"The gentleman strained himself a bit," said the gardener, in a tone of apology to Molly. "I can't think how he come to break his chain"—he meant the dog this time. "I've said he ought to be shot long ago; now they'll believe me. Why, he bit off the porter's ear at the station when he first come, and he was half mad with rage to-day."

"I'm all right," said Edmund, with a kindly smile to the horribly distressed Molly. She went up to him with a gentle, tender anxiety on her face that betrayed a too strong feeling, only he was just faint enough not to notice it.

"It's nothing, child," he said in the fatherly tone that to Molly meant so far too much. "The merest rick. I forgot, in the hurry, to think how high I was lifting you, and I also forgot that there might be cucumber frames on the other side!"

"I wouldn't have said 'over the garden wall,' sir, if there had been," said the gardener with a smile, as he offered a glass of water that had been fetched by the other man, whose coat and gaiters proclaimed him unmistakably a keeper.

"A fine dog, poor fellow," said Edmund to the latter.

The keeper shook his head. "I don't deny it, sir, but there are fine lions and fine bears, too, sir, that are kept locked up in the Zooelogical Gardens." Evidently the gardener and the keeper were of one opinion in this matter.

Presently Sir Edmund was so clearly all right that the men, after being tipped and having all their further offers of help refused, went away.

Edmund and Molly were left alone.

"How well you run!" he said, smiling.

"Yes; even without a ferocious dog behind me I can run fairly well," she said. "But I wish you had let me get over that wall alone. And I wish they could have spared that splendid animal."

"After all, he would have been shot whether we had been there or not," said Edmund. "My only bad moment was listening for the crash of broken glass and thinking that you were cut to pieces."

"You are sure that you have not hurt yourself?" Her grey eyes were large with anxiety.

Edmund, laughing, held up his hand, which was bleeding.

"I see I have sustained a serious injury of which I was not aware in the excitement of the crisis."

Molly examined his hand with a professional air. Edmund let her wash it with her handkerchief dipped in the glass of water, and bind it with his own. Her touch was light and skilful, and it would have been absurd to refuse to let her do it. But, as holding his wrist she raised it a little higher to turn her bandage under it, her small, lithe, thin hand was close to his face, and he gave it the slightest kiss.

Any girl who had been abroad would have taken it as little more than the merest politeness, but to Molly it came as a surprise. A glow of quick, deep joy rose within her; her cheeks did not blush, for this was a feeling too peaceful, too restful for blushes or any sort of discomfort.

"This young lady can run like a deerhound," said Edmund, "and bandage like a surgeon."

"But that's about all she can do," laughed Molly. "Ah! there"—she could not quite hide the regret in her voice—"there are Lady Groombridge and Lady Rose."



CHAPTER XII

MOLLY'S NIGHT WATCH

That night Molly could write it on the tablets of her mind that she had passed a nearly perfect day. The evening had not promised to be as happy as the rest, but it had held a happy hour. Mrs. Delaport Green had made a masterly descent just in time for dinner. Molly smiled at the thought when alone in her room. A beautiful tea-gown had expressed the invalid, and was most becoming.

"Every one has been so kind, dear Lady Groombridge; really, it is a temptation to be ill in this house—everything so perfectly done."

Lady Groombridge most distinctly grunted.

"Why is toothache so peculiarly hard to bear?" She turned to Edmund Grosse.

"It wants a good deal of philosophy certainly, especially when one's face swells; but yours, fortunately, has not lost its usual outline." And he gave her a complimentary little bow.

"Oh! there you are wrong," cried the sufferer. "My face is very much swollen on one side."

But she did not mention on which side the disfigurement was to be seen, and she ate an excellent dinner and talked very brightly to her host, who could not think why his wife had taken an evident dislike to the little woman. Edmund teased her several times, and would not let her settle down into her usual state of self-content, but after dinner she wisely took refuge with the merciful Rose.

Lady Groombridge meanwhile gave Molly a dose of good advice, kindly, if a little roughly, administered.

"I was pretty and an orphan myself, and it is not very easy work; then you have money, which makes it both better and worse. Be with wise people as much as you can; if they are a little dull it is worth while. If you take up with any bright, amusing woman you meet, you will find yourself more worried in the long run;" and she glanced significantly at Mrs. Delaport Green.

The obvious nature of the advice, of which this remark is a sample, did not spoil it. Sometimes it is a comfort to have the thing said to us that we quite see for ourselves. In to-day's unwonted mood Molly was ready to receive very ordinary wisdom as golden.

And then Lady Groombridge discovered that Molly was musical, and the older woman loved music, finding in it some of the romance which was shut out by her own limitations and by a life of over great bustle and worry.

So Molly found in her music expression for her joy in the spring, and her wistful, undefined sense of hope in life.

Lady Groombridge, sitting near her, listened almost hungrily, and asked for more. She was utterly sad to-night with the "might have been" of a childless woman. The news of the final sacrifice on the part of the heir to Groombridge, of all that meant so much to herself and her husband, had made so keen to her the sense of emptiness in their old age. And the music soothed her into a deeper feeling of submission that in reality underlay the outward unrest and discontent of to-day. Submission was, at one time, the most marked virtue of every class in our country, and it may be found sometimes in those who, having lost all other conscious religion, will still say, "He knows best," revealing thereby the bed-rock of faith as the foundation of their lives. Lady Groombridge had not lost her religious beliefs, but she was more dutiful than devout, and did not herself often reflect on what strength duty depended.

And Molly, who knew nothing of submission, yet ministered to the older woman's peace by her music. When the men came out, Lord Groombridge took a chair close to his wife's as if to share in her pleasure, and Edmund moved out of Molly's sight. She sometimes heard the voice of Rose or of Billy or of Mrs. Delaport Green, but not Sir Edmund's, and she naturally thought he was listening, whereas part of the time he was reading a review. But as the ladies were going up to bed, he said, looking into the large, grey eyes:

"Who said she could do nothing but run like a deerhound and bandage like a surgeon? And now I find she can play like an artist. What next?"

And Molly, standing in her room, said to herself that it had been the happiest day of her life.

But a moment later the maid came in, and while helping to take off her dinner dress, told her mistress that the kitchenmaid in a room near hers was groaning horribly. It seemed that Lady Groombridge had given out some medicine, and Lady Rose had sent up her hot-water bottle and her spirit-lamp, and had advised that the bottle be constantly refilled during the night.

"But I'm sure, miss, she shouldn't take that medicine. I took on myself to tell her not to till I'd spoken to you, and I'm sure I don't know who is going to sit up filling bottles to-night. Lady Groombridge's maid"—in a tone of deep respect—"isn't one to be disturbed, and the scullerymaid won't get to bed till one in the morning: this girl being ill it gives her double work."

Molly instantly rose to the situation. She knew of better appliances than the softest hot-water bottles, and soon after her noiseless entrance into the housemaid's attic the pain had been relieved. But, being a little afraid that the girl was threatened with appendicitis, she knew that if that were the case the relief from the application she had used was only temporary. However, the patient rested longer than she expected. Molly sat by the open window, while behind her on the two narrow beds lay the sick girl and the now loudly-snoring scullerymaid, who had come up a little before twelve o'clock.

"Not quite six hours' sleep that girl will get to-night," mused Molly, "and then downstairs again and two hours' work before the cook comes down to scold her. What a life!"

But, after all, Molly had noticed the blush with which the girl had put a few violets in a little pot on the chimney-piece. Was it quite sure that Miss Dexter's life would be happier than that of the snorer on the bed, who smiled once or twice in her noisy sleep?

"There is happiness in this world after all," mused Molly, soothed by thoughts of the past day, by the stillness on the face of the earth, and by a certain rest that came to her with all acts of kindness—a certain lull to those activities of mind and instinct that constantly led her out of the paths of peace.

This was a sacred time of the night to Molly. It was associated in her mind with the best hours she had ever lived, hours of sick nursing and devotion, hours of real use and help. For months now she had been living entirely for herself, to fight her own battle and make her own way in a hostile world. She had had much excitement and even real pleasure. Her imagination had taken fire with the notion that she must assert herself or be crushed in the race of life. Heavy ordinary people would find it hard to understand Molly's strange idealisation of the glories of the kingdom of this world which she meant to conquer. And if she were frustrated in her passion for worldly success, there were capacities in her which she as yet hardly suspected, but she did feel at times the stirrings of evil things, cruelty, revenge, and she hardly knew what else. How could people understand her? She shrank from understanding herself.

But to-night she knew the inspiration of another ideal; she recognised the possibility of aims in which self hardly counts. There had been indeed a stir in the minds of all at Groombridge when they knew of the final step taken by the heir. Molly, looking up at the great castle, on her homeward drive, with its massive towers and its most commanding position, had felt more and more impressed by an action on so big a scale. It was impossible to be at Groombridge and not to feel the great and noble opportunities its possession must give any remarkable man; and the man who could give up such opportunities must be a very remarkable man indeed. In Molly's self-engrossed life it had something of the same effect as a great thunderstorm among mountains would have had in the physical order.

And to-night it came over her again, and she seemed to be listening to the echoes of a far vibrating sound. And might there not be happiness for Mark Molyneux? Might it not be happiness for herself to give up the wretched, uncomfortable fight that life so often seemed to be, and to let loose the Molly who could toil and go sleepless and be happy, if she could achieve any diminution of bodily pain in man or woman, child or beast?

The dawn lightened; one or two rabbits stirred in the bracken in the near park—this was peace. Then Molly smiled tenderly at the dawn. There might come another solution in which life would be unselfish without such acute sacrifice, and in which evil possibilities would be starved for lack of temptation. And all that was good would grow in the sunshine.

And the sleeping scullerymaid smiled also.



CHAPTER XIII

SIR DAVID'S MEMORY

Lady Rose Bright was faintly disturbed on Tuesday morning, and came into Lady Groombridge's sitting-room after Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly had left the castle too preoccupied to notice the tall figure of Grosse in a far window.

This room had happily escaped all Georgian gorgeousness of decoration, and the backs of the books, a fine eighteenth-century collection, stood flush to the walls. The long room was all white except for the books, the flowered chintz covers, some fine bronze statuettes, and a few bowls of roses.

Lady Rose moved mechanically towards the empty fire-place.

It was one thing to try not to dislike Miss Dexter, and to see her in a haze of Christian love; it was another to realise that, while she herself had slept most comfortably, Molly had not been to bed at all because the little kitchenmaid was in pain. Humility and appreciation were rising in Rose's mind, as half absently she gently raised a vase from the chimney-piece, and, turning to the light to examine its mark, saw Sir Edmund looking at her from his distant window.

A little, quite a little, flush came into her cheeks; not much deeper than the soft, healthy colour usual to them. She examined the china with more attention.

The tall figure moved slowly, lazily, down the room towards her, holding the Times in one hand.

"It's not Oriental," he said, "it's Lowestoft."

"Ah!" said Rose absently. She felt the eyes whose sadness had been apparent even to Mrs. Delaport Green looking her over with a quick scrutiny.

"Why, in your general scheme of benevolence, have you not thought it fit, during the last few days, to give me the chance of talking to you alone?" The tone was full of exasperation, but ironical too, as if he were faintly amused at himself for being exasperated.

"I don't know. Have I avoided being alone with you?" Rose had turned to the chimney-piece.

Edmund Grosse sank into a low chair, crossed his legs, and looked up at her defiantly, but with keen observation.

"It has been too absurd," he said, "you have hardly spoken to me, and you know, of course, that I came here to see you. I meant to go to the Riviera until I heard that you were coming here."

"But you have been quite happy, quite amused. There seemed no reason why I should interrupt. And you know, Edmund, they said that you came here every year."

"Well, I didn't come only to see you," he said, "as you like it better that way. And now, it is about Miss Molly Dexter I want to speak to you."

This time Rose gave a little ghost of a sigh, and looked at him with unutterable kindness. She was feeling that, after all, she had come second in his consciousness—after Miss Dexter, whom she could not like, but who had sat up all night with the kitchenmaid.

"Why about Miss Dexter? what can I have to do with her?" The tone was almost contemptuous—not quite, Rose was too kind.

"Do you remember that I went to Florence?"

"Yes; I did not want you to go." There was at once a distinct note of distress in her voice. It was horribly painful to her to have to think of the things she tried so hard to bury away.

"No, but I went," he said very gently; "and it was useless, as I knew it would be. But I want to tell you one thing which I have learnt, and which I think you ought to know, as it may be inconvenient if you do not. It is that Miss Dexter——" Rose interrupted him quickly.

"Is the daughter of the lady in Florence?" She gave a little hysterical laugh. He looked at her in astonishment.

"And that is why she dislikes me so much. Do you know, Edmund, I had a feeling from the moment I first saw her that there was something wrong between us. It gave me a horrible feeling, and then I asked Mary Groombridge about her, and she told me the poor girl's story; only she said the mother lived in Paris. Of course Mary does not know, or she would never have asked us here together. But that is how I knew what you were going to say; and yet I had no notion of it till a moment ago, when it came to me in a flash. Only I wish I had known sooner!"

It was not common with Rose to say so much at a time, and there had been slight breaks and gaps in her voice, pathetic sounds to the listener. She seemed a little—just a little—out of breath with past sorrow and present pain. Edmund thought he would never come to know all the inflections in that voice.

"I wish I had known sooner. I am afraid I have not been kind to her."

"And if you had known you would have cast your pearls at her feet," he said, in tender anger. "Don't make the mistake of being too kind to her, Rose. I want you to keep her at a distance. There is something all the more dangerous about her because she is distinctly attractive. She has primitive passions, and yet she is not melodramatic; it's a dangerous species."

It was amazing how easy it was to take a severe view of poor Molly after she had gone away, and how he believed what he said.

"She has never seen her mother?" asked Rose gently.

"No, but I am sure she knows about her mother," the slowness in his voice was vindictive; "and that her mother knows what we don't know about the will."

"Edmund dear," said Rose very earnestly, "do please leave that point alone; no good can come of it. I do assure you that no good, only harm, will come of it. It's bad and unwholesome for us all—mother and you and me—to dwell on it. I do really wish you would leave it alone."

Edmund frowned, though he liked that expression, "mother and you and me."

"You needn't think about it unless you wish to," he answered.

"But I wish you wouldn't!"

"If I had banished it from my thoughts up till now, I could not leave it alone now, for I have a clue."

"Oh, don't, Edmund."

"Well, it may come to nothing; only I'm glad that it makes one thing still more clear to me though it may go no further."

He told her then of what the stud-groom had said, and ended by showing her the letter. Rose read it in silence, and then, still standing with her face turned away, she said in a very low voice:

"It is a comfort as far as it goes. But I knew it was so; he never meant things to be as they are—poor David! Edmund, it is of no use to think of it. Even if the paper then witnessed were the will, it is lost now and will never be found. I would rather—I would really rather not think too much about it."

"No, no," he answered soothingly, "don't dear, don't dwell on it."

"I like," she answered, "to dwell on the thought that David did think of me lovingly, and did not mean to leave me to any shame. I am sure he never meant to leave me poor, and to let me suffer all the publicity about that poor woman. I am sure he always meant to change the will in time, but, you see, all that mischief is done and can't be undone. I mean the humiliation and the idea that she was in Florence all the time during our married life, and all the talk, and my having to meet this unfortunate girl who has his money. All of them think he was unfaithful to me, and nothing can put that right. Nothing—I mean nothing of this world—can put any of that right. And I can't bear the idea of a quarrel and going to law with these people for money; it may be pride, but I simply can't bear it."

"But, don't you see," said Edmund, "that if we could prove there was another will, that would clear David's reputation."

"It won't prevent people knowing that there was the first will and all about the poor woman in Florence."

"No; but it will make people feel that he behaved properly in the end. It will alter their bad opinion of him."

"But it will also make them go on thinking and talking of the scandal, and if it is left alone they will forget. People forget so soon, because there is always something new to talk about. He will just take his place among the heroes who died for their country, and the rest will be forgotten."

Edmund looked at her quickly, as if taking stock of the delicate nature of the complex womanly materials he had to deal with, but her face was still averted.

"I think it's hard on David." He spoke as if yielding to her wish. "I do think it is hard. If he did make this will, and it is lost through chance or fraud, I think it is very hard that his last wishes should be disregarded, and his memory should suffer in all right-minded people's opinions. Of course, it is for you to decide, but I own I should otherwise feel it wrong to leave a stone unturned if anything could be done to restore his good name."

He felt that Rose was terribly troubled, but he could not quite realise what it was to her to disturb her hardly-won peace of mind and calm of conscience.

"If it were not for the money!" she faltered. "I shall get to long for that money; so many people become horrid when they have a lawsuit about a fortune. It has always seemed to me that if the money is only for one's self one might leave it alone, and then, after all, if we went to law and failed, things would be much worse than they were before."

"Well," said Edmund, slightly exasperated but controlling himself. "I don't mean to do anything definite yet, but we ought to find out if we can make a case of it. We can always stop in time if we can't get what we want, but it's worth while to try. It is not merely the money—the less you dwell on that the better. Seriously, I think it would be very wrong that, through any fastidiousness of yours, David's memory should not be cleared if it is possible to clear it."

The last shot had this time reached the mark. After a few minutes' silence Rose said in a very low voice:

"But then, what can I do about it?" He felt that she was hurt, but he knew he had gained his point.

"I don't think you can do anything at this moment but allow me a free hand; I could not do what is necessary without your permission and your trust—and, presently, let me compare notes with you freely. I know what your judgment is worth when you can get rid of those scruples."

"Very well."

But still she did not turn round. Indeed, the wounds in her mind were too deep and too fresh to make the subject give her anything but quivering pain. It was impossible that Edmund should suspect half of what she felt. He naturally concluded that much of her present suffering showed how unconquerably Rose's love for Sir David had outlived the strain put on it. To Rose it would have been much simpler if it had been so. But in fact part of the trial to Rose was the doubt of her own past love, and of her own present loyalty. Had she ever truly loved David while he was still her hero "sans peur et sans reproche," could that love have been killed at all? So much anxiety to be sure of having forgiven, so much self-reproach for the failure of her marriage, such an acute, overwhelming sense of shame, and such shrinking from all that was ugly and low, were intermixed and confused in poor Rose's mind that it was no wonder even Edmund, with all his tact and his tenderness, blundered at times.

They were quite silent for some moments. Edmund wanted to see her face but he could not. Presently she looked into the glass over the chimney-piece, and in the glass he saw with remorse a little tear about to fall.

"I think I've caught cold," she murmured to herself. Producing a tiny handkerchief she seemed to apply it to her nose, and so caught that one little tear. Her movements were wonderfully graceful, but the man looking at her did not think of that. What he thought was:—How exactly she was herself and no one else. How could she have that child's simplicity of hers, and her amazing power of seeing through a stone wall? How could she be a saint and have all a woman's faults? How could she live half in another world and yet with all her absurd unworldliness be so eminently a woman of this one? She was twenty-six, but she knew what many women of fifty never learn; she was twenty-six, yet she was more innocent than many a child of thirteen. What a contrast to Molly's crude ignorance and hankering after success!

All the time he looked at her in silence and she did not seem to realise it. She put her handkerchief into her belt and took it out again; she touched her hair, seeing in the glass that it was untidy. Then she sat down on a low stool, and her soft, fluffy black draperies fell round her. She pressed her elbows on her knees, and sank her face in her hands. She might have been alone; he was not quite sure she was not praying. There were some moments of silence. At last she moved, raised her head, and looked him gently full in the face.

"And you—you never talk about yourself," she said, with a thrill in her voice that he had known so long. "I always talk so much of myself when I am alone with you."

"No," he said, with a touch of lazy anger, "I'm not worth talking about, not worth thinking of, and you know it!"

For a moment she flushed.

"You always have abused yourself."

"Because I know what's in your thoughts, and when I am with you I can't help expressing them—there!" he concluded defiantly, and crossed and uncrossed his legs again.

"Edmund, that isn't one bit, one little bit true. But I do wish you were happier."

"Yes, of course," he went on sardonically, "you know that too. You know that I loathe and detest life—that I hate the morning because it begins a new day. Oh, I am bored to extinction, you know all that, you most exasperating woman. I hate"—he suddenly seemed to see that he was giving her pain, and the next words were muttered to himself—"no, I love the pity in your eyes."

The graceful figure sitting there trembled a little, and the white hands covered the eyes again.

"But," he went on quickly in a louder voice, "the pity's no good. You might as well expect me to command an army to-morrow, or become an efficient Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury, or a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or anything else that is impossible, as become the sort of man you would like me to be. You know so perfectly well," he laughed, "how rotten I am; you are astonished if you find me do any sort of good—you can't help it, how can you, when it's just and true? Do you know I sometimes have had absurd dreams of what I might have been if you had not been so terribly clear-sighted. You stood in your white frock under the old mulberry tree—your first long skirt—and you saw that I was no good, and you were perfectly right, but, after all, what is your life to be now?"

Rose got up from the stool and rested one hand on the marble mantelpiece. She needed some help, some physical support.

"Edmund," she said, "I don't think I dwell much on the future; I leave all in God's hands. I have been through a good deal now, you must not expect too much of me." She paused. "But what you have said to me about yourself is nonsense; I wish you would not talk like that. You are only forty. You are very clever, very rich, you have the right sort of ambition although you won't say so, and you are, oh! so kind. Couldn't you do something, have some real interest?" He growled inarticulately. "Is it of no use to ask you just to think it over?"

"None whatever," he said firmly and cheerfully.

The gong sounded in the hall for luncheon.



BOOK II



CHAPTER XIV

MOLLY IN THE SEASON

"Still together?"

"Yes; and it has not turned out so badly as might be expected."

"I thought you were to have had a flat with a dear old governess?"

"I could not get Miss Carew, the governess in question, and Adela Delaport Green pressed me to stay with her for the season."

"It does credit to the amiability of both," said Edmund.

"I don't know about that," answered Molly, "we both knew what we wanted, and that we could not easily get it unless we combined, and so we combined."

"But was it quite easy to get over the slight friction at Groombridge?"

"Oh, yes; directly we got away Adela was all right. She felt stifled by the atmosphere, and she recovered as soon as she got home."

Edmund would have been less surprised at the tone of this last remark if he had seen Lady Groombridge's exceedingly offhand way of greeting Molly this same evening. That great lady, having expected to find that Molly had, acting on her advice, abandoned Mrs. Delaport Green, was quite disappointed in the girl when she met them still together in London, and so she extended her frigidity to both of them.

"And you are enjoying yourself?" Edmund went on. "Come, let us sit behind those palms. You look as if things were going smoothly."

"It is delightful."

Molly cast her grey eyes over the moving groups that were strolling about the ballroom, and over the lights and flowers and the band preparing to begin again, and then looked up into Edmund's face. It was a slow, luxurious movement, fitted to the rather unusually developed face and expression. Most debutantes are crude in their enjoyment, but Molly was beginning London at twenty-one, not at eighteen, and circumstances made her more mature than her actual experience of society warranted. Yet it seemed to Edmund that the untamed element in her was the more striking from the contrast. Molly accepted social delights and social conventions as a young and gentle tigress might enjoy the soft turf of an English lawn.

The defiance in her tone when she alluded to Groombridge faded now.

"I have six balls in the next four nights, and one opera, and we are going to Ascot, then back to London, then to Cowes, and, after that, I am going to the Italian Lakes and to Switzerland, and wherever I like."

"Is Mrs. Delaport Green so very unselfish?"

"Oh, no; I am only going to stay with Adela till the end of the season, and then I am going abroad with two girls who are quite delightful, and in October the flat and the governess are to come into existence."

"Yes; everything—everything perfect," murmured Grosse, looking at her with an expression that included her own appearance in the "everything perfect." Then, dropping his restless eyeglass, he went on.

"And you are never bored?"

"Never for one single moment."

"Amazing! and what is more amazing is that possibly you never will be bored."

"Am I to die young then?" asked Molly.

"Not necessarily, but I believe you will enjoy too keenly, and probably suffer too keenly to be bored."

"Did you ever enjoy very keenly?" asked Molly, with timid interest.

"Didn't I!" cried Grosse, with unusual animation; "until the last seven or eight years I enjoyed myself hugely, but——"

"Why did it stop?" asked Molly, her large eyes straining with eagerness.

"You look like a child who must know the end of the story at once. Do you always get so eager when you are told a story? Mine is dreadfully dull. While I had plenty of work to do, and something to look forward to, I was amused, but then——"

"Then what?"

"Well, then I became rich, and I've been dawdling about ever since. At first I enjoyed it, but now I'm bored to extinction."

"I can understand," said Molly, "when anything becomes quite easy it doesn't seem worth while to do it. But isn't there anything difficult you want to do?"

"Yes," said Edmund, "there are two things; one is plainly impossible, and the other is not hopeful, and neither of them prevents my feeling bored, for unfortunately neither of them gives me enough to do."

"Couldn't you work more at them?" asked Molly, with much sympathy.

"No," he said, as if talking to himself, "no one has the power to make a woman change her nature, and the other matter needs an expert. Good Heavens!" he stopped short, in astonishment at himself.

"Why, what's the matter?" asked Molly, while a deep flush of colour rose in her dark cheeks.

"You must be a witch," he said lightly; "you make me say things I don't in the least mean to say, and that I have never said to anyone else. And here is a distracted partner, Edgar Tonmore, coming to reproach you."

"Our dance is nearly over, Miss Dexter," said a young, fresh voice, and a most pleasing specimen of well-built and well-trained manhood stood before them. "I have been looking for you everywhere."

Molly and Edmund rose.

He stood where they left him watching her whirl past. It was as he had suspected; she had the gift of perfect movement.

And Molly, as she danced past, glanced towards the tall, loose figure, dignified with all its carelessness and with some curious trick of distinction and indifference in its bearing, and twice she caught tired eyes looking very earnestly at her.

"Good Heavens! I was talking of Rose to that girl, and of my efforts to get at her mother's money, and I never speak of either to mortal man. What made me do it?"

Slowly he turned away and left the ballroom and the house, declining with a wave of the hand various appeals to stay, and found himself in the street.

"Sympathies and affinities be hanged!" He said it aloud. "She isn't even really beautiful, and I'll be hanged, too, if I'll talk to her any more."

But, alack for Molly, he did talk to her on almost every occasion on which they met. It was from no conscious lack of royalty to Rose; it was largely because he was so full of her and her affairs that he would in an assembly of indifferent people drift towards one who was in any way connected with those affairs. Then one word or two, the merest "how d'ye do?" seemed to develop instantly into talk, and shortly the talk turned to intimate things. And for him Molly was always at her best. Many people did not like her, yet admired her, and admitted her into their houses half unwillingly. Her speech was not often kindly, and there was an element of defiance even in her quietness, for her unmistakable social ease was distinctly negative. Molly was rich and dressed well, and Mrs. Delaport Green was a very clever woman, whose blunders were rare and whose pet vice was not unfashionable. There was nothing in this life to soften and ripen the best side of Molly. But Edmund drew out whatever she had in her that was gentle and kindly.

It does not need the experience of many London seasons in order to realise that it is a condition of things in which many of the faculties of our nature are suspended. It is not as a Puritan moralist might put it, that the atmosphere of a whirlpool of carnal vice chokes higher things, for the amusements may be perfectly innocent. Only for a time the people who are engaged in them don't happen to think, or to pity, or to pray, or to condemn, or often, I believe, to love, though it may seem absurd to say so. It may, therefore, be called a rest cure for aspirations and higher ambitions and anxieties and all the nobler discontents. To Molly it was youth and fun and brightness and forgetfulness. There was no leisure to be morbid, no occasion to be bitter or combative. The game of life was too bright and smooth, above all too incessant not to suffice.

Mrs. Delaport Green might be outside the circle in which Lady Groombridge disported herself with more dignity than gaiety, but she had the entree to some houses almost as good, if not as exclusive, and she had also a large number of acquaintances who entertained systematically and extravagantly. That the Delaport Greens were very rich, or lived as if they were very rich, had from the first surprised the "paying guest." Lately it had become evident to her that if Adela had not been addicted to cards, Molly would never have been established in her house. She had found out by now that Mr. Delaport Green was a man of very good repute in the financial world as being distinctly successful on the Stock Exchange. He struck Molly as a sturdy type of Englishman, rather determined on complete independence, and liking to pay his way in a large free fashion. She rather wondered at his having consented to the plan of the "paying guest," but he seemed quite genial when he came across her and inquired with sympathy after her amusements, and evidently wished that she should enjoy herself.

Many girls whose position was undoubtedly secure, whom no one disliked and everybody was willing to amuse, had a much less amusing summer than Molly. And Edmund Grosse, most unconsciously to himself, was a leading figure in the warm dream of delight in which Molly lived from the middle of May till the end of June. They did not meet often at dances, but at stiffer functions, at the Opera, and also twice in the country—once on the river on a Sunday afternoon, and once for a whole week-end party, which last days deserve to be treated in more detail.

The group who met under the deep shade of some historic cedars, on a hot Saturday afternoon, to spend together a Saturday to Monday with a notably pleasant host and hostess, had carried with them the electric atmosphere of the season that so fascinated Molly's inexperience, to perfume it further with the June roses and light it with the romance of summer moonlight. Of the party were Molly and her chaperone and Sir Edmund Grosse.

By this time Mrs. Delaport Green had made up her mind that Molly had decidedly better become Lady Grosse, and she felt that it would be a pleasing and honourable conclusion to the season if the engagement were announced before she and Molly parted. She had fleeced Molly very considerably, but she wanted her to have her money's worth, and go away content.

It would take long to carry conviction as to the actual good and the possibility of further good there was in Mrs. Delaport Green. Out of reach of certain temptations she might have been quoted as a positive model of goodness and unselfish brightness. If her imitative gift had found only the highest models, she might have been a happy nun, or a quiet, stay-at-home wife and mother. But she was tossed into a social whirlpool where her instincts and her ambitions and her perceptions were all confused, and out of the depths of her little spoiled soul, had crawled a vice—probably hereditary—which might otherwise have slept. It was fast becoming known that Molly's chaperone was a thorough gambler.

Sir Edmund Grosse was not unwilling to dawdle under the shade of an old wall with Mrs. Delaport Green that Saturday evening in the country.

"I feel terribly responsible," she said, in her thin eager little voice; "I am sure that boy is going to propose to my protege!"

"What boy?" asked Edmund, in a tone of indifference.

"Edgar Tonmore."

"Is Edgar here, then?"

"Oh, no; it won't be at once. He has gone to Scotland, but he will be back before we leave London."

"Really he is an excellent fellow. I don't see why you should be anxious."

"But Molly is an orphan," she said plaintively, eyeing him quickly as she spoke.

"Even so, orphans marry and live happily ever after."

"But I'm not sure she will live happily."

"Why not?"

"I don't think she cares for him."

"Then I suppose she will refuse."

"But people so often make mistakes. I don't think dear Molly knows her own mind, and it is so natural that she should not confide in me as I am in her mother's place."

"Leave things alone. Edgar will find out if she likes him or not."

"Will he? oh well, it's a comfort that you take that view." And she then changed the topic, being of opinion that nothing more could be done with it. But no doubt the effect produced in Edmund was an increase of interest in Molly's affairs. It would be exceedingly tiresome if she should marry this attractive but penniless boy, as he knew him to be, under the impression that she possessed enough money for them both.

Edmund had only that morning received certain intelligence of the whereabouts of young Akers, the son of the old stud-groom.

From Florence had come the information that Madame Danterre was supposed to be in failing health, and that she had been seldom seen to drive out of her secluded grounds this summer, whereas last year she used to go long distances in her old-fashioned English carriage in the evenings. Thus it became a matter of thrilling interest whether the great fortune would pass to Molly before any evidence could be produced of the existence of the last will in which he so firmly believed.

"I believe the old sinner knows all about it, even if she hasn't got it," Grosse murmured to himself.

Finally he concluded that it would be better if Molly married money and not poverty, and did not smile on the penniless Edgar Tonmore. Therefore, finding himself alone with her during church time next morning, he thought no harm of trying to put a little spoke in the wheel to prevent that affair going too easily. But first he asked her why she did not go to church.

"I might say, why don't you go yourself?" said Molly, "but I don't mind telling you that I hardly ever do go."

"Why not?"

"Why not?" Molly was leaning back in a low chair under the shadow of the cedars, as still as if she would never move again, as still as the greyhound that was lying by her. "I hate going to church. None of it seems beautiful to me as it does to Adela. My aunt used to say that we were not fortunate in our clergyman, but personally I don't like any clergymen. I am anti-clerical like a Frenchwoman."

"Have you any French blood?"

"Yes; my mother was French."

"But you do good works; I remember how you nursed the kitchenmaid at Groombridge."

"I like to stop pain, but not because it is a good work. I can't stand all the fuss about good works and committees, and nonsense about loving the poor. It's a way rich people have to make themselves feel comfortable. Don't you think so?"

"No, I don't. I know people who make themselves exceedingly uncomfortable because they give away half what they possess."

"Really," said Molly, a little contemptuously. She knew that he was thinking of Rose Bright. "My opinion is that doing good works means to bustle about trying to get as much of other people's money to give away as you can, without giving any yourself."

Edmund did not like to suggest that this opinion might be the result of special experiences gained while living in the house of Mrs. Delaport Green.

"If," Molly went on, evidently glad to relieve her mind on the subject, "you got the money to pay your unfortunate dressmaker, there would be some justice in that. But," she suddenly sat up and her eyes shot fire at Edmund, "to fuss at a bazaar to show your kindness of heart while you know you are not going to pay the woman who made the very gown you have on, is perfectly sickening."

"It is atrocious," said Grosse, who wanted to change the subject. But this was effected by the most unexpected apparition of Mr. Delaport Green, whom they had both supposed to be refreshing himself by the sea at Brighton.

Mr. Delaport Green was dressed in very light grey, with a white waistcoat. His figure was curious, as it extended in parts so far in front of the rest that it gave the impression that you must pass your eyes over a great deal of substance in the foreground before you could see the face. Then again, the nose was so predominant that it checked any attempt to realise the eyes and forehead, while the cheeks were baggy and the skin unwholesome.

Edmund Grosse had only seen him on two occasions when he dined at his house, and he had liked him at once. There was something markedly masculine about him; he knew life, and had made up his mind as to his own part in it without delusions and without whining. He would have preferred to have been slim and handsome, and to have known the ways of the social world from his youth, but there were plenty of other things to be interested in, and he was not averse to the power which follows on wealth. He was a self-made Englishman, with nothing of the Jew about him, either for good or evil. But no apparition could have been more surprising to the two as he came slowly over the grass to meet them. Molly saw at once that Adela's husband was exceedingly annoyed, probably exceedingly angry, and although she had always felt his capacity for being very angry, she had never seen him in that condition before.

"I came down in the motor to get a short talk on business with Miss Dexter," he explained, "but I am sorry to disturb a more amusing conversation."

Edmund, of course, after that left them alone, and walked off by himself.

Molly looked all her astonishment at Adela's "Tim."

"Miss Dexter," he said very slowly, "I was given to understand when you came to us in the winter that you were a young lady wanting a home and some amusement in London. I thought it kindly in my wife to wish to have you with her, and, as she is young and a good deal alone" (Molly looked the other way at this assertion), "I thought it would be for the advantage of both. But I had no notion that there was any question of payment in the case, and I must now ask you to tell me exactly what you have paid to Mrs. Delaport Green since first you made her acquaintance."

Molly was not entirely astonished at discovering that Adela's husband had known nothing whatever of Adela's financial arrangements with herself. But she was so angry at this proof of what she had up to now only faintly suspected, that it was not very difficult to make her tell all that she knew of her share in Adela's expenses, only that knowledge proved to be of a very vague kind. Molly had kept no accounts, and had the vaguest notion of what her bills included. One thing she intended to conceal (but Mr. Delaport Green managed to make her confide even that) was the fact that she had given L100 to his wife's dressmaker. He made no comment of any sort, only firmly and quietly insisted on Molly giving him all the items she could. Then he got up and said—

"Good-bye for the present; I want to get back in time for lunch."

And he walked away, making one or two notes in a little book he held in his hand as to the cheque that Molly should find waiting for her next day.

Molly, left alone on the bench, did not at the first moment dwell on the thought of how far this talk with her host would affect her own plans. She could only think of the man himself. She had been for many weeks in his house, and had never done more than "exchange the weather" with him, or occasionally suffer gladly the little jokes and puns to which he was addicted. She had written to Miss Carew that his attitude towards Adela and herself was that of a busy man towards his nursery. Since that how little she had thought about him! And now she felt the strength in him, not weakened, but lit up with a kind of pathos. He might have been a true friend to any man or woman. He was really fond of Adela Delaport Green, and that position in itself was tragic enough. It was plain to Molly, although nothing had been breathed on the subject that morning, that Tim would not find it hard to forgive his Adela. Adela would pass almost scot-free from well-merited punishment; and yet her husband was strong enough to have punished effectively where he deemed it necessary. Molly was puzzled because she was without a clue to the mystery. The fact was that Tim had no wish to punish effectively. As long as Adela passed untouched by one sin, as long as he felt sure of one great virtue in her life, all such details as much gambling, much selfishness, absurd extravagance, could be easily forgiven. Molly herself would be fairly dealt with and set aside; the "paying guest" was an indignity that he would soon forget. He would have been entirely indifferent to the impression of regretful interest that he had made upon her.

That night Edmund Grosse was Molly's confidant as to the second, and evidently final, rupture between herself and Mrs. Delaport Green that had taken place in the afternoon. He could not but be kind and sympathetic as to her difficulties. It was, no doubt, very blind of him not to see that she was too quickly convinced of the wisdom of his advice, far too anxious to act as seemed well in his opinion. It never dawned on his imagination for a moment that the most serious part of the loss of the end of the season to Molly was the loss of his society during that time.

They strolled in the moonlight between the cedars and under the great wall with its alternate "ebon and ivory" of darkest evergreen growths and masses of white climbing roses, Molly's white gown rustling a little in the stillness. And Molly discovered with joy that he was trying to set her mind against marriage with Edgar Tonmore. If he only knew how little danger there was of that! And under Edmund's influence she decided to offer herself for a visit of two or three weeks to Mrs. Carteret, in the old and much disliked home of her childhood. It would look right; it would give a certain dignity to her position after the breakdown of the Delaport Green alliance, and it was always a great mistake to break with natural connections. So far Edmund Grosse; and in Molly's mind it ran something like this: "He wants me to stand well with the world, and I will do this, intolerable as it is, to please him. He likes to think that I have some nice relations, and so I must try to be friendly with Aunt Anne Carteret, though that is the hardest part. And he wants me to get away from Edgar Tonmore, and I would go away from so many more people if he wished it."

The evening passed into night, and Edmund was walking alone under the wall, dreaming of Rose.

All this foolish gambling, quarrelsome, small world of men and women made such a foil to her image. Molly and her mother, the Delaport Greens, and many others were grouped in his mind as he purled the smoke disdainfully from his cigar. Something in Molly's walk by his side just now had made him see again the old woman with her quick, alert movements in the garden at Florence; after all they were cut from the same piece, the old wicked woman and the slight, dark girl with the curious eyes. Molly must not be trusted; she must be suspected all the more because of her attractions in the moments of dangerous gentleness. And with a certain simplicity Edmund looked again at the moon above him, all the more glorious because secret and dark things were moving stealthily under the trees in the lower world.

And Molly was kneeling on her low window-seat, looking out at the same moon in a mood of joy that was transmuted half consciously into prayer by the alchemy of pure love.



CHAPTER XV

A POOR MAN'S DEATH

Early in October, Molly and Miss Carew took up their abode in a flat with quite large rooms and a pleasing view of Hyde Park.

August and September had been two of the healthiest and most normal months that Molly had ever spent or was likely ever to spend again. The weeks between the rupture with the Delaport Greens and the journey to Switzerland had been trying, although it was undoubtedly much pleasanter to be Mrs. Carteret's guest than it had ever been to be a permanent inmate of her house.

Molly—thought Mrs. Carteret—was restless, not inclined to morbid thoughts, and more gentle than of yore, but more nervous and fanciful.

It was not until after a fortnight abroad, after the revelation of mountains realised for the first time, that Molly had the courage to say to herself that she had been a fool during the visit to Aunt Anne. Was it in the least likely that a man of Edmund Grosse's kind would act romantically or hastily? Of course not. She had been as foolish as Mrs. Browning's little Effie in dreaming that a lover might come riding over the Malcot hills on a July evening.

The girls with whom Molly had travelled were of a healthy, intellectual type, and Molly, under their influence, had grown to feel the worth of the higher side of Nature's gifts. And so, vigorous in mind and body, she had come to London in October, so she said, to study music.

Miss Carew was a little disappointed when Molly expressed lofty indifference as to who had yet come to London. But that indifference did not last long when her friends of the season began to find her out. Then Miss Carew surprised Molly by her excessive nervousness and shyness of new acquaintances. "Carey" had always professed to love society, and had always been very carefully dressed in the fashion of the moment. But, as a civilian may idealise warfare and be well read in tactics, and yet be unequal to the emergency when war actually raises its grisly head, so it was with poor Miss Carew. She simply collapsed when Molly's worldly friends, as she called them with envious admiration, swept into the room, garnished with wonderful hats and fashionable furs. She had none of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly—

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course, if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess. But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional tete-a-tete with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work, and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those institutions. A kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly for her to be able to do good works in company with other people. She was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out alone and without direction. Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are loved for themselves.

Molly, in the village at home, had always made the expression of gratitude impossible, but she constantly added ingratitude as a large item in the account she kept running, in her darker hours, against the human race.

Late on a wet and windy October evening she went to undertake the nursing of Pat Moloney for the first part of the night. She had been visiting him constantly for several weeks, and actually nursing him for three days.

"Has the doctor been?"

"Yes, miss" (in a very loud whisper); "he says Pat is awful bad; he left a paper for you."

Molly Dexter walked across the small, bare room and took a paper of directions from the chimney-piece, and then stood looking at the old man's heavy figure on the bed. He was lying on his side, his face turned to the wall.

"You had better rest in the back room while I am here," she said.

"I couldn't, indeed I couldn't, miss, him being like that; you mustn't ask me to. Besides, I've been round and asked the priest to come, and so I couldn't take my things off. I'll just have some tea and a drop of whisky in it, and I can keep going all the night, it's more than likely he'll die at the dawn."

Molly eyed the woman with supreme contempt.

"It isn't at all certain that he's going to die, he'll make a good fight yet if you will give him a chance."

Mrs. Moloney looked deeply offended. It had been all very well to be guided by a lady at the beginning of the illness, but now it was very different. She felt half consciously that science had done its worst, and bigger questions than temperatures and drugs were at issue.

"A priest now," said Molly, in a whisper of intense scorn, "would kill him at once."

Mrs. Moloney did not condescend to reply. She had propped a poor little crucifix, a black cross, with a chipped white figure on it, against a jam pot on a shelf under the window, and she had borrowed two candlesticks with coloured candles from a labourer's wife on the floor beneath. The window had been shut, so that the wind should not blow down these objects.

Molly looked at the man on the bed and sniffed.

"He must have air—" the whisper was a snort.

At that moment there was a knock on the outer door. On the iron outer stairs was standing the priest.

"It's just the curate," said Mrs. Moloney, looking out of the window; and then she disappeared into the tiny passage.

Molly stood defiantly, her figure drawn to its full height. She felt that she knew exactly the kind of Irish curate who was coming in to disturb, and probably kill, the unhappy man on the bed. Well, she should make a fight for this poor, crushed life; she would stand between the horrible tyranny and superstition that lit those pink candles, and that would rouse a man to make his poor wretched conscience unhappy and frighten him to death. "If there is a hell," she muttered, "it must be ready to punish such brutality as that."

Mrs. Moloney opened the door as wide as possible, and the priest came in. Miss Dexter looked at him in amazement; how, and where had she seen him before?

He went straight to the bed and looked at the man in silence, while Molly looked at him. He was about middle height, with very dark hair and eyes, a small, well-formed head, and a very good forehead. It was not until he turned to Mrs. Moloney that Molly understood why she had fancied that she had seen him before. She was sure now that she had seen his photograph, but, although she was certain of having seen it, she could not remember when or where she had done so.

"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?"

"It's the only place to make into an altar, father?"

"Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage."

Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be done without a protest.

"The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed."

The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression on Molly's countenance.

"It would be a great mistake to wake him, of course," he said; and then, "Do you suppose he will sleep for long?"

"I haven't the faintest notion"; the uttermost degree of scorn was conveyed in those few words.

Mrs. Moloney suppressed a sob.

"He's not been to the Sacraments for three years," she murmured.

The priest leant over the bed and looked intently at the dying man.

Mrs. Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in a corner on the dirty floor.

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him—

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you, father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again. After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she added abruptly—

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it. But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed. She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year—and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty God, dearest brother, and commend thee to Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies, encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee; and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some passages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast outlines of the prayer—the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance. Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence—this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.



CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational—a lower part of her nature,—they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the circumstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought. If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence? Perhaps Madame Danterre's assertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly, was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to her mother. From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her. She now shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an expiation for sin. It did not strike her, as it never struck the noble penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object of these expiatory actions. She felt at the moment that it must be a comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she would offer her. And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly proceeded to write to Madame Danterre. For she knew that if her offer were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden in her heart.

Molly had pride enough to shrink utterly from the connection with her mother, and her girl's innocence shrank, too, with quick sensitiveness from what might be before her. How strange now appeared the dreams of her childhood, the idealisation of the young and beautiful mother!

The letter was short, but very earnest, and had all the ring of truth in it. She could not but think that any mother would respond to it, and, for herself, after sending it there could be no looking back. Once the letter was posted to the lawyer to be forwarded to Madame Danterre, a huge weight seemed to be lifted from Molly's mind. That night she met Edmund Grosse at dinner. He had never seen her so bright and good-looking, and he found he had many questions to ask as to the summer abroad.

For several weeks Molly received no answer from Florence, but during that time she did not repent her hasty action. And during those weeks her interest in religion grew stronger. Just as she had been unable to work with philanthropists, she was ready now to take her religion alone. She felt kinder to the world at large, but she did not at first feel any need of human help or human company. She went sometimes to a service at Westminster Abbey, sometimes to St. Paul's, sometimes to the Oratory, and two or three times to the church in West Kensington in which Father Molyneux was assistant parish priest. On the whole she liked this last much the best. Indeed, she was so much attracted by his sermons that she went to call upon him late one afternoon.

The visitor was shown into a rather bare parlour, and Father Molyneux soon came in. He was a good deal interested in seeing her there. He had never been more snubbed in his life than by this lady on their first meeting, and he had been much surprised at seeing her in the church soon afterwards. She was plainly dressed, though at an expense he would never have imagined to be possible, and she appeared a little softer than when he had seen her last. She looked at him rather hard, not with the look that puzzled Rose Bright; it was a look of sympathy and of inquiry.

"I have had curious experiences since we met," she said, "and I want to understand them better. Have you—has anybody been praying for me?"

"I have said Mass for you twice since poor Moloney died," he said.

"I thought there was some sort of influence," she murmured. "That night I was tired and excited and worried, and foolishly prejudiced. Somehow the prayers you read for Pat Moloney, the whole attitude of your Church in those prayers, caught my breath. I imagine it was something like the effect of a revivalist preacher on a Welsh miner." She paused. Father Molyneux was full of interest, and did not conceal it.

"I can't tell," he said. "Of course, it may have been——"

"Nerves," interrupted Molly so decidedly that he laughed; it was not in the least what he had meant to say.

"But," she went on, with an air of impartial diagnosis, "it has lasted. I have been very happy. I understand now what is meant by religion. I understand what you felt about that man's soul. I understand, when you are preaching, that intense sense of worth-whileness. I understand the religious sense, the religious attitude. It makes everything worth while because of love. It does not explain all the puzzles. It does not answer questions, it swallows them up alive. It makes everything so big, and at the same time so small, because there are infinite things too. Then it insists on reality; I see now it must insist on dogma for fear of unreality. Renan was quite wrong in that great sentence of his: 'Il ne faut rien dire de limitee en face de l'infini.' The infinite is a fog to us if there are no outlines in our conception of it. Don't you think so?"

There was a light in her face no one had ever seen there before.

"And the only outlines that can satisfy us are the outlines of a Personality. As a rule I have always disliked individuals. I know you are surprised. Of course, you are just the other way; you have a touch of genius, a gift for being conscious of personalities, of being attracted to them. Now I have never liked people; in fact, I've hated most of them. But since this religious experience I have known"—her voice dropped; it had been a little loud—"I have known that I want a friend, and can have one."

The priest was astonished by Molly. He had never met any one like her before. Her self-confidence was curious, and her eloquence was so sudden and abounding that his own words seemed to leave him. She was in a moment as silent as she had been talkative, her eyes cast down on the floor. Then she looked at him with an almost imperious questioning in her eyes.

"You have said so much that I expected to say myself," he said, with a faint sense of humour, "and you have not asked me a single question."

Molly laughed "Tell me," she said, "I am right; it is all true? I do understand religious experience, the religious sense at last, don't I?"

"Shall I tell you what I miss in it?" he said, suppressing any further comment on her amazing assertion. "I mean in all you have said. And, oddly enough, the Welsh miner would have had it. I mean that, seeing Our Lord as the One Friend of your life, you should also see that you have resisted and betrayed and offended Him during that life which He gave you."

"No: I have not thought much about that side of things" said Molly "I have been too happy."

"You would be far happier if you did."

"But what have I done?" said Molly, almost in a tone of injured respectability.

"Well, you have hated people—or, at least" (in a tone of apology), "you said so just now."

"Oh! yes; it's quite true. I am a great hater and an uncertain one. I never know who it is going to be, or when it will come."

"But you know you have been commanded to love them."

"Yes; but only as much as I love myself, and I quite particularly dislike myself."

"You've no right to—none whatever."

"And why not?"

"Because God made you in His own image and likeness. You can't get out of it. But, you know, I don't believe one word you say. I met you showing love to the poor."

"No, indeed," said Molly indignantly, "I did not love Pat Moloney. I wish you would believe what I say. I hate my mother; I hate the aunt who brought me up; I hate crowds of people. I don't hate one man because I want him to fall in love with me, but if he doesn't do that soon, I shall hate him too. I feel friendly towards you now, but I don't know how soon I may hate you. At least," she paused, and a gentle look came into her face, "I had all these hatreds up to a few weeks ago; now they are comparatively dormant."

Again the flood of her words seemed to check him, but he tried:

"I believe it then; I will take all you say as true. I think you are fairly convincing. Well, then, how do you suppose you can be united to Infinite Love, Infinite Mercy, Infinite Purity? God is not merely good, He is Goodness. Until you feel that His Presence would burn and destroy and annihilate your unworthiness, you have no sense of the joys of His Friendship. You stand now looking up to Him and choosing Him as your Friend, whereas you must lie prostrate in the dust and wait to be chosen. When you have done that He will raise you, and the Heavens will ring with the joy of the great spirits who never fell, and who are almost envious of the sinner doing Penance."

Molly bent her head low. "I see," she murmured, "mine have been merely the guesses of an amateur; it is useless—I don't understand."

"It isn't, indeed it isn't," he said quietly. "It is the introduction. The King is sending His heralds. Some are drawn to Him by the sense of their own sinfulness, others, as you are, by a glimpse of His beauty."

Molly was not angry, only disappointed. The very habit of a life of reserve must have brought some sense of disappointment in the result. She did not mind being told that she must lie in the dust; the abnegation was not abhorrent; she knew that love in itself sometimes demanded humiliation. But she felt sad and discouraged. She had seemed to have conquered a kingdom. Without exactly being proud of them, she had felt her religious experiences to be very remarkable, and now she saw that they only pointed to a very long road, hard to walk on. She got up quickly and was near the door before he was.

"Will you come and see me?" she said, and she gave him her card. "If you can, send me a postcard beforehand that I may not miss you. Good-bye."

He opened the front door for her and her carriage was waiting.

"The third time you have been late for dinner this week," observed the Father Rector. "Have some mutton?"

"Thanks," said the young man; "I wish I could learn the gentle art of sending people away without offending them."

"They didn't include that in the curriculum at Oxford?" The tone was not quite kind; neither was the snort with which the remark was concluded. It was no sauce to the lumpy, greasy mutton that Mark was struggling to eat. Suddenly he caught the eye of the second curate, Father Marny, who had conceived a great affection for him, and he smiled merrily with a school-boy's sense of mischief.



CHAPTER XVII

THE BLIND CANON

In a small room in a small house in a small street in Chelsea, Father Molyneux was sitting with a friend. There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them. It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna. The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before he had become blind.

Mark Molyneux had just been reading to him for an hour, and he now put down the book. The old man smacked his lips with enjoyment. The author was new to him, but he had won his admiration at the first reading.

"What people call his paradoxes," he said, "is his almost despairing attempt at making people pay attention; he has to shout to men who are too hurried to stop. The danger is that, as time goes on, he will only be able to think in contrasts and to pursue contradictions."

The speaker paused, and then, his white fingers groped a little as if he were feeling after something. His voice was rich and low. Then he kept still, and waited with a curious look of acquired patience. At last, the younger man began.

"I want to ask your advice, or rather, I want to tell you something I have decided on."

"And you only want me to agree," laughed Canon Nicholls, and the blind face seemed full of perception.

"Well, I think you will." The boyish voice was bright and keen. "I've come to tell you that I want to be a monk."

"Tut, tut," said Canon Nicholls, and then they both laughed together. "Since when?" he asked a moment later.

"It has been coming by degrees," said Mark, in a low voice. "I want to be altogether for God."

"And why can't you be that now?"

"It's too confusing," he said; "half the day I am amused or worried or tired. I've got next to no spiritual life."

Canon Nicholls did not help him to say more.

"I can't be regular in anything, and now there's the preaching."

"What's the matter with that?"

"Who was it who said that a popular preacher could not save his soul? Father Rector says that it's very bad for me that I crowd up the church. He is evidently anxious about me."

"How kind!"

"Then, since I've been preaching, such odd people come to see me."

"I know," said the Canon, "there's a fringe of the semi-insane round all churches; they used to lie in wait for me once."

"Then I simply love society. I've been to hear such interesting people talk at several houses lately. I go a good deal to Miss Dexter."

"Miss Molly Dexter."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't do that; she's a minx. She is the girl who stayed with that kind little woman, Mrs. Delaport Green, who sometimes comes to see me."

"You see," Mark went on eagerly, "I'm doing no good like this. So I have made up my mind to try and be a Carthusian."

His face lit up now with the same intense delight. "It's such a splendid life! Fancy! No more humbug, and flattery, and insincerity. 'Vous ne jouerez plus la comedie,' an old monk said to me. Wouldn't it be splendid? Think of the stillness, and then the singing of the Office while the world is asleep, like the little birds at dawn. It would be simply and entirely to live for God!"

"I do believe in a personal devil," muttered Canon Nicholls to himself, and Mark stared at him. "Now listen," he said. "There is a young man who has a vocation to the priesthood, and he comes under obedience to work in London. That is, to live in the thick of sin, of suffering, of folly and madness. If it were acknowledged that the place was full of cholera or smallpox it would be simple enough. But the place is thick with disguises. The worst cases don't seem in the least ill; the stench of the plague is a sweet smell, and the confusion is thicker because there are angels and demons in the same clothes, living in the same houses, doing the same actions, saying almost the same things. In every Babylon there have been these things, but this is about the biggest. And the most harmless of the sounds, the hum of daily work, is loud and continuous enough to dull and wear the senses. So confused and perplexed is the young man that he doesn't know when he has done good or done harm; being young, compliments appeal to him very seriously; being young, he takes too many people's opinions; and, being young, he generalises and if, for instance, I tell him not to go often to the house of a capricious woman of uncertain temper, he probably resolves at once never to lunch in an agreeable house again. Meanwhile, above this muddle, this tragicomedy, he sees the distant hills glowing with light; so, without waiting for orders, he leaves the people crying to him for help and turns tail and runs away! And what only the skill of a personal devil could achieve, he thinks in his heart that he is choosing a harder fight, a more self-denying life."

"But I could help those people more by my prayers."

"Granted, if it were God's will that you should lead the life of contemplation, but I don't believe it is. I don't see what right you've got to believe it is. As to not living altogether for God here, that's His affair. Mind you, I don't undervalue the difficulties, and it's uncommon hard to human nature. Don't think too much of other people's opinions; I know you feel a bit out of it with the priests about you. They are rough to young men like you—it's jealousy, if they only knew it. Jealousy is the fault of the best men, because they never suspect themselves of it. If they saw it, they would fight it. Face facts. You have some gifts; you will be much humbler if you thank God for them instead of trying to think you haven't got them. And be quite particularly nice to the growler sort of priest; he's had a hard time and, lived a hard life; much harder than the life of a monk. Mind you respect his scars."

He talked on, partly to give Mark time; he saw he had given him a shock.

"Mind," he said, "there is sometimes an acute personal temptation, but you've not got that now. You've got a sort of perception of what it might be. It won't be unbearable." He crossed his legs and put the long, white fingers into each other. "But I'm old now, and it's my experience that the mischief for all priests is to let society be their fun. It ought to be a duty, and a very tiresome duty too. Take your amusements in any other way, and go out to lunch in the same state of mind as you visit a hospital. Do you think the best women, whether Protestant or Catholic, think society their fun? They may like it or not, but it is a serious duty to them."

Mark sprang up suddenly. "I can't stand this!" he said. "You go on talking, and I want to be a Carthusian, and I will be one." He laughed; his voice was troubled and the clear joy of his face was clouded.

Canon Nicholls felt in his pocket for a snuff-box, and brought it out. "Go along, if you can't stand it. And don't come back till you've seen through the devil's trick. I don't mind what I bet that you won't run away."

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection, the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face. But his love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming perfectness of the young man. Mark's nature was gloriously sweet and abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his lost sheep. Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford, and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days. He had known dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country. Then gently—not with any shock—had come the vocation to the priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a man's life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always enjoyed. Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.

Long before the Groombridges could be brought to believe that the brilliant and favourite young cousin had rejected all that they could leave him, it had become a matter of course to the rest of the family and their friends that Mark Molyneux would be a priest, and give up the property to the younger brother.

When the outer world took up the matter, Father Molyneux always made people feel as if allusions to his renunciation of Groombridge were simply quite out of taste, and nothing out of taste seemed in keeping with anything connected with him. It was all so simple to Mark, and so perfect to Canon Nicholls, that the latter almost dreaded this very perfection as unlikely, and unbefitting the "second-rate" planet in which it was his lot to live. And to confirm this almost superstitious feeling of a man who had lived to know where the jolts and jars of life cause the acutest suffering to the idealist, had come this fresh aspiration of Mark's after a life more completely perfect in itself. Strong instincts were entirely in accord with the older man's sober judgment of the situation. And yet he wished it could be otherwise. He had no opinion of the world that Mark wanted to give up. He would most willingly have shut any cloister door between that world and his cherished son in the spirit. It was with no light heart that he wanted him to face all the roughness of human goodness, all the blinding confusion of its infirmities, all the cruelty of its vices. The old man's own service in his last years was but to stand and wait, but, even so, he was too often oppressed by the small things that fill up empty hours, small uncharitablenesses, small vanities, small irritations. Was it not a comfort at such moments to believe that in another world we should know human nature in others and in ourselves without any cause for repugnance and without any ground for fear?



CHAPTER XVIII

MADAME DANTERRE'S ANSWER

At last there came a letter to Molly from her mother.

"CARISSIMA,—

"I thank you for your most kind intentions. I too have at times thought of seeing you. But I am now far too ill, and I have no attention to spare from my unceasing efforts to keep well. I can assure you that two doctors and two nurses spend their time and skill on the struggle. I may, they tell me, live many years yet if I am not troubled and disturbed. I had, by nature, strong maternal instincts; it was your father's knowledge of that side of my character which made his conduct in taking you from me almost criminal in its cruelty. You must have had a most tiresome childhood with his sister, and probably you gave her a great deal of trouble. Your letter affected me with several moments of suffocation, and the doctors and nurses are of opinion that I must not risk any more maternal emotions. My poor wants are now very expensive. I am obliged to have everything that is out of season, and one chef for my vegetables alone. Have you ever turned your attention to vegetable diet? Doctor Larrone, whom I thoroughly confide in, sees no reason why life should not be indefinitely prolonged if the right—absolutely the right—food is always given. I am sending you a little brochure he has written on the subject.

"I hope that your allowance is sufficient for your comfort. I should like you to have asparagus at every meal, and I trust, my dear child, that you will never become a devote. It is an extraordinary waste of the tissues.

"As we are not likely to correspond again, I should like you to know that I have made a will bequeathing to you the fortune which was left me, as an act of reparation, by Sir David Bright.

"I wonder why an Englishman, Sir Edmund Grosse, has made so many attempts at seeing me? Do you know anything of him? I risk much in the effort to write this letter to assure you of my love.