"Nothing can be more foolish than to discuss the past, Mr. Fairfax," replied Clarissa, in a low voice that trembled a little. "You have made me do wrong more than once in my life. There must be an end of this. What would my husband think, if he could hear you? what would he think of me for listening to you? Let me pass, if you please; and God grant that we may never meet again after to-night!"

"God grant that we may never part, Clarissa! O, my love, my love, for pity's sake be reasonable! We are not children to play fast and loose with our lives. You love me, Clary. No sweet-spoken pretences, no stereotyped denials, will convince me. You love me, my darling, and the world is all before us. I have mapped-out our future; no sorrow or discredit shall ever come nigh you—trust a lover's foresight for that. Whatever difficulties may lie in our pathway are difficulties that I will face and conquer—alone. You have only to forget that you have ever been Daniel Granger's wife, and leave Paris with me to-night."

"Mr. Fairfax! are you mad?"

"Never more reasonable—never so much in earnest. Come with me, Clarissa. It is not a sacrifice that I ask from you: I offer you a release. Do you think there is any virtue or beauty in your present life, or any merit in continuing it? From first to last, your existence is a lie. Do you think a wedding-ring redeems the honour of a woman who sells herself for money? There is no slavery more degrading than the bondage of such an alliance."

"Open the door, Mr. Fairfax, and let me go!"

His reproaches stung her to the quick; they were so bitterly true.

"Not till you have heard me, my darling—not till you have heard me out."

His tone changed all at once, softening into ineffable tenderness. He told her of his love with words of deeper passion than he had ever spoken yet—words that went home to the heart that loved him. For a moment, listening to that impassioned pleading, it seemed to Clarissa that this verily was life indeed—that to be so loved was in itself alone the perfect joy and fulness of existence, leaving nothing more to be desired, making shame as nothing in the balance. In that one moment the guilty heart was well-nigh yielding; the bewildered brain could scarcely maintain the conflict of thought and feeling. Then suddenly this mental agony changed to a strange dulness, a mist rose between Clarissa and the eager face of her lover. She was nearer fainting than she had ever been in her life before.

George Fairfax saw her face whiten, and the slender figure totter ever so slightly. In a moment a strong arm was round her. The weary head sank on his shoulder.

"My darling," he whispered, "why not leave Paris to-night? It cannot be too soon. Your husband is away. We shall have a start of two or three days, and avoid all risk of pursuit."

"Not quite," said a voice close behind him; and looking round, George Fairfax saw one of the folding-doors open, and Daniel Granger standing on the threshold. The locked outer door had availed the traitor nothing. Mr. Granger had come upstairs with the porter, who carried a bunch of duplicate keys in his pocket.

Clarissa gave a sudden cry, which rose in the next instant to a shrill scream. Two men were struggling in the doorway, grappling each other savagely for one dreadful minute of confusion and agony. Then one fell heavily, his head crashing against the angle of the doorway, and lay at full length, with his white face looking up to the ceiling.

This was George Fairfax.

Clarissa threw herself upon her knees beside the prostrate figure.

"George! George!" she cried piteously.

It was the first time she had ever uttered his Christian name, except in her dreams; and yet it came to her lips as naturally in that moment of supreme agony as if it had been their every-day utterance.

"George! George!" she cried again, bending down to gaze at the white blank face dimly visible in the firelight; and then, with a still sharper anguish, "He is dead!"

The sight of that kneeling figure, the sound of that piteous imploring voice, was well-nigh maddening to Daniel Granger. He caught his wife by the arm, and dragged her up from her knees with no tender hand.

"You have killed him," she said.

"I hope I have."

Whatever latent passion there was in this man's nature was at white heat now. An awful fury possessed him. He seemed transformed by the intensity of his anger. His bulky figure rose taller; his full gray eyes shone with a pitiless light under the straight stern brows.

"Yes," he said, "I hope I have killed your lover."

"My lover!"

"Your lover—the man with whom you were to have left Paris to-night. Your lover—the man you have met in this convenient rendezvous, day after day for the last two months. Your lover—the man you loved before you did me the honour to accept the use of my fortune, and whom you have loved ever since."

"Yes," cried Clarissa, with a wild hysterical laugh, "my lover! You are right. I am the most miserable woman upon earth, for I love him."

"I am glad you do not deny it. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let me see if I have killed him."

There were a pair of half-burned wax candles on the mantelpiece. Mr. Granger lighted one of them, and then knelt down beside the prostrate figure with the candle in his hand. George Fairfax had given no sign of life as yet. There had not been so much as a groan.

He opened his enemy's waistcoat, and laid his hand above the region of the heart. Yes, there was life still—a dull beating. The wretch was not dead.

While he knelt thus, with his hand upon George Fairfax's heart, a massive chain, loosened from its moorings, fell across his wrist. Attached to the chain there was a locket—a large gold locket with a diamond cross—one of the ornaments that Daniel Granger had given to his wife.

He remembered it well. It was a very trifle among the gifts be had showered upon her; but he remembered it well. If this had been the one solitary gem he had given to his wife, he could not have been quicker to recognise it, or more certain of its identity.

He took it in the palm of his hand and touched the spring, holding the candle still in the other hand. The locket flew open, and he saw the ring of silky brown hair and the inscription, "From Clarissa."

He looked up at his wife with a smile—such a smile! "You might have afforded your lover something better than a secondhand souvenir," he said.

Clarissa's eyes wandered from the still white face, with its awful closed eyes, only to rest for a moment on the unlucky locket.

"I gave that to my sister-in-law," she said indifferently. "Heaven only knows how he came by it." And then, in a different tone, she asked, "Why don't you do something for him? Why don't you fetch some one? Do you want him to die?"

"Yes. Do you think anything less than his death would satisfy me? Don't alarm yourself; I am not going to kill him. I was quite ready to do it just now in hot blood. But he is safe enough now. What good would there be in making an end of him? There are two of you in it."

"You can kill me, if you like," said Clarissa "Except for my child's sake, I have little wish to live."

"For your child's sake!" echoed her husband scornfully. "Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night."

He dropped the locket on George Fairfax's breast with a contemptuous gesture, as if he had been throwing away a handful of dirt. That folly had cost dearly enough.

"I'll go and fetch some one," he said. "Don't let your distraction make you forget that the man wants all the air he can get. You had better stand away from him."

Clarissa obeyed mechanically. She stood a little way off, staring at that lifeless figure, while Daniel Granger went to fetch the porter. The house was large, and at this time in the evening for the most part untenanted, and Austin's painting-room was over the arched carriage-way. Thus it happened that no one had heard that fall of George Fairfax's.

Mr. Granger explained briefly that the gentleman had had a fall, and was stunned—would the porter fetch the nearest doctor? The man looked a him rather suspiciously. The lovely lady's arrival in the gloaming; a locked door; this middle-aged Englishman's eagerness to get into the rooms; and now a fall and the young Englishman is disabled. The leaf out of a romance began to assume a darker aspect. There had been murder done, perhaps, up yonder. The porter's comprehensive vision surveyed the things that might be—the house fallen into evil repute by reason of this crime, and bereft of lodgers. The porter was an elderly man, and did not care to shift his household gods.

"What have they come to do up there?" he asked. "I think I had better fetch the sergent de ville."

"You are quite at liberty to do that, provided you bring a doctor along with him," replied Daniel Granger coolly, and then turned on his heel and walked upstairs again.

He roamed through the empty rooms with a candle in his hand until he found a bottle of water, some portion of which he dashed into his enemy's face, kneeling by his side to do it, but with a cool off-hand air, as if he were reviving a dog, and that a dog upon, which he set no value.

George Fairfax opened his eyes, very slowly, and groaned aloud.

"O God, my head!" he said. "What a blow!"

He had a sensation of lying at the bottom of a steep hill—on a sharp inclined plane, as it were, with his feet uppermost—a sense of suffocation, too, as if his throat had been full of blood. There seemed to him to be blood in his eyes also; and he could only see things in a dim cloudy way—a room—what room he could not remember—one candle flaring on the mantelpiece, and the light of an expiring fire.

Of the things that had happened to him immediately before that struggle and that fall, he had, for the time being, no memory. But by slow degrees it dawned upon him that this was Austin Lovel's painting-room.

"Where the devil are you, Austin?" he asked impatiently.

"Can't you pick a fellow up?"

A grasp stronger than ever Austin Lovel's had been, dragged him to his feet, and half led, half pushed him into the nearest chair. He sat there, staring blankly before him. Clarissa had moved away from him, and stood amid the deep shadows at the other end of the studio, waiting for her doom. It seemed to her to matter very little what that doom should be. Perfect ruin had come upon her. The porter came in presently with a doctor—a little old grey-headed man, who wore spectacles, and had an ancient doddering manner not calculated to inspire beholders with any great belief in his capacity.

He bowed to Mr. Granger in on old-fashioned ceremonious way, and went over to the patient.

"A fall, I believe you say, monsieur!" he said.

"Yes, a fall. He struck his head against the angle of that doorway."

Mr. Granger omitted to state that it was a blow between the eyes from his clenched fist which had felled George Fairfax—a blow sent straight out from the powerful shoulder.

"There was no seizure—no fit of any kind, I hope?"

"No."

The patient had recovered himself considerably by this time, and twitched his wrist rather impatiently from the little doctor's timid grasp.

"I am well enough now," he said in a thick voice. "There was no occasion to send for a medical man. I stumbled at the doorway yonder, and knocked my head in falling—that's all."

The Frenchman was manipulating Mr. Fairfax's cranium with cautious fingers.

"There is a considerable swelling at the back of the skull," he said. "But there appears to have been another blow on the forehead. There is a puffiness, and a slight abrasion of the skin."

Mr. Fairfax extricated his head from this investigation by standing up suddenly out of reach of the small doctor. He staggered a little as he rose to his feet, but recovered himself after a moment or so, and stood firmly enough, with his hand resting on the back of the chair.

"If you will be good enough to accept this by way of fee," he said, slipping a napoleon into the doctor's hand, "I need give you no farther trouble."

The old man looked rather suspiciously from Mr. Fairfax to Mr. Granger and then back again. There was something queer in the business evidently, but a napoleon was a napoleon, and his fees were neither large nor numerous. He coughed feebly behind his hand, hesitated a little, and then with a sliding bow slipped from the room.

The porter lingered, determined to see the end of the romance, at any rate.

It was not long.

"Are you ready to come away?" Daniel Granger asked his wife, in a cold stern voice. And then, turning to George Fairfax, he said, "You know where to find me, sir, when you wish to settle the score between us."

"I shall call upon you to-morrow morning, Mr. Granger."

Clarissa looked at George Fairfax piteously for a moment, wondering if he had been much hurt—if there were any danger to be feared from the effects or that crushing fall. Never for an instant of her life had she meant to be false to her husband; but she loved this man; and her secret being discovered now, she deemed that the bond between her and Daniel Granger was broken. She looked at George Fairfax with that brief yearning look, just long enough to see that he was deadly pale; and then left the room with her husband, obeying him mechanically They went down the darksome staircase, which had grown so familiar to Clarissa, out into the empty street. There was a hackney carriage waiting near the archway—the carriage that had brought Mr. Granger. He put his wife into it without a word, and took his seat opposite to her; and so they drove home in profound silence.

Clarissa went straight to her room—the dressing-room in which Daniel Granger had talked to her the night before ha went to England. How well she remembered his words, and her own inclination to tell him everything! If she had only obeyed that impulse—if she had only confessed the truth—the shame and ignominy of to-night would have been avoided. There would have been no chance of that fatal meeting with George Fairfax; her husband would have sheltered her from danger and temptation—would have saved her from herself.

Vain regrets. The horror of that scene was still present with her—must remain so present with her till the end of her life, she thought. Those two men grappling each other, and then the fall—the tall figure crashing down with the force of a descending giant, as it had seemed to that terror-stricken spectator. For a long time she sat thinking of that awful moment—thinking of it with a concentration which left no capacity for any other thought in her mind. Her maid had come to her, and removed her out-of-door garments, and stirred the fire, and had set out a dainty little tea-tray on a table close at hand, hovering about her mistress with a sympathetic air, conscious that there was something amiss. But Clarissa had been hardly aware of the girl's presence. She was living over again the agony of that moment in which she thought George Fairfax was dead.

This could not last for ever. She awoke by and by to the thought of her child, with her husband's bitter words ringing in her ears,—

"Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?"

"Perhaps they will shut me out of my nursery," she thought.

The rooms sacred to Lovel Granger were on the same floor as her own—she had stipulated that it should be so. She went out into the corridor from which all the rooms opened. All was silent. The boy had gone to bed, of course, by this time; very seldom had she been absent at the hour of his retirement. It had been her habit to spend a stolen half-hour in the nursery just before dressing for dinner, or to have her boy brought to her dressing-room—one of the happiest half-hours in her day. No one barred her entrance to the nursery. Mrs. Brobson was sitting by the fire, making-believe to be busy at needlework, with the under-nurse in attendance—a buxom damsel, whose elbows rested on the table as she conversed with her superior. Both looked up in some slight confusion at Clarissa's entrance. They had been talking about her, she thought, but with a supreme indifference. No petty household slander could trouble her in her great sorrow. She went on towards the inner room, where her darling slept, the head-nurse following obsequiously with a candle. In the night-nursery there was only the subdued light of a shaded lamp.

"Thank you, Mrs. Brobson, but I don't want any more light," Clarissa said quietly. "I am going to sit with baby for a little while. Take the candle away, please; it may wake him."

It was the first time she had spoken since she had left the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. Her own voice sounded strange to her; and yet its tone could scarcely have betrayed less agitation.

"The second dinner-bell has rung, ma'am," Mrs. Brobson said, with a timorously-suggestive air; "I don't know whether you are aware."

"Yes, I know, but I am not going down to dinner; I have a wretched headache. You can tell Target to say so, if they send for me."

"Yes, ma'am; but you'll have something sent up, won't you?"

"Not yet; by and by, perhaps, I'll take a cup of tea in my dressing-room. Go and tell Target, please, Mrs. Brobson; Mr. Granger may be waiting dinner."

She was so anxious to get rid of the woman, to be alone with her baby. She sat down by the cot. O, inestimable treasure! had she held him so lightly as to give any other a place in her heart? To harbour any guilty thought was to have sinned against this white-souled innocent. If those clear eyes, which looked up from her breast sometimes with such angelic tenderness, could have read the secrets of her sinful heart, how could she have dared to meet their steadfast gaze? To-night that sleeping baby seemed something more to her than her child; he was her judge.

"O, my love, my love, I am not good enough to have you for my son!" she murmured, sobbing, as she knelt by his side, resting her tired head upon his pillow, thinking idly how sweet it would be to die thus, and make an end of all this evil.

She stayed with her child for more than an hour undisturbed, wondering whether there would be any attempt to take him away from her—whether there was any serious meaning in those pitiless words of Daniel Granger's. Could he think for a moment that she would surrender him? Could he suppose that she would lose this very life of her life, and live?

At a little after nine o'clock, she heard the door of the outer nursery open, and a masculine step in the room—her husband's. The door between the two nurseries was half open. She could hear every word that was spoken; she could see Daniel Granger's figure, straight and tall and ponderous, as he stood by the table talking to Mrs. Brobson.

"I am going back to Arden the day after to-morrow, Brobson," he said; "you will have everything ready, if you please."

"O, certainly, sir; we can be ready. And I'm sure I shall rejoice to see our own house again, after all the ill-conveniences of this place." And Mrs. Brobson looked round the handsomely-furnished apartment as if it had been a hovel. "Frenchified ways don't suit me," she remarked. "If, when they was furnishing their houses, they laid out more money upon water-jugs and wash-hand basins, and less upon clocks and candelabras, it would do them more credit; and if there was a chair to be had not covered with red velvet, it would be a comfort. Luxury is luxury; but you may overdo it."

This complaint, murmured in a confidential tone, passed unnoticed by Daniel Granger.

"Thursday morning, then, Mrs. Brobson, remember; the train leaves at seven. You'll have to be very early."

"It can't be too early for me."

"I'm glad to hear that; I'll go in and take a look at the child—asleep, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir; fast asleep."

He went into the dimly-lighted chamber, not expecting to see that kneeling figure by the cot. He gave a little start at seeing it, and stood aloof, as if there had been infection that way. Whatever he might feel or think, he could scarcely order his wife away from her son's bedside. Her son! Yes, there was the sting. However he might put her away from himself, he could not utterly sever that bond. He would do his best; but in the days to come his boy might revolt against him, and elect to follow that guilty mother.

He had loved her so fondly, he had trusted her so completely; and his anger against her was so much the stronger because of this. He could not forgive her for having made him so weak a dupe. Her own ignominy—and he deemed her the most shameful of women—was not so deep as his disgrace.

He stood aloof, looking at his sleeping boy, looking across the kneeling figure as if not seeing it, but with a smouldering anger in his eyes that betrayed his consciousness of his wife's presence. She raised her haggard eyes to his face. The time would come when she would have to tell him her story—to make some attempt to justify herself—to plead for his pardon; but not yet. There was time enough for that. She felt that the severance between them was utter. He might believe, he might forgive her; but he would never give her his heart again. She felt that this was so, and submitted to the justice of the forfeiture. Nor had she loved him well enough to feel this loss acutely. Her one absorbing agony was the fear of losing her child.

Daniel Granger stood for a little while watching his son's placid slumber, and then left the room without a word. What could he say to his wife? His anger was much too great for words; but there was something more than anger: there was a revulsion of feeling, that made the woman he had loved seem hateful to him—hateful in her fatal beauty, as a snake is hateful in its lithe grace and silvery sheen. She had deceived him so completely; there was something to his mind beyond measure dastardly in her stolen meetings with George Fairfax; and he set down all her visits to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard to that account. She had smiled in his face, and had gone every other day to meet her lover.

Clarissa stayed with her child all that night. The servants would wonder and speculate, no doubt. She knew that; but she could not bring herself to leave him. She had all manner of fantastic fears about him. They would steal him from her in the night, perhaps. That order of Daniel Granger's about Thursday morning might be only a ruse. She laid herself down upon a sofa near the cot, and pretended to sleep, until the nurse had gone to bed, after endless fussings and rustlings and movings to and fro, that were torture to Mrs. Granger's nerves; and then listened and watched all the night through.

No one came. The wintry morning dawned, and found her child still slumbering sweetly, the rosy lips ever so slightly parted, golden-tinted lashes lying on the round pink cheeks. She smiled at her own folly, as she sat watching him in that welcome daylight. What had she expected? Daniel Granger was not an ogre. He could not take her child from her.

Her child! The thought that the boy was his child very rarely presented itself to her. Yet it had been suggested rather forcibly by those bitter words of her husband's: "Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?"

For Daniel Granger and herself there might be parting, an eternal severance; but there could be no creature so cruel as to rob her of her child.

She stayed with him during his morning ablutions; saw him splash and kick in the water with the infantine exuberance that mothers love to behold, fondly deeming that no baby ever so splashed or so kicked before; saw him arrayed in his pretty blue-braided frock, and dainty lace-bedizened cambric pinafore. What a wealth of finery and prettiness had been lavished upon the little mortal, who would have been infinitely happier dressed in rags and making mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, where there were no cupboards full of broken wagons and head-less horses, flat-nosed dolls and armless grenadiers, the cast-off playthings of a flock of brothers and sisters—a very chaos of rapture for the fingers of infancy! Only a few expensive toys from a fashionable purveyor—things that went by machinery, darting forward a little way with convulsive jerks and unearthly choking noises, and then tumbling ignominiously on one side.

Clarissa stayed with the heir of Arden until the clock in the day-nursery struck nine, and then went to her dressing-room, looking very pale and haggard after her sleepless night. In the corridor she met her husband. He bent his head gravely at sight of her, as he might have saluted a stranger whom he encountered in his own house.

"I shall be glad to speak to you for a quarter of an hour, by and by," he said. "What time would suit you best?" "Whenever you please. I shall be in my dressing-room," she answered quietly; and then, growing desperate in her desire to know her fate, she exclaimed, "But O, Daniel, are we really to go back to Arden to-morrow?"

"We are not," he said, with a repelling look. "My children are going back to-morrow. I contemplate other arrangements for you."

"You mean to separate my baby and me?" she cried incredulously.

"This is neither the place nor the time for any discussion about that. I will come to your dressing-room by and by."

"I will not be parted from my child!"

"That is a question which I have to settle."

"Do not make any mistake, Mr. Granger," Clarissa said firmly, facing him with a dauntless look that surprised him a little—yet what cannot a woman dare, if she can betray the man who has loved and trusted her? "You may do what you please with me; but I will not submit to have my child taken from me."

"I do not like talking in passages," said her husband; "if you insist upon discussing this matter now, we had better go into your room."

They were close to the dressing-room door. He opened it, and they went in. The fire was burning brightly, and the small round table neatly laid for breakfast. Clarissa had been in the habit of using this apartment as her morning-room. There were books and drawing-materials, a table with a drawing-board upon it, and a half-finished sketch.

She sank down into a chair near the fire, too weak to stand. Her husband stood opposite to her. She noticed idly that he was dressed with his usual business-like neatness, and that there was no sign of mental anguish in his aspect. He seemed very cold and hard and cruel as he stood before her, strong in his position as an injured man.

"I am not going to talk about last night any more than I am positively obliged," he said; "nothing that I or you could say would alter the facts of the case, or my estimation of them. I have made my plans for the future. Sophia and Lovel will go back to Yorkshire to-morrow. You will go with me to Spa, where I shall place you under your father's protection. Your future life will be free from the burden of my society."

"I am quite willing to go back to my father," replied Clarissa, in a voice that trembled a little. She had expected him to be very angry, but not so hard and cold as this—not able to deal with her wrong-doing in such a business-like manner, to dismiss her and her sin as coolly as if he had been parting with a servant who had offended him.

"I am ready to go to my father," she repeated, steadying her voice with an effort; "but I will go nowhere without my child."

"We will see about that," said Mr. Granger, "and how the law will treat your claims; if you care to advance them—which I should suppose unlikely. I have no compunction about the justice of my decision. You will go nowhere without your child, you say? Did you think of that last night when your lover was persuading you to leave Paris?"

"What!" cried Clarissa aghast. "Do you imagine that I had any thought of going with him, or that I heard him with my free will?"

"I do not speculate upon that point; but to my mind the fact of his asking you to run away with him argues a foregone conclusion. A man rarely comes to that until he has established a right to make the request. All I know is, that I saw you on your knees by your lover, and that you were candid enough to acknowledge your affection for him. This knowledge is quite sufficient to influence my decision as to my son's future—it must not be spent with Mr. Fairfax's mistress."

Clarissa rose at the word, with a shrill indignant cry. For a few moments she stood looking at her accuser, magnificent in her anger and surprise.

"You dare to call me that!" she exclaimed.

"I dare to call you what I believe you to be. What! I find you in an obscure house, with locked doors; you go to meet your lover alone; and I am to think nothing!"

"Never alone until last night, and then not with my consent, I went to see Mr. and Mrs. Austin—I did not know they had left Paris."

"But their departure was very convenient, was it not? It enabled your lover to plead his cause, to make arrangements for your flight. You were to have three days' start of me. Pshaw! why should we bandy words about the shameful business? You have told me that you love him—that is enough."

"Yes," she said, with the anger and defiance gone out of her face and manner, "I have been weak and guilty, but not as guilty as you suppose. I have done nothing to forfeit my right to my son. You shall not part us!"

"You had better tell your maid you are going on a journey to-morrow. She will have to pack your things—your jewels, and all you care to take."

"I shall tell her nothing. Remember what I have said—I will not be separated from Lovel!"

"In that case, I must give the necessary orders myself," said Mr. Granger coolly, and saying this he left the room to look for his wife's maid.

Jane Target, the maid, came in presently. She was the young woman chosen for Clarissa's service by Mrs. Oliver; a girl whose childhood had been spent at Arden, and to whose childish imagination the Levels of Arden Court had always seemed the greatest people in the world. The girl poured out her mistress's tea, and persuaded her to take something. She perceived that there was something amiss, some serious misunderstanding between Clarissa and her husband. Had not the business been fully discussed in the Areopagus downstairs, all those unaccountable visits to the street near the Luxembourg, and Mr. Fairfax's order to the coachman?

"Nor it ain't the first time I've seen him there neither," Jarvis had remarked; "me and Saunders have noticed him ever so many times, dropping in promiscuous like while Mrs. G. was there, Fishy, to say the least of it!"

Jane Target was very fond of her mistress, and would as soon have doubted that the sun was fire as suspected any flaw in Clarissa's integrity. She had spoken her mind more than once upon this subject in the servants' hall, and had put the bulky Jarvis to shame.

"Do, ma'am, eat something!" she pleaded, when she had poured out the tea. "You had no dinner yesterday, and no tea, unless you had it in the nursery. You'll be fit for nothing, if you go on like this."

Fit for nothing! The phrase roused Clarissa from her apathy. Too weak to do battle for her right to the custody of her child, she thought; and influenced by this idea, she struggled through a tolerable breakfast, eating delicate petite pains which tasted like ashes, and drinking strong tea with a feverish eagerness.

The tea fortified her nerves; she got up and paced her room, thinking what she ought to do.

Daniel Granger was going to take her child from her—that was certain—unless by some desperate means she secured her darling to herself. Nothing could be harder or more pitiless than his manner that morning. The doors of Arden Court were to be shut against her.

"And I sold myself for Arden!" she thought bitterly. She fancied how the record of her life would stand by-and-by, like a verse in those Chronicles which Sophia was so fond of: "And Clarissa reigned a year and a half, and did that which was evil"—and so on. Very brief had been her glory; very deep was her disgrace.

What was she to do? Carry her child away before they could take him from her—secure him to herself somehow. If it were to be done at all, it must be done quickly; and who had she to help her in this hour of desperate need.

She looked at Jane Target, who was standing by the dressing-table dusting the gold-topped scent-bottles and innumerable prettinesses scattered there—the costly trifles with which women who are not really happy strive to create for themselves a factitious kind of happiness. The girl was lingering over her work, loth to leave her mistress unless actually dismissed.

Jane Target, Clarissa remembered her a flaxen-haired cottage girl, with an honest freckled face and a calico-bonnet; a girl who was always swinging on five-barred gates, or overturning a baby brother out of a primitive wooden cart—surely this girl was faithful, and would help her in her extremity. In all the world, there was no other creature to whom she could appeal.

"Jane," she said at last, stopping before the girl and looking at her with earnest questioning eyes, "I think I can trust you." "Indeed you can, ma'am," answered Jane, throwing down her feather dusting-brush to clasp her hands impetuously. "There's nothing in this world I would not do to prove myself true to you."

"I am in great trouble, Jane."

"I know that, ma'am," the girl answered frankly.

"I daresay you know something of the cause. My husband is angry about—about an accidental meeting which arose between a gentleman and me. It was entirely accidental on my part; but he does not choose to believe this, and——" The thought of Daniel Granger's accusation flashed upon her in this moment in all its horror, and she broke down, sobbing hysterically.

The girl brought her mistress a chair, and was on her knees beside her in a moment, comforting her and imploring her to be calm.

"The trouble will pass away, ma'am," said the maid, soothingly. "Mr. Granger will come to see his mistake. He can't be angry with you long, I'm sure; he loves you so."

"Yes, yes, he has been very good to me—better than I have ever deserved; but that is all over now. He won't believe me—he will hardly listen to me. He is going to take away my boy, Jane."

"Going to take away Master Lovel?"

"Yes; my darling is to go back to Arden, and I am to go to papa."

"What!" cried Jane Target, all the woman taking fire in her honest heart. "Part mother and child! He couldn't do that; or if he could, he shouldn't, while I had the power to hinder him."

"How are we to prevent him, Jane—you and I?"

"Let's take the darling away, ma'am, before he can stop us."

"You dear good soul!" cried Clarissa. "It's the very thing I've been thinking of. Heaven knows how it is to be done; but it must be done somehow. And you will come with me, Jane? and you will brave all for me, you good generous girl?"

"Lor, ma'am, what do you think I'm frightened of? Not that stuck-up Mrs. Brobson, with her grand airs, and as lazy as the voice of the sluggard into the bargain. Just you make up your mind, mum, where you'd like to go, and when you'd like to start, and I shall walk into the nursery as bold as brass, and say I want Master Lovel to come and amuse his mar for half an hour; and once we've got him safe in this room, the rest is easy. Part mother and child indeed! I should like to see him do it! I warrant we'll soon bring Mr. Granger to his senses."

Where to go? yes, there was the rub. What a friendless creature Clarissa Granger felt, as she pondered on this serious question! To her brother? Yes, he was the only friend she would care to trust in this emergency. But how was she to find him? Brussels was a large place, and she had no clue to his whereabouts there. Could she feel even sure that he had really gone to Brussels?

Somewhither she must go, however—that was certain. It could matter very little where she found a refuge, if only she had her darling with her. So the two women consulted together, and plotted and planned in Clarissa's sanctum; while Daniel Granger paced up and down the great dreary drawing-room, waiting for that promised visit from George Fairfax.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XLIII.

CLARISSA'S ELOPEMENT.

Mr. Fairfax came a little after noon—came with a calm grave aspect, as of a man who had serious work before him. With all his heart he wished that the days of duelling had not been over; that he could have sent his best friend to Daniel Granger, and made an end of the quarrel in a gentlemanlike way, in some obscure alley at Vincennes, or amidst the shadowy aisles of St. Germains. But a duel nowadays is too complete an anachronism for an Englishman to propose in cold blood. Mr. Fairfax came to his enemy's house for one special purpose. The woman he loved was in Daniel Granger's power; it was his duty to explain that fatal meeting in Austin's rooms, to justify Clarissa's conduct in the eyes of her husband. It was not that he meant to surrender his hope of their future union—indeed, he hoped that the scene of the previous evening would bring about a speedy separation between husband and wife. But he had placed her in a false position; she was innocent, and he was bound to assert her innocence.

He found Daniel Granger like a man of iron, fully justifying that phrase of Lady Laura's—"Carre par la base." The ignominy of his own position came fully home to him at the first moment of their meeting. He remembered the day when he had liked and respected this man: he could not despise him now.

He was conscious that he carried the mark of last night's skirmish in an unpleasantly conspicuous manner. That straight-out blow of Daniel Granger's had left a discoloration of the skin—what in a meaner man might have been called a black eye. He, too, had hit hard in that brief tussle; but no stroke of his had told like that blow of the Yorkshireman's. Mr. Granger bore no trace of the encounter.

The two men met with as serene an air as if they had never grappled each other savagely in the twilight.

"I considered it due to Mrs. Granger that I should call upon you," George Fairfax began, "in order to explain her part in the affair of last night."

"Go on, sir. The old story, of course—Mrs. Granger is spotless; it is only appearances that are against her."

"So far as she is concerned, our meeting yesterday afternoon was an accident. She came there to see another person."

"Indeed I Mr. Austin the painter, I suppose?—a man who painted her portrait, and who had no farther acquaintance with her than that. A very convenient person, it seems, since she was in the habit of going to his rooms nearly every afternoon; and I suppose the same kind of accident as that of yesterday generally brought you there at the same time."

"Mrs. Granger went to see her brother."

"Her brother?"

"Yes, Austin Lovel; otherwise Mr. Austin the painter. I have been pledged to him to keep his identity a secret; but I feel myself at liberty to break my promise now—in his sister's justification."

"You mean, that the man who came to this house as a stranger is my wife's brother?"

"I do."

"What duplicity! And this is the woman I trusted!"

"There was no voluntary duplicity on your wife's part. I know that she was most anxious you should be told the truth."

"You know! Yes, of course; you are in my wife's confidence—an honour I have never enjoyed."

"It was Austin who objected to make himself known to you."

"I scarcely wonder at that, considering his antecedents. The whole thing has been very cleverly done, Mr. Fairfax, and I acknowledge myself completely duped. I don't think there is any occasion for us to discuss the subject farther. Nothing that you could say would alter my estimation of the events of last night. I regret that I suffered myself to be betrayed into any violence—that kind of thing is behind the times. We have wiser remedies for our wrongs nowadays."

"You do not mean that you would degrade your wife in a law court!" cried Mr. Fairfax. "Any legal investigation must infallibly establish her innocence; but no woman's name can escape untainted from such an ordeal."

"No, I am not likely to do that. I have a son, Mr. Fairfax. As for my wife, my plans are formed. It is not in the power of any one living to alter them."

"Then it is useless for me to say more. On the honour of a gentleman, I have told you nothing but the truth. Your wife is innocent."

"She is not guiltless of having listened to you. That is quite enough for me."

"I have done, sir," said George Fairfax gravely, and, with a bow and a somewhat cynical smile, departed.

He had done what he felt himself bound to do. He had no ardent wish to patch up the broken union between Clarissa and her husband. From the first hour in which he heard of her marriage, he had held it in jealous abhorrence. He had very little compunction about what had happened. It must bring matters to a crisis, he thought. In the meantime, he would have given a great deal to be able to communicate with Clarissa, and began accordingly to deliberate how that might best be done.

He did not deliberate long; for while he was meditating all manner of roundabout modes of approach, he suddenly remembered how Austin Lovel had told him he always wrote to his sister under cover to her maid. All he had to do, therefore, was to find out the maid's name.

That would be easy enough, Mr. Fairfax imagined, if his servant was good for anything. The days of Leporello are over; but a well-bred valet may still have some little talent for diplomacy.

"My fellow has only to waylay one of Granger's grooms," Mr. Fairfax said to himself, "and he can get the information I want readily enough."

There was not much time to be lost, he thought. Mr. Granger had spoken of his plans with a certain air of decision. Those plans involved some change of residence, no doubt. He would take his wife away from Paris; punish her by swift banishment from that brilliant city; bury her alive at Arden Court, and watch her with the eyes of a lynx for the rest of his life.

"Let him watch you never so closely, or shut you in what prison he may, I will find a door of escape for you, my darling," he said to himself.

The mistress and maid were busy meanwhile, making arrangements for a sudden flight. There was very little packing to be done; for they could take nothing, or scarcely anything, with them. The great difficulty would be, to get the child out of the house. After a good deal of deliberation they had decided the manner in which their attempt was to be made. It was dusk between five and six; and at dusk Jane was to go to the nursery, and in the most innocent manner possible, carry off the boy for half-an-hour's play in his mother's dressing-room. It was, fortunately, a usual thing for Clarissa to have him with her at this time, when she happened to be at home so early. There was a dingy servants' staircase leading from the corridor to the ground-floor; and down this they were to make their escape unobserved, the child bundled up in a shawl, Jane Target having slipped out beforehand and hired a carriage, which was to wait for them a little way off in a side-street. There was a train leaving Paris at seven, which would take them to Amiens, where they could sleep that night, and go on to Brussels in the morning. Once in Brussels, they must contrive somehow to find Austin Lovel.

Of her plans for the future—how she was to live separated from her husband, and defying him—Clarissa thought nothing. Her mind was wholly occupied by that one consideration about her child. To secure him to herself was the end and aim of her existence.

It was only at Jane's suggestion that she set herself to calculate ways and means. She had scarcely any ready money—one five-pound note and a handful of silver comprised all her wealth. She had given her brother every sixpence she could spare. There were her jewels, it is true; jewels worth three or four thousand pounds. But she shrank from the idea of touching these.

While she sat with her purse in her hand, idly counting the silver, and not at all able to realise the difficulties of her position, the faithful Jane came to her relief.

"I've got five-and-twenty pounds with me, ma'am; saved out of my wages since I've been in your service; and I'm sure you're welcome to the money."

Jane had brought her little hoard with her, intending to invest some part of it in presents for her kindred—a shawl for her mother, and so on; but had been disappointed, by finding that the Parisian shops, brilliant as they were, contained very much the same things she had seen in London, and at higher prices. She had entertained a hazy notion that cashmere shawls were in some manner a product of the soil of France, and could be bought for a mere trifle; whereby she had been considerably taken aback when the proprietor of a plate-glass edifice on the Boulevard des Italiens asked her a thousand francs for a black cashmere, which she had set her mind upon as a suitable covering for the shoulders of Mrs. Target.

"You dear good girl!" said Clarissa, touched by this new proof of fidelity; "but if I should never be able to pay you the money!"

"Stuff and nonsense, ma'am! no fear of that; and if you weren't, I shouldn't care. Father and mother are comfortably off; and I'm not going to work for a pack of brothers and sisters. I gave the girls new bonnets last Easter, and sent them a ribbon apiece at Christmas; and that's enough for them. If you don't take the money, ma'am, I shall throw it in the fire."

Clarissa consented to accept the use of the money. She would be able to repay it, of course. She had a vague idea that she could earn money as a teacher of drawing in some remote continental city, where they might live very cheaply. How sweet it would be to work for her child! much sweeter than to be a millionaire's wife and dress him in purple and fine linen that cost her nothing.

She spent some hours in looking over and arranging her jewels. From all of these she selected only two half-hoop diamond rings, as a reserve against the hour of need. These and these only of Daniel Granger's gifts would she take with her. She made a list of her trinkets, with a nota bene stating her appropriation of the two rings, and laid it at the top of her principal jewel-case. After this, she wrote a letter to her husband—a few lines only, telling him how she had determined to take her child away with her, and how she should resist to the last gasp any attempt to rob her of him.

"If I were the guilty wretch you think me," she wrote, "I would willingly surrender my darling, rather than degrade him by any association with such a fallen creature. But whatever wrong I have committed against you—and that wrong was done by my marriage—I have not forfeited the right to my child's affection."

This letter written, there was nothing more to be done. Jane packed a travelling-bag with a few necessary items, and that was all the luggage they could venture to carry away with them.

The afternoon post brought a letter from Brussels, addressed to Miss Jane Target, which the girl brought in triumph to her mistress.

"There'll be no bother about finding Mr. Austin, ma'am," she cried. "Here's a letter!"

The letter was in Austin's usual brief careless style, entering into no explanations; but it told the quarter in which he had found a lodging; so Clarissa was at least sure of this friendly shelter. It would be a poor one, no doubt; nor was Austin Lovel by any means a strong rock upon which to lean in the hour of trouble. But she loved him, and she knew that he would not turn his back upon her.

The rest of the day seemed long and dreary. Clarissa wandered into the nursery two or three times in order to assure herself, by the evidence of her own eyes, of her boy's safety. She found the nursemaid busy packing, under Mrs. Brobson's direction.

The day waned. Clarissa had not seen her husband since that meeting in the corridor; nor had she gone into any of the rooms where Miss Granger might be encountered.

That young lady, painfully in the dark as to what had happened, sat at her table in the window, diligently illuminating, and wondering when her father would take her into his confidence. She had been told of the intended journey on the next day, and that she and her brother were to go back to Arden Court, under the protection of the servants, while Mr. Granger and his wife went elsewhere, and was not a little puzzled by the peculiarity of the arrangement. Warman was packing, complaining the while at having to do so much in so short a time, and knew nothing of what had occurred in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard, after the dismissal of the carriage by Mr. Fairfax.

"There must have been something, miss," she said, "or your pa would never have taken, this freak into his head—racing back as if it was for a wager; and me not having seen half I wanted to see, nor bought so much as a pincushion to take home to my friends. I had a clear month before me, I thought, so where was the use of hurrying; and then to be scampered and harum-scarumed off like this! It's really too bad."

"I have no doubt papa has good reasons for what he is doing, Warman," answered Miss Granger, with dignity.

"O, of course, miss; gentlefolks has always good reasons for their goings-on!" Warman remarked snappishly, and then "took it out" of one of Miss Granger's bonnets during the process of packing.

Twilight came at last, the longed-for dusk, in which the attempt was to be made. Clarissa had put on one of her darkest plainest dresses, and borrowed a little black-straw bonnet of her maid's. This bonnet and her sealskin jacket she deferred putting on until the last; for there was always the fear that Mr. Granger might come in at some awkward moment. At half-past five Jane Target went to the nursery and fetched the year-old heir of Arden Court.

He was always glad to go to his mother; and he came to-night crowing and laughing, and kicking his little blue shoes in boisterous rapture. Jane kept guard at the door while Clarissa put on her bonnet and jacket, and wrapped up the baby—first in a warm fur-lined opera-jacket, and then in a thick tartan shawl. They had no hat for him, but tied up his pretty flaxen head in a large silk handkerchief, and put the shawl over that. The little fellow submitted to the operation, which he evidently regarded in the light of an excellent joke.

Everything was now ready. Clarissa carried her baby, Jane went before with the bag, leading the way down the darksome servants' staircase, where at any moment they might meet one of Mr. Granger's retainers. Luckily, they met no one; the descent only occupied about two minutes; and at the bottom of the stairs, Clarissa found herself in a small square stone lobby, lighted by a melancholy jet of gas, and pervaded by the smell of cooking. In the next moment Jane—who had made herself mistress of all minor details—opened a door, and they were out in the dull quiet street—the side-street, at the end of which workmen were scalping away a hill.

A few doors off they found the carriage, which Jane had secured half an hour before, and a very civil driver. Clarissa told the driver where to go, and then got in, with her precious burden safe in her arms.

The precious burden set up a wail at this juncture, not understanding or approving these strange proceedings, and it was as much as his mother could do to soothe him. A few yards round the corner they passed a man, who looked curiously at the vehicle. This was George Fairfax, who was pacing the street in the gloaming in order to reconnoitre the dwelling of the woman he loved, and who let her pass him unaware. His own man was busy at the same time entertaining one of Mr. Granger's footmen in a neighbouring wine-shop, in the hope of extracting the information his master required about Mrs. Granger's maid. They reached the station just five minutes before the train left for Amiens; and once seated in the railway-carriage, Clarissa almost felt as if her victory was certain, so easily had the first stage been got over. She kissed and blessed Jane Target, whom she called her guardian angel; and smothered her baby with kisses, apostrophising him with all manner of fond foolishness.

Everything favoured her. The flight was not discovered until nearly three-quarters of an hour after Clarissa had eloped with her baby down that darksome stair. Mrs. Brobson, luxuriating in tea, toast, and gossip before the nursery fire, and relieved not a little by the absence of her one-year-old charge, had been unconscious of the progress of time. It was only when the little clock upon the chimney-piece chimed the half-hour after six, that she began to wonder about the baby.

"His mar's had him longer than ever," she said; "you'd better go and fetch him, Liza. She'll be wanting to dress for dinner, I dessay. I suppose she's going down to dinner to-night, though there is something up."

"She didn't go down to breakfast, nor yet to lunch," said Eliza, who had her information fresh and fresh from one of the footmen; "and Mr. Granger's been a-walking up and down the droring-room as if he was a-doing of it for a wager, William Baker says. Mr. Fairfax come this morning, and didn't stop above a quarter of a hour; but William was outside the droring-room door all the time, and there was no loud talking, nor quarrelling, nor nothink."

"That Fairfax is a villain," replied Mrs. Brobson. "I don't forget the day he kissed baby in Arden Park. I never see any good come of a single gentleman kissing a lady's baby, voluntary. It isn't their nature to do it, unless they've a hankering after the mar."

"Lor, Brobson, how horful!" cried Eliza. And in this pleasant converse, the nurse and her subordinate wasted another five minutes.

The nursemaid frittered away a few more minutes in tapping gingerly at the dressing-room door, until at last, emboldened by the silence, she opened it, and, peering in, beheld nothing but emptiness. Mrs. Granger had gone to the drawing-room perhaps; but where was baby? and where was Jane Target? The girl went in search of her favourite, William Baker. Were Mrs. Granger and baby in the drawing-room? No; Mr. Baker had been in attendance all the afternoon. Mrs. Granger had not left her own apartments.

"But she's not there," cried Eliza, aghast; "nor Target either. I've been looking for baby."

She ran back to the dressing-room; it was still empty, and the bedroom adjoining. Mr. Granger's dressing-room was beyond that, and he was there writing letters. At this door—this sacred door, the threshold whereof she had never crossed—Eliza the nursemaid tapped nervously.

"O, if you please, sir, have you got Master Lovel?"

"No," cried Daniel Granger, starting up from his desk. "What made you think him likely to be here?"

"I can't find him, please, sir. I've been looking in Mrs. Granger's dressing-room, and everywhere almost. Jane Target fetched him for his ma close upon a hour ago; and Mrs. Brobson sent me for him, and I fancied as you might have got him with you, sir."

Mr. Granger came out of his room with the lamp in his hand, and came through the bedroom to his wife's dressing-room, looking with that stern searching gaze of his into every shadowy corner, as if he thought Clarissa and her baby might be playing hide-and-seek there. But there was no one—the cheval-glass and the great glass door of the wardrobe reflected only his own figure, and the scared nursemaid peering from behind his elbow. He went on to the nursery, opening the doors of all the rooms as he passed, and looking in. There are some convictions that come in a minute. Before that search was finished, Daniel Granger felt very sure that his wife had left him, and had taken her child away with her.

In what manner and to what doom had she gone? Was her flight a shameful one, with George Fairfax for her companion? He knew now, for the first time, that in the depths of his mind there had been some lurking belief in her innocence, it was so supreme an agony to him to imagine that she had taken a step which must make her guilt a certainty. He did not waste much time in questioning the verbose Brobson. The child was missing—that was quite clear—and his wife, and his wife's maid. It was some small relief to him to know that she had taken the honest Yorkshire girl. If she had been going to ignominy, she would scarcely have taken any one who knew her past history, above all, one whom she had known in her childhood.

What was he to do? To follow her, of course, if by any means he could discover whither she had gone. To set the telegraph wires going, also, with a view to discovering her destination. He drove off at once to the chief telegraph office, and wrote a couple of messages, one to Mr. Lovel, at Spa—the other to Mr. Oliver, at Holborough Rectory; with a brief stern request to be informed immediately if his wife should arrive at either place. There was Lady Laura Armstrong, her most intimate friend, with whom she might possibly seek a refuge in the hour of her trouble; but he did not care to make any application in that quarter, unless driven to do so. He did not want to make his wrongs public.

From the telegraph office he drove to the Northern Railway Station, and made minute inquiries about the trains. There was a train by which she might have gone to Calais half an hour before he arrived there. He enlisted the services of an official, and promenaded the waiting-rooms and platforms, the dreary chambers in which travellers wait for their luggage, to and fro between the barriers that torment the soul of the impatient. He asked this man, and several other men, if a lady, with her baby and maid, had been observed to take their departure by any train within the last hour. But the men shrugged their shoulders hopelessly. Ladies and maids and babies came and went in flocks, and no one noticed them. There were always babies. Yes; one of the men did remember a stout lady in a red shawl, with a baby and a birdcage and a crowd of boxes, who had gone by the second-class. Is it that that was the lady monsieur was looking for, par hasard?

"She will go to her father," Mr. Granger said to himself again and again; and this for the moment seemed to him such a certainty, that he had half made up his mind to start for Spa by the next train that would carry him in that direction. But the thought of George Fairfax—the possibility that his wife might have had a companion in her flight—arrested him in the next moment. "Better that I should stop to make sure of his whereabouts," he thought; and drove straight to the Champs Elysees, where Mr. Fairfax had his bachelor quarters.

Here he saw the valet, who had not long returned from that diplomatic expedition to the neighbourhood of the Rue de Morny; but who appeared the very image of unconsciousness and innocence notwithstanding. Mr. Fairfax was dining at home with some friends. Would Mr. Granger walk in? The dinner was not served yet. Mr. Fairfax would be delighted to see him.

Mr. Granger refused to go in; but told the man he should be glad to see Mr. Fairfax there, in the ante-room, for a moment. He wanted to be quite sure that the valet was not lying.

Mr. Fairfax came out, surprised at the visit.

"I had a special reason for wishing to know if you were at home this evening," said Daniel Granger. "I am sorry to have disturbed you, and will not detain you from your friends."

And then the question flashed upon him—Was she there? No; that would be too daring. Any other refuge she might seek; but surely not this.

George Fairfax had flung the door wide open in coming out. Mr. Granger saw the dainty bachelor room, with its bright pictures shining in the lamp-light, and two young men in evening-dress lolling against the mantelpiece. The odours of an elaborate dinner were also perceptible. The valet had told the truth. Daniel Granger murmured some vague excuse, and departed.

"Queer!" muttered Mr. Fairfax as he went back to his friends.

"I'm afraid the man is going off his head; and yet he seemed cool enough to-day."

From the Champs Elysees Mr. Granger drove to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. There was another possibility to be considered: if Austin the painter were indeed Austin Lovel, as George Fairfax had asserted, it was possible that Clarissa had gone to him; and the next thing to be done was to ascertain his whereabouts. The ancient porter, whom Mr. Granger had left the night before in a doubtful and bewildered state of mind, was eating some savoury mess for his supper comfortably enough this evening, but started up in surprise, with his spectacles on his forehead, at Mr. Granger's reappearance.

"I want to know where your lodger Mr. Austin went when he left here?" Mr. Granger demanded briefly.

The porter shrugged his shoulders.

"Alas, monsieur, that is an impossibility. I know nothing of Mr. Austin's destination; only that he went away yesterday, at three o'clock, in a hackney-coach, which was to take him to the Northern Railway."

"Is there no one who can tell me what I want to know?" asked Mr. Granger.

"I doubt it, monsieur. Monsieur Austin was in debt to almost every one except his landlord. He promised to write about his furniture,—some of the movables in those rooms upstairs are his—cabinets, carved chairs, tapestries, and so on; but he said nothing as to where he was going."

"He promised to write," repeated Mr. Granger. "That's an indefinite kind of promise. You could let me know, I suppose, if you heard anything?"

"But certainly," replied the porter, who saw Mr. Granger's fingers in his waistcoat pocket, and scented a fee, "monsieur should know immediately."

Mr. Granger wrote his address upon a card, and gave it to the porter, with a napoleon.

"You shall have another when you bring me any information. Good-night."

At home, Daniel Granger had to face his daughter, who had heard by this time of her stepmother's departure and the abstraction of the baby.

"O, papa," she exclaimed, "I do so feel for you!" and made as if she would have embraced her parent; but he stood like a rock, not inviting any affectionate demonstration.

"Thank you, my dear," he said gravely; "but I can do very well without pity. It's a kind of thing I'm not accustomed to. I am annoyed that Clarissa should have acted in—in this ill-advised manner; but I have no doubt matters will come right in a little time."

"Lovel—my brother is safe, papa?" inquired Sophia, clasping her hands.

"I have every reason to believe so. He is with his mother."

Miss Granger sighed profoundly, as much as to say, "He could not be in worse hands."

"And I think, my dear," continued her father, "that the less you trouble yourself about this business the bettor. Any interference on your part will only annoy me, and may occasion unpleasantness between us. You will go back to Arden, to-morrow, as I intended, with Warman, and one of the men to take care of your luggage. The rest of the establishment will follow in a day or so."

"And you, papa?"

"My plans are uncertain. I shall return to Arden as soon as I can."

"Dear old Arden!" exclaimed Sophia; "how I wish we had never left it! How happy I was for the first four years of my life there!"

This apostrophe Mr. Granger perfectly understood—it meant that, with the advent of Clarissa, happiness had fled away from Sophia's dwelling-place. He did not trouble himself to notice the speech; but it made him angry nevertheless.

"There is a letter for you, papa," said Miss Granger, pointing to a side-table; "a letter which Warman found upstairs."

The lynx-eyed Warman, prying and peering about, had spied out Clarissa's letter to her husband, half hidden among the frivolities on the dressing-table. Mr. Granger pounced upon it eagerly, full of hope. It might tell him all he wanted to know.

It told him nothing. The words were not consistent with guilt, unless Clarissa were the very falsest of women. But had she not been the falsest? Had she not deceived him grossly, unpardonably? Alas, he was already trying to make excuses for her—trying to believe her innocent, innocent of what society calls sin—yes, she might be that. But had he not seen her kneeling beside her lover? Had she not owned that she loved him? She had; and the memory of her words were poison to Daniel Granger.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XLIV.

UNDER THE SHADOW OF ST. GUDULE.

It was about half an hour before noon on the following day when Clarissa arrived at Brussels, and drove straight to her brother's lodging, which was in an obscure street under the shadow of St. Gudule. Austin was at work in a room opening straight from the staircase—a bare, shabby-looking chamber—and looked up from his easel with profound astonishment on beholding Mrs. Granger with her maid and baby.

"Why, Clary, what in the name of all that's wonderful, brings you to Brussels?" he exclaimed.

"I have come to live with you for a little while, Austin, if you will let me," she answered quietly. "I have no other home now."

Austin Lovel laid down his palette, and came across the room to receive her.

"What does it all mean, Clary?—Look here, young woman," he said to Jane Target; "you'll find my wife in the next room; and she'll help you to make that youngster comfortable.—Now, Clary," he went on, as the girl curtseyed and vanished through the door that divided the two rooms, "what does it all mean?"

Clarissa told him her story—told it, that is to say, as well as she could tell a story which reflected so much discredit upon herself.

"I went to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard at 5 on Tuesday—as I promised, you know, Austin—and found Mr. Fairfax there. You may imagine how surprised I was when I heard you were gone. He did not tell me immediately; and he detained me there—talking to me."

The sudden crimson which mounted to her very temples at this juncture betrayed her secret.

"Talking to you!" cried Austin; "you mean making love to you! The infernal scoundrel!"

"It was—very dishonourable!"

"That's a mild way of putting it. What! he hung about my rooms when I had gone, to get you into a trap, as it were, at the risk of compromising you in a most serious manner! You never gave him any encouragement, did you, Clarissa?"

"I never meant to do so."

"You never meant! But a woman must know what she is doing. You used to meet him at my rooms very often. If I had dreamt there was any flirtation between you, I should have taken care to put a stop to that. Well, go on. You found Fairfax there, and you let him detain you, and then——?"

"My husband came, and there was a dreadful scene, and he knocked Mr. Fairfax down."

"Naturally. I respect him for doing it."

"And for a few minutes I thought he was dead," said Clarissa with a shudder; and then she went on with her story, telling her brother how Daniel Granger had threatened to separate her from her child.

"That was hard lines," said Austin; "but I think you would have done better to remain passive. It's natural that he should take this business rather seriously at first: but that would wear off in a short time. What you have done will only widen the breach."

"I have got my child," said Clarissa.

"Yes; but in any case you must have had him. That threat of Granger's was only blank cartridge. He could not deprive you of the custody of your son."

"He will try to get a divorce, perhaps. He thinks me the vilest creature in the world."

"A divorce—bosh! Divorces are not obtained so easily. What a child you are, Clarissa!"

"At any rate, he was going to take me back to papa in disgrace. I could not have endured that. My father would think me guilty, perhaps."

Again the tell-tale crimson flushed Clarissa's face. The memory of that September evening at Mill Cottage flashed across her mind, and her father's denunciation of George Fairfax and his race.

"Your father would be wise enough to defend his child, I imagine," replied Austin, "although he is not a person whose conduct I would pretend to answer for. But this quarrel between you and your husband must be patched up, Clary."

"That will never be."

"It must be—for your son's sake, if not for yours. You pretend to love that boy, and are yet so blind to his interests? He is not the heir to an entailed estate, remember. Granger is a self-made man, and if you offend him, may leave Arden Court to his daughter's children."

She had robbed her son of his birthright, perhaps. For what? Because she had not had the strength to shut her heart against a guilty love; because, in the face of every good resolution she had ever made, she had been weak enough to listen when George Fairfax chose to speak.

"It seems very hard," she said helplessly.

"It would be uncommonly hard upon that child, if this breach were not healed. But it must be healed."

"You do not know half the bitter things Mr. Granger said. Nothing would induce me to humiliate myself to him."

"Not the consideration of your son's interests?"

"God will protect my son; he will not be punished for any sin of his mother's."

"Come now, Clary, be reasonable. Let me write to Granger in my own proper character, telling him that you are here."

"If you do that, I will never forgive you. It would be most dishonourable, most unkind. You will not do that, Austin?"

"Of course I will not, if you insist upon it. But I consider that you are acting very foolishly. There must have been a settlement, by the way, when you married. Do you remember anything about it?"

"Very little. There was five hundred a year settled on me for pin money; and five hundred a year for papa, settled somehow. The reversion to come to me, I think they said. And—yes, I remember—If I had any children, the eldest son was to inherit Arden Court."

"That's lucky! I thought your father would never be such a fool as to let you marry without some arrangement of that sort."

"Then my darling is safe, is he not?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so."

"And you will not betray me, Austin?" said Clarissa imploringly.

"Betray you! If you put it in that way, of course not. But I should be acting more in your interests if I wrote to Granger. No good can come of the step you have taken. However, we must trust to the chapter of accidents," added Austin, with a resumption of his habitual carelessness. "I needn't tell you that you are heartily welcome to my hospitality, such as it is. Our quarters are rough enough, but Bessie will do what she can to make you comfortable; and I'll put on a spurt and work hard to keep things together. I have found a dealer in the Montagne de la Cour, who is willing to take my sketches at a decent price. Look here, Clary, how do you like this little bit of genre? 'Forbidden Fruit'—a chubby six-year-old girl, on tiptoe, trying to filch a peach growing high on the wall; flimsy child, and pre-Raphaelite wall. Peach, carnation velvet; child's cheek to match the peach. Rather a nice thing, isn't it?" asked Austin lightly.

Clarissa made some faint attempt to appear interested in the picture, which she only saw in a dim far-off way.

"I shall be very glad to see where you are going to put baby," she said anxiously.

The bleak and barren aspect of the painting-room did not promise much for the accommodation or comfort of Mr. Lovel's domicile.

"Where I am going to put baby! Ah, to be sure, you will want a room to sleep in," said Austin, as if this necessity had only just struck him. "We'll soon manage that; the house is roomy enough,—a perfect barrack, in fact. There was a lace-factory carried on in it once, I believe. I daresay there's a room on this floor that we can have. I'll go and see about that, while you make yourself comfortable with Bessie. We have only two rooms—this and the next, which is our bedroom; but we shall do something better by and by, if I find my pictures sell pretty fast."

He went off whistling an opera air, and by no means oppressed by the idea that he had a sister in difficulties cast upon his hands.

There was a room—a darksome chamber at the back of the house—looking into a narrow alley, where domestic operations of some kind seemed to be going on in every window and doorway, but sufficiently spacious, and with two beds. It was altogether homely, but looked tolerably clean; and Clarissa was satisfied with it, although it was the poorest room that had ever sheltered her. She had her baby—that was the grand point; and he rolled upon the beds, and crowed and chattered, in his half inarticulate way, with as much delight as if the shabby chamber had been an apartment in a palace.

"If he is happy, I am more than content!" exclaimed Mrs. Granger.

A fire was lighted in the stove, and Bessie brought them a second breakfast of coffee and rolls, and a great basin of bread and milk for young Lovel. The little man ate ravenously, and did not cry for Brobson—seemed indeed rather relieved to have escaped from the jurisdiction of that respectable matron. He was fond of Jane Target, who was just one of those plump apple-cheeked young women whom children love instinctively, and who had a genius for singing ballads of a narrative character, every verse embellished with a curious old-fashioned quavering turn.

After this refreshment—the first that Clarissa had taken with any approach to appetite since that luckless scene in her brother's painting-room—Jane persuaded her mistress to lie down and rest, which she did, falling asleep peacefully, with her boy's bright young head nestling beside her on the pillow. It was nearly dark when she awoke; and after dinner she went out for a walk with Austin, in the bright gas-lit streets, and along a wide boulevard, where the tall bare trees looked grim in the darkness. The freedom of this new life seemed strange to her, after the forms and ceremonies of her position as Daniel Granger's wife, and Sophia Granger's stepmother—strange, and not at all unpleasant.

"I think I could be very happy with you and Bessie always, Austin," she said, "if they would only leave me in peace."

"Could you, Clary? I'm sure I should be very glad to have you; but it would be rather hard upon Granger."

"He was going to take me back to papa; he wanted to get rid of me."

"He was in a passion when he talked about that, rely upon it."

"He was as cold as ice, Austin. I don't believe he was ever in a passion in his life."

* * * * *



CHAPTER XLV.

TEMPTATION.

It was Sunday; and Clarissa had been nearly a week in Brussels—a very quiet week, in which she had had nothing to do but worship her baby, and tremblingly await any attempt that might be made to wrest him from her. She lived in hourly fear of discovery, and was startled by every step on the staircase and fluttered by every sudden opening of a door, expecting to see Daniel Granger on the threshold.

She went to church alone on this first Sunday morning. Austin was seldom visible before noon, dawdling away the bleaker morning hours smoking and reading in bed. Bessie had a world of domestic business on her hands, and the two boys to torment her while she attempted to get through it. So Clarissa went alone to St. Gudule. There were Protestant temples, no doubt, in the Belgian city wherein she might have worshipped; but that solemn pile drew her to itself with a magnetic attraction. She went in among the gay-looking crowd—the old women in wondrous caps, the sprinkling of soldiers, the prosperous citizens and citizenesses in their Sunday splendour—and made her way to a quiet corner remote from the great carved-oak pulpit and the high altar—a shadowy corner behind a massive cluster of columns, and near a little wooden door in one of the great portals, that opened and shut with a clanging noise now and then, and beside which a dilapidated-looking old man kept watch over a shell-shaped marble basin of holy water, and offered a brush dipped in the sacred fluid to devout passers-by. Here she could kneel unobserved, and in her ignorant fashion, join in the solemn service, lifting up her heart with the elevation of the host, and acknowledging her guiltiness in utter humility of spirit.

Yet not always throughout that service could she keep her thoughts from wandering. Her mind had been too much troubled of late for perfect peace or abstraction of thought to be possible to her. The consideration of her own folly was very constantly with her. What a wreck and ruin she had made of her life—a life which from first to last had been governed by impulse only!

"If I had been an honourable woman, I should never have married Daniel Granger," she said to herself. "What right had I to take so much and give so little—to marry a man I could not even hope to love for the sake of winning independence for my father, or for the sake of my old home?"

Arden Court—was not that the price which had made her sacrifice tolerable to her? And she had lost it; the gates of the dwelling she loved were closed upon her once again—and this time for ever. How the memory of the place came back to her this chill March morning!—the tall elms rocking in the wind, the rooks' nests tossing in the topmost branches, and the hoarse cawing of discontented birds bewailing the tardiness of spring.

"It will be my darling's home in the days to come," she said to herself; but even this thought brought no consolation. She dared not face her son's future. Would it not involve severance from her? Now, while he was an infant, she might hold him; but by-and-by the father's stern claim would be heard. They would take the boy away from her—teach him to despise and forget her. She fancied herself wandering and watching in Arden Park, a trespasser, waiting for a stolen glimpse of her child's face.

"I shall die before that time comes," she thought gloomily.

Some such fancy as this held her absorbed when the high mass concluded, and the congregation began to disperse. The great organ was pealing out one of Mozart's Hallelujahs. There was some secondary service going on at either end of the church. Clarissa still knelt, with her face hidden in her hands, not praying, only conjuring up dreadful pictures of the future. Little by little the crowd melted away; there were only a few worshippers murmuring responses in the distance; the last chords of the Hallelujah crashed and resounded under the vaulted roof; and at last Clarissa looked up and found herself almost alone.

She went out, but shrank from returning immediately to her child. Those agitating thoughts had affected her too deeply. She walked away from the church up towards the park, hoping to find some quiet place where she might walk down the disturbance in her mind, so as to return with a calm smiling face to her darling. It was not a tempting day for any purposeless pedestrian. The sky had darkened at noon, and there was a drizzling rain coming down from the dull gray heavens. The streets cleared quickly now the services were over; but Clarissa went on, scarcely conscious of the rain, and utterly indifferent to any inconvenience it might cause her.

She was in the wide open place near the park, when she heard footsteps following her, rapidly, and with a purpose, as it seemed. Some women have a kind of instinct about these things. She knew in a moment, as if by some subtle magnetism, that the man following her was George Fairfax.

"Clarissa," said a voice close in her ear; and turning quickly, she found herself face to face with him.

"I was in the church," he said, "and have followed you all the way here. I waited till we were clear of the narrow streets and the crowd. O, my darling, thank God I have found you! I only knew yesterday that you had left Paris; and some happy instinct brought me here. I felt sure you would come to Austin. I arrived late last night, and was loafing about the streets this morning, wondering how I should discover your whereabouts, when I turned a corner and saw you going into St. Gudule. I followed, but would not disturb your orisons, fair saint. I was not very far off, Clarissa—only on the other side of the pillar."

"Was it kind of you to follow me here, Mr. Fairfax?" Clarissa asked gravely. "Have you not brought enough trouble upon me as it is?"

"Brought trouble upon you! Yes, that seems hard; but I suppose it was my fate to do that, and to make amends for it afterwards, dearest, in a life that shall know no trouble."

"I am here with my son, Mr. Fairfax. It was the fear of being separated from him that drove me away from Paris. If you have one spark of generous feeling, you will not pursue me or annoy me here. If my husband were to see us together, or were to hear of our being seen together, he would have just grounds for taking my child away from me."

"Clarissa," exclaimed George Fairfax, with intensity, "let us make an end of all folly and beating about the bush at once and for ever. I do not say that I am not sorry for what happened the other night—so far as it caused annoyance to you—but I am heartily glad that matters have been brought to a crisis. The end must have come sooner or later, Clary—so much the better if it has come quickly. There is only one way to deal with the wretched mistake of your marriage, and that is to treat it as a thing that has never been. There are places enough in the world, Clary, in which you and I are nameless and unknown, and we can be married in one of those places. I will run all risks of a criminal prosecution and seven, years at Portland. You shall be my wife, Clarissa, by as tight a knot as Church and State can tie."

She looked at him with a half scornful smile.

"Do you think you are talking to a child?" she said.

They had been standing in the chill drizzling rain all this time, unconscious, and would have so stood, perhaps, if a shower of fire and brimstone had been descending upon Brussels. But at this juncture Mr. Fairfax suddenly discovered that it was raining, and that Clarissa's shawl was growing rapidly damper.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "what a brute I am. I must find you some kind of shelter."

There was a cafe near at hand, the cafe attached to the Theatre du Pare, with rustic out-of-door constructions for the accommodation of its customers. Mr. Fairfax conducted Clarissa to one of these wooden arbours, where they might remain till the rain was over, or till he chose to bring her a carriage. He did not care to do that very soon. He had a great deal to say to her. This time he was resolved not to accept defeat.

A solitary waiter espied them promptly, having so little to do in this doleful weather, and came for orders. Mr. Fairfax asked for some coffee, and waited in silence while the man brought a little tray with cups and saucers and a great copper coffee-pot, out of which he poured the black infusion with infinite flourish.

"Bring some cognac," said Mr. Fairfax; and when the spirit had been brought, he poured half a wine-glassful into a cup of coffee, and entreated Clarissa to drink it as an antidote to cold.

"You were walking ever so long in the rain," he said.

She declined the nauseous dose.

"I am not afraid of catching cold," she said; "but I shall be very glad if you will let that man fetch me a fly. I ought to have been at home half an hour ago."

"At home! Is it permissible to ask where you live?"

"I would rather not tell you my address. I hope, if my being here had anything to with your coming to Brussels, that you will go back to Paris at once."

"I shall never go back to Paris unless I enter its gates with you some day. I am going to the East, Clary; to Constantinople, and Athens, and all the world of fable and story, and you are going with me—you and young Lovel. Do you know there is one particular spot in the island of Corfu which I have pitched upon for the site of a villa, just such a fairy place as you can sketch for me—your own architecture—neither gothic nor composite, neither classic nor rustic, only le style Clarisse; not for our permanent dwelling—to my mind, nothing but poverty should ever chain a man to one habitation—but as a nest to which we might fly now and then, when we were weary of roaming."

He was talking lightly, after his nature, which was of the lightest, but for a purpose, also, trying to beguile Clarissa from serious considerations, to bring a smile to the pale sad face, if he could. In vain; the hazel eyes looked straight forward with an unwonted fixedness, the lips were firmly set, the hands clasped rigidly.

After this, his tone grew more earnest; again he pleaded, very much as he had pleaded before, but with a stronger determination, with a deeper passion, painting the life that might be for those two in the warmest, brightest colours that his fancy could lend it. What had she to care for? he argued. Absolutely nothing. She had broken with her husband, whom George Fairfax knew by his own experience to be implacable in his resentment. And oh, how much to gain! A life of happiness; all her future spent with the man who loved her; spent wherever and however she pleased. What was he but her slave, to obey her?

She was not unmoved by his pleading. Unmoved? These were words and tones that went home to her heart of hearts. Yes, she could imagine the life he painted so well. Yes, she knew what the future would seem to her, if it were to be spent with him. She loved him dearly—had so loved him ever since that night in the railway-carriage, she thought. When had his image really been absent from her since that time?

He insisted that she should hear him to the end, and she submitted, not unwillingly, perhaps. She had no thought of yielding; but it was sweet to her to hear his voice—for the last time, she told herself; this must be the last time. Even while he pleaded and argued and demonstrated that the wisest thing in the world she could do was to run away with him, she was meditating her plan of escape. Not again must they meet thus. She had a certain amount of strength of mind, but it was not inexhaustible, and she felt her weakness.

"You forget that I have a son," she said at last, when he urged her to speak.

"He shall be my son. Do you think I do not love that rosy yearling? He shall inherit Lyvedon, if you like; there is no entail; I can do what I please with it. Yes, though I had sons of my own he should be first, by right of any wrong we may do him now. In the picture I have made of our future life, I never omitted that figure, Clarissa. Forget your son! No, Clary; when I am less than a father to him, tell me that I never loved you."

This was the man's way of looking at the question; the boy's future should be provided for, he should have a fine estate left him by way of solatium. The mother thought of what her son would think of her, when he grew old enough to consider her conduct.

"I must ask you to get me a fly somehow, Mr. Fairfax," she said quietly. "It is still raining, and I am really anxious to get home to Lovel. I am sorry you should have taken so much trouble about me; it is quite useless, believe me. I know that I have been very weak—guilty even—in many ways since I have known you; but that is all over now. I have paid the penalty in the loss of my husband's esteem. I have nothing now to live for but my child."

"And is that to be the end of everything, Mrs. Granger?" asked George Fairfax, with an angry look in his eyes. "Are we to part upon that? It is such an easy thing to lure a man on to a certain point, and then turn upon him and protest you never meant to go beyond that point. You have paid the penalty! Do you think I have paid no penalty? Was it a pleasant thing to me, do you suppose, to jilt Geraldine Challoner? I trampled honour in the dust for your sake, Clarissa. Do you know that there is a coolness between my mother and me at this moment, because of my absence from England and that broken-off marriage? Do you know that I have turned my back for ever upon a place that any man might be proud to call his home, for the sake of being near you? I have cast every consideration to the winds; and now that you have actually broken loose from your bondage, now that there is nothing to come between us and a happy future, you set up your son as an obstacle, and"—he concluded with a bitter laugh—"ask me to fetch you a fly!"

"I am sorry to wound you; but—but—I cannot bring dishonour upon my son."

"Your son!" cried George Fairfax savagely. "An east wind may blow your son off the face of the earth to-morrow. Is a one-year-old baby to stand between a man and his destiny? Come, Clary, I have served my apprenticeship; I have been very patient; but my patience is exhausted. You must leave this place with me to-night."

"Mr. Fairfax, will you get me a fly, or must I walk home?"

He looked at her fixedly for a few moments, intent upon finding out if she were really in earnest, if this cold persistence were unconquerable even by him. Her face was very pale, the eyes downcast, the mouth firm as marble.

"Clarissa," he cried, "I have been fooled from first to last—you have never loved me!"

Those words took her off her guard; she lifted her eyes to meet his, eyes full of love and despair, and again he told himself success was only a question of time. His apprenticeship was not finished yet; he must be content to serve a little longer. When she had tasted the bitterness of her new life, its helplessness, its desolation, with only such a broken reed as Austin Lovel to lean upon, she would turn to him naturally for comfort and succour, as the fledgling flies back to its nest.

But if in the meantime Daniel Granger should relent and pursue her, and take her back to his heart with pardon and love? There was the possibility of that event; yet to press matters too persistently would be foolish, perilous even. Better to let her have her own way for a little, since he knew that she loved him.

He went to look for the depressed waiter, whom he dispatched in quest of a vehicle, and then returned to the rustic shelter, where Clarissa sat like a statue, watching the rain pouring down monotonously in a perpetual drizzle. They heard the wheels of the carriage almost immediately. Mr. Fairfax offered his arm to Clarissa, and led her out of the garden; the obsequious waiter on the other side holding an umbrella over her head.

"Where shall I tell the man to drive?" he asked.

"To St. Gudule."

"But you don't live in the cathedral, like Hugo's Esmeralda. Am I not to know your address?"

"It is better not. Austin knows that you were the cause of my leaving Paris. If you came, there might be some misunderstanding."

"I am not afraid of facing Austin."

"But I am afraid of any meeting between you. I cannot tell you where I am living, Mr. Fairfax."

"That seems rather hard upon me. But you will let me see you again, won't you, Clary? Meet me here to-morrow at dusk—say at six o'clock. Promise to do that, and I will let you off."

She hesitated, looking nervously to the right and left, like a hunted animal.

"Promise, Clary; it is not very much to ask."

"Very well, then, I promise. Only please let the man drive off to St. Gudule, and pray don't follow me."

Mr. Fairfax grasped her hand. "Remember, you have promised," he said, and then gave the coachman his orders. And directly the fly containing Clarissa had rattled off, he ran to the nearest stand and chartered another.

"Drive to St. Gudule," he said to the man, "and when you see a carriage going that way, keep behind it, but not too near."

It happened, however, that the first driver had the best horse, and, being eager to earn his fare quickly, had deposited Clarissa in the Place Gudule before George Fairfax's charioteer could overtake him. She had her money ready to slip into the man's hand, and she ran across the square and into the narrow street where Austin lived, and vanished, before Mr. Fairfax turned the corner of the square.

He met the empty vehicle, and dismissed his own driver thereupon in a rage. "Your horse ought to be suppressed by the legal authorities," he said, as he gave the man his fare.

She must live very near the cathedral, he concluded, and he spent a dreary hour patrolling the narrow streets round about in the wet. In which of those dull-looking houses has she her dwelling? He could not tell. He walked up and down, staring up at all the windows with a faint hope of seeing her, but in vain; and at last went home to his hotel crestfallen and disappointed.

"She escapes me at every turn," he said to himself. "There is a kind of fatality. Am I to grow old and gray in pursuing her, I wonder? I feel ten years older already, since that night when she and I travelled together."

* * * * *



CHAPTER XLVI.

ON THE WING.

Clarissa hung over her baby with all manner of fond endearments.

"My darling! my darling!" she sobbed; "is it a hard thing to resist temptation for your sake?"

She had shed many bitter tears since that interview with George Fairfax, alone in the dreary room, while Level slept the after-dinner sleep of infancy, and while Mrs. Level and Jane Target gossipped sociably in the general sitting-room. Austin was out playing dominoes at the cafe of a Thousand Columns, with some Bohemianishly-disposed Bruxellois.

She had wept for the life that might have been, but which never could be. On that point she was decided. Not under the shadow of dishonour could she spend her days. She had her son. If she had been alone, utterly desolate, standing on some isolated rock, with nothing but the barren sea around her, she might perhaps have listened to that voice which was so very sweet to her, and yielded. But to take this dreadful leap which she was asked to take, alone, was one thing; to take it with her child in her arms, another. Her fancy, which was very vivid, made pictures of what her boy's future might be, if she were to do this thing. She thought of him stung by the mention of his mother's name, as if it were the foulest insult. She thought of his agony when he heard other men talk of their mothers, and remembered the blackness of darkness that shrouded his. She thought of the boyish intellect opening little by little, first with vague wonder, then fearful curiosity, to receive this fatal knowledge; and then the shame for that young innocent soul!

"O, not for worlds!" she cried, "O, not for worlds! God keep me from any more temptation!"

Not with mere idle prayers did she content herself. She knew her danger; that man was resolute, unscrupulous, revengeful even: and she loved him. She determined to leave Brussels. She would go and lose herself in the wide world of London; and then, after a little while, when all possibility of her movements being traced was over, she would take her child to some secluded country place, where there were woods and meadows, and where the little dimpled hands could gather bright spring flowers. She announced her intention to her brother that evening, when he came home at a latish hour from the Thousand Columns, elated by having won three francs and a half at dominoes—an amount which he had expended on cognac and syphons for himself and his antagonist.

He was surprised, vexed even, by Clarissa's decision. Why had she come to him, if she meant to run away directly? What supreme folly to make such a journey for nothing! Why did she not go from Paris to London at once?