He was not enjoying it, but he kept it up. He wanted to be friends with her for more reasons than one. No one had ever remained long at enmity with him. He had "got over" a good many people in the course of his career, as he had "got over" Joseph Hutchinson. This had always been accomplished because he presented no surface at which arrows could be thrown. She was the hardest proposition he had ever come up against, he was thinking; but if he didn't let himself be fool enough to break loose and get mad, she'd not hate him so much after a while. She would begin to understand that it wasn't his fault; then perhaps he could get her to make friends. In fact, if she had been able to read his thoughts, there is no certainty as to how far her temper might have carried her. But she could see him only as a sharp-faced, common American of the shop-boy class, sitting at the head of Jem Temple Barholm's table, in his chair.

As they passed through the hall to go to the drawing-room after the meal was over, she saw a neat, pale young man speaking to Burrill and heard a few of his rather anxiously uttered words.

"The orders were that he was always to be told when Mr. Strangeways was like this, under all circumstances. I can't quiet him, Mr. Burrill. He says he must see him at once."

Burrill walked back stiffly to the dining-room.

"It won't trouble HIM much to be disturbed at his wine," he muttered before going. "He doesn't know hock from port."

When the message was delivered to him, Tembarom excused himself with simple lack of ceremony.

"I 'll be back directly," he said to Palliser. "Those are good cigars." And he left the room without going into the matter further.

Palliser took one of the good cigars, and in taking it exchanged a glance with Burrill which distantly conveyed the suggestion that perhaps he had better remain for a moment or so. Captain Palliser's knowledge of interesting detail was obtained "by chance here and there," he sometimes explained, but it was always obtained with a light and casual air.

"I am not sure," he remarked as he took the light Burrill held for him and touched the end of his cigar—"I am not quite sure that I know exactly who Mr. Strangeways is."

"He's the gentleman, sir, that Mr. Temple Barholm brought over from New York," replied Burrill with a stolidity clearly expressive of distaste.

"Indeed, from New York! Why doesn't one see him?"

"He's not in a condition to see people, sir," said Burrill, and Palliser's slightly lifted eyebrow seeming to express a good deal, he added a sentence, "He's not all there, sir."

"From New York, and not all there. What seems to be the matter?" Palliser asked quietly. "Odd idea to bring a lunatic all the way from America. There must be asylums there."

"Us servants have orders to keep out of the way," Burrill said with sterner stolidity. "He's so nervous that the sight of strangers does him harm. I may say that questions are not encouraged."

"Then I must not ask any more," said Captain Palliser. "I did not know I was edging on to a mystery."

"I wasn't aware that I was myself, sir," Burrill remarked, "until I asked something quite ordinary of Pearson, who is Mr. Temple Barholm's valet, and it was not what he said, but what he didn't, that showed me where I stood."

"A mystery is an interesting thing to have in a house," said Captain Palliser without enthusiasm. He smoked his cigar as though he was enjoying its aroma, and even from his first remark he had managed not to seem to be really quite addressing himself to Burrill. He was certainly not talking to him in the ordinary way; his air was rather that of a gentleman overhearing casual remarks in which he was only vaguely interested. Before Burrill left the room, however, and he left it under the impression that he had said no more than civility demanded, Captain Palliser had reached the point of being able to deduce a number of things from what he, like Pearson, had not said.



CHAPTER XXIII

The man who in all England was most deeply submerged in deadly boredom was, the old Duke of Stone said with wearied finality, himself. He had been a sinful young man of finished taste in 1820; he had cultivated these tastes, which were for literature and art and divers other things, in the most richly alluring foreign capitals until finding himself becoming an equally sinful and finished elderly man, he had decided to marry. After the birth of her four daughters, his wife had died and left them on his hands. Developing at that time a tendency to rheumatic gout and a daily increasing realization of the fact that the resources of a poor dukedom may be hopelessly depleted by an expensive youth passed brilliantly in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, when it was endurable, he found it expedient to give up what he considered the necessities of life and to face existence in the country in England. It is not imperative that one should enter into detail. There was much, and it covered years during which his four daughters grew up and he "grew down," as he called it. If his temper had originally been a bad one, it would doubtless have become unbearable; as he had been born an amiable person, he merely sank into the boredom which threatens extinction. His girls bored him, his neighbors bored him, Stone Hover bored him, Lancashire bored him, England had always bored him except at abnormal moments. "I read a great deal, I walk when I can," this he wrote once to a friend in Rome. "When I am too stiff with rheumatic gout, I drive myself about in a pony chaise and feel like an aunt in a Bath chair. I have so far escaped the actual chair itself. It perpetually rains here, I may mention, so I don't get out often. You who gallop on white roads in the sunshine and hear Italian voices and vowels, figure to yourself your friend trundling through damp, lead-colored Lancashire lanes and being addressed in the Lancashire dialect. But so am I driven by necessity that I listen to it gratefully. I want to hear village news from villagers. I have become a gossip. It is a wonderful thing to be a gossip. It assists one to get through one's declining years. Do not wait so long as I did before becoming one. Begin in your roseate middle age."

An attack of gout more severe than usual had confined him to his room for some time after the arrival of the new owner of Temple Barholm. He had, in fact, been so far indisposed that a week or two had passed before he had heard of him. His favorite nurse had been chosen by him, because she was a comfortable village woman whom he had taught to lay aside her proper awe and talk to him about her own affairs and her neighbors when he was in the mood to listen. She spoke the broadest possible dialect,—he liked dialect, having learned much in his youth from mellow-eyed Neapolitan and Tuscan girls,—and she had never been near a hospital, but had been trained by the bedsides of her children and neighbors.

"If I were a writing person, she would become literature, impinging upon Miss Mitford's tales of 'Our Village,' Miss Austen's varieties, and the young Bronte woman's 'Wuthering Heights.' Mon Dieu! what a resource it would be to be a writing person!" he wrote to the Roman friend.

To his daughters he said:

"She brings back my tenderest youth. When she pokes the fire in the twilight and lumbers about the room, making me comfortable, I lie in my bed and watch the flames dancing on the ceiling and feel as if I were six and had the measles. She tucks me in, my dears—she tucks me in, I assure you. Sometimes I feel it quite possible that she will bend over and kiss me."

She had tucked him in luxuriously in his arm-chair by the fire on the first day of his convalescence, and as she gave him his tray, with his beef tea and toast, he saw that she contained anecdotal information of interest which tactful encouragement would cause to flow.

"Now that I am well enough to be entertained, Braddle," he said, "tell me what has been happening."

"A graidely lot, yore Grace," she answered; "but not so much i' Stone Hover as i' Temple Barholm. He's coom!"

Then the duke vaguely recalled rumors he had heard sometime before his indisposition.

"The new Mr. Temple Barholm? He's an American, isn't he? The lost heir who had to be sought for high and low— principally low, I understand."

The beef tea was excellently savory, the fire was warm, and relief from two weeks of pain left a sort of Nirvana of peace. Rarely had the duke passed a more delightfully entertaining morning. There was a richness in the Temple Barholm situation, as described in detail by Mrs. Braddle, which filled him with delight. His regret that he was not a writing person intensified itself. Americans had not appeared upon the horizon in Miss Mitford's time, or in Miss Austen's, or in the Brontes' the type not having entirely detached itself from that of the red Indian. It struck him, however, that Miss Austen might have done the best work with this affair if she had survived beyond her period. Her finely demure and sly sense of humor would have seen and seized upon its opportunities. Stark moorland life had not encouraged humor in the Brontes, and village patronage had not roused in Miss Mitford a sense of ironic contrasts. Yes, Jane Austen would have done it best.

That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary flavor. No man or woman of his own class could have given such a recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment. He and those like him could have seen the thing only from their own amused, outraged, bewildered, or cynically disgusted point of view. Mrs. Braddle saw it as the villagers saw it—excited, curious, secretly hopeful of undue lavishness from "a chap as had nivver had brass before an' wants to chuck it away for brag's sake," or somewhat alarmed at the possible neglecting of customs and privileges by a person ignorant of memorial benefactions. She saw it as the servants saw it—secretly disdainful, outwardly respectful, waiting to discover whether the sacrifice of professional distinction would be balanced by liberties permitted and lavishness of remuneration and largess. She saw it also from her own point of view—that of a respectable cottage dweller whose great-great-grandfather had been born in a black-and- white timbered house in a green lane, and who knew what were "gentry ways" and what nature of being could never even remotely approach the assumption of them. She had seen Tembarom more than once, and summed him up by no means ill-naturedly.

"He's not such a bad-lookin' chap. He is na short-legged or turn-up- nosed, an' that's summat. He con stride along, an' he looks healthy enow for aw he's thin. A thin chap nivver looks as common as a fat un. If he wur pudgy, it ud be a lot more agen him."

"I think, perhaps," amiably remarked the duke, sipping his beef tea, "that you had better not call him a 'chap,' Braddle. The late Mr. Temple Barholm was never referred to as a 'chap' exactly, was he?"

Mrs. Braddle gave vent to a sort of internal-sounding chuckle. She had not meant to be impertinent, and she knew her charge was aware that she had not, and that he was neither being lofty or severe with her.

"Eh, I'd 'a'loiked to ha' heard somebody do it when he was nigh," she said. "Happen I'd better be moindin' ma P's an' Q's a bit more. But that's what this un is, yore Grace. He's a 'chap' out an' out. An' theer's some as is sayin' he's not a bad sort of a chap either. There's lots o' funny stories about him i' Temple Barholm village. He goes in to th' cottages now an' then, an' though a fool could see he does na know his place, nor other people's, he's downreet open-handed. An' he maks foak laugh. He took a lot o' New York papers wi' big pictures in 'em to little Tummas Hibblethwaite. An' wot does tha think he did one rainy day? He walks in to the owd Dibdens' cottage, an' sits down betwixt 'em as they sit one each side o' th' f're, an' he tells 'em they've got to cheer him up a bit becos he's got nought to do. An' he shows 'em th' picter-papers, too, an' tells 'em about New York, an' he ends up wi' singin' 'em a comic song. They was frightened out o' their wits at first, but somehow he got over 'em, an' made 'em laugh their owd heads nigh off."

Her charge laid his spoon down, and his shrewd, lined face assumed a new expression of interest.

"Did he! Did he, indeed!" he exclaimed. "Good Lord! what an exhilarating person! I must go and see him. Perhaps he'd make me laugh my 'owd head nigh off.' What a sensation! "

There was really immense color in the anecdotes and in the side views accompanying them; the routing out of her obscurity of the isolated, dependent spinster relative, for instance. Delicious! The man was either desperate with loneliness or he was one of the rough-diamond benefactors favored by novelists, in which latter case he would not be so entertaining. Pure self-interest caused the Duke of Stone quite unreservedly to hope that he was anguished by the unaccustomedness of his surroundings, and was ready to pour himself forth to any one who would listen. There would be originality in such a situation, and one could draw forth revelations worth forming an audience to. He himself had thought that the volte-face such circumstances demanded would surely leave a man staring at things foreign enough to bore him. This, indeed, had been one of his cherished theories; but the only man he had ever encountered who had become a sort of millionaire between one day and another had been an appalling Yorkshire man, who had had some extraordinary luck with diamond-mines in South Africa, and he had been simply drunk with exhilaration and the delight of spending money with both hands, while he figuratively slapped on the back persons who six weeks before would have kicked him for doing it.

This man did not appear to be excited. The duke mentally rocked with gleeful appreciation of certain things Mrs. Braddle detailed. She gave, of course, Burrill's version of the brief interview outside the dining-room door when Miss Alicia's status in the household bad been made clear to him. But the duke, being a man endowed with a subtle sense of shades, was wholly enlightened as to the inner meaning of Burrill's master.

"Now, that was good," he said to himself, almost chuckling. "By the Lord! the man might have been a gentleman."

When to all this was added the story of the friend or poor relative, or what not, who was supposed to be "not quoite reet i' th' yed," and was taken care of like a prince, in complete isolation, attended by a valet, visited and cheered up by his benefactor, he felt that a boon had indeed been bestowed upon him. It was a nineteenth century "Mysteries of Udolpho" in embryo, though too greatly diluted by the fact that though the stranger was seen by no one, the new Temple Barholm made no secret of him.

If he had only made a secret of him, the whole thing would have been complete. There was of course in the situation a discouraging suggestion that Temple Barholm MIGHT turn out to be merely the ordinary noble character bestowing boons.

"I will burn a little candle to the Virgin and offer up prayers that he may NOT. That sort of thing would have no cachet whatever, and would only depress me," thought his still sufficiently sinful Grace.

"When, Braddle, do you think I shall be able to take a drive again?" he asked his nurse.

Braddle was not prepared to say upon her own responsibility, but the doctor would tell him when he came in that afternoon.

"I feel astonishingly well, considering the sharpness of the attack," her patient said. "Our little talk has quite stimulated me. When I go out,"—there was a gleam in the eye he raised to hers,—" I am going to call at Temple Barholm."

"I knowed tha would," she commented with maternal familiarity. "I dunnot believe tha could keep away."

And through the rest of the morning, as he sat and gazed into the fire, she observed that he several times chuckled gently and rubbed his delicate, chill, swollen knuckled hands together.

A few weeks later there were some warm days, and his Grace chose to go out in his pony carriage. Much as he detested the suggestion of "the aunt in the Bath chair," he had decided that he found the low, informal vehicle more entertaining than a more imposing one, and the desperation of his desire to be entertained can be comprehended only by those who have known its parallel. If he was not in some way amused, he found himself whirling, with rheumatic gout and seventy years, among recollections of vivid pictures better hung in galleries with closed doors. It was always possible to stop the pony carriage to look at views—bits of landscape caught at by vision through trees or under their spreading branches, or at the end of little green-hedged lanes apparently adorned with cottages, or farm-houses with ricks and barn-yards and pig-pens designed for the benefit of Morland and other painters of rusticity. He could also slacken the pony's pace and draw up by roadsides where solitary men sat by piles of stone, which they broke at leisure with hammers as though they were cracking nuts. He had spent many an agreeable half-hour in talk with a road-mender who could be led into conversation and was left elated by an extra shilling. As in years long past he had sat under chestnut-trees in the Apennines and shared the black bread and sour wine of a peasant, so in these days he frequently would have been glad to sit under a hedge and eat bread and cheese with a good fellow who did not know him and whose summing up of the domestic habits and needs of "th' workin' mon" or the amiabilities or degeneracies of the gentry would be expressed, figuratively speaking, in thoughts and words of one syllable. The pony, however, could not take him very far afield, and one could not lunch on the grass with a stone-breaker well within reach of one's own castle without an air of eccentricity which he no more chose to assume than he would have chosen to wear long hair and a flowing necktie. Also, rheumatic gout had not hovered about the days in the Apennines. He did not, it might be remarked, desire to enter into conversation with his humble fellow-man from altruistic motives. He did it because there was always a chance more or less that he would be amused. He might hear of little tragedies or comedies,— he much preferred the comedies,—and he often learned new words or phrases of dialect interestingly allied to pure Anglo-Saxon. When this last occurred, he entered them in a notebook he kept in his library. He sometimes pretended to himself that he was going to write a book on dialects; but he knew that he was a dilettante sort of creature and would really never do it. The pretense, however, was a sort of asset. In dire moments during rains or foggy weather when he felt twinges and had read till his head ached, he had wished that he had not eaten all his cake at the first course of life's feast, that he had formed a habit or so which might have survived and helped him to eke out even an easy-chair existence through the last courses. He did not find consolation in the use of the palliative adjective as applied to himself. A neatly cynical sense of humor prevented it. He knew he had always been an entirely selfish man and that he was entirely selfish still, and was not revoltingly fretful and domineering only because he was constitutionally unirritable.

He was, however, amiably obstinate, and was accustomed to getting his own way in most things. On this day of his outing he insisted on driving himself in the face of arguments to the contrary. He was so fixed in his intention that his daughters and Mrs. Braddle were obliged to admit themselves overpowered.

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" he protested when they besought him to allow himself to be driven by a groom. "The pony is a fat thing only suited to a Bath chair. He does not need driving. He doesn't go when he is driven. He frequently lies down and puts his cheek on his hand and goes to sleep, and I am obliged to wait until he wakes up."

"But, papa, dear," Lady Edith said, "your poor hands are not very strong. And he might run away and kill you. Please do be reasonable!"

"My dear girl," he answered, "if he runs, I shall run after him and kill him when I catch him. George," he called to the groom holding the plump pony's head, "tell her ladyship what this little beast's name is."

"The Indolent Apprentice, your Grace," the groom answered, touching his hat and suppressing a grin.

"I called him that a month ago," said the duke. "Hogarth would have depicted all sorts of evil ends for him. Three weeks since, when I was in bed being fed by Braddle with a spoon, I could have outrun him myself. Let George follow me on a horse if you like, but he must keep out of my sight. Half a mile behind will do."

He got into the phaeton, concealing his twinges with determination, and drove down the avenue with a fine air, sitting erect and smiling. Indoor existence had become unendurable, and the spring was filling the woods.

"I love the spring," he murmured to himself. "I am sentimental about it. I love sentimentality, in myself, when I am quite alone. If I had been a writing person, I should have made verses every year in April and sent them to magazines— and they would have been returned to me."

The Indolent Apprentice was, it is true, fat, though comely, and he was also entirely deserving of his name. Like his Grace of Stone, however, he had seen other and livelier days, and now and then he was beset by recollections. He was still a rather high, though slow, stepper—the latter from fixed preference. He had once stepped fast, as well as with a spirited gait. During his master's indisposition he had stood in his loose box and professed such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been. He had champed his oats and listened to the repartee of the stable-boys, and he had, perhaps, felt the coming of the spring when the cuckoo insisted upon it with thrilling mellowness across the green sweeps of the park land. Sometimes it made him sentimental, as it made his master, sometimes it made him stamp his small hoofs restlessly in his straw and want to go out. He did not intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious Apprentice by hastening his pace unduly and raising false hopes for the future, but he sniffed in the air the moist green of leafage and damp moss, massed with yellow primroses cuddling in it as though for warmth, and he thought of other fresh scents and the feel of the road under a pony's feet.

Therefore, when he found himself out in the world again, he shook his head now and then and even tossed it with the recurring sensations of a pony who was a mere boy and still slight in the waist.

"You feel it too, do you? " said the duke. "I won't remind you of your years."

The drive from Stone Hover to the village of Temple Barholm was an easy one, of many charms of leaf-arched lanes and green- edged road. The duke had always had a partiality for it, and he took it this morning. He would probably have taken it in any case, but Mrs. Braddle's anecdotes had been floating through his mind when he set forth and perhaps inclined him in its direction.

The groom was a young man of three and twenty, and he felt the spring also. The horse he rode was a handsome animal, and he himself was not devoid of a healthy young man's good looks. He knew his belted livery was becoming to him, and when on horseback he prided himself on what he considered an almost military bearing. Sarah Hibson, farmer Hibson's dimple-chinned and saucy-eyed daughter, had been "carryin' on a good bit" with a soldier who was a smart, well-set-up, impudent fellow, and it was the manifest duty of any other young fellow who had considered himself to be "walking out with her" to look after his charges. His Grace had been most particular about George's keeping far enough behind him; and as half a mile had been mentioned as near enough, certainly one was absolved from the necessity of keeping in sight. Why should not one turn into the lane which ended at Hibson's farm-yard, and drop into the dairy, and "have it out wi' Sarah?"

Dimpled chins and saucy eyes, and bare, dimpled arms and hands patting butter while heads are tossed in coquettishly alluring defiance, made even "having it out" an attractive and memory-obscuring process. Sarah was a plump and sparkling imp of prettiness, and knew the power of every sly glance and every dimple and every golden freckle she possessed. George did not know it so well, and in ten minutes had lost his head and entirely forgotten even the half-mile behind.

He was lover-like, he was masterful, he brought the spring with him; he "carried on," as Sarah put it, until he had actually out-distanced the soldier, and had her in his arms, kissing her as she laughed and prettily struggled.

"Shame o' tha face! Shame o' tha face, George!" she scolded and dimpled and blushed. "Wilt tha be done now? Wilt tha be done? I'll call mother."

And at that very moment mother came without being called, running, red of face, heavy-footed, and panting, with her cap all on one side.

"Th' duke's run away! Th' duke's run away!" she shouted. "Jo seed him. Pony got freetened at summat— an' what art doin' here, George Bind? Get o' thy horse an' gallop. If he's killed, tha 'rt a ruined man."

There was an odd turn of chance in it, the duke thought afterward. Though friskier than usual, the Indolent Apprentice had behaved perfectly well until they neared the gates of Temple Barholm, which chanced to be open because a cart had just passed through. And it was not the cart's fault, for the Indolent Apprentice regarded it with friendly interest. It happened, however, that perhaps being absorbed in the cart, which might have been drawn by a friend or even a distant relative, the Indolent Apprentice was horribly startled by a large rabbit which leaped out of the hedge almost under his nose, and, worse still, was followed the next instant by another rabbit even larger and more sudden and unexpected in its movements. The Indolent Apprentice snorted, pawed, whirled, dashed through the open gateway,—the duke's hands were even less strong than his daughter had thought,—and galloped, head in air and bit between teeth, up the avenue, the low carriage rocking from side to side.

"Damn! Damn!" cried the duke, rocking also. "Oh, damn! I shall be killed in a runaway perambulator!"

And ridiculous as it was, things surged through his brain, and once, though he laughed at himself bitterly afterward, he gasped "Ah, Heloise;" as he almost whirled over a jagged tree-stump; gallop and gallop and gallop, off the road and through trees, and back again on to the sward, and gallop and gallop and jerk and jolt and jerk, and he was nearing the house, and a long-legged young man ran down the steps, pushing aside footmen, and was ahead of the drunken little beast of a pony, and caught him just as the phaeton overturned and shot his grace safely though not comfortably in a heap upon the grass.

It was of course no trifle of a shock, but its victim's sensations gave him strong reason to hope, as he rolled over, that no bones were broken. The following servants were on the spot almost at once, and took the pony's head.

The young man helped the duke to his feet and dusted him with masterly dexterity. He did not know he was dusting a duke, and he would not have cared if he had.

"Hello," he said, "you're not hurt. I can see that. Thank the Lord! I don't believe you've got a scratch."

His grace felt a shade shaky, and he was slightly pale, but he smiled in a way which had been celebrated forty years earlier, and the charm of which had survived even rheumatic gout.

"Thank you. I'm not hurt in the least. I am the Duke of Stone. This isn't really a call. It isn't my custom to arrive in this way. May I address you as my preserver, Mr. Temple Barholm?"



CHAPTER XXIV

Upon the terrace, when he was led up the steps, stood a most perfect little elderly lady in a state of agitation much greater than his own or his rescuer's. It was an agitation as perfect in its femininity as she herself was. It expressed its kind tremors in the fashion which belonged to the puce silk dress and fine bits of collar and undersleeve the belated gracefulness of which caused her to present herself to him rather as a figure cut neatly from a book of the styles he had admired in his young manhood. It was of course Miss Alicia, who having, with Tembarom, seen the galloping pony from a window, had followed him when he darted from the room. She came forward, looking pale with charming solicitude.

"I do so hope you are not hurt," she exclaimed. "It really seemed that only divine Providence could prevent a terrible accident."

"I am afraid that it was more grotesque than terrible," he answered a shade breathlessly.

"Let me make you acquainted with the Duke of Stone, Miss Alicia," Tembarom said in the formula of Mrs. Bowse's boarders on state occasions of introduction. "Duke, let me make you acquainted, sir, with my—relation—Miss Alicia Temple Barholm."

The duke's bow had a remote suggestion of almost including a kissed hand in its gallant courtesy. Not, however, that Early Victorian ladies had been accustomed to the kissing of hands; but at the period when he had best known the type he had daily bent over white fingers in Continental capitals.

"A glass of wine," Miss Alicia implored. "Pray let me give you a glass of wine. I am sure you need it very much."

He was taken into the library and made to sit in a most comfortable easy-chair. Miss Alicia fluttered about him with sympathy still delicately tinged with alarm. How long, how long, it had been since he had been fluttered over! Nearly forty years. Ladies did not flutter now, and he remembered that it was no longer the fashion to call them "ladies." Only the lower-middle classes spoke of "ladies." But he found himself mentally using the word again as he watched Miss Alicia.

It had been "ladies" who had fluttered and been anxious about a man in this quite pretty way.

He could scarcely remove his eyes from her as he sipped his wine. She felt his escape "providential," and murmured such devout little phrases concerning it that he was almost consoled for the grotesque inward vision of himself as an aged peer of the realm tumbling out of a baby-carriage and rolled over on the grass at the feet of a man on whom later he had meant to make, in proper state, a formal call. She put her hand to her side, smiling half apologetically.

"My heart beats quite fast yet," she said. Whereupon a quaintly novel thing took place, at the sight of which the duke barely escaped opening his eyes very wide indeed. The American Temple Barholm put his arm about her in the most casual and informally accustomed way, and led her to a chair, and put her in it, so to speak.

"Say," he announced with affectionate authority, "you sit down right away. It's you that needs a glass of wine, and I'm going to give it to you."

The relations between the two were evidently on a basis not common in England even among people who were attached to one another. There was a spontaneous, every-day air of natural, protective petting about it, as though the fellow was fond of her in his crude fashion, and meant to take care of her. He was fond of her, and the duke perceived it with elation, and also understood. He might be the ordinary bestower of boons, but the protective curve of his arm included other things. In the blank dullness of his unaccustomed splendors he had somehow encountered this fine, delicately preserved little relic of other days, and had seized on her and made her his own.

"I have not seen anything as delightful as Miss Temple Barholm for many a year," the duke said when Miss Alicia was called from the room and left them together.

"Ain't she great?" was Tembarom's reply. "She's just great."

"It's an exquisite survival of type," said the duke. "She belongs to my time, not yours," he added, realizing that "survival of type" might not clearly convey itself.

"Well, she belongs to mine now," answered Tembarom. "I wouldn't lose her for a farm."

"The voice, the phrases, the carriage might survive,- they do in remote neighborhoods, I suppose—but the dress is quite delightfully incredible. It is a work of art," the duke went on. She had seemed too good to be true. Her clothes, however, had certainly not been dug out of a wardrobe of forty years ago.

"When I went to talk to the head woman in the shop in Bond Street I fixed it with 'em hard and fast that she was not to spoil her. They were to keep her like she was. She's like her little cap, you know, and her little mantles and tippets. She's like them," exclaimed Tembarom.

Did he see that? What an odd feature in a man of his sort! And how thoroughly New Yorkish it was that he should march into a fashionable shop and see that he got what he wanted and the worth of his money! There had been no rashness in the hope that the unexplored treasure might be a rich one. The man's simplicity was an actual complexity. He had a boyish eye and a grin, but there was a business-like line about his mouth which was strong enough to have been hard if it had not been good-natured.

"That was confoundedly clever of you," his grace commented heartily— "confoundedly. I should never have had the wit to think of it myself, or the courage to do it if I had. Shop-women make me shy."

"Oh, well, I just put it up to them," Tembarom answered easily.

"I believe," cautiously translated the duke, "that you mean that you made them feel that they alone were responsible."

"Yes, I do," assented Tembarom, the grin slightly in evidence. "Put it up to them's the short way of saying it."

"Would you mind my writing that down?" said the duke. "I have a fad for dialects and new phrases." He hastily scribbled the words in a tablet that he took from his pocket. "Do you like living in England?" he asked in course of time.

"I should like it if I'd been born here," was the answer.

"I see, I see."

"If it had not been for finding Miss Alicia, and that I made a promise I'd stay for a year, anyhow, I'd have broken loose at the end of the first week and worked my passage back if I hadn't had enough in my clothes to pay for it." He laughed, but it was not real laughter. There was a thing behind it. The situation was more edifying than one could have hoped. "I made a promise, and I'm going to stick it out," he said.

He was going to stick it out because he had promised to endure for a year Temple Barholm and an income of seventy thousand pounds! The duke gazed at him as at a fond dream realized.

"I've nothing to do," Tembarom added.

"Neither have I," replied the Duke of Stone.

"But you're used to it, and I'm not. I'm used to working 'steen hours a day, and dropping into bed as tired as a dog, but ready to sleep like one and get up rested."

"I used to play twenty hours a day once," answered the duke, "but I didn't get up rested. That's probably why I have gout and rheumatism combined. Tell me how you worked, and I will tell you how I played."

It was worth while taking this tone with him. It had been worth while taking it with the chestnut-gathering peasants in the Apennines, sometimes even with a stone-breaker by an English roadside. And this one was of a type more unique and distinctive than any other—a fellow who, with the blood of Saxon kings and Norman nobles in his veins, had known nothing but the street life of the crudest city in the world, who spoke a sort of argot, who knew no parallels of the things which surrounded him in the ancient home he had inherited and in which he stood apart, a sort of semi-sophisticated savage. The duke applied himself with grace and finished ability to drawing him out. The questions he asked were all seemingly those of a man of the world charmingly interested in the superior knowledge of a foreigner of varied experience. His method was one which engaged the interest of Tembarom himself. He did not know that he was not only questioned, but, so to speak, delicately cross-examined and that before the end of the interview the Duke of Stone knew more of him, his past existence and present sentiments, than even Miss Alicia knew after their long and intimate evening talks. The duke, however, had the advantage of being a man and of cherishing vivid recollections of the days of his youth, which, unlike as it had been to that of Tembarom, furnished a degree of solid foundation upon which go to build conjecture.

"A young man of his age," his grace reflected astutely, "has always just fallen out of love, is falling into it, or desires vaguely to do so. Ten years later there would perhaps be blank spaces, lean years during which he was not in love at all; but at his particular period there must be a young woman somewhere. I wonder if she is employed in one of the department stores he spoke of, and how soon he hopes to present her to us. His conversation has revealed so far, to use his own rich simile, 'neither hide nor hair' of her."

On his own part, he was as ready to answer questions as to ask them. In fact, he led Tembarom on to asking.

"I will tell you how I played" had been meant. He made a human document of the history he enlarged, he brilliantly diverged, he included, he made pictures, and found Tembarom's point of view or lack of it gave spice and humor to relations he had thought himself tired of. To tell familiar anecdotes of courts and kings to a man who had never quite believed that such things were realities, who almost found them humorous when they were casually spoken of, was edification indeed. The novel charm lay in the fact that his class in his country did not include them as possibilities. Peasants in other countries, plowmen, shopkeepers, laborers in England—all these at least they knew of, and counted them in as factors in the lives of the rich and great; but this dear young man—!

"What's a crown like? I'd like to see one. How much do you guess such a thing would cost—in dollars?"

"Did not Miss Temple Barholm take you to see the regalia in the Tower of London? I am quite shocked," said the duke. He was, in fact, a trifle disappointed. With the puce dress and undersleeves and little fringes she ought certainly to have rushed with her pupil to that seat of historical instruction on their first morning in London, immediately after breakfasting on toast and bacon and marmalade and eggs.

"She meant me to go, but somehow it was put off. She almost cried on our journey home when she suddenly remembered that we'd forgotten it, after all."

"I am sure she said it was a wasted opportunity," suggested his grace.

"Yes, that was what hit her so hard. She'd never been to London before, and you couldn't make her believe she could ever get there again, and she said it was ungrateful to Providence to waste an opportunity. She's always mighty anxious to be grateful to Providence, bless her!"

"She regards you as Providence," remarked the duke, enraptured. With a touch here and there, the touch of a master, he had gathered the whole little story of Miss Alicia, and had found it of a whimsical exquisiteness and humor.

"She's a lot too good to me," answered Tembarom. "I guess women as nice as her are always a lot too good to men. She's a kind of little old angel. What makes me mad is to think of the fellows that didn't get busy and marry her thirty-five years ago."

"Were there—er—many of 'em?" the duke inquired.

"Thousands of 'em, though most of 'em never saw her. I suppose you never saw her then. If you had, you might have done it."

The duke, sitting with an elbow on each arm of his chair, put the tips of his fine, gouty fingers together and smiled with a far-reaching inclusion of possibilities.

"So I might," he said; "so I might. My loss entirely— my abominable loss."

They had reached this point of the argument when the carriage from Stone Hover arrived. It was a stately barouche the coachman and footman of which equally with its big horses seemed to have hastened to an extent which suggested almost panting breathlessness. It contained Lady Edith and Lady Celia, both pale, and greatly agitated by the news which had brought them horrified from Stone Hover without a moment's delay.

They both ascended in haste and swept in such alarmed anxiety up the terrace steps and through the hall to their father's side that they had barely a polite gasp for Miss Alicia and scarcely saw Tembarom at all.

"Dear Papa!" they cried when he revealed himself in his chair in the library intact and smiling. "How wicked of you, dear! How you have frightened us!"

"I begged you to be good, dearest," said Lady Edith, almost in tears. "Where was George? You must dismiss him at once. Really—really—"

"He was half a mile away, obeying my orders, "said the duke. "A groom cannot be dismissed for obeying orders. It is the pony who must be dismissed, to my great regret; or else we must overfeed him until he is even fatter than he is and cannot run away."

Were his arms and legs and his ribs and collar-bones and head quite right? Was he sure that he had not received any internal injury when he fell out of the pony-carriage? They could scarcely be convinced, and as they hung over and stroked and patted him, Tembarom stood aside and watched them with interest. They were the girls he had to please Ann by "getting next to," giving himself a chance to fall in love with them, so that she'd know whether they were his kind or not. They were nice-looking, and had a way of speaking that sounded rather swell, but they weren't ace high to a little slim, redheaded thing that looked at you like a baby and pulled your heart up into your throat.

"Don't poke me any more, dear children. I am quite, quite sound," he heard the duke say. "In Mr. Temple Barholm you behold the preserver of your parent. Filial piety is making you behave with shocking ingratitude."

They turned to Tembarom at once with a pretty outburst of apologies and thanks. Lady Celia wasn't, it is true, "a looker," with her narrow shoulders and rather long nose, but she had an air of breeding, and the charming color of which Palliser had spoken, returning to Lady Edith's cheeks, illuminated her greatly.

They both were very polite and made many agreeably grateful speeches, but in the eyes of both there lurked a shade of anxiety which they hoped to be able to conceal. Their father watched them with a wicked pleasure. He realized clearly their well-behaved desire to do and say exactly the right thing and bear themselves in exactly the right manner, and also their awful uncertainty before an entirely unknown quantity. Almost any other kind of young man suddenly uplifted by strange fortune they might have known some parallel for, but a newsboy of New York! All the New Yorkers they had met or heard of had been so rich and grand as to make them feel themselves, by contrast, mere country paupers, quite shivering with poverty and huddling for protection in their barely clean rags, so what was there to go on? But how dreadful not to be quite right, precisely right, in one's approach—quite familiar enough, and yet not a shade too familiar, which of course would appear condescending! And be it said the delicacy of the situation was added to by the fact that they had heard something of Captain Palliser's extraordinary little story about his determination to know "ladies." Really, if Willocks the butcher's boy had inherited Temple Barholm, it would have been easier to know where one stood in the matter of being civil and agreeable to him. First Lady Edith, made perhaps bold by the suggestion of physical advantage bestowed by the color, talked to him to the very best of her ability; and when she felt herself fearfully flagging, Lady Celia took him up and did her very well-conducted best. Neither she nor her sister were brilliant talkers at any time, and limited by the absence of any common familiar topic, effort was necessary. The neighborhood he did not know; London he was barely aware of; social functions it would be an impertinence to bring in; games he did not play; sport he had scarcely heard of. You were confined to America, and if you knew next to nothing of American life, there you were.

Tembarom saw it all,—he was sharp enough for that,—and his habit of being jocular and wholly unashamed saved him from the misery of awkwardness that Willocks would have been sure to have writhed under. His casual frankness, however, for a moment embarrassed Lady Edith to the bitterest extremity. When you are trying your utmost to make a queer person oblivious to the fact that his world is one unknown to you, it is difficult to know where do you stand when he says

"It's mighty hard to talk to a man who doesn't know a thing that belongs to the kind of world you've spent your life in, ain't it? But don't you mind me a minute. I'm glad to be talked to anyhow by people like you. When I don't catch on, I'll just ask. No man was ever electrocuted for not knowing, and that's just where I am. I don't know, and I'm glad to be told. Now, there's one thing. Burrill said 'Your Ladyship' to you, I heard him. Ought I to say it, er oughtn't I?"

"Oh, no," she answered, but somehow without distaste in the momentary stare he had startled her into; "Burrill is—"

"He's a servant," he aided encouragingly. "Well, I've never been a butler, but I've been somebody's servant all my life, and mighty glad of the chance. This is the first time I've been out of a job."

What nice teeth he had! What a queer, candid, unresentful creature! What a good sort of smile! And how odd that it was he who was putting her more at her ease by the mere way in which he was saying this almost alarming thing! By the time he had ended, it was not alarming at all, and she had caught her breath again.

She was actually sorry when the door opened and Lady Joan Fayre came in, followed almost immediately by Lady Mallowe and Captain Palliser, who appeared to have just returned from a walk and heard the news.

Lady Mallowe was most sympathetic. Why not, indeed? The Duke of Stone was a delightful, cynical creature, and Stone Hover was, despite its ducal poverty, a desirable place to be invited to, if you could manage it. Her ladyship's method of fluttering was not like Miss Alicia's, its character being wholly modern; but she fluttered, nevertheless. The duke, who knew all about her, received her amiabilities with appreciative smiles, but it was the splendidly handsome, hungry-eyed young woman with the line between her black brows who engaged his attention. On the alert, as he always was, for a situation, he detected one at once when he saw his American address her. She did not address him, and scarcely deigned a reply when he spoke to her. When he spoke to others, she conducted herself as though he were not in the room, so obviously did she choose to ignore his existence. Such a bearing toward one's host had indeed the charm of being an interesting novelty. And what a beauty she was, with her lovely, ferocious eyes and the small, black head poised on the exquisite long throat, which was on the verge of becoming a trifle too thin! Then as in a flash he recalled between one breath and another the quite fiendish episode of poor Jem Temple Barholm—and she was the girl!

Then he became almost excited in his interest. He saw it all. As he had himself argued must be the case, this poor fellow was in love. But it was not with a lady in the New York department stores; it was with a young woman who would evidently disdain to wipe her feet upon him. How thrilling! As Lady Mallowe and Palliser and the others chattered, he watched him, observing his manner. He stood the handsome creature's steadily persistent rudeness very well; he made no effort to push into the talk when she coolly held him out of it. He waited without external uneasiness or spasmodic smiles. If he could do that despite the inevitable fact that he must feel his position uncomfortable, he was possessed of fiber. That alone would make him worth cultivating. And if there were persons who were to be made uncomfortable, why not cut in and circumvent the beauty somewhat and give her a trifle of unease? It was with the light and adroit touch of accustomedness to all orders of little situations that his grace took the matter in hand, with a shade, also, of amiable malice. He drew Tembarom adroitly into the center of things; he knew how to lead him to make easily the odd, frank remarks which were sufficiently novel to suggest that he was actually entertaining. He beautifully edged Lady Joan out of her position. She could not behave ill to him, he was far too old, he said to himself, leaving out the fact that a Duke of Stone is a too respectable personage to be quite waved aside.

Tembarom began to enjoy himself a little more. Lady Celia and Lady Edith began to enjoy themselves a little more also. Lady Mallowe was filled with admiring delight. Captain Palliser took in the situation, and asked himself questions about it. On her part, Miss Alicia was restored to the happiness any lack of appreciation of her "dear boy" touchingly disturbed. In circumstances such as these he appeared to the advantage which in a brief period would surely reveal his wonderful qualities. She clung so to his "wonderful qualities" because in all the three-volumed novels of her youth the hero, debarred from early advantages and raised by the turn of fortune's wheel to splendor, was transformed at once into a being of the highest accomplishments and the most polished breeding, and ended in the third volume a creature before whom emperors paled. And how more than charmingly cordial his grace's manner was when he left them!

"To-morrow," he said, "if my daughters do not discover that I have injured some more than vital organ, I shall call to proffer my thanks with the most immense formality. I shall get out of the carriage in the manner customary in respectable neighborhoods, not roll out at your feet. Afterward you will, I hope, come and dine with us. I am devoured by a desire to become more familiar with The Earth."



CHAPTER XXV

It was Lady Mallowe who perceived the moment when he became the fashion. The Duke of Stone called with the immense formality he had described, and his visit was neither brief nor dull. A little later Tembarom with his guests dined at Stone Hover, and the dinner was further removed from dullness than any one of numerous past dinners always noted for being the most agreeable the neighborhood afforded. The duke managed his guest as an impresario might have managed his tenor, though this was done with subtly concealed methods. He had indeed a novelty to offer which had been discussed with much uncertainty of point of view. He presented it to an only languidly entertained neighborhood as a trouvaille of his own choice. Here was drama, here was atmosphere, here was charm verging in its character upon the occult. You would not see it if you were not a collector of such values.

"Nobody will be likely to see him as he is unless he is pointed out to them," was what he said to his daughters. "But being bored to death,— we are all bored,—once adroitly assisted to suspect him of being alluring, most of them will spring upon him and clasp him to their wearied breasts. I haven't the least idea what will happen afterward. I shall in fact await the result with interest."

Being told Palliser's story of the "Ladies," he listened, holding the tips of his fingers together, and wearing an expression of deep interest slightly baffled in its nature. It was Lady Edith who related the anecdote to him.

"Now," he said, "it would be very curious and complicating if that were true; but I don't believe it is. Palliser, of course, likes to tell a good story. I shall be able to discover in time whether it is true or not; but at present I don't believe it."

Following the dinner party at Stone Hover came many others. All the well-known carriages began to roll up the avenue to Temple Barholm. The Temple Barholm carriages also began to roll down the avenue and between the stone griffins on their way to festive gatherings of varied order. Burrill and the footmen ventured to reconsider their early plans for giving warning. It wasn't so bad if the country was going to take him up.

"Do you see what is happening?" Lady Mallowe said to Joan. "The man is becoming actually popular."

"He is popular as a turn at a music hall is," answered Joan. "He will be dropped as he was taken up."

"There's something about him they like, and he represents what everybody most wants. For God's sake! Joan, don't behave like a fool this time. The case is more desperate. There is nothing else— nothing."

"There never was," said Joan, " and I know the desperateness of the case. How long are you going to stay here?"

"I am going to stay for some time. They are not conventional people. It can be managed very well. We are relatives."

"Will you stay," inquired Joan in a low voice, "until they ask you to remove yourself?"

Lady Mallowe smiled an agreeably subtle smile.

"Not quite that," she answered. "Miss Alicia would never have the courage to suggest it. It takes courage and sophistication to do that sort of thing. Mr. Temple Barholm evidently wants us to remain. He will be willing to make as much of the relationship as we choose to let him."

"Do you choose to let him make as much of it as will establish us here for weeks—or months?" Joan asked, her low voice shaking a little.

"That will depend entirely upon circumstances. It will, in fact, depend entirely upon you," said Lady Mallowe, her lips setting themselves into a straight, thin line.

For an appreciable moment Joan was silent; but after it she lost her head and whirled about.

"I shall go away," she cried.

"Where?" asked Lady Mallowe.

"Back to London."

"How much money have you?" asked her mother. She knew she had none. She was always sufficiently shrewd to see that she had none. If the girl had had a pound a week of her own, her mother had always realized that she would have been unmanageable. After the Jem Temple Barholm affair she would have been capable of going to live alone in slums. As it was, she knew enough to be aware that she was too handsome to walk out into Piccadilly without a penny in her pocket; so it had been just possible to keep her indoors.

"How much money have you?" she repeated quietly. This was the way in which their unbearable scenes began—the scenes which the servants passing the doors paused to listen to in the hope that her ladyship would forget that raised voices may be heard by the discreet outsider.

"How much money have you?" she said again.

Joan looked at her; this time it was for about five seconds. She turned her back on her and walked out of the room. Shortly afterward Lady Mallowe saw her walking down the avenue in the rain, which was beginning to fall.

She had left the house because she dared not stay in it. Once out in the park, she folded her long purple cloak about her and pulled her soft purple felt hat down over her brows, walking swiftly under the big trees without knowing where she intended to go before she returned. She liked the rain, she liked the heavy clouds; she wore her dark purples because she felt a fantastic, secret comfort in calling them her mourning —her mourning which she would wear forevermore.

No one could know so well as herself how desperate from her own point of view the case was. She had long known that her mother would not hesitate for a moment before any chance of a second marriage which would totally exclude her daughter from her existence. Why should she, after all, Joan thought? They had always been antagonists. The moment of chance had been looming on the horizon for months. Sir Moses Monaldini had hovered about fitfully and evidently doubtfully at first, more certainly and frequently of late, but always with a clearly objecting eye cast askance upon herself. With determination and desire to establish a social certainty, astute enough not to care specially for young beauty and exactions he did not purpose to submit to, and keen enough to see the advantage of a handsome woman with bitter reason to value what was offered to her in the form of a luxurious future, Sir Moses was moving toward action, though with proper caution. He would have no penniless daughters hanging about scowling and sneering. None of that for him. And the ripest apple upon the topmost bow in the highest wind would not drop more readily to his feet than her mother would, Joan knew with sharp and shamed burnings.

As the rain fell, she walked in her purple cloak, unpaid for, and her purple hat, for which they had been dunned with threatening insults, and knew that she did not own and could not earn a penny. She could not dig, and to beg she was ashamed, and all the more horribly because she had been a beggar of the meaner order all her life. It made her sick to think of the perpetual visits they had made where they were not wanted, of the times when they had been politely bundled out of places, of the methods which had been used to induce shop-keepers to let them run up bills. For years her mother and she had been walking advertisements of smart shops because both were handsome, wore clothes well, and carried them where they would be seen and talked about. Now this would be all over, since it had been Lady Mallowe who had managed all details. Thrown upon her own resources, Joan would have none of them, even though she must walk in rags. Her education had prepared her for only one thing—to marry well, if luck were on her side. It had never been on her side. If she had never met Jem, she would have married somebody, since that would have been better than the inevitable last slide into an aging life spent in cheap lodgings with her mother. But Jem had been the beginning and the end.

She bit her lips as she walked, and suddenly tears swept down her cheeks and dripped on to the purple cloth folded over her breast.

"And he sits in Jem's place! And every day that common, foolish stare will follow me!" she said.

He sat, it was true, in the place Jem Temple Barholm would have occupied if he had been a living man, and he looked at her a good deal. Perhaps he sometimes unconsciously stared because she made him think of many things. But if she had been in a state of mind admitting of judicial fairness, she would have been obliged to own that it was not quite a foolish stare. Absorbed, abstracted, perhaps, but it was not foolish. Sometimes, on the contrary, it was searching and keen.

Of course he was doing his best to please her. Of all the "Ladies," it seemed evident that he was most attracted by her. He tried to talk to her despite her unending rebuffs, he followed her about and endeavored to interest her, he presented a hide-bound unsensitiveness when she did her worst. Perhaps he did not even know that she was being icily rude. He was plainly "making up to her" after the manner of his class. He was perhaps playing the part of the patient adorer who melted by noble long-suffering in novels distinguished by heroes of humble origin.

She had reached the village when the rain changed its mind, and without warning began to pour down as if the black cloud passing overhead had suddenly opened. She was wondering if she would not turn in somewhere for shelter until the worst was over when a door opened and Tembarom ran out with an umbrella.

"Come in to the Hibblethwaites cottage, Lady Joan," he said. "This will be over directly."

He did not affectionately hustle her in by the arm as he would have hustled in Miss Alicia, but he closely guarded her with the umbrella until he guided her inside.

"Thank you," she said.

The first object she became aware of was a thin face with pointed chin and ferret eyes peering at her round the end of a sofa, then a sharp voice.

"Tak' off her cloak an' shake th' rain off it in th' wash 'us'," it said. "Mother an' Aunt Susan's out. Let him unbutton it fer thee."

"I can unbutton it myself, thank you," said Lady Joan. Tembarom took it when she had unbuttoned it. He took it from her shoulders before she had time to stop him. Then he walked into the tiny "wash 'us" and shook it thoroughly. He came back and hung it on a chair before the fire.

Tummas was leaning back in his pillows and gazing at her.

"I know tha name," he said. "He towd me," with a jerk of the head toward Tembarom.

"Did he?" replied Lady Joan without interest.

A flaringly illustrated New York paper was spread out upon his sofa. He pushed it aside and pulled the shabby atlas toward him. It fell open at a map of North America as if through long habit.

"Sit thee down," he ordered.

Tembarom had stood watching them both.

"I guess you'd better not do that," he suggested to Tummas.

"Why not? " said the boy, sharply. "She's th' wench he was goin' to marry. It's th' same as if he'd married her. If she wur his widder, she'd want to talk about him. Widders allus wants to talk. Why shouldn't she? Women's women. He'd ha' wanted to talk about her."

"Who is 'he'?" asked Joan with stiff lips.

"The Temple Barholm as' 'd be here if he was na."

Joan turned to Tembarom.

"Do you come here to talk to this boy about HIM?" she said. "How dare you!"

Tummas's eyes snapped; his voice snapped also.

"He knew next to nowt about him till I towd him," he said. "Then he came to ax me things an' foind out more. He knows as much as I do now. Us sits here an' talks him over."

Lady Joan still addressed Tembarom.

"What interest can you have in the man who ought to be in your place?" she asked. "What possible interest?"

"Well," he answered awkwardly, "because he ought to be, I suppose. Ain't that reason enough?"

He had never had to deal with women who hated him and who were angry and he did not know exactly what to say. He had known very few women, and he had always been good- natured with them and won their liking in some measure. Also, there was in his attitude toward this particular woman a baffled feeling that he could not make her understand him. She would always think of him as an enemy and believe he meant things he did not mean. If he had been born and educated in her world, he could have used her own language; but he could use only his own, and there were so many things he must not say for a time at least.

"Do you not realize," she said, "that you are presuming upon your position—that you and this boy are taking liberties?"

Tummas broke in wholly without compunction.

"I've taken liberties aw my loife," he stated, "an' I'm goin' to tak' 'em till I dee. They're th' on'y things I can tak', lyin' here crippled, an' I'm goin' to tak' 'em."

"Stop that, Tummas! " said Tembarom with friendly authority. "She doesn't catch on, and you don't catch on, either. You're both of you 'way off. Stop it!"

"I thought happen she could tell me things I didn't know," protested Tummas, throwing himself back on his pillows. "If she conna, she conna, an' if she wunnot, she wunnot. Get out wi' thee!" he said to Joan. "I dunnot want thee about th' place."

"Say," said Tembarom, "shut up!"

"I am going," said Lady Joan and turned to open the door.

The rain was descending in torrents, but she passed swiftly out into its deluge walking as rapidly as she could. She thought she cared nothing about the rain, but it dashed in her face and eyes, taking her breath away, and she had need of breath when her heart was beating with such fierceness.

"If she wur his widder," the boy had said.

Even chance could not let her alone at one of her worst moments. She walked faster and faster because she was afraid Tembarom would follow her, and in a few minutes she heard him splashing behind her, and then he was at her side, holding the umbrella over her head.

"You're a good walker," he said, "but I'm a sprinter. I trained running after street cars and catching the 'L' in New York."

She had so restrained her miserable hysteric impulse to break down and utterly humiliate herself under the unexpected blow of the episode in the cottage that she had had no breath to spare when she left the room, and her hurried effort to escape had left her so much less that she did not speak.

"I'll tell you something," he went on. "He's a little freak, but you can't blame him much. Don't be mad at him. He's never moved from that corner since he was born, I guess, and he's got nothing to do or to think of but just hearing what's happening outside. He's sort of crazy curious, and when he gets hold of a thing that suits him he just holds on to it till the last bell rings."

She said nothing whatever, and he paused a moment because he wanted to think over the best way to say the next thing.

"Mr. James Temple Barholm "—he ventured it with more delicacy of desire not to seem to "take liberties" than she would have credited him with—"saw his mother sitting with him in her arms at the cottage door a week or so after he was born. He stopped at the gate and talked to her about him, and he left him a sovereign. He's got it now. It seems a fortune to him. He's made a sort of idol of him. That's why he talks like he does. I wouldn't let it make me mad if I were you."

He did not know that she could not have answered him if she would, that she felt that if he did not stop she might fling herself down upon the wet heather and wail aloud.

"You don't like me," he began after they had walked a few steps farther. "You don't like me."

This was actually better. It choked back the sobs rising in her throat. The stupid shock of it, his tasteless foolishness, helped her by its very folly to a sort of defense against the disastrous wave of emotion she might not have been able to control. She gathered herself together.

"It must be an unusual experience," she answered.

"Well, it is—sort of," he said, but in a manner curiously free from fatuous swagger. "I've had luck that way. I guess it's been because I'd GOT to make friends so as I could earn a living. It seems sort of queer to know that some one's got a grouch against me that—that I can't get away with."

She looked up the avenue to see how much farther they must walk together, since she was not "a sprinter" and could not get away from him. She thought she caught a glimpse through the trees of a dog-cart driven by a groom, and hoped she had not mistaken and that it was driving in their direction.

"It must, indeed," she said, "though I am not sure I quite understand what a grouch is."

"When you've got a grouch against a fellow," he explained impersonally, "you want to get at him. You want to make him feel like a mutt; and a mutt's the worst kind of a fool. You've got one against me."

She looked before her between narrowed lids and faintly smiled—the most disagreeable smile she was capable of. And yet for some too extraordinary reason he went on. But she had seen men go on before this when all the odds were against them. Sometimes their madness took them this way.

"I knew there was a lot against me when I came here," he persisted. "I should have been a fool if I hadn't. I knew when you came that I was up against a pretty hard proposition; but I thought perhaps if I got busy and SHOWED you—you've got to SHOW a person—"

"Showed me what?" she asked contemptuously.

"Showed you—well—me," he tried to explain.

"You!"

"And that I wanted to be friends," he added candidly.

Was the man mad? Did he realize nothing? Was he too thick of skin even to see?

"Friends! You and I?" The words ought to have scorched him, pachyderm though he was.

"I thought you'd give me a chance—a sort of chance—"

She stopped short on the avenue.

"You did?"

She had not been mistaken. The dog-cart had rounded the far-off curve and was coming toward them. And the man went on talking.

"You've felt every minute that I was in a place that didn't belong to me. You know that if the man that it did belong to was here, you'd be here with him. You felt as if I'd robbed him of it—and I'd robbed you. It was your home—yours. You hated me too much to think of anything else. Suppose— suppose there was a way I could give it back to you—make it your home again."

His voice dropped and was rather unsteady. The fool, the gross, brutal, vulgar, hopeless fool! He thought this was the way to approach her, to lead her to listen to his proposal of marriage! Not for a second did she guess that they were talking at cross purposes. She did not know that as he kept himself steady under her contemptuousness he was thinking that Ann would have to own that he had been up against it hard and plenty while the thing was going on.

"I'm always up against it when I'm talking to you," he said. "You get me rattled. There's things I want to talk about and ask you. Suppose you give me a chance, and let us start out by being sort of friends."

"I am staying in your house," she answered in a deadly voice, "and I cannot go away because my mother will not let me. You can force yourself upon me, if you choose, because I cannot help it; but understand once for all that I will not give you your ridiculous chance. And I will not utter one word to you when I can avoid it."

He was silent for a moment and seemed to be thinking rather deeply. She realized now that he saw the nearing dog-cart.

"You won't. Then it's up to me," he said. Then with a change of tone, he added, "I'll stop the cart and tell the man to drive you to the house. I'm not going to force myself on you, as you call it. It'd be no use. Perhaps it'll come all right in the end."

He made a sign to the groom, who hastened his horse's pace and drew up when he reached them.

"Take this lady back to the house," he said.

The groom, who was a new arrival, began to prepare to get down and give up his place.

"You needn't do that," said Tembarom.

"Won't you get up and take the reins, sir?" the man asked uncertainly.

"No. I can't drive. You'll have to do it. I'll walk."

And to the groom's amazement, they left him standing under the trees looking after them.

"It's up to me," he was saying. "The whole durned thing's up to me."



CHAPTER XXVI

The neighborhood of Temple Barholm was not, upon the whole, a brilliant one. Indeed, it had been frankly designated by the casual guest as dull. The country was beautiful enough, and several rather large estates lay within reach of one another, but their owners were neither very rich nor especially notable personages. They were of extremely good old blood, and were of established respectability. None of them, however, was given to entertaining house parties made up of the smart and dazzlingly sinful world of fashion said by moralists to be composed entirely of young and mature beauties, male and female, capable of supplying at any moment enlivening detail for the divorce court—glittering beings whose wardrobes were astonishing and whose conversations were composed wholly of brilliant paradox and sparkling repartee.

Most of the residents took their sober season in London, the men of the family returning gladly to their pheasants, the women not regretfully to their gardens and tennis, because their successes in town had not been particularly delirious. The guests who came to them were generally as respectable and law-abiding as themselves, and introduced no iconoclastic diversions. For the greater portion of the year, in fact, diners out were of the neighborhood and met the neighborhood, and were reduced to discussing neighborhood topics, which was not, on the whole, a fevered joy. The Duke of Stone was, perhaps, the one man who might have furnished topics. Privately it was believed, and in part known, that he at least had had a brilliant, if not wholly unreprehensible, past. He might have introduced enlivening elements from London, even from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome; but the sobering influence of years of rheumatic gout and a not entirely sufficing income prevented activities, and his opinions of his social surroundings were vaguely guessed to be those of a not too lenient critic.

"I do not know anything technical or scientific about ditch- water," he had expressed himself in the bosom of his family. "I never analyzed it, but analyzers, I gather, consider it dull. If anything could be duller than ditch-water, I should say it was Stone Hover and its surrounding neighborhood." He had also remarked at another time: "If our society could be enriched by some of the characters who form the house parties and seem, in fact, integral parts of all country society in modern problem or even unproblem novels, how happy one might be, how edified and amused! A wicked lady or so of high, or extremely low, rank, of immense beauty and corruscating brilliancy; a lovely creature, male or female, whom she is bent upon undoing—"

"Dear papa!" protested Lady Celia.

"Reproach me, dearest. Reproach me as severely as you please. It inspires me. It makes me feel like a wicked, dangerous man, and I have not felt like one for many years. Such persons as I describe form the charm of existence, I assure you. A ruthless adventuress with any kind of good looks would be the making of us. Several of them, of different types, a handsome villain, and a few victims unknowing of their fate, would cause life to flow by like a peaceful stream."

Lady Edith laughed an unseemly little laugh—unseemly, since filial regret at paternal obliquity should have restrained it.

"Papa, you are quite horrible," she said. "You ought not to make your few daughters laugh at improper things."

"I would make my daughters laugh at anything so long as I must doom them to Stone Hover—and Lady Pevensy and Mrs. Stoughton and the rector, if one may mention names," he answered. "To see you laugh revives me by reminding me that once I was considered a witty person— quite so. Some centuries ago, however; about the time when things were being rebuilt after the flood."

In such circumstances it cannot be found amazing that a situation such as Temple Barholm presented should provide rich food for conversation, supposition, argument, and humorous comment.

T. Tembarom himself, after the duke had established him, furnished an unlimited source of interest. His household became a perennial fount of quiet discussion. Lady Mallowe and her daughter were the members of it who met with the most attention. They appeared to have become members of it rather than visitors. Her ladyship had plainly elected to extend her stay even beyond the period to which a fond relative might feel entitled to hospitality. She had been known to extend visits before with great cleverness, but this one assumed an established aspect. She was not going away, the neighborhood decided, until she had achieved that which she had come to accomplish. The present unconventional atmosphere of the place naturally supported her. And how probable it seemed, taking into consideration Captain Palliser's story, that Mr. Temple Barholm wished her to stay. Lady Joan would be obliged to stay also, if her mother intended that she should. But the poor American—there were some expressions of sympathy, though the situation was greatly added to by the feature — the poor American was being treated by Lady Joan as only she could treat a man. It was worth inviting the whole party to dinner or tea or lunch merely to see the two together. The manner in which she managed to ignore him and be scathing to him without apparently infringing a law of civility, and the number of laws she sometimes chose to sweep aside when it was her mood to do so, were extraordinary. If she had not been a beauty, with a sort of mystic charm for the male creature, surely he would have broken his chains. But he did not. What was he going to do in the end? What was she going to do? What was Lady Mallowe going to do if there was no end at all? He was not as unhappy- looking a lover as one might have expected, they said. He kept up his spirits wonderfully. Perhaps she was not always as icily indifferent to him as she chose to appear in public. Temple Barholm was a great estate, and Sir Moses Monaldini had been mentioned by rumor. Of course there would be something rather strange and tragic in it if she came to Temple Barholm as its mistress in such singular circumstances. But he certainly did not look depressed or discouraged. So they talked it over as they looked on.

"How they gossip! How delightfully they gossip!" said the duke. "But it is such a perfect subject. They have never been so enthralled before. Dear young man! how grateful we ought to be for him!"

One of the most discussed features of the case was the duke's own cultivation of the central figure. There was an actual oddity about it. He drove from Stone Hover to Temple Barholm repeatedly. He invited Tembarom to the castle and had long talks with him—long, comfortable talks in secluded, delightful rooms or under great trees on a lawn. He wanted to hear anecdotes of his past, to draw him on to giving his points of view. When he spoke of him to his daughters, he called him "T. Tembarom," but the slight derision of his earlier tone modified itself. "That delightful young man will shortly become my closest intimate," he said. "He not only keeps up my spirits, but he opens up vistas. Vistas after a man's seventy-second birthday! At times I could clasp him to my breast."

"I like him first rate," Tembarom said to Miss Alicia. "I liked him the minute he got up laughing like an old sport when he fell out of the pony carriage."

As he became more intimate with him, he liked him still better. Obscured though it was by airy, elderly persiflage, he began to come upon a background of stability and points of view wholly to be relied on in his new acquaintance. It had evolved itself out of long and varied experience, with the aid of brilliant mentality. The old peer's reasons were always logical. He laughed at most things, but at a few he did not laugh at all. After several of the long conversations Tembarom began to say to himself that this seemed like a man you need not be afraid to talk things over with—things you didn't want to speak of to everybody.

"Seems to me," he said thoughtfully to Miss Alicia, "he's an old fellow you could tie to. I've got on to one thing when I've listened to him: he talks all he wants to and laughs a lot, but he never gives himself away. He wouldn't give another fellow away either if he said he wouldn't. He knows how not to."

There was an afternoon on which during a drive they took together the duke was enlightened as to several points which had given him cause for reflection, among others the story beloved of Captain Palliser and his audiences.

"I guess you've known a good many women," T. Tembarom remarked on this occasion after a few minutes of thought. "Living all over the world as you've done, you'd be likely to come across a whole raft of them one time and another."

"A whole raft of them, one time and another," agreed the duke. "Yes."

"You've liked them, haven't you?"

"Immensely. Sometimes a trifle disastrously. Find me a more absolutely interesting object in the universe than a woman —any woman—and I will devote the remainder of my declining years to the study of it," answered his grace.

He said it with a decision which made T. Tembarom turn to look at him, and after his look decide to proceed.

"Have you ever known a bit of a slim thing"—he made an odd embracing gesture with his arm—"the size that you could pick up with one hand and set on your knee as if she was a child"—the duke remained still, knowing this was only the beginning and pricking up his ears as he took a rapid kaleidoscopic view of all the "Ladies" in the neighborhood, and as hastily waved them aside—"a bit of a thing that some way seems to mean it all to you—and moves the world?" The conclusion was one which brought the incongruous touch of maturity into his face.

"Not one of the 'Ladies,"' the duke was mentally summing the matter up. "Certainly not Lady Joan, after all. Not, I think, even the young person in the department store."

He leaned back in his corner the better to inspect his companion directly.

"You have, I see," he replied quietly. "Once I myself did." (He had cried out, "Ah! Heloise!" though he had laughed at himself when he seemed facing his ridiculous tragedy.)

"Yes," confessed T. Tembarom. "I met her at the boarding-house where I lived. Her father was a Lancashire man and an inventor. I guess you've heard of him; his name is Joseph Hutchinson."

The whole country had heard of him; more countries, indeed, than one had heard. He was the man who was going to make his fortune in America because T. Tembarom had stood by him in his extremity. He would make a fortune in America and another in England and possibly several others on the Continent. He had learned to read in the village school, and the girl was his daughter.

"Yes," replied the duke.

"I don't know whether the one you knew had that quiet little way of seeing right straight into a thing, and making you see it, too," said Tembarom.

"She had," answered the duke, and an odd expression wavered in his eyes because he was looking backward across forty years which seemed a hundred.

"That's what I meant by moving the world," T. Tembarom went on. "You know she's RIGHT, and you've got to do what she says, if you love her."

"And you always do," said the duke—"always and forever. There are very few. They are the elect."

T. Tembarom took it gravely.

"I said to her once that there wasn't more than one of her in the world because there couldn't be enough to make two of that kind. I wasn't joshing either; I meant it. It's her quiet little voice and her quiet, babyfied eyes that get you where you can't move. And it's something else you don't know anything about. It's her never doing anything for herself, but just doing it because it's the right thing for you."

The duke's chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was. The one he remembered had been another man's wife, a little angel brought up in a convent by white-souled nuns, passed over by her people to an elderly vaurien of great magnificence, and she had sent the strong, laughing, impassioned young English peer away before it was too late, and with the young, young eyes of her looking upward at him in that way which saw "straight into a thing" and with that quiet little voice. So long ago! So long ago!

"Ah! Heloise!" he sighed unconsciously.

"What did you say?" asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back.

"I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty," he answered. "It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when she was twenty-four."

"Died!" said Tembarom. "Good Lord!" He dropped his head and even changed color. "A fellow can't get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it couldn't happen. Suppose—" he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up— "Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I've proved what I said—just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do."

"I am sure you have," the duke said.

"It's because of that I began to say this." Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. "You're a man, and I'm a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you're a man, too. I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn't."

The duke's eyes lighted anew.

"She had her reasons," he said.

"She laid 'em out as if she'd been my mother instead of a little red- headed angel that you wanted to snatch up and crush up to you so she couldn't breathe. She didn't waste a word. She just told me what I was up against. She'd lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I'd got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I'd see— beauties that were different from anything I'd ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them—the best of them."

"Ladies?" interjected the duke gently.

"Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like those in the Ladies' Pictorial. The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!" he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. "I've seen the whole lot of them; I've done my darndest to get next, and there's not one—" he stopped short. "Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?" he added suddenly.

"That was not her point," remarked the duke. "She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked." T. Tembarom's eagerness was inspiring to behold.

"I have, haven't I?" he cried. "That was what I wanted to ask you. I've done as she said. I haven't shirked a thing. I've followed them around when I knew they hadn't any use on earth for me. Some of them have handed me the lemon pretty straight. Why shouldn't they? But I don't believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes."

"No, she did not," the duke said. "Also she probably did not know that in ancient days of chivalry ladies sent forth their knights to bear buffeting for their sakes in proof of fealty. Rise up, Sir Knight!" This last phrase of course T. Tembarom did not know the poetic significance of.

To his hearer Palliser's story became an amusing thing, read in the light of this most delicious frankness. It was Palliser himself who played the fool, and not T. Tembarom, who had simply known what he wanted, and had, with businesslike directness, applied himself to finding a method of obtaining it. The young women he gave his time to must be "Ladies" because Miss Hutchinson had required it from him. The female flower of the noble houses had been passed in review before him to practise upon, so to speak. The handsomer they were, the more dangerously charming, the better Miss Hutchinson would be pleased. And he had been regarded as a presumptuous aspirant. It was a situation for a comedy. But the "Ladies" would not enjoy it if they were told. It was also not the Duke of Stone who would tell them. They could not in the least understand the subtlety of the comedy in which they had unconsciously taken part. Ann Hutchinson's grandmother curtsied to them in her stiff old way when they passed. Ann Hutchinson had gone to the village school and been presented with prizes for needlework and good behavior. But what a girl she must be, the slim bit of a thing with a red head! What a clear-headed and firm little person!

In courts he had learned to wear a composed countenance when he was prompted to smile, and he wore one now. He enjoyed the society of T. Tembarom increasingly every hour. He provided him with every joy.

Their drive was a long one, and they talked a good deal. They talked of the Hutchinsons, of the invention, of the business "deals" Tembarom had entered into at the outset, and of their tremendously encouraging result. It was not mere rumor that Hutchinson would end by being a rich man. The girl would be an heiress. How complex her position would be! And being of the elect who unknowingly bear with them the power that "moves the world," how would she affect Temple Barholm and its surrounding neighborhood?

"I wish to God she was here now! " exclaimed Tembarom, suddenly.

It had been an interesting talk, but now and then the duke had wondered if, as it went on, his companion was as wholly at his ease as was usual with him. An occasional shade of absorption in his expression, as if he were thinking of two things at once despite himself, a hint of restlessness, revealed themselves occasionally. Was there something more he was speculating on the possibility of saying, something more to tell or explain? If there was, let him take his time. His audience, at all events, was possessed of perceptions. This somewhat abrupt exclamation might open the way.

"That is easily understood, my dear fellow," replied the duke.

"There's times when you want a little thing like that just to talk things over with, just to ask, because you—you're dead sure she'd never lose her head and give herself away without knowing she was doing it. She could just keep still and let the waves roll over her and be standing there ready and quiet when the tide had passed. It's the keeping your mouth shut that's so hard for most people, the not saying a darned thing, whatever happens, till just the right time."

"Women cannot often do it," said the duke. "Very few men can."

"You're right," Tembarom answered, and there was a trifle of anxiety in his tone.

"There's women, just the best kind, that you daren't tell a big thing to. Not that they'd mean to give it away—perhaps they wouldn't know when they did it—but they'd feel so anxious they'd get—they'd get—"

"Rattled," put in the duke, and knew who he was thinking of. He saw Miss Alicia's delicate, timid face as he spoke.

T. Tembarom laughed.

"That's just it," he answered. "They wouldn't go back on you for worlds, but—well, you have to be careful with them."

"He's got something on his mind," mentally commented the duke. "He wonders if he will tell it to me."

"And there's times when you'd give half you've got to be able to talk a thing out and put it up to some one else for a while. I could do it with her. That's why I said I wish to God that she was here."

"You have learned to know how to keep still," the duke said. "So have I. We learned it in different schools, but we have both learned."

As he was saying the words, he thought he was going to hear something; when he had finished saying them he knew that he would without a doubt. T. Tembarom made a quick move in his seat; he lost a shade of color and cleared his throat as he bent forward, casting a glance at the backs of the coachman and footman on the high seat above them.

"Can those fellows hear me?" he asked.

"No," the duke answered; "if you speak as you are speaking now."

"You are the biggest man about here," the young man went on. "You stand for everything that English people care for, and you were born knowing all the things I don't. I've been carrying a big load for quite a while, and I guess I'm not big enough to handle it alone, perhaps. Anyhow, I want to be sure I'm not making fool mistakes. The worst of it is that I've got to keep still if I'm right, and I've got to keep still if I'm wrong. I've got to keep still, anyhow."

"I learned to hold my tongue in places where, if I had not held it, I might have plunged nations into bloodshed," the duke said. "Tell me all you choose."

As a result of which, by the time their drive had ended and they returned to Stone Hover, he had told him, and, the duke sat in his corner of the carriage with an unusual light in his eyes and a flush of somewhat excited color on his cheek.

"You're a queer fellow, T. Tembarom," he said when they parted in the drawing-room after taking tea. "You exhilarate me. You make me laugh. If I were an emotional person, you would at moments make me cry. There's an affecting uprightness about you. You're rather a fine fellow too, 'pon my life." Putting a waxen, gout-knuckled old hand on his shoulder, and giving him a friendly push which was half a pat, he added, "You are, by God!"



And after his guest had left him, the duke stood for some minutes gazing into the fire with a complicated smile and the air of a man who finds himself quaintly enriched.

"I have had ambitions in the course of my existence— several of them," he said, "but even in over-vaulting moments never have I aspired to such an altitude as this—to be, as it were, part of a melodrama. One feels that one scarcely deserves it."



CHAPTER XXVII

"Mr.Temple Barholm seems in better spirits," Lady Mallowe said to Captain Palliser as they walked on the terrace in the starlight dusk after dinner.

Captain Palliser took his cigar from his mouth and looked at the glowing end of it.

"Has it struck you that he has been in low spirits?" he inquired speculatively. "One does not usually connect him with depression."

"Certainly not with depression. He's an extraordinary creature. One would think he would perish from lack of the air he is used to breathing—New York air."

"He is not perishing. He's too shrewd," returned Palliser. "He mayn't exactly like all this, but he's getting something out of it."

"He is not getting much of what he evidently wants most. I am out of all patience," said Lady Mallowe.

Her acquaintance with Palliser had lasted through a number of years. They argued most matters from the same basis of reasoning. They were at times almost candid with each other. It may be acknowledged, however, that of the two Lady Mallowe was the more inclined to verge on self-revelation. This was of course because she was the less clever and had more temper. Her temper, she had, now and then, owned bitterly to herself, had played her tricks. Captain Palliser's temper never did this. It was Lady Mallowe's temper which spoke now, but she did not in the least mind his knowing that Joan was exasperating her beyond endurance. He knew the whole situation well enough to be aware of it without speech on her part. He had watched similar situations several times before.