"I was one of the fellows in that survey," explained Harkness, "and if you're the fellow we saw at the station, as I reckon you are, then I don't know any more about this old gentleman I've been housing than you do."

Trenholme had an impulse to command silence, but, resisting it, only kept silence himself and resumed his tread over the uneven ground.

"'Tisn't true," broke in the other again, in unexpected denial of his own words, "that that's all I know. I know something more; 'tisn't much, perhaps, but as I value my soul's salvation, I'll say it here. Before I left the neighbourhood of Turrifs, I heard of this old gentleman here a-making his way round the country, and I put in currency the report that he was Cameron, and I've no doubt that that suggestion made the country folks head him off towards Turrifs Station as far as they could influence his route; and that'll be how he came there at Christmas time. Look you here! I didn't know then, and I don't know now, whether he was or wasn't—I didn't think he was—but for a scheme I had afoot I set that idea going. I did it by telegraphing it along the line, as if I'd been one of the operators. The thing worked better than I expected."

Alec listened without the feeling of interest the words were expected to arouse. To his mind a fellow who spoke glibly about his soul's salvation was either silly or profane. He had no conception that this man, whose way of regarding his own feelings, and whose standard of propriety as to their expression, differed so much from his own, was, in reality, going through a moral crisis.

"Well?" said he.

"Well, I guess that's about all I have to say."

"If you don't know anything more, I don't see that you've told me anything." He meant, anything worth telling, for he did not feel that he had any interest with the other's tricks or schemes.

"I do declare," cried Harkness, without heeding his indifference, "I'm just cut up about this night's affair; I never thought Job would set on anyone but his wife. I do regret I brought this good old gentleman to this place. If some one offered me half Bates's land now, I wouldn't feel inclined to take it."

Trenholme returned to his pacing, but when he had passed and re-passed, he said, "Cameron doesn't seem to have been able to preach and pray like an educated man; but Bates is here, he will see him to-morrow, and if he doesn't claim the body, the police will advertise. Some one must know who the old man is."

The words that came in return seemed singularly irrelevant. "What about the find of asbestos the surveyor thought he'd got on the hills where Bates's clearing is? Has Bates got a big offer for the land?"

"He has had some correspondence about it," said Trenholme, stiffly.

"He'll be a rich man yet," remarked the American, gloomily. "Asbestos mines are piling in dollars, I can tell you. It's a shame, to my mind, that a snapping crab-stick like that old Bates should have it all." He rose as with the irritation of the idea, but appeared arrested as he looked down at the dead man. "And when I think how them poor ladies got their white skirts draggled, I do declare I feel cut up to that extent I wouldn't care for an asbestos mine if somebody came and offered it to me for nothing this minute."

Then, too absorbed in feeling to notice the bathos of his speech, he put his hands in his pockets, and began strolling up and down a beat of his own, a few yards from the track Trenholme had made, and on the other side of the dead.

As they walked at different paces, and passing each other at irregular times, perhaps the mind of each recurred to the remembrance of the other ghostly incident and the rumour that the old man had already risen once. The open spot of sloping ground surrounded by high black trees, which had been so lately trodden by many feet, seemed now the most desolate of desolate places. The hymn, the prayer, that had arisen there seemed to leave in the air only that lingering influence which past excitement lends to its acute reaction.

A sudden sharp crack and rustling, coming from out the gloom of the trees, startled them.

"Ho!" shouted the American. "Stand! Is there any one there?"

And Alec in his heart called him a fool for his pains, and yet he himself had not been less startled. Nothing more was heard. It was only that time—time, that mysterious medium through which circumstance comes to us from the source of being; that river which, unseen, unfelt, unheard, flows onward everywhere—had just then brought the moment for some dead branch to fall.

END OF BOOK II.



BOOK III.

"Nothing is inexorable but Love."



CHAPTER I.

That which is to be seen of any event, its causes and consequences, is never important compared with the supreme importance of those unseen workings of things physical and things spiritual which are the heart of our life. The iceberg of the northern seas is less than its unseen foundations; the lava stream is less than the molten sea whence it issues; the apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling in her orbit, are less than the great invisible force which controls their movements and the movements of all the things that do appear. The crime is not so great as its motive, nor yet as its results; the beneficent deed is not so great as the beneficence of which it is but a fruit; yet we cannot see beneficence, nor motives, nor far-reaching results. We cannot see the greatest forces, which in hidden places, act and counteract to bring great things without observation; we see some broken fragments of their turmoil which now and again are cast up within our sight.

Notwithstanding this, which we all know, the average man feels himself quite competent to observe and to pass judgment on all that occurs in his vicinity. In the matter of the curious experience which the sect of the Adventists passed through in Chellaston, the greater part of the community formed prompt judgment, and in this judgment the chief element was derision.

The very next day, in the peaceful Sunday sunshine, the good people of Chellaston (and many of them were truly good) spent their breath in expatiating upon the absurdity of those who had met with the madman upon the mountain to pray for the descent of heaven. It was counted a good thing that a preacher so dangerously mad was dead; and it was considered as certain that his followers would now see their folly in the same light in which others saw it. It was reported as a very good joke that when one white-clad woman had returned to her home, wan and weary, in the small hours of the night, her husband had refused to let her in, calling to her from an upper window that his wife had gone to have a fly with the angels, and he did not know who she might be. Another and coarser version of the same tale was, that he had taken no notice of her, but had called to his man that the white cow had got loose and ought to be taken back into the paddock. Both versions were considered excellent in the telling. Many a worthy Christian, coming out of his or her place of worship, chuckled over the wit of this amiable husband, and observed, in the midst of laughter, that his wife, poor thing, had only got her deserts.

In the earlier hours of that Sunday morning rumour had darted about, busily telling of the sudden freak the drunkard's violence had taken, and of Father Cameron's death. Many a version of the story was brought to the hotel, but through them the truth sifted, and the people there heard what had really occurred. Eliza heard, for one, and was a good deal shocked. Still, as the men about the place remarked that it was a happy release for Father Cameron, who had undoubtedly gone to heaven, and that it was an advantage, too, to Job's wife, who would now be saved from further torment at her husband's hands, her mind became acquiescent. For herself, she had no reason to be sorry the old man was dead. It was better for him; it was better for her, too. So, without inward or outward agitation, she directed the morning business of the house, setting all things in such order that she, the guiding hand of it all, might that afternoon take holiday.

Some days before she had been invited by Mrs. Rexford to spend this afternoon with them and take tea. Then, as it was said that Principal Trenholme, in spite of a sprained ankle, had insisted upon taking the Church services as usual, all the fine ladies at the hotel intended to go and hear him preach in the evening. Eliza would go too. This programme was highly agreeable to her, more so than exciting amusement which would have pleased other girls better. Although nothing would have drawn expression of the fact from her, in the bottom of her deeply ambitious heart she felt honoured by the invitations Miss Rexford obtained for her, and appreciated to the full their value. She also knew the worth of suitable attendance at church.

Sunday was always a peaceful day at Chellaston. Much that was truly godly, and much that was in truth worldly, combined together to present a very respectable show of sabbath-keeping. The hotel shared in the sabbath quiet, especially in the afternoon, when most people were resting in their rooms.

About three o'clock Eliza was ready to go to her room on the third story to dress for the afternoon. This process was that day important, for she put on a new black silk gown. It was beflounced and befrilled according to the fashion of the time. When she had arranged it to a nicety in her own room, she descended to one of the parlours to survey herself in the pier-glass. No one was there. The six red velvet chairs and the uniform sofa stood in perfect order round the room. The table, with figured cloth, had a large black Bible on it as usual. On either side of the long looking-glass was a window, in which the light of day was somewhat dulled by coarse lace curtains. Abundance of light there was, however, for Eliza's purpose. She shut the door, and pushed aside the table which held the Bible, the better to show herself to herself in the looking-glass.

Eliza faced herself. She turned and looked at herself over one shoulder; then she looked over the other shoulder. As she did so, the curving column of her white neck was a thing a painter might have desired to look at, had he been able to take his eyes from the changeful sheen on her glossy red hair. But there was no painter there, and Eliza was looking at the gown. She walked to the end of the room, looking backward over her shoulder. She walked up the room toward the mirror, observing the moving folds of the skirt as she walked. She went aside, out of the range of the glass, and came into it again to observe the effect of meeting herself as though by chance, or rather, of meeting a young woman habited in such a black silk gown, for it was not in herself precisely that Eliza was at the moment interested. She did not smile at herself, or meet her own eyes in the glass. She was gravely intent upon looking as well as she could, not upon estimating how well she looked.

The examination was satisfactory. Perhaps a woman more habituated to silk gowns and mantua-makers would have found small wrinkles in sleeve or shoulder; but Eliza was pleased. If the gown was not perfect, it was as good a one as she was in the habit of seeing, even upon gala occasions. And she had no intention of keeping her gown for occasions; her intention was that it should be associated with her in the ordinary mind of the place. Now that she was fortunate enough to possess silk (and she was determined this should only be the forerunner of a succession of such gowns) people should think of her as Miss White, who wore silk in the afternoons. She settled this as she saw how well the material became her. Then, with grave care, she arranged a veil round the black bonnet she wore, and stood putting on new gloves preparatory to leaving the room. Eliza was not very imaginative; but had she been disposed to foresee events, much as she might have harassed herself, she would not have been more likely to hit upon the form to be taken by the retributive fate she always vaguely feared than are the poor creatures enslaved by fearful imaginations.

The door opened, and Harkness thrust his handsome head into the room. He was evidently looking for her. When he saw her he came in hastily, shutting the door and standing with his back to it, as if he did not care to enter further.

Eliza had not seen him that day. After what had happened, she rather dreaded the next interview, as she did not know what he might find to say; but the instant she saw him, she perceived that it was something more decisive than he had ever shown sign of before. He looked tired, and at the same time as if his spirit was upwrought within him and his will set to some purpose.

"I'm real glad to see you," he said, but not pleasantly. "I've been looking for you; and it's just as well for you I found you without more ado."

"I'm just going out," said Eliza; "I can't stay now."

"You'll just stop a bit where you are, and hear what I'm going to say."

"I can't," said she, angrily; but he was at the door, and she made no movement towards it.

He talked right on. "I'm going away," he said. "I've packed up all that I possess here in this place, and I'm going to depart by this afternoon's train. No one much knows of this intention. I take it you won't interfere, so I don't mind confiding my design to your kind and sympathetic breast."

The emphasis he laid on the eulogy was evidently intended for bitter sarcasm. Anger gave her unwonted glibness.

"I'll ask you to be good enough to pay our bill, then. If you're making off because you can't pay your other debts it's no affair of mine."

He bowed mockingly. "You are real kind. Can't think how much obliged I am for your tactful reminder; but it don't happen to be my financial affairs that I came to introdooce to your notice." He stammered a moment, as if carried rather out of his bearings by his own loquacity. "It's—it's rather your finances that I wish to enlarge upon."

She opposed herself to him in cold silence that would not betray a gleam of curiosity.

"You're a mighty fine young lady, upon my word!" he observed, running his eye visibly over her apparel. "Able to work for yourself, and buy silk skirts, and owning half a bit of ground that people are beginning to think will be worth something considerable when they get to mining there. Oh, you're a fine one—what with your qualities and your fortune!"

A sudden unbecoming colour came with tell-tale vehemence over her cheek and brow.

"Your qualities of mind, as I've remarked, are fine; but the qualities of your heart, my dear, are finer still. I've been making love to you, with the choicest store of loving arts, for eight long months; and the first blush I've been enabled to raise on your lovely countenance is when I tell you you've more money than you looked for! You're a tender-hearted young lady!"

"The only train I ever heard of on Sunday afternoon goes pretty soon," she said; and yet there was now an eager look of curiosity in her eyes that belied her words.

He took no notice of her warning, but resumed now with mock apology. "But I'm afraid I'm mistaken in the identity. Sorry to disappoint you, but the estate I allude to belongs to Miss Cameron, who lived near a locality called Turrifs Station. Beg pardon, forgot for the moment your name was White, and that you know nothing about that interesting and historic spot."

Perhaps because she had played the part of indifference so long, it seemed easiest to her, even in her present confusion of mind; at any rate she remained silent.

"Pity you weren't her, isn't it?" He showed all his white teeth. He had been pale at first, but in talking the fine dark red took its wonted place in his cheeks. He had tossed back his loose smoke-coloured hair with a nervous hand. His dark beauty never showed to better advantage as he stood leaning back on the door. "Pity you aren't her, isn't it?" he repeated, smilingly.

She had no statuesque pose, but she had assumed a look of insensibility almost equal to that of stone.

"Come to think of it, even if you were her, you'd find it hard to say so now; so, either way, I reckon you'll have to do without the tin. 'Twould be real awkward to say to all your respectable friends that you'd been sailing under false colours; that 'White' isn't your bona fide cognomen; that you'd deserted a helpless old woman to come away; and as to how you left your home—the sort of carriage you took to, my dear, and how you got over the waggoner to do the work of a sexton—Oh, my, fine tale for Chellaston, that! No, my dear young lady, take a fatherly word of admonition; your best plan is to make yourself easy without the tin."

He looked at her, even now, with more curiosity than malice in his smiling face. A power of complete reserve was so foreign to his own nature that without absolute proof he could not entirely believe it in her. The words he was speaking might have been the utter nonsense to her that they would have been to any but the girl who was lost from the Bates and Cameron clearing for all hint she gave of understanding. He worked on his supposition, however. He had all the talking to himself.

"You're mighty secret! Now, look at me. I'm no saint, and I've come here to make a clean breast of that fact. When I was born, Uncle Sam said to me, 'Cyril P. Harkness, you're a son of mine, and it's your vocation to worship the God of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Almighty Dollar'; and I piped up, 'Right you are, uncle.' I was only a baby then." He added these last words reflectively, as if pondering on the reminiscence, and gained the object of his foolery—that she spoke.

"If you mean to tell me that you're fond of money, that's no news. I've had sense to see that. If you thought I'd a mine belonging to me somewhere that accounts for the affection you've been talking of so much. I begin to believe in it now."

She meant her words to be very cutting, but she had not much mobility of voice or glance; and moreover, her heart was like lead within her; her words fell heavily.

"Just so," said he, bowing as if to compliment her discrimination. "You may believe me, for I'm just explaining to you I'm not a saint, and that is a sentiment you may almost always take stock in when expressed by human lips. I was real sick last summer; and when I came to want a holiday I thought I'd do it cheap, so when I got wind of a walking party—a set of gentlemen who were surveying—I got them to let me go along. Camp follower I was, and 'twas first rate fun, especially as I was on the scent of what they were looking for. So then we came on asbestos in one part. Don't know what that is, my dear? Never mind as to its chemical proportions; there's dollars in it. Then we dropped down on the house of the gentleman that owned about half the hill. One of them was just dead, and he had a daughter, but she was lost, and as I was always mighty fond of young ladies, I looked for her. Oh, you may believe, I looked, till, when she was nowhere, I half thought the man who said she was lost had been fooling. Well, then, I—" (he stopped and drawled teasingly) "But possibly I intrude. Do you hanker after hearing the remainder of this history?"

She had sat down by the centre table with her back to him.

"You can go on," she muttered.

"Thanks for your kind permission. I haven't got much more to tell, for I don't know to this mortal minute whether I've ever found that young lady or not; but I have my suspicions. Any way, that day away we went across the lake, and when the snow drove us down from the hills the day after, the folks near the railroad were all in a stew about the remains of Bates's partner, the poppa of the young lady. His remains, having come there for burial, and not appearing to like the idea, had taken the liberty of stepping out on the edge of the evening, and hooking it. So said I, 'What if that young lady was real enterprising! what if she got the waggoner to put her poppa under the soil of the forest, and rode on herself, grand as you please, in his burial casket!' (That poor waggoner drank himself to death of remorse, but that was nothing to her.) The circumstances were confusing, and the accounts given by different folks were confusing, and, what's more, 'tisn't easy to believe in a sweet girl having her poppa buried quite secret; most young ladies is too delicate. Still, after a bit, the opinion I've mentioned did become my view of the situation; and I said to myself 'Cyril, good dog; here's your vocation quite handy. Find the young lady, find her, good fellow! Ingratiate yourself in her eyes, and you've got, not only an asbestos mine, but a wife of such smartness and enterprise as rarely falls to the lot of a rising young man.' I didn't blame her one bit for the part she had taken, for I'd seen the beast she'd have had to live with. No doubt her action was the properest she could take. And I thought if I came on her panting, flying, and offered her my protection, she'd fall down and adore me. So, to make a long tale short, I stopped a bit in that locality, hunting for her quite private after every one else had given up hunting. I heard of a daft old man who'd got about, the Lord only knows how, and I set the folks firmly believing that he was old Cameron. Well, if he was, then the girl was lost and dead; but if he wasn't—well, I twigged it she'd got on the railroad, and, by being real pleasant to all the car men, I found out, quite by the way and private, how she might have got on, and where any girl had got off, till by patience and perseverance I got on your track; and I've been eight months trying to fathom your deepness and win your affections. The more fool I! For to try to win what hasn't any more existence than the pot at the rainbow's tail is clear waste of time. Deep you are; but you haven't got any of the commodity of affection in your breast."

"Why didn't you tell me this before, like an honest man?" she asked; "and I'd have told you you didn't know as much as you thought you did." Her voice was a little thick; but it was expressionless.

"I'm not green. If you'd known you were possessed of money, d'you suppose you'd have stayed here to marry me? Oh no, I meant to get that little ceremony over first, and spring the mine on you for a wedding present after. The reason I've told you now is that I wouldn't marry you now, not if you'd ten millions of dollars in cash in your pocket."

"Why not? If I'm the person you take me for, I'm as rich and clever now." She still sat with her back to him; her voice so impassive that even interrogation was hardly expressed in words that had the form of a question.

"Yes, and you'd be richer and cleverer now with me, by a long chalk, than without me! If you'd me to say who you are, and that I'd known it all along, and how you'd got here, and to bring up the railroad fellows (I've got all their names) who noticed you to bear witness, your claim would look better in the eyes of the law. 'Twould look a deal better in the eyes of the world, too, to come as Mrs. Cyril P. Harkness, saying you had been Miss Cameron, than to come on the stage as Miss White, laying claim to another name; and it would be a long sight more comfortable to have me to support and cherish you at such a time than not to have a friend in the world except the folks whose eyes you've pulled the wool over, and who'll be mighty shocked. Oh, yes; by Jemima! you'd be richer and cleverer now with me than without me. But I'll tell you what I've come here to say"—his manner took a tone more serious; his mocking smile passed away; he seemed to pause to arrest his own lightness, and put on an unwonted dignity. "I tell you," he repeated slowly, "what I've come here to say—I do despise a young lady without a heart. Do you know what occurred last night? As good an old gentleman as ever lived was brutally felled to the earth and killed; a poor man who was never worse than a drunkard has become a murderer, and there's a many good pious ladies in this town who'll go about till death's day jeered at as fools. Would you like to be marked for a fool? No, you wouldn't and neither will they; and if you're the young lady I take you for, you could have hindered all this, and you didn't. I brought the old man to this place; I am to blame in that, my own self, I am; but I tell you, by the salvation of my soul, when I stood last night and heard him pray, and saw those poor ladies with their white garbs all bedraggled, around him praying, I said to myself, 'Cyril, you've reason to call on the rocks and hills to cover you,' and I had grace to be right down sorry. I'm right down ashamed, and so I'm going to pull up stakes and go back to where I came from; and I've come here now to tell you that after what I've seen of you in this matter I'd sooner die than be hitched with you. You've no more heart than my old shoe; as long as you get on it's all one to you who goes to the devil. You're not only as sharp as I took you for, but a good deal sharper. Go ahead; you'll get rich somehow; you'll get grand; but I want you to know that, though I'm pretty tricky myself, and 'cute enough to have thought of a good thing and followed it up pretty far, I've got a heart; and I do despise a person made of stone. I was real fond of you, for you far exceeded my expectations; but I'm not fond of you now one bit. If you was to go down on your bended knees and ask me to admire you now, I wouldn't."

She listened to all the sentence he pronounced upon her. When he had finished she asked a question. "What do you mean about going to law about the clearin'?"

"Your worthy friend, Mr. Bates, has arrived in this place this very day. He's located with the Principal, he is."

"He isn't here," she replied in angry scorn.

"All right. Just as you please."

"He isn't here," she said more sulkily.

"But he is."

She ignored his replies. "What do you mean about going to law about the land?"

"Why, I haven't got much time left,"—he was standing now with his watch in his hand—"but for the sake of old times I'll tell you, if you don't see through that. D'you suppose Bates isn't long-headed! He's heard about Father Cameron being here, and knowing the old man couldn't give an account of himself, he's come to see him and pretend he's your father. Of course he's no notion of you being here. He swears right and left that you went over the hills and perished in the snow; and he's got up great mourning and lamenting, so I've heard, for your death. Oh, Jemima! Can't you see through that?"

"Tell me what you mean," she demanded, haughtily. She was standing again now.

"Why, my dear, if you knew a bit more of the world you'd know that it meant that he intends to pocket all the money himself. And, what's more, he's got the best of the situation; for you left him of your own accord, my dear, and changed your name, and if you should surprise him now by putting in an appearance and saying you're the lost young lady, what's to hinder him saying you're not you, and keeping the tin? I don't know who's to swear to you, myself. The men round Turrifs said you were growing so fast that between one time and another they wouldn't know you. Worst, that is, of living in out-of-the-way parts—no one sees you often enough to know if you're you or if you're not you."

"It is not true," she cried. He had at last brought the flash to her eyes. She stood before him palpitating with passion. "You are a liar!" she said, intensely. "Mr. Bates is as honest as"—words failed her—"as—as honest and as good as you don't even know how to think of."

He was like a necromancer who, although triumphant at having truly raised a spirit by his incantations, quails mystified before it.

"Oh well, since you feel so badly about it I'll not say that you mayn't outwit him if you put in your claim. You needn't give up all for lost if he does try to face it out."

"Give up what for lost? Do you think I care about this old mine so much? I tell you, sooner than hear a tricky sharper like you say that Mr. Bates is as cunning as you are, I'd—I'd—" She did not say more, but she trembled with passion. "Go!" she concluded. "If you say I'm unfeeling, you say a thing I suppose is true enough; but you've said things to me this afternoon that are not true; and if there's a good honest man in this world, it's Mr. Bates. Sooner than not believe that I'd—sooner die."

The tears had welled up and overflowed her eyes. Her face was red and burning.

"Say, Eliza," he said, gently enough. He was more astonished than he could realise or express, but he was really troubled to see her cry.

"Oh, don't 'Eliza' me!" she cried, angrily. "You said you were going to go—go—go—I tell you, go! What business is it of yours, I'd like to know, to mention Mr. Bates to me? You've no business with either him or me."

"Upon my word! I'll take my gospel oath I've said no more than I do believe."

"I dare say not. You don't know what an honest man is, so how could you believe in one?"

"I've a real soft heart; I hate to see you cry, Eliza."

"Well, Mr. Bates hasn't a soft heart at all; he's as unkind as can be; but he's as much above you, with all your softness, as light is above boot blacking."

She was not good-looking in her tears. She was not modest in her anger; all the crude rude elements of her nature broke forth. She wrenched the door open although with obstinate strength he tried to keep it shut, desiring stupidly to comfort her. She cast him aside as a rough man might push a boy. When she was making her way upstairs he heard smothered sounds of grief and rage escaping from her.



CHAPTER II.

When Eliza had been in her own room for about half an hour, her passion had subsided. She was not glad of this; in perverseness she would have recalled the tempest if she could, but she knew not what to call back or how to call. She knew no more what had disturbed her than in times of earthquake the sea water knows the cause of its unwonted surging. She sat angry and miserable; angry with Harkness, not because he had called her heartless—she did not care in the slightest for his praise or blame—but because he had been the bearer of ill tidings; and because he had in some way produced in her the physical and mental distress of angry passion, a distress felt more when passion is subsiding. She ranked it as ill tidings that her father's land had risen in value. She would rather that her worldly wisdom in leaving it had been proved by subsequent events than disproved, as now, by news which raised such a golden possibility before her ignorant eyes, that her heart was rent with pangs of envy and covetousness, while her pride warred at the very thought of stooping to take back what she had cast away, and all the disclosure that must ensue. Above all, she counted it ill tidings that Bates was reported to be in the place. She was as angry with him now as on the day she had left him—more angry—for now he could vaunt new prosperity as an additional reason why she had been wrong to go. Why had he come here to disturb and interrupt? What did the story about Father Cameron matter to him? She felt like a hunted stag at bay; she only desired strength and opportunity to trample the hunter.

Partly because she felt more able to deal with others than with the dull angry misery of her own heart, partly because she was a creature of custom, disliking to turn from what she had set out to do, she found herself, after about an hour of solitude, rearranging her street toilet to walk to Mrs. Rexford's house.

When she had made her way down to the lower flat of the hotel she found Harkness had spoken the truth in saying he intended to go, for he was gone. The men in the cool shaded bar-room were talking about it. Mr. Hutchins mentioned it to her through the door. He sat in his big chair, his crutches leaning against him.

"Packed up; paid his bill; gone clear off—did you know?"

"Yes, I knew," said Eliza, although she had not known till that moment.

"Said he was so cut up, and that he wouldn't stay to give evidence against poor Job, or be hauled before the coroner to be cross-questioned about the old man. He's a sharp 'un; packed up in less time than it takes most men to turn round—adjustable chair and all."

Eliza had come to the threshold of the bar-room door to hear all he said. The sunshine of a perfect summer day fell on the verandah just outside, and light airs came through the outer door and fanned her, but in here the sweet air was tarnished with smoke from the cigars of one or two loiterers.

Two men of the village were sitting with their hats on. As they said "Good-day" to Eliza, they did not rise or take off their hats, not because they did not feel towards her as a man would who would give this civility, but because they were not in the habit of expressing their feelings in that way. Another transient caller was old Dr. Nash, and he, looking at Eliza, recognised in a dull way something in her appearance which made him think her a finer woman than he had formerly supposed, and, pulling off his hat, he made her a stiff bow.

Eliza spoke only to Mr. Hutchins: "I shall be gone about four hours; I am going to the Rexfords to tea. You'd better look into the dining-room once or twice when supper's on."

"All right," said he, adding, when the clock had had time to tick once, "Miss White."

And the reason he affixed her name to his promise was the same that had compelled Dr. Nash's bow—a sense of her importance growing upon him; but the hotel-keeper observed, what the old doctor did not, that the gown was silk.

"Fine woman that, sir," he remarked, when she was gone, to anyone who might wish to receive the statement.

"Well," said one of the men, "I should just think it."

"She seems," said Dr. Nash, stiffly, "to be a good girl and a clever one."

"She isn't just now what I'd call a gurl," said the man who had answered first. "She's young, I know; but now, if you see her walking about the dining-room, she's more like a queen than a gurl."

Without inquiring into the nature of this distinction Dr. Nash got into his buggy. As he drove down the street under the arching elm trees he soon passed Eliza on her way to the Rexfords, and again he lifted his hat. Eliza, with grave propriety, returned the salutation.

The big hawthorn tree at the beginning of Captain Rexford's fence was thickly bedecked with pale scarlet haws. Eliza opened the gate beside it and turned up the cart road, walking on its grassy edge, concealed from the house by ragged lilac trees. She preferred this to-day to the open path leading to the central door. This road brought her to the end of the long front verandah. Here she perceived voices from the sitting-room, and, listening, thought she heard Principal Trenholme talking. She went on past the gable of the house into the yard, a sloping straggling bit of ground, enclosed on three sides by the house and its additions of dairies and stables, and on the fourth side bounded by the river. For once the place seemed deserted by the children. A birch, the only tree in the enclosure, cast fluttering shadow on the closely cropped sod. Sunlight sparkled on the river and on the row of tin milk pans set out near the kitchen door. To this door Eliza went slowly, fanning herself with her handkerchief, for the walk had been warm. She saw Miss Rexford was in the kitchen alone, attending to some light cookery.

"I heard company in the front room, so I came round here till they were gone."

"You are not usually shy," said Sophia.

Eliza sat down on a chair by the wall. With the door wide open the yard seemed a part of the kitchen. It was a pleasant place. The birch tree flicked its shadow as far as the much-worn wooden doorstep.

"I was very sorry to hear about last night, Miss Sophia," said Eliza, sincerely, meaning that she was sorry on Winifred's account more immediately.

"Yes," said Sophia, acknowledging that there was reason for such sympathy.

"Is that Principal Trenholme talking?" asked Eliza. The talk in the sitting-room came through the loose door, and a doubt suddenly occurred to her.

"No; it's his brother," said Sophia.

"The voices are alike."

"Yes; but the two men don't seem to be much alike."

"I didn't know he had a brother."

"Didn't you? He has just come."

Sophia was taking tea-cakes from the oven. Eliza leaned her head against the wall; she felt warm and oppressed. One of the smaller children opened the sitting-room door just then and came into the kitchen. The child wore a very clean pinafore in token of the day. She came and sat on Eliza's knee. The door was left ajar; instead of stray words and unintelligible sentences, all the talk of the sitting-room was now the common property of those in the kitchen.

In beginning to hear a conversation already in full flow, it is a few moments before the interchange of remarks and interrogations makes sense to us. Eliza only came to understand what was being talked of when the visitor said "No, I'm afraid there's no doubt about the poor girl's death. After there had been two or three snow-storms there was evidently no use in looking for her any more; but even then, I think it was months before he gave up hopes of her return. Night after night he used to hoist a pinewood torch, thinking she might have fallen in with Indians and be still alive and trying to make her way back. The fact of the matter was, Mrs. Rexford, Bates loved her, and he simply could not give her up for dead."

The young man had as many emphasised words in his speech as a girl might have had, yet his talk did not give the impression of easily expressed feeling.

"Ah, it was very sad."

"Yes, I didn't know I could have minded so much a thing that did not affect me personally. Then when he had given up hope of finding her living, he was off, when the spring came, everywhere over the woods, supposing that if she had perished, her body could be found when the snow was gone. I couldn't help helping him to search the place for miles round. It's a fine place in spring, too; but I don't know when one cares less about spring flowers than when one's half expecting the dead body of a girl to turn up in every hollow where they grow thickest. I've beaten down a whole valley of trillium lilies just to be sure she had not fallen between the rocks they grew on. And if I felt that way, you may suppose it was bad enough for Bates."

"He seems to have had a feeling heart."

"Oh well, he had brought the girl up. I don't think he cared for anything in the world but her."

"And Dr. Nash saw Mr. Bates as soon as you got him to your brother's? If Dr. Nash thinks he'll pull through I should think you must feel hopeful."

"Yes—well, I left him on the sofa. He's rather bad."

There was a pause, as if Mrs. Rexford might be sighing and shaking her head over some suffering before described.

Sophia had gone to the milk cellar to get cream for tea. Eliza followed her out into the yard.

"I had better not stay to tea," said she, "there won't be room."

"Oh yes, there will; I have a headache, so I'm not going into the dining-room."

"Then I won't stay. I would rather come some night when you are there."

"How handsome your dress looks! You are getting quite a fine lady, Eliza."

"My dress!" said Eliza, looking down at it. It seemed to her so long since she thought of it. "Yes," she continued, stroking it, "it looks very nicely, doesn't it?"

Sophia assented heartily. She liked the girl's choice of clothes; they seemed to remove her from, and set her far above, the commoner people who frequented the hotel.

"You're very tired, Miss Sophia, I can see; and it's no wonder after last night. It's no fun staying to-night, for we all feel dull about what's happened; I'll go now."

Eliza went quietly down the lane again, in shadow of the lilac hedge, and let herself out of the wooden gate; but she did not return to the village. She looked down the road the other way, measuring with her eyes the distance to the roof of Trenholme's house. She walked in that direction, and when she came to Captain Rexford's pasture field, she got through the bars and crossed it to a small wood that lay behind. Long golden strips of light lay athwart the grass between elongated shades cast by cows and bushes. The sabbath quiet was everywhere. All the cows in the pasture came towards her, for it was milking time, and any one who came suggested to them the luxury of that process. Some followed her in slow and dubious fashion; some stopped before her on the path. Eliza did not even look at them, and when she went in among the young fir trees they left her alone.

It was not a thick wood; the evening sun shone freely between the clumps of young spruce. In an open glade an elm tree stood, stretching out branches sensitive to each breath of air, golden in the slant sunlight above the low dark firs. The roots of this tree were raised and dry. Eliza sat down on them. She could see between the young trees out to the side of the college houses and their exit to the road. She could see the road too: it was this she watched.



CHAPTER III.

Eliza sat still in her rough woodland chamber till the stray sunbeams had left its floor of moss and played only through the high open windows in the elm bough roof. She had seen the cows milked, and now heard the church bells ring. She looked intently through the fissures of the spruce shrub walls till at length she saw a light carriage drive away from the college grounds with the clergyman and his brother in it. She knew now that their house would be left almost empty. After waiting till the last church-going gig had passed on the road and the bells had stopped, she went into the college grounds by a back way, and on to the front of Trenholme's house.

As was common in the place, the front door yielded when the handle was turned. Eliza had no wish to summon the housekeeper. She stood in the inner hall and listened, that she might hear what rooms had inmates. From the kitchen came occasional clinking of cups and plates; the housekeeper had evidently not swerved from her regular work. With ears preternaturally acute, Eliza hearkened to the silence in the other rooms till some slight sound, she could hardly tell of what, led her upstairs to a certain door. She did not knock; she had no power to stand there waiting for a response; the primitive manners of the log house in which she had lived so long were upon her. She entered the room abruptly, roughly, as she would have entered the log house door.

In a long chair lay the man she sought. He was dressed in common ill-fitting clothes; he lay as only the very weak lie, head and limbs visibly resting on the support beneath them.

She crossed her arms and stood there, fierce and defiant. She was conscious of the dignity of her pose, of her improved appearance and of her fine clothes; the consciousness formed part of her defiance. But he did not even see her mood, just as, manlike, he did not see her dress. All that he did see was that here, in actual life before him, was the girl he had lost. In his weakness he bestirred himself with a cry of fond wondering joy—"Sissy!"

"Yes, Mr. Bates, I'm here."

Some power came to him, for he sat erect, awed and reverent before this sudden delight that his eyes were drinking in. "Are you safe, Sissy?" he whispered.

"Yes," she replied, scornfully, "I've been quite safe ever since I got away from you, Mr. Bates. I've taken care of myself, so I'm quite safe and getting on finely; but I'd get on better if my feet weren't tied in a sack because of the things you made me do—you made me do it, you know you did." She challenged his self-conviction with fierce intensity. "It was you made me go off and leave your aunt before you'd got any one else to take care of her; it was you who made me take her money because you'd give me none that was lawfully my own; it was you that made me run away in a way that wouldn't seem very nice if any one knew, and do things they wouldn't think very nice, and—and" (she was incoherent in her passion) "you made me run out in the woods alone, till I could get a train, and I was so frightened of you coming, and finding me, and telling, that I had to give another name; and now, when I'm getting on in the world, I have to keep hiding all this at every turn because people wouldn't think it very pretty conduct. They'd think it was queer and get up a grand talk. So I've told lies and changed my name, and it's you that made me, Mr. Bates."

He only took in a small part of the meaning of the words she poured upon him so quickly, but he could no longer be oblivious to her rage. His joy in seeing her did not subside; he was panting for breath with the excitement of it, and his eyes gloated upon her; for his delight in her life and safety was something wholly apart from any thought of himself, from the pain her renewed anger must now add to the long-accustomed pain of his own contrition.

"But how," he whispered, wondering, "how did you get over the hills? How?—"

"Just how and when I could. 'Twasn't much choice that you left me, Mr. Bates. It signifies very little now how I got here. I am here. You've come after the old man that's dead, I suppose. You might have saved yourself the trouble. He isn't father, if that's what you thought."

He did not even hear the last part of her speech. He grasped at the breath that seemed trying to elude him.

"You went out into the woods alone," he said, pityingly. He was so accustomed to give her pity for this that it came easily. "You—you mean over our hills to the back of the—"

"No, I don't, I wasn't such a silly as to go and die in the hills. I got across the lake, and I'm here now—that's the main thing, and I want to know why you're here, and what you're going to do."

Her tone was brutal. It was, though he could not know it, the half hysterical reaction from that mysterious burst of feeling that had made her defend him so fiercely against the American's evil imputation.

She was not sufficiently accustomed to ill health to have a quick eye for it; but she began now to see how very ill he looked. The hair upon his face and head was damp and matted; his face was sunken, weather-browned, but bloodless in the colouring. His body seemed struggling for breath without aid from his will, for she saw he was thinking only of her. His intense preoccupation in her half fascinated, half discomforted her, the more so because of the feverish lustre of his eye.

"I'm sorry you're so ill, Mr. Bates," she said, coldly; "you'd better lie down."

"Never mind about me," he whispered, eagerly, and feebly moved upon the seat to get a little nearer her. "Never mind about me; but tell me, Sissy, have you been a good girl since you got off like this? You're safe and well—have you been good?"

"I took your aunt's money, if you mean that, but I left you my half of things for it; and anyway, it was you who made me do it."

"Yes, yes," he assented, "'twas my doing; the sin of all you did then lies at my door. But since then, Sissy?" His look, his whole attitude, were an eager question, but she looked at him scornfully.

"Of course I've been good. I go to church and say my prayers, and every one respects me. I worked first in a family, but I didn't let them call me a servant. Then I got a place in the Grand Hotel. Old Mr. Hutchins had got lame, so he couldn't see after things, and I could. I've done it now for six months, and it's a different house. I always do everything I do well, so we've made money this summer. I'm thinking of making Mr. Hutchins take me into partnership; he'd rather do it than lose me. I'm well thought of, Mr. Bates, by everybody, and I'm going to get rich."

"Rich," he echoed, quietly. He looked now, his mind drawn by hers, at her fine clothes, and at the luxuriant red hair that was arranged with artificial display. The painfulness of his breath and his weakness returned now within his range of feeling.

Without having expected to absorb his mind or knowing that she cared to do so, she still felt that instant that something was lost to her. The whole stream of his life, that had been hers since she had entered the room, was no longer all for her. She pressed on quietly to the business she had with him, fearing to lose a further chance.

"Look here, Mr. Bates! It's not more than a few hours since I heard you were here, so I've come to tell you that I'm alive and all right, and all that I've done that wasn't very nice was your fault; but, look here, I've something else to say: I don't know why you've come here to see this old preacher, or who he is, or what you have to do with him; but it would be cruel and mean of you now, after driving me to do what I did, to tell the people here about it, and that my name isn't White, you know. I've very nice friends here, who'd be shocked, and it would do me harm. I'm not going to accuse you to people of what you've done. I'm sorry you're ill, and that you've had all the trouble of hunting for me, and all that; but I've come to ask you now to keep quiet and not say who I am."

He drew great sighs, as a wounded animal draws its breath, but he was not noticing the physical pain of breathing. He did not catch at breath as eagerly as he was trying to catch at this new idea, this new Sissy, with a character and history so different from what he had supposed. His was not a mind that took rational account of the differences between characters, yet he began to realise now that the girl who had made her own way, as this one had, was not the same as the girl he had imagined wandering helplessly among pathless hills, and dying feebly there.

She still looked at him as if demanding an answer to her request, looked at him curiously too, trying to estimate how ill he was. He did not speak, and she, although she did not at all fathom his feeling, knew instinctively that some influence she had had over him was lessened.

"Of course you can spoil my life if you like, Mr. Bates, but I've come to ask you not. Someone's told me there's a mine found on our clearin'—well, when I took your aunt's gold pieces I meant to leave you the land for them. I'm too proud to go back on that now, far too proud; you can keep the money if you want to, or you can give me some of it if you want to. I'd like to be rich better than anything, but I'd rather be poor as a church mouse, and free to get on my own way, than have you to say what I ought to do every touch and turn, thinking I'd only be good and sensible so long as I did what you told me" (there was derision in her voice). "But now, as I say, you have the chance to make me miserable if you choose; but I've come to ask you not to, although if you do, I dare say I can live it down."

He looked at her bewildered. A few moments since and all the joy bells of his life had been a-chime; they were still ringing, but jangling confusedly out of tune, and—now she was asking him to conceal the cause of his joy, that he had found her. He could not understand fully; his mind would not clear itself.

"I won't do anything to make you miserable, Sissy," he said, faintly.

"You won't tell that you've seen me, or who I am, or anything?" she insisted, half pleading, half threatening.

He turned his face from her to hide the ghastly faintness that was coming over him. "I—I oughtn't to have tried to keep you, when I did," he said.

"No, you oughtn't to," she assented, quickly.

"And I won't speak of you now, if that's what you want."

"Thank you," she said, wondering what had made him turn his back to her. "You aren't very ill, are you, Mr. Bates?"

"No—you—I only can't get my breath. You'd better go, perhaps."

"Yes, I think I had," she replied.

And she went.



CHAPTER IV.

There are many difficulties in this world which, if we refuse to submit to them, will in turn be subdued by us, but a sprained ankle is not one of them. Robert Trenholme, having climbed a hill after he had twisted his foot, and having, contrary to all advice, used it to some extent the next day, was now fairly conquered by the sprain and destined to be held by this foot for many long days. He explained to his brother who the lady was whom he had taken up the hill, why he himself had first happened to be with her, and that he had slipped with one foot in a roadside ditch, and, thinking to catch her up, had run across a field and so missed the lane in the darkness. This was told in the meagre, prosaic way that left no hint of there being more to tell.

"What is she like?" asked Alec, for he had confessed that he had talked to the lady.

"Like?" repeated Robert, at a loss; "I think she must be like her own mother, for she is like none of the other Rexfords."

"All the rest of the family are good-looking."

"Yes," said Robert dreamily.

So Alec jumped to the conclusion that Robert did not consider Miss Rexford good-looking. He did not tell anything more about her or ask anything more. He saw no reason for insulting Robert by saying he had at first overheard her conversation, and that it had been continued to him after she had mistaken one for the other. He wondered over those of her remarks which he remembered, and his family pride was hurt by them. He did not conceive that Robert had been much hurt, simply because he betrayed no sign of injured feeling. Younger members of a family often long retain a curiously lofty conception of their elders, because in childhood they have looked upon them as embodiments of age and wisdom. Alec, in loose fashion of thought, supposed Robert to be too much occupied by more important affairs to pay heed to a woman's opinion of him, but he cherished a dream of some day explaining to Miss Rexford that she was mistaken in his brother's character. His pulse beat quicker at the thought, because it would involve nearness to her and equality of conversation. That Robert had any special fancy for the lady never entered his mind.

Although we may be willing to abuse those who belong to us we always feel that the same or any censure coming from an outsider is more or less unjust; and, too, although the faults of near relatives grieve us more bitterly than the crimes of strangers, yet most of us have an easy-going way of forgetting all about the offence at the first opportunity. There is nothing in the world stronger than the quiet force of the family tie, which, except in case of need, lies usually so passive that its strength is overlooked by the superficial observer. It was by virtue of this tie now that the two brothers, although they had so great a difference, although they were so constituted as to see most things very differently, found themselves glad to be in each other's company. Their hearts grew warmer by mere proximity; they talked of old family incidents, and of the incidents of the present, with equal zest. The one thing they did not immediately mention was the subject of the quarrel about which they had not yet come to an agreement.

One thing that fretted Alec considerably during that Sunday and Monday was that Bates had arrived at Chellaston in such a weak state, and had had so severe an attack of his malady on the Sunday evening, that it was impossible to take him to see the body of the old man who went by the name of Cameron. It was in vain that Bates protested, now more strongly than ever, that he was certain the man was not Cameron; as he would give no proof of his certainty further than what had already been discussed between them, Alec could not but feel that he was unreasonable in refusing to take any interest in the question of identity. However, he was not well enough to be troubled, certainly not well enough to be moved. Alec strode over to Cooper's farm alone, and took a last look at the old man where he lay in a rough shed, and gave his evidence about the death before the coroner.

What few belongings the old man had were taken from the Harmon house by the coroner before Harkness left, but no writing was found upon them. A description of the body was advertised in the Monday's papers, but no claim came quickly. Natural law is imperious, seeking to gather earth's children back to their mother's breast, and when three warm days were past, all of him that bore earthly image and superscription was given back to earth in a corner of the village cemetery. An Adventist minister, who sometimes preached in Chellaston, came to hold such service as he thought suitable over the grave, and Alec Trenholme was one of the very few who stood, hat in hand, to see the simple rite.

They were not in the old graveyard by the river, but in a new cemetery that had been opened on a slope above the village. It was a bare, stony place; shrubs that had been planted had not grown. In the corner where they untie it, except little by little, in a lifetime, or in generations of lives! Alec Trenholme, confronted almost for the first time with the thought that it is not easy to find the ideal modern life, even when one is anxious to conform to it, began tugging at all the strands of difficulty at once, not seeing them very clearly, but still with no notion but that if he set his strength to it, he could unravel them all in the half-hour's walk that lay between him and the college.

He had not got from under the arching elms at the thin end of the village when two young ladies in an open phaeton bowed to him. He was not absent; his mind worked wholesomely at the same instant with his senses. He saw and knew that these were the Miss Browns, to whom Robert had introduced him at the end of the Sunday evening service. He thought them very pretty; he had seen then that they were very gentle and respectful to Robert; he saw now from the smile that accompanied the bow, that he was a person they delighted to honour. They were driving quickly: they were past in a flash of time; and as he replaced his hat upon his head, he thought that he really was a very good-looking fellow, very well proportioned, and straight in the legs. He wondered if his clothes were just the thing; they had not been worn much, but it was a year since he had got them in England to bring out, and their style might be a little out of date! Then he thought with satisfaction that Robert always dressed very well. Robert was very good-looking too. They were really a very fine pair of brothers! Their father had been a very fine—He had got quite a bit further on the road since he met the carriage, so lightly had he stepped to the tune of these thoughts, so brightly had the sun shone upon them. Now he thought of that pile of aprons he had in his portmanteau, and he saw them, not as they were now, freshly calendered in the tight folds of a year's disuse, but as he had often seen them, with splashes of blood and grease on them. He fancied the same stains upon his hands; he remembered the empty shop he had just passed near the general store, which for nearly a year back he had coveted as a business stand. He estimated instinctively the difference in the sort of bow the pretty Brown girls would be likely to give him if he carried his own purpose through. The day seemed duller. He felt more sorry for his brother than he had ever felt before. He looked about at the rough fields, the rude log fences, at the road with its gross unevennesses and side strips of untrimmed weeds. He looked at it all, his man's eyes almost wistful as a girl's. Was it as hard in this new crude condition of things to hew for oneself a new way through the invisible barriers of the time-honoured judgments of men, as it would be where road and field had been smoothed by the passing of generations?

He had this contrast between English and Canadian scenery vividly in his mind, wondering what corresponding social differences, if any, could be found to make his own particular problem of the hour more easy, and all the fine speculations he had had when he came down from the cemetery had resolved themselves into—whether, after all, it would be better to go on being a butcher or not, when he came to the beginning of the Rexford paling. He noticed how battered and dingy it was. The former owner had had it painted at one time, but the paint was almost worn off. The front fencing wanted new pales in many places, and the half acre's space of grass between the verandah and the road was wholly unkempt. It certainly did not look like the abode of a family of any pretensions. It formed, indeed, such a contrast to any house he would have lived in, even had painting and fencing to be done with his own hand, that he felt a sort of wrath rising in him at Miss Rexford's father and brother, that they should suffer her to live in such a place.

He had not come well in front before he observed that the women of the family were grouped at work on the green under a tree near the far end of the house. A moment more, and he saw the lady of the midnight walk coming towards him over the grass. He never doubted that it was she, although he had not seen her before by daylight. She had purposely avoided him on the Sunday; he had felt it natural she should do so. Now when he saw her coming—evidently coming on purpose to waylay and speak to him, the excitement he felt was quite unaccountable, even to himself; not that he tried to account for it—he only knew that she was coming, that his heart seemed to beat against his throat, that she had come and laid her hand upon the top of the paling, and looked over at him and said:

"Have they buried him? Did you—have you been there?"

"Yes," said he.

"We have only just heard a rumour that the funeral was taking place. I thought when I saw you that perhaps you had been there. I am so glad you went." Her eyes looked upon him with kind approval.

He fancied from her manner that she thought herself older than he—that she was treating him like a boy. Her face was bright with interest and had the flush of some slight embarrassment upon it.

He told her what had happened and where the grave was, and stood in the sweet evening air with quieted manner before her. She did not seem to be thinking of what he said. "There was something else that I—I rather wanted to take the first opportunity of saying to you."

All her face now was rosy with embarrassment, and he saw that, although she went on bravely, she was shy—shy of him! He hardly took in what she was saying, in the wonder, in the pleasure of it. Then he knew that she had been saying that she feared she had talked to him while mistaking him for his brother, that what she had said had doubtless appeared very wild, very foolish, as he did not know the conversation out of which it grew; probably he had forgotten or had not paid heed at the time, but if he should chance to remember, and had not already repeated her words, would he be kind enough not to do so, and to forget them himself?

This was her request, and he guessed, from the tenor of it, that she did not know how little he had heard in all or how much she had said to him and how much to his brother; that she would like to know, but was too proud to ask or to hear; that, in fact, this proud lady had said words that she was ashamed of.

"I haven't said a word to Robert about it, and of course I won't now." It was a very simple thing to say, yet some way he felt a better man in his own eyes because she had asked him. He did not claim that he had paid no attention or forgotten, for he felt just now that all her words were so supremely worthy of deference that he only wished he could remember more of what she had let fall when her heart was stirred. "Of course," he said, "I didn't know it had been Robert, or I would have gone back for him."

He floundered on into the midst of excuses, and her embarrassment had time to pass away, with it the blush on her face, and he felt as if a sun had somewhere set.

"Thank you" (she was all sedateness now) "I fear that Principal Trenholme is suffering very much from his foot and will be kept in for some time. If you had told me that you had repeated my unjust speeches I should have asked you to take some apology, to say that I am quite willing to acknowledge my own—unreasonableness."

He saw that this speech was intended to cover all the ground, and that he was desired to impart as much of the apology as he believed to be needed, and no more. He remembered now that he had intended to plead Robert's cause, but could think of nothing to say except—

"Robert is—Robert really is an awfully good man."

This he said so suddenly and so earnestly looking at her, that she was betrayed into an unintended answer.

"Is he?" And then in a moment she smiled on him again, and said warmly, "He certainly is if you say that; a brother knows as no one else can."

She was treating him like a boy again. He did not like it now because he had felt the sweetness of having her at an advantage. There are some men who, when they see what they want, stretch out their hands to take it with no more complexity of thought than a baby has when it reaches for a toy. At other times Alec Trenholme might consider; just then he only knew that he wanted to talk longer with this stately girl who was now retiring. He arrested her steps by making a random dash at the first question that might detain her.

There was much that, had he known his own mind clearly and how to express it, he would have liked to say to her. Deep down within him he was questioning whether it was possible always to live under such impulse of fealty to Heaven as had befallen him under the exciting influence of Cameron's expectation, whether the power of such an hour to sift the good from the evil, the important from the unimportant in life, could in any wise be retained. But he would have been a wholly different man from what he was had he thought this concisely, or said it aloud. All that he did was to express superficial curiosity concerning the sentiments of others, and to express it inanely enough.

"Do you think," he said, "that all those poor people—my brother's housekeeper, for instance—do you think they really thought—really expected—"

"I think—" she said. (She came back to the fence and clasped her hands upon it in her interest.) "Don't you think, Mr. Trenholme, that a person who is always seeking the Divine Presence, lives in it and has power to make other people know that it is near? But then, you see, these others fancy they must model their seeking upon the poor vagaries of their teacher. We are certain that the treasure is found, but—we mix up things so, things are really so mixed, that we suppose we must shape our ideas upon the earthen vessel that holds it. I don't know whether I have said what I mean, or if you understand—" she stopped.

She was complaining that people will not distinguish between the essence of the heaven-sent message and the accident of form in which it comes. He did not quite understand, because, if the truth must be told, he had not entirely listened; for although all the spiritual nature that was in him was stimulated by hers, a more outward sympathy asserted itself too; he became moved with admiration and liking for her, and feeling struggled with thought.

"Yes," he said, dreaming of her alone, "if one could always be with people who are good, it would be easier to do something worth doing."

Notwithstanding her interest in what she was saying, Sophia began now to see the inclination of his heart for her as one might see a trivial detail of landscape while looking at some absorbing thing, such as a race. She saw the homage he inwardly proffered more clearly than he saw it himself. She had seen the same thing before often enough to know it.

"I think," she continued, "if I had been very ignorant, and had seen a good deal of this old man, I would have followed him anywhere, because I would have thought the spiritual force of his life was based on his opinions, which must therefore be considered true. Isn't that the way we are apt to argue about any phase of Church or Dissent that has vitality?"

But the knowledge she had just come by was making its way to a foremost place in her thought, and her open heart closed gently as a sensitive plant closes its leaves. As he watched the animation of her face, he saw the habitual reserve come over it again like a shadow. He felt that she was withdrawing from him as truly as if she had been again walking away, although now she stood still where his renewal of talk had stopped her. He tried again to grasp at the moment of gracious chance, to claim her interest, but failed.

He went on down the road. He had not guessed the lady had seen his heart, for he hardly saw it himself; yet he called himself a blundering fool. He wondered that he had dared to talk with her so long, yet he wondered more that he had not dared to talk longer. In all this he never thought of social grades, as he had done in connection with the smiles of the Miss Browns. Sophia Rexford had struck his fancy more as a superior being; and to angels, or to the Madonna, we do not seek to recommend ourselves by position or pedigree.

The strong, clear evening light, tinted with gold, was upon everything. He felt that if he could but live near the woman he had left, the problem of living would become simple, and the light of life's best hours would shine for him always; but he entered into no fine distinction of ideal friendships.



CHAPTER V.

In the meantime the elder of the brothers Trenholme had not the satisfaction of meeting with Sophia Rexford, or of going to see the strange old man laid away in his last resting-place.

Robert Trenholme lay in his house, suffering a good deal of physical pain, suffering more from restlessness of nerve caused by his former tense activity, suffering most from the consideration of various things which were grievous to him.

He had been flouted by the woman he loved. The arrow she had let fly had pierced his heart and, through that, his understanding. He never told her, or anyone, how angry he had been at the first stab that wounded, nor that, when the familiar sound of his brother's voice came to him in the midst of this anger, he had been dumb rather than claim kindred in that place with the young man who, by his actions, had already taken up the same reproach. No, he never told them that it was more in surly rage than because he had slipped in the ditch that he had let them go on without him in the darkness; but he knew that this had been the case; and, although he was aware of no momentous consequences following on this lapse, he loathed himself for it, asking by what gradual steps he had descended to be capable of such a moment of childish and churlish temper. He was a product of modern culture, and had the devil who had overcome him been merely an unforgiving spirit, or the spirit of sarcastic wit or of self-satisfied indifference, he might hardly have noticed that he had fallen from the high estate of Christian manhood, even though the fiend jumped astride his back and ambled far on him; but when he found that he had been overcome by a natural impulse of passionate wrath he was appalled, and was philosopher enough to look for the cause of such weakness prior to the moment of failure. Was it true, what Sophia had said, that he had sold his birthright for a little paltry prosperity? He thought more highly of her discrimination than any one else would have done, because he loved her. What had she seen in him to make her use that form of accusation? And if it was true, was there for him no place of repentance?

Then he remembered the purer air of the dark mountaintop. There he had seen many from his own little cure of souls who were shaken by the madman's fervour as he had never been able to move them by precept or example. There he, too, had seen, with sight borrowed from the eyes of the enthusiast, the enthusiast's Lord, seen Him the more readily because there had been times in his life when he had not needed another to show him the loveliness that exceeds all other loveliness. He was versed in the chronicle of the days when the power of God wrought wonders by devoted men, and he asked himself with whom this power had been working here of late—with him, the priest, or with this wandering fool, out of whose lips it would seem that praise was ordained. He looked back to divers hours when he had given himself wholly to the love of God, and to the long reaches of time between them, in which he had not cast away the muck-rake, but had trailed it after him with one hand as he walked forward, looking to the angel and the crown. He seemed to see St. Peter pointing to the life all which he had professed to devote while he had kept back part; and St. Peter said, "Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God."

There was for him the choice that is given to every man in this sort of pain, the choice between dulling his mind to the pain, letting it pass from him as he holds on his way (and God knows it passes easily), or clasping it as the higher good. Perhaps this man would not have been wiser than many other men in his choice had he not looked at the gathering of his muck-rake and in that found no comfort. Since a woman had called this prosperity paltry, it seemed less substantial in his own eyes; but, paltry or worthy, he believed that it was in the power of his younger brother to reverse that prosperity, and he felt neither brave enough to face this misfortune nor bad enough to tamper with that brother's crude ideals for the sake of his own gain. From the length of his own experience, from the present weariness of his soul, he looked upon Alec more than ever as a boy to be shielded from the shock of further disillusion with regard to himself. He had not had Alec's weal a thorn in his conscience for ten months without coming to feel that, if merely for the sake of his own comfort, he would not shoulder that burden again. Now this conception he had of Alec as a weaker man, and of his ideals as crude and yet needing tender dealing, was possibly a mistaken one, yet, so curious is our life that, true or false, it was the thing that at this juncture made him spurn all thought of setting aside the reproach of his roused sense of loss as morbid or unreal. He looked to his early realisation of the all-attractiveness of the love of God, not with the rational view that such phase of religion is ordained to fade in the heat of life, but with passionate regret that by his own fault he had turned away from the glory of life. He thought of the foolish dreamer who had been struck dead in the full impulse of adoration and longing love, and he would have given reason and life itself to have such gate of death open now for him.

His spirit did not rest, but tossed constantly, as a fever patient upon his bed, for rest requires more than the softest of beds; and as even those whose bodies are stretched on pillows of down may be too weak to find bodily rest, so the soul that lies, as do all self-sick souls, in the everlasting arms, too often lacks health to feel the up-bearing.

A clever sailor, whose ship is sinking because of too much freight does not think long before he throws the treasure overboard; a wise man in pain makes quick vows of abstinence from the cause of pain. In Trenholme there was little vestige of that low type of will which we see in lobsters and in many wilful men, who go on clutching whatever they have clutched, whether it be useful or useless, till the claw is cut off. He had not realised that he had fallen from the height of his endeavours before he began to look about eagerly for something that he might sacrifice. But here he was met by the difficulty that proves that in the higher stages of human development honest effort after righteousness is not one whit easier than are man's first simple efforts to put down the brute in him. Trenholme could find in himself no offending member that was not so full of good works toward others that he could hardly destroy it without defrauding them. He had sought nothing for himself that was not a legitimate object of desire. The world, the flesh, and the devil had polished themselves to match all that was best in him, and blended impartially with it, so that in very truth he did not know where to condemn. A brave man, when examined, will confess all that he honourably may, but not more; so Trenholme confessed himself to be worldly, but against that he was forced to confess that a true son of the world would have been insensible to the torture he was groaning under. He upbraided himself for not knowing right from wrong, and yet he knew that it was only a very superficial mind that imagined that without direct inspiration from Heaven it could detect its sin and error truly. Crying for such inspiration, his cry seemed unanswered.

Ah, well, each man must parley as best he may with the Angel who withstands him in the narrow place where there is no way to turn to the right hand or the left. We desire at such times to be shown some such clear portraiture of the ideal to which we must conform in our place and circumstance as shall cause us no more to mistake good for evil. Possibly, if such image of all we ourselves ought to be were given to our gaze, we could not look in its eyes and live. Possibly, if Heaven granted us the knowledge of all thoughts and deeds that would make up the ideal self, we should go on our way producing vile imitations of it and neglecting Heaven, as they do who seek only to imitate the Divine Example. At any rate, such perfection of self-ideal is not given us, except with the years that make up the sum of life.



CHAPTER VI.

Robert Trenholme had a lively wit, and it stood him many times in lieu of chapel walls for within it he could retire at all times and be hidden. Of all that he experienced within his heart at this time not any part was visible to the brother who was his idle visitor; or perhaps only the least part, and that not until the moot point between them was touched upon.

There came a day, two days after the old preacher had been buried, when the elder brother called out:

"Come, my lad, I want to speak to you."

Robert was lying on a long couch improvised for him in the corner of his study. The time was that warm hour of the afternoon when the birds are quiet and even the flies buzz drowsily. Bees in the piebald petunias that grew straggling and sweet above the sill of the open window, dozed long in each sticky chalice. Alec was taking off his boots in the lobby, and in reply to the condescending invitation he muttered some graceless words concerning his grandmother, but he came into the room and sat with his elbows on the table. He had an idea of what might be said, and felt the awkwardness of it.

"That fellow Bates," he observed, "is devouring your book-case indiscriminately. He seems to be in the sort of fever that needs distraction every moment. I asked him what he'd have to read, and he said the next five on the shelf—he's read the first ten."

"It's not of Bates I wish to speak; I want to know what you've decided to do. Are you going to stick to your father's trade, or take to some other?"

Robert held one arm above his head, with his fingers through the leaves of the book he had been reading. He tried to speak in a casual way, but they both had a disagreeable consciousness that the occasion was momentous. Alec's mind assumed the cautious attitude of a schoolboy whispering "Cave". He supposed that the other hoped now to achieve by gentleness what he had been unable to achieve by storm.

"Of course," he answered, "I won't set up here if you'd rather be quit of me. I'll go as far as British Columbia, if that's necessary to make you comfortable."

"By that I understand that in these ten months your mind has not altered."

"No; but as I say, I won't bother you."

"Have you reconsidered the question, or have you stuck to it because you said you would?"

"I have reconsidered it."

"You feel quite satisfied that, as far as you are concerned, this is the right thing to do?"

"Yes."

"Well then, as far as I am concerned, I don't want to drive you to the other side of the continent. You can take advantage of the opening here if you want to."

Alec looked down at the things on the table. He felt the embarrassment of detecting his brother in some private religious exercise; nothing, he thought, but an excess of self-denial could have brought this about; yet he was gratified.

"Look here! You'd better not say that—I might take you at your word."

"Consider that settled. You set up shop, and I will take a fraternal interest in the number of animals you kill, and always tell you with conscientious care when the beef you supply to me is tough. And in the meantime, tell me, like a good fellow, why you stick to this thing. When you flung from me last time you gave me no explanation of what you thought."

"At least," cried Alec, wrath rising at the memory of that quarrel, "I gave you a fair hearing, and knew what you thought."

When anger began he looked his brother full in the face, thus noticing how thin that face was, too thin for a man in the prime of life, and the eye was too bright. As the brief feeling of annoyance subsided, the habitual charm of the elder man's smile made him continue to look at him.

"And yet," continued Robert, "two wrongs do not make a right. That I am a snob does not excuse you for taking up any line of life short of the noblest within your reach."

The other again warned himself against hidden danger. "You're such a confoundedly fascinating fellow, with your smiles and your suppressed religion, I don't wonder the girls run after you. But you are a Jesuit—I never called you a snob—you're giving yourself names to fetch me round to see things your way."

It was an outburst, half of admiring affection, half of angry obstinacy, and the elder brother received it without resentment, albeit a little absently. He was thinking that if Alec held out, "the girls" would not run after him much more. But then he thought that there was one among them who would not think less, who perhaps might think more of him, for this sacrifice. He had not made it for her; it might never be his lot to make any sacrifice for her; yet she perhaps would understand this one and applaud it. The thought brought a sudden light to his face, and Alec watched the light and had no clue by which to understand it. He began, however, defending himself.

"Look here! You suggest I should take the noblest course, as if I had never thought of that before. I'm not lower in the scale of creation than you, and I've had the same bringing up. I've never done anything great, but I've tried not to do the other thing. I felt I should be a sneak when I left school if I disappointed father for the sake of being something fine, and I feel I should be a sneak now if I turned—"

"You acted like the dear fellow I always knew you were in the first instance, but why is it the same now? It's not for his sake, surely, for, for all you know, from where he is now, the sight of you going on with that work may not give him pleasure, but pain."

"No; I went into it to please him, but now he's gone that's ended."

"Then it's not the same now. Why do you say you'd feel like a sneak if you changed? There is, I think, no goddess or patron saint of the trade, who would be personally offended at your desertion."

"You don't understand at all. I'm sick—just sick, of seeing men trying to find something grand enough to do, instead of trying to do the first thing they can grandly."

"I haven't noticed that men are so set on rising."

"No, not always; but when they're not ambitious enough to get something fine to do, they're not ambitious enough to do what they do well, unless it's for the sake of money. Look at the fellows that went to school with us, half of them shopkeepers' sons. How many of them went in with their fathers? Just those who were mean enough to care for nothing but money-making, and those who were too dull to do anything else."

"The education they got was good enough to give them a taste for higher callings."

"Yes"—with a sneer—"and how the masters gloried over such brilliant examples as yourself, who felt themselves 'called higher,' so to speak! You had left school by the time I came to it, but I had your shining tracks pointed out to me all along the way, and old Thompson told me that Wolsey's father was 'in the same line as my papa,' and he instructed me about Kirke White's career; and I, greedy little pig that I was, sucked it all in till I sickened. I've never been able to feed on any of that food since."

In a moment the other continued, "Well, in spite of the fact that our own father was too true and simple ever to be anything but a gentleman, it remains true that the choice of this trade and others on a level with it—"

"Such as hunting and shooting, or the cooking of meats that ladies are encouraged to devote themselves to."

"I was saying—the choice of this trade, or of others on a level with it, be they whatever they are, implies something coarse in the grain of the average man who chooses it, and has a coarsening effect upon him."

"If the old novels are any true picture of life, there was a time when every cleric was a place-hunter. Would you have advised good men to keep out of the church at that time? I'm told there's hardly an honourable man in United States politics: is that less reason, or more, for honest fellows to go into public life there?" (Impatience was waxing again. The words fell after one another in hot haste.) "There's a time coming when every man will be taught to like to keep his hands clean and read the poets; and will you preach to them all then that they mustn't be coarse enough to do necessary work, or do you imagine it will be well done if they all do an hour a day at it in amateur fashion? You're thoroughly inconsistent," he cried.

"Do you imagine I'm trying to argue with you, boy?" cried the other, bitterly. "I could say a thousand things to the point, but I've no desire to say them. I simply wish to state the thing fairly, to see how far you have worked through it."

"I've thought it out rather more thoroughly than you, it seems to me, for at least I'm consistent."

They were both offended; the elder biting his lip over sarcastic words, the younger flushed with hasty indignation. Then, in a minute, the one put away his anger, and the other, forgetting the greater part of his, talked on.

"I'll tell you the sort of thing that's made me feel I should be a sneak to give it up. Just after I left school I went back to visit old Thompson, and he and his wife took me to a ball at the Assembly Rooms. It was quite a swell affair, and there weren't enough men. So old Thompson edged us up to a grand dame with a row of daughters, and I heard him in plethoric whisper informing her, as in duty bound, just who I was, 'but,' added he, as a compensating fact, 'there isn't a finer or more gentlemanly fellow in the room.' So the old hen turned round and took me in with one eye, all my features and proportions; but it wasn't till Thompson told her that father was about to retire, and that I, of course, was looking to enter a higher walk, that she gave permission to trot me up. Do you think I went? They were pretty girls she had, and the music—I'd have given something to dance that night; but if I was the sort of man she'd let dance with her girls, she needn't have taken anything else into account; and if I was decent enough for them, it was because of something else in me other than what I did or didn't do. I swore then, by all that's sweet—by music and pretty girls and everything else—that I'd carve carcases for the rest of my days, and if the ladies didn't want me they might do without me. You know how it was with father; all the professional men in the place were only too glad to have a chat with him in the reading-rooms and the hotel. They knew his worth, but they wouldn't have had him inside their own doors. Well, the worse for their wives and daughters, say I. They did without him; they can do without me. The man that will only have me on condition his trade is not mine can do without me too, and if it's the same in a new country, then the new country be damned!"

The hot-headed speaker, striding about the room, stopped with the word that ended this tirade, and gave it out roundly.

"The thing is," said Robert, "can you do without them—all these men and women who won't have you on your own terms? They constitute all the men and women in the world for you and me, for we don't care for the other sort. Can you do without them? I couldn't." He said the "I couldn't" first as if looking back to the time when he had broken loose from the family tradition; he repeated it more steadfastly, and it seemed to press pathetically into present and future—"I couldn't." The book that he had been idly swinging above his pillow was an old missal, and he lowered it now to shield his face somewhat from his brother's downward gaze.

"No, you couldn't," repeated Alec soberly. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down half pityingly, perhaps with a touch of superiority. "You couldn't; but I can, and I'll stand by my colours. I should be a coward if I didn't."

Robert coloured under his look, under his words, so he turned away and stood by the window. After a minute Robert spoke.

"You haven't given me the slightest reason for your repeated assertion that you would be a coward."

"Yes, I have. That's just what I've been saying."

"You have only explained that you think so the more strongly for all opposition, and that may not be rational. Other men can do this work and be thankful to get it; you can do higher work." His words were constrainedly patient, but they only raised clamour.

"I don't know what you profess and call yourself! What should I change for? To pamper your pride and mine—is that a worthy end? To find something easier and more agreeable—is that manly, when this has been put into my hand? How do I know I could do anything better? I know I can do this well. As for these fine folks you've been talking of, I'll see they get good food, wherever I am; and that's not as easy as you think, nor as often done; and there's not one of them that would do all their grand employments if they weren't catered for; and as for the other men that would do it" (he was incoherent in his heat), "they do it pretty badly, some of them, just because they're coarse in the grain; and you tell me it'll make them coarser; well then, I, who can do it without getting coarse, will do it, till men and women stop eating butcher's meat. You'd think it more pious if I put my religion into being a missionary to the Chinese, or into writing tracts? Well, I don't."

He was enthusiastic; he was perhaps very foolish; but the brother who was older had learned at least this, that it does not follow that a man is in the wrong because he can give no wiser reason for his course than "I take this way because I will take it."

"Disarm yourself, old fellow," he said. "I am not going to try to dissuade you. I tried that last year, and I didn't succeed; and if I had promise of success now, I wouldn't try. Life's a fearful thing, just because, when we shut our eyes to what is right in the morning, at noon it's not given us to see the difference between black and white, unless our eyes get washed with the right sort of tears."

Alec leaned his head out of the window; he felt that his brother was making a muff of himself, and did not like it.

"If you see this thing clearly," Robert continued, "I say, go ahead and do it; but I want you just to see the whole of it. According to you, I am on the wrong track; but I have got far along it, and now I have other people to consider. It seems a pity, when there are only two of us in the world, that we should have to put half the world between us. We used to have the name, at least of being attached." He stopped to find the thread, it was a disconnected speech for him to formulate. He had put his arm under his head now, and was looking round at his brother. "I have never misrepresented anything. For the matter of that, the man who had most to do with putting me in my berth here, knew all that there was to be known about my father. He didn't publish the matter, for the sake of the school; and when I had taken the school, I couldn't publish it either. All the world was free to inquire, but as far as I know, no one has done so; and I have let the sleeping dog lie."

"I never said you ought to have been more talkative. It's not my business."

"The position you take makes it appear that I am in a false position. Give me time to get about again. I ought at least to be more frank with my personal friends. Wait till I have opportunity to speak myself—that is all I ask of you. After that do what you will; but I think it only right to tell you that if you set up shop here, or near here, I should resign my place in this college."