the poor," she said, sententiously, "would recognise at once the impossibility of Miss Gresley's characters and situations."

        "To me they seem real," said Rachel.

        "Ah, my dear Miss West, you will excuse me, but a young lady like yourself, nursed in the lap of luxury, can hardly be

expected to look at life with the same eyes as a poor waif like myself, who has penetrated to the very core of the city, and who has heard the stifled sigh of a vast perishing humanity."

        "I lived in the midst of it for six years," said Rachel. "I did not cast in my lot with the poor, for I was one of them, and earned my bread among them. Miss Gresley's book may not be palatable in some respects, the district visitor and the woman missionary are certainly treated with harshness, but as far as my experience goes, the 'Idyll' is a true word from first to last."

        There was in Rachel's voice a restrained force that vaguely stirred all the occupants of the room. Every one looked at her, and for a moment no one spoke. She became quite colourless.

        "Very striking. Just what I should have said in her place," said Sybell to herself. "I will ask her again."

        "I can hear it raining," said Doll's voice from the head of the table to the company in general. "If it will only go on for a week without stopping there may be some hope for the crops yet."

        The conversation buzzed up again, and Rachel turned instantly to Hugh, before Mr. Harvey, leaning forward with his ring, had time to address her.

        Hugh alone saw what a superhuman effort it had been to her to overcome her shrinking from mentioning, not her previous poverty, but her personal experience. She had sacrificed her natural reserve, which he could see was great; she had even set good taste at defiance to defend Hester Gresley's book. Hugh had shuddered as he heard her speak. He felt that he could not have obtruded himself on so mixed an assembly. Yet he saw that it had cost her more to do so than it would have cost him.

        He began to remember having heard people speak of an ironmaster's daughter, whose father had failed and died, and who, after several years of dire poverty, had lately inherited a vast fortune from her father's partner. It had

been talked about at the time, a few months ago. This must be she.

        "You have a great affection for Miss Gresley," he said in a low voice.

        "I have," said Rachel, her lip still quivering. "But if I disliked her I hope I should have said the same. Surely it is not necessary to love the writer in order to defend the book."

        Hugh was silent. He looked at her, and wished that she might always be on his side.

        "About two courses ago I was going to tell you," said Rachael smiling, "of one of my chief difficulties on my return to the civilised world and 'Society.' But now you have had an example of it. I am trying to cure myself of the trick of becoming interested in conversation. I must learn to use words as counters, not as coins. I need not disbelieve what I say, but I must not speak of anything to which I attach value. I perceive that to do this is an art and a means of defence from invasion. But I, on the contrary, become interested, as you have just seen. I forget that I am only playing a game, and I rush into a subject like a bull into a china shop, and knock about all the crockery until--as I am not opposed by my native pitchfork--I suddenly return to my senses, and discover that I have mistaken a game for real earnest."

        "We were all in earnest five minutes ago," said Hugh, "at least, I was. I could not bear to hear Miss Gresley patronised by all these failures and amateurs. But unless I am very much mistaken you will find several pitchforks laid up for you in the drawing-room."

        "I don't mean to smash any more china," said Rachel.

        Another wavelet skimmed in and broke a little further up the sand. A sense of freshness, of expectation was in the air. The great gathered ocean was stirring itself in the distance. Hugh had forgotten his trouble.

        He turned the conversation back to Hester Gresley and her writing. He spoke of her with sympathy and appreciation,

and presently detected a softness in Rachel's eyes which made him jealous of Hester.

        By the time the evening was over the imperceptible travelling of the summer sea had reached as far as the tidal wave.

        Hugh left when Rachel did, accompanying her to her carriage. At the door were the darkness and the rain. At the door with them the horror and despair of the morning were in wait for him, and laid hold upon him. Hugh shuddered, and turned instinctively to Rachel.

        She was holding out her hand to him. He took it and held it tightly in his sudden fear and desolation.

        "When shall I meet you again?" he said hoarsely.

        A long look passed between them. Hugh's tortured soul full of passionate entreaty leaped to his eyes. Hers, sad and steadfast, met the appeal in his, and recognised it as a claim. There was no surprise in her quiet face.

        "I ride early in the Row," she said. "You can join me there if you wish. Good-night."

        She took her hand with great gentleness out of his, and drove away.

        And the darkness shut down again on Hugh's heart.

CHAPTER VI

Içi bas tous les hommes pleurent
Leurs amitiés et leurs amours.

BOURGET.

        But nevertheless here and there among its numberless counterfeits a friendship rises up between two women which sustains the life of both, which is still young when life is waning, which man's love and motherhood cannot displace nor death annihilate; a friendship which is not the solitary affection of an empty heart nor the deepest affection of a full one, but which nevertheless lightens the burdens of this world and lays its pure hand upon the next.

        Such a friendship, very deep, very tender, existed between Rachel West and Hester Gresley. It dated back from the nursery days, when Hester and Rachel solemnly eyed each other, and then made acquaintance in the dark gardens of Portman Square, into which Hester introduced a fortified castle with a captive princess in it and a rescuing prince and a dragon, and several other ingredients of romance, to the awed amazement of Rachel--stolid, solid, silent Rachel--who loved all two- and four-legged creatures, but who never made

them talk to each other as Hester did. And Hester, in blue serge, told Rachel, in crimson velvet, as they walked hand in hand in front of their nursery-maids, what the London sparrows said to each other in the gutters, and how they considered the gravel-path in the square was a deep river suitable to bathe in. And when the spring was coming, and the prince had rescued the princess so often from the dungeon in the laurel-bushes that Hester was tired of it, she told Rachel how the elms were always sighing because they were shut up in town, and how they went out every night with their roots into the green country to see their friends, and came back oh! so early in the morning, before any one was awake to miss them. And Rachel's heart yearned after Hester, and she gave her her red horse and the tin duck and magnet, and Hester made stories about them all.

        At last the day came when Rachel's mother, who had long viewed the intimacy with complacency, presented her compliments, in a note-sheet with two immense gilt crests on it, to Hester's aunt, and requested that her little niece might be allowed to come to tea with her little daughter. And Lady Susan Gresley, who had never met the rich ironmaster's wife in this world, and would probably be equally exclusive in the next, was about to refuse, when Hester, who up to that moment had apparently taken no interest in the matter, suddenly cast herself on the floor in a paroxysm of despair and beat her head against the carpet. The tearful entreaties of her aunt gradually elicited the explanation, riddled by sobs, that Hester could never take an interest in life again, could never raise herself even to a sitting position, nor dry her eyes on her aunt's handkerchief, unless she were allowed to go to tea with Rachel and see her dormouse.

        Lady Susan, much upset herself, and convinced that these outbursts were prejudicial to Hester's health, gave way at once, and a few days later Hester, pale, shy, in a white muffler, escorted by Mademoiselle, went to tea in the magnificent house on the other side of the square, and saw Rachel's

round head without a feathered hat on it, and both children were consumed by shyness until the two Mademoiselles withdrew into another room, and Rachel showed Hester the dormouse which she had found in the woods in the country, and which ate out of her hand. And Hester made a little poem on it, beginning:

There was a mouse in Portman Square.

        And then, after both girls had danced through one London season in different ball-rooms, Rachel's parents died, her mother first, and then--by accident--her father, leaving behind him an avalanche of unsuspected money difficulties, in which even his vast fortune was engulphed.

        Hard years followed for Rachel. She ate the bread of carefulness in the houses of poor relations not of high degree, with whom her parents had quarrelled when they had made their money and began to entertain social ambitions. She learned what it was to be the person of least importance in families of no importance. She essayed to teach and failed. She had no real education. She made desperate struggles for independence, and learned how others failed besides herself. She left her relations and their bitter bread and came to London, and struggled with those who struggled, and saw how Temptation spreads her net for bleeding feet. Because she loved Hester she accepted from her half her slender pin-money. Hester had said, "If I were poor, Rachel, how would you bear it if I would not let you help me?" And Rachel had wept slow difficult tears, and had given Hester the comfort of helping

her. The greater generosity was with Rachel, and Hester knew it.

        And as Rachel's fortunes sank, Hester's rose. Lady Susan Gresley had one talent, and she did not lay it up in a napkin. She had the art of attracting people to her house, that house to which Mrs. West had never forced an entrance. Hester was thrown from the first into a society which her clergyman brother, who had never seen it, pronounced to be frivolous, worldly, profane, but which no one has called dull. There were many facets in Hester's character, and Lady Susan had managed to place her where they caught the light. Was she witty? Was she attractive? Who shall say. Man is wisely averse to "cleverness" in a woman, but if he possesses any armour wherewith to steel himself against wit it is certain that he seldom puts it on. She refused several offers, one so brilliant that no woman ever believed that it was really made.

        Lady Susan saw that her niece, without a fortune, with little beauty save that of high breeding, with weak health, was becoming a personage. "What will she become?" people said. And in the meanwhile Hester did nothing beyond dressing extremely well. And everything she saw and every person she met added fuel to an unlit fire in her soul.

        At last Rachel was able to earn a meagre living by typewriting, and for four years, happy by contrast with those when despair and failure had confronted her, she lived by the work of her hands among those poor as herself. Gradually she had lost sight of all her acquaintances. She had been out of the schoolroom for too short a time to make friends. And alas! in the set in which she had been launched poverty was a crime; no, perhaps not quite that, but as much a bar to intercourse as in another class a want of the letter H is found to be.

        It was while Rachel was still struggling for a livelihood that the event happened which changed the bias of her character, as a geranium transplanted from the garden changes its attitude in a cottage window.

        On one of the early days of her despair she met on the

dreary stairs of the great rabbit warren in which she had a room, a man with whom she had been acquainted in the short year of her social life before the collapse of her fortunes. He had paid her considerable attention, and she had thought once or twice with momentary bitterness that, like the rest, he had not cared to find out what had become of her. She greeted him with shy but evident pleasure. She took for granted he had come to see her, and he allowed her to remain under that delusion. In reality he had been hunting up an old model whom he wanted for his next picture, and who had silently left Museum Buildings some months before without leaving his address. He had genuinely admired her though he had forgotten her, and he was unaffectedly delighted to see her again.

        That one chance meeting was the first of many. Flowers came to Rachel's little room, and romance came with them. Rachel's proud tender heart struggled and then gave way before this radiant first love blossoming in the midst of her loneliness. At last on a March afternoon when the low sun caught the daffodils he had brought her he told her he loved her.

        Days followed, exquisite days, which have none like them in later life whatever later life may bring. That year the spring came early, and they went often together into the country. And that year when all the world was white with blossom the snow came, and laid upon earth's bridal veil a white shroud. Every cup of May blossom, every petal of hawthorn bent beneath its burden of snow. And so it was in the full springtide of Rachel's heart. The snow came down upon it. She discovered at last that though he loved her he did not wish to marry her; that even from the time of that first meeting he had never intended to marry her. That discovery was a shroud. She wrapped her dead love in it, and would fain have buried it out of her sight.

        But only after a year of conflict was she suffered to bury it; after a year during which the ghost of her dead ever came

back and came back to importune her vainly with its love.

        Rachel's poor neighbours grew accustomed to see the tall handsome waiting figure which always returned and returned, but which at last after one dreadful day was seen no more in Museum Buildings. Rachel had laid the ghost at last. But the conflict remained graven in her face.

        On a certain cold winter morning Hester darted across the wet pavement from the brougham to the untidy entrance of Museum Buildings where Rachel still lived. It was a miserable day. The streets and bare trees looked as if they had been drawn in in ink, and the whole carelessly blotted before it was dry. All the outlines were confused, blurred. The cold penetrated to the very bones of the shivering city.

        Rachel had just come in wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of manuscript to be transcribed. A woman waiting for her on the endless stone stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth.

        "He always employed me till you came," she shrieked, shaking her fist at her, "and now he gives it all to you because you're younger and better looking."

        She gave the woman as much as she dared spare, the calculation did not take long, and went on climbing the stairs.

        Something in the poor creature's words, something vague but repulsive in her remembrance of the man who paid her for the work by which she could barely live, fell like lead into Rachel's heart. She looked out dumbly over the wilderness of roofs. The suffering of the world was eating into her soul, the suffering of this vast travailing East London, where people trod each other down to live.

        "If any one had told me," she said to herself, "when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation, and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with, the ink I

used, the paper I wrote on--all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my matchbox, especially my matchbox, was the result of sweated labour, I should not have believed it, I should have laughed. But yet it is so. If I had not been rich once myself I should think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let such things go on. They have the power to help us. We have none to help ourselves. But they never use it. The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open. I have got that woman's work. I have struggled hard enough to get it, but though I did not realise it, I might have known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing some one else off it."

        Rachel looked out across the miles of roofs which lay below her garret window. The sound was in her ears of that great whirlpool wherein youth and beauty and innocence go down quick day by day. The wilderness of leaden roofs turned suddenly before her eyes into a sullen furrowed sea of shame and crime which, awaiting no future day of judgment, daily gave up its awful dead.

        Presently Hester came in, panting a little after the long ascent of worn stairs, and dragging with her a large parcel. It was a fur-lined cloak. Hester spread it mutely before her friend, and looked beseechingly at her. Then she kissed her, and the two girls clung together for a moment in silence.

        "Dearest," said Rachel, "don't give me new things. It isn't that--you know I did take it when I was in need. But oh, Hester, I know you can't afford it. I should not mind if you were rich, at least, I would try not, but--if you would only give me some of your old clothes instead. I should like them all the better because you had worn them." And Rachel kissed the lapel of Hester's coat.

        "I can't," whispered Hester into Rachel's hair. "The best is only just good enough."

        "Wouldn't it be kinder to me?"

        Hester trembled, and then burst into tears.

        "I will wear it, I will wear it," said Rachel hurriedly. "Look, Hester! I have got it on. How deliciously warm, and--do look; it has two little pockets in the fur lining."

        But Hester wept passionately, and Rachel sat down by her on the floor in the new cloak till the paroxysm was over.

        How does a subtle affinity find a foothold between natures which present an obvious, a violent contrast to each other? Why do the obvious and the subtle forget their life-long feud at intervals, and suddenly appear for a moment in each other's society?

        Rachel was physically strong. Hester was weak. The one was calm, patient, practical, equable, the other imaginative, unbalanced, excitable.

        Life had not spoilt Rachel. Lady Susan Gresley had done her best to spoil Hester. The one had lived the unprotected life, and showed it in her bearing. The other had lived the sheltered life, and bore its mark upon her pure forehead and youthful face.

        "I cannot bear it," said Hester at last. "I think and think, and I can't think of anything. I would give my life for you, and you will hardly let me give you £3 10s. 6d. That is all it cost. It is only frieze, that common red frieze, and the lining is only rabbit." A last tear fell at the word rabbit. "I wanted to get you a velvet one, just the same as my new one, lined with chinchilla, but I knew it would only make you miserable. I wish," looking vindictively at the cloak, "I wish rabbits had never been born."

        Rachel laughed. Hester was evidently recovering.

        "Mr. Scarlett was saying last night that no one can help any one," continued Hester, turning her white exhausted face to her friend. "He said that we are always so placed that we can only look on. And I told him that could not be true, but oh, in my heart, Rachel, I have felt it was true all these long, long five years since you have lived here."

        Rachel came and stood beside her at the little window.

There was just room for them between the typewriter and the bed.

        Far below, Hester's brougham was pacing up and down.

        "Then are love and sympathy nothing?" she said. "Those are the real gifts. If I were rich to-morrow I should look to you just as I do now for the things which money can't buy. And those are the things"--Rachel's voice shook--"which you have always given me, and which I can't do without. You feel my poverty more than I do myself. It crushed me at first when I could not support myself. Now that I can--and in everything except money I am very rich--I am comparatively happy."

        There was a long silence.

        "Perhaps," said Rachel at last with difficulty, "if I had remained an heiress Mr. Tristram might have married me. I feel nearly sure he would have married me. In that case I lost my money only just in time to prevent a much greater misfortune, and I am glad I am as I am."

        Rachel remembered that conversation often in after years with a sense of thankfulness that for once she who was so reticent had let Hester see how dear she was to her.

        The two girls stood long together cheek against cheek.

        And as Hester leaned against Rachel the yearning of her soul towards her suddenly lit up something which had long lain colossal but inapprehended in the depths of her mind. Her paroxysm of despair at her own powerlessness was followed by a lightning flash of self-revelation. She saw, as in a dream, terrible, beautiful, inaccessible, but distinct, where her power lay, of which restless bewildering hints had so often mocked her. She had but to touch the houses and they would fall down. She held her hands tightly together lest she should do it. The strength as of an infinite ocean swept in beneath her weakness, and bore it upon its surface like a leaf.

        "You must go home," said Rachel gently, remembering Lady Susan's punctual habits.

        Hester kissed her absently and went out into the new world

which had been pressing upon her all her life, the gate of which Love had opened for her. For Love has many keys besides that of her own dwelling. Some who know her slightly affirm that she can only open her own cheap patent padlock with a secret word on it that everybody knows. But some who know her better hold that hers is the master-key which will one day turn all the locks in all the world.

        A year later Hester's first book, "An Idyll of East London," was reaping its harvest of astonished indignation and admiration, and her acquaintances--not her friends--were still wondering how she came to know so much of a life of which they decided she could know nothing, when suddenly Lady Susan Gresley died, and Hester went to live in the country with her clergyman brother.

        A few months later still, and on a mild April day, when the poor London trees had black buds on them, Rachel brushed and folded away in the little painted chest of drawers her few threadbare clothes, and put the boots--which the cobbler whose wife she had nursed had patched for her--under the shelf which held her few cups and plates and the faithful tin kettle, which had always been a cheerful boiler. And she washed her seven coarse handkerchiefs, and put them in the washband-stand drawer. And then she raked out the fire and cleaned the grate, and set the room in order. It was quickly done. She took up her hat which lay beside a bundle on the bed. Her hands trembled as she put it on. She looked wistfully round her, and her face worked. The little room which had looked so alien when she came to it six years ago had become a home. She went to the window and kissed the pane through which she had learnt to see so much. Then she seized up the bundle, and went quickly out, locking the door behind her, and taking the key with her.

        "I am going away for a time, but I shall come back," she said to the cobbler's wife on the same landing.

        "No one comes back as once goes," said the woman, without

raising her eyes from the cheap blouse which she was finishing, which kept so well the grim secret of how it came into being that no one was afraid of buying it.

        "I am keeping on the room."

        The woman smiled incredulously, giving one sharp glance at the bundle. She had seen many flittings. She should buy the kettle when Rachel's "sticks" were sold by the landlord in default of the rent.

        "Well, you was a good neighbour," she said. "There's a many as 'ull miss you. Good-bye, and good luck to ye. I shan't say as you've left."

        "I shall come back," said Rachel hoarsely, and she slipped downstairs like a thief. She felt like a thief. For she was rich. The man who had led her father into the speculations which had ruined him had died childless, and had bequeathed to her a colossal fortune.

CHAPTER VII

        Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilise the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?

EMERSON.

        When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a stimulus to her love of dress, when at last she met, as she would have expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and final deviation from the path of honour were the result of new arrangements round the same centre.

        The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face--Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a

Madonna--with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the contemplation of such impregnable virtue.

        "You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to heaven I were as cold as I appear."

        And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times, had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.

        From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation himself before proceeding to the matter in hand.

        "Having noticed that a mother--I mean a young mother--is never really happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you wish to return to Westhope?" he said one morning at breakfast.

        "Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another."

        "We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London."

        She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the

reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.

        She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there. The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her, withering her round cheek, and making her small plump hand look shrunk and thin. A fortnight had passed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her, but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven, and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh's letters to herself. For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that Hugh's letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself. But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.

        Would she in eighteen months' time--she should certainly refuse to marry within the year--be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in coloured raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? "How some one must have loved him," she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying. And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep

beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up black-robed from the flower-laden sod, and hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more and broken on the same wheel. "Which? Which?"

        A servant entered.

        "Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?"

        "Yes," said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by the presence of an acquaintance.

        "It is very charitable of you to see me," said Rachel. "Personally, I think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry some message of forgiveness to her as she is dying. Her name is Morgan. Do you remember her?"

        "I once had a maid called Morgan," said Lady Newhaven. "She was drunken, and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing."

        "She took your diamond heart pendant," continued Rachel. "She was never found out. She can't return it, for of course she sold it and spent the money. But now at last she feels she did wrong, and she says she will die easier for your forgiveness."

        "Oh! I forgive her," said Lady Newhaven indifferently. "I often wondered how I lost it. I never cared about it." She glanced at Rachel, and added tremulously, "My husband gave it me."

        A sudden impulse was urging her to confide in this grave, gentle-eyed woman. The temptation was all the stronger because Rachel, who had only lately appeared in society, was not connected with any portion of her previous life. She was as much a chance acquaintance as a fellow passenger in a railway carriage.

        Rachel rose and held out her hand.

        "Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her outstretched hand and holding it.

        "I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say things you will regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see you are."

        "I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent weeping.

        Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own engagements, their own pleasures and troubles are liable to be set aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many trains. Those who sought her seldom realised that her day was as full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal grey gown for the first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.

        Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes, and turned impulsively towards her.

        The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared on the surface together.

        "I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am most reserved. I daresay you have noticed how reserved I am. I live in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks of herself. I am not saying this the least un-

kindly, but of course it is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does. How will it affect them? That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."

        Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honoured conversational opening.

        "And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven, "a girl cannot enter into them."

        "Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel smiling, wondering if she might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many layers of prepared conventional feelings in which a few thin streaks of genuine emotion were embedded, she told her story--the story of a young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the children--"such sweet children, such little darlings"--and the gradual estrangement. Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart's unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.

        "He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel. "My influence over him is simply boundless. If I said, as I sometimes did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he would go and dance with her. I have seen him do it."

        "I suppose he did it to please you."

        "That was just it, simply to please me."

        Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to misconstruction. Rachel's heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable development was finally reached in floods of tears.

        "And you remember that night you were at an evening party here," sobbed Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and speaking extempore. "It is just a fortnight ago, and I have not slept since, and he was here, looking so miserable (Rachel started slightly); he sometimes did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And afterwards, when every one had gone, Edward took him to his study and told him he had found us out, and they drew lots which should kill himself within five months--and I listened at the door."

        Lady Newhaven's voice rose half strangled, hardly human in a shrill grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no affectation about her now.

        Rachel's heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She knelt down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her, and leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish upon her breast.

        "And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.

        "I don't know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven. "It is that which is killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and sometimes I think it is Hugh."

        At the name of Hugh Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.

        Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in the world.

        "Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she had died for it, she must have asked that question.

        "Yes," said Lady Newhaven.

        A shadow fell on Rachel's face, as on the face of one who suddenly discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under the flag of a new ally.

        "I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering herself sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night before. "I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."

CHAPTER VIII

A square-set man and honest.

TENNYSON.

        "I lay low till I got my clothes," said Dick, "and then I went to the Duke of --. I've just been looking at a hack for him. He says he does not want one that takes a lot of sitting on. I met him the first night I landed. In fact, I stepped out of the train on to his royal toe travelling incog. I was just going to advise him to draw in his feelers a bit, and give the Colonies a chance, when he turned round and I saw who it was. I knew him when I was A.D.C. at Melbourne before I took to the drink. He said he thought he'd know my foot anywhere, and asked me down for -- races.

        "And you enjoyed it? "

        "Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of child's play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."

        "And what are you going to do now? "

        "Go down to the city and see what Darnell's cellars are like before I store my wine in them. It won't take long. Er!--I Say, Cack--Newhaven?"

        "Well?"

        "Ought I to--how about my calling on Miss --. I never caught her name?"

        "Miss West, the heiress?"

        "Yes. Little attention on my part."

        "Did she ask you to call?"

        "No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like it."

        "Well, then, go and be--snubbed."

        "I don't want snubbing. A little thing like me wants encouragement."

        "A good many other people are on the look out for encouragement in that quarter."

        "That settles it," said Dick, "I'll go at once. I've got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I'll take Miss--"

        "West. West. West."

        "Miss West on the way."

        "My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking. Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."

        "Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester? She is a kind of cousin of mine."

        "Miss Gresley has gone to live in the country a few miles from us, with her clergyman brother."

        "James Gresley. I remember him. He's a bad egg."

        "Now, Dick, are you in earnest, or are you talking nonsense about Miss West?"

        "I'm in earnest." He looked it.

        "Then, for heaven's sake, don't put your foot in it by calling. My wife has taken a violent fancy to Miss West. I don't think it is returned, but that is a detail. If you want to give her a chance leave it to me."

        "I know what that means. You married men are mere sieves. You'll run straight home with your tongue out and tell Lady Newhaven that I want to marry Miss --, I can't clinch her name, and then she'll tell her when they are combing their back hair. And then if I find, later on, I don't like her and step off the grass I shall have behaved like a perfect brute,

and all that sort of thing. A man I knew out in Melbourne told me that by the time he'd taken a little notice of a likely girl he'd gone too far to go back and he had to marry her."

        "You need not be so coy. I don't intend to mention the subject to my wife. Besides, I don't suppose Miss West will look at you. You're a wretched match for her. With her money she might marry a brewery or a peerage."

        "I'll put myself in focus anyhow," said Dick. "Hang it all. If you could get a woman to marry you, there is hope for everybody. I don't expect it will be as easy as falling off a log. But if she is what I take her to be I shall go for all I'm worth."

        Some one else was going for all he was worth. Lord Newhaven rode early, and he had frequently seen Rachel and Hugh riding together at foot's pace. Possibly his offer to help Dick was partly prompted by an unconscious desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.

        Dick, whose worst enemy could not accuse him of diffidence, proved a solid spoke but for a few days only. Rachel suddenly broke all her engagements and left London.

CHAPTER IX.

        Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'église.

        Through this favoured locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns again as if loth to leave the rich low meadow lands and clustering villages upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among the gravestones of the little churchyard. On one occasion, after repeated prayers for

rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar's garden, and vindictively carried away his beehives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.

        Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms, the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on saints days and G.F.S. gatherings.

        About eight o'clock on this particular morning in July the Drone could hear if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley, and to a young thrush which was hurling its person like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his graveclothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river's edge, and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.

        The service ended at last, and after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it beak agape into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the churchyard--with its one melancholy Scotch fir embarrassed by its trouser of ivy--to the little gate which led into their garden.

        They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He at least evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses--the maltreated, the travestied name of "gentleman."

        None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which we are told distinguish the

true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value--the right outside.

        To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley's suspicious eye and thin compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it, as a hunted hare against a stone wall. He was unmistakably of those who who only see side issues.

        Mrs. Gresley took her husband's arm as he closed the gate. She was still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a clergyman's wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always wearing out old finery. Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr. Gresley.

        The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden looking fondly at their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small slight figure appeared on the terrace.

        "James!" said Mrs. Gresley with decision. "It is your duty to speak to Hester about attending early service. If she can go out in the garden she can come to church."

        "I have spoken to her once," said Mr. Gresley, frowning, "and though I put it before her very plainly she showed great obstinacy. Fond as I am of Hester, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that she has an arrogant and callous nature. But we must remember, my love, that Aunt Susan was most lax in all her views, and we must make allowance for Hester, who

lived with her till last year. It is only natural that Hester, bred up from childhood in that worldly circle--dinner parties all through Lent, and Sunday luncheons--should have fallen through want of solid church teaching into freethinking, and ideas of her own upon religion."

        Mr. Gresley's voice was of that peculiar metallic note which carries further than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices. Hester's little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley's study on the ground floor, but nevertheless she often heard confused anxious parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note which knew no cessation until objection or opposition ceased. As she came towards them, she heard with perfect distinctness what he was saying, but it did not trouble her. Hester was gifted with imagination, and imagination does not find it difficult to read by the short hand of the expressions and habitual opinions and repressions of others what they occasionally say at full length, and to which they fondly believe they are giving utterance for the first time. Mr. Gresley had said all this many times already by his manner, and it had by its vain repetitions lost its novelty. Mr. Gresley was fortunately not aware of this, for unimaginative persons believe themselves to be sealed books, as hermetically sealed as the characters of others are to themselves.

        Hester was very like her brother. She had the same nose, slightly too long for her small face, the same short upper lip and light hair, only her brother's was straight and hers was crimped, as wet sand is crimped by a placid outgoing sea. That she had an equally strong will was obvious. But there the likeness ended. Hester's figure was slight, and she stooped a little. Hester's eyes were very gentle, very appealing under their long curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley's never were, gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of them sometimes, that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its very soul and all its best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester showed her age in her eyes. She was seven

and twenty and appeared many years younger, until she looked at you.

        Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon, adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.

        Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dressmaker informed her had "to be kept down," made a mental note for the hundredth time that Hester "laced in."

        Hester gave that impression of "finish" and sharpness of edge so rarely found among the blurred vague outlines of Englishwomen. There was nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her delicate pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender feet as she walked, her quick alert movements, everything about her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than the succés fou in black and white of the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.

        "Good morning," she said, turning back with them to the house. "Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet. And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it. Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to temptation."

        Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in the afternoon.

        "My dear Hester," Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalised, "I

am sure you won't mind my saying so, but James has not seen his paper yet."

        "I have noticed he never by any chance looks at it till the evening, and you always say you never read it," said Hester, deep in a political crisis.

        "That is his rule, and a very good rule it is, but he naturally likes to be the first to look at it," said Mrs. Gresley with a great exercise of patience. She had heard Hester was clever, but she found her very stupid. Everything had to be explained to her.

        Her tone recalled Hester from the Indian tribal rising, and the speech of the Prime Minister, to the realities of life. It was fortunate for her that she was quick-witted. These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for her. She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters. She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her entire intercourse with the Gresleys, and never offended in that manner again.

        On this particular morning she waited decorously beside her brother as he opened the bag, and dealt out the contents into three heaps. Hester pounced on hers, and subsided into her chair at the breakfast-table.

        "I wonder," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at Hester's pile of letters over the top of her share of the morning's correspondence--namely, a list of Pryce Jones, "that you care to write so many letters, Hester. I am sure I never did such a thing when I was a girl. I should have regarded it as a waste of time."

        "Ha!" said Mr. Gresley, in a gratified tone, opening a little roll. "What have we here? Proofs! My paper upon 'Modern Dissent.' I told Edwards I would not allow him to put it in his next number of the Southminster Advertiser until I had glanced at it in print. I don't know when I shall find time to correct it. I shall be out all the afternoon at the Chapter meeting."

        He looked at Hester. She had laid down her letters and was taking a cup of coffee from Mrs. Gresley. She evidently had not heard her brother's remark.

        "You and I must lay our heads together over this, Hester," he said, holding up with some pride a long slip of proof. "It will be just in your line. You might run it over after breakfast," he continued, in high good humour, "and put in the stops and grammar and spelling--you're more up in that sort of thing than I am--and then we will go through it together."

        Hester was quite accustomed, when her help was asked as to a composition, to receive as a reason for the request the extremely gratifying assurance that she was "good" at punctuation and spelling. It gave the would-be author a comfortable feeling that after all he was only asking advice on the crudest technical matters on which Hester's superiority could be admitted without a loss of masculine self-respect.

        "I would rather not tamper with punctuation and spelling," said Hester, drily. "I am so shaky on both myself. You had better ask the schoolmaster. He knows all that sort of A B C better than I do."

        Mr. Gresley frowned and looked suspiciously at her. He wanted Hester's opinion, of which she was perfectly aware. But she intended that he should ask for it.

        Mrs. Gresley, behind the coffee-pot, felt that she was overlooked. She had helped Mr. Gresley with his numerous literary efforts until Hester came.

        "I saw you correcting some one's manuscript last week," he said. "You were at it all day in the hay-field."

        "That was different. I was asked to criticise the style and composition."

        "Oh well!" said Mr. Gresley, "don't let us split hairs. I don't want an argument about it. If you'll come into my study at ten o'clock I'll get it off my hands at once."

        "With pleasure," said Hester, looking at him with rueful admiration. She had tried a hundred times to get the better of him in conversation, but she had not yet succeeded.

        "I have a message for you," continued Mr. Gresley, in restored good humour. "Mrs. Loftus writes that she is returning to Wilderleigh at the end of the week, and that the sale of work may take place in the Wilderleigh gardens at the end of August. And--let me see, I will read what she says:

        "'I am not unmindful of our conversation on the duty of those who go annually to London to bring a spiritual influence to bear on society.'--("I impressed that upon her before she went up.")--'We had a most interesting dinner-party last week, nearly all celebrated and gifted persons, and the conversation was really beyond anything I can describe to you. I thought my poor brain would turn. I was quite afraid to join in. But Mr. Harvey, the great Mr. Harvey, told me afterwards I was at my best. One lady, Miss Barker, who has done so much for the East End, is coming down to Wilderleigh shortly for a rest. I am anxious you should talk to her. She says she has doubts, and she is tired of the Bible. By the way, please tell Hester, with my love, that she and Mr. Harvey attacked "The Idyll of East London" and showed it up entirely, and poor little me had to stand up for her against them all.'"

        "She would never do that," said Hester, tranquilly. "She might perhaps have said, 'The writer is a friend of mine. I must stand up for her.' But she would never have gone beyond saying it to doing it."

        "Hester," exclaimed Mrs. Gresley, feeling that she might just as well have remained a spinster if she was to be thus ignored in her own house, "I can't think how you can allow your jealousy of Sybell Loftus, for I can attribute it to nothing else, to carry you so far."

        "Perhaps it had better carry me into the garden," said Hester, rising with the others. "You must forgive me if I spoke irritably. I have a racking headache."

        "She looks ill," said her brother, following Hester's figure with affectionate solicitude as she passed the window a moment later.

        "And yet she does next to nothing," said the hard-worked little wife, intercepting the glance. "I always thought she wrote her stories in the morning. I know she is never about if the Pratt girls call to see her before luncheon. Yet when I ran up to her room yesterday morning to ask her to take Mary's music, as Fraülein had the headache"--(Mrs. Gresley always spoke of the headache and the toothache)--"she was lying on her bed doing nothing at all."

        "She is very unaccountable," said Mr. Gresley. "Still, I can make allowance for the artistic temperament. I share it to a certain degree. Poor Hester. She is a spoilt child."

        "Indeed, James, she is. And she has an enormous opinion of herself. For my part, I think the Bishop is to blame for making so much of her. Have you never noticed how different she is when he is here, so gay and talkative, and when we are alone she hardly says a word for days together, except to the children."

        "She talked more when she first came," said Mr. Gresley. "But when she found I make it a rule to discourage argument"--(by argument Mr. Gresley meant difference of opinion)--"she seemed gradually to lose interest in conversation. Yet I have heard the Bishop speak of her as a brilliant talker. And Lord Newhaven asked me last spring how I liked having a celebrity for a sister. A celebrity! Why, half the people in Middleshire don't even know of Hester's existence." And the author of "Modern Dissent" frowned.

        "That was a hit at you, my dear," said Mrs. Gresley. "It was just after your pamphlet on 'Schism' appeared. Lord Newhaven always says something disagreeable. Don't you remember when you were thinking of exchanging Warpington for that Scotch living he said he knew you would not do it because with your feeling towards Dissent you would never go to a country where you would be a Dissenter yourself."

        "How about the proofs?" said Hester's voice through the open window. "I am ready when you are, James."

CHAPTER X

        Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.

EMERSON.

        "No, indeed."

        "This little paper on 'Dissent,' which I propose to publish in pamphlet form after its appearance as a serial--it will run to two numbers in the Southminster Advertiser--was merely thrown off in a few days when I had influenza, and could not attend to my usual work."

        "It must be very difficult to work in illness," said Hester, who had evidently made a vow during her brief sojourn in the garden, and was now obviously going through that process which the society of some of our fellow creatures makes as necessary as it is fatiguing--namely, that of thinking beforehand what we are going to say.

        Mr. Gresley liked Hester immensely when she had freshly ironed herself flat under one of these resolutions. He was wont to say that no one was pleasanter than Hester when she

was reasonable, or made more suitable remarks. He perceived with joy that she was reasonable now, and the brother and sister sat down close together at the writing-table with the printed sheets between them.

        "I will read aloud," said Mr. Gresley, "and you can follow me, and stop me if you think--er--the sense is not quite clear."

        "I see."

        The two long noses, the larger freckled one surmounted by a pince-nez, the other slightly pink as if it had absorbed the tint of the blotting-paper over which it was so continually poised, both bent over the sheets.

        Through the thin wall which separated the schoolroom from the study came the sound of Mary's scales. Mary was by nature a child of wrath, as far as music was concerned, and Fraülein--anxious, musical Fraülein--was strenuously endeavouring to impart to her pupil the rudiments of what was her chief joy in life.

        "Modern Dissent," read aloud Mr. Gresley, "by Veritas."

        "Veritas!" repeated Hester. Astonishment jerked the word out of her before she was aware. She pulled herself hastily together.

        "Certainly," said the author, looking at his sister through his glasses, which made the pupils of his eyes look as large as the striped marbles on which Mary and Regie spent their pennies. "Veritas," he continued, "is a Latin word signifying Truth."

        "So I fancied. But is not Truth rather a large name to adopt as a nom de guerre? Might it not seem rather--er--in a layman it would appear arrogant."

        "I am not a layman, and I do not pretend to write on subjects of which I am ignorant," said Mr. Gresley with dignity. "This is not a work of fiction. I don't imagine this, or fancy that, or invent the other. I merely place before the public forcibly and in a novel manner a few great truths."

        Mary was doing her finger exercises. C C C with the thumb,

D D D with the first finger. Fraülein was repeating, "Won! Two! Free! Won! Two! Free!" with a new intonation of cheerful patience at each repetition.

        "Ah!" said Hester. "A few great truths. Then the name must be Veritas. You would not reconsider it."

        "Certainly not," said Mr. Gresley, his eye challenging hers. "It is the name I am known by as the author of 'Schism.'"

        "I had momentarily forgotten 'Schism'," said Hester dropping her glance.

        "I went through a good deal of obloquy about 'Schism,'" said Mr. Gresley with pride, "and I should not wonder if 'Modern Dissent' caused quite a ferment in Middleshire. If it does I am willing to bear a little spite and ill-will. All history shows that truth is met at first by opposition. Half the country clergy round here are asleep. Good men, but lax. They want waking up. I said as much to the Bishop the other day, and he agreed with me, for he said that if some of his younger clergy could be waked up to a sense of their own arrogance and narrowness he would hold a public thanksgiving in the cathedral. But he added that he thought nothing short of the last trump would do it."

        "I agree with him," said Hester, having first said the sentence to herself, and having decided it was innocuous.

        The climax of the music lesson had arrived. "The Blue Bells of Scotland"-the sole Klavier Stück which Mary's rigidly extended little starfishes of hands could wrench out of the schoolroom piano--was at its third bar.

        "Well," said Mr. Gresley, refreshed by a cheering retrospects. "Now for 'Modern Dissent.'"

        A strenuous hour ensued.

        Hester was torn in different directions, at one moment tempted to allow the most flagrant passages to pass unchallenged rather than attempt the physical impossibility of interrupting the reader only to be drawn into a dispute with him at another burning to save her brother from the consequences which wait on certain utterances.

        Presently Mr. Gresley's eloquence, after various tortuous and unnatural windings, swept in the direction of a pun, as a carriage after following the artificial curves of a deceptive approach nears a villa. Hester had seen the pun coming for half a page, as we see the villa through the trees long before we are allowed to approach it, and she longed to save her brother from what was in her eyes as much a degradation as a tu quoque. But she remembered in time that the Gresleys considered she had no sense of humour, and she decided to let it pass. Mr. Gresley enjoyed it so much himself that he hardly noticed her fixed countenance.

        Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humour and those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they possess it more abundantly. The crevasse seems to extend far inland to the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humour will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that large class of our fellow creatures, who, conscious of a genius for adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible piquancy in putting a woman's hat on a man's head, and in that "verbal romping" which playfully designates a whisky and soda as a gargle, and says "au reservoir" instead of "au revoir."

        At last, however, Hester nervously put her hand over the next sheet, as he read the final words of the last.

        "Wait a moment," she said hurriedly. "This last page, James. Might it not be well to reconsider it? Is it politic to assume such great ignorance on the part of Nonconformists? Many I know are better educated than I am."

        "My dear," said Mr. Gresley, "ignorance is at the root of any difference of opinion on such a subject as this. I do not say wilful ignorance, but the want of sound Church teaching. I must cut at the roots of this ignorance."

        "Dear James, it is thrice killing the slain. No one believes these fallacies which you are exposing; the Nonconformists least of all. Those I have talked with don't hold these absurd

opinions that you put down to them. You don't even touch their real position. You are elaborately knocking down ninepins that have never stood up because they have nothing to stand on."

        "I am not proposing to play a game of mental skittles," said the clerical author. "It is enough for me, as I said before, to cut at the roots of ignorance wherever I see it flourishing, not to pull off the leaves one by one as you would have me to do by dissecting their opinions. This may not be novel, it may not even be amusing, but nevertheless, Hester, a clergyman's duty is to wage unceasing war against spiritual ignorance. And what," read on Mr. Gresley, after a triumphant moment in which Hester remained silent, "is the best means of coping against ignorance, against darkness"--("It was a root a moment ago," thought Hester)--"but by the infusion of light? The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Half a page more and the darkness was modern Dissent. Hester put her hand over her mouth and kept it there.

        The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example of the majority of laymen, and crept up a tree to be out of the way.

        When it was all over she came down trembling.

        "Well! what do you think of it?" said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up and down the room.

        "You hit very hard," said Hester, after a moment's consideration. She did not say "You strike home."

        "I have no opinion of being mealy mouthed," said Mr. Gresley, who was always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement. "If you have anything worth saying say it plainly. That is my motto. Don't hint this or that, but take your stand upon a truth and strike out."

        "Why not hold out our hands to our fellow creatures instead of striking at them?" said Hester, moving towards the door.

        "I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies

of Christ," Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity through the convex glasses of his own mental pince-nez. "In these days we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary--"

        But Hester had vanished.

        There was a dangerous glint in her grey eyes, as she ran up to her little attic.

        "According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist," she said to herself. "If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so. For once I got out of the room in time."

        Hester's attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering, of which the preparation of food--and still worse the preparation of chicken food--is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled out of the house.

        She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the old gardener Abel was planting something large in the way of "runners" or "suckers," making a separate hole for each with his thumb.

        Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as "curly kebbidge," or "salary," or "sparrow-grass."

        Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to straighten himself, and--holding

himself strongly at the hinge, with earth-ingrained hands--to discourse on politics and religion, and to opine that our policy in China was "neither my eye nor my elber." "The little lady," as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and crossing the churchyard sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath, under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his flock by their young pastor.

        "How dreadful is this place. This is none other but the house of God," was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.* Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it. She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called it, by "interfering in church matters," when he nailed it up. After a few minutes she dropped over the low churchyard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank, and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.

        Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.

        "Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One dabbler in a Vicarage is quite enough."

        She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been opened.

        "I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said as she settled herself comfortably.

        Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.

        "And so she is leaving London--isn't this rather sudden?
___________________

A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August 1898, in the porch of a country church.

--and coming down at once--to-day--no, yesterday, to South minster, to the Palace. And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."

        Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!

        The miller's old white horse with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.

        A little bunch of red and white cows knee-deep in the water were swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humour, and scrambling out of the water proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.

        "How like James and the Pratts," hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic."

        Hester had been up since five o'clock, utilising the quiet hours before the house was astir. She was tired out. A "bumble bee" was droning sleepily near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was going to do when he was a river. "How tired the banks must be of listening to him," thought Hester with closed eyes.

        And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being, from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly awakened by Mr. Gresley's voice near at hand.

        "Hester! Hester! HESTER!"

        "Here! Here!" gasped Hester with a start, upsetting her lapful of letters, as she scrambled hastily to her feet.

        The young Vicar drew near, and looked over the churchyard wall. A large crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his countenance.

        "We have nearly finished luncheon," he observed. "The servants could not find you anywhere. I don't want to be always finding fault, Hester, but I wish for your own sake as well as ours you would be more punctual at meals."

        Hester had never been late before, but she felt that this was not the moment to remind her brother of that fact.

        "I beg pardon," she said humbly. "I fell asleep."

        "You fell asleep!" said Mr. Gresley, who had been wrestling all the morning with platitudes on Thy will be done. "All I can say, Hester, is that it is unfortunate you have no occupation. I cannot believe it is for the good of any of us to lead so absolutely idle a life that we fall asleep in the morning."

        Hester made no reply.

CHAPTER XI

        It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

GEORGE ELIOT.

        The children knew that Hester was in disgrace, as she vainly tried to eat the congealed slice of roast mutton with blue slides in it, which had been put before her chair half an hour ago, when the joint was sent out for the servants' dinner. The children liked "Auntie Hester," but without enthusiasm, except Regie, the eldest, who loved her as himself. She could tell them stories, and make butterflies and horses and dogs out of paper, but she could never join in their games, not even in the delightful new ones she invented for them. She was always tired directly. And she would never give them rides on her back, as the large good-natured Pratt girls did. And she was dreadfully shocked if they did not play fair, so much so, that on one occasion Mr. Gresley had to interfere, and

to remind her that a game was a game, and that it would be better to let the children play as they liked than to be perpetually finding fault with them.

        Perhaps nothing in her life at the Vicarage was a greater trial to Hester than to see the rules of fair play broken by the children with the connivance of their parents. Mr. Gresley had never been to a public school, and had thus missed the A B C of what in its later stages is called "honour." He was an admirable hockey player, but he was not in request at the frequent Slumberleigh matches, for he never hit off fair, or minded being told so.

        "Auntie Hester is leaving all her fat," said Mary suddenly in a shrill voice, her portion of pear held in her left cheek as she spoke. She had no idea that she ought not to draw attention to the weakness of others. She was only anxious to be the first to offer interesting information.

        "Never mind," said Mrs. Gresley, admiring her own moderation. "Finish your pear."

        If there was one thing more than another in Hester's behaviour that annoyed Mrs. Gresley--and there were several others--it was Hester's manner of turning her food over on her plate, and leaving half of it.

        Hester did it again now, and Mrs. Gresley, already irritated by her unpunctuality, tried to look away so as not to see her and prayed for patience. The hundred a year which Hester contributed to the little establishment had eased the struggling household in many ways; but Mrs. Gresley sometimes wondered if the money, greatly needed as it was, counterbalanced the perpetual friction of her sister-in-law's presence.

        "Father!"

        "Yes, my son."

        "Isn't it wrong to drink wine?"

        "Yes, my son."

        "Then why does Auntie Hester drink it?"

        Hester fixed her eyes intently on her brother. Would he uphold her before the children?

        "Because she thinks it does her good," said Mr. Gresley.

        She withdrew her eyes. Her hand, holding a spoonful of cold rice pudding, shook. A delicate colour flooded her face, and finally settled in the tip of her nose. In her own way she loved the children.

        "Ach, mein Herr," almost screamed Fraülein, who adored Hester, and saw the gravity of the occasion, "aber Sie vergessen that the Herr Doctor Br-r-r-r-r-own has so strong--so very strong command--"

        "I cannot allow a discussion as to the merits or demerits of alcohol at my table," said Mr. Gresley. "I hold one opinion, Dr. Brown holds another. I must beg to be allowed to differ from him. Children, say grace,"

        It was Wednesday and a half-holiday, and Mrs. Gresley had arranged to take the children in the pony-carriage to be measured for new boots. These expeditions to Westhope were a great event. At two o'clock exactly the three children rushed downstairs, Regie bearing in his hand his tin money-box, in which a single coin could be heard to leap. Hester produced a bright threepenny piece for each child, one of which was irretrievably buried in Regie's money-box, and the other two immediately lost in the mat in the pony-carriage. However, Hester found them, and slipped them inside their white gloves, and the expedition started, accompanied by Boulou, a diminutive yellow and white dog of French extraction. Boulou was a well-meaning, kind little soul. There was a certain hurried arrogance about his hind legs, but it was only manner. He was not in reality more conceited than most small dogs who wear their tails high.

        Hester saw them drive off, and a few minutes later Mr. Gresley started on his bicycle for a ruri-dicanal Chapter meeting in the opposite direction. She heard the Vicarage gate "clink" behind him as she crossed the little hall, and then she suddenly stopped short and wrung her hands. She had forgotten to tell either of them that the Bishop of South-

minster was going to call that afternoon. She knew he was coming on purpose to see her, but this would have been incredible to the Gresleys. She had not read Rachel's letter announcing his coming till she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the subject till this moment.

        She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each side of the back wheel.

        Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs, and leaned her head against the banisters.

        To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fraülein, who had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit lamp, and now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two thin slices of bread and butter.

        "You are all goodness, Fraülein," said Hester, raising her small haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fraülein could express her silent sympathy. So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fraülein watching every mouthful.

        Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished. There were breaks in the clouds after all. Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fraülein often said, "easy cast down, and easy

cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up" once more. She kissed Fraülein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down smiling and composed to await her friend in the drawing-room.

        Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law's only sitting-room, and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.

        The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighbourhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in "their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up."

        Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbours just because they were neighbours; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger brothers--with whom they were not acquainted--as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.

        When after her aunt's death she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with

an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that at any rate she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus' time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large under-current of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother's sister.

        Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but he had evidently though involuntarily adopted it for better for worse; perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice and a tendency to monologue chequered by prehistoric jokes and tortured puns may meet with a more patient audience. Hester made many discoveries about herself during the first months of her life at Warpington, and the first of the series amazed her more than any of the later ones.

        She discovered that she was proud. Perhaps she had not the enormous opinion of herself which Mrs. Gresley so frequently deplored, for Hester's thoughts seldom dwelt upon herself. But the altered circumstances of her life forced them momentarily upon herself nevertheless, as a burst pipe will spread its waters down a damask curtain.

        So far, during the eight years since she had left the schoolroom, she had always been "Miss Gresley," a little personage treated with consideration wherever she went, and choyée for her delicate humour and talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation, as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also

grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and then indignant at bearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the latter--without being acquainted with them except officially--as "fine," as caring only for "London people," and as being "tuft-hunters," because they frequently entertained at their houses persons of rank, to half of whom they were related. All this was new to Hester. She discovered that, though she might pay visits at these houses, she must never mention them, as it was considered the height of vulgarity to speak of people of rank.

        Mrs. Gresley, who had been quite taken aback when the first of these invitations came, felt it her duty to warn Hester against a love of rank, reminding her that it was a very bad thing to get a name for running after titled people.

        "James and I have always kept clear of that," she remarked with dignity. "For my part, I daresay you will think me very old-fashioned, but I must own I never can see that people with titles or wealth are one bit nicer or pleasanter than those without them."

        Hester agreed.

        "And," continued Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to them as I do now."

        If Lady Susan Gresley had passed her acquaintance through a less exclusive sieve, Hester might have had the advantage of hearing all these well-worn sentiments, and of realising the point of view of a large number of her fellow creatures before she became an inconspicuous unit in their midst.

        But if Mrs. Gresley was pained by Hester's predilection for the society of what she called "swells" (the word though quite extinct in civilised parts can occasionally be found in country districts), she was still more pained by the friend-

ship Hester formed with persons whom her sister-in-law considered "not quite."

        Mrs. Gresley was always perfectly civil, and the Pratts imperfectly so to Miss Brown, the doctor's invalid sister. But Hester made friends with her, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Gresley that kindness was one thing and intimacy another.

        "The truth is," Mrs. Gresley would say, "Hester loves adulation, and as she can't get it from the Pratts and us, she has to go to those below her in the social scale, like Miss Brown, who will give it to her. Miss Brown may be very cultivated. I dare say she is, but she makes up to Hester."

        Sybell Loftus, who lived close at hand at Wilderleigh, across the Drone, was one of the very few besides Miss Brown among her new acquaintances who hailed Hester at once as a kindred spirit, to the unconcealed surprise of the Pratts and the Gresleys. Sybell adored Hester's book, which the Gresleys and Pratts considered rather peculiar "as emanating from the pen of a clergyman's sister." She enthusiastically suggested to Hester several improvements which might easily be made in it, which would have changed its character altogether. She even entrenched on the sacred precinct of a married woman's time to write out the openings of several romances, which she was sure Hester with her wonderful talent could build up into magnificent works of art. She was always running over to the Vicarage to confide to Hester the unique thoughts which had been vouchsafed to her while contemplating a rose, or her child or her husband, or all three together.

        Hester was half amused, half fascinated, and ruefully lost many of the mornings still left her by the Pratts and Gresleys, in listening to the outpourings of this butterfly soul which imagined every flower it involuntarily alighted on and drew honey from to be its own special production.

        But Hester's greatest friend in Middleshire was the Bishop of Southminster, with whom Rachel was staying, and whom she was expecting this afternoon.

CHAPTER XII

The depth and dream of my desire
    The bitter paths wherein I stray,
Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire,
    Thou knowest Who hast made the Clay!

RUDYARD KIPLING.

        But perhaps it is a mistake to feel compassion for persons like Hester, for if they have many evil days and weeks in their usually short lives, they have also moments of sheer bliss, hours of awed contemplation and of exquisite rapture which possibly in the long run equal the more solid joys of a good income and a good digestion, nay, even the perennial glow of that happiest of happy temperaments which limits the nature of others by its own, which sees no uncomfortable difference between a moral and a legal right, and believes it can measure life with the same admirable accuracy with which it measures its drawing-room curtains.

        As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel's faithful dog-like eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester's dancing, mischievous ones. They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the Vicarage on his way back.

        Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself, and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she described "not wisely but too well."

But she was faithful to her salt. She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have objected had they been present. Indeed, she spoke of them in what they would have termed "a very proper manner," of their kindness to her when she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her breakfast tray every morning, and how in the spring he had taught her to bicycle.

        "But oh! Rachel," added Hester, "during the last nine months my self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill the poor creature. My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself of which I never dreamed. I feel as if I had been ironed all over since I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out clear in the process."

        "I am quite alarmed," said Rachel tranquilly.

        "You ought to be. First of all I did think I cared nothing about food. I don't remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan. But here I--I am difficult about it. I do try to eat it, but often I really can't. And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting habit which always offends me in other people. Now I am as bad as any of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very rich."

        "I suppose the cooking is vile?"

        "I don't know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can't judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must."

        Rachel looked critically at Hester's innocent, childlike face. When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint colour in her cheek had a violet tinge.

        She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw

plainly enough that Hester's weak health was slipping further down the hill.

        "And all this time you have been working?"

        "If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now. Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant discovery about myself, that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted."

        "But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?"

        "I did. I did. But of course--it is very natural--they think that rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel. And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings."

        "Who on earth are the Pratts?"

        "They are what they call 'county people.' Their father made a fortune in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I never would dance with him. He used to come to our 'At Homes,' but he was never asked to dinner. He is a great 'parti' among a certain set down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and called 'Hessie,' which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James' and Minna's greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they came up to my room to what they called 'rout me out,' though I had told them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people in the book were real just then. And then when I recognised them, and the scene in my mind which I had

been waiting for for weeks was shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly. And then--I was so ashamed afterwards--I burst into tears of rage and despair."

        Even the remembrance was too much. Hester wiped away two large tears on to a dear little handkerchief just large enough to receive them, and went on with a quaver in her voice.

        "I was so shocked at myself that I found it quite easy to tell them next day that I was sorry I had lost my temper, but they have not been the same since. Not that I wanted them to be the same. I would rather they were different. But I was anxious to keep on cordial terms with Minna's friends. She quarrels with them herself, but that is different. I suppose it is inevitable if you are on terms of great intimacy with people you don't really care for."

        "At any rate, they have not interrupted you again?"

        "N--no. But still, I was often interrupted. Minna has too much to do, and she is not strong just now, and she often sends up one of the children, and I was so nearly fierce with one of them, poor little things, that I felt the risk was becoming too great, so I have left off writing between breakfast and luncheon, and I get up directly it is light instead. It is light very early now. Only the worst part of it is that I am so tired for the rest of the day that I can hardly drag myself about."

        Rachel said nothing. She seldom commented on the confidences that were made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes are holden.

        "And the book itself? Is it nearly finished?"

        Hester's face changed. Eagerly, shyly, enthusiastically, she talked to her friend about the book, as a young girl talks of her lover. Everything else was forgotten. Hester's eyes burned. Her colour came and went. She was transfigured.

        The protecting anxious affection died out of Rachel's face as she looked at Hester, and gave place to a certain wistful, half envious admiration. She had once been shaken by all these emotions herself, years ago, when she was in love. She had regarded them as a revelation while they lasted; and--afterwards--as a steep step, a very steep step upon the stair of life. But she realised now that such as Hester live constantly in the world which the greater number of us can only enter when human passion lends us the key; the world at which, when the gates are shut against us, the coarser minded among us are not ashamed to level their ridicule and contempt.

        Hester spoke brokenly with awe and reverence of her book, as of some mighty presence, some constraining power outside herself. She saw it complete, beautiful, an entrancing vision, inaccessible as a sunset.

        "I cannot reach up to it. I cannot get near it," she said. "When I try to write it it is like drawing an angel with spread wings with a bit of charcoal. I understate everything. Yet I labour day by day travestying it, caricaturing the beautiful thoughts that come into my mind. I make everything commonplace and vulgar by putting it into words. I go alone into the woods and sit for hours quite still with the trees. And gradually I understand and know. And I listen and Nature speaks, really speaks--not a façon de parler as some people think who explain to you that you mean this or that by your words which you don't mean--and her spirit becomes one with my spirit. And I feel I can never again misunderstand her, never again fail to interpret her, never again wander so far away from her that every white anemone, and every seedling fern disowns me, and waits in silence till the alien has gone from among them. And I come home, Rachel, and I try, sometimes I try for half the night, to find words to

translate it into. But there are no words, or if there are I cannot find them, and at last I fall back on some coarse simile, and in my despair I write it down. And Oh! Rachel, the worst is that presently, when I have forgotten what it ought to have been, when the vision fades, I know I shall admire what I have written. It is that that breaks my heart."

        The old, old lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealised Nature, as she idealised her fellow creatures, as she idealised everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought with bewilderment that that was just what she could do.

        At this moment a carriage drew up at the door, and after a long interval, during which the wrathful voice of the cook could be distinctly heard through the kitchen window recalling "Hemma" to a sense of duty from the backyard, "Hemma" breathlessly ushered in the Bishop of Southminster.

CHAPTER XIII

        Originality irritates the religious classes, who will not be taken out of their indolent ways of thinking; who have a standing grievance against it, and heresy and heterodoxy are bad words ready for it.

W.W. PEYTON.

        Jowett is believed to have said, "A Bishop without a sense of humour is lost." Perhaps that may have been one of the reasons why, by Jowett's advice, the See of Southminster was offered to its present occupant. The Bishop's mouth, though it spoke of an indomitable will, had a certain twist of the lip, his deep-set, benevolent eyes had a certain twinkle which made persons like Lord Newhaven and Hester hail him at once as an ally, but which ought to have been a danger-signal to some of his clerical brethren--to Mr. Gresley in particular.

        The Bishop respected and upheld Mr. Gresley as a clergyman, but as a conversationalist the young Vicar wearied him. If the truth were known (which it never was) he had arranged to visit Hester when he knew Mr. Gresley would be engaging the reluctant attention of a ruri-dicanal meeting.

        He gave a sigh of relief as he became aware that Hester and

Rachel were the only occupants of the cool, darkened room. Mrs. Gresley, it seemed, was also out.

        Hester made tea, and presently the Bishop, who looked much exhausted, roused himself. He had that afternoon attended two deathbeds, one the deathbed of a friend, and the other that of the last vestige of peace, expiring amid the clamour of a distracted Low Church parish and High Church parson, who could only meet each other after the fashion of cymbals. For the moment even his courageous spirit had been disheartened.

        "I met a son of Anak the other night at the Newhavens," he said to Hester, "who claimed you as a cousin--a Mr. Richard Vernon. He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected."

        "How like Dick," said Hester.

        "I remembered him at last. His father was the squire of Fallow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster. Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents. As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father's absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments. I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton. I remember while he was there he won a bet from another boy who could not pay, and he foreclosed on the loser's cricketing trousers. His parents were distressed about it when he brought them home, and I tried to make him see that he ought not to have taken them. But Dick held firm. He said it was like tithe, and if he could not get his own in money as I did he must collect it in trousers. I must own he had me there. I noticed that he wore the garments daily as long as any question remained in his parents' minds as to whether they ought to be returned. After that I felt sure he would succeed in life."

        "I believe he is succeeding in Australia."

        "I advised his father to send him abroad. There really was not room for him in England, and unfortunately for the

army, the examiners jibbed at his strictly phonetic spelling. He tells me he has given up being an A.D.C. and has taken to vine-growing, because if people are up in the world they always drink freely, and if they are 'down on their luck' they drink all the more to drown care. The reasoning appeared to me sound."

        "He and James used to quarrel frightfully in the holidays," said Hester. "It was always the same reason, about playing fair. Poor James did not know that games were matters of deadly importance, and that a rule was a sacred thing. I wonder why it is that clergymen so often have the same code of honour as women; quite a different code from that of the average man."

        "I think," said the Bishop, "it is owing to that difference of code that women clash so hopelessly with men when they attempt to compete or work with them. Women have not to begin with the esprit de corps which the most ordinary men possess. With what difficulty can one squeeze out of a man any fact that is detrimental to his friend, or even to his acquaintance, however obviously necessary it may be that the information should be asked for and given. Yet I have known many good and earnest and affectionate women who lead unselfish lives, who will 'give away' their best woman friend at the smallest provocation, or without any provocation at all; will inform you à propos of nothing that she was jilted years ago, or that her husband married her for her money. The causes of humiliation and disaster in a woman's life seem to have no sacredness for her women friends. Yet if that same friend whom she has run down is ill, the runner down will nurse her day and night with absolutely selfless devotion."

        "I have often been puzzled by that," said Rachel. "I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason. They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty

of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to."

        Hester's eyes fixed on her friend.

        "Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves?" she asked; "or do you leave them?"

        "I do neither," said Rachel. "I treat them just the same as before."

        "Then aren't you a hypocrite, too?"

        Hester's small face was set like a flint.

        "I think not," said Rachel tranquilly, "any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently while the good will remain."

        "I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.

        "I don't think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then--"

        "Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.

        "Then leave them in silence."

        "I only know of a woman's silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"

        "I do not. It is my own fault if I idealise a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honour certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation--and--I withdraw."

        "You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."

        "Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should--"

        "Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.

        "No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."

        "Thrice miserable man!"

        "You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"

        "Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."

        At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy," and he now showed his "Frenchyness" by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.

        "Mother got out at Mrs. Brown's," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."

        "Oh, Regie," expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."

        Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.

        Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and

in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.

        "I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."

        "She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."

        "I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighbourhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen's sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work. She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be. Originality is out of place in a clergyman's family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonenity, who have no sense of humour, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her 'Idyll' she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it, and an outer one of amiable country neighbours, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them,

and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervour and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of gratitude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so."

        "She says her temper has become that of a fiend."

        "She is passionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives she will outgrow her passionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become passive, contemplative. Then instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learnt to receive impressions calmly, and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far."

CHAPTER XIV

        Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

GEORGE ELIOT.

        But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fraülein would like it just as much. Still it was a blow. Regie leaned his head against Hester's shoulder.

        Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child's touch till she was a mother: that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor substitute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.

        "The tail is still on," she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.

        The cow's tail was painted in blue upon its side.

        "When I bought it," said Regie, in a strangled voice, "and it was a great deal of money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that."

        "All the best cows have their tails on the side," said Hester. "And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before." And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.

        "And now what has Stella got?"

        Stella produced a bag of "bull's-eyes" which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.

        "Fraülein never eats bull's-eyes," said Mary, who was what her parents called "a very truthful child."

        "I eats them," said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa, till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upwards, were visible.

        Stella always turned upside down if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.

        Hester had hardly set Stella right side upwards when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.

        "Run upstairs, my pets," she said. "Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time."

        "We came ourselves, mother," said Regie. "Fraülein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets."

        "Well, never mind; run away now," said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, "and take Boulou."

        "You are tired out," said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law's brown boots.

        Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping, and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained bootlaces. But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.

        As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.

        "I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper."

        Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life. We never get so far as the drawing-room. Our conquests, our self-denials are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton. We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones--not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen--to higher things.

        The sole was a direct answer to prayer. Mrs. Gresley had been enabled to stifle her irritation against this delicate, whimsical, fine lady of a sister-in-law--laced in, too, we must not forget that--who, in Mrs. Gresley's ideas, knew none of the real difficulties of life, its butcher's bills, its monthly nurses, its constant watchfulness over delicate children, its long, long strain at two ends which won't meet. We must know but little of our fellow creatures if the damp sole in the bag appears to us other than the outward and homely sign of an inward and spiritual conquest.

        As such Hester saw it, and she kissed Mrs. Gresley and thanked her, and then ran herself to the kitchen with the peace offering, and came back with her sister-in-law's down-at-heel indoor shoes.

        Mr. Gresley was stabling his bicycle in the hall as she crossed it. He was generally excessively jocose with his bicycle. He frequently said, "Woah, Emma!" to it. But to-day he, too, was tired, and put Emma away in silence.

        When Hester returned to the drawing-room Mrs. Gresley had recovered sufficiently to notice her surroundings. She was sitting with her tan-stockinged feet firmly planted on the carpet instead of listlessly outstretched, her eyes ominously fixed on the tea-table and seed cake.

        Hester's silly heart nudged her side like an accomplice.

        "Who has been here to tea?" said Mrs. Gresley. "I met the Pratts and the Thursbys in Westhope."

        Hester was frightened. We need to be, in the presence of those who judge others by themselves.

        "The Bishop was here and Rachel West," she said colouring. "They left a few minutes ago."

        "Well, of all unlucky things that James and I should have been out. James, do you hear that? The Bishop's been while we were away. And I do declare, Hester," looking again at the table, "you never so much as asked for the silver teapot."

        "I never thought of it," said Hester ruefully. It was almost impossible to her to alter the habit of a lifetime, and to remember to dash out and hurriedly change the daily routine if visitors were present. Lady Susan had always used her battered old silver teapot every day, and for the life of her Hester could not understand why there should be one kind one day and one kind another. She glanced resentfully at the little brown earthenware vessel which she had wielded so cheerfully half an hour ago. Why did she never remember the Gresleys' wishes?

        "Hester," said Mrs. Gresley suddenly, taking new note of Hester's immaculate brown holland gown, which contrasted painfully with her own dilapidated pink shirt with hard collars and cuffs and imitation tie, tied for life in the shop where it was born. "You are so smart; I do believe you knew they were coming."

        If there was one thing more than another which offended Hester, it was being told that she was smart.

        "I trust I am never smart," she replied; not with any touch of the haughtiness that some ignorant persons believe to be

the grand manner, but with a subtle change of tone and carriage which seemed instantly to remove her to an enormous distance from the other woman with her insinuation and tan stockings. Mrs. Gresley unconsciously drew in her feet. "I did not know when I dressed this morning that the Bishop was coming to-day."

        "Then you did know later that he was coming?"

        "Yes, Rachel West wrote to tell me so this morning, but I did not open her letter at breakfast, and I was so vexed at being late for luncheon that I forgot to mention it then. I remembered as soon as James had started and ran after him, but he was too far off to hear me call to him."

        It cost Hester a good deal to give this explanation, as she was aware that the Bishop's visit had been to her and to her alone.

        "Come, come," said Mr. Gresley, judicially, with the natural masculine abhorrence of a feminine skirmish. "Don't go on making foolish excuses, Hester, which deceive no one; and you, Minna, don't criticise Hester's clothes. It is the Bishop's own fault for not writing his notes himself. He might have known that Miss West would have written to Hester instead of to me. I can't say I think Hester behaved kindly towards us in acting as she did, but I won't hear any more argument about it. I desire the subject should now DROP."

        The last words were uttered in the same tone in which Mr. Gresley closed morning service, and were felt to be final. He was not in reality greatly chagrined at missing the Bishop, whom he regarded with some of the suspicious distrust with which a certain class of mind ever regards that which is superior to it. Hester left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

        "James," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at her priest with tears of admiration in her eyes, "I shall never be good like you, so you need not expect it. How you can be so generous and patient with her I don't know. It passes me."

        "We must learn to make allowances for each other,"

said Mr. Gresley, in his most affectionate cornet, drawing his tired, tearful little wife down beside him on the sofa. And he made some fresh tea for her, and waited on her, and she told him about the children's boots and the sole, and he told her about a remarkable speech he had made at the chapter meeting, and a feeling that had been borne in on him on the way home that he should shortly write something striking about Apostolic Succession. And they were happy together; for though he sometimes reproved her as a priest if she allowed herself to dwell on the probability of his being made a Bishop, he was very kind to her as a husband.

CHAPTER XV

        Beware of a silent dog and of still water.

        And the Drone kept in order on your left by the low line of the Slumberleigh hills will follow you and leave you, leave you and return all the way to Westhope. You are getting out at Westhope, of course, if you are a Middleshire man. For Westhope is on the verge of Middleshire, and the train does not go any further; at least, it only goes into one of the insignificant counties which jostle each other to hold on to Middleshire, unknown Saharas, where passengers who oversleep themselves wake to find themselves cast away.

        Westhope Abbey stands in its long low meadows and level

gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep cobbled streets.

        Down the great central aisle you may walk on mossy stones between the high shafts of broken pillars under the sky. God's stars look down once more where the piety of man had for a time shut them out. Through the slender tracery of what was once the east window, instead of glazed saint and crucifix, you may see the little town clasping its hill.

        The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer. A thin wind-whipped grass holds the summit of the broken walls against all comers. The fallen stones, quaintly carved with angel and griffin, are going slowly back year by year, helped by the rain and hindered by the frost, slowly back through the sod to the generations of human hands that held and hewed them, and fell to dust below them hundreds of years ago. The spirit returns to the God who gave it, and the stone to the hand that fashioned it.

        The adjoining monastery had been turned into a dwelling house, without altering it externally, and it was here that Lord Newhaven loved to pass the summer months. Into its one long upper passage all the many rooms opened, up white stone steps through arched doors, rooms which had once been monks' dormitories, abbots' cells, where Lady Newhaven and her guests now crimped their hair, and slept under down quilts till noon.

        It was this long passage with its interminable row of low latticed windows that Lord Newhaven was turning into a depository for the old English weapons which he was slowly collecting. He was standing now gazing lovingly at them, drawing one finger slowly along an inlaid arquebus, when a yell from the garden made him turn and look out.

        It was not a yell of anguish, and Lord Newhaven remained

at the window leaning on his elbows, and watching at his ease the little scene which was taking place below him.

        On his bicycle on the smooth shaven lawn was Dick wheeling slowly in and out among the stone-edged flower-beds, an apricot in each broad palm, while he discoursed in a dispassionate manner to the two excited little boys who were making futile rushes for the apricots. The governess and Rachel were looking on. Rachel had arrived at Westhope the day before from Southminster. "Take your time, my son," said Dick, just eluding by a hairsbreadth a charge through a geranium bed on the part of the eldest boy. "If you are such jolly little fools as to crack your little skulls on the sun-dial I shall eat them both myself. Miss Turner says you may have them, so you've only got to take them. I can't keep on offering them all day long. My time" (Dick ran his bicycle up a terrace, and as soon as the boys were up, glided down again) "my time is valuable. You don't want them?" A shrill disclaimer and a fresh onslaught. "Miss Turner, they thank you very much, but they don't care for apricots."

        Half a second more and Dick skilfully parted from his bicycle and was charged by his two admirers and severely pummelled as high as they could reach. When they had been led away by Miss Turner, each biting an apricot and casting longing backward looks at their friend, Rachel and Dick wandered to the north side of the abbey and sat down there in the shade.

        Lord Newhaven could still see them, could still note her amused face under her wide white hat. He was doing his best for Dick, and Dick was certainly having his chance, and making the most of it according to his lights.

        "But all the same I don't think he has a chance," said Lord Newhaven to himself. "That woman, in spite of her frank manner and her self-possession, is afraid of men; not of being married for her money, but of man himself. And whatever else he may not be, Dick is a man. It's the best chance she will ever get, so it is probable she won't take it."

        Lord Newhaven sauntered back down the narrow black oak staircase to his own room on the ground-floor. He sat down at his writing-table and took out of his pocket a letter which he had evidently read before. He now read it slowly once more.

        "Your last letter to me had been opened," wrote his brother from India, "or else it had not been properly closed. As you wrote on business, I wish you would be more careful."

        "I will," said Lord Newhaven, and he wrote a short letter in his small upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.

        Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful personage.

        "Come as far as the post-office," said Lord Newhaven.

        Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.

        "You millionaires are all the same," he said. "Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It's like keeping a dog and barking yourself."

        "I don't fancy I bark much," said Lord Newhaven.

        "No, and you don't bite often, but when you do you take out the piece. Do you remember that coloured chap at Broken Hill?"

        "He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.

        "He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same. You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog's trick, and that you would never turn on him."

        "It's a way worms have."

        "Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor

rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."

        "He'd have done for me if he could."

        "Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I saw him break a chap's back once, and it did not take so very long either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up? That's what I've never been able to understand about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you. They would know they'd have to."

        "I have not your art," said Lord Newhaven tranquilly, "of letting a man know when he's getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row and he'll be in it. I'm not made like that."

        "It works well," said Dick. "It's a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren't as a rule over anxious to toe the mark. But you never do let them know."

        "No," said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of "bulls'-eyes" and peppermints, "I never do. I don't defend it. But--"

        "But what?"

        Lord Newhaven's face underwent some subtle change. His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick's suddenly, with the clear frank glance of a schoolboy.

        "But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious--I can't."

        Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.

        "Aren't you going to buy some stamps?" he asked, perfectly

aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.

        Lord Newhaven, who was being watched with affectionate interest from behind the counter by the grocer postmaster, went in, hit his head against a pendant ham, and presently emerged with brine in his hair, and a shilling's worth of stamps in his hand.

        Later in the day, when he and Dick were riding up the little street with a view to having a look at the moor--for Middleshire actually has a grouse moor, although it is in the Midlands--the grocer in his white apron rushed out and waylaid them.

        "Very sorry about the letter, my lord," he repeated volubly, touching his forelock. "Hope her la-ship told you as I could not get it out again, or I'm sure I would have done to oblige your lordship, and her la-ship calling on purpose. But the post-office is that mean and distrustful as it don't leave me the key, and once hanything is in, in it is."

        "Ah!" said Lord Newhaven slowly. "Well, Jones, it's not your fault. I ought not to have changed my mind. I suppose her ladyship gave you my message that I wanted it back?"

        "Yes, my lord, and her la-ship come herself, not ten minutes after you was gone. But I've no more power over that there recepticle than a hunlaid hegg, and that's the long and short of it. I've allus said, and I say it again, 'Them as have charge of the post-office should have the key.'"

        "When I am made postmaster-general you shall have it," said Lord Newhaven, smiling. "It is the first reform that I shall bring about." And he nodded to the smiling apologetic man and trotted on, Dick beside him, who was apparently absorbed in the action of his roan cob.

        But Dick's mind had sustained a severe shock. That Lady Newhaven, "that jolly little woman," the fond mother of those two "jolly little chaps," should have been guilty of an underhand trick, was astonishing to him.

        Poor Dick had started life with a religious reverence for woman; had carried out his brittle possession to bush life in

Australia, from thence through two A.D.C.-ships, and, after many vicissitudes, had brought it safely back with a large consignment of his own Burgundy to his native land. It was still sufficiently intact--save for a chip or two--to make a pretty wedding present to his future wife. But it had had a knock since he mounted the roan cob. For unfortunately the kind of man who has what are called "illusions" about women, is too often the man whose discrimination lies in other directions, in fields where little high-heeled shoes are not admitted.

        Rachel had the doubtful advantage of knowing that in spite of Dick's shrewdness respecting shades of difference in muscatels, she and Lady Newhaven were nevertheless ranged on the same pedestal in Dick's mind, as flawless twins of equal moral beauty. But after this particular day she observed that Lady Newhaven had somehow slipped off the pedestal, and that she, Rachel, had the honour of occupying it alone.

CHAPTER XVI

        Une grande passion malheureuse est un grand moyen de sagesse.

        She had not the exalted ideas about her fellow creatures which Hester had, but she possessed the rare gift of reticence. She exemplified the text--"Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives." And in Rachel's quiet soul a

vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded. When she found money at her command she had spent sums (as her lawyer told her) out of all proportion on that poor human body, stumbling between vice and starvation. But now, during the last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong heart flinched before it, the other side of life: the starved soul in the delicately nurtured, richly clad body, the atrophied spiritual life in hideous contrast with the physical ease and luxury which were choking it. The second experience was harder to bear than the first. And just as in the old days she had shared her bread and cheese with those hungrier than herself, and had taken but little thought for those who had bread and to spare, so now she felt but transient interest in those among her new associates who were successfully struggling against the blackmail of luxury, the leprosy of worldliness, the selfishness that at last coffins the soul it clothes. Her heart yearned instead towards the spiritually starving, the tempted, the fallen in that great little world, whose names are written in the book, not of life, but of Burke--the little world which is called "Society."

        She longed to comfort them, to raise them up, to wipe from their hands and garments the muddy gold stains of the gutter into which they had fallen, to smoothe away the lines of mean care from their faces. But it had been far simpler in her previous life to share her hard-earned bread with those who needed it than it was now to share her equally hard-earned thoughts and slow gleanings of spiritual knowledge, to share the things which belonged to her peace.

        Rachel had not yet wholly recovered from the overwhelming passion of love which, admitted without fear a few years ago, had devastated the little city of her heart, as by fire and sword, involving its hospitable dwellings, its temples and its palaces in one common ruin. Out of that desolation she was

unconsciously rebuilding her city, but it was still rather gaunt and bare, the trees had not had time to grow in the streets, and there was an ugly fortification round it of defaced, fire-seared stones which had once stood aloft in minaret and tower, and which now served only as a defence against all comers.

        If Dick had been in trouble, or rather if she had known the troubles he had been through, and which had made his crooked mouth shut so firmly, Rachel might possibly have been able to give him something more valuable than the paper money of her friendship. But Dick was obviously independent. He could do without her, while Hugh had a claim upon her. Rachel's thoughts turned to Hugh again and ever again. Did he see his conduct as she saw it? A haunting fear was upon her that he did not. And she longed with an intensity that outbalanced for the time every other feeling that he should confess his sin fully, entirely--see it in all its ugliness and gather himself together into a deep repentance before he went down into silence, or before he made a fresh start in life. She would have given her right hand to achieve that.

        And in a lesser degree she was drawn towards Lady Newhaven. Lady Newhaven was conscious of the tender compassion which Rachel felt for her, and used it to the uttermost, but unfortunately she mistook it for admiration of her character, mixed with sympathetic sorrow for her broken heart. If she had seen herself as Rachel saw her she would have conceived, not for herself but for Rachel, some of the aversion which was gradually distilling bitter drop by drop into her mind for her husband. She would not have killed him. She would have thought herself incapable of an action so criminal, so monstrous. But if part of the ruin in the garden were visibly trembling to its fall, she would not have warned him if he had been sitting beneath it, nor would her conscience have ever reproached her afterwards.

        "I wish Miss Gresley would come and stay here instead of

taking you away from me," she said plaintively to Rachel one morning, when she made the disagreeable discovery that Rachel and Hester were friends. "I don't care much about her myself, she is so profane, and so dreadfully irreligious. But Edward likes to talk to her. He prefers artificial people. I wonder he did not marry her. That old cat, Lady Susan Gresley, was always throwing her at his head. I wish she was not always persuading you to leave me for hours together. I get so frightened when I am left alone with Edward. I live in perpetual dread that he will say something before the children or the servants. He is quite cruel enough."

        "He will never say anything."

        "You are always so decided, Rachel. You don't see possibilities, and you don't know him as I do. He is capable of anything. I will write a note now, and you can take it to Miss Gresley if you must go there to-day."

        "I wish to go very much."

        "And you will stay another week whether she comes or not?"

        There was a momentary pause before Rachel said cheerfully, "I will stay another week, with pleasure. But I am afraid Lord Newhaven will turn restive at taking me in to dinner."

        "Oh! he likes you. He always prefers people who are not of his own family."

        Rachel laughed. "You flatter me."

        "I never flatter any one. He does like you, and, besides, there are people coming next week for the grouse shooting. I suppose that heavy young Vernon is going to lumber over with you. It's not my fault if he is always running after you. Edward insisted on having him. I don't want him to dance attendance on me."

        "He and I are going to bicycle to Warpington together. The Gresleys are cousins of his. If it turns very hot we will wait till after sunset to return, if we may."

        "Just as you like," said Lady Newhaven with asperity. "But I advise you to be careful, my dear Rachel. It never

seems to occur to you what onlookers see at a glance, namely, that Mr. Vernon is in love with your fortune."

        "According to public opinion that is a very praiseworthy attachment," said Rachel, who had had about enough. "I often hear it commended."

        Lady Newhaven stared. That her conversation could have the effect of a mustard leaf did not strike her. She saw that Rachel was becoming restive, and, of course, the reason was obvious. She was thinking of marrying Dick.

        "Well, my dear," she said, lying down on a low couch near the latticed window, and opening a novel. "You need not be vexed with me for trying to save you from a mercenary marriage. I only speak because I am fond of you. But one marriage is as good as another. I was married for love myself; I had not a farthing. And yet you see my marriage has turned out a tragedy--a bitter, bitter tragedy.

        Tableau.--A beautiful, sad-faced young married woman in white, reclining among pale-green cushions near a bowl of pink carnations, endeavouring to rouse the higher feelings of an inexperienced though not youthful spinster in a short bicycling skirt. Decidedly, the picture was not flattering to Rachel.

CHAPTER XVII

        On s'ennuie presque toujours avec ceux qu'on ennuie.

        "Miss West will like to meet them," she remarked to Hester, whose jaw dropped at the name of Pratt. "And it is very likely if they take a fancy to her they will ask her to stay at the Towers while she is in the neighbourhood. If the captain is at home I will ask him to come too. The Pratts are always so pleasant and hospitable."

        Hester was momentarily disconcerted at the magnitude of the social effort which Rachel's coming seemed to entail. But for once she had the presence of mind not to show her dismay, and she helped Mrs. Gresley to change the crewel-work antimacassars with their washed-out kittens swinging and playing leap-frog for the best tussore silk ones.

        The afternoon was still young when all the preparations had been completed, and Mrs. Gresley went upstairs to change her gown, while Hester took charge of the children, as Fraülein had many days previously arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open windows of the doctor's red brick house opposite Abel's cottage. Hester could

just hear it from the bottom of the garden near the churchyard wall, and there she took the children, and under the sycamore, with a bench round it, the dolls had a tea-party. Hester had provided herself with a lump of sugar and a biscuit, and out of these many dishes were made, and were arranged on a clean pocket-handkerchief spread on the grass. Regie carried out his directions as butler with solemn exactitude, and though Mary, who had inherited the paternal sense of humour, thought fit to tweak the handkerchief and upset everything, she found the witticism so coldly received by "Auntie Hester," although she explained that father always did it, that she at once suited herself to her company and helped to repair the disaster.

        It was very hot. The dolls, from the featureless midshipman to the colossal professional beauty sitting in her own costly perambulator (a present from Mrs. Pratt), felt the heat, and showed it by their moist countenances. The only person who was cool was a small nude china infant in its zinc bath, the property of Stella, whose determination to reach central facts and to penetrate to the root of the matter, at present took the form of tearing or licking off all that could be torn or licked from objects of interest. Hester, who had presented her with the floating baby in the bath, sometimes wondered as she watched Stella conscientiously work through a well-dressed doll down to its stitched sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when she turned her attention to theology.

        They were all sitting in a tight circle round the handkerchief, Regie watching Hester cutting a new supply of plates out of smooth leaves with her little gilt scissors, while Mary and Stella tried alternately to suck an inaccessible grain of sugar out of the bottom of an acorn cup.

        Rachel and Dick had come up on their silent wheels, and were looking at them over the wall before Hester was aware of their presence.

        "May we join the tea-party?" asked Rachel, and Hester started violently.

        "I am afraid the gate is locked," she said. "But perhaps you can climb it."

        "We can't leave the bicycles outside though," said Dick, and he took a good look at the heavy padlocked gate. Then he slowly lifted it off its hinges, wheeled in the bicycles, and replaced the gate in position.

        Rachel looked at him.

        "Do you always do what you want to do?" she said involuntarily.

        "It saves trouble," he said, "especially as no one can be such a first-class fool as to think a padlock will keep a gate shut. He would expect it to be opened."

        "But father said no one could come in there now," explained Regie, who had watched open-mouthed the upheaval of the gate. "Father said it could not be opened any more. He told mother."

        "Did he, my son?" said Dick, and he kissed every one, beginning with Hester, and finishing with the dolls. Then they all sat down to the tea-party, and partook largely of the delicacies, and after tea Dick solemnly asked the children if they had seen the flying halfpenny he had brought back with him from Australia. The children crowded round him, and the halfpenny was produced and handed round. Each child touched it and found it real. Auntie Hester and Auntie Rachel examined it. Boulou was requested to smell it. And then it was laid on the grass, and the pocket-handkerchief which had done duty as a tablecloth was spread over it.

        The migrations of the halfpenny were so extraordinary that even Rachel and Hester professed amazement. Once it was found in Rachel's hand, into which another large hand had gently shut it. But it was never discovered twice in the same place, though all the children rushed religiously to look for it where it was last discovered.

        Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie's back, and amid the wild excitement of the

children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his stocking at his knee.

        "Make it fly down my back too, Uncle Dick," shrieked Mary. "Regie, give it to me."

        But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful halfpenny.

        "Make it fly down my throat," he cried, too excited to know what he was doing, and he put the halfpenny in his mouth.

        "Put it out this instant," said Dick, without moving.

        A moment's pause followed, in which the blood ebbed away from the hearts of the two women.

        "I can't," said Regie, "I've swallowed it." And he began to whimper, and then suddenly rolled on the grass screaming.

        Dick pounced upon him like a panther, and held him by the feet head downwards, shaking him violently.

        The child's face was terrible to see.

        Hester hid her face in her hands. Rachel rose and stood close to Dick.

        "I think the shaking is rather too much for him," she said, watching the poor little purple face intently.

        "I'm bound to go on," said Dick, fiercely. "Is it moving, Regie?"

        "It's going down," screamed Regie, suddenly.

        "That it's not," said Dick, and he shook the child again, and the halfpenny flew out upon the grass.

        "Thank God," said Dick, and he laid the gasping child on Hester's lap and turned away.

        A few minutes later Regie was laughing and talking and feeling himself a hero. Presently he slipped off Hester's knee, and ran to Dick, who was lying on the grass a few paces off, his face hidden in his hands.

        "Make the halfpenny fly again, Uncle Dick," cried all the children, pulling at him.

        Dick raised an ashen face for a moment and said hoarsely, "Take them away."

        Hester gathered up the children and took them back to the house through the kitchen garden.

        "Don't say we have arrived," whispered Rachel to her. "I will come on with him presently." And she sat down near the prostrate vinegrower. The president of the South Australian Vinegrowers' Association looked very large when he was down.

        Presently he sat up. His face was drawn and haggard, but he met Rachel's dog-like glance of silent sympathy with a difficult crooked smile.

        "He is such a jolly little chap," he said, winking his hawk eyes.

        "It was not your fault."

        "That would not have made it any better for the parents," said Dick. "I had time to think of that while I was shaking that little money-box. Besides, it was my fault in a way. I'll never play with other people's children again. They are too brittle. I've had shaves up the Fly River and in the South Sea Islands, but never anything as bad as this, in this blooming little Vicarage garden with a church looking over the wall."

        Hester was skimming back towards them.

        "Don't mention it to James and his wife," she said to Dick, "He has to speak at a temperance meeting to-night. I will tell them when the meeting is over."

        "That's just as well," said Dick, "for I know if James jawed much at me I should act on the text that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

        "In what way?"

        "Either way," said Dick. "Tongue or fist. It does not matter which so long as you give more than you get. And the text is quite right. It is blessed for I've tried it over and over again, and found it true every time. But I don't want to try it on James if he's anything like what he was as a curate."

        "He is not much altered," said Hester.

        "He is the kind of man that would not alter much," said Dick. "I expect God Almighty likes him as he is."

        Mr. and Mrs. Gresley meanwhile were receiving Mrs. Pratt and the two Miss Pratts in the drawing-room. Selina and Ada Pratt were fine handsome young women with long upper lips, who wore their smart sailor hats tilted backwards to show their bushy fringes, and whose muff-chains with swinging pendant hearts, silk blouses and sequin belts and brown boots represented to Mrs. Gresley the highest pinnacle of the world of fashion.

        Selina was the most popular, being liable to shrieks of laughter at the smallest witticisms, and always ready for that species of amusement termed "bally-ragging" or "haymaking." But Ada was the most admired. She belonged to that type which in hotel society and country towns is always termed "queenly." She "kept the men at a distance." She "never allowed them to take liberties," &c. &c. She held her chin up and her elbows out, and was considered by the section of Middleshire society in which she shone to be very distinguished. Mrs. Pratt was often told that her daughter looked like a duchess; and this facsimile of the aristocracy, or rather of the most distressing traits of its latest recruits, had a manner of lolling with crossed legs in the parental carriage and pair, which was greatly admired. "Looks as if she was born to it all," Mr. Pratt would say to his wife.

        Mrs. Gresley was just beginning to fear her other guests were not coming when two tall figures were seen walking across the lawn, with Hester between them.

        Mr. Gresley sallied forth to meet them, and blasts of surprised welcome were borne into the drawing-room by the summer air.

        "But it was locked. I locked it myself."

        Inaudible reply.

        "Padlocked. Only opens to the word Moon. Key on my own watch chain."

        Inaudible reply.

        "Hinges!! Ha! Ha! Ha! very good, Dick. Likely story that. I see you're the same as ever. Travellers' tales. But we are not so easily taken in, are we, Hester?"

        Mrs. Gresley certainly had the gift of prophecy as far as the Pratts were concerned. Mrs. Pratt duly took the expected "fancy" to Rachel, and pressed her to stay at "The Towers," while she was in the neighbourhood, and make further acquaintance with her "young ladies."

        "Ada is very pernickety," she said, smiling towards that individual conversing with Dick. "She won't make friends with everybody, and she gives it me (with maternal pride) when I ask people to stay whom she does not take to. She says there's a very poor lot round here, and most of the young ladies so ill-bred and empty she does not care to make friends with them. I don't know where she gets all her knowledge from. I'm sure it's not from her mother. Ada, now you come and talk a little to Miss West."

        Ada rose with the air of one who confers a favour, and Rachel made room for her on the sofa while Mrs. Pratt squeezed herself behind the tea-table with Mrs. Gresley.

        The conversation turned on bicycling.

        "I bike now and then in the country," said Ada, "but I have not done much lately. We have only just come down from town, and of course I never bike in London."

        Rachel had just said that she did.

        "Perhaps you are nervous about the traffic," said Rachel.

        "Oh! I'm not the least afraid of the traffic, but it's such bad form to bike in London."

        "That of course depends on how it's done," said Rachel; "but I am sure in your case you need not be afraid."

        Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer.

        When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother. "Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she's just as stuck up as she can be."

        The Pratts were "Liverpool."

        "Well, my dear," said Mrs. Pratt with natural pride. "It's well known no one is good enough for you. But I took to Miss West, and an orphan and all, with all that money, poor thing."

        "She has no style," said Selina, "but she has a nice face, and she's coming to stay with Sibbie Loftus next week, when she leaves Vi Newhaven. She may be Birmingham, Ada, but she's just as thick with county people as we are."

        "I did not rightly make out," said Mrs. Pratt reflectively, "whether that tall gentleman, Mr. Vernon, was after Miss West or Hessie Gresley."

        "Oh! Ma! You always think some one's after somebody else," said Ada impatiently, whose high breeding obliged her to be rather peremptory with her simple parent. "Mr. Vernon is a pauper, and so is Hessie. And besides Hessie is not the kind of girl that anybody would want to marry."

        "Well, I'm not so sure of that," said Selina. "But if she had had any chances I know she would have told me because I told her all about Captain Cobbett and Mr. Baxter."

CHAPTER XVIII

Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages.

LA FONTAINE

        Rachel proved an attentive listener, and after Mr. Gresley had furnished her at length with nutritious details respecting parochial work, he went on:

        "I am holding this evening a temperance meeting in the Parish Room. I wish, Miss West, that I could persuade you to stay for it, and thus enlist your sympathies in a matter of vital importance."

        "They have been enlisted in it for the last ten years," said Rachel, who was not yet accustomed to the invariable assumption on the part of Mr. Gresley that no one took an interest in the most obvious good work until he had introduced and championed it. "But," she added, "I will stay with pleasure."

        Dick, who was becoming somewhat restive under Mrs. Gresley's inquiries about the Newhavens, became suddenly interested in the temperance meeting.

        "I've seen many a good fellow go to the dogs through drink in the Colonies, more's the pity," Dick remarked. "I think

I'll come, too, James. And if you want a few plain words you call on me."

        "I will," said Mr. Gresley, much gratified. "I always make a point of encouraging the laity, at least those among them who are thoroughly grounded in Church teaching, to express themselves. Hear both sides, that is what I always say. The Bishop constantly enjoins on his clergy to endeavour to elicit the lay opinion. The chair this evening will be taken by Mr. Pratt, a layman."

        The temperance meeting was to take place at seven o'clock, and possibly Rachel may have been biased in favour of that entertainment by the hope of a quiet half-hour with Hester in her own room. At any rate, she secured it.

        When they were alone Rachel produced Lady Newhaven's note.

        "Do come to Westhope," she said. "While you are under this roof it seems almost impossible to see you, unless we are close to it," and she touched the sloping ceiling with her hand. "And yet I came to Westhope, and I am going on to Wilderleigh partly in order to be near you."

        Hester shook her head.

        "The book is nearly finished," she said, the low light from the attic window striking sideways on the small face with its tightly compressed lips.

        A spirit indomitable, immortal, looked for a moment out of Hester's grey eyes. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was becoming weaker day by day.

        "When it is finished," she went on, "I will go anywhere and do anything, but stay here I must till it is done. Besides, I am not fit for society at present. I am covered with blue mould. Do you remember how that horrid Lady Carbury used to laugh at the country squires' daughters for being provincial? I have gone a peg lower than being provincial, I have become parochial."

        A knock came at the door, and Fraülein's mild, musical face appeared in the aperture.

        "I fear to disturb you," she said, "but Regie say he cannot go to sleep till he see you."

        Hester introduced Fraülein to Rachel, and slipped downstairs to the night nursery.

        Mary and Stella were already asleep in their high-barred cribs. The blind was down, and Hester could only just see the white figure of Regie sitting up in his nightgown. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took him in her arms.

        "What is it, my treasure?"

        "Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying halfpenny?"

        "No, darling. Why?"

        "Because mother always says not to put pennies in my mouth, and I never did till to-day. And now Mary says I have been very naughty."

        "It does not matter what Mary says," said Hester, with a withering glance towards the sleeping angel in the next crib, who was only Mary by day. "But you must never do it again, and you will tell mother all about it to-morrow."

        "Yes," said Regie; "but, but--"

        "But what?"

        "Uncle Dick did say it was a flying halfpenny, and you said so, too, and that other auntie. And I thought it did not matter putting in flying halfpennies, only common ones."

        Hester saw the difficulty in Regie's mind. "It felt common when it was inside," said Regie doubtfully, "and yet you and Uncle Dick did say it was a flying one."

        Regie's large eyes were turned upon her with solemn inquiry in them. It is in crises like this that our first ideals are laid low.

        Regie had always considered Hester as the very soul of honour, that mysterious honour which he was beginning to dimly apprehend through her allegiance to it, and which, in his mind, belonged as exclusively to her as the little bedroom under the roof.

        "Regie," said Hester, tremulously, seeing that she had unwittingly put a stumbling-block before the little white feet she loved, "when we played at the doll's tea-party, and you were the butler, I did not mean you were really a butler, did I? I knew, and you know, and we all knew, that you were Regie all the time."

        "Ye-es."

        "It was a game. And so when Uncle Dick found us playing the tea-party game he played another game about the flying halfpenny."

        "Then it was a common halfpenny after all," said Regie with a deep sigh.

        "Yes, it was a common halfpenny, only the game was that it could fly, like the other game was that the acorn-cups were real tea-cups. So Uncle Dick and all of us were not saying what was not true. We were all playing at a game. Do you understand, my little mouse?"

        "Yes," said Regie, with another voluminous sigh, and Hester realised with thankfulness that the halfpenny and not herself had fallen from its pedestal. "I see now, but when he said, Hi! Presto! and it flew away, I thought I saw it flying. Mary said she did. And I suppose the gate was only a game too."

        Hester felt that the subject would be quite beyond her powers of explanation if once the gate were introduced into it.

        She laid Regie down and covered him.

        "And you will go to sleep now. And I will ask Uncle Dick when next he comes to show us how he did the game with the halfpenny."

        "Yes," said Regie dejectedly. "I'd rather know what there is to be known. Only I thought it was a flying one. Good night, Auntie Hester."

        She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had

arrived. Mr. Gresley's voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.

        Accordingly a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the parish room. It was crammed. The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure. Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say. Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington. Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.

        Dick, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the assembly, and as Rachel well knew, looking for her. Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals. There was a vacant space between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible. Entirely disregarding the anxious churchwardens who were waving him forward Dick disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of space upon the empty seat near her, and Dick, who had persuaded the young men to give him footroom on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several "school forms," sat down beside her.

        It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling. But the thought darted through her mind that Dick was the kind of man who somehow or other would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry. There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished with a nervous tremor that his choice had fallen on some one else.

        The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighbouring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down

except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker. Mr. Pratt's face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long parti-coloured whiskers. He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his "humble brethren," admirably suited to one, who after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a "county family."

        The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.

        The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin ascetic looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties. Dick who had so far taken more interest in Rachel's gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.

        A restive movement in the audience followed the speech, which was loudly clapped by Mr. Gresley and the Pratts.

        Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.

        Mr. Gresley had an enormous advantage as a platform speaker, and as a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home, owing to the conviction that he had penetrated to the core of any subject under discussion, and could pronounce judgment upon it in a conclusive manner. He was wont to approach every subject by the preliminary statement that he had "threshed it out." This threshing out had been so thorough that there was hardly a subject even of the knottiest description which he was unable to dismiss with a few pregnant words. "Evolution! Ha! ha!! Descended from an ape. I don't believe that for one." While women's rights received their death-blow from a jocose allusion to the woman following the plough, while the man sat at home and rocked the cradle.

        With the same noble simplicity he grappled with the

difficult and complex subject of temperance, by which he meant total abstinence. He informed his hearers, "in the bigoted tones of a married teetotaler," that he had gone to the root of the matter--the roots were apparently on the surface--and that it was no use calling black white and white black. He for one did not believe in muddling up black and white as some lukewarm people advocated till they were only a dirty grey. No; either drink was right or it was wrong. If it was not wrong to get drunk, he did not know what was wrong. He was not a man of compromise. Alcohol was a servant of the devil, and to tamper with it was to tamper with the evil one himself; touch not; taste not; handle not. He for his part should never side with the devil.

        This lofty utterance having been given time to sink in, Mr. Gresley looked round at the sea of stolid, sullen faces, and concluded with saying that the chairman would now call upon his cousin, Mr. Vernon, to speak to them on the shocking evils he himself had witnessed in Australia as the results of drink.

        Dick was not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from his seat with the help of the young men, and slowly ascended the platform. He looked a size too large for it, and for the other speakers, and his loose tweed suit and heather stockings were as great a contrast to the tightly buttoned up black of the other occupants as were his strong keen face and muscular hands to those of the previous speakers.

        "That's a man," said a masculine voice behind Rachel. "He worn't reared on ditch water, you bet."

        "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen," said Dick, "You've only got to listen to me for half a minute, and you'll find out without my telling you that Nature did not cut me out for a speaker. I'm no talker. I'm a working man"--an admission which Mr. Pratt would rather have been boiled in his own oil than have made--"for the last seven years I've done my twelve hours a day, and I've come to think more of what a man gets through with his hands than the sentiments which he can wheeze out after a heavy meal. But Mr. Gresley

has asked me to tell you what I know about drink, as I have seen a good many samples of it in Australia."

        Dick then proceeded, with a sublime disregard of grammar, and an earnestness that increased as he went on, to dilate on the evil effects of drink as he himself had witnessed them. He described how he had seen men who could not get spirits make themselves drunk on "Pain-killer"; how he had seen strong young station hands, who had not tasted spirits for months, come down from the hills with a hundred pounds in their pockets, and drink themselves into "doddery" old men in a fortnight in the nearest township, where they were kept drunk on drugged liquor till all their hard-earned wages were gone.

        The whole room listened in dead silence. No feet shuffled. Mr. Gresley looked patronisingly at Dick's splendid figure and large outstretched hand, with the crooked middle finger which he had cut off by mistake in the Bush, and had stuck on again himself. Then the young Vicar glanced smiling at the audience, feeling that he had indeed elicited a "lay opinion" of the best kind.

        "Now what are the causes of all these dreadful things?" continued Dick. "I'm speaking to the men here, not the women. What are the causes of all this poverty and vice and scamped workmanship, and weak eyes and shaky hands on the top of high wages? I tell you they come from two things, and one is as bad as the other. One is drinking too much, and the other is drinking bad liquor. Every man who's worth his salt," said Dick, balancing his long bent finger on the middle of his other palm, "should know when he has had enough. Some can carry more, some less." Mr. Gresley started and signed to Dick, but Dick did not notice. "Bad liquor is at the root of half the drunkenness I know. I don't suppose there are many publicans here to-night, for this meeting isn't quite in their line, and if there are, they can't have come expecting compliments. But if you fellows think you get good liquor at the publics round here, I tell you, you are jolly well mistaken."

        "Hear! Hear!" shouted several voices.

        "I've been in the course of the last week to most of the public-houses in Southminster and Westhope and Warpington to see what sort of stuff they sold, and upon my soul, gentlemen, if I settled in Warpington I'd, I'd"--Dick hesitated for a simile strong enough--"I'd turn teetotaler until I left it again, rather than swallow the snake poison they serve out to you."

        There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Mr. Gresley, whose complexion had deepened, sprang to his feet and endeavoured to attract Dick's attention, but Dick saw nothing but his audience. Mr. Gresley began to speak in his high sing-song voice.

        "My young friend," he said, "has mistaken the object of this meeting. In short I must--"

        "Not a bit," said Dick, "not a bit; but if the people have had enough of me I'll take your chair while you have another innings."

        In a moment the room was in an uproar.

        Shouts of "No, no," "Go on," "Let him speak."

        In the tumult Mr. Gresley's voice instead of being the solo became but as one instrument--albeit a trombone--in an orchestra.

        "But I thoroughly agree with the gentlemen who spoke before me," said Dick, when peace was restored. "Total abstinence is a long chalk below temperance, but it's better than drunkenness any day. And if a man can't get on without three finger-nips let him take the pledge. There are one or two here to-night who would be the better for it. But to my thinking total abstinence is like a water mattress. It is good for a sick man, and it's good for a man with a weak will, which is another kind of illness. But temperance is for those who are in health. There is a text in the Bible about wine making glad the heart of man. That's a good text and one to go on. As often as not texts are like bags, and a man crams all his own rubbish into them, and expects you to take them together. There are some men who ought to know better

who actually get out of that text by saying the Bible means unfermented liquor"--Mr. Gresley became purple. "Does it? Then how about the other place where we hear of new wine bursting old bottles. What makes them burst? Fermentation, of course, as every village idiot knows. No, I take it when the Bible says wine it means wine. Wine's fermented liquor, and what's unfermented liquor? Nothing but 'pop'."

        Dick pronounced the last word with profound contempt, which was met with enthusiastic applause.

        "My last word to you, gentlemen," continued Dick, "is keep in mind two points: first, look out for an honest publican, if there is such an article, who will buy only the best liquor from the best sources, and is not bound by the breweries to sell any stuff they send along. Join together, and make it hot for a bound publican. Kick him out, even if he is the Squire's butler." Mr. Pratt's complexion became apoplectic. "And the second point is, Remember some men have heads and some haven't. It is no use for a lame man entering for a hurdle race. A strong man can take his whack--if it's with his food--and it will do him good, while a weak man can't hang up his hat after the first smile."

        A storm of applause followed, which was perhaps all the heartier by dafsreason of the furious face of Mr. Gresley. Dick was clapped continuously as he descended the platform, and slowly left the room feeling in his pockets for his tobacco pouch. A squad of young men creaked out after him, and others followed by twos and threes, so that the mellifluous voice of Mr. Pratt was comparatively lost, who, disregarding his position as chairman, now rose to pour oil--of which in manner alone he had always a large supply--on the troubled waters. Mr. Pratt had felt a difficulty in interrupting a member of a county family, which with the eye of faith he plainly perceived Dick to be, and at the same time a guest of "Newhaven's." The Pratts experienced in the rare moments of their intercourse with the Newhavens some of that sublime awe, that subdued rapture, which others experience in cathe-

drals. Mr. Pratt had also taken a momentary pleasure in the defeat of Mr. Gresley, who did not pay him the deference which he considered due to him and his "seat." Mr. Pratt always expected that the Vicar should, by reason of his small income, take the position of a sort of upper servant of the Squire; and he had seen so many instances of this happy state of things that he was perpetually nettled by Mr. Gresley's "independent" attitude; while Mr. Gresley was equally irritated by "the impatience of clerical control" and shepherding which Mr. Pratt, his largest and woolliest sheep, too frequently evinced.

        As the chairman benignly expressed his approval of both views, and toned down each to meet the other, the attention of the audience wandered to the occasional laughs and cheers which came from the school playground. And when a few minutes later Rachel emerged with the stream she saw Dick standing under the solitary lamp-post speaking earnestly to a little crowd of youths and men. The laughter had ceased. Their crestfallen appearance spoke for itself.

        "Well, good-night, lads," said Dick cordially, raising his cap to them, and he rejoined Rachel and Hester at the gate.

        When Dick and Rachel had departed on their bicycles, and when the deputation after a frugal supper had retired to rest, and when the drawing-room door was shut, then, and not till then, did Mr. Gresley give vent to his feelings.

        "And he would not stop," he repeated over and over again almost in hysterics, when the total abstinence hose of his wrath had been turned on Dick until every reservoir of abuse was exhausted. "I signed to him; I spoke to him. You saw me speak to him, Minna, and he would not stop."

        Hester experienced that sudden emotion which may result either in tears or laughter at the cruel anguish brought upon her brother by the momentary experience of what he so ruthlessly inflicted.

        "He talked me down," said Mr. Gresley, his voice shaking. "He opposed me in my own school-room. Of course, I blame myself for asking him to speak. I ought to have inquired

into his principles more thoroughly, but he took me in entirely by saying one thing in this room and the exact opposite on the platform."

        "I thought his views were the same in both places," said Hester, "and at the time I admired you for asking him to speak, considering he is a vine-grower."

        "A what?" almost shrieked Mr. Gresley.

        "A vine-grower. Surely you know he has one of the largest vineyards in South Australia?"

        For a moment Mr. Gresley was bereft of speech.

        "And you knew this and kept silence," he said at last, while Mrs. Gresley looked reproachfully, but without surprise, at her sister-in-law.

        "Certainly. What was there to speak about? I thought you knew."

        "I never heard it till this instant. That quite accounts for his views. He wants to push his own wines. Of course, drunkenness is working for his interests. I understand it all now. He has undone the work of years by that speech for the sake of booking a few orders. It is contemptible. I trust, Hester, he is not a particular friend of yours, for I shall feel it my duty to speak very strongly to him if he comes again."

        But Dick did not appear again. He was off and away before the terrors of the Church could be brought to bear on him.

        But his memory remained green at Warpington.

        "They do say," said Abel to Hester a few days later, planting his spade on the ground, and slowly scraping off upon it the clay from his nailed boots, "as that Muster Vernon gave 'em a dusting in the school-yard as they won't forget in a hurry. He said he could not speak out before the women folk, but he was noways nesh to pick his words onst he was outside. Barnes said as his tongue 'ud 'ave raised blisters on a hedge stake. But he had a way with him for all that. There was a deal of talk about him at market last Wednesday,

and Jones and Peg is just silly to go back to Australy with 'im. I ain't sure," continued Abel, closing the conversation by a vigorous thrust of his spade into the earth, "as one of the things that fetched 'em all most wasn't his saying that since he's been in a hot climate he knowed what it was to be tempted himself when he was a bit down on his luck or a bit up. Pratts would never have owned to that." The village always spoke of Mr. Pratt in the plural without a prefix. "I've been to a sight of temperance meetings because," with indulgence, "master likes it, tho' I always has my glass, as is natural. But I never heard one of the speakers kind of settle to it like that. That's what the folks say; that for all he was a born gentleman he spoke to 'em as man to man, not as if we was servants or childer."

CHAPTER XIX

Le bruit est pour le fat.
La plainte est pour le sot.
L'honnête homme trompé
S'en va et ne dit mot.

M. DELANONI.

        Lord Newhaven drew up a chair, and Rachel felt vaguely relieved at his presence. He had a knack of knowing when to appear, and when to efface himself.

        "She can't leave her book," said Rachel.

        "Her first book was very clever," said Lord Newhaven, "and what was more, it was true. I hope for her own sake she will outgrow her love of truth, or it will make deadly enemies for her."

        "And good friends," said Rachel.

        "Possibly," said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at her, and almost obliged to believe that she had spoken without self-consciousness. "But if she outgrows all her principles, I hope at any rate she won't outgrow her sharp tongue. I liked her ever since she first came to this house, ten years ago, with Lady Susan Gresley. I remember saying that Captain Pratt, who called while she was here, was a 'bounder.' And Miss Gresley said she did not think he was quite a bounder,

only on the boundary line. If you knew Captain Pratt, that describes him exactly."

        "I wish she had not said it," said Rachel with a sigh. "She makes trouble for herself by saying things like that. Is Lady Newhaven in the drawing-room?"

        "Yes, I heard her singing 'The Lost Chord' not ten minutes ago."

        "I will go up to her," said Rachel.

        "I do believe," said Lord Newhaven, when Rachel had departed, "that she has an affection for Miss Gresley."

        "It is not necessary to be a detective in plain clothes to see that," said Dick.

        "No. It generally needs to be a magnifying glass to see a woman's friendship, and then they are only expedients till we arrive, Dick. You need not be jealous of Miss Gresley. Miss West will forget all about her when she is Mrs. Vernon."

        "She does not seem very keen about that," said Dick grimly. "I'm only marking time. I'm no forwarder than I was."

        "Well, it's your own fault for fixing your affections on a woman who is not anxious to marry. She has no objection to you. It is marriage she does not like."

        "Oh! That's bosh," said Dick. "All women wish to be married, and if they don't they ought to."

        He felt that an invidious reflection had been cast on Rachel.

        "All the same, a man with one eye can see that women with money or anything that makes them independent of us don't flatter us by their alacrity to marry us. They will make fools of themselves for love, none greater, and they will marry for love. But their different attitude towards us, their natural lords and masters, directly we are no longer necessary to them as stepping-stones to a home and a recognised position revolts me. If you had taken my advice at the start, you would have made up to one among the mob of women who are dependent on marriage for their very existence. If a man goes into that herd he will not be refused. And if he is it does not matter.

It is the blessed custom of piling everything on to the eldest son, and leaving the women of the family almost penniless, which provides half of us with wives without any trouble to ourselves. Whatever we are, they have got to take us. The average dancing young woman living in luxury in her father's house is between the devil and the deep sea. We are frequently the devil, but it is not surprising that she can't face the alternative, a poverty to which she was not brought up, and in which she has seen her old spinster aunts. But I suppose in your case you really want the money?"

        Dick looked rather hard at Lord Newhaven.

        "I should not have said that unless I had known it to be a lie," continued the latter, "because I dislike being kicked. But, Dick, listen to me. You have not," with sudden misgiving, "laid any little matrimonial project before her this evening, have you?"

        "No, I was not quite such a fool as that."

        "Well! Such things do occur. Moonlight, you know, &c. &c. I was possessed by a devil once, and proposed by moonlight, as all my wife's friends know, and probably her maid. But seriously, Dick, you are not making progress, as you say yourself."

        "Well!" rather sullenly.

        "Well, onlookers see most of the game. Miss West may--I don't say she is--but if things go on as they are for another week she may become slightly bored. That was why I joined you at supper. She had had, for the time, enough."

        "Of me?" said Dick, reddening under his tan.

        "Just so. It is a matter of no importance after marriage, but it should be avoided beforehand. Are you really in earnest about this?"

        Dick delivered himself slowly and deliberately of certain platitudes.

        "Well, I hope I shall hear you say all that again some day in a condensed form before a clergyman. In the meanwhile--"

        "In the meanwhile I had better clear out."

        "Yes; I don't enjoy saying so in the presence of my own galantine and mayonnaise, but that is it. Go, and--come back."

        "If you have a Bradshaw," said Dick, "I'll look out my train now. I think there is an express to London about seven in the morning, if you can send me to the station."

        "But the post only comes in at eight."

        "Well, you can send my letters after me."

        "I daresay I can, my diplomatist. But you are not going to leave till the post has arrived, when you will receive business letters, requiring your immediate presence in London. You are not going to let a woman know that you leave on her account."

        "You are very sharp, Cackles," said Dick, drearily. "And I'll take a leaf out of your book and lie, if you think it is the right thing. But I expect she will know very well that the same business which took me to that infernal temperance meeting has taken me to London."

        Rachel was vaguely relieved when Dick went off next morning. She was not, as a rule, oppressed by the attentions she received from young men, which in due season became "marked," and then resulted in proposals neatly or clumsily expressed. But she was disturbed when she thought of Dick, and his departure was like the removal of a weight, not a heavy, but still a perceptible one. For Rachel was aware that Dick was in deadly earnest, and that his love was growing steadily, almost unconsciously, was accumulating like snow, flake by flake, upon a mountain-side. Some day, perhaps not for a long time, but some day, there would be an avalanche, and, in his own language, she "would be in it."

CHAPTER XX

        Si l'on vous a trahi, ce n'est pas la trahison qui importe; c'est le pardon qu'elle a fait naître dans votre âme.... Mais si la trahison n'a pas accru la simplicité, la confiance plus haute, l'étendue de l'amour, on vous aura trahi bien inutilement, et vous pouvez vous dire qu'il n'est rien arrivé.

MAETERLINCK.

        The two friends bore their fate for a time in inward impatience, and then, not without compunction, "practised to deceive." Certain obtuse persons push others, naturally upright, into eluding and outwitting them, just as the really wicked people, who give vivâ voce invitations, goad us into crevasses of lies, for which, if there is any justice anywhere, they will have to answer at the last day. Mr. Gresley gave the last shove to Hester and Rachel by an exhaustive harangue on what he called socialism. Finding they were discussing some phase of it, he drew up a chair and informed them that he had "threshed out" the whole subject.

        "Socialism," he began, delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. "Community of goods. People don't see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can't knock that into people's heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away."

        It was after this conversation, or rather, monologue, that Hester and Rachel arranged to meet by stealth.

        They were sitting luxuriously in the short grass, with their backs against the churchyard wall, and their hats tilted over their eyes.

        "I wish I had met this Mr. Dick five or six years ago," said Rachel with a sigh.

        Hester was the only person who knew about Rachel's previous love disaster.

        "Dick always gets what he wants in the long run," said Hester. "I should offer to marry him at once if I were you. It will save a lot of trouble, and it will come to just the same in the end."

        Rachel laughed, but not light-heartedly. Hester had only put into words a latent conviction of her own which troubled her.

        "Dick is the right kind of man to marry," continued Hester, dispassionately. "What lights he has he lives up to. If that is not high praise I don't know what is. He is good, but somehow his goodness does not offend one. One can condone it. And if you care for such things, he has a thorough-going respect for women, which he carries about with him in a little patent safe of his own."

        "I don't want to marry a man for his qualities and mental furniture," said Rachel, wearily. "If I did I would take Mr. Dick."

        There was a short silence.

        "I am sure," said Rachel at last, "that you do not realise how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone. Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it's despicable. I have struggled against it. It is idiotic to generalise from one personal experience. I keep before my mind that other men are not like him. I know they aren't, but yet--somehow I think they are. I am frightened."

        Hester turned her wide eyes towards her friend.

        "Do you still consider after these four years that he did you an injury?"

        Rachel looked out upon the mournful landscape. The weariness of midsummer was upon it. A heavy hand seemed laid upon the brow of the distant hills.

        "I gave him everything I had," she said slowly, "and he threw it away. I have nothing left for any one else. Perhaps it is because I am naturally economical," she added, smiling faintly, "that it seems now, looking back, such a dreadful waste."

        "Only in appearance, not in reality," said Hester. "It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of all the reins.'"

        "You mean it did me good," said Rachel, "and that he was

a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don't take a burning interest in my own character. I don't find my mental standpoint--isn't that what Mrs. Loftus calls it?--very engrossing."

        "He was a benefactor all the same," said Hester with decision. "I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of gratitude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?"

        "Oh!" said Rachel ruefully. "When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly."

        "You are a true prophet, Rachel."

        "Yes, executioner."

        "My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself--not that that is saying much--to have saved you from that hour."

        "I know it."

        "But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God, I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you--the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness--which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination--I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have had no more sympathy than she has. People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathise with what one has experienced. That is why they are

always saying 'as a mother,' or 'as a wife.' If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but for want of using your powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonised awakening all the great realities of life--love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm--would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why I can't bear to hear her speak of them because every word she says proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door--until then."

        Silence.

        "Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?"

        No answer.

        "Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?"

        "No."

        "But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents."

        "Don't," said Rachel, her lip trembling.

        "I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care now. You seek out those who need you. Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering, which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?"

        "They were cheaply bought," said Rachel with conviction, speaking with difficulty.

        "Would you have learnt them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?"

        "Oh, Hester! would anybody?"

        "Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would you?"

        "N--no," said Rachel.

        There was a long silence.

        Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."

        At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.

        "I see what you mean," she said, "I have not reached the place yet, but I can believe that I shall come to it some day when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty. Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn--by experience. I have been very fortunate."

        Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel's hands. It was as if she had said, "Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me." And the action was so understood.

        Rachel coloured, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.

        "How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?" said Rachel in a whisper. "When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you know them?"

        A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester's face. "'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester's voice altered.

        "Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James. You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love scenes in the 'Idyll' were put together from scraps I had collected of James' engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the 'Idyll.' And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own."

        "You are profane now," said Rachel smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.

        A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them imitating a charger, while Fraülein and the two little girls followed.

        Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.

        "Where is Uncle Dick?" he said.

        "I don't know," said Rachel, reddening in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.

        "Then he has not come with you?"

        Regie's mind was what his father called 'sure and steady.' Mr. Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.

        "No, he has not come with me."

        "Mary," shrieked Regie, "he has not come."

        "I knew he had not," said Mary. "When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else."

        Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys' favourite child. However thoroughly they might divest themselves of parental partiality, they could not but observe that she was as sensible as a grown-up person.

        "I thought he might be somewhere near," explained Regie, "in a tree or something," looking up into the little yew. "You can't tell with a conjurer like Uncle Dick, can you Auntie Hester, whatever Mary may say?"

        "Mary is generally wrong," said Hester, "but she is right or once."

        Mary, who was early acquiring the comfortable habit of hearing only the remarks that found an echo in her own breast, heard she was right, and said shrilly:

        "I told Regie when we was still on the road that Uncle Dick wasn't there. Mother doesn't always go with father, but he said he'd run and see."

        "We shall be very late for luncheon," said Fraülein hastily, blushing down to the onyx brooch at her turn-down collar, and drawing Mary away.

        "Perhaps he left the halfpenny with you," said Regie. "Fraülein would like to see it."

        "No, no," said Fraülein, the tears in her eyes. "I do not vish at all. I cry half the night when I hear of it."

        "I only cry when baby beats me," said Mary, balancing on one leg.

        "I have not got the halfpenny," said Rachel, the three elders studiously ignoring Mary's personal reminiscences.

        The children were borne away by Fraülein, and the friends kissed and parted.

        "I am coming to Wilderleigh tomorrow," said Rachel. "I shall be much nearer to you then."

        "It is no good contending against Dick and fate," said Hester, shaking her finger at her. "You see it is all decided for you. Even the children have settled it."

CHAPTER XXI

        If a fool be associated with a wise man all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.

Buddist Dhaammapada.

        Perhaps one of the reasons why Lady Newhaven and Sybell Loftus did not "get on," was owing to a certain superficial resemblance between them.

        Both exacted attention, and if they were in the same room together it seldom contained enough attention to supply the needs of both. Both were conscious, like "Celia Chettam," that since the birth of their first child their opinions respecting literature, politics, and art had acquired additional weight and solidity, and that a wife and mother could pronounce with decision on important subjects where a spinster would do well to hold her peace. Each was fond of saying, "As a married woman I think this or that"; yet each was conscious of dislike and irritation when she heard the other say it. And there is no doubt that Sybell had been too unwell to appear at Lady Newhaven's garden party the previous summer, because Lady Newhaven had the week before advanced her cherished theory of "one life one love," to the delight of Lord Newhaven, and the natural annoyance of Sybell, whose second husband was at that moment handing tea, and answering, "That depends," when appealed to.

        "As if," as Sybell said afterwards to Hester, "a woman can help being the ideal of two men."

        "Sybell is such a bore now," continued Lady Newhaven, "that I don't know what she will be when she is older. I don't know why you go to Wilderleigh of all places."

        "I go because I am asked," said Rachel, "and partly because I shall be near Hester Gresley."

        "I don't think Miss Gresley can be very anxious to see you, or she would have come here when I invited her. I told several people she was coming, and that Mr. Carstairs, who thinks so much of himself, came on purpose to meet her. It is very tiresome of her to behave like that, especially as she did not say she had any engagement. You make a mistake Rachel, in running after people who won't take any trouble to come and see you. It is a thing I never do myself."

        "She is buried in her book at present."

        "I can't think what she has to write about. But I suppose she picks up things from other people."

        "I think so. She is a close observer."

        "I think you are wrong, there, Rachel, for when she was here some years ago, she never looked about her at all. And I asked her how she judged of people, and she said, 'By appearances.' Now that was very silly, because as I explained to her, appearances were most deceptive, and I had often thought a person with a cold manner was cold-hearted, and afterwards found I was quite mistaken."

        Rachel did not answer. She wondered in what the gift consisted, which Lady Newhaven and Sybell both possessed, of bringing all conversation to a standstill.

        "It seems curious," said Lady Newhaven after a pause, "how the books are mostly written by the people who know least of life. Now the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese.' People think so much of them. I was looking at them the other day. Why, they are nothing to what I have felt. I sometimes think if I wrote a book--I don't mean that I have any special talent--but if I really sat down and wrote a book with all the deep side of life in it, and one's own religious feelings, and described love and love's tragedy as they really are, what

a sensation it would make. It would take the world by storm."

        "Any book dealing sincerely with one of those subjects could not fail to be a great success."

        "Oh, yes. I am not afraid I should fail. I do wish you were not going, Rachel. We have so much in common. And it is such a comfort to be with some one who knows what one is going through. I believe you feel the suspense, too, for my sake."

        "I do feel it--deeply."

        "I sometimes think," said Lady Newhaven, her face ageing suddenly under an emotion so disfiguring that Rachel's eyes fell before it. "I am sometimes almost certain that Edward drew the short lighter. Oh! do you think if he did he will really act up to it when the time comes?"

        "If he drew it he will certainly take the consequences."

        "Will he, do you think? I am almost sure he drew it. He is doing so many little things that look as if he knew he were not going to live. I heard Mr. Carstairs ask him to go to Norway with him next spring, and Edward laughed, and said he never looked more than a few months ahead."

        "I am afraid he may have said that intending you to hear it."

        "But he did not intend me to hear it. I overheard it."

        Rachel's face fell.

        "You did promise after you told me about the letter that you would never do that kind of thing again."

        "Well, Rachel, I have not. I have not even looked at his letters since. I could not help it that once, because I thought he might have told his brother in India. But don't you think his saying that to Mr. Carstairs looks--"

        Rachel shook her head.

        "He is beyond me," she said. "There may be something more behind which we don't know about."

        "I have a feeling, it has come over me again and again lately, that I shall be released, and that Hugh and I shall be happy together yet."

        And Lady Newhaven turned her face against the high back of her carved oak chair, and sobbed hysterically.

        "Could you be happy if you had brought about Lord Newhaven's death?" said Rachel.

        Her voice was full of tender pity, not for the crouching unhappiness before her, but for the poor atrophied soul. Could she reach it? She would have given everything she possessed at that moment for one second of Christ's power to touch those blind eyes to sight.

        "How can you say such things. I should not have brought it about. I did not even know of that dreadful drawing of lots till the thing was done. That was all his own doing."

        Rachel sighed. The passionate yearning towards her companion shrank back upon herself.

        "The fault is in me," she said to herself. "If I were purer, humbler, more loving, I might have been allowed to help her."

        Lady Newhaven rose, and held Rachel tightly in her arms.

        "I count the days," she said hoarsely, shaking from head to foot. "It is two months and three weeks to-day. November the twenty-ninth. You will promise faithfully to come to me and be with me then? You will not desert me? Whatever happens you will be sure--to come?"

        "I will come. I promise," said Rachel. And she stooped and kissed the closed eyes. She could at least do that.

CHAPTER XXII

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.

Song of the Bandar-log.

        "Oh! what you have missed!" she said breathlessly. "But you do look tired. You were quite right to lie down before dinner, only you aren't lying down. We have had such a conversation downstairs. The others are all out boating with Doll but Mr. Harvey, the great Mr. Harvey, you know."

        "I am afraid I don't know."

        "Oh yes, you do. The author of 'Unashamed'."

        "I remember now."

        "Well, he is here, resting after his new book, 'Rahab.' And he has been reading us the opening chapters, just to Miss Barker and me. It is quite wonderful. So painful, you know. He does not spare the reader anything, he thinks it wrong to leave out anything, but so powerful."

        "Is it the same Miss Barker whom I met at your house in the season who denounced 'The Idyll'?"

        "Yes. How she did cut it up. You see she knows all

about East London, and that sort of thing. I knew you would like to meet her again because you are philanthropic, too. She hardly thought she could spare the time to come, but she thought she would go back fresher if the wail were out of her ears for a week. The wail! Isn't it dreadful. I feel we ought to do more than we do, don't you?"

        "We ought, indeed."

        "But, then, you see as a married woman--I can't leave my husband and child, and bury myself in the East End, can I?"

        "Of course not. But surely it is an understood thing that marriage exempts women from all impersonal duties."

        "Yes, that is just it. How well you put it. But others could. I often wonder why after writing 'The Idyll' Hester never goes near East London. I should have gone straight off, and have cast in my lot with them if I had been in her place."

        "Do you ever find people do what you would have done if you had been in their place?"

        "No, never. They don't seem to see it. It's a thing I can't understand, the way people don't act up to their convictions. And I do know, though I would not tell Hester so for worlds, that the fact that she goes on living comfortably in the country after bringing out that book makes thoughtful people, not me, of course, but other earnest-minded people, think she is a humbug."

        "It would--naturally," said Rachel.

        "Well, now I am glad you agree with me, for I said something of the same kind to Mr. Scarlett last night, and he could not see it. He's rather obtuse. I daresay you remember him?"

        "Perfectly."

        "I don't care about him, he is so superficial, and Miss Barker says he is very lethargic in conversation. I asked him because--don't breathe a word of it--but because as a married woman one ought to help others, and--do you remember how he stood up for Hester that night in London?"

        "For her book, you mean."

        "Well, it's all one. Men are men, my dear. Let me tell you he would never have done that if he had not been in love with her."

        "Do you mean that men never defend obvious truths unless they are in love!"

        "Now you are pretending to misunderstand me," said Sybell joyously, making her little squirrel face into a becoming pout. "But it's no use trying to take me in. And it's coming right. He's there at this moment!"

        "At the Vicarage?"

        "Where else! I asked him to go. I urged him. I said I felt sure she expected him. One must help on these things."

        "But if he is obtuse and lethargic and superficial, is he likely to suit Hester?"

        "My dear, the happiest lot for a woman is marriage. And you and I are Hester's friends. So we ought to do all we can for her happiness. That is why I just mentioned this."

        The dressing-gong began to boom.

        "I must fly," said Sybell, depositing a butterfly kiss on Rachel's forehead. And she flew.

        "I wish I knew what I felt about him," said Rachel to herself. "I don't much like hearing him called obtuse and superficial, but I suppose I should like still less to hear Sybell praise him. I have never heard her praise anything but mediocrity yet."

        If Rachel had been at all introspective she might have found a clue as to her feeling for Hugh in the unusual care with which she arranged her hair, and her decision at the last moment to discard the pale-green gown lying in state on the bed for a white satin one embroidered at long intervals with rose-coloured carnations. The gown was a masterpiece, designed especially for her by a great French milliner. Rachel often wondered whose eyesight had been strained over those marvellous carnations, but to-night she did not give them a thought. She looked with grave dissatisfaction at her pale

nondescript face and nondescript hair and eyes. She did not know that only women with marriageable daughters saw her as she saw herself in the glass.

        As she left her room a door opened at the further end of the same wing, and a tall man came out. The middle-class element in her said, "Superfine." His fastidious taste said, "A plain woman."

        In another instant they recognised each other.

        "Superfine! What nonsense," she thought, as she met his eager tremulous glance.

        "A plain woman. Rachel plain!" He had met the welcome in her eyes, and there was beauty in every movement, grace in every fold of her white gown.

        As they met the gong suddenly boomed out close beneath them, and they could only smile at each other as they shook hands. The butler, who was evidently an artist in his way, proved the gong to the uttermost; and they had descended the staircase together, and had crossed the hall before its dying tremors allowed them to speak.

        As he was about to do so he saw her wince suddenly. She was looking straight in front of her at the little crowd in the drawing-room. For an instant her face turned from white to grey, and she involuntarily put out her hand as if to ward off something. Then a lovely colour mounted to her cheek; she drew herself up and entered the room, while Hugh, behind her, looked fiercely at each man in succession.

        It is always the unexpected that happens. As Rachel's half-absent eyes passed over the group in the brilliantly lighted drawing-room her heart reared without warning and fell back upon her. She had only just sufficient presence of mind to prevent her hand pressing itself against her heart. He was there, he was before her--the man whom she had loved with passion for four years, and who had tortured her.

        Mr. Harvey (the great Mr. Harvey) strode forward, and Rachel found her hand engulfed in a large soft hand which seemed to have a poached egg in the palm.

        "This is a pleasure to which I have long looked forward," murmured the great man, all cuff and solitaire, bending in what he would have termed a "chivalrous manner" over Rachel's hand; while Doll, standing near, wondered drearily "why these writing chaps were always such bounders."

        Rachel passed on to greet Miss Barker, standing on the hearthrug, this time in magenta velveteen, but presumably still tired of the Bible, conversing with Rachel's former lover, whose eyes were on the floor, and whose hand gripped the mantelpiece. He had seen her--recognised her.

        "May I introduce Mr. Tristram?" said Sybell to Rachel.

        "We have met before," said Rachel gently, as he bowed without looking at her, and she put out her hand.

        He was obliged to touch it, obliged to meet for one moment the clear calm eyes that had once held boundless love for him, boundless trust in him; that had, as he well knew, wept themselves half blind for him.

        Mr. Tristram was one of the many who judge their actions in the light of after circumstances, and who towards middle age discover that the world is a treacherous world. He had not been "in a position to marry" when he had fallen in love with Rachel. But he had been as much in love with her as was consistent with a permanent prudential passion for himself and his future, that future which the true artist must ever preserve untrammelled. "High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone," &c. He had felt keenly breaking with Rachel. Later on, when a tide of wealth flowed up to the fifth floor of Museum Buildings, he had recognised for the first time that he had made a great mistake in life. To the smart of baffled love had been added acute remorse, not so much for wealth missed as for having inflicted upon himself and upon her a frightful and unnecessary pain. But how could he have foreseen such a thing? How could he tell? he had asked himself in mute stupefaction when the news reached him. What a cheat life was! What a fickle jade was Fortune!

        Since the memorable day when Rachel had found means to lay the ghost that haunted her he had made no sign.

        "I hardly expected you would remember me," he said, catching at his self-possession.

        "I have a good memory," she said, aware that Miss Barker was listening, and that Hugh was bristling at her elbow. "And the little Spanish boy whom you were so kind to, and who lodged just below me in Museum Buildings, has not forgotten either. He still asks after the 'Cavaliere'."

        "Mr. Tristram is positively blushing at being confronted with his good deeds," said Sybell, intervening on discovering that the attention of some of her guests had been distracted from herself. "Yes, darling"--to her husband--"you take in Lady Jane. Mr. Scarlett, will you take in Miss West?"

        "I have been calling on your friend, Miss Gresley," said Hugh, after he had overcome his momentary irritation at finding Mr. Harvey was on Rachel's other side. "I did not know until her brother dined here last night that she lived so near."

        "Did not Mrs. Loftus tell you?" said Rachel, with a remembrance of Sybell's remarks before dinner.

        "She told me after I had mentioned my wish to go and see her. She even implored me so repeatedly to go that I--"

        "Nearly did not go at all."

        "Exactly. But in this case I persevered because I am, or hope I am, a friend of hers. But I was not rewarded."

        "I thought you said you had seen her."

        "Oh, yes, I saw her, and I saw that she looked very ill. But I found it impossible to have any conversation with her in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Gresley. Whenever I spoke to her Mr. Gresley answered, and sometimes Mrs. Gresley also. In fact, Mr. Gresley considered the call as paid to himself. Mrs. Loftus tells me he is much cleverer than his sister, but I did not gain that impression. And after I had given tongue to every platitude I could think of I had to take my leave."

        "Hester ought to have come to the rescue."

        "She did try. She offered to show me the short cut to Wilderleigh across the fields. But unluckily--"

        "I can guess what you are going to say."

        "I am sure you can. Mr. Gresley accompanied us, and Miss Gresley turned back at the first gate."

        "You have my sympathy."

        "I hope I have, for I have had a severe time of it. Mr. Gresley was most cordial," continued Hugh ruefully, "and said what a pleasure it was to him to meet any one who was interested in intellectual subjects. I suppose he was referring to my platitudes. He said living in the country cut him off almost entirely from the society of his mental equals, so much so that at times he had thoughts of moving to London, and making a little centre for intellectual society. According to him the whole neighbourhood was sunk in a state of hopeless apathy, with the exception of Mrs. Loftus. He said she was the only really clever cultivated person in Middleshire."

        "Did he? How about the Bishop of Southminster?"

        "He did not mention him. My acquaintance with Mrs. Loftus is of the slightest," added Hugh, interrogatively, looking at his graceful, animated hostess.

        "I imagined you knew her fairly well, as you are staying here."

        "No. She asked me rather late in the day. I fancy I was a 'fill up.' I accepted in the hope, rather a vague one, that I might meet you here."

        To Rachel's surprise her heart actually paid Hugh the compliment of beating a shade faster than its wont. She looked straight in front of her, and her absent eyes fell on Mr. Tristram sitting opposite, talking somewhat sulkily to Miss Barker. Rachel looked steadily at him.

        Mr. Tristram had been handsome once, and four years had altered him but little in that respect. He had not yet grown stout, but it was evident that Nature had that injury in reserve for him. To grow stout is not necessarily to look common, but if there is an element of inherent commonness

in man or woman, a very little additional surface will make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The "little more and how much it is" had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of the slim. Life had evidently not gone too well with him. Self-pity and the harassed look which comes of annoyance with trifles had set their mark upon him. His art had not taken possession of him. "High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone." But they sometimes faint also in bachelor lodgings. The whole effect of the man was second rate, mentally, morally, socially. He seemed exactly on a par with the second-rate friends with whom Sybell loved to surround herself. Hugh and Dick were taking their revenge on the rival who blocked their way. Whatever their faults might be, they were gentlemen, and Mr. Tristram was only "a perfect gentleman." Rachel had not known the difference when she was young. She saw it now.

        "I trust, Miss West," said the deep voice of the Harvey, revolving himself and his solitaire slowly towards her, "that I have your sympathy in the great cause to which I have dedicated myself, the emancipation of woman."

        "I thought the new woman had effected her own emancipation," said Rachel.

        Mr. Harvey paid no more attention to her remark than any one with a theory to propound which must be delivered to the world as a whole.

        "I venture to think," he continued, his heavy, lustreless eyes coming to a standstill upon her, "that though I accept in all reverence the position of woman as the equal of man, as promulgated in 'The Princess,' by our lion-hearted Laureate, nevertheless I advance beyond him in that respect. I hold," in a voice calculated to impress the whole table, "that woman is man's superior, and that she degrades herself when she endeavours to place herself on an equality with him."

        There was a momentary silence, like that which travellers

tell us succeeds the roar of the lion in his primeval forest, silencing even the twitter of the birds.

        "How true that is," said Sybell, awed by the lurid splendour of Mr. Harvey's genius. "Woman is man's superior, not his equal. I have felt that all my life, but I never quite saw how until this moment. Don't you think so, too, Miss Barker?"

        "I have never lost an opportunity of asserting it," said the Apostle, her elbow on Mr. Tristram's bread, looking at Mr. Harvey with some asperity, for poaching on her manor. "All sensible women have been agreed for years on that point."

CHAPTER XXIII

With aching hands and bleeding feet
    We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
    Of the long day, and wish 'twere done!
            Not till the hours of light return,
            All we have built do we discern.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

        Hester came to the window and looked out. There was light, but there was no dawn as yet. In the grey sky over the grey land the morning star, alone and splendid, kept watch in the east.

        She sat down and leaned her brow against the pane. She did not know that it was aching. She did not know that she was cold, exhausted, so exhausted that the morning star in the outer heaven and the morning star in her soul were to her the same. They stooped together, they merged into one great light, heralding a perfect day presently to be.

        The night was over, and that other long night of travail and patience and faith, and strong rowing in darkness against the stream, was over, too, at last--at last. The book was finished.

        The tears fell slowly from Hester's eyes on to her clasped

hands, those blessed tears which no human hand shall ever intervene to wipe away.

        To some of us Christ comes in the dawn of the spiritual life walking upon the troubled waves of art. And we recognise Him, and would fain go to meet Him. But our companions and our own fears dissuade us. They say it is only a spirit, and that Christ does not walk on water, that the land whither we are rowing is the place He has Himself appointed for us to meet Him. So our little faith keeps us in the boat, or fails us in the waves of that wind-swept sea.

        It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a voice from the other side say, "Come over." She had stopped her ears, she had tried not to go. She had shrunk back a hundred times from the cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling foot through it. And now, after an interminable interval, after she had trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and the rain, after she had sunk in despair, and risen again, she knew not how, now at length a great wave--the last--had cast her up half-drowned upon the shore. A miracle had happened. She had reached the other side, and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore under a great white star.

        Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he. Across the pause which God has set 'twixt night and day came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester's ear as from another world, a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance like scattered bubbles through deep water.

        The day was coming. God's creatures of tree and field and hill took form. Man's creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God's sky. Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the grey. Close against the

eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house.

        But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water.

        "James," said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later, as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, "Hester was not there. I thought she had promised to come."

        "She had."

        There was a moment's silence.

        "Perhaps she is not well," said Mr. Gresley, closing the churchyard gate into the garden.

        Mrs. Gresley's heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the mainspring of the religious life?

        "I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia now," she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband's arm. She almost hated the slight graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband.

        "I will speak seriously to her," said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had "spoken seriously" to Hester many times at his wife's instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.

        A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.

        Hester, standing in a white gown under the the veiled trees

in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespasser in his own garden.

        But a glimpse of his cucumber frames in the background reassured him. He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.

        Hester did not hear him.

        She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia tree. Yesterday it had been a bud. But to-day the great almond white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul before its God.

        As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched ravaged face towards him and smiled. Something of the passionate self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes.

        "Dear Hester," he said, seeing only the wan drawn face. "Are you ill?"

        "Yes. No. I don't think so," said Hester tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasised by a long clerical coat, and a bed of Brussels sprouts.

        "I missed you," said Mr. Gresley with emphasis.

        "Where? When?" Hester's eyes had lost their fixed look, and stared vacantly at him.

        Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance.

        Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it.

        "At God's altar," he said gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of the man.

        "Have you not found me, there?" said Hester below her breath, but so low that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared their profanity.

        "I will appeal to her better feelings," he said to himself. "They must be there if I can only touch them."

        He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our fellow creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them in spite of our tip-toe good intentions. Is that why such appeals too often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation?

        But fortunately a robust belief in the assiduities of the devil as the cause of all failures, and a conviction that whoso opposed Mr. Gresley opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in emergencies of this kind.

        He spoke earnestly and at length to his sister. He waved aside her timid excuse that she had overslept herself after a sleepless night, and had finished dressing but the moment before he found her in the garden. He entreated her to put aside such insincerity as unworthy of her. He reminded her of the long months she had spent at Warpington with its peculiar spiritual opportunities; that he should be to blame if he did not press upon her the first importance of the religious life, the ever-present love of God, and the means of approaching Him through the sacraments. He entreated her to join her prayers with his that she might be saved from the worship of her own talent which had shut out the worship of God, from this dreadful indifference to holy things, and the impatience of all religious teaching which he grieved to see in her.

        He spoke well, the earnest blind would be leader endeavouring to guide her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged, passionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have drawn her lovingly towards it.

        The tears were in Hester's eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was

not religion that was abhorrent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his in the religion of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she trusted herself to speak.

        "It is good of you to care what becomes of me," she said gently, but her voice was cold. "I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your point of view you were right to speak--as--as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it."

        "She can't meet me fairly," said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden anger at the meanness of such tactics. "They say she is so clever, and she can't refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me. She always puts me off like that."

        The sun had vanquished the mist, and in the brilliant light the two figures moved silently side by side back to the house, one with something very like rage in his heart, the rage that in bygone days found expression in stake and faggot.

        Perhaps the heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when the magnolia opened.

CHAPTER XXIV

        Il le fit avec des arguments inconsistants et irréfutables, de ces arguments qui fondent devant la raison comme la neige au feu, et qu'on ne pent saisir, des arguments absurdes et triomphants de curé de campagne qui demontre Dieu.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

        "I am not literary," said Doll, who always thought it necessary to explain that he was not what no one thought he was. "I hate all that sort of thing. Utter rot I call it. For goodness' sake, Scarlett, sit tight. I must be decent to the beast in my own house, and if you go I shall have to have him alone jawing at me till all hours of the night in the smoking-room."

        Hugh was easily persuaded, and so it came about that the morning congregation at Warpington had the advantage of furtively watching Hugh and Mr. Tristram as they sat together in the carved Wilderleigh pew, with Sybell and Rachel at one end of it and Doll at the other. No one looked at Rachel. Her hat attracted a momentary attention, but her face none.

        The Miss Pratts, on the contrary, well caparisoned by their man milliner, well groomed, well curled, were a marked feature of the sparse congregation. The spectator of so many points, all made the most of, unconsciously felt with a sense of oppres-

sion that everything that could be done had been done. No stone had been left unturned.

        Their brother, Captain Algernon Pratt, sitting behind them, looked critically at them, and owned that they were smart women. But he was not entirely satisfied with them as he had been in the old days, before he went into the Guards and began the real work of his life, raising himself in society.

        Captain Pratt was a tall, pale young man--assez beau garçon--faultlessly dressed, with a quiet acquired manner. He was not ill-looking, the long, upper lip concealed by a perfectly kept moustache, but the haggard eye and the thin line in the cheek, which did not suggest thought and over-work as their cause, made his appearance vaguely repellant.

Jesu, lover of my soul,

        Fraülein, on Hester's other side, was singing with her whole soul, accompanied by a pendulous movement of the body:

Cover my defenceless 'ead,
Wiz ze sadow of zy wing.

        Mr. Gresley, after baying like a bloodhound through the opening verses, ascended the pulpit and engaged in prayer. The congregation amen-ed and settled itself. Mary leaned her blonde head against her mother, Regie against Hester.

        The supreme moment of the week had come for Mr. Gresley.

        He gave out the text:

        "Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?"

        All of us who are Churchmen are aware that the sermon is a period admirably suited for quiet reflection.

        "A good woman loves but once," said Mr. Tristram to himself in an attitude of attention, his fine eyes fixed

decorously on a pillar in front of him. Some of us would be as helpless without a Bowdlerised generality or a platitude to sustain our minds as the invalid would be without his peptonised beef-tea.

        "Rachel is a good woman, a saint. Such a woman does not love in a hurry, but when she does she loves for ever." What was that poem he and she had so often read together? Tennyson, wasn't it? about love not altering "when it alteration finds," but bears it out even to the crack of doom. Fine poet, Tennyson, he knew the human heart. She had certainly adored him four years ago, just in the devoted way in which he needed to be loved. And how he had worshipped her! Of course he had behaved badly. He saw that now. But if he had it was not from want of love. She had been unable to see that at the time. Good women were narrow, and they were hard, and they did not understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learnt better by now? Did she realise that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the gentle familiar face beside him.

        "She will forgive me," he said, reassuring himself in spite of an inward qualm of misgiving. "I am glad I arranged to stay on. I will speak to her this afternoon. She has become much softened, and we will bury the past, and make a fresh start together."

        "I will walk up to Beaumere this afternoon," said Doll, stretching a leg outside the open end of the pew. "I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters worms. They are some of my best tenants, and they won't like it when they hear of it. And I'll go round the young pheasants. (Doll did this or something similar every Sunday afternoon of his life, but he always rehearsed it comfortably in thought on Sunday

mornings.) And if Withers is about I'll go out in the boat, the big one, the little one leaks, and set a trimmer or two for to-morrow. I'm not sure I'll set one under the south bank, for there was the devil to pay last time when that beast of an eel got among the roots. I'll ask Withers what he thinks. I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters blind leaders of the blind. It's such bad form, and I don't suppose the text meant that to start with, and what's the use of ill-feeling in a parish. And I'll take Scarlett with me. We'll slip off after luncheon, and leave that bounder to bound by himself. And poor old Crack shall come too. Uncle George always took him."

        "James is simply surpassing himself," said Mrs. Gresley to herself, her arm round her little daughter. "Worms! what a splendid comparison. The Churchman the full-grown man after the stature of Christ, and the Dissenter invertebrate (I think dear James means inebriate) like a worm cleaving to the earth. But possibly God in His mercy may let them slip in by a back door to heaven! How like him to say that, so generous, so wide-minded, taking the hopeful view of everything. How noble he looks. These are days in which we should stick to our colours. I wonder how he can think of such beautiful things. For my part I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity. How striking! What a lesson to the Bishop if he were only here. He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion. What a gift he has. I know he will eat nothing for luncheon. If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated." And Mrs. Gresley closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, a tear sliding down her cheek on to Mary's floss-silk mane, that she might become less unworthy to be the wife of one so far above her, that the children might all grow up like him, and that she might be given patience to bear with Hester even when she vexed him.

        Captain Pratt's critical eye travelled over the congregation. It absolutely ignored Mrs. Gresley and Fraülein. It lingered momentarily on Hester. He knew what he called "breeding" when he saw it, and he was aware that Hester possessed it, though his sisters would have laughed at the idea. He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside as in Hester's case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it impossible to know better. Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer. He was excessively careful whom he knew, what women he danced with, what houses he visited, and any of his acquaintances who cared to ascertain their own social status to a hairsbreadth had only to apply to it the touchstone of Captain Pratt's manner towards them.

        Hester, who grasped many facts of that kind, was always amused by the cold consideration with which he treated her on his rare visits to the parental Towers; and which his sisters could only construe as a sign that "Algy was gone on Hessie."

        "But he will never marry her," they told each other. "Algy looks higher."

        It was true. If Hester had been Lady Hester, it is possible that the surname of Pratt, if frequently refused by stouter women, might eventually have been offered to her. But Captain Pratt was determined to marry rank, and nothing short of a Lady Something was of any use to him. An Honourable was better than nothing, but it did not count for much with him. It had a way of absenting itself when wanted. No one was announced as an Honourable. It did

not even appear on cards. It might be overlooked. Rank, to be of any practical value, must be apparent, obvious. Lady Georgiana Pratt, Lady Evelina Pratt! Any name would do with that prefix. His eye travelled as far as Sybell and stopped again. She was "the right sort" herself, and she dressed in the right way. Why could not Ada and Selina imitate her? But he had never forgiven her the fact that he had met "a crew of cads" at her house, whom he had been obliged to cut afterwards in the Row. No, Sybell would not have done for him. She surrounded herself with vulgar people.

        Captain Pratt was far too well mannered to be guilty of staring, except at pretty maidservants or shop girls, and his eye was moved on by the rigid police of etiquette which ruled his every movement. It paused momentarily on Rachel. He knew about her, as did every bachelor in London. A colossal heiress. She was neither plain nor handsome. She had a good figure, but not good enough to counterbalance her nondescript face. She had not the air of distinction which he was so quick to detect and appraise. She was a social nonentity. He did not care to look at her a second time. "I would not marry her with twice her fortune," he said to himself.

        Regie's hand had stolen into Hester's. His even breathing, felt rather than heard, as he dropped asleep against her shoulder, surrounded Hester with the atmosphere of peace and comfort which his father had broken earlier in the day. Regie often brought back to her what his father wrested from her.

        She listened to the sermon as from a warm nest safely raised above the quaggy ground of personal feeling.

        "Dear James! How good he is; how much in earnest. But worms don't go in at back doors. Why are not clergymen taught a few elementary rules of composition before they are ordained? But perhaps no one will notice it except myself. James is certainly a saint. He has the courage of his opinions.

I believe he loves God and the Church with his whole heart, and would go to the stake for them, or send me there if he thought it was for the good of my soul. Why has he no power? Why is he so much disliked in the parish and neighbourhood? I am sure it is not because he has small abilities and makes puns, and says cut-and-dried things. How many excellent clergymen who do the same are beloved? Is it because he deals with every one as he deals with me? What dreadful things he thinks of me. I don't wonder he is anxious about me, What unworthy motives of wilful blindness and arrogance he is attributing to the Nonconformists! Oh, James! James! will you never see that it is disbelief in the sincerity of the religion of others, because it is not in the same narrow form as your own, which makes all your zeal and earnestness of none effect! You think the opposition you meet with everywhere is the opposition of evil to good, of indifference to piety. When will you learn that it is the good in your hearers which opposes you, the love of God in them which is offended by your representation of Him!"

        Hugh's eyes were fixed on the same pillar as Mr. Tristram's, but if he had been aware of that fact he would have chosen another pillar. His thin handsome face was beginning to show the marks of mental strain. His eyes had the set impassive look of one who, hedged in on both sides, sees a sharp turn ahead of him on an unknown road.

        "Rachel! Rachel! Rachel! Don't you hear me calling to you? Don't you hear me telling you that I can't live without you? The hymn was right. 'Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee,' only it was written of you, not of that far, far away God who does not care. Only care for me. Only love me. Only give me those cool hands that I may lean my forehead against them. No help can come to me except through you. Stoop down to me and raise me up, for I love you."

        The sun went in suddenly, and a cold shadow fell on the pillar and on Hugh's heart.

        Love and marriage were not for him. That far-away God, that Judge in the black cap, had pronounced sentence against him, had doomed that he should die in his sins. When he had sat in his own village church only last Sunday between his mother and sister, he had seen the empty place on his chancel wall where the tablet to his memory would be put up. When he walked through the churchyard, his mother leaning on his arm, his step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant space by his father's grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would shortly cover him. His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle feeble-minded sister who had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her colourless existence to that of her brother. Hughie was the romance of her grey life: what Hughie said, what Hughie thought, Hughie's wife--oh, jealous thought only to be met by prayer! But later on, joy of joys--Hughie's children! He realised it, now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday. He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the labyrinth of broken twisted thought, from which he could find no way out.

        There must be some way out. He had stumbled callously through one day after another of these weeks in which he had not seen Rachel, towards his next meeting with her, as a half blind man stumbles towards the light. But the presence of Rachel afforded no clue to the labyrinth. What vain hope was this that he had cherished unconsciously that she could help him. There was no help for him. There was no way out. He was in a trap. He must die, and soon, by his own hand. Incredible, preposterous fate! He shuddered, and looked around him involuntarily.

        His glance, reverent, full of timid longing fell on Rachel, and his heart cried aloud suddenly, "If she loves me, I shall not be able to leave her."

CHAPTER XXV

Look in my face! my name is Might-have-been;
I am also caled No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

        Sybell had announced at luncheon, in the tone of one who observes a religious rite, that she should rest till four o'clock, and would be ready to sit for the portrait of her upper lip at that hour.

        It was only half-past two now. Mr. Tristram had planted himself exactly in front of Rachel's windows, with his back to the house. "She will keep me waiting, but she will come out in time," he said to himself, nervous and self-confident by turns, resting his head rather gracefully on his hand. His knowledge of womankind supported him like a life-belt, but it has been said that life-belts occasionally support their wearers upside down. Theories have been known to exhibit the same spiteful tendency towards those who place their trust in them.

        "Of course, she has got to show me that she is offended with me," he reflected, gazing steadily at the Welsh hills. "She would not have come out if I had asked her, but she will certainly come as I did not. I will give her half an hour."

        Rachel, meanwhile, was looking fixedly at Mr. Tristram from her bedroom window with that dispassionate scrutiny to avoid which the vainest would do well to take refuge in noisome caves.

        "I wonder," she said to herself, "whether Hester always saw him as I see him now. I believe she did."

        Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. "If this is really I, and that is really he, I had better go down and get it over," she said to herself.

        Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed, and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.

        "I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you," he said, after a moment's hesitation. "I am anxious to have a serious conversation with you."

        "Certainly," she said.

        They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.

        It was an afternoon the secret of which autumn and spring will never tell to winter and summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and we should feel no surprise.

        A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendour of the sunfired woods where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of grey stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

        When the kingfisher had left them tête-àtête Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."

        Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the principal feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.

        Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said brokenly:

        "Can you forgive me?"

        What woman, even in her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of earshot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in trouble? Rachel softened instantly.

        "I forgave you long ago," she said gently.

        Something indefinable in the clear full gaze that met his daunted him. He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing in cold and darkness, looking in through the windows of her untroubled eyes at the warm sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.

        A single yellow leaf, crisped and hollowed to a fairy boat, came sailing on an imperceptible current of air to rest on Rachel's knee.

        "I was angry at first," she said, her voice falling across the silence like another leaf. "And then after a time I forgave you. And later still, much later, I found out that you had never injured me--that I had nothing to forgive."

        He did not understand, and as he did not understand he explained volubly--for here he felt he was on sure ground--that, on the contrary, she had much to forgive, that he had acted like an infernal blackguard, that men were coarse brutes, not fit to kiss a good woman's shoe latchet, &c. &c. He identified his conduct with that of the whole sex, without alluding to it as that of the individual Tristram. He made it clear that he did not claim to have behaved better than "most men."

        Rachel listened attentively. "And I actually loved him," she said to herself.

        "But the divine quality of woman is her power of forgiving.

Her love raises a man, transfigures him, ennobles his whole life," &c. &c.

        "My love did not appear to have quite that effect upon you at the time," said Rachel, regretting the words the moment they were spoken.

        Mr. Tristram felt relieved. Here at last was the reproach he had been expecting.

        He assured her she did well to be angry. He accused himself once more. He denounced the accursed morals of the day above which he ought to have risen, the morals, if she did but know it, of all unmarried men.

        "That is a hit at Mr. Scarlett," she said scornfully to herself, and then her cheek blanched as she remembered that Hugh was not exempt after all. She became suddenly tired, impatient, but she waited quietly for the inevitable proposal.

        Mr. Tristram, who had the gift of emphatic and facile utterance, which the conventional consider to be the sign-manual of genius, had become so entangled in the morals of the age, that it took him some time to extricate himself from the subject before he could pass on to plead in an impassioned manner the cause of the man, unworthy though he might be, who had long loved her, loved her now, and would always love her, in this world and the next.

        It was the longest proposal Rachel had ever had, and she had had many. But if the proposal was long the refusal was longer. Rachel, who had a good memory, led up to it by opining that the artistic life made great demands, that the true artist must live entirely for his art, that domestic life might prove a hindrance. She had read somewhere that high hopes fainted on warm hearthstones. Mr. Tristram demolished these objections as ruthlessly as ducks peck their own ducklings if they have not seen them for a day or two.

        Even when she was forced to become more explicit it was at first impossible to Mr. Tristram to believe she would finally reject him. But the knowledge, deep-rooted as a forest oak, that she had loved him devotedly could not at last prevail

against the odious conviction that she was determined not to marry him.

        "Then, in that case you never loved me?"

        "I do not love you now."

        "You are determined not to marry?"

        "On the contrary, I hope to do so."

        Rachel's words took her by surprise. She had no idea till that moment that she hoped anything of the kind.

        "You prefer some one else. That is the real truth."

        "I prefer several others."

        Mr. Tristram looked suspiciously at her. Her answers did not tally with his previous knowledge of her. Perhaps he forgot that he had set his docile pupil rather a long holiday task to learn in his absence and she had learnt it.

        "You think you would be happier with some fortune-hunter of an aristocrat than with a plain man of your own class, who, whatever his faults may be, loves you for yourself."

        Why is it that the word aristocrat as applied to a gentleman is as offensive as that of flunkey applied to a footman?

        Rachel drew herself up imperceptibly.

        "That depends upon the fortune-hunter," she said with that touch of hauteur which, when the vulgar have at last drawn it upon themselves by the insolence which is the underside of their courtesy, always has the same effect on them as a red rag on a bull.

        In their own language they invariably "stand up to it." Mr. Tristram stood up physically and mentally. He also raised his voice, causing two rabbits to hurry back into their holes.

        Women, he said, were incalculable. He would never believe in one again. His disbelief in woman rose even to the rookery in the high elms close at hand. That she, Rachel, whom he had always regarded as the first among women, should be dazzled by the empty glamour of rank, now that her fortune put such marriages within her reach,

was incredible. He should have repudiated such an idea with scorn if he had not heard it from her own lips. Well, he would leave her to the life she had chosen. It only remained for him to thank her for stripping his last illusions from him, and to bid her good-bye.

        "We shall never meet again," he said, holding her hand, and looking very much the same without his illusions as he did when he had them on. He had read somewhere a little poem about "A Woman's No," which at the last moment meant "Yes." And then there was another which chronicled how after several stanzas of upbraiding "we rushed into each other's arms." Both recurred to him now. He had often thought how true they were.

        "I do not think we shall meet again," said Rachel, who apparently had an unpoetic nature; "but I am glad for my own sake that we have met this once, and have had this conversation. I think we owed it to each other and to our--former attachment."

        "Well, good-bye." He still held her hand. If she was not careful she would lose him.

        "Good-bye."

        "You understand it is for always?"

        "I do."

        He became suddenly livid. He loved her more than ever. Would she really let him go?

        "I am not the kind of man to be whistled back," he said fiercely. It was an appeal and a defiance, for he was just the kind of man, and they both knew it.

        "Of course not."

        "That is your last word?"

        "My last word."

        He dropped her hand, and half turned to go.

        She made no sign.

        Then he strode violently out of the wood without looking behind him. At the little gate he stopped a moment listening intently. No recalling voice reached him. Poets did not

know what they were talking about. With a trembling hand he slammed the gate and departed.

        Rachel remained a long time sitting on the wooden bench, so long that the stooping sun found out the solemn outstretched arms of the cedar, and touched them till they gleamed green as a beetle's wing. Each little twig and twiglet was made manifest, raw gold against the twilight that lurked beneath the heavy boughs.

        She sat so still that a squirrel came tip-toeing across the moss, and struck tail momentarily to observe her. He looked critically at her, first with one round eye, and then, turning his sleek head, with the other, and decided that she was harmless.

        Presently a robin dropped down close to her, flashing up his grey underwing as he alighted, and then flew up into the cedar, and from its sun-stirred depths said his say.

        The robin never forgets. In the autumn afternoons when the shadows are lengthening he sings sadness into your heart. If you are joyful shut your ears against him, for you may keep peace but never joy while he is singing. He knows all about it, "love's labour lost," the grey face of young Love dead, the hard-wrought grave in the live rock where he is buried. And he tells of it again, and again and again, as if Love's sharp sword had indeed reddened his little breast, until the heart aches to hear him. But he tells also that consolation is folded not in forgetfulness, but in remembrance. That is why he sings in the silence of the autumn dawn, before memory closes her eyes, and again near sunset, when memory wakes.

        Still Rachel sat motionless.

        She had laboured with dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting: that it was not in her to forget. The past

had seemed to stretch its cruel desecrating hand over all the future, cutting her off from the possibility of love and marriage, and from the children whom in dreams she held in her arms. As she had said to Hester, she thought she "had nothing left to give."

        But now the dead past had risen from its grave in her meeting with her former lover, and in a moment, in two short days and wakeful nights, the past relinquished its false claim upon her life. She saw that it was false, that she had been frightened where no fear was, that her deliverance lay in remembrance itself, not in the handcuffs with which until now she had bound her deliverer.

        Mr. Tristram had come back into her life, and with his own hands had destroyed the overthrown image of himself, which lay like a barrier across her heart. He had replaced it by an accurate presentment of himself as he really was.

        "Only that which is replaced is destroyed," and it is often our real self in its native rags, and not as we jealously imagine another king in richer purple who has replaced us in the throne-room of the heart that loved us. To the end of life Rachel never forgot Mr. Tristram, any more than the amber forgets its fly. But she was vaguely conscious as he left her that he had set her free. She listened to his retreating step hardly daring to breathe. It was too good to be true. At last there was dead silence. No echo of a footfall. Quite gone. He had departed not only out of her presence but out of her life.

        She breathed again. A tremor like that which shakes the first green leaf against the March sky stole across her crushed heart, empty at last, empty at last. She raised her hand timidly in the sunshine. She was free. She looked round dazzled, bewildered. The little world of sunshine and the turquoises of sky strewn among the golden network of the trees smiled at her, as one who brings good tidings.

        A certain familiar hold on life and nature, so old that it was almost new, which she had forgotten, but which her

former self used to feel, came back suddenly upon her like a lost friend from over seas. Scales seemed to fall from her eyes. The light was too much for her. She had forgotten how beautiful the world was. Everything was possible.

        Some in the night of their desolation can take comfort when they see the morning star shuddering white in the east, and can say "Courage, the day is at hand."

        But others never realise that their night is over till the sun is up. Rachel had sat in a long stupor. The message writ large for her comfort in the stars that the night was surely waning had not reached her, bowed as she thought beneath God's hand. And the sure return of the sun at last came upon her like a miracle.

CHAPTER XXVI

        'Tis not for every one to catch a salmon.

        Thither Doll and Hugh took their way in the leisurely manner of men whose orthodoxy obliges them to regard Sunday as a day of rest.

        Doll pointed out to Hugh the coppice which his predecessor Mr. George Loftus had planted. Hugh regarded it without excitement. Both agreed that it was coming on nicely. Hugh thought he ought to do a little planting at his own place. Doll said you could not do everything at once. A large new farm was the next object of interest. "Uncle George rebuilt Greenfields from the ground," remarked Doll, as they crossed the high road and took to the harvesting fields where "the ricks stood grey to the sun."

        Hugh nodded. Doll thought he was a very decent chap, though rather low spirited. Hugh thought that if Mr. George Loftus had been alive he might have consulted him. In an amicable silence, broken occasionally by whistling for Crack, who hurried blear-eyed and asthmatic out of rabbit holes, the pair reached Beaumere; and, after following the path through

the wood, came suddenly upon the little lake locked in the heart of the steeply climbing forest.

        Doll stood still and pointed with his stick for fear Hugh might overlook it. "I come here every Sunday," he remarked.

        A sense of unreality and foreboding seized on Hugh, as the still face of the water looked up at him. Where had he seen it before, this sea of glass reflecting the yellow woods that stooped to its very edge? What had it to do with him?

        "I've been here before," he said, involuntarily.

        "I daresay," said Doll. "Newhaven marches with me here. The boundary is by that clump of silver birch. The Drone comes in there, but you can't see it. The Newhavens are friends of yours, aren't they?"

        "Acquaintances," said Hugh absently, looking hard at the water. He had never been here before. Memory groped blindly for a lost link, as one who momentarily recognises a face in a crowd, and tries to put a name to it and fails. As the face disappears, so the sudden impression passed from Hugh's mind.

        "I expect you have been here with them," said Doll. "Good man, Newhaven."

        "I used to see a good deal of them at one time," said Hugh, "but they seem to have forgotten me of late."

        "Oh! that's her," said Doll. "She is always oft and on with people. Takes a fancy one day and a dislike the next. But he's not like that. You always know where to find him. Solid man, Newhaven. He doesn't say much, but what he says he sticks to."

        "He gives one that impression," said Hugh.

        "I rather think he is there now," said Doll, pointing to the further shore. "I see a figure moving, and two little specks. I should not wonder if it were him and the boys. They often come here on Sunday afternoons."

        "You have long sight," said Hugh. He had met Lord Newhaven several times since the drawing of lots, and they

had always greeted each other with cold civility. But Hugh avoided him when he could without drawing attention to the fact that he did so.

        "Are you going over to his side?" he asked.

        "Rather not," said Doll. "I have never set a single trimmer or fired a shot beyond that clump of birch, or Uncle George before me."

        The two men picked their way down the hillside among the tall thin tree trunks. There was no one except the dogs at the keeper's cottage in a clearing half-way down. Doll took the key of the boathouse from a little hole under the eaves.

        "I think Withers must be out," he remarked at last, after knocking and calling at the locked door and peering through the closed window. Hugh had been of that opinion for some time. "Gone out with his wife, I expect. Never mind, we can do without him."

        They went slipping over the dry beech-mast to the boathouse. Doll unlocked the door and climbed into one of the boats, Hugh and Crack followed. They got a perch rod off a long shelf, and half a dozen trimmers. Then they pulled out a little way and stopped near an archipelago of water-lily leaves.

        Doll got out the perch rod and float and made a cast.

        "It's not fishing," he said apologetically, half to his guest and half to his Maker. "But we are bound to get some baits."

        Hugh nodded and gazed down at the thin forest below. He could see the perch moving in little companies in the still water beyond the water trees. Presently a perch, a very small one, out alone for the first time, came up, all stiff head and shoulders and wagging tail, to the carelessly covered hook.

        "Don't, don't, you young idiot," said Hugh below his breath. But the perch knew that the time had come when a perch must judge for himself.

        The float curtsied and went under, and in another second the little independent was in the boat.

        "There are other fools in the world besides me, it seems," said Hugh to himself.

        "He'll do, but I wish he was a dace," said Doll, slipping the victim into a tin with holes in the top. "Half a dozen will be enough."

        They got half a dozen, baited and set the trimmers white side up, and were turning to row back, when Doll's eye became suddenly fixed.

        "By Jove, there's something at it," he said, pointing to a trimmer at some distance.

        Both men looked intently at it. Crack felt that something was happening, and left off smelling the empty fish-can.

        The trimmer began to nod, to tilt, and then turned suddenly upside down, and remained motionless.

        "He's running the line off it," said Doll.

        As he spoke the trimmer gave one jerk and went under. Then it reappeared, awkwardly bustling out into the open.

        "Oh! hang it all, it's Sunday," said Doll with a groan. "We can't be catching pike on a Sunday." And he caught up the oars and rowed swiftly towards the trimmer.

        As soon as they were within a boat's length it disappeared again, came up again, and went pecking along the top of the water. Doll pursued warily and got hold of it.

        "Gently now," he said, as he shipped the oars. "He'll go under the boat and break us if we don't look out. I'll play him, and you shove the net under him. Damn!--God forgive me!--We have come out without a landing-net. Good Lord, Scarlett, you can't gaff him with a champagne-opener. There, you pull him in, and I'll grab him somehow. I've done it before. Crack, lie down, you infernal fool. Scarlett, if you pull him like that you'll lose him to a certainty. By George, he's a big one." Doll tore off his coat and pulled up his shirtsleeves. "He's going under the boat. If you let him go under the boat, I tell you he'll break us. I'm quite ready." Doll was rubbing his waistcoat-buttons against the gunwale. "Bring him in gradually. For goodness' sake, keep your feet

off the line, or, if he makes a dash, he'll break you. Give him line. Keep your elbows out. Keep your hands free. Don't let him jerk you. If you don't give him more line when he runs, you'll lose him. He's not half done yet. Confound you, Scarlett, hold on for all you're worth. All right, old chap, all right. Don't mind me. You're doing it first-class. Right as rain. Now, now. By George, did you see him that time? He's a nailer. Steady on him. Bring him in gently. Keep an even pull on him. Keep steady."

        Doll craned over the gunwale, his arms in the water. There was a swirl, a momentary glimpse of a stolid fish face, and heavy shoulders, and the boat righted itself.

        "Missed him as I live!" gasped Doll. "Bring him in again."

        Hugh let out the slippery line and drew it in again slowly, hand over hand. Doll's round head was over the side, his long legs spread adhesively in the bottom of the boat. Crack, beyond himself with excitement, got on the seat and barked without ceasing.

        "He's coming up again," said Doll gutturally, sliding forward his left hand. "I must get him by the eyes, and then I doubt if I can lift him. He's a big brute. He's dragging the whole boat and everything. He's about done now. Steady! Now!"

        The great side of the pike lay heaving on the surface for a second, and Doll's left forefinger and thumb were groping for its eyes. But the agonised pike made a last effort. Doll had him with his left hand, but could not raise him. "Pull him in now for all you're worth," he roared to Hugh, as he made a grab with his right hand. His legs began to lose their grip under the violent contortions of the pike. The boat tilted madly. Hugh reached forward to help him. There was a frantic effort, and it capsized.

        "Bad luck," said Doll, coming up sputtering, shaking his head like a spaniel. "But we shall get him yet. He's bleeding like a pig. He'll come up directly. Good Lord, the water's

like ice. We must be over one of the springs. I suppose you are all right, Scarlett."

        Hugh had come up, but in very different fashion.

        "Yes," he said faintly, clutching the upturned boat.

        "I'm not sure," said Doll, keeping going with one hand, "that we had not better get ashore, and fetch the other boat. The water's enough to freeze one."

        "I can't swim," said Hugh, his teeth chattering.

        He was a delicate man at the best of times, and the cold was laying hold of him.

        Doll looked at his blue lips and shaking hands, and his face became grave. He measured the distance to the shore with his eye. It had receded in a treacherous manner.

        "I'm not much of a performer myself," he said, "since I broke my arm last winter, but I can get to the shore. The question is, can you hold on while I go back and bring the other boat, or shall we have a try at getting back together?"

        "I can hold on all right," said Hugh, instantly aware that Doll did not think he could tow him to land, but was politely ready to risk his existence in the attempt.

        "Back directly," said Doll, and without a second's delay he was gone. Hugh put out his whole strength in the endeavour to raise himself somewhat out of the ice-cold water. But the upturned boat sidled away from him like a skittish horse, and after grappling with it he only slipped back again exhausted, and had to clutch it as best he could.

        As he clung to the gunwale he heard a faint coughing and gasping close to his ear. Some one was drowning. Hugh realised that it must be Crack, under the boat. He called to him, he chirruped as if all were well. He stretched one hand as far as he could under the boat feeling for him. But he could not reach him. Presently the faint difficult sound ceased, began again, stopped, and was heard no more.

        A great silence seemed to rush in on the extinction of that small sound. It stooped down and enveloped Hugh in it. Everything was very calm, very still. The boat kept turning

slowly round and round, the only thing that moved. The sunlight quivered on the wet upturned keel. Already it was drying in patches. Hugh watched it. The cold was sapping his powers as if he were bleeding.

        "I could have built a boat in the time Loftus takes to fetch one," he said to himself, and he looked round him. No sign of Doll. He was alone in the world. The cold was gaining on him slowly, surely. Why had he on such heavy gloves which made him fumble so clumsily. He looked at his bare cut hands, and realised that their grip was leaving them. He felt that he was in measurable distance of losing his hold.

        Suddenly a remembrance flashed across him of the sinister face of the water as it had first looked up at him through the trees. Now he understood. This was the appointed place for him to die. Hugh tightened his hold with his right hand, for his left was paralysed.

        "I will not," he said. "Nothing shall induce me. I will live and marry Rachel."

        The cold advanced suddenly on him as at the point of the bayonet.

        "Why not die?" said another voice. "Will it be easier in three months' time than it is now? Will it ever be so easy again? See how near death is to life, a wheel within a wheel, two rings linked together. A touch, and you pass from one to the other."

        Hugh looked wildly round him. The sun lay warm upon the tree tops. It could not be that he was going to die here and now; here in the living sunshine, with the quiet friendly faces of the hills all round him.

        He strengthened his numb hold fiercely, all but lost it, regained it. Cramp long held at bay overcame him.

        And the boat kept turning in the twilight. He reached the end of his strength and held on beyond it. He heard some one near at hand suffocating in long-drawn gasps. Not Crack this time, but himself.

        The boat was always turning in the darkness.

        The struggle was over. "It is better so," said the other voice, through the roaring of a cataract near at hand. "Your mother will bear it better so. And all the long difficulties are over, and pain is past, and life is past, and sleep is best."

        "But Rachel?"

        She was here in the warm swaying darkness. She was with him. She was Death. Death was only her arms round him in a great peace. Death was better than life. He let go the silly boat that kept him from her, and turned wholly to her, his closed eyes against her breast.

CHAPTER XXVII

        The main difference between people seems to be that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely--is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's nothing to tie him to.

EMERSON.

        "Me, too," said Pauly.

        "I am not anxious to be a horse, Teddy. I'm quite content as I am."

        Lord Newhaven was stretched in an easy but undefensive attitude on the heathery bank, with his hands behind his head. His two sons rushed simultaneously at him and knelt on his chest.

        "Promise," they cried, punching him. "Two turns each." There was a free fight, and Lord Newhaven promised.

        "Honour bright. Two turns each, and really deep."

        "Honour bright," said Lord Newhaven.

        His two sons got off his chest, and Teddy climbed on his back in readiness as his father sat up and began to unlace his boots.

        "Higher," said Teddy over his shoulder, his arms tightly clasped round his father's neck, as Lord Newhaven rolled up his trousers.

        "You young slave-driver, they won't go up any higher."

        "You did say 'Honour Bright.'"

        "Well, Shylock, I am 'honour bright.'"

        "You had them over your knees last time."

        "I had knickerbockers on, then."

        "Won't these do the same?"

        "They won't come up another inch."

        "Then one, two, three--off!" shrieked Teddy, digging his heels into the parental back.

        The horse displayed surprising agility. It curveted, it kicked, it jumped a little drain, it careered into the water, making a tremendous splashing.

        The two boys screamed with delight.

        But at last the horse sat down on the bank gasping, wiped its forehead, and, in spite of frenzied entreaties, proceeded to put on its socks and boots.

        Lord Newhaven was not to be moved a second time. He lit a cigarette, and observed that the moment for sailing boats had arrived.

        The boats were accordingly sailed. Lord Newhaven tilted his hat over his eyes and acted umpire.

        "It is not usual to sail boats upside down," he said, seeing Teddy deliberately upset his.

        "They are doing it out there," said Teddy, who had a reason for most things. And he continued to sail his boat upside down.

        Lord Newhaven got up, and swept the water with his eye. His face became keen. Then his glance fell anxiously on the children.

        "Teddy and Pauly," he said, "promise me that you will both play on this one bit of sand, and not go in the water till I come back."

        They promised, staring bewildered at their father.

        In another moment Lord Newhaven was tearing through the brushwood that fringed the water's edge.

        As he neared the boathouse he saw another figure trying to shove out the remaining boat.

        It was Doll. Lord Newhaven pushed her off and jumped in.

        Doll was almost speechless. His breath came in long gasps. The sweat hung on his forehead. He pointed to the black upturned boat.

        "This one leaks," said Lord Newhaven sharply.

        "It's got to go all the same, and sharp," said Doll, hoarsely.

        Lord Newhaven seized up a fishing-tin, and thrust it into Doll's hands.

        "You bale while I row," he said, and he rowed as he had never rowed before.

        "Who is it?" he said, as the boat shot out into the open.

        Doll was baleing like a madman.

        "Scarlett," he said. "And he's over one of the springs. He'll get cramp."

        Lord Newhaven strained at his oars.

        Consciousness was coming back, was slowly climbing upwards, upwards through immense intervals of time and space, to where at last with a wrench pain met it half-way. Hugh stirred feebly in the dark of a great forlornness and loneliness.

        "Rachel," he said, "Rachel."

        His head was gently raised, and a cup pressed to his lips. He swallowed something.

        He groped in the darkness for a window, and then opened his eyes. Lord Newhaven withdrew a pace or two, and stood looking at him.

        Their eyes met.

        Neither spoke, but Hugh's eyes, dark with the shadow of death, said plainly, "Hast thou found me, oh mine enemy?"

        Then he turned them slowly, as an infant turns them, to the sky, the climbing woods, leaning over each other's shoulders to look at him, to the warm earth on which he lay. At a little distance was stretched a small rough-haired form. Hugh's eyes fixed on it. It lay very still.

        "Crack," he said suddenly, raising himself on his elbow.

        There was neither speech nor language. Crack's tail, that courteous member, made no sign.

        "He was under the boat," said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at the exhausted face of the man he had saved, and

unable for the life of him to help a momentary fellow-feeling about the little dog.

        Hugh remembered. It all came back, the boat, Crack's dying gasps, the agonised struggle, the strait gate of death, the difficult passage through it, the calm beyond. He had almost got through, and had been dragged back.

        "Why did you interfere?" he said, in sudden passion, his eyes flaming in his white face.

        A dull colour rose to Lord Newhaven's cheek.

        "I thought it was an accident," he said. "If it was not I beg your pardon."

        There was a moment's silence.

        "It was an accident," said Hugh hoarsely, and he turned on his elbow and looked fixedly at the water, so that his companion might not see the working of his face.

        Lord Newhaven walked slowly away in the direction of Doll, whose distant figure followed by another was hurrying towards them.

        "And so there is a Rachel as well, is there?" he said to himself, vainly trying to steel himself against his adversary.

        "How is he now?" said Doll, coming within earshot.

        "He's all right, but you'd better get him into dry clothes and yourself too."

        "Change on the bank," said Doll, seizing a bundle from the keeper. "It's as hot as an oven in the sun. Why Scarlett's sitting up! I thought when we laid into him on the bank that he was too far gone, didn't you? I suppose"--hesitating-- Crack?"

        Lord Newhaven shook his head.

        "I must go back to my boys now," he said, "or they will be getting into mischief."

        Doll nodded. He and Lord Newhaven had had a hard fight to get the leaking boat to land with Hugh at the bottom of it. It had filled ominously when Doll ceased baleing to help to drag in the heavy unconscious body.

        There had been a moment when, inapprehensive as he was

Doll had remembered with a qualm that Lord Newhaven could not swim.

        "Every fellow ought to swim," was the moral he drew from the incident and repeated to his wife, who, struck by the soundness of the remark, repeated it to the Gresleys.

        Lord Newhaven retraced his steps slowly along the bank in his water-logged boots. He was tired and he did not hurry, for he could see in the distance two small figures sitting faithfully on a log where he had left them.

        "Good little chaps," he said half aloud.

        In spite of himself his thoughts went back to Hugh. His feelings towards him had not changed, but they had been forced during the last half-hour out of their original intrenchments into the open, and were liable to attack from new directions.

        It was not that he had virtually saved Hugh's life, for Doll would never have got him into the leaking boat and kept it afloat single-handed. That first moment of enthusiasm when he had rubbed the senseless limbs and breathed into the cold lips, and had felt his heart leap when the life came halting back into them, that moment had passed and left him cold.

        But Hugh's melancholy eyes, as they opened once more on this world and met his unflinching, haunted him, and the sudden anger at his interference. It was the intrenchment of his contempt that Lord Newhaven missed.

        A meaner nature would not have let him off so easily as Hugh had done.

        "It was an accident," he said to himself unwillingly. "He need not have admitted that, but I should have been on a gridiron if he had not. In different circumstances that man and I might have been friends. And if he had got into a scrape of this kind a little further afield I might have helped to get him out of it. He feels it. He has aged during the last two months. But as it is-- Upon my word, if he were a boy I should have had to let him off. It would have been too bloodthirsty. But he is seven and twenty. He is

old enough to know better. She made a fool of him, of course. She made a greater one of me once, for I--married her.

        Lord Newhaven reviewed with a dispassionate eye his courtship and marriage.

        "A wood anemone," he said to himself; "I likened her to a wood anemone. Good Lord! And I was thirty years of age, while this poor devil is twenty-seven."

        Lord Newhaven stopped short with fixed eyes.

        "I believe I should have to let him off," he said half-aloud. "I believe I would let him off if I was not as certain as I stand here that he will never do it."

CHAPTER XXVIII

        The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it.

        "The truth is," said Mr. Gresley tremulously, "that they can't and won't hear reason. They can't controvert what I say, so they take refuge in petty spite like this. I must own I am disappointed in Walsh. He is a man of some education, and liberal as regards money. I had thought he was better than most of them, and now he turns on me like this."

        "It's a way worms have," said Hester.

        "Oh, don't run a simile to death, Hester," said Mr. Gresley impatiently. "If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning, you would have seen I only used the word worm figuratively. I never meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to misunderstand me. Worms pay school rates! Such folly is positively sickening if it were not malicious."

        Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at the incident.

        As the church bell stopped the swing door opened and Boulou hurried in like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned. No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself to herself" for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a "grande passion" for Boulou.

        The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the "shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.

        "Oh, Regie, we always go there," said Mary plaintively, who invariably chose the Pratts' park, with its rustic bridges and châlets, which Mr. Pratt in a gracious moment had "thrown open" to, the Gresleys on Sundays, because, as he expressed it, "they must feel so cramped in their little garden."

        But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the "shrubberies" they went. Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice near at hand.

        As we grow older we realise that in the new gardens where life leads us we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in our old garden of Eden, round the little

gabled house where we were born. We were so thorough as children. We knew the underneath of every laurel bush, the shape of its bunches of darkling branches, the green dust that our small restless bodies rubbed off from its under twigs. We see now as strangers those little hanging horsetails of pink which sad-faced elders call ribes, but once long ago when the world was young we knew them eye to eye, and the compact little black insects on them, and the quaint taste of them, and the clean clean smell of them. Everything had a taste in those days and was submitted to that test, just as until it had been licked the real colour of any object of interest was not ascertained. There was a certain scarlet berry, very red without and very white within, which we were warned was deadly poison. How well, after a quarter of a century, we remember the bitter taste of it, how much better than many other forbidden fruits duly essayed in later years. We ate those scarlet berries and lived though warned to the contrary.

        Presently Boulou, who could do nothing simply, found a dead mouse, where any one else could have found it, in the middle of the path, and made it an occasion for a theatrical display of growlings and shakings. The children decided to bury it, and after a becoming silence their voices could be heard singing "Home, Sweet Home" as the body was being lowered into the grave previously dug by Boulou, who had to be forcibly restrained from going on digging it after the obsequies were over.

        "He never knows when to stop," said Regie, wearily, as Boulou, with a little plaister of earth on his nose, was carried coughing back to Hester.

        As she took him Rachel and Sybell came slowly down the path towards them, and the latter greeted Hester with an effusion which suggested that when two is not company three may be.

        "A most vexing thing has happened," said Sybell in a gratified tone, sitting down under Hester's tree. "I really

don't think I am to blame. You know Mr. Tristram, the charming artist who has been staying with us?"

        "I know him," said Hester.

        "Well, he was set on making a sketch of me for one of his large pictures, and it was to have been finished to-day. I don't see any harm myself in drawing on Sunday. I know the Gresleys do, and I love the Gresleys, he has such a powerful mind; but one must think for oneself, and it was only the upper lip, so I consented to sit to him at four o'clock. I noticed he seemed a little--well rather--"

        "Just so," said Hester.

        "The last few days. But, of course, I took no notice of it. A married woman often has to deal with such things without making a fuss about them. Well, I overslept myself, and it was nearly half-past four before I awoke. And when I went into my sitting-room a servant brought me a note. It was from him, saying he had been obliged to leave Wilderleigh suddenly on urgent business, and asking that his baggage might be sent after him."

        Hester raised her eyes slightly as if words failed her. Sybell's conversation always interested her.

        "Perhaps the reason she is never told anything," she said to herself, "is because the ground the confidence would cover is invariably built over already by a fiction of her own which it would not please her to see destroyed."

        "Who would have thought," continued Sybell, "that he would have behaved in that way because I was one little half-hour late. And of course the pretext of urgent business is too transparent, because there is no Sunday post, and the telegraph boy had not been up. I asked that. And he was so anxious to finish the sketch. He almost asked to stay over Sunday on purpose."

        Rachel and Hester looked on the ground.

        "Rachel said he was all right in the garden just before, didn't you, Rachel?"

        "I said I thought he was a little nervous."

        "And what did he talk to you about?"

        "He spoke about the low tone of the morals of the day, and about marriage."

        "Ah! I don't wonder he talked to you, Rachel, you are so sympathetic. I expect lots of people confide in you about their troubles and love affairs. Morals of the day! Marriage! Poor, poor Mr. Tristram! I shall tell Doll quietly this evening. On the whole, it is just as well he is gone."

        "Just as well," said Rachel and Hester with surprising unanimity.

CHAPTER XXIX

        So fast does a little leaven spread within us--so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another.

--GEORGE ELIOT.

        It was during these days that Hugh and Rachel saw much of each other, during these days that Rachel passed in spite of herself beyond the anxious impersonal interest which Hugh had awakened in her, on to that slippery much trodden ground of uncomfortable possibilities where the unmarried meet.

        Hugh attracted and repelled her.

        It was, alas! easy to say why she was repelled. But who shall say why she was attracted? Has the secret law ever been discovered which draws one man and woman together amid the crowd? Hugh was not among the best men who had wished to marry her, but nevertheless he was the only man since Mr. Tristram who had succeeded in making her think continually of him. And perhaps she half knew that though she had been loved by better men, Hugh loved her better than they had.

        Which would prove the stronger, the attraction or the repulsion?

        "How can I?" she said to herself over and over again.

"When I remember Lady Newhaven, how can I? When I think of what his conduct was for a whole year, how can I? Can he have any sense of honour to have acted like that? Is he even really sorry? He is very charming, very refined, and he loves me. He looks good, but what do I know of him except evil. He looks as if he could be faithful, but how can I trust him?"

        Hugh fell into a deep dejection after his narrow escape. Dr. Brown said it was nervous prostration, and Doll rode into Southminster and returned laden with comic papers. Who shall say whether the cause was physical or mental. Hugh had seen death very near for the first time, and the thought of death haunted him. He had not realised when he drew lots that he was risking the possibility of anything like that, such an entire going away, such an awful rending of his being as the short word death now conveyed to him. He had had no idea it would be like that. And he had got to do it again. There was the crux. He had got to do it again.

        He leant back faint and shuddering in the deck chair in the rose garden where he was lying.

        Presently Rachel appeared, coming towards him down the narrow grass walk between two high walls of hollyhocks. She had a cup of tea in her hand.

        "I have brought you this," she said, "with a warning that you had better not come in to tea. Mr. Gresley has been sighted walking up the drive. Mrs. Loftus thought you would like to see him, but I reminded her that Dr. Brown said you were to be kept very quiet."

        Mr. Gresley had called every day since the accident in order to cheer the sufferer to whom he had been greatly attracted. Hugh had seen him once, and afterwards had never felt strong enough to repeat the process.

        "Must you go back?" he asked.

        "No," she said. "Mrs. Loftus and he are great friends. I should be rather in the way."

        And she sat down by him.

        "Are you feeling ill?" she said gently, noticing his careworn face.

        "No," he replied. "I was only thinking. I was thinking," he went on after a pause, "that I would give everything I possess not to have done something which I have done."

        Rachel looked straight in front of her. The confession was coming at last. Her heart beat.

        "I have done wrong," he said slowly, "and I am suffering for it, and I shall suffer more before I've finished. But the worst is--"

        She looked at him.

        "The worst is that I can't bear all the consequences myself. An innocent person will pay the penalty of my sin."

        Hugh's voice faltered. He was thinking of his mother.

        Rachel's mind instantly flew to Lord Newhaven. "Then Lord Newhaven drew the short lighter," she thought, and she coloured deeply.

        There was a long silence.

        "Do you think," said Hugh, smiling faintly, "that people are ever given a second chance?"

        "Always," said Rachel. "If not here--afterwards."

        "If I were given another," said Hugh. "If I might only be given another now in this life I should take it."

        He was thinking if only he might be let off this dreadful, self-inflicted death. She thought he meant that he repented of his sin, and would fain do better.

        There was a sound of voices near at hand. Sybell and Mr. Gresley came down the grass walk towards them.

        "London society," Mr. Gresley was saying, "to live in a stuffy street away from the beauties of Nature, its birds and flowers, to spend half my days laying traps for invitations, and half my nights grinning like a fool in stifling drawing-rooms, listening to vapid talk. No, thanks! I know better than to care for London society. Hester does, I know, but then Hester does not mind making up to big people, and I do. In fact--"

        "I have brought Mr. Gresley after all, in spite of Dr. Brown," said Sybell, "because we were in the middle of such an interesting conversation on the snares of society that I knew you would like to hear it. You have had such a dull day with Doll away at his County Council."

        That night as Rachel sat in her room she went over that half-made, ruthlessly interrupted confidence.

        "He does repent," she said to herself, recalling the careworn face. "If he does, can I overlook the past? Can I help him to make a fresh start? If he had not done this one dishonourable action, I could have cared for him. Can I now?"

CHAPTER XXX

        A fool's mouth is his destruction.

        The end of August had now arrived, and with it two white tents, which sprang up suddenly one morning like giant mushrooms on one of Doll's smooth-shaven lawns. He groaned in spirit as he watched their erection. They would ruin the turf.

        "Might as well iron it with a hot iron," he said disconsolately to Hugh. "But, of course, this sort of thing--Diocesan Fund, eh? In these days we must stand by our colours." He repeated Mr. Gresley's phrase. Doll seldom ventured on an opinion not sanctioned by the ages, or that he had not heard repeated till its novelty had been comfortably rubbed off by his wife or the Gresleys.

        The two men watched the proceedings mournfully. They could not help, at least they were told they could not help the women busily engaged in draping and arranging the stalls. They were still at large, but Doll knew as well as a dog who is going to be washed, what was in store for him in the afternoon, and he was depressed beforehand.

        "Don't let yourself be run in," he said generously to Hugh. "You're not up to it. It takes a strong man to grapple with this sort of thing. Kills off the weakly ones like flies. You lie low in the smoking-room till it's all over."

        "All I can say is," remarked Mrs. Gresley, as she and Hester led the Vicarage donkey and cart up the drive, heavily laden with the work of many months, "that the Pratts have behaved exceedingly badly. Here they are,the richest people by far in the parish, and they would not even take a stall, they would not even furnish half of one, and they said they would be away, and they are at the Towers after all. No one likes the Pratts more than I do, or sees their good points as I do, but I can't shut my eyes to the fact that they are the meanest of the mean."

        The Pratts had only contributed two "bed-spreads," and a "sheet-sham," and a set of antimacassars. If the reader wishes to know what "bed-spreads" and "sheet-shams" are, let him ask his intended, and let him see to it that he marries a woman who cannot tell him.

        Mrs. Pratt had bought the antimacassars for the Towers, and secretly adored them until Ada pronounced them to be vulgar. The number of things which Ada discovered to be vulgar increased every day, and included the greater part of her mother's wardrobe, much to the distress of that poor lady. Mrs. Pratt had reached the size when it is prudent to concentrate a love of bright colours in one's parasol. On this particular afternoon she shed tears over the fact that Ada refused to accompany her if her mother wore a unique garment of orange satin covered with what appeared to be a plague of black worms.

        Of course, the sale of work was combined with a garden party, and a little after three o'clock carriage after carriage began to arrive, and Sybell, with a mournful, handsome, irreproachably dressed husband, took up her position on the south front to receive her guests.

        The whole neighbourhood had been invited, and it can generally be gauged with tolerable accuracy by a hostess of some experience who will respond to the call and who will stay away. Sybell and her husband were among those who were not to be found at these festivities, neither were the New-

havens, save at their own, nor the Pontisburys, nor the Bishop of Southminster. Cards had, of course, been sent to each, but no one expected them to appear.

        Presently, among the stream of arrivals, Sybell noticed the slender figure of Lady Newhaven, and--astonishing vision--Lord Newhaven beside her.

        "Wonders will never cease," said Doll, shaken for a moment out of the apathy of endurance.

        Sybell raised her eyebrows, and advanced with the prettiest air of empressement to meet her unexpected guests. No, clearly it was impossible that the two women should like each other. They were the same age, about the same height and colouring, their social position was too similar, their historic houses too near each other. Lady Newhaven was by far the best looking, but that was not a difference which attracted Sybell towards her. On this occasion Sybell's face assumed its most squirrel-like expression, for as ill-luck would have it they were dressed alike.

        Lady Newhaven looked very ethereal as she came slowly across the grass in her diaphanous gown of rich white, covered with a flowing veil of thinnest transparent black. Her blue eyes looked restlessly bright, her lips wore a mechanical smile. Rachel watching her, experienced a sudden pang at her undeniable loveliness. It wounded her suddenly as it never had done before. "I am a common-looking square-built woman compared to her," she said to herself. "No wonder he--"

        She instinctively drew back as Lady Newhaven turned quickly towards her.

        "You dear person," said Lady Newhaven, her eyes moving restlessly over the crowd, "are you still here? Let us go and buy something together. How nice you look," without looking at her. She drew Rachel apart in the direction of the tents.

        "Where is he?" she said sharply. "I know he is here. I heard all about the accident, though Edward never told me. I don't see him."

        "He is not in the gardens. He is not coming out. He is still rather knocked up."

        "I thought I should have died when I heard it. Ah, Rachel, never love any one. You don't know what it's like. But I must see him. I have come here on purpose."

        "So I supposed."

        "Edward would come, too. He appeared at the last moment when the carriage came round, though I have never known him to go to a garden-party in his life. But where is he, Rachel?"

        "Somewhere in the house, I suppose."

        "I shan't know where to find him. I can't be wandering about that woman's house by myself. We must slip away together, Rachel, and you must take me to him. I must see him alone for five minutes."

        Rachel shook her head.

        Captain Pratt, tall, pale, cautious, immaculate, his cane held along his spinal column, appeared suddenly close at hand.

        "Mrs. Loftus is fortunate in her day," he remarked, addressing himself to Lady Newhaven, and observing her fixedly with cold admiration. "I seldom come to this sort of thing, but neighbours in the country must support each other. I see you are on your way to the tents. Pray allow me to carry your purchases for you."

        "Oh! don't let me trouble you," said Lady Newhaven, shrinking imperceptibly. But it was no trouble to Captain Pratt, and they walked on together.

        Lord Newhaven, who could not have been far off, joined Rachel.

        "Well, my dear," said Mrs. Pratt to Ada, "you might have let me wear my black and orange, after all, for you see Lady Newhaven has something very much the same, only hers is white underneath. And do you see she has got two diamond butterflies on, the little one at her throat and the big one

holding her white carnations. And you would not let me put on a single thing. There now, Algy has joined her," continued Mrs. Pratt, her attention quickly diverted from her own wrongs. "Now they are walking on together. How nice he looks in those beautiful clothes. Algy and Lord Newhaven and Mr. Loftus all have the same look, haven't they? All friends together, as I often say, such a mercy among county people. You might walk a little with Lord Newhaven, Ada. It's unaccountable how seldom we see him, but always so pleasant when we do. Ah! he's speaking to Rachel West. They are going to the tents, after all. Well, whatever you may say, I do think we ought to go and buy something, too. Papa says he won't put his hand in his pocket if the Loftuses are to get all the credit, and we ought to have had the choice of having the sale at the Towers, so he shan't do anything; but I think it would be nice if we went and bought a little something. Just a five-pound note. You shall spend it, my dear, if you like."

        "This is sheer recklessness," said Lord Newhaven, as Rachel bought an expensive tea-cosy from Fraülein. "In these days of death-duties you cannot possess four teapots, and you have already bought three teapot costumes."

        "That is what I am here for," said Rachel, producing a cheque-book. "How much did you say, Fraülein?"

        "Twenty-seven and seex," said Fraülein.

        "Now I see it in the full light, I have taken a fancy to it myself," said Lord Newhaven. "I never saw anything the least like it. I don't think I can allow you to appropriate it, Miss West. You are sweeping up all the best things."

        "I have a verr' pretty thing for gentlemen," said Fraülein. "Herr B-r-r-rown has just bought one."

        "Very elaborate indeed. Bible-markers, I presume? Oh! Braces! Never mind, they will be equally useful to me. I'll have them. Now for the tea-cosy. It is under-priced. I consider that, with the chenille swallow, it is worth thirty shillings. I will give thirty for it."

        "Thirty-two and six," said Rachel.

        "The landed interest is not going to be brow-beaten by coal-mines. Thirty-three and twopence."

        "Forty shillings," said Rachel.

        "Forty-two," said Lord Newhaven.

        Every one in the tent had turned to watch the bidding.

        "Forty-two and six," said Rachel.

        Fraülein blushed. She had worked the tea-cosy. It was to her a sonata in red plush.

        "Three guineas," said Captain Pratt, by an infallible instinct perceiving and placing himself within the focus of general interest.

        The bidding ceased instantly. Lord Newhaven shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Fraülein, still shaking with conflicting emotions, handed the tea-cosy to Captain Pratt. He took it with an acid smile, secretly disgusted at the sudden cessation of interest, for which he had paid rather highly, and looked round for Lady Newhaven.

        But she had disappeared.

        "Fancy you and Algy bidding against each other like that," said Ada Pratt archly to Lord Newhaven, for though Ada was haughty in general society she could be sportive, and even friskily ingratiating, towards those of her fellow creatures whom she termed "swells." "Why half Middleshire will be saying that you have quarrelled next."

        "Only those who do not know how intimate Captain Pratt and I really are could think we have quarrelled," said Lord Newhaven, his eye wandering over the crowd. "But I am blocking your way and Mrs. Pratt's. How do you do, Mrs. Pratt. Miss West, your burden is greater than you can bear. You are dropping part of it. I don't know what it is, but I can shut my eyes as I pick it up. I insist on carrying half back to the house. It will give a pleasing impression that I have bought largely. Weren't you pleased at the money we wrung out of Captain Pratt? He never thought we should stop bidding. It's about all the family will contribute, unless

that good old Mama Pratt buys something. She is the only one of the family I can tolerate. Is Scarlett still here? I ought to have asked after him before."

        "He's here, but he's not well. He's in hiding in the smoking-room."

        "He is lucky he is no worse. I should have had rheumatic fever if I had been in his place. How cool it is in here after the glare outside. Must you go out again? Well, I consider I have done my duty, and that I may fairly allow myself a cigarette in peace."

        "Really, Mr. Loftus, I'm quite shocked. This absurd faintness! The tent was very crowded, and there is not much air to-day, is there? I shall be all right if I may sit quietly in the hall a little. How deliciously cool in here after the glare outside. A glass of water? Thanks. Yes, only I hate to be so troublesome. And how are you after that dreadful accident in the boat?"

        "Oh! I am all right," said Doll, who by this time hated the subject. "It was Scarlett who was nearly frozen like New Zealand lamb."

        Doll had heard Mr. Gresley fire off the simile of the lamb, and considered it sound.

        "How absurd you are. You always make me laugh. I suppose he has left now that he is unfrozen."

        "Oh! no. He is still here. We would not let him go till he was better. He is not up to much. Weak chap at the best of times I should think. He's lying low in the smoking-room till the people are gone."

        "Mr. Scarlett is an old friend of ours," said Lady Newhaven, sipping her glass of water, and spilling a little, "but I can't quite forgive him, no, I really can't, for the danger he caused to Edward. You know, or perhaps you don't know, that Edward can't swim, either. Even now I can't bear to think what might have happened."

        She closed her eyes with evident emotion.

        Doll's stolid garden party face relaxed. "Good little woman," he thought. "As fond of him as she can be."

        "All's well that ends well," he remarked aloud.

        Doll did not know that he was quoting Shakespeare, but he did know by long experience that this sentence could be relied on as suitable to the occasion, or to any occasion that looked a little "doddery," and finished up all right.

        "And now, Mr. Loftus, positively I must insist on your leaving me quietly here. I am quite sure you are wanted outside, and I should blame myself if you wasted another minute on me. It was only the sun which affected me. Don't mention it to Edward. He is always so fussy about me. I will rest quietly here for a quarter of an hour, and then rejoin you all again in the garden."

        "I hope I am not disturbing any one," said Lord Newhaven, quietly entering the smoking-room. "Well, Scarlett, how are you getting on?"

        Hugh, who was lying on a sofa with his arms raised and his hands behind his head, looked up and his expression changed.

        "He was thinking of something uncommonly pleasant," thought Lord Newhaven, "not of me or mine, I fancy. I have come to smoke a cigarette in peace," he added aloud, "if you don't object."

        "Of course not."

        Lord Newhaven lit his cigarette and puffed a moment in silence.

        "Hot outside," he said.

        Hugh nodded. He wondered how soon he could make a pretext for getting up and leaving the room.

        There was a faint silken rustle, and Lady Newhaven, pale, breathless, came swiftly in and closed the door. The instant afterwards she saw her husband and shrank back with a little cry. Lord Newhaven did not look at her. His eyes were fixed on Hugh.

        Hugh's face became suddenly ugly, livid. He rose slowly to his feet, and stood motionless.

        "He hates her," said Lord Newhaven to himself. And he removed his glance and came forward.

        "You were looking for me, Violet?" he remarked. "I have no doubt you are wishing to return home. We will go at once." He threw away his cigarette. "Well, good-bye, Scarlett, in case we don't meet again. I daresay you will pay Westhope a visit later on. Ah, Captain Pratt! so you have fled, like us, from the madding crowd. I can recommend Loftus's cigarettes. I have just had one myself. Good-bye. Did you leave your purchases in the hall, Violet? Yes? Then we will collect them on our way."

        The husband and wife were half-way down the grand staircase before Lord Newhaven said in his usual even voice:

        "I must ask you once more to remember that I will not have any scandal attaching to your name. Did not you see that that white mongrel Pratt was on your track? If I had not been there when he came in he would have drawn his own vile conclusions, and for once they would have been correct."

        "He could not think worse of me than you do," said the wife, half cowed, half defiant.

        "No, but he could say so, which I don't, or, what is more probable, he could use his knowledge to obtain a hold over you. He is a dangerous man. Don't put yourself in his power."

        "I don't want to, or in anybody's."

        "Then avoid scandal instead of courting it, and don't repeat the folly of this afternoon."

        Captain Pratt did not remain long in the smoking-room. He had only a slight acquaintance with Hugh, which did not appear capable of expansion. Captain Pratt made a few efforts, proved its inelastic properties, and presently lounged out again.

        Hugh moved slowly to the window, and leaned his throbbing

forehead against the stone mullion. He was still weak, and the encounter with Lady Newhaven had shaken him.

        "What did he mean?" he said to himself, bewildered and suspicious. "'Perhaps I should be staying at Westhope later on!' But of course I shall never go there again. He knows that as well as I do. What did he mean?"

CHAPTER XXXI

The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the wing.

OMAR KHAYYÁM.

        Lord Newhaven stood looking fixedly out eastward across the level land to the low hills beyond. He stood so long that the day died, and twilight began to rub out first the hills and then the long white lines of flooded meadow and blurred pollard willows. Presently the river mist rose up to meet the coming darkness. In the east, low and lurid, a tawny moon crept up the livid sky. She made no moonlight on the grey earth.

        Lord Newhaven moved away from the window, where he had become a shadow among the shadows, and sat down in the dark at his writing-table.

        Presently he turned on the electric lamp at his elbow and took a letter out of his pocket. The circle of shaded light fell on his face as he read--the thin grave face, with the steady, inscrutable eyes.

        He read the letter slowly, evidently not for the first time.

        "If I had not been taken by surprise at the moment I should not have consented to the manner in which our differences were settled. Personally, I consider the old

arrangement to which you regretfully alluded at the time"--("pistols for two and coffee for four," I remember perfectly)--"as preferable, and as you appeared to think so yourself, would it not be advisable to resort to it? Believing that the old arrangement will meet your wishes as fully as it does mine, I trust that you will entertain this suggestion, and that you will agree to a meeting with your own choice of weapons on any pretext you may choose to name within the next week."

        The letter ended there. It was unsigned.

        "The time is certainly becoming short," said Lord Newhaven. "He is right in saying there is only a week left. If it were not for the scandal for the boys, and if I thought he would really hold to the compact, I would meet him, but he won't. He flinched when be drew lots. He won't. He has courage enough to stand up in front of me for two minutes, and take his chance, but not to blow his own brains out. No. And if he knew what is in store for him if he does not, he would not have courage to face that either. Nor should I, if I were in his shoes, poor devil. The first six foot of earth would be good enough for me."

        He threw the letter with its envelope into the fire and watched it burn.

        Then he took up the gold pen which his wife had given him, examined the nib, dipped it very slowly in the ink, and wrote with sudden swiftness.

        "Allow me to remind you that you made no objection at the time to the manner of our encounter and my choice of weapons, by means of which publicity was avoided. The risk was equal. You now, at the last moment, propose that I should run it a second time, and in a manner to cause instant scandal. I must decline to do so, or to reopen the subject, which had received my careful consideration before I decided upon it. I have burnt your letter, and desire you will burn mine."

        "Poor devil!" said Lord Newhaven, putting the letter, not

in the post-box at his elbow, but in his pocket. "Loftus and I did him an ill turn when we pulled him out of the water."

        The letter took its own time, for it had to avoid possible pitfalls. It shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the village post-office, but after a day's delay it was launched, and lay among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried, hurried, as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its London address, and, went softly upstairs, and laid itself with a few others on Hugh's breakfast table.

        For many weeks since his visit at Wilderleigh, Hugh had been like a man in a boat without oars, drifting slowly, imperceptibly on the placid current of a mighty river, who far away hears the fall of Niagara droning like a bumble bee in a lily cup.

        Long ago, in the summer, he had recognised the sound, had realised the steep agony towards which the current was bearing him, and had struggled horribly, impotently, against the inevitable. But of late, though the sound was ever in his ears, welling up out of the blue distance, he had given up the useless struggle, and lay still in the sunshine watching the summer woods slide past, and the clouds sail away, always away and away, to the birthplace of the river, to that little fluttering pulse in the heart of the hills which a woman's hand might cover, the infant pulse of the great river to be.

        Hugh's thoughts went back like the clouds towards that tiny spring of passion in his own life. He felt that he could have forgiven it--and himself--if he had been swept into the vortex of a headlong mountain torrent leaping down its own wild water-way, carrying all before it. Other men he had seen who had been wrested off their feet, swept out of their own keeping by such a torrent on the steep hillside of their youth. But it had not been so with him. He had walked

more cautiously than they. As he walked he had stopped to look at the little thread of water which came bubbling up out of its white pebbles. It was so pretty, it was so feeble, it was so clear. Involuntarily he followed it, watched it grow, amused himself half contemptuously with it, helped its course by turning obstacles from its path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the shore. And behold his oars were gone! He had been trapped to his destruction.

        Hugh had never regarded seriously his intrigue with Lady Newhaven. He had been attracted, excited, partially, half-willingly enslaved. He had thought at the time that he loved her, and that supposition had confirmed him in his cheap cynicism about woman. This, then, was her paltry little court, where man offered mock homage, and where she played at being queen. Hugh had made the discovery that love was a much overrated passion. He had always supposed so, but when he tired of Lady Newhaven he was sure of it. His experience was, after all, only the same as that which many men acquire by marriage, and hold unshaken through long and useful lives. But Hugh had not been able to keep the treasures of this early experience. It had been rendered worthless, perhaps rather contemptible by a later one, that of falling in love with Rachel, and the astonishing discovery that he was in love for the first time. He had sold his birthright for a mess of red pottage, as surely as any man or woman who marries for money or liking. He had not believed in his birthright, and holding it to be worthless, had given it to the first person who had offered him anything in exchange.

        His whole soul had gradually hardened itself against Lady Newhaven. If he had loved her, he said to himself, he could

have borne his fate. But the play had not been worth the candle. His position was damnable, but that he could have borne--at least so he thought if he had had his day. But he had not had it. That thought rankled. To be hounded out of life because he had mistaken paper-money for real was not only unfair, it was grotesque.

        Gradually, however, Hugh forgot his smouldering hate of Lady Newhaven, his sense of injustice and anger against fate, he forgot everything in his love for Rachel. It became the only reality of his life.

        He had remained in London throughout October and November, cancelling all his engagements because she was there. What her work was he vaguely apprehended: that she was spending herself and part of her colossal fortune in the East End, but he took no interest in it. He was incapable of taking more interests into his life at this time. He passed many quiet evenings with her in the house in Park Lane which she had lately bought. The little secretary who lived with her had always a faint smile and more writing to do than usual on the evenings when he dined with them.

        A great peace was over all their intercourse. Perhaps it was the hush before the storm, the shadow of which was falling, falling, with each succeeding day across the minds of both. Once only a sudden gust of emotion stirred the quiet air, but it dropped again immediately. It came with the hour when Hugh confessed to her the blot upon his past. The past was taking upon itself ever an uglier and more repulsive aspect as he saw more of Rachel. It was hard to put into words, but he spoke of it. The spectre of love rose like a ghost between them as they looked earnestly at each other, each pale even in the ruddy firelight.

        Hugh was truthful in intention. He was determined he would never lie to Rachel. He implied an intrigue with a married woman, a deviation not only from morality but from honour. More he did not say. But as he looked at her strained face it seemed to him that she expected something

more. A dreadful silence fell between them when he had finished. Had she then no word for him. Her eyes, mute, imploring, dark with an agony of suspense, met his for a second and fell instantly. She did not speak. Her silence filled him with despair. He got up. "It's getting late. I must go," he stammered.

        She rose mechanically and put out her hand.

        "May I come again?" he said, holding it more tightly than he knew and looking intently at her. Was he going to be dismissed?

        The pain he caused her hand recalled her to herself. A look of bewilderment crossed her face, and then she realised his suspense and said gravely, "You may come again."

        He kissed the hand he held, and as he did so he knew for the first time that she loved him. But he could not speak of love after what he had just told her. He looked back when he reached the door and saw her standing where he had left her. She had raised the hand he had kissed to her lips.

        That was three days ago. Since then he had not dared to go and see her. He could not ask her to marry him when he was within a few days of the time when he was bound in so-called honour to give Lord Newhaven satisfaction. He certainly could not be in her presence again without asking her. The shadows of the last weeks had suddenly become ghastly realities once more. The roar of Niagara drowned all other sounds. What was he going to do? What was he going to do in the predicament towards which he had been drifting so long, which was now actually upon him? Who shall say what horror, what agony of mind, what frenzied searching for a way of escape, what anguish of baffled love crowded in on Hugh's mind during those last days? At the last moment he caught at a straw, and wrote to Lord Newhaven offering to fight him. He did not ask himself what he should do if Lord Newhaven refused. But when Lord Newhaven did refuse, his determination, long unconsciously

fostered, sprang full-grown into existence in a sudden access of passionate anger and blind rage.

        "He won't fight, won't he! He thinks I will die like a rat in a trap with all my life before me. I will not. I offered him a fair chance of revenging himself--I would have fired into the air--and if he won't take it it is his own look out, damn him. He can shoot me at sight if he likes. Let him."

CHAPTER XXXII

                    On ne peut jamais dire.
Fontaine je ne boirai jamais de ton eau.

        And now she was enduring it again, though in a different form. There is an element of mother love in the devotion which some women give to men. In the first instance it had opened the door of Rachel's heart to Hugh, and had gradually merged with other feelings and deepened into the painful love of a woman not in her first youth for a man of whom she is not sure.

        Rachel was not sure of Hugh. Of his love for her she was sure, but not of the man himself, the gentle, refined, lovable nature that mutely worshipped and clung to her. She could not repulse him any more than she could repulse a child. But through all her knowledge of him, the knowledge of love--the only true knowledge of our fellow creatures--a thread of doubtful anxiety was interwoven. She could form some idea how men like Dick, Lord Newhaven, or the Bishop would act in given circumstances, but she could form no definite idea how Hugh would act in the same circumstances. Yet she knew Hugh a thousand times better than any of the others. Why was this? Many women before Rachel have sought diligently

to find, and have shut their eyes diligently, lest they should discover what it is that is dark to them in the character of the man they love.

        Perhaps Rachel half knew all the time the subtle inequality in Hugh's character. Perhaps she loved him all the better for it. Perhaps she knew that if he had been without a certain undefinable weakness he would not have been drawn towards her strength. She was stronger than he, and perhaps she loved him more than she could have loved an equal.

        "Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères." She had come across that sentence one day in a book she was reading, and had turned suddenly blind and cold with anger. "He is sincere," she said fiercely, as if repelling an accusation. "He would never deceive me." But no one had accused Hugh.

        The same evening he made the confession for which she had waited so long. As he began to speak an intolerable suspense, like a new and acute form of a familiar disease, lay hold on her. Was he going to live or die? She should know at last. Was she to part with him, to bury love for the second time, or was she to keep him, to be his wife, the mother of his children?

        As he went on, his language becoming more confused, she hardly listened to him. She had known all that too long. She had forgiven it, not without tears; but still, she had forgiven it long ago. Then he stopped. It seemed to Rachel as if she had reached a moment in life which she could not bear. She waited, but still he did not speak. Then she was not to know. She was to be ground between the millstones of four more dreadful days and nights. She suddenly became aware, as she stared at Hugh's blanching face, that he believed she was about to dismiss him. The thought had never entered her mind.

        "Do you not know that I love you?" she said silently to him as he kissed her hand.

        When he had left her a gleam of comfort came to her, the only gleam that lightened the days and nights that followed. It was not his fault if he had made a half confession. If he

had gone on, and had told her of the drawing of lots, and which had drawn the fatal lot, he would have been wanting in sense of honour. He owed it to the man he had injured to reserve entire secrecy.

        "He told me of the sin which might affect my marrying him," said Rachel, "but the rest had nothing to do with me. He was right not to speak of it. If he had told me, and then a few days afterwards Lord Newhaven had committed suicide, he would know I should put two and two together, and who the woman was, and the secret would not have died with Lord Newhaven as it ought to do. But if Hugh were the man who had to kill himself, he might have told me so without a breach of confidence, because then I should never have guessed who the others were. If he were the man he could have told me, he certainly would have told me, for it could have done no harm to any one. Surely Lady Newhaven must be right when she was so certain that her husband had drawn the short lighter. And she herself had gained the same impression from what Hugh had vaguely said at Wilderleigh. But what are impressions, suppositions, except the food of suspense. Rachel sighed and took up her burden as best she could. Hugh's confession had at least one source of comfort in it, deadly cold comfort if he were about to leave her. She knew that night as she lay awake that she had not quite trusted him up till now, by the sense of entire trust and faith in him which rose up to meet his self-accusation. What might have turned away Rachel's heart from him had had the opposite effect. "He told me the worst of himself, though he risked losing me by doing it. He wished me to know before he asked me to marry him. Though he acted dishonourably once he is an honourable man. He has shown himself upright in his dealing with me."

        Hugh came back no more after that evening. Rachel told herself she knew why, she understood. He could not speak of love and marriage when the man he had injured was on the brink of death. Her heart stood still when she thought of Lord Newhaven, the gentle, kindly man who was almost her

friend, and who was playing with such quiet dignity a losing game. Hugh had taken from him his wife, and by that act was now taking from him his life too.

        "It was an even chance," she groaned. "Hugh is not responsible for his death. Oh, my God! At least he is not responsible for that. It might have been he who had to die instead of Lord Newhaven. But if it is he, surely he could not leave me without a word. If it is he, he would have come bid me good-bye. He cannot go down into silence without a word. If it is he, he will come yet."

        She endured through the two remaining days, turning faint with terror each time the door-bell rang, lest it might be Hugh.

        But Hugh did not come.

        Then, after repeated frantic telegrams from Lady Newhaven, she left London precipitately to go to her, as she had promised, the twenty-eighth of November, the evening of the last day of the five months.

CHAPTER XXXIII

        And he went out immediately, and it was night

        A sense of unreality seized her. It was not the world which was out of joint, which was rushing to its destruction. It must be she who was mad, stark mad to have believed these chimeras.

        As she got out of the carriage a step came lightly along the gravel, and Lord Newhaven emerged into the little ring of light by the archway.

        "It is very good of you to come," he said cordially, with extended hand. "My poor wife is very unwell, and expecting you anxiously. She told me she had sent for you."

        All was unreal--the familiar rooms and passages, the flickering light of the wood fire in the drawing-room, the darkened room, into which Rachel stole softly and knelt down beside a trembling white figure, which held her with a drowning clutch.

        "I will be in the drawing-room after dinner," Lady Newhaven whispered hoarsely. "I won't dine down. I can't bear to see him."

        It was all unreal except the jealousy which suddenly took Rachel by the throat and nearly choked her.

        "I have undertaken what is beyond my strength," she said to herself, as she hastily dressed for dinner. "How shall I bear it when she speaks of him? How shall I go through with it?"

        Presently she was dining alone with Lord Newhaven. He mentioned that it was Dick Vernon with whom he had been walking when she arrived. Dick was staying in Southminster for business combined with hunting, and had ridden over. Lord Newhaven looked furtively at Rachel as he mentioned Dick. Her indifference was evidently genuine.

        "She has not grown thin and parted with what little looks she possessed on Dick's account," he said to himself; and the remembrance slipped across his mind of Hugh's first word when he recovered consciousness after drowning--"Rachel."

        "I would have asked Dick to dine," continued Lord Newhaven, when the servants had gone, "but I thought two was company and three none, and that it was not fair on you and Violet to have him on your hands, as I am obliged to go to London on business by the night express."

        He was amazed at the instantaneous effect of his words.

        Rachel's face became suddenly livid, and she sank back in her chair. He saw that it was only by a supreme effort that she prevented herself from fainting. The truth flashed into his mind.

        "She knows," he said to himself. "That imbecile, that brainless viper to whom I am tied, has actually confided in her. And she and Scarlett are in love with each other, and the suspense is wearing her out."

        He looked studiously away from her, and continued a desultory conversation, but his face darkened.

        The little boys came in, and pressed themselves one on each side of their father, their eyes glued on the crystallised cherries. Rachel had recovered herself, and she watched the

children and their father with a pain at her heart which was worse than the faintness.

        She had been unable to believe that if Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would remain quietly here over the dreadful morrow, under the same roof as Teddy and Pauly. Oh! surely nothing horrible could happen so near them. Yet he seemed to have no intention of leaving Westhope. Then perhaps he had not drawn the short lighter after all. At the moment when suspense, momentarily lulled, was once more rising hideous, colossal, he casually mentioned that he was leaving by the night train. The reason was obvious. The shock of relief almost stunned her.

        "He will do it quietly to-morrow away from home," she said to herself, watching him with miserable eyes as he divided the cherries equally between the boys. She had dreaded going upstairs to Lady Newhaven, but anything was better than remaining in the dining-room. She rose hurriedly, and the boys raced to the door and struggled which should open it for her.

        Lady Newhaven was lying on a sofa by the wood fire in the drawing-room.

        Rachel went straight up to her, and said hoarsely:

        "Lord Newhaven tells me he is going to London this evening by the night express."

        Lady Newhaven threw up her arms.

        "Then it is he," she said. "When he stayed on and on up to to-day I began to be afraid that it was not he, after all; and yet little things made me feel sure it was, and that he was only waiting to do it before me and the children. I have been so horribly frightened. Oh! if he might only go away, and that I might never, never look upon his face again."

        Rachel sat down by the latticed window and looked out into the darkness. She could not bear to look at Lady Newhaven. Was there any help anywhere from this horror of death without, from this demon of jealousy within?

        "I am her only friend," she said to herself over and over

again. "I cannot bear it, and I must bear it. I cannot desert her now. She has no one to turn to but me."

        "Rachel, where are you?" said the feeble, plaintive voice.

        Rachel rose and went unsteadily towards her. It was fortunate the room was lit only by the firelight.

        "Sit down by me here on the sofa, and let me lean against you. You do comfort me, Rachel, though you say nothing. You are the only true friend I have in the world, the only woman who really loves me. Your cheek is quite wet, and you are actually trembling. You always feel for me. I can bear it now you are here, and he is going away."

        When the boys had been reluctantly coerced to bed, Lord Newhaven rang for his valet, told him what to pack, that he should not want him to accompany him, and then went to his sitting-room on the ground floor.

        "Scarlett seems a fortunate person," he said, pacing up and down. "That woman loves him, and if she marries him she will reform him. Is he going to escape altogether in this world and the next, if there is a next? Is there no justice anywhere? Perhaps at this moment he is thinking that he has salved his conscience by offering to fight, and that, after all, I can't do anything to prevent his living and marrying her if he chooses. He knows well enough I shall not touch him, or sue for a divorce, for fear of the scandal. He thinks he has me there. And he is right. But he is mistaken if he thinks I can do nothing. I may as well go up to London and see for myself whether he is still on his feet to-morrow night. It is a mere formality, but I will do it. I might have guessed that she would try to smirch her own name, and the boys through her, if she had the chance. She will defeat me yet, unless I am careful. Oh! ye gods! why did I marry a fool who does not even know her own interests. If I had life over again I would marry a Becky Sharp, any she-devil incarnate, if only she had brains. One cannot circumvent a fool because one can't foresee their line of action. But Miss West, for a

miracle, is safe. She has a lock-and-key face. But she is not for Scarlett. Did Scarlett tell her himself in an access of moral spring cleaning preparatory to matrimony? No. He may have told her that he had got into trouble with some woman, but not about the drawing of lots. Whatever his faults are, he has the instincts of a gentleman, and his mouth is shut. I can trust him like myself there. But she is not for him. He may think he will marry her, but I draw the line there. Violet and I have other views for him. He can live if he wants to, and apparently he does want to, though whether he will continue to want to is another question. But he shall not have Rachel. She must marry Dick."

        A distant rumbling was heard of the carriage driving under the stable archway on its way to the front door.

        Lord Newhaven picked up a novel with a mark in it, and left the room. In the passage he stopped a moment at the foot of the narrow black oak staircase to the nurseries, which had once been his own nurseries. All was very silent. He listened, hesitated, his foot on the lowest stair. The butler came round the corner to announce the carriage.

        "I shall be back in four days at furthest," Lord Newhaven said to him, and turning, went on quickly to the hall, where the piercing night air came in with the stamping of the impatient horses' hoofs.

        A minute later the two listening women upstairs heard the carriage drive away into the darkness, and a great silence settled down upon the house.

CHAPTER XXXIV

        The fool saith, Who would have thought it?

        Mrs. Gresley recovered slowly, and before she was downstairs again Regie sickened with one of those swift sudden illnesses of childhood which make childless women thank God for denying them their prayers.

        Mrs. Gresley was not well enough to be told, and for many days Mr. Gresley and Hester and Doctor Brown held Regie forcibly back from the valley of the shadow where, since the first cradle was rocked, the soft feet of children have cleft so sharp an entrance over the mother hearts that vainly barred the way.

        Mr. Gresley's face grew as thin as Hester's as the days went by. On his rounds, for he let nothing interfere with his work, heavy farmers in dog carts, who opposed him at vestry meetings, stopped to ask after Regie. The most sullen of his parishioners touched their hats to him as he passed, and mothers of families who never could be induced to leave their cooking to attend morning service, and were deeply offended at being called "after-dinner Christians" in consequence, forgot the opprobrious term, and brought little offerings of new-laid eggs and rosy apples to tempt "the little master."

        Mr. Gresley was touched, grateful.

        "I don't think I have always done them justice," he actually said to Hester one day. "They do seem to understand me a little better at last. Walsh has never spoken to me since my sermon on Dissent, though I always make a point of being friendly to him, but to-day he stopped and said he knew what trouble was, and how he had lost"--Mr. Gresley's voice faltered, "It is a long time ago--but how, when he was about my age, he lost his eldest boy, and how he always remembered Regie in his prayers, and I must keep up a good heart. We shook hands," said Mr. Gresley. "I sometimes think Walsh means well, and that he may be a good-hearted man after all."

        Beneath the arrogance which a belief in Apostolic succession seems to induce in natures like Mr. Gresley's, as mountain air induces asthma in certain lungs, the shaft of agonised anxiety had pierced to a thin layer of humility. Hester knew that that layer was only momentarily disturbed, and that the old self would infallibly reassert itself, but the momentary glimpse drew her heart towards her brother. He was conscious of it, and love almost grew between them as they watched by Regie's bed.

        At last, after an endless night, the little faltering feet came to the dividing of the ways, and hesitated. The dawn fell grey on the watchful faces of the doctor and Hester, and on the dumb suspense of the poor father. And with a sigh, as one who half knows he is making a life-long mistake, Regie settled himself against Hester's shoulder and fell asleep.

        The hours passed. The light grew strong, and still Regie slept. Doctor Brown put cushions behind Hester, and gave her food. He looked anxiously at her. "Can you manage?" he whispered later, when the sun was streaming in at the nursery window. And she smiled back in scorn. Could she manage? What did he take her for?

        At last Regie stretched himself and opened his eyes. The

doctor took him gently from Hester, gave him food, and laid him down.

        "He is all right," he said. "He will sleep all day."

        Mr. Gresley, who had hardly stirred, hid his face in his hands.

        "Don't try to move, Miss Hester," said Doctor Brown gently.

        Hester did not try. She could not. Her hands and face were rigid. She looked at him in terror. "I shall have to scream in another moment," she whispered.

        The old doctor picked her up, and carried her swiftly to her room, where Fraülein ministered to her.

        At last he came down and found Mr. Gresley waiting for him at the foot of the stair.

        "You are sure he is all right?" he asked.

        "Sure! Fraülein is with him. He got the turn at dawn."

        "Thank God!"

        "Well, I should say thank your sister too. She saved him. I tell you, Gresley, neither you nor I could have sat all those hours without stirring as she did. She had cramp after the first hour. She has a will of iron in that weak body of hers."

        "I had no idea she was uncomfortable," said Mr. Gresley, half incredulous.

        "That is one of the reasons why I always say you ought not to be a clergyman," snapped the little doctor, and was gone.

        Mr. Gresley was not offended. He was too overwhelmed with thankfulness to be piqued.

        "Good old Brown," he said indulgently. "He has been up all night, and he is so tired he does not know he is talking nonsense. As if a man who did not understand cramp was not qualified to be a priest. Ha! Ha! He always likes to have a little hit at me, and he is welcome to it. I must just creep up and kiss dear Hester. I never should have thought she had it in her to care for any one as she has shown she cares for Regie. I shall tell her so, and how surprised I am, and how I love her for it. She has always seemed so insensible, so callous.

But, please God, this is the beginning of a new life for her. If it is she shall never hear one word of reproach about the past from me."

        A day or two later the Bishop of Southminster had a touch of rheumatism, and Doctor Brown attended him. This momentary malady may possibly account to the reader for an incident which remained to the end of life inexplicable to Mr. Gresley.

        Two days after Regie had taken the turn towards health, and on the afternoon of the very same day when Doctor Brown had interviewed the Bishop's rheumatism, the episcopal carriage might have been seen squeezing its august proportions into the narrow drive of Warpington Vicarage; at least, it was always called the drive, though the horses' noses were reflected in the glass of the front door while the hind-wheels still jarred the gate-posts.

        Out of the carriage stepped, not the Bishop, but the tall figure of Dick Vernon, who rang the bell, and then examined a crack in the portico.

        He had plenty of time to do so.

        "Lord! what fools!" he said half aloud. "The crazy thing is shouting out that it is going to drop on their heads, and they put a clamp across the crack. Might as well put a respirator on a South Sea Islander. Is Mr. Gresley in? Well then, just ask him to step this way, will you? Look here, James, if you want to be had up for manslaughter, you leave this porch as it is. No, I did not drive over from Southminster on purpose to tell you, but I mention it now I am here."

        "I added the portico myself when I came here," said Mr. Gresley stiffly, who had not forgotten or forgiven the enormity of Dick's behaviour at the temperance meeting.

        "So I should have thought," said Dick, warming to the subject, and mounting on a small garden-chair. "And some escaped lunatic has put a clamp on the stucco."

        "I placed the clamp myself," replied Mr. Gresley. "There really is no necessity for you to waste your time and mine

here. I understand the portico perfectly. The crack is merely superficial."

        "Is it?" said Dick; "then why does it run round those two consumptive little pillars? I tell you it's tired of standing up. It's going to sit down. Look here"--Dick tore at the stucco with his knife, and caught the clamp as it fell--"that clamp was only put in the stucco. It never reached the stone or the wood, whichever the little kennel is made of. You ought to be thankful it did not drop on one of the children, or on your own head. It would have knocked all the texts out of it for some time to come."

        Mr Gresley did not look very grateful as he led the way to his study.

        "I was lunching with the Bishop to-day," said Dick, "and Doctor Brown was there. He told us about the trouble here. He said the little chap Regie was going on like a house on fire. The Bishop told me to ask after him particularly."

        "He is wonderfully better every day," said Mr. Gresley softening. "How kind of the Bishop to send you to inquire. Not having children himself, I should never have thought--"

        "No," said Dick, "you wouldn't. Do you remember when we were at Cheam, and Ogilvy's marked sovereign was found in the pocket of my flannel trousers. You were the only one of the boys, you and that sneak Field, who was not sure I might not have taken it. You said it looked awfully bad, and so it did."

        "No one was gladder than I was when it was cleared up," said Mr. Gresley.

        "No," said Dick; "but we don't care much what any one thinks when it's cleared up. It's before that matters. Is Hester in? I've two notes for her. One from Brown, and one from the Bishop, and my orders are to take her back with me. That is why the Bishop sent the carriage."

        "I am afraid Hester will hardly care to leave us at present," said Mr. Gresley. "My wife is on her sofa, and Regie is still very weak. He has taken one of those unaccountable fancies

of children for her, and can hardly bear her out of his sight."

        "The Bishop has taken another of those unaccountable fancies for her," said Dick, looking full at Mr. Gresley in an unpleasant manner. "I'm not one that holds that parsons should have their own way in everything. I've seen too much of missionaries. I just shove out curates and vicars and all that small fry if they get in my way. But when they break out in buttons and gaiters, by Jove, I knock under to them, at least, I do to men like the Bishop. He knows a thing or two. He has told me not to come back without Hester, and I'm not going to. Ah! There she is in the garden." Dick's large back had been turned towards the window, but he had seen the reflection of a passing figure in the glass of a framed testimonial which occupied a prominent place on the study wall, and he at once marched out into the garden and presented the letters to Hester.

        Hester was bewildered at the thought of leaving Warpington, into which she seemed to have grown like a Buddhist into his tree. She was reluctant, would think it over, &c. But Dick, after one glance at her strained face, was obdurate. He would hear no reason. He would not go away. She and Fraülein nervously cast a few clothes into a box, Fraülein so excited by the apparition of a young man and a possible love affair, that she could hardly fold Hester's tea-gowns.

        When Hester came down with her hat on she found Dick untyring Mr. Gresley's bicycle in the most friendly manner while the outraged owner stood by remonstrating.

        "I assure you, Dick, I don't wish it to be touched. I know my own machine. If it were a common puncture I could mend it myself, but I don't want the whole thing ruined by an ignorant person. I shall take it in to Southminster on the first opportunity."

        "No need to do that," said Dick cheerfully. "Might as well go to a doctor to have your nails cut. Do it at home. You don't believe in the water test? Oh! that's rot. You'll

believe in it when you see it. You're learning it now. There! Now I've got it in the pail; see all these blooming little bubbles jostling up in a row. There's a leak at the valve. No, there isn't. It's only unscrewed. Good Lord, James, it's only unscrewed, and you thought the whole machine was out of order. There, now, I've screwed it up. Devil a bubble! What's that you're saying about swearing in your presence? Oh! don't apologise! You can't help being a clergyman. Look for yourself. You will never learn if you look the other way just when a good-natured chap is showing you. I would have put the tyre on again, but as you say you can do it better yourself, I won't. Sorry to keep you waiting, Hester. And look here, James, you ought to bicycle more. Strengthen your legs for playing the harmonium on Sundays. Well, I could not tell you had an organ in that little one-horse church. Good-bye, Fraülein, good-bye, James. Home, Coleman. And look here," said Dick, putting his mischievous face out of the window as the carriage turned, "if you are getting up steam for another temperance meeting I'm your man."

        "Good-bye, dear James," interrupted Hester hastily, and the carriage drove away.

        "He looks pasty," said Dick, after an interval. "A chap like James has no power in his arms and legs. He can kneel down in church, and put his arm round Mrs. Gresley's waist, but that's about all he's up to. He doesn't take enough exercise."

        "He is not well. I don't think I ought to have left them."

        "You had no choice. Brown said, unless you could be got away at once you would be laid up. I was at luncheon at the Palace when he said it. The Bishop's sister was too busy with her good works to come herself so I came instead. I said I should not come back alive without you. They seemed to think I should all the same, but of course that was absurd. I wanted the Bishop to bet upon it, but he wouldn't."

        "Do you always get what you want?" said Hester.

        "Generally, if it depends on myself. But sometimes things depend on others besides me. Then I may be beaten."

        They were passing Westhope Abbey wrapped in a glory of sunset and mist.

        "Did you know Miss West was there?" Dick said suddenly.

        "No," said Hester surprised. "I thought she was in London."

        "She came down last night to be with Lady Newhaven who is not well. Miss West is a great friend of yours, isn't she?"

        "Yes."

        "Well, she has one fault, and it is one I can't put up with. She won't look at me."

        "Don't put up with it," said Hester softly. "We women all have our faults, dear Dick. But if men point them out to us in a nice way we can sometimes cure them."

CHAPTER XXXV

        When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?

SHAKESPEARE.

        As the sun sank on the afternoon of the second day it peered in at her sitting alone by her window. Lady Newhaven after making the whole day frightful was mercifully asleep. Rachel sat looking out into the distance beyond the narrow confines of her agony. Has not every man and woman who has suffered sat thus by the window, looking out, seeing nothing, but still gazing blindly out hour after hour?

        Perhaps the quiet mother earth watches us, and whispers to our deaf ears--

Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

but of clay of your mother's weaving, and she will take it from you presently when you lay back your head on her breast.

        There had been wind all day, a high, dreadful wind, which had accompanied all the nightmare of the day as a wail accompanies pain. But now it had dropped with the sun, who was setting with little pageant across the level land. The whole sky, from north to south, from east to west, was covered with a wind-threshed floor of thin wan clouds, and shreds of clouds, through which, as through a veil, the steadfast face of the heaven beyond looked down.