Katherine was very still. She made no outcry. Yet her very stillness seemed to him the more ominous, and the horror of the recital grew upon him. His voice sounded to him unnaturally loud and harsh in the surrounding quiet. Once her silken draperies gave a shuddering rustle—that was all.

At last it was over. At last he dared to look at her. The colour and youthful roundness had gone out of her face. It was gray as her dress, fixed and rigid as a marble mask. Ormiston was overcome with a consuming pity for her and with a violence of self-hatred. Hangman, and to his own sister—in truth, it seemed to him to have come to that! He knelt down in front of her, laying hold of both her knees.

"Kitty, can you ever forgive me for telling you this?" he asked hoarsely.

Even in this extremity Katherine's inherent sweetness asserted itself. She would have smiled, but her frozen lips refused. Her eyelids quivered a little and closed.

"I have nothing to forgive you, dear," she said. "Indeed, it is good of you to tell me, since—since so it is."

She put her hands upon his shoulders, gripping them fast, and bowed her head. The little flames crackled, dancing among the pine logs and the silk of her dress rustled as her bosom rose and fell.

"It won't make you ill again?" Roger asked anxiously.

Katherine shook her head.

"Oh, no!" she said, "I have no more time for illness. This is a thing to cure, as a cautery cures—to burn away all idleness and self-indulgent, sick room fancies. See, I am strong, I am well."

She stood up, her hands slipping down from Ormiston's shoulders and steadying themselves on his hands as he too rose. Her face was still ashen, but purpose and decision had come into her eyes.

"Do this for me," she said, almost imperiously. "Go to Denny, tell her to bring me the baby. She is to leave him with me. And tell her, as she loves both him and me,—as she values her place here at Brockhurst,—she is not to speak."

As he looked at her Ormiston turned cold. She was terrible just then.

"Katherine," he said quickly, "what on earth are you going to do?"

"No harm to my baby in any case—you need not be alarmed. I am quite to be trusted. Only I cannot be reasoned with or opposed, still less condoled with or comforted, yet. I want my baby, and I must have him, here, alone, the doors shut—locked if I please." Her lips gave, the corners of her mouth dropped. And watching her Ormiston swore a little under his breath. "We have something to say to each other, the baby and I," she went on, "which no one else may hear. So do what I ask you, Roger. And come back—I may want you—in about an hour, if I do not send for you before."

Alone with her child, Lady Calmady moved slowly across and bolted both the nursery and the chapel-room doors. Then she drew a low stool up in front of the fire and sat down, laying the infant upon her lap. It was a delicious, dimpled creature, with a quantity of silky golden-brown hair, that curled in a tiny crest along the top of its head. It was but half awake yet, the rounded cheeks pink with the comfort of food and slumber. And as the beautiful, young mother, bending that set, ashen face of hers above it, laid the child upon her knees, it stretched, clenching soft baby fists and rubbing them into its blue eyes.

Katherine unwrapped the shawls, and took off one small garment after another—delicate gossamer-like things of fine flannel, lawn and lace, such as women's fingers linger over in the making with tender joy. Once her resolution failed her. She wrapped the half-dressed child in its white shawls again, rose from her place and walked over to the sunny window, carrying it in the hollow of her arm—it staring up, meanwhile, with the strange wonder of baby eyes, and cooing, as though holding communication with gracious presences haunting the moulded ceiling above. Katherine gazed at it for a few seconds. But the little creature's serene content, its absolute unconsciousness of its own evil fortune, pained her too greatly. She went back, sat down on the stool again, and completed the task she had set herself.

Then, the baby lying stark naked on her lap, she studied the fair, little face, the penciled eyebrows and fringed eyelids,—dark like her own,—the firm, rounded arms, the rosy-palmed hands, their dainty fingers and finger-nails, the well-proportioned and well-nourished body, without smallest mark or blemish upon it, sound, wholesome, and complete. All these she studied long and carefully, while the dancing glow of the firelight played over the child's delicate flesh, and it extended its little arms in the pleasant warmth, holding them up, as in act of adoration, towards those gracious unseen presences, still, apparently, hovering above the flood of instreaming sunshine against the ceiling overhead. Lastly she turned her eyes, with almost dreadful courage, upon the mutilated, malformed limbs, upon the feet—set right up where the knee should have been, thus dwarfing the child by a fourth of his height. She observed them, handled, felt them. And as she did so, her mother-love, which, until now, had been but a part and consequence—since the child was his gift, the crown and outcome of their passion, his and hers—of the great love she bore her husband, became distinct from that, an emotion by itself, heretofore unimagined, pervasive of all her being. It had none of the sweet self-abandon, the dear enchantments, the harmonising sense of safety and repose which that earlier passion had. This was altogether different in character, and made quite other demands on mind and heart. For it was fierce, watchful, anxious, violent with primitive instinct; the roots of it planted far back in that unthinkable remoteness of time, when the fertile womb of the great earth mother began to bring forth the first blind, simple forms of those countless generations of living creatures which, slowly differentiating themselves, slowly developing, have peopled this planet from that immeasurable past to the present hour. Love between man and woman must be forever young, even as Eros, Cupid, Krishna, are forever youthful gods. But mother-love is of necessity mature, majestic, ancient from the stamp of primal experience which is upon it.

And so, at this juncture, realising that which her motherhood meant, her immaturity, her girlhood fell away from Katherine Calmady. Her life and the purpose of it moved forward on another plane.

She bent down and solemnly kissed the unlovely, shortened limbs, not once or twice, but many times, yielding herself up with an almost voluptuous intensity to her own emotion. She clasped her hands about her knees, so that the child might be enclosed, overshadowed, embraced on all sides by the living defenses of its mother's love. Alone there, with no witnesses, she brooded over it, crooned to it, caressed it with an insatiable hunger of tenderness.

"And yet, my poor pretty, if we had both died, you and I, ten days ago," she murmured, "how far better. For what will you say to me when you grow older—to me who have brought you, without any asking or will of yours, into a world in which you must always be at so cruel a disadvantage? How will you bear it all when you come to face it for yourself, and I can no longer shield you and hide you away as I can do now? Will you have fortitude to endure, or will you become sour, vindictive, misanthropic, envious? Will you curse the hour of your birth?"

Katherine bowed her proud head still lower.

"Ah! don't do that, my darling," she prayed in piteous entreaty, "don't do that. For I will share all your trouble, do share it even now, beforehand, foreseeing it, while you still lie smiling unknowing of your own distress. I shall live through it many times, by day and night, while you live through it only once. And so you must be forbearing towards me, my dear one, when you come——"

She broke off abruptly, her hands fell at her sides, and she sat rigidly upright, her lips parted, staring blankly at the dancing flames.

In repeating Dr. Knott's statement Ormiston had purposely abstained from all mention of Richard Calmady's accident and its tragic sequel. He could not bring himself to speak to Katherine of that. Until now, dominated by the rush of her emotion, she had only recognised the bare terrible fact of the baby's crippled condition, without attempting to account for it. But, now, suddenly the truth presented itself to her. She understood that she was herself, in a sense, accountable—that the greatness of her love for the father had maimed the child.

As she realised the profound irony of the position, a blackness of misery fell upon Katherine. And then, since she was of a strong, undaunted spirit, an immense anger possessed her, a revolt against nature which could work such wanton injury, and against God, who, being all-powerful, could sit by and permit it so to work. All the foundations of faith and reverence were, for the time being, shaken to the very base.

She gathered the naked baby up against her bosom, rocking herself to and fro in a paroxysm of rebellious grief.

"God is unjust!" she cried aloud. "He takes pleasure in fooling us. God is unjust!"



CHAPTER X

THE BIRDS OF THE AIR TAKE THEIR BREAKFAST

Ormiston's first sensation on reentering his sister's room was one of very sensible relief. For Katherine leaned back against the pink brocade cushions in the corner of the sofa, with the baby sleeping peacefully in her arms. Her colour was more normal too, her features less mask-like and set. The cloud which had shadowed the young man's mind for nearly a fortnight lifted. She knew; therefore, he argued, the worst must be over. It was an immense gain that this thing was fairly said. Yet, as he came nearer and sat down on the sofa beside her, Ormiston, who was a keen observer, both of horses and women, became aware of a subtle change in Katherine. He was struck—he had never noticed it before—by her likeness to her—and his—father, whose stern, high-bred, clean-shaven face and rather inaccessible bearing and manner impressed his son, even to this day, as somewhat alarming. People were careful not to trifle with old Mr. Ormiston. His will was absolute in his own house, with his tenants, and in the great iron-works—almost a town in itself—which fed his fine fortune. While from his equals—even from his fellow-members of that not over-reverent or easily impressible body, the House of Commons—he required and received a degree of deference such as men yield only to an unusually powerful character. And there was now just such underlying energy in Katherine's expression. Her eyes were dark, as a clear midnight sky is dark, her beautiful lips compressed, but with concentration of purpose, not with weakness of sorrow. The force of her motherhood had awakened in Katherine a latent, titanic element. Like "Prometheus Bound," chained to the rock, torn, her spirit remained unquelled. For good or evil—as the event should prove—she defied the gods.

And something of all this—though he would have worded it very differently in the vernacular of passing fashion—Ormiston perceived. She was unbroken by that which had occurred, and for this he was thankful. But she was another woman to her who had greeted him in pretty apology an hour ago. Yet, even recognising this, her first words produced in him a shock of surprise.

"Is that horse, the Clown, still at the stables?" she asked.

Ormiston thrust his hands into his pockets; and sitting on the edge of the sofa with his knees apart, stared down at the carpet. The mention of the Clown always cut him, and raised in him a remorseful anger. Yes she was like his father, going straight to the point, he thought. And, in this case, the point was acutely painful to him personally. Ormiston's moral courage had been severely taxed, and he had a fair share of the selfishness common to man. It was all very well, but he wished to goodness she had chosen some other subject than this. Yet he must answer.

"Yes," he said; "Willy Taylor has been leading the gallops for the two-year-olds on him for the last month."—He paused. "What about the Clown?"

"Only that I should be glad if you would tell Chifney he must find some other horse to lead the gallops."

Ormiston turned his head.

"I see—you wish the horse sold," he said, over his shoulder.

Katherine looked down at the sleeping baby, its round head, crowned by that delicious crest of silky hair, cuddled in against her breast. Then she looked in her brother's eyes full and steadily.

"No," she answered. "I don't want it sold, I want it shot, by you, here, to-night."

"By Jove!" the young man exclaimed, rising hastily and standing in front of her.

Katherine gazed up at him, and held the child a little closer to her breast.

"I have been alone with my baby. Don't you suppose I see how it has come about?" she asked.

"Oh, damn it all!" Ormiston cried. "I prayed, at least, you might be spared thinking of that."

He flung himself down on the sofa again—while the baby clenching its tiny fist, stretched and murmured in its sleep—and bowed himself together, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

"I'm at the bottom of it. It's all my fault," he said. "I am haunted by the thought of that day and night, for if ever one man loved another I loved Richard. And yet if I hadn't been so cursedly keen about the horse all this might never have happened. Oh! if you only knew how often I've wished myself dead since that ghastly morning. You must hate me, Kitty. You've cause enough. Yet how the deuce could I foresee what would come about?"

For the moment Katherine's expression softened. She laid her left hand very gently on his bowed head.

"I could never hate you, dear old man," she said. "You are innocent of Richard's death. But this last thing is different." Her voice became fuller and deeper in tone. "And whether I am equally innocent of his child's disfigurement, God only knows—if there is a God, which perhaps, just now, I had better doubt, lest I should blaspheme too loudly, hoping my bitter words might reach His hearing."

Yet further disturbed in the completeness of it's comfort, as it would seem, by the seriousness of her voice, the baby's mouth puckered. It began to fret. Katherine rose and stood rocking it, soothing it—a queenly young figure in her clinging gray and white draperies, which the instreaming sunshine touched, as she moved, to a delicate warmth of colour.

"Hush, my pretty lamb," she crooned—and then softly yet fiercely to Ormiston, "You understand, I wish it. The Clown is to be shot."

"Very well," he answered.

"Sleep—what troubles you, my precious," she went on. "I want it done, now, at once.—Hush, baby, hush.—The sun shall not go down upon my wrath, because my wrath shall be somewhat appeased before the sunset."

Katherine swayed with a rhythmic motion, holding the baby a little away from her in her outstretched arms.

"Tell Chifney to bring the horse up to the square lawn, here, right in front of the house.—Hush, my kitty sweet.—He is to bring the horse himself. None of the stable boys or helpers are to come. It is not to be an entertainment, but an execution. I wish it done quietly."

"Very well," Ormiston repeated. He hesitated, strong protest rising to his lips, which he could not quite bring himself to utter. Katherine, the courage and tragedy of her anger, dominated him as she moved to and fro in the sunshine soothing her child.

"You know it's a valuable horse," he remarked, at last, tentatively.

"So much the better. You do not suppose I should care to take that which costs me nothing? I am quite willing to pay.—Sleep, my pet, so—is that better?—I do not propose to defraud—hush, baby darling, hush—Richard's son of any part of his inheritance. Tell Chifney to name a price for the Clown, an outside price. He shall have a cheque to-morrow, which he is to enter with the rest of the stable accounts.—Now go, please. We understand each other clearly, and it is growing late.—Poor honey love, what vexes you?—You will shoot the Clown, here, before sunset. And, Roger, it must lie where it falls to-night. Let some of the men come early to-morrow, with a float. It is to go to the kennels."

Ormiston got up, shaking his shoulders as though to rid himself of some encumbering weight. He crossed to the fireplace and kicked the logs together.

"I don't half like it," he said. "I tell you I don't. It seems such a cold-blooded butchery. I can't tell if it's wrong or right. It seems merciless. And it is so unlike you, Kitty, to be merciless."

He turned to her as he spoke, and Katherine—her head erect, her eyes full of the sombre fire of her profound alienation and revolt—drew her hand slowly down over the fine lawn and lace of the baby's long white robe, and held it flat against the soles of the child's hidden feet.

"Look at this," she said. "Remember, too, that the delight of my life has gone from me, and that I am young yet. The years will be many—and Richard is dead. Has much mercy been shown to me, do you think?"

And the young man seeing her, knowing the absolute sincerity of her speech, felt a lump rise in his throat. After all, when you have acted hangman to your own sister, as he reasoned, it is but a small matter to act slaughterman to a horse.

"Very well," he answered, huskily enough. "It shall be as you wish, Kitty. Only go back to the sofa, and stay there, please. If I think you are watching, I can't be quite sure of myself. Something may go wrong, and we don't want a scene which will make talk. This is a business which should be got through as quickly and decently as possible."

The sun was but five minutes high, and no longer brightened the southern house front, though it spread a ruddy splendour over the western range of gables, and lingered about the stacks of slender twisted chimneys, and cast long slanting shadows across the lawns and carriage drives, before Lady Calmady's waiting drew to a close. From the near trees of the elm avenue, and from the wood overhanging the pond below the terraced kitchen gardens, came the singing of blackbirds and thrushes—whether raised as evening hymn in praise of their Creator, or as love-song each to his mate, who shall say? Possibly as both, since in simple minds—and that assuredly is matter for thankfulness—earthly and heavenly affections are bounded by no harsh dividing line. The chorus of song found its way in at the windows of Katherine's room—fresh as the spring flowers which filled it, innocent of hatred and wrong as the face of the now placid baby, his soft cheeks flushed with slumber, as he nestled in against his mother's bosom.

Indeed a long time had passed. Twice Denny had looked in and, seeing that quiet reigned, had noiselessly withdrawn. For Katherine, still physically weak, drained, moreover, by the greatness of her recent emotion, her senses lulled to rest by the warm contact and even breathing of the child, had sunk away into a dreamless sleep.

The questioning neigh of a stallion, a scuffle of horse hoofs, footsteps approaching round the corner of the house, passing across the broad graveled carriage sweep and on to the turf, aroused her. And these sounds were so natural, full of vigorous outdoor life and the wholesome gladness of it, that for a moment she came near repentance of her purpose. But then feeling, as he rested on her arm, her baby's shortened, malformed limbs, and thinking of her well-beloved dying, maimed and spent, in the fulness of his manhood, her face took on that ashen pallor again and all relenting left her. There was a satisfaction of wild justice in the act about to be consummated. And Katherine raised herself from the pink brocade cushions, and sat erect, her lips parted in stern excitement, her forehead contracted in the effort to hear, her eyes fixed on the wide, carven, ebony bed and its embroidered hangings. The poor Hart had, indeed, ceased to pasture in reposeful security before the quaint pavilion, set—for its passing refreshment—in the midst of the Forest of This Life. Now it fled, desperate, by crooked tangled ways, over rocks, through briars, while Care, the Leopard, followed hard behind.

First Roger Ormiston's voice reached her in brief direction, and the trainer's in equally brief reply. The horse neighed again—a sound strident and virile, the challenge of a creature of perfect muscle, hot desire, and proud, quick-coursing blood. Afterwards, an instant's pause, and Chifney's voice again,—"So-ho—my beauty—take it easy—steady there, steady, good lad," and the slap of his open hand on the horse's shoulder straightening it carefully into place. While behind and below all this, in sweet incongruous undertone of uncontrollable joy, arose the carolling of the blackbirds and thrushes praising, according to their humble powers, God, life, and love.

Finally, as climax of the drama, the sharp report of a pistol, ringing out in shattering disturbance of the peace of the fair spring evening, followed by a dead silence, the birds all scared and dumb—a silence so dead, that Katherine Calmady held her breath, almost awed by it, while the hissing and crackling of the little flames upon the hearth seemed to obtrude as an indecent clamour. This lasted a few seconds. Then the noise of a plunging struggle and the muffled thud of something falling heavily upon the turf.—

Dr. Knott had been up all night, but his patient, Lord Denier's second coachman, would pull through right enough; so he started on his homeward journey in a complacent frame of mind. He reckoned it would save him a couple of miles, let alone the long hill from Farley Row up to Spendle Flats, if on his way back from Grimshott he went by Brockhurst House. It is stretching a point, he admitted, to drive under even your neighbour's back windows at five o'clock in the morning. But the doctor being himself in an unusually amiable attitude, was inclined to accredit others with a like share of good temper. Moreover, the natural man in him cried increasingly loudly for food and bed.

John Knott was not given to sentimental rhapsodies over the beauties of nature. Like other beauties she had her dirty enough moods, he thought. Still, in his own half-snarling fashion, he dearly loved this forest country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any movement of bird or beast. With the collar of his long drab driving-coat turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high, swinging gig, with Timothy, the weazel-faced, old groom by his side, while the drama of the opening day unfolded itself before his somewhat critical gaze. He noted that it would be fine, though windy. In the valley, over the Long Water, spread beds of close, white mist. The blue of the upper sky was crossed by curved windows of flaky, opalescent cloud. In the east, above the dusky rim of the fir woods on the edge of the high-lying tableland, stretched a blinding blaze of rose-saffron, shading through amber into pale primrose colour above. The massive house front, and the walls fencing the three sides of the square enclosure before it, with the sexagonal, pepper-pot summer-houses at either corner, looked pale and unsubstantial in that diffused, unearthly light. At the head of the elm avenue, passing through the high, wrought-iron gates and along the carriage drive which skirts the said enclosure,—the great, square grass plot on the right hand, the red wall of the kitchen gardens on the left,—Dr. Knott had the reins nearly jerked out of his hand. The mare started and swerved, grazing the off wheel against the brickwork, and stopped, her head in the air, her ears pricked, her nostrils dilated showing the red.

"Hullo, old girl, what's up? Seen a ghost?" he said, drawing the whip quietly across the hollow of her back.

But the mare only braced herself more stiffly, refusing to move, while she trembled and broke into a sudden sweat. The doctor was interested and looked about him. He would first find the cause of her queer behaviour, and give her a good dressing down afterwards if she deserved it.

The smooth, slightly up-sloping lawn was powdered with innumerable dewdrops. In the centre of it, neck outstretched, the fine legs doubled awkwardly together, the hind quarters and barrel rising, as it lay on its side, in an unshapely lump, gray from the drenching dew, was a dead horse. Along the top of the further wall a smart and audacious party of jackdaws had stationed themselves, with much ruffling of gray, neck feathers impudent squeakings and chatter. While a pair of carrion crows hopped slowly and heavily about the carcass, flapping up with a stroke or two of their broad wings in sudden suspicion, then settling down again nearer than before.

"Go to her head, Timothy, and get her by as quietly as you can. I'll be after you in a minute, but I'm bound to see what the dickens they've been up to here."

As he spoke Dr. Knott hitched himself down from off the gig. He was cramped with sitting, and moved forward awkwardly, his footsteps leaving a track of dark irregular patches upon the damp grass. As he approached, the jackdaws flung themselves gleefully upward from the wall, the sun glinting on their glossy plumage as they circled and sailed away across the park. But the crow who had just begun work in earnest, stood his ground, notwithstanding the warning croak of his more timid mate. He grasped the horse's skull with his claws, and tore away greedily at the fine skin about the eye-socket with his strong, black beak.

"How's this, my fine gentleman, in too much of a hurry this morning to wait for the flavour to get into your meat?" John Knott said, as the bird rose sullenly at last. "Got a small hungry family at home, I suppose, crying 'give, give.' Well, that's taught better men than you, before now, not to be too nice, but to snatch at pretty well anything they can get."

He came close and stood looking meditatively down at the dead race-horse—recognised its long, white-reach face, the colour and make of it, while his loose lips worked with a contemptuous yet pitying smile.

"So that's the way my lady's taken it, has she?" he said presently. "On the whole I don't know that I'm sorry. In some cases much benefit unquestionably is derivable from letting blood. This shows she doesn't mean to go under if I know her; and that's a mercy, for that poor little beggar, the baby's sake."

He turned and contemplated the stately facade of the house. The ranges of windows, blind with closed shutters and drawn curtains, in the early sunshine gave off their many panes a broad dazzle of white light.

"Poor little beggar," he repeated, "with his forty thousand a year and all the rest of it. Such a race to run and yet so badly handicapped!"

He stooped down, examined the horse, found the mark of the bullet.

"Contradictory beings, though, these dear women," he went on. "So fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to lay a finger on them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good for this old rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and they'll show an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of men should be more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than He bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the apple and the snake."

He moved away up the carriage drive, following Timothy, the sweating, straining mare, and swinging gig. The carrion crow flapped back, with a croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty valley, dewy grassland, far ranging hillside crowned with wood.

"The old story," he muttered, "always repeating itself. And it strikes one as rather a wasteful, clumsy contrivance, at times. Life forever feeding on death—death forever breeding life."

Thus ended the Clown, own brother to Touchstone, of merry name and mournful memory, paying the penalty of wholly involuntary transgressions. From which ending another era dated at Brockhurst, the most notable events of which it is the purpose of the ensuing pages duly to set forth.



BOOK II

THE BREAKING OF DREAMS



CHAPTER I

RECORDING SOME ASPECTS OF A SMALL PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb. Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities, material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the loss or defect of one participant must—indirectly, no doubt, yet very surely—make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the lot fell otherwise. And—always admitting the harshness of the limitations he had imposed on himself—the martyrdom of those he held dearest, did, in fact, work to secure him a measure of content that had otherwise been unattainable. The twelve years following the birth of Lady Calmady's child were the most fruitful of his life. He filled a post no other person could have filled; one which, while satisfying his religious sense and priestly ideal of detachment, appeased the cravings of his heart and developed the practical man in him. The contemplative and introspective attitude was balanced by an active and objective one. For he continued to live under his dear lady's roof, seeing her daily and serving her in many matters. He watched her, admiring her clear yet charitable judgment and her prudence in business. He bowed in reverence before her perfect singleness of purpose. He was almost appalled, apprehending, now and then, the secret abysses of her womanhood, the immensity of her self-devotion, the swing of her nature from quick, sensitive shrinking to almost impious pride. Man is the outcome of the eternal common sense; woman that of some moment of divine folly. Meanwhile the ways of true love are many; and Julius March, thus watching his dear lady, discovered, as other elect souls have discovered before him, that the way of chastity and silence, notwithstanding its very constant heartache, is by no means among the least sweet. The entries in his diaries of this period are intermittent, concise, and brief—naturally enough, since the central figure of Julius's mental picture had ceased, happily for him, to be himself.

And not only Katherine's sorrows, but the unselfish action of another woman went to make Julius March's position at Brockhurst tenable. A few days after Ormiston's momentous interview with his sister, news came of Mrs. St. Quentin's death. She had passed hence peacefully in her sleep. Knowledge of the facts of poor, little Dickie Calmady's ill-fortune had been spared her. For it would be more satisfactory—so Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had remarked, not without a shade of irony—that if Lucia St. Quentin must learn the sad fact at all, she should do so where le bon Dieu Himself would be at hand to explain matters, and so, in a degree, set them right.

Early in April Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had gathered together her most precious possessions and closed the pretty apartment in the rue de Rennes. It had been a happy halting-place on the journey of life. It was haunted by well-beloved ghosts. It cost not a little to bid it, the neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Pres, where she had so long worshipped, and her little coterie of intimate friends, farewell. Yet she set forth, taking with her Henriette, the hard-featured, old, Breton maid, and Monsieur Pouf, the gray, Persian cat,—he protesting plaintively from within a large Manilla basket,—and thus accompanied, made pilgrimage to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of her girlhood assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken down for once, and, laying her beautiful head on the elder woman's shoulder, had sobbed out a question as to when this visit must end, Marie de Mirancourt had answered—

"That, most dear one, is precisely as you shall see fit to decide. It need not end till I myself end, if you so please."

And when Katherine, greatly comforted yet fearing to be over-greedy of comfort, had reasoned with her, reminding her of the difference of climate, the different habits of living in that gay, little Paris home and this great English country house; reminding her, further, of her so often and fondly expressed desire to retire from the world while yet in the complete possession of her powers and prepare for the inevitable close within the calm and sacred precincts of the convent—the other replied almost gaily—

"Ah, my child! I have still a naughty little spirit of experiment in me which defiles the barbarities of your climate. While as to the convent, it has beckoned so long—let it beckon still! It called first when my fiance died,—God rest his soul,—worn out by the hardships he endured in the war of La Vendee and I put from me forever all thought of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being. But then there were my brother's sons—orphaned by the guillotine—to place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you—whom I receive from her as a welcome legacy—to remain just so long as I am not a burden to you. Second childhood and first should understand one another. We will play delightful games together, the dear baby and I. So let the convent beckon. For the convent is perhaps, after all, but an impatient grasping at the rest of paradise, before that rest is fairly earned. I have a good hope that, after all, we give ourselves most acceptably to God in thus giving ourselves to His human creatures."

Thus did Marie de Mirancourt, for love's sake, condemn herself to exile, thereby rendering possible—among other things—Julius's continued residence at Brockhurst. For Captain Ormiston had held true to his resolve of scorning the delights of idleness, the smiles of ladies more kind than wise, and all those other pleasant iniquities to which idleness inclines the young and full-blooded, of bidding farewell to London and Windsor, and proceeding to "live laborious days" in some far country. He had offered to remain indefinitely with Katherine if she needed him. But she refused. Let him be faithful to the noble profession of arms and make a name for himself therein.

"Brockhurst has ceased to be a place for a soldier," she said. "Leave it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of the bitterness of her speech, she added:—"Really there is not more work than I can manage, with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a good servant if a little tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the stables."—Lady Calmady paused, and her face grew hard. But for her husband's dying request, she would have sold every horse in the stud, razed the great square of buildings to the ground and made the site of it a dunghill. "Work is a drug to deaden thought. So it is a kindness to let me have plenty of it, dear old man. And I fear, even when the labour of each day is done, and Dickie is safe asleep,—poor darling,—I shall still have more than enough of time for thought, for asking those questions to which there seems no answer, and for desires, vain as they are persistent, that things were somehow, anyhow, other than they are!"

Therefore it came about that a singular quiet settled down on Brockhurst—a quiet of waiting, of pause, rather than of accomplishment. But Julius March, for reasons aforesaid, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, in virtue of her unclouded faith in the teachings of her Church,—which assures its members of the beneficent purpose working behind all the sad seeming of this world,—alike rejoiced in that. A change of occupations and of interests came naturally with the change of the seasons, with the time to sow and reap, to plant saplings, to fell timber, to fence, to cut copsing, to build or rebuild, to receive rents or remit them, to listen to many appeals, to readjust differences, to feed game or to shoot it, to bestow charity of meat and fuel, to haul ice in winter to the ice-house from the lake. But beyond all this there was little going or coming at Brockhurst. The magnates of the countryside called at decent intervals, and at decent intervals Lady Calmady returned their civilities. But having ceased to entertain, she refused to receive entertainment. She shut herself away in somewhat jealous seclusion, defiant of possibly curious glances and pitying tongues. Before long her neighbours, therefore, came to raise their eyebrows a little in speaking of her, and to utter discreet regrets that Lady Calmady, though handsome and charming when you saw her, was so very eccentric, adding—"Of course every one knows there is something very uncomfortable about the little boy!" Then would follow confidences as to the disastrous results of popish influences and Romanising tendencies; and an openly expressed conviction—more especially on the part of ladies blessed with daughters of marriageable age—that it would have been so very much better for many people if the late Sir Richard Calmady had looked nearer home for a bride.

But these comments did not affect Katherine. In point of fact they rarely reached her ears. Alone among her neighbours, Mary Cathcart, of the crisp, black hair and gipsy-like complexion, was still admitted to some intimacy of intercourse. And the girl was far too loyal either to bring in gossip or to carry it out. Brockhurst held the romance of her heart. And, notwithstanding the earnest wooing—as the years went on—of more than one very eligible gentleman, Brockhurst continued to hold it.

Meanwhile the somewhat quaint fixed star around which this whole system of planets, large and small, very really revolved, shone forth upon them all with a cheerful enough light. For Dickie by no means belied the promise of his babyhood. He was a beautiful and healthy little boy, with a charming brilliance of colouring, warm and solid in tone. He had his mother's changeful eyes, though the blue of them was brighter than hers had now come to be. He had her dark eyebrows and eyelashes too, and her finely curved lips. While he bore likeness to his father in the straight, square-tipped nose and the close-fitting cap of bright, brown hair with golden stains in it, growing low in short curling locks on the broad forehead and the nape of the neck—expressing the shape of the head very definitely, and giving it something of antique nobility and grace.

And the little lad's appearance afforded, in these pleasant early days at all events, fair index to his temperament. He was gay-natured, affectionate, intelligent, full of a lively yet courteous curiosity, easily moved to laughter, almost inconveniently fearless and experimental; while his occasional thunderbursts of passion cleared off quickly into sunshine and blue sky again. For as yet the burden of deformity rested upon him very lightly. He associated hardly at all with other children, and had but scant occasion to measure his poor powers of locomotion against their normal ones. Lady Fallowfeild it is true, in obedience to suggestions on the part of her kindly lord and master, offered tentatively to import a carriage load—little Ludovic Quayle was just the same age as Dickie—from the Whitney nurseries to spend the day.

"Good fellow, Calmady. I liked Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild had said to her. His conversation, it may be observed, was nothing if not interjectional. "Pretty woman, Lady Calmady—-terrible thing for her being left as she is. Always shall regret Calmady. Very sorry for her. Always have been sorry for a pretty woman in trouble. Ought to see something of her, my dear. The two estates join, and, as I always have said, it's a duty to support your own class. Can't expect the masses to respect you unless you show them you're prepared to stand by your own class. Just take some of the children over to see Lady Calmady. Pretty children, do her good to see them. Rode uncommonly straight did Calmady. Terribly upsetting thing his funeral. Never shall forget it. Always did like Calmady—good fellow, Calmady. Nasty thing his death."

But Katherine's pen was fertile in excuses to avoid the invasion from Whitney. Lady Fallowfeild's small brains and large domestic complacency were too trying to her. And that noble lady, it must be owned, was secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her simple mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the Roman Church. Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently converted into little monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden conversion could be accomplished Lady Fallowfeild did not presume to explain. It sufficed her that "everybody always said Papists were so dreadfully clever and unscrupulous you never could tell what they might not do next."

Once, when Dickie was about six years old, Colonel St. Quentin brought his young wife and two little girls to stay at Brockhurst. Katherine had a great regard for her cousin, yet the visit was never repeated. On the flat poor Dick could manage fairly well, his strangely shod feet traveling laboriously along in effort after rapidity; his hands hastily outstretched now and again to lay hold of door-jamb or table-edge, since his balance was none of the securest. But in that delightfully varied journey from the nursery, by way of his mother's bed-room, the Chapel-Room next door, the broad stair-head,—with its carven balusters, shiny oak flooring, and fine landscapes by Claude and Hobbema,—the state drawing-room and libraries, to that America of his childish dreams, that country of magnificent distances and large possibility of discovery, the Long Gallery, he was speedily distanced by the three-year-old Betty, let alone her six-year-old sister Honoria, a tall, slim, little maiden, daintily high-bred of face and fleet of foot as a hind. This was bad enough. But the stairways afforded yet more afflicting experiences—the descent of even the widest and shallowest flights presented matter of insuperable difficulty; while the ascent was only to be achieved by recourse to all-fours, against the ignominy of which mode of progression Dickie's soul revolted. And so the little boy concluded that he did not care much about little girls; and confided to his devoted play-fellow Clara—Mrs. Denny's niece and sometime second still-room maid, now promoted, on account of her many engaging qualities, to be Dickie's special attendant—that:—

"They went so quick, they always left him behind, and it was not nice to be left behind, and it was very rude of them to do it; didn't Clara think so?"

And Clara, as in duty and affection bound, not without additional testimony in a certain dimness of her pretty, honest, brown eyes, did indeed very much think so. It followed, therefore, that Dickie saw the St. Quentin family drive away, nurses and luggage complete, quite unmoved. And returned with satisfaction and renewed self-confidence to the exclusive society of all those dear grown-up people—gentle and simple—who were never guilty of leaving him behind; to that of Camp, the old, white bulldog, and young Camp, his son and heir, who, if they so far forgot themselves as to run away, invariably ran back again and apologised, fawning upon him and pushing their broad, ugly, kindly muzzles into his hands; and to that of Monsieur Pouf, the gray Persian cat, who, far from going too quickly, displayed such majestic deliberation of movement and admirable dignity of waving fluffed tail, that it required much patient coaxing on Dickie's part ever to make him leave his cushion by the fire and go at all.

But, with the above-mentioned exception, the little boy's self-content suffered but slight disturbance. He took himself very much for granted. He was very curious of outside things, very much amused. Moreover, he was king of a far from contemptible kingdom; and in the blessed ignorance of childhood—that finds pride and honour in things which a wider and sadder knowledge often proves far from glad or glorious—it appeared to him not unnatural that a king should differ, even to the point of some slightly impeding disabilities, from the rank and file of his obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was as yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea. The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for him, was not just yet.

And Richard's continued and undismayed acquiescence in his physical misfortune was fostered, indirectly, by the captivating poetry of myth and legend with which his mind was fed. He had an insatiable appetite for stories, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt was an untiring raconteuse. On Sunday afternoons upon the terrace, when the park lay bathed in drowsy sunshine and sapphire shadows haunted the under edge of the great woods, the pretty old lady—her eyes shining with gentle laughter, for Marie de Mirancourt's faith had reached the very perfect stage in which the soul dares play, even as lovers play, with that it holds most sacred—would tell Dickie—the fairy tales of her Church. Would tell him of blessed St. Francis and of Poverty, his sweet, sad bride; of his sermon to the birds dwelling in the oak groves along Tiber valley; of the mystic stigmata, marking as with nail prints his hands and feet, and of that indomitable love towards all creatures, which found alike in the sun in heaven and the heavy-laden ass, brothers and friends. Or she would tell him of that man of mighty strength and stature, St. Christopher, who, in the stormy darkness,—yielding to its reiterated entreaties,—set forth to bear the little child across the wind-swept ford. How he staggered in midstream, amazed and terrified under the awful weight of that, apparently so light, burden; to learn, on struggling ashore at last, that he had borne upon his shoulder no mortal infant, but the whole world and the eternal maker of it, Christ Himself.

These and many another wonder tale of Christian miracle did she tell to Dickie—he squatting on a rug beside her, resting his curly head against her knees, while the pink-footed pigeons hurried hither and thither, picking up the handfuls of barley he scattered on the flags, and the peacocks sunned themselves with a certain worldly and disdainful grace on the hand-rails of the gray balustrades, and young Camp, after some wild skirmish in search of sport, flung himself down panting, his tongue lolling out of his grinning jaws, by the boy's side.

And Katherine, putting aside her cares as regent of Dickie's kingdom and the sorrow that lay so chill against her heart, would tell him stories too, but of a different order of sentiment and of thought. For Katherine was young yet, and her stories were gallant—since her own spirit was very brave—or merry, because it delighted her to hear the boy laugh. And often, as he grew a little older, she would sit with her arm round him, in the keen, winter twilights before the lamps were lit, on the broad cushioned bench of the oriel window in the Chapel-Room. Outside, the stars grew in number and brightness as the dusk deepened. Within, the firelight played over the white-paneled walls, revealing fitfully the handsome faces of former Calmadys—short-lived, passing hence all unsated with the desperate joys of living—painted by Vandyke and Sir Peter Lely, or by Romney and Sir Joshua. Then she would tell him not only of Aladdin, of Cinderella, and time-honoured Puss-in-Boots, but of Merlin the great enchanter, and of King Arthur and his company of noble knights. And of the loves of Sigurd the Niblung and Brunhilda the wise and terrible queen, and of their lifelong sorrow, and of the fateful treasure of fairy gold which lies buried beneath the rushing waters of the Rhine. Or she would tell him of those cold, clear, far-off times in the northern sojourning places of our race—tell him of the cow Audhumla, alone in the vast plain at the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted over with hoar frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from them a warrior named Bur, the father of Boer, the father of Odin, who is the father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his three evil children—here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not, always feel his mother hold him more closely, while her voice took a deeper tone—Fenrir the wolf, who, when Thor sought to bind him, bit off the brave god's right hand; and Joermungand the Midgard serpent, who, tail in mouth, circles the world; and Hela, the pale queen, who reigns in Niflheim over the dim kingdoms of the dead. And of Baldur the bright shining god, joy of Asgard, slain in error by Hoeder his blind twin-brother; for whom all things on earth—save one—weep, and will weep, till in the last days he comes again. And of All-Father Odin himself, plucking out his right eye and bartering it for a draught of wisdom-giving water from Mirmir's magic well. Again, she would tell him of the End—which it must be owned frightened Dickie a little, so that he would stroke her cheek, and say softly, "But, mummy, you really are sure, aren't you, it won't happen for a good while yet?"—Of Ragnaroek, the Twilight of the Gods; of the Fimbul winter, and cheerless sun and hurrying, blood-red moon, and all the direful signs which must needs go before the last great battle between good and evil.

And through all of these stories, of Christian and heathen origin alike, Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent as a strain of austere music, the idea—very common to ages less soft and fastidious than our own—of payment in self-restraint and labour, or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained and knowledge won.

He found the same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March, he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick was a very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the matter—a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a pedant, even in matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the mingled charm and pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell. With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability, Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.

And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and more authentic history—in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and, as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.

The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies, instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it, returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly creatures—to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea in its wild, pale eyes.

It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of humour, realism, and the supernatural. From thenceforth for some weeks—though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the origin of these grisly imaginative freaks—many margins were adorned, or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.

So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really worth having—namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and courage to possess.

The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It came in time-honoured forms—those of horses and of a woman.



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY THINGS—HIMSELF INCLUDED

It came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at Brockhurst, after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction in the Sikh war; and had seen fighting on a grand scale in the battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return of the mighty Ulysses himself.

For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. The boy was sweet-tempered enough, had his hours, indeed, of overflowing fun and high spirits. Still he was restless and tired easily of each occupation in turn. He developed a disquieting relish for solitude; and took to camping-out on one of the broad window-seats of the Long Gallery, in company with volumes of Captain Cook's and Hakluyt's voyages, old-time histories of sport and natural history; not to mention Robinson Crusoe and the merry but doubtfully decent pages of Geoffrey Gambado. And his mother noted, not without a sinking of the heart, that the window-seat, which in his solitary moods Dickie most frequented, was precisely that one of the eastern bay which commanded—beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the troco-ground—a good view of the grass ride, running parallel with the lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing stables were taken out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground. Then fears began to assail Katherine that the boy's childhood, the content and repose of it, were nearly past. Small wonder that her heart should sink!

On the day of her brother's return, Katherine, after rather anxious search, so found Richard. He was standing on the book-strewn window-seat. He had pushed open the tall narrow casement and leaned out. The April afternoon was fitfully bright. A rainbow spanned the landscape, from the Long Water in the valley to the edge of the forest crowning the table-land. Here and there showers of rain fell, showing white against huge masses of purple cloud piled up along the horizon.

And as Katherine drew near, threading her way carefully between the Chinese cabinets, oriental jars, and many quaint treasures furnishing the end of the great room, she saw that, along the grass ride, some twenty race-horses, came streeling homeward in single file—a long line of brown, chestnut, black, and of the raw yellows and scarlets of horse-clothing against the delicate green of springing turf and opening leaves. Beside them, clad in pepper-and-salt mixture, breeches and gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his handsome gray cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished a fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled shrilly a few bars of that then popular but undistinguished tune, "Pop goes the weazel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of his mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered in at the open casement.

"Dickie, Dickie," Katherine called, in swift anxiety. "Be careful. You will fall."

She came close, putting her arm round him. "You reckless darling," she went on; "don't you see how dangerous the least slip would be?"

The boy straightened himself and looked round at her. His blue eyes were alight. All the fitful brightness, all the wistful charm of the April evening was in his face.

"But it's the only place where I can see them, and they're such beauties," he said. "And I want to see them so much. You know we always miss them somehow, mummy, when we go out."

Katherine was off her guard. Three separate strains of feeling influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change in Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make for difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural excitement of her brother's homecoming, disturbing the monotony of her daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past, well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling incontinently out of the window. And so, being moved, she held the boy tightly and answered rather at random, thereby provoking fate.

"Yes, my dearest, I know we always miss them somehow when we go out. It is best so. But do pray be more careful with these high windows."

"Oh! I'm all right—I'm careful enough." His glance had gone back to where the last of the horses passed out of sight behind the red wall of the gardens. "But why is it best so? Ah! they're gone!" he exclaimed.

Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and Richard, clinging on to the window-ledge, while she still held him, lowered himself into a sitting position beside her.

"Thank you, mummy," he said. And the words cut her. They came so often in each day, and always with the same little touch of civil dignity. The courtesy of Richard's recognition of help given, failed to comfort her for the fact that help was so constantly required. Lady Calmady's sense of rebellion arose and waxed strong whenever she heard those thanks.

"Mother," he went on, "I want to ask you something. You won't mind?"

"Do I ever mind you questioning me?" Yet she felt a certain tightening about her heart.

"Ah, but this is different! I've wanted to for a long while, but I did not know if I ought—and yet I did not quite like to ask Auntie Marie or Julius. And, of course, one doesn't speak to the servants about anything of that sort."

Richard's curly head went up with a fine, little air of pride as he said the last few words. His mother smiled at him. There was no doubt as to her son's breeding.

"Well, what then?" she said.

"I want to know—you're sure you don't mind—why you dislike the horses, and never go to the stables or take me there? If the horses are wrong, why do we keep them? And if they're not wrong, why, mother, don't you see, we may enjoy them, mayn't we?"

He flushed, looking up at her, spoke coaxingly, merrily, a trifle embarrassed by his own temerity, yet keen to prove his point and acquire possession of this so coveted joy.

Katherine hesitated. She was tempted to put aside his question with some playful excuse. And yet, where was the use? The question must inevitably be answered one day; and Katherine, as had been said, was moved just now, dumbness of long habit somewhat melted. Perhaps this was the appointed time. She drew her arm from around the boy and took both his hands in hers.

"My dearest," she said, "our keeping the horses is not wrong. But—one of the horses killed your father."

Richard's lips parted. His eyes searched hers.

"But how?" he asked presently.

"He was trying it at a fence, and it came down with him—and trampled him."

There was a pause. At last the boy asked rather breathlessly: "Was he killed then, mother, at once?"

It had been Katharine's intention to state the facts simply, gravely, and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that refused to be gain-said.

"No," she answered, "he lived four days. He spoke to me of many things he wished to do. And—I have done them all, I think. He spoke to me of you——" Katherine closed her eyes. "The boy might care for the stables. The boy must ride straight." For the moment she could not look at Richard, knowing that which she must see. The irony of those remembered words appeared too great.—"But he suffered," she went on brokenly, "he suffered—ah! my dear——"

"Mummy, darling mummy, don't look like that!" Dickie cried. He wrenched his hands from her grasp and threw his arms impulsively about her neck. "Don't—it hurts me. And—and, after all," he added, reasoningly, consolingly, "it wasn't one of these horses, you know. They've never done anybody any harm. It was an accident. There must always be accidents sometimes, mustn't there? And then, you see, it all happened long, long ago. It must have, for I don't remember anything about it. It must have happened when I was a baby."

"Alas, no," Katherine exclaimed, wrung by the pathos of his innocent egoism; "it happened even before then, my dearest, before you were born."

With the unconscious arrogance of childhood, Richard had, so far, taken his mother's devotion very much as a matter of course. He had never doubted that he was, and always had been, the inevitable centre of all her interests. So now, her words and her bearing, bringing—in as far as he grasped them—the revelation of aspects of her life quite independent of his all-important, little self, staggered him. For the first time poor Dickie realised that even one's own mother, be she never so devoted, is not her child's exclusive and wholly private property, but has a separate existence, joys and sorrows apart. Instinctively he took his arms from about her neck and backed away into the angle of the window-seat, regarding her with serious and somewhat startled attention. And, doing so, he for the first time realised consciously something more, namely, the greatness of her beauty.

For the years had dealt kindly with Katherine Calmady. Not the great sorrows of life, or its great sacrifices, but fretfulness, ignoble worries, sordid cares, are that which draw lines upon a woman's face and harshen her features. At six and thirty Lady Calmady's skin was smooth and delicate, her colour, still clear and softly bright. Her hair, though somewhat darker than of old, was abundant. Still she wore it rolled up and back from her forehead, showing the perfect oval of her face. Her eyes, too, were darker; and the expression of them had become profound—the eyes of one who has looked on things which may not be told and has chosen her part. Her bosom had become a little fuller; but the long, inward curve of her figure below it to the round and shapely waist, and the poise of her rather small hips, was lithe and free as ever. While there was that enchanting freshness about her which is more than the mere freshness of youth or of physical health—which would seem, indeed, to be the peculiar dowry of those women who, having once known love in all its completeness and its strength, of choice live ever afterwards in perfect chastity of act and thought.

And a perception not only of the grace of her person, as she sat sideways on the window-seat in her close-fitting, gray gown, with its frilled lace collar and ruffles at the wrists, came to Richard now. He perceived something of this more intimate and subtle charm which belonged to her. He was enthralled by the clear sweetness, as of dewy grass newly turned by the scythe, which always clung about her, and by the whispering of her silken garments when she moved. A sudden reverence for her came upon him, as though, behind her gracious and so familiar figure, he apprehended that which belonged to a region superior, almost divine. And then he was seized—it is too often the fate of worshippers—with jealousy of that past of hers of which he had been, until now, ignorant. And yet another emotion shook him, for, in thus realising and differentiating her personality, he had grown vividly, almost painfully, conscious of his own.

He turned away, laying his cheek against the stone window-ledge, while the drops of a passing scud of rain beat in on his hot face.

"Then—then my father never saw me," he exclaimed vehemently. And, after a moment's pause, added, "I am glad of that—very glad."

"Ah! But, my dearest," Lady Calmady cried, bewildered and aghast, "you don't know what you are saying—think."

Richard kept his face to the splashing rain.

"I don't want to say anything wrong; but," he repeated, "I am glad."

He turned to her, his lips quivering a little, and a desolate expression in his eyes, which told Katherine, with only too bitter assurance, that his childhood and the repose of it were indeed over and gone.

She held out her arms to him in silent invitation, and drew the dear curly head on to her bosom.

"You're not displeased with me, mummy?"

"Does this seem as if I was displeased?" she asked.

Then they sat silent once more, Katherine swaying a little as she held him, soothing him almost as in his baby days.

"I won't lean out of the window again," he said presently, with a sigh of comfort. "I promise that."

"There's a darling. But I am afraid we must go. Uncle Roger will be here soon."

The boy raised his head.

"Mother," he said quickly, "will you send Clara, please, to put away these books? And may I have Winter to fetch me? I—I'm tired. If you don't mind? I don't care to walk."

Yet, since happily at thirteen Richard's moods were still as many and changeful as the aspects of that same April day, he enjoyed some royally unclouded hours before he—most unwillingly—retired to bed that night. For on close acquaintance the great Ulysses proved a very satisfactory hero. Roger Ormiston's character had consolidated. It was to some purpose that he had put away the pleasant follies of his youth. He looked out now with a coolness and patience, born of wide experience, upon men and upon affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or his head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an active—though far from morbidly sentimental—compassion for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher—for which those who have lived with philosophers of the eloquent sort will unquestionably give thanks, knowing, to their sorrow, how often handsome speech is but a cloak to hide incapacity of honest doing.

And so, after dinner, under plea of an imperative need of cigars, Ormiston had borne Dickie off to the Gun-Room; and there, in the intervals of questioning him a little about his tastes and occupations, had told him stories many and great. For he wanted to get hold of the boy and judge of what stuff he was made. Like all sound and healthy-minded men he had an inherent suspicion of the abnormal. He could not but fear that persons unusually constituted in body must be the victims of some corresponding crookedness of spirit. But as the evening drew on he became easy on this point. Whatever Richard's physical infirmity, his nature was wholesome enough. Therefore when, at close upon ten o'clock, Lady Calmady arrived in person to insist that Dickie must go, there and then, straight to bed, she found a pleasant scene awaiting her.

The square room was gay with lamplight and firelight, which brought into strong relief the pictures of famous horses and trophies of old-time weapons—matchlocks, basket-handled swords, and neat silver-hilted rapiers, prettiest of toys with which to pink your man—that decorated its white-paneled walls.

Ormiston stood with his back to the fire, one heel on the fender, his broad shoulders resting against the high chimneypiece, his head bent forward as he looked down, in steady yet kindly scrutiny, at the boy. His face was tanned by the sun and wind of the long sea voyage—people still came home from India by the Cape—till his hair and moustache showed pale against his bronzed skin. And to Richard, listening and watching from the deep armchair drawn up at right angles to the hearth, he appeared as a veritable demigod, master of the secrets of life and death—beheld, moreover, through an atmosphere of fragrant tobacco smoke, curiously intoxicating to unaccustomed nostrils. Dickie had tucked himself into as small a space as possible, to make room for young Camp, who lay outstretched beside him. The bull-dog's great underhung jaw and pendulous, wrinkled cheeks rested on the arm of the chair, as he stared and blinked rather sullenly at the fire—moved and choked a little, slipping off unwillingly to sleep, to wake with a start, to stare and blink once more. The embroidered couvre-pieds, which Dickie had spread across him, gathering the top edge of it up under the front of his Eton jacket, offered luxurious bedding. But Camp was a typical conservative, slow-witted, stubborn against the ingress of a new idea. This tall, somewhat masterful stranger must prove himself a good man and true—according to bull-dog understanding of those terms—before he could hope to gain entrance to that faithful, though narrow heart.

Ormiston meanwhile, finely contemptuous of canine criticism, greeted his sister cheerily.

"You're bound to give us a little law to-night, Kitty," he said, holding out his hand to her. "We won't break rules and indulge in unbridled license as to late hours again, will we, Dick? But, you see, we've both been doing a good deal, one way and another, since we last met, and there were arrears of conversation to make up."—He smiled very charmingly at Lady Calmady, and his fingers closed firmly on her hand.—"We've been getting on famously, notwithstanding our long separation." He looked down at Richard again. "Fast friends, already, and mean to remain so, don't we, old chap?"

Thereupon Lady Calmady's soul received much comfort. Her pride was always on the alert, fiercely sensitive concerning Richard. And the joy of this meeting had, till now, an edge of jealous anxiety to it. If Roger did not take to the boy, then—deeply though she loved him—Roger must go. For the same elements were constant in Katherine Calmady. Not all the discipline of thirteen years had tamed the hot blood in her which made her order out the Clown for execution. But as Ormiston spoke, her face softened, her eyes grew luminous and smiled back at him with an exquisite gladness. The soft gloom of her black velvet dress emphasised the warm, golden whiteness of her bare shoulders and arms. Ormiston seeing her just then, understanding something of the drama of her thought, was moved from his habitual cool indifference of bearing.

"Katherine," he said, "do you know you take one rather by surprise. Upon my word you're more beautiful than ever."

And Richard's clear voice rang out eagerly from the depths of the big chair—

"Yes—yes—isn't she, Uncle Roger—isn't she—delicious?"

The man's smile broadened almost to laughter.

"You young monkey," he said very gently; "so you have discovered that fact already, have you? Well, so much the better. It's a safe basis to start from; don't you think so, Kitty?"

But Lady Calmady drew away her hand. The blood had rushed into her face and neck. Her beauty, now, for so long, had seemed a negligible quantity, a thing that had outlasted its need and use—since he who had so rejoiced in it was dead. What is the value of ever so royal a crown when the throne it represents has fallen to ruin? And yet, being very much a woman, those words of praise came altogether sweetly to Katherine from the lips of her brother and her son. She moved away, embarrassed, not quite mistress of herself, sat down on the arm of Richard's chair, leaned across him and patted the bull-dog—who raised his heavy head with a grunt, and slapped Dickie smartly in the stomach with his tail, by way of welcome.

"You dear foolish creatures," she said, "pray talk of something more profitable. I am growing old, and, in some ways, I am rather thankful for it. All the same, Dickie, darling, you positively must and shall go to bed."

But Colonel Ormiston interrupted her. He spoke with a trace of hesitation, turning to the fireplace and flicking the ash off the end of his cigar.

"By the bye, Katherine, how's Mary Cathcart? Have you seen her lately?"

"Yes, last week."

"Then she's not gone the way of all flesh and married?"

"No," Lady Calmady answered. She bent a little lower, tracing out the lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her finger. "Several men have asked her to marry. But there is only one man in the world, I fancy, whom Mary would ever care to marry—poor Camp, did I tickle you?—and he, I believe, has not asked her yet."

"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are mistaken."

"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I suppose she was too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of his love."

Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with excitement, for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles. He observed, moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for all its sunburn.

"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in question had better be quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to Mary Cathcart again."

Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and stood in front of Richard.

"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to our driving over to Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if I've forgotten any of the turns in the road, you know. And you and Miss Cathcart are great chums, aren't you?"

"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.

Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.

"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and Uncle Roger to take care of each other for once. You may go."

The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the day took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly to and fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool linen sheets and pillow.

For there was new element in Dickie's dreams to-night:—namely, a recurrent distress of helplessness and incapacity of movement, and therefore of escape, in the presence of some on-coming multitudinous terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a certain stanza of the ballad of Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar feeling, sickening yet fascinating, ever since he could remember first to have read it, a feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand, yet made him turn back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming and deadly courage that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as from out a background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse trees with large golden leaves—like those on the panels of the great, lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery—innumerable hordes of fanatic Chinamen poured down on him, a hideous bedizenment of vermilion war-devils painted on their blue tunics and banners and shields. And he, Richard,—or was it he, Witherington?—alone facing them all,—they countless in number, always changing yet always the same. From under their hard, upturned hats, a peacock feather erect in each, the cruel, oblique-eyed, impassive faces stared at him. They pressed him back and back against the base of a seven-storied pagoda, the wind bells of which jangled far above him from the angles of its tiers of fluted roofs. And the sky was black and polished. Yet it was broad, glaring daylight, every object fearfully distinct. And he was fixed there, unable to get away because—yes, of course, he was Witherington, so there was no need of further explanation of that inability of escape.

And still, at the same time, he could see Chifney on the handsome gray cob, trotting soberly along the green ride, beside the long string of race-horses coming home from exercise. The young leaves were fragile and green now, not sparse and metallic, and the April rain splashed in his face. He tried to call out to Tom Chifney, but the words died in his throat. If they would only put him on one of those horses! He knew he could ride, and so be safe and free. He called again. That time his voice came. They must hear. Were they not his own servants, after all, and his own horses—or would be soon, when he was grown up? But neither the trainer, nor the boys so much as turned their heads; and the living ribbon of brown and chestnut swept on and away out of sight. No one would heed him, no one would hearken to his cry.

Once his mother and some man, whom he knew yet did not know, passed by him hand in hand. She wore a white dress, and smiled with a look of ineffable content. Her companion was tall, gracious in bearing and movement, but unsubstantial, a luminous shadow merely. Richard could not see his face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of the Chevy Chase ballad. He was—he was the winged sea-gull, with wild, pale eyes, hiding—abject yet fierce—among the vegetable beds in the Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, and it crawled away among the cabbages ignominiously, covered with the shame of its incompleteness and its fallen estate.

And then from out the honey-combed rocks, under the black, polished sky, the blue tunicked Chinamen swept down on Richard again with the maddening horror of infinite number. They crushed in upon him, nearer and nearer, pressing him back against the wall of that evil pagoda. The air was hot and musky with their breath and thick with the muffled roar of their countless footsteps. And they came right in on him, trampling him down, suffocating, choking him with the heat of them and the dead weight.

Shouting aloud—as it seemed to him—in angry terror, the boy woke. He sat up trembling, wet with perspiration, bewildered by the struggle and the wild phantasmagoria of his dream. He pulled open the neck of his nightshirt, leaned his head against the cool brass rail of the back of the bedstead, while he listened with growing relief to the rumble of the wind in the chimney, and the swish of the rain against the casements, and watched the narrow line of light under the door of his mother's room.

Yes, he was Richard Calmady, after all, here in his own sheltered world, among those who had loved and served him all his life. Nothing hurtful could reach him here, nothing of which he need be afraid. There was no real meaning in that ugly dream.

And then Dickie paused a moment, still sitting up in the warm darkness, pressing his hands down on the mattress on either side to keep himself from slipping. For involuntarily he recalled the feeling which had prompted his declaration that he was glad his father had never seen him; recalled his unwillingness to walk, lest he should meet Ormiston unexpectedly; recalled the instinct which, even during that glorious time in the Gun-Room, had impelled him to keep the embroidered couvre-pieds carefully over his legs and feet. And, recalling these things, poor Dickie arrived at conclusions regarding himself which he had happily avoided arriving at before. For they were harsh conclusions, causing him to cower down in the bed, and bury his face in the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing sobs which would come.