"Ah, yes! fine thing going out early," he repeated. "Always made a practice of it myself at your age, Calmady. Can't stand doctor's stuff, don't believe in it, never did. Though I like Knott, good fellow Knott—always have liked Knott. But never was a believer in drugs. Nothing better than a good sharp walk, now, early, really early before the frost's out of the grass. Excellent for the liver walking——"

Here, perceiving that his son Ludovic looked very hard at him, eyebrows raised to most admonitory height, he added hastily—

"Eh?—yes, of course, or riding. Riding, nothing like that for health—better exercise still——"

"Is it?" Richard put in. He was too busy with his own thoughts to be greatly affected by Lord Fallowfeild's blunders just then. "I'm glad to know you think so. You see it's a matter in which I'm not very much of a judge."

"No—no—of course not.—Queer fellow Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild added to himself. "Uncommonly sharp way he has of setting you down."

But just then, to his relief, Lady Calmady, Lady Louisa Barking, and pretty, little Lady Constance Quayle entered the room together. Mr. Ormiston and John Knott followed engaged in close conversation, the rugged, rough-hewn aspect of the latter presenting a strong contrast to the thin, tall figure and face, white and refined to the point of emaciation, of the diplomatist. Julius March, accompanied by Camp—still carrying his tail limp and his great head rather sulkily—brought up the rear. And Dickie, while greeting his guests, disposing their places at table, making civil speeches to his immediate neighbour on the left,—Lady Louisa,—smiling a good-morning to his mother down the length of the table, felt a wave of childish disappointment sweep over him. For Helen came not, and with a great desiring he desired her. Poor Dickie, so wise, so philosophic in fancy, so enviably, disastrously young in fact!

"Oh! thanks, Lady Louisa—it's so extremely kind of you to care to come. The fog was rather beastly this morning wasn't it? And I shouldn't be surprised if it came down on us again about sunset. But it's a charming day meanwhile.—There Ludovic please,—next Dr. Knott. We'll leave this chair for Madame de Vallorbes. She's coming, I suppose?"

And Richard glanced towards the door again, and, so doing, became aware that little Lady Constance, sitting between Lord Fallowfeild and Julius March, was staring at him. She had an innocent face, a small, feminine copy of her father's save that her eyes were set noticeably far apart. This gave her a slow, ruminant look, distinctly attractive. She reminded Richard of a gentle, well-conditioned, sweet-breathed calf staring over a bank among ox-eyed daisies and wild roses. As soon as she perceived—but Lady Constance did not perceive anything very rapidly—that he observed her, she gave her whole attention, to the contents of her plate and her colour deepened perceptibly.

"Pretty country about you here, uncommonly pretty," Lord Fallowfeild was saying in response to some remark of Lady Calmady's. "Always did admire it. Always liked a meet on this side of the county when I had the hounds. Very pleasant friendly spirit on this side too. Now Cathcart, for instance—sensible fellow Cathcart, always have liked Cathcart, remarkably sensible fellow. Plain man though—quite astonishingly plain. Daughter very much like him, I remember. Misfortune for a girl that. Always feel very much for a plain woman. She married well though—can't recall who just now, but somebody we all know. Who was it now, Lady Calmady?"

Between that haunting sense of embarrassment, and the kindly wish to carry things off well, and promote geniality, Lord Fallowfeild spoke loud. At this juncture Mr. Quayle folded his hands and raised his eyes devoutly to heaven.

"Oh, my father! oh, my father!" he murmured. Then he leant a little forward watching Lady Calmady.

"But, as you may remember, Mary Cathcart had a charming figure," she was saying, very sweetly, essaying to soften the coming blow.

"Ah! had she though? Great thing a good figure. I knew she married well."

"Naturally I agree with you there. I suppose one always thinks one's own people the most delightful in the world. She married my brother."

"Did she though!" Lord Fallowfeild exclaimed, with much interest. Then suddenly his tumbler stopped half-way to his mouth, while he gazed horror-stricken across the table at Mr. Ormiston.

"Oh no, no! not that brother," Katherine added quickly. "The younger one, the soldier. You wouldn't remember him. He's been on foreign service almost ever since his marriage. They are at the Cape now."

"Oh! ah! yes—indeed, are they?" he exclaimed. He breathed more easily. Those few thousand miles to the Cape were a great comfort to him. A man could not overhear your strictures on his wife's personal appearance at that distance anyhow.—"Very charming woman, uncommonly tactful woman, Lady Calmady," he said to himself gratefully.

Meanwhile Lady Louisa Barking, at the other end of the table, addressed her discourse to Richard and Julius, on either side of her, in the high, penetrating key affected by certain ladies of distinguished social pretensions. Whether this manner of speech implies a fine conviction of superiority on the part of the speaker, or a conviction that all her utterances are replete with intrinsic interest, it is difficult to determine. Certain it is that Lady Louisa practically addressed the table, the attendant men-servants, all creation in point of fact, as well as her two immediate neighbours. Like her father she was large and handsome. But her expression lacked his amiability, her attitude his pleasing self-distrust. In age she was about six-and-thirty and decidedly mature for that. She possessed a remarkable power of concentrating her mind upon her own affairs. She also laboured under the impression that she was truly religious, listening weekly to the sermons of fashionable preachers on the convenient text that "worldliness is next to godliness" and entertaining prejudices, finely unqualified by accurate knowledge, against the abominable errors of Rome.

"I was getting so terribly fagged with canvassing that my doctor told me I really must go to Whitney and recruit. Of course Mr. Barking is perfectly secure of his seat. I am in no real anxiety, I am thankful to say. He does not speak much in the House. But I always feel speaking is quite a minor matter, don't you?"

"Doubtless," Julius said, the remark appearing to be delivered at him in particular.

"The great point is that your party should be able to depend absolutely upon your loyalty. Being rather behind the scenes, as I can't help being, you know, I do feel that more and more. And the party depends absolutely upon Mr. Barking. He has so much moral stamina, you know. That is what they all feel. He is ready at any moment to sacrifice his private convictions to party interests. And so few members of any real position are willing to do that. And so, of course, the leaders do depend on him. All the members of the Government consult him in private."

"That is very flattering," Richard remarked.—Still Helen tarried, while again, glancing in the direction of the door, he encountered Lady Constance's mild, ruminant stare.

"Can one pronounce anything flattering when one sees it to be so completely deserved?" Ludovic Quayle inquired in his most urbane manner. "Prompt and perpetual sacrifice of private conviction to party interest, for example—how can such devotion receive recognition beyond its deserts?"

"Do have some more partridge, Lady Louisa," Richard put in hastily.

"In any case such recognition is very satisfactory.—No more, thank you, Sir Richard," the lady replied, not without a touch of acerbity. Ludovic was very clever no doubt; but his comments often struck her as being in equivocal taste. He gave a turn to your words you did not expect and so broke the thread of your conversation in a rather exasperating fashion. "Very satisfactory," she repeated. "And, of course, the constituency is fully informed of the attitude of the Government towards Mr. Barking, so that serious opposition is out of the question."

"Oh! of course," Richard echoed.

"Still I feel it a duty to canvass. One can point out many things to the constituents in their own homes which might not come quite so well, don't you know, from the platform. And of course they enjoy seeing one so much."

"Of course, it makes a great change for them," Richard echoed dutifully.

"Exactly, and so on their account, quite putting aside the chance of securing a stray vote here or there, I feel it a duty not to spare myself, but to go through with it just for their sakes, don't you know."

"My sister is nothing if not altruistic, you'll find, Calmady," Mr. Quayle here put in in his most exquisitely amiable manner.

But now encouraged thereto by Lady Calmady, Lord Fallowfeild had recovered his accustomed serenity and discoursed with renewed cheerfulness.

"Great loss to this side of the county, my poor friend Denier," he remarked. "Good fellow Denier—always liked Denier. Stood by him from the first—so did your son.—No, no, pardon me—yes, to be sure—excellent claret this—never tasted a better luncheon claret.—But there was a little prejudice, little narrowness of feeling about Denier, when he first bought Grimshott and settled down here. Self-made man, you see, Denier. Entirely self-made. Father was a clergyman, I believe, and I'm told his grandfather kept an umbrella shop in the Strand. But a very able, right-minded man Denier, and wonderfully good-natured fellow, always willing to give you an opinion on a point of law. Great advantage to have a first-rate authority like that to turn to in a legal difficulty. Very useful in county business Denier, and laid hold of country life wonderfully, understood the obligations of a land-owner. Always found a fox in that Grimshott gorse of his, eh, Knott?"

"Fox that sometimes wasn't very certain of his country," the doctor rejoined. "Hailed from the neighbourhood of the umbrella shop perhaps, and wanted to get home to it."

Lord Fallowfeild chuckled.

"Capital," he said, "very good—capital. Still, it's a great relief to know of a sure find like that. Keeps the field in a good temper. Yes, few men whose death I've regretted more than poor Denier's. I miss Denier. Not an old man either. Shouldn't have let him slip through your fingers so early, Knott, eh?"

"Oh! that's a question of forestry," John Knott answered grimly. "If one kept the old wood standing, where would the saplings' chances come in?"

"Oh! ah! yes—never thought of that before,"—and thinking of it now the noble lord became slightly pensive. "Wonder if it's unfair my keeping Shotover so long out of the property?" he said to himself. "Amusing fellow Shotover, very fond of Shotover—but extravagant fellow, monstrously extravagant."

"Lord Denier's death gave our host here a seat on the local bench just at the right moment," the doctor went on. "One man's loss is another man's opportunity. Rather rough, perhaps, on the outgoing man, but then things usually are pretty rough on the outgoing man in my experience."

"I suppose they are," Lord Fallowfeild said, rather ruefully, his face becoming preternaturally solemn.

"Not a doubt of it. The individual may get justice. I hope he does. But mercy is kept for special occasions—few and far between. One must take things on the large scale. Then you find they dovetail very neatly," Knott continued, with a somewhat sardonic mirthfulness. The simplicity and perplexity of this handsome, kindly gentleman, amused him hugely. "But to return to Lord Denier—let alone my skill, that of the whole medical faculty put together couldn't have saved him."

"Couldn't it, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild.

"That's just the bother with your self-made man. He makes himself—true. But he spends himself physically in the making. All his vitality goes in climbing the ladder, and he's none left over by the time he reaches the top. Lord Denier had worked too hard as a youngster to make old bones. It's a long journey from the shop in the Strand to the woolsack you see, and he took sick at two-and-thirty I believe. Oh yes! early death, or premature decay, is the price most outsiders pay for a great professional success. Isn't that so, Mr. Ormiston?"

But at this juncture the conversation suffered interruption by the throwing open of the door and entrance of Madame de Vallorbes.

"Pray let no one move," she said, rather as issuing an order than preferring a request—for her father, Lord Fallowfeild, all the gentlemen, had risen on her appearance—save Richard.—Richard, his blue eyes ablaze, the corners of his mouth a-tremble, his heart going forth tumultuously to meet her, yet he alone of all present denied the little obvious act of outward courtesy from man to woman.

"Pinned to his chair, like a specimen beetle to a collector's card," John Knott said grimly to himself. "Poor dear lad—and with that face on him too. I hoped he might have been spared taking fire a little longer. However, here's the conflagration. No question about that. Now let's have a look at the lady."

And the lady, it must be conceded, manifested herself under a new and somewhat agitating aspect, as she swept up the room and into the vacant place at Richard's right hand with a rush of silken skirts. She produced a singular effect at once of energy and self-concentration—her lips thin and unsmiling, an ominous vertical furrow between the spring of her arched eyebrows, her eyes narrow, unresponsive, severe with thought under their delicate lids.

"I am sorry to be late, but it was unavoidable. I was kept by some letters forwarded from Newlands," she said, without giving herself the trouble of looking at Richard as she spoke.

"What does it matter? Luncheon's admittedly a movable feast, isn't it?"

Madame de Vallorbes made no response. A noticeable hush had descended upon the whole company, while the men-servants moved to and fro serving the newcomer. Even Lady Louisa Barking ceased to hold high discourse, political or other, and looked disapprovingly across the table. An hour earlier she had resented the younger woman's merry wit, now she resented her sublime indifference. Both then and now she found her perfect finish of appearance unpardonable. Lord Fallowfeild's disjointed conversation also suffered check. He fidgeted, vaguely conscious that the atmosphere had become somewhat electric.—"Monstrously pretty woman—effective woman—very effective—rather dangerous though. Changeable too. Made me laugh a little too much before luncheon. Louisa didn't like it. Very correct views, my daughter Louisa. Now seems in a very odd temper. Quite the grand air, but reminds me of somebody I've seen on the stage somehow. Suppose all that comes of living so much in France," he said to himself. But for the life of him he could not think of anything to say aloud, though he felt it would be eminently tactful to throw in a casual remark at this juncture. Little Lady Constance was disquieted likewise. For she, girl-like, had fallen dumbly and adoringly in love with this beautiful stranger but a few years her senior. And now the stranger appeared as an embodiment of unknown emotions and energies altogether beyond the scope of her small imagination. Her innocent stare lost its ruminant quality, became alarmed, tearful even, while she instinctively edged her chair closer to her father's. There was a great bond of sympathy between the simple-hearted gentleman and his youngest child. Mr. Quayle looked on with lifted eyebrows and his air of amused forbearance. And Dr. Knott looked on also, but that which he saw pleased him but moderately. The grace of every movement, the distinction of face and figure, the charm of that finely-poised, honey-coloured head showing up against the background of gray-blue tapestried wall, were enough, he owned—having a very pretty taste in women as well as in horses—to drive many a man crazy.—"But if the mother's a baggage, the daughter's a vixen," he said to himself. "And, upon my soul if I had to choose between 'em—which God Almighty forbid—I'd take my chance with the baggage." As climax Lady Calmady's expression was severe. She sat very upright, and made no effort at conversation. Her nerves were a little on edge. There had been awkward moments during this meal, and now her niece's entrance struck her as unfortunately accentuated, while there was that in Richard's aspect which startled the quick fears and jealousies of her motherhood.

And to Richard himself, it must be owned, this meeting so hotly desired, and against the dangers of which he had so wisely guarded, came in fashion altogether different to that which he had pictured. Helen's manner was cold to a point far from flattering to his self-esteem. The subtle intimacies of the scene in the Long Gallery became as though they had never been. Dickie thinking over his restless night, his fierce efforts at self-conquest, those long hours in the saddle designed for the reduction of a perfervid imagination, wrote himself down an ass indeed. And yet—yet—the charm of Helen's presence was great. And surely she wasn't quite herself just now, there was something wrong with her? Anybody could see that. Everybody did see it in fact, he feared, and commented upon it in no charitable spirit. Hostility towards her declared itself on every side. He detected that—or imagined he did so—in Lady Louisa's expression, in Ludovic Quayle's extra-superfine smile, in the doctor's close and rather cynical attitude of observation, and, last but not least, in the reserve of his mother's bearing and manner. And this hostility, real or imagined, begot in Richard a new sensation—one of tenderness, wholly unselfish and protective, while the fighting blood stirred in him. He grew slightly reckless.

"What has happened? We appear to have fallen most unaccountably silent," he said, looking round the table, with an air of gallant challenge pretty to see.

"So we have, though," exclaimed Lord Fallowfeild, half in relief, half in apology. "Very true—was just thinking the same thing myself."

While Mr. Ouayle, leaning forward, inquired with much sweetness:—"To whom shall I talk? Madame de Vallorbes is far more profitably engaged in discussing her luncheon, than she could be in discussing any conceivable topic of conversation with such as I. And Dr. Knott is so evidently diagnosing an interesting case that I have not the effrontery to interrupt him."

Disregarding these comments Richard turned to his neighbour on the left.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Louisa," he said, "but before this singular dumbness overtook us all, you were saying?"—

The lady addressed, electing to accept this as a tribute to the knowledge, and the weight, and distinction, of her discourse, thawed, became condescending and gracious again.

"I believe we were discussing the prospects of the party," she replied. "I was saying that, you know, of course there must be a large Liberal majority."

"Yes, of course."

"You consider that assured?" Julius put in civilly.

"It is not a matter of personal opinion, I am thankful to say—because of course every one must feel it is just everything for the country. There is no doubt at all about the majority among those who really know—Mr. Barking, for instance. Nobody can be in a better position to judge than he is. And then I was speaking the other night to Augustus Tremiloe at Lord Combmartin's—not William, you know, but Augustus Tremiloe, the man in the Treasury, and he——"

"Uncommonly fine chrysanthemums those," Lord Fallowfeild had broken forth cheerfully, finding sufficient, if tardy, inspiration in the table decorations. "Remarkably perfect blossoms and charming colour. Nothing nearly so good at Whitney this autumn. Excellent fellow my head gardener, but rather past his work—no enterprise, can't make him go in for new ideas."

Mr. Ormiston, leaning across Dr. Knott, addressed himself to Ludovic, while casting occasional and rather anxious glances upon his daughter. Thus did voices rise, mingle, and the talk get fairly upon its legs again. Then Richard permitted himself to say quietly—

"You had no bad news, I hope, in those letters, Helen?"

"Why should you suppose I have had bad news?" she demanded, her teeth meeting viciously in the morsel of kissing-crust she held in her rosy-tipped fingers.

It was as pretty as a game to see her eat. Dickie laughed a little, charmed even with her naughtiness, embarrassed too, by the directness of her question.

"Oh! I don't exactly know why—I thought perhaps you seemed——"

"You do know quite exactly why," the young lady asserted, looking full at him. "You saw that I was in a detestable, a diabolic temper."

"Well, perhaps I did think I saw something of the sort," Richard answered audaciously, yet very gently.

Helen continued to look at him, and as she did so her cheek rounded, her mouth grew soft, the vertical line faded out from her forehead.—"You are very assuaging, Cousin Richard," she said, and she too laughed softly.

"Understands the vineries very well though," Lord Fallowfeild was saying; "and doesn't grow bad peaches, not at all bad peaches, but is stupid about flowers. He ought to retire. Never shall have really satisfactory gardens till he does retire. And yet I haven't the heart to tell him to go. Good fellow, you know, good, honest, hard-working fellow, and had a lot of trouble. Wife ailing for years, always ailing, and youngest child got hip disease—nasty thing hip disease, very nasty—quite a cripple, poor little creature, I am afraid a hopeless cripple. Terrible anxiety and burden for parents in that rank of life, you know."

"It can hardly be otherwise in any rank of life," Lady Calmady said slowly, bitterly. An immense weariness was upon her—weariness of the actual and present, weariness of the possible and the future. Her courage ebbed. She longed to go away, to be alone for a while, to shut eyes and ears, to deaden alike perception and memory, to have it all cease. Then it was as though those two beautiful, and now laughing, faces of man and woman in the glory of their youth, seen over the perspective of fair, white damask, glittering glass and silver, rich dishes, graceful profusion of flowers and fruit, at the far end of the avenue of guests, mocked at her. Did they not mock at the essential conditions of their own lives too? Katherine feared, consciously or unconsciously they did that. Her weariness dragged upon her with almost despairing weight.

"Do you get your papers the same day here, Sir Richard?" Lady Louisa asked imperatively.

"Yes, they come with the second post letters, about five o'clock," Julius March answered.

But Lady Louisa Barking intended to be attended to by her host.

"Sir Richard," she paused, "I am asking whether your papers reach you the same day?"

And Dickie replied he knew not what, for he had just registered the discovery that barriers are quite useless against a certain sort of intimacy. Be the crowd never so thick about you, in a sense at least, you are always alone, exquisitely, delicately, alone with the person you love.



CHAPTER VIII

RICHARD PUTS HIS HAND TO A PLOUGH FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK

"Dearest mother, you look most deplorably tired."

Richard sat before the large study table, piled up with letters, papers, county histories, racing calendars, in the Gun-Room, amid a haze of cigar smoke. "I don't wonder," he went on, "we've had a regular field-day, haven't we? And I'm afraid Lord Fallowfeild bored you atrociously at luncheon. He does talk most admired foolishness half his time, poor old boy. All the same Ludovic shouldn't show him up as he does. It's not good form. I'm afraid Ludovic's getting rather spoilt by London. He's growing altogether too finicking and elaborate. It's a pity. Lady Louisa Barking is a rather exterminating person. Her conversation is magnificently deficient in humour. It is to be hoped Barking is not troubled by lively perceptions or he must suffer at times. Lady Constance is a pretty little girl, don't you think so? Not oppressed with brains, I dare say, but a good little sort."

"You liked her?" Katherine said. She stood beside him, that mortal weariness upon her yet.

"Oh yes!—well enough—liked her in passing, as one likes the wild roses in the hedge. But you look regularly played out, mother, and I don't like that in the least."

Richard twisted the revolving-chair half round, and held out his arms in invitation. As his mother leaned over him, he stretched upward and clasped his hands lightly about her neck.—"Poor dear," he said coaxingly, "worn to fiddle-strings with all this wild dissipation! I declare it's quite pathetic."—He let her go, shrugging his shoulders with a sigh and a half laugh. "Well, the dissipation will soon enough be over now, and we shall resume the even tenor of our way, I suppose. You'll be glad of that, mother?"

The caress had been grateful to Katherine, the cool cheek dear to her lips, the clasp of the strong arms reassuring. Yet, in her present state of depression, she was inclined to distrust even that which consoled, and there seemed a lack in the fervour of this embrace. Was it not just a trifle perfunctory, as of one who pays toll, rather than of one who claims a privilege?

"You'll be glad too, my dearest, I trust?" she said, craving further encouragement.

Richard twisted the chair back into place again, leaned forward to note the hour of the clock set in the centre of the gold and enamel inkstand.

"Oh! I'm not prophetic. I don't pretend to go before the event and register my sensations until both they and I have fairly arrived. It's awfully bad economy to get ahead of yourself and live in the day after to-morrow. To-day's enough—more than enough for you, I'm afraid, when you've had a large contingent of the Whitney people to luncheon. Do go and rest, mother. Uncle William is disposed of. I've started him out for a tramp with Julius, so you need not have him on your mind."

But neither in Richard's words nor in his manner did Lady Calmady find the fulness of assurance she craved.

"Thanks dearest," she said. "That is very thoughtful of you. I will see Helen and find out——"

"Oh! don't trouble about her either," Richard put in. Again he studied the jewel-rimmed dial of the little clock. "I found she wanted to go to Newlands to bid Mrs. Cathcart good-bye. It seems Miss St. Quentin is back there for a day or two. So I promised to drive her over as soon as we were quit of the Fallowfeild party."

"It is late for so long a drive."

Richard looked up quickly and his face wore that expression of challenge once again.

"I know it is—and so I am afraid we ought to start at once. I expect the carriage round immediately." Then repenting:—"You'll take care of yourself won't you, mother, and rest?"

"Oh yes! I will take care of myself," Katherine said. "Indeed, I appear to be the only person I have left to take care of, thanks to your forethought. All good go with you, Dick."

It followed—perhaps unreasonably enough—that Richard, some five minutes later, drove round the angle of the house and drew the mail-phaeton up at the foot of the gray, griffin-guarded flight of steps—whereon Madame de Vallorbes, wrapped in furs, the cavalier hat and its trailing plumes shadowing the upper part of her face and her bright hair, awaited his coming—in a rather defiant humour. His cousin was troubled, worried, and she met with scant sympathy. This aroused all his chivalry. Whatever she wished for, that he could give her, she should very certainly have. Of after consequences to himself he was contemptuous. The course of action which had shown as wisdom a couple of hours ago, showed now as selfishness and pusillanimity. If she wanted him, he was there joyfully to do her bidding, at whatever cost to himself in subsequent unrest of mind seemed but a small thing. If heartache and insidious provocations of the flesh came later, let them come. He was strong enough to bear the one and crush out the other, he hoped. It would give him something to do—he told himself, a little bitterly—and he had been idle of late!

And so it came about that Richard Calmady held out his hand, to help his cousin into her place at his side, with more of meaning and welcome in the gesture than he was quite aware. He forgot the humiliation of the broad strap about his waist, of the high, ingeniously contrived driving-iron against which his feet rested, steadying him upon the sharply sloping seat. These were details, objectionable ones it was true, but, to-day, of very secondary importance. In the main he was master of the situation. For once it was his to render, rather than receive, assistance. Helen was under his care, in a measure dependent on him, and this gratified his young, masculine pride, doomed too often to suffer sharp mortification. A fierce pleasure possessed him. It was fine to bear her thus away, behind the fast trotting horses, through the pensive, autumn brightness. Boyish self-consciousness and self-distrust died down in Richard, and the man's self-reliance, instinct of possession and of authority, grew in him. His tone was that of command, for all its solicitude, as he said:—

"Look here, are you sure you've got enough on? Don't go and catch cold, under the impression that there's any meaning in this sunshine. It is sure to be chilly driving home, and it's easy to take more wraps."

Helen shook her head, unsmiling, serious.

"I could face polar snows."

Richard let the horses spring forward, while little pebbles rattled against the body of the phaeton, and the groom, running a few steps, swung himself up on to the back seat, immediately becoming immovable as a wooden image, with rigidly folded arms.

"Oh! the cold won't quite amount to that," Richard said. "But I observe women rarely reckon with the probabilities of the return journey."

"The return journey is invariably too hot, or too cold, too soon, or too late—for a woman. So it is better not to remember its existence until you are compelled to do so. For myself, I confess to the strongest prejudice against the return journey."

Madame de Vallorbes' speech was calm and measured, yet there was a conviction in it suggestive of considerable emotion. She sat well back in the carriage, her head turned slightly to the left, so that Richard, looking down at her, saw little but the pure firm line of her jaw, the contour of her cheek, and her ear—small, lovely, the soft hair curling away from above and behind it in the most enticing fashion. Physical perfection, of necessity, provoked in him a peculiar envy and delight. And nature appeared to have taken ingenious pleasure, not only in conferring an unusual degree of beauty upon his companion, but in finishing each detail of her person with unstinted grace. For a while the young man lost himself in contemplation of that charming ear and partially averted face. Then resolutely he bestowed his attention upon the horses again, finding such contemplation slightly enervating to his moral sense.

"Yes, return journeys are generally rather a nuisance, I suppose," he said, "though my experience of that particular form of nuisance is limited. I have not been outward-bound often enough to know much of the regret of being homeward-bound. And yet, I own, I should not much mind driving on and on everlastingly on a dreamy afternoon like this, and—and as I find myself just now—driving on and seeking some El Dorado—of the spirit, I mean, not of the pocket—seeking the Fortunate Isles that lie beyond the sunset. For it would be not a little fascinating to give one's accustomed self, and all that goes to make up one's accepted identity, the slip—to drive clean out of one's old circumstances and find new heavens, a new earth, and a new personality elsewhere. What do you say, Helen, shall we try it?"

But Helen sat immobile, her face averted, listening intently, revolving many things in her mind, meditating how and when most advantageously to speak.

"It would be such an amiable and graceful experiment to try on my own people, too, wouldn't it?" the young man continued, with a sudden change of tone. "And I am so eminently fitted to lose myself in a crowd without fear of recognition, just the person for a case of mistaken identity!"

"Do not say such things, Richard, please. They distress me," Madame de Vallorbes put in quickly. "And, believe me, I have no quarrel with the return journey in this case. At Brockhurst I could fancy myself to have found the Fortunate Isles of which you spoke just now. I have been very happy there—too happy, perhaps, and therefore, to-day, the whip has come down across my back, just to remind me."

"Ah! now you say the painful things," Dick interrupted. "Pray don't—I—I don't like them."

Madame de Vallorbes turned her head and looked at him with the strangest expression.

"My metaphor was not out of place. Do you imagine horses are the only animals a man drives, mon beau cousin? Some men drive the woman who belongs to them, and that not with the lightest bit, I promise you. Nor do they forget to tie blood-knots in the whip-lash when it suits them to do so."

"What do you mean?" he asked abruptly.

"Merely that the letters, which so stupidly endangered my self-control at luncheon, contained examples of that kind of driving."

"How—how damnable," the young man said between his teeth.

The red and purple trunks of the great fir trees reeled away to right and left as the carriage swept forward down the long avenue. To Richard's seeing they reeled away in disgust, even as did his thought from the images which his companion's words suggested. While, to her seeing, they reeled, smitten by the eternal laughter, the echoes of which it stimulated her to hear.—"The drama develops," she said to herself, half triumphant, half abashed. "And yet I am telling the truth, it is all so—I hardly even doctor it."—For she had been angered, genuinely and miserably angered, and had found that odious to the point of letting feeling override diplomacy. There was subtle pleasure in now turning her very lapse of self-control to her own advantage. And then, this young man's heart was the finest, purest-toned instrument upon which she had ever had the chance to play as yet. She was ravished by the quality and range of the music it gave forth. Madame de Vallorbes pressed her hands together within the warm comfort of her sable muff, averted her face again, lest it should betray the eager excitement that gained on her, and continued:—

"Yes, whip and rein and bit are hardly pretty in that connection, are they? If you would willingly give your identity the slip at times, dear cousin, I have considerably deeper cause to wish to part company with mine! You, in any case, are morally and materially free. A whole class of particularly irritating and base cares can never approach you. And it was in connection with just such cares that I spoke of the hatefulness of return journeys."

Helen paused, as one making an effort to maintain her equanimity.

"My letters recall me to Paris," she said, "where detestable scenes and most ignoble anxieties await me."

"How soon must you go?"

"That is what I asked myself," she said, in the same quiet, even voice. "I have not yet arrived at a decision, and so I asked you to bring me out Dickie, this afternoon."—She looked up at him, smiling, lovely and with a certain wistful dignity, wholly coercive. "Can you understand that the orderly serenity of your splendid house became a little oppressive? It offered too glaring a contrast to my own state of mind and outlook. I fancied my brain would be clearer, my conclusions more just, here out of doors, face to face with this half-savage nature."

"Ah, I know all that," Richard said. Had not the blankness of the fog brought him help this very morning?—"I know it, but I wish you did not know it too."

"I know many things better not known," Helen replied. Her conscience pricked her. She thanked her stars confession had ceased with enlargement from the convent-school, and was a thing of the past. "You see, I want to decide just how long I dare stay—if you will keep me?"

"We will keep you," Richard said.

"You are very charming to me, Dick," she exclaimed impulsively, sincerely, again slightly abashed. "How long can I stay, I wonder, without making matters worse in the end, both for my father and for myself? I am young, after all, and I suppose I am tough. The cuticle of the soul—if souls can have a cuticle—like that of the body, thickens under repeated blows. But my father is no longer young. He is terribly sensitive where I am concerned. And he is inevitably drawn into the whirlpool of my wretched affair sooner or later. On his account I should be glad to defer the return journey as long——"

"But—but—I don't understand," Richard broke out, pity and deep concern for her, a blind fury against a person, or persons, unknown, getting the better of him. "Who on earth has the power to plague you and make you miserable, or your father either?"

The young man's face was white, his eyes full of pain, full of a great love, burning down on her. As once, long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could have danced and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had prospered above her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the laughter which bubbled up in her pretty throat. She was in the humour to pelt peacocks royally, had such pastime been possible. As it was, she closed her eyes for a little minute and waited, biting the inside of her lip. At last, she said slowly, almost solemnly:—

"Don't you know that for certain mistakes, and those usually the most generous, there is no redress?"

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Mean?—the veriest commonplace in my own case," she answered. "Merely an unhappy marriage. There are thousands such."

They had left the shadow of the fir woods now. The carriage crossed the white-railed culvert—bridging the little stream that takes its rise amid the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bog, and meanders down the valley—and entered the oak plantation just inside the park gate. Russet leaves in rustling, hurrying companies, fled up and away from the rapidly turning wheels and quick horse hoofs. The sunshine was wan and chill as the smile on a dead face. Lines of pale, lilac cloud—shaped like those flights of cranes which decorate the oriental cabinets of the Long Gallery—crossed the western sky above the bare balsam poplars, the cluster of ancient half-timbered cottages at the entrance to Sandyfield church lane, and the rise of the gray-brown fallow beyond, where sheep moved, bleating plaintively, within a wattled fold.

The scene, altogether familiar though it was, impressed itself on Richard's mind just now, as one of paralysing melancholy. God help us, what a stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow and misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of being? Certainly it would seem not—Richard reasoned—listening to the words of the radiant woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent and puissant grace, to be a queen and idol of men. For sadder than the thin sunshine, bare trees and complaint of the hungry flock, was that assured declaration that loveless and unlovely marriages—of which her own was one—exist by the thousand, are, indeed, the veriest commonplace!

These reflections held Richard, since he had been thinker and poet—in his degree—since childhood; lover only during the brief space of these last ten surprising days. Thus the general application claimed his attention first. But hard on the heels of this followed the personal application. For, as is the way of all true lovers, the universality of the law under which it takes its rise mitigates, by most uncommonly little, either the joy or sorrow of the particular case. Poignant regret that she suffered, strong admiration that she bore suffering so adherent with such lightness of demeanour—then, more dangerous than these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that same spirit resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous call from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge now first made evident in her.—And here Richard's heart—in spite of pity, in spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries to save her five minutes' discomfort—sang Te Deum, and that lustily enough! For by this revelation of the infelicity of her state, his whole relation to, and duty towards her changed and took on a greater freedom. To pour forth worship and offers of service at the feet of a happy woman is at once an impertinence to her and a shame to yourself. But to pour forth such worship, such offers of service, at the feet of an unhappy woman—age-old sophistry, so often ruling the speech and actions of men to their fatal undoing!—this is praiseworthy and legitimate, a matter not of privilege merely, but of obligation to whoso would claim to be truly chivalrous.

The perception of his larger liberty, and the consequences following thereon, kept Richard silent till Sandyfield rectory, the squat-towered, Georgian church and the black-headed, yew trees in the close-packed churchyard adjoining, the neighbouring farm and its goodly show of golden-gray wheat-ricks were left behind, and the carriage entered on the flat, furze-dotted expanse of Sandyfield common. Flocks of geese, arising from damp repose upon the ragged autumn turf, hissed forth futile declarations of war. A gipsy caravan painted in staring colours, and hung all over with heath-brooms and basket-chairs, caused the horses to swerve. Parties of home-going school-children backed on to the loose gravel at the roadside, bobbing curtsies or pulling forelocks, staring at the young man and his companion, curious and half afraid. For in the youthful, bucolic mind a mystery surrounded Richard Calmady and his goings and comings, causing him to rank with crowned heads, ghosts, the Book of Daniel, funerals, the Northern Lights, and kindred matters of dread fascination. So wondering eyes pursued him down the road.

And wondering eyes, as the minutes passed, glanced up at him from beneath the sweeping plumes and becoming shadow of the cavalier's hat. For his prolonged silence rendered Madame de Vallorbes anxious. Had she spoken unadvisedly with her tongue? Had her words sounded crude and of questionable delicacy? Given his antecedents and upbringing, Richard was bound to hold the marriage tie in rather superstitious reverence, and was likely to entertain slightly superannuated views regarding the obligation of reticence in the discussion of family matters. She feared she had reckoned insufficiently with all this in her eagerness, forgetting subtle diplomacies. Her approach had lacked tact and finesse. In dealing with an adversary of coarser fibre her attack would have succeeded to admiration. But this man was refined and sensitive to a fault, easily disgusted, narrowly critical in questions of taste.

Therefore she glanced up at him again, trying to divine his thought, her own mind in a tumult of opposing purposes and desires. And just as the contemplation of her beauty had so deeply stirred him earlier this same afternoon, so did the contemplation of his beauty now stir her. It satisfied her artistic sense. Save that the nose was straighter and shorter, the young man reminded her notably of a certain antique, terracotta head of the young Alexander which she had once seen in a museum at Munich, and which had left an ineffaceable impression upon her memory. But, the face of the young Alexander beside her was of nobler moral quality than that other—undebauched by feasts and licentious pleasures as yet, masculine yet temperate, the sanctuary of generous ambitions—merciless it might be, she fancied, but never base, never weak. Thus was her artistic sense satisfied, morally as well as physically. Her social sense was satisfied also. For the young man's high-breeding could not be called in question. He held himself remarkably well. She approved the cut of his clothes moreover, his sure and easy handling of the spirited horses.

And then her eyes, following down the lines of the fur rug, received renewed assurance of the fact of his deformity—hidden as far as might be, with decent pride, yet there, permanent and unalterable. This worked upon her strongly. For, to her peculiar temperament, the indissoluble union in one body of elements so noble and so monstrous, of youthful vigour and abject helplessness, the grotesque in short, supplied the last word of sensuous and dramatic attraction. As last evening, in the Long Gallery, so now, she hugged herself, at once frightened and fascinated, wrought upon by excitement as in the presence of something akin to the supernatural, and altogether beyond the confines of ordinary experience.

And to think that she had come so near holding this inimitable creature in her hand, and by overhaste, or clumsiness of statement should lose it! Madame de Vallorbes was wild with irritation, racked her brain for means to recover her—as she feared—forfeited position. It would be maddening did her mighty hunting prove but a barren pastime in the end. And thereupon the little scar on her temple, deftly concealed under the soft, bright hair, began to smart and throb. Ah! well, the hunting should not prove quite barren anyhow, of that she was determined, for, failing her late gay purpose, that small matter of long-deferred revenge still remained in reserve. If she could not gratify one passion, she would gratify quite another. For in this fair lady's mind it was—perhaps unfortunately—but one step from the Eden bowers of love to the waste places of vindictive hate.—"Yet I would rather be good to him, far rather," she said to herself, with a movement of quite pathetic sincerity.

But here, just at the entrance to the village street, an altogether unconscious deus ex machina—destined at once to relieve Helen of further anxiety, and commit poor Dickie to a course of action affecting the whole of his subsequent career—presented itself in the shape of a white-tented miller's waggon, which, with somnolent jingle of harness bells and most admired deliberation, moved down the centre of the road. A yellow-washed garden-wall on one side, the brook on the other, there was not room for the phaeton to pass.

"Whistle," Richard commanded over his shoulder. And the wooden image thereby galvanised into immediate activity whistled shrilly, but without result as far as the waggon was concerned.

"The fellow's asleep. Go and tell him to pull out of the way."

Then, while the groom ran neatly forward in twinkling, white breeches and flesh-coloured tops, Richard, bending towards her, as far as that controling strap about his waist permitted, shifted the reins into his right hand and laid his left upon Madame de Vallorbes' sable muff.

"Look here, Helen," he said, rather hoarsely, "I am indescribably shocked at what you have just told me. I supposed it was all so different with you. I'd no suspicion of this. And—and—if I may say so, you've taught me a lesson which has gone home—steady there—steady, good lass"—for the horses danced and snorted—"I don't think I shall ever grumble much in future about troubles of my own, having seen how splendidly you bear yours. Only I can't agree with you no remedy is possible for generous mistakes. The world isn't quite so badly made as all that. There is a remedy for every mistake except—a few physical ones, which we euphuistically describe as visitations of God.—Steady, steady there—wait a bit.—And I—I tell you I can't sit down under this unhappiness of yours and just put up with it. Don't think me a meddling fool, please. Something's got to be done. I know I probably appear to you the last person in the world to be of use. And yet I'm not sure about that. I have time—too much of it—and I'm not quite an ass. And you—you must know, I think, there's nothing in heaven or earth I would not do for you that I could——"

The miller hauled his slow-moving team aside, with beery-thick objurgations and apologies. The groom swung himself up at the back of the carriage again. The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung away down Sandyfield Street—scattering a litter of merry, little, black pigs and remonstrant fowls to right and left—past modest village shop, and yellow-washed tavern, and red, lichen-stained cottage, beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars that raised their brown-gray spires to the blue-gray of the autumn sky. Richard's left hand held the reins again.

"Half confidences are no good," he said. "So, as you've trusted me thus far, Helen, don't you think you will trust somewhat further? Be explicit. Tell me the rest?"

And hearing him, seeing him just then, Madame de Vallorbes' heart melted within her, and, to her own prodigious surprise, she had much ado not to weep.



CHAPTER IX

WHICH TOUCHES INCIDENTALLY ON MATTERS OF FINANCE

As Richard had predicted the fog reappeared towards sun sunset. At first, as a frail mist, through which the landscape looked colourless and blurred. Later it rose, growing in density, until all objects beyond a radius of some twenty paces were engulfed in its nothingness and lost. Later still—while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at Newlands—it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the senses, baffling to sight and hearing alike. From out it, half-leafless branches, like gaunt arms in tattered draperies, seemed to claw and beckon at the passing carriage and its occupants. The silver mountings of the harness showed in points and splashes of hard, shining white as against the shifting, universal dead-whiteness of it, while the breath from the horses' nostrils rose into it as defiant jets of steam, that struggled momentarily with the opaque, all-enveloping vapour, only to be absorbed and obliterated as light by darkness, or life by death.

The aspect presented by nature was sinister, had Richard Calmady been sufficiently at leisure to observe it in detail. But, as he slowly walked the horses up and down the quarter of a mile of woodland drive, leading from the thatched lodge on the right of the Westchurch road to the house, he was not at leisure. He had received enlightenment on many subjects. He had acquired startling impressions, and he needed to place these, to bring them into line with the general habit of his thought. The majority of educated persons—so-called—think in words, words often arbitrary and inaccurate enough, prolific mothers of mental confusion. The minority, and those of by no means contemptible intellectual calibre,—since the symbol must count for more than the mere label,—think in images and pictures. Dickie belonged to the minority. And it must be conceded that his mind now projected against that shifting, impalpable background of fog, a series of pictures which in their cynical pathos, their suggestions at once voluptuous and degraded, were hardly unworthy of the great master, William Hogarth, himself.

For Helen, in the reaction and relief caused by finding her relation to Richard unimpaired, caused too by that joyous devilry resident in her and constantly demanding an object on which to wreak its derision, had by no means spared her lord and master, Angelo Luigi Francesco, Vicomte de Vallorbes. And this only son of a thrifty, hard-bitten, Savoyard banker-noble and a Neopolitan princess of easy morals and ancient lineage, this Parisian viveur, his intrigues, his jealousies, his practical ungodliness and underlying superstition, his outbursts of temper, his shrewd economy in respect of others, and extensive personal extravagance, offered fit theme, with aid of little romancing, for such a discourse as it just now suited his very brilliant, young wife to pronounce.

The said discourse opened in a low key, broken by pauses, by tactful self-accusations, by questionings as to whether it were not more merciful, more loyal, to leave this or that untold. But as she proceeded, not only did Helen suffer the seductions of the fine art of lying, but she really began to have some ado to keep her exuberant sense of fun within due limits. For it proved so excessively exhilarating to deal thus with Angelo Luigi Francesco! She had old scores to settle. And had she not this very day received an odiously disquieting letter from him, in which he not only made renewed complaint of her poor, little miseries of debts and flirtations, but once more threatened retaliation by a cutting-off of supplies? In common justice did he not deserve villification? Therefore, partly out of revenge, partly in self-justification, she proceeded with increasing enthusiasm to show that to know M. de Vallorbes was a lamentably liberal education in all civilised iniquities. With a hand, sure as it was light, she dissected out the unhappy gentleman, and offered up his mangled and bleeding reputation as tribute to her own so-perpetually outraged moral sense and feminine delicacy, not to mention her so-repeatedly and vilely wounded heart. And there really was truth—as at each fresh flight of her imagination she did not fail to remind herself—in all that which she said. Truth?—yes, just that misleading sufficiency of it in which a lie thrives. For, as every artist "in this kind" is aware, precisely as you would have the overgrowth of your improvisation richly phenomenal and preposterous, must you be careful to set the root of it in the honest soil of fact. To omit this precaution is to court eventual detection and consequent confusion of face.

As it was, Helen entered the house at Newlands, a house singularly unused to psychological aberrations, in buoyant spirits, mischief sitting in her discreetly downcast eyes, laughter perplexing her lips. She had placed her cargo of provocation, of resentment, to such excellent advantage! She was, moreover, slightly intoxicated by her own eloquence. She was at peace with herself and all mankind, with de Vallorbes even since his sins had afforded her so rare an opportunity. And this occasioned her to congratulate herself on her own conspicuous magnanimity. It is so exceedingly pleasing not only to know yourself clever, but to believe yourself good! She would be charming to these dear kind, rather dull people. Not that Honoria was dull, but she had inconveniently austere notions of honour and loyalty at moments. And then the solitary drive home with Richard Calmady lay ahead, full of possible drama, full of, well, heaven knew what! Oh! how entrancing a pastime is life!

But to Richard, walking the snorting and impatient horses slowly up and down the woodland drive in the blear and sightless fog, life appeared quite other than an entrancing pastime. The pictures projected by his thought, and forming the medium of it, caused him black indignation and revolt, desolated him, too, with a paralysing disgust of his own disabilities. For poor Dick had declined somewhat in the last few hours, it must be owned, from the celestial altitudes he had reached before luncheon. Some part of his cousin's discourse had been dangerously intimate in character, suggesting situations quite other than platonic. To him there appeared a noble innocence in her treatment of matters not usually spoken of. He had listened with a certain reverent amazement. Only out of purity of mind could such speech come. And yet an undeniable effect remained, and it was not altogether elevating. Richard was no longer the young Sir Galahad of the noontide of this eventful day. He was just simply a man—in a sensible degree the animal man—loving a woman, hating that other man to whom she was legally bound. Hating that other man, not only because he was unworthy and failed to make her happy, but because he stood in his—Richard's—way. Hating the man all the more fiercely because, whatever the uncomeliness of his moral constitution, he was physically very far from uncomely. And so, along with nobler incitements to hatred, went the fiend envy, which just now plucked at poor Dickie's vitals as the vulture at those of the chained Titan of old. Whereupon he fell into a meditation somewhat morbid. For, contemplating in pictured thought that other man's bodily perfection, contemplating his property and victim,—the fair modern Helen, who by her courage and her trials exercised so potent a spell over his imagination,—Richard loathed his own maimed body, maimed chances and opportunities, as he had never loathed them before. How often since his childhood had some casual circumstance or trivial accident brought the fact of his misfortune home to him, causing him—as he at the moment supposed—to reckon, once and for all, with the sum total of it! But as years passed and experience widened, below each depth of this adhering misery another deep disclosed itself. Would he never reach bottom? Would this inalienable disgrace continue to show itself more restricting and impeding to his action, more repulsive and contemptible to his fellow-men, through all the succeeding stages and vicissitudes of his career, right to the very close?

To her hosts Madame de Vallorbes appeared in her gayest and most engaging humour. It was only a flying visit, she mustn't stay, Richard was waiting for her. Only she felt she must just have two words with Honoria. And say good-bye? Yes, ten thousand sorrows, it was good-bye. She was recalled to Paris, home, and duty. She made an expressive little grimace at Miss St. Quentin.

"Your husband will be"—began Mrs. Cathcart, in her large, gently authoritative manner.

"Enchanted to see me, of course, dear Cousin Selina, or he would not have required my return thus urgently. We may take that for said. Meanwhile what strange sprigs of nobility flourish in the local soil here."

And she proceeded to give an account of the Fallowfeild party at luncheon more witty, perhaps, than veracious. Helen could be extremely entertaining on occasion. She gave reins to her tongue, and it galloped away with her in most surprising fashion.

"My dear, my dear," interrupted her hostess, "you are a little unkind surely! My dear, you are a little flippant!"

But Madame de Vallorbes enveloped her in the most assuaging embrace.

"Let me laugh while I can, dearest Cousin Selina," she pleaded. "I have had a delightful little holiday. Every one has been charming to me. You, of course—but then you always are that. Your presence breathes consolation. But Aunt Katherine has been charming too, and that, quite between ourselves, was a little more than I anticipated. Now the holiday draws to a close and pay-day looms large ahead. You know nothing about such pay-days, thank heaven, dear Cousin Selina. They are far from joyous inventions; and so"—the young lady spread abroad her hands, palms upward, and shrugged her shoulders under their weight of costly furs—"and so I laugh, don't you understand, I laugh!"

Miss St. Quentin's delicate, square-cut face wore an air of solicitude as she followed her friend out of the room. There was a trace of indolence in her slow, reflective speech, as in her long, swinging stride—the indolence bred of unconscious strength rather than of weakness, the leisureliness which goes with staying power both in the moral and the physical domain.

"See here, Nellie," she said, "forgive brutal frankness, but which is the real thing to-day—they're each delightful in their own way—the tears or the laughter?"

"Both! oh, well-beloved seeker after truth," Madame de Vallorbes answered. "There lies the value of the situation."

"Fresh worries?"

"No, no, the old, the accustomed, the well-accredited, the normal, the stock ones—a husband and a financial crisis."

As she spoke Madame de Vallorbes fastened the buttons of her long driving-coat. Miss St. Quentin knelt down and busied herself with the lowest of these. Her tall, slender figure was doubled together. She kept her head bent.

"I happen to have a pretty tidy balance just now," she remarked parenthetically, and as though with a certain diffidence. "So you know, if you are a bit hard up—why—it's all perfectly simple, Nellie, don't you know."

For a perceptible space of time Madame de Vallorbes did not answer. A grating of wheels on the gravel arrested her attention. She looked down the long vista of ruddily lighted hall, with its glowing fire and cheerful lamps to the open door, where, against the blear whiteness of the fog, the mail-phaeton and its occupant showed vague, in outline and in proportions almost gigantic against the thick, shifting atmosphere. Miss St. Quentin raised her head, surprised at her companion's silence. Helen de Vallorbes bent down, took the upturned face in both hands and kissed the soft cheeks with effusion.

"You are adorable," she said. "But you are too generous. You shall lend me nothing more. I believe I see my way. I can scrape through this crisis."

Miss St. Quentin rose to her feet.

"All right," she said, smiling upon her friend from her superior height with a delightful air of affection and apology. "I only wanted you just to know, in case—don't you see. And—and—for the rest, how goes it Helen? Are you turning all their poor heads at Brockhurst? You're rather an upsetting being to let loose in an ordinary, respectable, English country-house. A sort of Mousquetaire au couvent the other way about, don't you know. Are you making things fly generally?"

"I am making nothing fly," the other lady rejoined gaily. "I am as inoffensive as a stained-glass saint in a chapel window. I am absolutely angelic."

"That's worst of all," Honoria exclaimed, still smiling. "When you're angelic you are most particularly deadly. For the preservation of local innocents, somebody ought to go and hoist danger signals."

Miss St. Quentin, after just a moment's hesitation, followed her friend through the warm, bright hall to the door. Then Helen de Vallorbes turned to her.

"Au revoir, dearest Honoria," she said, "and the sooner the better. Leave your shopgirls and distressed needlewomen, and all your other good works for a still better one—namely for me. Come and reclaim, and comfort, and support me for a while in Paris."

Again she kissed the soft cheek.

"I am as good as gold. I am just now actually mawkish with virtue," she murmured, between the kisses.

Richard witnessed this exceedingly pretty leave-taking not without a movement of impatience. The fog was thickening once more. It grew late. He wished his cousin would get through with these amenities. Then, moreover, he did not covet intercourse with Miss St. Quentin. He pulled the fur rug aside with his left hand, holding reins and whip in his right.

"I say, are you nearly ready?" he asked. "I don't want to bother you; but really it's about time we were moving."

"I come, I come," Madame de Vallorbes cried, in answer. She put one neatly-shod foot on the axle, and stepped up—Richard holding out his hand to steady her. A sense, at once pleasurable and defiant, of something akin to ownership, came over him as he did so. Just then his attention was claimed by a voice addressing him from the further side of the carriage. Honoria St. Quentin stood on the gravel close beside him, bare-headed, in the clinging damp and chill of the fog.

"Give my love to Lady Calmady," she said. "I hope I shall see her again some day. But, even if I never have the luck to do that, in a way it'll make no real difference. I've written her name in my private calendar, and shall always remember it."—She paused a moment. "We got rather near each other somehow, I think. We didn't dawdle or beat about the bush, but went straight along, passed the initial stages of acquaintance in a few hours, and reached that point of friendship where forgetting becomes impossible.

"My mother never forgets," Richard asserted, and there was, perhaps, a slight edge to his tone. Looking down into the girl's pale, finely-moulded face, meeting the glance of those steady, strangely clear and observant eyes, he received an impression of something uncompromisingly sincere and in a measure protective. This, for cause unknown, he resented. Notwithstanding her high breeding. Miss St. Quentin's attitude appeared to him a trifle intrusive just then.

"I am very sure of that—that your mother never forgets, I mean. One knows, at once, one can trust her down to the ground and on to the end of the ages."—Again she paused, as though rallying herself against a disinclination for further speech. "All captivating women aren't made on that pattern, unfortunately, you know, Sir Richard. A good many of them it's wisest not to trust anything like down to the ground, or longer than—well—the day before yesterday."

And without waiting for any reply to this cryptic utterance, she stepped swiftly round behind the carriage again, waved her hand from the door-step and then swung away, with lazy, long-limbed grace, past the waiting men-servants and through to the ruddy brightness of the hall.

Madame de Vallorbes settled herself back rather languidly in her place. She was pricked by a sharp point of curiosity, regarding the tenor of Miss St. Quentin's mysterious colloquy with Richard Calmady. She had been able to catch but a word here and there, and these had been provokingly suggestive. Had the well-beloved Honoria, in a moment of overscrupulous conscientiousness permitted herself to hoist danger signals? She wanted to know, for it was her business to haul such down again with all possible despatch. She intended the barometer to register set fair whatever the weather actually impending. Yet to institute direct inquiries might be to invite suspicion. Helen, therefore, declined upon diplomacy, upon the inverted sweetnesses calculated nicely to mask an intention quite other than sweet. She really held her friend in very warm affection. But Madame de Vallorbes never confused secondary and primary issues. When you have a really big deal on hand—and of the bigness of her present deal the last quarter of an hour had brought her notably increased assurance—even the dearest friend must stand clear and get very decidedly out of the way. So, while the muffled thud of the horses' hoofs echoed up from the hard gravel of the carriage drive through the thick atmosphere, and the bare limbs of the trees clawed, as with lean arms clothed in tattered draperies, at the passing carriage and its occupants, she contented herself by observing:—

"I am grateful to you for driving me over, Richard. Honoria is very perfect in her own way. It always does me good to see her. She's quite unlike anybody else, isn't she?"

But Richard's eyes were fixed upon the blank wall of fog just ahead, which, though always stable, always receded before the advancing carriage. The effect of it was unpleasant somehow, holding, as it did to his mind, suggestions of other things still more baffling and impending, from which—though you might keep them at arm's length—there was no permanent or actual escape. The question of Miss St. Quentin's characteristics did not consequently greatly interest him. He had arrived at conclusions. There was a matter of vital importance on which he desired to speak to his cousin. But how to do that? Richard was young and excellently modest. His whole purpose was rather fiercely focused on speech. But he was diffident, fearing to approach the subject which he had so much at heart clumsily and in a tactless, tasteless manner.

"Miss St. Quentin? Oh yes!" he replied, rather absently. "I really know next to nothing about her. And she seems merely to regard me as a vehicle of communication between herself and my mother. She sent her messages just now—I hope to goodness I shan't forget to deliver them! She and my mother appear to have fallen pretty considerably in love with one another."

"Probably," Madame de Vallorbes said softly. An agreeable glow of relief passed over her. She looked up at Richard with a delightful effect of pensiveness from beneath the sweeping brim of her cavalier hat.—"I can well believe Aunt Katherine would be attracted by her," she continued. "Honoria is quite a woman's woman. Men do not care very much about her as a rule. There is a good deal of latent vanity resident in the members of your sex, you know, Richard; and men are usually conscious that Honoria does not care so very much about them. They are quite right, she does not. I really believe when poor, dreadful, old Lady Tobermory left her all that money Honoria's first thought was that now she might embrace celibacy with a good conscience. The St. Quentins are not precisely millionaires, you know. Her wealth left her free to espouse the cause of womanhood at large. She is a little bit Quixotic, dear thing, and given to tilting at windmills. She wants to secure to working women a fair business basis—that is the technical expression, I believe. And so she starts clubs, and forms circles. She says women must be encouraged to combine and to agitate. Whether they are capable of combining I do not pretend to say. These high matters transcend my small wit. But, as I have often pointed out to her, agitation is the natural attitude of every woman. It would seem superfluous to encourage or inculcate that, for surely wherever two or three petticoats are gathered together, there, as far as my experience goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them."

Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite resignation.

"All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows! If Honoria, or any other sweet, feminine Quixote, can find means to lighten the burden of our lives, she has my very sincere thanks, well understood."

Richard drew his whip across the backs of the trotting horses, making them plunge forward against that blank, impalpable wall of all-encircling, ever-receding, ever-present fog. The carriage had just crossed the long, white-railed bridge, spanning the little river and space of marsh on either side, and now entered Sandyfield Street. The tops of the tall Lombardy poplars were lost in gloom. Now and again the redness of a lighted cottage window, blurred and contorted in shape, showed through the gray pall. Slow-moving, country figures, passing vehicles, a herd of some eight or ten cows—preceded by a diabolic looking billy-goat, and followed by a lad astride the hind-quarters of a bare-backed donkey—grew out of pallid nothingness as the carriage came abreast of them, and receded with mysterious rapidity into nothingness again. The effect was curiously fantastic and unreal. And as the minutes passed that effect of unreality gained upon Richard's imagination, until now—as last evening in the stately solitude of the Long Gallery—he became increasingly aware of the personality of his companion, increasingly penetrated by the feeling of being alone with that personality, as though the world, so strangely blotted out by these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete, exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly, causing an excitement in him which at once hindered and demanded speech.

Night began to close in in good earnest. Passing the broad, yellowish glare streaming out from the rounded tap-room window of the Calmady Arms, and passing from the end of the village street on to the open common, the light had become so uncertain that Richard could no longer see his companion's face clearly. This was almost a relief to him, so that, mastering at once his diffidence and his excitement, he spoke.

"Look here, Helen," he said, "I have been thinking over all that you told me. I don't want to dwell on subjects that must be very painful to you, but I can't help thinking about them. It's not that I won't leave them alone, but that they won't leave me. I don't want to presume upon your confidence, or take too much upon myself. Only, don't you see, now that I do know it's impossible to sit down under it all and let things go on just the same.—You're not angry with me?"

The young man spoke very carefully and calmly, yet the tones of his voice were heavily charged with feeling.

Madame de Vallorbes clasped her hands rather tightly within her sable muff. Unconsciously she began to sway a little, just a very little, as a person will sway in time to strains of stirring music. An excitement, not mental merely but physical, invaded her. For she recognised that she stood on the threshold of developments in this very notable drama. Still she answered quietly, with a touch even of weariness.

"Ah! dear Richard, it is so friendly and charming of you to take my infelicities thus to heart! But to what end, to what end, I ask you? The conditions are fixed. Escape from them is impossible. I have made my bed—made it most abominably uncomfortably, I admit, but that is not to the point—and I must lie on it. There is no redress. There is nothing to be done."

"Yes, there is this," he replied. "I know it is wretchedly inadequate, it doesn't touch the root of the matter. Oh! it's miserably inadequate—I should think I did know that! Only it might smooth the surface a bit, perhaps, and put a stop to one source of annoyance. Forgive me if I say what seems coarse or clumsy—but would not your position be easier if, in regard to—to money, you were quite independent of that—of your husband, I mean—M. de Vallorbes?"

For a moment the young lady remained very still, and stared very hard at the fog. The most surprising visions arose before her. She had a difficulty in repressing an exclamation.

"Ah! there now, I have blundered. I've hurt you. I've made you angry," Dickie cried impulsively.

"No, no, dear Richard," she answered, with admirable gentleness, "I am not angry. Only what is the use of romancing?"

"I am not romancing. It is the simplest thing out, if you will but have it so."

He hesitated a little. The horses were pulling, the fog was in his throat thick and choking—or was it, perhaps, something more unsubstantial and intangible even than fog? The spacious barns and rickyards of the Church Farm were just visible on the right. In less than five minutes more, at their present pace, the horses would reach the first park gate. The young man felt he must give himself time. He quieted the horses down into a walk.

"If I were your brother, Helen, I should save you all these sordid money worries as a matter of course. You have no brother—so, don't you see, I come next. It's a perfectly obvious arrangement. Just let me be your banker," he said.

Madame de Vallorbes shut her pretty teeth together. She could have danced, she could have sung aloud for very gaiety of heart. She had not anticipated this turn to the situation; but it was a delicious one. It had great practical merits. Her brain worked rapidly. Immediately those practical merits ranged themselves before her in detail. But she would play with it a little—both diplomacy and good taste, in which last she was by no means deficient, required that.

"Ah! you forget, dear Richard," she said, "in your friendly zeal you forget that, in our rank of life, there is one thing a woman cannot accept from a man. To take money is to lay yourself open to slanderous tongues, is to court scandal. Sooner or later it is known, the fact leaks out. And however innocent the intention, however noble and honest the giving, however grateful and honest the receiving, the world puts but one construction upon such a transaction."

"The world's beastly evil-minded then," Richard said.

"So it is. But that is no news, Dickie dear," Madame de Vallorbes answered. "Nor is it exactly to the point."

Inwardly she trembled a little. What if she had headed him off too cleverly, and he should regard her argument as convincing, her refusal as final? Her fears were by no means lessened by the young man's protracted silence.

"No, I don't agree," he said at last. "I suppose there are always risks to be run in securing anything at all worth securing, and it seems to me, if you look at it all round, the risks in this case are very slight. Only you—and M. de Vallorbes need know. I suppose he must. But then, if you will pardon my saying so, after what you have told me I can't imagine he is the sort of person who is likely to object very much to an arrangement by which he would benefit, at least indirectly. As for the world,"—Richard ceased to contemplate his horses. He tried to speak lightly, while his eyes sought that dimly seen face at his elbow. "Oh, well, hang the world, Helen! It's easy enough for me to say so, I dare say, being but so slightly acquainted with it and the ways of it. But the world can't be so wholly hide-bound and idiotic that it denies the existence of exceptional cases. And this case, in some of its bearings at all events, is wholly exceptional, I am—happy to think."

"You are a very convincing special pleader, Richard," Madame de Vallorbes said softly.

"Then you accept?" he rejoined exultantly. "You accept?"

The young lady could not quite control herself.

"Ah! if you only knew the prodigious relief it would be," she exclaimed, with an outbreak of impatience. "It would make an incalculable difference. And yet I do not see my way. I am in a cleft stick. I dare not say Yes. And to say No——" Her sincerity was unimpeachable at that moment. Her eyes actually filled with tears. "Pah! I am ashamed of myself," she cried, "but to refuse is distracting."

The gate of the outer park had been reached. The groom swung himself down and ran forward, but confused by the growing darkness and the thick atmosphere he fumbled for a time before finding the heavy latch. The horses became somewhat restive, snorting and fidgeting.

"Steady there, steady, good lass," Richard said soothingly. Then he turned again to his companion. "Believe me it's the very easiest thing out to accept, if you'll only look at it all from the right point of view, Helen."

Madame de Vallorbes withdrew her right hand from her muff and laid it, almost timidly, upon the young man's arm.

"Do you know, you are wonderfully dear to me, Dick?" she said, and her voice shook slightly. She was genuinely touched and moved. "No one has ever been quite so dear to me before. It is a new experience. It takes my breath away a little. It makes me regret some things I have done. But it is a mistake to go back on what is past, don't you think so? Therefore we will go forward. Tell me, expound. What is this so agreeably reconciling point of view?"

But along with the touch of her hand, a great wave of emotion swept over poor Richard, making his grasp on the reins very unsteady. The sensations he had suffered last evening in the Long Gallery again assailed him. The flesh had its word to say. Speech became difficult. Meanwhile his agitation communicated itself strangely to the horses. They sprang forward against that all-encircling, ever-present, yet ever-receding, blank wall of fog, to which the overarching trees lent an added gloom and mystery, as though some incarnate terror pursued them. The gate clanged-to behind the carriage. The groom scrambled breathlessly into his place. Sir Richard's driving was rather reckless, he ventured to think, on such a nasty, dark night, and with a lady along of him too. He was not sorry when the pace slowed down to a walk. That was a long sight safer, to his thinking.

"The right point of view is this," Richard said at last; "that in accepting you would be doing that which, in some ways, would make just all the difference to my life."

He held himself very upright on the sloping driving-seat, rather cruelly conscious of the broad strap about his waist, and the high, unsightly driving-iron against which, concealed by the heavy, fur rug, his feet pushed as he steadied himself. He paused, gazing away into the silent desolation of the now invisible woods, and when he spoke again his voice had deepened in tone.

"It must be patent to you—it is rather detestably patent to every one, I suppose, if it comes to that—that I am condemned to be of precious little use to myself or any one else. I share the fate of the immortal Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria. A very fine feast is spread before me, while I find myself authoritatively forbidden to eat first of this dish and then of that, until I end by being every bit as hungry as though the table was bare. It becomes rather a nuisance at times, you know, and taxes one's temper and one's philosophy. It seems a little rough to possess all that so many men of my age would give just anything to have, and yet be unable to get anything but unsatisfied hunger, and—in plain English—humiliation, out of it."

Madame de Vallorbes sat very still. Her charming face had grown keen. She listened, drawing in her breath with a little sobbing sound—but that was only the result of accentuated dramatic satisfaction.

"You see I have no special object or ambition. I can't have one. I just pass the time. I don't see any prospect of my ever being able to do more than that. There's my mother, of course. I need not tell you she and I love one another. And there are the horses. But I don't care to bet, and I never attend a race-meeting. I—I do not choose to make an exhibition of myself."