Real English churchyard elms crowded about the wall and blightingly overshadowed the lonely group of graves. English ivy, instead of neatly clothing the wall, as it had been meant to do, straggled wildly over the part of the enclosure which had once been a garden around them. Out of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up, and ragged things that had gone to seed. The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones—several of them ornate and costly—stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular.

"It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from the dam. But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn't think—or care. Poor dead people! How out of it they are! And we shall be the same some day—neglected and abandoned, just like this."

"DON'T!" muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering. The ghost of his sweet Lily seemed to reproach him with Deb's voice. But the ghost-woman fifteen months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if one can look at the thing dispassionately and with an unbiased mind.

"Let us go and see the dam," Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies' heads. "You haven't seen our big dam, have you? Everybody that comes to Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why. 'Pennycuick's Folly' some people call it, because he spent so much money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen'orth of paint. He likes to do things thoroughly. So do I."

And soon they halted on the embankment of a mile-wide sheet of water, shining like a mirror in a setting of soft-bosomed hills, their dun day colour changed to a heavenly rose-purple under the poetic evening sky.

"Why, it is a lake," said Guthrie Carey. "You could hold regattas on it." "We do, now and then, with our little boats. We have three over there"—pointing with her whip to a white shed on the farther shore. "And swimming matches. We used sometimes, when we were younger, to come down on hot nights and be mermaids. Once we moored ourselves out in the middle, away from the mosquitoes, and slept in the bottom of the boat, under the stars."

"How charming!"

"It was holiday time, and our parents were away. We took cushions and things, and it was great fun; but Keziah reported us, and we were never allowed to do it again."

They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the moon swam up—the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden and Alice Urquhart last night.

He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick.

First, it was only the story of the baby—the story he had told Alice, with some omissions and additions. He took advantage of the opportunity to ask Deb's invaluable advice.

Deb, well aware of the influence of a summer night and certain accessories, tried her best to be practical. She asked straight questions about the baby.

"Where have you got him? Where does this friend live who has been recommended to you?"

"In Sandridge—all at Sandridge—"

"That dirty, low part! That's no place to rear a boy in. Bring him into the bush, to clean air, if you want to make a man of him. I know a dear, nice woman—she is our overseer's wife—who has no children, and is dying to get hold of one somehow or other. We might make some arrangement with her, I am sure; and, if so, the little fellow would be in clover. We'd all look after him, of course, while you were at sea—"

"Oh! oh! oh!" The young father's heart simply exhaled itself in gratitude too vast for words. Ah! there was no hanging back now! Not the baby only, but the dog-chain, was laid at Deborah's feet.

"You go and fetch him tomorrow," said she, "and I'll talk to Mrs Kelsey while you are away. Then I'll meet you at the station on your return, to help you with him, and tell you what Mrs Kelsey says—though I have no doubt of what it will be. But we'll keep him at Redford for a bit, till he gets used to everybody; and you must stay with him all you can until your ship sails...."

His eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand on her shawl again. He leaned to her. It was no use—the moon and his feelings were too much for him. They were talking of the baby, and the word "love" had not been, and was not going to be, mentioned; but there the thing was, unmistakable to her keen intelligence, looming like a frontier custom-house on the road ahead.

She grasped his big, trembling hand, and with it held him back, meeting his adoring gaze with steady eyes and mouth.

"My dear boy, don't—don't! Don't spoil this nice evening—"

It was all that was necessary. And still so kind, so gentle with him! No scorn, no offended dignity, no displeasure even. She, who could punish insolence with anybody, was never hard upon the humble admirer—only too soft, in fact, with all her basic firmness, and incapable of the hard-hearted coquetry that so commonly makes beauty vile. "Face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast"—that was not Deborah Pennycuick.

A sob broke from him.

"I am a damned fool!" he muttered savagely, and by a violent effort collected himself. "I beg your pardon."

"That's all right," she said, turning the ponies from the embankment and whipping them to a gallop.



CHAPTER VII.

There was a moon the next night also. It did not appreciably affect him this time—down in dirty Sandridge, hobnobbing with the baby's caretaker and the general merchant, who, shutting his shop at six, was free to make the sailor's acquaintance, and help him to spend a pleasant evening. But it turned Redford garden, with its fine old trees and lawns, into the usual bit of fairyland for those who strayed therein.

Redford was packed with Christmas guests. The waggonette that had taken Guthrie Carey to the train had returned full of them, and batches had been arriving at intervals through the day. At bed-time the sisters were sharing rooms; Rose had come to Deb's, Frances to Mary's; and the unmarried men were all at the bachelors' quarters.

It was a hot night, and Deb, under the circumstances, was disinclined for sleep. She paid visits to one guest chamber and another, for private gossips and good-nights; when she returned to her own, where placid Rose had long composed herself, she roamed the floor like a caged animal.

"It is no use my coming to bed yet," she addressed her sister. "I could not sleep. I should only kick about and disturb you. I'll sit down and read a bit."

She found a novel and an easy-chair, and made deliberate efforts to tranquillise herself. Soon Rose heard sighs and phews, and sudden rustlings and slappings, and then the bang of a book upon the floor.

"I can't read! and the light brings the mosquitoes. It's too hot in here. I'm going out to get cool, Rosie."

"A'right," mumbled drowsy Rose. And the light was extinguished, and the blind of the French window rattled up.

Deb flung both leaves wide—like all the Redford doors, they were never locked or barred—and drifting over the verandah, sat down on the edge of it, with her feet on the gravel. She had tossed off her pearl necklace and a breast-knot of wilted roses; otherwise, she sat in full evening dress, and the night air bathed her bare neck and arms. Also the mosquitoes found them—a delicious morsel!—so that she had to turn her lacy skirt up over her head to be quite comfortable. From under this hood the dark lamps of her eyes shone forth, gazing steadily into the dim world—into the bit of future that she thought she saw unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the open spaces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green sky, the rising moon—these things made the picture, but were to all intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a hedge of laurels, and fixed itself in the neighbourhood of a distant garden-seat. Then at once she stiffened like a cat that has heard a mouse squeak or a bird's wing rustle; she was alert on the instant, concentrated upon the phenomenon. Instinct recognised the tip of a cigar which had the handsome face of Claud Dalzell behind it.

"What is he doing out of doors at this time of night?" she wondered; and the little star began to draw her like a magnet. The world becomes another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws—or rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts cultivated for her guidance by generations of wise men, now, all in a moment, came this moon-born impulse to give herself to him unasked. She could not resist it.

Like Deb, Claud had not been inclined to sleep, and for much the same reason. The guest chamber usually allotted to him being needed for a lady, he had been sent to the bachelors' quarters—a barrack-like dormitory amongst the outbuildings, very useful for the accommodation of the occasional 'vet' or cattle-buyer, and to take the overflow of company on festive occasions. Jim Urquhart, when at Redford, always slept there; he preferred it, particularly when he had companions with whom to smoke and talk sheep, and perhaps play cards, at liberty; for the bachelors' quarters had its own wood-stack and supplies, and one could sit by a blazing hearth all night, if so disposed, without incommoding anybody.

Generally four bachelor beds were made up, and a screened end of the room stacked with the material for twice as many more. At Christmas all were in use, and lined the two long walls—which Dalzell called "herding", and disliked extremely, while recognising that it was a necessary arrangement to which it was his duty to conform.

The herd was undressing itself in a miscellaneous manner—yawning, chaffing, cutting stupid jokes, some of them at his expense; until the process was at an end, and he could reasonably assume the fellows to be asleep, he preferred the gardens to the bachelors' quarters.

And the free night enfolded him—the rising moon uplifted him—in the usual way, he being, like Deb, like Guthrie Carey, an instrument fitted to respond to their mute appeals. Perhaps even more finely fitted than Guthrie or Deb; for he had what are called "gifts" of intellect and imagination transcending theirs—faculties of mind which, lacking worthy use, bred in him a sort of chronic melancholy, the poetic discontent of the unappreciated and misunderstood—a mood to which moonlight ministers as wine to the drinking fever, at once an exquisite exasperation and a divine appeasement. He was a poet, a painter, a musician—possibly a soldier, or a king—possibly anything—spoiled, blighted by that misnamed good fortune which the lucky workers who had to work so naturally and stupidly envied him. The proper stimulus to the worthy development of the manhood latent in him had been taken from him at the start. And now he wandered amongst his dilettantisms, dissatisfied and ineffectual. He lived beneath himself in his common intercourse with others; he ate his heart when he was alone.

Unconsciously, by force of habit, he selected the most comfortable and cleanly of the garden-seats, and made sure that the best of cigars was drawing perfectly, before he gave himself to his meditations on this particular moonlight night. Then he began to think of Deb—in the same new way that Carey had begun to think of her after discovering a dangerous rival in the field. To Claud, Guthrie was dangerous in his rude bulk and strength, the knitted brute power that the sea and his hard life had given him; to Guthrie, Claud was dangerous in the highbred beauty and finish of his person, clothes and manners, and in the astounding "cleverness" that he displayed. Each man feared the force of those qualities which he lacked himself, and was secretly ashamed of lacking.

Claud Dalzell considered this matter of the rival—not a probable but a possible rival—seriously, for the first time. Hitherto he had had an easy mind in his relations with the beauty of the countryside. She was his for all he wanted of her. And feeling this, he had taken no steps to register his claim; he had not even yet proposed to her. Matrimony was not a fashionable institution—it was, indeed, a jest—in his set. A young man with a heap of money was not expected to tie himself down as if he were a poor clerk on a hundred a year. The conditions of club life, with as many domestic hearths to visit as he wished, and to stay away from when he chose, the luxury and freedom of pampered bachelorhood, had not only been deemed appropriate, but necessary to his peculiar needs and organisation. He had not considered himself a marrying man. But now the new idea came to him—to make his rights in Deb secure.

Certainly he could not contemplate the possibility of doing without her. He had loved her that much for years. Within the last day or two he had loved her twice that much. And now the moonlight showed him his love enthroned above all his lesser loves—a thing of heaven, where they were of the earth—consecrated a great passion, to lift him out of himself. He sat and smoked, spiritually bemused, his brain running like a fountain with melodies of music and poetry, notes and words that sang in his ears and murmured on his lips without his hearing them. So a distant curlew thrilled him to a more ecstatic melancholy with its call through the moon-transfigured world, and he did not notice it. All the influences of the gentle night contributed to his inspired mood, but Love was the first violin in that orchestra under Nature's conductorship—Nature, whose hour it was, walking, a god, in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day.

And here came Deb, gliding towards him by a path that he could not see, holding her lace skirts tightly bunched in her nervous hands. Youth to youth, beauty to beauty, man to woman, woman to man, the magnet to the steel—they were just elements of the elements, for once in their lives.

"How fortunate that I put on black tonight," thought Deb, as she pursued her stealthy way at the back of bushes—"and something that does not rustle!"

"How beautiful she was tonight!" thought Claud. "How a dark dress throws up that superb neck of hers! I'll take her to Europe, and show her to the sculptors and painters; but where's the hand that could carve that shape, or the paint that could give her colour? I'll have a London season with her, and see her snuff out the milk-and-water debutantes. No milk-and-water about Deb—wine and fire!—and withal so proud and unapproachable. That hulking brute imagines—but he'll find his mistake if he attempts to cross the line. Beauty, passion, purity—what a blend! She's a woman alone—the blue rose of women—and she is mine." He murmured, to some cadence of a Schubert serenade: "My Deb! My love! My love! My queen!" and suddenly stopped short in his musings.

Her foot crunched the gravel behind him. Without turning his head, he sat alertly motionless for several minutes, listening, holding his breath. Then he dropped his cigar gently.

"Fine night, Deb," he remarked aloud.

There was no immediate answer, but presently a low chuckle from the laurel bushes.

"How did you know it was me?" she asked, imitating his casual tone.

"Couldn't explain, I'm sure. It was borne in on me, somehow."

"You did not see me."

"I don't want to see, in your case. I feel you."

There was another brief silence, and then she rustled off a step or two.

"Well, good-night! I just came out to look for a book I left here somewhere."

"What book?" "It doesn't matter. It is too late to read tonight, anyhow."

"It spoils books to leave them out all night. I will help you to find it." He got up, and pretended to look about. "It is not on this seat—"

"Perhaps Miss Keene has taken it in. She is always after me to pick up my litters. It won't rain, anyway, so it doesn't matter."

"No, it won't rain tonight. Awfully nice night, isn't it? I came over here to get a quiet smoke and let those fellows subside a bit. I could not stand their noise, and the place is stifling."

"I'm afraid so. I'm so sorry we have to put you there; but you know—"

"Oh, of course! I don't mind a bit. It is hot indoors, wherever you are. If it were not for the mosquitoes, it would be nice to sleep in hammocks under the trees this weather." "I have often thought so. I can't breathe shut up. Rose is in my room tonight, and she seems like a whole crowd. I had to come out to cool myself." "And to get your book. What book was it?" "The—er—Clough's poems." "How many copies have you?—because one of them has been in my pocket for two days."

"Well, I don't want it. Good-night!"

She put out her hand. He took it and held it. The moonlight now was very bright, but not bright enough to reveal his smile or her blush. However, neither could be hidden from the second sight of love. "Don't go yet, Debbie. I never get a word with you these days, you are so taken up with all sorts of people. And you haven't had time to get cool yet. I know you haven't—by the feel of your hand."

She tried to withdraw it, but did not try very hard.

"My dear boy," she trembled, "do you know what time it is? It must be simply ALL hours."

"What does that matter? We are not keeping anybody up." "And there's tomorrow to be considered. Christmas Eve is always such a busy, tiring—"

"Sufficient for the day. Let us take things as we can get them. Besides, you will sleep all the better for it. Five minutes more or less—"

He pulled gently but firmly at the imprisoned hand. "Well, just five minutes—although it's really—"

She was drawn down to the bench beside him, and the man in the moon, as he looked into their shining, happy eyes, seemed to wink knowingly.

"Oh, Debbie, isn't it a heavenly night? Oh, Debbie!" His arms went round her, and she simply melted into them. "Oh, my love!..."

Five minutes! It ran to an hour and a half before she scudded across the lawn to bed.

And it was Mary, the busy housekeeper, who, on her busiest day, drove to the station to meet Guthrie Carey and the baby, and the baby's cheap and temporary child-nurse.

Mary, though she was not Deb, was too sweet and good for words. She put the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his child. There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on his. Little Harry fused them. She had remembered to bring fresh milk and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, and seemed to forget that any other foster-mother had ever existed. His father's relieved and astonished pleasure in the sight was only equalled by Mary's pleasure in seeing his pleasure. "Isn't he a jolly little cuss, Miss Pennycuick?" "He is a perfect darling," crooned Mary, kissing him.

And, in fact, Harry Carey was a fine, clean, wholesome child, as worthy of his old family as any born under the ancestral roof.

Mary shouldered him as if he belonged to her when they arrived at Redford, shortly before the dinner hour.

"Now, Mr Carey, you must go to the bachelors' quarters, I am sorry to say; but he will not miss you, since you have been away from him for so long. He knows me now," said Mary proudly, "and I will take charge of him. You may safely leave him to us now."

"Indeed, yes, I know that," said the thankful parent, and hastened to his new quarters to receive the greetings and chaffings of the young bachelors, and to dress himself for dinner, while Mary carried the baby into the house, calling on Keziah Moon to come to her, the inadequate nurse-girl trailing at her heels.

The house party gathered in the glazed corridor of the "middle part"—a long, narrow room, that had once been a verandah, and that led to the new big dining-room—to await the summons to the meal. Here Deb, beautiful in limp white silk that showed up the lovely carmine of her cheeks, came forward to welcome the returned guest with an eager warmth that sadly misled him. He sat down to his dinner a few minutes later with his head in a whirl and his appetite nowhere, as an effect of that cordial pressure of the hand, those tender eyes, and that deep-hued blush upon him.

Then, as he came to himself, there crept into his mind a sense that things had been happening while he was away. All the eyes around the table seemed continually to turn either towards Deb, who, still flushed, and bestowing absent-minded smiles upon anybody and anything, was certainly different from her usual stately self; or upon Claud Dalzell, who sat beside her, and seemed to have appropriated some of her lost dignity; or upon Mr Pennycuick, who fumbled oddly with carving knife and gravy spoon, and gave other evidences, Guthrie thought, of having been upset and shaken. The young man was still fumbling himself for light upon these mysteries, when they were dispelled by a shock that for the moment stunned him.

Mr Pennycuick called for a certain brand of wine long famous at his board. When it came, and the bottles were being sent round, he stood up, with a trembling goblet in his hand. The eyes round the table dropped—all but Guthrie's, which stared at the old man.

"There's no time like the present," began the host, "if a thing has to be done." He repeated this strange and embarrassing introductory remark, and then spent some time in clearing his throat and blowing his nose, and trying to wipe up the wine he was shaking over. When the fidgets had seized upon the whole company, he rushed his fence. "Ahem! I must ask you, my friends, to fill your glasses in honour of an event—an event—that has just transpired in our midst—that—that I am sure will interest you all—that—in short, my dear daughter Deborah—and the man of her choice—who knows, I hope, what a lucky dog he is—"

"He does!" Claud interjected; and there was eager dumb-show all round the table, everyone—again excepting Guthrie—leaning forward to cast wreathed smiles at the seated couple. "I have given my consent," said Mr Pennycuick—"I have given my consent. My daughter shall be happy in her own way—and I hope he'll see to it that she gets all she bargains for. He is the son of my oldest friend, a man that was better than a brother to me—the whitest, straightest—But there's no words to say what he was. Only, the son of such a man—anybody with Billy Dalzell's blood in him—ought to be—if he isn't—"

"He is!" sang Deb, in her rich, ringing voice. "Oh, please, don't say any more, father!"

"Well, my dear, I know I am no hand at speech-making, but I can wish you luck, both of you, and I do. And I want our friends here—old friends of the family—to do the same. Good wishes mayn't bring good fortune, but for all we know they may do something towards it; and anyway, she may as well have all her chances. Ladies and gentlemen, long life and happiness to Deborah Pennycuick and her husband that is to be!"

A general turmoil broke out, glass-clinkings, cheers, handshakings; kissings, with a sob or two from the overwrought. And Guthrie, with no heart upon his sleeve, bowed and drank with the rest. When the demonstration was over, and the company back in its chairs, Dalzell was left standing. His bride-elect sat beside him, her elbow on the table, her face shaded by her hand.

"On behalf of my dear wife that is to be," said Claud, with a quiet mastery of himself that was in striking contrast to the old man's agitation, "and as a grateful duty of my own, I beg to thank you all, and especially Mr Pennycuick, for this great kindness—for your generous sympathy with us in our present happiness. Mr Pennycuick seems to have a doubt—natural to anyone in the circumstances, but inevitable in a father—the father of such a daughter—as to my being qualified to appreciate the gift he has just bestowed upon me; I can assure him, and all of you, that I am overwhelmed with the sense of my good fortune, and of my unworthiness of it. I am unworthy—I admit it; but it shall be the business of my life to correct that fault—if it is a fault, and not merely a misfortune that I cannot help. To the best of my power I will prove—by deeds, not words—that I do know her value." Deb's hand under the table here stole towards his that hung at his side, and he stood holding it until he finished speaking. "Fortune has been kind in granting me the means to surround her with material comfort—to give so rare a jewel the setting appropriate to it; for the rest, I must trust to her generosity. I feel quite safe in trusting to it. We have known each other—I believe we have loved each other—from childhood; I hope Mr Pennycuick will take that as some guarantee that his little misgivings are unnecessary." The orator twisted his moustache, and glanced down at the bowed head beside him. "She seems to be a little taken aback by the suddenness of this public announcement, but I can say that it does not come a moment too soon for me. Mr Pennycuick has made me a proud man. I glory in my position as his daughter's affianced husband; I wish to parade it as openly as possible. However, to spare her, I will say no more just now. Ladies and gentlemen"—bowing to right and left—"I thank you again."

He sat down amid thunders of applause; and leaning back in his chair, he looked straight and full at Guthrie Carey. Guthrie Carey, erect, calm as a stone image, returned the look steadily. There was absolutely no expression in his eyes.



CHAPTER VIII.

Carey junior joined the Christmas party after breakfast, and was handed round. Mary introduced him. He was spick-and-span, with shining cheeks and a damp and glossy top-knot, and his blue eyes stared at the strange crowd stolidly for several minutes before he suddenly crumpled up his face and uttered a howl of terror.

"What is it?" queried Dalzell, with raised brows, pretending that he had never seen such a thing before.

"It's a baby," Frances explained, dancing round it. "Baby! Baby!"—shaking the new rattle that was one of its Christmas gifts—"look at me, baby! It is Mr Carey's baby. Oh, come and speak to him, Mr Carey! He is frightened of so many strangers."

The stalwart father in the background glowered upon the son disgracing him. Red as beetroot, embarrassed and annoyed, he strode forward. The yelling infant cast one glance at him, and yelled louder than before. "I shouldn't have let him come," the sailor growled. He had got up from the wrong side of the bed that morning, and was in the mood to regret everything, even that he had been born. "I don't know what possessed me to let you be bothered with the brat. I'll ring for his nurse."

This was unanimously objected to. The ladies gathered round, with honeyed words and tinkling baubles to pacify the little guest. Deborah snatched him from her sister's arms, and ran with him into the garden, where she tossed him, still writhing and wailing, up and down, and dipped his face into flowers, and played other pranks calculated to enchant the average baby. This baby turned on her for her pains, and having slapped her cheeks, grabbed her beautiful hair and tore it down about her ears. The next instant he felt the weight of the hand from which his own had derived its strength.

"You brute!" cried Deb, shielding the offending little arm from a second blow. "A great big man like you, to strike a tender mite like this!"

"'Tender' is hardly the word," the irate parent sneered. "And mite as he is, he is not to do things of that sort." Guthrie glared at her sacred locks, dishevelled. "I'm awfully sorry. He shan't do it again. I'll take him away tomorrow."

"You will do nothing of the sort," flashed Deb. "You are not fit to have the care of him. He shall stay here, where he will be treated as a baby ought to be—not smacked and knocked about for nothing at all."

"I admire his pluck," quoth Dalzell, sauntering up.

"So do I," said Deb; but she handed her sobbing burden to Mary. "Here, take him, Moll, while I put my hair up. POOR little fellow!"

She need not have been so severe. She might have known that it was because the cheeks and hair were hers that the baby had been punished for his assault on them. She could have seen that she was wringing the culprit's heart. Perhaps she did, and had no room in her own to care. She stood on the sunny garden path and lifted her hands to her head—a lovely pose.

"Here, let me," said Claud Dalzell.

She let him—which was cruellest of all. Guthrie turned his murderous eyes from the group and sauntered away, out of the garden, out of their sight, unrecalled, apparently unnoticed. Mary carried the crying child into the house.

Then for an hour the silly fellow walked alone in the most solitary places that he could find, revelling in the thought that it was Christmas Day, and he singled out by Fate to have no share in its happy circumstances: no home, no friends, no love, like other men—nothing to make life worth living, save only the baby son that he had ill-used. Apart from the sting of Deb's comment on it, he repented him of that blow. A great big man like him, to strike a tender mite like this—a motherless babe, his precious Lily's bequest to him—aye, indeed! It was the act of a brute, whatever the provocation. The mite was a waif too, alone in the world when his father was at sea, pathetically helpless, with no defence against blows and unkindness. The reflection brought dimness to the man's hard blue eyes, and turned his steps houseward.

He arrived to find a large four-horsed brake at the door. The body was filling with other persons—the sailor knew not, cared not whom. He looked up at the radiant figure in front. She looked down on him with heart-melting kindness, as if nothing had happened.

"Why, Mr Carey, aren't you coming to church?" she called to him. "Not—not today, I think," he answered, without premeditation.

"Christmas Day," she hinted invitingly. "You don't always get the chance, you know."

"I know. But—thanks—I'd rather not," he bluntly persisted, hating himself for the churlish response, and all the time wanting to go—certain to have gone if he had given himself time to think. Soldiers and sailors, with their habit of unquestioning obedience to authority, are almost always "good" churchmen, and, as she had pointed out, this offer of Christian privileges did not come to him every year. He had not anticipated it on this occasion, knowing Redford to be situated at least ten miles from a church.

"Oh, well," said Deborah, scenting spite, "I daresay it IS more comfortable in the cool house."

And then she left him, in the position of a self-indulgent idler, preferring comfort to duty, a foil to his more conscientious rival. When the dust of the departure had cleared away, he sat on, not in the cool house, but on the hot verandah, nursing his griefs in solitude. He seemed the only person left behind, or else he seemed forgotten, as a guest of no account. "What a Christmas Day!" was again his thought, while he dragged before his mind's eye old pictures of his English home, his dead mother, Santa Claus stockings, and all sorts of pathetic things. He resolved to quit Redford on the morrow, and spend the last hours of his leave in establishing his son elsewhere.

Then Mary Pennycuick came out to him, with that son in her arms. Her face was redeemed from its plainness by the tender motherliness and the no less tender friendliness of its expression; that of little Harry was cherubic. The heart of the lonely man warmed to both.

"He has come to tell daddy that he is a good boy now," explained Mary proudly. Guthrie ejaculated "Sonny boy!" and held out his arms. The baby, bearing no malice, tumbled into them, and was at once occupied with his father's watch-chain. The three subsided upon two cane chairs, looking, as Mary keenly comprehended, like a self-contained family.

"You have stayed at home because of him!" the man complained fretfully.

But the girl hastened to perjure herself with the assertion that she had done nothing of the kind. She then persuaded him to the half-belief that his child was not only no nuisance to the house, but its positive delight; and she earnestly talked him out of his cruel resolve to return it to bad air and all sorts of domestic risks. "How can he be any burden on us?" she pleaded. "We need never see him unless we like—only, of course, we shall like. It is entirely an arrangement between you and Mrs Kelsey. Unless," she bethought herself—"unless you'd like to consider an idea of Alice Urquhart's—"

"Oh, no!" he broke in. "I'd rather Mrs Kelsey—a proper business agreement—if I could feel absolutely certain—"

"Well, you can," said Mary. "The beginning and end of all the trouble to us is our answering for Mrs Kelsey. She was once our nurse, and we know her ways; for the rest, she is as independent of us as that lady in Sandridge."

"In that case—of course, I've very little time, and really I don't know where to turn—perhaps until after this voyage—"

"Yes. Then, if you are dissatisfied, you can make a change." She assumed the matter settled, and began to go into details. "Deb saw Mrs Kelsey while you were away; she's willing enough. She says ten shillings a week would cover everything. The drainage is all right. Kelsey will see that he has one cow's milk. They'll feed him well, but they won't give him rich things; she's the most careful woman. He'll be out in the air, getting strong, all the time. He'll want hardly any clothes in the country. Deb says he'd be better without shoes and socks."

"I hope he'll be kept out of Miss Deborah's way, after that exhibition—"

"Nonsense! She was too rough and ready with him. And she didn't mind a bit—of course not. She says she likes boys to be boys. He is a thorough boy," Mary proudly declared, bending to kiss a chubby knee.

Harry acknowledged the caress with a thumping smack of her bowed head.

"Gently—gently!" warned the father amiably.

"Now, what do you say to our walking over to interview Mrs Kelsey?" Mary pushed her advantage home. "I daresay she will be busy, but she'd give us a few minutes. It would be a satisfaction to her to speak to you herself, and here is a good opportunity. They won't be home much before two."

Guthrie fetched his straw hat. Mary retied the baby's flapping head-gear, and they set forth.

"Let me have him," she begged, mother-like.

"No. He is too heavy for you."

The father carried the child, who loved the feel of the strong arms, in which he jumped up and down, continuing to make play with his sturdy little fists. Instead of striking back, Guthrie answered the baby assaults with wild-beast roars and gestures that sent the little man into fits of delight. Mary laughed in chorus, keeping touch with the happy creature over the towering shoulder reared between them. It was more than ever like a little self-contained family, taking its Sunday stroll.

Mrs Kelsey had her Christmas dinner in hand, but came to them in her big white apron and sleeves rolled to her dimpled elbows, smiling, business-like, charming in her plain, reposeful, straightforward attitude towards the visitors and their mission. No sooner had he beheld her orderly and cheerful house, looked into her kind eyes, and heard her sincere speech, than the young father was satisfied that he had found a good place for his little son. The child seemed to know it too, for when the strange woman drew him to her broad lap—calmly, as if used to doing it—he surrendered himself without a protest. When presently she gave him a drink of milk and a biscuit to munch, he regaled himself peaceably, with the air of feeling quite at home. When he had finished his lunch he played with a collie puppy.

"I'll do my best for him, sir, and I'll not let these young ladies spoil him if I can help it," said Mrs Kelsey, with a smile at Mary Pennycuick.

Terms had been arranged, and everything settled.

"I hope you will be able to keep him from being any bother to them," said Guthrie earnestly.

"Bother!" crowed Mary, whose intention was to visit the child daily. "We'll see to that, Mr Carey—never fear."

Mrs Kelsey suggested beginning her duties, with the aid of the little nurse, at once; but Mary would not hear of parting the boy from his father while they could be together. So he was carried back to Redford, to be the plaything of the housekeeper's room for the rest of the day.

"MY baby," Mary began to call him. She had to preside at the great dinner, but was not visible to her family for hours before and after.

It was a better Christmas to Guthrie Carey in the end than in the beginning. Deb came back from church chastened in spirit, to make up to him for her unkindness, on the score of which her warm heart had reproached her. She made him play billiards with her after tea, while Claud was resting after his labours; she chaffed him deliciously on his errors in the game. She forgot to ask after his baby; but she asked whether it would not be possible to get his leave extended. When he said "No"—he had had more than his share already—she commended him for his sense of duty, and in her seriousness was more enchanting than in her fun.

"But I do wish we could have kept you longer," she flattered him, in her sweet way. "However, we shall have a hostage for your return."

Several new people came to dinner, including Mr Goldsworthy and Ruby—the latter sent at once, by Deb's command, to keep little Carey company. Spacious Redford was taxed to the utmost to accommodate its guests, and never was better Christmas cheer provided in the old hall of English Redford than its son in exile dispensed under his Australian roof. When every leaf was put into the dining-table, it was so long that Mary at one end was beyond speaking distance of her father at the other, and those at the sides could scarce use their elbows as they ate. The banquet was prodigious, with speeches to wind up with (Mr Goldsworthy, in his oration, disgusted Deb by referring to the host as "princely", and to the ladies of the house as his "bevy of beautiful daughters"); and if the truth must be told, the crowning ceremony of the loving cup was a bit superfluous. It found the host already fuddled beyond a doubt, and several of the guests under suspicion of being so. But in the opinion of all, Redford had celebrated Christmas in an unsurpassably proper manner.

Two mornings later, a waggonette was packed with luggage and four passengers—Mary Pennycuick, Guthrie Carey, the baby and the baby's little nurse. They proceeded in a body to the overseer's house, where the load was halved. Mary, the baby, and one box were left with Mrs Kelsey (reinforced by the collie puppy and a plate of sugared strawberries); the sailor and the nursemaid, after a few poignant moments, went on to a distant railway station.

"Have an easy mind," said Mary, outside the parlour door. "He will be well off with her, and we shall all be looking after him."

"How can I thank you?" said the parting guest, barely able to articulate. He wrung her hand, and looked at her kind, red face with feelings unspeakable. "God bless you! God reward you for your goodness to the little chap and me."

He was including all the family in his benediction, and it was the father in him that was so touched and overcome. None the less, she accepted the tribute for her own, and to her poverty-stricken womanhood it was wealth indeed.

She stood in the porch to watch the wheels of his departing chariot flash through the sun and dust. She stared long at the vacant point of disappearance, like one entranced. When she came to herself, she ran into the house and fell upon little Harry.

"My baby," she crooned passionately, "MY baby!"

Carey Junior responded with his ready fist, pushing her from him. He was feeding the puppy with a strawberry, and she put her head in the way.

"Fie! You mustn't do that," said Mrs Kelsey, mindful of her responsibilities. "That's rude."

"Oh, let him," pleaded the girl, infatuated with that look of his father in his face; and she dropped on her knees before him and kissed a dangling foot, with which he kicked her mouth. "Let him do what he likes, so long as he's happy."

"Not at all," her old nurse reproved her. "I promised Mr Carey that he should not be spoiled."

He was not spoiled. The admirable foster-mother, brooking no interference with her system, improved him into a well-behaved child, as well as the healthiest and most beautiful in all that countryside. It was a standing grievance at Redford that she would not allow him to be always on show there, subject to Mary's indulgence, and Deb's caprices, and the temptations of the housekeeper's store-room. Only Mr Kelsey, who was his idol, was permitted to withdraw him from Mrs Kelsey's eye. The man used to take the child, with a toy whip in his little hand, on the saddle before him, and let him think he was guiding the steady horse and doing all the business of the station as well. The overseer confessed, in bad weather, when he had to ride alone, that he was lost without his little mate. "Hardly weaned," he used to brag, "and knows every beast on the place as well as I do myself." This was gross exaggeration, yet was the infant Harry a conspicuously forward child, with the "makings of a man" in him visible to all. His hearty whoas and gee-ups carried as far as the overseer's gruff voice; and the picture of the jolly boy, with his rosy, joyous face, and his fair curls blowing in the wind, was one to kindle the admiration of all who saw it. The phrase continually on the lips of his adopted family and connections was: 'Won't his father be surprised when he sees him!' They enjoyed in anticipation the grateful praises that would be heaped upon them then.

But Guthrie Carey never saw his son again.

The baby went a-visiting with his foster-parents to the local township, and it was supposed caught the infection of typhoid there from some unknown source. Having caught it, the robust little body, unused to any ailment, was wrecked at once, where a frail child might easily have weathered the storm. No little prince of blood royal could have been better nursed and more strenuously fought for; but three days after he had visibly sickened he was dead. And then the wail went up, "Oh! what will his father say?"

When Guthrie came, prepared by letters from fellow-mourners as bereaved as himself, it was but from one day to the next—only to "hear the particulars" and to see the little grave. Deborah was away from home, but in any case Mary would have been the one to perform the sad duties of the occasion; they were hers by right. She took him to the family cemetery on the only evening of his stay, and, herself speechless and weeping, showed him the whole place renovated and made beautiful for the sake of the latest comer. No weeds, no dead rose-bushes, no vampire ivy now; but an orderly garden, new planted and watered, and in the midst a small mound heaped with fresh-cut flowers. She had visited the child daily while he lived at Mrs Kelsey's; now she almost daily visited his grave.

They dropped on their knees beside it, close as bride and bridegroom on altar steps, as father and mother at the firstborn's cradle. The dusk was melting into moonlight; they could not see each other's faces. When his big frame heaved with heavy sobs, she laid a timid hand—her beautiful hand—on his shoulder; and when he felt that sympathetic woman's touch, he turned suddenly and kissed her. Afterwards he did not remember that he had done it.

She seemed to cling to him when, next morning, the time came for him to go.

"You will come again?" she implored him, in a trembling whisper. "You will come here when you return next time?"

"Oh, surely," he replied, whispering too, and to the full as deeply moved. But when he got away it was to other lands that he turned his eyes, in the search for new interests to occupy his lonely life. With Lily and the baby dead, and Deborah Pennycuick given to another man, Australia had no more hold on him. His first letter to Redford notified that he had changed into another line, and that the name of his new ship was the DOVEDALE. She traded to the West Indies.

He forgot to write again when, not very long afterwards, he went back to his old line, at the invitation of the Company, as captain of the ship on which he had served as mate.



CHAPTER IX.

"'Dovedale'—DOVEDALE—hullo!" Mr Pennycuick broke the silence of his newspaper reading. "Why, isn't that—Well, upon my soul! it does seem as if some folks were born unlucky. Here's that poor young fellow—first he loses a charming wife, before he's been married any time, and then the finest child going, and now here he's gone himself, before his prime, with no end of a career before him—"

"Who?" cried Deb from the tea-table, where she was helping herself to a hot cake.

"Young Carey—our Carey; oh, it's him all right, worse luck! His ship's been wrecked, and only two A.B.s saved to tell the tale. Look here."

He passed the newspaper, pressed under his broad thumb.

Deb stood to read the indicated item, while her father watched her face. Neither of them noticed Mary's peculiar appearance, nor marked her departure from the room.

"We must inquire about this," said Deb earnestly. "We must get the names of those on board. He may have been on leave." She was a prompt person, and as she spoke looked at the clock—a little after four—and laid the paper down. "I'll drive you to the station, daddy, and we'll telegraph to the shipping people and his doctor friend. We'll get authentic information somehow, if we have to cable home for it."

They were off in a quarter of an hour, having sent a message to Mary by Miss Keene to explain their errand. They dined in the township while waiting for replies, and came home late at night, heavy-hearted, with the melancholy news confirmed. Since it happened to be the transition moment, when Mr Carey had ceased to be a mate, and was only a prospective commander, the authorities in Melbourne, consulting latest advices, had no doubt of his having been on the DOVEDALE to the last. Those of them who presently found themselves mistaken did not take the trouble to say so. They left it to time and the newspapers.

But meanwhile Mary Pennycuick sadly complicated the case. When Deb and her father returned from their expedition, it was to hear from Frances an excited story of how the elder sister had hidden behind locked doors, and not only refused dinner but denied speech to all comers.

"We know she's there, because she said 'Go away' to Miss Keene when she knocked first; but since then she hasn't said a word—not for hours and hours. I've been listening at her door since Miss Madden let me out of school. I shouldn't be surprised," said Frances, who had a fine imagination, "if she's committed suicide. Poor Mr Carey was her lover, you know."

"Pooh!" said Deb.

SHE knew whose lover poor Mr Carey had been. But she ran to Mary's room in some concern. She tried the handle of the door, and then rapped sharply.

"Molly, open this door!" she commanded.

And there was a rustle inside, a shuffling step, and the lock clicked. She marched in, to see Mary fling herself back on the bed from which she had risen, with a protesting wail:

"Oh, why can't you all let me alone?"

"Why, what's the matter?" Deb climbed on the bed, and tried to lift the half-buried head to her breast—a signal for the pent-up grief to burst forth. "Molly, sweetheart, what's all this about?"

"Oh, my love! my love!" keened Mary wildly. "Oh, Deb! oh, Deb! He was my all, and he's dead, and I can't bear it—I can't! I can't!"

Deb pursed her lips, and the colour rose in her clear cheek. She saw the situation, so pathetic and so ignominious! SHE could not understand a woman falling in love with, and then breaking her heart for, a man who had never cared for her. But then Deb's face was not heavy and bricky, with prominent cheek-bones, and a forehead four inches high.

"My precious," she crooned, as tenderly as if she understood it all, and as if her immense pity was not mixed with contempt—"don't, don't! It doesn't matter about me, but don't let the others think—It would be too undignified, darling—a casual acquaintance—though a dear, good boy as ever lived—"

"There was nobody like him, Deb, and he was my all—"

"No, no, Mary—"

"You don't know, Debbie—oh, nobody knows!" And wrapping her head in her arms again, Mary abandoned herself to her despair.

Deb got off the bed, lit dressing-table candles, and poured water and eau de Cologne into a wash-basin. She returned with a fragrant sponge, with which she stroked what she could reach of her sister's face.

"Come now," said she briskly, "you must have a little pride, dear. You mustn't give way like this—for a man who did not—and you know he did not—"

Mary broke in with sudden passion, lifting her distorted countenance to the cruel light.

"He did!" she affirmed. "You have no business to sneer and say he didn't—he DID!"

It was not for nothing that the heart-hungry girl had brooded for months over a few acts and words, magnifying them through the spectacles that Nature and her needs had provided. Deb put her pitying arms round her sister's shoulders.

"But, my dear, I know—we all know—"

"How could you know when you were not at home? Nobody knows—nobody but him and me." Feeling Deb's continued scepticism in the silence of her caresses, Mary burst out recklessly: "Would he have KISSED me if he had not?"

Deb's arm was withdrawn. She twisted half round to look in Mary's face. Mary covered it with her pretty hands, weeping bitterly.

"Is that—did he do that?" asked Deb, in a low tone.

"That night—that last night—oh, I ought not to have spoken of it!—when we were at our little grave. It was that precious child that drew us together. You think he had gone away and forgotten, but I know he had not; he would have come back—he promised to. He gave me his dear photograph. I have not shown it to anybody, but here it is—"

And still sobbing, and with tears running down her cheeks, she reached to a drawer by the bedside, and dragged out this further testimony to her claim—it was wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, like her father's valentine—and displayed it with a touching pride. Before handing it to Deb, she gazed at it with grotesquely distorted face, kissed it, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it again, and moaned over it, rocking to and fro; then, when she had pushed it from her, flung herself into her former attitude of complete abandonment to grief.

Very calmly Deb carried the picture to the dressing-table, and held it behind a candle. There he was, big, strong, healthy, manly, with that clear brow, that square chin, that steady, good mouth; and he looked her straight in the eyes. Was it possible that a countenance could so deceive? No more tears from Deb for his untimely fate. Had it been his face in the flesh, it could not possibly have gazed in that undaunted way at hers; her expression would have withered him.

She returned to the morning-room—drawing-room also when no guests were in the house—to report to her father.

"Mary has gone to bed," she said quietly. "She is very much upset by this business. It appears there was something between her and Mr Carey. She expected him to come back for her—"

"What! MARY?" cried Rose, waiting with Frances to say goodnight.

"There!" triumphed Frances, "what did I say?"

"MARY!" their father echoed Rose's surprised tone. "The dickens! You don't say so. Poor little soul! Poor little girlie! Well, I never thought of that. Did you, Deb?"

"Never, father. Not for a moment."

"I suppose it was the child. It must have been the child." Mr Pennycuick was deeply concerned. "I wonder why he never said anything," he addressed Deb, when Rose and Frances had been sent to bed. "Eh, Deb? Seems strange, don't it? We had so much talk together. Quite like a sort of son, he was. Aye, I could have made a son of that fellow. Poor lad!—poor lad! Suppose he thought it wasn't the straight thing to bind a girl of ours till he was in a better position—it'd be just like him. Well—but Mary, of all people!" (This was the puzzle to all.) "It must have been the baby. She certainly did dote on that child, and 'love me, love my dog'—eh? But to think of her keeping it so close all that time! Afraid I'd make a fuss, I suppose. You could have told her, Deb, that I don't stand in my children's way for the sake of my own feelings; and a Carey of Wellwood isn't for us to sniff at either, if he is poor. A Carey has been good enough for a Pennycuick before today. God! I wish I'd known. I might have got him something better to do, and saved them both from this. Poor old girl! Is she very bad, Debbie? Shall I go and talk to her a bit?"

"I wouldn't tonight, father, if I were you," replied Deb, with a weary air. "She is quieter now, and I have given her something to send her to sleep. I will keep my door open, and go and look at her through the night. I think she will be better tomorrow."

On the morrow Mary was at least more self-controlled. She came amongst her family with the look of one who had passed through an illness, and shrinking from the first words and glances. But they all gathered her to their hearts, and murmured loving sympathy in her ears, and tenderly fussed over her and waited upon her. Her father took her to his sanctum, and showed her his old daguerreotype and valentine, and told her they should be hers at his death. Miss Keene excited as an old maid is over anybody's love affair, wanted to take over the house-keeping as well as the doing of the flowers, in order to leave the mourner free to enjoy the full luxury of her state. The governess, assumed to be above love affairs, was very strict with Frances, holding her to tasks set on purpose to prevent her from teasing her eldest sister. But Frances had informed the servants overnight that Mr Carey was drowned, and that he had been Miss Pennycuick's affianced husband all the time, unbeknown to anybody. And the tale was already spreading far and wide—to the Urquharts at Five Creeks, to Mr Thornycroft at Bundaboo, to Mr Goldsworthy and his parishioners, to the editor of the local paper—so that soon the family friends were arriving, to press Mary's hand and condole with her—to show her how she had risen in the world, as a woman in the eyes of all.

"No, no," she protested, when the affianced husband was too literally taken for granted; "it was not a formal engagement. It was only"—defending herself against the puzzled stare and lifted eyebrow—"only that we understood each other. He was coming back, if he had lived."

The wish was father to the thought. Good, honest girl as she was, she had persuaded herself to this—that he would have come back if he had lived, and that then the omitted formalities called for by that graveside kiss would certainly have been observed. It seems incredible, but rampant sex does stranger things every day of the week. There is, at any rate, nothing extraordinary in the way she clung to the sweet dignity that a similar belief on the part of others brought to her—the poor, plain girl, who had always been "out of it".

The long-hidden photograph was now put into a costly frame, and set up in her room for anybody to see. Frances would often sneak in with a visitor, to show the manner of man who would have married Molly; there were even times when Mary herself was the exhibitor. At other times she might have been found kneeling before it as at a shrine, and weeping her eyes out. And she put off her colours and ornaments, and wore black, and nobody made any objection. The hero of romance was given to her unquestioningly, and with him a respect and consideration such as she had never known before. Lovers talked to her of their love affairs, feeling that she was now one of them. Her father maundered to her for hours at a stretch of the old Mary Carey, at last secure of sympathy and a perfect listener. Deb was reserved and silent, but otherwise as devoted as the rest.

And then came the inevitable discovery that Guthrie Carey was not dead, after all. It was made at Five Creeks, while Frances was on a holiday visit to her friend, Belle Urquhart. At Redford, nobody thought of reading the shipping columns in the newspaper—their interest was supposed to be gone for ever; but Jim Urquhart glanced at them daily, looking for the arrival of a friend from overseas. And one day he saw a ship's name that was familiar to him, and bracketed with it the name of G. Carey as its commander. The coincidence was startling. He pointed it out to a man staying in the house—a stranger to the Redford family and to the district.

"There was a mate named Carey on this ship a while ago. He changed into that unfortunate DOVEDALE that was wrecked, and was lost with her. Odd that the captain of his old vessel should have the same name—same initial too. Our friend was Guthrie—"

"Guthrie Carey? Oh, I know Guthrie Carey. Met him in London last year, just after the DOVEDALE wreck. He told me of his narrow escape—was really going with her on her last voyage, and only prevented at the last moment by the offer of this captaincy from his former owners. It's the same man. Do you know him?"

They all told how much they knew him; and there was great commotion at Five Creeks. Jim was for driving hot-foot to Redford to warn Mr Pennycuick against disseminating the newspaper through the house too rashly. Alice and her mother each volunteered to go with him, so as to "break it" with feminine skilfulness to Mary, whose reason might be destroyed by too sudden a gorge of joy, like the stomach of a starved man by clumsy feeding. But while they anxiously discussed what ought to be done, Frances was doing. The enterprising young lady slipped away, and with Belle's help caught and saddled her pony, and was off to Redford as if wolves were at her heels. No war correspondent on active service ever did a smarter trick to get ahead of other papers.

She burst into the family circle violently.

"Mary—Mary! Deb! Rose! father! Mr Carey is alive! He wasn't drowned! He wasn't on the DOVEDALE—he was just going; but they wanted him back, and they made him a captain, and he's here now. His ship came in last night, and there it is in the paper, and his name; and Mr Mills at Five Creeks saw him himself after the Dovedale was wrecked, and he knows him well, and he's in Melbourne now, and I expect he'll be here directly—perhaps he's coming up now, this very minute—"

She was checked by angry exclamations from all persons addressed, except Mary. She, at the moment bending over a table, cutting out needle-work, straightened herself, and stood stockstill and staring, while first her bricky face went dark purple all over, and then seemed drained in three seconds of every drop of blood. She heard the words: 'Mr Carey is alive,' and instantly believed them; at the same moment her dream-palace vanished, and she saw the bare ground of her love affair exactly as it was—as Guthrie himself would see it—and just how she had deceived herself and others. Her healthy heart and nervous system could not support her under the impact of such a shock. She reeled as she stood, spun half round, and fell backwards into Deborah's arms.

"You little FOOL!" Deb rated the dismayed child, "to blurt it out like that. Never mind, father, it's all right. She has fainted, but she'll soon come round. Go and get a smelling-bottle, somebody. Tell Keziah to bring a little brandy—don't speak to anybody else. Where's today's ARGUS?"

While Rose was flying for restoratives, and Frances speeding through the house with her great news, Deb and her father exchanged significant glances over Mary's prostrate form.

"It is more than a year," said Deb, "and he has not even written to her."

"I'll write to him," said Mr Pennycuick, grinding his teeth—"I'll write to him!" It was the tone in which he might have said, "I'll wring his neck for him!"

But when Mary came round and perceived his mood and intentions, she implored him not to write—went on her knees, and almost shrieked in her frantic fear of his doing so.

"Oh, father, don't—DON'T! If he does not remember—if he does not want to come—you would not drag him by force? And he never bound himself—he never really asked me; very likely he did not mean anything, after all."

"Not mean anything!" shouted the indignant father. "He can kiss a girl—a daughter of mine—and not mean anything! I'll make him tell me whether he dared not to mean anything—"

"No, father," commanded Deb. "You must not write to him. It is not for a Pennycuick to fling herself at any man's head. Let him alone; we don't want him. Treat him—as I hope Molly is going to do—with the contempt that he deserves."

Mr Pennycuick stormed and muttered, but obeyed; and for two days Captain Carey was left to the anathemas of Redford and the countryside as a heartless jilt, to Mary's extreme anguish. She tried to water down the concoction that she stood answerable for, to take blame off him and put it on herself; but she dared not go far enough to convince anybody that she was not sacrificing herself to shield him.

It was a horrible position for a delicate-minded and even high-minded girl, and the misery of it was aggravated by the constant effort to efface its signs and evidences. She was left with no outlook in life but to get through twenty, thirty, forty years somehow, and come to a little peace at last, when everything would be forgotten; and her one forlorn hope was that Guthrie would not discover her crime—would keep up the neglect with which he had treated his old friends, and not come near them.

He might have done this—for the fact was that he now had a dawning "affair" in another quarter—had not Frances intervened. To her, inaction at such a crisis was intolerable, and since nobody else would do it, she wrote to Guthrie Carey herself. She wrote, she said, to welcome him back to life and to Australia, and to congratulate him on being a captain; incidentally she mentioned other matters, and asked innocent-seeming questions which she was well aware could only be answered in person.

Frances, since his first acquaintance with her, had shot up into a slim, tall girl, exquisite in colouring and the daintiness of her figure and face. Although unlike Deb in every way, people were beginning to compare them as rival beauties—Frances' private opinion being that there was no comparison. She had nearly done with governesses, short frocks and pigtails, and was ardently anticipating the power and glory coming to her when she should be a full-grown woman.

Two days after the clandestine postage of her letter to Captain Carey, a new housemaid brought Mary his visiting-card on a silver tray. Mary knew, before looking at it—having heard nothing of the letter, and no sound of his arrival in his hired buggy—what name it bore. Her forlorn hope had been too forlorn to stand for anything but despair. She had expected the catastrophe from the first.



CHAPTER X.

How she got into the room—the isolated big drawing-room, which somebody else, who was aware of his arrival, had directed that he was to be shown into—Mary knew not; but she was there. He stood perfectly still, massive and inflexible, to receive her. Without approaching him—or he her—to shake hands, without looking at his face or anywhere near it, she perceived the adamantine set of lips, the cold gaze, more withering than fire, which informed her that he knew all; and she sank crouching into a chair, and hid her face. But her back was against the wall now. The coward stage was past. In the most desperately false position that a girl could occupy, she made no further attempt to run away from the truth, perhaps because she saw that it was useless. When he began, very politely, but with no beating about the bush, to say: "I daresay you are surprised to see me, Miss Pennycuick, but I was told—and since I came up here I have been told again by several different persons—something that I want you to help me to understand," she jerked herself upright, and stopped him with a swift gesture and the cry of: "I know! I know what you have been told; and I have nothing to say. I cannot contradict it."

She was a piteous object, in her shaking anguish; but he looked at her, of course, without a scrap of pity.

"Do you think you really know?" he questioned her, with cold gravity. "Perhaps I have been given an exaggerated version. I was in hopes that it was altogether an invention of Miss Francie's—I know of old that she is prone to make reckless statements—"

"Ah-h—Francie!"

"She was kind enough to write me a long letter, to congratulate me on my promotion. She told me all the family news. And she said—she asked me—but really I haven't the cheek to repeat her words—"

His cold face had become hot, and his manner agitated.

"Go on," said she, calming under the perception that the worst had come utterly to the worst.

"Well, if you will forgive me—she asked me, in effect, when I was coming to marry you, and why I had kept the engagement a secret so long." He paused, one dark red blush, to note the effect of so brutal a stroke.

She said, meeting his eyes for the first time:

"And you believed it at once—of ME?"

"No, Miss Pennycuick. I laughed. I said to myself: 'Here is another of Miss Francie's mare's nests.' But when I read on—she told me so many things—they were incredible, but still I felt I had to sift the matter; and since I came up today, other people—I've been to Five Creeks and had a talk with Jim Urquhart—now I don't know what to think; at least, there is but one thing that I can think."

The chair she had taken had a high back, and against this she laid her head, as if too weary to support it. Lack of sleep and appetite had paled her florid colour to a sickly hue, and she looked wan and languid as a dying woman. But still he did not pity her, as he must have done had her face been half as beautiful as Deb's or Francie's.

"Miss Pennycuick," he continued, as she kept silence, "I want to get the hang of this thing. Will you tell me straight—yes or no—have you been giving it out that I left Redford two years ago engaged to you?"

Her first impulse was to cry out: "Oh, no, no! Not quite so bad as that!" But on second thoughts she said:

"Yes—practically."

Sudden rage seemed to seize him. He sat up, he crossed his knees, he uncrossed them, he twisted this way and that, he muttered "Good God!" as if the pious ejaculation had referred to the Other Person, and his stare at her was cruel.

"But—but—I have been racking my brains to remember anything—surely I never gave you—I am perfectly convinced, I have the best reason for being absolutely certain, that I could not have given you—"

"Never!" she broke in. "Of course not. It was all my own invention."

"You admit it? Thank you. You formally relieve me of the imputation I have so long lain under without knowing it, of having run away from my duty?"

She said lifelessly: "We thought you were dead."

"Hah! I see. You thought it didn't matter what you said of a dead man? But dead men's characters should be all the more sacred because they cannot defend them. I should be sorry indeed to leave behind me such a reputation as I seem to have hereabouts—though, indeed, a man is very helpless in these cases. He is at a hopeless disadvantage when a woman is his traducer. I can see that Jim Urquhart will never be a friend of mine again, whatever happens."

"He shall know the truth. Everybody shall know the truth," said Mary.

"How can everybody know the truth? Only by my own affidavit, and that would not be believed. Besides, it is not for me to deny—at the cost of branding a lady a liar."

It was the straight word, regardless of manners, with this sea-bred man.

"You need not. I know how to do it so that people will believe. I am going to write a letter to the newspaper—a plain statement, that will fully exonerate you."

He nearly jumped out of his chair with the fright she gave him.

"You will do nothing so ridiculous!" he exclaimed angrily.

"It is the only way," said she—"the only way to make sure."

"If you do," he menaced her, "I shall simply write another for the next issue to flatly contradict you."

"Then you would be a liar."

"That doesn't matter in the least. I must be a man first. I am not going to let you ruin yourself."

"Ah, that is done already! Nothing can make it worse—for me."

He looked at her, taking in the words, in some sort understanding them. She lifted her eyes to look at him, and what he saw behind the look went to his kindly heart. He "felt" for her for the first time.

"May I go now?" she whispered.

His answer was to move to a seat beside her.

"I wish you would tell me," he said, in more humane tones, "how you came to do it. I would like to understand, and I can't, for the life of me. You must have had some reason. DID I do anything, unknowing—"

She shook her head hopelessly.

"No. You were only kind and good, as you would have been to anyone."

"Kind and good? Rubbish! It was you—all of you—who were kind and good. Oh, I don't forget what you did for me, and never shall. I feel"—it was the very feeling that had so oppressed him in the case of the lady at Sandridge—"under a load of obligation to you that I can never hope to discharge. But still—but still—though I trust I showed some of the gratitude I felt—I cannot remember how I came to give you the idea—I must have done something, I suppose; one is a blundering fool without knowing it—"

"No," she protested—"no, no! It was my own idea entirely."

"But I can't reconcile that with your character, Miss Pennycuick."

"Nor can I," she laughed bitterly.

"There's a mystery somewhere. Did anybody tell you anything? Did Miss Frances put constructions on innocent appearances? Did—"

"No," Mary resolutely stopped him. "It is good of you to try to make excuses, but there is no excuse for me—none. Francie only said what she knew. I let them believe you were my lover; I am twenty-seven—I never had one—and—and—oh, I thought that, at least, you might be mine when you were dead! I did not mean to be a liar, as you called me—yes, that is the right word—"

"Forgive me for using it," he muttered. "You do not realise at first that you are lying, when you only act lies and don't speak them. And I DID think that perhaps, that possibly—of course, I was ridiculously wrong—it was atrocious, unforgivable—I don't ask you to forgive me—I don't want you to—but those dear days when our little boy—oh, you know!—and when you kissed me that night beside his grave—"

"WHAT!" A lightning change came over the young man, as if the word had been an electric current suddenly shot into him. "KISSED YOU?"

"It was nothing; you did not know you did it—"

"But here—hold on—this is serious. DID I kiss YOU? You are sure you are not dreaming?"

"I would not be very likely to dream that," she said, with a strange smile. "But of course it was only—at such a time—as you would have kissed your sister—anybody. Your very forgetting it shows that."

But a dim memory was awakening in him, frightfully perturbing to his mind.

"I KISSED you!" he repeated, and slowly realised that he had been that consummate ass. The poor baby's dead hand had retained its old power to entrap a simpleton unawares.

Well, simpleton or not, Guthrie Carey was Guthrie Carey—sailor-bred, accustomed to meet vital emergencies with boldness and promptness; accustomed also to take his own views of what was a man's part at such times. While she implored him to say no more about that kiss, crying shame upon herself for mentioning it, he sat in silence, thinking hard. As soon as she had done, he spoke:

"Miss Pennycuick, I now understand everything. You are completely justified. It is I who have been to blame." And he then, in precise language, such as no real lover could have used, but still as prettily as was possible under the circumstances, requested the honour of her hand in marriage.

To his astonishment, she laughed. It was a wild-sounding cackle, and quickly turned into a wail.

"Ah-h! Ah-h-h!" She faced him again, head up and hands down. "That, Mr Carey, is the one way out of it that is utterly, absolutely, eternally impossible."

"Why?" he demanded, with his man's dull incomprehension, and went on to demonstrate that there was no other. "I do not wish," he lied chivalrously, "to take any other. I—I—believe me, I am not ungrateful for your—for your thinking a great deal more of me than I deserve. I will try to show myself worthy—"

A magnanimous arm attempted to encircle her. She backed from it, and rose hurriedly from her chair, with what he would have imagined a gesture of repulsion if he had not known her, from her own showing, so over-eager for his embraces. He rose too.

"Do not!" she cried breathlessly, passionately. "As if I could dream—What can you think of me, to imagine that I would for a moment—"

She broke from him and ran towards the door, sobbing, with her handkerchief to her eyes. In three strides he was there before her, cutting off her retreat; so she swung back into the room, cast herself on the floor beside a sofa, and throwing up her arms, plunged her head down between them into the depths of a large cushion, which smothered cries that would otherwise have been shrieks. She abandoned all effort to control herself, except the effort to hide, which was futile.

Guthrie Carey's first feeling was of alarm, lest anyone should hear and come in to see what was the matter; he felt like wanting to guard the door. But in a minute or two his soft heart was so worked upon by the spectacle before him that he could think of nothing else. However little he might want to marry Mary Pennycuick, he was not going to be answerable for this sort of thing; so he marched resolutely to the sofa, and stooped to lift the convulsed creature bodily into his arms.

He might as well have tried to grasp a sleeping porcupine.

"How dare you?" she cried shrilly, whirling to her feet, dilating like a hooded snake before his astonished eyes. "How dare you touch me?" He was too cowed to answer, and she stood a moment, all fire and fury, glaring at him, her tear-ravaged face distorted, her hands clenched; then she whirled out of the room, and this time he made no effort to stop her.

He dropped back on the sofa, and said to himself helplessly:

"Well, I'm blowed!"

There was stillness for some time. This part of the house seemed quite empty, save for one buzzing fly, which he or Mary had let in. The little housekeeper was very particular about flies in summer, every window and chimney-opening being wire-netted, every door labelled with a printed request to the user to shut it; and his dazed mind occupied itself with the idea of how this insect would have distressed her if she had not had so much else to think of. He had an impulse to hunt it, for her sake, through the green-shadowed space in which it careered in long tacks with such energy and noise; but, standing up, he was seized with a stronger impulse to leave the house forthwith, and everything in it. He wanted liberty to consider his position and further proceedings before he faced the family.

As he approached the door, it was opened from without. Deb stood on the threshold, pale, proud, with tight lips and sombre eyes. She bowed to him as only she could bow to a person she was offended with.

"Would you kindly see my father in his office, Mr Carey?" she inquired, with stony formality. "He wishes to speak to you."

"Certainly, Miss Deborah," he replied, not daring to preface the words with even a "How-do-you-do". "I want to see him—I want to see him particularly."

Deb swept round to lead the way downstairs.

An embarrassing march it was, tandem fashion, through the long passages of the rambling house. While trying to arrange his thoughts for the coming interview, Captain Carey studied her imperious back and shoulders, the haughty poise of her head; and though he was not the one that had behaved badly, he had never felt so small. At the door of the morning-room she dismissed him with a jerk of the hand. "You know your way," said she, and vanished.

"She is more beautiful than ever," was his poignant thought, as he walked away from her, and from all the glorious life that she suggested—to such a dull and common doom.

Mr Pennycuick, at first, was a terrible figure, struggling between his father-fury and his old-gentleman instincts of courtesy to a guest.

"Sir," said he, "I am sorry that I have to speak to you under my own roof; in another place I could better have expressed what I have to say—"

But before he could get to the gist of the matter, Mary intervened.

"Miss Keene has some refreshment for Mr Carey in the dining-room," she said. "And, father, I want, if you please, to have a word with you first." She had recovered self-possession, and wore a rigid, determined air, contrasting with the sailor's bewilderment, which was so great that he found himself driven from the office before he had made up his mind whether he ought to go or stay.

He sat down to his unnecessary meal, and tried to eat, while an embarrassed maiden lady talked platitudes to him. Didn't he find it very dusty in town? Miss Keene, knitting feverishly, was anxious to be informed. And didn't he think the country looked well for the time of year?

He was relieved from this tedium by another summons to the office. Fortified with a glass of good wine, he returned to the encounter, inwardly calling upon his gods to direct him how to meet it. He found poor old Father Pennycuick aged ten years in the hour since he had seen him last. But he still stood in massive dignity, a true son of his old race.

"Well, Mr Carey," said he, "I have had a great many troubles of late, sir, but never one like this. I thought that losing money—the fruits of a lifetime of hard work—was a thing to fret over; and then, again, I've thought that money's no consequence so long as you've got your children alive and well—that THAT was everything. I know better now. I know there's things may happen to a man worse than death—worse than losing everything belonging to him, no matter what it is. When that child was a little thing, she had an illness, and the doctors gave her up. Two nights her mother and I sat up watching her, expecting every breath to be the last, and broken-hearted was no word for what we felt. I cried like a calf, and I prayed—I never prayed like it before or since—and fools we are to ask the Almighty for we don't know what! Now I wish He had taken her. And I've told her so."

"Then you have been very cruel, Mr Pennycuick," Guthrie Carey replied sharply—"and as unjust as cruel. She has done nothing—"

"I know what she's done," the stern parent interposed. "I wouldn't have believed it if anybody else had told me; but I have her own word for it. And if she has been a liar once, I still know when to believe her."

"If you will be so good as to tell me what she has said, then I will make MY statement."

The old man put up his hand.

"Don't perjure yourself," said he, grimly smiling. "It is very kind of you to try to let us down easily, but you can spare your breath. Excuses only make it worse. There's nothing to be said for her, and you'll really oblige me by not going into details. I only sent for you to make such amends as I can—to apologise most humbly—to express my sorrow—my shame—my unspeakable humiliation—that a child of mine—a Pennycuick—a girl I thought was nothing if not maidenly and self-respecting, and the very soul of honour and straightness and proper pride—"

"You speak as if she was not all that now—"

"NOW!—and done a low, contemptible thing like that! Oh, I don't understand it—I can't; it's too monstrous—except that I have her word for it. She says she did it, and so there it is. And, sir, I beg your pardon on behalf of the house that she has disgraced—the house that reared her and thought her so different—"

He gulped, coughed, and gave Guthrie a chance to put in a word.

"Mr Pennycuick, the simple fact is that I made love to your daughter—"

"Made her an offer of marriage?" snarled the other, wheeling round.

"I kissed her—"

Mr Pennycuick snapped his thumb and finger derisively.

"THAT kind of kiss!—as good as asked for."

"It was not as good as asked for. Your daughter is not that kind of woman."

"I thought not, but she says she is."

"Pay no heed to what she says. Her morbid conscientiousness runs away with her. I tell you the plain truth, as man to man, without any hysterics—I kissed her of my own free will—your daughter, sir. And I am here now to stand by my act. If she will forgive my—my tardiness—as you know, I was in no position then to aspire to marriage with a lady of this family; I am not now, but I am better off than I was—will you give your consent to our engagement?"

"No!" roared Mr Pennycuick, looking as if threatened with an apoplectic fit. "I'll see her engaged to the devil first!"

Like Mary, he seemed to take the generous offer as a personal insult. Guthrie Carey, conscious of doing the duty of a gentleman at enormous cost, could not understand why.



CHAPTER XI.

Captain Carey, while leaving it to be understood that he held himself engaged to Mary Pennycuick until further orders, realised the welcome fact that in the meantime he was honourably free; and he excused himself from staying to dinner. But scarcely had he driven off in his hired buggy than that of Mr Goldsworthy clattered into the stableyard. It was the good man's habit, when on his parochial visitations, to 'make' Redford at meal times, or at bed-time, whenever distances allowed; he called it, most appropriately, his second home, and walked into the house as if it really belonged to him two or three times a week.

The first person that he encountered on this occasion was Frances, who had waylaid Guthrie Carey on his departure, and whom he had left standing under the back porch, aglow with excitement. She was a picture in her pale blue frock—put on for his eyes—and with her mane of burnished gold falling about her sparkling blush-rose face; but the parson, accustomed to regard her as a child, was unaffected by the sight.

"Surely," he exclaimed, with agitation, "that was young Mr Carey that I passed at the gate just now? He had his hat pulled over his eyes, and did not stop to speak to me; but the figure—" "Was his," said Frances, bursting to be the first to say it. "Very much in the flesh still, isn't he? And oh, to think he's gone like this, just as we'd got him back—SO big and handsome, and such a DEAR brother-in-law as he would have made!"

She stamped her foot. "What do you think, Mr Goldsworthy?—he came for her today, just as he promised, and then she turned round and wouldn't have him! We thought he'd jilted her, and instead of that she's jilted him. Oh, I could smack her! To have such a chance—SHE!—and after all the fuss she made about him—and throw it away! But I think he'll come back before his ship sails—he said he would—and perhaps she'll be less of an idiot by then; she'd better, unless she wants to die an old maid. Oh, if it was ME—!"

Mr Goldsworthy penetrated to the morning-room, where something of the same tale was repeated to him. Yes, Guthrie Carey was alive and well, and had been up to see them. Yes, he had asked for Mary—now that he was a captain—but she had finally decided against marrying a sailor. Wisely, perhaps; at any rate, it was her business; the family did not wish to discuss the matter.

When Mr Goldsworthy found that Mary did not come to dinner, he drew some conclusions for himself. He told himself there was something "fishy" in the affair—something behind, that was purposely kept from him. But he was hungry, and the fragrant soup steamed under his nose and glittered in his spoon—it was so admirably clear. Just now the doings of the Redford cook were of more concern to him than Mary's doings.

But although he enjoyed the meal to which he had looked forward all day, he enjoyed it much less than usual. A more sensitive person in his place must have found it wretched. Deb was a chilling hostess. Her frigid dignity and forced politeness caused discomfort even to him, thereby lowering her status in his eyes, lessening the ardour of his admiration for her. Mr Pennycuick, such a stickler for hospitality, scarcely spoke a word to the guest. Rose was a nobody, but still might have done something in the way of entertainment; and she quite ignored him, looking down as if to hide eyes that had been crying. Frances was eager to engage in conversation, but was bidden roughly by her father to hold her tongue. The stately governess wore only more ostentatiously than usual the detached air that always marked her out of school; and it was left to poor Miss Keene, with her timid platitudes, to keep up an appearance of civility.

Mr Pennycuick vanished abruptly after dinner; it was presently rumoured that he was not well, and had gone to bed. Frances was taken away to prepare lessons. Rose and Deborah came and went. Coffee was served. The parson was again left to Miss Keene, who would not be pumped for confidences, further than to admit that Mary was keeping her room with a headache, in consequence of the agitating visit of Captain Carey, but laboriously talked parish to him, without appearing to know anything of the subject. So the poor man actually became so bored that he changed his mind about staying for the night. He remembered that there was a good moon, and that he had an early engagement next morning, and ordered his buggy soon after nine o'clock. Afterwards he believed that it was the direct voice of the Lord that had called him to take his journey home at that hour.

He drove alone, having a steady (Redford) mare, that stood quietly at gates and doors, and no groom—a luxury almost unknown amongst country parsons, who must all keep horses. The night was beautiful, still, cool and clear, the moon so full that he could see for miles. Because of this, he took his daylight short cuts across country, preferring grass when he could get it to the dusty summer road. And one of his short cuts led along the top of the embankment of the big dam.

He slackened speed at this spot, touched by the beauty of the scene, which could hardly have appealed in vain to any man who had just had a good dinner. How peacefully the still water lay under the shining moon—that moon which is capable of making, not soft young lovers only, but the toughest old stagers sentimental—nay, maudlin—at times; an intoxicant purged of the grossness of spirituous liquors, but acting on the brain in precisely the same way. Mr Goldsworthy, already uplifted by good Redford wine, felt the effect of the lovely night in dim poetic stirrings of his sordid little soul. He mused of God and heaven, and the other things that he made sermons out of, in a disinterested, unprofessional way, these being the lines along which his imagination worked. "Surely the Lord is in this place," was the unspoken thought, elevating and inspiring, with which he surveyed the placid lake and the dreaming hills; and "it is good for me to be here," he felt, even at the cost of a Redford bed and breakfast, and the choice vegetables that the gardener would have put into his buggy in the morning.

But what was this? A boat adrift! From out of the shadow of the white shed on the further shore a black spot moved—one of the boats that should have been locked up, since no one was allowed to use them without Mr Pennycuick's permission. It came into the open moonlight, into the middle of that silver mirror, and he saw that oars propelled it, and saw the figure of the person wielding them. Who had dared to take this liberty with sacred Redford property? he wondered, with the indignation of a co-proprietor; and he assumed a poacher after the fish that Mr Pennycuick had been trying with characteristic perseverance and unsuccess to naturalise in his dam. But looking harder, the clergyman saw the figure rise in the boat, and that it was a woman's. Almost at the same instant he saw that it had disappeared. Seizing whip and reins, he lashed his mare to a gallop along the embankment and down its steep side, where she nearly upset him, and round the lake shore—the buggy rocking like a cradle—to the point nearest to the boat, now visibly adrift and empty. He jumped to the ground, tore off his coat and vest (which had a valuable watch attached), flinging them and his hat, and presently his boots, into the buggy; and with a word of warning to the mare, he plunged into the water to the rescue of some poor fool whom as yet he had not identified.

He returned to shore with Mary Pennycuick in his arms. Spent and panting from his struggle, and awed by the tragical significance of the affair, his heart exulted at his deed. He thanked God that he had been in time—with a fervour proportionate to her rank and consequence—and anticipated the splendid reward awaiting him as the benefactor of the great family, entitled to their full confidence and eternal gratitude. But also he was filled with solicitude for the poor girl.

She was unconscious when he laid her down on the grass, but choked and moaned when he set to work to revive her, and realised that she was back in life and misery after he had succeeded in getting some whisky down her throat—contents of the flask he always carried, as a preventive of chills and remedy for undue fatigues, and from which he had first helped himself. They sat upon the ground side by side, his arm round her waist, her head—feeling only that it was cushioned somewhere—on his shoulder. The night was so warm and windless that their wet clothes were little discomfort to them, but he kept grasping and wringing handfuls with the hand at liberty, while he supported her with the other. The danger of damp "things" was more terrifying to him now than the danger of death had been a few minutes ago.

"There, there," he said soothingly, "you feel better now—don't you? Then I'll just put on my coat, if you don't mind. I'll wrap you up in the buggy rug—and we'll get back to Redford as soon as we can. And in the morning, dear, you'll wake up sorry for this—this madness, and you'll never do it again, will you?"

"Hysteria," he said to himself. "Her head turned by this love affair. He's treated her badly, whatever they may say, and it has unhinged her mind."

This thought disposed him to be gentle with her when she positively refused to be taken back to Redford.

"Leave me here," she implored him. "I cannot go home! I will not go home! My father told me he wished I was dead. Oh, I should have been dead now if you had left me alone, and then they would have been satisfied, and I should have been out of my misery, which is more than I can bear. Oh, Mr Goldsworthy, don't—don't!" "Mad as a hatter, poor thing," he thought, as he desisted from his effort to raise her. "Why, her father thinks the world of her!"

But something had to be done. It was unwise to use force in these cases—nor could he have brought himself to use it—and of course he could not leave her at the dam, or leave her at all, while she was in her present mood, and without other protection; at the same time, it was imperatively necessary that he should get out of his wet clothes—her also. He mentioned this latter fact, and it was touching to see her own careful housewifely instincts assert themselves through all her mental agony.

"Oh, you ARE wet," she mourned, feeling him—it did not matter about herself; "oh, I am so sorry! Do—do go home at once, and take them off, and have something hot before you go to bed."

"I will," he said, "if you will go with me." A moment's reflection showed him that this was the best course—to take her to his own house, and send a message to Mr Pennycuick that she was there, and safe.

The thought of the town frightened her. She dreaded to go anywhere out of the solitude of Nature in which she had tried to hide. But he assured her of privacy and protection, and she was spent and beaten, and she gave in. Like a child, she stood to be wrapped in the rug and lifted into the buggy, and they proceeded on their way to his home, where his old sister kept house for him and mothered his child, with the aid of one servant.

It was nearly midnight when they arrived, and the parsonage was dark. Miss Goldsworthy, not expecting him, was sitting up with a sick parishioner half a mile off; Ruby and the maid were fast asleep. When the latter was heard stirring in her room, her master called a few questions to her, and then bade her go back to bed.

"We don't want her poking round," he whispered to Mary, as (when together they had hurried the mare into her stall) he led the drooping girl to his study—and how grateful she was to him for this consideration! He closed the door behind them, and led her gently to his own arm-chair—she clung to the hand that was so kind to her in her need—bidding her keep the rug about her (so as not to wet the furniture); and he lit a kerosene stove that was one of his private luxuries, always available when the maid-of-all-work was not. He exhorted his charge to comfort herself by the poor blaze while he fetched such odds and ends of clothes as he could gather from his sister's room; and then he told her to change her wet garments for these dry ones while he performed the same operation for himself elsewhere. She obeyed him as meekly as a child, and was sitting huddled in Miss Goldsworthy's faded flannel dressing-gown when he returned, carrying a kettle and a tray.

"Now I will make you a nice hot cup of tea," said he cheerily, planting the kettle on a round hole at the top of the stove and the tray on his writing table. "You put your clothes in the passage? That's right. We'll dry them presently. Oh, yes"—starting to cut bread and butter—"you must have something to eat. You have had no dinner."

He forced her to eat, and to drink the hot tea, and she did feel the better for it. Over her cup she lifted swimming eyes to his face, whispering: "You are good to me!" And he remarked to himself that she was not mad, as he had thought.

When the meal was disposed of, he felt that the time for explanations and for considering how to deal with the extraordinary situation had come.

"Now, my dear," he began, taking on something of the parson air at last, "the first thing to be done is to inform your family of your whereabouts. I must go and find up somebody to take a message to them, to relieve their minds."

She roused from her semi-torpor to plead for a reprieve. Not yet—not yet! Whatever she had to face, let her rest for a little first. They had parted with her for the night; they would not go to her room, she knew—outcast as she now was from the sympathy of them all; they would not miss her before the morning. And, oh, she could not go home! She had disgraced her family—her own father had wished her dead. She was a wicked woman, not fit to live; but, if she must live, let it be anywhere—anywhere—rather than at Redford now!

At this repetition of her strange charge against a doting father, and the mention of disgrace, a distressing suspicion came into the parson's mind. He calculated the length of time between Guthrie Carey's visits; he looked at her searchingly. No, there was no evidence that she had done the special wrong. But that there was wrong of some sort somewhere was evident enough.

"I know your father's affection for you," he said seriously, "and I cannot believe that he would express himself as you say he did."

"I deserved it," she said. "I don't blame him—nobody could."

"There must indeed have been some grave reason—"

"There was—there was!"

"What was it?"

"Oh, don't ask me!" she wailed, covering her face. But, crossing over to her side, he took one of the shielding hands, and holding it tenderly, assured her that she must tell him. He was her pastor—he was her best friend; just now he was her champion, prepared to fight her battle, whatever it was. And to do this successfully it was necessary that he should know all. In the end she told him—not all, but the main facts. He thought it the silliest case of making a mountain of a molehill that he had ever heard of. He was convinced there was more in the background, to account for the violent emotions aroused—to account for a good girl leaving a good home in the middle of the night to drown herself. In his conjectures he made Guthrie Carey the villain of the piece—the young man who, after creating all the disturbance, had significantly cleared out. Sailors were an immoral lot—a sweetheart in every port, as the world knew. And this fellow—why, you had only to look at his big, brawny build (Mr Goldsworthy was a small man) to see that he had a brutal nature.

At any rate, the parson was satisfied that the heroine of the story remained a "pure" girl—foolish, but womanly, and very, very unfortunate. As she sat weeping by his side, dependent solely upon his protection, he stroked her hand and looked at it—so shapely and high-bred, the hand of a Pennycuick of the great house—a hand that would be full of gold some day; and his thoughts were busy.

The beautiful Deborah was gone, and could never have been for him; he had been an idiot to think it. She had no bent towards religion, was ruinously dressy and extravagant, unhousewifely as a woman could be; but Miss Pennycuick, great lady as she was, could cook and sew, was a master hand with servants and with children, and had never failed of interest in the church—nor in him. They had always been the best of friends, he and she; did it not seem that Providence had decreed they should be more? Why had he been sent to the dam in the nick of time, when he had intended to stay at Redford until morning? Why was she sitting here now, alone with him in his study, cut off from everybody else in the world? The hand of the Lord was in it. Looks were of small account when one considered her rank and the fortune she would inherit; but, of course, he did not admit to himself that he considered any one of these three things; nor that she was of age and her own mistress, although she had just forced the fact upon him when, promising him to make no further attempt upon her life, she announced an intention to find a situation somewhere in which she would be able to support herself apart from her family, and away from all who knew her. No, what he considered was the will of God and the dictates of his conscience. She had been given into his hands; he was bound to take care of her, and there was but one way to do it. It would be wrong and cruel to force her back to Redford. It was preposterous to think of making a governess or companion of her, a daughter of the proud Pennycuicks. She could not remain in his house as she was, without scandal, although he was a clergyman, with a sister housekeeper. Here they were now—past midnight, and practically without a soul in the house—and he so young still, and, if he might presume to say it, so attractive!