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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.

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

"It's a way worms have."

"Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."

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

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

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

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

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

"But what?"

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

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

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

"Aren't you going to buy some stamps?" he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVI

"Une grande passion malheureaux est un grand moyen de sagesse."

Rachel had left London precipitately after she had been the unwilling confidante of Lady Newhaven's secret, and had taken refuge with that friend of all perplexed souls, the Bishop of Southminster. She felt unable to meet Hugh again without an interval of breathing-time. She knew that if she saw much more of him he would confide in her, and she shrank from receiving a confidence the ugliest fact of which she already knew. Perhaps she involuntarily shrank also from fear lest he should lower himself in her eyes by only telling her half the truth. Sad confessions were often poured into Rachel's ears which she had known for years. She never alluded to that knowledge, never corrected the half-lie which accompanies so many whispered self—accusations. Confidences and confessions are too often a means of evasion of justice—a laying of the case for the plaintiff before a judge without allowing the defendant to be present or to call a witness. Rachel, by dint of long experience, which did slowly for her the work of imagination, had ceased to wonder at the faithfully chronicled harsh words and deeds of generous souls. She knew or guessed at the unchronicled treachery or deceit which had brought about that seemingly harsh word or deed.

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

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

Rachel had not yet wholly recovered from the overwhelming passion of love which, admitted without fear a few years ago, had devastated the little city of her heart, as by fire and sword, involving its hospitable dwellings, its temples, and its palaces in one common ruin. Out of that desolation she was unconsciously rebuilding her city, but it was still rather gaunt and bare, the trees had not had time to grow in the streets, and there was an ugly fortification round it of defaced, fire-seared stones, which had once stood aloft in minaret and tower, and which now served only as a defence against all corners.

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

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

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

"He will never say anything."

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

"I wish to go very much."

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

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

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

Rachel laughed. "You flatter me."

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

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

"Just as you like," said Lady Newhaven with asperity. "But I advise you to be careful, my dear Rachel. It never seems to occur to you what on-lookers see at a glance, namely, that Mr. Vernon is in love with your fortune."

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVII

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

Hester did not fail a second time to warn the Gresleys of the arrival of guests. She mentioned it in time to allow of the making of cakes, and Mr. Gresley graciously signified his intention of returning early from his parochial rounds on the afternoon when Dick and Rachel were expected, while Mrs. Gresley announced that the occasion was a propitious one for inviting the Pratts to tea.

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

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

The afternoon was still young when all the preparations had been completed, and Mrs. Gresley went up-stairs to change her gown, while Hester took charge of the children, as Fraeulein had many days previously arranged to make music with Dr. and Miss Brown on this particular afternoon. And very good music it was which proceeded out of the open windows of the doctor's red brick house opposite Abel's cottage. Hester could just hear it from the bottom of the garden near the church-yard wall, and there she took the children, and under the sycamore, with a bench round it, the dolls had a tea-party. Hester had provided herself with a lump of sugar and a biscuit, and out of these many dishes were made, and were arranged on a clean pocket-handkerchief spread on the grass. Regie carried out his directions as butler with solemn exactitude; and though Mary, who had inherited the paternal sense of humor, thought fit to tweak the handkerchief and upset everything, she found the witticism so coldly received by "Auntie Hester," although she explained that father always did it, that she at once suited herself to her company, and helped to repair the disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel looked at him.

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

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

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

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

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

Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie's back; and amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his stocking at his knee.

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

But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful half-penny.

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

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

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

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

Dick pounced upon him like a panther, and held him by the feet head downward, shaking him violently. The child's face was terrible to see.

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

"I think the shaking is rather too much for him," she said, watching the poor little purple face intently. "I'm bound to go on," said Dick, fiercely. "Is it moving, Regie?"

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

"That it's not," said Dick, and he shook the child again, and the half-penny flew out upon the grass. "Thank God," said Dick, and he laid the gasping child on Hester's lap and turned away.

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

"Make the half-penny fly again, Uncle Dick," cried all the children, pulling at him.

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

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

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

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

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

"It was not your fault."

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

Hester was skimming back towards them.

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

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

"In what way?"

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

"He is not much altered," said Hester.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inaudible reply.

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

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

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

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

The conversation turned on bicycling.

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

Rachel had just said that she did.

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

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

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

Ada glared at Rachel, and did not answer.

When the Pratts had taken leave she said to her mother:

"Well, you can have Rachel West if you want to, but if you do I shall go away. She is only Birmingham, and yet she's just as stuck up as she can be."

The Pratts were "Liverpool."

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVIII

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

If, after the departure of the Pratts, Rachel had hoped for a word with Hester, she was doomed to disappointment. Mr. Gresley took the seat on the sofa beside Rachel which Ada Pratt had vacated, and after a few kindly eulogistic remarks on the Bishop of Southminster and the responsibilities of wealth, he turned the conversation into the well-worn groove of Warpington.

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

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

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

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

"I've seen many a good fellow go to the dogs through drink in the Colonies, more's the pity," Dick remarked. "I think I'll come too, James. And if you want a few plain words you call on me."

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

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

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

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

Hester shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

Hester introduced Fraeulein to Rachel, and slipped down-stairs to the night nursery.

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

"What is it; my treasure?"

"Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying half-penny?"

"No, darling. Why?"

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

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

"Yes," said Regie; "but, but—"

"But what?"

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

Hester saw the difficulty in Regie's mind.

"It felt common when it was inside," said Regie, doubtfully, "and yet you and Uncle Dick did say it was a flying one."

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

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

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

"Ye-es."

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

"Then it was a common half-penny, after all," said Regie, with a deep sigh.

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

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

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

She laid Regie down and covered him.

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

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

She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front-door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had arrived. Mr. Gresley's voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.

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

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

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

The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighboring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker. Mr. Pratt's face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long, parti-colored whiskers. He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his "humble brethren," admirably suited to one who, after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a "county family."

The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.

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

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

Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hear! hear!" shouted several voices.

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

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

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

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

In a moment the room was in an uproar.

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

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

"But I thoroughly agree with the gentlemen who spoke before me," said Dick, when peace was restored. "Total abstinence is a long chalk below temperance, but it's better than drunkenness any day. And if a man can't get on without three-finger nips, let him take the pledge. There are one or two here to-night who would be the better for it. But, to my thinking, total abstinence is like a water mattress. It is good for a sick man, and it's good for a man with a weak will, which is another kind of illness. But temperance is for those who are in health. There is a text in the Bible about wine making glad the heart of man. That's a good text, and one to go on. As often as not texts are like bags, and a man crams all his own rubbish into them, and expects you to take them together. There are some men, who ought to know better, who actually get out of that text by saying the Bible means unfermented liquor"—Mr. Gresley became purple. "Does it? Then how about the other place where we hear of new wine bursting old bottles. What makes them burst? Fermentation, of course, as every village idiot knows. No, I take it when the Bible says wine it means wine. Wine's fermented liquor, and what's unfermented liquor? Nothing but 'pop.'"

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

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

A storm of applause followed, which was perhaps all the heartier by reason of the furious face of Mr. Gresley. Dick was clapped continuously as he descended the platform and slowly left the room, feeling in his pockets for his tobacco-pouch. A squad of young men creaked out after him, and others followed by twos and threes, so that the mellifluous voice of Mr. Pratt was comparatively lost, who, disregarding his position as chairman, now rose to pour oil—of which, in manner alone, he had always a large supply—on the troubled waters. Mr. Pratt had felt a difficulty in interrupting a member of a county family, which with the eye of faith he plainly perceived Dick to be, and at the same time a guest of "Newhaven's." The Pratts experienced in the rare moments of their intercourse with the Newhavens some of that sublime awe, that subdued rapture, which others experience in cathedrals. Mr. Pratt had also taken a momentary pleasure in the defeat of Mr. Gresley, who did not pay him the deference which he considered due to him and his "seat." Mr. Pratt always expected that the Vicar should, by reason of his small income, take the position of a sort of upper servant of the Squire; and he had seen so many instances of this happy state of things that he was perpetually nettled by Mr. Gresley's "independent" attitude; while Mr. Gresley was equally irritated by "the impatience of clerical control" and shepherding which Mr. Pratt, his largest and woolliest sheep, too frequently evinced.

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

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

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

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

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

"He talked me down," said Mr. Gresley, his voice shaking. "He opposed me in my own school-room. Of course, I blame myself for asking him to speak. I ought to have inquired into his principles more thoroughly, but he took me in entirely by saying one thing in this room and the exact opposite on the platform."

"I thought his views were the same in both places," said Hester, "and, at the time, I admired you for asking him to speak, considering he is a vine-grower."

"A what?" almost shrieked Mr. Gresley.

"A vine-grower. Surely you know he has one of the largest vineyards in South Australia?"

For a moment Mr. Gresley was bereft of speech.

"And you knew this and kept silence," he said at last, while Mrs. Gresley looked reproachfully, but without surprise, at her sister-in-law.

"Certainly. What was there to speak about? I thought you knew."

"I never heard it till this instant. That quite accounts for his views. He wants to push his own wines. Of course, drunkenness is working for his interests. I understand it all now. He has undone the work of years by that speech for the sake of booking a few orders. It is contemptible. I trust, Hester, he is not a particular friend of yours, for I shall feel it my duty to speak very strongly to him if he comes again."

But Dick did not appear again. He was off and away before the terrors of the Church could be brought to bear on him.

But his memory remained green at Warpington.

"They do say," said Abel to Hester a few days later, planting his spade on the ground, and slowly scraping off upon it the clay from his nailed boots, "as that Muster Vernon gave 'em a dusting in the school-yard as they won't forget in a hurry. He said he could not speak out before the women folk, but he was noways nesh to pick his words onst he was outside. Barnes said as his tongue 'ud 'ave raised blisters on a hedge stake. But he had a way with him for all that. There was a deal of talk about him at market last Wednesday, and Jones and Peg is just silly to go back to Australy with 'im. I ain't sure," continued Abel, closing the conversation by a vigorous thrust of his spade into the earth, "as one of the things that fetched 'em all most wasn't his saying that since he's been in a hot climate he knowed what it was to be tempted himself when he was a bit down on his luck or a bit up. Pratts would never have owned to that." The village always spoke of Mr. Pratt in the plural without a prefix. "I've been to a sight of temperance meetings, because," with indulgence, "master likes it, tho' I always has my glass, as is natural. But I never heard one of the speakers kind of settle to it like that. That's what the folks say; that for all he was a born gentleman he spoke to 'em as man to man, not as if we was servants or childer."



CHAPTER XIX

Le bruit est pour le fat. La plainte est pour le sot. L'honnete homme trompe S'en va et ne dit mot. —M. DELANONI

"And so you cannot persuade Miss Gresley to come to us next week?" said Lord Newhaven, strolling into the dining-room at Westhope Abbey, where Rachel and Dick were sitting at a little supper-table laid for two in front of the high altar. The dining-room had formerly been the chapel, and the carved stone altar still remained under the east window.

Lord Newhaven drew up a chair, and Rachel felt vaguely relieved at his presence. He had a knack of knowing when to appear and when to efface himself.

"She can't leave her book," said Rachel.

"Her first book was very clever," said Lord Newhaven, "and, what was more, it was true. I hope for her own sake she will outgrow her love of truth, or it will make deadly enemies for her."

"And good friends," said Rachel.

"Possibly," said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at her, and almost obliged to believe that she had spoken without self-consciousness. "But if she outgrows all her principles, I hope, at any rate, she won't outgrow her sharp tongue. I liked her ever since she first came to this house, ten years ago, with Lady Susan Gresley. I remember saying that Captain Pratt; who called while she was here, was a 'bounder.' And Miss Gresley said she did not think he was quite a bounder, only on the boundary-line. If you knew Captain Pratt, that describes him exactly."

"I wish she had not said it," said Rachel, with a sigh. "She makes trouble for herself by saying things like that. Is Lady Newhaven in the drawing-room?"

"Yes, I heard her singing 'The Lost Chord' not ten minutes ago."

"I will go up to her," said Rachel.

"I do believe," said Lord Newhaven, when Rachel had departed, "that she has an affection for Miss Gresley."

"It is not necessary to be a detective in plain clothes to see that," said Dick.

"No. It generally needs to be a magnifying-glass to see a woman's friendship, and then they are only expedients till we arrive, Dick. You need not he jealous of Miss Gresley. Miss West will forget all about her when she is Mrs. Vernon."

"She does not seem very keen about that," said Dick, grimly. "I'm only marking time. I'm no forwarder than I was."

"Well, it's your own fault for fixing your affections on a woman who is not anxious to marry. She has no objection to you. It is marriage she does not like."

"Oh, that's bosh!" said Dick. "All women wish to be married, and if they don't they ought to."

He felt that an invidious reflection had been east on Rachel.

"All the same, a man with one eye can see that women with money, or anything that makes them independent of us, don't flatter us by their alacrity to marry us. They will make fools of themselves for love—none greater—and they will marry for love. But their different attitude towards us, their natural lords and masters, directly we are no longer necessary to them as stepping-stones to a home and a recognized position, revolts me. If you had taken my advice at the start, you would have made up to one among the mob of women who are dependent on marriage for their very existence. If a man goes into that herd he will not be refused. And if he is it does not matter. It is the blessed custom of piling everything on to the eldest son, and leaving the women of the family almost penniless, which provides half of us with wives without any trouble to ourselves. Whatever we are, they have got to take us. The average dancing young woman living in luxury in her father's house is between the devil and the deep sea. We are frequently the devil; but it is not surprising that she can't face the alternative—a poverty to which she was not brought up, and in which she has seen her old spinster aunts. But I suppose in your case you really want the money?"

Dick looked rather hard at Lord Newhaven.

"I should not have said that unless I had known it to be a lie," continued the latter, "because I dislike being kicked. But, Dick, listen to me. You have not," with sudden misgiving, "laid any little matrimonial project before her this evening, have you?"

"No; I was not quite such a fool as that."

"Well! Such things do occur. Moonlight, you know, etc. I was possessed by a devil once, and proposed by moonlight, as all my wife's friends know, and probably her maid. But, seriously, Dick, you are not making progress, as you say yourself."

"Well!" rather sullenly.

"Well, on-lookers see most of the game. Miss West may—I don't say she is—but if things go on as they are for another week she may become slightly bored. That was why I joined you at supper. She had had, for the time, enough."

"Of me?" said Dick, reddening under his tan.

"Just so. It is a matter of no importance after marriage, but it should be avoided beforehand. Are you really in earnest about this?"

Dick delivered himself slowly and deliberately of certain platitudes.

"Well, I hope I shall hear you say all that again some day in a condensed form before a clergyman. In the meanwhile—"

"In the meanwhile I had better clear out."

"Yes; I don't enjoy saying so in the presence of my own galantine and mayonnaise, but that is it. Go, and—come back."

"If you have a Bradshaw," said Dick, "I'll look out my train now. I think there is an express to London about seven in the morning, if you can send me to the station."

"But the post only comes in at eight."

"Well, you can send my letters after me."

"I dare say I can, my diplomatist. But you are not going to leave till the post has arrived, when you will receive business letters requiring your immediate presence in London. You are not going to let a woman know that you leave on her account."

"You are very sharp, Cackles," said Dick, drearily. "And I'll take a leaf out of your book and lie, if you think it is the right thing. But I expect she will know very well that the same business which took me to that infernal temperance meeting has taken me to London."

Rachel was vaguely relieved when Dick went off next morning. She was not, as a rule, oppressed by the attentions she received from young men, which in due season became "marked," and then resulted in proposals neatly or clumsily expressed. But she was disturbed when she thought of Dick, and his departure was like the removal of a weight, not a heavy, but still a perceptible one. For Rachel was aware that Dick was in deadly earnest, and that his love was growing steadily, almost unconsciously, was accumulating like snow, flake by flake, upon a mountain-side. Some day, perhaps not for a long time, but some day, there would be an avalanche, and, in his own language, she "would be in it."



CHAPTER XX

Si l'on vous a trahi, ce n'est pas la trahison qui importe; c'est le pardon qu'elle a fait naitre dans votre ame. . . . Mais si la trahison n'a pas accru la simplicite, la confiance plus haute, l'etendue de l'amour, on vous aura trahi bien inutilement, et vous pouvez vous dire qu'il n'est rien arrive.—MAETERLINCK.

Rachel and Hester were sitting in the shadow of the church-yard wall where Hester had so unfortunately fallen asleep on a previous occasion. It was the first of many clandestine meetings. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley did not realize that Hester and Rachel wished to "talk secrets," as they would have expressed it, and Rachel's arrival was felt by the Gresleys to be the appropriate moment to momentarily lay aside their daily avocations, and to join Hester and Rachel in the garden for social intercourse. The Gresleys liked Rachel. Listeners are generally liked. Perhaps also her gentle, unassuming manner was not an unpleasant change after the familiar nonchalance of the Pratts.

The two friends bore their fate for a time in inward impatience, and then, not without compunction, "practised to deceive." Certain obtuse persons push others, naturally upright, into eluding and outwitting them, just as the really wicked people, who give viva voce invitations, goad us into crevasses of lies, for which, if there is any justice anywhere, they will have to answer at the last day. Mr. Gresley gave the last shove to Hester and Rachel by an exhaustive harangue on what he called socialism. Finding they were discussing some phase of it, he drew up a chair and informed them that he had "threshed out" the whole subject.

"Socialism," he began, delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. "Community of goods. People don't see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can't knock that into people's heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away."

It was after this conversation, or rather monologue, that Hester and Rachel arranged to meet by stealth.

They were sitting luxuriously in the short grass, with their backs against the church-yard wall, and their hats tilted over their eyes.

"I wish I had met this Mr. Dick five or six years ago," said Rachel, with a sigh.

Hester was the only person who knew about Rachel's previous love disaster.

"Dick always gets what he wants in the long run," said Hester. "I should offer to marry him at once, if I were you. It will save a lot of trouble, and it will come to just the same in the end."

Rachel laughed, but not light-heartedly. Hester had only put into words a latent conviction of her own which troubled her.

"Dick is the right kind of man to marry," continued Hester, dispassionately. "What lights he has he lives up to. If that is not high praise, I don't know what is. He is good, but somehow his goodness does not offend one. One can condone it. And, if you care for such things, he has a thorough-going respect for women, which he carries about with him in a little patent safe of his own."

"I don't want to marry a man for his qualities and mental furniture," said Rachel, wearily. "If I did I would take Mr. Dick."

There was a short silence.

"I am sure," said Rachel at last, "that you do not realize how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels, who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone? Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it's despicable. I have straggled against it. It is idiotic to generalize from one personal experience. I keep before my mind that other men are not like him. I know they aren't, but yet—somehow I think they are. I am frightened."

Hester turned her wide eyes towards her friend.

"Do you still consider, after these four years, that he did you an injury?"

Rachel looked out upon the mournful landscape. The weariness of midsummer was upon it. A heavy hand seemed laid upon the brow of the distant hills.

"I gave him everything I had," she said, slowly, "and he threw it away. I have nothing left for any one else. Perhaps it is because I am naturally economical," she added, smiling faintly, "that it seems now, looking back, such a dreadful waste."

"Only in appearance, not in reality," said Hester. "It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long-run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of all the reins.'"

"You mean it did me good," said Rachel, "and that he was a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don't take a burning interest in my own character. I don't find my mental stand-point—isn't that what Mrs. Loftus calls it?—very engrossing."

"He was a benefactor, all the same," said Hester, with decision. "I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of gratitude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?"

"Oh!" said Rachel, ruefully. "When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly."

"You are a true prophet, Rachel."

"Yes, executioner."

"My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself—not that that is saying much—to have saved you from that hour."

"I know it."

"But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God! I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you—the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness—which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination—I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have had no more sympathy than she has. People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathize with what one has experienced. That is why they are always saying, 'as a mother,' or 'as a wife.' If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but from want of using your powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonized awakening, all the great realities of life—love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm—would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why I can't bear to hear her speak of them, because every word she says proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door—until then."

Silence.

"Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?"

No answer.

"Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?"

"No."

"But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents."

"Don't," said Rachel, her lip trembling.

"I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care now. You seek out those who need you. Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?"

"They were cheaply bought," said Rachel, with conviction, speaking with difficulty.

"Would you have learned them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?"

"Oh, Hester! would anybody?"

"Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would you?"

"N—no," said Rachel.

There was a long silence.

Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."

At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.

"I see what you mean," she said; "I have not reached the place yet; but I can believe that I shall come to it some day, when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty. Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman, without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn—by experience. I have been very fortunate."

Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel's hands. It was as if she had said, "Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me." And the action was so understood.

Rachel colored, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.

"How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?" said Rachel, in a whisper. "When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you know them?"

A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester's face. "'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester's voice altered.

"Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James. You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love-scenes in the Idyll were put together from scraps I had collected of James's engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the Idyll. And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own."

"You are profane now," said Rachel, smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.

A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them, imitating a charger, while Fraeulein and the two little girls followed.

Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.

"Where is Uncle Dick?" he said.

"I don't know," said Rachel, reddening, in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.

"Then he has not come with you?"

Regie's mind was what his father called "sure and steady." Mr. Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.

"No, he has not come with me."

"Mary!" shrieked Regie, "he has not come."

"I knew he had not," said Mary. "When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else."

Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys' favorite child. However thoroughly they might divest themselves of parental partiality, they could not but observe that she was as sensible as a grown-up person.

"I thought he might be somewhere near," explained Regie, "in a tree or something," looking up into the little yew. "You can't tell with a conjurer like Uncle Dick, can you, Auntie Hester, whatever Mary may say?"

"Mary is generally wrong," said Hester, "but she is right for once."

Mary, who was early acquiring the comfortable habit of hearing only the remarks that found an echo in her own breast, heard she was right, and said, shrilly:

"I told Regie when we was still on the road that Uncle Dick wasn't there. Mother doesn't always go with father, but he said he'd run and see."

"We shall be ver'r late for luncheon," said Fraeulein, hastily, blushing down to the onyx brooch at her turn-down collar, and drawing Mary away.

"Perhaps he left the half-penny with you," said Regie. "Fraeulein would like to see it."

"No, no," said Fraeulein, the tears in her eyes. "I do not vish at all. I cry half the night when I hear of it."

"I only cry when baby beats me," said Mary, balancing on one leg.

"I have not got the half-penny," said Rachel, the three elders studiously ignoring Mary's personal reminiscences.

The children were borne away by Fraeulein, and the friends kissed and parted.

"I am coming to Wilderleigh to-morrow," said Rachel. "I shall be much nearer to you then."

"It is no good contending against Dick and fate," said Hester, shaking her finger at her. "You see it is all decided for you. Even the children have settled it."



CHAPTER XXI

If a fool be associated with a wise man all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.—Buddhist Dhammapada.

"I can't think what takes you to Wilderleigh," said Lady Newhaven to Rachel. "I am always bored to death when I go there. Sybell is so self-centred."

Perhaps one of the reasons why Lady Newhaven and Sybell Loftus did not "get on" was owing to a certain superficial resemblance between them.

Both exacted attention, and if they were in the same room together it seldom contained enough attention to supply the needs of both. Both were conscious, like "Celia Chettam," that since the birth of their first child their opinions respecting literature, politics, and art had acquired additional weight and solidity, and that a wife and mother could pronounce with decision on important subjects where a spinster would do well to hold her peace. Each was fond of saying, "As a married woman I think this or that"; yet each was conscious of dislike and irritation when she heard the other say it. And there is no doubt that Sybell had been too unwell to appear at Lady Newhaven's garden-party the previous summer, because Lady Newhaven had the week before advanced her cherished theory of "one life one love," to the delight of Lord Newhaven and the natural annoyance of Sybell, whose second husband was at that moment handing tea and answering "That depends" when appealed to.

"As if," as Sybell said afterwards to Hester, "a woman can help being the ideal of two men."

"Sybell is such a bore now," continued Lady Newhaven, "that I don't know what she will be when she is older. I don't know why you go to Wilderleigh, of all places."

"I go because I am asked," said Rachel, "and partly because I shall be near Hester Gresley."

"I don't think Miss Gresley can be very anxious to see you, or she would have come here when I invited her. I told several people she was coming, and that Mr. Carstairs, who thinks so much of himself, came on purpose to meet her. It is very tiresome of her to behave like that, especially as she did not say she had any engagement. You make a mistake, Rachel, in running after people who won't take any trouble to come and see you. It is a thing I never do myself."

"She is buried in her book at present."

"I can't think what she has to write about. But I suppose she picks up things from other people."

"I think so. She is a close observer."

"I think you are wrong there, Rachel, for when she was here some years ago she never looked about her at all. And I asked her how she judged of people, and she said, 'By appearances.' Now that was very silly, because, as I explained to her, appearances were most deceptive, and I had often thought a person with a cold manner was cold-hearted, and afterwards found I was quite mistaken."

Rachel did not answer. She wondered in what the gift consisted, which Lady Newhaven and Sybell both possessed, of bringing all conversation to a stand-still.

"It seems curious," said Lady Newhaven, after a pause, "how the books are mostly written by the people who know least of life. Now, the Sonnets from the Portuguese. People think so much of them. I was looking at them the other day. Why, they are nothing to what I have felt. I sometimes think if I wrote a book—I don't mean that I have any special talent—but if I really sat down and wrote a book with all the deep side of life in it, and one's own religious feelings, and described love and love's tragedy as they really are, what a sensation it would make! It would take the world by storm."

"Any book dealing sincerely with one of those subjects could not fail to be a great success."

"Oh yes. I am not afraid I should fail. I do wish you were not going, Rachel. We have so much in common. And it is such a comfort to be with some one who knows what one is going through. I believe you feel the suspense, too, for my sake."

"I do feel it—deeply."

"I sometimes think," said Lady Newhaven, her face aging suddenly under an emotion so disfiguring that Rachel's eyes fell before it—"I am sometimes almost certain that Edward drew the short lighter. Oh! do you think if he did he will really act up to it when the time comes?"

"If he drew it he will certainly take the consequences."

"Will he, do you think? I am almost sure he drew it. He is doing so many little things that look as if he knew he were not going to live. I heard Mr. Carstairs ask him to go to Norway with him next spring, and Edward laughed, and said he never looked more than a few months ahead."

"I am afraid he may have said that intending you to hear it."

"But he did not intend me to hear it. I overheard it." Rachel's face fell.

"You did promise after you told me about the letter that you would never do that kind of thing again."

"Well, Rachel, I have not. I have not even looked at his letters since. I could not help it that once, because I thought he might have told his brother in India. But don't you think his saying that to Mr. Carstairs looks—"

Rachel shook her head.

"He is beyond me," she said. "There may be something more behind which we don't know about."

"I have a feeling, it has come over me again and again lately, that I shall be released, and that Hugh and I shall be happy together yet."

And Lady Newhaven turned her face against the high back of her carved oak chair and sobbed hysterically.

"Could you be happy if you had brought about Lord Newhaven's death?" said Rachel.

Her voice was full of tender pity, not for the crouching unhappiness before her, but for the poor atrophied soul. Could she reach it? She would have given everything she possessed at that moment for one second of Christ's power to touch those blind eyes to sight.

"How can you say such things? I should not have brought it about. I did not even know of that dreadful drawing of lots till the thing was done. That was all his own doing."

Rachel sighed. The passionate yearning towards her companion shrank back upon herself.

"The fault is in me," she said to herself. "If I were purer, humbler, more loving, I might have been allowed to help her."

Lady Newhaven rose, and held Rachel tightly in her arms.

"I count the days," she said, hoarsely, shaking from head to foot. "It is two months and three weeks to-day. November the twenty-ninth. You will promise faithfully to come to me and be with me then? You will not desert me? Whatever happens you will be sure—to come?"

"I will come. I promise," said Rachel. And she stooped and kissed the closed eyes. She could at least do that.



CHAPTER XXII

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind. —Song of the Bandar-log.

Rachel arrived after tea at Wilderleigh, and went straight to her room on a plea of fatigue. It was a momentary cowardice that tempted her to yield to her fatigue. She felt convinced that she should meet Hugh Scarlett at Wilderleigh. She had no reason for the conviction beyond the very inadequate one that she had met him at Sybell's London house. Nevertheless, she felt sure that he would be among the guests, and she longed for a little breathing-space after parting with Lady Newhaven before she met him. Presently Sybell flew in and embraced her with effusion.

"Oh! what you have missed!" she said, breathlessly. "But you do look tired. You were quite right to lie down before dinner, only you aren't lying down. We have had such a conversation down-stairs. The others are all out boating with Doll but Mr. Harvey, the great Mr. Harvey, you know."

"I am afraid I don't know."

"Oh yes, you do. The author of Unashamed."

"I remember now."

"Well, he is here, resting after his new book, Rahab. And he has been reading us the opening chapters, just to Miss Barker and me. It is quite wonderful. So painful, you know. He does not spare the reader anything; he thinks it wrong to leave out anything—but so powerful!"

"Is it the same Miss Barker whom I met at your house in the season, who denounced The Idyll?"

"Yes. How she did cut it up! You see, she knows all about East London, and that sort of thing. I knew you would like to meet her again because you are philanthropic, too. She hardly thought she could spare the time to come, but she thought she would go back fresher if the wail were out of her ears for a week. The wail! Isn't it dreadful? I feel we ought to do more than we do, don't you?"

"We ought, indeed."

"But then, you see, as a married woman, I can't leave my husband and child and bury myself in the East End, can I?"

"Of course not. But surely it is an understood thing that marriage exempts women from all impersonal duties."

"Yes, that is just it. How well you put it! But others could. I often wonder why, after writing The Idyll, Hester never goes near East London. I should have gone straight off, and have cast in my lot with them if I had been in her place."

"Do you ever find people do what you would have done if you had been in their place?"

"No, never. They don't seem to see it. It's a thing I can't understand the way people don't act up to their convictions. And I do know, though I would not tell Hester so for worlds, that the fact that she goes on living comfortably in the country after bringing out that book makes thoughtful people, not me, of course, but other earnest-minded people, think she is a humbug."

"It would—naturally," said Rachel.

"Well, now I am glad you agree with me, for I said something of the same kind to Mr. Scarlett last night, and he could not see it. He's rather obtuse. I dare say you remember him?"

"Perfectly."

"I don't care about him, he is so superficial, and Miss Barker says he is very lethargic in conversation. I asked him because—don't breathe a word of it—but because, as a married woman, one ought to help others, and—do you remember how he stood up for Hester that night in London?"

"For her book, you mean."

"Well, it's all one. Men are men, my dear. Let me tell you he would never have done that if he had not been in love with her."

"Do you mean that men never defend obvious truths unless they are in love?"

"Now you are pretending to misunderstand me," said Sybell, joyously, making her little squirrel face into a becoming pout. "But it's no use trying to take me in. And it's coming right. He's there at this moment!"

"At the Vicarage?"

"Where else? I asked him to go. I urged him. I said I felt sure she expected him. One must help on these things."

"But if he is obtuse and lethargic and superficial, is he likely to suit Hester?"

"My dear, the happiest lot for a woman is marriage. And you and I are Hester's friends. So we ought to do all we can for her happiness. That is why I just mentioned this."

The dressing-gong began to boom.

"I must fly," said Sybell, depositing a butterfly kiss on Rachel's forehead. And she flew.

"I wish I knew what I felt about him," said Rachel to herself. "I don't much like hearing him called obtuse and superficial, but I suppose I should like still less to hear Sybell praise him. I have never heard her praise anything but mediocrity yet."

If Rachel had been at all introspective she might have found a clew as to her feeling for Hugh in the unusual care with which she arranged her hair, and her decision at the last moment to discard the pale-green gown lying in state on the bed for a white satin one embroidered at long intervals with rose-colored carnations. The gown was a masterpiece, designed especially for her by a great French milliner. Rachel often wondered whose eyesight had been strained over those marvellous carnations, but to-night she did not give them a thought. She looked with grave dissatisfaction at her pale, nondescript face and nondescript hair and eyes. She did not know that only women with marriageable daughters saw her as she saw herself in the glass.

As she left her room a door opened at the farther end of the same wing, and a tall man came out. The middle-class element in her said, "Superfine." His fastidious taste said, "A plain woman."

In another instant they recognized each other.

"Superfine! What nonsense," she thought, as she met his eager, tremulous glance.

"A plain woman. Rachel plain!" He had met the welcome in her eyes, and there was beauty in every movement, grace in every fold of her white gown.

As they met the gong suddenly boomed out close beneath them, and they could only smile at each other as they shook hands. The butler, who was evidently an artist in his way, proved the gong to the uttermost; and they had descended the staircase together, and had crossed the hall before its dying tremors allowed them to speak.

As he was about to do so he saw her wince suddenly. She was looking straight in front of her at the little crowd in the drawing-room. For an instant her face turned from white to gray, and she involuntarily put out her hand as if to ward off something. Then a lovely color mounted to her cheek; she drew herself up and entered the room, while Hugh, behind her, looked fiercely at each man in succession.

It is always the unexpected that happens. As Rachel's half-absent eyes passed over the group in the brilliantly lighted drawing-room her heart reared, without warning, and fell back upon her. She had only just sufficient presence of mind to prevent her hand pressing itself against her heart. He was there; he was before her—the man whom she had loved with passion for four years, and who had tortured her.

Mr. Harvey (the great Mr. Harvey) strode forward, and Rachel found her hand engulfed in a large soft hand, which seemed to have a poached egg in the palm.

"This is a pleasure to which I have long looked forward," murmured the great man, all cuff and solitaire, bending in what he would have termed a "chivalrous manner" over Rachel's hand; while Doll, standing near, wondered drearily "why these writing chaps were always such bounders."