He watched his nephew now—having first assured himself by a comprehensive downward glance that no other windows of the hotel-front were open. The young man seemed tremendously moved, far too much so to talk. Thorpe ventured once some remarks about the Mexican mountains, which were ever so much bigger, as he remembered them, but Alfred paid no heed. He continued to gaze across the lake, watching in rapt silence one facet after another catch the light, and stand out from the murky gloom, radiantly white, till at last the whole horizon was a mass of shining minarets and domes, and the sun fell full on his face. Then, with a long-drawn sigh, he turned, re-entered the room, and threw himself into a chair.

"It's too good!" he declared, with a half-groan. "I didn't know it would be like that."

"Why nothing's too good for us, man," his uncle told him.

"THAT is," said the boy, simply, and Thorpe, after staring for a moment, smiled and rang the bell for breakfast.

When Julia made her appearance, a few minutes later, the table was already laid, and the waiter was coming in with the coffee.

"I thought we'd hurry up breakfast," her uncle explained, after she had kissed him and thanked him for the sunrise he had so successfully predicted—"because I knew you'd both be crazy to get out."

He had not over-estimated their eagerness, which was so great, indeed, that they failed to note the excessive tranquility of his own demeanour. He ate with such unusual deliberation, on this exciting morning, that they found themselves at the end of their repast when, apparently, he had but made a beginning.

"Now you mustn't wait for me at all," he announced to them then. "I'm a little tired this morning—and I think I'd just like to lie around and smoke, and perhaps read one of your novels. But you two must get your things on and lose no time in getting out. This is the very best time of day, you know—for Alpine scenery. I'd hate to have you miss any of it."

Under his kindly if somewhat strenuous insistence, they went to their rooms to prepare for an immediate excursion. He was so anxious to have them see all there was to be seen that, when Julia returned, properly cloaked and befurred, and stood waiting at the window, he scolded a little.

"What on earth is that boy doing?" he exclaimed, with a latent snarl in his tone which was novel to her ear. "He'll keep you here till noon!"

"He's shaving, I think. He won't be long," she replied, with great gentleness. After a moment's pause, she turned from the window and came gayly forward.

"Oh, I forgot: I was going to feed the birds. There are several of them out there now." As she spoke, she busily broke up some of the rolls on the table. Her face was bright with the pleasure of the thought.

"If you don't much mind, Julia," her uncle began, with almost pleading intonations, "I rather think I wouldn't feed those birds. The rule is there before our eyes, you know—and it's always been my idea that if you're at a hotel it's the correct thing to abide by its rules. It's just an idea of mine—and I daresay, if you think about it, you'll feel the same way."

The girl freed the last remaining bread-crumb from her gloves. "Why, of course, uncle," she said, with promptitude.

Although there was no hint of protest in her tone or manner, he felt impelled to soften still further this solitary demonstration of his authority. "You see I've been all round the world, my little girl," he explained, haltingly, "and when a man's done that, and knocked about everywhere, he's apt to get finicking and notional about trifles every once in a while."

"You're less so than anybody I ever knew," she generously interposed.

"Oh, no I'm not. You don't know me well enough yet; that's what's the matter. And you see, Julia—another thing just because you saw that lady throwing out bread, that aint a very good reason why you should do it. You don't know what kind of a person she may be. Girls have got to be so frightfully careful about all that sort of thing."

Julia offered a constrained little laugh in comment. "Oh, you don't know how careful I can be," she said.

"But you're not annoyed?" he entreated her—and for answer she came behind him, and rested an arm on his shoulder, and patted it. He stroked her hand with his own. "That's something like the nicest niece in the world!" he exclaimed, with fervour.

When at last she and her brother had gone, he made short work of his breakfast, and drank his coffee at a gulp. A restless activity suddenly informed his movements. He lit a cigar, and began pacing up and down the room, biting his lips in preoccupation as he went. After a little, he opened a window, and ventured cautiously as far out on the balcony as was necessary to obtain a view of the street below. Eventually, he identified his nephew and niece among the pedestrians beneath him, and he kept them in sight till, after more than one tiresome halt at a shop window, they disappeared round a bend in the road. Then he turned and came back into the room with the buoyant air of a man whose affairs are prospering.

He smiled genially to himself as he gathered from the table in one capacious hand all the pieces of bread his beloved niece had broken up, and advanced again to the open window. Waiting here till one of the dingy gulls moving aimlessly about was headed toward him, he tossed out a fragment. The bird dashed at it with a scream, and on the instant the whole squawking flock were on wing. He suffered the hubbub to proceed unappeased for a little while he kept a watchful though furtive eye on that balcony to the left, below. Unhappily he could not get out far enough to see whether the inner curtains of its window were drawn. He threw another bit of bread, and then looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past nine. Surely people travelling to see scenery would be up by this hour.

The strategy of issuing just enough bread to keep the feathered concourse in motion commended itself to his mind. As a precautionary measure, he took all the rolls remaining on the table, and put them in the drawer of a desk by the window. It even occurred to him to ring for more bread, but upon consideration that seemed too daring. The waiter would be sufficiently surprised at the party's appetites as it was.

Half an hour later, his plan of campaign suddenly yielded a victory. Lady Cressage appeared on her balcony, clad in some charming sort of morning gown, and bareheaded. She had nothing in her hands, and seemed indifferent to the birds, but when Thorpe flung forth a handful of fragments into the centre of their whirling flock, she looked up at him. It was the anxious instant, and he ventured upon what he hoped was a decorous compromise between a bow and a look of recognition.

She was in no haste to answer either. He could see rather than hear that she said something to her invisible companion within, the while she glanced serenely in the general direction of his balcony. It seemed to him that the answer to her remark, whatever it was, must have exerted a direct influence upon his destiny, for Lady Cressage all at once focussed her vague regard upon him, and nodded with a reasonably gracious smile.

"It's wonderful luck to find you here," he called down to her. Having played their part, he wished now that the birds were at Jericho. Their obstreperous racket made conversation very difficult. Apparently she made him an answer, but he could catch nothing of it.

"I'm here with my niece and nephew," he shouted down. "I don't hear what you say. May I come down and pay my respects—later on? What is your number, and when may I come?"

These questions, as he flashed them in review through his mind, seemed to be all right from the most exacting social point of view. Doubtless it was equally all right that, before replying, she should consult her companion, as she did at some length. Then she replied—and he had no difficulty now in hearing her above the birds—that it would be very nice of him to come, say, in an hour's time. She told him the number—and then almost abruptly went in.

Thorpe, during this hour that ensued, smoked with volcanic energy. He tried to interest himself in one after another of half a dozen Tauchnitz novels his niece carried about, with a preposterous absence of success. He strove to arrange in some kind of sequence the things that he should say, when this momentous interview should begin, but he could think of nothing which did not sound silly. It would be all right, he argued to himself in the face of this present mental barrenness; he always talked well enough on the spur of the moment, when the time came—and still was not reassured.

He wondered if both ladies would be there to receive him, and decided that they would probably regard that as indispensable to the proprieties. In that case, their conversation would necessarily be of the most casual and general character. He would tell them a good deal about his niece, he foresaw. A man travelling about with a niece—and such a delightfully lady-like and engaging little niece—would take on some added interest and dignity, he perceived, in the eyes of ladies travelling alone. He essayed to estimate just how much they would probably like Julia. Of course he would say nothing about her mother and the book-shop; a vague allusion to a widowed sister would be ample on that head. But there could be confident references to Cheltenham; he knew from what Julia had said that it suggested the most satisfactory social guarantees, if taken strictly by itself. And then so much would depend upon Julia herself! If she succeeded in striking up a friendship with them—ah, then everything would be all right. Perhaps they would take a fancy to Alfred too! He was a boy, of course, but conceivably the fact that he wanted to paint, and knew about pictures, would appeal to them. He seemed to have heard somewhere that artists were the very devil among women.

At last the weary time of waiting had worn itself out, somehow, and, after a final polishing before his glass, he went down, and found his right corridor, and knocked at the door. A pleasant voice bade him enter, and, hat and gloves in hand, he went in.

As he had imagined, both ladies were present. He had not been prepared, however, for the fact that it was the American who played the part of hostess. It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down, and generally made him free of the apartment. When he shook hands with Lady Cressage, there was somehow an effect of the incidental in the ceremony, as if she were also a guest.

Nothing could have been simpler or more pleasing than the little visit turned out to be. Miss Madden had suddenly grown tired of the snowless and dripping English winter, and had as promptly decided to come to Switzerland, where the drifts ought to be high enough, and the frosts searching enough, in all conscience. They had selected Territet, because it was familiar to her, and because it was on the way to Martigny and Brieg, and she had had a notion of crossing either the Simplon or the St. Bernard in winter. As she found now, the St. Bernard was quite impracticable, but admittedly a post road was kept open over the Simplon. It was said now that she would not be allowed to proceed by this, but it often happened that she did the things that she was not allowed to do. The hotel-people at both Brieg and Berisal had written refusing to let their horses attempt the Simplon journey, and they were of course quite within their rights, but there were other horses in Switzerland. One surely could buy horses—and so on.

Thorpe also had his turn at autobiography. He told rather whimsically of his three months' experiences at the tail of the juvenile whirligigs, and his auditors listened to them with mild smiles. He ventured upon numerous glowing parentheses about Julia, and they at least did not say that they did not want to know her. They heard with politeness, too, what he could contrive to drag in about his artist-nephew, and said it must be very pleasant for him to have such nice company. At least Miss Madden said this: her companion, as he thought it over afterward, seemed hardly to have said anything at all. She answered the few remarks which he found it possible to direct to her, but the responses took no hold upon his memory. He fancied that she was bored, or unhappy, or both.

Finally, in the midst of commonplaces which, to his apprehension, were verging upon flatness, a bold inspiration disclosed itself—as splendid as the Dent du Midi revealing its glaciers above the mounting sunrise—in his brain.

"We should all be charmed if you would come up and dine with us tonight," he said, under the abrupt impulsion of this idea. "It's been such an age since we wanderers have had the privilege of company at our table!"

The felicity of these phrases from his lips attracted his admiring attention, even while he waited in suspense for an answer to them.

The ladies exchanged a look. "Yes," said Miss Madden, after the slightest of pauses, "we shall be very happy."

Shortly thereafter Thorpe took his leave, and went downstairs and out. He wandered about till luncheon time, observing the mountains across the lake from various standpoints, and, as it were, with new eyes. He was interested in them in a curious new fashion; they seemed to say things to him. His lip curled once at the conceit that he was one of the Alps himself.



CHAPTER XII

IT did not happen until three days later that Thorpe's opportunity to speak alone with Lady Cressage came.

In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have become fused in a remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the striking prescience he had shown in bringing them.

Both the ladies unaffectedly liked Julia; so much so that they seemed unwilling to make any plans which did not include her. Then it was only a matter of course that where she went her brother should go—and a further logical step quite naturally brought in their willing uncle. If he had planned everything, and now was ordering everything, it could not have gone more to his liking.

Certain side speculations lent a savour to the satisfaction with which he viewed this state of affairs. He found many little signs to confirm the suspicion that the two ladies had been the readier to make much of Julia because they were not overkeen about each other's society. The bright, sweet-natured girl had come as a welcome diversion to a couple who in seclusion did battle with tendencies to yawn. He was not quite convinced, for that matter, that the American lady always went to that trouble. She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person, who would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing the things she wanted to do. Her relations with her companion afforded him food for much thought. Without any overt demonstrations, she produced the effect of ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far as it went, tended to prejudice him against her. On the other hand, however, she was so good to Julia, in a peculiarly frank and buoyant way which fascinated the girl, that he could not but like her. And she was very good to Alfred too.

There was, indeed, he perceived, a great deal of individuality about the friendship which had sprung up between Miss Madden and his nephew. She was years his senior—he settled it with himself that the American could not be less than seven-and-twenty,—yet Alfred stole covert glances of admiration at her, and seemed to think of nothing but opportunities for being in her company as if—as if—Thorpe hardly liked to complete the comparison in his own thoughts. Alfred, of course, said it was all on account of her wonderful hair; he rather went out of his way to dilate upon the enthusiasm her "colour scheme"—whatever that might mean—excited in him as an artist. The uncle had moments of profound skepticism about this—moments when he uneasily wondered whether it was not going to be his duty to speak to the young man. For the most part, however, he extracted reassurance from Miss Madden's demeanour toward the lad. She knew, it seemed, a vast deal about pictures; at least she was able to talk a vast deal about them, and she did it in such a calmly dogmatic fashion, laying down the law always, that she put Alfred in the position of listening as a pupil might listen to a master. The humility with which his nephew accepted this position annoyed Thorpe upon occasion, but he reasoned that it was a fault on the right side. Very likely it would help to keep the fact of the lady's seniority more clearly before the youngster's mind, and that would be so much gained.

And these apprehensions, after all, were scarcely to be counted in the balance against the sense of achieved happiness with which these halcyon days kept Thorpe filled. The initiatory dinner had gone off perfectly. He could have wished, indeed, that Julia had a smarter frock, and more rings, when he saw the imposing costumes and jewelled throats and hands of his guests—but she was a young girl, by comparison, he reflected, and there could be no doubt that they found her charming. As for Alfred, he was notably fine-looking in his evening-clothes—infinitely more like the son of a nobleman, the gratified uncle kept saying to himself, than that big dullard, the Honourable Balder. It filled him with a new pleasure to remember that Alfred had visiting cards presenting his name as D'Aubigny, which everybody of education knew was what the degenerate Dabney really stood for. The lad and his sister had united upon this excellent change long ago at Cheltenham, and oddly enough they had confessed it to their uncle, at the beginning of the trip, with a show of trepidation, as if they feared his anger. With radiant gayety he had relieved their minds by showing them his card, with "Mr. Stormont Thorpe" alone upon it. At the dinner table, in the proudest moment of his life, he had made himself prouder still by thinking how distinguished an appearance his and Alfred's cards would make together in the apartment below next day.

But next day, the relations between the two parties had already become too informal for cards. Julia went down to see them; they came up to see Julia. Then they all went for a long walk, with luncheon at Vevey, and before evening Alfred was talking confidently of painting Miss Madden. Next day they went by train to St. Maurice, and, returning after dark, dined without ceremony together. This third day—the weather still remaining bright—they had ascended by the funicular road to Glion, and walked on among the swarming luegers, up to Caux. Here, after luncheon, they had wandered about for a time, regarding the panorama of lake and mountains. Now, as the homeward descent began, chance led the two young people and Miss Madden on ahead.

Thorpe found himself walking beside Lady Cressage. He had upon his arm her outer wrap, which she said she would put on presently. To look at the view he must glance past her face: the profile, under the graceful fur cap, was so enriched by glowing colour that it was, to his thought, as if she were blushing.

"How little I thought, a few months ago," he said, "that we should be mountaineering together!"

"Oh, no one knows a day ahead," she responded, vaguely. "I had probably less notion of coming to Switzerland then than you had."

"Then you don't come regularly?"

"I have never seen either Germany or Switzerland before. I have scarcely been out of England before."

"Why now"—he paused, to think briefly upon his words—"I took it for granted you were showing Miss Madden around."

"It 's quite the other way about," she answered, with a cold little laugh. "It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the chaperone." Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what it meant only in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness of the tone in which it had been uttered.

"No—it didn't seem as if it were altogether—what I might call—YOUR tour," he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few days, but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom of intercourse had been enlarged.

The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went on then with a renewed consciousness of risk.

"You mustn't be annoyed with me," he urged. "I've been travelling with that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've got into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are happy. And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of interfering, and seeing what's wrong."

She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful inspiration—"By the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow that you were the daughter of one of my Directors"—this smile froze upon the instant.

"The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?" she remarked, "than it is from here."

Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. "I have taken a great interest in General Kervick," he said, almost defiantly. "I am seeing to it that he has a comfortable income—an income suitable to a gentleman of his position—for the rest of his life."

"He will be very glad of it," she remarked.

"But I hoped that you would be glad of it too," he told her, bluntly. A curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him. If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely that she would defer to it. "I'm talking to you as I would to my niece, you know," he added, plausibly.

She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the point of view took her by surprise. "I don't understand," she said. "You are providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me like an uncle. Is that it?"

He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. "No—that isn't it," he said, and laughed again. "I couldn't tell, you know, that you wouldn't want to talk about your father." "Why, there's no reason in the world for not talking of him," she made haste to declare. "And if he's got something good in the City, I'm sure I'm as glad as anyone. He is the sort that ought always to have a good deal of money. I mean, it will bring out his more amiable qualities. He does not shine much in adversity—any more than I do."

Thorpe felt keenly that there were fine things to be said here—but he had confidence in nothing that came to his tongue. "I've been a poor man all my life—till now," was his eventual remark.

"Please don't tell me that you have been very happy in your poverty," she adjured him, with the dim flicker of a returning smile. "Very likely there are people who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. I don't want to hear them tell about it. To me poverty is the horror—the unmentionable horror!"

"There never was a day that I didn't feel THAT!" Thorpe put fervour into his voice. "I was never reconciled to it for a minute. I never ceased swearing to myself that I'd pull myself out of it. And that's what makes me sort of soft-hearted now toward those—toward those who haven't pulled themselves out of it."

"Your niece says you are soft-hearted beyond example," remarked Lady Cressage.

"Who could help being, to such a sweet little girl as she is?" demanded the uncle, fondly.

"She is very nice," said the other. "If one may say such a thing, I fancy these three months with her have had an appreciable effect upon you. I'm sure I note a difference."

"That's just what I've been saying to myself!" he told her. He was visibly delighted with this corroboration. "I've been alone practically all my life. I had no friends to speak of—I had no fit company—I hadn't anything but the determination to climb out of the hole. Well, I've done that—and I've got among the kind of people that I naturally like. But then there came the question of whether they would like me. I tell you frankly, that was what was worrying the heart out of me when I first met you. I like to be confessing it to you now—but you frightened me within an inch of my life. Well now, you see, I'm not scared of you at all. And of course it's because Julia's been putting me through a course of sprouts."

The figure was lost upon Lady Cressage, but the spirit of the remarks seemed not unpleasant to her. "I'm sure you're full of kindness," she said. "You must forget that I snapped at you—about papa." "All I remember about that is," he began, his eye lighting up with the thought that this time the opportunity should not pass unimproved, "that you said he didn't shine much in adversity—-any more than you did. Now on that last point I disagree with you, straight. There wouldn't be any place in which you wouldn't shine."

"Is that the way one talks to one's niece?" she asked him, almost listlessly. "Such flattery must surely be bad for the young." Her words were sprightly enough, but her face had clouded over. She had no heart for the banter.

"Ah"—he half-groaned. "I only wish I knew what was the right way to talk to you. The real thing is that I see you're unhappy—and that gets on my nerve—and I should like to ask you if there wasn't something I could do—and ask it in such a way that you'd have to admit there was—and I don't know enough to do it."

He had a wan smile for thanks. "But of course there is nothing," she replied, gently.

"Oh, there must be!" he insisted. He had no longer any clear notions as to where his tongue might not lead him. "There must be! You said I might talk to you as I would to Julia."

"Did I?"

"Well, I'm going to, anyway," he went on stoutly, ignoring the note of definite dissent in her interruption. "You ARE unhappy! You spoke about being a chaperone. Well now, to speak plainly, if it isn't entirely pleasant for you with Miss Madden—why wouldn't you be a chaperone for Julia? I must be going to London very soon—but she can stay here, or go to Egypt, or wherever she likes—and of course you would do everything, and have everything—whatever you liked, too."

"The conversation is getting upon rather impossible grounds, I'm afraid," she said, and then bit her lips together. Halting, she frowned a little in the effort of considering her further words, but there was nothing severe in the glance which she lifted to him as she began to speak. "Let us walk on. I must tell you that you misconceive the situation entirely. Nobody could possibly be kinder or more considerate than Miss Madden. Of course she is American—or rather Irish-American, and I'm English, and our notions and ways are not always alike. But that has nothing to do with it. And it is not so much that she has many thousands a year, and I only a few hundreds. That in itself would signify nothing—and if I must take help from somebody I would rather take it from Celia Madden than anybody else I know—but this is the point, Mr. Thorpe. I do not eat the bread of dependence gracefully. I pull wry faces over it, and I don't try very much to disguise them. That is my fault. Yes—oh yes, I know it is a fault—but I am as I am. And if Miss Madden doesn't mind—why"—she concluded with a mirthless, uncertain laugh—"why on earth should you?"

"Ah, why should I?" he echoed, reflectively. "I should like desperately to tell you why. Sometime I will tell you."

They walked on in silence for a brief space. Then she put out her hand for her wrap, and as she paused, he spread it over her shoulders.

"I am amazed to think what we have been saying to each other," she said, buttoning the fur as they moved on again. "I am vexed with myself."

"And more still with me," he suggested.

"No-o—but I ought to be. You've made me talk the most shocking rubbish."

"There we disagree again, you know. Everything you've said's been perfect. What you're thinking of now is that I'm not an old enough friend to have been allowed to hear it. But if I'm not as old a friend as some, I wish I could make you feel that I'm as solid a friend as any—as solid and as staunch and as true. I wish I could hear you say you believed that."

"But you talk of 'friends,'" she said, in a tone not at all responsive—"what is meant by 'friends'? We've chanced to meet twice—and once we barely exchanged civilities, and this time we've been hotel acquaintances—hardly more, is it?—and you and your young people have been very polite to me—and I in a silly moment have talked to you more about my affairs than I should—I suppose it was because you mentioned my father. But 'friends' is rather a big word for that, isn't it?"

Thorpe pouted for a dubious moment. "I can think of a bigger word still," he said, daringly. "It's been on the tip of my tongue more than once."

She quickened her pace. The air had grown perceptibly colder. The distant mountains, visible ever and again through the bare branches, were of a dark and cheerless blue, and sharply defined against the sky. It was not yet the sunset hour, and there were no mists, but the light of day seemed to be going out of the heavens. He hurried on beside her in depressed silence.

Their companions were hidden from view in a convolution of the winding road, but they were so near that their voices could be heard as they talked. Frequently the sound of laughter came backward from them.

"They're jolly enough down there," he commented at last, moodily.

"That's a good reason for our joining them, isn't it?" Her tone was at once casual and pointed.

"But I don't want to join them!" he protested. "Why don't you stay with me—and talk?" "But you bully me so," she offered in explanation.

The phrase caught his attention. Could it be that it expressed her real feeling? She had said, he recalled, that he had made her talk. Her complaint was like an admission that he could overpower her will. If that were true—then he had resources of masterfulness still in reserve sufficient to win any victory.

"No—not bully you," he said slowly, as if objecting to the word rather than the idea. "That wouldn't be possible to me. But you don't know me well enough to understand me. I am the kind of man who gets the things he wants. Let me tell you something: When I was at Hadlow, I had never shot a pheasant in my life. I used to do tolerably well with a rifle, but I hardly knew anything about a shot-gun, and I don't suppose I'd ever killed more than two or three birds on the wing—and that was ages ago. But I took the notion that I would shoot better than anybody else there. I made up my mind to it—and I simply did it, that's all. I don't know if you remember—but I killed a good deal more than both the others put together. I give you that as an example. I wanted you to think that I was a crack shot—and so I made myself be a crack shot."

"That is very interesting," she murmured. They did not seem to be walking quite so fast.

"Don't think I want to brag about myself," he went on. "I don't fancy myself—in that way. I'm not specially proud of doing things—it's the things themselves that I care for. If some men had made a great fortune, they would be conceited about it. Well, I'm not. What I'm keen about is the way to use that fortune so that I will get the most out of it—the most happiness, I mean. The thing to do is to make up your mind carefully what it is that you want, and to put all your power and resolution into getting it—and the rest is easy enough. I don't think there's anything beyond a strong man's reach, if he only believes enough in himself."

"But aren't you confusing two things?" she queried. The subject apparently interested her. "To win one's objects by sheer personal force is one thing. To merely secure them because one's purse is longer than other people's—that's quite another matter."

He smiled grimly at her. "Well, I'll combine the two," he said.

"Then I suppose you will be altogether irresistible," she said, lightly. "There will be no pheasants left for other people at all."

"I don't mind being chaffed," he told her, with gravity. "So long as you're good-natured, you can make game of me all you like. But I'm in earnest, all the same. I'm not going to play the fool with my money and my power. I have great projects. Sometime I'll tell you about them. They will all be put through—every one of them. And you wouldn't object to talking them over with me—would you?"

"My opinion on 'projects' is of no earthly value—to myself or anyone else."

"But still you'd give me your advice if I asked it?" he persisted. "Especially if it was a project in which you were concerned?"

After a moment's constrained silence she said to him, "You must have no projects, Mr. Thorpe, in which I am concerned. This talk is all very wide of the mark. You are not entitled to speak as if I were mixed up with your affairs. There is nothing whatever to warrant it."

"But how can you help being in my projects if I put you there, and keep you there?" he asked her, with gleeful boldness. "And just ask yourself whether you do really want to help it. Why should you? You've seen enough of me to know that I can be a good friend. And I'm the kind of friend who amounts to something—who can and will do things for those he likes. What obligation are you under to turn away that kind of a friend, when he offers himself to you? Put that question plainly to yourself."

"But you are not in a position to nominate the questions that I am to put to myself," she said. The effort to import decision into her tone and manner was apparent. "That is what I desire you to understand. We must not talk any more about me. I am not the topic of conversation."

"But first let me finish what I wanted to say," he insisted. "My talk won't break any bones. You'd be wrong not to listen to it—because it's meant to help you—to be of use to you. This is the thing, Lady Cressage: You're in a particularly hard and unpleasant position. Like my friend Plowden"—he watched her face narrowly but in vain, in the dull light, for any change at mention of the name—"like my friend Plowden you have a position and title to keep up, and next to nothing to keep it up on. But he can go down into the City and make money—or try to. He can accept Directorships and tips about the market and so on, from men who are disposed to be good to him, and who see how he can be of use to them—and in that way he can do something for himself. But there is the difference: you can't do these things, or you think you can't, which is the same thing. You're all fenced in; you're surrounded by notice-boards, telling you that you mustn't walk this way or look that way; that you mustn't say this thing or do the other. Now your friend down ahead there—Miss Madden—she doesn't take much stock in notice-boards. In fact, she feeds the gulls, simply because she's forbidden to do it. But you—you don't feed any gulls, and yet you're annoyed with yourself that you don't. Isn't that the case? Haven't I read you right?"

She seemed to have submitted to his choice of a topic. There was no touch of expostulation in the voice with which she answered him. "I see what you think you mean," she said.

"Think!" he responded, with self-confident emphasis. "I'm not 'thinking.' I'm reading an open book. As I say, you're not contented—you're not happy; you don't try to pretend that you are. But all the same, though you hate it, you accept it. You think that you really must obey your notice-boards. Now what I tell you you ought to do is to take a different view. Why should you put up all this barbed wire between yourself and your friends? It doesn't do anybody else any good—and it does you harm. Why, for example, should Plowden be free to take things from me, and you not?"

She glanced at him, with a cold half-smile in her eye. "Unfortunately I was not asked to join your Board."

He pressed his lips tightly together, and regarded her meditatively as he turned these words over in his mind. "What I'm doing for Plowden," he said with slow vagueness meanwhile, "it isn't so much because he's on the Board. He's of no special use to me there. But he was nice to me at a time when that meant everything in the world to me—and I don't forget things of that sort. Besides, I like him—and it pleases me to let him in for a share of my good fortune. See? It's my way of enjoying myself. Well now, I like you too, and why shouldn't I be allowed to let you in also for a share of that good fortune? You think there's a difference, but I tell you it's imaginary—pure moonshine. Why, the very people whose opinion you're afraid of—what did they do themselves when the South African craze was on? I'm told that the scum of the earth had only to own some Chartered shares, and pretend to be 'in the know' about them—and they could dine with as many duchesses as they liked. I knew one or two of the men who were in that deal—I wouldn't have them in my house—but it seems there wasn't any other house they couldn't go to in London."

"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed. "It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself—one admits that,—but it was only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets, you know. And—I don't think I see your application, in any event. The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?"

Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'" he repeated, as if talking to himself. "They like to have things 'on a business basis.'"

He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't understand you," she remarked, blankly.

"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows, and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy. "This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden, and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke—but it had its meaning—at least to me. Now I want to ask you—if I decide to form another Company, a very small and particular Company—if I should decide to form it, I say—could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board? Of course I could ask—but what I mean is—well, I guess you know what I mean."

The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away—disappeared. He looked at Lady Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued.

"Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say," she observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his self-command. "Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went on. "We—we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!—no more talk at all!"

"But just a word—you're not angry?"

She shook her head very slightly.

"And you do know that I'm your friend—your solid, twenty-four-carat friend?"

After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper—"Yes—be my friend—if it amuses you,"—and led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road.



CHAPTER XIII

TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train for Geneva—homeward bound.

It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes the formless impression that there were other things beside business. Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset him. And upset he undeniably was.

They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept very badly, and that they must "count him out" of their plans for the day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce him to go out either day.

Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity synchronized with an apparent change in the attitude of their new friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship had somehow vanished. Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common. There were no more trips together—no more fortuitous luncheons or formal dinners as a group.

The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite, and that the curtains were drawn aside—but there was no other token of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the previous evening, of course—it lingered in their minds as a rather perfunctory ceremony—but this had not prevented their hoping for another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle—and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.

"Fortunately, it is a clear day," said Julia. "We shall see Mont Blanc."

Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears. Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.

At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.

"It's as they said," she observed. "You are not allowed to drive in the mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint for a model Republic—doesn't it?"

"I daresay they're quite right," Lady Cressage replied, listlessly. "It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes—and all that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent."

"And you're on the side of the Government," said the other, with a twinkle in her brown eyes. "Truly now—you hated the whole idea of driving over the Simplon."

Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.

"But do you like this Russian plan any better?" demanded Celia. "I wish for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me—and let me know to the uttermost just what you think." "'For once'?" queried the other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of the quotation to be marked.

"Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking," Miss Madden declared. She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. "It is not you alone—Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case in point," she pursued, with a little laugh, "I could not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it."

"But you wanted to go," objected Lady Cressage, quietly. "That was the important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with the matter."

Celia's face clouded momentarily. "Those are not the kind of things I like to hear you say," she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. "They put everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said it a thousand times—and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what you do want—what really will please you! You never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or not."

The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. "That is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago," said Lady Cressage, passively—"that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak. I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine."

"Delightful!" cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again. "You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with. The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford—or passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing—if I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was—and it would all be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You don't tell me things!"

Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve. "It is a constitutional defect—even national, according to you. How shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?—I forget."

"The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well worth while—and next Moscow—and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow—it seems to me it must be the best thing in Europe—if you can call Russia Europe. That's the way it presents itself to me—but then I was brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing—in its proper season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would like the Russian experiment."

The other laughed gently. "But if I don't know what a real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes—truly—I should like very much to go."

Miss Madden sighed briefly. "All right," she said, but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone.

A space of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.

"It's from our young friend," she explained, genially—"the painter-boy—Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I made—that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't think I promised anything of the kind—but I suppose that is a detail. It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time—they were to go very early, weren't they?"

Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. "It was 8:40, I think—fully half an hour ago," she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.

"Curious conglomeration"—mused the other. "The boy and girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective—but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had always been—simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty—a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such nobility of mind and temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous. I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he thought so.—But I never stop when I begin talking of my father."

"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him," Lady Cressage put in. "One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!"

Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her earlier subject. "Of course there is a certain difference," she went on, carelessly,—"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated."

"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me," said the other, with interest. "And his people were booksellers—somewhere in London—so that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very well indeed—in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself—and he's very proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?"

"Oh, I don't know," Celia replied, idly. "It seemed to me that he was the kind of piratical buccaneer who oughtn't to be shaved and polished and taught drawing-room tricks—I feel that merely in the interest of the fitness of things. Have you looked into his eyes—I mean when they've got that lack-lustre expression? You can see a hundred thousand dead men in them."

"I know the look you mean," said Lady Cressage, in a low voice.

"Not that I assume he is going to kill anybody," pursued Miss Madden, with ostensible indifference, but fixing a glance of aroused attention upon her companion's face, "or that he has any criminal intentions whatever. He behaves very civilly indeed, and apparently his niece and nephew idolize him. He seems to be the soul of kindness to them. It may be that I'm altogether wrong about him—only I know I had the instinct of alarm when I caught that sort of dull glaze in his eye. I met an African explorer a year ago, or so, about whose expeditions dark stories were told, and he had precisely that kind of eye. Perhaps it was this that put it into my head—but I have a feeling that this Thorpe is an exceptional sort of man, who would have the capacity in him for terrible things, if the necessity arose for them."

"I see what you mean," the other repeated. She toyed with the bread-crumbs about her plate, and reflectively watched their manipulation into squares and triangles as she went on. "But may that not be merely the visible sign of an exceptionally strong and masterful character? And isn't it, after all, the result of circumstances whether such a character makes, as you put it, a hundred thousand dead men, or enriches a hundred thousand lives instead? We agree, let us say, that this Mr. Thorpe impresses us both as a powerful sort of personality. The question arises, How will he use his power? On that point, we look for evidence. You see a dull glaze in his eye, and you draw hostile conclusions from it. I reply that it may mean no more than that he is sleepy. But, on the other hand, I bring proofs that are actively in his favour. He is, as you say, idolized by the only two members of his family that we have seen—persons, moreover, who have been brought up in ways different to his own, and who would not start, therefore, with prejudices in his favour. Beyond that, I know of two cases in which he has behaved, or rather undertaken to behave, with really lavish generosity—and in neither case was there any claim upon him of a substantial nature. He seems to me, in fact, quite too much disposed to share his fortune with Tom, Dick, and Harry—anybody who excites his sympathy or gets into his affections." Having said this much, Lady Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. "So now," she added, with a flushed smile, "since you love arguments so much, how do you answer that?"

Celia smiled back. "Oh, I don't answer it at all," she said, and her voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. "Your proofs overwhelm me. I know nothing of him—and you know so much!"

Lady Cressage regarded her companion with a novel earnestness and directness of gaze. "I had a long, long talk with him—the afternoon we came down from Glion."

Miss Madden rose, and going to the mantel lighted a cigarette. She did not return to the table, but after a brief pause came and took an easy-chair beside her friend, who turned to face her. "My dear Edith," she said, with gravity, "I think you want to tell me about that talk—and so I beg you to do so. But if I'm mistaken—why then I beg you to do nothing of the kind."

The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and then clasped them upon her knee. "I seem not to know what I want! What is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?"

"Now—now!" Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference, apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.

"There is really nothing to tell,"—she faltered, hesitatingly—"that is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it—the talk left my mind in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was said—it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something else was being talked about—but the whole experience made a most tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people of—well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,—but this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without any special aim that one could see—he reduced my brain to a sort of porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him—babbling rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?"

"Nerves," said Miss Madden, judicially.

"Oh, that is meaningless," the other declared. "Anybody can say 'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'"

"But yours is a special case of nerves," Celia pursued, with gentle imperturbability. "I think I can make my meaning clear to you—though the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity—call it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say it broke your nerve—but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old wound aches when there's a storm in the air—so your old hurt distracts and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain."

"Perhaps—I don't know," Edith replied, in a tone of melancholy reverie. "It makes a very poor creature out of me, whatever it is."

"I rather lose patience, Edith," her companion admonished her, gravely. "Nobody has a right to be so deficient in courage as you allow yourself to be."

"But I'm not a coward," the other protested. "I could be as brave as anybody—as brave as you are—if a chance were given me. But of what use is bravery against a wall twenty feet high? I can't get over it. I only wound and cripple myself by trying to tear it down, or break through it.—Oh yes, I know what you say! You say there is no wall—that it is all an illusion of mine. But unfortunately I'm unable to take that view. I've battered myself against it too long—too sorely, Celia!"

Celia shrugged her shoulders in comment. "Oh, we women all have our walls—our limitations—if it comes to that," she said, with a kind of compassionate impatience in her tone. "We are all ridiculous together—from the point of view of human liberty. The free woman is a fraud—a myth. She is as empty an abstraction as the 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' that the French put on their public buildings. I used to have the most wonderful visions of what independence would mean. I thought that when I was absolutely my own master, with my money and my courage and my free mind, I would do things to astonish all mankind. But really the most I achieve is the occasional mild surprise of a German waiter. Even that palls on one after a time. And if you were independent, Edith—if you had any amount of money—what difference do you think it would make to you? What could you do that you don't do, or couldn't do, now?"

"Ah, now"—said the other, looking up with a thin smile—"now is an interval—an oasis."

Miss Madden's large, handsome, clear-hued face, habitually serene in its expression, lost something in composure as she regarded her companion. "I don't know why you should say that," she observed, gently enough, but with an effect of reproof in her tone. "I have never put limits to the connection, in my own mind—and it hadn't occurred to me that you were doing so in yours."

"But I'm not," interposed Lady Cressage.

"Then I understand you less than ever. Why do you talk about an 'interval'? What was the other word?—'oasis'—as if this were a brief halt for refreshments and a breathing-spell, and that presently you must wander forth into the desert again. That suggestion is none of mine. We agreed that we would live together—'pool our issues,' as they say in America. I wanted a companion; so did you. I have never for an instant regretted the arrangement. Some of my own shortcomings in the matter I have regretted. You were the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen, and you were talented, and you seemed to like me—and I promised myself that I would add cheerfulness and a gay spirit to your other gifts—and in that I have failed wofully. You're not happy. I see that only too clearly."

"I know—I'm a weariness and a bore to you," broke in the other, despondingly.

"That is precisely what you're not," Celia went on. "We mustn't use words of that sort. They don't describe anything in our life at all. But I should be better pleased with myself if I could really put my finger on what it is that is worrying you. Even if we decided to break up our establishment, I have told you that you should not go back to what you regard as poverty. Upon that score, I had hoped that your mind was easy. As I say, I think you attach more importance to money than those who have tested its powers would agree to—but that's neither here nor there. You did not get on well on 600 pounds a year—and that is enough. You shall never have less than twice that amount, whether we keep together or not—and if it ought to be three times the amount, that doesn't matter.

"You don't seem to realize, Edith"—she spoke with increased animation—"that you are my caprice. You are the possession that I am proudest of and fondest of. There is nothing else that appeals to me a hundredth part as much as you do. Since I became independent, the one real satisfaction I have had is in being able to do things for you—to have you with me, and make you share in the best that the world can offer. And if with it all you remain unhappy, why then you see I don't know what to do."

"Oh, I know—I behave very badly!" Lady Cressage had risen, and with visible agitation began now to pace the room. "I deserve to be thrown into the lake—I know it well enough! But Celia—truly—I'm as incapable of understanding it as you are. It must be that I am possessed by devils—like the people in the New Testament. Perhaps someone will come along who can cast them out. I don't seem able to do it myself. I can't rule myself at all. It needs a strength I haven't got!"

"Ah!" said Celia, thoughtfully. The excited sentences which Edith threw over her shoulder as she walked appeared, upon examination, to contain a suggestion.

"My dear child," she asked abruptly, after a moment's silence, "do you want to marry?"

Lady Cressage paused at the mantel, and exchanged a long steadfast glance with her friend. Then she came slowly forward. "Ah, that is what I don't know," she answered. Apparently the reply was candid.

Miss Madden pursed her lips, and frowned a little in thought. Then, at some passing reflection, she smiled in a puzzled fashion. At last she also rose, and went to the mantel for another cigarette. "Now I am going to talk plainly," she said, with decision. "Since the subject is mentioned, less harm will be done by speaking out than by keeping still. There is a debate in your mind on the matter, isn't there?"

The other lady, tall, slender, gently ruminative once more, stood at the window and with bowed head looked down at the lake. "Yes—I suppose it might be called that," she replied, in a low voice.

"And you hesitate to tell me about it? You would rather not?" Celia, after an instant's pause, went on without waiting for an answer. "I beg that you won't assume my hostility to the idea, Edith. In fact, I'm not sure I don't think it would be the best thing for you to do. Marriage, a home, children—these are great things to a woman. We can say that she pays the price of bondage for them—but to know what that signifies, we must ask what her freedom has been worth to her."

"Yes," interposed the other, from the window. "What have I done with my freedom that has been worth while?"

"Not much," murmured Celia, under her breath. She moved forward, and stood beside Edith, with an arm round her waist. They looked together at the lake.

"It is Lord Plowden, is it not?" asked the American, as the silence grew constrained.

Lady Cressage looked up alertly, and then hesitated over her reply. "No," she said at last. Upon reflection, and with a dim smile flickering in her side-long glance at Celia, she added, "He wants to marry you, you know."

"Leave that out of consideration," said Celia, composedly. "He has never said so. I think it was more his mother's idea than his, if it existed at all. Of course I am not marrying him, or anybody else. But I saw at Hadlow that you and he were—what shall I say?—old friends."

"He must marry money," the other replied. In an unexpected burst of candour she went on: "He would have asked me to marry him if I had had money. There is no harm in telling you that. It was quite understood—oh, two years ago. And I think I wished I had the money—then."

"And you don't wish it now?"

A slight shake of Edith's small, shapely head served for answer. After a little, she spoke in a musing tone: "He is going to have money of his own, very soon, but I don't think it would attract me now. I like him personally, of course, but—there is no career, no ambition, no future."

"A Viscount has future enough behind him," observed Celia.

"It doesn't attract me," the other repeated, vaguely. "He is handsome, and clever, and kind and all that—but he would never appeal to any of the great emotions—nor be capable of them himself He is too smooth, too well-balanced, too much the gentleman. That expresses it badly—but do you see what I mean?"

Celia turned, and studied the beautiful profile beside her, in a steady, comprehending look.

"Yes, I think I see what you mean," she said, with significance in her tone.

Lady Cressage flushed, and released herself from her companion's arm. "But I don't know myself what I mean!" she exclaimed, despairingly, as she moved away. "I don't know!—I don't know!"



CHAPTER XIV

ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.

"It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a' come out on," she told them, in salutation—and for comment they all glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.

"I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go home," she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. "But it isn't three yet—it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be more comfortable upstairs—"

"Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us," protested Julia. She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was unmistakable.

The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long, listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.

"But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?" she observed, coldly. "You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?"

Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.

"There has been so much to do, mamma," she explained, in a clear, cool voice. "We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me—and Alfred has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you sooner—and much oftener—if we had thought you wanted us. But really, when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible for us to pretend that you were glad to see us."

"Oh, I was glad enough," Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. "Why shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you expect me to shout and dance?"

"But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square," Alfred reminded her.

"That's different," she declared. "What would I be doing in Ovington Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there; it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!"

Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal countenance, hardened beyond their wont. "You talk as if there had been some class war declared," she said, with obvious annoyance. "You know that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you as he is to us."

"Uncle Stormont!" Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged with hostile sarcasm. "But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel," broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. "He has a perfect right to use the one he likes best."

"Oh, I don't dispute his right," she replied, once more in her passionless monotone. "Everybody can call themselves whatever they please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me—but they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I should call that providential."

"And that's what we DO call it," put in Julia, with vivacity. "And why should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all. Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself—at least for the present. But when Uncle St—when uncle says there's more than enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things for you—why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow Alfred to do things for me."

"That you never did," interposed the young man, gayly. "I'll say that for you, Jule."

"And never will," she assured him, with cheerful decision. "But no—mamma—can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all—and when uncle's money came you sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be—I won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us—and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all."

"I never said anything of the sort," the mother declared, with a touch of animation.

"Oh no—you never said it," Julia admitted, "but what else can we think you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that—and I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go——"

"But I did want you to go," Mrs. Dabney affirmed.

"Well, then, when I come back—when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,—why, you won't even come and look at the house!"

"But I don't want to see it," the mother retorted; obstinately.

"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising. "Nobody will ask you again." "Oh yes they will," urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody—and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.

After his disappearance from the scene—unlamented, to the best of Julia's juvenile perceptions—there had been relatively peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—Julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have their own way.

Alfred and his mother were Thorpes—that is to say, people who necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath, however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence—and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.

"Oh yes they will," she repeated, and warned her brother into the background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. "We are your children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us."

"How could I help letting it come?" demanded the mother, listlessly argumentative. "You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your education and your ideas—and what more do you want? Why should you come bothering me?"

"How unjust you are, mamma!" cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her bright glance.

The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she spoke:

"If you ever have children of your own," she said, "and you slave your life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your betters, and they act accordingly—then you'll understand. But you don't understand now—and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come in whenever it's convenient—and you feel like it. I must go back to my books now."

She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter. Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.

Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless, ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner. At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet, and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.

"Bring everything in!" she called to the boy, and helped out his apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.

Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.

"I think you may go home now," she said to him, with the laconic abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. "You have a home, haven't you?"

Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job, he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.

"Got a mother?" she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.

"And do you think yourself better than she is?"

The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the Dials. "I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't," he answered, in swift, rasping accents. "She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave—" "Go home!" she bade him, peremptorily—and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the shop.

Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book—the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history—but loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others. Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters—for what reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise, she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop.

It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.

Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. "Do mind what you're about!" she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.

"Shut up the place!" he answered, with lordly geniality. "I've walked all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion—I couldn't have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!"

"There isn't any fire down here," she said, apologetically, as they edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. "The old fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find it too cold—do you?—with your coat on? Or would you rather come upstairs?"

"Never mind the cold," he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before the desk. "I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've done today?"

Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light. His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned a new authority.

The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy expression which had been their complement. He was all vigour, readiness, confidence, now. She deemed him almost handsome, this curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his commanding gaze upon her.

"We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day," he went on. "This is the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was—and the working of it is all in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to come to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means, to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without any charge at all. But today it was a little different. The price was up ten shillings above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber, on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound shares. That offer fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares, plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. That makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's haul. D'ye see?"

She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than she would have cared to confess.

"Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets," he proceeded with a steady glow in his eyes. "A fortnight hence, that is March 14th, we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's office and settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber makes the price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have to pay us in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be. We'll decide on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds. It's best in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like that, in order not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate."

"But why not frighten them?" Louisa asked. "I thought you wanted to frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago."

He smiled genially. "I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some actual dealings. Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to the general public will come into the market too. But of course you see that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they come back to us. Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will snap them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from the fortnightly tax we are levying on them. In that way we shall eventually let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half."

"What do you want to do that for?" The sister's grey eyes had caught a metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. "Why let anybody out? Why can't you go on taking their money for ever?"

Thorpe nodded complacently. "Yes—that's what I asked too. It seemed to me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them there. But when you come to reflect—you can't get more out of a man than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go bankrupt—and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose everything that you counted on making out of him. So, after a certain point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt with on a different footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.

"You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well, our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start with. Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another, till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let him out. See?"

"It's cruel, isn't it?" she commented, calmly meditative, after a little pause.

"Everything in the City is cruel," he assured her with a light tone. "All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand pounds—maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well—money like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept it—and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes."

Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness. As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.

"That's the kind of hand," he began again, thoughtfully, "that breaks the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move. It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes them by the throat"—he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension—"when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business—my God! what good are they?"

He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind.

"There was a man in here asking about you today," she remarked, in a casual fashion. "Said he was an old friend of yours."

"Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now," he observed with beaming indifference. "I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square—that'll be good enough for me. By the way—you haven't been out to see us yet. We're all settled now. You must come at once—why not with me, now?"

Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.

"He left a card for you," she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. "I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it."

"Oh, damn him, and his card too," Thorpe protested easily. "I don't want to see either of them."

"He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He seemed to act as if you'd want to see him—but I didn't know. I didn't tell him your address."

Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.

"What was his name?" he asked with abruptness.

"I don't in the least remember," she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. "He was a little man, five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair—a kind of Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether you were in England or not!"

Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head. "You must find that card!" he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. "I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!"

"Oh, I have a good few other things to do," she reminded him, as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. "I can put my hand on any one of four thousand books in stock," she mildly boasted over her shoulder, "and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell if a single book is missing—and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever knew to do that."

"Oh of course, you're an exception," he admitted, under a sense of justice. "But I wish you'd find the card."

"I know where it is," she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. "I'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand," she explained.

He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it under the gas-light. "Where is Montague Street?" he asked, with rough directness.

"In Bloomsbury—alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street—I don't know how many others there may be."

Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. "Yes—Bloomsbury," he said hurriedly. "That would be his form. And you say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts—nothing about the Company, eh?" He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him a good deal.

"No," she assured him, reflectively; "no, I'm sure he didn't. From what he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere else, for that matter, I should say."

Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look. "No—he's a shade off in the upper story," he told her in a confidential tone. "Still, it's important that I should see him,"—and with only a hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.

By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella for a cab.



CHAPTER XV

"We've got a spare room here, haven't we?" Thorpe asked his niece, when she came out to greet him in the hall of their new home in Ovington Square. He spoke with palpable eagerness before even unbuttoning his damp great-coat, or putting off his hat. "I mean it's all in working order ready for use?"

"Why yes, uncle," Julia answered, after a moment's thought. "Is someone coming?"

"I think so," he replied, with a grunt of relief. He seemed increasingly pleased with the project he had in mind, as she helped him off with his things. The smile he gave her, when she playfully took his arm to lead him into the adjoining library, was clearly but a part of the satisfied grin with which he was considering some development in his own affairs.

He got into his slippers and into the easy-chair before the bright fire and lit a cigar with a contented air.

"Well, my little girl?" he said, with genial inconsequence, and smiled again at her, where she stood beside the mantel.

"It will be such a lark to play the hostess to a stranger!" she exclaimed. "When is he coming?—I suppose it is a 'he,'" she added, less buoyantly.

"Oh—that fellow," Thorpe said, as if he had been thinking of something else. "Well—I can't tell just when he will turn up. I only learned he was in town—or in England—a couple of hours ago. I haven't seen him yet at all. I drove round to his lodgings, near the British Museum, but he wasn't there. He only comes there to sleep, but they told me he turned in early—by nine o'clock or so. Then I went round to a hotel and wrote a note for him, and took it back to his lodgings, and left it for him. I told him to pack up his things as soon as he got it, and drive here, and make this his home—for the time being at least."

"Then it's some old friend of yours?" said the girl. "I know I shall like him."

Thorpe laughed somewhat uneasily. "Well—yes—he's a kind of a friend of mine," he said, with a note of hesitation in his voice. "I don't know, though, that you'll think much of him. He aint what you'd call a ladies' man."

He laughed again at some thought the words conjured up. "He's a curious, simple old party, who'd just like a comfortable corner somewhere by himself, and wouldn't expect to be talked to or entertained at all. If he does come, he'll keep to himself pretty well. He wouldn't be any company for you. I mean,—for you or Alfred either. I think he's a Canadian or West Indian,—British subject, at all events,—but he's lived all his life in the West, and he wouldn't know what to do in a drawing-room, or that sort of thing. You'd better just not pay any attention to him. Pass the time of day, of course, but that's all."

Julia's alert, small-featured face expressed some vague disappointment at what she heard, but her words were cheerful enough. "Oh of course—whatever he likes best," she said. "I will tell Potter to make everything ready. I suppose there's no chance of his being here in time for dinner?"

Thorpe shook his head, and then lifted his brows over some new perplexity. "I guess he'd want to eat his meals out, anyway," he said, after some thought. "I don't seem to remember much about him in that respect—of course, everything was so different in camp out in Mexico—but I daresay he wouldn't be much of an ornament at the table. However, that'll be all right. He's as easy to manage as a rabbit. If I told him to eat on the roof, he'd do it without a murmur. You see it's this way, Julia: he's a scientific man—a kind of geologist, and mining expert and rubber expert—and chemical expert and all sort of things. I suppose he must have gone through college—very likely he'll turn out to have better manners than I was giving him credit for. I've only seen him in the rough, so to speak. We weren't at all intimate then,—but we had dealings together, and there are certain important reasons why I should keep close in touch with him while he's here in London. But I'll try and do that without letting you be bothered." "What an idea!" cried Julia. "As if that wasn't what we had the house for—to see the people you want to see."

Her uncle smiled rather ruefully, and looked in a rather dubious way at his cigar. "Between you and me and the lamp-post, Jule," he said, with a slow, whimsical drawl, "there isn't a fellow in the world that I wanted to see less than I did him. But since he's here—why, we've got to make the best of it."

After dinner, Thorpe suffered the youngsters to go up to the drawing-room in the tacit understanding that he should probably not see them again that night. He betook himself then once more to the library, as it was called—the little, cozy, dark-panelled room off the hall, where the owner of the house had left two locked bookcases, and where Thorpe himself had installed a writing-desk and a diminutive safe for his papers. The chief purpose of the small apartment, however, was indicated by the two big, round, low-seated easy-chairs before the hearth, and by the cigar boxes and spirit-stand and tumblers visible behind the glass of the cabinet against the wall. Thorpe himself called the room his "snuggery," and spent many hours there in slippered comfort, smoking and gazing contentedly into the fire. Sometimes Julia read to him, as he sat thus at his ease, but then he almost invariably went to sleep.