Melrose stopped abruptly. His hard eyes in their deep, round orbits were fixed on Faversham. The young man was mainly conscious of a half-hysterical inclination to laugh, which he strangled as he best could. Was he to be offered the post?

"And, moreover," Melrose resumed, "I want a secretary—I want a companion—I want some one who will help me to arrange the immense, the priceless collections there are stacked in this house—unknown to anybody—hardly known, in the lapse of years, even to myself. I desire to unravel my own web, so to speak—to spin off my own silk—to examine and analyze what I have accumulated. There are rooms here—containing masterpieces—unique treasures—that have never been opened for years—whose contents I have myself forgotten. That's why people call me a madman. Why? What did I want with a big establishment eating up my income?—with a lot of prying idiots from outside—museum bores, bothering me for loans—common tourists, offering impertinent tips to my housekeeper, or picking and stealing, perhaps, when her back was turned! I bought the things, and shut them up. They were safe, anyway. But now that process has gone on for a quarter of a century. You come along. A chance—a freak—a caprice, if you like, makes me arrange these rooms for you. That gives me new ideas—"

He turned and looked with sharp, slow scrutiny round the walls:

"The fact is I have been so far engaged in hoarding—heaping together. The things in this house—my extraordinary collections—have been the nuts—and I, the squirrel. But now the nuts are bursting out of the hole, and the squirrel wants to see what he's got. That brings me to my point!"

He turned emphatically toward Faversham, leaning hard on a marqueterie table that stood between them:

"I offer you, sir, the post, the double post, of agent to my property, and of private secretary, or assistant to myself. I offer you a salary of three thousand a year—three thousand pounds, a year—if you will undertake the management of my estates, and be my lieutenant in the arrangement of my collections. I wish—as I have said—to unpack this house; and I should like to leave my property in order before I die. Which reminds me, I should of course be perfectly ready to make proper provision, by contract, or otherwise, so that in the event of any sudden termination of our agreement—my death for instance—you should be adequately protected. Well, there, in outline, is my proposal!"

During this extraordinary speech Faversham's countenance had reflected with tolerable clearness the various impressions made by it—incredulous or amused astonishment—bewilderment—deepening gravity—coming round again to astonishment. He raised himself in his chair.

"You wish to make me your agent—the agent for these immense estates?"

"I do. I had an excellent agent once—twenty years ago. But old Dovedale stole him from me—bribed him by higher pay. Since then I have had nothing but clerks—rent-collectors—rascally makeshifts, all of them."

"But I know nothing about land—I have had no experience!"

"A misfortune—but in some ways to the good. I don't want any cocksure fellow, with brand-new ideas lording it over me. I should advise you of course."

"But—at the same time—I should not be content with a mere clerk's place, Mr. Melrose," said Paversham, a momentary flash in his dark eye. "I am one of those men who are better as principals than as subordinates. Otherwise I should be in harness by now."

Melrose eyed him askance for a moment—then said: "I understand. I should be willing to steer my course accordingly—to give you a reasonable freedom. There are two old clerks in the estate-office, who know everything that is to be known about the property, and there are my solicitors both in Carlisle and Pengarth. For the rest, you are a lawyer, and there are some litigations pending. Your legal knowledge would be of considerable service. If you are the clever fellow I take you for, a month or two's hard work, the usual technical books, some expert advice—and I have little doubt you would make as good an agent as any of them. Mind, I am not prepared to spend unlimited money—nor to run my estates as a Socialist concern. But I gather you are as good a Conservative as myself."

Faversham was silent a moment, observing the man before him. The whole thing was too astounding. At last he said: "You are not prepared, sir, you say, to spend unlimited money. But the sum you offer me is unheard of."

"For an agent, yes—for a secretary, yes—for a combination of the two, under the peculiar circumstances, the market offers no precedents. You and I make a market—and a price."

"You would expect me to live in this house?"

"I gather these rooms are not disagreeable to you?"

"Disagreeable! They are too sumptuous. If I did this thing, sir, I should want to do it in a businesslike way."

"You want an office? Take your choice." Melrose's gesture indicated the rest of the house. "There are rooms enough. But you will want some place, I imagine, where you can be at home, receive friends—like the young lady and her mother yesterday—and so on."

His smile made him more Ogreish than before.

He resumed:

"And by the way, if you accepted my proposal, I should naturally expect that for a time you would devote yourself wholly to the organization of the collections, inside the house, and to the work of the estate, outside it. But you are of an age when a man hopes to marry. I should of course take that into account. In a year or two—"

"Oh, I have no immediate ideas of that kind," said Faversham, hastily.

There was a pause. At the end of it Faversham turned on his companion. A streak of feverish colour, a sparkling vivacity in the eyes, showed the effect produced by the conversation. But he had kept his head throughout the whole interview, and a certain unexpected strength in his personality had revealed itself to Melrose:

"You will hardly expect me, sir, to give an immediate answer to these proposals?"

"Take your time—take your time—in moderation," said Melrose, drumming on the table before him.

"And there are of course a few things that I on my side should wish to know."

A series of inquiries followed: as to the term of the proposed engagement; the degree of freedom that would be granted him; the date at which his duties would begin, supposing he undertook them—("To-morrow, if it pleases you!" said Melrose, jovially)—passing on to the general circumstances of the estates, and the nature of the pending litigations. The questions were put with considerable tact, but were none the less shrewd. Melrose's strange character with its mixture of sagacity, folly, and violence, had never been more acutely probed—though quite indirectly.

At the end of them his companion rose.

"You have a talent for cross-examination," he said with a rather sour smile. "I leave you. We have talked enough."

"Let me at least express before you go the gratitude I feel for proposals so flattering—so generous," said Faversham, not without emotion; "and for all the kindness I have received here, a kindness that no man could ever forget."

Melrose looked at him oddly, seemed about to speak—then muttered something hardly intelligible, ceased abruptly, and departed.

* * * * *

The master of the Tower went slowly to his library through the splendid gallery, where Mrs. Dixon and the new housemaid were timidly dusting. But he took no notice of them. He went into his own room, locked his door, and having lit his own fire, he settled down to smoke and ruminate. He was exhausted, and his seventy years asserted themselves. The radical alteration in his habits and outlook which the preceding six weeks had produced, the excitement of unpacking the treasures now displayed in the gallery, the constant thinkings and plannings connected with Faversham and the future, and, lastly, the interview just concluded, had tried his strength. Certain symptoms—symptoms of old age—annoyed him though he would not admit it. No doubt some change was wanted. He must smoke less—travel less—give himself more variety and more amusement. Well, if Faversham consented, he should at least have bought for himself a companionship that was agreeable to him, and relief from a number of routine occupations which he detested.

Suddenly—a child's voice—a child's shrill voice, ringing through the gallery—followed by scufflings and hushings, on the part of an older person—then a wail—and silence. Melrose had risen to his feet with an exclamation. Some peculiar quality in the voice—some passionate, thrilling quality—had produced for the moment an extraordinary illusion.

He recovered himself in a moment. It was of course the child of the upholstress who had been working in the house for a week or so. He remembered to have noticed the little girl. But the sound had inevitably suggested thoughts he had no wish to entertain. He had a letter in his pocket at that moment which he did not mean to answer—the first he had received for many years. If he once allowed a correspondence to grow up—with that individual—on the subject of money, there would be no end to it; it would spread and spread, till his freedom was once more endangered. He did not intend that persons, who had been once banished from his life, should reenter it—on any pretext. Netta had behaved to him like a thief and a criminal, and with the mother went the child. They were nothing to him, and never should be anything. If she was in trouble, let her go to her own people.

He took out the letter, and dropped it into the midst of the burning logs before him. Then he turned to a heap of sale catalogues lying near him, and after going through them, he rose, and as though drawn to it by a magnetic power, he went to the Riesener table, and unlocked the drawer which held the gems.

Bringing them back to the fireside he watched the play of the flames on their shining surfaces, delighting greedily in their beauty; in the long history attaching to each one of them, every detail of which he knew; in the sense of their uniqueness. Nothing like them of their kind, anywhere; and there they were in his hand, after these years of fruitless coveting. He had often made Mackworth offers for them; and Mackworth had laughed at him.

Well, he had bid high enough this time, not for the gems themselves, but for the chance of some day persuading their owner to entertain the notion of selling them. It pleased him to guess at what had been probably Faversham's secret expectation that morning of a proposal for them; and to think that he had baffled it.

He might, of course, have made some quite preposterous offer which would have forced the young man's hand. But that might have meant, probably would have meant, the prompt departure of the enriched Faversham. But he wanted both Faversham and the gems; as much as possible—that is, for his money. The thought of returning to his former solitariness was rapidly becoming intolerable to him. Meanwhile the adorable things were still under his roof; and with a mad pleasure he relocked the drawer.

* * * * *

Faversham spent the rest of the morning in cogitations that may be easily imagined. He certainly attributed some share in the extraordinary proposal that had been made to him, to his possession of the gems, and to Melrose's desire to beguile them from him. But what then? Sufficient for the day! He would decide how to deal with that crisis when it should arrive.

Meanwhile, the amazing proposal itself was before him. If it were accepted, he should be at once a comparatively rich man, with an infinity of chances for the future; for Melrose's financial interest and influence were immense. If not free to marry immediately, he would certainly be free—as Melrose himself had hinted—to prepare for marriage. But could he do the work?—could he get on with the old man?—could he endure the life?

After luncheon Dixon, with the subdued agitation of manner which showed the advent of yet another change in the household, came in to announce that a motor had come from Carlisle, that Mr. Melrose did not propose to use it himself, and hoped that Mr. Faversham would take a drive.

It was the invalid's first excursion into the outer world.

He sat breathing in great draughts of the scented summer air, feeling his life and strength come back into him.

The rain had passed, and the fells rose clear and high above the moist hay meadows and the fresh-leaved trees.

As they emerged upon the Keswick road he tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder. "Do you know Green Cottage?"

"Mrs. Penfold's, sir? Certainly."

"How far is it?"

"I should say about two miles."

"Go there, please."

The two miles passed for Faversham in a double excitement he had some difficulty in concealing; the physical excitement of change and movement, of this reentry upon a new world, which was the old; and the mental excitement of his own position.

At the cottage door, he dismounted slowly. The maid-servant said she thought Mrs. Penfold was in the garden. Would the gentleman please come in?

Faversham, leaning on his stick, made his way through the tiny hall of the cottage, and the drawing-room door was thrown open for him. A young lady was sitting at the farther end, who rose with a slight cry of astonishment. It was Lydia.

Through her reception of him Faversham soon learnt what are the privileges of the wounded, and how glad are all good women of excuses to be kind. Lydia placed him in the best chair, in front of the best view, ordered tea, and hovered round him with an eager benevolence. Her mother, she said, would be in directly. Faversham, on his side, could only secretly hope that Mrs. Penfold's walk might be prolonged.

They were not interrupted. Lydia, with concern, conjectured that Mrs. Penfold and Susan had gone to visit a couple of maiden ladies, living half a mile off along the road. But she showed not the smallest awkwardness in entertaining her guest. The rain of the morning had left the air chilly, and a wood fire burnt on the hearth. Its pleasant flame gave an added touch of intimity to the little drawing-room, with its wild flowers, its books, its water-colours, and its modest furnishings. After the long struggle of his illness, and the excitement of the morning, Faversham was both soothed and charmed. His whole nature relaxed; happiness flowed in. Presently, on an impulse he could not resist, he told her of the offer which had been made to him.

Lydia's embroidery dropped on her lap.

"Mr. Melrose's agent!" she repeated, in wonder. "He has offered you that?"

"He has—on most generous terms. Shall I take it?"

She flushed a little, for the ardent deference in his eyes was not easy to ignore. But she examined his news seriously—kindling over it.

"His agent—agent for his miserable, neglected property! Heavens, what a chance!"

She looked at him, her soul in her face. Something warned him to be cautious.

"You think it so neglected?"

"I know it: but ask Lord Tatham! He's chairman of some committee or other—he'll tell you."

"But perhaps I shall have to fight Tatham? Suppose that turns out to be my chief business?"

"Oh, no, you can't—you can't! He's too splendid—in all those things."

"He is of course the model youth," said Faversham dryly.

"Ah, but you can't hate him either!" cried Lydia, divining at once the shade of depreciation. "He is the kindest, dearest fellow! I agree—it's provoking not to be able to sniff at him—such a Prince Charming—with all the world at his feet. But one can't—one really can't!"

Jealousy sprang up sharply in Faversham, though a wider experience of the sex might have suggested to him that women do not generally shower public praise on the men they love. Lydia, however, quickly left the subject, and returned to his own affairs. Nothing, he confessed, could have been friendlier or sincerer than her interest in them. They plunged into the subject of the estate; and Faversham stood amazed at her knowledge of the dales-folk, their lives and their grievances. At the end, he drew a long breath.

"By George!—can I do it?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" said Lydia eagerly, driving her needle into the sofa cushion. "You'll reform him!"

Faversham laughed.

"He's a tough customer. He has already warned me I am not to manage his estates like a Socialist."

"No—but like a human being!" cried Lydia, indignantly—"that's all we want. Come and talk to Lord Tatham!"

"Parley with my employer's opponent!"

"Under a flag of truce," laughed Lydia, "and this shall be the neutral ground. You shall meet here—and mamma and I will hold the lists."

"You think—under those circumstances—we should get through much business?" His dark eyes, full of gaiety, searched hers. She flushed a little.

"Ah, well, you should have the chance anyway."

Faversham rose unwillingly to go. Lydia bent forward, listening.

"At last—here comes my mother."

For outside in the little hall there was suddenly much chatter and swishing of skirts. Some one came laughing to the drawing-room and threw it open. Mrs. Penfold, flushed and excited, stood in the doorway.

"My dear, did you ever know such kind people!"

Her arms were laden with flowers, and with parcels of different sorts. Susy came behind, carrying two great pots of Japanese lilies.

"You said you'd like to see those old drawings of Keswick—by I forget whom. Lady Tatham has sent you the whole set—they had them—you may keep them as long as you like. And Lord Tatham has sent flowers. Just look at those roses!" Mrs. Penfold put down the basket heaped with them at Lydia's feet, while Susy—demurely—did the same with the lilies. "And there is a fascinating parcel of books for Susy—all the new reviews! ... Oh! Mr. Faversham—I declare—why, I never saw you!"

Voluble excuses and apologies followed. Meanwhile Lydia, with a bright colour, stood bewildered, the flowers all about her, and the drawings in her hands. Faversham escaped as soon as he could. As he approached Lydia to say good-bye, she looked up, put the drawings aside, and hurriedly came with him to the door.

"Accept!" she said. "Be sure you accept!"

He had a last vision of her standing in the dark hall, and of her soft, encouraging look. As he drove away, two facts stood out in consciousness: first, that he was falling fast and deep in love; next, that—by the look of things—he had a rival, with whom, in the opinion of all practical people, it would be mere folly for him to think of competing.



BOOK II



X

While Faversham was driving back to Threlfall, his mind possessed by a tumult of projects and images—which was a painful tumult, because his physical strength was not yet equal to coping with it—a scene was passing in a bare cottage beside the Ulls-water road, whence in due time one of those events was to arise which we call sudden or startling only because we are ignorant of the slow [Greek: ananke ] which has produced them.

An elderly man had just entered the cottage after his day's work. He was evidently dead tired, and he had sunk down on a chair beside a table which held tea things and some bread and butter. His wife could be heard moving about in the lean-to scullery behind the living-room.

The man sat motionless, his hands hanging over his knees, his head bent. He seemed to be watching the motes dancing in a shaft of dusty sunlight that had found its way into the darkened room. For the western sun was blazing on the front, the blinds were down, and the little room was like an oven. The cottage was a new one and stood in a bare plot of garden, unshaded and unsheltered, on a stretch of road which crossed the open fell. It was a labourer's cottage, but the furniture of the living-room was superior in quality to that commonly found in the cottages of the neighbourhood. A piano was crowded into one corner, and a sideboard, too large for the room, occupied the wall opposite the fireplace.

The man sitting in the chair also was clearly not an ordinary labourer. His brown suit, though worn and frayed, had once been such a suit as Messrs. Carter, tailors, of Pengarth, were accustomed to sell to their farmer clients, and it was crossed by an old-fashioned chain and seal. The suit was heavily splashed with mud; so were the thick boots; and on the drooped brow shone beads of sweat. John Brand was not much over fifty, but he was tired out in mind and body; and his soul was bitter within him.

A year before this date he had been still the nominal owner of a small freehold farm between Pengarth and Carlisle, bordering on the Threlfall property. But he was then within an ace of ruin, and irreparable calamity had since overtaken him.

How it was that he had fallen into such a plight was still more or less mysterious to a dull brain. Up to the age of forty-seven, he had been employed on his father's land, with little more than the wages of a labourer, possessing but small authority over the men working on the farm, and no liberty but such as the will of a tyrannical master allowed him. Then suddenly the father died, and Brand succeeded to the farm. All his long-checked manhood asserted itself. There was a brief period of drinking, betting, and high living. The old man had left a small sum of ready money in the bank, which to the son, who had always been denied the handling of money, seemed riches. It was soon spent, and then unexpected burdens and claims disclosed themselves. There was a debt to the bank, which there were no means of paying. And he discovered to his dismay that a spinster cousin of his mother's had lent money to his father within the preceding five years, on the security of his stock and furniture. Where the borrowed money had gone no one knew, but the spinster cousin, alarmed perhaps by exaggerated accounts of the new man's drinking habits, pressed for repayment.

Brand set his teeth, ceased to spend money, and did his best to earn it. But he was a stupid man, and the leading-strings in which his life had been held up to middle age had enfeebled such natural powers as he possessed. His knowledge was old-fashioned, his methods slovenly; and his wife, as harmless as himself, but no cleverer, could do nothing to help him. By dint, however, of living and working hard he got through two or three years, and might just have escaped his fate—for his creditors, at that stage, were all ready to give him time—had not ill-fortune thrown him across the path of Edmund Melrose. The next farm to his belonged to the Threlfall estate. Melrose's methods as a landlord had thrown out one tenant after another, till he could do nothing but put in a bailiff and work it himself. The bailiff was incompetent, and a herd of cattle made their way one morning through a broken fence that no one had troubled to mend, and did serious damage to Brand's standing crops. Melrose was asked to compensate, and flatly declined. The fence was no doubt his; but he claimed that it had been broken by one of Brand's men. Hence the accident. The statement was false, and the evidence supporting it corrupt. Moreover the whole business was only the last of a series of unneighbourly acts on the part both of the bailiff and landowner, and a sudden fury blazed up in Brand's slow mind. He took his claim to the county court and won his case; the judge allowing himself a sharp sentence or two on the management of the Threlfall property. Brand spent part of his compensation money in entertaining a group of friends at a Pengarth public. But that was the last of his triumph. Thenceforward things went mysteriously wrong with him. His creditors, first one, then all, began to tighten their pressure on him; and presently the bank manager—the Jove of Brand's little world—passed abruptly from civility or indulgence, to a peremptory reminder that debts were meant to be paid. A fresh bill of sale on furniture and stock staved off disaster for a time. But a bad season brought it once more a long step nearer, and the bank, however urgently appealed to, showed itself adamant, not only as to any further advance, but as to any postponement of their own claim. Various desperate expedients only made matters worse, and after a few more wretched months during which his farm deteriorated, and his business went still further to wreck, owing largely to his own distress of mind, Brand threw up the sponge. He sold his small remaining interest in his farm, which did not even suffice to pay his debts, and went out of it a bankrupt and broken man, prematurely aged. A neighbouring squire, indignant with what was commonly supposed to be the secret influences at work in the affair, offered him the post of bailiff in a vacant farm; and he and his family migrated to the new-built cottage on the Ullswater road.

As to these secret influences, they were plain enough to many people. Melrose who had been present on the day when the case was tried had left the court-house in a fury, in company with a certain ill-famed solicitor, one Nash, who had worked up the defence, and had served the master of Threlfall before in various litigations connected with his estates, such as the respectable family lawyers in Carlisle and Pengarth would have nothing to do with. Nash told his intimates that night that Brand would rue his audacity, and the prophecy soon dismally fulfilled itself. The local bank to which Brand owed money had been accustomed for years to deal with very large temporary balances—representing the rents of half the Threlfall estates. Nash was well known to the manager, as one of those backstairs informants, indispensable in a neighbourhood where every farmer wanted advances—now on his crops—now on his stock—and the leading bank could only escape losses by the maintenance of a surprising amount of knowledge as to each man's circumstances and character. Nash was observed on one or two occasions going in and out of the bank's private room, at moments corresponding with some of the worst crises of Brand's fortunes. And with regard to other creditors, no one could say precisely how they were worked on, but they certainly showed a surprising readiness to join in the harrying of a struggling and helpless man.

In any case Brand believed, and had good cause for believing, that he had been ruined by Melrose in revenge for the county court action. His two sons believed it also.

The tired man sat brooding over these things in the little hot room. His wife came in, and stood at the door observing him, twisting her apron in a pair of wet hands.

"Yo'll have your tea?"

"Aye. Where are t' lads?"

"Johnnie's gotten his papers. He's gane oot to speak wi' the schoolmaster. He's thinkin' o' takkin' his passage for t' laast week in t' year."

Brand made no reply. Johnnie, the elder son, was the apple of his eye. But an uncle had offered him half his passage to Quebec, and his parents could not stand in the way.

"An' Will?"

"He's cleanin' hissel'."

As she spoke, wavering steps were heard on the stairs, and while she returned to her kitchen the younger son, Will Brand, opened the door of the front room.

He was a lanky, loose-jointed youth of twenty, with a long hatchet face. His movements were strangely clumsy, and his eye wandered. The neighbours had always regarded him as feeble-witted; and about a year before this time an outburst of rough practical joking on the lad's part—sudden jumpings out from hedges to frighten school-children going home, or the sudden whoopings and howlings of a white-sheeted figure, for the startling of lovers in the gloaming—had drawn the attention of the Whitebeck policeman to his "queerness." Only his parents knew of what fits of rage he was capable.

He wore now, as he came into the living-room, an excited, quasi-triumphant look, which did not escape his father.

"What you been after, Will?"

"Helpin' Wilson."

Wilson was a neighbouring keeper, who in June and July, before the young pheasants were returned to the woods, occasionally employed Will Brand as a watcher, especially at night.

Brand made no reply. His wife brought in the tea, and he and Will helped themselves greedily. Presently Will said abruptly:

"A've made that owd gun work all right."

"Aye?" Brand's tone was interrogative, but listless.

"I shot a kestrel an' a stoat wi' un this morning."

"Yo'did, eh?"

Will nodded, his mouth crammed with bread and butter, strange lights and flickering expressions playing over his starved, bony face.

"Wilson says I'm gettin' a varra fair shot."

"Aye? I've heard tha' practisin'." Brand turned a pair of dull eyes upon his son.

"An' I wish tha' wudn't do't i' my garden!" said Mrs. Brand, with energy. "I doan't howd wi' guns an' shootin' aboot, in a sma' garden, wi' t' washin' an' aw."

"It's feyther's garden, ain't it, as long as he pays t' rent!" said Will, bringing his hand down on the table with sudden passion. "Wha's to hinder me? Mebbe yo' think Melrose 'ull be aboot."

"Howd your tongue, Willie," said his mother, mildly. "We werena taakin' o' Melrose."

"Noa—because we're aye thinkin'!"

The lad's eyes blazed as he roughly pushed his cup for a fresh supply. His mother endeavoured to soothe him by changing the subject. But neither husband nor son encouraged her. A gloomy silence fell over the tea-table. Presently Brand moved, and with halting step went to the little horsehair sofa, and stretched himself full length upon it. Such an action on his part was unheard of. Both wife and son stared at him without speaking. Then Mrs. Brand got up, fetched an old shawl, and put it over her husband who had closed his eyes. Will left the room, and sitting on a stool outside the cottage door, with the old gun between his knees, he watched the sunset as it flushed the west, and ran along the fell-tops, till little by little the summer night rose from the purple valley, or fell softly from the emerging stars, and day was done.

* * * * *

A fortnight later, Mr. Louis Delorme, the famous portrait painter, arrived at Duddon Castle. Various guests had been invited to meet him. Two guests—members of the Tatham family—had invited themselves, much to Lady Tatham's annoyance. And certain neighbours were coming to dine; among them Mrs. Penfold and her daughters.

Dinner was laid in a white-pillared loggia, built by an "Italianate" Lord Tatham in the eighteenth century on the western side of the house, communicating with the dining-room behind it, and with the Italian garden in front. It commanded the distant blue line of the Keswick and Ullswater mountains, and a foreground of wood and crag, while the Italian garden to which the marble steps of the loggia descended, with its formal patterns of bright colour, blue, purple, and crimson, lay burning in the afterglow of sunset light, which, in a northern July, will let you read till ten o'clock.

The guests gathered on the circle of smooth-shaven grass that in the centre made a space around a fountain, with a gleaming water nymph. A broad grass pathway led them to the house, so that guests emerging from it arrived in rather spectacular fashion—well seen, against the ivied walls of the castle, to the unfair advantage, as usual, of grace and good looks.

Before hostess or neighbours appeared, however, Mr. Delorme and a certain Gerald Tatham, Lady Tatham's brother-in-law, had the green circle to themselves. Gerald Tatham was one of the uninvited guests. He considered himself entitled to descend on Duddon twice a year, and generally left it having borrowed money of his nephew, in elaborate forgetfulness of a similar transaction twelve months earlier still undischarged. He was married, but his wife did not pay visits with him. Victoria greatly preferred her—plain and silent as she was—to her husband; but realizing what a relief it must be to a woman to get such a man off her hands as often as possible, she never pressed her to come to Duddon. Meanwhile Gerald Tatham passed as an agreeable person, well versed in all those affairs of his neighbours which they would gladly have kept to themselves, and possessed of certain odd pockets of knowledge, sporting or financial, which helped him to earn the honest or doubtful pennies on which his existence depended.

Delorme and he got on excellently. Gerald respected the painter as a person whose brush, in a strangely constituted world, was able to supply him with an income which even the sons of land or commerce might envy; and secretly despised him for a lack of grandfathers, for his crop of black curls, his southern complexion and his foreign birth. Delorme thought Gerald an idler of no account, and perceived in him the sure signs of a decadence which was rapidly drawing the English aristocratic class into the limbo of things that were. But Gerald was an insatiable hawker of gossip; and a fashionable painter, with an empire among young and pretty women, must keep himself well stocked with that article.

So the two walked up and down together, talking pleasantly enough. Presently Delorme, sweeping a powerful hand before him, exclaimed on the beauty of the castle and its surroundings.

"Yes—a pretty place," said Gerald, carelessly, "and, for once, money enough to keep it up."

"Your nephew is a lucky fellow. Why don't they marry him."

"No hurry! When it does come off my sister-in-law will do something absurd."

"Something sentimental? I'll bet you she doesn't! Democracy is all very well—except when it comes to marriage. Then even idealists like Lady Tatham knock under."

"I wish you may be right. Anyway, she won't send him to New York!"

"No need! Blue blood—impoverished!—that's my forecast."

Gerald smiled—ungenially.

"Victoria would positively dislike an heiress. Jolly easy to take that sort of line—on forty thousand a year! But as to birth, the family, in my opinion, has a right to be considered."

Delorme hesitated a moment, then threw a provocative look at his companion, the look of the alien to whom English assumptions are sometimes intolerable.

"Pretty mixed—your stocks—some of them—by now!"

"Not ours. You'd find, if you looked into it, that we've descended very straight. There's been no carelessness."

Delorme threw up his hands.

"Good heavens! Carelessness, as you call it, is the only hope for a family nowadays. A strong blood—that's what you want—a blood that will stand this modern life—and you'll never get that by mating in and in. Ah! here come the others."

They turned, and saw a stream of people coming round the corner of the house. The rector and Mrs. Deacon—the gold cross on the rector's waistcoat shining in the diffused light. Lady Barbara Woolson, the other uninvited guest, Victoria's first cousin; a young man in a dinner jacket and black tie walking with Lady Tatham; a Madonnalike woman in black, hand in hand with a tall schoolboy; and two elderly gentlemen.

But in front—some little way in front—there walked a pair for whom all the rest appeared to be mere escort and attendance; so vivid, so charged with meaning they seemed, among the summer flowers, and under the summer sky.

A slender girl in white, and a tall youth looking down upon her, treading the grass just slightly in advance of her, with a happy deference, as though he led in the fairy queen. So delicate were her proportions, so bright her hair, and so compelling the charm that floated round her, that Delorme, dropping his cigarette, hastily put up his eyeglasses, and fell into his native tongue.

"Sapristi!—quelle petite fee avez-vous la?"

"My sister-in-law talked of some neighbours—"

"Mais elle entre en reine! My dear fellow, it looks dangerous."

Gerald pulled his moustaches, looking hard at the advancing pair.

"A pretty little minx—I must have it out with Victoria." But his tone was doubtful. It was not easy to have things out with Victoria.

* * * * *

The dinner under the loggia went gaily. Not many courses; much fruit; a shimmer of tea-roses before the guests; and the scent of roses blowing in from the garden outside.

Victoria had Delorme on her right, and Lydia sat next the great man. Tatham could only glance at her from afar. On his right, he had his cousin, Lady Barbara, whom he cordially disliked. Her yearly visit, always fixed and announced by herself, was a time of trial both for him and his mother, but they endured it out of a sentimental and probably mistaken belief that the late Lord Tatham had—in her youth—borne her a cousinly affection. Lady Barbara was a committee-woman, indefatigable, and indiscriminate. She lived and gloried in a chronic state of overwork, for which no one but herself saw the necessity. Her conversation about it only confirmed the frivolous persons whom she tried to convert to "social service," in their frivolity. After a quarter of an hour's conversation with her, Tatham was generally dumb, and as nearly rude as his temperament allowed. While, as to his own small efforts, his cottages, County Council, and the rest, no blandishments would have drawn from him a word about them; although, like many of us, Lady Barbara would gladly have purchased leave to talk about her own achievements by a strictly moderate amount of listening to other people's.

On his other side sat a very different person—the sweet-faced lady, whose boy of fourteen sitting opposite kept up with her through dinner a shy telegraphy of eye and smile. They were evidently alone in the world, and everything to each other. She was a widow—a Mrs. Edward Manisty, whose husband, a brilliant but selfish man of letters, had died some four years before this date. His wife had never found out that he was selfish; her love had haloed him; though she had plenty of character of her own. She herself was an American, a New Englander by birth, carrying with her still the perfume of a quiet life begun among the hills of Vermont, and in sight of the Adirondacks; a life fundamentally Puritan and based on Puritan ideals; yet softened and expanded by the modern forces of art, travel, and books. Lucy Manisty had attracted her husband, when he, a weary cosmopolitan, had met her first in Rome, by just this touch of something austerely sweet, like the scent of lavender or dewy grass; and she had it still—mingled with a kind humour—in her middle years, which were so lonely but for her boy. She and Victoria Tatham had made friends on the warm soil of Italy, and through a third person, a rare and charming woman, whose death had first made them really known to each other.

"I never saw anything so attractive!" Mrs. Manisty was murmuring in Tatham's ear.

He followed the direction of her eyes, and his fair skin reddened.

"She is very pretty, isn't she?"

"Very—like a Verrocchio angel—who has been to college! She is an artist?"

"She paints. She admires Delorme."

"That one can see. And he admires her!"

"We—my mother—wants him to paint her."

"He will—if he knows his own business."

"A Miss Penfold?" said Lady Barbara, putting up her eyeglass. "You say she paints. The modern girl must always do something! My girls have been brought up for home."

A remark that drove Tatham into a rash defence of the modern girl to which he was quite unequal, and in which indeed he was half-hearted, for his fundamental ideas were quite as old-fashioned as Lady Barbara's. But Lydia, for him, was of no date; only charm itself, one with all the magic and grace that had ever been in the world, or would be.

Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him—a bright, signalling look, only to tell him how hugely well she was getting on with Delorme. He smiled in return, but inwardly he was discontented. Always this gay camaraderie—like a boy's. Not the slightest tremor in it. Not a touch of consciousness—or of sex. He could not indeed have put it so. All he knew was that he was always thirstily seeking something she showed no signs of giving him.

But he himself was being rapidly swept off his feet. Since their meeting at Threlfall, which had been interrupted by Melrose's freakish return, there had been other meetings, as delightful as before, yet no more conclusive or encouraging. He and Lydia had indeed grown intimate. He had revealed to her thoughts and feelings which he had unveiled for no one else—not even for Victoria—since he was a boy at school with boyish friendships. And she had handled them with such delicacy, such sweetness; such frankness too, in return as to her own "ideas," those stubborn intractable ideas, which made him frown to think of. Yet all the time—he knew it—there had been no flirting on her part. Never had she given him the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from beginning to end, that soft, intangible barrier which at once checked and challenged him.

Passion ran high in him. And, moreover, he was beginning to be more than vaguely jealous. He had seen for himself how much there was in common between her and Faversham; during the last fortnight he had met Faversham at the cottage on several occasions; and there had been references to other visits from the new agent. He understood perfectly that Lydia was broadly, humanly interested in the man's task: the poet, the enthusiast in her was stirred by what he might do, if he would, for the humble folk she loved. But still, there they were—meeting constantly. "And he can talk to her about all the things I can't!"

His earlier optimism had quite passed by now; probably, though unconsciously, under the influence of Lydia's nascent friendship with Faversham. There had sprung up in him instead a constant agitation and disquiet that could no longer be controlled. No help—but rather danger—lay in waiting....

Delorme had now turned away from Lydia to his hostess, and Lydia was talking to Squire Andover on her other side, a jolly old boy, with a gracious, absent look, who inclined his head to her paternally. Tatham knew very well that there was no one in the county who was more rigidly tied to caste or rank. But he was kind always to the outsider—kind therefore to Lydia. Good heavens!—as if there was any one at the table fit to tie her shoe-string!

His pulses raced. The heat, the golden evening, the flowers, all the lavish colour and scents of nature, seemed to be driving him toward speech—toward some expression of himself, which must be risked, even if it lead him to disaster.

* * * * *

The dinner which appeared to Tatham interminable, and was really so short, by Victoria's orders, that Squire Andover felt resentfully he had had nothing to eat, at last broke up. The gentlemen lingered smoking on the loggia. The ladies dispersed through the garden, and Delorme—after a look round the male company—quietly went with them. So did the gentleman in the dinner jacket and black tie. Tatham, impatiently doing his duty as host, could only follow the fugitives with his eyes, their pale silks and muslins, among the flowers and under the trees.

But his guests, over their cigars, were busy with some local news, and, catching Faversham's name, Tatham presently recalled his thoughts sufficiently to listen to what was being said. The topic, naturally, was Faversham's appointment. Every landowner there was full of it. He had been seen in Brampton on market day driving in a very decent motor; and since his accession he had succeeded in letting two or three of the derelict farms, on a promise of repairs and improvements which had been at last wrung out of Melrose. It was rumoured also that the most astonishing things were happening in the house and the gardens.

"Who on earth is the man, and where does he come from?" asked a short, high-shouldered man with a blunt, pugnacious face. He was an ex-officer, a J.P., and one of the most active Conservative wire-pullers of the neighbourhood. He and Victoria Tatham were the best of friends. They differed on almost all subjects. He was a mass of prejudices, large and small, and Victoria laughed at him. But when she wanted to help any particularly lame dog over any particularly high stile, she always went to Colonel Barton. A cockney doctor attached to the Workhouse had once described him to her as—'eart of gold, 'edd of feathers'—and the label had stuck.

"A Londoner, picked up badly hurt on the road, by Undershaw, I understand, and carried into the lion's den," said Andover, in answer to Barton. "And now they say he is obtaining the most extraordinary influence over the old boy."

"And the house—turned into a perfect palace!" said the rector, throwing up his hands.

The others, except Tatham, crowded eagerly round, while the rector described a visit he had paid to Faversham, within a few days of the agent's appointment, on behalf of a farmer's widow, a parishioner, under notice to quit.

"Hadn't been in the house for twenty years. The place is absolutely transformed! It used to be a pigsty. Now Faversham's rooms are fit for a prince. Nothing short of one of your rooms here"—he addressed Tatham, with a laughing gesture toward the house—"comparable to his sitting-room. Priceless things in it! And close by, an excellent office, with room for two clerks—one already at work—piles of blue-books, pamphlets, heavens knows what! And they are fitting up a telephone between Threlfall and some new rooms that he has taken for estate business in Pengarth."

"A telephone—at Threlfall!" murmured Andover.

"And Undershaw tells me that Melrose has taken the most extraordinary fancy for the young man. Everything is done for him. He may have anything he likes. And, rumour says—an enormous salary!"

"Sounds like an adventurer," grumbled Barton, "probably is."

Tatham broke in. "No, you're wrong there, Colonel. I knew Faversham at college. He's a very decent fellow—and awfully clever."

Yet, somehow, his praise stuck in his throat.

"Well, of course," said Andover with a shrug, "if he is a decent fellow, as Tatham says, he won't stay long. Do you imagine Melrose is going to change his spots?—not he!"

"Somebody must really go and talk to this chap," said Barton gloomily. "I believe Melrose will lose us the next election up here. You really can't expect people to vote for Tories, if Tories are that sort."

The talk flowed on. But Tatham had ceased to listen. For some little time there had been no voices or steps in the garden outside. They had melted into the wood beyond. But now they had returned. He perceived a white figure against a distant background of clipped yew.

Rising joyously he threw down his cigarette.

"Shall we join the ladies?"

"I say, you've had a dose of Delorme."

For he had found her still with the painter, who as soon as Tatham appeared had subsided languidly into allowing Lady Barbara to talk to him.

"Oh! but so amusing!" cried Lydia, her face twinkling. "We've picked all the Academy to pieces and danced on their bones."

"Has he asked you to sit to him?"

Lydia hesitated, and in the soft light he saw her flush.

"He said something. Of course it would be a great, great honour!"

"An honour to him," said Tatham hotly.

"I'm afraid you don't know how to respect great men!" she said laughing, as they drew out of the shadow of the Italian garden with its clipped yews and cypresses, and reached a broad terrace whence the undulations of the park stretched westward and upward into the purple fissures and clefts of the mountains. Trees, fells, grass were steeped in a wan, gold light, a mingling of sunset and moonrise. The sky was clear; the gradations of colour on the hills ethereally distinct. From a clump of trees came a soft hooting of owls; and close behind them a tall hedge of roses red and white made a bower for Lydia's light form, and filled the night with perfume.

"What do great men matter?" said Tatham incoherently as they paused; "what does anything matter—but—Lydia!"

It was a cry of pain. A hand groped for hers. Lydia startled, looked up to see the face of Tatham looking down upon her through the warm dusk—transfigured.

"You'll let me speak, won't you? I daresay it's much too soon—I daresay you can't think of it—yet. But I love you. I love you so dearly! I can't keep it to myself. I have—ever since I first saw you. You won't be angry with me for speaking? You won't think I took you by surprise? I don't want to hurry you—I only want you to know—"

Emotion choked him. Lydia, after a murmur he couldn't catch, hid her face in her hands.

He waited; and already there crept through him the dull sense of disaster. The impulse to speak had been irresistible, and now—he wished he had not spoken.

At last she looked up.

"Oh, you have been so good to me—so sweet to me," and before he knew what she was doing, she had lifted one of his hands in her two slender ones and touched it with her lips.

Outraged—enchanted—bewildered—he tried to catch her in his arms. But she slipped away from him and with her hands behind her, she looked at him, smiling through tears, her fair hair blown back from her temples, her delicate face alive with feeling.

"I can't say yes—it wouldn't be honest if I did—it wouldn't be fair to you. But, oh, dear, I'm so sorry—so dreadfully sorry—if it's my fault—if I've misled you. I thought I'd tried hard to show what I really felt—that I wanted to be friends—but not—not this. Dear Lord Tatham, I do like and admire you so much—but—"

"You don't want to marry me!" he said bitterly, turning away.

She paused a moment.

"No"—the word came with soft decision—"no. And if I were to marry you without—without that feeling—you have a right to—I should be doing wrong—to you—and to myself. You see"—she looked down, the points of her white shoe drawing circles on the grass, as though to help out her faltering speech—"I—I'm not what I believe you think me. I've got all sorts of hard, independent notions in my mind. I want to paint—and study—and travel—I want to be free—"

"You should be free as air!" he interrupted passionately.

"Ah, but no!—not if I married. I shouldn't want to be free in that way, if—"

"If you were in love? I understand. And you're not in love with me. Why should you be?" said poor Tatham, with a new and desperate humility. "Why on earth should you be? But I'd adore you—I'd give you anything in the world you wanted."

Sounds of talking and footsteps emerged from the dusk behind them; the high notes of Lady Barbara, and the answering bass of Delorme.

"Don't let them find us," said Lydia impetuously—"I've so much to say."

Tatham turned, and led the way to the pillared darkness of a pergola to their left. One side of it was formed by a high yew hedge; on the other, its rose-twined arches looked out upon the northern stretches of the park, and on the garden front of Duddon. There it lay, the great house, faintly lit; and there in front stretched its demesne, symbol of its ancient rule and of its modern power. A natural excitement passed through Lydia as they paused, and she caught its stately outline through the night. And then, the tameless something in her soul, which was her very self, rose up, rejoicing in its own strength, and yet—wistful, full of tenderness. Now!—let her play her stroke—her stroke in the new great game that was to be, in the new age, between men and women.

"Why shouldn't we just be friends?" she urged. "I know it sounds an old, stale thing to say. But it isn't. There's a new meaning in it now, because—because women are being made new. It used to be offering what we couldn't give. We could be lovers; we weren't good enough—we hadn't stuff enough—to be friends. But now—dear Lord Tatham—just try me—" She held out to him two hands, which he took against his will. "I like you so much!—I know that I should love your mother. Now that we've had this out, why shouldn't we build up something quite fresh? I want a friend—so badly!"

"And I want something—so much more than a friend!" he said, pressing her hands fiercely.

"Ah, but give it up!" she pleaded. "If you can't, I mustn't come here any more, nor you to us. And why? It would be such a waste—of what our friendship might be. You could teach me so many things. I think I could teach you some."

He dropped her hands, mastering himself with difficulty.

"It's nonsense," he said shortly; "I know it's nonsense! But—if I promised not to say anything of this kind again for a year?"

She pondered. There were compunctions, remorses, in her. As Susan had warned her, was she playing with a man's heart and life?

But her trust in her own resources, the zest of spiritual adventure, and a sheer longing to comfort him prevailed.

"You'll promise that; and I'll promise—just to be as nice to you as ever I can!" She paused. They looked at each other; the trouble in his eyes questioning the smile in hers. "Now please!—my friend!"—she slid dexterously, though very softly, into the everyday tone—"will you advise me? Mr. Delorme has asked me to sit to him. Just a sketch in the garden—for a picture he's at work on. You would like me to accept?"

She stood before him, her eyes raised, with the frank gentleness of a child. Yet there was a condition implied in the question.

Tatham broke out—passionately,

"Just tell me. There's—there's no one else?"

She suffered for him; she hastened to comfort him.

"No, no—indeed there's no one else. Though, mind, I'm free. And so are you. Shall I come to-morrow?" she asked again, with quiet insistence.

There was a gulp in Tatham's throat. Yet he rose—dismally—to her challenge.

"You would do what I like?" he asked, quivering.

"Indeed I would."

"I invited Delorme here—just to please you—and because I hoped he'd paint you."

"Then that's settled!" she said, with a little sigh of satisfaction.

"And what, please, am I to do—that you'd like?" She looked up mischievously.

"Call me Lydia—forget that you ever wanted to marry me—and don't mind a rap what people say!"

He laughed, through his pain, and gravely took her hand.

"And now," said Lydia, "I think it's time to go home."

* * * * *

When all the guests were gone, when Gerald and Delorme had smoked their last interminable cigars, and Delorme had made his last mocking comments on the "old masters" who adorned the smoking-room, Tatham saw him safely to bed, and returned to his sitting-room on the ground floor. The French window was open, and he passed out into the garden. Soon, in his struggle with himself, he had left the garden and the park behind, and was climbing the slope of the fells. The play of the soft summer winds under the stars, the scents of bracken and heather and rushes, the distant throbbing sounds that rose from the woods as the wind travelled through them—and soon, the short mountain turf beneath his feet, and around and below him, the great shapes of the hills, mysteriously still, and yet, as it seemed to him, mysteriously alive—these things spoke to him and, little by little, calmed his blood.

It was the first anguish of a happy man. When, presently, he lay safe hidden in a hollow of the lonely fell, face downward among the moonlit rocks, some young and furious tears fell upon the sod. That quiet strength of will in so soft a creature—a will opposed to his will—had brought him up against the unyieldingness of the world. The joyous certainties of life were shaken to their base; and yet he could not, he did not, cease to hope.



XI

Victoria was sitting to Delorme in a corner of the Italian garden. He wished to paint her en plein air, and he was restlessly walking to and fro, about her, choosing a point of view. Victoria was vaguely pleased by the picturesqueness of his lion head set close on a pair of powerful shoulders, no less than by the vivacity of his dark face and southern gesture. He wore a linen jacket with bulging pockets, and a black skullcap, which gave him a masterful, pontifical air. To Victoria's thinking, indeed, he "pontified" at all times, a great deal more than was necessary.

However she sat resigned. She did not like Delorme, and her preference was all for another school of art. She had moreover a critical respect for her own features, and she did not want at all to see them rendered by what seemed to her the splashing violence of Delorme's brushwork. But Harry had asked it of her, and here she was.

Her thoughts, moreover, were full of Harry's affairs, so that the conversation between her and the painter was more or less pretence on her part.

Delorme, meanwhile, was divided between the passion of a new subject and the wrath excited in him by a newspaper article which had reached him at breakfast.

"A little more to the left, please, Lady Tatham. Admirable! One moment!" The scrabble of charcoal on paper.

Delorme stepped back. Victoria sat languidly passive.

"Did you read that article on me in The Weekly? The man's a fool!—knows nothing, and writes like God Almighty. A little more full face. That's it! I suppose all professions are full of these jealous beasts. Ours is cluttered up with them—men who never sell a picture, and make up by living on the compliments of their own little snarling set. But, upon my word, it makes one rather sick. Ah, that's good! You moved a trifle—that's better—just a moment!"

"I'm glad you let me sit," said Victoria absently. "I stood to Whistler once. It nearly killed me."

"Ah, Jimmy!" said Delorme. "Jimmy was a Tartar!"

He went off at score into recollections of Whistler, drawing hard all the time.

Victoria did not listen. She was thinking of those sounds of footsteps she had heard under her window at dawn, and passing her room. This morning Harry looked as usual, except for something in the eyes, which none but she would notice. What had he been doing all those hours? There was nothing erratic or abnormal about Harry. Sound sleep from the moment he put his head on his pillow to the moment at eight o'clock when his servant with great difficulty woke him, was the rule with him.

What could have happened the night before—while he and Lydia Penfold were alone together? Victoria had seen them come back into the general company, had indeed been restlessly on the watch for their return. It had seemed to her—though how be sure in that mingled light?—both at the moment of their reappearance and afterward, that Harry was somewhat unusually pale and quiet, while the girl's look had struck her as singular—exaltee—the eyes shining—yet the manner composed and sweet as usual. She already divined the theorist in Lydia, the speculator with life and conduct. "But not with my Harry!" thought the mother, fiercely.

But how could she prevent it? What could she do? What can any mother do when the wave of energy—spiritual and physical—has risen or is rising to its height in the young creature, and the only question is how and where it shall break; in crash and tempest, or in a summer sea?

Delorme suddenly raised his great head from his easel.

"That was a delicious creature that sat by me last night."

"Miss Penfold? She is one of your devotees."

"She paints, so she said. Mon Dieu! Why do women paint?"

Victoria, roused, hotly defended the right of her sex to ply any honest art in the world that might bring them either pleasure or money.

"Mais la peinture!" Delorme's shoulder shrugged still higher. "It is an infernal thing, milady, painting. What can a woman make of it? She can only unsex herself. And in the end—what she produces—what is it?"

"If it pays the rent—isn't that enough?"

"But a young girl like that! What, in God's name, has she do to with paying the rent? Let her dance and sing—have a train of lovers—look beautiful!"

"The whole duty of woman!" laughed Victoria with a touch of scorn; "for our grandmothers."

"No: for all time," said Delorme stoutly. "Ask milord." He looked toward the house, and Victoria saw Tatham emerging. But she had no intention whatever of asking him. She rose hastily, excused herself on the score of needing a few minutes' rest, and went to meet her son.

"I forgot to tell you, mother," he said, as they approached each other, "Faversham's coming this afternoon. I had a letter from him this morning. He seems to be trying to make the old man behave."

"I shall be glad to see him."

Struck by something lifeless and jaded in the voice she loved, Victoria shot a glance at her son, then slipped her hand into his arm, and walked back with him to his library.

He sat down silently to his books and papers. A couple of official reports lay open, and Victoria knew that he was going to an important county meeting that evening, where he was to be in the chair. Many older men, men who had won their spurs in politics or business, would be there, and it was entirely by their wish—their kindly wish—that Harry would take the lead. They desired to see him treading in the steps of his forefathers.

Perched on the end of his writing table, she watched her son a moment. It seemed to her she saw already what the young face would be like when it was old. A pang struck her.

"Harry—is there anything wrong?"

He looked up quite simply and stretched his hand to her.

"I asked her to marry me last night."

"Well?" The colour rushed into the mother's face.

"No go. She doesn't love me. She wants us to be friends."

Victoria gasped.

"But she's coming to sit to Delorme this afternoon!"

"Because I asked her."

"Harry, dear boy, for both your sakes—either all or nothing! If she doesn't care—break it off."

"There's nothing to break off, dearest. And don't ask me not to see her. I couldn't. Who knows? She's got her ideas. Of course I've got mine. Perhaps—after all—I may win. Or, if not—perhaps"—he shaded his face with his hand—"she'll show me—how not to mind. I know she wants to."

Silence a moment. Then the lad's hand dropped. He smiled at Victoria.

"Let's fall in! There's nothing else to do anyway. She's not like other girls. When she says a thing—she means it. But so long as I can see her—I'm happy!"

"You ought to forget her!" said Victoria angrily, kissing his hair. "These things should end—one way or the other."

He looked perplexed.

"She doesn't think so—and I'm thankful she doesn't, mother—don't say anything to her. Promise me. She said last night—she loved you. She wants to come here. Let's give her a jolly time. Perhaps—"

The patience in his blue eyes nearly made her cry. And there was also the jealousy that no fond mother escapes, the commonest of all jealousies. He was passing out of her hands, this creature of her own flesh. Till now she had moulded and shaped him. Henceforward the lightest influence rained by this girl's eyes would mean more to him than all the intensity of her own affection.

* * * * *

Victoria's mind for the rest of the sitting was in a state of abstraction, and she sat so still that Delorme was greatly pleased with her. At luncheon she was still absent-minded, and Lady Barbara whispered in Gerald Tatham's ear that Victoria was always a poor hostess, but this time her manners were really impossible.

"But you intend to stay a fortnight, don't you?" said Gerald, not without malice.

"If I can possibly stay it out." The reply was lofty, but the situation, as Gerald knew, was commonplace. Lady Barbara's house in town was let for another fortnight, and Duddon's Castle was more agreeable and more economical than either lodgings or a hotel.

Meanwhile a pair of eyes belonging to the young man whose dinner jacket and black tie had marked him out amid the other male guests of the night before were observing matters with a more subtle and friendly spirit behind them. Cyril Boden was a Fellow of All Souls, a journalist, an advanced Radical, a charmer, and a fanatic. He hated no man. That indeed was the truth. But he hated the theories and the doings of so many men, that the difference between him and the mere revolutionary was hard to seize. He had a smooth and ruddy face, in which the eyebrows seemed to be always rising interrogatively; longish hair; stooping shoulders, and an amiable, lazy, mocking look that belied a nature of singular passion, always occupied with the most tremendous problems of life, and afraid of no solution.

He had been overworking himself in the attempt to settle a dock strike, and had come to Duddon to rest. Victoria was much attached to him in a motherly way, and he to her. They sparred a good deal; she attacking "agitators" and "demagogues," he, fierce on "feudal tyranny," especially when masked in the beauties and amenities of such a place as Duddon. But they were friends all the same, exchanging the unpaid services of friends.

In the afternoon, before Lydia Penfold appeared, Boden found amusement in teasing Delorme—an old acquaintance. Delorme was accustomed to pose in all societies as Whistler's lawful and only successor. "Pattern" and "harmony" possessed him; "finish" was only made for fools, and the story-teller in art was the unclean thing. His ambition, like Whistler's, was to paint a full length in three days, and hear it hailed a masterpiece. And, like Whistler, he had no sooner painted it than he scraped it out; which most sitters found discouraging.

Boden, meanwhile, made amends for all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects—art and divorce. He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal to ethical or poetic emotion.

"Boden admires a painter because he is a good man and pays his washing bills," drawled Delorme behind his cigarette, from the lazy depths of a garden chair. "His very colours are virtues, and his pictures must be masterpieces, because he subscribes to the Dogs' Home, and doesn't beat his wife."

"Excellently put," said Boden, his hat on the back of his head, his eyes beginning to shine. "Do men gather grapes off thistles?"

"Constantly. There is no relation whatever between art and morality." Delorme smoked pugnaciously. "The greater the artist, generally speaking, the worse the man."

"I say! Really as bad as that?"

Boden waved a languid hand toward the smoke-wreathed phantom of Delorme. The circle round the two laughed, languidly also, for it was almost too hot laugh. The circle consisted of Victoria, Gerald Tatham, Mrs. Manisty, and Colonel Barton, who had reappeared at luncheon, in order to urge Tatham to see Faversham as soon as possible on certain local affairs.

"Oh! I give you my head in a charger," said Delorme, not without heat. "For you, Burne-Jones is 'pure' and I am 'decadent'; because he paints anemic knights in sham armour and I paint what I see."

"The one absolutely fatal course! Don't you agree?"

Boden turned smiling to Mrs. Manisty, of whose lovely head and soft eyes he was conscious through all the chatter.

The eyes responded.

"What do we see?" she said, with her shy smile. "Surely we only see what we think—or dream!"

"True!" cried Delorme; "but a painter thinks in paint."

"There you go," said Boden, "with your esoteric stuff. All your great painters have thought and felt with the multitude—painted for the multitude."

"Never." The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up. "The multitude is a brute beast!"

"A just beast," murmured Boden.

"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter—in all the world!"

"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.

"Good heavens, no! Artists—and judges—together. The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven."

Boden caught Victoria's laugh.

"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I can stand—with apologies to my hostess."

"Oh, we're done for," said Victoria, quietly.

Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in the sunshine, then to his hostess.

"Not yet. But you're doomed. As the old Yorkshireman said to his son, when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travelling menagerie—that 'genelman's to be wooried soom day.' When the real Armageddon comes, it'll not find you in possession. You'll have gone down long before."

"Really? Then who will be in possession?" asked Gerald Tatham, a very perceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice. He disliked Boden as one of "the infernal Radicals" whom Victoria would inflict on the sacred precincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.

"Merely the rich"—the tone was still nonchalant—"the Haves against the Haven'ts. No nonsense left, by that time, about 'blood' and 'family.' Society will have dropped all those little trimmings and embroideries. We shall have come to the naked fundamental things."

"The struggle of rich and poor?" said Delorme. "Precisely. That's what all you fellows who go and preach revolution to dockers are after. And what on earth would the world do without wealth? Wealth is only materialized intelligence! What's wrong with it?"

"Only that we're dying of it."

The young man paused. He sat silently smoking, his eyes—unseeing—fixed upon the house. Lucy Manisty looked at him with sympathy.

"You mean," she said, "that no one who has the power to be rich has now ever the courage to be poor?"

He nodded, and turning to her he continued in a lower voice: "And think what's lost! Are we all to be smothered in this paraphernalia of servants, and motor cars and gluttonous living? There's scarcely a man—for instance—among my friends who'll dare to marry! Hundreds used to be enough—now they must have thousands—or say their wives must. And they'll sell their souls to get the thousands. Who's the better—who's the happier for it in the end? We have left ourselves nothing to love with—nothing to be happy with. What does natural beauty—or human feeling—matter to the men who spend their days speculating in the City? I know 'em. I have watched some of them for years. It's a thirst that destroys a man. To want to be rich is bad enough—to want to be rich quick is death and damnation ..."

There was silence again, till suddenly Boden addressed Colonel Barton, who was sitting opposite half asleep in the sun.

"I say, what's the name of a village, about two miles from here, I walked through while you were all at church this morning?—the most God-forsaken place I ever saw!—a horrible, insanitary hole!"

"Mainstairs!" said Barton, promptly, waking up. "That's the only village hereabout that fits the description. But Melrose owns two or three of them."

"The man that owns that village ought to be hung," said Boden with quiet ferocity. "In any decent state of society he would be hung."

Barton shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm on the sanitary authority. We've summoned him till we're tired, to put those cottages in repair. No use. Now, we've told him that we shall repair them ourselves and send in the bill to him. That's stirred him, and he's immediately given everybody notice to quit—says he'll close the whole village. But the people won't go. There are no other cottages for miles—they've taken to stoning our inspectors."

"And you think our land system's going to last on these terms?" said Boden, his eyes flaming.

The little Tory opposite drew himself up.

"It's not the system—it's the man."

"The system's judged—that permits the man."

"Melrose is unique," said Barton, hotly; "we are a model county, but for the Melrose estate."

"But the exception is damning! It compromises you all. That such a place as Mainstairs should be possible—that's the point!"

"For you Socialists, I daresay!" cried Barton. "The rest of us know better than to expect a perfect world!"

Boden laughed, the passion dying from his face.

"Ah, well, we shall have to make you march—you fellows in possession. No hope—unless we are 'behind you with a bradawl!'"

"On the contrary! We marched before you Socialists were thought of. Who have put the bulk of the cottages of England in repair during the last half century, I should like to know—and built most of the new ones? The landlords of England! Who stands in the way of reform at the present moment? The small owner. And who are the small owners? Mainly Radical tradesmen."

Boden looked at him—then queerly smiled. "I daresay. I trust no man—further than I can see him. But if what you say is true, why don't you Conservatives—in your own interest—coerce men like Melrose? He's giving you away, every month he exists."

"Well, Tatham's at it," said Barton quietly; "we're all at it. And there's a new agent just appointed. Something to be hoped from him."

"Who is it?"

"You didn't hear us discussing him last night? A man called Claude Faversham."

"Claude Faversham? A tall, dark fellow—writes a little—does a little law—but mostly unemployed? Oh, I know him perfectly. Faversham? You don't mean it!" Boden threw himself back in his chair with a sarcastic lip, and relit his pipe. As he watched the spirals of smoke he recalled the few incidents of his acquaintance with the young man. They had both been among the original members of a small club in London, frequented by men of letters and junior barristers. Faversham had long since dropped out of the club, and was now the companion, so Boden understood, of much richer men, and a great frequenter of the Stock Exchange, where money is mysteriously made without working for it. That fact alone was enough for Cyril Boden. He felt an instinctive, almost a fanatical, antipathy toward the new agent. On the one side the worshippers of the Unbought and the Unpriced; on the other Mammon and all his troop. It was so that Boden habitually envisaged his generation. It was so, and by no other test, that he divided the sheep from the goats.

Meanwhile, Lydia Penfold, driving a diminutive pony, was slowly approaching the castle through the avenue of splendid oaks which led up to it. Faversham was walking beside her. He had overtaken her at the beginning of the avenue, and had sent on his motor that he might have the pleasure of her society.

The daintiness of her white dress, with all its pretty details, the touch of blue in her hat, and at her waist, delighted his eyes. It pleased him that there was not a trace in her of Bohemian carelessness in these respects. Everything was simple, but everything was considered. She knew her own beauty; that was clear. It gave her self-possession; but, so far as he could see, without a trace of conceit. He had never met a young girl with whom he could talk so easily.

She had greeted him with her most friendly smile. But it seemed to him nevertheless that she was a little pensive and overcast.

"You dined here last night?" he asked her. "Did the lion roar properly?"

"Magnificently. You weren't there?"

"No. Undershaw put down his foot. I shan't submit much longer!"

"You're really getting strong?"

Her kind eyes considered him. He had often marveled that one so young should be mistress of such a look—so softly frank and unafraid.

"A Hercules! Besides, the work's so interesting, one's no time to think of one's game leg!"

"You're getting to know the estate?"

"I've been motoring about it for a fortnight, that's something for a beginning. And I've got plenty of things to tell you."

He plunged into them. It was evident that he was resuming topics familiar to them both. Their talk indeed showed them already intimate, sharers in a common enterprise, where she was often inspiration, and he executive and practical force. Ever since, indeed, she had said to him with that kindled, eager look—"Accept! Accept!"—he had been sharply aware of how best to approach, to attract her. She was, it seemed, no mere passive girl. She was in her measure a thinker—a character. He perceived in her—deep down—enthusiasms and compassions, that seemed often as though they shook her beyond her strength. They made him uncomfortable; they were strange to his own mind; and yet they moved and influenced him. During the short time, for instance, that she had lived in their midst, she had made friends everywhere—so he discovered—among these Cumbria folk. She never harangued about them; a few words, a few looks, burning from an inward fire—these expressed her: as when, twice, he had met her at dusk, with the aspect of a wounded spirit, coming out of hovels that he himself must now be ashamed of, since they were Melrose's hovels.

"I've just come from Mainstairs," he said to her abruptly, as the house in front drew nearer.

The colour rushed into Lydia's cheeks.

"Are you going to put that right?"

"I'm going to try. I've been talking to your old friend Dobbs. I saw his poor daughter, and I went into most of the cottages."

Somewhat to his dismay he saw the delicate face beside him quiver, and the eyes cloud. But the emotion was driven back.

"You're too late—for Bessie!" she said—how sadly! The accent touched him.

"The girl is really dying? Was it diphtheria?"

"She has been dying for months—and in such pain."

"It is paralysis?"

"After diphtheria. Did they show you the graves in the churchyard?—they call it the Innocents' Corner. Thirty children died in that village last year and the year before."

There was silence a little.

"I wonder what I can do," said Faversham, at last, reflectively. "I have been working out a number of new proposals—and I submit them to Mr. Melrose to-night."

She looked wistfully at the speaker.

"Good luck! But Mr. Melrose is hard to move."

Faversham assented.

"The hope lies in his being now an old man—and anxious to get rid of responsibilities. I shall try to show him that bad citizenship costs more money than good."

"I hope—oh! I hope—you'll succeed!" she said fervently. Her emotion infected him. He smiled down upon her.

"That ought to make me succeed! But of course I have no experience. I am a townsman."

"You've always been a Londoner?"

"Practically, always. But I was tired of London before all this happened—dying to get out of it."

And he began a short account of himself, more intimate than any he had yet given her; to which Lydia listened with her open, friendly look, perhaps a little shyer than before. And so different, instinctively, is the way in which a man will tell his story to a woman, from that in which he tells it to a man, that the same half-ironic, half-bitter narrative which had repelled Tatham, attracted Lydia. Her sympathy rose at once to meet it. He was an orphan, and till now lonely and unsuccessful; tormented, too, by unsatisfied ideals and ambitions. Her imagination was pitiful and quick; she imagined she understood. She liked his frankness; it flattered and touched her. She liked his deep rich voice, and his dark face, with its lean strength, and almost southern colour. During his illness he had grown a small peaked beard, and it pleased her artistic sense, by giving him a look of Cardinal Richelieu—as that great man stood figured in an old French print she had picked up once in a box on the Paris quays. Moreover his friendship offered her so much fresh knowledge of the world and life. Here, again, was comradeship. She was lucky indeed. Harry Tatham—and now this clever, interesting man, entering on his task. It was a great responsibility. She would not fail either of her new friends! They knew—she had made—she would make it quite plain, that she was not setting her cap at either. Wider insights, fresh powers, honourable, legitimate powers, for her sex—it was these she was after.

In all all this Lydia was perfectly sincere. But the Comic Spirit sitting aloft took note.

They paused a moment on the edge of the plateau on which the house stood—the ground breaking from it to the west. A group of cottages appeared amid the woods far away.

"If all estates were like this estate!" cried Lydia, pointing to them, "and all cottages like their cottages!"

Faversham flushed and stiffened.

"Oh! the Tathams are always perfection!"

Lydia's eyebrows lifted.

"It is a crime?"

"No—but one hears too much of it."

"Not from them!" The tone was indignant.

"I daresay."

Suddenly, he threw her a look which startled her. She descended from her pony-cart at the steps of the castle, her breath fluttering a little. What had happened?

"Her ladyship is in the garden," said the footman who received them. And he led the way through a door in the wall of the side court. They followed—in a constrained silence. Lydia felt puzzled, and rather angry.

Faversham recovered himself.

"I apologize! They have all the virtues."

His voice was lowered—for her ear; there was deference in his smile. But somehow Lydia was conscious of a note of stormy self-assertion in him, which was new to her; something strong and stubborn, which refused to take her lead as usual.

Lady Tatham advanced. The eyes of a group of people sitting in a circle under the shade of a spreading yew tree turned toward them.

Boden, who had given Faversham a perfunctory greeting, fell back into his chair again, and watched the new agent's reception with coolly smiling eyes.

Tatham came hurrying up to greet them. No one but Lydia could have distinguished any change in the boyish voice and look. But it was there. She felt it.

He turned from her to Faversham.

"Awfully glad to see you. Hope you're quite fit again."

"Very nearly all right, thank you."

"Are you actually at work? Great excitement everywhere about you!"

Tatham stood, with his straw hat tilted toward the back of his head, and his hands on his sides, observing his guest.

Faversham shrugged his shoulders.

"I feel horribly nervous!"

"Well you may!" laughed Tatham. "Never mind. We'll all back you up, if you'll let us."

"As far as I am concerned—the smallest contributions thankfully received. Who are these people here?"

Tatham introduced him.

Then to Lydia:

"Delorme is waiting for you." He carried her off.

By this time Mr. Andover, the old grizzled squire who had been Lydia's partner at dinner the night before, had dropped in, and various other residents from the neighbourhood. They gathered eagerly round Faversham, in the deep shade of the yews.

And before long, the new man had produced an excellent first impression upon these country gentlemen who were now to be his neighbours. It was evident that he was anxious to remove grievances. His tone as to his employer was guarded, but not at all servile; and he made the impression of a man of ability accustomed to business, though modestly avowing his ignorance of rural affairs; independent, yet anxious to do his best with a great trust.

After half an hour's discussion, Barton drew Victoria aside, and said to her excitedly that the new agent was "a capital fellow!"

"He'll do the job, you'll see! Melrose is breaking up—thank God! Every one who's seen him lately says he's not half the man he was. He'll have to give this fellow a free hand. That estate has been a plague-spot! But we'll get it cleared up now."

Victoria wondered. Secretly, she doubted the power of any man to manage Melrose even moriturus.

Meanwhile it had not escaped her that the new agent and Lydia Penfold had arrived together. It had struck her also that their manner toward each other, as she went to meet them, had been the manner of persons just emerged from a somewhat intimate conversation. And she already perceived the nascent jealousy in Harry.

Well, no doubt the agent also was to be practised on by these newfangled arts. For no girl could have had the audacity to make the compact Lydia Penfold had made with Harry, if she were already in love with another man! No. Faversham, it was plain, would be the next added to her train. Victoria beheld the golden-haired creature as the modern Circe, surrounded by troops of ex-suitors—lovers transmogrified to Friends—docile at the heel of the sorceress. You took your chance, received your "No," and subsided cheerfully into the pen. Victoria vowed to herself that her Harry should do nothing of the kind!

She looked round her for the presumptuous maiden. There she was, under a fountain wall in the Italian garden, her white dress gleaming from the warm shadow in which the stone was steeped; Delorme, with an easel, in front. He was making a rapid charcoal sketch of her, and she was sitting daintily erect, talking and smiling at intervals. A little way off, a group of people, critical observers of the proceeding, lounged on the grass or in garden chairs; among them, Tatham. And as he sat watching the sitting, his hat drawn forward over his brow and eyes, although he chatted occasionally with Mrs. Manisty beside him, his mother was miserably certain that he was in truth alive to nothing but the white vision under the wall—the delicate three-quarter face, with its pointed chin, and the wisps of gold hair blowing about the temples.

And the owner of the face! Was she quite unmoved by a situation which might, Victoria felt, have strained the nerves even of the experienced?

A slight incident seemed to show that she was not unmoved. Lydia had shown a keen, girlish pleasure in the prospect of sitting to Delorme, the god, professionally, of her idolatry. Yet the sketch, for that afternoon, came to nothing. For after an hour's sitting Delorme, as usual, became restless and excited, exclaimed at the difficulty of the subject, cursed the light, and finally, in a fit of disgust, wiped out everything he had done. Lydia rose from her seat, looking rather white, and threw a strange, appealing glance—the mother caught it—at her young host. Tatham sprang up, released her instantly and peremptorily, though Delorme implored for another half-hour. Lydia, unheard by the artist, gave soft thanks to her deliverer, and, presently, there they were—she and Harry—strolling up and down the rose-alleys together, as though nothing, absolutely nothing, had happened.

And yet Harry had only asked her to marry him the night before, and she had only refused! Impossible to suppose that it was the mere plotting of the finished coquette. This lover required neither teasing nor kindling.

However, there it was. This little struggling artist had refused Harry; and she had refused Duddon.

For one could not be so absurd as to ignore that. Victoria, sitting in the shade beside Lady Barbara, who had gone to sleep, looked dreamily round on the rose-red pile of building, on the great engirdling woods, the hills, the silver reaches of river—interwoven now with the dark tree-masses, now with glades of sunlit pasture. Duddon was one of the great possessions of England. And this slip of a girl, with her home-made blouses, and her joy in making twenty pounds out of her drawings, wherewith to pay the rent, had put it aside, apparently without a moment's hesitation. Magnanimity—or stupidity?

The next moment Victoria was despising her own amazement. "One takes one's own lofty feelings for granted—but never other people's! She says she doesn't love him—and that's the reason. And I straightway don't believe her. What snobs we all are! One's astonishment betrays one's standard. Gerald says, 'What have the poor to do with fine feelings?' and I detest him for it. But I'm no better."

Suddenly, on the other side of the yew hedge behind her—voices. Harry and Lydia Penfold, in eager and laughing discussion. And all at once a name reached her ears:

"Lydia"—pronounced rather shyly, in Tatham's voice.

"Lydia!" No doubt by the bidding of the young lady.

"I did not know I was so old-fashioned," thought Lady Tatham indignantly.

Yet the tone in which the name was given was neither caressing nor tender. It simply meant, of course, that the young woman was breaking him in to her ideas; her absurd ideas, from which Harry must be protected.

They emerged from the shrubbery and came toward her. Lydia timidly approached Victoria. With Tatham she had not apparently been timid. But for his mother she was all deference.

"Isn't there a flower-show here to-morrow? May Susan and I come and help?"

The speaker raised her eyes to Lady Tatham, and Victoria read in them something beautiful and appealing, that at once moved and angered her. The girl seemed to offer her heart to Tatham's mother.

"I can't marry your son!—but let me love you—be your friend!—the friend of both."

Was that what it meant?

What could Victoria do? There was Harry hovering in the background, with that eager, pale look. She was helpless. Mechanically she said, "We shall be delighted—grateful. I will send for you."

Thenceforward, however, Lydia allowed Tatham no more private speech with her. She made herself agreeable to all Victoria's guests in turn. Delorme fell head over ears in love with her, so judicious, yet so evidently sincere were the flatteries she turned upon him, and so docile her consent to another sitting. Sweet, grave Lucy Manisty watched her with fascination. The Manisty boy dragged her to the Long Pond, to show her the water-beasts there, as the best way of marking his approval. Colonel Barton forgot politics to chat with her; and the mocking speculation in Cyril Boden's eyes gradually softened, as the girl's charm and beauty penetrated, little by little, through all the company.

Faversham alone seemed to have no innings with her till he was about to take his departure. Then Victoria noticed that Lydia made a quick movement toward him, and they stood together a few minutes, talking—certainly not as strangers.

Gerald Tatham also noticed it. There were few things, within his powers, that he left unnoticed.

"Now that would be suitable!" he said in Lady Barbara's ear, nodding toward the pair. "You saw how they came in together. But of course it's a blind. Any one with half an eye can see that she's just fishing for Harry!"



XII

Faversham sped home through the winding Cumbrian lanes, driven by the new chauffeur just imported from Manchester. The hedges were thick with meadow-sweet and its scent, mingled with that of new-mown hay, hung in the hot, still air. In front of him the Ullswater mountains showed dimly blue. It was a country he was beginning to love. His heart rose to it.

Small wonder in that! For here, in this northern landscape, so strange to him but three months ago, he had first stumbled on Success—and he had first met Lydia.

Was there any chance for him? Through all his talks with the country neighbours, or with Lady Tatham, he had been keenly on the watch for anything that might show him what Lydia's position in the Duddon Castle circle actually was. That Tatham was in love with her was clear. Mrs. Penfold's chatter as to the daily homage paid by the castle to the cottage, through every channel—courtesies or gifts—that the Tathams' delicacy could invent, or the Penfolds' delicacy accept, had convinced him on that point. And Faversham had seen for himself at Duddon that Tatham hung upon her every movement and always knew where she was and to whom she was talking; nor had the long conversation in the rose-walk escaped him.

Well, of course, in the case of any other girl in the world than Lydia, such things would be conclusive. Who was likely to refuse Tatham, plus the Tatham estates? But unless he had mistaken her altogether—her detachment, her unworldliness, her high spirit—Lydia Penfold was not the girl to marry an estate. And if Tatham himself had touched her heart—"would she have allowed me the play with her that she has done this last fortnight?" She would have been absorbed, preoccupied; and she had been neither. He thought of her kind eyes, her frank, welcoming ways, her intense interest in his fortunes. Impossible—if she were in love with or on the point of an engagement to Harry Tatham.

She had forgiven him for his touch of jealous ill-temper! As they stood together at the last in the Duddon garden, she had said, "I must hear about to-night! send me a word!" And he carried still, stamped upon his mind, the vision of her—half shy, half eager—looking up.

For the rest, the passion that was rapidly rising in the veins of a man full of life and will, surprised the man himself, excited in him a new complacency and self-respect. For years he had said to himself that he could only marry money. He remembered with a blush one or two rather sordid steps in that direction—happily futile. But Lydia was penniless; and he could make her rich. For his career was only beginning; and on wealth, the wealth which is power, he was more than ever determined.

A turn in the road brought Threlfall into view. The new agent sat with folded arms, gazing at the distant outline, and steadily pulling himself together to meet the ordeal of the evening. It was by Melrose's own wish he had drawn up a careful scheme of the alterations and improvements which seemed to him imperatively necessary in the financial interests of the estate; and he had added to it a statement—very cautious and diplomatic—of the various public and private quarrels in which Melrose was now concerned, with suggestions as to what could be done to straighten them out. With regard to two or three of them litigation was already going on; had, indeed, been going on interminably. Faversham was certain that with a little good-will and a very moderate amount of money he could settle the majority of them in a week.

So far Melrose had been fairly amenable—had given a curt assent, for instance, to the conditions on which Faversham had proposed to relet two of the vacant farms, and to one or two other changes. But Faversham realized that he possessed no true knowledge of the old man's mind and temperament. Exultant though he often felt in his new office, and the preposterously large salary attached to it, he reminded himself constantly that he trod on unsure ground. Once or twice he had been conscious of a strange sense as of some couchant beast beside him ready to spring; also of some curious weakening and disintegration in Melrose, even since he had first known him. He seemed to be more incalculable, less to be depended on. His memory was often faulty, and his irritability hardly sane.

Faversham indeed was certain, from his own observation, that the mere excitement of opening and exploring the huge collections he had accumulated, during these twenty years, in the locked rooms of the house, had imposed a sharp nervous strain on a man now past seventy, who for all the latter part of his life had taken no exercise and smoked incessantly.

Supposing he were suddenly to fall ill and die—what would happen to the house and its collections, or to the immense fortune, the proportions of which the new agent was now slowly beginning to appreciate? All sorts of questions with regard to the vanished wife and child were now rising insistently in Faversham's mind. Were they really dead, and if so, how and where? Once or twice, since his acceptance of the agency, Melrose had repeated to him with emphasis: "I am alone in the world." Dixon and his wife preserved an absolute silence on the subject, and loyalty to his employer forbade Faversham to question them or any other of Melrose's dependents. It struck him, indeed, that Mrs. Dixon had shown a curious agitation when, that morning, Faversham had conveyed to her Melrose's instructions to prepare a certain room on the first floor as the agent's future bedroom.