"It depends what you have to do with him. About here he goes by the name of the 'Ogre.'"

"How, does he eat people up?" asked the stranger, smiling.

The girl hesitated.

"Ask one of his tenants!" she said at last.

"Oh, he's a landlord, and a bad one?"

She nodded, a sudden sharpness in her gray eyes.

"But that's not the common reason for the name. It's because he shuts himself up—in a house full of treasures. He's a great collector."

"Of works of art? You—don't need to be mad to do that! It seems to be one of the things that pays best nowadays—with all these Americans about. It's a way of investing your money. Doesn't he show them to anybody?"

"Nobody is allowed to go near him, or his house. He has built a high wall round his park, and dogs are let loose at night that tear you to pieces."

"Nice man! If it weren't for the dogs, I should brave him. In a small way, I'm a collector myself."

He smiled, and Lydia understood that the personal reference was thrown out as a feeler, in case she might be willing to push the conversation further. But she did not respond, although as he spoke she happened to notice that he wore a remarkable ring on his left hand, which seemed to illustrate his remark. An engraved gem?—Greek? Her eyes were quick for such things.

However, she was seized with shyness, and as she had now finished the packing of her brushes and paints, and the young man had elaborately fastened all the straps of the portable easel and its case, there was nothing for him to do but to stoop unwillingly for his soft hat which was lying on the grass. Then an idea struck him.

"I say, what are you going to do with all these things?"

"Carry them home." She smiled. "I am not a cripple."

"Mightn't I—mightn't I carry them for you?"

"Thank you. My way lies in quite another direction. Good-night."

She held out a shapely hand. He took it, lifted his hat, and departed.

As soon as he was safely past a jutting corner of the road Lydia, instead of going home, lazily sat down again on a rock to think about what had happened. She was perfectly aware that—considering the whole interview had only taken ten minutes—she had made an impression upon the young man. And as young men of such distinguished appearance were not common in the Whitebeck neighbourhood, the recollection of all those little signs in look and manner which had borne witness to the stranger's discreet admiration of her was not at all disagreeable.

He was not a native—that she was sure of. She guessed him a Londoner. "Awfully good clothes!—London clothes. About thirty, I should think? I wonder what he does. He can't be rich, or he wouldn't be bicycling. He did up those straps as though he were used to them; but he can't be an artist, or he'd have said something. It was a face with lots of power in it. Not very good-tempered, I should say? But there's something about him—yes, distinctly, something! I liked his thin cheeks, and his dark curls. His head, too, was uncommonly well set on. I'm sure that there's a good deal to him, as the Americans say; he's not stuffed with sawdust. I can imagine—just imagine—being in love with him."

She laughed to herself.

Then a sudden thought occurred to her, which reddened her cheeks. Suppose when the young man came to think over it, he believed that she had let the papers fall into the river—deliberately—on purpose—just to attract his attention? At the very precise moment that he comes upon the scene, she slips into the water. Of course!—an arranged affair!

She sat on, meditating in some discomfort.

"It is no use deceiving ourselves," she thought. "We're not in the good old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious—and harder. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway something's gone—what is it? Poetry? Illusion? And yet!—why is it that men still put us off our balance?—even now—that they matter so much less, now that we live our own lives, and can do without them? I shouldn't be sitting here, bothering my head, if it had been another girl who had come to help."

Slowly she gathered up her things and took her way home, while the evening of blue and pearl fell around her, while the glow died on the fells, and Venus came out in a sky that was still too full of light to let any lesser stars appear.

She crossed the stepping stones, and in a river field on the farther side she came across an old shepherd, carrying a wounded ewe across his shoulders, and with his dog beside him. At sight of him she paused in astonishment. He was an old friend of hers, but he belonged to a village—the village of Mainstairs—some three miles away in the lowland toward Pengarth. She had first come across him when sketching among some distant fells where he had been a shepherd for more than forty years.

The old man's russet face, sharp-lined and strong, lit up as he saw her approaching.

"Why I thowt I med coom across yer!" he said smiling. And he explained that he had been paying a visit to a married daughter under Naddle Fell, and had volunteered to carry an injured sheep down to a valley farm, whence it had strayed on his way home.

They stopped to talk while he rested a few minutes, under his burden, propped against a rock. Lydia asked him after a sick grand-daughter. Her question showed knowledge—no perfunctory kindness.

He shook his head sadly, and her grave, soft look, as she fell silent a little, beside him, said more than words.

"Anything been done to your cottage?" she asked him presently.

"Noa—nowt."

"Nor to the other houses?"

"Naethin'."

Her brows frowned.

"Horrible!" she said under her breath. But they did not pursue the subject. Instead the old man broke out in praise of the "won'erful 'cute" sheep dog beside him, and in the story of the accident which had slightly lamed the ewe he was carrying. Lydia's vivacious listening, her laugh, her comments, expressed—unconsciously—with just a touch of Cumbria dialect, showed them natural comrades. Some deeply human gift, some spontaneity in the girl, answered to the racy simplicity of the old man.

"Tell me once more"—she said, as she rose from her seat upon a fallen tree, and prepared to go on her way—"those counting words you told me last week. I tried to tell them to my mother—but I couldn't remember them all. They made us laugh so."

"Aye, they're the owd words," said the shepherd complacently. "We doan't use 'em now. But my feyther minds how his feyther used allus to count by 'em."

And he began the catalogue of those ancient numerals by which the northern dalesman of a hundred years ago were still accustomed to reckon their sheep, words that go back to the very infancy of man.

"Yan—tyan—tethera—methera—pimp; sethera—lethera—hovera—dovera—dick."

Lydia's face dissolved in laughter—and when the old man delighting in her amusement went on to the compounds of ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the rest:

"Yan-a-dick—tyan-a-dick—tethera-a-dick—methera-a-dick—bumfit."

At "bumfit" (fifteen) they both rocked with merriment, the old man carried away by the infection of hers.

"Go on," said Lydia—the tears of laughter in her eyes—"up to twenty, and then hear me say them."

"Yan-a-bumfit—tyan-a-bumfit—tethera-a-bumfit—methera-a-bumfit—giggot" (twenty).

"Giggot" set them both off again—and then Lydia—stumbling, laughing, and often corrected, said her lesson.

By the time she was fairly perfect, and the old man had straightened himself again under his load—a veritable "good shepherd," glorified by the evening light—they parted with a friendly nod, glad to have met and sure to meet again.

"I'll come and see Bessie soon," she said gently, as she moved on.

"Aye. Yo'll be varra welcome."

She stepped forward briskly, gained the high road, and presently saw in front of her a small white house, recently built, and already embowered in a blossoming garden. Lilacs sent their fragrance to greet her; rhododendrons glowed through the twilight, and a wild-cherry laden with bloom reared its white miracle against the walls of the house.

Lydia stood at the gate devouring the tree with her eyes. The blossom had already begun to drop. "Two days more"—she said to herself, sighing—"and it'll be gone—till next year. And it's been out such a little, little while! I seem hardly to have looked at it. It's horrible how short-lived all the beautiful things are."

"Lydia!" A voice called from an open window.

"Yes, mother."

"You're dreadfully late, Lydia! Susan and I have finished supper long ago."

Lydia walked into the house, and put her head into the drawing-room.

"Sorry, mother! It was so lovely, I couldn't come in. And I met a dear old shepherd I know. Don't bother about me. I'll get some milk and cake."

She closed the door again, before her mother could protest.

"Girls will never think of their meals!" said Mrs. Penfold to herself in irritation. "And then all of a sudden they get nerves—or consumption—or something."

As she spoke, she withdrew from the window, and curled herself up on a sofa, where a knitted coverlet lay, ready to draw over her feet. Mrs. Penfold was a slight, pretty woman of fifty with invalidish Sybaritic ways, and a character which was an odd mixture of humility and conceit—diffidence and audacity. She was quite aware that she was not as clever as her daughters. She could not write poetry like Susan, or paint like Lydia. But then, in her own opinion, she had so many merits they were without; merits which more than maintained her self-respect, and enabled her to hold her ground with them. For instance: by the time she was four and twenty, Lydia's age, she had received at least a dozen proposals. Lydia's scalps, so far as her mother knew, were only two—fellow-students at South Kensington, absurd people, not to be counted. Then, pretty as Lydia was, her nose could not be compared for delicacy with her mother's. "My nose was always famous"—Mrs. Penfold would say complacently to her daughters—"it was that which first attracted your dear father. 'It was,' he said—you know he always expressed himself so remarkably—'such a sure sign of "race."' His own people—oh! they were quite nice people—but quite middle-class." Again, her hands and feet were smaller and more aristocratic than either Lydia's or Susan's. She liked to remind herself constantly how everybody had admired them and talked about them when she was a girl.

Drawing her work-box toward her, while she waited for Lydia's return, Mrs. Penfold fell to knitting, while the inner chatter of the mind went as fast as her needles—concerned chiefly with two matters of absorbing interest: Lydia's twenty pounds, and a piece of news about Lydia, recently learnt from the rector's wife.

As to the twenty pounds, it was the greatest blessing! Of course the school salary would have been a certainty—and Lydia had hardly considered it with proper seriousness. But there—all was well! The extra twenty pounds would carry them on, and now that Lydia had begun to earn, thought the maternal optimist, she would of course go on earning—at higher and higher prices—and the family income of some three hundred a year would obtain the increment it so desperately needed. And as Mrs. Penfold looked upon a girls' school as something not far removed from a nunnery, a place at any rate painfully devoid of the masculine element; and as her whole mind was set—sometimes romantically, sometimes financially—on the marriage of her daughters, she felt that both she and Lydia had escaped what might have been an unfortunate necessity.

Yes, indeed!—what a providential escape, if—

Mrs. Penfold let fall her knitting; her face sparkled. Why had Lydia never communicated the fact, the thrilling fact that she had been meeting at the rectory—more than once apparently—not merely a young man, but the young man of the neighbourhood. And with results—favourable results—quite evident to the Rector and the Rector's wife, if Lydia herself chose to ignore and secrete them. It was really unkind....

The door opened. A white figure slipped into the room through its mingled lights, and found a stool beside Mrs. Penfold.

"Dear—are you all right?"

Mrs. Penfold stroked the speaker's head.

"Well, I thought I was going to have a headache this morning, darling—but I didn't—it went away. Lydia! the Rector and Mrs. Deacon have been here. Why didn't you tell me you have been meeting Lord Tatham at the rectory?"

Lydia laughed.

"Didn't I? Well, he's quite decent."

"Mrs. Deacon says he admired you. She's sure he did!" Mrs. Penfold stooped eagerly toward her daughter, trying to see her face in the twilight.

"Mrs. Deacon's a goose! You know she is, mother,—you often say so. I met him first, of course, at the Hunt Ball. And you saw him there too. You saw me dancing with him."

"But that was only once," said Mrs. Penfold, candidly. "I didn't think anything of that. When I was a girl, if a young man liked me at a dance, we went on till we made everybody talk. Or else, there was nothing in it."

"Well, there was nothing in it, dear—in this case. And I wouldn't advise you to give me to Lord Tatham—just yet!"

Mrs. Penfold sighed.

"Of course one knows that that kind of young man has his marriage made for him—just like royalty. But sometimes—they break out. There are dukes that have married plain Misses—no better than you, Lydia—and not American either. But—Lydia—you did like him?"

"Who? Lord Tatham? Certainly."

"I expect most girls do! He's the great parti about here."

"Mother, really!" cried Lydia. "He's just a pleasant youth—not at all clever. And oh, how badly he plays bridge!"

"That doesn't matter. Mrs. Deacon says you got on with him, splendidly."

"I chaffed him a good deal. He really plays worse than I do—if you can believe it."

"They like being chaffed"—said Mrs. Penfold pensively—"if a girl does it well."

"I don't care, darling, whether they like it or not. It amuses me, and so I do it."

"But you mustn't let them think they're being laughed at. If you do that, Lydia, you'll be an old maid. Oh, Lydia!"—the speaker sighed like a furnace—"I do wish you saw more young men!"

"Well, I saw another one—much handsomer than Lord Tatham—this afternoon," laughed Lydia.

Mrs. Penfold eagerly inquired. The story was told, and Mrs. Penfold, as easily lured by a new subject as a child by a new doll, fell into many speculations as to who the youth could have been, and where he was going. Lydia soon ceased to listen. But when the coverlet slipped away she did not fail to replace it tenderly over her mother's feet, and every now and then her fingers gave a caressing touch to the delicate hand of which Mrs. Penfold was so proud. It was not difficult to see that of the two the girl was really the mother, in spirit; the maturer, protecting soul.

Presently she roused herself to ask:

"Where is Susan?"

"She went up to write directly after supper, and we mustn't disturb her. She hopes to finish her tragedy to-night. She said she had an inspiration."

"Inspiration or no, I shall hunt her to bed, if I don't hear her door shut by twelve," said Lydia with sisterly determination.

"Do you think, darling, that Susy—will ever make a great deal of money by her writings?" The tone was wistful.

"Well, no, mother, candidly, I don't. There's no money in tragedies—so I'm told."

Mrs. Penfold sighed. But Lydia, changed the subject, entered upon a discussion, so inventively artistic, of the new bonnet, and the new dress in which her mother was to appear on Whitsunday, that when bedtime came Mrs. Penfold had seldom passed a pleasanter evening.

After her mother had gone to bed, Lydia wandered into the moonlit garden, and strolled about its paths, lost in the beauty of its dim flowers and the sweetness of its scents. The spring was in her veins, and she felt strangely shaken and restless. She tried to think of her painting, and the prospect she had of getting into an artistic club, a club of young landscapists, which exhibited every May, and was beginning to make a mark. But her thoughts strayed perpetually.

So her mother imagined that Lord Tatham had only danced once with her at the Hunt Ball? As a matter of fact, he had danced with her once, and then, as dancing was by no means the youth's strong point, they had sat out in a corner of the hotel garden, by the river, through four supper dances. And if the fact had escaped the notice both of Mrs. Penfold and Susy, greatly to Lydia's satisfaction, she was well aware that it had not altogether escaped the notice of the neighbourhood, which kept an eager watch on the doings of its local princeling in matters matrimonial.

And as to the various meetings at the rectory, Lydia could easily have made much of them, if she had wished. She had come to see that they were deliberately sought by Lord Tatham, and encouraged by Mrs. Deacon. And because she had come to see it, she meant to refuse another invitation from Mrs. Deacon, which was in her pocket—without consulting her mother. Besides—said youthful pride—if Lord Tatham really wished to know them, Lady Tatham must call. And Lady Tatham had not called.

Her mother was quite right. The marriage of young earls are, generally speaking, "arranged," and there are hovering relations, and unwritten laws in the background, which only the foolish forget. "And as I am not a candidate for the place," thought Lydia, "I won't be misunderstood!"

She did not intend indeed to be troubled—for the present—with such matters at all.

"Marrying is not in the bill!" She declaimed it to a lilac-bush, standing with her hands behind her, and face uplifted. "I have no money, and no position—therefore the vast majority of men won't want to marry me. And as to scheming to make them want it—why!—good heavens!—when there are such amusing things to do in the world!"

She paced the garden paths, thinking passionately, defiantly of her art, yet indignant with herself for these vague yearnings and languors that had to be so often met and put down.

"Men!—men!—what do they matter to me, except for talk—and fun! Yet there one goes thinking about them—like any fool. It's sex of course—and youth. I can no more escape them than anybody else. But I Can be mistress of them. I will. That's where this generation differs. We needn't drift—we see clear. Oh! those clouds—that blue!—those stars! Dear world! Isn't beauty enough?"

She lifted her arms above her head in a wild aspiration. And all in a moment it surprised her to feel her eyes wet with tears.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the young man who had rescued her press cuttings had fallen, barely an hour after his parting from her, upon evil fortunes.

His bicycle had carried him swiftly down the valley toward the Whitebeck bridge. Just above the bridge, a steep pitch of hill, one of those specimens of primitive road-making that abound in Cumbria, descended rapidly into a dark hollow, with a high wall on one side, overhung by trees, and on the other a bank, broken three parts of tie way down by the entrance of a side road. At the top of the hill, Faversham, to give the youth his name, stopped to look at the wall, which was remarkable for height and strength. The thick wood on his right hid any building there might be on the farther side of the stream. But clearly this was the Ogre's wall—ogreish indeed! A man might well keep a cupboard full of Fatimas, alive or dead, on the other side of it, or a coiner's press, or a banknote factory, or any other romantic and literary villainy. Faversham found himself speculating with amusement on the old curmudgeon behind the wall; always with the vision, drawn by recollection on the leafy background, of a girl's charming face—clear pale skin, beautiful eyes, more blue surely than gray—the whitest neck, with coils of brown hair upon it—the mouth with its laughing freedom—yet reticent—no mere silly sweetness!

Then putting on his brake, he began to coast down the hill, which opened gently only to turn without notice into something scandalously precipitous. The bicycle had been hired in Keswick, and had had a hard season's use. The brake gave way at the worst moment of the hill, and Faversham, unable to save himself, rushed to perdition. And by way of doubling his misfortune, as in the course of his mad descent he reached the side road on the left, there came the loud clatter of a cart, and a young horse emerged almost at a gallop, with a man tugging vainly at its rein.

Ten minutes later a group of men stood consulting by the side of the road over Faversham's prostrate form. He was unconscious; his head and face were covered with blood, and his left ankle was apparently broken. A small open motor stood at the bottom of the hill, and an angry dispute was going on between an old man in mire-stained working-clothes, and the young doctor from Pengarth to whom the motor belonged.

"I say, Mr. Dixon, that you've got to take this man into Mr. Melrose's house and look after him, till he is fit to be moved farther, or you'll be guilty of his death, and I shall give evidence accordingly!" said the doctor, with energy, as he raised himself from the injured man.

"Theer's noa place for him i' t' Tower, Mr. Undershaw, an' I'll take noa sich liberty!"

"Then I will. Where's Mr. Melrose?"

"I' London—till to-morrow. Yo'll do nowt o' t' soart, doctor."

"We shall see. To carry him half a mile to the farm, when you might carry him just across that bridge to the house, would be sheer murder. I won't see it done. And if you do it, you'll be indicted for manslaughter. Now then—why doesn't that hurdle come along?" The speaker looked impatiently up the road; and, as he spoke, a couple of labourers appeared at the top of the hill, carrying a hurdle between them.

Dixon threw looks of mingled wrath and perplexity at the doctor, and the men.

"I tell yo', doctor, it conno' be done! Muster Melrose's orders mun be obeyed. I have noa power to admit onybody to his house withoot his leave. Yo' knaw yoursel'," he added in the doctor's ear, "what Muster Melrose is."

Undershaw muttered something—expressing either wrath or scorn—behind his moustache; then said aloud:

"Never you mind, Dixon; I shall take the responsibility. You let me alone. Now, my boys, lend a hand with the hurdle, and give me some coats."

Faversham's leg had been already placed in a rough splint and his head bandaged. They lifted him, quite unconscious, upon the hurdle, and made him as comfortable as they could. The doctor anxiously felt his pulse, and directed the men to carry him, as carefully as possible, through a narrow gate in the high wall opposite which was standing open, across the private foot-bridge over the stream, and so to the Terrace whereon stood Threlfall Tower. Impenetrably hidden as it was behind the wall and the trees, the old house was yet, in truth, barely sixty yards away. Dixon followed, lamenting and protesting, but in vain.

"Hold your tongue, man!" said Undershaw at last, losing his temper. "You disgrace your master. It would be a public scandal to refuse to help a man in this plight! If we get him alive through to-night, it will be a mercy. I believe the cart's been over him somewhere!" he added, with a frowning brow.

Dixon silenced, but by no means persuaded, followed the little procession, till it reached a side door of the Tower, opening on the terrace just beyond the bridge. The door was shut, and it was not till the doctor had made several thunderous attacks upon it, beside sending men round to the other doors of the house, that Mrs. Dixon at last cautiously opened it.

Fresh remonstrance and refusal followed on the part both of husband and wife. Fresh determination also on the part of the doctor, seconded by the threatening looks and words of Faversham's bearers, stout Cumbria labourers, to whom the storming of the Tower was clearly a business they enjoyed. At last the old couple, bitterly protesting, gave way, and the procession entered.

They found themselves in a long corridor, littered with a strange multitude of objects, scarcely distinguishable in the dim light shed by one unshuttered window through which some of the evening glow still penetrated. Dixon and his wife whispered excitedly together; after which Dixon led the way through the corridor into the entrance hall—which was equally encumbered—and so to a door on the right.

"Yo' can bring him in there," he said sulkily to Undershaw. "There's mebbe a bed upstairs we can bring doon."

He threw open the drawing-room—a dreary, disused room, with its carpets rolled up in one corner, and its scanty furniture piled in another. The candle held by Mrs. Dixon lit up the richly decorated ceiling.

"Can't you do anything better?" asked Undershaw, turning upon her vehemently. "Don't you keep a spare bedroom in this place?"

"Noa, we doan't!" said Mrs. Dixon, with answering temper. "There isn't a room upstairs but what's full o' Muster Melrose's things. Yo' mun do wi' this, or naethin'."

Undershaw submitted, and Faversham's bearers gently laid him down, spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could be found. Dixon and his wife, in a state of pitiable disturbance, went off to look for one, while Undershaw called after them:

"And I warn you that to-morrow you'll have to find quarters for two nurses!"

Thus, without any conscious action on his own part, and in the absence of its formidable master, was Claude Faversham brought under the roof of Threlfall Tower.



IV

On the evening of the following day, Mr. Edmund Melrose arrived in Pengarth by train from London, hired a one-horse wagonette, and drove out to the Tower.

His manners were at no time amiable, but the man who had the honour of driving him on this occasion, and had driven him occasionally before, had never yet seen him in quite so odious a temper. This was already evident at the time of the start from Pengarth, and thenceforward the cautious Cumbrian preserved an absolute and watchful silence, to the great annoyance of Melrose, who would have welcomed any excuse for ill-humour. But as nothing beyond the curtest monosyllables were to be got out of his companion, and as the rich beauty of the May landscape was entirely lost upon himself, Melrose was reduced at last in the course of his ten miles' drive to scanning once more the copy of the Times which he had brought with him from the south. The news of various strikes and industrial arbitrations which it contained had already enraged him; and enraged him again as he looked through it. The proletariat, in his opinion, must be put down and kept down; that his own class began to show a lamentable want of power to do either was the only public matter that ever really troubled him. So far as his life was affected by the outside world at all, except as a place where auctions took place, and dealers' shops abounded, it was through this consciousness of impending social disaster, this terror as of a rapidly approaching darkness bearing the doom of the modern world in its bosom, which intermittently oppressed him, as it has oppressed and still overshadows innumerable better men of our day.

At this moment, in the month of May, 190—, Edmund Melrose had just passed his seventieth birthday. But the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence; although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character. His aspect, even on the threshold of old age, had still something of the magnificence of an Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type. He seemed indeed to be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other. His wandering eyes, his long acquisitive fingers, his rapid movements showed him still the hunter on the trail, to whom everything else was in truth indifferent but the satisfaction of an instinct which had grown and flourished on the ruins of a man.

As they drove along, through various portions of the Tower estates, the eyes of the taciturn driver beside him took note of the dilapidated farm buildings and the broken gates which a miserly landlord could not be induced to repair, until an exasperated tenant actually gave notice. Melrose meanwhile was absorbed in trying to recover a paragraph in the Times he had caught sight of on a first reading, and had then lost in the excitement of studying the prices of a sale at Christie's, held the day before, wherein his own ill luck had led to the bad temper from which he was suffering. He tracked the passage at last. It ran as follows:

"The late Professor William Mackworth has left the majority of his costly collections to the nation. To the British Museum will go the marbles and bronzes, to the South Kensington, the china and the tapestries. Professor Mackworth made no stipulations, and the authorities of both museums are free to deal with his bequests as they think best."

Melrose folded the newspaper and put it back into his pocket with a short sudden laugh, which startled the man beside him. "Stipulations! I should rather think not! What museum in its senses would accept such piffling stuff with any stipulations attached? As it is, the greater part will go into the lumber-rooms; they'll never show them! There's only one collection that Mackworth ever had that was worth having. Not a word about that. People don't give their best things to the country—not they. Hypocrites! What on earth has he done with them? There are several things I want."

And he fell into a long and greedy meditation, in which, as usual, his fancy pursued a quarry and brought it down. He took no notice meanwhile of the objects passed as they approached the Tower, although among them were many that might well have roused the attention of a landlord; as, for instance, the condition of the long drive leading up to the house, with its deep ruts and grass-grown sides; a tree blown down, not apparently by any very recent storm, and now lying half across the roadway, so that the horse and carriage picked their way with difficulty round its withered branches; one of the pillars of the fine gateway, which gave access to the walled enclosure round the house, broken away; and the enclosure within, which had been designed originally as a formal garden in the Italian style, and was now a mere tangled wilderness of weeds and coarse grass, backed by dense thickets of laurel and yew which had grown up in a close jungle round the house, so that many of the lower windows were impenetrably overgrown.

As they drew up at the gate, the Pengarth driver looked with furtive curiosity at the house-front. Melrose, in the words of Lydia to young Faversham, had "become a legend" to his neighbourhood, and many strange things were believed about him. It was said that the house contained a number of locked and shuttered rooms which were never entered; that Melrose slept by day, and worked or prowled by night; that his only servants were the two Dixons, no one else being able to endure his company; that he and the house were protected by savage dogs, and that his sole visitors were occasional strangers from the south, who arrived with black bags, and often departed pursued with objurgations by Melrose, and in terror of the dogs. It was said also that the Tower was full of precious and marvellous things, including hordes of gold and silver; that Melrose, who was detested in the countryside, lived in the constant dread of burglary or murder; and finally—as a clue to the whole situation which the popular mind insisted on supplying—that he had committed some fearful crime, during his years in foreign parts, for which he could not be brought to justice; but remorse and dread of discovery had affected his brain, and turned him into a skulking outcast.

Possessed by these simple but interesting ideas, the Pengarth man sharply noticed, first that the gate of the enclosure was padlocked, Melrose himself supplying a key from his pocket; next that most of the windows of the front were shuttered; and lastly—strange and unique fact, according to his own recollections of the Tower—that two windows on the ground floor were standing wide open, giving some view of the large room within, so far as two partially drawn curtains allowed. As Melrose unlocked the gate, the house door opened, and three huge dogs came bounding out, in front of a gray-haired man, whom the driver of the wagonette knew to be "owd Dixon," Melrose's butler and factotum. The driver was watching the whole scene with an absorbed curiosity, when Melrose turned, threw him a sudden look, paid him, and peremptorily bade him be off. He had therefore no time to observe the perturbation of Dixon who was coming with slow steps to meet his master; nor that a woman in white cap and apron had appeared behind him on the steps.

* * * * *

Melrose on opening the gate found himself surrounded by his dogs, a fine mastiff and two young collies. He was trying to drive them off, after a gruff word to Dixon, when he was suddenly brought to a standstill by the sight of the woman on the steps.

"D——n it!—whom have you got here?" he said, fiercely perceiving at the same moment the open windows on the ground floor.

"Muster Melrose—it's noan o' my doin'," was Dixon's trembling reply, as he pointed a shaky finger at the windows. "It was t' yoong doctor from Pengarth—yo' ken him—"

A woman's voice interrupted.

"Please, sir, would you stop those dogs barking? They disturb the patient."

Melrose looked at the speaker in stupefaction.

"What the deuce have you been doing with my house?"—he turned furiously to Dixon—"who are these people?"

"Theer's a yoong man lyin' sick i' the drawin'-room," said Dixon desperately. "They do say 'at he's in a varra parlish condition; an' they tell me there's to be no barkin' nor noise whativer."

"Well, upon my word!" Melrose was by this time pale with rage. "A young man—sick—in my drawing-room!—and a young woman giving orders in my house!—you're a precious lot—you are!" He strode on toward the young woman, who, as he now saw, was in the dress of a nurse. She had descended the steps, and was vainly trying to quiet the dogs.

"I'll uphold yer!" muttered Dixon, following slowly after; "it's the queerest do-ment that iver I knew!"

"Madam! I should like to know what your business is here. I never invited you that I know of, and I am entirely at a loss to understand your appearance in my house!"

The girl whom Melrose addressed with this fierce mock courtesy turned on him a perplexed face.

"I know nothing about it, sir, except that I was summoned from Manchester last night to an urgent case, and arrived early this morning. Can't you, sir, quiet your dogs? Mr. Faversham is very ill."

"In my house!" cried Melrose, furiously. "I won't have it. He shan't remain here. I will have him removed."

The girl looked at him with amazement.

"That, sir, would be quite impossible. It would kill him to move him. Please, Mr. Dixon, help me with the dogs."

She turned imploringly to Dixon, who obediently administered various kicks and cuffs to the noisy trio which at last procured silence.

Her expression lightened, and with the professional alertness of one who has no time to spend in gossiping, she turned and went quickly back into the house.

Dixon approached his master.

"That's yan o' them," he said, gloomily. "T'other's inside."

"T'other who?—what? Tell me, you old fool, at once what the whole cursed business is! Are you mad or am I?"

Dixon eyed him calmly. He had by this time summoned to his aid the semi-mystical courage given him occasionally by his evangelical faith. If it was the Lord's will that such a thing should happen, why it was the Lord's will; and it was no use whatever for Mr. Melrose or any one else to kick against the pricks. So with much teasing deliberation, and constantly interrupted by his angry master, he told the story of the accident on the evening before, of Doctor Undershaw's appearance on the scene, and of the storming of the Tower.

"Well, of all the presuming rascals!" said Melrose with slow fury, under his breath, when the tale was done. "But we'll be even with him! Send a man from the farm, at once, to the cottage hospital at Whitebeck. They've got an ambulance—I commission it. It's a hospital case. They shall see to it. Be quick! March!—do you hear?—I intended to quit of them—bag and baggage!"

Dixon did not move.

"Doctor said if we were to move un now, it 'ud be manslaughter," he said stolidly, "an' he'd have us 'op."

"Oh, he would, would he!" roared Melrose, "I'll see to that. Go along, and do what you're told. D——n it! am I not to be obeyed, sir?"

Wherewith he hurried toward the house. Dixon looked after him, shook his head, and instead of going toward the farm, quietly retreated round the farther corner of the house to the kitchen. He was the only person at the Tower who had ever dared to cross Melrose. He attempted it but rarely; but when he did, Melrose was each time freshly amazed to discover that, in becoming his factotum, Dixon had not altogether ceased to be a man.

Melrose entered the house by the front door. As he walked into the hall, making not the slightest effort to moderate the noise of his approach, another woman—also in white cap and apron—ran toward him, with quick noiseless steps from the corridor, her finger on her lip.

"Please, sir!—it is most important for the patient that the house should be absolutely quiet."

"I tell you the house is mine!" said Melrose, positively stamping. "What business have you—or the other one—to give orders in it? I'll turn you all out!—you shall march, I tell you!"

The nurse—an older woman than the first who had spoken to him outside—drew back with dignity.

"I am sorry if I offended you, sir. I was summoned from Carlisle this morning as night nurse to an urgent case. I have been helping the other nurse all day, for Mr. Faversham has wanted a great deal of attention. I am now just going on duty, while the day nurse takes some rest."

"Show me where he is," said Melrose peremptorily. "I wish to see him."

The nurse hesitated. But if this was really the master of the house, it was difficult to ignore him entirely. She looked at his feet.

"You'll come in quietly, sir? I am afraid—your boots—"

"Oh, go on! Order me about! What's wrong with my boots?" The pale grin was meant for sarcasm.

"They're rather heavy, sir, for a sick-room. Would you—would you mind—taking them off?"

"Upon my word, you're a cool one!"

But there was something in the quiet self-possession of the woman which coerced, while it exasperated him. He perceived plainly that she took him for a madman to be managed. Yet, after glaring at her for a moment, he sat down fuming, and removed his boots. She smiled.

"That'll do nicely, sir. Now if you don't mind coming very quietly—"

She glided to the door of the drawing-room, opened it noiselessly and beckoned to Melrose. He went in, and, against his will, he went on tiptoe, and holding his breath.

Inside, he looked round the darkened room in angry amazement. It had been wholly transformed. The open windows had been cleaned and curtained; the oak floor shone as though it had been recently washed; there was a table on which were medicine bottles and glasses, with a chair or two; while in the centre of the room, carefully screened from light, was a white bed. Upon it, a motionless form.

"Poor young fellow!" whispered the nurse, standing beside Melrose, her kind face softening. "He has been conscious a little to-day—the doctor is hopeful. But he has been very badly hurt."

Melrose surveyed him—the interloper!—who represented to him at that moment one of those unexpected checks and annoyances in life, which selfish men with strong wills cannot and do not attempt to bear. His privacy, his habits, his freedom—all at the mercy of this white-faced boy, these two intolerable women, and the still more intolerable doctor, on whom he intended to inflect a stinging lesson! No doubt the whole thing had been done by the wretched pill-man with a view to his own fees. It was a plant!—an infamous conspiracy.

He came closer. Not a boy, after all. A young man of thirty—perhaps more. The brow and head were covered with bandages; the eyes were closed; the bloodless mouth hung slightly open, with a look of pain. The comeliness of the dark, slightly bearded face was not entirely disguised by the dressings in which the head was swathed; and the chest and arms, from which the bedclothes had been folded back, were finely, though sparely, moulded. Melrose, whose life was spent among artistic objects was not insensible to the young man's good looks, as they were visible even under his bandages and in the dim light, and for the first time he felt a slight stir of pity.

He left the room, beckoning to the night nurse.

"What's his name?"

"We took some cards from his pocket. I think, sir, the doctor put them here for you to see."

The nurse went to the hall table and brought one.

"Claude Faversham, 5 Temple Buildings, E.C."

"Some young loafer, pretending to be a barrister," said Melrose contemptuously. "What's he doing here—in May? This is not the tourist season. What business had he to be here at all? I have no doubt whatever that he was drunk, otherwise why should he have had an accident? Nobody else ever had an accident on that hill. Why should he, eh? Why should he? And how the deuce are we to get at his relations?"

The nurse could only reply that she had no ideas on the subject, and had hardly spoken when the sound of wheels outside brought a look of relief to her face.

"That's the ice," she said, rejoicingly. "We sent for it to Pengarth this afternoon."

And she fled on light steps to the front door.

"Sent whom? My man—My cart!" growled Melrose, following her, to verify the outrage with his own eyes. And there indeed at the steps stood the light cart, the only vehicle which the master of the Tower possessed, driven by his only outdoor servant, Joe Backhouse, who had succeeded Dixon as gardener. It was full of packages, which the nurse was eagerly taking out, comparing them with a list she held in her hand.

"And of course I'm to pay for them!" thought Melrose furiously. No doubt his credit has been pledged up to the hilt already for this intruder, this beggar at his gates by these impertinent women. He stood there watching every packet and bundle with which the nurse was loading her strong arms, feeling himself the while an utterly persecuted and injured being, the sport of gods and men; when the sight of a motor turning the corner of the grass-grown drive, diverted his thoughts.

The doctor—the arch-villain of the plot!

Melrose bethought himself a moment. Then he went along the corridor to his library, half expecting to see some other invader ensconced in his own chair. He rang the bell and Dixon hurriedly appeared.

"Show Doctor Undershaw in here."

And standing on the rug, every muscle in his tall and still vigorous frame tightening in expectation of the foe, he looked frowning round the chaos of his room. Pictures, with or without frames, and frames without pictures; books in packing-cases with hinged sides, standing piled one upon another, some closed and some with the sides open and showing the books within; portfolios of engravings and drawings; inlaid or ivory boxes, containing a medley of objects—miniatures, snuff-boxes, buttons, combs, seals; vases and plates of blue and white Nankin; an Italian stucco or two; a Renaissance bust in painted wood; fragments of stuff, cabinets, chairs, and tables of various dates and styles—all were gathered together in one vast and ugly confusion. It might have been a salone in one of the big curiosity shops of Rome or Venice, where the wrecks and sports of centuries are heaped into the piano nobile of some great building, once a palazzo, now a chain of lumber rooms. For here also, the large and stately library, with its nobly designed bookcases—still empty of books—its classical panelling, and embossed ceiling, made a setting of which the miscellaneous plunder within it was not worthy. A man of taste would have conceived the beautiful room itself as suffering from the disorderly uses to which it was put.

Only, in the centre, the great French table, the masterpiece of Riesener, still stood respected and unencumbered. It held nothing but a Sevres inkstand and pair of candle-sticks that had once belonged to Madame Elisabeth. Mrs. Dixon dusted it every morning, with a feather brush, generally under the eyes of Melrose. He himself regarded it with a fanatical veneration; and one of the chief pleasures of his life was to beguile some passing dealer into making an offer for it, and then contemptuously show him the door.

"Doctor Undershaw, Muster Melrose."

Melrose stood to arms.

A young man entered, his step quick and decided. He was squarely built, with spectacled gray eyes, and a slight brown moustache on an otherwise smooth face. He looked what he was—competent, sincere, and unafraid.

Melrose did not move from his position as the doctor approached, and barely acknowledged his bow. Behind the sarcasm of his voice the inner fury could be felt.

"I presume, sir, you have come to offer me your apologies?"

Undershaw looked up.

"I am very sorry, Mr. Melrose, to have inconvenienced you and your household. But really after such an accident there was nothing else to be done. I am certain you would have done the same yourself. When I first saw him, the poor fellow was in a dreadful state. The only thing to do was to carry him into the nearest shelter and look after him. It was—I assure you—a case of life and death."

Melrose made an effort to control himself, but the situation was too much for him.

He burst out, storming:

"I wonder, sir, that you have the audacity to present yourself to me at all. Who or what authorized you, I should like to know, to take possession of my house, and install this young man here? What have I to do with him? He has no claim on me—not the hundredth part of a farthing! My servant tells me he offered to help you carry him to the farm, which is only a quarter of a mile distant. That of course would have been the reasonable, the gentlemanly thing to do, but just in order to insult me, to break into the privacy of a man who, you know, has always endeavoured to protect himself and his life from vulgar tongues and eyes, you must needs browbeat my servants, and break open my house. I tell you, sir, this is a matter for the lawyers! It shan't end here. I've sent for an ambulance, and I'll thank you to make arrangements at once to remove this young man to some neighbouring hospital, where, I understand, he will have every attention."

Melrose, even at seventy, was over six feet, and as he stood towering above the little doctor, his fine gray hair flowing back from strong aquiline features, inflamed with a passion of wrath, he made a sufficiently magnificent appearance. Undershaw grew a little pale, but he fronted his accuser quietly.

"If you wish him removed, Mr. Melrose, you must take the responsibility yourself, I shall have nothing to do with it—nor will the nurses."

"What do you mean, sir? You get yourself and me into this d——d hobble, and then you refuse to take the only decent way out of it! I request you—I command you—as soon as the Whitebeck ambulance comes, to remove your patient at once, and the two women who are looking after him."

Undershaw slipped his hands into his pockets. The coolness of the gesture was not lost on Melrose.

"I regret that for a few days to come I cannot sanction anything of the kind. My business, Mr. Melrose, as a doctor, is not to kill people, but, if I can, to cure them."

"Don't talk such nonsense to me, sir! Every one knows that any serious case can be safely removed in a proper ambulance. The whole thing is monstrous! By G—d, sir, what law obliges me to give up my house to a man I know nothing about, and a whole tribe of hangers-on, besides?"

And, fairly beside himself, Melrose struck a carved chest, standing within reach, a blow which made the china and glass objects huddled upon it ring again.

"Well," said Undershaw slowly, "there is such a thing as—a law of humanity. But I imagine if you turn out that man against my advice, and he dies on the road to hospital, that some other kind of law might have something to say to it."

"You refuse!"

The shout made the little doctor, always mindful of his patient, look behind him, to see that the door was closed.

"He cannot be moved for three or four days," was the firm reply. "The chances are that he would collapse on the road. But as soon as ever the thing is possible you shall be relieved of him. I can easily find accommodation for him at Pengarth. At present he is suffering from very severe concussion. I hope there is not actual brain lesion—but there may be. And, if so, to move him now would be simply to destroy his chance of recovery."

The two men confronted each other, the unreasonable fury of the one met by the scientific conscience of the other. Melrose was dumfounded by the mingled steadiness and audacity of the little doctor. His mad self-will, his pride of class and wealth, surviving through all his eccentricities, found it unbearable that Undershaw should show no real compunction whatever for what he had done, nay, rather, a quiet conviction that, rage as he might, the owner of Threlfall Tower would have to submit. It was indeed the suggestion in the doctor's manner, of an unexplained compulsion behind—ethical or humanitarian—not to be explained, but simply to be taken for granted, which perhaps infuriated Melrose more than anything else.

Nevertheless, as he still glared at his enemy, Melrose suddenly realized that the man was right. He would have to submit. For many reasons, he could not—at this moment in particular—excite any fresh hue and cry which might bring the whole countryside on his back. Unless the doctor were lying, and he could get another of the craft to certify it, he would have to put up—for the very minimum of time—with the intolerable plague of this invasion.

He turned away abruptly, took a turn up and down the only free space the room contained, and returned.

"Perhaps you will kindly inform me, sir—since you have been good enough to take this philanthropic business on yourself—or rather to shovel it on to me"—each sarcastic word was flung like a javelin at the doctor—"whether you know anything whatever of this youth you are thrusting upon me? I don't imagine that he has dropped from the skies! If you don't know, and haven't troubled yourself to find out, I shall set the police on at once, track his friends, and hand him over!"

Undershaw was at once all civility and alacrity.

"I have already made some inquiries at Keswick, Mr. Melrose, where I was this morning. He was staying, it appears, with some friends at the Victoria Hotel—a Mr. and Mrs. Ransom, Americans. The hotel people thought that he had been to meet them at Liverpool, had taken them through the Lakes, and had then seen them off for the south. He himself was on his way to Scotland to fish. He had sent his luggage to Pengarth by rail, and chose to bicycle, himself, through the Vale of St. John, because the weather was so fine. He intended to catch a night train on the main line."

"Just as I supposed! Idle scapegrace!—with nothing in the world to do but to get himself and other people into trouble!"

"You saw the card that I left for you on the hall table? But there is something else that we found upon him in undressing him which I should greatly prefer, if I might, to hand over to your care. You, I have no doubt, understand such things. They seem to be valuable, and neither the nurses nor I at all wish to have charge of them. There is a ring"—Undershaw searched his pockets—"and this case."

He held out two small objects. Melrose—still breathing quick with anger—took them unwillingly. With the instinctive gesture of the collector, however, he put up his eyeglass to look at the ring. Undershaw saw him start.

"Good heavens!"

The voice was that of another man. He looked frowning at Undershaw.

"Where did you get this?"

"He wore it on his left hand. It is sharp as you see, and rather large, and the nurse was afraid, while he is still restless and sometimes delirious, he might do himself some hurt with it."

Melrose opened the case—a small flat case of worn green leather some six inches long; and looked at its contents in a speechless amazement. The ring was a Greek gem of the best period—an Artemis with the towered crown, cut in amethyst. The case contained six pieces,—two cameos, and four engraved gems—amethyst, cornelian, sardonyx, and rock crystal; which Melrose recognized at once as among the most precious things of this kind in the world! He turned abruptly, walked to his writing-table, took out the gems, weighed them in his hand, examined them with a magnifying glass, or held them to the light, muttering to himself, and apparently no longer conscious of the presence of Undershaw. Recollections ran about his brain: "Mackworth showed me that Medusa himself last year in London. He bought that Mars at the Castellani sale. And that's the Muse which that stupid brute Vincent had my commission for, and let slip through his fingers at the Arconati sale!"

Undershaw observed him, with an amusement carefully concealed. He had suspected from the beginning that in these possessions of the poor stricken youth means might be found for taming the formidable master of the Tower. For himself he scorned "la curiosite," and its devotees, as mere triflers and shell-gatherers on shores bathed by the great ocean of science. But like all natural rulers of men he was quick to seize on any weakness that suited his own ends; and he said to himself that Faversham was safe.

"They are valuable?" he asked, as Melrose still sat absorbed.

"They are," was the curt reply.

"I am glad they have fallen into such good hands. They show I think"—the speaker smiled amicably—"that we have not to do with any mere penniless adventurer. His friends are probably at this moment extremely anxious about him. I hope we may soon get some clue to them. Now"—the voice sharpened to the practical note—"may I appeal to you, Mr. Melrose, to make arrangements for the nurses as soon as is convenient to you. Their wants are very simple—two beds—plain food—small amount of attendance—and some means of communicating without too much delay with myself, or the chemist. I promise they shall give as little trouble as possible!"

Melrose rose slowly without replying. He took a bunch of keys from is pocket, and opened one of the drawers in the Riesener table. As he did so, the drawer, under a stream of sunset light from the window beyond it, seemed to give out a many-coloured flash—a rapid Irislike effect, lost in a moment. The impression made on Undershaw was that the drawer already contained gems like those in the case—or jewels—or both.

Melrose seemed to have opened the drawer in a fit of abstraction during which he had forgotten Undershaw's presence. But, if so, the act roused him, and he looked round half angrily, half furtively at his visitor, as he hastily relocked the drawer.

Then speaking with renewed arrogance, he said:

"Well, sir, I will see to these things. For to-night, I consent—for to-night only, mind you—reserving entirely my liberty of action for to-morrow."

Undershaw nodded, and they left the room together.

Dixon and Mrs. Dixon were both waiting in the passage outside, watching for Melrose, and hanging on his aspect. To their amazement they were told that a room was to be got ready for the nurses, a girl was to be fetched to wait on them from the farm, and food was to be cooked.

The faces of both the old servants showed instant relief. Dixon went off to the farm, and Mrs. Dixon flew to her kitchen. She was getting old, and the thought of the extra work to be done oppressed her. Nevertheless after these years of solitude, passed as it were in a besieged camp—Threlfall and its inmates against the world—this new and tardy contact with humanity, this momentary return to neighbourly, kindly ways brought with it a strange sweetness. And when night fell, and a subdued, scarcely perceptible murmur of life began to creep about the passages of the old house, in general so dead and silent, Mrs. Dixon might have been heard hoarsely crooning an old song to herself as she went to and fro in the kitchen. All the evening she and Dixon were restless, inventing work, when work was finished, running from yard to house and house to yard, calling to each other without reason, and looking at each other with bewildered eyes. They were like beetles under a stone, when the stone is suddenly lifted.

Gradually the house sank to rest. Dixon creeping past the door of the sick-room, on his stockinged feet, could hear the moaning, the hoarse indeterminate sounds, now loud, now plaintive, made by the sufferer. The day nurse came out with an anxious face, on her way to bed. Mr. Faversham she said was very ill—what could be done if it did become necessary to summon the doctor? Dixon assured her the gardener who was also the groom was sleeping in the house, and the horse was in the stable. She had only to wake Mrs. Dixon—he showed her where and how. In the dark corridor, amid all its obstructive lumber, these two people who had never seen each other before, man and woman, took anxious counsel for the help of an unconscious third, a complete stranger to both of them.

The night nurse gave a dose of morphia according to directions, and sat down on a low chair at the foot of the bed watching her patient.

About two o'clock in the morning, just as the darkness was beginning to thin, she was startled by a sound outside. She half rose, and saw the door open to admit a tall and gaunt figure, whom she recognized as the master of the house.

She held up an anxious finger, but Melrose advanced in spite of it. His old flowered dressing-gown and gray head came within the range of the night-light, and the nurse saw his shadow projected, grotesque and threatening, on the white traceries of the ceiling. But he made no sound, and never looked at the nurse. He stood surveying young Faversham for some time, as he lay hot and haggard with fever, yet sleeping under the power of morphia. And at last, without a word, the nurse saw her formidable visitor depart.

Melrose returned to his own quarters. The window of his room was open, and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show purple through dim veils of silvery cloud. He stood still, looking out. His mind was churning like a yeasty sea. Old facts came to the surface; faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the Campagna. Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily. It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone. He thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted him. And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind. Self-pity; recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned his back some thirty years before—the normal pleasures, friendships, occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment—against two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion, deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second—his wife—whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against and deserted him.

Also—creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age—and of the end, waiting. He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded. So defiant was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will. He would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that seemed to admit the grim fact—weakly accepted—into the citadel of a still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent. Some day he would feel, perhaps suddenly—the thought of it sent through him a shiver of impotent revolt against the human destiny—the clutch of the master whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!—only subterraneously connected with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected. The advent of the unconscious youth below had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of crystallizing force. Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the Dixons. Something seemed to have ended; and the mere change suggested that something might begin.

The sudden shock, indeed, of the new event, the mere interruption of habit, were serious matters in the psychology of a man, with whom neither brain nor nerves were normally attuned. Melrose moved restlessly about his room for a great part of the night. He could not get the haggard image of Faversham out of his mind; and he was actually, in the end, tormented by the thought that, in spite of nurses and doctors, he might die.

Nonsense! One could get a specialist from Edinburgh—from London if necessary.

And always, by whatever road, his thoughts came back—as it were leaping—to the gems. Amethyst, sardonyx, crystal—they twinkled and flashed through all the byways of the brain. So long as the house held their owner, it held them also. Two of them he had coveted for years. They must not—they should not—be lost to him again. By what ridiculous chance had this lad got hold of them?

With the morning came a letter from a crony of Melrose's in London, an old Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, with whom he had had not a few dealings in the past.

"Have you heard that that queer fish Mackworth has left his whole cabinet of gems to a young nephew—his sister's son, to whom they say he has been much attached? Everything else goes to the British Museum and South Kensington, and it is a queer business to have left the most precious thing of all to a youth who in all probability has neither knowledge nor taste, and may be trusted to turn them into cash as soon as possible. Do you remember the amethyst Medusa? I could shout with joy when I think of it! You will be wanting to run the nephew to earth. Make haste!—or Germany or America will grab them."

But the amethyst Medusa lay safe in her green case in the drawer of the Riesener table.



V

Duddon Castle in May was an agreeable place. Its park, lying on the eastern slopes of the mountain mass which includes Skiddaw and Blencathra, had none of the usual monotony of parks, but was a genuine "chase," running up on the western side into the heather and rock of the mountain where the deer were at home, while on the east and south its splendid oaks stood thick in bracken beside sparkling becks, overlooking dells and valleys of succulent grass where the sheep ranged at will. The house consisted of an early Tudor keep, married to a Jacobean house of rose-coloured brick, which Lady Tatham had since her widowhood succeeded in freeing from the ugly stucco which had once disguised and defaced it. It could not claim the classical charm, the learned elegance of Threlfall Tower. Duddon was romantic—a medley of beautiful things, full of history, colour, and time, fused by the trees and fern, the luxuriant creepers and mosses, and of a mild and rainy climate into a lovely irregular whole; with no outline to speak of, yet with nothing that one could seriously wish away. The size was great, yet no one but an auctioneer could have called it "superb"; it seemed indeed to take a pleasure in concealing the whole extent of its clustered building; and by the time you were aware of it, you had fallen in love with Duddon, and nothing mattered.

But if without, in its broad external features, Duddon betrayed a romantic freedom in the minds of those who had planned it, nothing could have been more orderly or exquisite than its detail, when detail had to be considered. The Italian garden round the house with its formal masses of contrasting colour, its pleached alleys, and pergolas, its steps, vases, and fountains, was as good in its way as the glorious wildness of the Chase. One might have applied to it the Sophoclean thought—"How clever is man who can make all these things!"—so diverse, and so pleasant. And indoors, Duddon was oppressive by the very ingenuity of its refinement, the rightness of every touch. No overcrowding; no ostentation. Beautiful spaces, giving room and dignity to a few beautiful objects; famous pictures, yet not too many; and, in general, things rather suggestive than perfect; sketches—fragments—from the great arts of the world; as it were, a lovely wreckage from a vast ocean set tenderly in a perfect order, breathing at once the greatness and the eternal defeat of men.

The interior beauty of Duddon was entirely due to Victoria, Lady Tatham, mother of the young man who now owned the Tatham estates. She had created it through many years; she had been terribly "advised," in the process, by a number of clever folk, English and foreign; and the result alternately pleased and tormented her. To be fastidious to such a point is to grow more so. And Victoria Tatham was nothing if not fastidious. She had money, taste, patience, yet ennui confronted her in many paths; and except for the son she adored she was scarcely a happy woman. She was personally generous and soft-hearted, but all "causes" found in her rather a critic than a supporter. The follies of her own class were particularly plain to her; her relations, with their great names, and great "places," seemed to her often the most ridiculous persons in the world—a world no longer made for them. But one must hasten to add that she was no less aware of her own absurdities; so that the ironic mind in her robbed her both of conceit for herself and enthusiasm for others.

Two or three days after the storming of Threlfall Tower, Lady Tatham came in from a mountain ramble at tea-time, expecting her son, who had been away on a short visit. She entered the drawing-room by a garden door, laden with branches of hawthorn and wild cherry. In her linen dress and shady hat she still looked youthful, and there were many who could not be got to admit that she was any less beautiful than she had ever been. These flatterers of course belonged to her own generation; young eyes were not so kind.

Tea had been brought in, and she was busy with the arrangement of a branch of wild cherry in a corner of the room where its pearl and silver blossoms shone out against a background of dull purple, when the door was hastily opened, and a curly-haired youth stood on the threshold who smiled at sight of her.

"You are here, mother! That's jolly! I thought I might find you gone."

"I put off London till next week. Mind my hat, you wretch."

For the young fellow had put his arms round her, kissing her heartily. She disengaged herself and her hat, affecting to scold; but her eyes betrayed her. She put up her hand and smoothed back the thick and tumbling hair from his forehead.

"What a ruffian you look! Where have you been all this time?"

"I stopped in Keswick to do various things—and then—I say, shan't we have some tea? I've got lots to tell you. Well, in the first place, mother, I'd better warn you, you may have some visitors directly!"

Lady Tatham opened her eyes, struck by the elation of the tone.

"Strangers?"

"Well, nearly—but I think you've seen them. You know that lady and her daughters who came to White Cottage about two years ago?"

"A Mrs. Penfold?"

"Just so. I told you I met them—in April, when you were abroad—at the Hunt Ball. But—well, really, I've met them several times since. The Deacons know them." The slight consciousness in the voice did not escape his mother. "You know you've never called on them. Mother, you are disgraceful about calling! Well, I met them again this afternoon, just the other side of Whitebeck. They were in a pony-carriage, and I was in the motor. It's a jolly afternoon, and they didn't seem to have anything particular to do, so I just asked them to come on here, and have tea, and we'd show them the place."

"All right, dear. I'll bear up. Do you think they'll come?"

"Well, I don't know," said her son dubiously. "You see—I think Miss Penfold thought you ought to have called on them before they came here! But Mrs. Penfold's a nice old thing—she said they'd come."

"Well, there's plenty of tea, and I'll go and call if you want me to."

"How many years?" laughed Tatham. "I remember somebody you took eight years to call on, and when you got there you'd forgotten their names."

"Pure invention. Never mind, sit down and have your tea. How many daughters?"

"How many Miss Penfolds? Well, there are two, and I danced with them both. But"—the young man shook his head slowly—"I haven't got any use for the elder one."

"Plain?"

"Not at all—rather pretty. But she talks philosophy and stuff. Not my sort."

"And the younger one doesn't talk philosophy?"

"Not she. She's a deal too clever. But she paints—like a bird. I've seen some of her things."

"Oh!—so you've been to call?"

Lady Tatham lifted her beautiful eyes upon her son. Harry Tatham fidgeted with his cup and spoon.

"No. I was shy, because you hadn't been. But—"

"Harry," interrupted his mother, her look all vivacity, "did she paint those two water-colours in your sitting-room?"

The boyish, bluntly cut face beside her broke into a charming laugh.

"I bought 'em out of the Edinburgh exhibition. Wasn't it 'cute of me? She told me she had sent them there. So I just wrote to the secretary and bought them."

There was silence a moment. Lady Tatham continued to look at her son. The eyebrows on her brow, as they slowly arched themselves, expressed the half-amused, half-startled inquiry she did not put into words. He flushed scarlet, still smiling, and suddenly he laid his hand on hers.

"I say, mummie, don't tease me, and don't talk to me about it. There may be nothing in it—nothing at all."

His mother's face deepened into gravity.

"You take my breath away. Remember—there's only me, Harry, to look after you."

"I know. But you're not like other mothers," said the youth impatiently. "You want me to be happy and please myself. At least if you'd wanted the usual thing, you should have brought me up differently!" He smiled upon her again, patting her hand.

"What do you mean by the 'usual thing'?"

"Well, family and money, I suppose. As if we hadn't got enough for ten!"

Lady Tatham hesitated.

"One talks in the air," she said, frowning a little. "I can't promise you, Harry, exactly how I should behave, if—"

"If what?"

"If you put me to the test."

"Oh, yes, you can," he said, affectionately. Then he got up restlessly from the table. "But don't let's talk about it. Somehow I can't stand it—yet. I just wanted you to know that I liked them—and I'd be glad if you'd be civil to them—that's all. Hullo—here they are!" For as he moved across the room he caught sight, through a side window commanding the park, of a pony-carriage just driving into the wide gravel space before the house.

"Already? Their pony must have seven-leagued boots, to have caught you up in this time."

"Oh! I was overtaken by Undershaw, and he kept me talking. He told me the most extraordinary thing! You've no idea what's been happening at the Tower. That old brute Melrose! But I say—!" He made a dash across the room.

"What's the matter?"

"I must go and put those pictures away, in case—"

A far door opened and shut noisily behind him. He was gone.

"In case he asks her to go and see his sitting-room? This is all very surprising."

Lady Tatham sat on at the tea-table, her chin in her hands. It was quite true that she had brought up her son with unconventional ideas; that she had unconventional ideas herself on family and marriage. All the same, her mind at this moment was in a most conventional state of shock. She knew it, perceiving quite clearly the irony of the situation. Who were the Penfolds? A little artist girl?—earning her living—with humble, perhaps hardly presentable relations—to mate with her glorious, golden Harry?—Harry whom half the ambitious mothers of England courted and flattered?

The thought of defeating the mothers of England was however so pleasant to her sense of humour that she hurriedly abandoned this line of reflection. What had she been about? to be so blind to Harry's proceedings? She had been lately absorbed, with that intensity she could still, at fifty, throw into the most diverse things, in a piece of new embroidery, reproducing a gorgeous Italian design; and in a religious novel of Fogazzaro's. Also she had been watching birds, for hours, with a spy-glass in the park. She said to herself that she had better have been watching her son.

Meanwhile she was quite aware of the slight sounds from the hall which heralded the approaching visitors. The footman threw the door open; and she rose.

There came in, with hurrying steps, a little lady in widow's dress, her widow's veil thrown back from her soft brown hair and childish face. Behind her, a tall girl in white, wearing a shady hat.

The little lady held out a hand—eager but tremulous.

"I hope, Lady Tatham, we are not intruding? We know it isn't correct—indeed we are quite aware of it—that we should call upon you first. But then we know your son—he is such a charming young man!—and he asked us to come. I don't think Lydia wanted to come—she always wants to do things properly. No, indeed, she didn't want to come. It's all my doing. I persuaded her."

"That was very kind of you," said Lady Tatham as she shook hands first with the mother, and then with the silent daughter. "Oh, I'm a dreadful neighbour. I confess it in sackcloth and ashes. I ought to have called upon you long ago. I don't know what to say. I'm incorrigible! Please will you sit down, and will you have some tea? My son will be here directly."

But instead of sitting down Mrs. Penfold ran to the window, exclaiming on the beauty of the view, the garden, the trees, and the bold profile of the old keep, thrown forward among the flowers. There was nothing the least distinguished in her ecstasy. But it flowed and bubbled with perfect sincerity; and Lady Tatham did not dislike it at all.

"A lady"—she thought—"quite a lady, though rather a goose. The daughter is uncomfortable."

And she glanced at the slightly flushed face of Lydia, who followed in their wake, every now and then replying, as politeness demanded, to some appeal from her mother. It was indeed clear that the visit had been none of her doing.

Grace?—personality?—Lady Tatham divined them, from the way the girl moved, from the look in her gray-blue eyes, from the carriage of her head. She was certainly pretty, with that proud virginal beauty which often bears itself on the defensive, in our modern world where a certain superfluity of women has not tended to chivalry. But how little prettiness matters, beside the other thing!—the indefinable, irresistible something—which gives the sceptre and the crown! All the time she was listening to Mrs. Penfold's chatter, and the daughter's occasional words, Victoria Tatham was on the watch for this something; and not without jealousy and a critical mind. She had been taken by surprise; and she resented it.

Harry was very long in coming back!—in order she supposed to give her time to make acquaintance.

But at last she had them at the tea-table, and Mrs. Penfold's adjectives were a little quenched. Each side considered the other. Lady Tatham's dress, her old hat, and country shoes attracted Lydia, no less than the boyish, open-air look, which still survived through all the signs of a complex life and a cosmopolitan experience. Mrs. Penfold, on her part, thought the old hat, and the square-toed shoes "unsuitable." In her young days great ladies "dressed" in the afternoons.

"Do you like your cottage?" Lady Tatham inquired.

Mrs. Penfold replied that nothing could be more to their taste—except for the motors and the dust.

"Ah! that's my fault," said a voice behind her. "All motorists are brutes. I say, it was jolly of you to come!"

So saying, Tatham found a place between his mother and Mrs. Penfold, looking across at Lydia. Youth, happiness, manly strength came in with him. He had no features to speak of—round cheeks, a mouth generally slightly open, and given to smiling, a clear brow, a red and white complexion, a babyish chin, thick fair hair, and a countenance neither reserved nor foolishly indiscreet. Tatham's physical eminence—and it was undisputed—lay not in his plain, good-tempered face, but in the young perfection of his athlete's form. Among spectacles, his mother, at least, asked nothing better than to see him on horseback or swinging a golf-club.

"How did you come?—through the Glendarra woods?" he asked of Lydia. The delight in his eyes as he turned them upon her was already evident to his mother.

Lydia assented.

"Then you saw the rhododendrons? Jolly, aren't they?"

Lydia replied with ardour. There is a place in the Glendarra woods, where the oaks and firs fall away to let a great sheet of rhododendrons sweep up from the lowland into a mountain boundary of gray crag and tumbling fern. Rose-pink, white and crimson, the waves of colour roll among the rocks, till Cumbria might seem Kashmir. Lydia's looks sparkled, as she spoke of it. The artist in her had feasted.

"Won't you come and paint it?" said Tatham bending forward eagerly. "You'd make a glorious thing of it. Mother could send a motor for you so easily. Couldn't you, mother?"

"Delighted," said Lady Tatham, rather perfunctorily. "They are just in their glory—they ought to be painted."

"Thank you so much!"—Lydia's tone was a little hurried—"but I have so many subjects on hand just now."

"Oh, but nothing half so beautiful as that, Lydia!" cried her mother, "or so uncommon. And they'll be over directly. If Lady Tatham would really send the motor for you—"

Lydia murmured renewed thanks. Tatham, observing her, retreated, with a laugh and a flush.

"I say, we mustn't bother you to paint what we like. That would be too bad."

Lydia smiled upon him.

"I'm so busy with a big view of the river and Threlfall."

"Threlfall? Oh, do you know—mother! do you know what's been happening at Threlfall. Undershaw told me. The most marvellous thing!" He turned to Mrs. Penfold. "You've heard the stories they tell about here of old Melrose?"

Lydia laughed softly.

"Mother collects them!"

Mrs. Penfold confessed that, being a timid person, she went in fear, sometimes of Mr. Melrose, sometimes of his bloodhounds. She did not like passing the gate of Threlfall, and the high wall round the estate made her shudder. Of course the person that put up that wall must be mad.

"A queer sort of madman!" said Tatham, with a shrug. "They say he gets richer every year in spite of the state of the property. And meanwhile no human being, except himself or the Dixons, has ever slept in that house, or taken bite or sup in it for at least twenty years. And as for his behaviour to everybody round about—well, I can tell you all about that whenever you want to know! However, now they've stormed him—they've smoked him out like a wasp's nest. My goodness—he did buzz! Undershaw found a man badly hurt, lying on the road by the bridge—bicycle accident—run over too, I believe—and carried him into the Tower, willy-nilly!" The speaker chuckled. "Melrose was away. Old Dixon said they should only come in over his body—but was removed. Undershaw got four labourers to help him, and, by George, they carried the man in! They found the drawing-room downstairs empty, no furniture in it, or next to none—turned it into a bedroom in no time. Undershaw telegraphed for a couple of nurses—and when Melrose came home next day—tableau! There was a jolly row! Undershaw enjoyed it. I'd have given anything in the world to be there. And Melrose'll have to stick it out they say for weeks and weeks—the fellow's so badly hurt—and—"

Lydia interrupted him.

"What did Doctor Undershaw say of him to-day?"

She bent forward across the tea-table, speaking earnestly.

Tatham looked at her in surprise.

"The report is better. Had you heard about it?"

"I must have seen him just before the accident—"

"Lydia! I never understood," said Mrs. Penfold rather bewildered.

Lydia explained that she too had seen Doctor Undershaw that morning, on his way to the Tower, in Whitebeck village, and he had told her the story. She was particularly interested, because of the little meeting by the river, which she described in a few words. Twenty minutes or so after her conversation with the stranger the accident must have happened.

Mrs. Penfold meanwhile was thinking, "Why didn't Lydia tell me all this on the drive?" Then she remembered one of Lydia's characteristics—a kind of passionate reticence about things that moved her. Had the fate then of the young man—whom she could only have seen for a few minutes—touched her so much?

Lady Tatham had listened attentively to Lydia's story—the inner mind of her all the time closely and critically observant of the story-teller, her beauty, the manner and quality of it, her movements, her voice. Her voice particularly. When the girl's little speech came to an end, Victoria still had the charm of it in her ears.

"Does any one know the man's name?" she inquired.

"I forgot to ask Undershaw," said Tatham.

Lydia supplied the information. The name of the young man was Claude Faversham. He seemed to have no relations whatever who could come and nurse him.

"Claude Faversham!" Tatham turned upon her with astonishment. "I say! I know a Claude Faversham. I was a term with him at Oxford—at least if it's the same man. Tall?—dark?—good-looking?"

Lydia thought the adjectives fitted.

"He had the most beautiful ring!" she added. "I noticed it when he was tying up my easel."

"A ring!" cried Tatham, wrinkling up his forehead. "By George, that is odd! I remember Faversham's ring perfectly. An uncle gave it him—an old Professor at Oxford, who used to collect things. My tutor sent me to a lecture once, when I was in for schools. Mackworth—that was the old boy's name—was lecturing, and Faversham came down to help him show his cases. Faversham's own ring was supposed to be something special, and Mackworth talked no end about it. Goodness!—so that's the man. Of course I must go and see him!—ask after him anyway."

But the tone had grown suddenly dubious. Lady Tatham's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Go to Threlfall, Harry?"

"Well, not to call on Melrose, mother! I should have to make sure he was out of the way. But I feel as if I ought to do something about Faversham. The fact is he did me a great kindness my first term at Oxford—he got me into a little club I wanted to belong to."

"Oh, but you could belong to any club you wished!" cried Mrs. Penfold.

Tatham laughed and coloured. Lady Tatham slipped the slightest look at Lydia.

"Not at all. Faversham was awfully useful. I must see what can be done. He can't stay on at that place."

"You never go to Threlfall?" Mrs. Penfold addressed her hostess.

"Never," said Lady Tatham quietly. "Mr. Melrose is impossible."

"I should jolly well think he is!" said Tatham; "the most grasping and tyrannical old villain! He's got a business on now of the most abominable kind. I have been hearing the whole story this week. A man who dared to county court him for some perfectly just claim. And Melrose in revenge has simply ruined him. Then there's a right of way dispute going on—scandalous!—nothing to do with me!—but I'm helping other people to fight him. And his cottages!—you never saw such pigsties! He's defied every sort of inspector. I believe everybody's afraid of him. And you can't get a yard of land out of him for any public purpose whatever. Well, now that I'm on the County Council, I mean to go for him!"

The young man sprang up, apparently to fetch cigarettes, really that he might once more obtain a full view of Lydia, who had moved from the tea-table to a more distant seat.

Mrs. Penfold waved the silver box aside. "I never learnt"—she said, adding with soft, upturned eyes—confidingly—"sometimes I wish I did. Oh, Lydia will!"

And Lydia, following Lady Tatham's lead, quietly lit up. Tatham who cherished some rather strict and old-fashioned notions about women, very imperfectly revealed even to his mother, was momentarily displeased; then lost himself in the pleasure of watching a white hand and arm—for the day was hot and sleeves short—in new positions.

Lady Tatham looked round in answer to her son's last words.

"I wish, Harry, you'd leave him alone."

"Who? Melrose? Mother! Oh, I forgot—he's a sort of cousin, isn't he?"

"My second cousin."

"Worse luck! But that's nothing, unless one chooses it shall be. I believe, mother, you know a heap of things about Melrose you've never told me!"

Lady Tatham smiled faintly, but did not reply. Whereat Mrs. Penfold whose curiosity was insatiable, within lady-like bounds, tried to ask questions of her hostess. A wife? Surely there had been a wife?

"Certainly—twenty years ago. I saw her." The answer came readily.

"She ran away?"

"Not in the usual sense. There was no one, I understand, to run with. But she could not stand Threlfall—nor—I suppose—her husband. So one day—when he had gone to Italy, and she was left behind—she just—"

"'Elopes—down a ladder of ropes'" laughed Tatham; "and took the child?"

"Yes—and a bronze, worth a thousand pounds."

"Sensible woman! And where are they now?"

Lady Tatham shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, they can't be alive, surely," said Lydia. "Mr. Melrose told Doctor Undershaw that he had no relations in the world, and didn't wish to be troubled with any."

Contempt sat on Tatham's ruddy countenance.

"Well, as far as we're concerned, he may take it easy. His family affections don't matter to anybody! But the way he behaves as a landowner does really matter to all of us. He brings disgrace on the whole show."

He rose, straightening his young shoulders as he spoke. Lydia noted the modest involuntary consciousness of power and responsibility which for a moment dignified the boyish countenance; and as her eyes met his Tatham was startled by the passionate approval expressed in the girl's look.

She asked if there was no agent on the Melrose estates to temper the tyrannies of their master.

Tatham came to her side—explaining—looking down upon her with an eagerness which had but a superficial connection with the thing said.

"You see no decent man would ever stay with him. He'd never do the things Melrose does. He'd cut his hand off first. And if he didn't, the old villain would kick him out in no time. But that's enough about him, isn't it? I get him on the brain! Won't you come and see the pictures?"

* * * * *

The quartet inspecting the house had passed through the principal rooms, and had returned to the drawing-room. There Tatham said something to Lydia, and they moved away together. His mother looked after them. Tatham was leading the way toward the door in the farther wall which led to his own sitting-room. Their young faces were turned toward each other. The girl's shyness seemed to have broken up. She was now talking fast, with smiles. Ah, no doubt they would have plenty to say to each other, as soon as they were together.

It was one of the bitter-sweet moments of life. Lady Tatham steadied herself.

"That is a sketch," she said mechanically, "by Burne-Jones, for one of the Pygmalion and Galatea series. We have one or two others on the same subject."

Mrs. Penfold clasped her small hands in rapture.

"Oh! but how interesting! Do you know I was once Galatea? When I was a girl I used to act a great deal. Well, not act exactly—for I didn't have to speak. I never could remember my lines. But I had two great parts. There was Hermione, in 'The Winter's Tale'; and Galatea. I made hundreds of pounds for hospitals—hundreds. It's not vain now, is it, to say one was pretty in one's youth?"

"You like remembering it? Some people don't."

"Ah, no, that's wrong! I'd liked to have been beautiful once, if I'm old and ugly now," cried Mrs. Penfold with fervour. "Of course"—she looked shyly at the sketch—"I had beautiful draperies on. My Galatea was not like that."

"Draperies?" Lady Tatham laughed. "Pygmalion had only just made her—there had been no time to dress her."

"We dressed her," said Mrs. Penfold decidedly, "from top to toe. Some day I must show you the drawings of it—it's not like that at all. The girls think I'm silly to talk of it—oh! they don't say it—they're very good to me. But I can see they do. Only—they've so many things to be proud of. Susy's so clever—she knows Greek and all that kind of thing. And Lydia's drawing is so wonderful. Do you know she has made twenty pounds out of her sketches this week!"

"Capital!" said Lady Tatham smiling.

"Ah, it means a great deal to us! You see"—Mrs. Penfold looked round her—"when you're very rich, and have everything you want, you can't understand—at least I don't think you can—how it feels to have twenty pounds you don't expect. Lydia just danced about the room. And I'm to have a new best dress—she insists on it. Well, you see"—the little pink and white face of the speaker broke into smiles—"that's all so amusing. It puts one in good spirits. It's just as though one were rich, and made a thousand pounds. I daresay"—she looked, awestruck, at the Burne-Jones sketch—"that's worth our whole income. But we're very happy. We never fret. Lydia and Susy both help in the housework. And I make their blouses."

"How clever of you! That's a Fra Angelico"—said Lady Tatham pointing, and not knowing what to do with these confidences—"an Annunciation."

Mrs. Penfold thought it quite lovely. Lydia, when she was studying in London, had copied one like it in the National Gallery. And her poor father had liked it so. As they wandered on through the pictures, indeed, Lady Tatham soon came to know a great deal about Lydia's "poor father"—that he had been a naval officer, a Captain Penfold, who had had to retire early on half-pay because of ill-health, and had died just as the girls had grown up. "He felt it so—he was so proud of them—but he always said, 'If one of us is to go, why, it had better be me, Rosina—because you have such spirits—you're so cheerful.' And I am. I can't help it."

It was all sincere. There was neither snobbishness nor affectation in the little widow, even when she prattled most embarrassingly about her own affairs, or stood frankly wondering at the Tatham wealth. But no one could deny it was untutored. Lady Tatham thought of all the Honourable Johns, and Geralds, and Barbaras on the Tatham side—Harry's uncles and cousins—and the various magnificent people, ranging up to royalty, on her own; and envisaged the moment when Mrs. Penfold should look them all in the face, with her pretty, foolish eyes, and her chatter about Lydia's earnings and Lydia's blouses. And not all the inward laughter which the notion provoked in one to whom life was largely comedy, in the Meredithian sense, could blind her to the fact that the shock would be severe.

Had she really injured the prospects of her boy by the way—the romantic, idealist way—in which she had brought him up. Her Harry!—with whom she had read poetry, and talked of heroes, into whose ears she had poured Ruskin and Carlyle from his youth up; who was the friend and comrade of all the country folk, because of a certain irrepressible interest in his kind, a certain selflessness that were his cradle gifts; who shared in his boyish way, her own amused contempt for shams and shows—had she, after all, been training him for a mistake in the most serious step of life?

For, like it or despise it, English society was there, and he must fill his place in it. And things are seemly and unseemly, fitting and unfitting—as well as good and bad. This inexperienced girl, with her prettiness, and her art, and her small world—was it fair to her? Is there not something in the unconscious training of birth and position, when, bon gre, mal gre, there is a big part in the world's social business to be played?

And meanwhile, with a fraction of her mind, she went on talking "Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff." She did the honours of half their possessions. Then it suddenly seemed to her that the time was long, and she led the way back once more to the drawing-room, in a rather formidable silence, of which even her cheerful companion became aware.

But as they entered the room, the door at the farther end opened again, and Tatham and Lydia emerged.

Good heavens!—had he been proposing already? But a glance dispelled the notion. Lydia was laughing as they came in, and a little flushed, as though with argument. It seemed to his mother that Harry's look, on the other hand, was overcast. Had the girl been trampling on him? Impossible! In any case, there was no denying the quiet ease, the complete self-possession, with which the "inexperienced" one moved through Harry's domain, and took leave of Harry's mother. Your modern girl?—of the intellectual sort—quite unmoved by gewgaws! Minx!

Harry saw the two ladies into their pony-carriage. When he returned to his mother, it was with an absent brow. He went to the window and stood softly whistling, with his hands in his pockets. Lady Tatham waited a little, then went up to him, and took him by the arms—her eyes smiling into his, without a word.

He disengaged himself, almost roughly.

"I wish I knew something about art!" he said discontentedly. "And why should anybody want to be independent all their lives—economically independent?"

He slowly repeated the words, evidently from another mouth, in a land of wonder.

"That's the young woman of to-day, Harry."

"Isn't it better to be happy?" he broke out, and then was silent.

"Harry!—you didn't propose to her?"

He laughed out.

"Propose to her! As if I dare! I haven't even made friends with her yet—though I thought I had. She talks of things I don't understand."

"Not philosophy and stuff?"

"Lord, no!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "It's much worse. It's as though she despised—" He paused again.

"Courting?" said his mother at last, her head against his shoulder.

"Well, anything of that sort, in comparison with art—and making a career—and earning money—and things of that kind. Oh, I daresay I'm a stupid ass!—"

Lady Tatham laughed softly.

"You can buy all her pictures, Harry."

"I don't believe she'd like it a bit, if she knew!" he said, gloomily.

The young man's chagrin and bewilderment were evident. His mother could only guess at the causes.

"How long have you known her, Harry?"

"Just two months."

Lady Tatham took him again by the shoulders, and looked into his face.

"Why didn't you tell me before? Do you want her?" she asked slowly.

"Yes—but I shall never get her," was the half desperate reply.

"Pooh!" she said, releasing him, after she had kissed him. "We shall see."

And straightway, with a wave of the hand as it were, she dismissed all thought of the Honourable Johns and Geralds. Mrs. Penfold and her chatter sank out of sight and hearing. She was her son's champion—against the world.



VI

It was the tenth day since the evening when Claude Faversham had been carried unconscious into Threlfall Tower, and the first one which anything like clearness of mind had returned to him. Before that there had been passing gleams and perceptions, soon lost again in the delusions of fever, or narcotic sleep. A big room—strange faces—pain—a doctor coming and going—intervals of misery following intervals of nothingness—helplessness—intolerable oppression—horrible struggles with food—horrible fear of being touched—gradually, little by little, these ideas had emerged in consciousness.