Sunday was bleak and stormy, and no one stirred out of the house. He was alone again with the ladies at breakfast, and during the long day he was much in their company. It was like no other day he had ever imagined to himself.

On the morrow, in the morning train by which he returned alone to town, his mind roved luxuriously among the fragrant memories of that day. He had been so perfectly at home—and in such a home! There were some things which came uppermost again and again—but of them all he dwelt most fixedly upon the recollection of moving about in the greenhouses and conservatories, with that tall, stately, fair Lady Cressage for his guide, and watching her instead of the flowers that she pointed out. Of what she had told him, not a syllable stuck in his mind, but the music of the voice lingered in his ears.

"And she is old Kervick's daughter!" he said to himself more than once.



CHAPTER VIII

IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed in making what, by the map, should be so brief a journey. In Thorpe's own compartment, men spoke with savage irony of cyclists alleged to be passing them on the road, and exchanged dark prophecies as to the novelties in imbecility and helplessness which the line would be preparing for the Christmas holidays. The old joke about people who had gone travelling years before, and were believed to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent, revived itself amid gloomy approbation. The still older discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton was really the worst followed naturally in its wake, and occupied its accustomed half-hour—complicated, however, upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover, and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other railway could be half so bad.

The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment, and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton, having piled up additional defenses in the shape of personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer. He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied, of knowing a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover, so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned in the same breath with the daringly inventive and resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge, showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances plainly reflected the doubt.

But to Thorpe the journey seemed short enough—almost too short. The conversation interested him not at all; if he had ever known the Southern lines apart, they were all one to him now. He looked out of the window, and could have sworn that he thought of nothing but the visit from which he was returning.

When he alighted at Cannon Street, however, it was to discover that his mind was full of a large, new, carefully-prepared project. It came to him, ready-made and practically complete, as he stood on the platform, superintending the porter's efforts to find his bags. He turned it over and over in his thoughts, in the hansom, more to familiarize himself with its details than to add to them. He left the cab to wait for him at the mouth of a little alley which delves its way into Old Broad Street through towering walls of commercial buildings, old and new.

Colin Semple was happily in his office—a congeries of small, huddled rooms, dry and dirty with age, which had a doorway of its own in a corner of the court—and Thorpe pushed on to his room at the end like one who is assured of both his way and his welcome.

The broker was standing beside a desk, dictating a letter to a clerk who sat at it, and with only a nod to Thorpe he proceeded to finish this task. He looked more than once at his visitor as he did so, in a preoccupied, impersonal way. To the other's notion, he seemed the personification of business—without an ounce of distracting superfluous flesh upon his wiry, tough little frame, without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort. He was the machine perfected and fined down to absolute essentials. He could understand a joke if it was useful to him to do so. He could drink, and even smoke cigarettes, with a natural air, if these exercises seemed properly to belong to the task he had in hand. Thorpe did not conceive him doing anything for the mere human reason that he liked to do it. There was more than a touch of what the rustic calls "ginger" in his hair and closely-cropped, pointed beard, and he had the complementary florid skin. His eyes—notably direct, confident eyes—were of a grey which had in it more brown than blue. He wore a black frock-coat, buttoned close, and his linen produced the effect of a conspicuous whiteness.

He turned as the clerk left the room, and let his serious, thin lips relax for an instant as a deferred greeting. "Well?" he asked, impassively.

"Have you got a quarter-of-an-hour?" asked Thorpe in turn. "I want a talk with you."

For answer, Semple left the room. Returning after a minute or two, he remarked, "Go ahead till we're stopped," and seated himself on the corner of the desk with the light inconsequence of a bird on a twig. Thorpe unbuttoned his overcoat, laid aside his hat, and seated himself.

"I've worked out the whole scheme," he began, as if introducing the product of many sleepless nights' cogitations. "I'm going to leave England almost immediately—go on the Continent and loaf about—I've never seen the Continent."

Semple regarded him in silence. "Well?" he observed at last.

"You see the idea, don't you?" Thorpe demanded.

The broker twitched his shoulders slightly. "Go on," he said.

"But the idea is everything," protested the other. "We've been thinking of beginning the campaign straight away—but the true game now is to lie low—silent as the grave. I go away now, d'ye see? Nothing particular is said about it, of course, but in a month or two somebody notices that I'm not about, and he happens to mention it to somebody else—and so there gets to be the impression that things haven't gone well with me, d'ye see? On the same plan, I let all the clerks at my office go. The Secretary'll come round every once in a while to get letters, of course, and perhaps he'll keep a boy in the front office for show, but practically the place'll be shut up. That'll help out the general impression that I've gone to pieces. Now d'ye see?"

"It's the Special Settlement you're thinking of," commented Semple.

"Of course. The fellows that we're going to squeeze would move heaven and hell to prevent our getting that Settlement, if they got wind of what was going on. The only weak point in our game is just there. Absolutely everything hangs on the Settlement being granted. Naturally, then, our play is to concentrate everything on getting it granted. We don't want to raise the remotest shadow of a suspicion of what we're up to, till after we're safe past that rock. So we go on in the way to attract the least possible attention. You or your jobber makes the ordinary application for a Special Settlement, with your six signatures and so on; and I go abroad quietly, and the office is as good as shut up, and nobody makes a peep about Rubber Consols—and the thing works itself. You do see it, don't you?"

"I see well enough the things that are to be seen," replied Semple, with a certain brevity of manner. "There was a sermon of my father's that I remember, and it had for its text, 'We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.'"

Thorpe, pondering this for a moment, nodded his head. "Semple," he said, bringing his chair forward to the desk, "that's what I've come for. I want to spread my cards on the table for you. I know the sum you've laid out already, in working this thing. We'll say that that is to be paid back to you, as a separate transaction, and we'll put that to one side. Now then, leaving that out of consideration, what do you think you ought to have out of the winnings, when we pull the thing off? Mind, I'm not thinking of your 2,000 vendor's shares——"

"No—I'm not thinking much of them, either," interposed Semple, with a kind of dry significance.

"Oh, they'll be all right," Thorpe affirmed. He laughed unconsciously as he did so. "No, what I want to get at is your idea of what should come to you, as a bonus, when I scoop the board."

"Twenty thousand pounds," said Semple, readily.

Thorpe's slow glance brightened a trifle. "I had thought thirty would be a fairer figure," he remarked, with an effort at simplicity.

The broker put out his under-lip. "You will find people rather disposed to distrust a man who promises more than he's asked," he remarked coldly.

"Yes—I know what you mean," Thorpe hurried to say, flushing awkwardly, even though the remark was so undeserved; "but it's in my nature. I'm full of the notion of doing things for people that have done things for me. That's the way I'm built. Why"—he halted to consider the advisability of disclosing what he had promised to do for Lord Plowden, and decided against it—"why, without you, what would the whole thing have been worth to me? Take one thing alone—the money for the applications—I could have no more got at it than I could at the Crown Jewels in the Tower. I've wondered since, more than once—if you don't mind the question—how did you happen to have so much ready money lying about."

"There are some Glasgow and Aberdeen folk who trust me to invest for them," the broker explained. "If they get five per cent. for the four months, they'll be very pleased. And so I shall be very pleased to take thirty thousand instead of twenty—if it presents itself to your mind in that way. You will give me a letter to that effect, of course."

"Of course," assented Thorpe. "Write it now, if you like." He pushed his chair forward, closer to the desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. "What I want to do is this," he said, looking up. "I'll make the promise for thirty-two thousand, and I'll get you to let me have two thousand in cash now—a personal advance. I shall need it, if I'm to hang about on the Continent for four months. I judge you think it'll be four months before things materialize, eh?"

"The Special Settlement, in the natural order of events, would come shortly after the Christmas holidays. That is nearly three months. Then the work of taking fort-nightly profits will begin—and it is for you to say how long you allow that to go on."

"But about the two thousand pounds now," Thorpe reminded him.

"I think I will do that in this way," said Semple, kicking his small legs nonchalantly. "I will buy two thousand fully-paid shares of you, for cash down, NOT vendor's shares, you observe—and then I will take your acknowledgment that you hold them for me in trust up to a given date. In that way, I would not at all weaken your market, and I would have a stake in the game." "Your stake's pretty big, already," commented Thorpe, tentatively.

"It's just a fancy of mine," said the other, with his first smile. "I like to hold shares that are making sensational advances. It is very exciting."

"All right," said Thorpe, in accents of resignation. He wrote out two letters, accepting the wording which Semple suggested from his perch on the desk, and then the latter, hopping down, took the chair in turn and wrote a cheque.

"Do you want it open?" he asked over his shoulder. "Are you going to get it cashed at once?"

"No—cross it," said the other. "I want it to go through my bankers. It'll warm their hearts toward me. I shan't be going till the end of the week, in any event. I suppose you know the Continent by heart."

"On the contrary, very little indeed. I've had business in Frankfort once, and in Rotterdam once, and in Paris twice. That is all."

"But don't you ever do anything for pleasure?" Thorpe asked him, as he folded the cheque in his pocket-book.

"Oh yes—many things," responded the broker, lightly. "It's a pleasure, for example, to buy Rubber Consols at par."

"Oh, if you call it buying," said Thorpe, and then softened his words with an apologetic laugh. "I didn't tell you, did I? I've been spending Saturday and Sunday with Plowden—you know, the Lord Plowden on my Board."

"I know of him very well," observed the Scotchman.

"Has he a place that he asks people down to, then? That isn't the usual form with guinea-pigs."

"Ah, but, he isn't the guinea-pig variety at all," Thorpe asserted, warmly. "He's really a splendid fellow—with his little oddities, like the rest of us, of course, but a decent chap all through. Place? I should think he HAD got a place! It's one of the swellest old country-houses you ever saw—older than hell, you know—and it's kept up as if they had fifty thousand a year. Do you happen to know what his real income is supposed to be?"

Semple shook his head. He had taken his hat, and was smoothing it deftly with the palm of his hand.

"I asked," Thorpe went on, "because he had so much to say about his poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how I knocked the pheasants!" A clerk showed his head at the door, with a meaning gesture. "I must go now," said Semple, briskly, and led the way out to another room. He halted here, and dismissed his caller with the brief injunction, "Don't go away without seeing me."

It was the noon-hour, and the least-considered grades of the City's slaves were in the streets on the quest for cheap luncheons. Thorpe noted the manner in which some of them studied the large bill of fare placarded beside a restaurant door; the spectacle prompted him luxuriously to rattle the gold coins remaining in his pocket. He had been as anxious about pence as the hungriest of those poor devils, only a week before. And now! He thrust up the door in the roof of the cab, and bade the driver stop at his bank. Thence, after some brief but very agreeable business, and a hurried inspection of the "Court" section of a London Directory, he drove to a telegraph station and despatched two messages. They were identical in terms. One sought General Kervick at his residence—he was in lodgings somewhere in the Hanover Square country—and the other looked for him at his club. Both begged him to lunch at the Savoy at two o'clock.

There was time and to spare, now. Thorpe dismissed the cab at his hotel—an unpretentious house in Craven Street, and sent his luggage to his rooms. There were no letters for him on the board in the hallway, and he sauntered up to the Strand. As by force of habit, he turned presently into a side-street, and stopped opposite the ancient book-shop of his family.

In the bright yet mellow light of the sunny autumn noontide, the blacks and roans and smoked drabs of the low old brick front looked more dingy to his eye than ever. It spoke of antiquity, no doubt, but it was a dismal and graceless antiquity of narrow purposes and niggling thrift. It was so little like the antiquity, for example, of Hadlow House, that the two might have computed their age by the chronological systems of different planets. Although his sister's married name was Dabney, and she had been sole proprietor for nearly a dozen years, the sign over the doorway bore still its century-old legend, "Thorpe, Bookseller."

He crossed the street, and paused for a moment to run an eye over the books and placards exposed on either side of the entrance. A small boy guarded these wares, and Thorpe considered him briefly, with curious recollections of how much of his own boyhood had been spent on that very spot. The lad under observation had a loutish and sullen face; its expression could not have been more devoid of intellectual suggestions if he had been posted in a Wiltshire field to frighten crows with a rattle, instead of being set here in the highway of the world's brain-movement, an agent of students and philosophers. Thorpe wondered if in his time he could have looked such a vacant and sour young fool. No—no. That could not be. Boys were different in his day—and especially boys in book-shops. They read something and knew something of what they handled. They had some sort of aspirations, fitful and vague as these might be, to become in their time bookmen also. And in those days there still were bookmen—widely-informed, observant, devoted old bookmen—who loved their trade, and adorned it.

Thorpe reflected that, as he grew older, he was the better able to apprehend the admirable qualities of that departed race of literature's servants. Indeed, it seemed that he had never adequately realized before how proud a man might well be of descending from a line of such men. The thought struck him that very likely at this identical doorway, two generations back, a poor, out-at-the-elbows, young law-student named Plowden had stood and turned over pages of books he could not dream of buying. Perhaps, even, he had ventured inside, and deferentially picked acquaintance with the Thorpe of the period, and got bookish advice and friendly counsel for nothing. It was of no real significance that the law-student grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as the Plowdens.

A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a high desk. She did not look up.

"Well—I visited his Lordship all right." He announced his presence thus genially.

"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked, turning to him, after a pause, her emotionless, plain face.

"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity. "You should have seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe' there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you—all to myself at breakfast two days running. And such ladies—finer than silk. Oh, it's clear as daylight—I was intended for a fashionable career."

She smiled in a faint, passive way. "Well—they say 'better late than never,' you know." "And after all, IS it so very late?" he said, adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. "I'm just turned forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there, the other day—and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty."

"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain," she commented.

"I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The mother, Lady Plowden—why she made me feel as if I was at the very least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me, and listened to me, and said friendly things to me—why, just as anybody might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her."

Louisa laughed in his face. "Don't be a fool, Joel," she adjured him, with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience with the buoyancy of his smile. "Why, of course, you'll know her," he protested. "What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a thing!"

"There's no good talking about it at all," she observed, after a little pause. "It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And as I said the other night, if you want to do things for the children, that's another matter. They're of an age when they can learn whatever anybody chooses to teach them."

"Where are they now?" he asked. Upon the instant another plan began to unfold itself in the background of his mind.

"They're both at Cheltenham, though they're at different places, of course. I was recommended to send Julia there—one of our old customers is a Governor, or whatever it's called—and he got special terms for her. She was rather old, you know, to go to school, but he arranged it very nicely for her—and there is such a good boys' college there, it seemed the wisest thing to send Alfred too. Julia is to finish at Christmas-time—and what I'm going to do with her afterward is more than I know."

"Is she pretty?" the uncle of Julia enquired.

"She's very nice," the mother answered, with vague extenuation in her tone. "I don't know about her looks—she varies so much. Sometimes I think she's pretty—and then again I can't think it. She's got good features, and she holds herself well, and she's very much the lady—rather too much, I think, sometimes—but it all depends upon what you call pretty. She's not tall, you know. She takes after her father's family. The Dabneys are all little people."

Thorpe seemed not to care about the Dabneys. "And what's Alfred like?" he asked.

"He wants to be an artist!" There was a perceptible note of apprehension in the mother's confession.

"Well—why shouldn't he—if he's got a bent that way?" demanded Thorpe, with reproof in his tone. "Did you want him to be a shop-keeper?"

"I should like to see him a doctor," she replied with dignity. "It was always my idea for him."

"Well, it's no good—even as an idea," he told her. "Doctors are like parsons—they can't keep up with the times. The age is outgrowing them. Only the fakirs in either profession get anything out of it, nowadays. It's all mystery and sleight-of-hand and the confidence trick—medicine is—and if you haven't got just the right twist of the wrist, you're not in it. But an artist stands on his merits. There is his work—done by his own hands. It speaks for itself. There's no deception—it's easy enough to tell whether it's good or bad. If the pictures are good, people buy them. If they're bad, people don't buy them. Of course, it won't matter to Alfred, financially speaking, whether his pictures sell well or not. But probably he'd give it up, if he didn't make a hit of it.

"I don't know that there's any crying need that he should do anything. My own idea for him, perhaps, would be the Army, but I wouldn't dream of forcing it on him against his will. I had a bitter enough dose of that, myself, with father. I'd try to guide a youngster, yes, and perhaps argue with him, if I thought he was making a jack of himself—but I wouldn't dictate. If Alfred thinks he wants to be an artist, in God's name let him go ahead. It can be made a gentlemanly trade—and the main thing is that he should be a gentleman."

Louisa had listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. "If you don't mind, I don't know that I do," she said when it was finished. "Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick temper. He reminds me of father—oh, ever so much more than you do. He contradicts everything everybody says. He quite knows it all."

"But he's a good fellow, isn't he?" urged Thorpe. "I mean, he's got his likable points? I'm going to be able to get along with him?"

"I didn't get along with him very well," the mother admitted, reluctantly, "but I daresay with a man it would be different. You see, his father was ill all those four years, and Alfred hated the shop as bad as you did, and perhaps in my worry I blamed him more than was fair. I want to be fair to him, you know."

"But is he a gentleman? That puts it in a word," Thorpe insisted.

"Oh, mercy yes," Louisa made ready answer. "My only fear is—whether you won't find him too much of a gentleman."

Thorpe knitted his brows. "I only hope we're talking about the same thing," he said, in a doubtful tone. Before she could speak, he lifted his hand. "Never mind—I can see for myself in ten minutes more than you could tell me in a lifetime. I've got a plan. I'm going on the Continent in a few days' time, to stay for three or four months. I've got nothing special to do—just to travel about and see things and kill time—I shall probably go to Italy and Switzerland and Paris and the Rhine and all sorts of places—and it occurred to me that I'd take the two youngsters with me. I could get acquainted with them, that way, and they'd be company for me. I've been lonesome so long, it would feel good to have some of my own flesh and blood about me—and I suppose they'd be tickled to death to go."

"Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas," Mrs. Dabney objected, blankly.

"Bah!" Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. "What on earth difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?

"And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him. Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special start for it." He added, upon a luminous afterthought: "Perhaps his seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of wanting to be an artist."

The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction. "Well—if you really think it's best," she began, "I don't know that I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way. Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether—and all I can say is—I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have some travelling clothes."

"I can wait till you get her ready—only you must hurry up about it."

Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on the desk. "I will give you back that thirty," he said, as he wrote, "and here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time, will you? and if you want more tell me."

A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for leaving.

His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand, was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible letters before her mental vision. "Even now I don't believe in him," the impalpable legend ran.



CHAPTER IX

GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.

By tacit agreement, the General ordered the luncheon, speaking French to the waiter throughout. Divested of his imposing great-coat, he was seen to be a gentleman of meagre flesh as well as of small stature. He had the Roman nose, narrow forehead, bushing brows, and sharply-cut mouth and chin of a soldier grown old in the contemplation of portraits of the Duke of Wellington. His face and neck were of a dull reddish tint, which seemed at first sight uniformly distributed: one saw afterward that it approached pallor at the veined temples, and ripened into purple in minute patches on the cheeks and the tip of the pointed nose. Against this flushed skin, the closely-cropped hair and small, neatly-waxed moustache were very white indeed. It was a thin, lined, care-worn face, withal, which in repose, and particularly in profile, produced an effect of dignified and philosophical melancholy. The General's over-prominent light blue eyes upon occasion marred this effect, however, by glances of a bold, harsh character, which seemed to disclose unpleasant depths below the correct surface. His manner with the waiters was abrupt and sharp, but undoubtedly they served him very well—much better, in truth, than Thorpe had ever seen them serve anybody before.

Thorpe observed his guest a good deal during the repast, and formed numerous conclusions about him. He ate with palpable relish of every dish, and he emptied his glass as promptly as his host could fill it. There was hardly a word of explanation as to the purpose of their meeting, until the coffee was brought, and they pushed back their chairs, crossed their legs, and lighted cigars.

"I was lucky to catch you with my wire, at such short notice," Thorpe said then. "I sent two, you know—to your chambers and your club. Which of them found you?"

"Chambers," said the General. "I rarely dress till luncheon time. I read in bed. There's really nothing else to do. Idleness is the curse of my life."

"I've been wondering if you'd like a little occupation—of a well-paid sort," said Thorpe slowly. He realized that it was high time to invent some pretext for his hurried summons of the General.

"My dear sir," responded the other, "I should like anything that had money in it. And I should very much like occupation, too—if it were, of course, something that was—was suitable to me."

"Yes," said Thorpe, meditatively. "I've something in my mind—not at all definite yet—in fact, I don't think I can even outline it to you yet. But I'm sure it will suit you—that is, if I decide to go on with it—and there ought to be seven or eight hundred a year for you in it—for life, mind you."

The General's gaze, fastened strenuously upon Thorpe, shook a little. "That will suit me very well," he declared, with feeling. "Whatever I can do for it"—he let the sentence end itself with a significant gesture.

"I thought so," commented the other, trifling with the spoon in his cup. "But I want you to be open with me. I'm interested in you, and I want to be of use to you. All that I've said, I can do for you. But first, I'm curious to know everything that you can tell me about your circumstances. I'm right in assuming, I suppose, that you're—that you're not any too well-fixed."

The General helped himself to another little glass of brandy. His mood seemed to absorb the spirit of the liqueur. "Fixed!" he repeated with a peevish snap in his tone. "I'm not 'fixed' at all, as you call it. Good God, sir! They no more care what becomes of me than they do about their old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position—and everything—and they round on me like—like cuckoos." His pale, bulging eyes lifted their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke, and flashed with the predatory fierceness of a hawk.

Intuition helped Thorpe to guess whom "they" might mean. The temper visibly rising in the old man's mind was what he had hoped for. He proceeded with an informed caution. "Don't be annoyed if I touch upon family matters," he said. "It's a part of what I must know, in order to help you. I believe you're a widower, aren't you, General?"

The other, after a quick upward glance, shook his head resentfully. "Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy with HER son-in-law—and her daughter. He is a man of property—and also, apparently, a man of remarkable credulity and patience." He paused, to scan his companion's face. "They divide him between them," he said then, from clenched teeth—"and I—mind you—I made the match! He was a young fellow that I found—and I brought him home and introduced him—and I haven't so much as an Italian postage-stamp to show for it. But what interest can you possibly take in all this?" The unamiable glance of his eyes was on the instant surcharged with suspicion.

"How many daughters have you?" Thorpe ventured the enquiry with inward doubts as to its sagacity.

"Three," answered the General, briefly. It was evident that he was also busy thinking.

"I ask because I met one of them in the country over Sunday," Thorpe decided to explain.

The old soldier's eyes asked many questions in the moment of silence. "Which one—Edith?—that is, Lady Cressage?" he enquired. "Of course—it would have been her."

Thorpe nodded. "She made a tremendous impression upon me," he observed, watching the father with intentness as he let the slow words fall.

"Well she might," the other replied, simply. "She's supposed to be the most beautiful woman in England."

"Well—I guess she is," Thorpe assented, while the two men eyed each other.

"Is the third sister unmarried?" it occurred to him to ask. The tone of the question revealed its perfunctory character.

"Oh—Beatrice—she's of no importance," the father replied. "She goes in for writing, and all that—she's not a beauty, you know—she lives with an old lady in Scotland. The oldest daughter—Blanche—she has some good looks of her own, but she's a cat. And so you met Edith! May I ask where it was?"

"At Hadlow House—Lord Plowden's place, you know."

The General's surprise at the announcement was undoubted. "At Plowden's!" he repeated, and added, as if half to himself, "I thought that was all over with, long ago."

"I wish you'd tell me about it," said Thorpe, daringly. "I've made it plain to you, haven't I? I'm going to look out for you. And I want you to post me up, here, on some of the things that I don't understand. You remember that it was Plowden who introduced you to me, don't you? It was through him that you got on the Board. Well, certain things that I've seen lead me to suppose that he did that in order to please your daughter. Did you understand it that way?"

"It's quite likely, in one sense," returned the General. He spoke with much deliberation now, weighing all his words. "He may have thought it would please her; he may not have known how little my poor affairs concerned her."

"Well, then," pursued Thorpe, argumentatively, "he had an object in pleasing her. Let me ask the question—did he want to marry her?"

"Most men want to marry her," was the father's non-committal response. His moustache lifted itself in the semblance of a smile, but the blue eyes above remained coldly vigilant.

"Well—I guess that's so too," Thorpe remarked. He made a fleeting mental note that there was something about the General which impelled him to think and talk more like an American than ever. "But was HE specially affected that way?"

"I think," said Kervick, judicially, "I think it was understood that if he had been free to marry a penniless wife, he would have wished to marry her."

"Do you know," Thorpe began again, with a kind of diffident hesitation—"do you happen to have formed an idea—supposing that had been the case—would she have accepted him?" "Ah, there you have me," replied the other. "Who can tell what women will accept, and what they will refuse? My daughter refused Lord Lingfield—and he is an Under-Secretary, and will be Earl Chobham, and a Cabinet Minister, and a rich man. After that, what are you to say?"

"You speak of her as penniless," Thorpe remarked, with a casual air.

"Six hundred a year," the father answered. "We could have rubbed along after a fashion on it, if she had had any notions at all of taking my advice. I'm a man of the world, and I could have managed her affairs for her to her advantage, but she insisted upon going off by herself. She showed not the slightest consideration for me—but then I am accustomed to that."

Thorpe smiled reflectively, and the old gentleman read in this an encouragement to expand his grievances.

"In my position," he continued, helping himself to still another tiny glass, "I naturally say very little. It is not my form to make complaints and advertise my misfortunes. I daresay it's a fault. I know it kept me back in India—while ever so many whipper-snappers were promoted over my head—because I was of the proud and silent sort. It was a mistake, but it was my nature. I might have put by a comfortable provision for my old age, in those days, if I had been willing to push my claims, and worry the Staff into giving me what was my due. But that I declined to do—and when I was retired, there was nothing for me but the ration of bread and salt which they serve out to the old soldier who has been too modest. I served my Queen, sir, for forty years—and I should be ashamed to tell you the allowance she makes me in my old age. But I do not complain. My mouth is closed. I am an English gentleman and one of Her Majesty's soldiers. That's enough said, eh? Do you follow me? And about my family affairs, I'm not likely to talk to the first comer, eh? But to you I say it frankly—they've behaved badly, damned badly, sir.

"Mrs. Kervick lives in Italy, at the cost of HER son-in-law. He has large estates in one of the healthiest and most beautiful parts; he has a palace, and more money than he knows what to do with—but it seems that he's not my son-in-law. I could do with Italy very well—but that doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. No! let the worn-out old soldier sell boot-laces on the kerb! That's the spirit of woman-kind. And my daughter Edith—does she care what becomes of me? Listen to me—I secured for her the very greatest marriage in England. She would have been Duchess of Glastonbury today if her husband had not played the fool and drowned himself."

"What's that you say?" put in Thorpe, swiftly.

"It was as good as suicide," insisted the General, with doggedness. His face had become a deeper red. "They didn't hit it off together, and he left in a huff, and went yachting with his father, who was his own sailing-master—and, as might be expected, they were both drowned. The title would have gone to her son—but no, of course, she had no son—and so it passed to a stranger—an outsider that had been an usher in a school, or something of that sort. You can fancy what a blow this was to me. Instead of being the grandfather of a Duke, I have a childless widow thrust back upon my hands! Fine luck, eh? And then, to cap all, she takes her six hundred a year and goes off by herself, and gives me the cold shoulder completely. What is it Shakespeare says? 'How sharper than a serpent's teeth'——"

Thorpe brought his fist down upon the table with an emphasis which abruptly broke the quotation in half. He had been frowning moodily at his guest for some minutes, relighting his cigar more than once meanwhile. He had made a mental calculation of what the old man had had to drink, and had reassured himself as to his condition. His garrulity might have an alcoholic basis, but his wits were clear enough. It was time to take a new line with him.

"I don't want to hear you abuse your daughter," he admonished him now, with a purpose glowing steadily in his firm glance. "Damn it all, why shouldn't she go off by herself, and take care of her own money her own way? It's little enough, God knows, for such a lady as she is. Why should you expect her to support you out of it? No—sit still! Listen to me!"—he stretched out his hand, and laid it with restraining heaviness upon the General's arm—"you don't want to have any row with me. You can't afford it. Just think that over to yourself—you—can't afford—it."

Major-General Kervick's prominent blue eyes had bulged forth in rage till their appearance had disconcerted the other's gaze. They remained still too much in the foreground, as it were, and the angry scarlets and violets of the cheeks beneath them carried an unabated threat of apoplexy—but their owner, after a moment's silence, made a sign with his stiff white brows that the crisis was over. "You must remember that—that I have a father's feelings," he gasped then, huskily.

Thorpe nodded, with a nonchalance which was not wholly affected. He had learned what he wanted to know about this veteran. If he had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog's awe of a stick. It was almost too easy to terrorize him.

"Oh, I make allowances for all that," Thorpe began, vaguely. "But it's important that you should understand me. I'm this sort of a man: whatever I set out to do, and put my strength into it, that I do! I kill every pheasant I fire at; Plowden will tell you that! It's a way I have. To those that help me, and are loyal to me, I'm the best friend in the world. To those that get in my way, or try to trip me up, I'm the devil—just plain devil. Now then—you're getting three hundred a year from my Company, that is to say from me, simply to oblige my friend Plowden. You don't do anything to earn this money; you're of no earthly use on the Board. If I chose, I could put you off at the end of the year as easily as I can blow out this match. But I propose not only to keep you on, but to make you independent. Why do I do that? You should ask yourself that question. It can't be on account of anything you can do for the Company. What else then? Why, first and foremost, because you are the father of your daughter."

"Let me tell you the kind of man I am," said the General, inflating his chest, and speaking with solemnity.

"Oh, I know the kind of man you are," Thorpe interrupted him, coolly. "I want to talk now."

"It was merely," Kervick ventured, in an injured tone, "that I can be as loyal as any man alive to a true friend."

"Well, I'll be the true friend, then," said Thorpe, with impatient finality. "And now this is what I want to say. I'm going to be a very rich man. You're not to say so to anybody, mind you, until the thing speaks for itself. We're keeping dark for a few months, d'ye see?—lying low. Then, as I say, I shall be a very rich man. Well now, I wouldn't give a damn to be rich, unless I did with my money the things that I wanted to do, and got the things with it that I wanted to get. Whatever takes my fancy, that's what I'll do."

He paused for a moment, mentally to scrutinize a brand-new project which seemed, by some surreptitious agency, to have already taken his fancy. It was a curious project; there were attractive things about it, and objections to it suggested themselves as well.

"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts—"I may want to—well, here's what occurs to me as an off-chance. I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and it seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be so poor. Well, then—I might say to you, here's two thousand a year, say, made over to you in your name, on the understanding that you turn over half of it, say, to her. She could take it from you, of course, as her father. You could say you made it out of the Company. Of course it might happen, later on, that I might like to have a gentle hint dropped to her, d'ye see, as to where it really came from. Mind, I don't say this is what is going to be done. It merely occurred to me."

After waiting for a moment for some comment, he added a second thought: "You'd have to set about making friends with her, you know. In any case, you'd better begin at that at once."

The General remained buried in reflection. He lighted a cigarette, and poured out for himself still another petit verre. His pursed lips and knitted brows were eloquent of intense mental activity.

"Well, do you see any objections to it?" demanded Thorpe, at last.

"I do not quite see the reasons for it," answered the other, slowly. "What would you gain by it?"

"How do you mean—gain?" put in the other, with peremptory intolerance of tone.

General Kervick spread his hands in a quick little gesture. These hands were withered, but remarkably well-kept. "I suppose one doesn't do something for nothing," he said. "I see what I would gain, and what she would gain, but I confess I don't see what advantage you would get out of it."

"No-o, I daresay you don't," assented Thorpe, with sneering serenity. "But what does that matter? You admit that you see what you would gain. That's enough, isn't it?"

The older man's veined temples twitched for an instant. He straightened himself in his chair, and looked hard at his companion. There was a glistening of moisture about his staring eyes.

"It surely isn't necessary—among gentlemen"—he began, cautiously picking his phrases—"to have quite so much that's unpleasant, is it?"

"No—you're right—I didn't mean to be so rough," Thorpe declared, with spontaneous contrition. Upon the instant, however, he perceived the danger that advantage might be taken of his softness. "I'm a plain-spoken man," he went on, with a hardening voice, "and people must take me as they find me. All I said was, in substance, that I intended to be of service to you—and that that ought to interest you."

The General seemed to have digested his pique. "And what I was trying to say," he commented deferentially, "was that I thought I saw ways of being of service to you. But that did not seem to interest you at all."

"How—service?" Thorpe, upon consideration, consented to ask.

"I know my daughter so much better than you do," explained the other; "I know Plowden so much better; I am so much more familiar with the whole situation than you can possibly be—I wonder that you won't listen to my opinion. I don't suggest that you should be guided by it, but I think you should hear it."

"I think so, too," Thorpe declared, readily enough. "What IS your opinion?"

General Kervick sipped daintily at his glass, and then gave an embarrassed little laugh. "But I can't form what you might call an opinion," he protested, apologetically, "till I understand a bit more clearly what it is you propose to yourself. You mustn't be annoyed if I return to that—'still harping on my daughter,' you know. If I MUST ask the question—is it your wish to marry her?"

Thorpe looked blankly at his companion, as if he were thinking of something else. When he spoke, it was with no trace of consciousness that the question had been unduly intimate.

"I can't in the least be sure that I shall ever marry," he replied, thoughtfully. "I may, and I may not. But—starting with that proviso—I suppose I haven't seen any other woman that I'd rather think about marrying than—than the lady we're speaking of. However, you see it's all in the air, so far as my plans go."

"In the air be it," the soldier acquiesced, plausibly. "Let us consider it as if it were in the air—a possible contingency. This is what I would say—My—'the lady we are speaking of' is by way of being a difficult lady—'uncertain, coy, and hard to please' as Scott says, you know—and it must be a very skilfully-dressed fly indeed which brings her to the surface. She's been hooked once, mind, and she has a horror of it. Her husband was the most frightful brute and ruffian, you know. I was strongly opposed to the marriage, but her mother carried it through. But—yes—about her—I think she is afraid to marry again. If she does ever consent, it will be because poverty has broken her nerve. If she is kept on six hundred a year, she may be starved, so to speak, into taking a husband. If she had sixteen hundred—either she would never marry at all, or she would be free to marry some handsome young pauper who caught her fancy. That would be particularly like her. You would be simply endowing some needy fellow, beside losing her for yourself. D'ye follow me? If you'll leave it to me, I can find a much better way than that—better for all of us."

"Hm!" said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. "I see what you mean," he remarked at last. "Yes—I see."

The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring to the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his way out without a word.

At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his presence. "Which way are you going?" he asked.

"I don't know," Thorpe answered absently. "I think—I think I'll take a walk on the Embankment—by myself."

The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. "But when am I to see you again?" he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied control.

"See me?" Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.

"There are things to be settled, are there not?" the other faltered, in distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. "You spoke, you know, of—of some employment that—that would suit me."

Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his wandering attention. "Oh yes," he said, with lethargic vagueness—"I haven't thought it out yet. I'll let you know—within the week, probably."

With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter self-disgust.

The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep, had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all," he said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."



CHAPTER X

ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.

The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of petulance.

"Isn't it too provoking!" cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last. "This is where we are now—according to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left, the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see, we might as well be at Redhill."

"It is pretty hard luck," Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. "But hang it all—it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and you'll see some Alps yet."

"Where we're going," the young man interposed, "the head-porter told me it was always cloudier than anywhere else."

"I don't think that can be so," Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his corner. "It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as all that."

"The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland," said the girl—"they would do anything."

Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. "Well, you can comfort yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll stay here, all right," he assured her. The young people smiled back at him, and with this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat, lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did not in the least resent the failure of the scenery.

For something more than three months, this purposeless pleasure-tour had been dragging him about from point to point, sleeping in strange beds, eating extraordinarily strange food, transacting the affairs of a sight-seer among people who spoke strange languages, until he was surfeited with the unusual. It had all been extremely interesting, of course, and deeply improving—but he was getting tired of talking to nobody but waiters, and still more so of having nothing to do which he could not as well leave undone if he chose. After a few days more of Switzerland—for they had already gazed with blank faces at this universal curtain of mist from such different points of view as Lucerne, Interlaken, and Thun—it was clear to him that they would, as he phrased it, to himself, make a break for home. Unless, indeed, something happened at Montreux. Ah, would anything happen at Montreux? For four days his mind had been automatically reverting to that question; it lurked continually in the background of his thoughts, now, as he smoked and idly ruminated, on his way southward through the fog.

All the rest of the prolonged trip had been without any specific motive, so far as he was concerned. The youngsters had planned all its routes and halts and details of time and connections, and he had gone along, with cheerful placidity, to look at the things they bade him observe, and to pay the bills. Perhaps in all things their tastes had not been his tastes. He would have liked more of Paris, he fancied, and less of the small Dutch and North German towns which they seemed to fancy so much. Still, the beer was good—and really their happiness, as a spectacle, had given him more satisfaction than a thousand miles of boulevards could have done.

He liked this niece and nephew of his more than he could ever have imagined himself liking any young people. They had been shy with him at the outset—and for the first week his experiment had been darkened by the belief that, between themselves, they did not deem him quite good enough. He had been wise enough, then, to have it out with the girl—she was the one to whom he felt it easiest to talk frankly—and had discovered, to his immense relief, that they conceived him to be regarding them as encumbrances. At breakfast next morning, with tactful geniality, he set everything right, and thereafter they were all extremely happy together.

So far as he could judge, they were very superior young people, both intellectually and spiritually. The girl spoke French, and her brother German, with what seemed to him remarkable proficiency. Their young minds were the repositories of an astounding amount of information: they knew who Charles the Bold was; they pointed out to their uncle the distinction between Gothic and Romanesque arches; they explained what was the matter with the Anabaptists; they told him that the story of the Bishop and the rats at Bingen was a baseless myth, and that probably there had never been any such man as William Tell. Nor did they get all this out of the guide-books which they pored over with such zest. It was impossible not to see that they were familiar with large numbers of the subjects that these books discussed, and that the itinerary which they marked out had reference to desires and interests that they had cultivated for themselves.

Julia, upon even first sight, made a much pleasanter impression than her mother's hesitating description had prepared him for. As he came to know her well, he ceased to remember that there was a question in any mind as to her being a pretty girl. There was less colour in her face than he could have wished. Her smooth, pallid skin, almost waxen in texture, had a suggestion of delicate health which sometimes troubled him a little, but which appealed to the tenderness in his nature all the time. The face was unduly thin, perhaps, but this, and the wistful glance of the large grey eyes in repose, made up an effect that Thorpe found touched him a good deal. Even when she was in visibly high spirits, the look in these eyes seemed to him to be laying claim to his protection. She could be merry upon occasion, in a gentle and tranquil way, and as her self-confidence expanded under the shelter of their growing intimacy, she disclosed to her uncle plenty of initiative and individuality—but what he felt in her most was a peculiarly sweet and girlish trustfulness, which made him like himself more than he had ever done before. He could feel that he was at his very best—a hitherto unsuspected best—when Julia was about. He wanted to buy for her everything in the windows upon which she bestowed the most casual approving glance. It was a delight merely to look at her, and to meditate upon the felicity of being able to do things for so charming a girl.

Alfred made a less direct demand upon his uncle's admiration, but he was a very good fellow all round. He was big and fair and muscular, and nothing about him but his spectacles seemed in Thorpe's mind to be related to his choice of art as a profession. That so robust and hearty a young fellow should wish to put paint on a canvas with small brushes, was to the uncle an unaccountable thing. It was almost as if he had wanted to knit, or do embroidery. Of the idleness and impatience of discipline which his mother had seemed to allege against him, Thorpe failed to detect any signs. The young man was never very late in the morning, and, beside his tireless devotion to the task of hunting up old pictures in out-of-the-way places, did most of the steward's work of the party with intelligence and precision. He studied the time-tables, audited the hotel-bills, looked after the luggage, got up the street-maps of towns and the like, to such good purpose that they never lost a train, or a bag, or themselves. Truly, an excellent young man. Thorpe noted with especial satisfaction his fine, kindly big-brother attitude toward his sister Julia—and it was impossible for him to avoid the conviction that Louisa was a simpleton not to appreciate such children. They did not often allude to their mother; when they did, it was in language the terms of which seemed more affectionate than the tone—and Thorpe said often to himself that he did not blame them. It was not so much that they had outgrown their mother's point of view. They had never occupied it.

The journey, so far as Thorpe comprehended its character, had been shaped with about equal regard for Julia's interest in the romance of history, and Alfred's more technical and practical interest in art. Each had sufficient sympathy with the tastes of the other, however, to prevent any tendency to separation. They took their uncle one day to see where William the Silent was assassinated, and the next to observe how Rembrandt's theory of guild portrait-painting differed from Van der Helst's, with a common enthusiasm. He scrutinized with patient loyalty everything that they indicated to him, and not infrequently they appeared to like very much the comments he offered. These were chiefly of a sprightly nature, and when Julia laughed over them he felt that she was very near to him indeed.

Thus they saw Paris together—where Thorpe did relinquish some of the multiplied glories of the Louvre to sit in front of a cafe by the Opera House and see the funny people go past—and thence, by Bruges and Antwerp, to Holland, where nobody could have imagined there were as many pictures as Thorpe saw with his own weary eyes. There were wonderful old buildings at Lubeck for Julia's eyes to glisten over, and pictures at Berlin, Dresden, and Dusseldorf for Alfred.

The assumption existed that the excursion into the Thuringenwald to see the memorials of Luther was especially for the uncle's benefit, and he tried solicitously to say or look nothing which might invalidate it. There were other places in Germany, from Mainz to Munich, which he remembered best by their different beers. They spent Christmas at Vienna, where Julia had heard that its observance was peculiarly insisted upon, and then they saw the Tyrol in its heaviest vesture of winter snows, and beautiful old Basle, where Alfred was crazier about Holbein than he had been at Munich over Brouwer. Thorpe looked very carefully at the paintings of both men, and felt strengthened in his hopes that when Alfred got a little older he would see that this picture business was not the thing for a young gentleman with prospects to go into.

It was at Basle that Thorpe received a letter from London which directly altered the plans of the party. He had had several other letters from London which had produced no such effect. Through Semple, he had followed in outline the unobtrusive campaign to secure a Special Settlement, and had learned that the Stock Exchange Committee, apparently without opposition, had granted one for the first week in February.

Even this news, tremendously important as it was, did not prompt Thorpe to interfere with the children's projects. There was no longer any point in remaining away from London; there were, indeed, numerous reasons for a prompt return. But he was loth to deprive the youngsters of that descent into smiling, sunlit Italy upon which they had so fondly dwelt in fancy, and after all Semple could do all that was needful to be done for another month.

So they went to Basle, and here it was that another kind of letter came. It was in a strange hand, at once cramped and fluttering, which puzzled the recipient a good deal; it was a long time before even the signature unravelled itself. Then he forced himself to decipher it, sentence by sentence, with a fierce avidity. It was from General Kervick.

The next morning Thorpe astonished his young companions by suggesting an alteration in their route. In a roundabout and tentative fashion—in which more suspicious observers must have detected something shamefaced—he mentioned that he had always heard a great deal about Montreux as a winter-resort. The fact that he called it Montroox raised in Julia's mind a fleeting wonder from whom it could be that he had heard so much about it, but it occurred to neither her nor her brother to question his entire good faith. Their uncle had displayed, hitherto, a most comforting freedom from discrimination among European towns; he had, indeed, assured them many times that they were all one to him. That he should suddenly turn up now with a favourite winter-resort of his own selection surprised them considerably, but, upon reflection, it also pleased them. He had humoured all their wishes with such unfailing and bountiful kindness, that it was a delight to learn that there was something he wanted to do. They could not finish their breakfast till the guide-book had been brought to the table.

"Oh! How splendid!" Julia had cried then. "The Castle of Chillon is there!"

"Why of course!" said Thorpe, complacently.

They laughed gayly at him for pretending that he had known this, and he as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath of relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much better than he had feared.

Now, on this Sunday afternoon, as the train made its sure-footed way across the mountains, the thought that he was actually to alight at Montreux at once fascinated and depressed him. He was annoyed with himself for suffering it to get such a hold upon his mind. What was there in it, anyway? There was a big hotel there, and he and his youngsters were to stop at it, and if he accidentally encountered a certain lady who was also stopping there—and of course the meeting would bear upon its face the stamp of pure chance—what of it?

And if he did meet her, thus fortuitously—what would happen then? No doubt a lady of her social position met abroad great numbers of people that she had met at home. It would not in any way surprise her—this chance encounter of which he thought so much. Were there sufficient grounds for imagining that it would even interest her? He forced his mind up to this question, as it were, many times, and invariably it shied and evaded the leap.

There had been times, at Hadlow House, when Lady Cressage had seemed supremely indifferent to the fact of his existence, and there had been other times when it had appeared manifest that he pleased her—or better, perhaps, that she was willing to take note of how much she pleased him. It must have been apparent to her—this fact that she produced such an impression upon him. He reasoned this out satisfactorily to himself. These beautiful women, trained from childhood for the conquest of a rich husband, must have cultivated an extraordinary delicacy of consciousness, in such matters. They must have developed for themselves what might be called a sixth sense—a power of feeling in the air what the men about were thinking of them. More than once he had caught a glimmer of what he felt to be the operation of this sense, in the company of Lady Cressage. He could not say that it had been discernible in her glance, or her voice, or her manner, precisely, but he was sure that he had seen it, somehow.

But even assuming all this—admitting that in October, on a wet Sunday, in the tedium of a small country-house party, she had shown some momentary satisfaction in the idea that he was profoundly impressed by her—did it at all follow that in February, amid the distractions of a fashionable winter-resort, and probably surrounded by hosts of friends, she would pay any attention to him whatever? The abject fear that she might not even remember him—might not know him from Adam when he stood before her—skulked about in the labyrinths of his mind, but he drove it back whenever it showed itself. That would be too ignominious.

The young people at the other side of the compartment, forever wiping the window with the napkin, and straining their eyes to see the invisible, diverted his unsettled attention. A new perception of how much he liked them and enjoyed having them with him, took hold of his thoughts. It had not occurred to him before, with any definiteness, that he would be insupportably lonely when the time came to part with them.

Now, when he dwelt upon it, it made him feel sad and old.

He said to himself at once, with decision, that there need be no parting at all. He would take a house without delay, and they should live with him. He could not doubt that this would be agreeable to them; it would solve every problem for him.

His fancy sketched out the natural and legitimate extensions of this project. There would be, first of all, a house in town—a furnished house of a modest sort, having no pretension save to provide a cheerful temporary shelter for three people who liked one another. Here the new household would take shape, and get its right note of character. Apparently Louisa would not be urged to form part of this household. He said to himself with frankness that he didn't want her, and there had been nothing to indicate that her children would pine for her. She showed good sense when she said that her place was in the shop, and in her ancestral home over the shop. No doubt there would be a certain awkwardness, visible to others if not to themselves, about her living in one part of London and her children in another. But here also her good sense would come on;—and, besides, this furnished house in town would be a mere brief overture to the real thing—the noble country mansion he was going to have, with gardens and horses and hounds and artificial lakes and deer parks and everything. Quite within the year he would be able to realize this consummation of his dreams.

How these nice young people would revel in such a place—and how they would worship him for having given it to them for a home! His heart warmed within him as he thought of this. He smiled affectionately at the picture Julia made, polishing the glass with vehement circular movements of her slight arm, and then grimacing in comic vexation at the deadly absence of landscape outside. Was there ever a sweeter or more lovable girl in this world? Would there have to be some older woman to manage the house, at the beginning? he wondered. He should like it immensely if that could be avoided. Julia looked fragile and inexperienced—but she would be twenty-one next month. Surely that was a mature enough age for the slight responsibility of presiding over servants who should be the best that money could buy. Many girls were married, and given households of their own to manage, when they were even younger.

This reflection raised an obstacle against the smooth-flowing current of his thoughts. Supposing that Julia got the notion of marrying—how miserable that would make everything. Very likely she would never do any such thing; he had observed in her no shadow of a sign that a thought of matrimony had ever crossed her brain. Yet that was a subject upon which, of course, she could not be asked to give pledges, even to herself.

Thorpe tried to take a liberal view of this matter. He argued to himself that there would be no objection at all to incorporating Julia's husband into the household, assuming that she went to the length of taking one, and that he was a good fellow. On this latter point, it was only the barest justice to Julia's tastes and judgment to take it for granted that he would be a good fellow. Yet the uncle felt uneasily that this would alter things for the worse. The family party, with that hypothetical young man in it, could never be quite so innocently and completely happy as—for instance—the family party in this compartment had been during these wonderful three months.

Mechanically he rubbed the window beside him, and turned to look out with a certain fixedness—as if he might chance to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom with whom Julia would have it in her power to disturb the serenity of their prospective home. A steep white cliff, receding sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse grotesquely low for its size, crouching under big shelving galleries heaped with snow; an opening in front, to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a valley into which they would descend—he saw these things. They remained in his mind afterward as a part of something else that he saw, with his mental vision, at the same moment—a strikingly real and vivid presentment of Lady Cressage, attired as he had seen her in the saddle, her light hair blown about a little under her hat, a spot of colour in the exquisite cheek, the cold, impersonal dignity of a queen in the beautiful profile.

The picture was so actual for the instant that he uttered an involuntary exclamation—and then looked hastily round to see whether his companions had heard it. Seemingly they had not; he lolled again upon the comfortless cushion, and strove to conjure up once more the apparition. Nothing satisfactory came of the effort. Upon consideration, he grew uncertain as to whether he had seen anything at all. At the most it was a kind of half-dream which had visited him. He yawned at the thought, and lighted a fresh cigar. All at once, his mind had become too indolent to do any more thinking. A shapeless impression that there would be a good many things to think over later on flitted into his brain and out again.

"Well, how are the mountains using you, now?" he called out to his niece.

"Oh, I could shake them!" she declared. "Listen to this: 'A view of singular beauty, embracing the greater part of the Lake of Geneva, and the surrounding mountains, is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now—or were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort of valley in front of us—but that is all. If I could only see one mountain with snow on it——"

"Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come to that," Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity. "You're on mountains yourself, all the time."

"You know what I mean," she retorted. "I want to see something like the coloured pictures in the hotels."

"Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow," he said, for perhaps the twentieth time that day.

"There—that looks like water!" said Alfred. "See? just beyond the village. Yes, it is water. There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events."

"But it isn't the right colour," protested Julia, peering through the glass. "It's precisely like everything else: it's of no colour at all. And they always paint it such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss Government ought to return you your money."

"You wait till you see it tomorrow—or next day," said the uncle, vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed a drowsy mood. As he went off to sleep, the jolting racket of the train mellowed itself into a murmur of "tomorrow or next day, tomorrow or next day," in his ears.



CHAPTER XI

FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold it that she had not so much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her muff still in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud with vexation.

Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water—motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour—which at some small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter of the pier, there was no proof in sight that this was a lake at all. It was as uninspiring to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a porch.

While her uncle and brother occupied themselves with the luggage being brought up by the porters, she opened a window and stepped out upon the tiny balcony. A flaring sign on the inner framework of this balcony besought her in Swiss-French, in the interests of order, not to feed the birds. The injunction seemed meaningless to her until she perceived, over by the water, several gulls lazily wheeling about. They were almost as grey as the fog they circled in. Suddenly they seemed to perceive her in turn, and, swerving sharply, came floating toward the hotel, with harsh, almost menacing cries. She hurried in, and shut the window with decision. It seemed to her that the smile with which, as she turned, she was able to meet her uncle's look, was a product of true heroism.

Apparently this smile did not altogether delude him. "Oh, now, you mustn't get down on your luck," he adjured her. "We're going to be awfully cozy here. Have you seen your room? It's just there, in a little alley to the right of the door. They say it has an even finer view than these windows. Oh, you needn't laugh—this is the best view in the world, I'm told by those who know. And as a winter-resort, why——"

"I say, look here!" The interruption came from Alfred, who, having gone out on one of the balconies, put in his head now to summon them. "Come here! Here's some fun."

He pointed out to Thorpe the meaning of the inscription on the sign, and then pulled him forward to observe its practical defiance. A score of big gulls were flapping and dodging in excited confusion close before them, filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now and again, one of the birds, recovering its senses in the hurly-burly, would make a curving swoop downward past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly catch in its beak something that had been thrown into the air.

Thorpe, leaning over his railing, saw that a lady on a balcony one floor below, and some yards to the left, was feeding the birds. She laughed aloud as she did so, and said something over her shoulder to a companion who was not visible.

"Well, that's pretty cool," he remarked to his niece, who had come to stand beside him. "She's got the same sign down there that we've got. I can see it from here. Or perhaps she can't read French."

"Or perhaps she isn't frightened of the hotel people," suggested the girl. She added, after a little, "I think I'll feed them myself in the morning. I certainly shall if the sun comes out—as a sort of Thanksgiving festival, you know."

Her uncle seemed not to hear her. He had been struck by the exceptional grace of the gestures with which the pieces of bread were flung forth. The hands and wrists of this lady were very white and shapely. The movements which she made with them, all unaware of observation as she was, and viewed as he viewed them from above, were singularly beautiful in their unconstraint. It was in its way like watching some remarkable fine dancing, he thought. He could not see much of her face, from his perch, but she was tall and fashionably clad. There was a loose covering of black lace thrown over her head, but once, as she turned, he could see that her hair was red. Even in this fleeting glimpse, the unusual tint attracted his attention: there was a brilliancy as of fire in it. Somehow it seemed to make a claim upon his memory. He continued to stare down at the stranger with an indefinable sense that he knew something about her.

Suddenly another figure appeared upon the balcony—and in a flash he comprehended everything. These idiotic, fighting gluttons of gulls had actually pointed out to him the object of his search. It was Lady Cressage who stood in the doorway, there just below him—and her companion, the red-haired lady who laughed hotel-rules to scorn, was the American heiress who had crossed the ocean in his ship, and whom he had met later on at Hadlow. What was her name—Martin? No—Madden. He confronted the swift impression that there was something odd about these two women being together. At Hadlow he had imagined that they did not like each other. Then he reflected as swiftly that women probably had their own rules about such matters. He seemed to have heard, or read, perhaps, that females liked and disliked each other with the most capricious alternations and on the least tangible of grounds. At all events, here they were together now. That was quite enough.

The two ladies had gone in, and closed their window. The sophisticated birds, with a few ungrateful croaks of remonstrance, had drifted away again to the water. His niece had disappeared from his elbow. Still Thorpe remained with his arms folded on the railing, his eyes fixed on the vacant balcony, below to the left.

When at last he went inside, the young people were waiting for him with the project of a stroll before dinner. The light was failing, but there was plenty of time. They had ascertained the direction in which Chillon lay; a servant had assured them that it was only a few minutes' walk, and Alfred was almost certain that he had seen it from the window.

Thorpe assented with a certain listlessness, which they had never noted in his manner before, but when Julia begged him not to stir if he were in the slightest degree tired, he replied honestly enough that he would do anything rather than be left alone. Then, of course, they said, there should be no walk, but to this he would not listen. The party trooped downstairs, accordingly, and out into the street. The walking was vile, but, as Julia had long ago said, if they were to be deterred by slush they would never get anywhere or see anything.

It proved to be too late and too dark to either enter the castle or get much of an idea of its exterior. Returning, they paused again to look into the lighted window of the nice little book-shop. The numerous photographs of what they were entitled to behold from the windows of their hotel seemed more convincing than photographs usually were. As the young people inspected them, they became reassured. It was not credible that such a noble vista would forever deny itself to such earnest pilgrims. When their uncle introduced this time his ancient formula about the certainty of brilliant sunshine in the morning, they somehow felt like believing him.

"Yes—I really think it must change," Julia declared, with her fascinated glance upon the photographs.

Alfred looked at his watch. "We'd better get along to the hotel, hadn't we?" he suggested.

"By the way"—Thorpe began, with a certain uneasiness of manner—"speaking of dinner, wouldn't you like to dine at the big table d'hote, instead of up in our sitting-room?"

"If you're tired of our dining alone—by all means," answered Julia, readily. There was obvious surprise, however, in both her look and tone.

"Tired nothing!" he assured her. "I like it better than anything else in the world. But what I mean is—I was thinking, seeing that this is such a great winter-resort, and all the swagger people of Europe come here—that probably you youngsters would enjoy seeing the crowd."

Julia's glance, full of affectionate appreciation, showed how wholly she divined his spirit of self-sacrifice. "We wouldn't care in the least for it," she declared. "We enjoy being a little party by ourselves every whit as much as you do—and we both hate the people you get at table d'hotes—and besides, for that matter, if there are any real swells here, you may be sure they dine in their own rooms."

"Why, of course!" Thorpe exclaimed swiftly, in palpable self-rebuke. "I don't know what I could have been thinking of. Of course they would dine in their rooms."

Next morning, Thorpe rose earlier than ever—with the impression of a peculiarly restless and uncomfortable night behind him. It was not until he had shaved and dressed that he noted the altered character of the air outside. Although it was not fully daylight yet, he could see the outlines of the trees and vinerows on the big, snow-clad hill, which monopolized the prospect from his window, all sharp and clear cut, as if he were looking at them through an opera-glass. He went at once to the sitting-room, and thrust the curtains aside from one of the windows.

A miracle had been wrought in the night. The sky overhead was serenely cloudless; the lake beneath, stirring softly under some faint passing breeze, revealed its full breadth with crystalline distinctness. Between sky and water there stretched across the picture a broad, looming, dimly-defined band of shadow, marked here and there at the top by little slanting patches of an intensely glowing white. He looked at this darkling middle distance for a moment or two without comprehension. Then he turned and hurriedly moved to the door of Julia's room and beat upon it.

"Get up!" he called through the panels. "Here's your sunrise—here's your Alpine view. Go to your window and see it!"

A clear voice, not unmirthful, replied: "I've been watching it for half an hour, thanks. Isn't it glorious?"

He was more fortunate at the opposite door, for Alfred was still asleep. The young man, upon hearing the news, however, made a toilet of unexampled brevity, and came breathlessly forth. Thorpe followed him to the balcony, where he stood collarless and uncombed, with the fresh morning breeze blowing his hair awry, his lips parted, his eyes staring with what the uncle felt to be a painful fixedness before him.

Thorpe had seen many mountains in many lands. They did not interest him very much. He thought, however, that he could see now why people who had no mountains of their own should get excited about Switzerland. He understood a number of these sentimental things now, for that matter, which had been Greek to him three months before. Unreceptive as his philistinism may have seemed to these delightful youngsters, it was apparent enough to him that they had taught him a great deal. If he could not hope to share their ever-bubbling raptures and enthusiasms, at least he had come to comprehend them after a fashion, and even to discern sometimes what it was that stirred them.