"Ugly lady!" the child cried, in his broken voice. "Not Billy's mummy—ugly lady!"

"Billy's is a pretty mummy, isn't she, darling?" the man tenderly said.

"Billy's mummy loves her precious boy," Lucilla murmured.

"'Oves daddy, too," the child sobbed, feeling the father's touch.

She smiled upon the kneeling young man. "Loves dear daddy, too," she said.

It had been only a foolish flirtation—just the snatching at something to fill his empty days. Everard Barett's heart had been his wife's all along. He knew it for a certainty, looking at the woman and her child together, kneeling before them, with a sudden conviction of his own unworthiness, and folly, and absurdity.

"We all love each other, little man," he said. "If we three stick together, we're all right, Boy Billy—we're all right, Luce."

He got upon his feet presently. "I'm going to the Works this afternoon, dear," he said. "And after dinner I thought I'd go in and take a hand at bridge with the Worleys. I'm afraid you'll have rather a time of it, poor old girl."

"I'm afraid you will, when you come home again," Lucilla said.

He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I say, haven't we had almost enough?" he asked. "A fortnight's a deuce of a time! She's all very well, but it's jollier when we're alone, Luce. I want us to be alone again."

When he came home to dinner, his wife met him in the hall. "Everard," she said, "it's come."

"In the name of heaven, what?"

"The Rigor. You know. She can't move. Can't stir hand nor foot. All the afternoon she was in a terrible way, crying, and—well, actually fighting me. Then the Rigor came on."

"I'll run for the doctor," he said. He had an aghast face.

"All done. He's here. He's waiting for you to carry Vera to bed."

"Let him carry her himself!" Everard said, fiercely. "Look here, I'm best out of this. I'll go and dine somewhere."

"My dear, you can't run away like that," she said, and, of course, prevailed.

It was as Lucilla had said. Vera was rigid. She looked up at Everard with a smile of satisfaction at that fact. "What do you think of me now?" it seemed to ask. "Am I the sort of woman to turn your back on, and neglect?—a woman who at once becomes as stiff as a broomstick?"

"She must be got upstairs and undressed," the doctor said to Barett.

"Lean on me and try to walk," Barett implored the patient.

She gave a defiant smile. "If my life depended on it I could not move a toe," she said.

"If I took her head, and you her feet?" Everard suggested to the doctor—a plan at once negatived by Vera.

"I won't be carried in that fashion," she said. "I am not a long woman, like Luce," she added. "Fred carries me with perfect ease."

"I think you can manage it, Mr Barett," the doctor said.

There was no help for it. Everard stooped to the task. He ought to have been a happy man, perhaps, with that burden in his arms. It was not as such he described himself to his wife afterwards.

Halfway up the stairs he tripped, and she screamed.

"Grip me! Grip me! Don't let me drop over the balusters!" she called.

He laboured on, the cords bursting in his forehead, his legs bending, his throat swelling, his arms two seats of agony. Lucilla, who had gone before, cleared the mats out of his way. "It isn't much farther," she whispered.

"He is not grasping me right," Mrs Butt cried in a terrified voice. "It's not how Fred grasps me. I am as easy as a child when he carries me. Oh! I shall drop—he is going to let me drop!"

He thought he was, but made a superhuman effort, and tottered on. Having reached level ground he stopped, then started on again with a staggering run. In piloting her through the bedroom door he banged her head against the frame, and Vera gave a howl of rage and pain.

The next minute she found herself hurled upon the bed.

She remained as she fell, upon her face, uttering suffocating moans of angry shame and misery.

Everard waited not a second to watch her there. He reeled from the room, and reaching the landing again, sank down there, ignominiously, sitting on the carpet, his back to the wall, a wreck of his spruce, dapper self, having bodily and spiritually reached the bounds of endurance.

They telegraphed for her husband. "Let him come and take her home, and carry her himself!" Everard said, savagely. "It's his place to carry her, not mine. We've done our part—let her go."

He came as soon as the train could bring him. Lucilla was able to tell him truthfully that his wife had lain and called upon his name all night.

"He is kneeling by her bedside and kissing her, and crying over her," Lucilla told her husband, running down to him, her own eyes wet with tears. "Isn't it a mercy he loves her so?"

"There's nothing whatever the matter with her, you know," Everard said. "The doctor's just been telling me. Nothing whatever."

"I knew that all along," Lucilla told him.

He took her hand and looked in her face, and his own grew red. "Confession is good for the soul, and you and I should have no secrets, Luce," he said. "That little woman upstairs—you'll think me an awful ass. She and I—she——"

Lucilla nodded, without looking at him. "I knew that all along, too," she said.

"You knew? Yet you asked her here?"

He held her before him, and looked in her face, and kissed her.

"I don't believe any other woman would have done that. That was a risky thing to do, Luce," he said.

"But it answered," Lucilla said to herself as she turned away.



TO BERTHA IN BOMBAY

He is a big, heavily-made, healthy-looking man of young middle-age. He came into the coffee-room as I was sitting at breakfast, and having looked slowly round the room, he placed himself with much deliberation opposite me, at the little table which I had secured to myself. The act did not prejudice me in his favour. There was room and to spare at a large centre table where a dozen men were sitting; two of the smaller tables were empty. There was something about him I need not bore you by describing which stamps the colonial man. From such, one knows what to expect. He called for a carte and ordered porridge and a sole, and they were some time in bringing his breakfast.

However, as you know, I have not arrived at thirty years without having learnt to endure a prolonged gaze with perfect appearance of indifference.

"I hope you have no objection to my sharing your table?" he said; and I replied, as I went on with my meal, that I had none.

"You have an open window, and a view of the sea," he remarked, and I assented, and added that on such a morning these things were desirable.

Then his porridge came, and I proceeded with my toast and marmalade, and the letter I had from you in Bombay, which lay beside my plate. Your writing is never too legible, Berthalina, and my head and eyes were aching, that morning, and I felt less rested than when I had gone to bed. My limbs ached too, and while I looked at those crossed lines of yours, without gathering the sense of what I read, I was wondering if, in the broiling heat of this sultry weather, I had taken cold, and was going to be laid up in this strange place, alone in a hotel. Have I told you that, since the cramming for this last horrid exam. has sent me, to an extent, off my mental equilibrium, I have a constant terror of falling ill? It was that which had given me such a fit of horrors when I saw my bedroom, the night before. Here, by the orders of a peremptory doctor, for change of air and the sea-breeze, I find myself, after vainly tramping the town for lodging, in a tiny back room of a huge hotel, with a window which will only open two inches at the top, and a ceiling and four walls crushing in on me like the lid and sides of a coffin! For prospect, I have a window like my own, at about five yards' distance, a few feet of red brick, and a leaden water-pipe!

If I were to be ill in this hole! The fear of it kept me awake and feverish for hours; but falling asleep at last, I had the most vivid and delicious dream. I felt myself irresistibly called by something—I don't know what, the murmur of the sea, perhaps; and I thought I escaped from that entombment, and walked in my night-gown down a long corridor, to a door at the other side of the house. The door yielded, in that ridiculous way in which all obstacles yield in dreams, and I went through a room which I should know again among ten thousand rooms, to the window—a big window thrown wide open; and through it the sea—the sea—the sea! Such a sea! As effulgent, moon-silvered, glorious, as we may look on in Paradise, Berthalina, if God hears the "silly sailor-folk," as Kipling has undertaken that He will.

Ah! The sea, as revealed by the coffee-room window, sparkling in sunshine, dotted with fishing-boats, the white bathing-machines defining its margin, is but a vulgar thing, compared with the sea of my dream.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" The man opposite put the question quite unconcernedly, but I was back in the description of your triumphant dinner-party, and was unpleasantly startled. I answered with a little temper, therefore, that of course I believed in them; and I did not encourage him to further conversation by a glance in his direction.

Had I seen any? he inquired; and I answered "Hundreds." After a minute, repenting of my incivility, I put your letter down, and told him that that was why he saw me getting my breakfast before him. And I even explained—for why need a self-respecting woman be disagreeable even to an unknown colonial in an ill-made flannel suit, and with rough hair?—that I had been working too hard lately, and that the shades of people, dead or in distant lands, well-known and half-forgotten, had taken to appearing before me, when I lifted my eyes from my book.

"In fact, I have come here to get rid of ghosts," I told him; and he said he hoped I had not come to the wrong place. "Why, you surely don't think 'The Continental' haunted?" I inquired.

Then he told me, with an appearance of perfect gravity, that a ghost had visited him last night.

"It is just possible that my ghosts have lost their way in this bewildering place and have strolled in to you, by mistake," I suggested.

"You don't happen to have seen any since you came here?"

"I only came last night."

"And you didn't see one?"

"No! Do I look as if I had?"

"Not the ghost of a terrified man, for instance, flying up in bed?"

"Good gracious, no! Why?"

"I thought you might have done," he said, and went on with his breakfast.

You'll say he talked such nonsense to get me to look at him, Berthalina; and of course I did. He has not the appearance of a seer of ghosts: a huge, heavy man, with a hump on a big, characterful nose; a powerful jaw, and very quick, blue eyes beneath shaggy eyebrows. The talk of ghosts seemed out of place on such firm lips.

"Was your ghost that of a terrified man, etc.?" I asked him, in spite of myself.

He gave a vigorous shake of his head. "Thank heavens, no!" he said. "In that case I shouldn't have given it two thoughts."

"Of what then?"

"Of a beautiful woman."

He spoke with much deliberation, and his eyes upon my face were serious.

"What was she like? Describe her."

He turned away to reach a bit of bread from a neighbouring table. "She was very much like you," he said.

You may be sure I let him see then that he had gone too far.

* * * * *

I was standing by the door of my disgraceful little bedroom, dressed for walking, when I saw him again. He was mounting the broad stairs with his head bent, and not wishing to pass the man on my way down, I waited till he had disappeared within the door of his room. That door, with the width of the house between, was directly opposite mine. As it opened, there came to me the first glimmer of the light which was to burst on me in all its terrible force a minute later.

When he had reappeared, in his great loose grey flannels, his straw hat on his head, a book in his hand, and had gone downstairs, I flew along the corridor and pushed open the door of the room he had left. Berthalina, it was the room of my dream! Those details which had impressed themselves so clearly on my sleeping vision last night were here in the flesh—well not exactly in the flesh, but—. I stood at the window, wide open from the bottom; the sea lay sparkling in the sunlight—

Of course, you remember the time when I stayed with you, my dear friend, after that crisis in my stupid life of which you and only one other knew? You haven't forgotten how I terrified you nearly to death by walking in my sleep to your room? and how, afterwards, you insisted on keeping the key of my bedroom door under your own pillow? To the best of my belief I have never sleep-walked either before or since that time. The certainty came to me now, as I stood at the man's window, that I had done it again last night!

* * * * *

"And what have you been doing with yourself, all day?"

I had turned my back on the pier bands, on the crowds of the esplanade, and had wandered as far as my legs would carry me along the beach—a hard, smooth beach of yellow sand—and was sitting there, with only the waves for company, when the voice of the man I had successfully dodged all day spoke at my back.

"You were not at lunch, nor at the table d'hote, to-night," he added; and I did not consider that the statement demanded comment.

He came and sat beside me, and gathered up his knees into his arms and looked out to sea. "I suppose the beach is free to all?" he remarked; and my silence did not gainsay him.

"I am like you," he went on: "I care nothing for all that," he jerked his head in the direction of the town and the populace. "I'm never afraid of my own company. And you?"

"I prefer it to all other company," I assured him, and told the lie with the acrimony of truth.

"And you have been by the sea all day?"

"I have been tramping the town looking for rooms."

"You are not comfortable at the hotel?"

"I prefer apartments."

"Perhaps for a young woman, alone, it is better."

Now for my opportunity.

"I have not been alone until this morning," I told him steadily. "My sister left me by the early train; before breakfast."

"You probably miss her very much?"

"I do. She scarcely ever leaves me. We have everything in common. She is my twin-sister. You could scarcely tell the one from the other, apart."

The information did not flow from me as I desired, but was, rather, gasped out—or so it seems to me on looking back.

I felt him turn his eyes on me—they look absurdly blue and youthful in his sun-reddened, middle-aged face—but I think I mentioned this before. You know how I love a man's hair clipped to the bone, Berthalina? My dear, this one wears his in a mop! I must admit, however, it is a soft kind of hair, and does not arrange itself badly.

"We even share the same bed," I went on. I had to twist my fingers together painfully to maintain the necessary levelness of the indifferent voice. "But that is a matter of precaution."

"Of precaution?"

"My sister is—a sleep-walker," I said, and waited, with the sound of the sea and the band and the multitude in the near distance booming in my head. "Even last night—I awoke to find our door open," I added. "She had wandered in her sleep."

I had said it; but I declare to you, Berthalina, the effort left me weak as a baby. Before you make up your mind to a career of perfidy, dear, go through a course of physical training. You want the strength of a Sandow, I assure you.

I waited with inward trembling for his comment. He made none, but pointed out to me instead the colour of the brown sail of a little fishing-boat almost stationary on the placid sea, the light of the sinking sun upon it. A big steamer came into sight upon the horizon-line. A bare-legged man, pushing a shrimping-net before him, waded through the shallow waters, close inshore.

"This is very pleasant," he said. "You did not mention if you were successful in obtaining rooms?"

I shook my head. "But I leave here in four days."

"And until then?"

"I must remain at the hotel—where I think it is about time I returned."

He rose, as I did. "Have you any objection to my walking at your side?" he asked, and walked there without waiting for permission. "I am a lonely man, and a stranger here," he volunteered. "And you?"

I told him that I was used to being alone; that there was no one now belonging to me—

"With the exception of your twin sister who never leaves you," he reminded me, and went on at once to tell me of his life, which had been passed for many years in Australia. His sister who lived with him died there eight years ago, he is forty years old, he has made money, and has come home for a holiday.

All this, and much more I learnt. He seems quite eager to impart personal information—or perhaps I did not learn it all then, but afterwards. For there has been no getting away from the man, Berthalina; you may believe that my will was good.

At night, I got the chambermaid to lock me in that atrocious little cabin of mine. (Oh, I know you are laughing, Berthalina; good gracious! what a fool I feel about it all.) I knew that he was an early riser, and I did not go down the next morning till I felt sure that he would be enjoying the sea-breezes, and that the coffee-room would be nearly empty. There he was, patiently keeping guard over the table in the window! He strode across to me (he is so huge and self-assured and important-looking, that everyone turns to watch him, and the waiters fly at a glance). "I have kept our table," he said, "and I have taken the liberty to order for you the same breakfast you had yesterday."

After that, I gave up trying to avoid him. I had put everything right in his mind, and it was only for four days! Then I must be getting back, and looking out for ways and means to earn the money I have borrowed to pay my fees and keep me at the hospital. Oh dear! How it all weighs on my mind!

"And so you are going to be a doctor?" he said once, I don't know at which meeting. How can I tell—there were so many!

"I am a doctor," I corrected him.

"Well, I am a doctor too," he said. "And perhaps that is the reason I loathe the thought of any woman meddling in that profession."

"I don't particularly like it myself," I told him. "It was necessary for me to be something, and I had enthusiasm enough to begin with; but——"

"What is your sister?" he asked me suddenly; it took me by surprise, but I told him, with blushes, that she was a doctor too.

"I wonder what my brother will say to that?" he pondered. "You look surprised. Is there any reason I should not have a brother? He is a doctor like myself, and shares my prejudices."

"Those prejudices don't affect my sister," I took courage to remark.

"They should. No decent woman can afford to despise the prejudices of a decent man. The place of a young and beautiful woman is not——"

"I did not tell you she was young or beautiful. I—she—we are thirty years old; and 'pretty,' 'interesting,' 'fine-looking,' are the most complimentary epithets which have ever been applied to us."

"We don't all see with the same eyes," the man said.

It was on our last evening that I sate on a chair in the hotel gardens; he came and smoked his cigar beside me.

"You go to-morrow?" he said.

I nodded.

"And you don't purpose to tell me where you go?"

I shook my head. How can I have him coming to my place with that story of my sister—?

"So here, for ever, we say good-bye. I go back to my practice in Sydney; and you——?"

I said nothing to fill up the pause.

"Four days!" he mused, and was silent.

The band was playing on the pier; the strains of that pretty thing Hayden Coffin sings in The Greek Slave came sorrowfully to us across the sea and the sand. The people in their smart seaside costumes went trooping past.

"Not a face I know in all these thousands," he said, and waved the hand which held the cigar to include pier, parade, beach. "Not a face known to you. Under such circumstances two people get to know each other in four days as well as in years of ordinary intercourse. When I say good-bye to you, I shall feel that I am parting with a very dear friend. A friend I shall hardly know how to replace, or even to live without. After four days! Absurd, is it not?"

"May I tell you about my brother?" This was after a long pause, during which I had been inwardly shrinking from the dreary struggle before me, and wishing—wishing—wishing that life was all holiday. "He is my twin brother. Curious, isn't it? You don't think so? Oh, of course we know there are twin brothers as well as twin sisters; but—. Still, let me tell you a rather curious fact with regard to him.

"The night before that morning when I had the happiness to meet you, he was staying in this hotel—he left by that convenient train before breakfast, you know, the early one—and he had a strange experience. He was lying awake in bed—the moon was very bright, it was that which kept him awake—when the door of his room opened, and a woman, young and beautiful, in her night-gear, with her dark hair, 'straight as rain,' hanging down her back and over her shoulders, and with eyes full of all my brother loves to see in a woman's eyes, came into his room. He is not a nervous man, and he saw at once the woman, who in the moonlight was lovely as a vision, walked in her sleep. He held his breath, fearing to disturb her. She went to the window, stretched out her arms to the sea, bathed her hands and her adorable face in the moonlight, drank in, in grateful breaths, the cool sea air, and passing silently through his room, left him as she came.

"You think that an interesting experience for my brother, do you not? But I have not quite finished.

"My brother is a man not without sentiment, although he has attained to middle life without marrying. He has more sentiment, in fact, than in his young days, when he decided it was best for man to live alone. He has seen cause to doubt the wisdom of that creed. He is not without regrets and longings, thoughts of what might have been, and what might yet be. Fairly successful and happy in his career, he has yet come to think that a woman's love and companionship are perhaps just those things he has missed which might have crowned his life.

"Having arrived at such a pass, he was moved by that vision of the night—mightily moved. And he swore to himself that the woman who had come to him like that—a living, breathing, beautiful woman, and yet almost in an angel's guise—was the woman he would seek out and marry, if he could prevail on her to have him.

"Tell me what you think of that resolve of my brother's," he asked me presently. He turned from watching the passing crowd and looked for the first time in my face; and then he got upon his feet. "You will perhaps give me your opinion later?" he said. "You will think about it, and let me hear when I come back?"

I did not wait for his coming back. I went to my room and stayed there. I don't know if he looked for me at our table in the window next morning, for I did not go to the coffee-room for breakfast. And by eleven o'clock I was sitting in the ladies' drawing-room—empty as Sahara at that hour—with my hotel bill in my hand, wondering how it was possible that such a little, little holiday should have cost so very much.

Then he came into the room. He sat down opposite to me at the round table, and I saw that he had a telegram in his hand.

"I have bad news for you," he said. "Your twin sister is dead."

"Oh!" I breathed. What could I do but sit there turning red and white, and looking like a fool before him?

"It is a sad and curious coincidence that my twin brother expired at the same instant. What is there for us to do but to console each other?"

He reached out a hand, palm upwards, to me across the table. "You will find life pleasanter as a doctor's wife than as a doctor," he said. "And——"

But I have told you enough till next mail, Berthalina. By that time, perhaps, you will have prepared yourself for the rest of what he said to me, and what I answered.

I wonder if you will think I have been a sensible and self-restrained woman all my life to act like a rash, precipitate fool in the finish?

I wonder!



AUNTIE

"And now, pray, what are you gnashing your teeth about? You never rested until I'd made Auntie promise to stay with us. I didn't wish for her; she didn't wish to come; but, as she's here, the least we can do is to behave decently to her."

"Who said we shouldn't behave decently to her?"

"Well, to see you standing there cursing and gnashing your teeth while you brush your hair!"

"I don't curse, or gnash my teeth, or even brush my hair in public, do I?"

"Oh, of course, it's the wife who has the monopoly of all such pleasing demonstrations!" the wife said. Then she pushed her arms through the short sleeves of the blouse she was going to wear, in honour of Auntie, at dinner that night, and presented her back to Augustus Mellish in order that he might perform a husband's part and fasten the garment.

"You, who have never been in her delightful home at Surbiton, don't know the luxurious sort of life Auntie leads," Mrs Mellish went on. "Travels with her maid, generally; but I told her we could not put her up. Keeps four servants; never does a thing for herself, but is pampered and made much of in every way. Money, of course. There isn't anything in Auntie to call forth all that devotion."

"Money is a useful thing," the husband said. "I wish your infernal dressmaker wouldn't make your things so tight. That's the second nail I've broken, confound it!"

"Gnashing again! If I were to swear and go on in that ridiculous way over every little thing I do for you, I wonder what you'd think of it! Brushing your hats, ironing your ties, putting your trousers into stretchers—and if I ask you to fasten a few buttons, you blaspheme. If you had the worries on your shoulders I have on mine! Cook's in one of her tempers to-day, just because I was anxious for things to go without a hitch, for Auntie. There's a piece of salmon, at half-a-crown a pound, bought because Auntie would think just nothing of the price, and is all the year round accustomed to salmon; cook is certain to send it in bleeding or to boil it to a rag. You, at your office all day long, with nothing to think about, and when you come home everything running on oiled wheels——"

"Oh, I've heard all that before. My life is all perfect joy, according to you," Augustus said. And in such inspiring intercourse the Mellishes passed the few minutes of their tete-a-tete.

In the drawing-room, Auntie awaited them: a large, matronly-looking spinster, with a heavy face and frame, a non-intelligential gaze from dull brown eyes. Not a promising visitor, from a social point of view. She was expensively attired, her garments rustling richly when she moved. Her dark hair was fashionably piled on the top of her head.

She sat in a chair farthest from the window which she regarded distrustfully, it being slightly open. In the railway carriage coming down she had felt sure there was a draught, and now her neck was a little stiff.

She thought slightingly of Grace's drawing-room; indeed, the whole establishment wore a paltry air, to her thinking, who had a predilection for the ornately massive in style. But if Grace had been foolish enough to marry a lawyer, in a town already too full of lawyers, and he young, and with his way to make, what could she expect? Alfred's daughter should surely have done better than that, Auntie said to herself.

Still, later on, she was bound to admit that the lawyer and his wife did their best to make her comfortable, and showed her every attention. Augustus, or Gussie, as Grace instructed her to call him, seemed an agreeable person, although no one could consider him a good-looking one—not half good-looking enough for Grace, who had been considered a beauty. So black he was about the shaven portion of his face, his close-cropped hair, and great eyes, so white everywhere else. Auntie, who associated health with a brick-red complexion like her own, decided that he could not be a strong man. She spoke to her niece about him after dinner.

"He's chalk-white," she said.

Grace was not at all alarmed for her husband's health. "He's always like that," she said. "He's never had a day's illness. I do hope you and Gussie will like each other, Auntie. I can tell you, he's bent on pleasing you."

"He seemed agreeable," Auntie said. "Has he got nerves?" she asked.

"Nerves!" repeated Grace, opening her eyes. "Dear, no! Only like other people's. Why?"

"I only asked the question," Auntie said. "When he isn't talking or eating, his mouth still works; and when he smiles he shows his gums. I thought it was nerves."

"Oh, that's just a habit he's got. He only does it when strangers are present."

"I hope Henry won't catch it," Auntie said. "Children are imitative."

"No fear about Henry. Henry takes after me—colour and all," Mrs Mellish said. She was a brown-haired woman, with cheeks like a damask rose, and Henry was the only child of the house, and was away at a boarding-school.

During the evening a neighbour and his wife came in. He and she and the two ladies played bridge, while Gussie looked on or fidgeted aimlessly about the room, taking up and putting down again books and papers, looking into empty ornamental jars, continually comparing his own watch with the drawing-room clock.

"To tell you the truth, he always goes out in the evening," Grace informed Auntie, while seeing her to her bedroom. "He has his club, you know. They play rather high. I don't think he cares for our careful little game. If you don't mind, I think I shall tell him to go there to-morrow night. He does worry me so when he prowls about the drawing-room."

"Let him go, by all means. I don't mind at all," Auntie acquiesced.

"I knew she'd win. They always do, when they've money, and don't want to," Mellish said to his wife, talking over the evening's game. "Played threepence a hundred, didn't she?"

"Isn't it mean of her!" Grace said. "With a purse full of sovereigns—for I saw them when she gave it to me to pay the cab—and thirty more, she told me, in her jewel-case. By the way, the servants asked for their wages again to-day, Gussie."

"Oh, I daresay! Ask your aunt to pay them."

"I should like to see myself stooping to ask such a thing of Auntie!"

"You don't mind stooping to ask money of me every time you open your mouth."

"I wonder you can dare to say it! I haven't had a penny from you, for a week. I hadn't even the half-crown to buy the child the new paint-box he wrote for."

"Henry? Does he want a paint-box? He shall have it, poor little chap. I will see about it tomorrow."

* * * * *

"Once he's gone to the office, don't you see him any more, all day?" Auntie asked, as the front door closed on the master of the house, next morning.

"Not till dinner. He has a biscuit for his lunch, or goes without it. He isn't a man to care for food at any time."

"No. He isn't what I call a restful man," Auntie said, and spread herself more at her ease in her chair. "He isn't one, I should say, to enjoy the comforts of home."

"Oh, as for that, I don't care for a man always in your way among the chairs and tables," Mrs Mellish said. "Gussie isn't a woman's man, you see, Auntie. He's about as clever as they're made, Gussie is; and when they're like that they're men's men; and I like them better so."

Grace's red cheeks were redder. She was a quick-tempered, high-spirited young woman. "Hands off! he's mine," her manner, more than her words, said to Auntie, who would have liked to listen to a few wifely confidences as she and her niece sat tete-a-tete through the long morning.

* * * * *

They lived in a provincial town, and on the second night of Auntie's stay they went to the theatre, at which a London company happened to be performing.

Grace loved the play, and was in high spirits, making an extra toilette for the occasion. She was not half through it when her husband, who had hurried over his dressing, left her and went downstairs. He had heard Auntie, who was always too early for everything, and made a merit of it, leave her room. He found her in the drawing-room, pulling a pair of long white gloves over her large hands and arms.

"I have been stupid enough to leave myself short of cash," Mellish said, beginning lightly at once, almost before he had closed the door behind him. "I wonder if you could oblige me, Auntie, with a few pounds for a couple of days? Say ten or fifteen? Just to carry me on till my money-ship comes in."

Auntie, working on her tight gloves, looked at him; his tone was carefully careless, but his face, which she had called chalk-white, was surely whiter yet. His question being asked, his lips still moved.

"How Grace can bear to sit opposite to him at meals every day, I don't know!" Auntie said to herself. "He gives me the creeps."

She drew in her lower lip loosely beneath her teeth, her gaze grew blanker; never a clever-looking woman, now she looked a fool. Slowly she shook her head.

"No. I am afraid I can't," she said. "I'm afraid I can't spare it. I only brought as much as I should want to get me back home again."

There was a minute's unbroken silence. Gussie's smile, always so pronounced, spread across his gums till his face looked as if it were cut in two.

"I can let you have half a sovereign," Aunty suggested.

"Oh, thank you; it's of no consequence," Gussie said, making a gesture of refusal. He walked about the room as if hurriedly seeking for something he never found.

Auntie, with her unintelligent gaze divided between his movements and the glove which so reluctantly covered her arm, offered a tardy explanation.

"I never lend money," she said. "It was my father's dying request that I never should. I owe it to him to regard it."

"Quite so; of course," Gussie said. "The matter just came into my head. I merely mentioned it. Pray don't give it a thought."

As they drove to the theatre, Auntie remarked that she should insist on paying for her ticket and her share of the cab, a suggestion at which Gussie and Grace were hospitably offended. She asked, then, if the house was safe, left with only the maid-servants to protect it. In order to reassure her, Augustus informed her that he was intending to go home once in the course of the evening to make sure that things were all right.

"Not that it matters to me," Auntie told him; "for I have brought my valuables with me—jewellery and money, too. I always take them with me, in strange places. I could never enjoy the play if my mind were not at rest. I wear a bag concealed in the skirt of my dress on purpose."

"Ah! I wish I could make Grace as thoughtful!" Gussie said.

"Give me Auntie's money and jewels, then see!" Grace cried.

"And I suppose you go to bed with them, too?" Gussie admiringly inquired. "Grace has never so much as carried up the plate-basket."

He was quite right. Auntie did go to bed with them, always putting the bag containing them under her pillow.

"A wise precaution!" said Gussie.

"I'm a heavy sleeper," Auntie explained. "A robber might break in and take my property, and I never hear him; but let him touch the pillow beneath my head, and I'm wide awake on the moment."

"Yes, but—" said Augustus Mellish, and smiled, "a few drops of chloroform on a handkerchief held over your face, Auntie, and where would you and your jewellery be then?"

They were at the theatre, by that time, and Auntie did not answer. But when she went to bed that night she thought of what Grace's husband had said. She had a little difficulty with breathing, being a stout woman, and a horror of suffocation. The idea of that handkerchief held over her face was terrible. She loved her money and her jewels, but loved more her comfort and her life.

"Once they stopped my breath, I should never wake up again!" she said to herself; and, deciding to alter her usual procedure, she returned her treasure from the bag hidden in her skirts to her jewel-case.

The play had been a moving one. Grace, very susceptible to emotion, had laughed and cried beside her; but Auntie was a phlegmatic person. The comedy was just make-believe. She thought more, as she undressed, of Augustus's request for a loan than of the heart-stirring episodes of the drama. She had been wise not to begin lending him money, but to say at once, straight out, "No." He had asked for only a few pounds; if she had given them, he would have gone on to ask for more, in all probability. Auntie liked Grace well enough, rather better than most people, perhaps; but Grace had pleased herself in getting married; the man she had taken must keep her. He had no claim on Grace's Auntie.

With such thoughts in her mind, as soon as her head touched the pillow, she slept.

She awoke with a sickly, suffocating smell in her nostrils; and her eyes opened wide upon a face bent above her own. She had slept with a small lamp burning beside her, and by its dim light it seemed to her that the face was black.

As she gazed, the face receded. Its owner drew backwards, pulling one empty hand from beneath her pillow. The other hand held the handkerchief whose odour she had felt upon mouth and nostrils.

Auntie flew up in bed. "Burglar!" she cried.

It was the only word spoken between them. The whole incident was over in a half-minute. By the time that epithet had burst without volition from her lips the robber, with his black-veiled face, had slunk to the door and was gone.

With an agility she had not displayed since girlhood, Auntie sprang from the bed, and, clutching the bag containing her money and jewels, furiously rang the bell.

Mrs Mellish, in her nightgown, came running into the room.

"Oh, Auntie! Are you ill? Are you on fire?" she cried.

The stout lady, strengthless and breathless, was lying in a chair, the jewel-case clasped laxly with one arm.

"A robber has been here," she gasped. "A robber, with black on his face, and a chloroformed handkerchief."

"Oh, Auntie! Auntie! Never!"

"Where is your husband? Is he in your room?"

No. For Augustus, ever a restless sleeper, had thought he heard something stirring in the room beneath, and, later, a footstep on the stair. He had risen, therefore, had taken the pistol, which always lay loaded by his side, and gone down to investigate.

Auntie opened her mouth to speak, but closed it without a sound; her eyes, with their most vacant stare, were turned upon her niece; she gathered her underlip loosely beneath her teeth.

It was not until the servants, also aroused by the bell, but having waited to dress, came to Auntie's room, that Mrs Mellish was at liberty to run down to seek her husband.

There was no doubt about the house having been entered, she said, on her return; Auntie had by no means dreamt the burglar.

("No!" interpolated Auntie, with a solemnly emphatic shake of the head.)

A window broken in the kitchen, and a wide-open sash had showed the exploring Gussie the means of ingress. In the dining-room it was evident that a couple of glasses of brandy had been drunk, but none of the silver on the sideboard had been touched. Too clearly, Auntie and her possessions had been the objects of the attempt.

Auntie nodded gloomy affirmation, trembling and gasping in her chair. Where was Gussie, she asked; and showed relief and satisfaction when told he had gone to give notice of the affair to the police. But not even the promise that the servants and Grace would sit beside her and watch her while she slept would induce the poor lady to go to bed again.

"Not in this house. Never again in this house," she protested.

And even when morning brought a cessation of panic and a certain sense of security to all, she could not be persuaded to change her mind.

"I should die if I ever trusted myself to fall asleep under this roof again," she said. "Let me get away from it as soon as possible. I am fifty years of age, but I've never had a bad shock before in my life. I won't risk a second."

The swarthy, fat, foolish face was pale and flabby and aged from the night's adventure and the sleepless hours following.

"Auntie, I am sure you are not well enough to travel," Grace said. But, with a grim determination, Auntie persisted.

"The first train. I should like to get away by the very first."

"It isn't our fault, remember," Grace said, firing up. "It isn't as if we arranged a burglary for you, Auntie."

There was a train at 10.15 a.m., and of this Auntie would avail herself.

No policeman came to the house. Augustus did not return.

"He and the detectives have got on a track, and are following it up," his wife said. "Trust Gussie!"

When the ladies were about to sit down to breakfast, and still the master of the house had not returned, Grace was a little surprised. The neighbour who had played bridge with them came in. He had heard of the burglary, and was come to offer assistance, he said. He picked up a couple of newspapers lying by Mr Mellish's empty plate.

"You let those alone! Gussie hasn't seen them yet," Gussie's wife said. The Mellishes were on terms of great intimacy with the neighbour.

"I'll take them, all the same," he laughed. "Send Gus to me for them if he wants them."

"I tell you what! I think I'll just 'phone up to the office to see if Gussie's there," Grace said. "I don't see the fun of being kept in the dark like this. I should like to know what's going on, and if they've caught anyone."

The face of the friendly neighbour changed as she disappeared to carry out this intention. He walked close to Auntie and whispered in her ear:

"Don't let her get hold of a newspaper," he said. "There's disagreeable news. I heard it last night. Mellish has got into a scrape—forgery, they say. I hope to heaven he's got away—H-s-s-sh!"

There was no need of the caution. Auntie, with the grand talent for silence which distinguished her, sat with a sucked-in lip looking heavily after the retreating neighbour, when Grace returned. Grace, bright and pretty in her neat morning blouse, made a laughing dash at the papers in the neighbour's hand. He flourished them a moment above her head and retired.

"Gussie's not at the office," Mrs Mellish said. "He's on the track of your burglar, Auntie, you bet. He'll catch him, too! You'll be wanted to identify him; could you swear to him, do you think?"

Auntie very hurriedly declared her inability to do this. "All the upper part of his face was covered," she said.

But she thought of a black-shaved chin below the mask, and a jaw that had worked silently, in a way of late familiar to her; and she found herself quite unable to do justice to her niece's eggs and bacon.

* * * * *

At the door of the first-class railway compartment by which Auntie was to travel Grace stood.

"Gussie will be furious when he comes back and finds you gone," she said. "He'll catch the man, to the deadest certainty. He's got the brains of the whole police force in his own head. You should have stayed to enjoy the excitement."

Auntie, whitened and flabby-looking under her smart violet toque, reiterated the statement that she could not have stayed another night.

"It's been a great shock. I feel as if I might never recover from it; and I wish with all my heart I had never come," she said.

"Well, since you wish it, I wish it, too," Grace retorted, kindling. "We must console ourselves that it has not been for long, and try to forget all about it."

"I shall be glad to be back in my own home," Auntie said.

She looked so changed from the well-satisfied, prosperous Auntie whom Grace had welcomed to her home two days before, that Mrs Mellish's resentment faded as she regarded her.

"You are sure you like best to travel alone?" she asked her, with anxious kindness.

Yes. Auntie preferred her own company. If a man got in at any of the stations, she said, so upset were her nerves, she would certainly be ill with the fright.

So Mrs Mellish found the guard and intimated to him that the lady wished to be undisturbed. Auntie stopped him when, in his officious zeal, he was about to lock the carriage door.

"I can't bear the feeling of being locked in," she said. "It makes me lose my breath."

She leaned out of the window, and kissed her niece with more demonstrativeness than was her custom. "You know my address if you—want anything. Good-bye," she said.

"Good-bye," Grace said, and shook a hand at the window. "Don't forget to eat your sandwiches—you had no breakfast, you know. You've got some brandy-and-water in your flask, remember. Take care of yourself. Good-bye."

"Silly old goose! Making such a fuss, at her age!" she said to herself as she walked away. "Well, after all, it's a relief she's gone. I'm sure I never wanted her. It was Gussie's idea, not mine."

Evidently the story of the burglary had got about. Mrs Mellish noticed several people turning to look at her with unwonted interest as she walked along.

On inquiring of the servants, she found the master had not returned.

On his dressing-table, as she took off her hat, she noticed a neat little oblong parcel lying. It was addressed in Augustus's writing, "To my darling Henry, with all his father's love."

Grace smiled to herself. "Gussie remembered the paint-box," she said. "He never forgets the boy."

She took the little parcel, and posted it to her son.

As the train sped on, Auntie, expanding herself in her corner, felt a revival of health and spirits.

She had escaped, thanks be to God. But for her mercifully awakening before the chloroform had taken effect, she would at the present moment be lying a corpse on the visitors' bed of her niece's house, done to death by her niece's husband. Once under the chloroform—she was certain of it—she could not have revived.

She could not endure to think of the house in which she had been attacked, and on which she had now mercifully been permitted to turn her back. The sun had shone brightly within its spotless windows this morning; fresh flowers had decked the breakfast-table; a neat servant had brought in the coffee. Grace, at her end of the table, pretty and rosy and young, had talked away, only pleasantly excited by the night's adventure, in her quick, alert manner. And over it all was hanging this cloud of ruin, horror, disgrace! Let Auntie banish the ever-recurring picture, if possible, from her mind. Surely she had done well to get away!

But as the train sped on, Grace's image, pretty, brisk, capable, floated persistently before her eyes. She heard her quick speech, her laugh. She was Auntie's own flesh and blood—Alfred's daughter. Some people, who did not appreciate how keenly she felt discomfort, and how dreadfully anything at all unpleasant upset her, might say she should have stayed at Grace's side, and not left her alone to face what was coming: they might say it to each other, that is. No one had the right to censure Auntie.

"What good could I do? I should only have been in the way," she said; "best to keep out of it all."

The train sped on. At every station the attentive guard walked by, turned an observant eye, touched his cap. The old girl was good for two-and-six at the journey's end, perhaps; also, perhaps, she would thank him and give him nothing. A guard can never be sure. Still—!

How could Grace, who had been such a nice bright little girl, and who used to go to Auntie for her holidays, years ago, and give very little trouble, considering, have tied herself to that mouthing black and white man, with his restless little shaking hands, endlessly fidgeting? When she partook of a late supper Auntie sometimes had bad dreams, and awoke with her heart beating into her mouth. She knew what her nightmare would be for the future!

There were Grace's sandwiches. To divert her thoughts she took the little packet from the bag which held her money and jewels, and drew out also her silver flask. Years ago her doctor had told her never to travel without a little brandy. She looked at the sandwiches, unscrewed the flask, but found sight and scent to be enough that morning, and put both aside.

It had seemed a long journey, but now London was near. They stopped at Broxbourne. Auntie was not quite sure if this station they flew by was Ponder's End or Angel Road; she put her head out of the window to try to catch the name on the lamps and benches, failed to do so, and lay back again in her corner.

What was that? A stirring, a bulging outward of the valances of the opposite seat. Something was emerging. A man. Dragging himself forth on his stomach, gathering himself up to his hands and knees, rising to his full height, collapsing, a dusty, degraded bundle of clothes, in the further corner of the carriage.

"Guard!" shrieked Auntie. "Gua——!"

The word died on her stiff blue lips. She, too, collapsed in her corner, and lay stonily staring at the face staring back at her: a face with desperation in its hunted eyes, with black chin, and chalk-white cheek and brow, and a mouth restlessly mumbling with no sound.

Beside the man, on the flat-topped division of the seat, a pistol lay; but the fingers of the small white hand which held it were nerveless. In his bearing was no menace—only the unstrung droop of despair.

So they faced each other without a word—the man and woman who for the last two days had played the roles of attentive host and gratified guest.

And the train sped on. Away from the sunny little house, the dainty, capable housewife, the security, the shelter, the heaven of home; away from peace and guiltlessness; away from a life in which the "gnat-like buzzings of little cares" had once been its heaviest burden, to a life in death of danger, of degradation, of bottomless despair.

As the train slackened speed for the next station, the man arose, dropped the pistol in his pocket; his hand stole out to the handle of the door. Cautiously he looked forth over flat landscape of building site, of brickfield, of the huge tanks and lush vegetation of sewage farms. Gently he pushed the door a little open, and, holding it, paused, as more slowly, slower still the train sped on.

There was a shrinking touch upon his arm, and Auntie, livid, heavily breathing, pointed to the silver flask filled with brandy, to the parcel of sandwiches Grace had cut for her, chatting happily the while, that morning. The man took them without a word, and pushed them in the pocket of his coat.

The train was slackening still. Auntie grasped her bag, with weak, half-paralysed fingers drew out the bag of money and jewels for which the man had groped last night beneath her pillow, put it in his hand. There came a sound in Augustus Mellish's throat that might have been a sob or a strangled word; then the door opened wider; a moment, and he had slipped from sight.

The station was passed, and the train sped on, bearing Auntie, sole occupant of the carriage, her journey nearly done.

At St Pancras the guard, the chances of half-crown or no half-crown still agitating his mind, came to the door of the first-class carriage he had taken under his special supervision. He touched his cap with a smile expressive of felicitation that, thanks to his unremitting care, the lady had reached the end of her travels undisturbed and in peace from intrusion.

But Auntie was lying back in her corner, dead.



WILLY AND I

When we were little—Willy and I—oh, such a weary long year ago!—we lived in a big house, in a wide, quiet street in the old town of Norwich. Now, although the house was so big, there was allotted to it only a small square of garden; a garden exquisitely kept and fostered; a garden to smell the roses in, blushing on their neat rows of standards; to walk in, holding father's or mother's hand; even, wondrous treat! to take our tea in, sometimes, sitting demurely, we two, with a couple of dolls and a few lead soldiers from Willy's last new box for company, at the little round table whose root was buried deep in the ground beneath the red may-tree. A garden for such mild pleasures, but not for play. A garden that was the delight of our city-bred father, who protected the sprouting mignonette seeds from depredations of snail and slug, who trained with tenderest care the slenderest shoots of sweet-pea and canariense, who tied and pruned and watered with his own hands when office hours were over. A broken toy would have been as great an offence in that treasured spot as a stray cat; a little footmark on the verbena bed, a kicked-up stone on the gravel walk, were punishable offences. No room for us two children there.

And so, besides the nursery where our toys and books were kept and where our soberer hours were passed, there was given up to our use at the top of the house a large attic, which was called our play-room.

It is quite desirable for children to run wild at times, it is good for them to shout, to scream, to jump, to ramp—good for girls as well as boys. And if you girls who read this have not a big garden where you may do these things unmolested, I counsel you to demand respectfully of your parents a play-room such as was this of ours. I don't for a minute advise you to copy Willy and me in aught—for we were often and often a naughty pair—I only suggest that your parents should copy ours in making over to you an empty room.

We had not many toys there. On looking back I think we spent our time mostly in struggles on the floor, rolling over and over each other with screams and shouts; with roarings as of wild animals emphasising the fact that we were not Willy and his little sister Polly, but a great large lion and a huge black bear in mortal combat. We played at French and English too. It takes a lot of yelling from lusty lungs, a lot of stamping and jumping on hollow boards, for one little girl to represent at all adequately a mighty and victorious army. Of Willy, as not only his countless followers but as Napoleon at their head, a good deal was also required. With all our vigour, we were only ordinary flesh and blood and we always grew tired at last, and then we sat down quietly upon the floor and looked through our closed window at the window opposite.

There was only a narrow passage between our house and the next; walking through it with outstretched arms you could touch the house walls on either side. Unless you leaned quite out of the window, so high up were we, you could not see the little dark-paved court beneath; and a close wire screen covering the window was believed to prevent the possibility of our looking out at all. But Willy, to whose bold, adventurous spirit I felt my own but a feeble companion, had contrived with his pocket-knife to undo the four screws which attached the wooden framework of the screen to the window-frame. So that the obstacle being at will removed, and I holding desperately to his knickerbockered legs, the boy could look out upon the black pavement beneath, or drop a marble from his pocket upon the head of a passer-by.

It was not the dark passage, however, which as a rule claimed our attention, but the window exactly opposite our own. We could see quite plainly into the room, and its occupant could see into ours.

This was a small young man with a pale face. So much I remember of him; and the fact that the sight of prominent dark eyes and a runaway chin always recalls to me this episode in my childhood's career, inclines me to believe that that conformation of features was his.

The room had been empty like our own till one day a bed had been set up in it, and a chair and a washstand; and after that the young man had appeared.

"It isn't his play-room, it's his bedroom; he's another lodger at Miller's," Willy informed me.

When we were not at play we used to sit at the window and watch him. He did not go to an office, like our father. He seemed to have nothing to do. Sometimes he stood before the window and looked across at us, but oftenest he lay on his back on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

"I should jolly well like to have my bedroom up here, and never take off my clothes when I go to bed," Willy said, enviously.

It is curious to remember what a new interest that silent watcher of us gave to our gambols. It was with one eye on the pale young man at the window that I marched to the tune of Old Bob Ridley on the field of Waterloo; and Willy became so painfully realistic in giving me my quietus, when I lay dying and at his mercy after the battle, that I had to turn on my face and cry secretly, he hurt me so.

One day—a very sunshiny day, I remember, the sky above our neighbour's roof was a bright blue—we were holding a lively representation of a circus we had visited the day before. Willy, with the carriage whip brought up from the hall, took the place of the gentleman in the ring, while I as the piebald palfrey galloped on all fours spiritedly round the place, or pranced proudly on my hind legs, to command. We were spurred on to more vivacious action by the knowledge that our neighbour had opened his window wide, and was standing before it. When we tired of our equestrian performances, and took up our position opposite him, he, for the first time, nodded and smiled at us, and presently motioned to us to throw up our window likewise.

Proud and pleased at this mark of attention, we speedily tore down the screen, and, both of us going to work together in our eagerness, flung the window wide.

"Nothing like being friendly with your neighbours," the young man said. "You seem pretty lively across there—how do you do?"

We said, both at once, that we were quite well, thank you; that this was our play-room; and we asked him how he liked being a lodger. We asked him many things, besides. Was he ill, or only very tired, that he lay on his bed so much? Did he have his dinner up there, or did he go down to get it as we did? Did he eat what he liked, or what Miss Miller liked to give him? Was he fond of Miss Miller? We hated her because once she had seen Willy leaning out of the window and had told father, who had had the horrid screen put up.

I don't remember what answers he made to all these questions, piped forth in eager little voices, whose words tripped each other up in their hurry, but I know he said he thought the screen a babyish contrivance and advised us, now we had taken it down, not to put it back again. I reminded Willy that father would be very cross if we did not, and Willy reminded me that father being out for two nights, that didn't matter. We cautioned our neighbour not to let Miss Miller know the window was open or she would be at her tale-telling again, and he, on his part, advised our keeping the fact of his being now such friends with us secret from the servants. He hated servants, he told us, as much as Miss Miller; and Willy admitted that ours were certainly sneaks and not to be trusted. I told him that Willy and I often had secrets, and volunteered the information that I had once kept one from mother for two whole nights!

He should think we were very lonely with father and mother away, and only cats of servants left to us, he said; and asked what we should like best in the world to play with.

We both with one breath cried "a kitten;" because that was the one coveted treasure which had been persistently denied us hitherto.

Then he said that he most fortunately happened to possess the sweetest kitten in all the world, of which he would be happy to make us a present; and Willy said, in deep-toned satisfaction, "would he really, though?" and I got on my feet to jump for joy.

It was just then that nurse's voice came calling us to say good-bye to our father and mother. So we slammed down the window in our new friend's face, and pushed the screen back into position, and, bursting with our secret, Willy and I went galloping down the stairs.

Oh, those uncarpeted, twisting stairs! Now that Willy and I have "grown up and gone away," do they creak gaily beneath the happy feet of children still, I wonder, or only groan with the heavy tread of sober grown-ups? Often and often now, while

"In the elders' seat Resting with quiet feet,"

I fall asleep and dream I come to the foot of those enchanted stairs, where for my little companion and me stupid law and irksome restraint ceased, and the liberty we craved began. Then, once more, Willy and I, whose hands will never meet again on earth, mount hand in hand to the region we loved.

We drove with our father and mother to the station, and, coming back, found we had the tiresome formality of our nursery tea to get through before we were free to make tracks for our happy hunting-ground above.

The young man was waiting there, before his open window, his hands in his trousers-pockets. We tore down the screen, flung up our own window. "Have you got it?" we called to him, breathlessly. "Is it there? The kitten?"

It was in his coat-pocket; a little sandy kitten which trembled exceedingly through all its fluffy fur, and piteously mewed. He held it forth to us, finger and thumb about its tiny neck, across the narrow way; but stretch as far as we could we could not reach it. Willy undertook to catch it if it were thrown, but the young man said that for worlds he would not endanger the life of the kitten, and I implored him to run no risks.

"What is that standing up by the side of your bed?" Willy asked him, pointing. "It was not there before—that long board?"

It was a plank, the young man informed us. He was going to make it into a box. He was a carpenter by trade. Didn't we know it?

We told him no, and artlessly informed him we had thought he was a gentleman, assuring him politely at the same time we were glad he was not.

Then Willy suggested that the plank should bridge the space from his room to ours, and that the kitten should be induced to walk on it.

The young man welcomed the idea as an excellent one, but feared when Kitty saw the great depth below she might turn giddy and fall. Done in the dark, now, she would not see, nor have any fear.

But nurse made us go to bed before dark we told him, and we so longed for the precious kitten.

We should know it would be there, he said. Leave the screen down, and the window open all night, and we should know it would be there, and could bring it its breakfast, the first thing in the morning.

With this prospect we were obliged to be content; but although at present, separated from our new treasure, we stayed in its neighbourhood as long as we could, learning from the obliging young man many wrinkles for the education and upbringing of the kitten, which would have to live in the play-room, its bread and milk obtained by cunning and subterfuge from under nurse's nose.

Inexpressibly I longed to have the little thing in my possession; for with its present owner, despite his love for it, it seemed less happy than I could wish—stowed away, heedless of its feelings, in his coat-pocket, or exposed on the narrow window-ledge, where it shivered, and mewed, and squeezed up to shelter, in an agony of terror lest it might fall.

We stayed with it until we were called to bed, but it was not of the kitten alone we talked. It gave us much pleasure to find what interest our new friend took in us. He even troubled to inquire where, exactly, in our house, which was built like Miss Miller's, did we sleep—how near to mother's room, how far from the servants? As you went up from the back passage to the great square front landing, our mother's door was the one that faced you—he knew that—

We laughed, and told him no, and cried out in our new delightful friendliness how stupid he was! That was our nursery door, and then came our night nursery, and then mother's, and—so on.

It was with much reluctance we tore ourselves away when nurse called; the wind from the open window blew chill upon us as we nodded good-bye to our friend. He waved the mewing kitten to us in farewell. It protested loudly, its little fluffy hind legs clawing despairingly at the empty air.

* * * * *

In the afternoon of the next day our parents were home again, brought back by a telegram which told them that their house had been robbed, the strong box in our mother's room broken open, and all the easily portable articles of plate taken from the housemaid's pantry.

We had policemen in the house, all the morning, policemen were closeted with our father when he came home. Willy, in a suddenly disorganised household, free from nursery rule, trotted about, proud of his courage in thus daring, at a policeman's heels. Now and again, I would hear him coming at a rush upstairs to report progress to me, who would not leave the play-room.

All the bars of the doors and shutters were untouched. The thief must have been let into the house, the policeman said; and our father, who trusted all his servants, was furious with the policeman.

A policeman wasn't a man to be afraid of when you knew him; why wouldn't I come and see this one? He—Willy, quite a hero that morning—would take care of me.

Then away, with excited face and flying feet, downstairs again. And presently, a quieter step upon the stairs—a step I knew well then, hear often in the lonely silence now, shall surely know amid the sound of all the myriad feet that tread the golden floor when I hear it again—and my mother was in the room.

"Where is my little girl, and what is she hiding away for? And what have you got in your lap, and why are you crying, Polly?" she asked.

Then she turned back my little skirt which hid it, and there was the kitten; sobbing wildly, I flew up and pushed it into her arms.

"The man—the man at the window—promised it," I cried, incoherently. "And I wanted it because it was so unhappy—and we left the window open—and I loved it so. And it had to walk the plank—and Willy and me thought it was asleep, and I picked it up—and it was dead."

Soon, lying with the dead kitten in her arms, I had sobbed out something of the story. "It is a secret—a secret," I told her, wildly; "don't let Willy and the man at the window know I told!"

She carried me away, before the policeman and my father had mounted to the attic. It was Willy, shaken and frightened now, who had to tell the story of the unscrewed screen, the open window, the plank laid across.

They said it was the young man at the window who came over on the plank, sitting on it and pulling himself along; they said he brought the kitten, as he had promised, having first choked the life out of it lest it should mew, and wake the house. They said that when they caught the robber, Willy and I would have to go and look at him and say, "That is the man." We used to lie shaking in our beds at night, dreading the hour when we should be called on to do this duty.

But they never got the jewellery back, they never caught the robber.

As time went on, Willy, who was always brave for his age, grew braver, and would often declare he, if policemen were present, and the robber in hand-cuffs, would not be afraid to look upon him; but be sure that I, who thought of the murdered kitten, had never a wish to see the young man with the prominent black eyes and the runaway chin again.

* * * * *

I made a pilgrimage to that wide street the other day, and stopped before that big old house where we two had lived as children, where I had played so contentedly second fiddle to Willy. Willy, who was so eager to act the leading part, so determined to enjoy, to do, to conquer; Willy

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is that his grave is green!"

I stepped into the narrow passage between the two houses, and looking up, saw that the present neighbours, friendlily inclined, had slung a rope across from window to window, upon which towels hung to dry. I could see only the projecting ledge of the window through which our little faces used to peep and the projecting ledge of that upon which the kitten had shivered and mewed. But I looked long at these, and at the tiny slip of blue sky above, and then came home and wrote this story.



A BROKEN BOOT

"Oh, the insufferable eyes of these poor might-have-beens."

Every morning of the spring and early summer he had walked down that sun- and shadow-flecked suburban road, and rested on that particular iron chair. The butcher's and fishmonger's boys going their rounds, the policeman on his beat, the postman wearily footing it, the daily governess returning from her morning's occupation, had become used to his appearance there; and he watched each one going upon his or her business, wistful-eyed.

To-day, on one of the chairs planted by the thoughtfulness of the ever-solicitous Town Council at intervals along the road, a tramp had also placed himself. He was a tramp of a dirty and unprepossessing appearance, and having cast a sidelong glance at the well-dressed, handsome, and distinguished-looking young man beside him, he had begun in hoarse, faint tones to beg of him. The voice was evidently that of a hungry man; but to the appeal no response was made, unless there was reply of a sort in a painfully crimsoning cheek and an averted gaze. The tramp pointed to his feet, the ragged boots grey with dust of weary miles, the naked toe peeping through. The gentleman faintly shook the head that he continued to hold aside. With an effort the tramp got upon his feet.

"D—n you!" he said. "May your belly go as empty as mine. May hell-fire blister your feet as mine are blistered!"

The man left alone upon the iron bench looked after the tramp shuffling painfully away, with no anger or condemnation in his eyes, only a submissive sadness.

"Poor devil!" he said. "Poor devil! What a beast I must seem to him."

Once again his fingers, hopeless as his eyes, felt over the region of his coat and waistcoat-pockets, wandered nervelessly to his trousers-pockets—empty all! How many a time had they flown there in the last few weeks to make the same discovery—a discovery causing a shock at first, surprise, incredulity, anger; of late, mechanically only, quite hopelessly.

And only a short time ago his pockets had been so well lined! He had been in debt, it is true, but money had been forthcoming for who cared to take. No beggar, however "professional," however visibly lying, had ever asked of him in vain. He had squandered, in a society his father's son should never have known, the fortune his father had left him; his extravagance had been mad, his self-indulgence unlimited; but it must be told of him that the occasion on which he most bitterly felt his present poverty was such an one as this. He missed so much—all that made life worth living in that foolish whirl "from gilded bar to gilded bar" which was all his manhood's experience: his credit at his tailor's, the cigars he had smoked and given away, his daily games of billiards (the one thing at which he had excelled in all his wasted life was billiards, his fingers sometimes itched with the longing to feel the cue in his hand again), all the thousand extravagances of such a young man's day. But up to the present it was this alone which made poverty intolerable,—the having to refuse when Want asked of him.

He watched the tramp hobbling painfully into the distance, and in his pale blue eyes came that pricking which is of tears.

"His blistered feet!" he said. "His blistered feet!"

And then very slowly he lifted one of his own long legs and laid it at the ankle upon the other knee, and touching his slender, high-arched foot very gingerly, he bent his head and examined his own boot.

Yes; there, sure enough, was the crack in the leather he had first discovered yesterday, and which had caused him a sleepless night. The first crack in his last pair of boots!

The lower lip of that small mouth which had been used to laugh at such foolish nothings, and which now so easily drooped to grieving, fell open as he looked. The crack was quite close to the sole and was scarcely noticeable yet, but it would take—how few days! to widen to a considerable gap! Then the people of the town in which he had been born, through which he had ridden his father's horses, and driven his father's carriages, would notice that he walked about in broken boots! To-day he had been careful to come by back ways to that favourite road whose sunshine and shadow he had run over so often as a boy; to his seat on that chair which was placed beneath the hedge of the garden in whose house he had been born.

Three months ago, when to his overwhelming astonishment it was first made clear to him that he had no longer a penny under heaven, he had gone in his bewilderment to his brother, a man whose share of the patrimony had not been squandered—had been put out to usury rather, bringing in thirty, forty, a hundredfold—a man living in luxury and holding the respect of his fellow-townsmen.

"You can come to me," the brother had said. "Eat at my table, sleep beneath my roof. I shall not turn my back upon my brother. But I shall not pay any bills for you, nor shall I allow you a farthing of money—you have shown us the use you make of money. You will find it inconvenient to be without, and I advise you therefore to get work."

So, for three months he had availed himself of his brother's hospitality, and the brother had kept his word. For three months he had crossed in the muddiest part of the street because he had feared to look the crossing-sweeper in the face, he had avoided the placarded blind man, the paralytic woman who had known him well. He carefully made detours to escape these, and the shoeblack boys with whom he had been held in high favour. As for the people of his own class—the world is not all unkind, but it is very busy, very forgetful—none remembered to seek him. He had been surrounded by associates of a sort; and he found himself quite alone.

For the first week or so he had thought it would be an easy thing to find employment; a few rebuffs where he had looked for a helping hand, a curt refusal or two, seemed to show him it was an impossibility. He had no knowledge of book-keeping, he could not take a clerkship; business men, with a mere glance at his handsome, delicate features, at the shrinking, deprecating glance of his eyes, at his white, nervous fingers, his faultless dress, decided that he was no good.

"Work? Yes. But at what can I work?" he had asked his brother at length, flushing and hesitating; for since he had been a recipient of his bounty he had become afraid of his highly-respected relatives, and of the wife who looked at him with hard eyes as he took his place at the table.

To that question no answer but a sour smile of a dragged-down lip and a shrug of the shoulder had come, followed by the reminder that there was always a crossing to sweep.

"I would rather sweep a crossing than lead the life you are leading," the brother had said.

And the other had acquiesced. It would be better, certainly; but—

For a young man of aristocratic appearance and faultlessly cut clothes to take a place at a crossing in his native town, and beg of the passers-by, some of whom would be personal friends, for coppers, requires moral courage; he had been all his life, hence his misfortunes, a moral coward.

So, of late, only spasmodically, and with a hopelessness that prepared defeat, did he make efforts to find occupation. But he was not naturally an idle man nor in all directions incompetent, and he watched the people passing to office, shop, workroom, with a gaze which had grown unspeakably wistful.

* * * * *

When the hour for the midday meal arrived, he had been wont to return to his brother's house, but to-day he had something else to do.

The road being emptied of the stream of passers-by which flowed more fully at that time, he got up and walked to the gate of the house where he had been born, and looked long within, upon the garden. It had always been a beautiful garden, full of flowering shrubs, and wide lawns, and winding, box-edged paths. Very little had it altered since to him it had seemed all the world, and he had the fancy to follow now about its sunny, shadowy ways into all its pleasant haunts, the figure of a little boy who had played there long ago.

It had been a lonely child who had played there, his only brother being too old to play, and he had gone about the garden-ways, carrying his absurd jumble of childish fancies, incredible aspirations, baby ambitions, on untiring little feet. It pleased the young man at the gate to follow him in fancy, from spot to spot, always in the sunshine, always with flowers around him, and the whisper of trees about him, and the song of birds overhead.

Leaving behind him the gay flower-beds upon which the creeper-covered house looked forth, into many a leafy nook and shrub-bound fastness the phantom little form ran happily. Where the trees grew tall and close above an undergrowth of shepherd's-parsley and blue-bell had been a favourite resort of the child's. When the eyes of the young man followed him there, and saw him stop beside the smooth trunk of a silver birch, he knew that a new knife had been given him that day, and that he was going to carve his own name upon the bark. He knew that, the task being accomplished, the child would fetch his mother, and lead her to the tree to see how deep the knife cut, and how always—always the name would be there!

Once, being tired with overmuch play, the child had fallen asleep against that tree, and had wakened to hear his mother's voice calling,—

* * * * *

The young man came back to the iron bench, his figure drooping. The lower lip had fallen open, showing the small, regular teeth. Into the face, "accustomed to refusals," into the wistful gaze of the pale blue eyes, something of awe had crept. Presently he put up his boot upon his knee, and once more his eyes fell upon the crack in the side. He moved his foot within the boot—certainly a bulging showed; by to-morrow the stocking would be seen.

To-morrow! Yes. He nodded his handsome head with eyes upon the boot and breathed the word to himself.

How long ago it seemed since this tragedy of the broken boot had befallen! Could it have been but yesterday? Was that possible?

His great need had developed his strategical powers, and accident had seemed to further his design. Quick upon the discovery, he had encountered his brother's page on his way to his brother's shoemaker, bearing that relative's shoes to be repaired. Seizing the opportunity, he had hastily divested himself of his own boot and had added that to the page's burden.

His spirits so easily arose; such a load by that simple manoeuvre had been lifted from his heart! He pushed his feet into his slippers and came whistling downstairs to lunch. He had a perfect ear, and his whistle was most melodious and sweet; the canaries in the dining-room windows awoke and joined in shrilly. His brother, standing, with sour, sarcastic face, upon the hearth, held fastidiously between finger and thumb an article which apparently it was not agreeable to him to touch.

"I met Payne taking my boots," he said; "he had managed to get hold of one of yours by mistake. I rescued it. I think we don't employ the same bootmaker."

* * * * *

The young man's cheek did not burn any longer as he recalled that incident. He felt nothing now, no anger, no bitterness. To such as he it is so easy to forgive. Forgiveness had ever flowed from him in sheer weakness. It had been the habit of his life to love and admire his brother—he loved and admired him still. He did not think that he himself would have been quite so hard on a poor devil in his place; but his brother was a strong man and he a weak one—no doubt his brother was right.

It was certain he was not a cruel man—did he not owe him the bread he ate? Had he not shed tears over the death of a dog a day or two before? The dog had been in incurable pain, and a pill which had been procured from the chemist had caused that pain instantly to cease. The master had given the order of execution, and had turned away from the gaze of the suffering brute with the waters of sensibility in his eyes.

And how quietly the dog had died! One instant in convulsions of pain, and the next still—quite still! The young man who had carried with him from childhood a great dread of death had been much impressed. After all, could it be so terrible?

Only one little pill had sufficed to produce that great change—would suffice to kill two or three dogs, the chemist had said. But the young man had brought away with him a second dose for fear of accident. As he looked with unseeing eyes at the broken boot, his finger and thumb held the second little pill securely in the corner of his waistcoat pocket.

He was afraid of death; but, as a child believes, he believed in God. Through the recklessness, the wildness, the "joyous folastries" of youth there had clung to him still the feeling that God was above him; there beyond the stars; he had felt His smile sometimes, or grown cold beneath His frown. He had not read, nor thought; nor had he listened to clever talk on the absurdities of a worn-out faith, the uselessness of an obsolete creed. His business had been with enjoying himself simply—with none of those things. Of every other foolishness on earth his lips had babbled, but not blasphemies. He had not trodden the downward path with lingering steps, he had gone precipitately to his ruin; but at least his eyes had been on the stars.

It was for this reason, perhaps, that, although he sat there, a miserable failure, driven by the heartless might of the world to the last extremity, there was yet a light upon his brow, and about his weakly-parted lips a sweetness sometimes absent from brows and lips of more admirable men.

If he went, beneath scented lime-tree, past gay-flowered border, to peep through a certain wistaria-festooned window he should see his father with pipe and book in the accustomed chair, the mother would look up from her sewing. A recollection came to him of how once in those childish years which had been so much with him of late a sudden sense of overpowering loneliness had come upon him as he played. He had rushed to that window to comfort his little soul with the sight of the familiar faces, and had found the room empty. He recalled the terror that had fallen upon him, the horror of desolation. He would not risk the shock of disillusion. He saw them quite plainly, as his eyes seemed fixed on the broken boot, but he would not disturb them. No. When the time came and he entered the gate he would not go near the house, but would make his way through the shrubbery in which the lawn ended, and would seek that wilderness which had been his playground.

The wild hyacinths were blue about the roots of the tree on which his name was cut—how low down the sprawling letters were!—the pet name by which his mother had called him. If he fell asleep with his back against the trunk she might come and call him by it again.

It was because he had not slept all night that he was so tired. He had tossed and turned, tossed and turned upon his bed, seeking in his muddled, ineffectual brain for an escape from the disgrace of the broken boot. Quite suddenly there had presented itself to him the way of escape—the only way—the way he intended to take.

The feathery leaves of the shepherd's-parsley would wave above the broken boot. He would fall so blessedly asleep—so blessedly! The dog, he remembered, had not stirred.

The present master of the wistaria-covered house was driven past him, as he sat in the roadside chair, to turn in at the familiar gate; the afternoon sun, sinking towards evening, shone on the smart phaeton, the glossy-sided horse. Lesser men walked by him briskly to their humble dwellings, little children, belated from school or at play, rushed on. He grudged to no man his success, he looked on without bitterness at the joy of life—he blamed no one, envied no one. He had gone astray somehow, and was stranded and lost; but it was without rancour, or enmity, or spite that he, a lonely outsider, watched the "flowing, flowing, flowing, of the world."

So, at length, he rose from his place, pushed open the gate, laying a tender touch upon the latch that such dear hands had pressed in days gone by. So he made his way, going with unerring step, beneath the overbranching of copper-beech, lilac, and red may, to the flower-carpeted wilderness where, with bluebells about its roots and feathery foliage waving high around its trunk, stood that silver birch-tree upon whose smooth bark he had long ago carved his name.



WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH

Ten days of honeymooning passed in a big hotel at Brighton. Ten days of feeling himself—he who, living, a man of wealth, in a small provincial town, was used to find himself talked about, looked up to, considered on every side—curiously unimportant and of no account. Then back with his bride to the imposing if somewhat gloomy-looking old house to which a dozen years ago he had brought home his first wife.