Arrived at the very delightful beech wood which formed a pleasant place of encampment for tea-parties, Canon Wrottesley could only smile absently at the picnic-baskets, and appear wrapped in thought when addressed; he might have been mentally preparing his next Sunday's sermon. Miss Abingdon thought that he was doing so and respected him for it; she even tried to attune her mind to his, and endeavoured to see vanity of vanities in this informal gathering of friends.

'We do not think enough of serious things,' she said.

The inhabitants of Sedgwick put on sporting airs and curiously cut overcoats on two days in each year. The weather for the occasion is nearly always cloudless, and the townsfolk have begun to think that either they are very clever in arranging the date of their local function, or that the clerk of the weather is deeply interested in Sedgwick Races.

On this particular day the sun flickered as usual through the clean leaves and boughs of the beech wood, doing its best to lend an air of picturesqueness to lobster salads and aspics, and shone brilliantly on servants, with their coats off, unpacking hampers at rows of long tables, and on people busily engaged in the inartistic business of eating.

In the paddock there was an unusual number of horses being led round and round in a ring, and some well-known bookies—not often seen at the little provincial meeting—were present with their raucous cries and their money-bags.

Kitty Sherard carried a pair of field-glasses on a long strap, and consulted from time to time a little gold-bound pocket-book in which she added up figures with a business-like air. She believed in Ormiston, which Sir Nigel Christopherson was riding, and she had something on Lamplighter as well. She knew every bookmaker on the course by sight, and had as much knowledge of the field as any one in the ring. And she looked exactly like some very beautiful child, and carried a parasol of rose-coloured chiffon beneath which her complexion and eyes appeared to great advantage. She smiled whether winning or losing, and ate a tiny luncheon with an epicurean air.

At four o'clock in the afternoon it is an accepted custom at Sedgwick Races for every one to have tea before the last event, and then horses are put to in coaches and carriages, and those who have attended the meeting whether for business or pleasure drive back to their own homes, or go slowly downhill in a long string to the little railway station where, for two days at least in the year, the local station-master is a person of importance.

Mrs. Ogilvie arrived at the racecourse, as she had promised to do, about tea-time. She hardly ever cared to watch the races; but she stood amongst her friends for a while in the pleasant shade of the wood, and looked on at the little gathering with that air of detached and hardly concealed weariness which she always felt on such occasions. She congratulated Peter, who had won a rather closely finished race earlier in the day; but her voice betrayed little interest in the event, and an onlooker might have been surprised at the almost distant way in which she spoke to him. She was sumptuously dressed, as usual, and wore her clothes with extravagant carelessness. She found herself at tea-time sitting next Canon Wrottesley, whose patriarchal mood seemed to her unnecessarily affected, and she requested him to ask Miss Sherard to come and speak to her. 'Kitty amuses me,' she said, with one of her characteristic shrugs, 'and most people are so dull, are they not?'

Canon Wrottesley felt that mixed sensation which association with Mrs. Ogilvie always gave him—a feeling of resentment combined with a desire to please. He rather hastily let the mantle of the seer drop from him, and said, 'I wish our little party were not so much dispersed. Mr. Lawrence from Frisby brought two charming friends with him, and they much hoped to have been here to meet you. Falconer is their name—Sir John and Lady Falconer. He has just been made Minister at Buenos Ayres, as I dare say you know, and he told me they once had the pleasure of meeting you in Spain, years and years ago.'

'I never remember people whom I have met years and years ago,' said Mrs. Ogilvie. Her near-sighted eyes, with their trick of contracting slightly when she looked fixedly at anything, narrowed as she spoke, and the heavy lids closed lazily upon them.

Lady Falconer, meanwhile, had arrived at the tea-table and greeted Mrs. Ogilvie with evident pleasure. 'I am afraid you will hardly remember me, as it is a very long time since we met,' she said; 'but my husband and I always remember how good you were to me when I was ill at Juarez.'

Mrs. Ogilvie rose and shook hands with a cordiality that was charmingly expressed. Her eyes were no longer half-closed, and her colour never varied. 'You were ill, were you not?' she said, in a manner that was a little vague but polite and sympathetic.

'Yes,' said Sir John, 'and you let your maid come and nurse her. My wife always said she would have died if it had not been for you.'

'The climate was abominable,' said Mrs. Ogilvie; 'every one felt ill there. Why does one go to these out-of-the-way places?'

'It is very absurd,' said Lady Falconer, in a friendly way, 'to be surprised at people growing up; yet I can hardly realize that Captain Ogilvie, whom we met to-day, is the little boy who was with you at Juarez. How time flies!'

'It more often crawls, I think,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, smiling, with her mouth a little twisted to one side. And then she rose to go because she never stayed long at any party, and not even the fact that Nigel Christopherson was going to ride in the last race altered her decision. At parting she was too glad to have met Lady Falconer, trusted that if ever she cared to see a collection of tiresome pictures she would come to Bowshott, and hoped that if the gardens would be of any interest to her she would drive over some afternoon when it was not too hot, and have tea with her—any afternoon would do. Had Mrs. Ogilvie been giving an invitation to tea in a barn it is probable that her manner would have been as distant, as casual, and as superb as when she suggested, with a queer sort of diffidence, that people might care to see the famous galleries and gardens of her magnificent house.

'How very interesting,' said Canon Wrottesley to Lady Falconer when the carriage had driven away, 'your meeting like this!' The vicar's acquaintance was not extensive, and that people should re-encounter each other or have mutual friends always struck him in the light of a strange coincidence.

'She has not altered much,' said Sir John Falconer, 'and yet it must be many years since we met: I suppose she never was good-looking. Somehow one seems unaware of it when one is speaking to her.'

'I could do nothing but look at her dress,' said Lady Falconer good-naturedly. 'How is it that everything she wears seems to be in such perfect taste?'

'Mrs. Ogilvie is a rich woman,' said Canon Wrottesley, enjoying a proprietary way of talking of his neighbour, 'and she is able to gratify her love of beautiful raiment. I do not understand these things myself,' he went on, with a masculine air, 'but the ladies tell me that her dresses are all that they should be.'

'I don't know what we should have done without her at Juarez,' said Lady Falconer, in her peculiarly kind manner. 'Sir John and I were on our honeymoon, and, like many other newly married people, we wanted to be alone.'

'Dudley, the artist, told us about Juarez, I remember,' interpolated Sir John, 'otherwise I do not suppose we should ever have heard of the place. Dudley had been sketching there.'

'I had not a maid with me,' went on Lady Falconer, in her pleasant voice, 'and Mrs. Ogilvie in the kindest way allowed a Spanish woman she had with her to do everything for me.'

'Mrs. Ogilvie is always devoted to everything Spanish,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. 'Her mother was Spanish, and I dare say you know she made her home in Spain for six years after the eldest boy's death.'

'I did not even know that she had lost a son,' said Lady Falconer. 'How very sad!'

The crowds of gaily-dressed people about them, the shouts of the bookmakers, and the pleasant sense of being on an enjoyable picnic contrasted oddly with any reference to such banished topics as death and sorrow.

'I consider that Mrs. Ogilvie is one of the most reserved women I ever met,' said the canon, proceeding to give an epitome of a character which he thought he—and perhaps only he—understood. 'She is impulsive yet cautious, clever yet light-minded; for a woman her intelligence is quite above the ordinary run, and yet she is often hopelessly difficult to convince.' He leaned forward on the table looking handsome and dignified, and his clean-shaven face had an appearance more clever than was quite justified by his attainments.

'I am sure that Mrs. Ogilvie is a woman of deep affections,' said Lady Falconer, whose tongue seemed framed for nothing but kind speeches.

'I remember,' said Sir John, 'how struck my wife and I were, that year we met her in Spain, by her devotion to her son. It seemed to us to have almost a touch of tragedy in it; but that, of course, is now explained by hearing that she had just lost her only other child.'

'Poor Mrs. Ogilvie!' said Mrs. Wrottesley.

The words seemed incongruous. Mrs. Ogilvie, with her contempt for pity, her sumptuous manner of living and of dressing, was hardly an object for compassion; and Canon Wrottesley felt that his wife's commiseration was out of place, although he was far too kind to say so in public.

There was a lull suddenly in the noise of the race-course; the bookmakers' harsh shouts ceased, and even conversation stopped for a moment, for the last race had begun.

The last race was an interesting event. It was a steeplechase for gentleman riders only, and friends of the riders were standing up, with field-glasses to their eyes, watching with absorbed attention the horses, which were still a great distance off on the other side of the course. Jane was standing by Peter. Kitty Sherard was quite near; she was not looking through field-glasses as the others were doing, but stood leaning lightly on the balcony of the stand with her two hands clasped on the wooden rail in front of her.

'Can you see who is leading?' said Jane, and received no answer to her question, and then she saw that Miss Sherard was not looking at the racecourse at all. Her face was white, and her hands, which were clasped on the wooden rail before her, had a strained look about them, and showed patches of white where the slender fingers were tightly pressed on the delicate skin.

The last race involved some big fences, it is true; but then Kitty of all people in the world was the last to be afraid of a stiff course. It was not like her to keep her eyes turned away from the horses until some one quite close to her said, 'Well, they 're over the water-jump anyway,' when she suddenly raised her field-glasses, with hands that were trembling a little, and kept her eyes fixed on the race. It was going to be a close finish, most people thought, and as the horses came round the farther corner you could, as the saying goes, have spread a tablecloth over them. Toffy's horse closely hugged the rails and was kept well in hand; while, of the two in front of him, one was showing signs of the pace and the other had not much running left in him. These two soon tailed off, when the favourite (dark green and yellow hoops) came through the other horses and rode neck to neck with Toffy's. It became a race between these two, and it was evident that the finish was going to be a close one.

'Toffy's not fit to ride,' said the voice of a young man who would have liked Toffy to win the race, although he knew better than to back him. 'He is as mad as ten hatters to have ridden to-day.'

'His weight is right enough,' said another manly voice, with a laugh; 'it's extraordinary how a man of his height can ride so light. Christopherson 's a regular bag of bones.'

'I wish to goodness they wouldn't talk!' said Kitty suddenly under her breath.

The two horses came on neck to neck to the last fence but one.

'By gad, he knows how to ride!' went on the masculine voice, 'but Spinach-and-Eggs is on the better horse of the two.'

The ground was in splendid going condition and the two horses raced over it. They could see Christopherson's face now, and Toffy was smiling slightly, while the other man's teeth were firmly set. Their two stirrups clanged together as their horses rose to the rails and galloped on to the last fence.

And there, of course, Toffy's horse fell. It was not his fault; there was a bit of soft ground just where he landed, his horse blundered and fell, and the favourite rode past the winning-post, an easy winner.

The spectators in the grand stand could see Christopherson pick himself up a moment later and lead his horse home; but there was one moment, when the rider behind him took the last jump, in which for a fraction of time it seemed more than possible that he might land on the top of Sir Nigel. For a breathless space there was that dramatic silence which may be felt when a concourse of people literally hold their breath. Miss Abingdon covered her face for a moment, and Jane heard Peter say 'Good God!'

The next moment the danger was over, and Jane was surreptitiously handing Miss Sherard a handkerchief drenched in eau-de-Cologne, for Kitty had sat down suddenly and her face was white. She did not speak, but she looked up into Jane's face for a moment, and the look said as plainly as possible, 'I can't help it—don't tell any one.'

'It was a horribly near thing,' Jane said, in order to explain Kitty's pallor to herself, 'and I 'm afraid it has given you rather a turn.'

Miss Sherard's feeling of faintness was only momentary, and already the bright colour was in her cheeks again and she laughed and said, 'It was not the jump, really, Jane; but I am a horrible gambler, and I put my very last shilling on Toffy.'



CHAPTER VI

Mrs. Ogilvie's ball, according to an old-established custom, followed closely on the race. The proximity of the two events had helped to gain for the quiet countryside the reputation of a gay neighbourhood. Country houses were filled with visitors, and the ballroom and the famous picture-gallery at Bowshott received an even larger number of guests than usual. There was something impressive in the great space and width of the ballroom, with its polished floor. The palm-houses had been emptied to form an avenue of green up the middle of the picture-gallery, at whose extreme end an altarpiece, representing a scene from the Book of Revelation, showed a company of the heavenly host as a background to a buffet-table crowded with refreshments. The constant movements and the brilliant lights provided a fitting air of gaiety to the scene. It was Mrs. Ogilvie's whim to have her rooms illuminated in a manner as nearly as possible to represent the effect of tempered sunlight. 'No woman cares to see,' she used to say, 'she wants to be seen.' And so the lights at Bowshott were always arranged in such a way that the beauty of women should be enhanced by them. Plain faces softened under the warm glow which had no hard shadows in it, and beautiful faces were lighted up in a manner that was almost extravagantly becoming.

'It is only on such an occasion as this,' said Miss Abingdon, 'that one really seems to think that Bowshott is put to its proper use.'

She was talking to a young man who called old furniture delicious and Spanish brocade sweetly pretty. 'The modern Englishman,' said Mr. Lawrence, 'was made to live in barracks or in a stable. Probably he is only in his right place when he is on a horse. Could any one but he live at Bowshott and dress in shabby shooting clothes, and smoke cigarettes in a room where Charles I. made love, and wear hobnailed boots to go up and down a grand staircase?'

Miss Abingdon sat on a convenient large couch, where a chaperon might close her eyes for a moment towards the end of a long evening without being accused of drowsiness. She was the recipient of many wise nods and hints and questions.

'How well they look together!' said a lady, as Peter Ogilvie and Jane came down the line of palms, and she left a blank at the end of her speech, to be filled in, if possible, by Miss Abingdon.

'Jane makes Peter look rather short,' said another.

'She should have chosen some one taller.'

'I suppose it really will be settled some day,' said Mr. Lawrence.

'They went for a ride this morning,' said Miss Abingdon dryly, 'and they were positively disappointed because Sir Nigel Christopherson could not go with them. I do not profess to understand love-affairs of the present day.'

Mr. Lawrence was a portly, red-faced young man, with a high-pitched voice. He throve on scandal, and gossiped like a housekeeper. Miss Abingdon liked and thoroughly approved him; his views were sound, his opinions orthodox, and he always took her in to supper at any dance where they met.

Mr. Lawrence's manner towards elderly ladies was a mixture of deference and familiarity which never failed to give satisfaction; he could even discuss Miss Abingdon's relatives with her without offence, and he gave advice on domestic matters. People in want of a cook or of a good housemaid generally wrote to Mr. Lawrence to ask if he knew of any one suitable for the post, and he recommended houses and health-resorts, and knew to a fraction what every one's income was. He was a useful member of society in a neighbourhood like that of Culversham, and was considered an interesting caller. It was his ambition to be first with every piece of intelligence, and he enjoyed telling news, even of a harassing description. Mr. Lawrence believed that Miss Abingdon's niece was already engaged to Peter Ogilvie, and he began by a series of deft questions to try to abstract the definite information that he required from her.

'Young people nowadays,' said Miss Abingdon, ascribing a riper age to Mr. Lawrence than he altogether approved—'young people nowadays think that everything that concerns themselves is what they call their own business. They talk as though they lived in some desert cave instead of in the midst of the world. I am on thorns sometimes when the servants are in the room; after all, a man may be only a footman, and yet is not necessarily a deaf-mute.'

Peter and Jane, meanwhile, had strolled into the picture-gallery, with its softly shaded lights and long vistas of flowering plants and palms. There was about them to-night something which seemed to set them apart. Few persons cared to disturb them, even by a greeting, as they sat side by side in the corridor or walked together down the long gallery. Jane Erskine had put off that air, which suited her so admirably, of seeming to be always under an open sky; she had left it behind with her short skirt and the motor-cap which she loved to pull down over her eyes. This evening in shimmering white satin, and with a string of pearls round her throat, she looked what she was—a very beautiful and very distinguished young woman. The tempered light of the room seemed to deepen the colour in her cheeks and to bring out the bright tints of her hair; her lips parted in a smile, and her eyes had radiance in them.

She and Peter mingled with the throng of dancers again, and then, not waiting until the music had finished, they left the ballroom by the farther door where Mrs. Ogilvie was standing.

Peter stopped when he saw her, and looked at her a little anxiously. 'You should not be standing, should you?' he said, in his kindly way; 'you look tired.'

Mrs. Ogilvie gave one of her enigmatic smiles. 'Who would not be tired?' she said. 'Was there ever such an extraordinary way of amusing oneself as to stand in a draughty doorway in the middle of the night, shaking hands with some hundreds of people whom one doesn't want to see!'

She sat down on a sofa and watched the two figures as they passed down the long corridor. The mechanical smile of welcome with which she had greeted half the county this evening had not died away from her face; she sat upright on the satin-covered sofa. There was about her an air of strength, of eminence almost, which seemed to place her genuine ugliness above criticism. Her dress was of some heavy purple stuff which few women would have had the courage to wear, and the diamonds in her hair, with their sharp points of radiating light, accentuated something that was magnificent and almost defiant about Mrs. Ogilvie to-night. Her short-sighted eyes contracted in their usual fashion as she watched the couple disappear down the vista of the corridor. 'If only it could be soon! If only their marriage could be soon!' she murmured to herself, her lips moving in an inward cry that in another woman might have been a prayer.

'How do you think she is looking?' said Peter, as, without conscious intention, he and Jane drifted away from the dancers into a more distant part of the house. 'Surely she gets tired too easily? I wish she would see a doctor; but she hates being fussed over, and one can never persuade her to take care of herself.'

'What is one to do with so wilful a woman?' said Jane.

They paused and looked at the dim crowd of dancers through one of the entrances to the ballroom, and passed down the corridor where misty figures sat on sofas and chairs enjoying the cool. Every one looked to them misty and far away to-night, almost as though they had not sufficiently materialized to be perfectly distinct.

With definite intention Peter led his partner towards a little room, hung with miniatures and plaques, at the farther end of the long corridor. Here they found Nigel Christopherson in conversation with Miss Sherard. Kitty was talking as lightly as usual, deliberately misunderstanding everything that was said to her, and being as provoking as she ever was; and Toffy was so much in earnest that he did not see Peter and Jane, but continued to talk to the girl beside him. So the two intruders never entered the room at all; but, as they pursued their way still farther, Peter was thinking about Mrs. Avory, and wishing to goodness that Toffy had never met her.

The big house seemed too full of people for his taste to-night. Every room and corridor was occupied, and Peter said, 'Let's go to my mother's sitting-room. Do you mind, Jane? We can get cool on the bridge.'

Bowshott is a very old house, so old that, if it had not been for archaeologists, who came there sometimes and read the grey stones as though they had been printed paper, no one would ever have known when the earliest part of it was built. Antiquaries agreed that it dated from Norman days; but the only portion of the building of that period which was standing now was a tower at the eastward end of the house. It had been almost in ruins at one time, but Colonel Ogilvie's father had restored it, and, with a considerable amount of skill, had connected it with the more modern part of the house by a stone bridge on a single arch. The whole thing was excellently contrived; the archway lent a frame to one of the most beautiful parts of the garden; and the tower, which was entered by a strong oak door from the bridge, now contained three curious, romantic-looking rooms, with quaint, uneven walls six feet thick, deep, narrow windows, and heavy oak ceilings. The largest of the rooms to which admittance was gained by the oak door was Mrs. Ogilvie's sitting-room. She had a curious love of being alone for hours at a time, and she enjoyed the sense of isolation which was afforded her by being cut off from the rest of the building by the stone bridge on its high arch. Here she would spend whole days by herself, reading or writing. Above this room, which was full of her own particular possessions, was a smaller apartment containing a valuable library of philosophical works. Here were muniment-chests, and the large writing-table where she wrote all the business letters relating to the estate; and here it was that she was wont to see her steward and her agent from time to time. No one but Mrs. Ogilvie and her son ever entered the room without some special reason, and it was too far away from the rest of the house for casual visitors to intrude themselves. The short passage, within the more modern house, which led to the bridge was reached by a door hung with a leather curtain securely arranged to prevent draughts, and no one ever lifted this curtain except those who had a right to the rooms beyond.

To-night, however, the house was open to all comers, and it afforded no surprise to Captain Ogilvie and his companion, when they had quitted the corridor and the reception-rooms, and had left the guests and servants behind them, to find a man's figure before them in the short passage leading to the leather-covered door.

'Who 's that, do you know?' said Peter, when they had passed under the curtain and were crossing the bridge.

'I have no idea,' said Jane; 'some stranger, I suppose, whom some one has brought.'

'They don't seem to be looking after him very well,' said Peter, 'leaving him to prowl about alone and get lost in a great barrack like this. I don't suppose I ought to have asked him if he wanted partners, or anything of that sort? Some one is sure to look after him.'

'Oh, sure to!' said Jane, and they passed over the bridge together and went into Mrs. Ogilvie's morning-room.

Having arrived there and secured two comfortable chairs, the power of speech seemed suddenly to have deserted two persons whose conversation was never brilliant, but who at least were seldom at a loss for anything to say. It appeared as though Peter Ogilvie had brought Miss Erskine to this distant room for no other purpose than to say to her, in an absent-minded way, 'Is every one enjoying themselves, do you think?'

'I think every one is quite happy,' said Jane, and added, with characteristic frankness, 'I know I am!'

Peter gave her a quick glance, turning his eyes full upon her for a moment as though to read something in the face beside him; then he began with absorbed attention to twist the silk string of his ball programme round and round his finger. The room where they sat was singularly unlike those rose-shaded bowers which are considered suitable to the needs of dancers who pause and rest in them. Its austere furnishing had something almost solemn and mysterious about it; and the stone walls hung with tapestry, on which quaint figures moved restlessly with the draught from an open window, would have given an eerie feeling to a man, for instance, sitting alone there at twelve o'clock at night. But in the gloom and austerity of the still and distant chamber sat Jane in white satin with pearls about her neck, and the room was illumined by her.

'So you are enjoying yourself,' said Peter at last—Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not fidget aimlessly with things, began diligently to pluck a long white feather out of her fan, and said in a voice that was deliberately commonplace, 'We ought to go back now, oughtn't we? Let me see who your next partner is, Peter, that I may send you back to dance with her.' She stretched out her hand for the young man's programme.

But Peter sat absorbed, twisting its silk cord round his finger. 'Don't let's go yet,' he said, and the constrained silence fell between them again. 'I want to ask you something, Jane.'

'Yes,' said Jane. Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer tried to extract the white ostrich feather from her fan.

'I want to know if you think you can care for me a little?'

Probably when a man feels most deeply his utterances are the most commonplace, and an Englishman is proverbially incapable of expressing his feelings. In the supreme moments of their lives, it is true, a few men, and those not always the most sincere, may speak eloquently; but for the most part a proposal of marriage from an Englishman is—as it should be—a clumsy thing. Peter Ogilvie could only speak in such limited language as he always used. Yet the world seemed to stand still for him just then, for he knew that everything in his heaven or upon earth depended on what Jane's answer would be.

'Don't let me bother you,' he said at last, 'or rush you into giving an answer now if you would rather wait.'

Perhaps a declaration of love from an old comrade is the most dear as well as the most embarrassing of all such avowals. A heart which has already given itself in loyalty and affection to another finds that it is not a deepening of this loyalty and affection that is asked, but a complete re-ordering of things. The lover's petition, therefore, either comes to the woman as a revelation, betraying to her in a flash that she has loved always, and has merely been calling the thing by another name, or else it finds her impatient at the disturbance of an old comradeship, a cherished friendship, which nothing but this foolish, exacting thing called love could ever shake.

Peter was not versed in introspective questions or hair-splittings; he loved with his whole heart, and he had tried to say so without very much success. Just then he would have given anything he possessed to be endowed with a little more eloquence, though deep down in his heart he had a lingering hope that perhaps Jane would understand. 'It's neck or nothing,' he was saying to himself, in the homely jargon in which he usually formed his thoughts. 'God knows I may have been a fool to speak.'

'Peter,' began Jane shyly. And Peter ceased twisting the silk cord of the programme round his finger, and they turned and looked at each other.

'Is it true?' he said at last, with a queer kind of wonder in his voice.

'Let us go into the garden,' he said. His instincts remained primitive, and just then this room was too narrow for all he felt, and it seemed to him that the large things of the night and the distant glory of the stars were the only environment that he could bear.

Passers-by, had they been mean enough to pause and listen outside the sheltering yew-hedge near which they sat, might have questioned the poetry of their love-making, and have condemned an avowal of devotion punctuated by barbarous slang; but the silence that fell between them was full of tenderness and more easily understood than speech, and perhaps the moon—an inquisitive person at the best of times—as she peeped over the grey turrets of the house saw the dawn of a love as single-hearted and as genuine as many sentiments which have been more carefully analysed and described.

These were two happy, light-hearted persons, without very much to recommend them except a certain straightforwardness of vision which abhorred, as by a natural instinct, circuitous or crooked things, a transparent honesty, and a simple acceptance of those obligations which race and good-breeding demand.

At the present moment, out in the garden on the stone seat set in the embrasure of the high yew-hedge, they were oblivious of everything in the world except each other and the absorbing discovery of love.

They were the last to hear the cry of 'Fire!' which rang out from the house, and they were still sitting undisturbed while men ran with hose and buckets, and a clamour arose in the stable-yard for more water, and a clatter of horses' hoofs could be heard as a groom galloped off for the nearest fire-engine. The yew-hedged garden where they sat was distant a long way from the house, and it was not until a heavy cloud of smoke rose up against the sky that Peter's attention was attracted, and he realized that the Norman tower was on fire.

He started up and ran to the place where grooms and helpers, gardeners and strangers' coachmen, and waiters and guests were standing, with hose and buckets, pouring a ridiculous little stream of water against the burning pile. The fire had begun in the roof, and the smoke was pouring from the narrow windows in the tower. No flames had shot up yet, and the fire-engine from Sedgwick, prompt and well-served as it always was, might be here any minute. The oak roof would burn slowly and the walls were secure, but the tapestry in the lower room was dry and old, and would fire like a bundle of shavings. An effort was made by a body of men to force an entrance into the lower room and save what they could; but they were beaten back by the smoke which came in volumes down the turret staircase and by the flames which now began to shoot up here and there against the darkness of the night. There was nothing for it but to safeguard the main building. The wind was setting towards it from the tower, and a party of men were up on the roof treading out burning sparks and playing water where slates were hottest or ashes might burst into flames.

Mrs. Ogilvie stood on the terrace in her magnificent purple gown, her red hair with flashing diamonds in it, and her long-handled glasses held up to her near-sighted eyes.

'So that goes!' she said, shrugging her shoulders. 'Well, it will give me a good deal of trouble. Or is it fate, I wonder?'

Peter was directing a body of men to play water on the bridge; garden and stable hoses were turned full upon it by relays of helpers, and some long ladders were placed against the windows to see if it were possible in that way to effect an entrance and save some of the valuables in the room. The guests—women in light ball dresses and bare shoulders, and men in evening clothes—had surged out on to the terrace, and were watching with that curious mixture of fascination and regret which comes to the eyes of those who see destruction going on and know that they are powerless to prevent it. Every ear was strained to catch the first sound of the fire-engine on the road from Sedgwick, and some twenty or thirty couples, more impatient than the rest, had run to a distant knoll, from whence the road was visible, to peer through the darkness and to see if anything was coming. The stars shone serenely overhead, and the moon was turning the water in the fountains to cascades of silver, while from turret and roof the volumes of grey smoke belched forth, and the ineffectual fire appliances played upon the house.

It was just then that what seemed almost like an apparition appeared upon the bridge. A man, not above medium height, with a cloak hastily thrown about his head to protect him from the smoke, dashed across the bridge, was drenched by the fall of water, and entered the turret room. People asked each other fearfully whose this strange figure could be. Many, strangely enough, had not seen it; the sudden dash through the smoke had not occupied a moment of time, and most eyes were directed towards the roof of the building, while others were turned towards the Sedgwick road. Those who had seen cast amazed eyes upon each other, women clutched the persons nearest them, and Jane Erskine, seeking half wildly for some one in the crowd, found Peter and said to him, 'What is it? Who went in there just now? Oh, Peter, for a moment I thought it was you!'

There was a shout of warning, but it was too late for the man, whoever he was, to turn back. He was inside the tower now, and no shouting could hold him. Some prayed as they stood there, murmuring half mechanically, 'Save him! save him!' as instinctively men and women will pray even when the life for which they plead may carry with it such sorrow as they never dreamed of.

Suddenly some young men who had climbed to the top of the knoll gave a shout, and the fire-engine from Sedgwick turned the corner of the road with a fine dash, for Tom Ellis, a good whip, was driving, and the white horse on the near side knew as well as any Christian how to save an inch of the road. The fire-engine, all gleaming with brass fittings and flaming red paint, clattered to the door, and pulled up with admirable precision on the spot from which a hose could be played. Eight men in helmets leaped from their seats and got their gear in order with the coolness of blue-jackets in a storm. But for its quietness and its controlled, workmanlike effect, the whole scene had distinctly a dramatic touch about it. Possibly the firemen would have shouted louder had they been upon the boards, and fainting women, it is generally assumed, give a realistic touch to well-staged melodrama. No doubt the crowd on the terrace at Bowshott would have disappointed an Adelphi audience. But the old white horse stood to attention like a soldier on a field day; and Tom Ellis, wiping his brow as though he himself had run in the shafts all the way from Sedgwick, lent a touch of stage realism to the scene. Nothing could save the interior of the tower—that was past praying for; but a shout went up that there was a man inside, and the firemen threw their ladders against the walls and prepared their scaling-irons and life-saving apparatus. The smoke rolled out in dense volumes now, and through the gloom a voice shouted, 'It 's all right! He 's crossed the bridge again!'

'Oh, are you sure? are you sure?' said Jane, her fear almost amounting to a panic, and it haunted her for long afterwards that perhaps the man had not actually escaped the fire. For nothing was heard of him again, and it was only after Peter had ordered a fruitless search to be made amongst the debris in the tower that she felt satisfied of the stranger's safety.

A newspaper reporter tried to prove that a gallant attempt had been made to save some valuables in the tower, and went so far as to head one of his paragraphs, 'A Gallant Act.' But there was nothing of value in the tower rooms except the old furniture and books and the tapestry on the walls, and these had all been destroyed.

The ruined interior of the tower smouldered the whole of the next day; though the walls still stood, gaunt and grim, windowless and gutted by the fire. But the building was covered by insurance, and even the loss of the tapestries seemed more than compensated by the fact that an absorbing topic of general interest had been provided in a quiet and uneventful neighbourhood.



CHAPTER VII

It was a matter of necessity with Mrs. Ogilvie to purchase a new dress for the wedding. Wherefore, in the week following the night of the ball, she went to London for the day, while builders and carpenters were already at work repairing the ruined tower.

'It will be inconvenient,' she said, 'to go up and see my dressmaker later when the house is full. Is it absolutely incumbent upon me, as the mother of the bridegroom, to dress in grey satin, or have I sufficiently scandalized my neighbours all my life to be able to wear what I like?'

Usually her maid accompanied her when Mrs. Ogilvie went up to London; but, in her wilful way, she had decided to-day that maids were useless, and that her present maid had round eyes that stared at her from the opposite side of the carriage when they travelled together. In short, Mrs. Ogilvie intended to go to London alone.

She departed with some sort of idea of enjoying the expedition; the purchase of clothes was a real aesthetic pleasure to her, and even the feel of the pavements in the world-forsaken London of September had something friendly about it that spoke to her with an intimacy and a kindliness such as she never experienced among country sights and sounds. A morning at Paquin's revived her as sea breezes revive other women. Lunch followed in a room pleasantly shaded from the sun and decorated with a fair amount of taste. But the food was uneatable, of course; Mrs. Ogilvie could never get a thing to eat that she liked.

It was nearly four o'clock before the brougham which had met her at the station in the morning drew up before a door in deserted Harley Street. An elderly man-servant showed her into the doctor's waiting-room, and Mrs. Ogilvie sat down and began turning over with interest the pages of a fashion magazine.

'I think I know the worst,' she said to the famous surgeon whom she had come to consult, when he led her into his room. 'What I want to know is, can you put off this tiresome business until after my son's wedding?'

He asked her quietly her reason for the delay. Few people argued with Mrs. Ogilvie; there was an inflexibility about her which made protest impossible. He knew that the case was a hopeless one, but life might certainly be prolonged if she would submit to treatment without delay.

'Why should you put it off?' he said; 'even five or six weeks may make an enormous difference.'

'I always put off disagreeable things,' said Mrs. Ogilvie lightly.

A London doctor probably knows many cases of delicate and sensitive women who will fret over a crumpled rose-leaf and die with the calm courage of a martyr; but the woman who would deliberately throw away her chances of life was unfamiliar to the famous specialist. He looked keenly at his patient for a moment out of his deep eyes.

'I have never known a case of this sort in which there was not an immediate effort at concealment,' he said to himself; 'and women conceal most of their sicknesses as if they were crimes.' Aloud he asked her what was the earliest date at which she could put herself into his hands.

'It is a great bore coming at all,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, with that sort of superb impertinence which distinguished her and was hardly ever offensive; 'but let us say in a month's time. The wedding was not to have been till late in November; but my son and Miss Erskine are quite absurdly in love with each other, and it will not be difficult to persuade them to alter that date for an earlier one.'

'If you have positively decided to postpone treatment,' said the surgeon, 'I can say nothing more except to tell you that you are minimizing your chances of recovery.'

'I don't feel in the least like dying yet,' she said.

'Were you to put yourself into my hands at once,' he urged, 'it is possible that you might be sufficiently recovered to go to the wedding in November.'

'No one is to know anything about it,' said Mrs. Ogilvie quickly and decisively. 'If my son is married in October I can come up to town, as I always do in November, and go into one of your nursing-homes. Probably the wall-papers will offend me, but at least I shall not have the whole of a countryside discussing my helplessness and the various stages of my illness. Ye gods! they would like to ask for details from one's very footman at the hall door!'

It was useless to say more. The surgeon recommended diet, and made out a prescription.

'Everything is talked about in these days, I admit,' he said, 'and I think no one regrets the decline of reserve more than we doctors do; but you are carrying a desire for concealment too far.'

Mrs. Ogilvie was drawing on her gloves and buttoning them with an air much more grave and intent than she had bestowed upon her doctor during the discussion of her health. 'Even an animal,' she said lightly, 'is allowed to creep away into the denseness of a thicket and nurse its wounds unseen; but we superior human beings are like the beggars who expose a mutilated arm to the pitiful, and would fain show their wounds to every passer-by.'

'Perhaps you will allow me to write to your son?' said the surgeon.

Mrs. Ogilvie replied by a quick and unequivocal answer in the negative; then, relaxing a little, she said more lightly, but with intent, 'I have always triumphed over difficulties all my life—I have always overcome.'

'That is quite possible,' said the physician gravely.

Mrs. Ogilvie stood up and began to arrange her veil before the mirror which hung above the mantel-piece; and, as she did so, she glanced critically at her face under her large, fashionable-looking hat, with its bizarre trimmings.

'I am very plain,' she said, with a sort of sensuous enjoyment in her frankness, 'and yet I have passed successfully for a beautiful woman most of my life. I am also what is ridiculously called a power in society, and I owe everything to my own will. I detest unsuccess!'

'You are talking of the success which lies in the hands of every clever woman,' said the doctor, 'but your health is another matter.'

'I believe in my good luck; it has never failed me,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, as she shook hands and said good-bye.

When she reached home she dressed in one of her sumptuous gowns, for a score of country neighbours were coming to meet Jane Erskine as the fiancee of her son. Her maid bore the brunt of my lady's sarcasm during the time of dressing, and was given a curt notice of dismissal before the toilet was complete. The woman's big round eyes, which were so obnoxious to her mistress, filled with tears as she accepted her discharge. And Mrs. Ogilvie, descending the broad staircase of the house with her air of magnificence, her jewels, and her red hair, rapped her fan suddenly and sharply on the palm of her hand, so that the delicate tortoise-shell sticks were broken. 'Why does she look at me like that?' she said fiercely below her breath. 'I am glad I dismissed her, and I am glad she cried! Why should not some one else suffer as well as I?'

'You are not really tiresome, Jane,' she said after dinner, as the two sat together on a couch. 'I have never known another engaged young lady whom I did not avoid; but you are distressing yourself quite unnecessarily about me. When I look tired, for instance, you may take it as a sure sign that I am bored; nothing ever really makes me feel ill except dullness.'

'Still,' urged Jane, 'Peter and I want it so much. We think if you were to get advice from a doctor it would make us feel so much happier about you.'

'I never allow any one to discuss my health with me,' said Mrs. Ogilvie coldly; 'it is only a polite way of pointing out to one that one is looking plain.'

Jane took one of her hands in hers with an impulsive gesture, and printed a kiss upon it.

'Do sit upon me when I begin to bore you or to say the wrong thing! I believe, for a woman, I am quite unpardonably clumsy and tactless.'

'Have you ever discovered,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, 'that tact is becoming a little overdone, and that it generally succeeds in accentuating a difficult situation, or in making it impossible? Women are horribly tactful as a rule, and that is why men's society is preferable to theirs. If you tread on a man's foot he will no doubt forgive you, while admitting that the blow was painful; but a woman smiles and tries to look as though she really enjoyed it.'

'Promise never to endure me in silence,' said Jane, laughing, 'even when I am most tactless!'

'Silent endurance is hardly my character,' said Mrs. Ogilvie, screwing up her eyes. 'I dismissed Forder before dinner because she annoyed me.'

'Please take Forder to your heart again tomorrow morning,' said Jane; 'she keeps Martin in such a good temper.'

'No,' said Mrs. Ogilvie; 'I shall get a new maid when I go up to London in November. Forder has had round eyes for such a long time, and she is hopelessly stupid about doing my hair.'

Mrs. Ogilvie always spoke about her hair with a touch of defiance in her voice. It was so undisguisedly auburn that probably only Jane Erskine and Peter ever believed that it was not dyed.

'What were we talking about?' she said presently. 'Oh yes, I was saying that you were not tiresome although you are engaged to be married. You are not even quite uninteresting, although you are healthy and happy! All the same, I am going to try and persuade you and Peter to have the wedding sooner than you intended.'

'Why?' said Jane simply.

'I am sick of Bowshott,' said Mrs. Ogilvie lightly. 'By the by, I believe I am going to make it over to you and Peter when you marry. Why should I act as custodian to a lot of grimy pictures, which don't amuse me the least bit in the world, or walk in these formal gardens, where I don't even meet a gardener after ten o'clock? A prison life would really be a pleasant change! I shall go to London when you are married; it is the only place—except Paris—where one lives. I must have the house in Berkeley Square painted. And, oh! there are heaps of things I want to do; must I really go into them all?

'When is the wedding to be?' asked old Lord Sherard, sinking on to the sofa beside Miss Erskine, when he and the other gentlemen returned from the dining-room.

'Jane and I have just been deciding that the wedding is to take place in the middle of October,' replied Mrs. Ogilvie in her cool, decisive voice.

Jane laughed and caught Peter's eye, and he drew her aside when he could, and asked for further confirmation of a change of plans of which he thoroughly approved.

There was no reason for delay; the building and repairing of the tower would hardly interfere with the other parts of the vast house. Jane, like Peter, was quite satisfied that their wedding should be at an earlier date than was at first suggested. They had known each other all their lives; why postpone the happy time when they should be married?

So wedding invitations were written and despatched, and wedding gowns were ordered, and wedding presents came in. Tenants presented silver bowls and trays, and servants gave clocks and illuminated addresses, and the Ogilvie family lawyer came down with his clerk to stay, and was hidden away somewhere in the big house, where he wrote busily all day, and made wills and transferred deeds, and wanted signatures for this thing and for that through half the autumn mornings.

'I see nothing for it,' said Jane, 'but to postpone getting my trousseau until after I am married. If I succeed in getting a wedding dress and something to go away in by the twenty-sixth, I shall consider myself lucky!'

Miss Abingdon, to whose Early Victorian mind a wedding was still an occasion for tears, sighed over her niece's engagement because Jane never came to her room at night to water her couch with tears, nor had doubts or presentiments or misgivings.

'She seems to have so little sense of responsibility,' she sighed to Mrs. Wrottesley, whose visits at this trying time were a cause of nothing but comfort to her.

'I know,' said Mrs. Wrottesley—in the hesitating manner of the woman who might have been 'advanced' had she not married a clergyman—'I know it may seem to you irreverent to say so, but I sometimes think that marriage is not undertaken lightly and unadvisedly enough. It seems to me that nowadays the tendency is to consider the matter almost too seriously, and that a certain light-hearted impulse is really what is required before taking what is called the plunge.'

Miss Abingdon—not by any means for the first time—felt regret that Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and becoming attitude for all women.

'I am afraid we must not tamper with the Prayer Book,' she said reprovingly; and Mrs. Wrottesley, who for twenty years had been silent under reproof, relapsed into silence again.

Jane, meanwhile, was saying good-bye to every tenant on Miss Abingdon's small estate. To her hunters she confided the good news that they were going with her when she married, and that they would hunt with her as before. And the stable cat, whom she took up in her arms and kissed affectionately, was told that he really must not mind saying good-bye, for that she, Jane, would only be two miles off, so that the stable cat needn't look quite so disconsolate. The proverbial old nurse in the village had to be visited, and the school-children asked to tea, and tenants and gardeners to dinner; and every one was in a highly nervous state of preparation, and in a still more delightful state of anticipation.

Miss Abingdon enjoyed the dear fussiness of the wedding preparations, and thought in her secret heart that Mrs. Ogilvie missed all the pleasure of the thing by giving a few brief, emphatic orders to her steward, instead of personally superintending every detail of the servants' ball and the tenants' dinner.

Mrs. Ogilvie's directions were probably made in less than an hour, and transmitted to Mr. Miller's capacious pocket-book when he came to her boudoir to receive instructions one autumn morning. When he had left, Mrs. Ogilvie quitted her writing-table, by which she had been sitting, and walked to the window of her room and stood idly by it, her graceful figure outlined against the pane. Before her stretched the great gardens in an aching formality of borders and devices. Viewed from a height, and with her near-sighted eyes, they presented an appearance of a piece of elaborate stitchwork on a green worsted ground. The fountains, with their punctual fall of spray, might have been a device in shells and beads in the centre of each design. Beyond the gardens there was a mass of woods, all dim greens and bright golds; but even the woods were touched with formality, and the foresters of the place had lopped away every unsightly branch from the beeches and oaks. Probably there may have been homely corners in the gardens and grounds which Peter had discovered as a child; but Mrs. Ogilvie, when she walked, kept to the prim paths of the terrace and the garden, where every pebble seemed to have its proper place, in full view of the windows of the house.

'It has always been a prison to me—always,' she murmured to herself, oblivious of the fact that no one more than she would have missed a luxurious environment and a stately setting to her own personality. Mrs. Ogilvie often imagined that she would have liked a small house; but there is no doubt that she would have quitted it in disgust the first time that the odour of dinner came up the back stairs. She believed that a large staff of servants was merely a burden; but she would have felt at a loss had she been obliged to wait on herself even for an hour. As she looked now at the gardens in front of her, and away to the woods beyond, and to the great stretches of greenhouses and conservatories to southward, she thought how irksome they were, how unnecessary, and how little pleasure they gave.

'Magnificence is always dull,' she thought, 'and yet people are impressed by it! They not only value themselves by what they have; they actually value others according to their possessions, and respect a man for his ownership of things of which they cannot even hope to rob him.'

She supposed that the tenants and servants would have to be fed on the occasion of a marriage. She believed it was their one idea of enjoying themselves; but she begged her steward not to bother her with details when he had gone into the question of roasting an ox whole. Having dismissed him with a few brief orders Mrs. Ogilvie went to her writing-table. 'I may as well get over all the disagreeable and odious things in one morning,' she said to herself.

Her writing-table was placed against a wall on which hung a mirror, and she sat down opposite it. According to a custom she had, she directed the envelopes first, before beginning to write her letters. Her writing-table was always littered with addressed envelopes of notes which she meant to write some day when she felt in the mood for writing.

She paused now when she had written the words: 'To be given to my son at my death;' and, screwing up her face into her twisted smile, she said to herself, 'How absurd and melodramatic it sounds!' Then she took a sheet of notepaper and began to write. The first few lines flowed easily enough, and then Mrs. Ogilvie's pen traced the letters more slowly on the page. Once she paused altogether, and said aloud to her image in the mirror opposite her escritoire, 'What a fool I am!' and then stooped again over her task. The sprawling writing had hardly covered half a sheet of notepaper when the red-gold head with its crown of plaits was raised again, and the woman in the mirror looked at her with a face that was suddenly livid. Her lips were white and were drawn back somewhat from her teeth; and Mrs. Ogilvie, in the midst of pain, recognized first of all how hideous she looked.

The pen dropped from her fingers, and she pushed her chair back from the writing-table and went over to the fireplace and lay down on the sofa. The day was cold, and Mrs. Ogilvie shivered and drew a cover over her feet. 'When this is over,' she thought, 'I will ring and have the fire lighted.'

She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and calculated deliberately how long the paroxysm would probably last. She had always regarded pain as an animate thing which had to be fought with, and she had never failed in courage when she met it, nor moaned when, as now for the first time, she was beaten by it. The clock seemed to tick more leisurely to-day, and the time passed very slowly; there is a loneliness about suffering which makes the hours drag heavily. Once she buried her face for a moment in the sofa cushions, and her bands clenched the cover and crumpled the delicate satin between her fingers. Her head sank lower, like a wounded bird that ruffles up the dust; she moved convulsively amongst the cushions. It was a grim fight with pain that she was making; she did not give in easily, but the odds were unequal. Mrs. Ogilvie was in the hands of an unsparing foe. She was conquered, but afterwards, when she lay quite still, there was a look of defiance in her attitude.

Her maid, coming in and finding her sleeping, glanced at the blinds and wondered if she dared lower them, for the sun was shining brilliantly into the room now, and its beams were resting full and strong on the figure on the sofa.

It was something about the position of the auburn head—something twisted and unnatural in the attitude of the recumbent form—that caused the woman to cry out suddenly and sharply, with a vibrating cry that seemed to set everything in the room jingling. No one heard her at first, and she opened the window and called aloud for help; for there was a sound of horses' hoofs upon the gravel, and Peter rode up with Jane to the door.

'Mrs. Ogilvie must have been dead an hour,' the village doctor said when he came; and then he sent the weeping girl and poor, white-faced, broken-hearted Peter out of the room. Neither of them could believe the horrible news; they turned to each other, taking hands, as children do in their grief, and Jane went back and with a sob stooped down and imprinted a long kiss on the dead woman's brow.

'She must have died just as she was writing her morning letters,' said Peter, as he glanced at the writing-table with its litter of notes and papers.

'Perhaps it would be as well to lock up anything that is lying about,' said the doctor; 'it is customary to do so. Or your lawyer—who, I understand, is in the house—could come in, I suppose, and put away jewels, etc.' He handed Peter the litter of notes and papers on the writing-table.

'Thank you,' said Peter. 'I don't suppose there is anything very important, but I will look through them presently.' He glanced at the topmost addresses of the notes, and decided that they were probably belated wedding invitations to people who had been forgotten, and he put an indiarubber band about them and thrust them into his pocket.

The guests in the house departed hurriedly within two hours of Mrs. Ogilvie's death, amidst all the confusion of hasty packing, and carriages ordered for this person and for that, and footmen hastening downstairs with luggage, and luncheon prepared hurriedly and eaten almost surreptitiously by those who wished to catch an early train. There was a horrible stir in the house under the hush and awe that death brings. No one wished to intrude upon Peter; yet a dozen friends wanted to see him, to hear, if possible, more details of his mother's sudden end. Others, with a sort of animal instinct of forsaking at once the place where death reigned, betrayed an almost contemptible haste in quitting the house; but they, too, must know all that could be told. They had never noticed that Mrs. Ogilvie did not seem well, or they had remarked that of late she had spent much time in her room, or 'she had seemed so bright and cheerful'; and, again, 'they had noticed how tired she had been at night sometimes.'

To no one had Peter any special news to give. Some one had heard, he believed, that she had been to see Sir Edward Croft, the great surgeon in London, and to-day they had telegraphed to him. Peter himself had not really been anxious about his mother, although he had imagined for some time past that she did not look well. He gave what attention he could to his guests, bade them a conventional good-bye, and displayed that reserve which an Englishman is supposed to be able to maintain in times of sorrow. But it is not too much to say that, warm-hearted, deeply affectionate man that he was, his grief for his mother's death had something bewildering in it. He had loved her faithfully and admired her loyally during the whole of his life; there had never been a quarrel between them, and, if he had not received many outward marks of affection from her, there was no single occasion in his life that he could remember in which she had failed him. He had come first always; he realized this with the sinking of heart which even the most dutiful son may feel when he sees with absolute clearness, perhaps for the first time, that he must have accepted, almost unknowingly, many sacrifices from his mother. He hoped, with a boyish remorse and a boyish simple-heartedness, that she understood everything now, and that somewhere, not very far off, she would be able to see into his heart and know positively how much he had loved her. He had always accepted in simple faithfulness the statement that those who were gone 'knew now,' as the phrase runs; and it comforted him to think that all he might have said to her when she was alive was clearly understood by his mother at last.

By two o'clock the big house was empty of guests and given over to silence, or to the sound of hushed footsteps about the stairs, or to the weeping of maids as they assembled in little groups in the corridors and spoke with sobs of the mistress whom they had served faithfully. Each room that had lately given up its tenant showed a disordered interior, with paper strewn here and there. Or some maid left behind to pack her mistress's heavier luggage could be seen kneeling before open trunks and deftly arranging their contents.

A grey-haired butler approached his master when the last of the carriages had driven away, and begged him to eat some luncheon, and informed him that Miss Erskine was still in the library.

'Send something there,' said Peter briefly.

For a moment Jane could only weep, and they clung to each other, saying, with the helplessness of the suddenly bereaved, 'Isn't it awful?' Then, as they began to grow calmer, Peter administered what comfort he could, and tried in his kindly way to induce the girl to eat something.

'You must eat, you know,' he said, 'and it will do you good. It has been a terrible time for you. And then I think you ought to go back and lie down for a bit.'

If it is true that a woman suggests beef-tea as a universal panacea for all ills, it is certain, on the other hand, that a man believes that a woman always feels better for lying down.

'I should like to wait,' Jane said, 'until Sir Edward arrives, and to hear what he has to say.'

A footman came in to clear away lunch, and then the two lovers went and sat together on the library sofa, and looked out on the long stretches of gardens with their cold precision and want of sympathy. A luggage-cart, piled high with dress-baskets and portmanteaux, passed down the drive towards the station gates, and a motor-car returned from a neighbouring house for something that had been forgotten. After that there was silence both within and without the house; even the maids had gone downstairs to sit together and whisper. It was one of those grey days in early autumn which have an almost weird sense of stillness about them. Hardly a leaf stirred, and even the flight of the birds was noiseless and touched with the universal feeling of hush. The begonias and dahlias and flaming autumn flowers in the broad border below the southern terrace wall had lost half their colour in the grey afternoon, and a robin alighted softly on the window-sill and, putting his head on one side, looked into the library at the pair sitting on the sofa.

Neither had spoken for a time. To-morrow there would probably be lawyers to see and the funeral to arrange for, and a hundred things to do; but to-day there was a lull in which time itself seemed to have stood still. Years had passed since this morning, and yet the clocks marked only a few hours on their dials. Mrs. Ogilvie had died at twelve o'clock, and the very flowers which she had placed by her table still bloomed freshly, and a book she had been reading lay open where she had left it.

Yet it seemed a lifetime since she had died.

During the interminable afternoon, and in the stillness of the big library, with its ordered rows of books and solemn-looking, carved cupboards, Peter and Jane Erskine sat together feeling oppressively this great lapse of time that had passed. Their understanding of one another had always been a strong bond between them; and now they felt not like the lovers of yesterday, but like those whose lives have been linked for years, and for whom loyalty and faith have grown deeper and stronger as troubles and storms came. They looked across to the ruined tower, where not very long ago, as we count time, they had told their love to each other; and, so looking, had drawn closer by their common sorrow. It seemed to them, in the hush of the library, that this time of grief and dependence had something arresting in it. Life had not demanded very much of them so far. To-day there was a strange sense that its demands, perhaps even for them, would not always be small.

The doctor and the lawyer summoned Peter presently, and afterwards he and Jane were told particulars of Mrs. Ogilvie's fatal illness.

'But she must have suffered—she must have suffered so!' said Jane, with all the resentfulness that youth feels towards pain. 'Why did she tell none of us? Why did none of us know?'

'I ought to have guessed something,' said Peter miserably. 'I must have been a fool not to see that something was wrong.' And together they wondered what would have happened if this had been done or that, and were inclined to reproach themselves for much in which they were in no measure to blame. They walked back through the dim, still woods; and at the white gates of Jane's pleasant home Peter left her, and she went on alone to meet Miss Abingdon.

It was late that night before the two sorrowful women went to bed; and hardly was breakfast over in the morning before, with the restlessness born of recent grief, Miss Abingdon was seeking anxiously to know what she could do or what ought to be done.

'If,' she said, 'I felt that I could even be of use by going up to town and choosing the servants' mourning, I should feel that I was doing something.'

There were piles of patterns of black stuffs, which Miss Abingdon had telegraphed for on the previous evening, lying in neat bundles on the breakfast-table, and stamped with their several prices and the width of the materials. Such things have often kept a woman sane in the first despair of grief.

'How would it do?' she said, 'to have a little crape on the body and not on the skirt?'

Jane replied that she thought it would do very nicely.

Poor Jane! her eyes were big with weeping, and she had lain awake the greater part of the night mourning for her friend who was gone. Now, as she tried to give her attention to her aunt and to the vexed question of the propriety of crape on the body, she thought, with girlish ingenuousness, that she wanted Peter more than she had ever wanted him before, and that she could do nothing until she had seen him. And across her grief came one great flash of joy as she realized that in all her troubles and sorrows she would have him with her.

'There he is now,' said Miss Abingdon, 'coming up the drive! Jane, my dear, how awfully ill Peter looks. Oh, my dear, you should have told me how ill he looks!'

Jane went out to the hall door without speaking. 'What is wrong?' she said briefly. 'Come into my sitting-room, Peter, and tell me what is wrong.'

'I 'd rather be outside, if you don't mind,' said Peter, the primitive man strong in him again.

There had been a storm in the night, after the unusual stillness of the afternoon, accompanied by heavy rain. Now the sun shone fitfully, and the disordered gardens and lawns were strewn with branches and countless leaves which chased each other, bowling along on their edges and dancing in mad eddies and circles.

'Let's get out of sight of the house,' said Peter; and they went into the high-walled garden and sat down on one of Miss Abingdon's cheerful-looking white seats.

There were long borders of dripping, storm-dashed flowers in front of them, and mignonette run to seed, and dahlias filled with moisture to their brims. Some gardeners were busy tying up saplings which had been detached from their stakes, and the beech trees on the other side of the high walls of the garden tossed their branches together and sighed a little.

Peter waited for a minute or two until the gardeners had moved out of hearing, and then said abruptly and with difficulty: 'You know those papers that the doctor gave me yesterday?'

'Those notes and things which were on her writing-table?' Jane asked.

Peter nodded his head, and then with an effort began again—this time with an attempt at formality—'I 'm sorry to have to tell you that there is something in one of them that I shall have to speak to you about.'

'Something in one of your mother's notes?' asked Jane, her level eyes turned questioningly upon him.

'I 'm telling it all wrong,' said Peter distractedly, 'and making it worse for you.'

'Are you quite sure that you need tell me anything at all?' asked Jane, and she laid her hand in his.

'I am quite sure,' he said; and then a very surprising thing happened, for he put Jane's hand aside and stood up before her.

'I 'm not even going to take your hand,' he said, 'until I have told you all about it. You see, there was a letter addressed to me amongst those on her writing-table yesterday. I 've shown it to the lawyer, but neither he nor I can make anything of it. It is directed to me to be given to me at her death; but she must have died while she was writing it. It leaves off in the middle of a sentence.'

'I think,' said Jane slowly, 'that nothing matters in the whole world so long as we have each other.'

'Ah, my dear!' said Peter, and he sat down on the bench and took her hand again. 'I 'll show you the letter,' he said suddenly, and brought the sheet of notepaper out of his pocket.

'May I read it?' said Jane.

'Yes, if you will,' he replied.

Afterwards they could tell every word of the unfinished letter by heart; but at the first reading the words seemed merely to puzzle Jane Erskine, and conveyed very little sense to her.

'When you get this letter I shall be dead,' wrote the woman who had meant to live for many years, 'and before I die I think there is something which I had better tell you. I am not haunted by remorse nor indulging in a deathbed repentance, and I shall merely ask you not to hate me more than you can help when you have finished reading this letter. You must often have heard of your elder brother who died when I was in Spain, the year after your father's death. He did not die——'

'There must be something more,' said Jane. She turned the page this way and that, as though to read some writing not decipherable by other eyes.

'I 've looked everywhere,' said Peter; 'there 's nothing more. Besides, you see, she stops in the middle of a sheet of notepaper. Why should she have written anything else on another piece?'

They read the letter again together, scanning the words line by line.

'What can it mean?' she said at last.

'I have evidently got an elder brother,' said Peter briefly, 'to whom everything belongs. Most people remember that my mother took a curious antipathy to the other little chap when I was born. I can't make it out in any possible way—no one can, of course. But it seems pretty plain that no will can be proved, nor can I touch anything, until my brother is known to be either dead or alive.'

'What can we do?' said Jane. Their two hands were locked together, and the trouble was the trouble of both.

'I can go out to Spain, where he is supposed to have died,' said Peter, 'and make inquiries.'

'I want to ask you something,' said Jane, after a pause. 'Let us be married quietly, first of all, and then we can do everything together.'

'I 'm probably a pauper,' he said simply, 'without the right to a single stone of Bowshott. I went fully into my father's will with the lawyer last night, and he leaves nearly everything to the eldest son.'

'Dear Peter!' protested Jane, accepting Peter's statement, but brushing aside its purport.

They talked on far into the morning, at one time half distrusting the evidence of their eyes which read the letter, at another looking far into the future to try to pierce the veil of darkness that at present shrouded it. Then, for there were many things to do, the young man turned his face homeward again, and Jane sat on alone in the garden, looking with eyes that hardly were conscious of seeing what they rested on, while the wet branches of the beech trees rocked themselves together, and the tearful autumn sunshine flickered on the disordered beds of mignonette. She sat there until the stable clock struck one, then rose and went indoors. One important decision had been made. They would be married quietly on the day Mrs. Ogilvie had fixed for the wedding; and then together they would seek the brother who, if he were still alive, would be brother to them both.

But the Court of Chancery took that reasonable view of the case which, as it frequently happens, is directly opposed to the view-sentimental. The Court of Chancery, in fact, refused to sanction the marriage of a minor with a man without settled prospects, and one whose position in the world was not confirmed by the possession either of money or of lands. At the age of twenty-five Miss Erskine might do as she liked; until then the Court of Chancery decided that she should divide her time each year between her two guardians, with whom she had always lived. No protests were of any avail, and wise relations and friends were agreed in thinking that it was better to postpone the marriage, at least for a time.

The autumn passed miserably. Peter went to Juarez first of all, and proved to be substantially true what at first he had supposed might have been the disordered fancy of a sick woman's mind. There was no record of the death of Edward Ogilvie, nor did any entry in registers show the name of an English child in the year when he was supposed to have died. No little grave in the cemetery marked his resting-place. One fact, at least, seemed established, and that was that Peter's elder brother had not died in infancy at Juarez.

Not much more than this could be proved, and Peter returned home to find that for the present nothing was legally his. Pending inquiries Bowshott was closed. Those who were in ignorance of the real state of affairs talked glibly of enormous death-duties which had crippled, for a time, even the immense Ogilvie estates, and had rendered it necessary for Peter to shut up the house and live economically. The countryside, which called itself gay, met at many little parties and talked charitably of the woman who was gone, saying, with an unconscious sense of patronage, that they had always liked Mrs. Ogilvie in spite of her faults. Death, the great leveller, had brought their unapproachable neighbour nearer to them; they were not afraid of her now. It was strange to think that she was really less than one of themselves in the cold isolation and the pathetic impotence of the grave. They could hardly picture her yet as a powerless thing—the keen, narrowing eyes closed, the sharp-edged poniard of her speech for ever sheathed.

Meanwhile, papers were examined, and every box and chest which contained written matter was searched for a clue to the missing child. Peter was engaged in long consultations with detectives, and lawyers were running up goodly bills, and British Consuls were making investigations abroad. A whole train of inquiries was set in motion, and pens and tongues were busy. The powerful hand of the law stretched itself out in secret to this country and to that, only to be met with a baffling failure to hold or to discover anything. Money was spent lavishly, and great brains tried to solve the mystery; and Mrs. Ogilvie lay in her grave in a silence that could not be broken, her hand, which had traced the few lines on one sheet of notepaper, cold and still for ever.



CHAPTER VIII

When Peter came back from Spain he came to an empty house. The big reception rooms at Bowshott were swathed in brown holland and dust-sheets, pictures were covered and carpets rolled up, giving an air of desolation to the place. The flowers in the formal gardens had all been dug up, and the carefully tended designs—so like a stitchwork pattern—had lost their mosaic of colour, leaving merely a careful drawing of brown upon green. The banks of flowering exotics, which his mother had loved to have in her drawing-rooms, had been removed to the greenhouses and conservatories. The sight of the gardeners mowing, for the last time in the season, the hundred-year-old turf of the lawn conveyed a suggestion of regret with it; the old pony harnessed to the mowing machine stepped sedately and quietly in his boots on the close, fine grass. Everything about Bowshott looked stately and beautiful in the clean, sharp air of the morning, when Peter drove up to the entrance after a long night journey and ascended the flight of steps leading to the hall door.

His return to the inheritance which had been indisputably his since he was a little boy had a horrible feeling of unreality about it. Half a dozen times in the course of the morning he had to check himself when he found his thoughts wandering to alterations or improvements, and to tell himself, with a bewildered feeling, that perhaps he had not a right to a flower in the garden or a chair in the house.

'I can't believe it's not mine,' he said aloud, as he drove up the long avenue from the station in his dog-cart, with one of the famous Bowshott hackneys in the shafts. 'I can't believe it's not mine!' Many people might have found in the singular unhomeliness of the big house a just cause for withholding their affection from it, but Peter had always loved it. Every corner of the place was full of memories to him. Here was the wall of the terrace off which, as a little boy, he used to jump, making horrible heelmarks in the turf where he alighted; and there was the stone summer-house, built after the fashion of a small Greek temple, but only interesting to Peter Ogilvie from the fact that he used to keep his wheelbarrow and garden tools there. He remembered the first day when it had suddenly struck him that the geometrically shaped flower-beds were designed after a pattern, and he had counted, with his nurse, the loops and circles in the design. There, again, were the fountains with their silver spray, in whose basins, by the inexorable but utterly unintelligible law of the nursery, he had never been allowed to play. Here was the clock on the tower which used to boom out every hour as it passed, but of whose strokes he was never conscious except when he heard it at night. Passing inside the house was the hall, with its big round tables by the fire, and beyond that was the library and his mother's drawing-room; while in the older wings of the house were the ballroom where Charles I. had banqueted, and the Sevres sitting-room, so called from the china plaques let into the mantelpiece, where he had made love.

'I hope, if my brother is alive, that he is a good sort of chap,' said Peter.

He breakfasted in the tapestried room which he had ordered to be kept open for him, and then went into the library to write his letters. He had a hundred things to do. At lunch-time he interviewed his steward, his agent, his stud-groom, and the other heads of departments of a large estate. The horses were to be sold with the exception of a few favourites. The gardens were to be kept up as usual.

Some dogs of his mother's would be cared for, his bankers would pay the usual subscriptions to local charities, and the almshouses in the village were to be maintained as they had always been maintained.

After lunch Mr. Semple, the lawyer, arrived. He was a pleasant man and a keen botanist. The gardens at Bowshott were a delight to him, and Peter had often found him good company over a cigar in the evenings. Mr. Semple was one of those who had throughout urged secrecy and caution in the matter of the late Mrs. Ogilvie's communication. 'In the first place,' he said, 'it may still be proved to have been an hallucination of her mind, attendant upon her state of health; and, in the second place, anything like publicity might bring a host of aspirants and adventurers whose claims would take months of investigation to dispose of.' He advised that everything about the house should remain in its present state for a year, until a proper legal inquiry into the disappearance of the elder son could be instituted.

'He may have died as a child, although he wasn't buried at Juarez,' said Peter.

Jane had departed to spend her usual six months of the year with General Erskine, but she had written to say, positively, that she knew it would come all right; and whenever Peter was downhearted he always thought of her letter, believing, in all simplicity, that Jane was never wrong. If only she were at Miss Abingdon's now, instead of in her uncle's house in Grosvenor Place!

'She 'll miss the hunting, I 'm afraid,' he thought miserably, contrasting their present separation with all the joy and happiness that they had so fully intended should be theirs this winter.

Mr. Semple had a shrewdness acquired from many years' experience in legal matters, and he shook his head when Peter made the suggestion that probably his brother had died in infancy. 'The conclusion I have arrived at, after years of legal work,' he said, 'is that the undesirable person lives, while the useful or much wanted one dies. Those who encumber the ground remain longest upon it, and the person in receipt of a large annuity or pension is proverbially long-lived. However, we have so far not found a single trace of the existence of Edward Ogilvie, though you must remember we have not yet ascertained in which different parts of Spain your mother lived during those two years which she spent there.'

'I don't see who on earth is to tell us!' ejaculated Peter. 'She generally had foreign maids about her, and I think I always had French nurses. I never heard of any old servant who went with her on her travels; and although, of course, money was paid to her by her bank, and letters were forwarded to her by the bankers, the actual addresses to which they were sent have not been kept after an interval of twenty-five years. One of the old clerks at Coutts's remembers, in an indefinite sort of way, that he forwarded packages for a long time to Madrid, and afterwards, he thinks, to Toledo, and then farther south, and at one time to Cintra; but my mother's headquarters seem always to have been in Granada, and the clerk says that he can give me no dates nor indeed any exact information.'

'I did not know she had been at Cintra or Toledo,' said Mr. Semple thoughtfully.

'I won't swear that she had,' said Peter. 'The Peninsula wasn't so generally known twenty-five years ago as it is now. Travelling was difficult then, and people in England, who have not themselves travelled much, are very liable to get confused about the names of foreign places.'

'Still,' said the lawyer, 'Cintra and Toledo are places that every one knows.'

'You mean,' said Peter, 'that in a well-known place, with English people living in it, there would be more likelihood of getting the information which we want?'

'I mean,' said Mr. Semple, 'that, as there is no evidence of your brother ever having been seen at Juarez, the next thing is to find out in what place there is evidence of his appearance.'

It was late afternoon, and as all clerical work for the day was now finished, Peter suggested and Mr. Semple readily agreed to a walk in the gardens. There was nothing left in the flower-beds, but the conservatories and the orchid-house were a real feast of pleasure to the lawyer. He went into the outer hall to fetch his stick and coat, and then, turning back towards his host, he made a humorous signal to convey the intelligence that some callers had driven up to the door. Peter retreated precipitately; but Mr. Semple had already been seen and was hailed by Mr. Lawrence, who had, a few minutes before, drawn up to the entrance in his big red motor-car. Already Mr. Lawrence was in earnest conversation with the butler, and his feminine-like ejaculations could be heard now as he stood and conversed with the man at the hall door. He stood on the doorstep while his guests in the motor, who seemed to fear that they might be intrusive, looked as though they would prefer to hasten their departure.

'Ah, how-do-you-do, Mr. Semple,' said Mr. Lawrence in his high-pitched voice, advancing a few steps into the hall. 'It is a great piece of luck meeting you like this! I have just driven over with my friends, Sir John and Lady Falconer.—Lady Falconer, may I introduce my friend, Mr. Semple?—This is a very sad house to come to, Mr. Semple, is it not?' he said, and paused, hoping for a little gossip from the lawyer. 'I was just driving through the village, and I have been to see the church with my friends, and we thought we would run in and inquire how everything was going on.'

'Everything,' said the lawyer dryly, 'is going on as well as could be expected.'

'How is Peter?' said Mr. Lawrence, putting on an appropriate expression of woe, which sat oddly on his big healthy red face. He was a kindly man at heart, but an idle existence and his inveterate love of gossip had made a poor creature of him. His healthy muscular frame did not know the sensation of that honest fatigue which follows a good day's work, and his mind travelled on lines of so little resistance that he may be said to have exercised it almost as infrequently as he exercised his body.

Mr. Semple replied that Peter seemed well; and Mr. Lawrence, taking him in an affectionate and familiar manner by the sleeve of his coat, said: 'I should so much like my friends to see the gardens; Peter would not mind, would he?'

Lady Falconer, the least intrusive of women, who had heard the whispered colloquy, here interposed and said that, as she was very cold, she would much prefer to go home; and Sir John added with simple directness that he thought that, as the place was more or less shut up at present, the gardens had better wait for a more fitting occasion.

Mr. Lawrence protested that a walk would do Lady Falconer good, and that, further, as they were leaving so soon, there would be no other chance of seeing the famous gardens. In fact Mr. Lawrence had the door of his motor-car open, and was helping Lady Falconer to alight almost before he had obtained Mr. Semple's permission to make a tour of the grounds.

'It's all right,' he said, in his fussy, dictatorial way, divesting himself of his heavy motor-coat, and preparing to act as cicerone. 'This place is thrown open once a week to the public; and although this isn't a visitors' day all sorts of people come to visit Bowshott on the other days of the week.'

Lady Falconer felt slightly ruffled by the way in which her wishes had been ignored in a small matter, and confined herself to talking to the lawyer; but Mr. Lawrence overtook them on the pretext of pointing out some special beauty of the design of the gardens, or of the fine view that could be obtained from the high position of the terraces, and the next moment he had plunged somewhat ruthlessly into the absorbing topic of Mrs. Ogilvie's sudden death.

'We were all shocked by it,' he said, emphasizing his words in his gushing way; 'and of course to our little circle,' he said, turning to Mr. Semple in an explanatory manner, 'it is more particularly painful and distressing, because Sir John and Lady Falconer had only just renewed a very old acquaintance with the deceased lady.'

'We knew Mrs. Ogilvie very well in Spain,' said Lady Falconer in her charming voice, still confining her remarks to Mr. Semple.