'And then the Pursuivant. You would not like to desert poor Pur,' added Cherry.

'I could do that better in town in some ways.'

'Mr. Underwood would think that as bad as Edgar's drawing,' said Wilmet. 'No, no, Felix, you have learnt one business thoroughly, and it would be foolish to begin a fresh one now. Besides, how about Mr. Froggatt?'

'Of course I should do nothing in such haste as to inconvenience Mr. Froggatt,' said Felix;' and no one is more anxious for our real benefit, if this were possible.'

'But you see it won't do,' reiterated Wilmet.

'Perhaps not,' he answered, with more of a sigh than his sisters expected.

Rather nettled, Wilmet set to work with pencil and paper to calculate expenses, Geraldine looked up at Felix, who had taken up a book, and began to whistle, 'For a' that, an' a' that.'

Presently Wilmet, by way of making assurance sure, went off for her account-book; when he looked up and said,' How should you have liked this, Cherry?'

'I don't know. I've not thought. Did you?'

'I hadn't time before our Pallas Athene settled it; and I believe she is right, if she would not lay it in quite so hard. It only seemed a pity to lose our last chance of a lift in life without at least considering it.'

'I thought you did not care about lifts in life.'

'I ought not. But when it is brought home that we have slipped down two degrees in the social scale, it is tempting to step up one again! However, it plainly cannot be.'

Yet when Wilmet mustered her irrefragable figures to prove how much poorer they would be in London than on their present income at Bexley, he would not go into details, saying that he wanted to hear no more about it, in a tone that a little hurt her. He was so uniformly gentle and gracious, that what would have passed unnoticed in most brothers, was noticed anxiously in him; and as Wilmet darned his shirt sleeve, a glistening came between her eyes and her needle, as she felt the requital of her prudence rather hard. Must all men pant to be out in the world, and be angry with women for withholding them?

Nor was Geraldine devoid of the old prick, when she thought of the degrees in the social scale in connection with the words about tradesmen and merchants.

Wilmet was not quite happy without knowing that the letter of refusal was written, and was more vexed than she liked to show when Felix laughed at her for supposing he could have made time to write it on a busy Saturday, even if there had been any London post to send it by. Poor Alice Knevett got a considerable snubbing for bursting in to ask the decision, and lamenting over it when she had heard it; but she stood her ground with a certain pertinacity of her own: and so late in the evening, that Wilmet had gone up to put Stella to bed, Felix came up with the letter in his hand. It was so carefully expressed, that Cherry could not help saying saucily that it was worthy of the editor of the Pursuivant; while Alice, much impressed by the long words, enthusiastically broke out, 'It is a most beautiful letter, only it ought to have said just the other thing!'

'Why, what would you have done without Cherry?' said Felix.

'I'd have come to stay with her! And it is such a pity! A merchant is a gentleman, and I am sure you could get to be anything—a member of Parliament, or a baronet, or—' as if her imagination could not go farther; but she looked up at him with a dew of eagerness glistening in her bright hazel eyes. 'I was telling Cherry it does seem such a dreadful horrible pity that you should be nailed down in this little hole of a place for life.'

Felix smiled—a man's superior, gratified, but half melancholy smile —as he answered, 'At any rate, you won't lose the pleasures of imagination or of pity.'

'But I want to see you have the spirit to try,' cried Alice, eagerly. 'I know you could.'

'It would not be right,' said Felix, sitting down by her, and in full earnest gentleness and gravity setting before her the reasons that Cherry had hardly thought it worth while really to explain—namely, the impossibility of their being able to pay their way and meet the needful expenses, and the evils of the young, inexperienced household residing in London, resigning security for dependence.

Alice, flattered by being treated as a sensible person, said, 'Yes,' and 'I see,' at all the proper places; then drew a sigh, saying, 'It is very good in you.'

'I knew you would see it in the right light,' replied Felix.

'Oh!' but the sigh recurred. 'I can't help being sorry, you know.'

'There is nothing to be sorry for,' he said gratefully. 'I was disappointed at first myself; but for sheer usefulness to one's neighbour, I believe that this present position, if I have sense to make use of it rightly, is as good as any; and the mere desire of station and promotion is—when one comes to look at it properly— nonsense after all.'

She opened her eyes in amazement, and made a little exclamation.

'They may be well when they come,' said Felix in answer: 'but I have thought it over well to-night, and I see that to do anything doubtfully right for their sake would be a risk for all that I have no right to run.'

Alice hung her head, overcome by the pure air of the region where he was lifting her; and in a sort of shyness at the serious tone in which he had spoken, he added, smiling,

'Then you'll forgive the "sound of it."'

'O Mr. Underwood,' she said, in the simplest and most earnest voice that Cherry had ever heard from her, 'I'm ashamed to recollect that nonsense!'



CHAPTER XIV

WHAT IT MAY LEAD TO



'I never was so berhymed since I was an Irish rat, which I can scarcely remember.'—As You Like It.

'Dim memories haunt the child, Of lives in other beings led— Other, and yet the same.' KEBLE.

In the autumn Alda made a visit at home. She had, as usual, gone with Mr. and Mrs. Underwood to their German baths, and had there fallen in with a merry set of her intimates in London, who had persuaded her to join them in an expedition to the Tyrol, which lasted till the end of September. On her return, she was dropped at Bexley, where her sisters were greatly edified by her sketch-book, a perfect journal in clever scenes and groups, like the 'Voyage en zig-zag.' Two of the gentlemen seemed always in waiting on the graceful outline that did duty for Alda; and indeed, she gave Wilmet to understand that only the skill that played them off one against the other had averted an offer from each, hundreds of miles from home, when it would have been so very inconvenient! Every morning Wilmet considered how her dinner would appear if one or both should suddenly drop in to pursue his courtship.

Even Felix, though he had pooh-poohed the mysterious whisper from his sisters, was startled at the apparition of a picturesque figure; in Tyrolese hat, green knickerbockers, belt, knapsack, loose velvet coat, and fair moustache, marching full into the shop; and while the customers who were making it a rendezvous gazed in doubt between gamekeepers and stage banditti, holding out a hand too fair and dainty for either character, and exclaiming, 'How are you, Mr. Froggatt! Hollo, Felix!'

Mr. Froggatt was amazed beyond measure, and it was only on hearing the ring of the mirthful laugh that he exclaimed, 'Mr. Edgar This is an alteration. You will find the young ladies up-stairs.'

Felix was disengaged at the moment, and could take him through the parlour, too glad to have him there at all to utter the faintest wish that he would have rung at the private door; and he ushered him into the drawing-room with the words, 'Here's the artist who has begun with himself;' and then retreated.

'Edgar! oh, you wonderful boy!' cried happy Geraldine, as he threw his arms round her; while Alda asked: 'Is that the thing now, Edgar?'

'Quite comifo,' he answered. 'Ha, little ones, have you forgotten me?'

'Stella says you're the clarionet in the brass band,' said Bernard. 'What have you got in that pack?'

'Munitions of war!' he answered, unstrapping his bag, and producing packets of French bon-bons, bought on his way home, from the sketching tour Mr. Renville always made with sundry of his pupils in early autumn. 'Gobble them up, little mice, before the cat comes home.'

Stella paused with a dutiful 'May I?' and Cherry had to interfere between the little maiden's scruples, Bernard's omnivorous inclination, and Theodore's terror at any new article of food; while Alda and Edgar exchanged eager question and answer:

'You've been at home. You've seen them all?'

'I dined there on Sunday—might do so any day; they can't do without me, that's a fact.'

'Nor me, I imagine,' said Alda. 'I suppose I am to go back with you?'

'So Madam proposed; but the fact is, that Molly has done uncommonly well without you this time.'

'What do you mean ?' asked Alda, sharply.

'What think you of a friend of Cherry?'

'I haven't got any friends.'

'Think again! Not the great convert, the Cacique of all the Mexicos?'

'Ferdinand Travis! You don't mean it?'

'I don't; but the elders mean it, and the youngers will do it.'

'Do tell me! I can't understand,' cried Alda, much excited. 'We have never met him.'

'The uncle or father—which?

'The uncle.'

'Well, the uncle has been in England, and fraternised with our governor at Peter Brown's; there was a banqueting all round, and his nephew was carried at his chariot wheels. If I am not much mistaken, gold and timber jingled to silver and bullock-hide, and concluded a prospective union in the persons of my nephew and my daughter. I'm sorry. I have long been persuaded that a very small effort on the part of our respected Blunderbore might have redeemed the family fortunes in the person of Polly.'

'How could you think of anything so absurd?' said Alda.

'As if my uncle would consent!'

'If Tom has any sentiment, it is for my father and the name of Underwood,' said Edgar. 'You remember he was sorely disappointed that Felix would not step into my shoes.'

'And very angry and hurt,' said Alda, 'as well he might be.'

'Yes; but that anger proved the vastness of his good intentions. Besides there's something about our old giant—steadiness and breeding, I believe—that uniformly makes Tom knock under to him; and there's a peculiar affinity of good sense between him and Marilda, that ought to have ripened under favourable circumstances.'

'And is he really cut out!' said Alda. 'I don't know how to believe this! How far has it gone?'

'Hanger on and oyster in love,' promptly answered Edgar.

'Honest Polly has the most comical look of anxious coyness on her jolly face, and holds her elbows squarer than ever; and a few paces off stands Montezuma, magnificent and melancholic; and Edgar assumed the posture.

'Melancholy, no wonder,' said the conscious beauty; 'Edgar he must be over head and ears in debt.'

'So it struck me; but he must have managed it uncommon quietly, for they call him the Mexican Muff, he's hand and glove with all their holinesses up at Clement's shop, and the wildest orgie he has been detected at was their magic-lantern.'

'Then it is real goodness that draws them together!' exclaimed Cherry, looking up from her presidency over the comfits.

'Goodness and a balance,' said Edgar.

'Did you know,' said Cherry, 'that as soon as he came of age, he paid the Insurance all the money for the Fortinbras Arms? The agents were quite overwhelmed, and wanted to put it in the Pursuivant.'

She was cut short by the return of Wilmet and Angela, accompanied by Miss Knevett. The effect of Edgar's appearance was startling. Alice gave a little scream of surprise, Angela crept behind her sisters, and Wilmet stood for a moment like a stag at gaze; then, as he said, 'Well, Mettie, are you going to send for the police?' exclaimed, 'You, Edgar! What a figure you have made of yourself!'

'See how our eldest crushes me!' said Edgar. 'Such a face as yours, Mettie, ought not to be wedded to the commonplace.'

'I suppose it is like German artists,' said Wilmet, trying to resign herself.

'It is such a beautiful becoming dress,' whispered Alice to Geraldine; while Edgar rattled on—'No wonder there is a deterioration in taste from living in the very tents of the Philistines. Why, Cherry, how do you bear existence surrounded by such colours as these?'

'The paper?' asked Wilmet, surprised. 'It is rather a large pattern, to be sure.'

'I call it cruelty to animals to shut Cherry up among the eternal abortive efforts of that gilded trellis to close upon those blue dahlias, crimson lilacs, and laburnums growing upwards, tied with huge ragged magenta ribbons. They would wear out my brain.'

'Well, I think when you remember our old paper, you might be thankful!' said Wilmet.

'Precisely what I do, and am not thankful. What our paper may have been in its earlier stages of existence, I am not prepared to say, but since I can remember, that hateful thing, the pattern, could only be traced by curious researches in dark corners, and the wall presented every nuance of purplish salmon or warm apricot.'

'Dear old paper!' cried Cherry. 'Yes, wasn't it soft, deepening off in clouds and bars, sunsets and storm-clouds, to make stories about?'

'Where it was most faded and grimy,' said Wilmet. 'It is all affectation not to be glad to have clean walls.'

'Clean!' cried Edgar, in horror. 'Defend me from the clean! Bare, bald, and frigid, with hard lines breaking up and frittering your background. If walls are ornamented at all, it should not be in a poor material like paper, but rich silk or woollen tapestry hangings.'

'We couldn't have tapestry now,' said Alice, in a puzzled voice.

'Then, '"Comrades, take warning by my fall, And have it strong or not at all."'

'Not walls,' laughed Cherry.

'Let them be of natural, or, at any rate, uniform tint; and cover them with your own designs of some character and purpose, not patterns bought by the yard.'

'Oh! I see what you would be at,' said Wilmet quaintly.

'You are bewailing the loss of your great Man Friday.'

'Achilles, I beg your pardon.'

'He never would come out,' said Angela; 'he came through the whitewash after the measles.'

'I wonder what the present inhabitants think of him,' said Cherry. 'One comfort is, if he is a bogy now, they may show him some day as an early effort of Sir Edgar Underwood, President of the Royal Academy.'

'Oh dear! I must go!' cried Alice. 'I only came to fetch a pattern for Aunt Maria, and she is waiting for it; but you are all so delightful here.'

'What pretty little thing have you picked up there?' asked Edgar, as she went.

'Have we not told you of Miss Pearson's niece?'

'You should take her likeness, Cherry, as a relief from the classically severe.'

Cherry opened her portfolio, and showed two or three water-coloured drawings of the graceful little head and piquant features. Edgar criticised, and promised a lesson; and the sitter, nothing loth, though rather coy, was caught. She blushed and smiled, and took exception at little personalities, and laughed her forgiveness, going through a play of countenance very perplexing to the pupil, but much relished by the master, as he called up the pout and smile by turns, and played with her little airs.

He took Alda back on Monday, but promised to come home for Christmas, and kept his word. Perhaps the Renville wirthschaft afforded less contrast with home than did the Underwood menage; and, in spite of the Philistine furniture, the rooms in the High Street agreed better with his tastes than the old house in St. Oswald's Buildings. He was above objecting to the shop; and whereas Clement carefully avoided the public precincts, he was often there, hunting up books, reading newspapers, gossiping with Mr. Froggatt or with Redstone, and always ensuring himself a welcome by the free bright sweetness of his manner and his amusing talk.

It was a prosperous winter; Felix, as partner and acknowledged editor, was in a more comfortable position both as to income and authority. Other matters were going well. Fulbert, to the general surprise, turned out a capital letter-writer, and sent home excellent accounts of himself, working heartily in a situation in the post- office, which Mr. Audley's Somerville interest had managed to secure for him. Moreover, all close scholarships had not been abolished, and Felix's opportunities in the newspaper line had enabled him to discover one at St. Cadoc's, a small college at Cambridge, to be competed for by the natives of the county where Clement had fortunately been born. A letter to the parish clerk of Vale Leston, to ask for the baptismal register of Edward Clement Underwood, produced a reply from a well-remembered old Abednego Tripp, who declared himself 'horned and rejoiced' at hearing from Master Felix, and at being able to do anything for one of the Reverend Mr. Edward's sons. The competition was not very severe; Clement obtained the scholarship, and therewith his maintenance for three years to come; and he was at the same time able to exercise a bit of patronage on his sisters' behalf, more gratifying to his own feelings than theirs. Mr. Fulmort's unmarried sisters had lived in the country with a former governess, until on the death of the elder, the survivor decided on employing her very considerable fortune in establishing a school where girls of small means might be prepared for becoming first-rate governesses, with special openings for the daughters of poor clergy and of missionaries.

One of the first families thought of was that of the favourite chorister; so Angela, now ten years old, was nominated at once, to the relief of Wilmet, who did not think her romping intimacies with the girls at Miss Pearson's very desirable. Moreover, after a correspondence between Miss Fulmort and Miss Lyveson, it was decided that Robina should be transferred to the new school at Brompton with her sister, partly by way of infusing a trustworthy element, and partly that her studies might be perfected by London masters. Robina, whose allegiance to Miss Lyveson was most devoted, was greatly grieved, but she was a reasonable, womanly little being, aware that governess-ship was her profession, and resolute to qualify herself; so though she came home with tell-tale spots under her eyes, she replied to all condolences with, 'I know it's right what must be must;' and her spirits rose when Lance came home, bound only to return during the holidays on two or three special days when his voice was indispensable at the cathedral.

Edgar and he together kept the house in continual merriment, so that the sober pillars of the house found themselves carried along, they knew not whither.

'I have had a serious application,' said Felix one evening. 'A solemn knock came to the office door, and an anxious voice came in—"Please, brother, I want to speak to you." There stood the little Star! I thought at least she had broken the chandelier, but no such thing. It was, "Please, brother, mayn't I have a birthday?"'

'Poor little darling!' cried some voices.

'What could have put it into her head?' said Wilmet.

'She said all little girls had birthdays, and Ellen Bruce had told Angel all about the dance in honour of hers.'

'Ah!' said Wilmet, 'we'll have Angel out of the way of that kind of chatter.'

'Poor little maid! of course I had to quench her,' said Felix, as far as her own day was concerned. I told her more about it than she had ever heard, but then she took me aback by saying Father was happy, and she thought he would like her to be happy.'

'You didn't consent!' exclaimed Wilmet.

'I represented that it was Theodore's birthday as well, and that strangers would make him miserable. She was really very good, and I want you just to consider whether we could not do something—of course on a different day—but in the course of the holidays, by way of treat. Surely you could invite some of Miss Pearson's pupils.'

'I don't like to begin, Felix,' said Wilmet; 'there would be reciprocity, and no one knows where it might lead to.'

'A few white muslin frocks—eh, W. W.? I think we could stand them.'

'That is not all I mean,' said Wilmet; 'it is the sort of style of thing. It would be all very well to have a few little girls here, but they would all ask us again, and I could not answer for what might happen at their homes.'

'It is out!' said Edgar. 'Now we know the sort of style of thing it might lead to. Minerva under a mistletoe bough.'

'Hurrah!' burst out Lance, in convulsions of mirth, which infected Felix and Cherry; while Wilmet, as simple as she was discreet, blushed up to the tips of her ears, and tried to defend herself.

'They tell me of doings at their parties that are what I should not like for our little girls, and I don't think you would, Felix.'

'Forfeits, to wit?' asked Edgar. 'Or cards, or waltzing. You may as well be explicit, Mettie.'

'No, no,' said Felix, 'Mettie shall not be teased: she is right in the main.' But his tone was that he always used when her prudence was too much for him.

'And the family refinement is to be secured by sitting in ashes all Christmas,' said Edgar. 'Slightly unchristian, it strikes me.'

'But,' continued Felix, 'out of these domestic ashes, we must get up some sport for the children. I stand committed to Stella.'

'Shall I get Bill Harewood, and do Box and Cox?' suggested Lance.

'Might we not get up something they could take part in themselves?' said Cherry; 'Cinderella, or some such little play?—Edgar, you know how to manage such things.

'Wilmet doesn't know where they would lead to,' gravely responded Edgar.

'To Lance's going off with a circus,' said Felix.

'I always had a great mind to do so,' responded Lance. 'To sing comic songs on one leg on a spotted horse's back, and go about day and night in a yellow van drawn by elephants—I call that life!'

'Secure a berth for me as scene-painter!' cried Edgar. 'See how I'd draw a house by the very outline of Mazeppa outside!'

'And Felix will print all our advertisements gratis!'

'Oh!' broke in Cherry, 'I have a notion. Couldn't we make a play of the conjuror in disguise? It is Dr. Knowall in German popular tales, Robin the Conjuror in English.'

'Nothing foolish, I hope?' seriously asked Wilmet.

'Oh no. Don't you recollect? The story is, that a set of thieves steal a jewel, a man comes shamming conjuror and offering to find it for the owner, intending to trust to chance, and feast at her expense as long as he is not found out.'

'I remember!' exclaimed Lance, you used to tell us the story. Somebody suspects him, and brings a creature shut up in a covered dish to ask him to tell what it was—and it happens to be a robin; so when he cries out, "Oh, poor Robin!" thinking himself done for, out hops the bird, and the enemy is sold.'

'Yes; and then he counts his dinners every day, and the thieves who have come to look on think he is counting them, and throw themselves on his mercy.'

'It has capabilities,' said Edgar.

'But the moral!' said Wilmet.

'What! Not the lesson against dealing with conjurors? demanded Edgar. 'I'll undertake to arm your pupils against spirit-rapping for ever.'

'In that point of view—' said Wilmet doubtfully.

'In that point of view,' said Felix, laughing, 'it has my vote.'

'I don't like deception to succeed,' said Wilmet; 'but at least there's none of the worst sort of nonsense.'

Lance leapt up and performed a pas seul, insisting that Bill Harewood must come and be a robber; and Edgar and Cherry instantly had their heads together as playwrights and managers.

'Never mind, Wilmet,' said Felix at their bedroom doors that night. 'Remember, Father never was a man for all work and no play.'

'I don't mind play, but I don't know what this may lead to;' then, as Felix laughed merrily at the repetition, she followed him into his room, saying, 'I mean, I have no trust in Edgar's discretion, or Lance's either, and all sorts of things may be put into the children's heads.'

'You can't keep children's heads a blank,' said Felix, 'and Edgar's good taste ought to be trusted in his own home, for his own sisters. Even you might stretch a few points to keep him happy and occupied with Cherry. Besides, I believe we do live a duller life than can be really good for any one. It can't be right to shut up all these young things all their holidays without any pleasure.'

'I thought,' said Wilmet, her eyes growing moist, 'it was pleasure enough to be all at home together.'

'So it is, to staid old fogies like you and me,' said Felix, kissing her; 'but the young ones want a lark now and then, and I confess I should be immensely disappointed if this fun didn't come off. No, no, W. W., I can't have you an old cat; you are much too young and pretty.'

The levity of this conclusion shocked Wilmet beyond remonstrance. Was Felix falling from his height of superiority, or was her strictness wearisome?

Meantime, Geraldine's brain was ringing with doggrel rhymes, and whirling with stage contrivances, in the delight of doing something with Edgar, whether versifying or drawing; and as Felix said, to keep him happy at home for Christmas was no small gain, even though it brought a painful realisation that their feast was not his feast.

Geraldine suffered in silence, for a word from her was always put down by some tender jest, avowing as much inferiority in goodness as superiority in intellect. As to Clement, Edgar's sport was to startle him with jokes, dilemmas, and irreverences, and then to decline discussion on the ground that he never argued with sisters, and that Clement would understand when he went to Cambridge. Otherwise, the subject was avoided at home, but Edgar consorted a good deal with Mr. Ryder, calling him the only person in the town, except Cherry, who knew the use of a tongue, and one day, when Felix was assisting his old master in a search through old newspapers in the reading- room, Mr. Ryder said, 'By-the-by, your brother Edgar has a good deal more of the talk of the day than you can be prepared for.'

'I am afraid so, sir,' said Felix; 'but he does not put it forth much at home.'

'So I hoped. It would have startled your father a good deal; but I believe myself acting in the spirit of his wishes in letting him talk out his crudities.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Felix, not quite knowing how to take this.

'It is a phase to be passed through,' said Mr. Ryder. 'Indeed, a good deal of it is fashion and vanity.'

'Mr. Audley thinks so,' replied Felix. 'He said he thought poor Edgar did not think enough to have real doubt, but that he considered other people's a dispensation from attending to the subject at all.'

'Exactly,' said Mr. Ryder, 'except so far as repeating what he has caught up seems to him knowing, and according to the spirit of the time, fit to dazzle us down here. Whatever may deepen him will probably change all that—I do not say into what you or your father would wish; but what is jargon now will pass away into something more real, for better or—'

'For worse?' asked Felix anxiously, as he paused.

'I do not say so,' returned Mr. Ryder. 'Perhaps what I chiefly wished at this moment was to clear myself in your eyes of treachery to your father.'

'No, sir, that I never could suspect.'

But the conversation might well leave heaviness behind it. Was it come to Edgar's views being such as to startle Mr. Ryder! who, for that matter, had of late shown much less laxity of opinion than in his younger and more argumentative days; and there was little comfort in supposing that these were not real honest doubts at all, only apologies for general carelessness and irreligion.

Yet with even this trouble in the recess of the heart, this was the merriest winter the Underwood household had known since their father's time.

Edgar chose to frame the play upon the Italian form of the story, where the impostor is a starveling poet, nicknamed Signor Topo, or Master Ratton, because his poverty had brought him to live in a hay- loft. This character he assumed, and no doubt it fitted him better than either the English cobbler or the German doctor; besides, as he said, sham court costume is always the easiest to contrive: but Cherry was by no means prepared to find the Rat-like poet the secret admirer of a daughter of the Serene Highness who owned the jewel.

'Such a monstrous interpolation,' quoth Geraldine.

'Interpolations are the beauty of the thing. It would be as flat as a pancake without.'

'And Wilmet won't like it.'

'Wilmet must be brought to the level of ordinary human nature.'

'I don't feel as if this were using her well. You know she expressly consented to this "because there was no nonsense in it."'

'I.e. if it had been Cinderella, it would have been improper; if the Sleeping Beauty, highly scandalous. Eh, Cherie?'

'You know I think Mettie does carry her scruples pretty far,' said Geraldine, trying not to laugh, 'but I won't be a party to cheating her; and if this young princess is to come in, she must be told of it.'

'Or she will take out her Gorgon's head in the midst, and petrify her subjects! Maybe it will be safest to prepare her. You see, such discipline reigns here, that a poor Bohemian like me doesn't know where to be.'

Accordingly, Edgar said in his airy way, 'O Mettie, by-the-by, we have put in a part for little Miss Knevett.'

'Indeed! I thought it was to be all among ourselves. Have you spoken to her?'

'Of course; and she is in the ecstatic state of preparation of spangles and coronets.'

'I wish you had spoken before. It would be hard to disappoint her now. What is she to be?'

'Nothing less than heroine. There must be some sort of conventional catastrophe, or the whole concern falls flat.'

'I don't see why it should not fall flat,' said Wilmet, with a sober air that drove Cherry into an uncontrollable convulsion of laughter; 'it would amuse the children just as well.'

'The children of six, maybe,' said Edgar gravely, 'but hardly the children of sixteen. Have you no mercy on them, my venerable sister?'

Wilmet had arrived at such a pass of resignation as to perceive that 'a fuss' on her part might be more mischievous than any 'nonsense' in which Edgar was likely to indulge in public, especially with Geraldine as his coadjutor. She tried to obtain some reassurance that there was 'nothing more silly than needful in this play of yours.'

'No, indeed. There is just a little mock courtship; but as that is the case with nine-tenths of the stories in the world, I don't think you gain much by turning it out.'

'I did hope for once in a way we ourselves might be quit of it.'

'It is hard on you,' said Cherry, smiling; 'but it would make a great uproar to disturb all now.'

'At any rate, I have found the old receipt for tea-cakes,' responded Wilmet, whose mind was almost as much preoccupied with the entertainment of the body as her sister's with that of the mind.

She had relented so far as to invite two little girls and their widowed mother, from whom there was no danger of reciprocities, Lance had prevailed to have Will Harewood as one of the robbers; and the Miss Pearsons were coming to behold their niece; besides which, Stella having imparted the great secret to Mr. Froggatt, Felix found the good old gentleman and his wife burning to have an invitation. Thus the party would be the largest Wilmet had ever contemplated; and the mysteries of tea and supper were so congenial to her housewifely soul, that she did not distress herself about the frequent rehearsals in Miss Pearson's empty school-room, the transformations of garments under the needles of Cherry and Robina, nor even the wildness and ecstacy of all the children from Lance downwards, all bursting with secrets, and letting them out at every corner of their grinning mouths.

It must soon be over, and Felix seemed to be enjoying it thoroughly; and Wilmet could tolerate a great deal when either Felix or Alda enjoyed. He was much too busy with Christmas accounts to undertake any part that needed learning, but he was pressed into the service as a courtier, only with a dispensation from either speaking or rehearsing; while Wilmet utterly scouted any idea of taking any share in the drama, having enough to do in her own character.

And in that character she was left alone to entertain the guests, for even Cherry was in request as prompter and assistant dresser—nay, with the assistance of Theodore's accordion, formed the whole band of musicians at the ball which opened the performance, and which required the entire corps dramatique. Robina, as the Elderly Princess, demonstratively dropped her bracelet, with a ruby about as big as a pigeon's egg (being the stopper of a scent-bottle), and after the dancers had taken some trouble not to step on it, they retired, and it was stolen by the gang of robbers, cloaked up to their corked eyebrows and moustaches.

Then appeared in his loft—supplied with straw culled from packages at the printing-house—the poet, well got up in his knickerbockers and velvet smoking-cap, scarf and guitar, soliloquising in burlesque rhyme on his fallen state and hopeless admiration, and looking very handsome and disconsolate, until startled by the cry behind the scenes—

'O yes! O yes! O yes! By command of her Highness! Lost, stolen, or strayed, Gone to the dogs or mislaid, Her Highness' splendid ruby. Whoso finds it—wit or booby, Tinker, tailor, soldier, lord— Let him ask what he will, he shall have his reward.'

Thereupon the poet, communicating his designs in a stage soliloquy, disguised himself in a tow wig and beard, and a railway rug turned up with yellow calico; and the scene shifting to the palace, he introduced himself to the Elderly Princess as the greatest of spiritualists—so great, that—

'Detective police are an ignorant fable: No detective can equal a walnut-wood table.'

But he required as a medium a maiden fair and lovely, but with a heart as yet untouched, otherwise the spirits might be offended. The only lady who was available was, of course, the youthful princess Fiordespina, whose alarm and reluctance had been contrived so as to be highly flattering to the disguised poet.

The dinner scenes, at which the robbers presented themselves in turn, and imagined that they heard themselves counted, went off in due order; also the test, when the courtiers tried to pose the spiritualist with making him divine what they brought him in a covered dish, and were disconcerted by his sighing out,

'Alas! alas! see envy batten On the unhappy Master Ratton!'

while the rat leaped out from beneath the lid!

Then came the avowal by the robber: but the conclusion was so far varied, that the jewel having been judiciously hidden, the poet made use of his voice and his guitar to throw the Lady Fiordespina into a mesmeric sleep before the court, and then to cause a table to rap out the letters, which she interpreted so as to lead to the spot.

It was the prettiest scene of all, his music and song were so graceful; and in spite of some suppressed giggling, the attitude and countenance of Fiordespina were so very pretty in her trance. Nothing more was left save the restoration of the ruby, the claiming of the reward, and the final tableau, in which Ratton and Fiordespina, in their native good mien, had their hands joined by the benignant Elderly Princess; while, to the equal amusement and confusion of all, good old Mrs. Froggatt fairly burst out crying with excitement and admiration!

Mrs. Vincent, the young widow, was likewise enchanted, and so was Miss Maria Pearson; but Wilmet could not quite fathom the tone of the elder and graver sister, or decide whether it were her own dissatisfaction that made her think Miss Pearson had not expected to see such a role bestowed upon her niece.

The doors between the drawing-room and the theatre were opened again; the boys handed round negus and lemonade; and Felix, standing over Cherry, said, 'Lance's circus speculation would not be a bad one. There's plenty of dramatic talent in the family.'

'Did you like it, Felix!'

'I could tell exactly which parts were yours and which Edgar's,' was the ambiguous answer, as he turned to secure the Princess Fiordespina for the dance that was to crown the performance.

'O Mr. Underwood! Oh yes, thank you! but—'

'Is it part of the programme that wizard and medium should dance together?'

'Oh no! Only it seems so funny to think of your dancing.'

'What, you thought a stationer must be stationary?'

'O Mr. Underwood, what a shocking pun!' and she was led off sparkling with pretty laughter; while the conjuror muttering,

'The gouty oak began to move And flounder into hornpipes,'

turned graciously on little Susie Vincent, and scared as much as he elevated her, by claiming her as his partner.

Will Harewood, dashing across the room, and looking earnestly with his bold and now flushed face up to Wilmet, blurted out, 'Miss Underwood, now please, let me dance with you.'

'Thank you,' she said graciously; 'but I believe I must play for them.'

'I'll do that,' said Clement, over her head.

'The Dead March in Saul?' murmured Edgar.

'Nonsense!' broke out Mrs. Vincent, starting up; 'what am I good for but to play?'

So Clement, who thought he had found an escape, was reduced to the necessity of asking the other little Vincent; and Wilmet's smile of consent so elated Bill Harewood, that he could not help flying across to that very happy and well-matched pair, the Elderly Princess and First Robber, to tell them, 'I've got her.'

'Who?'

'Why, your sister.'

'You've never been and made up to Wilmet!' said Lance, as if this instance of valour crowned his merits.

'Yes, I have; and she will. You see there ain't another gentleman out of the family except the old Froggy, and the little one has got him. Well, I always wished beyond anything to dance with Miss Underwood!'

'Did you?' said Robina. 'I never should have thought of that.'

'Most likely not,' said Bill; 'but she is the most beautiful woman I ever did or shall see in all my life;' and he flew back to her side.

'Is she?' said Robina, altogether amazed.

'Well, perhaps,' said Lance; 'you know one might go a long way without finding any one so handsome.'

'Then I wish people wouldn't say so. It seems making our Wilmet common, like any other girl, to care for her being pretty.'

'So Froggy's dancing with Stella,' observed Lance. I declare I'll try if Mrs. Frog won't stand up with me. Some one ought. You'll not mind waiting, Bobbie. It is not often one has the chance to dance with a cap like that.'

Bobbie resigned herself amicably, and Lance, with his bright arch face, made his bow and half polite, half saucy addresses to Mrs. Froggatt in her magnificent head-gear, making her laugh herself almost to tears again as she declined. He held the Miss Pearsons in greater awe, and ventured on neither; so that Robina had him for Sir Roger de Coverley, where the sole contretemps arose from Angel and Bear being in such boisterous spirits that Wilmet decreed that they must not be partners again. Of the rest, some had a good deal of dancing-master experience; Mrs. Harewood's impromptu merry-makings had afforded plenty of practice to the two choristers; even Clement had had a certain school-feast training; and Felix, with a good ear, ready eye, and natural ease of movement, acquitted himself to Miss Knevett's eagerly expressed admiration.

'Take care, Master Ratton will be jealous,' said Edgar, as he claimed her for the next dance, a quadrille.

'Jealous! oh no! Some people one never thinks of complimenting.'

Cherry caught the words, and wondered what they meant.

A few more dances, and then came Wilmet's anxiously contrived supper.

'I say,' observed Will Harewood to Lance, 'why can't we have things like this at home?'

''Tisn't their nature to,' judiciously responded Lance.

'This cream is quite up to the grub we get after a crack let-off in the Close,' added Will; for requisitions for their voices at private concerts had made the choir connoisseurs in the relics of feasts.

'Better, I should say,' returned Lance. 'Mettie doesn't make it of soap, or arsenic, or verdigris, like old Twopenny.'

'What! you don't mean that she made it herself!'

'Of course! who else should?'

'My eyes! And to see her looking like that!' Then, with a deep sigh, 'If I could only book her for my wife on the spot!'

Whence it may be inferred, that Stella's birthday party was not only a brilliant success, but might, in Wilmet's phrase, 'lead to something.' All it seemed to have led to at present was a discovery on the part of the good Miss Pearsons, that the household they had been wont to pity as small orphan children, now contained three fine young men.

At least Geraldine connected this with the desire they expressed that Alice might enjoy the same opportunities as Robina of giving her acquirements a final polish, up to diploma pitch. A correspondence commenced, resulting in Miss Knevett being engaged as teacher, being remunerated by lessons in languages and accomplishments. The arrangement gave universal satisfaction; Cherry could not detect any regret on the part of Felix; Alice would still spend her holidays with her aunts; and the sense that her departure was near made the intercourse between the two houses more frequent and familiar than it had ever yet been.

One evening Cherry, while looking up a quotation for Felix in Southey's Doctor, lit on his quaint theory of the human soul having previously migrated through successive stages of vegetable and animal life, and still retaining something characteristic from each transmigration. Her brothers were a good deal tickled with the idea; and Lance exclaimed, 'I know who must have been rhubarb, queen-wasp, and a hen-harrier.'

'Oh, that's too bad!' cried Robina.

'Why a hen-harrier?' asked Felix, recognising, like almost all the others.

'One of the birds of prey where the female is bigger than her mate,' drily observed Edgar.

'Besides,' said Cherry,' recollect the hen-harrier's countenance in pictures, with beady eyes, and a puffed supercilious smile about the beak.'

'Why, that's Lady Price!' chimed in Alice, making the discovery at last.

Lengthily and gravely Edgar uttered the words, 'Puzzle-monkey, praying mantis, sacred stork, howler.'

Lance and Robin roared with merriment, and after one glance at Clement's half virtuous, half offended countenance, Felix and Cherry fell into like convulsions; while Alice exclaimed, 'But who is it?' and Angel shouted the sufficiently evident answer, 'Clement, oh! the howler, the black preaching monkey in a natural surplice!'

'I can't think how you do it!' exclaimed Alice.

'I object to the mantis,' Cherry struggled to say. 'Nasty hypocritical creature that eats things up.'

'Praying for its living, eh, Cherry?' said wicked Edgar. 'If you had ever seen the long thin animal, with head back, hands joined, and pious attitude, you couldn't doubt.'

And as he spoke he sketched his mischievous likeness, at which the mirth grew more furious; while Cherry, always the most easily excited, uttered in a strangled voice, 'A parsnip, a barn-door hen, a dilapidated Guernsey cow, an old mother whale.'

'O Cherry, Cherry, you've immortalised yourself!' shouted Lance. 'How did you hit off the parsnip? the very thing that had stumped me.'

'The colour, and the odd sort of sweetness,' said Cherry.

'Won't we have fun with it when I go back!' cried Lance.—'Not tell? Nonsense! Why, no one will enjoy it like Mother Harewood herself.'

'Only don't say I made it. There, Edgar has got one.'

'Touch-me-not balsam, blister-fly, bantam-cock (full strut), black terrier.'

He did not caricature this time except with the muscles of his face, and with these he contrived to put on four different aspects, each so exactly like Mr. Mowbray Smith that not even Alice required the proclamation of the name; and Wilmet gravely said, 'I do not think this is a proper sort of game. It must be ill-natured or irreverent.'

'That depends,' said Geraldine, now thoroughly in the swing.— Here! Hawthornden apple-tree, stickleback, goldfinch, beaver.'

'The hardy Norseman's house of yore Was on the foaming wave,'

sang out Lance, recalling Theodore's substitute for Felix's name.

'Exactly like—figures, tastes, and all,' said Edgar, scanning Felix's clear, bright, fresh face, glossy hair, and rather short figure, at once trim and sturdy. 'The goldfinch hit him off exactly, but I don't see the force of the apple-tree.'

'You would,' said Cherry, 'if you were properly acquainted with our three trees and their individualities. The Hawthornden is a resolute looking fellow, but it indulges in the loveliest pink and white blossoms, and waxen, delicate, peachy fruit.'

'Uncommonly sour! Thank you, Cherry,' said Felix.

'Not in a pie,' suggested Alice.

'Properly treated and sweetened, eh ?' asked he, smiling on her.

'But why is Felix like a stickleback?' said Angela.

'Don't you know?' said Cherry; 'a beautiful bright little fish, and the good male one swims up and down taking care of the nest.'

'I do like the beaver,' allowed Wilmet. 'It always was my favourite beast.'

'It hits off the respectable householder element,' added Edgar. 'Three flaps of his broad tail rule beaverdom like Jupiter's nod.'

'I have one,' interposed Robina.—'Bella-donna lily, working bee, menura—'

'Hold hard!' called Lance; 'is a menura fish, flesh, or fowl?'

'Fowl: the lyre-tailed pheasant, that makes a shelter for its nest with its own tail.'

'Decided liar tale,' muttered Edgar.

'Go on, Bobbie,' Felix encouraged her. The pheasant suits both the twins as well as the bella-donna. Any more?'

'Perhaps the leading stag of the herd.'

'Don't make us like that proud, cowardly, tyrannical beast,' exclaimed Wilmet.

'I have seen you look exactly like one,' said Geraldine. 'That and the pheasant both give the notion of your neck.'

'Such a set of trumpery gaudy things!' grumbled Wilmet. 'Nothing but the bee is tolerable.'

'I did think of a speckled Hamburg hen, and a nice quiet she-goat,' said Robina; 'but they are all dowdy, and would not suit Alda.'

'There's something in the theory,' said Edgar. 'That belladonna approves itself perfectly—so delicate and stately, and yet so essentially unpoetical.'

'That Mettie takes as a compliment,' said Felix, 'only she would rather have been a potato, or a cabbage.'

'Now,' said Cherry, 'you will all know—bell-heather, the grasshopper, the lark, and the squirrel.'

'Is this the lark's crest, or the squirrel's tail!' said Felix, giving an elder brother's pull to the boy's highest wave of hair.

'Or the grasshopper's leap?' cried Lance, springing on him for a bout of buffeting and skirmishing; in the midst of which Alice was heard wondering how the riddles, as she thought them, were either made or guessed.

'They come,' said Geraldine. 'I am only afraid we shall fall into a trick of making them for everybody.'

'I wonder what you would make for me.'

Geraldine had it on her tongue's end that Alice would be difficult, for want of anything distinctive, but Felix and Edgar were both jotting something down, and Robina was before-hand with either— 'Scarlet pimpernel, tortoiseshell butterfly, budgerigar, marmoset.'

No one answered, for Felix had pushed a slip of paper over to Alice, on which she read—"'Forget-me-not, ladybird, linnet, kitten." I don't think I ever saw a linnet. Isn't it a little brown bird?'

'With a rich glow of red, and a beautiful song,' said Felix, smiling; and the red glowed redder on her cheek, as she said, laughing, 'Kitten for mischief, eh? For shame, Mr. Underwood!—What, another! Dear me, I shall not know myself!'

This had been slipped into her hand; and Cherry suspected that her exclamation had been a mistake of which she was conscious, as the colour deepened on her already blushing cheeks, and her eyes were cast down, while a demure smile played on her lips. The incautious exclamation had betrayed her, and the young ones clamoured to hear Edgar's view of her transmigration; but there was a little coy struggle of 'Oh no, she wouldn't, and she couldn't.'

'She smiled and blushed, and oft did say Her pretty oath by yea or nay.'

And in the midst came the message that the maid was arrived to take her home; and this being a cross stiff personage, who might never be kept waiting, she had to hurry away; and had no sooner gone than Angela burst out with, 'Here it is! I've got it! Listen to it: "Say, Lady—"'

'Stay, Angela,' interrupted Felix. 'You have no business with that.'

'Not Edgar's fun!' she exclaimed. 'Why, where is he?'

'Surely he is not going home with her!' said Wilmet in some dismay.

'Oh, but it is such fun,' went on Angela, 'only I can't make it out. You read it, Lance.'

'Did she give it you?' said Felix.

'No, I whipped it up when she dropped it. There's something about Ratton in it.'

Felix quietly took the paper out of her hand, folded it, and put it into an envelope. 'You take it back to her the first thing to- morrow,' he said. 'Now go to bed.'

Angela durst not oppose that tone, so unusually serious and authoritative; but she contrived to prolong her good-nights, and the putting away of her goods, with a kind of half droll, half sullen resignation; and just as Wilmet was hurrying her off, Edgar returned. He always spoilt Angela a little, and she sprang to him with a kind of droll pout. 'You'll not be cross, Edgar. You'll let us hear Alice's transmigrations. Look! here's Felix bottled them up in an envelope, and won't let us peep at them! But you'll let me hear. You won't order me off to bed.'

Cherry fancied she saw a disconcerted look on his face when he saw the envelope held up to him; but if so, it instantly gave place to the mischievous entertainment of defeating a lesson on discretion.— 'The heads of the family must assert themselves sometimes, my dear, even about nothing,' he said consolingly.

'Indeed,' said Wilmet, bristling in defence of Felix, 'of course we knew it was nothing. It was only very ill-mannered and wrong of Angela to go prying into what was not meant to be shown.

'I'm sure,' said Edgar most ungratefully, 'it might be posted on the church door for what I care, except for its intrinsic vileness.'

'Oh, let's have it! let's have it!' burst out Lance and Robina, who had been burning with curiosity all the time.

'Don't let us have them murdered, whatever they are,' said Edgar, taking them into his own hand. 'Pity the sorrows of a poor wretch seduced into one of your horrid jeux d'esprit—a lady's excuse for fishing for compliments that sound more than they mean. Here goes, then:—

'Say, Lady, what existence past Thine essence hath enfolded; What humble antecedent cast Thy present self hath moulded.

The hawthorn bush, with blossom white Veiling her branches pricking; The painted lady, fluttering light, The rash pursuer tricking.

Grass paraquit, who loves to sit In clustering rows and chat on; Caressing, purring, traitor kit, Fatal to Master Ratton.

There, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are satisfied,' he concluded, letting his performance float into the fire; 'the metaphors, to say the least, are startling, but that is the fault of the game.'

'I don't enter into it all,' said Cherry.

'Not likely another of the grass paraquits would, my dear,' said Edgar.

'And it is exactly what Robin made her,' said Angela; 'both that and the butterfly; and Felix, the kitten. You didn't borrow of course. How funny!'

'But I didn't make her inconstant,' said Robin; 'that is not fair.'

'Not when you made her a butterfly, and the shepherd's weather-glass too!'

'I never thought of that, only their being both bright, dark, sparkling things; and Felix has the forget-me-not, by way of antidote.'

'I do not think such things are wise,' pronounced Wilmet.

'And, by the by, Edgar, it has always been the custom that nobody should walk home with Alice. Miss Pearson would not like it, and it would make a talk.'

Edgar laughed. 'Dear W. W., let it not trouble you! What it may lead to is a bugbear to you. You can't think how much younger and more agreeable you will be when you have learnt that there can be passages that lead to nothing.'

Geraldine went to bed uncomfortable and perplexed. Before she was dressed in the morning, Alice darted in. 'Cherry, I'm so vexed; I dropped that paper. Do you think it is here?'

'No; Angel picked it up, and Edgar read us the verses, and then threw them into the fire.'

'Burnt them!'

'Yes; he said the worst of such games was that they force one to pay compliments that may be taken to mean more than they do.'

Cherry spoke under a stern sense of virtue doing a service to Alice; and when the quick answer came, 'He didn't say that, I'm sure it was Wilmet,' she asseverated, 'Indeed he did. I don't confuse in that way. It is a very good warning not to dwell on what gentlemen may say in mere play.'

'Who told you I did?' said Alice sharply. 'You've no business to say such things!'

Happily there was an interruption. Cherry felt as if she had had a taste of the claws; but she feared she had been malicious, and she was penitent.



CHAPTER XV

WHAT IT LED TO



'Then out and spak the popinjay.'—Old Ballad.

Geraldine was hard at work on a drawing. Edgar's teaching had improved her so much that, under a sore longing to obtain some good studies, she had ventured to place in the shop one of her best imaginary groups, and to her surprise and delight, it had brought her in fifteen shillings, and an order for a companion.

Vistas of hope began to rise before her, only obscured by her consciousness of the want of knowledge and skill. It took some resolution not to attend exclusively to her art, and she was forced to make it a rule never to touch a pencil till the lessons of Bernard and Stella were both over for the day.

They were finished, the children in the garden, and Cherry was in that world of joy and something like inspiration known to spirits imbued with any of the constructive poetry of art, always endeavouring to fulfil an ideal, never indeed satisfying themselves, but never so at rest as in the effort.

Presently she was startled by a step on the stairs. Nothing short of the Fall of Delhi had ever been known to bring Felix upstairs in business hours; and he was especially bound to his work at present, since Mr. Froggatt was detained at home by a serious attack of rheumatism. She looked up amazed at the eager question, 'Is there a letter from Alda?'

'I believe there is, waiting for Wilmet. What is the matter?'

'The most astonishing thing. Here is Ferdinand Travis writing to tell me of his engagement to Alda.'

'To Alda?'

'To Alda! I looked twice to be sure that there was no confusion between the names, but it is my sister Alda beyond a doubt. He would not ask my consent if it were Marilda. Here's the letter, as good and nice as possible, dear good fellow.'

'Then what Edgar told us must have been pure imagination.'

'Not the old folks' wishes, most likely. For the rest, Edgar can make a good story. One can't wonder at the preference, and there's no denying that it is a brilliant chance for Alda.'

'And what a blessing that he should be so good!'

'Infinite! No one could be so welcome! How pleased Mr. Audley will be! But I must go, and try not to look too much disposed to stand on the counter and crow.'

Whatever Felix did below, upstairs Cherry found drawing impossible. Ferdinand a brother! The pleasure was enhanced by the affectionate simplicity of his letter, the outcome of so good a heart, greatly in love, but very conscientious, and utterly unpresuming on his wealth, but showing all his old affection and reverence for Felix. What a delightful wonder that Alda should bring in a connection so faithful to Felix!

Yet, what would not Cherry have given to be as unsuspicious as Felix or Wilmet? Why would misgivings come into her head such as never troubled theirs? Why must she be haunted by Alda's intimations about her travelling companions, and her manner, half scornful, half nettled, when Edgar described the terms on which Mr. Travis stood?

She read Ferdinand's letter a second time, and was convinced that he looked at the whole with such artless seriousness as to preclude all notion of his having been consciously playing fast and loose; but she was ready to torture herself for the involuntary doubt whether her own sister were equally to be trusted.

However, when Wilmet came home, her genuine wholesome overflow of undoubting rapture could not but sweep Cherry along in the tide. Ferdinand combined the apparently impossible advantages of being thoroughly one of themselves, and yet of being able to give Alda the luxuries to which she had become accustomed; and Wilmet's joy was beyond expression. The contrast between the twins—one admired, praised, followed, esteemed, as one of the brightest ornaments of London society; the other toiling in an obscure poverty-stricken home, a teacher in a small third-class school, her beauty unheeded or viewed as a real disadvantage—all this never occurred for one moment to Wilmet, she only felt elevated in her sister.

Two days passed before more letters were received, and these came by the first instead of the second post, before breakfast was over. Four—besides one unheeded, being only in Robina's childish handwriting—Alda to Wilmet, Thomas Underwood and Ferdinand both to Felix, Edgar to Geraldine. There was a simultaneous opening of the letters, then a general starting and looking into one another's eyes, and Geraldine faintly murmured,

'Then it was really so!'

'So? what do you mean?' broke forth Wilmet. 'These selfish people are treating my poor Alda most cruelly among them; and Felix must go and fetch her home to be married from her own brother's house as she ought to be.'

'I shall have to fetch her home,' said Felix thoughtfully; 'but I wish I were quite clear that she has been dealing kindly by Marilda.'

'You are not believing that man Thomas rather than your own sister!' cried Wilmet. 'If Alda does happen to be prettier than his daughter, she can't help it. I'm sure I should be glad enough not to be pretty, but it is a trial, and one must do the best one can.'

'That is just what I fear Alda has been doing,' said Felix between his teeth, as he frowned over his letter.

'Read her letter, poor dear girl,' cried Wilmet, 'and see if you aren't ashamed of such a judgment! No. Some is only meant for me, but listen—"Your letter of sisterly joy has come on troubled waters. I always knew I was the poor relation upon sufferance, but I have been taught to feel it now." She does not know how she could bear it, but for the security of Ferdinand's strength; and they will not let her see him—say she must give him up or them—Mrs. Underwood's violence inconceivable, and all because of a chimerical fancy.'

'What does Ferdinand himself say?' asked Cherry, as Wilmet looked on for further selections.

'He says,' said Felix, reading, 'that our greeting was especially welcome, from the contrast to what he met with from Mr. Underwood. The angry opposition took him by surprise, having always thought they regarded Alda as a daughter; but of course nothing makes any difference to him, and he would much rather come to us for her than to a stranger. His uncle is at New Orleans, and he is writing to him; he is afraid they ought to wait for the answer, though there can be no doubt about it, and he owes him no obedience.—Now, Cherry, there is just time for Edgar's account before we go our several ways.'

'O Felix,' cried Wilmet, 'aren't you going to fetch her home, poor dear?'

'Not possible to-day, Mettie. I shall have much ado to get away to- morrow. Don't be so unhappy, you know she could come alone or with Edgar, if it were so very dreadful; or if you are so fierce, you had better go yourself and encounter "Man Thomas."'

Wilmet looked so much hurt, that Geraldine thought to defend Felix by reading aloud at once.

'MA CHERIE—Such a bear-garden never was seen! Madame furious, Tom abusive, Alda injured innocence, Montezuma heroism, and poor Polly magnanimous—though the least said about her, the soonest mended. I saw when I went back that the crisis could not be far off. The fact is, that our dear sister cannot see any one else treated as "an object," and has so persuaded herself that she is the proverbial maltreated poor relation, as to think everything fair.'

'Geraldine!' exclaimed Wilmet, 'how can you read? Felix, how can you listen to such things about your own sister?'

'It is only what she said herself,' said Felix drily. 'Go on, Cherry.'

'It must be owned that it was hard, when for once Polly had fallen in with something alike palatable to self and parents, and able to swallow her broad visage! If Madame had had any wit, she would have kept Alda away till the fish was hooked, when, it is my belief, he would have had no eyes for aught beyond; but the good creature is too sure of the charms of her own goose, to dread the admission of any swan whatsoever to her pond. While the Cacique being yet uncommitted, small blame to him if he saw the differ, especially as he attaches to Alda all the sanctity of Bexley, which is to him at the least what St. Matthew's is to Clem. To have been reared on the other—or indeed either side of the Atlantic, our intended brother-in-law is curiously simple. He accepted the intimation that Alda's face is her fortune with superb indifference; whether it will be the same with his uncle, remains to be seen; and I am afraid he is a good deal dependent on him, his mother's Mexican property having been speculated away. I don't like the look of the business; but if any one can do any good it is Marilda herself. Tom is in a towering rage, and his wife worse— neither perceiving that the noise they make is small mercy to their daughter. She looks all manner of colours, but stands out gallantly that she is glad, and that all is as it should be; and I believe that, left to herself, she will set things straight. Felix had better keep out of the fray except upon compulsion.'

'Here is compulsion,' said Felix. 'Tom Underwood summons me; I can't say I like the errand.'

'You ought not to let yourself be led by Edgar's unkind joking way!'

'We ought to be off now, at any rate,' said Felix, glad to close the discussion. 'I'll write to get Fernan to meet me at the station to- morrow.'

Accordingly, when he arrived, there was Ferdinand Travis driving a magnificent horse, the whole turn—out very far from looking like a connection of Froggatt and Underwood. He had certainly developed into a splendidly handsome fellow, though still lithe and slight rather than robust, and his dignified bearing giving the idea of greater height than his inches testified to. His greeting was warmly affectionate, with all his old wishful reverence towards his young godfather, and even with a sort of doubt of his thinking him worthy of his sister. As to the disturbance created by the avowal of the object of his attentions, he seemed amazed at it, and entirely unconscious of any supposed change on his part.

'I knew my uncle wished me to be an intimate with the family,' he said, 'and I was rejoiced to fall in with any one who bore your name, and knew how to appreciate you; but I had reason to think that—that there were other views—for—' and here the olive cheeks grew crimson, and he stammered himself into a hopeless entanglement, whence Felix recalled him charitably to an account of the explosion as it had affected himself.

It appeared that his proposal had not been mentioned to the family till Felix's answer had been received, Ferdinand feeling that no one ought to hear of it before the eldest brother. The lovers had met that night at a ball, and their consultation over the letters had taken place in the conservatory, where they had been surprised, and partly overheard, by Mrs. Underwood. When Ferdinand arrived the next morning, he was received with denunciations of underhand ways, and his explanation only made matters worse. A thunderstorm about ingratitude and treachery was launched forth, and he was told that the connection was so contrary to any intentions of his uncle, that Mr. Underwood could not hear of it, and that Alda must renounce it entirely, on peril of being cast off by the family. That Ferdinand regarded her brother as the true head of her house, was only additionally provoking; and Mr. Underwood had given him warning, which he only hinted at to Felix, that the engagement could not be carried on with impunity.

Therewith they reached Kensington Palace Gardens, and being in a measure forbidden the house, Ferdinand drove about waiting for Felix, who on giving his name, found himself ushered into the room where the whole party were finishing breakfast.

Alda, looking meek and pensive, but very lovely, exquisitely dressed in white and blue ribbons, flew into his arms as if her protector were come; Mr. Underwood, without getting up, acknowledged him by a grunt, and hand held out; Marilda came round, and put a cold hand into his, clasping it tight; and her mother greeted him with, 'So, Felix Underwood, you are come up about this unlucky business?'

'There is no reason it should be anything but a very happy one,' said Marilda stoutly. 'Come, Mamma, we had better leave Papa and Felix;' and she set the example, but Mrs. Underwood did not stir.

'You hear the dear girl!' she said. 'It ought to go to Alda's heart!'

'It is of no use talking before the ladies,' said Mr. Underwood, getting up. 'That is, unless you have the good sense to join with me in telling Alda that she must give up this wild affair. The fellow has next to nothing of his own, and his uncle would see him at Jericho before he consented to a match like this!'

'I am hardly prepared to do that, Sir,' said Felix, as Alda clung to his arm, and looked appealingly in his face, 'unless the objection were more personal.'

'Objection!' burst forth the lady of the house, 'when he has been making his way underhand—deceiving us all along.'

'Alda, my dear,' said Felix in her ear, 'don't you think you had better go upstairs?'

But Alda seemed as little disposed as Mrs. Underwood to quit the scene of conflict. 'O Felix, I don't know what she means, nor what we have been doing, for them all to turn against me.'

'Don't tell me, Miss Innocence,' retorted Mrs. Underwood, the artificial polish giving way, and the native scolding Polly Kedge breaking out in a storm of words. 'Wasn't the young man doing just as his uncle meant him, and my poor dear girl fancying him as I never saw her do any one before, till you came home with your sly, artful ways—you that owed us the very clothes on your back?'

'Hush, Mary!' ejaculated her husband; but he might as well have tried to stop a torrent. 'Ay, I know. She comes round every man of you with her smooth tongue and pretty face, till you—you are ready to take her part against your own child, Underwood. When my poor girl's laid in her coffin, then you will know what a serpent you've been fostering.'

To Felix's surprise and annoyance, Alda must needs answer: 'I'm sure it's very hard! If people will look at me, I can't help it; and I've as much right to be spoken to as Marilda. She that has got everything, and poor me—'

Luckily her tears stopped her voice.

'Come along, Felix,' said the master of the house, opening the door; and he, perceiving that escape alone could put an end to this most humiliating scene, whispered again his recommendation to Alda to go to her room, and saw her hurrying up the stairs before his kinsman shut the door of his private room with a bounce, exclaiming, 'There! Now we are out of the way of the women's tongues, we can hear ourselves speak. I am afraid it is an awkward business, Felix Underwood.'

'I am afraid it is, Sir.'

'And the ladies make it worse by making such a din about it,' said Tom, who after all was an Underwood, and whose better breeding had come to the perception how these ravings compromised his daughter's dignity. 'How far any one is to blame, I can't tell. The truth is, that it would have been very satisfactory both to Alfred Travis and to me if the lad and my girl could have made it up together, and they seemed ready enough to like each other. My girl has got rather a turn for your new-fashioned sort of saints, and he seemed just her style. Everything does go contrary at times; and when your sister came home, with her pretty face and way, my wife declares now she saw a change from the first, but to tell the truth I never did, and I doubt her doing so; but you may guess how amazed we were when she came on them whispering together, and it came out that he had been writing to you to sanction his proposing for Alda, as if he were ashamed to come to me, who had always been a father to her.'

'He meant no slight to you, Sir,' said Felix, eagerly; 'but you know we were his first acquaintance, and he had a feeling that an elder brother came nearest. I am sure he felt no shame; he was conscious of no change of intention.'

'Well, well, he is a little bit of an ass. Between ourselves, Felix, I don't blame him half as much as Alda. The girl is sharp enough; she has swarms of lovers; men come about her like wasps to a lump of sugar; and there's 5000 pounds ready for her the day she marries; but when there was one my poor Mary liked for once, we liked for her, and was in the way of liking her—Mary, who has shared everything with her like a sister—she might have let him alone. Indeed, her aunt gave her a hint, but it only served to make her carry it on on the sly.'

Felix wished he had not known of Alda's hearing Edgar's report. He could only say sadly, 'If so, she is quite indefensible.'

What would Wilmet have thought of his fight with 'Man Thomas?'

'Of course,' proceeded that gentleman, 'we know the less we say of that part of the story the better. Some day, Mary will know she's well rid of a coxcombical foreign-looking fellow. She can afford to look farther, but for your sister, this is the maddest thing in the world. William Travis made a regular mull with his wife's fortune, and depend on it, the young man has next to nothing, and would come to beggary if he offended his uncle. There is nothing for it but for them to give one another up!'

'I do not think there is much chance of their doing so,' replied Felix.

'Not as they are now, in the height and fury of the thing, but you are a sensible lad, Felix; you will do your best to show them the utter folly of the thing.'

'We do not know whether Ferdinand can afford it yet,' said Felix.

'Don't delude yourself with fancying Alfred Travis will swallow this! Not he! Why, he's set on that young Spanish don making a great match- —hardly thought my Mary's hundred thousand good enough.'

'Very likely he will refuse consent,' returned Felix; 'but, in the meantime, I see nothing to be done but for Alda to go home with me and wait.'

'To very little purpose,' ejaculated Mr. Underwood, 'except that maybe a taste of your way of life may bring her to her senses, and serve her right. I must say,' he added, 'it is hard that both this boy and girl should be thrown back on your hands for no fault of yours. I wish I could help it, but you see there wouldn't be a moment's peace if Alda stayed here without giving him up.'

'It is not fit that she should,' said Felix.

'I like the girl, too, indeed, she's almost like my own,' continued Mr. Underwood; 'the house will be dull without her, and I believe those pretty young women can't help flirting, and think one another's beaux fair game. Eh? Well, we'll send for her and put it to her—will she give up Travis and stay here, or hold him to it and go home with you?'

Felix could make no objection, though he had no question what the decision would be; so the bell was rung, Alda was summoned, and soon appeared with burning cheeks and moist eyes.

'Now, Alda,' said her adopted uncle, 'your brother and I have talked it over, and I am ready to overlook what has gone by—that is, if your aunt will—and to let all be as it was before, on this one condition, that you break off this foolish concern. Listen to me. You will find that he has little enough to call his own, and his uncle can cut off his allowance any day. It is mere insanity to think he will consent to such a match as you would be; and you would be doing the best thing for the young man and yourself to tell him it is all nonsense, and you've thought better of it.'

'O Uncle, I couldn't do that!'

'If not—you have the choice—I can't abet what Travis never intended, your aunt couldn't stand it either. There's nothing for it but that you should leave this house. Choose between us and him!'

'That can't help being done, Uncle,' said Alda, with streaming eyes and a choked voice. 'You have been very good to me, but he must come first;' and she moved towards Felix, who put his arm round her kindly, and kissed her, saying,

'Then, Alda, I will leave you to prepare; I must go and see the children and Edgar. I will come back for you in time for the half- past five train.'

Alda's tears flowed too fast again for words, and she turned to leave the room.

'I shall see you again,' said Mr. Underwood. 'Can I give you a lift anywhere, Felix?'

'No, thank you, Sir; Travis is waiting for me.'

'Ay, ay, very fine with his thorough-bred; but when his allowance is docked, how is he to live on his pay?'

The brougham had long been waiting for Tom Underwood, and he left them together. Alda hung on her brother. 'O Felix, is it not dreadful?'

'I thought him very kind and forgiving,' said Felix.

'Is that what you call forgiving? And oh! if you could hear Aunt Mary! You little think what I have gone through!'

'It will be over soon,' said Felix, kindly. 'You are going home, you know, and Wilmet is wild to have you.'

'But, Felix, you don't think they mean to do more than frighten me? Ferdinand must have a real right to his own father's money; and besides, he can't properly object to me; Uncle Tom promised me my 5000 pounds whatever happened!'

'I cannot stay to discuss that now, Alda,' said Felix. 'I have a great deal to do, and Fernan is waiting for me. I shall come back in time.'

'Oh, I wish I could come with you now! Dear Fernan! Tell him I have borne it all for his sake, but it is such an age since I saw him!'

'No doubt he will meet us at the station,' said Felix, escaping at last, and finding Ferdinand not many yards off in the road outside.

'Well, Fernan, to Brompton, if you please. Mr. Underwood is really much kinder than I expected; but as things stand, you can't carry it on in their house, so Alda comes home with me to-night.'

'Then the dear girl is really banished for my sake! I mean, no place is like Bexley to me. But it is very noble of her!' exclaimed Ferdinand, curiously divided between regard for Felix and sense of Alda's sacrifice.

'It is the proper place in which for her to wait for your uncle's answer,' said Felix; 'but indeed, Fernan, it is a question whether we ought to let you risk all your prospects.'

Ferdinand's vehement demand what Felix took him for, and equally eager protest that his uncle must know he had no right to withhold the means that were in all equity due to him, lasted through all the brief transit to the farther end of Brompton, where a great old house and grounds, once quite in the country, had been adapted and revivified by Miss Fulmort.

'Might I not come in and see the little girls?' asked Ferdinand, wistfully.

'I should rather suppose not,' said Felix, smiling. 'Life-Guardsmen are not exactly the visitors expected in establishments for young ladies. You had better not wait for me; I cannot give the children less than an hour.'

'I would wait if it were ten hours.'

'But how about your horse? He isn't in love!'

Ferdinand would not, however, be denied; and when at length a rendezvous was agreed on, Felix, free of the dashing equipage, of which he was, to tell the truth, slightly ashamed, rang at the gates, arrived at the house door, announced himself as Mr. Underwood, asked to see his sisters; and after a long labyrinth of matted passages, found himself in a pretty countrified room, where a wiry, elderly, sensible lady, with grey hair and a keen face, gave him a friendly reception, drew a favourable, but not enthusiastic, picture of Robina's steadiness and industry, and said that Angela was a more difficult character. By this time Robina came into the room with her hat on, eagerly, but with her face flushed and her eyes rather frightened, and as she received her brother's kiss, she said, 'The little ones are not come in yet.—May I take my brother into the garden, Miss Fennimore?'

Permission was given, and Robina held his hand with an unusually tight grasp as she led him to the wide, square, walled garden, with a broad gravel-walk around an old-fashioned bowling-green. He thought the round face looked anxious and perplexed, and was rather uneasy as he began by saying, 'I hope not to lose Angel. Do you always walk so early in the day?'

'On Herr Muller's days, because he only comes in the afternoon,' said Robina; 'but I am rather glad; I wanted to speak to you, Felix.'

'Is anything wrong?' said Felix, seeing that the child's face had become crimson, and hearing effort in her voice. 'You are happy here? Don't be afraid to tell me anything, my dear. Remember, there is no one so bound to watch over you.'

'I know,' said Robina, looking up into those kind eyes. 'I want to tell you—' but she panted, and he encouraged her by putting his other hand over hers caressingly. 'Edgar comes every Sunday,' came out at last.

'And what of that? Isn't it a pleasure?'

'It—it would be—but he and Alice ought not to send each other notes and messages.'

'What?' very low.

'Indeed they do; and I can't tell what to do.'

'What sort of notes and messages?' asked Felix, in a half reproving voice, as though he thought the solemnity of thirteen was taking alarm needlessly.

'O Felix, love notes,' half whispered the girl, hanging her burning head.

'Nonsense, child; you have misunderstood some joke.'

'No,' said Robina, looking full in his face with sturdy offended dignity. 'They both were in earnest when they told me about it.'

'About what?' said he, still severely, as he sat down on a bench, unheeding February damp.

'About—' she was not far from tears, as she faltered out, 'their engagement.'

'Theirs! he wrung the hand that he still retained; 'Edgar and—'

'And Alice Knevett,' said Robin. 'I would not promise not to tell. I hope it is not treachery!'

'How long?' asked Felix, hoarsely.

'Ever since the holidays. They used to walk together when Miss Pearson thought she was with us, but none of us ever knew it then.'

'You are certain? Remember, this is a graver matter than perhaps you understand.'

'I think I do understand, and it is that which makes me so unhappy; but, indeed, it can't be fancy. I have seen her ring, emerald and amethyst, for Edgar and Alice, and the locket with their hairs twisted together. The very first Sunday we were here, he gave me a note for her, and when I told him it was not allowed, he tried quizzing me at first, and at last told me I was a silly child who did not know what was proper between engaged people. So I said,' continued Robina, with dignity, 'that I could allow much to be proper in that case, but I wanted to know whether this was only kept from me because I was a baby, and was known to you and the grown-up people.'

'Right, Robin,' muttered Felix, feeling that she needed encouragement.

'Then he laughed at me more than ever about expecting things to be proclaimed on the market-cross, and tried to puzzle me out of my senses, till I could only stick to one thing, that I couldn't take his notes unless somebody knew. And after all I found the thing in my jacket pocket. He must have put it in when I was not looking.'

'And what did you do with it!'

'Oh! the dreadful thing! I felt as if it would bite me all the week long, but I didn't think it would be honourable to tear it or burn it, and I kept it. Luckily Alice didn't ask if I had a note, only whether he had said anything; and when she found I knew, she told me all about it, and said all sorts of things about my being unkind and mean to stand out, but I never promised to keep the secret.'

'Are you still keeping this note!'

'No. I gave it back to Edgar on Sunday, and told him to play no such tricks. I thought he would have been in a rage, but he was—oh! so provoking! just as if he didn't care for a little spite in a naughty child.'

'Then is this intercourse checked!'

'No, that's the worst of it. When I would not, they took to Angel. You know she got very fond of Edgar in the winter, and was always running after him and waiting on him. So she did what he told her quite innocently at first, till I found out what was going on, and tried to stop her; but she doesn't care for me as she does for Edgar, and thinks it grand to be in all their secrets, when I am too cross. And then there's a class that goes to the South Kensington Museum, and Alice is one of them, and Edgar is about there. I'm sure Miss Fulmort ought not to be deceived as they are doing; it's all nonsense about school-mistresses being designed by nature to be hoodwinked. It makes me so miserable, I don't know what to do; and when I heard you were come, it was as if you had been sent on purpose to help me.'

'Poor child!' said Felix, with a heavy sigh. 'You have kept this all to yourself.'

'I could not tell any one. I could have told Miss Lyveson, because she is one's friend; but it would only be being a tell-tale and informer here. And one's own brother, too! And I could not write, for they look over all the letters that are not to fathers and mothers.

'They must make an exception for me!' said Felix, in an indignant tone.

'I knew you would say so. O Felix, tell them so! I do feel like having Papa now I have you.'

'If you only had!' sighed Felix. 'My poor Bob, it is a grievous business, but you have been very upright and considerate, as far as I can see.'

'I'm so glad you don't want me to have told!' she said, with a sigh of relief, as unlike his as that of one who throws off a burden is to that of him who takes it up.

'Not if it can be helped. It would be a mischievous and cruel exposure, and would be hard on one who has been led into it,' he said, with breaks and pauses, half for breath, half for considering. 'It is most reckless, most unjustifiable, in Edgar!' He knit his brows, so that she gazed at him in awe and wonder, as having something in his countenance that she did not comprehend. Then, after a silence, he said, 'Robin, I will speak to Edgar, and if you do not find that this is stopped after one communication, which of course there must be, write to me. These ladies must make an exception in favour of such as we are!'

'O Felix, it is so nice to hold you and feel you! Only I wish I had not had to grieve you so much!'

'Dishonourable conduct is not what I was prepared for!' he said, setting his teeth.

'And will you speak to Angel? I hear them coming in,' said Robina.

'Yes. Let me have her alone at first. Come back in ten minutes' time.'

He was still sitting on the bench, with his elbows on his knees, and his hands over his brow, when Angela came towards him. She was of the same long-limbed make as Clement, was nearly as tall as the square sturdy Robina nearly three years older, and had Clement's small, almost baby mould of features, relieved only by such arch deep blue eyes as shone in Edgar's face. She looked such a mere child, that when her step and exclamation caused Felix to raise his head, it seemed absurd to imagine her to be knowingly engaged as go-between in a clandestine correspondence, and with a sort of pity and compunction for the blame he had intended, he held out his arms to her.

'O Felix, how cold you are! Your face is like marble. Now if I was to sit there, in this weather, wouldn't they be at me like wild cats?'

Thus reminded, Felix rose, and certainly shivered after the exercise of his privilege. 'Are you happy here, Angel?' he asked in a constrained tone.

'Yes, it is jollier than Miss Pearson's. There are more girls, and we do have such fun!'

'I hope you are good and steady, and very careful of all the rules.'

Angela fidgeted, as if she didn't like the style of the conversation.

'You know,' he continued, 'there may be rules that you may not see the use of, but that must be obeyed for all that.'

'What a tiresome dry old Blunderbore you are!' broke out Angela, with ill-assured sauciness; 'this isn't the way Edgar goes on when he comes to see us.'

Felix could not check a sort of groan or grunt; and Angela, whose pertness was defensive, quailed a little. She had driven him out of the due sequence of his discourse, but he resumed it. 'Angel, I must tell you; if anybody asks you to break rules—by giving letters—you must not'

Angela kicked pebbles about.

'Have you ever been asked to do so?'

She hung her head, and a pout came over her face.

'Angel,' he said, in a voice from the sadness of his heart, 'I will not ask any questions, in case you have made promises not to betray secrets; but you must never make such promises again. Tell me you will never do—this thing again.'

She was silent.

'Angela!' he said, reprovingly.

'I don't know why I should promise you more than Edgar,' broke out Angela, petulantly. 'He is my brother too, and he isn't cross; and I love him, and will keep his secret.'

Between this flat defiance of his authority, and his scruple about interfering with the child's sense of honour, Felix was in no slight perplexity even as to this interview with his little sister. His disclaimer came first. 'I ask about no one's secret,' he said, 'but, Angel, I must have you understand this. If you break the rules that forbid the giving of notes from any person outside the school, it will be doing more harm than you can understand. I shall put a stop to it at once, and most likely you will be sent away in disgrace.'

She was somewhat awed, but she did not speak.

'Whatever any one may say to you,' said Felix, 'recollect that it is dishonesty and treachery to do anything underhand, and the greatest possible mischief to those you wish to be kind to. Don't you see, it is no kindness to help any one to do wrong?'

She began to cry. 'They don't want to do wrong. It is very nasty and mean of Bobbie to have told.'

'You will know some day how good and trustworthy it is in Bobbie,' said her elder brother. 'You cannot understand the rights and wrongs in such a manner as this, at your age, Angel.' (To tell the child this was a mistake, if he had but known it.) 'You must be satisfied with knowing that whatever breaks rules and must be kept secret is necessarily disobedient and deceitful, and may have terrible consequences. Do you believe me? Then give me your word to have no more to do with it.'

She muttered something among her tears like 'I won't,' and Felix was satisfied, for the exaction of promises had necessarily been the chief mode of government with the two youthful pillars of the house, who spent so much time apart from their dominions; and it was almost unprecedented that such a promise was not observed.

Robina was lingering near, and as they joined her Felix found that his time was up. He was taken back to the drawing-room, where he found himself in presence of the lady he had seen, and of a much younger smaller person, with a slight cast in her eye, and a peculiar jerking manner such as he could well believe would frighten away a young girl's confidence. When he made his request for free correspondence from his little sisters, there was no demur; only Miss Fulmort said, half vexed, 'It ought to have been mentioned before; she did not know why the children had not told her.' And then she made a point of ascertaining Felix's individual address; for she said, 'A great deal of undesirable stuff may be scribbled to brothers and sisters.'

Felix possessed no card, unless such might be reckoned the announcement of photographs and stationery, etc., which was wont to be put up with parcels for strangers; and when he tried to write 'Mr. F. C. Underwood,' the shivering chill so affected his fingers that he could hardly guide the pencil. He took leave, and soon found the assiduous Ferdinand, who presently asked, shyly, 'What the little ones thought of it?'

Felix bethought himself. 'Really, Fernan, it was put out of my head; and, moreover, perhaps it had better not be known more widely than needful.'

'You do not doubt—'

All the ground that had been gone over before was argued out once again by the eager Mexican before they reached the National Gallery, the appointed place of meeting with Edgar. He was not within, but without, and, throwing away his cigar, hailed them as Fernan drew up his horse.

'At last! The storm must have been pitiless, to judge by the effects! You are blue with cold, Felix.'

'Ferdinand, thank you,' said Felix, getting out. 'I am sorry, but I must have Edgar alone a little while.'

'Look here, Travis,' said Edgar, seeing his blank look, 'we'll give you the honour of giving us a spread. You go on and order it at —'s, and I'll walk this fellow there. Curry soup that will astonish him, and warm the cockles of his heart, mind.'

Ferdinand nodded, and drove off, perfectly satisfied with this compensation.

'Let's see if we can walk a little life into you,' said Edgar, taking his brother's arm. 'Bless thy five wits, Tom's a cold! Was it Madame! I always thought she could not be many generations from Billingsgate.'

'I have been to Brompton.'

'That tragical hoarseness would lead me to conclude something. Eh! has that Robin been chirping out her fancies? And do you mean to say that you are struck all of a heap by the awful discovery of a boarding-school mystery?'

'It is naturally distressing to find you acting such a part.'

'Then I am afraid you have a good deal to go through in the course of your life. If every little flirtation on the part of your Geschwister is to produce this effect, there won't be much left of you by the time it comes to Stella.'

'What meaning do you attach to the words "little flirtation?"'

'When the head of the family puts the question in that solemn tone, how is it to be answered? Bless me, Blunderbore, such a countenance can only proceed from being smitten yourself! To be sure, when there was only one girl you ever spoke to, it was no wonder. Poor old fellow! I'd never have poached on your manor, but how was I to imagine a pillar of the house giving way to such levities?'

'This is mere bravado, Edgar,' was the grave answer, in a tone not disconcerted, but full of repression, and with a pale but steady countenance. 'Gloss it over as you will, a correspondence such as you have begun is unjustifiable. It risks damaging for ever the prospects, at once not only of—of the object—but those of your little sisters.'

'O Felicissimo mio, how green a spot is Bexley! As though secrets and mysteries were not the elixir of life to the boarding-school.'

'Have you ever considered what a discovery must involve?'

'I need not, it seems, since you had not the sense to box that child's ears for a meddlesome tell-tale. Did the scene equal Madame's performance?'

'You do not imagine that I mentioned it.'

'Oh! The revered prop of the state soars so far above my head that I did not know what he might regard as his duty.'

'You shall know it now, Edgar. There are two choices. If you are really engaged to this young lady' (Edgar made a nod of impatient scornful acquiescence, but certainly of acquiescence), 'then ask her honourably from her friends, and let whatever you do be open! Otherwise, give it up as an impossible imprudence, but drop all attempt at what is clandestine. Unless you do one or other of these, I warn you that I shall speak to Miss Pearson.'

'If you were a reasonable and experienced paterfamilias, instead of only a poor conscientious over-harassed prig of a boy, with more brothers and sisters than he knows what to do with, I'll tell you, in candid unprejudice, what you would do. Just let it alone! There are as many of such little affairs going as there are midges in a sunbeam; and they never do any one any harm, unless the higher powers make an unadvised hubbub.'

'Am I to understand that as an avowal that you know yourself to be trifling?'

'I know nothing about it. I don't live in the heroics, like some of my friends. In the rural seclusion of Bexley I saw a pretty lively girl, who, not to put too fine a point upon it, made quite as much up to the romantic young artist as ever the young artist did to her. Of course, there was an exchange of prettinesses, and life on either side became a blank when she was immured at Brompton, and the only solace left was the notes that so outrage your and Bobbie's united sense of propriety.'

'And what is to follow?'

'Is it to lead to?' he corrected, with a mimicry of Wilmet's tone. 'That depends. If you make the explosion, I shall have to rise to the occasion—keep the slip-knot ready and patent, and as soon as I get my head above water, have a wife and family on my back to keep me down, and hinder me from coming to your rescue. If not—why, it will take its chance, and we shall have a reasonable chance of trying whether we get tired of one another—the best thing that could happen to us, by the by—though she is such a saucy little darling, that were that picture of mine painted, I should be fool enough to marry her to-morrow.'

'And why—may I ask—seeing these things so clearly, did you draw the poor child into an engagement!

Edgar shrugged his shoulders. 'You had better ask why she drew me. If you didn't know it before, my dear Felix, "'Tis human natur to be fools."'

'Allowing it to be folly, you do not mean to persist?'

'As if a poor fellow must always have a meaning! Life is not worth having if one is to be always so awfully in earnest.'

'I have the misfortune to be in earnest,' said Felix, with the formality of one past patience, but resolved to keep his temper in hand, 'when I warn you, that if I find that this intercourse is continued, unless you choose to ask her properly of her father, it will be my duty to let Miss Pearson know.

'So be it,' was the answer, in a tone of half mocking, half compassionate submission, that was more provoking than all, except for the sudden change to the gay kindliness that followed, as Edgar threw aside his own affairs, to laugh over Ferdinand Travis's honest simplicity of adoration of Alda and all her household, declaring that it had been as much for his delight, as to be rid of him, that he himself had devised that commission of the luncheon. 'What a spread it will be!' Edgar chuckled to himself; 'and how it will be thrown away on the present company! not that there ever was a man who wanted it more!' he added, as he saw how white his brother's face was. 'You've been and got a chill!'

Felix did not deny it; and if his unsophisticated palate did not appreciate all that Ferdinand had ordered on the principle that nothing could be too good for him either in his individual capacity or as Alda's brother, he at least submitted to what his two companions required of him in the way of hot soup, and even of one glass of wine, before he grew restive, and insisted on carrying the head that their solicitude had succeeded in rendering heated and flushed to burning pitch, to do the business in the City that always sprang up whenever any one had to go to town.

Edgar bade him adieu; and the faithful Ferdinand drove him wherever he had to go, and finally to Kensington Palace Gardens, where he was ushered into the drawing-room, to find Marilda, resolved upon unconsciousness, but only succeeding in a kind of obstreperous cordiality and good will, which, together with the hot room, made him quite dizzy; and his answers were so much at random, that he sent Fulbert to an examination at Cambridge, and Clement prospecting in Australia. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Underwood made their appearance; but when Felix spoke of getting a cab, Marilda said the carriage was ordered. Then Alda was explicit about the boxes that were to follow, but on the whole she was behaving very prettily and unobtrusively. Marilda kissed her warmly, and detained Felix a moment to say, 'This will blow over, and then she will come back, unless things have settled themselves better. If I can do any good, write to me.'

So Alda quitted her adopted home; but the change might be lightened to her by being handed out of the carriage at the station by a military-looking figure, who announced that he wanted to see a fellow at Aldershot, and meant to dine there. It was not his fault that he got out at Farnborough.



CHAPTER XVI

THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT



'Peace, brother, be not exquisite, To cast the fashion of uncertain evils; For, grant they be so, while they rest unknown, What need a man forestall his date of grief?' MILTON.

Wilmet was so devoted to Alda and her hopes and fears, that she let Felix escape with less reproof than usual, for the cold that sat heavily upon him after the last day's chill. He did not give way to it. There might have been some temptation to sit over the fire if Geraldine had been alone there; but Alda, when Wilmet was out of reach, engrossed Cherry's ears with descriptions of her feelings, and cravings for sympathy in her suspense, treating every other subject as futile, and the interruption of the children's lessons as an insult. No one might talk of anybody but Ferdinand; and Cherry did not wonder that Felix looked wearied and harassed, and always betrayed some anxiety to come first into possession of the morning post. One day, nearly a fortnight after his visit to London, he called Wilmet away from the breakfast table into the sitting-room: 'Wilmet,' he said, 'I must go and see Miss Pearson before school hours.'

'You! Is there anything the matter with Alice?' asked Wilmet, startled at his tone.

'Had they—had you—any notion of anything between her and Edgar?'

'No! Miss Pearson has taken to saying, "My dear, your brothers are quite grown into young men," and I thought she did not like the play.'