"The mother got very uneasy about her boy, and went out to look for him. The neighbours too, though he was not a nice boy, and none but his mother liked him, went out also, for they would gladly find him and take him home to her; and they came at last to the wood, with their torches and lanterns.

"The boy was lying under a tree, and saw the lights, and heard the voices, and knew it was his mother come. Then the old wickedness rose up fresh in his heart, and he said to himself: 'She shall have trouble yet before she finds me! Am I to come and go as she pleases!' He lay very still; and when he saw them coming near, crept farther, and again lay still. Thus he went on doing, and so avoided his saviours. He heard one say there were wolves in the wood, for that was the sound of them; but he was just the kind of boy that will not believe, but thinks every one has a purpose of his own in saying this or that. So he slipped and slipped away until at length all despaired of finding him, and left the wood.

"Suddenly he knew that he was again alone. He gave a great shriek, but no one heard it. He stood quaking and listening. Presently his pony came rushing past him, with two or three wolves behind him. He started to his feet and began to run, wild to get out of the wood. But he could not find the way, and ran about this way and that until utter despair came down upon him, and all he could do was to lie still as a mouse lest the wolves should hear him.

"And as he lay he began at last to think that he was a wicked child; that his mother had done everything to make him good, and he would not be good; and now he was lost, and the wolves alone would find him! He sank at last into a stupor, and lay motionless, with death and the wolves after him.

"He came to himself in the arms of a strange woman, who had taken him up, and was carrying him home.

"The name of the woman was Sorrow—a wandering woman, a kind of gypsy, always going about the world, and picking up lost things. Nobody likes her, hardly anybody is civil to her; but when she has set anybody down and is gone, there is often a look of affection and wonder and gratitude sent after her. For all that, however, very few are glad to be found by her again.

"Sorrow carried him weeping home to his mother. His mother came out, and took him in her arms. Sorrow made her courtesy, and went away. The boy clung to his mother's neck, and said he was sorry. In the midst of her joy his mother wept bitterly, for he had nearly broken her heart. She could not get the wolves out of her mind.

"But, alas! the boy forgot all, and was worse than ever. He grew more and more cruel to his mother, and mocked at every word she said to him; so that—"

There came a cry from the gallery. The congregation started in sudden terror to their feet. The rector stopped, and turning to the right, stood gazing. In the front of the squire's pew stood Mrs. Wylder, white, and speechless with rage. For a moment she stood shaking her fist at the preacher. Then, in a hoarse broken voice, came the words—

"It's a lie. My boy was never cruel to me. It's a wicked lie."

She could say no more, but stood and glared, hate in her fierce eyes, and torture in her colourless face.

"Madam, you have betrayed yourself," said the rector solemnly. "If your son behaved well to you, it makes it the worse in you to behave ill to your Father. From Sunday to Sunday you insult him with rude behaviour. I tell you so in the face of this congregation, which knows it as well as I. Hitherto I have held my tongue—from no fear of the rich, from no desire to spare them deserved disgrace in the eyes of the poor, but because I shrank from making the house of God a place of contention. Madam, you have behaved shamefully, and I do my duty in rebuking you."

The whole congregation were on their feet, staring at her. A moment she stood, and would have brazened out the stare. But she felt the eyes of the motionless hundreds blazing upon her, and the culprit soul grew naked in the presence of judging souls. Her nerve gave way; she turned her back, left the pew, and fled from the church by the squire's door, into the grounds of Wylder Hall.

Happily Barbara was not in the church that morning.

The next Sunday the squire's pew was empty. The red volume lay open on its face upon the floor of it.

Wingfold's dear plot had palled. He had rough-hewed his end, but the divinity had shaped it. When the squire came to know what had taken place, he made his first call on the rector. He said nothing about his wife, but plainly wished it understood that he bore him no ill will for what he had done.



CHAPTER XXII.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

The rector had often wished his wife could in some natural way get hold of Miss Wylder; he suspected something exceptionally fine in her: how else could she, with such a father and such a mother, have such a countenance? There must be a third factor in the affair, and one worth knowing—namely herself! That she seemed to avoid being reckoned among church-goers might be a point in her favour! What reports reached him of her wild ways, mingled with exaggerated stories of her lawlessness, did not shock him: what was true in them might spring from mere exuberance of life, whose joy was her only law—and yet a real law to her!

He had had no opportunity of learning either how peculiar the girl was, or how capable. She was not yet up to his teaching; she had to have other water to drink first, and was now approaching a source that might have caused him anxiety for her, had he ever so little believed in chance. But a shepherd is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food. That its best instincts may not be to the taste either of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing against those instincts. Without appearing to their guardians both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of "society," haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy slopes of the heavenly hills.

Barbara had as yet had no experience of pain—or of more at least than came from sympathy with suffering—a sympathy which, though ready, could hardly be deep in one who had never had a headache herself. To all dumb suffering things, she was very gentle and pitiful; but her pity was like that of a child over her doll.

She was always glad to get away from home. While her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the rector, she was flying over hedge and ditch and rail, in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour and his grandson found open when first the former took the latter to see the place: Barbara had a key to it.

She went with swift gliding step, like that of a red Indian, into the library. Richard was piecing the broken cords of a great old folio—the more easily that they were double—in order to re-attach the loosened sheets and the hanging board, and so get the book ready for a new cover. She carried in her hand something yet more sorely in need of mending—a pigeon with a broken wing, which she had seen lying in the park, and had dismounted to take. It kept opening and shutting its eyes, and she knew that nothing could be done for it; but the mute appeal of the dying thing had gone to her heart, and she wanted sympathy, whether for it or for herself she could hardly have distinguished. How she came to wake a little more just then, I cannot tell, but the fact is a joint in her history. The jar to the pigeon's life affected her as a catastrophe. She felt that there a crisis had come: a living conscious thing could do nothing for its own life, and lay helpless. Say rather—seemed so to lie. Oh, surely it is in reason that not a sparrow should fall to the ground without the Father! To whom but the father of the children that bemoan its fate, should the children carry his sparrow? But Barbara was carrying her pigeon where was no help for the heart of either.

"Ah, poor thing," said Richard, "I fear we can do nothing for it! But it will be at rest soon! It is fast going."

"Ah! but where?" said Barbara, to whom that moment came the question for the first time.

"Nowhere," answered Richard.

"How can that be? If I were going, I should be going somewhere! I couldn't go nowhere if I tried ever so. I don't like you to say it is going nowhere! Poor little thing! I won't let you go nowhere!"

"Well!" returned Richard, a little bewildered, "what would you have me say? You know what I mean! It is going not to be, that is all."

"That is all! How would you like to be told you were going nowhere—going not to be—that was all?"

Richard saw that to declare abruptly his belief that he was himself as much going nowhere as any pigeon that ever died, would probably be to close the door between them. At the same time, if he left her to imagine that he expected life for himself, but not for the animals, she must think him selfish! Unwilling therefore to answer, he took refuge in his genuine sympathy with suffering.

"Is it not strange," he said, and would have taken from her hands the wounded bird, but she would not part with it, "that men should take pleasure in killing—especially a creature like that, so full of innocent content? It seems to me the greatest pity to stop such a life!"

As he spoke there came upon him the dim sense of a foaming reef of argument ahead—such as this: "Then there ought to be no death! And what ought not to be, cannot be! But there is death: what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life." Some such argument Richard, I say, saw vaguely through the gloom ahead, and began to beat to windward.

"Did you ever notice," he said, "in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the point at which the dead bird falls from the neck of the man?"

It was a point, however, at which neither he nor Barbara was capable of seeing the depth of the poem. Richard thought it was the new-born love of beauty that freed the mariner; he did not see that it was the love of life, the new-born sympathy with life.

"I don't even know what you are talking of," answered Barbara. "Do tell me. It sounds like something wonderful! Is it a story?"

"Yes—a wonderful story."

Richard had not attempted to understand Coleridge's philosophy, taking it for quite obsolete; and it was but doubtfully that he had made trial of his poems. Happily choosing Christabel, however, for a tasting-piece, he was immediately enchanted and absorbed; and never again had he been so keenly aware of disappointment as when he came to the end, and found, as an Irishman might say, that it was not there: a lump gathered in his throat; he flung the book from him, and it was a week before he could open it again.

The next poem he tried was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which he read with almost equal delight, bewitched with many an individual phrase, with the melody unique of many a stanza, with the strangeness of its speech, with the loveliness of its real, and the wildness of its invented pictures. But he had not yet discovered, or even begun to foresee the marvel of its whole. A man must know something of repentance before he can understand The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The volume containing it had come into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form of The Rime as it appeared in the Sibylline Leaves of 1817: when he came to look at that in the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He found also in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation—a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.

He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment intermitting his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.

The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard's table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.

But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.

"Have you forgotten it? I am so sorry!" said Barbara. "It is wonderful—not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called—" Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. "I don't wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!"

"I've not exactly forgotten it," answered Richard; "but I've copied out different editions for comparison, and they've got a little mixed in my head."

"But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can't keep you from seeing what the author wrote!"

"The editions I mean are those of the author himself. He kept making changes, some of them very great changes. Not many people know the poem as Coleridge first published it."

"Coleridge! Who was he?"

"The man that wrote the poem."

"Oh! He altered it afterwards?"

"Yes, very much."

"Did he make it better?"

"Much better."

"Then why should you care any more for the first way of it?"

"Just because it is different. A thing not so good may have a different goodness. A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not. That implies that not every change he made was for the better. And where he has put a better phrase, or passage, the former may yet be good. So you see a new form may be much better, and yet the old form remain much too good to be parted with. In any case it is intensely interesting to see how and why he changed a thing or its shape, and to ponder wherein it is for the better or the worse. That is to take it like a study in natural history. In that we learn how an animal grows different to meet a difference in the supply of its needs; in the varying editions of a poem we see how it alters to meet a new requirement of the poet's mind. I don't mean the cases are parallel, but they correspond somehow. If I were a schoolmaster, I should make my pupils compare different forms of the same poem, and find out why the poet made the changes. That would do far more for them, I think, than comparing poets with each other. The better poets are—that is, the more original they are—the less there is in them to compare."

"But I want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind the differences in the telling of it."

"I'm afraid I can't get into the current of it now."

"You can look at the book! It must be somewhere among all these!"

"No doubt. But I haven't time to look for it now."

"It won't take you a minute to find it."

"I must not leave my work."

"It wouldn't cost you more than one tiny minute!" pleaded Barbara like a child.

"Let me explain to you, miss:—I find the only way to be sure I don't cheat, is to know I haven't stopped an instant to do anything for myself. Sometimes I have stopped for a while; and then when I wanted to make up the time, I couldn't be quite sure how much I owed, and that made me give more than I needed—which I didn't like when I would gladly have been doing something else. When the time is my own, it is of far more value to me for the insides than to my employer for the outsides of the books. So you see, for my own sake as well as his, I cannot stop till my time is up."

"That is being honest!"

"Who can consent to be dishonest! It is the meanest thing to undertake work and then imagine you show spirit by shirking what you can of it. There's a lot of fellows like that! I would as soon pick a pocket as undertake and not do!"

Barbara begged no more.

"But I can talk while I work, miss," Richard went on; "and I will try again to remember."

"Please, please do."

Richard thought a little, and presently resuming the poem, went on to the end of the first part. As he finished the last stanza—

God save thee, ancient Mariner, From the fiends that plague thee thus!— Why look'st thou so?—With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross!'"—

"Ah!" cried Barbara, "I see now what made you think of the poem!"—and she looked down at the throbbing bird in her lap.

It opened its dark eyes once more—with a reeling, pitiful look at her, Barbara thought—quivered a little, and lay still. She burst into tears.

Richard dropped his work, and made a step toward her.

"Never mind," she said. "One has got to cry so much, and I may as well cry for the bird! I'm all right now, thank you! Please go on. The bird is dead, and I'm glad. I will let it lie a little, and then bury it. If it be anywhere, perhaps it will one day know me, and then it will love me. Please go on with the poem. It will make me forget. I'm not bound to remember, am I—where I'm not to blame, I mean, and cannot help?"

"Certainly not!" acquiesced Richard, and began the second part.

"I see! I see!" cried Barbara, wiping her eyes. "They were cross with him for killing the bird, not because they loved the beautiful creature, but because it was unlucky to kill him! And then when nothing but good came, they said it was quite right to kill him, and told lies of him, and said he was a bad bird, and brought the fog and mist!—I wonder what's coming to them!—That's not the end, is it? It can't be!"

"No; it's not nearly done yet. It's only beginning."

"I'm so glad! Do go on."

She was eager as any child. Coleridge could not have desired a better listener.

"I know! I know!" she said presently. "We were caught in a calm as we came home! My father is fond of the sea, and brought us round the Cape in a sailing-vessel. It was horrid. It lasted only three days, but I felt as if I should die. It wasn't long enough, I suppose, to draw out the creeping things."

"Perhaps it wasn't near enough to the equator for them," answered Richard, and went on:—

"Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young; Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung."

"Poor man! And in such weather!" exclaimed Barbara. "And such a huge creature! I see! They thought now the killing of the bird had brought the calm, and they would have their revenge! A bad set, those sailors! People that deserve punishment always want to punish. Do go on."

When the skeleton-ship came, her eyes grew with listening like those of one in a trance.

"What a horrid, live dead woman!" she said. "Her whiteness is worse than any blackness. But I wish he had told us what Death was like!"

"In the first edition," returned Richard, much delighted that she missed what constructive symmetry required, "there is a description of Death. I doubt if you would like it, though. You don't like horrid things?"

"I do—if they should be horrid, and are horrid enough."

"Coleridge thought afterwards it was better to leave it out!"

"Tell it me, anyhow."

"His bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust, Of mouldy damps and charnel crust, They were patched with purple and green.

"—There! What do you think of that?"

"He is nothing like so horrid as the woman!"

"She is more horrid in the first edition."

"How?"

"Her lips are red, her looks are free, Her locks are yellow as gold; Her skin is as white as leprosy, And she is far liker Death than he; Her flesh makes the still air cold."

"I do think that is worse. Tell me again how the other goes."

"The Night-Mare Life-in-death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold."

"Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?"

"I don't know. I can't quite get at it."

How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.

"There's another dreadful stanza in the first edition," he went on. "It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in the errata, to be omitted.—When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,

"'A gust of wind sterte up behind,'

"—as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:—

"'A gust of wind sterte up behind, And whistled through his bones; Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth, Half whistles and half groans;'

"and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton."

"I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!" said Barbara. "There is no nasty horror in it! There is a little in the description of Death!"

"I think with you," returned Richard, more and more astonished at the insight of a girl who had read next to nothing. "Our lecturer at King's," he went on, "pointed out to us, in this part, what some call a blunder."

"What is it?"

"I will give you the verses again; and you see if you can pick it out."

"Do, please."

"—Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip."

"I never saw a star there! But I see nothing wrong."

"Which is the nearest to us of the heavenly bodies?"

"The moon, I suppose."

"Certainly:—how, then, could a star come between us and it? For if the star were within the tip of the moon, it must be between us and the dark part of the moon!"

"I see! How stupid of me! But let me think!—If the star were just on the edge of the moon, between the horns, it would almost look as if it were within the tips—might it not?"

"That's the best that can be said for it anyhow,—except indeed that the poor ignorant sailor might, in the midst of such horrors, well make the blunder.—By the way, in the first edition it stood as you have just said: the line was,

"'Almost within the tips.'"

"What did he change it to?"

"He made it—

"'Within the nether tip.'"

"Why did he change it?"

"You would see that at the first glance, if you were used to riming."

"Are you a poet, then, as well as a blacksmith and a bookbinder?"

"Too much of a poet, I hope, to imagine myself more than a whittler of reeds!" answered Richard.

He was not sorry, however, to let Barbara know him for a poor relation of the high family of poets. In truth, what best enabled him to understand their work, was the humble work of the same sort he did himself.

She did not understand what he meant by a whittler of reeds, but she rightly took what he said for a humble affirmative.

"I begin to be frightened at you!" she rejoined, half meaning it. "Who knows what else you may not be!"

"I am little enough of anything," answered Richard, "but nothing that I do not wish to be more of."

A short silence followed.

"You have not told me yet why he changed that line!" resumed Barbara.

"Better wait until I can show it you in the book: then you will see at once."

"Please, go on then. I don't know anything about the poem yet! I don't know why it was written!"

"You like some dreams, though they have no reason in them, don't you?"

"Yes; but then I suppose there is reason in the poem!"

"There is, indeed!" said Richard, and went on.

But presently she stopped him.

"One thing I should like to know before we go further," she said; "—why they all fell down except the ancient Mariner."

"You remember that Death and the woman were casting dice?"

"Yes."

"It is not very clear, but this is how I understand the thing:—They diced for the crew, one by one; Death won every one till they came to the last, the ancient Mariner himself, and the woman, a sort of live Death, wins him. That is why she cries, 'I've won, I've won!' and whistles thrice—though she has won only one out of two hundred. I should think she was used to Death having more than she, else she wouldn't have been so pleased. Perhaps she seldom got one!"

"Yes, I see all that. But things oughtn't to go by the casting of dice. Money may, for that does not signify, but not the souls and bodies of men. It should not be the way in a poem any more than in the open world.—Let me think!—I have it!—They were not good men, those sailors! They first blamed, and then justified, and then again blamed and cruelly punished the poor mariner, who had done wrong certainly, but was doubtless even then sorry for it. He was cruel to a bird he did not know, and they were cruel to a man they did know! So they are taken, and he is left—to come well out of it at last, I hope.—Yes, it's all right! Now you can go on."

She said nothing as he showed her the deck strewn so thick with the dead bodies, whose cursing eyes all looked one way; but when the heavenly contrast came:—

The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside;—

she gave a deep sigh of delight, and said—

"Ah, don't I know her, the beauty! Isn't it just many a time she has made me sick with the love of her, and her peace, and her ways of looking, and walking, and talking—for talk she does to those that can listen hard! I dare say, in this old country where she's been about so long, you will think it silly to make so much of her; but you don't know here what it is to have her night after night for your one companion! She never grows a downright friend, though—a friend you've got at the heart of! She always looks at you as if she were saying—'Yes, yes; I know what you are thinking! but I have that in me you can never know, and I can never tell! It will go down with me to the grave of the great universe, and no one will ever know it! It is so lovely!—and oh, so sad!'"

She was silent. Richard could not answer. He saw her far away like the moon she spoke of. She was growing to him a marvel and a mystery. Something strange seemed befalling him. Was she weaving a spell about his soul? Was she fettering him for her slave? Was she one of the wild, bewildering creatures of ancient lonely belief, that are the souls of the loveliest things, but can detach themselves from them, and wander out in garments more immediately their own? Was she salamander or sylph, naiad or undine, oread or dryad?—But then she had such a head, and they were all rather silly!

When the ballad told how silvery were the sea-snakes in the moonlight, and how gorgeously varied in the red shadow, Richard looked for her to show delight in the play of their colours; but, though the sweet strong little mouth smiled, her brows looked more puzzled than pleased—which was a thing noteworthy.

Any marvel in Nature, however new, Barbara would have welcomed with bare delight; she would have asked neither the why, nor the how, nor the final cause of the phenomenon—as if, being natural, it must be right, and she needed not trouble herself; but here, in this poem, a world born of the imagination of a man, she wanted to know about everything, whether it was, or would be, or ought to be just so—whether, in a word, every fact was souled with a reason, as it ought to be. Perhaps she demanded such satisfaction too soon; perhaps she ought to have waited for the whole, and, having found that a harmonious thing, then first have inquired into the truth of its parts; but so it was: she must know as she went, that she might know when she arrived! But in this she revealed a genuine artistic faculty—that she gave herself up to the poet, and allowed him to inspire her, yet would have reason from him.

Richard went on:—

"O happy living things! No tongue Their beauty might declare; A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware! Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.

"The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea."

Barbara jumped up, clapping her hands with delight.

"I knew something was going to happen!" she cried. "I knew it was coming all right!"

"You have not heard the end yet! You don't know what may be coming!" protested Richard.

"Nothing can go wrong now! The man's love is awake, and he will be sorrier and sorrier for what he did! Instead of saying, 'The wrigglesome, slimy things!' he blesses them; and because he is going to be a friend to the other creatures in the house, and live on good terms with them, the body he had killed tumbles from his neck; the bad deed is gone down into the depth of the great sea, and he is able to say his prayers again;—no, not that exactly; it must be something better than saying prayers now!"— She paused a moment, then added, "It must be something I think I don't know yet!" and sat down.

Richard heard and admired: he thought that as she had perceived there was something better than saying prayers, she would pray no more!

"Go on; go on," she said. "But if you like to stop, I shan't mind. I have no fear now. It's all going right, and must soon come all right!"

"O sleep! It is a gentle thing,"

said Richard, going on.

"There it is!" she interrupted. "I knew it was all coming right! He can sleep now!"

"O sleep! It is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle deep from Heaven, That slid into my soul."

Some one was in the room, the door of which had been open all the time. The sky was so cloudy, and the twilight so far advanced, that neither of them, Barbara absorbed in the poem and Richard in the last of his day's work, had heard any one enter.

"Why don't you ring for a lamp?" said Lestrange.

"There is no occasion; I have just done," answered Richard.

"You cannot surely see in this light!" said Arthur, who was short-sighted. "You certainly were not at your work when I came into the room!"

He thought Richard had caught up the piece of leather he was paring, in order to deceive him.

"Indeed, sir, I was."

"You were not. You were reading!"

"I was not reading, sir. I was busy with the last of my day's work."

"Do not tell me you were not reading: I heard you!"

"You did hear me, sir; but you did not hear me reading," rejoined Richard, growing angry with the tone of the young man, and with his unreadiness to believe him.

Many workmen, having told a lie, would have been more indignant at not being believed, than was Richard speaking the truth; still, he was growing angry.

"You must have a wonderful memory, then!" said Lestrange. "But, excuse me, we don't care to hear your voice in the house."

The same moment, he either discovered, or pretended to discover, Barbara's presence.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Wylder!" he said. "I did not know he was amusing you! I did not see you were in the room!"

"I suppose," returned Barbara—and it savoured of the savage Lestrange sometimes called her—"you will be ordering the nightingales not to sing in your apple-trees next!"

"I don't understand you!"

"Neither do you understand Mr. Tuke, or you would not speak to him that way!"

She rose and walked to the door, but turned as she went, and added—

"He was repeating the loveliest poem I ever heard—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.—I didn't know there could be such a poem!" she added simply.

"It is not one I care about. But you need not take it second-hand from Tuke: I will lend it you."

"Thank you!" said Barbara, in a tone which was not of gratitude, and left the room.

Lestrange stood for a moment, but finding nothing suitable to say, turned and followed her, while Richard bit his lip to keep himself silent. He knew, if he spoke, there would be an end; and he did not want this to be his last sight of the wonderful creature!

Barbara went to the door with the intention of going to the stables for Miss Brown and galloping straight home. But she bethought herself that so she might seem to be ashamed. She was not Arthur's guest! He had been insolent to her friend, who had done more for her already than ever Arthur was likely to do, but that was no reason why she should run away from him—just the contrary! She would like to punish him for it somehow!—not shoot him, for she would not kill a pigeon, and to kill a man would be worse, though he wasn't so nice as a pigeon!—but she would like—yes, she would like to give him just three good cuts across the shoulders with her new riding-whip! What right had he to speak so to his superior! By being a true workman, Mr. Tuke was a gentleman! Could Arthur Lestrange have talked like that? Could he have spoken the poetry like that? The bookbinder was worth a hundred of him! Could Arthur shoe a horse? What if the working man were to turn out the real lord of the creation, and the gentleman have to black his boots! There was something like it in the gospel!

She did not know that in general the working man is as foolish and unfit as the rich man; that he only wants to be rich, and trample on his own past. The working man may perish like the two hundred of the crew, and the rich man may be saved like the Ancient Mariner!

It is the poor man that gives the rich man all the pull on him, by cherishing the same feelings as the rich man concerning riches, by fancying the rich man because of his riches the greater man, and longing to be rich like him. A man that can do things is greater than any man who only has things. True, a rich man can get mighty things done, but he does not do them. He may be much the greater for willing them to be done, but he is not the greater for the actual doing of them.

"At any rate," said Barbara to herself, "I like this working man better than that gentleman!"

Richard stood for a while boiling with indignation. He would have cared less if he had been sure he had answered him properly, but he could not remember what he had said.

The clock struck the hour that ended his workday. Instead of sitting down to read, he set out for the smithy. It was not a week since he had seen his grandfather, but he wanted motion, and desired a human face that belonged to him. It was rather dark when he reached it, but the old man had not yet dropped work. The sparks were flying wild about his gray head as Richard drew near.

"Can I help you, grandfather?" he said.

"No, no, lad; your hands are too soft by this time—with your bits of brass wheels, and scraps of leather, and needles, and paste! No, no, lad;—thou cannot help the old man to-night.—But you're not in earnest, are you?" he added, looking up suddenly. "You 'ain't left your place?"

"No, but my day's work being over, why shouldn't I help you to get yours over! When first I came you expected me to do so!"

"Look here, lad!—as a man gets older he comes to think more of fair play, and less of his rights: it seems to me that not your time only, but your strength as well belongs to the man who hires you; and if you weary yourself helping me, who have no claim, you cannot do so much or so good work for your master!—Do you see sense in that?"

"Indeed I do! I think you are quite right."

"It is strange," Simon went on, "how age makes you more particular! The thing I would have done without thinking when I was young, I think twice of now. Is that what we were sent here for—to grow honest, I wonder?—Depend upon it," he resumed after a moment's silence, "there's a somewhere where the thing's taken notice of! There's a somebody as thinks about it!"

After more talk, and a cup of tea at the cottage, Richard set out for the lodgeless gate, already mentioned more than once, to which the housekeeper had lent him a key.

He had not got far into the park, when to his surprise he perceived, a little way off on the grass, a small figure gliding swiftly toward him through the dusk rather than the light of the moon, which, but just above the horizon, sent little of her radiance to the spot. It was Barbara.

"I have been watching for you ever so long!" she said. "They told me you had gone out, and I thought you might come home this way."

"I wish I had known! I wouldn't have kept you waiting," returned Richard.

"I want the rest of the poem," she said. "It was horrid to have Arthur interrupt us! He was abominably rude too."

"He certainly had no right to speak to me as he did. And if he had confessed himself wrong, or merely said he had made a mistake, I should have thought no more about it. I hope it is not true you are going to marry him, miss!—because—"

"If I thought one of the family said so, I would sleep in the park to-night. I would not enter the house again. When I marry, it will be a gentleman; and Mr. Lestrange is not a gentleman—at least he did not behave like one to-day. Come, tell me the rest of the poem. We have plenty of time here."

The young bookbinder was perplexed. He had not much knowledge of the world, but he could not bear the thought of the servants learning that they were in the park together. At the same time he saw that he must not even hint at imprudence. Her will was not by him to be scanned! She must be allowed to know best! A single tone of hesitation would be an insult! He must take care of her without seeming to do so! If they walked gently, they would finish the poem as they came near the house: there he would leave her, and return by the lodge-gate.

"Where did we leave off?" he said.

His brief silence had seemed to Barbara but a moment spent in recalling.

"We left off at the place where the bird fell from his neck—no, just after that, where he falls asleep, as well he might, after it was gone."

The moon was now peeping, in little spots of light, through the higher foliage, and casting a doubtful, ghostly sediment of shine around them. The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara's soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like another moon from a cloud, walked the earth with bare head. Her hands too were bare, and glimmered in the night-gleam. He saw the rings on the small fingers shimmer and shine: she was as fond of colour and flash as lord St. Albans! Higher and higher rose the moon. Her light on the grass-blades wove them into a carpet with its weft of faint moonbeams. The small dull mirrors of the evergreen leaves glinted in the thickets, as the two went by, like the bits of ill-polished glass in an Indian tapestry. The moon was everywhere, filling all the hollow over-world, and for ever alighting on their heads. Far away they saw the house, a remote something, scarce existent in the dreaming night, the gracious-ghastly poem, and the mingling, harmonizing moon. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer; but they were moving toward it all the time, and it was even growing a move insistent fact. Thus they walked at once in the two blended worlds of the moonlight and the tale, while Richard half-chanted the music-speech of the most musical of poets, telling of the roaring wind that the mariner did not feel, of the flags of electric light, of the dances of the wan stars, of the sighing of the sails, of the star-dogged moon, and the torrent-like falls of the lightning down the mountainous cloud—for so Barbara, who had seen two or three tropical thunder-storms, explained to Richard the lightning which

"fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide;"

—until that groan arose from the dead men, and the bodies heaved themselves up on their feet, and began to work the ropes, and worked on till sunrise, and the mariner knew that not the old souls but angels had entered into them, by their gathering about the mast, and sending such a strange lovely hymn through their dead throats up to the sun.

When Richard repeated the stanza—

"It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune;"

Barbara uttered a prolonged "Oh!" and again was silent, listening to the talk of the elemental spirits, feeling the very wind of home that blew on the mariner, seeing the lighthouse, and the hill, and the weathercock on the church-spire, and the white bay, and the shining seraphs with the crimson shadows, and the sinking ship, and the hermit that made the mariner tell his story as he was telling it now.

But when Richard came to the words—

"He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small, For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all,"

she clapped her hands together; and when he ended them, she cried out—

"I was sure of it! I knew something would come to tie it all up together into one bundle! That's it! That's it! The love of everything is the garden-bed out of which grow the roses of prayer!—But what am I saying!" she added, checking herself; "I love everything, at least everything that comes near me, and I never pray!"

"Of course not! Why should you?" said Richard.

"Why should I not?"

"You would if it were reasonable!"

"I will, then! To love all the creatures and not have a word to say to the God that made them for loving them before-hand—is that reasonable?"

"No, if a God did make them."

"They could not make themselves!"

"No; nothing could make itself."

"Then somebody must have made them!"

"Who?"

"Why, the one that could and did—who else?"

"We know nothing about such a somebody. All we know is, that there they are, and we have got to love them!"

"Ah!" she said, and looked up into the wide sky, where now the "wandering moon" was alone,

Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way,

and gazed as if she searched for the Somebody. "I should like to see the one that made that!" she said at last. "Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can't have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don't believe there is any nowhere, so he can't be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don't get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can't say it!"

"You don't know what you mean, but you do say it!" thought Richard.

He was nowise repelled by her enthusiasm, for there was in it nothing assailant, nothing too absurdly superstitious. He did not care to answer her.

They went walking toward the house and were silent. The moon went on with her silentness: she never stops being silent. When they felt near the house, they fell to walking slower, but neither knew it. Barbara spoke again:

"Just fancy!" she said, "—if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look round and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there, and wondering when his little one would look round, and see him, and burst out laughing—no, not laughing—yes, laughing—laughing with delight—or crying, I don't know which! If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him—I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colours and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!—and all the creatures—and the people that one would love so if they would let you!—and all—"

"And all the pain, and the dying, and the disease, and the wrongs, and the cruelty!" interposed Richard.

She was silent. After a moment or two she said—

"I think I will go in now. I feel rather cold. I think there must be a fog, though I can't see it."

She gave a little shiver. He looked in her face. Was it the moon, or was it something in her thoughts that made the sweet countenance look so gray? Could his mere suggestion of the reverse, the wrong side of the web of creation, have done it? Surely not!

"I think I want some one to say must to me!" she said, after another pause. "I feel as if—"

There she stopped. Richard said nothing. Some instinct told him he might blunder.

He stood still. Barbara went on a few steps, then turned and said—

"Are you not going in?"

"Not just yet," he answered. "Please to remember that if I can do anything for you,—"

"You are very kind. I am much obliged to you. If you know another rime,—But I think I shall have to give up poetry."

"It will be hard to find another so good," returned Richard.

"Good-night," she said.

"Good-night, miss!" answered Richard, and walked away, with a loss at his heart. The poem has already ceased to please her! He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, and less happy than before!

"She has been taught to believe in a God," he said to himself. "She is afraid he will be angry with her, because, in her company, I dared question his existence! A generous God—isn't he! If he be anywhere, why don't he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn't want him, and I don't, I certainly shouldn't worship him because I saw him. I couldn't. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a God, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!"

He did not reflect that if he had wanted him, he would not have waited to see him before he worshipped him.

But Barbara was saying to herself—

"What if he has shown himself to me some time—one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose—and I didn't know him!—How frightful if there should be nobody at all up there—nobody anywhere all round!"

She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.

Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!



CHAPTER XXIII.

A HUMAN GADFLY.

From so early an age had Richard been accustomed to despise a certain form he called God, which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors, some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and devoid of prophetic imagination, that his antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any God whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false, that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable either of discovering or receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That he has never conceived a deity such as he could worship, is a poor ground to any but the man himself for saying such cannot exist; and to him it is but a ground lightly vaulted over the vacuity self-importance. Such a divine form may yet stand in the adytum of this or that man whom he and the world count an idiot.

Into the workshop of Richard's mind was now introduced, by this one disclosure of the mind of Barbara, a new idea of divinity, vague indeed as new, but one with which he found himself compelled to have some dealing. One of the best services true man can do a neighbour, is to persuade him—I speak in a parable—to house his children for a while, that he may know what they are: the children of another may be the saving of his children and his whole house. Alas for the man the children of whose brain are the curse of the household into which they are received! But from Barbara's house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic idea that must work, and would never cease to work until the house itself was all divine—the idea, namely, of a being to call God, who was a delight to think of, a being concerning whom the great negation was that of everything Richard had hitherto associated with the word God. The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open; and when admitted, the figure was not easy to set up so that it could be looked at. The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard's house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a Japanese teapot.

It was not pleasant to Richard to imagine any one with rights over him. It may be that some persist in calling up the false idea of such a one hitherto presented to them, in order to avoid feeling obligation to believe in him. For the notion of a God is one from which naturally a thoughtful man must feel more or less recoil while as yet he knows nothing of the being himself, or of the nature of his creative rights, the rights of perfect, self-refusing, devoted fatherhood. It is one thing to seem to know with the brain, quite another to know with the heart. But even in the hope-lighted countenance of Barbara, even in the tones in which she suggested the presence of a soul that meant and was all that the beautiful world hinted and seemed, Richard could not fail to meet something of the true idea of a God.

Naturally also, his notion of the God in whom he felt that Barbara was at least ready to believe, assumed something of the look of Barbara who was being drawn toward him; so that now the graces of the world, all its lovely impacts upon his senses, began to be mixed up in his mind with Barbara and her God. Barbara was beginning to infect him with—shall I call it the superstition of a God? Whatever it may be called, it was very far from being religion yet. The fact was only this—that the idea of a God worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.

He began to feel his heart drawn at times, in some strange, tenderer fashion, hitherto unknown to him, to the blue of the sky, especially in the first sweetness of a summer morning. His soul would now and then seem to go out of him, in a passion of embrace, to the simplest flower: the flower would be, for a moment, just its self to him. He would spread out his arms to the wind, now when it met him in its strength, now when it but kissed his face. He never consented with himself that it was one force in all the forms that drew him—that perhaps it was the very God, the All in all about him. Neither did he question much with himself as to how the development, rather than change, had begun. Whether God did this, or was this, or it was only the possessing Barbara that cast her light out of his eyes on the things he saw and felt, he scarcely asked; but fully he recognised the fact that Nature was more alive than she ever had been to him who had always loved her.

The thought of Barbara went on growing dear to him. He never pondered anything but the girl herself, cherished no dreams of her becoming more to him, of her ever being nearer than away there; just to know her was now, and henceforward ever would be the gladness of his life. If that life was but for a season; if the very core of life was decay; if life was because nobody could help its being; if it died because no one could keep it from dying; yet were there two facts fit almost to embalm the body of this living death: Barbara, and the world which was the body of Barbara! So life carried the day, if but the day, and the heart of Richard rejoiced in the midst of perishings. Only, the night was coming in which no man can rejoice.

Was he then presuming to be in love with Barbara? I do not care to meet the question. If I knew what the mysterious word, love, meant, I might be able to answer it, but what should I thus gain or give? I know he loved her. I know that a divine power of truth and beauty had laid hold upon him, and was working in him as the powers of God alone can work in man, for they are the same by which he lives and moves and has his being, and to life are more than meat and drink, than sun and air.

Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a God, we should think first whether his notional God is a God that ought, or a God that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a God than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all, and cannot care whether there be a God or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atmosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born into it.

For some time Richard saw little of Barbara.

The heads of the house did not interfere with him. Lady Ann would now and then sail through the room like an iceberg; sir Wilton would come in, give a glance at the shelves and a grin, and walk out again with a more or less gouty gait; so much was about all their contact. Arthur was a little ashamed of having spoken to him as he did, and had again become in a manner friendly. He had seen several decaying masses, among the rest the Golding of their difference, become books in his hands, and again he had grown sufficiently interested in the workman to feel in him something more than the workman. He was on the way to perceive that, in certain insignificant things, such as imagination, reading, insight, and general faculty, not to mention conscience, generosity, and goodness of heart, Richard was out of sight before the ruck of gentlemen. He saw already that in some things, thought a good deal of at his college, Richard was more capable than himself. He found in him too what seemed to him a rare notion of art. In truth Richard's advance in this region was as yet but small, for he was guided only by his limited efforts in verse; none the less, however, was he far ahead of Arthur, who saw only what was shown him. In literature Arthur had already learned something from Richard, and knew it. He had, indeed, without knowing it, begun to look up to him.

Richard also had discovered good in Arthur—among other things a careful regard to his word, and to his father's tenantry. There was of course, in a scanty nature like his, a good deal of the lord bountiful mingled with his behaviour to his social inferiors on the property: he posed to himself as a condescending landlord.

The only one in the house who gave Richard trouble, was the child Victoria. The way she always took to show her liking, was to annoy its object. Never was name less fitting than hers: there was no victory in her. She could but fly about like veriest mosquito. Richard let her come and go unheeded, except when her proximity to his work made him anxious. But the little vixen would not consent to be naught any smallest while. She would rather be abused than remain unnoticed. When she found that her standing and staring procured no attention from the bookbinder, she would begin to handle his tools, and ask what this and that was for, giving, like a woman of fashion, no heed to any answer he accorded her. Learning thus, that is, by experiment, how to annoy him, she did not let opportunity lack. When school was over in the morning, and she could go where she pleased, she went often to the library; and as no one willingly asked where she was, the chief pleasure of her acquaintance lying in the assurance that she was nowhere at hand, Richard had to endure many things from her; and things that do not seem worth enduring, are not unfrequently the hardest to endure.

The behaviour of the child grew worse and worse. She would more than touch everything, and that thing the most persistently which Richard was most anxious to have let alone, causing him no little trouble at times to set right what she had injured. Worst of all was her persecution when she found him using gold-leaf. She would come behind him and blow the film away just as he had got it flat on his cushion, or laid on the spot where his tool was about to fix a portion of it. Her mischief was not even irradiated by childish laughter; there was never any sign of frolic on her monkey face, except the steely glitter of her sharp, black bead-eyes, might be supposed to contain some sprinkle of fun in its malice. Expostulation was not of the slightest use, and sometimes it was all Richard could do to keep his hands off her. Now she would look as stolid as if she did not understand a word he said; now pucker up her face into a most unpleasant grin of derision and contemptuous defiance.

One day when he happened to be using the polishing-iron, Vixen, as her brothers called her, came in, and began to play with the paste. Richard turned with the iron in his hand, which he had just taken from the brasier. He was rubbing it bright and clean, and she noted this, but had not seen him take it from the fire: she caught at it, to spoil it with her pasty fingers. As quickly she let it go, but did not cry, though her eyes filled. Richard saw, and his heart gave way. He caught the little hand so swift to do evil, and would have soothed its pain. She pulled it from him, crying, "You nasty man! How dare you!" and ran to the door, where she turned and made a hideous face at him. The same moment, by a neighbouring door that opened from another passage, in came Barbara, and before Vixen was well aware of her presence, had dealt her such a box on the ear that she burst into a storm of wrathful weeping.

"You're a brute, Bab," she cried. "I'll tell mamma!"

"Do, you little wretch!" returned Barbara, whose flushed face looked lovely childlike in its indignation beside the furious phiz of the tormenting imp.

The monkey-creature left the room, sobbing; and Barbara turned and was gone before Richard could thank her.

He heard no more of the matter, and for some time had no farther trouble with Victoria.

Barbara had the kindest of hearts, but there was nothing soft about her She held it a sin to spoil any animal, not to say a child. For she had a strong feeling, initiated possibly by her black nurse, that the animals went on living after death, whence she counted it a shame not to teach them; and held that, if a sharp cut would make child or dog behave properly, the woman was no lover of either who would spare it.



CHAPTER XXIV.

RICHARD AND WINGFOLD.

Barbara had more than once or twice heard Mr. Wingfold preach, but had not once listened, or oven waked to the fact that she had not listened. Unaccustomed in childhood to any special regard of the Sunday, she had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations with church-going; but she liked a good many things better, and as she always did as she liked except she saw reason to the contrary, she had hitherto gone to church rather seldom. She might perhaps have sooner learned to go regularly but for her mother's extraordinary behaviour there: certainly she could not sit in the same pew with her reading her novel. Since Mr. Wingfold had taken the part of the prophet Nathan, and rebuked her, she had indeed ceased to go to church, but Barbara, as I have said, was as yet only now and then drawn thitherward.

Mr. Wingfold was almost as different from the clergyman of Richard's idea, as was Richard's imagined God from any believable idea of God. The two men had never yet met, for what should bring a working-man and the clergyman of the next parish together? But one morning—he often went for a walk in the early morning—Richard saw before him, in the middle of a field-path, seated on a stile and stopping his way, the back of a man in a gray suit, evidently enjoying, like himself, the hour before sunrise. He knew somehow that he was not a working-man, but he did not suspect him one of the obnoxious class which lives by fooling itself and others. Wingfold heard Richard's step, looked round, knew him at once an artisan of some sort, and saw in him signs of purpose and character strong for his years.

"Jolly morning!" he said.

"It is indeed, sir!" answered Richard.

"I like a walk in the morning better than at any other time of the day!" said Wingfold.

"Well, sir, I do so too, though I can't tell why. I've often tried, but I haven't yet found out what makes the morning so different."

"Come!" thought the clergyman; "here's something I haven't met with too much of!"

Richard remarked to himself that, whoever the gentleman was, he was certainly not stuck-up. They might have parted late the night before, instead of meeting now for the first time!

"Are you a married man?" asked Wingfold.

"No, sir," answered Richard, surprised that a stranger should put the question.

"If you had been," Wingfold went on, "I should have been surer of your seeing what I mean when I say, that to be out before sunrise is like looking at your best friend asleep—that is, before her sun, her thought, namely, is up. Watching her face then, you see it come to life, grow radiant with sunrise."

"But," rejoined Richard, "I have seen a person asleep whose face made it quite evident that thought was awake! It was shining through!"

"Shining through, certainly," said Wingfold, "not up. I doubt indeed if during any sleep, thought is quite in abeyance."

"Not when we are dead asleep, sir?—so dead that when we wake we don't remember anything?"

"If thought in such a case must be proved, it will have to go for non-existent. Yet, when you reflect that sometimes you discover that you must, a few minutes before, wide awake, have done something which you have no recollection of having done, and which, but for the fact remaining evident to your sight, you would not believe you had done, you must feel doubtful as to the loss of consciousness in sleep."

"Yes; that must give us pause!"

"Hamlet!" said the clergyman to himself. "That's good! You may have read from top to bottom of a page, perhaps," he went on, "without being able to recall a word: would you say no thought had passed through your mind in the process?—that the words had suggested nothing as you read them?"

"No, sir; I should be inclined to say that I forgot as fast as I read; that, as I read, I seemed to know the thing I read, but the process of forgetting kept pace for pace alongside the process of reading."

"I quite agree with you.—Now I wonder whether you will agree with me in what I am going to suggest next!"

"I can't tell that, sir," said Richard—somewhat unnecessarily; but Wingfold was pleased to find him cautious.

"I think," the parson continued, "that what I want in order to be able afterward to recollect a thing, is to be not merely conscious of the thing when it comes, but at the same moment conscious of myself. To remember, I must be self-conscious as well as thing-conscious."

"There I cannot quite follow you."

"When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it."

"I think I can follow you so far," said Richard.

"When, then," pursued the parson, "I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word."

"I understand so far, sir—at least I think I do."

"Then you will allow that a word with its reflection and mental impact thus operated upon by the mind is not so likely to be forgotten as one understood only in the first immediate way?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Well, then—mind I am only suggesting; I am not proclaiming a fact, still less laying down a law; I am not half sure enough about it for that—so it is with our dreams. We see, or hear, and are conscious that we do, in our dreams; our consciousness shines through our sleeping features to the eyes that love us; but when we wake we have forgotten everything. There was thought there, but not thought that could be remembered. When, however, you have once said to yourself in a dream, 'I think I am dreaming;' you always, I venture to suspect, remember that experience when you wake from it!"

"I daresay you do, sir. But there are many dreams we never suspect to be dreams while we are dreaming them, which yet we remember all the same when we come awake!"

"Yes, surely; and many people have such memories as hold every word and every fact presented to them. But I was not meaning to discuss the phenomena of sleep; I only meant to support my simile that to see the world before the sun is up, is like looking on the sleeping face of a friend. There is thought in the sleeping face of your friend, and thought in the twilight face of nature; but the face awake with thought, is the world awake with sunlight."

"There I cannot go with you, sir," said Richard, who, for all the impression Barbara had made upon him, had not yet thought of the world as in any sense alive; it was to him but an aggregate of laws and results, the great dissecting-room of creation, the happy hunting ground of the goddess who calls herself Science, though she can claim to understand as yet no single fact.

"Why?" asked Wingfold.

"Because I cannot receive the simile at all. I cannot allow expression of thought where no thought is."

Here a certain look on the face of the young workman helped the parson toward understanding the position he meant to take, "Ah!" he answered, "I see I mistook you! I understand now! Sleep she or wake she, you will not allow thought on the face of Nature! Am I right?"

"That is what I would say, sir," answered Richard.

"We must look at that!" returned Wingfold. "That would be scanned!—You would conceive the world as a sort of machine that goes for certain purposes—like a clock, for instance, whose duty it is to tell the time of the day?—Do I represent you truly?"

"So far, sir. Only one machine may have many uses!"

"True! A clock may do more for us than tell the time! It may tell how fast it is going, and wake solemn thought. But if you came upon a machine that constantly waked in you—not thoughts only, but the most delicate and indescribable feelings—what would you say then? Would you allow thought there?"

"Surely not that the machine was thinking!"

"Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought must have preceded and occasioned its existence? Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?"

"Perhaps I should be compelled to allow that much in regard to a clock even!—Are we coming to the Paley-argument, sir?" said Richard.

"I think not," answered Wingfold. "My argument seems to me one of my own. It is not drawn from design but from operation: where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought and feeling be somewhere concerned in its origin?"

"Might not the thought and feeling come by association, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?"

"I think our associations can hardly be so multiform, or so delicate, as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. If they have such a share, they must have reference either to a fore-existence, or to relations hidden in our being, over which we have no control; and equally in such case are the thoughts and feelings waked in us, not by us. I do not want to argue; I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that regard it, thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Even to wake old feelings, there must be a likeness to them in what wakes them, else how could it wake them? In a word, feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakes feeling. Then there is feeling in the thing that bears that shape, although itself it does not feel. Therefore I think it may be said that there is more thought, or, rather, more expression of thought, in the face of the world when the sun is up, than when he is not—as there is more thought in a face awake than in a face asleep.—Ah, there is the sun! and there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!"

Richard neither understood his last words, nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.

Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. It was no argument, but the presence of God that silenced the racked heart of Job. The men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours—from red to gold, from the human to the divine—as he ran to the horizon from beneath, and came up with a rush, eternally silent. With a moan of delight Richard turned to his gazing companion, when he beheld that on his face which made him turn from him again: he had seen what was not there for human eyes! The radiance of Wingfold's countenance, the human radiance that met the solar shine, surpassed even that which the moon and the sky and the sleeping earth brought out that night upon the face of Barbara! The one was the waking, the other but the sweetly dreaming world.

Richard refused to let any emotion, primary or reflex, influence his opinions; they must be determined by fact and severe logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite—that is, was not by him formally conceivable, must not be put in the category of things to be believed; but he had not a notion how many things he accepted unquestioning, which were yet of this order; and not being only a thing that thought, but a thing as well that was thought, he could not help being more influenced by such a sight than he would have chosen to be, and the fact that he was so influenced remained. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us; happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger, and walked on, leaving him where he stood, but taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and divide and so multiply. When he got to the next stile, he looked back, and saw him seated as at first, but now reading.



CHAPTER XXV.

WING FOLD AND HIS WIFE.

Thomas Wingfold closed his book, replaced it in his pocket, got down from the stile, turned his face toward home, crossed field after field, and arrived just in time to meet his wife as she came down the stair to breakfast.

"Have you had a nice walk, Thomas?" she asked.

"Indeed I have!" he answered. "Almost from the first I was right out in the open."—His wife knew what he meant.—"Before the sun came up", he went on, "I had to go in, and come out at another door; but I was soon very glad of it. I had met a fellow who, I think, will pluck his feet out of the mud before long."

"Have you asked him to the rectory?"

"No."

"Shall I write and ask him?"

"No, my wife. For one thing, you can't: I don't know his name, and I don't know what he is, or where he lives. But we shall meet again soon."

"Then you have made an appointment with him!"

"No, I haven't. But there's an undertow bringing us on to each other. It would spoil all if he thought I threw a net for him. I do mean to catch him if I can, but I will not move till the tide brings him into my arms. At least, that is how the thing looks to me at present. I believe enough not to make haste. I don't want to throw salt on any bird's tail, but I do want the birds to come hopping about me, that I may tell them what I know!"

As near as he could, Wingfold recounted the conversation he had had with Richard.

"He was a fine-looking fellow," he said, "—not exactly a gentleman, but not far off it; little would make him one. He looked a man that could do things, but I did not satisfy myself as to what might be his trade. He showed no sign of it, or made any allusion to it. But he was more at home in the workshop of his own mind than is at all usual with fellows of his age."

"It must," said Helen, "be old Simon Armour's grandson! I have heard of him from several quarters; and your description would just fit him. I know somebody that could tell you about him, but I wish I know anybody that could tell us about her—I mean Miss Wylder."

"I like the look of that girl!" said the parson warmly, "What makes you think she could tell us about my new acquaintance?"

"Only an impertinent speech of that little simian, Vixen Lestrange. I forget what she said, but it left the impression of an acquaintance between Bab, as she called her, and some working fellow the child could not bear."

"The enmity of that child is praise. I wonder how the Master would have treated her! He could not have taken her between his knees, and said whosoever received her received him! A child-mask with a monkey inside it will only serve a sentimental mother to talk platitudes about!"

"Don't be too hard on the monkeys, Tom!" said his wife. "You don't know what they may turn out to be, after all!"

"Surely it is not too hard on the monkeys to call them monkeys!"

"No; but when the monkey has already begun to be a child!"

"There is the whole point! Has the monkey always begun to be a child when he gets the shape of a child?—Miss Wylder is not quite so seldom in church now, I think!"

"I saw her there last Sunday. But I'm afraid she wasn't thinking much about what you were saying—she sat with such a stony look in her eyes! She did seem to come awake for one moment, though!"

"Tell me."

"I could hardly take my eyes off her, my heart was so drawn to her. There was a mingling of love and daring, almost defiance, in her look, that seemed to say, 'If you are worth it—if you are worth it—then through fire and water!' All at once a flash lighted up her lovely child-face—and what do you think you were at the moment saying?—that the flower of a plant was deeper than the root of it: that was what roused her!"

"And I, when I found what I had said, thought within myself what a fool I was to let out things my congregation could not possibly understand!—But to reach one is, in the end, to reach all!"

"I must in honesty tell you, however," pursued Mrs. Wingfold, "that the next minute she looked as far off as before; nor did she shine up once again that I saw."

"I will be glad, though," said Wingfold, "because of what you tell me! It shows there is a window in her house that looks in my direction: some signal may one day catch her eye! That she has a character of her own, a real one, I strongly suspect. Her mother more than interests me. She certainly has a fine nature. How much better is a fury than a fish! You cannot be downright angry save in virtue of the love possible to you. The proper person, who always does and says the correct thing—well, I think that person is almost sure to be a liar. At the same time, the contradictions in the human individual are bewildering, even appalling!—Now I must go to my study, and think out a thing that's bothering me!—By the way,"—he always said that when he was going to make her a certain kind of present; she knew what was coming—"here's something for you—if you can read it! I had just scribbled it this morning when the young man came up. I made it last night. I was hours awake after we went to bed!"

This is what he gave her:—

A SONG IN THE NIGHT.

A brown bird sang on a blossomy tree, Sang in the moonshine, merrily, Three little songs, one, two, and three, A song for his wife, for himself, and me.

He sang for his wife, sang low, sang high, Filling the moonlight that filled the sky, "Thee, thee, I love thee, heart alive! Thee, thee, thee, and thy round eggs five!"

He sang to himself, "What shall I do With this life that thrills me through and through! Glad is so glad that it turns to ache! Out with it, song, or my heart will break!"

He sang to me, "Man, do not fear Though the moon goes down, and the dark is near; Listen my song, and rest thine eyes; Let the moon go down that the sun may rise!"

I folded me up in the heart of his tune, And fell asleep in the sinking moon; I woke with the day's first golden gleam, And lo, I had dreamed a precious dream!



CHAPTER XXVI.

RICHARD AND ALICE.

One evening Richard went to see his grandfather, and asked if he would allow him to give Miss Wylder a lesson in horseshoeing: she wanted, he said, to be able to shoe Miss Brown—or indeed any horse. Simon laughed heartily at the proposal: it was too great an absurdity to admit of serious objection!

"Ah, you don't know Miss Wylder, grandfather!" said Richard.

"Of course not! Never an old man knew anything about a girl! It's only the young fellows can fathom a woman! Having girls of his own blinds a man to the nature of them! There's going to be a law passed against growing old! It's an unfortunate habit the world's got into somehow, and the young fellows are going to put a stop to it for fear of losing their wisdom!"

As the blacksmith spoke, he went on rasping and filing at a house-door key, fast in a vice on his bench; and his words seemed to Richard to fall from his mouth like the raspings from his rasp.

"Well, grandfather," said Richard, "if Miss Wylder don't astonish you, she'll astonish me!"

"Have you ever seen her drive a nail, boy?"

"Not once; but I am just as sure she will do it—and better than any beginner you've seen yet!"

"Well, well, lad! we'll see! we'll see! She's welcome anyhow to come and have her try! What day shall it be?"

"That I can't tell yet."

"It makes me grin to think o' them doll's hands with a great hoof in them!"

"They are little hands—she's little herself—but they ain't doll's hands, grandfather. You should have seen her box Miss Vixen's ears for making a face at me! Her ears didn't take them for doll's hands, I'll be bound! The room rang again!"

"Bring her when you like, lad," said Simon.

It was moonlight, and when Richard arrived at the lodgeless gate, he saw inside it, a few yards away, seated on a stone, the form of a woman. He thought the first moment, as was natural, of Barbara, but the next, he knew that this was something strange. She sat in helpless, hopeless attitude, with her head in her hands. A strange dismay came upon him at the sight of her; his heart fluttered in a cage of fear. He did not believe in ghosts. If he saw one, it would but show that sometimes when a person died there was a shadow left that was like him! There might be millions of ghosts, and no God the more! What are we all but spectres of the unknown? What was death but a vanishing of the unknown? What are the dead but vanishments! Yet he shuddered at the thought that he had actually come upon one of the dead that are still alive, of whom, once or twice in a long century, one is met wandering vaguely about the world, unable to find what used to make it home. He peered through the iron bars as into a charnel-house: one such wanderer was enough to make the whole vault of night a gaping tomb.

Putting his key in the lock made a sharp little noise. The figure started up, her face gleaming white in the moon, but dropped again on her stone, unable to stand. Richard could not take his eyes off her. While closing the gate he dared not turn his back to her. She sat motionless as before, her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. He stood for a moment staring and trembling, then, with an effort of the will that approached agony, went toward her. As he drew nearer, he began to feel as if he had once known her. He must have seen her in London somewhere, he thought. But why was her shadow sitting there, the lonely hostless guest of the night's caravansary?

He went nearer. The form remained motionless. Something reminded him of Alice Manson.

He laid his hand on the figure. It was a woman to the touch as well as to the eye. But not yet did she move an inch. He would have raised her face. Then she resisted. All at once he was sure she was Alice.

"Alice!" he cried. "Good God!—sitting in the cold night!"

She made him no answer, sat stone-still.

"What shall I do for you?" he said.

"Nothing," she answered, in a voice that might well have been that of a spectre. "Leave me," she added, as if with the last entreaty of despair.

"You are in trouble, Alice!" he persisted. "Why are you so far from home? Where's Arthur?"

"What right have you to question me?" she returned, almost fiercely.

"None but that I am your brother's friend."

"Friend!" she echoed, in a faint far-away voice.

"You forget, Alice, that I did all I could to be your friend, and you would not let me!"

She neither spoke nor moved. Her stillness seemed to say, "Neither will I now."

"Where are you going?" he asked, after a hopeless pause.

"Nowhere."

"Why did you leave London?"

"Why should I tell you?"

"I think you will tell me!"

"I will not."

"You know I would do anything for you!"

"I daresay!"

"You know I would!"

"I don't."

"Try me."

"I will not."

Her voice grew more and more faint and forced. Her words and it were very unlike.

"Don't go on like that, Alice. You're not being reasonable," pleaded Richard.

"Oh, do leave me alone!"

"I won't leave you."

"As you please! It's nothing to me."

"Alice, why do you speak to me like that? Tell me what's wrong."

"Everything is wrong. Everybody is wrong. The whole world is wrong."

Her voice was a little stronger. She raised herself, and looked him in the face.

"I hope not."

"I hope it is!"

"Why should you?"

"To think things were right would be too terrible! I say everything's wrong."

"What's to be done, then?" sighed Richard.

"I must get out of it all"

"But how?"

"There is only one way."

"What is that?"

"Everybody knows."

"Alice," cried Richard, nearly in despair like herself, "are you out of your mind?"

"Pretty nearly.—Why shouldn't I be? There are plenty of us!"

"Alice, if you won't tell me what is the matter with you, if you won't let me help you, I will sit down by you till the morning."

"What if I drop?"

"Then I will carry you away. The sooner you drop the better." Her resolution seemed to break.

"I 'ain't eaten a mouthful to-day," she said.

"My poor girl! Promise me to wait till I come back. Here, put on my coat."

She was past resisting more, and allowed him to button his coat about her.

But he was in great perplexity: where was he to get anything for her? And how was she to live till he brought it! It was terrible to think of! Alice with nothing to eat, and no refuge but a stone in the moonlight! This was what her religion had done for Alice!

"Miss Wylder's God!" he said to himself with contempt.

"He's well enough for the wind and the stars and the moonlight! but for human beings—for Alice—for creatures dying of hunger, what a mockery! If he were there, it would be a sickness to talk of him! Beauty is beauty, but for anything behind it—pooh!"

He stood a moment hesitating. Alice swayed on her seat, and would have fallen. He caught her—and in the act remembered a little cottage, a hut rather, down a lane a short way off. He took her in his arms and started for it.

She was dreadfully thin, but a strong man cannot walk very fast carrying a woman, however light she be, and she had half come to herself before he reached the cottage.

"Richard, dear Richard!" she murmured at his ear, "where are you carrying me? Are you going to kill me, or are you taking me home with you? Do set me down. Where's Arthur? I will let you be good to me! I will! I can't hold out for ever!"

She seemed to be dreaming—apparently about their meeting in Regent-street; or perhaps she was delirious from want of food. He walked on without attempting to answer her. Some great wrong had been done her, and his heart sank within him; for he believed in no judgment, no final setting right of wrongs. He knew of nothing better than that the wronged and the wronger would cease together. Certainly, if his creed represented fact, the best thing in existence is that it has no essential life in it, that it cannot continue, that it must cease: the good of living is that we must die. The hope of death is the inspiration of Buddhism! His heart ached with pity for the girl. His help, his tenderness expanded, and folded her in the wings of a shelter that was not empty because his creed was false.

"She belongs to me!" he said to himself. "The world has thrown her off: 'be it lawful I take up what's cast away!' Here is the one treasure, a human being! the best thing in the world! I will cherish it. Poor girl! she shall at least know one man a refuge!"

The cottage was a wretched place, but a labourer and his family lived in it. He knocked many times. A sleepy voice answered at last, and presently a sleepy-eyed man half opened the door.

"What's the deuce of a row?" he grunted.

"Here's a young woman half dead with hunger and cold!" said Richard. "You must take her in or she'll die!"

"Can't you take her somewhere else?"

"There's nowhere else near enough.—Come, come, let us in! You wouldn't have her die on your doorstep!"

"I don'ow as I see the sense o' bringin' her here!" answered the man sleepily. "We ain't out o' the hunger-wood ourselves yet!—Wife! here's a chap as says he's picked up a young 'oman a dyin' o' 'unger!—'tain't likely, be it, i' this land o' liberty?"

"Likely enough, Giles, where the liberty's mainly to starve!" replied a feminine voice. "Let un bring the poor thing in. There ain't nowhere to put her, an' there ain't nothin' to give her, but she can't lie out in the wide world!"

"'Ain't you got a drop o' milk?" asked Richard.

"Milk!" echoed the woman; "it's weeks an' weeks the childer 'ain't tasted of it! The wonder to me is that the cows let a poor man milk 'em!"

Richard set Alice on her feet, but she could not stand alone; had he taken his arm from round her, she would have fallen in a heap. But the woman while she spoke had been getting a light, and now came to the door with a candle-end. Her husband kept prudently in her shadow.

"Poor thing! poor thing! she be far gone!" she said, when she saw her. "Bring her in, sir. There's a chair she can sit upon. I'll get her a drop o' tea—that'll be better'n milk! There's next to no work, and the squire he be mad wi' Giles acause o' some rabbit or other they says he snared—which they did say it was a hare—I don'ow: take the skin off, an' who's to tell t'one from t'other! I do know I was right glad on't for the childer! An' if the parson tell me my man 'ill be damned for hare or rabbit, an' the childer starvin', I'll give him a bit o' my mind.—'No, sir!' says I; 'God ain't none o' your sort!' says I. 'An' p'r'aps the day may be at hand when the rich an' the poor 'ill have a turn o' a change together! Leastways there's somethin' like it somewheres i' the Bible,' says I. 'An' if it be i' the Bible,' says I, 'it's likely to be true, for the Bible do take the part o' the rich—mostly!'"

She was a woman who liked to hear herself talk, and so spoke as one listening to herself. Like most people, whether they talk or not, she got her ideas second-hand; but Richard was nowise inclined to differ with what she said about the Bible, for he knew little more and no better about it than she. Had parson Wingfold, who did know the Bible as few parsons know it, heard her, he would have told her that, by search express and minute, he had satisfied himself that there was not a word in the Bible against the poor, although a multitude of words against the rich. The sins of the poor are not once mentioned in the Bible, the sins of the rich very often. The rich may think this hard, but I state the fact, and do not much care what they think. When they come to judge themselves and others fairly, they will understand that God is no respecter of persons, not favouring even the poor in his cause.

Richard set Alice on the one chair, by the poor little fire the woman was coaxing to heat the water she had put on it in a saucepan. Alice stared at the fire, but hardly seemed to see it. The woman tried to comfort her. Richard looked round the place: the man was in the bed that filled one corner; a mattress in another was crowded with children; there was no spot where she could lie down.

"I shall be back as soon's ever I can," he said, and left the cottage.



CHAPTER XXVII.

A SISTER.

He hurried back over the bare, moon-white road. He had seen Miss Wylder come that morning, and hoped to reach the house, which was not very far off, before she should have gone to bed. Of her alone in that house did he feel he could ask the help he needed. If she had gone home, he would try the gardener's wife! But he wanted a woman with wit as well as will. He would help himself from the larder if he could not do better—but there would be no brandy there!

Many were the thoughts that, as now he walked, now ran, passed swiftly through his mind. It was strange, he said to himself, that this girl, of whom he had seen so little, yet in whom he felt so great an interest, should reappear in such dire necessity! When last he saw her, she hurt herself in frantic escape from him: now she could not escape!

"And this is the world," he went on, "that the priests would have you believe ruled by the providence of an all powerful and all good being! My heart is sore for the girl—a good girl, if ever there was one, so that I would give—yes, I think I would give my life for her! I certainly would, rather than see her in misery! Of course I would! Any man would, worth calling a man! When it came to the point, I should not think twice about it! And there is he, sitting up there in his glory, and looking down unmoved upon her wretchedness! I will not believe in any such God!"

Of course he was more than right in refusing to believe in such a God! Were such a being possible, he would not be God. If there were such a being, and all powerful, he would be the one not to be worshipped. But was Richard, therefore, to believe in no God altogether different? May a God only be such as is not to be believed in? Is it not rather that, to be God, the being must be so good that a man is hardly to be found able—must I say also, or willing—to believe in him? Perhaps, if he had been as anxious to do his duty all over, out and out, as he was where his feelings pointed to it, Richard might have had a "What if" or two to propose to himself. Might he not for instance have said, "What if a certain being should even now be putting in my way the honour and gladness of helping this woman—making me his messenger to her?" What if his soul was too impatient to listen for the next tick of the clock of eternity, and was left therefore to declare there was no such clock going! Ought he not even now to have been capable of thinking that there might be a being with a design for his creatures yet better than merely to make them happy? What if, that gained, the other must follow! Here was a man judging the eternal, who did not even know his own name!

As he drew near the house, the question arose in his mind: if Miss Wylder was gone to her room, what was he to do to find her? He did not know where her room was! He knew that, when she went up the stair, at the top of it she turned to the right—and he knew no more.

The side-gate at the lodge was yet open; so was the great door of the house. He entered softly, and going along a wide passage, arrived at the foot of the great staircase, which ascended with the wide sweep of half an oval, just in time to see at the top the reflection of a candle disappearing to the right. There were many chances against its being Barbara's, but with an almost despairing recklessness he darted up, and turning, saw again the reflection of the candle from the wall of a passage that crossed the corridor. He followed as swiftly and lightly as he could, and at the corner all but overturned an elderly maid, whose fright gave place to wrath when she saw who had endangered her.

"I want to see Miss Wylder!" said Richard hurriedly.

"You have no call to be in this part of the house," returned the woman.

"I can't stop to explain," answered Richard. "Please tell me which is her room."

"Indeed I will not."

"When she knows my business, she will be glad I came to her."

"You may find it for yourself."

"Will you take a message for me then?"

"I am not Miss Wylder's maid!" she replied. "Neither is it my place to wait on my fellow-servants."

She turned away, tossing her head, and rounded the corner into the corridor.

Richard looked down the passage. A light was burning at the other end of it, and he saw there were not many doors in it. With a sudden resolve to go straight ahead, he called out clear and plain—

"Miss Wylder!" and again, "Miss Wylder!"

A door opened and, to his delight, out peeped Barbara's dainty little head. She saw Richard, gave one glance in the opposite direction, and made him a sign to come to her. He did so. She was in her dressing-gown: it was not her candle he had followed, but its light had led him to her!

"What is it!" she said hurriedly. "Don't speak loud: lady Ann might hear you!"

"There's a girl all but dying—" began Richard.

"Go to the library," she said. "I will come to you there. I shan't be a minute!"

She went in, and her door closed with scarce a sound. Then first a kind of scare fell upon Richard: one of those doors might open, and the pale, cold face of the formidable lady look out Gorgon-like! If it was her candle he had followed, she could hardly have put it down when he called Miss Wylder! He ran gliding through passage and corridor, and down the stair, noiseless and swift as a bat. Arrived in the library, he lighted a candle, and, lest any one should enter, pretended to be looking out books. Within five minutes Barbara was at his side.