'Ah!' said the lawyer, 'you knew her in Spain?'

'Yes,' said Lady Falconer, 'and it was one of those friendships which I believe it was intended on both sides should be renewed when we should return to England; for, on my own and on my husband's part, it was a matter of real liking. But we have been on foreign service ever since we were married, and I never met Mrs. Ogilvie again till she drove over to the races at Sedgwick.'

Mr. Semple detached himself and his companion from the little group which Mr. Lawrence was showing round with so much assiduity, and, as they paced the broad walks of the terrace together, he said to her, with an air of frank confidence, 'You were with her, perhaps, before her elder child died?'

'No,' said Lady Falconer, 'and rather strangely I never knew till the other day that Mrs. Ogilvie had lost a child. There was only one boy with her when we knew her at Juarez; and, although she was in deep mourning at the time, we knew, of course, that she was in the first year of her widowhood. But we had no idea, as I was telling Mrs. Wrottesley the other day, that Mrs. Ogilvie had suffered a double loss.'

Mr. Semple led the way through the orchid-house and stopped to examine some of the blooms with absorbed attention. 'It is very chilly,' he said, as he stepped out into the cold air after that of the hot greenhouse; 'I hope you will not catch cold.' He locked his hands lightly behind his back as he walked, and continued to talk to the companion by his side. 'I wonder,' he said, 'if you could tell me exactly the year and the month when you first met Mrs. Ogilvie? There are various formalities to be gone through, in connection with Captain Ogilvie's accession to the property, which necessitate hunting up family records, and these have been very badly kept in the Ogilvie family. Also, may I say this to you in confidence? There was an idea in many people's minds that, about the time of Colonel Ogilvie's death and the early infancy of the second son, Peter, Mrs. Ogilvie's mind was slightly unhinged for a time. It may not have been so, but one cannot help wondering if the concealment which she has used to keep from her family the knowledge of the existence of this disease from which she has died may not have been something like a return of an old mental malady.'

Lady Falconer looked genuinely distressed, and protested that certainly when she knew Mrs. Ogilvie she was in all respects the most sane as well as one of the most charming of women. 'And as for giving you dates,' she said pleasantly, 'that is very easily done, for it was in the year and the month of my marriage that I first met her.'

'That would be?' said Mr. Semple, unlocking his clasped hands and touching his fingers together in the characteristic manner of the confidential lawyer.

'That was in December 1885,' she said.

'Ah!' said Mr. Semple contemplatively, 'then it must have been after little Edward Ogilvie's death, of course.'

'I cannot tell you,' said Lady Falconer, 'because, as I say, Mrs. Ogilvie never spoke of her loss. Perhaps that does not seem to you very remarkable, as we only met her in a most casual manner in an out-of-the-way village in Spain; but we really were on terms of some intimacy together, and one can only explain her silence by the fact, which seems to be pretty generally known, that she was a woman of quite unusual reserve.'

'Yes,' said Mr. Semple; 'I believe no one ever knew Mrs. Ogilvie very well.'

Mr. Lawrence called to them from behind to suggest that the new row of greenhouses was an immense improvement, and that they had cost over a thousand pounds to build.

Lady Falconer politely turned to look back, and then found herself rather determinedly appropriated by the lawyer.

'I always understood,' he said, 'that Mrs. Ogilvie travelled considerably in Spain; and, of course, in those days when railways were fewer, this was considered rather unusual, especially for a lady travelling with no gentleman with her. How courageous she was!'

'Much more courageous than I was even with my husband with me!' said Lady Falconer. 'Mrs. Ogilvie had been in quite out-of-the-way parts of the country; but she spoke the language perfectly, and I believe I used to hear that she had Spanish blood in her veins.'

'Yes; she had property at Granada, and beyond where the railway now extends, in some of the more southern provinces,' hazarded Mr. Semple.

'I think if I remember aright,' said Lady Falconer, 'that she had just returned from Cintra when I met her.'

'I have always heard that Cintra is a most lovely place,' said Mr. Semple conversationally; 'and Mrs. Ogilvie had a peculiar love for beautiful things.'

'Cintra is beautiful, and Lisbon itself is a particularly fine town,' assented Lady Falconer.

'Mrs. Ogilvie was not there when you knew her?'

Lawyers are inquisitive by profession, and Mr. Semple made his inquiries with easy tact; his manner was kind and pleasant, and betrayed so much real feeling for his clients that Lady Falconer was tempted to continue the subject of conversation in which he seemed so deeply interested.

'I wish,' she said cordially, 'that I could remember more details that might be of interest or of use to you. My husband and I have spent a most varied life, in which many interesting experiences have, alas! been almost forgotten; but we were both considerably impressed by Mrs. Ogilvie's vivid personality and her very real charm. These made much more impression on me than anything that she told us about her journeys. She was fond of travelling by sea, I remember, and I perfectly well recollect her telling my husband and me that she had come by ship to Lisbon when she first came to travel in Spain for her health.'

'Yes, I remember hearing that,' said Mr. Semple. 'Indeed, I believe that we took her passage for her, and in going over her papers the other day we came across two letters which she had written home from the ship.'

'Talking of that,' said Lady Falconer, 'I wonder if the maid who was with her during the time I was there could be of service to you? I often think a maid must know her mistress with even a greater degree of intimacy than many of her friends, and I remember it was a particularly nice Spanish woman whose services she lent me when I was ill.'

Mr. Semple would like to know if Lady Falconer remembered whether the woman had come out from England with Mrs. Ogilvie.

'I am afraid I cannot,' said Lady Falconer. 'But stop! Yes, I can. The maid who came out from England with Mrs. Ogilvie left her because she objected to the sea-voyage. It seems that the poor thing was so ill that she never appeared the whole time, and as soon as the ship touched port she went straight back to England by land. I remember it quite well now, because that was a particularly stormy winter, with dreadful gales; and when my illness was at its worst it was another very stormy night, and this Spanish woman whom I mentioned just now told me the story, and was evidently full of sympathy for the English maid. She enlivened the whole of her watch during the night by lamentations over the danger of sea-voyages, interspersed with prayers to the Virgin. I shall never forget how it blew! The house shook with the violence of the gale, and this Spanish woman sat by my bed and told me stories of shipwreck and of bodies washed up on the beach. Mrs. Ogilvie, I understand, had but lately parted with friends. Ah, I see now! I do not speak Spanish well, and I remember I had an idea at the time that this parting which the woman spoke of had something to do with friends who had left her. But, of course, what the Spanish woman must really have meant was that Mrs. Ogilvie had lately suffered a bereavement.'

'It is strange, then, is it not,' said the lawyer, 'that you should connect this parting in your own mind with the storm that was raging on the night of which you spoke?'

'That doesn't seem to me very strange,' said Lady Falconer, 'because, as I have said, I know so little Spanish. And yet I have an idea that this very emotional serving-woman seemed to predict some horrible catastrophe to the travellers.'

'How little self-control some of these people have!' commented Mr. Semple. 'I always wonder how it is that ladies choose foreign women to be their personal attendants. I suppose you don't happen to know if this maid remained long with Mrs. Ogilvie?'

'I do not indeed,' said Lady Falconer; 'but I am under the impression that Mrs. Ogilvie changed her maids frequently. This will coincide with your view that she was in a nervous, uncontrolled condition at the time, although in other respects I cannot honestly say that I ever noticed the least sign of an unhinged mind. One thought that she was too much alone; but, of course, her loss was a very recent one, and everybody knows that in grief there often comes a desire for solitude.'

'It was sad, therefore,' said Mr. Semple, 'that these friends of hers should be leaving her just then. Mrs. Ogilvie would have been all the better for having a few intimates about her. It would be useful if you could remember their names.'

'I do not even know that they were friends,' protested Lady Falconer; 'and, as I told you, the Spanish maid may well have been alluding to a recent death. But indeed the incident made very little impression on my mind; even if I were able to give you information about these unknown friends I do not know how it could in any way help you to solve the sad question of her mental state at the time.'

'You think these friends of hers whom you speak of would not be able to do so either?'

'Ah!' cried Lady Falconer, 'you are accepting my vague recollections almost as if they were legal evidence, whereas I really cannot tell you whether the Spanish maid alluded to friends or to the death of Mrs. Ogilvie's husband and her little boy. I can only say that the impression that remains with me is that Mrs. Ogilvie had been seeing some friends off on a voyage.'

'It would be important to know who those friends were,' said Mr. Semple.

'I wish I could help you!' said Lady Falconer.

They made a longer detour in the gardens than Lady Falconer would have cared to make had she not been interested in the man by her side, whose inquisitiveness was based upon friendship, and whose most persistent interrogations had been touched with a quiet and sober tact which contrasted pleasantly with Mr. Lawrence's dictatorial manner. That genial and rubicund person was now seen approaching with Sir John, and suggested that they 'ought to draw Peter for tea.'

Lady Falconer declined the refreshment with considerable emphasis. This visit to the closed house so recently shadowed by death seemed to her in doubtful taste, and she would now have preferred to return home; but Peter had seen them from the house, and being the least churlish of men he came out on to the terrace and invited the party to come in. He disliked Mr. Lawrence as much as it was in his uncritical nature to dislike any one; but it is more than possible that he would have resented a word said in his disfavour. 'Lawrence is a good fellow,' he used to say charitably, 'only he is so beastly domestic.'

Mr. Lawrence's conversation was indeed principally of the intimate order of things, and was concerned with details of births, deaths, and marriages, such as the feminine rather than the male mind is more generally supposed to indulge in. He drank several cups of tea, and was deeply interested in the fact that the tea-service was not the one in common use at Bowshott, and that, therefore, probably the bulk of the silver had been sent to the bank. He would have liked to make a tour of the rooms to see if there were any other changes noticeable anywhere, and he more than once remarked to his friends as they drove home in the motor-car that he could not understand why the drawing-rooms were swathed in brown holland unless Peter meant to go away again. If so, when was the marriage to be? Why should it be postponed for more than a brief period of mourning? And why did the rooms which he had seen through the windows wear such a shut-up and dismantled appearance? He found food for speculation during the whole afternoon call, and in his inquisitive way gave his mind to finding out as much as possible about his neighbour's doings.

Lady Falconer sat by the fire of logs, while Mr. Lawrence's garrulous conversation went on uninterruptedly. Peter found her quiet manner attractive, and began to feel grateful to Mr. Lawrence for his intrusiveness, without which he would not have enjoyed a conversation with this pleasant, gentle-mannered woman seated thoughtfully by the fire.

'May I ask a favour?' said Mr. Lawrence gushingly, laying his hand upon Peter's shoulder. 'I want awfully to see that new heating apparatus you have had put in downstairs. I was recommending it the other day to Carstairs; but I want to know something more about it, and then I shall be able to explain it better. How much coal, for instance, do you find it consumes?'

When the two had sought the lower regions Mr. Semple took Peter's vacant chair by the fire. Lady Falconer held her muff between her and the blaze, and her face was in shadow. The lawyer said briefly, 'We are in great perplexity, and I think you can help us, and I feel sure'—he looked at her with admiration—'that whatever I say to you will be received in confidence.'

'It shall be in confidence,' said Lady Falconer.

'At the same time,' said Mr. Semple, 'I must tell you that I mean to ask you a great many questions, and tell you very little in return—at least for the present. In the first place, it is all-important that we should know when Mrs. Ogilvie's elder boy died.'

'And I,' said Lady Falconer hopelessly, 'did not even know until the other day that she had had another boy.'

'And yet,' said the lawyer, 'however slight the chain of evidence is, we must follow it closely. You are probably the person who saw Mrs. Ogilvie first after the death of the child.'

'That I can hardly believe,' protested Lady Falconer. 'It seems to me that, however reserved a woman might be, she would still let another woman know about so intimate a trouble.'

'Mrs. Ogilvie was a very unusual woman,' said Mr. Semple.

'But even so——' began Lady Falconer.

'Even so,' repeated the lawyer, 'my friend Peter and his talkative neighbour will soon be back again, and I must examine my witness before they return.'

'But a witness,' exclaimed Lady Falconer, 'whose evidence is based on the only-half-intelligible gossip of a Spanish serving-woman made twenty-five years ago, and a week spent in an out-of-the-way mountain-village where she was ill nearly the whole time!'

Mr. Semple waved aside protests. 'Do forgive me for bothering you,' he said, 'and try to remember positively if there were any friends or neighbours who came about the house of whom we could perhaps ask tidings?'

'I am sure there were none,' said Lady Falconer. 'The charm of the place to Mrs. Ogilvie was, I know, its solitude, just as was its charm for us also.'

'No English people?'

'None, I am quite sure.'

'You have no idea who those friends were to whom Mrs. Ogilvie had lately said good-bye, and who were starting on a voyage?'

'I think,' said Lady Falconer slowly, 'it was because the storm blew so loudly that we spoke of them; and, yes, I am sure the woman crossed herself and prayed for those at sea.'

She hesitated, and Mr. Semple giving her a quick glance said, 'I am only asking for a woman's impression.'

'And at this length of time I cannot even tell you how I came to have this impression,' she replied, 'and yet the picture remains in my mind that these people, whoever they were, were sailing from Lisbon. The maid who waited upon me had evidently been engaged in Lisbon.'

Peter and Mr. Lawrence were heard in the hall outside, and the motor-car was at the door.

'Thank you very much,' said the lawyer, as the door opened.

Mr. Semple left the following morning, and did not return until the end of the week. He was a contented man, and made an excellent companion, and Peter enjoyed seeing him again and having his companionship at dinner on the night of his return. He was always interested in something, and quite disposed to take a book and remain quiet when his client was busy or disinclined for conversation. He and Peter smoked in silence for a considerable time after the servants had left the room, and even when an adjournment had been made to the library the lawyer, who was possibly tired after his journey, sat quietly in a leather armchair by the fire without saying anything.

Peter began to talk about the small items of news of the neighbourhood. 'The Falconers have left,' he said. 'I wonder what they found to amuse them at Lawrence's place?'

'Lawrence himself, perhaps,' said Mr. Semple dryly.

'But Lady Falconer does not even laugh at people,' replied Peter. 'I thought her a very charming woman.'

'She is a very charming woman,' replied Mr. Semple, 'and she used to know your mother long ago in Spain.'

Peter took his cigar out of his mouth, and turned interrogatively towards the lawyer. 'I don't suppose she was able to tell you anything?' he said, with a sharp note of interest in his voice.

'She was able to tell me nothing,' said Mr. Semple, 'except a woman's impression of a conversation she had with a Spanish serving-woman.'

'I should like to hear all she had to say,' said Peter briefly.

'Ships sailing for Argentine stop at Lisbon and take up passengers there,' said Mr. Semple. 'I have been to Lisbon since I last saw you. Mrs. Ogilvie paid the passage-money for a married couple and a child who sailed from that place in December of the year in which your brother is said to have died.'



CHAPTER IX

'I think I 'll go over and see Toffy,' said Peter to himself one day in the following week. Mr. Semple had been down to Bowshott again, bringing a mass of correspondence with him, and had left that morning. Nigel Christopherson was ill at Hulworth with one of his usual appalling colds, which brought him as nearly as possible to the grave every time they attacked him. Peter once again read through the letters and papers which he and the family lawyer had pored over until the small hours of this morning, and then he ordered his horse and rode over to see his friend.

No one ever arrived at Hulworth without remarking on the almost grotesque ugliness of the house. It was a flat-faced, barrack-like residence, with a stuccoed front and rows of ill-designed windows. A grim-looking flight of stone stairs with iron railings led to the front door, and beyond that were large and hideous rooms filled with treasures of art incongruously hung on lamentable wall-papers or pendent over pieces of furniture which would have made a connoisseur's eyes ache. The house and its furnishings were a strange mixture; the owner of the grim pile, be it said, had a mind which presented a blank to the dictates of art, and it puzzled him sorely to determine which of his possessions was beautiful and which was not. He had heard people become enthusiastic over his pictures, which he thought hideous, while they had frankly abused his furniture, which he was inclined to think was everything that was desirable.

'There 's only one way,' he used to say hopelessly, 'in which a fellow can know whether a thing is ugly or the reverse, and that is by fixing a price to it. If only some one would be kind enough to stick on a lot of labels telling me what the things are worth I should know what to admire and what to shudder at; but, as it is, the things which I personally like are always the things which other people abuse.'

And, alas for Sir Nigel and his lightly held treasures of art! his pictures and the vases ranged in great glass cases in the hall were heirlooms, and Toffy in his most impecunious days would often look at them sadly and shake his head, murmuring to himself, 'I 'd take five hundred pounds for the lot, and be glad to get rid of them.' There were days when in a gentle, philosophical way he felt a positive sense of injury in thinking of the vases behind the big glass doors, and he would then go into intricate and complicated sums in arithmetic whereby he could tell what it cost him per annum to look at the contents of the cases and the old portraits in their dim frames.

This afternoon he was lying on a florid and uncomfortable-looking sofa in a very large drawing-room, in front of a fireplace of white marble in scroll patterns and with a fender of polished steel. It was probably the ugliest as well as the least comfortable room in the house, but it happened to be the only one in which there was a good fire that afternoon; and Toffy, descending from his bedroom, weak and ill with influenza, had come in there at two o'clock, and was now lying down with a railway-rug placed across his feet, and his head uncomfortably supported by a hard roller-cushion and an ornamentation in mahogany which gracefully finished off the pattern of the sofa-frame. Many men when they are ill take the precaution of making their wills; Sir Nigel's preparation for a possible early demise always took the form of elaborately and sadly adding up his accounts. He had a large ledger beside him on the sofa, and slips of paper covered with intricate figures which neither he nor any one else could decipher.

His faithful valet Hopwood had been dispatched to London in order to learn chauffeur's work; for Toffy had decided, after working the matter out to a fraction, that a considerable saving could be effected in this way. His debts to the garage were being duly entered amongst Toffy's liabilities at this moment as he lay on the sofa in the vast cold drawing-room.

The drawing-room was not often used now. But it was the custom of his housekeeper to air the rooms once a week; and, this being Wednesday, she had lighted a fire there, while Lydia, a young housemaid and general factotum, had allowed all other fires to go out. There was a palpable sense of chilliness about the room, and in one corner of it the green-and-gold wall-paper showed stains of damp. Long gilded mirrors between tall windows occupied one side of the room, and had marble shelves beneath them upon which were placed ornate Bohemian glass vases and ormolu clocks and candlesticks. Some uncovered and highly polished mahogany tables imparted a hard and somewhat undraped look to the apartment. The windows, with their aching lines of plate-glass, were draped with rep curtains of vivid green, while the floor was covered with an Aubusson carpet exquisite in its colour and design. And between the green woollen bell-ropes on each side of the fireplace and above the cold hideousness of the marble mantelpiece hung a portrait by Romney of a lady as beautiful as a flower.

Sir Nigel had endeavoured to eat for lunch part of a chicken which his housekeeper had warmed up with a little grey sauce; and he was now wondering as he lay on the sofa whether any one would come if he were to tug at the green bell-rope over his head, or whether he could make his own way upstairs to his bedroom and get some fresh pocket-handkerchiefs. He had had a temperature for the greater part of the week, and he was now feeling as if his legs did not altogether belong to him; while, to make up for their feebleness and lightness, his head was most insistently there, and felt horribly hot and heavy.

He had just decided that he had better mount the long stairs to his room, for not only was there the consideration of handkerchiefs; there was medicine too which the doctor had told him to take, but which he always forgot at the right moment. He thought the journey had better be made now, and he could do the two things at one and the same time. He walked with uneven steps to the window and looked out upon some stretches of field which were euphemistically termed the Park, and watched a flock of sheep huddled together to protect themselves from the first sharp touch of frost, when he heard the sound of hoofs and saw Peter ride up to the door.

'It's an extraordinary thing,' he said to himself as he saw his friend dismount, 'Peter always seems to come when you want him. I believe he has got some sort of instinct which tells him when his friends are down on their luck!'

Peter would, of course, fetch the medicine from upstairs, and the pocket-handkerchiefs. Toffy wondered if he had ever felt ill in his life, and thought to himself, gazing without envy at the neat, athletic figure on the horse, what a good fellow he was. He crept back to the sofa again, and extending his thin hand to Peter as he entered, said, 'You see here the wreck of my former self! Sit down, Peter, and ring for tea; there isn't the smallest chance of your getting any!'

'Why didn't you come to Bowshott, you ass, if you are ill?' said Peter sternly. 'You will kill yourself some day coming down to this half-warmed barn in the winter-time.'

'It isn't half warmed,' said Toffy. 'I wish it were! This room is all right, isn't it? I aired another sofa by sleeping on it last night.'

'What on earth for?' demanded Peter, still in a tone of remonstrance. Toffy had been his fag at Eton, and Peter had got into the habit of taking care of him. He knew his friend's constitution better than most people did, and he expended much affection upon him, and endeavoured without any success to make him take care of himself. 'Why didn't you sleep in your bed like a Christian?' he demanded sternly. 'You will kill yourself if you go on playing the fool with your health!'

'The sheets seemed a bit damp in my bed, I thought,' said Toffy simply.

'Then why didn't your idiot of a housekeeper air them?'

'The duty of airing sheets is invested in the person of one Lydia, the niece of the above-mentioned housekeeper,' said Toffy. 'I asked her in the morning if my sheets had been aired, and she said that they had not. She further explained that she had taken the precaution of feeling them, and that they had not seemed very wet!'

'Oh, hang Mrs. Avory!' said Peter inwardly. 'Why has not Toffy got a good wife to look after him? Look here,' he said decisively, 'I am going to sleep over here to-night, and see that you go to bed, and I'm going to get your sheets now and warm 'em.'

'You 'll get a beastly dinner if you stay,' said Toffy through his nose.

Peter brought the sheets down in a bundle, and placing a row of hideous walnut-wood chairs with their legs in the fender, he proceeded to tinge the fine linen sheets a deep brown.

'They are warmed through,' he said grimly, when the smell of scorched linen became intrusive.

Peter made tea in the drawing-room and spilt a good deal of boiling water on the steel fender, and then he drew the green rep curtains across the cold windows, and made up a roaring fire, and pulled a screen round the sofa. He fetched his friend's forgotten medicine from his bedroom and administered it, and told him with a lame attempt at jocosity that he should have a penny if he took it like a lamb! Peter was full of small jokes this afternoon, and full, too, of a certain restlessness which had not expended itself when he had warmed sheets and made up fires and brewed tea to the destruction of the Hulworth steel fenders. He talked cheerfully on a dozen topics of conversation current in the neighbourhood, and on Toffy's invitation he sent a servant over to Bowshott to give notice that he would stay the night, and to bring back his things.

'I have been doing up my accounts,' said Toffy, 'and I believe the saddest book I ever read is my bank-book! A man has been down from the British Museum to look at those vases in the hall, and he says that one of them alone is worth four thousands pounds!—four thousand pounds, Peter! for a vase that's eating its head off in a glass case, and might be broken any day by a housemaid, while I perish with hunger!'

'If it's money,' began Peter easily, 'you 're an idiot if you don't let me know what you want.'

And then the whole realization of his uncertain position smote him sharply and cruelly for a moment as he remembered that he did not know how he stood with the world as regards money, and that probably he was not in the position to lend a five-pound note to any one. He had accumulated through sheer laziness a certain number of large debts, the payment of which had never troubled himself or his creditors, who were only too glad to keep his name on their books; but now it seemed that if he were to have merely a younger son's portion he might even find himself in debt to his brother's estate. He had gone thoroughly with the lawyer into the will of his father, and found that everything which it was possible to tie up on the elder son had been willed to him. His own share of the patrimony if his brother were still alive would be but a small one.

He got up from his chair and walked to the window, and pulling aside the curtain looked out on the frosty garden.

'It's going to be a bitter cold night,' he said. 'I think I will just look in at your room again, and see if they have made up the fire properly.'

He returned to the drawing-room and took up two or three newspapers in turn and laid them down again, while Toffy watched him gravely.

'I 've had a bit of a jar lately,' he said at last, taking up his stand with his back to the fire near the sofa.

'Have some dinner first,' said Toffy, 'and then we 'll go into the matter, as I always do with my creditors. You see, if one has a cook like Mrs. Cosby, there is an element of chance in the matter of getting dinner at all; and another thing is it may be so bad you won't survive it; so it's not much use being miserable before dinner, is it, when perhaps you may be buried comfortably and respectably afterwards?'

The presence of Lydia, who listened open-mouthed to all that was said, made conversation impossible, until at last, in an ecstasy of importance at having broken a dessert dish, she placed the wine upon the table and withdrew. Toffy carried the decanters into the drawing-room, where he believed he and Peter would be more comfortable, and having placed them on the table by the fire he congratulated his friend that they had both survived the ordeal of dinner, and then he suggested that Peter should tell him what was up.

'Rather a beastly thing has happened,' said Peter. He rose from the chair where he was sitting and went and stood by the marble mantelpiece. The black tie which he wore seemed to accentuate his fairness, and it was a boyish, unheroic figure which leaned against the whiteness of the marble mantelpiece as he began his puzzling tale. It did not take very long in the telling, and until he had finished Toffy did not speak. Indeed, there was silence for some time in the room after Peter had done, and then, there being no necessity for much speech or protestation between the two, Toffy said merely, 'What are you going to do?'

'I am going to the Argentine next week,' said Peter. 'It seems proved beyond any manner of doubt that my mother paid the passage of a woman and a little boy to go there in the very month and in the year that my brother was supposed to have died, and Cintra or Lisbon are the last places where there is even the vaguest evidence of her having been seen with two boys.'

Toffy lay on the sofa thinking, his arm thrown above his head in the attitude that was characteristic of him during the many weeks of illness that he usually had in the year.

'I can't think why,' he said, 'you should go yourself. There must be plenty of lawyers in Buenos Ayres who would undertake to see the thing through for you.'

'Well, come,' said Peter, 'if my brother has been done out of the place for twenty-five years, and if he is a good chap, and all that, I suppose the least one could do would be to try and look as if one didn't grudge giving him back his own.'

Probably there is an element of fairness about English men and women which obtrudes itself from time to time to their disadvantage; and Peter already found himself occupying, in his own mind at least, the position of the younger son.

'We will brave the terrors of the vasty deep together,' said Toffy; 'it's no use your going alone.'

'You ain't up to it,' said Peter gruffly, 'thanks all the same, old chap.'

'I must fly somewhere,' said Toffy, 'it doesn't much matter where.'

'Has the usual acute financial crisis come?' Peter said, looking affectionately at the long, thin figure on the sofa. 'You can't the least deceive me into thinking you had better go into Argentine to hunt for a man who has been missing for twenty-five years. It isn't good enough!'

'I shall have to get a lot of boots,' said Toffy thoughtfully; 'it seems the right sort of thing to do when one is starting on an expedition, and I would rather like to get some of those knives that fellows seem to buy when they go out to South America.'

'You see,' objected Peter, allowing the question of boots and hunting-knives to lapse, 'the place is right enough, I have no doubt, but it's pretty big, and I don't a bit know what is in front of me. I 'll tell you what I will do, though, I 'll send for you as soon as I get there if I find it's a white man's country at all, and then we will jog round together.'

'I suppose we couldn't go in a yacht?' said Toffy, inspired with a sudden suggestion, and sitting up on the sofa full of grave interest. 'There 'd be much less chance of being copped on the pier than if one travelled on a liner. Another thing, I 'm not at all sure that a yacht wouldn't be a good investment; it really is the only way to live economically and keep out of the reach of duns at the same time. A nice little eighty-tonner now, for instance, with Just two or three hands and a boy on board. What could be cheaper than that? And you could live the simple life to any extent that you liked! But of course something larger would be wanted for Argentine, and she couldn't be fitted out in time. No, Peter, I think I 'll risk having the heavy hand of the law laid upon me at starting, and we 'll just have to lump it and go in a mail steamer.'

Peter laughed. 'My bold buccaneer!' he said.

They sat silent for a time in the drawing-room with its crude colours and priceless china, while the big fire in the burnished steel grate roared with a jolly sound up the big chimney, and the air was frosty and cold outside. The room despite its hideousness was full of pleasant recollections to them both, for when Hulworth was not let Toffy had often assembled bachelor parties there, and it had always been a second home to Peter, where he had been wont to keep a couple of guns and some of his 'things.'

The actual journey to Argentine was not a matter demanding any courage on the part of either of the young men, but the result of the journey might have a grave effect on the fortune of Peter Ogilvie. Tomorrow was to have been his wedding-day; and this fact being persistently present to both men, they left the subject to the last. It was with an effort that Peter said, before they parted for the night, 'Whatever happens, we mean to try to be married when I come back. Jane is awfully plucky about it, but this confounded Court of Chancery does not seem to regard me with much favour at present.'

'It's only for a year,' said Toffy hopefully. 'Let's make a solemn covenant that we shall meet in this very room on the 25th of October 1911, with the wedding-day fixed for to-morrow again.'

'Where is your Bible?' said Peter. 'If you haven't one in your pocket or under your pillow, will it do if I kiss your account-book?'

'The whole thing can be just as we intended it to be,' said Toffy cheerfully. 'And this time next year Jane will be staying with Miss Abingdon, and old Wrot will be ironing out his surplice—at least Mrs. Wrot will, and he 'll look on and think he 's doing it. And I 'll be here, probably with a cold in my head as usual, and thereto I plight thee my troth!'

He fingered in his pocket the wedding-ring which Peter had given him for safe custody, and the care of which had seriously disturbed his slumbers at night. 'I 'll keep the ring until then, Peter, and place it on the third finger of Jane's left hand. No, no, you do that, by the way; and I shall have to wait until I get a wife of my own.'

'Here 's to her good health!' said Peter. And they endeavoured to be lively, as befits the subject of weddings; but Peter was thinking that perhaps his own wedding-day might be five years hence, and however they might plan that it should be the same as they had first intended, it was a long time to wait. And Toffy was wondering how long Horace Avory meant to live, and if Carrie would mind very much his going to Argentine, and whether she would write him one of those long tear-blistered letters in her indistinct handwriting, which he found so hard to read, and, suppose Horace Avory never died (as seemed quite likely), what would be the end of it all? Also, he wondered whether Carrie and Miss Sherard would get on well together if they were to meet, and he hoped with manly stupidity that they might be friends. But what he wondered more than anything else at present was whether Kitty Sherard would allow him to go and say good-bye to her. Toffy was feeling ill, and his vitality was low; in his weakness he thought with an insistence that was almost homesick in its intensity how beautiful it would be to see her in this ugly old house of his, in one of her rose-coloured gowns, and with her brown curls and her hopelessly baffling and bewildering manner of speech.

And each of the two young men, being absorbed in quite other subjects, talked cheerfully of the voyage, and speculated on what sort of sport they might incidentally get; and they discussed much more seriously the fishing flies and guns they should take with them than the possible finding of Peter's brother or Peter's own change of fortune.

Lydia, listening at the door before she went to bed, for no particular reason except that her aunt had forbidden it, decided that her master and Captain Ogilvie were planning a sporting expedition together—'which means dullness and aunt for me for a few months to come,' said Lydia, with a sniff.



CHAPTER X

So Peter went to London to collect his kit and to say good-bye to Jane Erskine, and Nigel Christopherson ordered a great many new boots of various designs, and some warlike weapons, and then there came the time when he had to write to Mrs. Avory to say that he was going away, and when in the solitude of his life at Hulworth he had time to sit down and wonder what she would think about it. He was not long left in doubt. A telegram came first, and then a letter. 'Dearest, dearest,' this ran, 'I cannot let you go away.' It was a horribly compromising letter, but it came from a poor little woman who had fought long odds, and who was often very tired, and who sat for the greater part of the day making blouses for which she was seldom paid. Mrs. Avory was not a strong woman, nor in any way a great-minded woman, but she was one who, in spite of weakness and a good deal of silliness, clung almost fiercely to the fact that she must be good, and who kept faithfully the promises she had made to a wholly unworthy person in the village church at home twelve years ago. Every word of the letter was an appeal to her dear, dear Nigel to stay in England and not leave her alone. She had so few friends and so little to look forward to except his Sunday visits. And then this poor tear-blotched letter which was neither very grammatical nor legibly written changed its tone suddenly, and Mrs. Avory said that perhaps it was better that he should go. Everything was very difficult, and it seemed that although his society was the one thing that she loved in the world, perhaps the fact of seeing him made things almost more difficult. Her husband, she heard, had been watching her movements lately; they said he wanted to marry some one else, so really and truly Nigel had better go, and if possible forget all about her for ever.

Toffy finished reading the letter and groaned. 'Was she never to have a good time!' he wondered, thinking of the dull room and the half-finished blouses upon the table, the economical gas jets in the fireplace in lieu of the glow of a bright fire, and the dingy paper on the walls. The whole thing was too hard on her, he thought, and everything in the world seemed to be against her.

Long ago, when he was little more than a boy, he had met Horace Avory and his wife in an out-of-the-way fishing village in Wales. Avory's treatment of the small timid woman had roused pity and resentment in Toffy's mind. A student of character would have seen directly that a woman with more power and strength of mind—a woman with a bit of the bully in herself—who could have taken the upper hand with the big red-faced tyrant, might have made a very fairly good imitation of a gentleman, and perhaps even of a good husband, of Avory. But his wife—timid, and all too gentle—could only wince under the things he said, or let her big eyes suddenly brim over with tears. Toffy began to writhe under the cruel speeches which Avory made to her; he never saw for an instant that there was a fault anywhere save with the husband. She was one of those women who invariably inspire sweeping and contradictory criticisms on the whole of her sex, one man finding in her a proof that all women are angels, and the next discovering as certainly that all women are fools.

Presently Avory left the fishing village on the plea of business and went back to London, leaving his wife and child in the little hotel by the sea. There had followed a whole beautiful sunlit month of peace and quiet for Mrs. Avory, while her little girl played on the sands and she worked and read, or walked and fished with Nigel, and the colour came back to her cheeks, and the vague look of terror left her eyes. And Toffy determined that Mrs. Avory should have a good time for once.

The years between boyhood and manhood had been bridged over by a sense that some one needed his care, and that he was a protection to a little woman who was weak and unhappy. And, whether it was love or not, the thing was honourable and straightforward as an English boy can make it. And then one night by the late post had come a letter from Horace Avory of a kind particularly calculated to wound. Mrs. Avory brought it to Toffy to read out on the sands; and she broke down suddenly and sobbed as though her heart would break; and Toffy to comfort her had told her that he loved her, and meant every word he said, and asked what on earth he could do for her, and said that she must really try not to cry or it would make her ill. He put his arm round the trembling form,—and Mrs. Avory took his hand in hers and clung to it; and then, comforted, she had dried her eyes at last, and gone back to the little hotel again. Toffy saw the whole scene quite plainly before him now. The little whitewashed inn with the hill behind it, the moonlit water of the bay, and the tide coming rolling in across the wet sands. When they met on the following day he told her with boyish chivalry that he would wait for her for years if need were, and that some day they should be happy together.

That had all happened long ago now, and during the years between they had hoped quite openly and candidly that it would all come right some day, although hardly saying even to themselves that the coming right was dependent upon Horace Avory's death.

Meanwhile Mrs. Avory worked hard at her unremunerative tasks, and trimmed parasols and cut out blouses, and worked hopefully, because she knew that it would all come right some day, and because Nigel had said that he loved her. And Nigel wrote regularly to her, and always went to see her on Sunday when he was in London. And every night of his life of late he had dreamed of a girl dressed in rose colour, who had given him her photograph to put on his writing-table.

He read Mrs. Avory's letter again (she wrote probably the worst hand in Christendom), and when he had spelt the ill-formed words once more, he discovered that the blotched and scrawled writing contained a postscript which he had not at first noticed. 'After all, you had better not come here,' it said, 'but I will run down and see you to-morrow. It is far the best and wisest plan, and I must say good-bye. Please expect me by the three o'clock train.' The letter, as usual, had not been posted in time to reach him in the morning, and Toffy realized almost with a sense of disaster that to-morrow was now to-day, and that it was too late to write and expostulate or to suggest to Mrs. Avory how unwise her visit would be. There was nothing for it but to order the motor-car and go to the station to meet her, and afterwards to give her tea in the library, and say to her all the comforting and consoling things he could think of.

Mrs. Avory appeared more than usually worn and thin this afternoon; and her eyes, so ready to brim with tears, looked pathetically large in her sallow little face. She had been sitting up late for many nights to finish her work, and there had been 'bothers' in her little household which she took to heart and worried over. Her dress looked worn and shabby, and her gloves were darned. The nervousness in her manner was increased by ill-health, and she reiterated that she knew she had done the best thing in running down here quietly for an hour, and that she had quite meant to bring her child and the governess; but Dorothy had not been well, and she did not like either to bring her or to leave her alone.

'I didn't know until the last minute that they couldn't come,' she reiterated nervously. Perhaps—who knows?—even she, poor soul, was dimly conscious that she had done a not very wise deed. But Toffy was all that was comforting and tender towards her, told her without flinching that of course she had done the right thing, and that it was awfully plucky of her to have come. He took off the damp tweed cape which she wore and led her to the fire. They had tea together in the big cold drawing-room, and then came the time to say good-bye, and Mrs. Avory pleaded to walk to the station for the sake of one last talk together, and her watch—which never kept scrupulous time—deceiving her as to the hour, she missed the last train at the little branch station at Hulworth, and then wondered tearfully, and with an access of nervousness which rendered her almost hysterical, what she should do.

Toffy had a Bradshaw twelve months old which he promised to consult if Mrs. Avory would walk back with him across the fields again to the house. He consoled her as best he could, and assured her that it would be all right. And Mrs. Cosby, who was really a great woman at a crisis, suggested suddenly and with brilliance that there was a train from the main station ten miles off at eight o'clock, and that the motor, if it did not break down, might take them there in half an hour. She provided warm wraps for the lady, and Nigel found rugs for her; and when all had been arranged, and she who got so little pleasure started for a moonlight drive in the cold crisp air, with Nigel taking care of her and wrapping her up warmly in rugs and furs, Mrs. Avory felt with a sudden rush of that joy of which she had so little experience that all had turned out happily and for the best.

It was not Toffy's fault upon this occasion that the motor-car came to grief. Mr. Lawrence's big Panhard ran into them when they were seven miles from home, and Mrs. Avory was taken back to Hulworth insensible and with a broken arm. Mr. Lawrence was himself bruised and shaken, but he helped to take Mrs. Avory home, where the housekeeper's greeting convinced him, if he had required convincing, that Mrs. Avory was staying at Hulworth. He said good-night when he had done everything that was useful and neighbourly, and had sent his chauffeur in his own car for the doctor, and had been helpful in getting remedies and suggesting cures. And the following day he had the pleasure of being first with the news of Mrs. Avory's escapade. Half his friends and neighbours heard all about it before lunch-time; his own bruises—rather obtrusively displayed—were proof of the truth of his story, if proof were needed. And Mr. Lawrence finished up his well-spent morning by lunching with Miss Abingdon, and by recounting to her in his high-pitched, gossiping voice his very latest piece of intelligence.

'I don't believe it,' said Miss Abingdon sharply.

Sometimes these ladies of a sterner period than ourselves say surprisingly rude things in the most natural and simple way.

'But it's a fact, really!' said Mr. Lawrence, with enjoyment. 'Why, the first thing the housekeeper said to her was, "So you 're back again!" No one had seen Toffy for ages. He said he had influenza.' Mr. Lawrence was going to add some jocular words to the effect that Toffy was a sly dog, but something in Miss Abingdon's face checked him, and he murmured only that it was an awful pity.

And then Kitty Sherard came in; she was staying with Miss Abingdon for a few days to console her for Jane's absence. Miss Abingdon did not quite approve of her, but, alas for the frailty of humanity, a little lightness and amusement are sometimes lacking in our otherwise admirable English homes, and the man or woman who can provide them is readily forgiven and easily excused. Miss Sherard was amusing; no one could deny it. She told her risque stories with the innocent look of a child, while her big eyes were raised almost with an air of questioning to her bearer's face. Also she was boundlessly affectionate, although she said such dreadful things, and in fine, where she was there were young men gathered together.

She came up the drive now. Canon Wrottesley's two elder sons with her and a sailor friend of theirs, and she was smiling at them all quite indiscriminately and doing considerable damage to their hearts without in the least intending it.

Miss Sherard had been shooting duck in the marshes below Bowshott, where Peter had given her leave to shoot when she liked; and she came towards the house now, a miniature gun over her shoulder, and clad in a brown shooting dress, with a knot of her favourite colour under her chin.

There was a certain jauntiness about Kitty which became her, where in almost any one else it might have seemed outrageous. Even Miss Abingdon always remembered that Kitty had lost her mother when she was four years old, and since then had been the playmate and boon companion of a man who had been accounted fast even in the go-ahead set in which he lived, and who had taken his daughter to every race meeting in England since the time when she could first sit beside him on the front seat of his coach. He had never allowed her to go to school, and he had dismissed half a dozen governesses in turn because they were trying to make a prim little miss of her, and because they always insisted on pouring out tea for him as if they expected him to marry them. When Kitty was sixteen he dismissed 'the whole bothering lot of old women' and finished her education himself. Lord Sherard spoke French like a native, and was one of the best riders and sportsmen of his day. He faithfully conveyed all that he knew to his daughter, with the result that Kitty had more knowledge of French literature than of English, and she and her father conversed but little with each other in their native tongue. But the result as far as Kitty was concerned was that she had turned out a beautiful and engaging young woman with eyes that looked frankly and charitably on the world. She loved you so much that she nearly always had her arm linked in yours when she told her absurd little stories; and she smiled so delightedly when you saw the joke of them, that even when you said, 'Well, really, Kitty!' you knew quite well that hers was a sort of innocence of daring, and you warned her severely that she must be very careful indeed to whom she said things like that, but that of course it didn't matter a bit as far as you yourself were concerned, because you understood her and loved her. And because everybody else said exactly the same sort of thing to her, and because no one would have ventured to crush that blithe and childlike nature by one word of real disapproval, there was not much hope that Kitty would ever reform and become sober-minded and well-behaved and satisfactory. The plague of it was that you couldn't help loving her whatever she did, and she loved you too, which was perfectly intoxicating when you came to think of it, except that you knew that she loved at least a hundred different people in exactly the same sort of way. She kept her real affection for her father and Jane Erskine, and lately she had fallen in love—which is a different thing—with Sir Nigel Christopherson.

Kitty stamped her feet in the hall, and then drew off her gloves and came forward to the drawing-room fire, with the big white sheepskin in front of it; and kneeling down before the blaze she told Mr. Lawrence and Miss Abingdon collectively that they had had very good sport in the marshes, and that she had brought back some duck for Miss Abingdon; and didn't everybody think it was too awfully cold, and what would their poor hunters do if a frost came?

Finally, having enunciated all these small remarks, Miss Kitty turned a radiant face on their visitor, who was stretched luxuriously in a big armchair by the fire, and bade him tell her the very latest news, for she expected all sorts of gossip and, if possible, some scandals from him.

Mr. Lawrence laughed delightedly; he was really proud of his reputation as a scandal-monger. 'Well,' he said, 'I believe I can supply you with the very latest thing of that description,' and then he told her the story.

Kitty had led a rough-and-tumble sort of life, and every one knew perfectly well that hers had been a liberal education at the hands of her father. Yet even Mr. Lawrence would not have blurted out his tale to Jane Erskine, for instance, as he had just done to Kitty. But bless you! every one knew that old Lord Sherard told his daughter his best scenes, and that she stayed with him in Continental hotels which some very particular mothers would not have allowed their daughters to enter. Mr. Lawrence wound up by saying, in a very charitable way, that he didn't blame the poor little woman, for she had a perfect beast of a husband.

Kitty was still kneeling on the white sheepskin rug and holding out her cold hands to the blaze when Mr. Lawrence had finished; and Miss Abingdon, who had tried once or twice without success to catch Mr. Lawrence's eye and to check his loquacity, shook her head as she realized that Kitty did not seem the least bit shocked.

When Mr. Lawrence had left, Kitty changed her shooting dress for a habit and announced to Miss Abingdon, who suggested that she should rest for the remainder of the afternoon, that she was going to exercise one of Jane's horses. She mounted the hunter and went off alone, blowing kisses to Miss Abingdon from the tips of her riding gloves, and so out of the white gates down the road to the left, and then into the open country. She set her horse at a fence and flew over it. Her small white teeth were pressed together, and her eyes, under level black eye-brows, had a fierce look in them. She pulled her hat more firmly down upon her brows and steered her hunter across country, as though following the quickest burst of hounds of the season. Kitty was a tireless rider, and Jane's hunter did not want exercise for some little time after this. The country round Bowshott is known as 'stiff' for hunting people, but Kitty had marked out a straight line for herself, and took everything that came in her way with a sort of foolhardiness which made a trifle of big hedges or yawning ditches, and all the time she was saying to herself, 'I will never forgive him, never!' She had given her whole heart to Nigel Christopherson, and believed that he had given his to her. And now he was at Hulworth with Mrs. Avory, and Mr. Lawrence was touring the country in his big red motor-car telling everybody about it.

Mrs. Wrottesley heard the story from her maid, who had it from Miss Abingdon's butler, and she told it to her mistress when they were counting charity blankets together in Mrs. Wrottesley's bedroom. The canon was away from home, and Mrs. Wrottesley was having a few uninterrupted days in which to do her work, without calls upon her to come and admire Canon Wrottesley. The story was received very quietly by her. She sat a full minute without saying anything at all, and then she finished counting the blankets. When that useful task was over Mrs. Wrottesley began to speak. This was a much more unusual event with her than with most people, and what made it more forcible was that she began to speak deliberately and with intention.

'I am going to stay at Hulworth,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. 'Pack my box, please, and order the carriage to be round in half an hour.'

She drove over to Hulworth, her plain and rather austere face showing very little expression upon it, and she reached the big ugly house to find Toffy sitting over a smouldering fire in the drawing-room, his hair rumpled up from his forehead and his head buried in his hands, and Mrs. Avory upstairs still suffering from slight concussion of the brain.

There are times when the strong arm of a man is the one needful and the one serviceable thing in the world; but there are times again when it is only a strong woman who is wanted, or who is capable of a certain sort of work.

'I don't know how you ever thought of coming,' said Toffy, looking at her with eyes which were about as full of perplexity and helplessness as a young man's could well be. 'I thought of writing to Peter, but after all this is his last time with Jane, and I have no relations myself, and I couldn't ask Lawrence not to say anything, because that would have given away the whole show.'

'I think I can settle everything satisfactorily with Mr. Lawrence,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. 'Mr. Lawrence is proverbially ill-natured in his own kind way, and it would not have been unlike him to omit the fact that I was staying with you during the time Mrs. Avory was here.'

'She came down yesterday afternoon to say good-bye to me,' said Toffy eagerly.

'And I arrived by the same train,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, 'which was very convenient.'

Toffy got up from his chair and crossed to the other side of the hearth and kissed Mrs. Wrottesley.

It was not an unusual thing for her to drive over to Hulworth to put housekeeping matters straight when they were at their most acute stages of discomfort, or when Toffy was more than common ill. She was quite at home in the house, and she now drew up a writing-table to the fire and penned a number of notes in her neat, precise hand, headed with the Hulworth address, telling her friends how sad she considered the accident of last night, how attentive Mr. Lawrence had been, and how, of course, she must give up her engagements at home for the next few days, as she would not dream of leaving until Mrs. Avory was able to leave also. The notes fell like a series of cold douches upon the warm interest and keen excitement prevalent at Culversham. Perhaps only Miss Abingdon was sincerely glad that conventionalities had been in force throughout.

'No one could be more delighted than I am that Mrs. Wrottesley was at Hulworth,' she said, 'though I doubt if it is a very wise thing for a married woman to pay visits without her husband. Still, no doubt Canon Wrottesley in his usual broad-minded way arranged that she should be there. He is always so thoughtful and self-sacrificing, and it's more than good of him to spare his wife to nurse Mrs. Avory. He is an example to us all.'

Canon Wrottesley had always been devoted to his wife. Her quiet dress and her mantle had ever seemed to him the essence of good womanhood, and he respected her for her considerable fortune as well as for her unimpeachable orthodoxy. His highest term of praise of her was to speak of her as the helpmeet for him.

The canon was now sitting in the very charming library of the house of his Bishop, where he was spending a few days, and was busy inditing a few lines to his wife to ask her if the latest news from Culversham was true. He was warned by a curious presentiment that the information which he had received was in accordance with facts, and, being always ready with a word of counsel, Canon Wrottesley was writing to his wife to warn her that until the whole thing blew over it would be wiser for her not to see anything of Mrs. Avory. Considering his own and her position in the parish, he thought they could not be too careful.

When the second post arrived at the palace, bringing him the unexpected news that his wife was at that moment nursing Mrs. Avory at their neighbour's house, Canon Wrottesley felt one of those shocks which in all their painfulness can only be realized, perhaps, by those who hold a conspicuous position in a very small society. When the world is narrowed down to quite a little place its weight is felt more heavily than when its interests and its knowledge are dispersed over a wider area.

He believed that poor Henrietta had meant well when she had gone to Hulworth to look after Mrs. Avory; but her action proved to the canon what he had always known—that a woman requires guidance, and he meant to tell his wife kindly how much wiser it would have been if, before taking any action in this matter, she had wired to him for advice.

The thing was a real trouble to him, and helped to spoil his enjoyable stay at the palace. He knew himself to be popular there and that his visit had given real pleasure. He had been asked to improvise upon the piano every evening, and had even sung once, saying gracefully to the Bishop's daughter, when she had concluded her very indifferent accompaniment to the song, 'An accompanist is born, not made!' He had preached one of his favourite sermons on Sunday, which had not only swelled the offertory bag to an unusual size, but had obtained for the canon quite a sheaf of compliments which he looked forward to retailing to Henrietta at home. He left the pleasant ways of the Bishop's palace determined to face with a magnanimous mind the difficulties that awaited him. He did not like Henrietta's being 'mixed up in this affair' at all, and, as he sat in the first-class carriage of the train on his homeward journey, a rug about his knees and a footwarmer at his feet, he decided that the wisest and best thing he could do would be to shorten his journey by getting out at Hulworth station and going straight up to Sir Nigel's house. When he had time, and was able to see how Culversham viewed this affair of Mrs. Avory's, he could then decide whether his wife should call upon her or not. But for the present he saw quite plainly that inaction and patience were the best course.

He gave up his ticket at the railway station with a fine air of reserve, and bade his coachman drive to Hulworth in the same manner in which a statesman might impart a Cabinet secret to his secretary. The brougham drove on through the grim stone gates of Hulworth and deposited the canon before the flight of steps leading to the front door. He decided, if possible, not to partake of any food in the house, nor even to sit down if this could be avoided. He was not going to blame Sir Nigel yet, but, to say the least of it, he thought that he had been unwise. The canon stood with his back to the fire in the drawing-room, looking judicial and massive. Presently Mrs. Wrottesley came in and saluted her husband with that calm affection which twenty-five years of married life may engender.

He stooped and kissed her gravely. 'My love,' he said, 'this is not the place for you.'

It seemed to Mrs. Wrottesley to come very suddenly to her that almost for the first time in their married life there was going to be a real matter of difference between her husband and herself, in which neither meant to give in. She regretted in her quiet way that it should be so.

'Remember,' said Canon Wrottesley kindly, 'that I don't in any way blame Sir Nigel; I think he is foolish, and I think, considering Mrs. Avory's position, she has been more than foolish. A woman who is separated from her husband cannot be too careful.'

'I am afraid,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, with regret in her voice, and coming straight to the point at once in her graceful way, 'that I must stay here for the present.'

The canon, although he had not intended doing so, sat down abruptly on one of the drawing-room chairs.

It was a horrible time for both these affectionate elderly people who had always lived a peaceful, orderly, well-conducted life together, and whose home had been, in the mind of the canon at least, the model household of the neighbourhood. Also, it was a real shock to him to realize that Henrietta did not mean to yield in this matter. She spoke with regret, but she spoke firmly. It must always be a surprise—even to a prophet—when a dumb creature speaks, and in a certain sense Mrs. Wrottesley had always been dumb. And now, after years of silence and affectionate wifely submission, Mrs. Wrottesley was asserting herself.

'You must be reasonable, dear,' her husband said at last.

Mrs. Wrottesley replied, 'I want to be reasonable;' and she told him the whole story of how her presence might save from very serious consequences two people who were admittedly not very wise, but who were certainly nothing more than foolish, and might prevent a scandal which would damage them in the eyes of the world and result in all sorts of trouble for Mrs. Avory.

'The scandal cannot now be prevented,' said Canon Wrottesley. 'I heard myself from Mr. Lawrence this morning telling me the whole story. My love, you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled; Mrs. Avory must send for her own relations, if she has any, to help her out of this regrettable business. I cannot allow you to appear in the matter at all.'

'I have had my letters addressed here for the last two days,' said Mrs. Wrottesley.

The canon rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room. 'I don't know what people will say,' he said, his forehead knitted into a frown and his fingers impatiently letting off small pistol-shots against his palm. There had never been a better wife or mother, he admitted to himself, than Henrietta Wrottesley, but she was a child still in many ways. 'To-morrow is Sunday,' he went on, 'and we must appear in church together. In this way only can we shut people's mouths and prevent their talking, and although I don't like anything in the form of secrecy or underhand actions, no one need know that you have been staying here.'

'I am afraid,' said Mrs. Wrottesley, still in that unyielding tone of gentle regret, 'that it is too late to keep my movements secret. There is an account of the accident in the local paper in which it is stated that I was staying here at the time.'

Canon Wrottesley loved to see his name in print, and looked with interest at the cutting while Mrs. Wrottesley added, 'I sent the communication to the paper.'

The canon found himself wondering in a puzzled way what was the ultimatum that a man should impose upon a woman. What, in point of fact, was the force that could be brought to bear upon the case? In primitive days the matter would have been easily enough settled, but in modern times moral force is the only lever, and although most women, he admitted, were very easily influenced by moral force, it struck him painfully that upon this occasion his wife was not going to be moved by it.

A beneficent Providence who, I think we may allow, comes often to the assistance of persons whose storm rages in quite a small and narrow teacup so long as they are genuinely attached to each other, may have designed that at this moment Lydia of the heavy foot should enter with the second post's letters, and amongst those which had been sent on to Mrs. Wrottesley was one directed to her husband in dear Miss Abingdon's handwriting.

The canon opened it unheedingly. Miss Abingdon often sent him little notes, but never, perhaps, had she written one which spoke more genuinely out of a full heart than did this. She had written in the middle of the night, although she felt how disorderly and almost indecorous such a proceeding was. By so doing she had missed the evening post, but she sent the missive to the village early in the morning by the hand of a groom, and felt glad, as she did so, that there were no secrets in her life. A letter posted at an unaccustomed hour suggested intrigues, and Miss Abingdon wondered how people could live who had such things upon their consciences.

Her unusual behaviour accounts for the fact that her letter arrived by the second post at Hulworth; Canon Wrottesley was so much upset at the time that he read half-way through it before he quite realized what it was about.

'MY DEAR CANON,'—it ran—'you must allow me to say what I think of your splendid conduct in regard to poor little Mrs. Avory. I had heard the story, of course, of her very indiscreet behaviour, but it was not till this morning that I knew how splendidly you had thrown yourself into the breach by allowing Mrs. Wrottesley to go over to Hulworth to stay and nurse the poor thing. I must tell you that I hear on all sides nothing but the kindest things said about your action in the matter. I do not often write so unreservedly as at present, but I do feel strongly on the subject, and on occasions such as this I may be allowed to say that it takes a good man and a broad-minded one to act promptly and generously—would that there were more of them in the English Church!'

Miss Abingdon used to fear afterwards that perhaps she had said too much; but to her also, as to Mrs. Wrottesley, the relief of speaking her mind once in a way was irresistible.

Of course it weakened the canon's position to show the letter to his wife. He ought to have relented gracefully and with dignity, and to have consented as a personal favour, even against his proper judgment, to his wife's remaining where she was. But Miss Abingdon's letter was too full of kind remarks to be kept to himself. He handed it to Henrietta, and when she had read it he folded it up carefully and put it in his pocket.

'That,' he said, 'is one of the best women that ever lived, and perhaps, who knows, there may be others who see this matter in the right light also.' All that he had previously said passed completely out of his mind as he talked of the insight and the complete understanding that some good women evinced. He began to speak with manly kindliness of the poor little invalid upstairs, and when at last he bade good-bye to his wife he kissed her affectionately and bade her—in his usual formula—not do too much.

Miss Abingdon's letter had shown the canon to himself in his true light; before he reached home he had come to believe that it was he who had urged his wife to go to Hulworth. As was usual with him when he felt strongly, he adopted a character role, and his handsome face wore a more than usually beneficent and great-minded expression upon it as he walked with his fine erect carriage through the village that night; while it would hardly have required a playbill of dramatis personae to indicate the fact that the canon was living the part of the Vicar of Wakefield in the supreme moment when he visits Olivia in prison. He had promised his wife before leaving to drive over often to see her during her stay at Hulworth; and the following Sunday he preached one of his most memorable sermons on the text—'And when they shall take up some deadly thing it shall not hurt them.'



CHAPTER XI

Mrs. Wrottesley remained at Hulworth until her patient was better, and then the good-hearted canon joined her there for a few days and was altogether charming to poor little Mrs. Avory, who liked him far better than she liked his wife. Toffy went up to London to join Peter Ogilvie and to take ship for Argentine, and Peter went to say good-bye to Jane Erskine.

These two last-named, cheerful people were in a state of acute unhappiness which each was doing his and her best to conceal. It required some pluck to be perfectly even-spirited and to show good mettle in those days. The world contained for them nothing but a sense of parting and uncertainty, and a horrible feeling of disappointment. Their lives were to be severed, perhaps for years, and over all the uncertainty and the thought of separation hung the mystery of Mrs. Ogilvie's half-finished message. The memory of her was clouded by the thought of how much she had suffered, and the conviction intruded itself painfully that, if they had but known more, something might have been done for her. The burden of a secret lies in the sense of loneliness which it brings. A unique experience, dissimilarity of thought or knowledge that is not shared by others, makes a solitude with which no bodily isolation can be compared. Only one person knew—only one person had ever known: that seemed the intolerable thing to the two persons left behind to wonder what the message could mean.

'I sometimes wish she had been a Catholic,' Peter once said. 'It might have been some sort of comfort to her.'

Mrs. Ogilvie was a woman who could remain silent always, and perhaps it was the supreme effort involved by breaking through a lifetime of reserve that, in its added strain upon her heart, had caused her death.

The last few days that the lovers had together were spent in a very loyal and affectionate endeavour to make each other as happy as possible. They made no professions of love or confidence, nor ever dreamed of promising to be true, because they never for a moment could admit the possibility of being anything else; and they did not even promise to write to each other, or to say their prayers at the same time every evening—the difficulty of calculating the difference between Greenwich and local time on a westward voyage put a stop to anything of that sort. Nor did they talk of remembering each other as they looked at the stars; but they spoke of the future and of all the good things it was going to bring, and they even laughed sometimes over imaginary portraits of the brother whom Peter was to seek, and they told each other ridiculous little tales of what he would be like and what he would say and do.

One afternoon Jane gave Peter a gold cigarette case as a parting gift, with his name scrawled in her big handwriting across it; while Peter presented his fiancee with a very handsome diamond ring, and forgot altogether that perhaps he could not pay for it, and went back and told the jeweller so. The jeweller, having known Captain Ogilvie all his life, and being aware that he had lately succeeded to an immense property, thought the young man was joking, and said it did not matter in the least.

Then came the day of parting—drizzly, wet, and depressing—just such a day as people always seem to choose on which to leave England; there was the usual routine of departure; the 'special' from Waterloo, the crowd at the station, the plethora of bags, chairs, and hold-alls; the good-byes, the children held up to the carriage-windows to wave hands, the 'last looks,' and the tears stopped in their flow by anxiety about luggage and missing bags. Then came Southampton, the embarkation, and a sort of enforced cheerfulness and admiration of the ship. Those who had journeyed down to see friends off adopted a congratulatory tone, as though the fact of their having already travelled so far in safety was a sort of assurance that there could be little to fear for the rest of the voyage.

At last the ship began to move slowly away, and finally swung round and got out of dock. It was just then that many of the voyagers wished that they might have had a few minutes longer of that dismal scene in the drizzling rain, of those dear hand-waving, smiling, or weeping figures on shore. But the engines had started their solemn beats, the pilot was on the bridge. The voyage had begun for good or ill, and the Lord watch over all!

Nigel Christopherson, being a man of feeling, said to a Scot who leaned over the rails with him, watching a group of female figures dressed in black on the quay, 'These good-byes are rather beastly, ain't they?'

To which the Scot replied, 'They make no difference to me whatever;' and the remark, Toffy thought, was an extraordinary check to any emotional feeling.

Jane got her first letter from Peter dated at Vigo, which peaceful port, with its rows of white houses built along the shore, and its green hill with the ruined castle behind, is a haven where many sea-sick passengers would be. They had had a bit of a tossing, Peter said, in the Bay, and Toffy had been very seedy but was better. The captain was a very good sort of fellow, and full of yarns; his cabin was profusely decorated with foxes' masks and brushes, and a few of his admirers believed that when he was at home he hunted. The unfeeling Scot, who had declined to sympathize with Toffy's sensibility to partings, had turned out to be a very interesting sort of man, and not unamusing. He helped to make the evenings on deck pass rather pleasantly with his stories. If Mr. Dunbar, as he was called, had not had such an amazing Scottish accent Peter would have said that probably the stories were not true. It was a letter such as a schoolboy might have written, but Jane treasured the ill-expressed sentiments as maidens of a bygone age may have treasured their lovers' shields; and although she left the letter lying about on her dressing-table, after the manner of modern young women, it was none the less the dearest possession of her life until the next one arrived.

Toffy sat up in his bunk with a horribly bad headache, and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Avory, which he posted at Vigo; and he wrote another letter, not nearly so long, but one which cost him much more time to compose, and addressed it to Miss Kitty Sherard. And this he carefully tore into little pieces one night when the decks were dark and there was no moon overhead; and he watched the small white bits of paper, as they floated away into the black depths of the water, and then he walked up and down the deck until the small hours of the morning, when Peter—one of whose worst qualities was that he always fussed over people he cared about—appeared in pyjamas and overcoat, and asked him sternly if he was trying to get another chill.

At Lisbon the intelligent Scot suggested to the two travellers that they should join him in a trip ashore. The three had made friends in the smoking-room, and Peter hailed Mr. Dunbar as a fellow-countryman, and enjoyed his rugged accent and his amazing penetration. He abounded in useful information about the country to which they were going, gave statistics on all points, and teemed with information. He was an ardent and indefatigable sightseer, and never visited a building without seeming to investigate it. The most complicated currency of a foreign country never disturbed him for an instant, and he would make little sums with extraordinary rapidity on the edge of any bill that was given to him. The difference of price, as stated in Spanish coinage, between a bottle of claret and a whisky-and-soda, might have puzzled some people; but Dunbar worked it out to a fraction in a second of time, and without a moment's hesitation laid his own share of the expense on the luncheon-table of the Braganza hotel. He spoke Spanish better than he spoke English, though he thought he had got rid of his Scottish accent; but he still said 'I mind' for 'I remember,' and differentiated in the matter of pronouncing 'court' and 'caught.'

At St. Vincent Peter wrote home again, and felt a certain sense of insecurity at leaving letters on the rocky island. It was four o'clock in the morning when the ship got into port, and the sun was rising over the hills eastward, while to the west the bare, rugged, mountainous land was a solemn, chilly grey colour. The water was smooth and dark beneath the hills, but nearer the ship it was touched by the clear pale light of the rising sun. The hills rose jagged and sharp against the sky without a scrap of verdure on them; but the kindly atmosphere turned those in the distance to a soft and tender blue. It smoothed away the rugged lines and effaced the cruel-looking scars that seamed their sides, and covered them with a misty peace. It seemed to the young man as he looked at them that things became easier when viewed from a distance. He had suffered very deeply during the last few weeks, and with him had suffered the girl whom he had loved and cared for always, and whom he would love and care for until the end of his life. Looking back at the distant misty hills on Cape Verde Island this voyage seemed to him, in spite of all its horrible sense of separation, to be something of a lull in the midst of quick-happening events. When first he left home he had been plagued with thoughts which he had fought with almost savage fierceness, and he had wrestled to expel them from his mind; but that there could be any mystery in his mother's life had necessarily awakened endless questionings in his mind.

Why, if this little brother of his had not died, had he disappeared? And what was the reason for his disappearance? 'He did not die,' said the half-finished letter which his mother's hand had traced; 'he did not die.' Once, in the middle of the night, as he said the wearisome sentence over to himself, a word had come suddenly before him in letters of flame, and Peter had turned away from it with a cry. A child who had been deprived of his life might be said in a sense not to have died, and there was the word of six letters in front of him in the dark. He turned on the electric light in his cabin, and for a moment he had half a mind to go in next door and wake Toffy. The burden of the suggestion was too horrible to bear alone. 'He did not die!' His mother's mental state might not have been perfectly sound at the time of her husband's death; and her preference for him, Peter, was a fact that had been remarked by all who knew her. Had she begun to write a confession to her son, and stopped short in the middle? 'Don't hate me too much,' the letter said. Why should he hate her? He did not know.

In the morning he was able to put aside utterly the thought which had tormented him, but he lived in dread of being beset by it at night-time again. He began to fear going to bed, and would sit up talking to Toffy till the small hours of the morning, or playing picquet with Dunbar. Men began to say that he 'jawed' too much and would not let them go to bed, little knowing how he used to try to prolong a conversation so that he might not be left alone with a horrible fear always ready to pounce upon him when night fell, and when only the thud of the engines playing some maddening tune broke the silence.

He tried, with a baffling sense of impatience, to make his own memory act, and to recall the days when he was not quite three years old. But the thing was an impossibility, of course, and his brain refused to give up a single picture of that time.

It was only when the ship had left St. Vincent that a certain amount of peace came to establish itself in his heart, and the large and beautiful consolation of the sea began to make itself felt. The weather was calm and clear, and the monotonous slap and swish of the water against the ship's side was in itself soothing. The company on board were all strangers to him, and this helped to give him a feeling that he was starting anew in life. Also he was on his way to do the best he could to find his brother, if he were living, or to clear up the mystery of his death, if he were dead. There was no horrid feeling of having failed to do the best that was possible. He must find Edward Ogilvie, or discover the grave where he lay; and after that it would be time enough to think what would be the next thing to do.

When the ship steamed away from St. Vincent in the evening, and the lighthouse on Bird Rock made a luminous point in the gathering darkness, the sight of land and of the hills had done Peter good, and had restored him to the normal and natural man again. He turned to look back at the rugged island, with the one point of light high up in its lighthouse, and he thought that it was like some lamp which a woman sets in the window to guide her husband home. With that feeling came a deep sense of the love and the confidence which he and Jane had in each other; he knew that she would not fail him whether he were rich or poor, happy or unhappy, and that seemed the only thing in the world worth knowing for certain.