The landlady, dropping the modern apology for a courtesy, promised with effusion under pressure of hard cash, to accede to Sir Anthony's benevolent wishes. The more so as she'd do anything to serve dear Mrs. Barton, who was always in everything a perfect lady, most independent, in fact; one of the kind as wouldn't be beholden to anybody for a farthing.

Some months passed away before the landlady had cause to report to Sir Anthony. But during the worst depths of the next London winter, when gray fog gathered thick in the purlieus of Marylebone, and shivering gusts groaned at the street corners, poor little Dolly caught whooping-cough badly. On top of the whooping-cough came an attack of bronchitis; and on top of the bronchitis a serious throat trouble. Herminia sat up night after night, nursing her child, and neglecting the work on which both depended for subsistence. Week by week things grew worse and worse; and Sir Anthony, kept duly informed by the landlady, waited and watched, and bided his time in silence. At last the case became desperate. Herminia had no money left to pay her bill or buy food; and one string to her bow after another broke down in journalism. Her place as the weekly lady's-letter writer to an illustrated paper passed on to a substitute; blank poverty stared her in the face, inevitable. When it came to pawning the type-writer, as the landlady reported, Sir Anthony smiled a grim smile to himself. The moment for action had now arrived. He would put on pressure to get away poor Alan's illegitimate child from that dreadful woman.

Next day he called. Dolly was dangerously ill,—so ill that Herminia couldn't find it in her heart to dismiss the great doctor from her door without letting him see her. And Sir Anthony saw her. The child recognized him at once and rallied, and smiled at him. She stretched her little arms. She must surely get well if a gentleman who drove in so fine a carriage, and scattered sovereigns like ha'pennies, came in to prescribe for her. Sir Anthony was flattered at her friendly reception. Those thin small arms touched the grandfather's heart. "She will recover," he said; "but she needs good treatment, delicacies, refinements." Then he slipped out of the room, and spoke seriously to Herminia. "Let her come to me," he urged. "I'll adopt her, and give her her father's name. It will be better for herself; better for her future. She shall be treated as my granddaughter, well-taught, well-kept; and you may see her every six months for a fortnight's visit. If you consent, I will allow you a hundred a year for yourself. Let bygones be bygones. For the child's sake, say YES! She needs so much that you can never give her!"

Poor Herminia was sore tried. As for the hundred a year, she couldn't dream of accepting it; but like a flash it went through her brain how many advantages Dolly could enjoy in that wealthy household that the hard-working journalist could not possibly afford her. She thought of the unpaid bills, the empty cupboard, the wolf at the door, the blank outlook for the future. For a second, she half hesitated. "Come, come!" Sir Anthony said; "for the child's own sake; you won't be so selfish as to stand in her way, will you?"

Those words roused Herminia to a true sense of her duty. "Sir Anthony Merrick," she said holding her breath, "that child is my child, and my dear dead Alan's. I owe it to Alan,—I owe it to her,—to bring her up in the way that Alan would approve of. I brought her into the world; and my duty is to do what I can to discharge the responsibilities I then undertook to her. I must train her up to be a useful citizen. Not for thousands would I resign the delight and honor of teaching my child to those who would teach her what Alan and I believed to be pernicious; who would teach her to despise her mother's life, and to reject the holy memory of her father. As I said to you before, that day at Perugia, so I say to you now, 'Thy money perish with thee.' You need never again come here to bribe me."

"Is that final?" Sir Anthony asked. And Herminia answered with a bow, "Yes, final; quite final."

Sir Anthony bent his head and left. Herminia stood face to face with abject poverty. Spurred by want, by indignation, by terror, by a sense of the absolute necessity for action, she carried her writing materials then and there into Dolly's sick-room, and sitting by her child's cot, she began to write, she hardly knew what, as the words themselves came to her. In a fever of excitement she wrote and wrote and wrote. She wrote as one writes in the silence of midnight. It was late before she finished. When her manuscript was complete, she slipped out and posted it to a weekly paper. It appeared that same Saturday, and was the beginning of Herminia's most valuable connection.

But even after she had posted it the distracted mother could not pause or rest. Dolly tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminia sat watching her. She pined for sympathy. Vague ancestral yearnings, gathering head within her, made her long to pray,—if only there had been anybody or anything to pray to. She clasped her bloodless hands in an agony of solitude. Oh, for a friend to comfort! At last her overwrought feelings found vent in verse. She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting by Dolly's side, wrote down her heart-felt prayer, as it came to her that moment,—

A crowned Caprice is god of the world: On his stony breast are his white wings furled. No ear to hearken, no eye to see, No heart to feel for a man hath he.

But his pitiless hands are swift to smite, And his mute lips utter one word of might In the clash of gentler souls and rougher— 'Wrong must thou do, or wrong must suffer.'

Then grant, O dumb, blind god, at least that we Rather the sufferers than the doers be.



XVI.

A change came at last, when Dolly was ten years old. Among the men of whom Herminia saw most in these later days, were the little group of advanced London socialists who call themselves the Fabians. And among her Fabian friends one of the most active, the most eager, the most individual, was Harvey Kynaston.

He was a younger man by many years than poor Alan had been; about Herminia's own age; a brilliant economist with a future before him. He aimed at the Cabinet. When first he met Herminia he was charmed at one glance by her chastened beauty, her breadth and depth of soul, her transparent sincerity of purpose and action. Those wistful eyes captured him. Before many days passed he had fallen in love with her. But he knew her history; and, taking it for granted she must still be immersed in regret for Alan's loss, he hardly even reckoned the chances of her caring for him.

'Tis a common case. Have you ever noticed that if you meet a woman, famous for her connection with some absorbing grief, some historic tragedy, you are half appalled at first sight to find that at times she can laugh, and make merry, and look gay with the rest of us. Her callous glee shocks you. You mentally expect her to be forever engaged in the tearful contemplation of her own tragic fate; wrapt up in those she has lost, like the mourners in a Pieta. Whenever you have thought of her, you have connected her in your mind with that one fact in her history, which perhaps may have happened a great many years ago. But to you, it is as yesterday. You forget that since then many things have occurred to her. She has lived her life; she has learned to smile; human nature itself cannot feed for years on the continuous contemplation of its own deepest sorrows. It even jars you to find that the widow of a patriotic martyr, a murdered missionary, has her moments of enjoyment, and must wither away without them.

So, just at first, Harvey Kynaston was afraid to let Herminia see how sincerely he admired her. He thought of her rather as one whose life is spent, who can bring to the banquet but the cold dead ashes of a past existence. Gradually, however, as he saw more and more of her, it began to strike him that Herminia was still in all essentials a woman. His own throbbing heart told him so as he sat and talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. Bit by bit the idea rose up in his mind that this lonely soul might still be won. He set to work in earnest to woo and win her.

As for Herminia, many men had paid her attentions already in her unwedded widowhood. Some of them, after the fashion of men, having heard garbled versions of her tragic story, and seeking to gain some base advantage for themselves from their knowledge of her past, strove to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring womanly instinct, she early discerned, and with unerring feminine tact, undeceived and humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her beauty and her patience, paid real court to her heart; but all these fell far short of her ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it was different. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man; and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died, had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did.

For some months they met often at the Fabian meetings and elsewhere; till at last it became a habit with them to spend their Sunday mornings on some breezy wold in the country together. Herminia was still as free as ever from any shrinking terror as to what "people might say;" as of old, she lived her life for herself and her conscience, not for the opinion of a blind and superstitious majority. On one such August morning, they had taken the train from London to Haslemere, with Dolly of course by their side, and then had strolled up Hind Head by the beautiful footpath which mounts at first through a chestnut copse, and then between heather-clad hills to the summit. At the loneliest turn of the track, where two purple glens divide, Harvey Kynaston seated himself on the soft bed of ling; Herminia sank by his side; and Dolly, after awhile, not understanding their conversation, wandered off by herself a little way afield in search of harebells and spotted orchises. Dolly found her mother's friends were apt to bore her; she preferred the society of the landlady's daughters.

It was a delicious day. Hard by, a slow-worm sunned himself on the basking sand. Blue dragon-flies flashed on gauze wings in the hollows. Harvey Kynaston looked on Herminia's face and saw that she was fair. With an effort he made up his mind to speak at last. In plain and simple words he asked her reverently the same question that Alan had asked her so long ago on the Holmwood.

Herminia's throat flushed a rosy red, and an unwonted sense of pleasure stole over that hard-worked frame as she listened to his words; for indeed she was fond of him. But she answered him at once without a moment's hesitation. "Harvey, I'm glad you ask me, for I like and admire you. But I feel sure beforehand my answer must be NO. For I think what you mean is to ask, will I marry you?"

The man gazed at her hard. He spoke low and deferentially. "Yes, Herminia," he replied. "I do mean, will you marry me? I know, of course, how you feel about this matter; I know what you have sacrificed, how deeply you have suffered, for the sake of your principles. And that's just why I plead with you now to ignore them. You have given proof long ago of your devotion to the right. You may surely fall back this second time upon the easier way of ordinary humanity. In theory, Herminia, I accept your point of view; I approve the equal liberty of men and women, politically, socially, personally, ethically. But in practice, I don't want to bring unnecessary trouble on the head of a woman I love; and to live together otherwise than as the law directs does bring unnecessary trouble, as you know too profoundly. That is the only reason why I ask you to marry me. And Herminia, Herminia," he leant forward appealingly, "for the love's sake I bear you, I hope you will consent to it."

His voice was low and tender. Herminia, sick at heart with that long fierce struggle against overwhelming odds, could almost have said YES to him. Her own nature prompted her; she was very, very fond of him. But she paused for a second. Then she answered him gravely.

"Harvey," she said, looking deep into his honest brown eyes, "as we grow middle-aged, and find how impossible it must ever be to achieve any good in a world like this, how sad a fate it is to be born a civilized being in a barbaric community, I'm afraid moral impulse half dies down within us. The passionate aim grows cold; the ardent glow fades and flickers into apathy. I'm ashamed to tell you the truth, it seems such weakness; yet as you ask me this, I think I WILL tell you. Once upon a time, if you had made such a proposal to me, if you had urged me to be false to my dearest principles, to sin against the light, to deny the truth, I would have flashed forth a NO upon you without one moment's hesitation. And now, in my disillusioned middle age what do I feel? Do you know, I almost feel tempted to give way to this Martinmas summer of love, to stultify my past by unsaying and undoing everything. For I love you, Harvey. If I were to give way now, as George Eliot gave way, as almost every woman who once tried to live a free life for her sisters' sake, has given way in the end, I should counteract any little good my example has ever done or may ever do in the world; and Harvey, strange as it sounds, I feel more than half inclined to do it. But I WILL not, I WILL not; and I'll tell you why. It's not so much principle that prevents me now. I admit that freely. The torpor of middle age is creeping over my conscience. It's simple regard for personal consistency, and for Dolly's position. How can I go back upon the faith for which I have martyred myself? How can I say to Dolly, 'I wouldn't marry your father in my youth, for honor's sake; but I have consented in middle life to sell my sisters' cause for a man I love, and for the consideration of society; to rehabilitate myself too late with a world I despise by becoming one man's slave, as I swore I never would be.' No, no, dear Harvey; I can't do that. Some sense of personal continuity restrains me still. It is the Nemesis of our youth; we can't go back in our later life on the holier and purer ideals of our girlhood."

"Then you say no definitely?" Harvey Kynaston asked.

Herminia's voice quivered. "I say no definitely," she answered; "unless you can consent to live with me on the terms on which I lived with Dolly's father."

The man hesitated a moment. Then he began to plead hard for reconsideration. But Herminia's mind was made up. She couldn't belie her past; she couldn't be false to the principles for whose sake she had staked and lost everything. "No, no," she said firmly, over and over again. "You must take me my own way, or you must go without me."

And Harvey Kynaston couldn't consent to take her her own way. His faith was too weak, his ambitions were too earthly. "Herminia," he said, before they parted that afternoon, "we may still be friends; still dear friends as ever? This episode need make no difference to a very close companionship?"

"It need make no difference," Herminia answered, with a light touch of her hand. "Harvey, I have far too few friends in the world willingly to give up one of them. Come again and go down with Dolly and me to Hind Head as usual next Sunday."

"Thank you," the man answered. "Herminia, I wish it could have been otherwise. But since I must never have you, I can promise you one thing; I will never marry any other woman."

Herminia started at the words. "Oh, no," she cried quickly. "How can you speak like that? How can you say anything so wrong, so untrue, so foolish? To be celibate is a very great misfortune even for a woman; for a man it is impossible, it is cruel, it is wicked. I endure it myself, for my child's sake, and because I find it hard to discover the help meet for me; or because, when discovered, he refuses to accept me in the only way in which I can bestow myself. But for a man to pretend to live celibate is to cloak hateful wrong under a guise of respectability. I should be unhappy if I thought any man was doing such a vicious thing out of desire to please me. Take some other woman on free terms if you can; but if you cannot, it is better you should marry than be a party to still deeper and more loathsome slavery."

And from that day forth they were loyal friends, no more, one to the other.



XVII.

And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her he was really going to be married,—what sudden thrill was this that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near and dear acquaintance.

She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But these monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest, hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard for life, even in the noblest women.

She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she knew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of all the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love him, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but never strive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that pants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more, don't pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you have ceased to desire; don't do injustice to your own prospective children by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, or admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as much as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, but before all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct of pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you." No woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me what you can of your love, and of yourself; but don't think I am so vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you. Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not and love not." When men and women can say that alike, the world will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will be as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.

Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity. They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our race must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man's plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be human.

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all IS patriotism? "My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my country!" This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely, "MY business-interests against the business-interests of other people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them." At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of conquest; "MY country against other countries; MY army and navy against other fighters; MY right to annex unoccupied territory against the equal right of all other peoples; MY power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races." It NEVER means or can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like Ireland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis a good man's duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis a good man's duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the particular community of which chance has made him a component member than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,—the only kind of patriotism worth a moment's thought in a righteous man's eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.

Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest limits of personality. It is no longer "Us against the world!" but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the last word of the intercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards, "Trespassers will be prosecuted." It says in effect, "This is my land. As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, and tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The grass on the wold grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise glorious in the morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies' shall tread them. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avaunt there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you the muddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And I choose to monopolize it."

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he cries aloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike with impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my hand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving it of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has outstripped them.

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of them all—the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:—"You live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel." That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at least is now fairly bred out of us.

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter, this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin. The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or desire him—and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity another monopolist instinct—the deepest-seated of all, the grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her! The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely. All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive it on its way up to civilization."

And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort in these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return. Unable to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike, she seeks equality in an equal slavery. That she will never achieve. The future is to the free. We have transcended serfdom. Women shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up; not by fettering the man, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the woman.

All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over in her mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston came to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did she feel it to some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at his happiness? Partly, she said to herself, because it is difficult to live down in a single generation the jealousies and distrusts engendered in our hearts by so many ages of harem life. But more still, she honestly believed, because it is hard to be a free soul in an enslaved community. No unit can wholly sever itself from the social organism of which it is a corpuscle. If all the world were like herself, her lot would have been different. Affection would have been free; her yearnings for sympathy would have been filled to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. As it was, she had but that one little fraction of a man friend to solace her; to resign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself bankrupt of love, was indeed a bitter trial to her.

Yet for her principles' sake and Dolly's, she never let Harvey Kynaston or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was a true and earnest friend at all times to both of them.



XVIII.

Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman's estate. And she was growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.

Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with her daughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of the expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark for the prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly and regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when she might be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceive that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child pre-destined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself—in a retrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in the daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores' ideas—nay, worse her ideals—were essentially commonplace. Not that she had much opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outside source; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort of atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to the Philistine.

Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter. These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character; they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely to persist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-established peculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species. They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly the mental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, the product of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that they differ much more from father to son, the product of one like factor alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, the maternal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Dolores early began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary and stereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as if they sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had never heard in the society of her mother's lodgings any but the freest and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention.

Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding the sentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning, Dolly thought better of the landlady's views and ideas than of her mother's. When she went to school, she considered the moral standpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than the moral standpoint of Herminia's attic. She accepted the beliefs and opinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural and congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls common-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of her mother.

From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun to make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminia noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and equipages of life,—to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—that Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they were courted, because they were respected; not because they were good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured, because they were respect-worthy.

But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceive with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or regard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only what was usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of considering the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or blame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in the same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant of the morass of London.

To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her, put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whose education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope that bound her to existence.

Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to a great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. She had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now it loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly's verdict would in almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growing old enough to question and criticise her mother's proceedings; she was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of the children who surrounded her—the children born under those special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp with the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity was shyly aroused as to her dead father's family. Herminia had done her best to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine as to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own development rendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and depart from it.

Already when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother's father in the church in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd that while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grandpapa should be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect. As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little more the world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how it could happen, if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Reverend, the Dean of Dunwich, that her mamma should be an outcast from her father's church, and scarcely well seen in the best carriage company. She had learnt that deans are rather grand people—almost as much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish them from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in fine houses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria with a coachman in livery. So much essential knowledge of the church of Christ she had gained for herself by personal observation; for facts like these were what interested Dolly. She couldn't understand, then, why she and her mother should live precariously in a very small attic; should never be visited by her mother's brothers, one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of Old Sarum, while the other she saw gazetted as a Colonel of Artillery; and should be totally ignored by her mother's sister, Ermyntrude, who lolled in a landau down the sunny side of Bond Street.

At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that her mother's extreme and advanced opinions had induced a social breach between herself and the orthodox members of her family. Even that Dolly resented; why should mamma hold ideas of her own which shut her daughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by the rest of her kindred? Dolly had no particular religious ideas; the subject didn't interest her; and besides, she thought the New Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical nebulous way that mamma herself did—in fact, she regarded it with some veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication. But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enough as far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn't understand why a person like mamma should cut herself off contumaciously from the rest of the world by presuming to disbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gaitered bishops held worthy of credence. All stylish society accepted the tenets of the Church of England. But in time it began to occur to her that there might be some deeper and, as she herself would have said, more disgraceful reason for her mother's alienation from so respectable a family. For to Dolly, that was disgraceful which the world held to be so. Things in themselves, apart from the world's word, had for her no existence. Step by step, as she grew up to blushing womanhood, it began to strike her with surprise that her grandfather's name had been, like her own, Barton. "Did you marry your cousin, mamma?" she asked Herminia one day quite suddenly.

And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why do you ask me?"

"Because," Dolly answered abashed, "I just wanted to know why your name should be Barton, the same as poor grandpapa's."

Herminia didn't dare to say too much just then. "Your dear father," she answered low, "was not related to me in any way."

Dolly accepted the tone as closing the discussion for the present; but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery somewhere in the matter to unravel.

In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school. Though she had always taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it a matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something more than the stray ends of time in a busy journalist's moments of leisure. At the school, where Dolly was received without question, on Miss Smith-Water's recommendation, she found herself thrown much into the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from the narrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society. Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England, the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouraged to the utmost. But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking that some few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as a most equivocal person, who didn't accept all the current superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her family and antecedents. Crimson with shame, Dolly parried such enquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself to pierce this dim mystery. Was it a runaway match?—with the groom, perhaps, or the footman? Only the natural shamefacedness of a budding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secrets prevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank all about it.

But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere of doubt surrounded her birth and her mother's history. It filled her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations.

And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned her mother's profound affection. It is often so. The love which parents lavish upon their children, the children repay, not to parents themselves, but to the next generation. Only when we become fathers or mothers in our turn do we learn what our fathers and mothers have done for us. Thus it was with Dolly. When once the first period of childish dependence was over, she regarded Herminia with a smouldering distrust and a secret dislike that concealed itself beneath a mask of unfelt caresses. In her heart of hearts, she owed her mother a grudge for not having put her in a position in life where she could drive in a carriage with a snarling pug and a clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude's children. She grew up, smarting under a sullen sense of injustice, all the deeper because she was compelled to stifle it in the profoundest recesses of her own heart.



XIX.

When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose just unrolling its petals, a very great event occurred in her history. She received an invitation to go and stop with some friends in the country.

The poor child's life had been in a sense so uneventful that the bare prospect of this visit filled her soul beforehand with tremulous anticipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always lived in the midmost centre of the Movement in London; she had known authors, artists, socialists, the cream of our race; she had been brought up in close intercourse with the men and women who are engaged in revolutionizing and remodelling humanity. But this very fact that she had always lived in the Thick of Things made a change to the Thin of Things only by so much the more delicious and enchanting. Not that Dolores had not seen a great deal, too, of the country. Poor as they were, her mother had taken her to cheap little seaside nooks for a week or two of each summer; she had made pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or autumn to Leith Hill or Mapledurham; she had even strained her scanty resources to the utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the Ardennes or in Normandy. But what gave supreme importance to this coming visit was the special fact that Dolly was now for the first time in her life to find herself "in society."

Among the friends she had picked up at her Marylebone day-school were two west-country girls, private boarders of the head-mistress's, who came from the neighborhood of Combe Neville in Dorset. Their name was Compson, and their father was rector of their native village, Upcombe. Dolly liked them very much, and was proud of their acquaintance, because they were reckoned about the most distinguished pupils in the school, their mother being the niece of a local viscount. Among girls in middle-class London sets, even so remote a connection with the title-bearing classes is counted for a distinction. So when Winnie Compson asked Dolly to go and stop with her at her father's rectory during three whole weeks of the summer holidays, Dolly felt that now at last by pure force of native worth she was rising to her natural position in society. It flattered her that Winnie should select her for such an honor.

The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thought and effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had no frocks good enough for such a grand house as the Compsons. "Grand" was indeed a favorite epithet of Dolly's; she applied it impartially to everything which had to do, as she conceived, with the life of the propertied and privileged classes. It was a word at once of cherished and revered meaning—the shibboleth of her religion. It implied to her mind something remote and unapproachable, yet to be earnestly striven after with all the forces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a point in favor of an occasion which she could plainly see Dolly regarded as so important; she managed to indulge her darling in a couple of dainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for her soul the very utmost verge of allowable luxury. The materials were oriental; the cut was the dressmaker's—not home-built, as usual. Dolly looked so brave in them, with her rich chestnut hair and her creamy complexion,—a touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birthplace,—that the mother's full heart leapt up to look at her. It almost made Herminia wish she was rich—and anti-social, like the rich people—in order that she might be able to do ample justice to the exquisite grace of Dolly's unfolding figure. Tall, lissome, supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she was indeed a girl any mother might have been proud of.

On the day she left London, Herminia thought to herself she had never seen her child look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted union of blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a tinge of wayward shyness to her girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened to nut-brown, but still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. 'Twas with a foreboding regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on both peach-bloom cheeks at parting. She almost fancied her child must be slipping from her motherly grasp when she went off so blithely to visit these unknown friends, away down in Dorsetshire. Yet Dolly had so few amusements of the sort young girls require that Herminia was overjoyed this opportunity should have come to her. She reproached herself not a little in her sensitive heart for even feeling sad at Dolly's joyous departure. Yet to Dolly it was a delight to escape from the atmosphere of Herminia's lodgings. Those calm heights chilled her.

The Compsons' house was quite as "grand" in the reality as Dolly had imagined it. There was a man-servant in a white tie to wait at table, and the family dressed every evening for dinner. Yet, much to her surprise, Dolly found from the first the grandeur did not in the least incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. She felt forthwith she was to the manner born. This was clearly the life she was intended by nature to live, and might actually have been living—she, the granddaughter of so grand a man as the late Dean of Dunwich—had it not been for poor Mamma's ridiculous fancies. Mamma was so faddy! Before Dolly had spent three whole days at the rectory, she talked just as the Compsons did; she picked up by pure instinct the territorial slang of the county families. One would have thought, to hear her discourse, she had dressed for dinner every night of her life, and passed her days in the society of the beneficed clergy.

But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcombe for Dolly. For the first time in her life, she saw something of men,—real men, with horses and dogs and guns,—men who went out partridge shooting in the season and rode to hounds across country, not the pale abstractions of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian Society meetings or wrote things called articles in the London papers. Her mother's friends wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; these real men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen. Dolly was charmed with them all, but especially with one handsome and manly young fellow named Walter Brydges, the stepson and ward of a neighboring parson. "How you talked with him at tennis to-day!" Winnie Compson said to her friend, as they sat on the edge of Dolly's bed one evening. "He seemed quite taken with you."

A pink spot of pleasure glowed on Dolly's round cheek to think that a real young man, in good society, whom she met at so grand a house as the Compsons', should seem to be quite taken with her.

"Who is he, Winnie?" she asked, trying to look less self-conscious. "He's extremely good-looking."

"Oh, he's Mr. Hawkshaw's stepson, over at Combe Mary," Winnie answered with a nod. "Mr. Hawkshaw's the vicar there till Mamma's nephew is ready to take the living—what they call a warming-pan. But Walter Brydges is Mrs. Hawkshaw's son by her first husband. Old Mr. Brydges was the squire of Combe Mary, and Walter's his only child. He's very well off. You might do worse, dear. He's considered quite a catch down in this part of the country."

"How old is he?" Dolly asked, innocently enough, standing up by the bedside in her dainty white nightgown. But Winnie caught at her meaning with the preternatural sharpness of the girl brought up in immediate contact with the landed interest. "Oh, he's of age," she answered quickly, with a knowing nod. "He's come into the property; he has nobody on earth but himself to consult about his domestic arrangements."

Dolly was young; Dolly was pretty; Dolly's smile won the world; Dolly was still at the sweetest and most susceptible of ages. Walter Brydges was well off; Walter Brydges was handsome; Walter Brydges had all the glamour of a landed estate, and an Oxford education. He was a young Greek god in a Norfolk shooting-jacket. Moreover, he was a really good and pleasant young fellow. What wonder, therefore, if before a week was out, Dolly was very really and seriously in love with him? And what wonder if Walter Brydges in turn, caught by that maiden glance, was in love with Dolly? He had every excuse, for she was lithe, and beautiful, and a joyous companion; besides being, as the lady's maid justly remarked, a perfect lady.

One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcombe, the Compsons gave a picnic in the wild Combe undercliff. 'Tis a broken wall of chalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, and deliciously overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters of close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread tangled labyrinths of fallen rock, or wind round tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble. They lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of broken cliff, whose summit was festooned with long sprays of clematis, or "old man's beard," as the common west-country name expressively phrases it. Thistledown hovered on the basking air. There they sat and drank their tea, couched on beds of fern or propped firm against the rock; and when tea was over, they wandered off, two and two, ostensibly for nothing, but really for the true business of the picnic—to afford the young men and maidens of the group some chance of enjoying, unspied, one another's society.

Dolly and Walter Brydges strolled off by themselves toward the rocky shore. There Walter showed her where a brook bubbled clear from the fountain-head; by its brink, blue veronicas grew, and tall yellow loosestrife, and tasselled purple heads of great English eupatory. Bending down to the stream he picked a little bunch of forget-me-nots, and handed them to her. Dolly pretended unconsciously to pull the dainty blossoms to pieces, as she sat on the clay bank hard by and talked with him. "Is that how you treat my poor flowers?" Walter asked, looking askance at her.

Dolly glanced down, and drew back suddenly. "Oh, poor little things!" she cried, with a quick droop of her long lashes. "I wasn't thinking what I did." And she darted a shy glance at him. "If I'd remembered they were forget-me-nots, I don't think I could have done it."

She looked so sweet and pure in her budding innocence, like a half-blown water-lily, that the young man, already more than two-thirds in love, was instantly captivated. "Because they were forget-me-nots, or because they were MINE, Miss Barton?" he asked softly, all timorousness.

"Perhaps a little of both," the girl answered, gazing down, and blushing at each word a still deeper crimson.

The blush showed sweet on that translucent skin. Walter turned to her with a sudden impulse. "And what are you going to do with them NOW?" he enquired, holding his breath for joy and half-suppressed eagerness.

Dolly hesitated a moment with genuine modesty. Then her liking for the well-knit young man overcame her. With a frightened smile her hand stole to her bodice; she fixed them in her bosom. "Will that do?" she asked timidly.

"Yes, that WILL do," the young man answered, bending forward and seizing her soft fingers in his own. "That will do very well. And, Miss Barton—Dolores—I take it as a sign you don't wholly dislike me."

"I like you very much," Dolly answered in a low voice, pulling a rock-rose from a cleft and tearing it nervously to pieces.

"Do you LOVE me, Dolly?" the young man insisted.

Dolly turned her glance to him tenderly, then withdrew it in haste. "I think I MIGHT, in time," she answered very slowly.

"Then you will be mine, mine, mine?" Walter cried in an ecstasy.

Dolly bent her pretty head in reluctant assent, with a torrent of inner joy. The sun flashed in her chestnut hair. The triumph of that moment was to her inexpressible.

But as for Walter Brydges, he seized the blushing face boldly in his two brown hands, and imprinted upon it at once three respectful kisses. Then he drew back, half-terrified at his own temerity.



XX.

From that day forth it was understood at Upcombe that Dolly Barton was informally engaged to Walter Brydges. Their betrothal would be announced in the "Morning Post"—"We learn that a marriage has been arranged," and so forth—as soon as the chosen bride had returned to town, and communicated the great news in person to her mother. For reasons of her own, Dolly preferred this delay; she didn't wish to write on the subject to Herminia. Would mamma go and spoil it all? she wondered. It would be just like her.

The remaining week of her stay at the rectory was a golden dream of delight to Dolly. Beyond even the natural ecstasy of first love, the natural triumph of a brilliant engagement, what visions of untold splendor danced hourly, day and night, before her dazzled eyes! What masques of magnificence! county balls, garden parties! It was heaven to Dolly. She was going to be grander than her grandest daydream.

Walter took her across one afternoon to Combe Mary, and introduced her in due form to his mother and his step-father, who found the pink-and-white girl "so very young," but saw no other grave fault in her. He even escorted her over the ancestral home of the masters of Combe Mary, in which they were both to live, and which the young squire had left vacant of set purpose till he found a wife to his mind to fill it. 'Twas the ideal crystallized. Rooks cawed from the high elms; ivy clambered to the gables; the tower of the village church closed the vista through the avenue. The cup of Dolly's happiness was full to the brim. She was to dwell in a manor-house with livery servants of her own, and to dress for dinner every night of her existence.

On the very last evening of her stay in Dorsetshire, Walter came round to see her. Mrs. Compson and the girls managed to keep discreetly out of the young people's way; the rector was in his study preparing his Sunday sermon, which arduous intellectual effort was supposed to engage his close attention for five hours or so weekly. Not a mouse interrupted. So Dolly and her lover had the field to themselves from eight to ten in the rectory drawing-room.

From the first moment of Walter's entry, Dolly was dimly aware, womanlike, of something amiss, something altered in his manner. Not, indeed, that her lover was less affectionate or less tender than usual,—if anything he seemed rather more so; but his talk was embarrassed, pre-occupied, spasmodic. He spoke by fits and starts, and seemed to hold back something. Dolly taxed him with it at last. Walter tried to put it off upon her approaching departure. But he was an honest young man, and so bad an actor that Dolly, with her keen feminine intuitions, at once detected him. "It's more than that," she said, all regret, leaning forward with a quick-gathering moisture in her eye, for she really loved him. "It's more than that, Walter. You've heard something somewhere that you don't want to tell me."

Walter's color changed at once. He was a man, and therefore but a poor dissembler. "Well, nothing very much," he admitted, awkwardly.

Dolly, drew back like one stung; her heart beat fast. "What have you heard?" she cried trembling; "Walter, Walter, I love you! You must keep nothing back. Tell me NOW what it is. I can bear to hear it."

The young man hesitated. "Only something my step-father heard from a friend last night," he replied, floundering deeper and deeper. "Nothing at all about you, darling. Only—well—about your family."

Dolly's face was red as fire. A lump rose in her throat; she started in horror. Then he had found out the Truth. He had probed the Mystery.

"Something that makes you sorry you promised to marry me?" she cried aloud in her despair. Heaven faded before her eyes. What evil trick could mamma have played her?

As she stood there that moment—proud, crimson, breathless—Walter Brydges would have married her if her father had been a tinker and her mother a gipsy girl. He drew her toward him tenderly. "No, darling," he cried, kissing her, for he was a chivalrous young man, as he understood chivalry; and to him it was indeed a most cruel blow to learn that his future wife was born out of lawful wedlock. "I'm proud of you; I love you. I worship the very ground your sweet feet tread on. Nothing on earth could make me anything but grateful and thankful for the gift of your love you're gracious enough to bestow on me."

But Dolly drew back in alarm. Not on such terms as those. She, too, had her pride; she, too, had her chivalry. "No, no," she cried, shrinking. "I don't know what it is. I don't know what it means. But till I've gone home to London and asked about it from mother,—oh, Walter, we two are no longer engaged. You are free from your promise."

She said it proudly; she said it bravely. She said it with womanly grace and dignity. Something of Herminia shone out in her that moment. No man should ever take her—to the grandest home—unless he took her at her full worth, pleased and proud to win her.

Walter soothed and coaxed; but Dolores stood firm. Like a rock in the sea, no assault could move her. As things stood at present, she cried, they were no longer engaged. After she had seen her mother and talked it all over, she would write to him once more, and tell him what she thought of it.

And, crimson to the finger-tips with shame and modesty, she rushed from his presence up to her own dark bed-room.



XXI.

Next morning early, Dolly left Combe Neville on her way to London. When she reached the station, Walter was on the platform with a bunch of white roses. He handed them to her deferentially as she took her seat in the third-class carriage; and so sobered was Dolly by this great misfortune that she forgot even to feel a passing pang of shame that Walter should see her travel in that humble fashion. "Remember," he whispered in her ear, as the train steamed out, "we are still engaged; I hold you to your promise."

And Dolly, blushing maidenly shame and distress, shook her head decisively. "Not now," she answered. "I must wait till I know the truth. It has always been kept from me. And now I WILL know it."

She had not slept that night. All the way up to London, she kept turning her doubt over. The more she thought of it, the deeper it galled her. Her wrath waxed bitter against Herminia for this evil turn she had wrought. The smouldering anger of years blazed forth at last. Had she blighted her daughter's life, and spoiled so fair a future by obstinate adherence to those preposterous ideas of hers?

Never in her life had Dolly loved her mother. At best, she had felt towards her that contemptuous toleration which inferior minds often extend to higher ones. And now—why, she hated her.

In London, as it happened, that very morning, Herminia, walking across Regent's Park, had fallen in with Harvey Kynaston, and their talk had turned upon this self-same problem.

"What will you do when she asks you about it, as she must, sooner or later?" the man inquired.

And Herminia, smiling that serene sweet smile of hers, made answer at once without a second's hesitation, "I shall confess the whole truth to her."

"But it might be so bad for her," Harvey Kynaston went on. And then he proceeded to bring up in detail casuistic objections on the score of a young girl's modesty; all of which fell flat on Herminia's more honest and consistent temperament.

"I believe in the truth," she said simply; "and I'm never afraid of it. I don't think a lie, or even a suppression, can ever be good in the end for any one. The Truth shall make you Free. That one principle in life can guide one through everything."

In the evening, when Dolly came home, her mother ran out proudly and affectionately to kiss her. But Dolly drew back her face with a gesture of displeasure, nay, almost of shrinking. "Not now, mother!" she cried. "I have something to ask you about. Till I know the truth, I can never kiss you."

Herminia's face turned deadly white; she knew it had come at last. But still she never flinched. "You shall hear the truth from me, darling," she said, with a gentle touch. "You have always heard it."

They passed under the doorway and up the stairs in silence. As soon as they were in the sitting-room, Dolly fronted Herminia fiercely. "Mother," she cried, with the air of a wild creature at bay, "were you married to my father?"

Herminia's cheek blanched, and her pale lips quivered as she nerved herself to answer; but she answered bravely, "No, darling, I was not. It has always been contrary to my principles to marry."

"YOUR principles!" Dolores echoed in a tone of ineffable, scorn. "YOUR principles! Your PRINCIPLES! All my life has been sacrificed to you and your principles!" Then she turned on her madly once more. "And WHO was my father?" she burst out in her agony.

Herminia never paused. She must tell her the truth. "Your father's name was Alan Merrick," she answered, steadying herself with one hand on the table. "He died at Perugia before you were born there. He was a son of Sir Anthony Merrick, the great doctor in Harley Street."

The worst was out. Dolly stood still and gasped. Hot horror flooded her burning cheeks. Illegitimate! illegitimate! Dishonored from her birth! A mark for every cruel tongue to aim at! Born in shame and disgrace! And then, to think what she might have been, but for her mother's madness! The granddaughter of two such great men in their way as the Dean of Dunwich and Sir Anthony Merrick.

She drew back, all aghast. Shame and agony held her. Something of maiden modesty burned bright in her cheek and down her very neck. Red waves coursed through her. How on earth after this could she face Walter Brydges?

"Mother, mother!" she broke out, sobbing, after a moment's pause, "oh, what have you done? What have you done? A cruel, cruel mother you have been to me. How can I ever forgive you?"

Herminia gazed at her appalled. It was a natural tragedy. There was no way out of it. She couldn't help seizing the thing at once, in a lightning flash of sympathy, from Dolly's point of view, too. Quick womanly instinct made her heart bleed for her daughter's manifest shame and horror.

"Dolly, Dolly," the agonized mother cried, flinging herself upon her child's mercy, as it were; "Don't be hard on me; don't be hard on me! My darling, how could I ever guess you would look at it like this? How could I ever guess my daughter and his would see things for herself in so different a light from the light we saw them in?"

"You had no right to bring me into the world at all," Dolly cried, growing fiercer as her mother grew more unhappy. "If you did, you should have put me on an equality with other people."

"Dolly," Herminia moaned, wringing her hands in her despair, "my child, my darling, how I have loved you! how I have watched over you! Your life has been for years the one thing I had to live for. I dreamed you would be just such another one as myself. EQUAL with other people! Why, I thought I was giving you the noblest heritage living woman ever yet gave the child of her bosom. I thought you would be proud of it, as I myself would have been proud. I thought you would accept it as a glorious birthright, a supreme privilege. How could I foresee you would turn aside from your mother's creed? How could I anticipate you would be ashamed of being the first free-born woman ever begotten in England? 'Twas a blessing I meant to give you, and you have made a curse of it."

"YOU have made a curse of it!" Dolores answered, rising and glaring at her. "You have blighted my life for me. A good man and true was going to make me his wife. After this, how can I dare to palm myself off upon him?"

She swept from the room. Though broken with sorrow, her step was resolute. Herminia followed her to her bed-room. There Dolly sat long on the edge of the bed, crying silently, silently, and rocking herself up and down like one mad with agony. At last, in one fierce burst, she relieved her burdened soul by pouring out to her mother the whole tale of her meeting with Walter Brydges. Though she hated her, she must tell her. Herminia listened with deep shame. It brought the color back into her own pale cheek to think any man should deem he was performing an act of chivalrous self-devotion in marrying Herminia Barton's unlawful daughter. Alan Merrick's child! The child of so many hopes! The baby that was born to regenerate humanity!

At last, in a dogged way, Dolly rose once more. She put on her hat and jacket.

"Where are you going?" her mother asked, terrified.

"I am going out," Dolores answered, "to the post, to telegraph to him."

She worded her telegram briefly but proudly:

"My mother has told me all. I understand your feeling. Our arrangement is annulled. Good-by. You have been kind to me."

An hour or two later, a return telegram came:—

"Our engagement remains exactly as it was. Nothing is changed. I hold you to your promise. All tenderest messages. Letter follows."

That answer calmed Dolly's mind a little. She began to think after all,—if Walter still wanted her,—she loved him very much; she could hardly dismiss him.

When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out her white face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively. Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with a look of offended dignity. "Never!" she answered in a firm voice. "Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure girl's kisses."

And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on their pillows in the Marylebone lodging-house.



XXII.

It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant at Sir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master's room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "Dolores Barton."

"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily.

The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed to retain any human affection.

So, when he read Dolly's card, being by nature suspicious, he felt sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.

But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face, and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him,—a tall sunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes,—he grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his eldest son's only daughter.

Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over.

Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashioned courtesy.

"And what can I do for you, young lady?" he asked in his best professional manner.

"Grandfather," the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, but saying it out none the less; "Grandfather, I'm your granddaughter, Dolores Barton."

The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange to say, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him.

"So I see, my child," he answered. "And what do you want with me?"

"I only knew it last night," Dolly went on, casting down those blue eyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I've come to implore your protection."

"That's prompt," the old man replied, with a curious smile, half suspicious, half satisfied. "From whom, my little one?" And his hand caressed her shoulder.

"From my mother," Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson. "From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the mother who, by her own confession, might have given me an honorable birthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to."

The old man eyed her with a searching glance.

"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said. "She hasn't dinged them into you!"

"She has tried to," Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to do with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction."

Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her spirit pleased him.

"That's well, my child," he answered. "That's well—for a beginning."

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness,—for in a moment, somehow, she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault,—began to tell him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire,—very well connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the horrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalled by it; how she could never again live under one roof with such a woman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, for assistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spoke impressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl really meant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purity of mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion of example. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy English maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of. 'Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she recoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathized with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him unbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history as he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himself now, if Dolores would come to him.

As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony's arms, as though she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather. Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butler could hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minutes later Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with a strange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcement that he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at home to nobody.

But before Dolly left her new-found relation's house, it was all arranged between them. She was to come there at once as his adopted daughter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; was to see nothing more of that wicked woman, her mother; and was to be married in due time from Sir Anthony's house, and under Sir Anthony's auspices, to Walter Brydges.

She wrote to Walter then and there, from her grandfather's consulting-room. Numb with shame as she was, she nerved her hand to write to him. In what most delicate language she could find, she let him plainly know who Sir Anthony was, and all else that had happened. But she added at the end one significant clause: "While my mother lives, dear Walter, I feel I can never marry you."



XXIII.

When she returned from Sir Anthony's to her mother's lodgings, she found Herminia, very pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her. Her eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a Pinturicchia at Perugia,—Alan's favorite picture. Out of her penury she had bought it. It represented the Madonna bending in worship over her divine child, and bore the inscription: "Quem genuit adoravit." Herminia loved that group. To her it was no mere emblem of a dying creed, but a type of the eternal religion of maternity. The Mother adoring the Child! 'Twas herself and Dolly.

"Well?" Herminia said interrogatively, as her daughter entered, for she half feared the worst.

"Well," Dolores answered in a defiant tone, blurting it out in sudden jerks, the rebellion of a lifetime finding vent at last. "I've been to my grandfather, my father's father; and I've told him everything; and it's all arranged: and I'm to take his name; and I'm to go and live with him."

"Dolly!" the mother cried, and fell forward on the table with her face in her hands. "My child, my child, are you going to leave me?"

"It's quite time," Dolly answered, in a sullen, stolid voice. "I can't stop here, of course, now I'm almost grown up and engaged to be married, associating any longer with such a woman as you have been. No right-minded girl who respected herself could do it."

Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips grew livid. She had counted on every element of her martyrdom,—save one; and this, the blackest and fiercest of all, had never even occurred to her. "Dolly," she cried, "oh, my daughter, you don't know what you do! You don't know how I've loved you! I've given up my life for you. I thought when you came to woman's estate, and learned what was right and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and call me blessed. And now,—oh, Dolly, this last blow is too terrible. It will kill me, my darling. I can't go on out-living it."

"You will," Dolly answered. "You're strong enough and wiry enough to outlive anything. . . . But I wrote to Walter from Sir Anthony's this morning, and told him I would wait for him if I waited forever. For, of course, while YOU live, I couldn't think of marrying him. I couldn't think of burdening an honest man with such a mother-in-law as you are!"

Herminia could only utter the one word, "Dolly!" It was a heart-broken cry, the last despairing cry of a wounded and stricken creature.



XXIV.

That night, Herminia Barton went up sadly to her own bed-room. It was the very last night that Dolores was to sleep under the same roof with her mother. On the morrow, she meant to remove to Sir Anthony Merrick's.

As soon as Herminia had closed the door, she sat down to her writing-table and began to write. Her pen moved of itself. And this was her letter:—

"MY DARLING DAUGHTER,—By the time you read these words, I shall be no longer in the way, to interfere with your perfect freedom of action. I had but one task left in life—to make you happy. Now I find I only stand in the way of that object, no reason remains why I should endure any longer the misfortune of living.

"My child, my child, you must see, when you come to think it over at leisure, that all I ever did was done, up to my lights, to serve and bless you. I thought, by giving you the father and the birth I did, I was giving you the best any mother on earth had ever yet given her dearest daughter. I believe it still; but I see I should never succeed in making YOU feel it. Accept this reparation. For all the wrong I may have done, all the mistakes I may have made, I sincerely and earnestly implore your forgiveness. I could not have had it while I lived; I beseech and pray you to grant me dead what you would never have been able to grant me living.

"My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as I did; I thought you would thank me for leading you to see such things as the blind world is incapable of seeing. There I made a mistake; and sorely am I punished for it. Don't visit it upon my head in your recollections when I can no longer defend myself.

"I set out in life with the earnest determination to be a martyr to the cause of truth and righteousness, as I myself understood them. But I didn't foresee this last pang of martyrdom. No soul can tell beforehand to what particular cross the blind chances of the universe will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is close at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith I started in life with. Nothing now remains for me but the crown of martyrdom. My darling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me that you should wish me dead; but 'tis a small thing to die, above all for the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, knowing that by doing so I can easily relieve my own dear little girl of one trouble in life, and make her course lie henceforth through smoother waters. Be happy! be happy! Good-by, my Dolly! Your mother's love go forever through life with you!

"Burn this blurred note the moment you have read it. I inclose a more formal one, giving reasons for my act on other grounds, to be put in, if need be, at the coroner's inquest. Good-night, my heart's darling. Your truly devoted and affectionate

MOTHER.

"Oh, Dolly, my Dolly, you never will know with what love I loved you."

When she had finished that note, and folded it reverently with kisses and tears, she wrote the second one in a firm hand for the formal evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, as pure as her own soul, like the one she had worn on the night of her self-made bridal with Alan Merrick. In her bosom she fastened two innocent white roses from Walter Brydges's bouquet, arranging them with studious care very daintily before her mirror. She was always a woman. "Perhaps," she thought to herself, "for her lover's sake, my Dolly will kiss them. When she finds them lying on her dead mother's breast, my Dolly may kiss them." Then she cried a few minutes very softly to herself; for no one can die without some little regret, some consciousness of the unique solemnity of the occasion.

At last she rose and moved over to her desk. Out of it she took a small glass-stoppered phial, that a scientific friend had given her long ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It contained prussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank it off. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend she had left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like some saint of the middle ages.

Not for nothing does blind fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity. From their graves shall spring glorious the church of the future.

When Dolores came in next morning to say good-by, she found her mother's body cold and stiff upon the bed, in a pure white dress, with two crushed white roses just peeping from her bodice.

Herminia Barton's stainless soul had ceased to exist forever.



THE END.