Had Gwen really been able to see to the bottom of her cousin's, the Hon. Percival's mind, she might not have felt quite so certain about his predispositions towards her adopted aunt. The description of these two as wanting to rush into each other's arms was exaggerated. It would have been fairer to say that Aunt Constance was fully prepared to consider an offer, and that Mr. Pellew was beginning to see his way to making one.

The most promising feature in the lady's state of mind was that she was formulating consolations, dormant now, but actively available if by chance the gentleman did not see his way. She was saying to herself that if another flower attracted this bee, she herself would thereby only lose an admirer with a disposition—only a slight one perhaps, but still undeniable—to become corpulent in the course of the next few years. She could subordinate her dislike of smoking so long as she could suppose him ever so little in earnest; but, if he did waver by any chance, what a satisfaction it would be to dwell on her escape from—here a mixed metaphor came in—the arms of a tobacco shop! She could shut her eyes, if she was satisfied of the sincerity of a redeeming attachment to herself, to all the contingencies of the previous life of a middle-aged bachelor about town; but they would no doubt supply a set-off to his disaffection, if that was written on the next page of her book of Fate. In short, she would be prepared in that case to accept the conviction that she was well rid of him. But all this was subcutaneous. Given only the one great essential, that he was not merely philandering, and then neither his escapades in the past, nor his cigars, nor even his suggestions towards a corporation, would stand in the way of a whole-hearted acceptance of a companion for life who had somehow managed to be such a pleasant companion during that visit at the Towers. At least, she would be better off than her four sisters. For this lady had a wholesome aversion for her brothers-in-law, tending to support the creed which teaches that the sacrament of marriage makes of its votaries, or victims, not only parties to a contract, but one flesh, and opens up undreamed-of possibilities of real fraternal dissension.

The gentleman, on the other hand, was in what we may suppose to be a corresponding stage of uncertainty. He too was able to perceive, or affect a perception, that, after all, if he came to the scratch and the scratch eventuated—as scratches do sometimes—in a paralysis of astonishment on the lady's part that such an idea should ever have entered into the applicant's calculations, it wouldn't be a thing to break his heart about exactly. He would have made rather an ass of himself, certainly. But he was quite prepared not to be any the worse.

This was, however, not subcutaneous, with him. He said it to himself, quite openly. His concealment of himself from himself turned on a sort of passive resistance he was offering to a growing reluctance to hear a negative to his application. He was, despite himself, entertaining the question:—Was this woman whom he had been assessing and wavering over, more masculino, conceivably likely to reject him on his merits? Might she not say to him:—"I have seen your drift, and found you too pleasant an acquaintance to condemn offhand. But now that you force me to ask myself the question, 'Can I love you?' you leave me no choice but to answer, 'I can't.'" And he was beginning to have a misgiving that he would very much rather that that scratch, if ever he came to it, should end on very different lines from this. All this, mind you, was under the skin of his reflections.

As he walked away slowly in the moonlight, with the appointment fresh in his mind to return next day on a shallow archaeological pretext, he may have been himself at a loss for his reason for completing a tour of the square, and pausing to look up at the house before making a definite start for his Club, or his rooms in Brook Street. Was any reason necessary, beyond the fineness of the night? He had an indisputable right to walk round Cavendish Square without a reason, and he exercised it. He rather resented the policeman on his beat saying goodnight to him, as though he were abnormal, and walked away in the opposite direction from that officer, who was searchlighting areas for want of something to do, with an implication of profound purpose. He decided on loneliness and a walk exactly the length of a cigar, throwing its last effort to burn his fingers away on his doorstep. He carried the animation of his thoughts on his face upstairs to bed with him, for it lasted through a meditation at an open window, through a chorus of cats about their private affairs, and the usual controversy about the hour among all the town-clocks, which becomes embittered when there is only one hour to talk about, and compromise is impossible. Mr. Pellew heard the last opinion and retired for the night at nine minutes past. But he first made sure that that Quarterly Review was in evidence, and glanced at the Egyptian article to confirm his impression of the contents. They were still there. He believed all his actions were sane and well balanced, but this was credulity. One stretches a point sometimes, to believe oneself reasonable.

It was a model September afternoon—and what can one say more of weather?—when at half-past three precisely Mr. Pellew's hansom overshot the door of 102, Cavendish Square, and firmly but amiably insisted on turning round to deposit its fare according to the exact terms of its contract. Its proprietor said what he could in extenuation of its maladroitness. They shouldn't build these here houses at the corners of streets; it was misguiding to the most penetrating intellect. He addressed his fare as Captain, asking him to make it another sixpence. He had been put to a lot of expense last month, along of the strike, and looked to the public to make it up to him. For the cabbies had struck, some weeks since, against sixpence a mile instead of eightpence. Mr. Pellew's heart was touched, and he conceded the other sixpence.

There at the door was Miss Grahame's open landaulet, and there were she and Gwen in it, just starting to see the former's little boy. That was how Dave was spoken of, at the risk of creating a scandal. They immediately lent themselves to a gratuitous farce, having for its object the liberation of Mr. Pellew and Miss Dickenson from external influence.

"Constance was back, wasn't she?" Thus Miss Grahame; and Gwen had the effrontery to say she was almost certain, but couldn't be quite sure. If she wasn't there, she would have to go without that pulverised Pharaoh, as Sir Somebody Something's just yearnings for his Quarterly were not to be made light of. "Don't you let Maggie take the book up to her, Percy. You go up in the sitting-room—you know, where we were playing last night?—and if she doesn't turn up in five minutes don't you wait for her!" Then the two ladies talked telegraphically, to the exclusion of Mr. Pellew, to the effect that Aunt Constance had only gone to buy a pair of gloves in Oxford Street, and was pledged to an early return. The curtain fell on the farce, and a very brief interview with Mary at the door ended in Mr. Pellew being shown upstairs, without reservation. So he and Aunt Constance had the house to themselves.

To do them justice, the attention shown to the covering fiction of the book-loan was of the very smallest. It could not be ignored altogether; so Miss Dickenson looked at the article. She did not read a word of it, but she looked at it. She went further, and said it was interesting. Then it was allowed to lie on the table. When the last possible book has been printed—for even Literature must come to an end some time, if Time itself does not collapse—that will be the last privilege accorded to it. It will lie on the table, while all but a few of its predecessors will stand on a bookshelf.

"It's quite warm out of doors," said Mr. Pellew.

"Warmer than yesterday, I think," said Miss Dickenson. And then talk went on, stiffly, each of its contribuents execrating its stiffness, but seeing no way to relaxation.

"Sort of weather that generally ends in a thunderstorm."

"Does it? Well—perhaps it does."

"Don't you think it does?"

"I thought it felt very like thunder an hour ago."

"Rather more than an hour ago, wasn't it?"

"Just after lunch—about two o'clock."

"Dessay you're right. I should have said a quarter to." Now, if this sort of thing had continued, it must have ended in a joint laugh, and recognition of its absurdity. Aunt Constance may have foreseen this, inwardly, and not been prepared to go so fast. For she accommodated the conversation with a foothold, partly ethical, partly scientific.

"Some people feel the effect of thunder much more than others. No doubt it is due to the electrical condition of the atmosphere. Before this was understood, it was ascribed to all sorts of causes."

"I expect it's nerves. Haven't any myself! Rather like tropical storms than otherwise."

Here was an opportunity to thaw the surface ice. The lady could have done it in an instant, by talking to the gentleman about himself. That is the "Open Sesame!" of human intercourse. She preferred to say that in their village—her clan's, that is—in Dorsetshire, there was a sept named Chobey that always went into an underground cellar and stopped its ears, whenever there was a thunderstorm.

Mr. Pellew said weakly:—"It runs in families." He had to accept this one as authentic, but he would have questioned its existence if anonymous. He could not say:—"How do you know?" to an informant who could vouch for Chobey. Smith or Brown would have left him much freer. The foothold of the conversation was giving way, and a resolute effort was called for to give it stability. Mr. Pellew thought he saw his way. He said:—"How jolly it must be down at the Towers—day like this!"

"Perfectly delicious!" was the answer. Then, in consideration of the remoteness of mere landscape from personalities, it was safe to particularise. "I really think that walk in the shrubbery, where the gentian grew in such quantity, is one of the sweetest places of the kind I ever was in."

"I know I enjoyed my ..." Mr. Pellew had started to say that he enjoyed himself there. He got alarmed at his own temerity and backed out ... "my cigars there," said he. A transparent fraud, for the possessive pronoun does not always sound alike. "My," is one thing before "self," another before "cigars." Try it on both, and see. Mr. Pellew felt he was detected. He could slur over his blunder by going straight on; any topic would do. He decided on:—"By-the-by, did you see any more of the dog?"

"Achilles? He went away, you know, with Mr. Torrens and his sister, a few days after."

"I meant that. Didn't you say something about seeing him with the assassin—the old gamekeeper—what was his name?"

"Old Stephen Solmes? Yes. I saw them walking together, apparently on the most friendly terms. Gwen told me afterwards. They were walking towards his cottage, and I believe Achilles saw him safe home, and came back."

"Just so. Torrens told me about the dog when old Solmes came to say good-bye to him, and do a little more penance in sackcloth and ashes. I am using Torrens's words. The old chap made a scene—went down on his knees and burst out crying—and the dog tried to console him. Torrens seemed quite clear about what was passing in the dog's mind."

"What did he say the dog meant? Can you remember?" Miss Dickenson was settling down to chat, perceptibly.

"Pretty well. Achilles had wished to say that he personally, so far from finding fault with Mr. Solmes for trying to shoot him, fully recognised that he drew trigger under a contract to do so, given circumstances which had actually come about. He would not endeavour to extenuate his own conduct, but submitted that he was entitled to a lenient judgment, on the ground that a hare, the pursuit of which was the indirect cause of the whole mishap, had jumped up from behind a stone.... Well—I suppose I oughtn't to repeat all a profane poet thinks fit to say...."

"Please do! Never mind the profanity!" It really was a stimulus to the lady's curiosity.

Mr. Pellew repeated the apology which the collie's master had ascribed to him. Achilles had only acted in obedience to Instincts which had been Implanted in him in circumstances for which he was not responsible, and which might, for anything he knew, have been conceived in a spirit of mischief by the Author of all Good. This levity was stopped by a shocked expression on the lady's face. "Well," said the gentleman, "you mustn't blow me up, Miss Dickenson. I am only repeating, as desired, the words of a profane poet. He had apologized, he told me, for what he said, when his sister boxed his ears."

"Serve him right. But what was his apology?"

"That he owed it to Achilles, who was unable to speak for himself, to lay stress on what he conceived to be the dog's Manichaean views, which he had been most unwillingly forced to infer from his practice of suddenly barking indignantly at the Universe, in what certainly seemed an unprayerful spirit."

"It was only Mr. Torrens's nonsense. He wanted to blaspheme a little, and jumped at the opportunity. They are all alike, Poets. Look at Byron and Shelley!"

Mr. Pellew, for his own purposes no doubt, managed here to insinuate that he himself was not without a reverent side to his character. These fillahs were no doubt the victims of their own genius, and presumably Mr. Torrens was a bird of the same feather. He himself was a stupid old-fashioned sort of fillah, and couldn't always follow this sort of thing. It was as delicate a claim as he could make to sometimes going to Church on Sunday, as was absolutely consistent with Truth.

To his great relief, Miss Dickenson did not catechize him closely about his religious views. She only remarked, reflectively and vaguely:—"One hardly knows what to think. Anyone would have said my father was a religious man, and what does he do but marry a widow, less than three years after my mother's death!"

Certainly the coherency of this speech was not on its surface. But Mr. Pellew accepted it contentedly enough. At least, it clothed him with some portion of the garb of a family friend; say shoes or gloves, not the whole suit. Whichever it was, he pulled them on, and felt they fitted. He began to speak, and stopped; was asked what he was going to say, and went on, encouraged:—"I was going to say, only I pulled up because it felt impertinent...."

"Not to me! Please tell me exactly!"

"I was going to ask, how old is your father? Is he older than me?"

"Why, of course he is! I'm thirty-six. How old are you? Tell the truth!" At this exact moment a funny thing happened. The passee elderly young lady vanished—she who had been so often weighed, found wanting, and been put back in the balance for reconsideration. She vanished, and a desirable alter ego—Mr. Pellew's, as he hoped—was looking across at him from the sofa by the window, swinging the tassel of the red blind that kept the sun in check, and hushed it down to a fiery glow on the sofa's occupant waiting to know how old he was.

"I thought I had told you. Nearly forty-six."

"Very well, then! My father is five-and-twenty years your senior."

"If you had to say exactly why you dislike your father's having married again, do you think you could?"

"Oh dear, no! I'm quite sure I couldn't. But I think it detestable for all that."

"I'm not sure that you're right. You may be, though! Are you sure it hasn't something to do with the ... with the party he's married?"

"Not at all sure." Dryly.

"Can't understand objecting to a match on its own account. It's always something to do with the outsider that comes in—the one one knows least of."

"You wouldn't like this one." It may seem inexplicable, that these words should be the cause of the person addressed taking the nearest chair to the speaker, having previously been a nomad with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. Close analysis may connect the action with an extension of the family-friendship wardrobe, which it may have recognised—a neckcloth, perhaps—and may be able to explain why it seemed doubtful form to the Hon. Percival to keep his thumbs in those waistcoat-loops. To us, it is perfectly easy to understand—without any analysis at all—why, at this juncture, Miss Dickenson said:—"I suppose you know you may smoke a cigarette, if you like?"

In those days you might have looked in tobacconist's shopwindows all day and never seen a cigarette. It was a foreign fashion at which sound smokers looked askance. Mossoos might smoke it, but good, solid John Bull suspected it of being a kick-shaw not unconnected with Atheism. He stuck to his pipe chiefly. Nevertheless, it was always open to skill to fabricate its own cigarettes, and Mr. Pellew's aptitude in the art was known to Miss Dickenson. The one he screwed up on receipt of this licence was epoch-making. The interview had been one that was going to last a quarter of an hour. This cigarette made its duration indeterminate. Because a cigarette is not a cigar. The latter is like a chapter in a book, the former like a paragraph. At the chapter's end vacant space insists on a pause for thought, for approval or condemnation of its contents. But every paragraph is as it were kindled from the last sentence of its predecessor; as soon as each ends the next is ready. The reader aloud is on all fours with the cigarette-smoker. He doesn't always enjoy himself so much, but that is neither here nor there.

It was not during the first cigarette that Mr. Pellew said to Aunt Constance:—"Where is it they have gone to-day, do you know?" That first one heard, if it listened, all about the lady's home in Dorsetshire and her obnoxious stepmother. It may have wondered, if it was an observant cigarette, at the unreserve with which the narrator took its smoker into the bosom of her confidence, and the lively interest her story provoked. If it had—which is not likely, considering the extent of its experience—a shrewd perception of the philosophy of reciprocity, probably it wondered less. It heard to the end of the topic, and Mr. Pellew asked the question above stated, as he screwed up its successor, and exacted the death-duty of an ignition from it.

"They ought to be coming back soon," was the answer. "I told them I wouldn't have tea till they came. They're gone to see a protegee of Clotilda's, who lives down a Court. It's not very far off; under a mile, I should think. We saw him in the street, coming from the railway-station. He looked a nice boy. That is to say, he would have looked nice, only he and his friends had all been blacking their faces with burnt cork."

"What a lark! Why didn't you go to the Court?... I'm jolly glad you didn't, you know, but you might have...." This was just warm enough for the position. With its slight extenuation of slang, it might rank as mere emphasized civility.

It was Miss Dickenson's turn to word something ambiguous to cover all contingencies. "Yes, I should have been very sorry if you had come to bring the book, and not found me here." This was clever, backed by a smile. She went on:—"They thought two would be quite enough, considering the size of the Court."

A spirit of accommodation prevailed. Oh yes—Mr. Pellew quite saw that. Very sensible! "It don't do," said he, "to make too much of a descent on this sort of people. They never know what to make of it, and the thing don't wash!" But he was only saying what came to hand; because he was extremely glad Miss Dickenson had not gone with the expedition. How far he perceived that his own visit underlay its arrangements, who can say? His perception fell short of being ignorant that he was aware of it. Suppose we leave it at that!

Still, regrets—scarcely Jeremiads—that she had not been included would be becoming, all things considered. They could not be misinterpreted. "I was sorry not to go," she said. "His father was a prizefighter and seems interesting, according to Clotilda. Her idea is to get Gwen enthusiastic about people of this sort, or any of her charitable schemes, rather than dragging her off to Switzerland or Italy. Besides, she won't go!"

"That's a smasher! The idea, I suppose, is to get her away and let the Torrens business die a natural death. Well—it won't!"

"You think not?"

"No thinking about it! Sure of it! I've known my cousin Gwen from a child—so have you, for that matter!—and I know it's useless. If she will, she will, you may depend on't; and if she won't she won't, and there's an end on't. You'll see, she'll consent to go fiddling about for three months or six months to Wiesbaden or Ems or anywhere, but she'll end by fixing the day and ordering her trousseau, quite as a matter of course! As for his changing—pooh!" Mr. Pellew laughed aloud. Miss Dickenson looked a very hesitating concurrence, which he felt would bear refreshing. He continued:—"Why, just look at the case! A man loses his eyesight and is half killed five minutes after seeing—for the first time, mind you, for the first time!—my cousin Gwen Rivers, under specially favourable circumstances. When he comes to himself he finds out in double quick time that she loves him? He change? Not he!"

"Do tell me, Mr. Pellew.... I'm only asking, you know; not expressing any opinion myself.... Do tell me, don't you think it possible that it might be better for both of them—for Gwen certainly, if it ... if it never...."

"If it never came off? If you ask me, all I can say is, that I haven't an opinion. It is so absolutely their affair and nobody else's. That's my excuse for not having an opinion, and you see I jump at it."

"Of course it is entirely their affair, and one knows. But one can't help thinking. Just fancy Gwen the wife of a blind country Squire. It is heartbreaking to think of—now isn't it?"

But Mr. Pellew was not to be moved from his position. "It's their own look out," said he. "Nobody else's!" He suddenly perceived that this might be taken as censorious. "Not finding fault, you know! You're all right. Naturally, you think of Gwen."

"Whom ought I to think of? Oh, I see what you mean. It's true I don't know Mr. Torrens—have hardly seen him!"

"I saw him a fairish number of times—one time with another. He's a sort of fillah ... a sort of fillah you can't exactly describe. Very unusual sort of fillah!" Mr. Pellew held his cigarette a little way off to look at it thoughtfully, as though it were the usual sort of fellow, and he was considering how he could distinguish Mr. Torrens from it.

"You mean he's unusually clever?"

"Yes, he's that. But that's not exactly what I meant, either. He's clever, of course. Only he doesn't give you a chance of knowing it, because he turns everything to nonsense. What I wanted to say was, that whatever he says, one fancies one would have said it oneself, if one had had the time to think it out."

Miss Dickenson didn't really identify this as a practicable shade of character, but she pretended she did. In fact she said:—"Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I've known people like that," merely to lubricate the conversation. Then she asked: "Did you ever talk to the Earl about him?"

"Tim? Yes, a little. He doesn't disguise his liking for him, personally. He's rather ... rather besotted about him, I should say."

"She isn't." How Mr. Pellew knew who was meant is not clear, but he did.

"Her mother, you mean," said he. "Do you know, I doubt if Philippa dislikes him? I shouldn't put it that way. But I think she would be glad for the thing to die a natural death for all that. Eyes apart, you know." When people begin to make so very few words serve their purpose it shows that their circumferences have intersected—no mere tangents now. A portion of the area of each is common to both. Forgive geometry this intrusion on the story, and accept the metaphor.

"Yes, that's what it is," said Aunt Constance. And then in answer to a glance that, so to speak, asked for a confirmation of a telegram:—"Oh yes, I know we both mean the same thing. You were thinking of that old story—the old love-affair. I quite understand." She might have added "this time," because the last time she knew what Mr. Pellew meant she was stretching a point, and he was subconscious of it.

"That's the idea," said he. "I fancy Philippa's feelings must be rather difficult to define. So must his papa's, I should think."

"I can't fancy anything more embarrassing."

"Of course Tim has a mighty easy time of it, by comparison."

"Does he necessarily know anything about it?"

"He must have heard of it. It wasn't a secret, though it wasn't announced in the papers. These things get talked about. Besides, she would tell him."

"Tell him? Of course she would! She would tell him that that young Torrens was a 'great admirer' of hers."

"Yes—I suppose she would make use of some expression of that sort. Capital things, expressions!"

Aunt Constance seemed to think this phrase called for some sort of elucidation. "I always feel grateful," said she, "to that Frenchman—Voltaire or Talleyrand or Rochefoucauld or somebody—who said language was invented to conceal our thoughts. That was what you meant, wasn't it?"

"Precisely. I suppose Sir Torrens—this chap's papa—told the lady he married ..."

"She was a Miss Abercrombie, I believe."

"Yes—I believe she was.... Told her he was a great admirer of her ladyship once on a time—a boyish freak—that sort of thing! Pretends all the gilt is off the gingerbread now. Wish I had been there when Sir Hamilton turned up at the Towers, after the accident."

"I was there."

"Well! And then?"

"Nothing and then. They were—just like anybody else. When I saw them was after his son had begun to pull round. Till then I fancy neither he nor the sister ..."

"Irene. ''Rene,' he calls her. Jolly sort of girl, and very handsome."

"Neither Irene nor her father came downstairs much. It was after you went away."

"And what did they say?—him and Philippa, I mean."

"Oh—say? What did they say? Really I can't remember. Said what a long time it was since they met. Because I don't believe they had met—not to shake hands—for five-and-twenty years!"

"What a rum sort of experience! Do you know?... only of course one can't say for certain about anything of this sort ..."

"Do I know? Go on."

"I was going to say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon. Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of the contract, if any existed.

Aunt Constance was not in the mood to pooh-pooh the tendresses of a youthful passion. She was, if you will have it so, sentimental. "Let me think if I should," said she, with a momentary action of closing her eyes, to keep inward thought free of the outer world. In a moment they were open again, and she was saying:—"No, I should not have done anything of the sort. One laughs at young people, I know, when they are so very inflammatory. But what do we think of them when they are not?" She became quite warm and excited about it, or perhaps—so thought Mr. Pellew as he threw his last cigarette-end away through that open window—the blaze of a sun that was forecasting its afterglow made her seem so. Mr. Pellew having thrown away that cigarette-end conscientiously, and made a pretence of seeing it safe into the front area, was hardly bound to go back to his chair. He dropped on the sofa, beside Miss Dickenson, with one hand over the back. He loomed over her, but she did not shy or flinch.

"What indeed!" said he seriously, answering her last words. "A young man that does not fall in love seldom comes to any good." He was really thinking to himself:—"Oh, the mistakes I should have been saved in life, if only this had happened to me in my twenties!" He was not making close calculation of what the lady's age would have been in those days.

She was dwelling on the abstract question:—"You know, say what one may, the whole of their lives is at stake. And we never think them young geese when the thing comes off, and they become couples."

"No. True enough. It's only when it goes off and they don't."

"And what is so creepy about it is that we never know whether the couple is the right couple."

"Never know anything at all about anything beforehand!" Mr. Pellew was really talking at random. Even the value of this trite remark was spoiled. For he added:—"Nor afterwards, for that matter!"

Miss Dickenson admitted that we could not lay too much stress on our own limitations. But she was not in the humour for platitudes. Her mind was running on a problem that might have worried Juliet Capulet had she never wedded her Romeo and taken a dose of hellebore, but lived on to find that County Paris had in him the makings of a lovable mate. Quite possible, you know! It was striking her that if a trothplight were nothing but a sort of civil contract—civil in the sense of courteous, polite, urbane, accommodating—an exchange of letters through a callous Post Office—a woman might be engaged a dozen times and meet the males implicated in after-life, without turning a hair. But even a hand-clasp, left to enjoy itself by its parents—not nipped in the bud—might poison their palms and recrudesce a little in Society, long years after! While, as for lips....

Something crossed her reflections, just on the crux of them—their most critical point of all. "There!" said she. "Did you hear that? I knew we should have thunder."

But Mr. Pellew had heard nothing and was incredulous. He verified his incredulity, going to the window to look out. "Blue sky all round!" said he. "Must have been a cart!" He went back to his seat, and the explanation passed muster.

Miss Dickenson picked up her problem, with that last perplexity hanging to it. No, it was no use!—- that equable deportment of Sir Hamilton and Philippa remained a mystery to her. She, however—mere single Miss Dickenson—could not of course guess how these two would see themselves, looking back, with all the years between of a growing Gwen and Adrian; to her, it was just the lapse of so much time, nothing more—a year or so over the time she had known Philippa. For Romeo and Juliet were metaphors out of date when she came on the scene, and Philippa was a Countess.

She was irritated by the inability she felt to comment freely on these views of the position. It would have been easier—she saw this—to do so had Mr. Pellew gone back to his chair, instead of sitting down again beside her on the sofa. It was her own fault perhaps, because she could not have sworn this time that she had not seemed to make room. That unhappy sex—the female one—lives under orders to bristle with incessant safeguards against misinterpretation. Heaven only knows—or should we not rather say, Hell only knows?—what latitudes have claimed "encouragement" as their excuse! That lady in Browning's poem never should have looked at the gentleman so, had she meant he should not love her. So he said! But suppose she saw a fly on his nose—how then?

Therefore it would never have done for Miss Dickenson to go into close analysis of the problems suggested by the meeting of two undoubted fiances of years long past, and the inexplicable self-command with which they looked the present in the face. She had to be content with saying:—"Of course we know nothing of the intentions of Providence. But it's no use pretending that it would not feel very—queer." She had to clothe this word with a special emphasis, and backed it with an implied contortion due to teeth set on edge. She added:—"All I know is, I'm very glad it wasn't me." After which she was clearly not responsible if the topic continued.

Mr. Pellew took the responsibility on himself of saying with deep-seated intuition:—"I know precisely what you mean. You're perfectly right. Perfectly!"

"A hundred little things," said the lady. The dragging in of ninety-nine of these, with the transparent object of slurring over the hundredth, which each knew the other was thinking of, merely added to its vividness. Aunt Constance might just as well have let it alone, and suddenly talked of something else. For instance, of the Sun God's abnormal radiance, now eloquent of what he meant to do for the metropolis when he got a few degrees lower, and went in for setting, in earnest. Or if she shrank from that, as not prosaic enough to dilute the conversation down to mere chat-point, the Ethiopian Serenaders who had just begun to be inexplicable in the Square below. But she left the first to assert its claim to authorship of the flush of rose colour that certainly made her tell to advantage, and the last to account for the animation which helped it. For the enigmatic character of South Carolina never interferes with a certain brisk exhilaration in its bones. She repeated in a vague way:—"A hundred things!" and shut her lips on particularisation.

"I don't know exactly how many," said Mr. Pellew gravely. He sat drawing one whisker through the hand whose elbow was on the sofa-back, with his eyes very much on the flush and the animation. "I was thinking of one in particular."

"Perhaps I was. I don't know."

"I was thinking of the kissin'."

"Well—so was I, perhaps. I don't see any use in mincing matters." She had been the mincer-in-chief, however.

"Don't do the slightest good! When it gets to kissin'-point, it's all up. If I had been a lady, and broken a fillah off, I think I should have been rather grateful to him for getting out of the gangway. Should have made a point of getting out, myself."

The subject had got comfortably landed, and could be philosophically discussed. "I dare say everyone does not feel the point as strongly as I do," said Miss Dickenson. "I know my sister Georgie—Mrs. Amphlett Starfax—looks at it quite differently, and thinks me rather a ... prig. Or perhaps prig isn't exactly the word. I don't know how to put it...."

"Never mind. I know exactly what you mean."

"You see, the circumstances are so different. Georgie had been engaged six times before Octavius came on the scene. But, oh dear, how I am telling tales out of school!..."

"Never mind Georgie and Octavius. They're not your sort. You were saying how you felt about it, and that's more interesting. Interests me more!" Conceive that at this point the lady glanced at the speaker ever so slightly. Upon which he followed a slight pause with:—"Yes, why are you a prig, as she thought fit to put it?"

"Because I told her that if ever I found a young man who suited me—and vice versa—and it got to ... to what you called just now 'kissing-point,' I should not be so ready as she had been to pull him off like an old glove and throw him away. That was when I was very young, you know. It was just after she jilted Ludwig, who afterwards married my sister Lilian—Baroness Porchammer; my eldest sister...."

"Oh, she jilted Ludwig, and he married your sister Lilian, was that it?" Mr. Pellew, still stroking that right whisker thoughtfully, was preoccupied by something that diverted interest from this family history.

Aunt Constance did not seem to notice his abstraction, but talked on. "Yes—and what is so funny about Georgie with Julius is that they don't seem to mind kissing now from a new standpoint. Georgie particularly. In fact, I've seen her kiss him on both sides and call him an old stupid. However, as you say, the cases are not alike. Perhaps if Philippa's old love had married her sister—Lady Clancarrock of Garter, you know—instead of Uncle Cosmo, as they call him, they could have got used to it, by now. Only one must look at these things from one's own point of view, and by the light of one's experience." A ring on her right hand might have been one of the things, and the sun-ray through the blind-slip the light of her experience, as she sat accommodating the flash-light of the first to the gleam of the second.

If everyone knew to a nicety his or her seeming at the precise point of utterance of any speech, slight or weighty, nine-tenths of our wit or profundity would remain unspoken. Man always credits woman with knowing exactly what she looks like, and engineering speech and seeming towards the one desired end of impressing him—important Him! He acquits himself of studying the subject! Probably he and she are, as a matter of fact, six of the one and half a dozen of the other. Of this one thing the story feels certain, that had Miss Dickenson been conscious of her neighbour's incorporation into a unit of magnetism—he being its victim—of her mere outward show in the evening light with the subject-matter of her discourse, this little lecture on the ethics of kissing would never have seen the light. But let her finish it. Consider that she gives a pause to the ring-gleam, then goes on, quite in earnest.

"It's very funny that it should be so, I know—but there it is! If I had ever been engaged, or on the edge of it—I never have, really and truly!—and the infatuated youth had ... had complicated matters to that extent, I never should have been able to wipe it off. That's an expression of a small niece of mine—three-and-a-quarter.... Oh dear—but I never said you might!..."

For the gentleman's conduct had been extraordinary! unwarranted, perhaps, according to some. According to others, he may only have behaved as a many in his position would have behaved half an hour sooner. "I am," said he, "the infatuated youth. Forgive me, Aunt Constance!" For he had deliberately taken that lady in his arms and kissed her.

The foregoing is an attempt to follow through an interview the development of events which led to its climax—a persistent and tenacious attempt, more concerned with its purpose than with inquiring into the interest this or that reader may feel who may chance to light upon this narrative. No very close analysis of the sublatent impulses and motives of its actors is professed or attempted; only a fringe of guesswork at the best. But let a protest be recorded against the inevitable vernacular judgment in disfavour of the lady. "Of course—the minx! As if she didn't know what she was about the whole time. As if she wasn't leading him on!" Because that is the attitude of mind of the correct human person in such a case made and provided. That is, if an inevitable automatic action can be called an attitude of mind. Is rotation on its axis an attitude of a wheel's mind? To be sure, though, a wheel may turn either of two ways. A ratchet-wheel is needed for this metaphor.

However, the correct human person may be expressing a universal opinion. This is only the protest of the story, which thinks otherwise. But even if it were so, was not Miss Dickenson well within her rights? The story claims that, anyhow. At the same time, it records its belief that four-fifths of the denouement was due to Helios. The magic golden radiance intoxicated Mr. Pellew, and made him forget—or remember—himself. The latter, the story thinks. That ring perhaps had its finger in the pie—but this may be to inquire too curiously.

One thing looks as though Miss Dickenson had not been working out a well-laid scheme. Sudden success does not stop the heart with a jerk, or cause speechlessness, even for a moment. Both had happened to her by the time she had uttered her pro forma remonstrance. Her breath lasted it out. Then she found it easiest to remain passive. She was not certain it would not be correct form to make a show of disengaging herself from the arms that still held her. But—she didn't want to!

This may have justified Mr. Pellew's next words:—"You do forgive me, don't you?" more as assertion than inquiry.

She got back breath enough to gasp out:—"Oh yes—only don't talk! Let me think!" And then presently:—"Yes, I forgive you in any case. Only—I'll tell you directly. Let's look out of the window. I want to feel the air blow.... You startled me rather, that's all!"

Said Mr. Pellew, at the window, as he reinstated an arm dispossessed during the transit:—"I did it to ... to clinch the matter, don't you see? I thought I should make a mess of it if I went in for eloquence."

"It was as good as any way. I wasn't the least angry. Only...."

"Only what?"

"Only by letting you go on like this"—half a laugh came in here—"I don't consider that I stand committed to anything."

"I consider that I stand committed to everything." The arm may have slightly emphasized this.

"No—that's impossible. It must be the same for both."

"Dearest woman! Just as you like. But I know what I mean." Indeed, Mr. Pellew did seem remarkably clear about it. Where, by-the-by, was that passee young lady, and that middle-aged haunter of Clubs? Had they ever existed?

Bones was audible from below, as they stood looking out at the west, where some cirro-stratus clouds were waiting to see the sun down beyond the horizon, and keep his memory golden for half an hour. Bones was affecting ability to answer conundrums, asked by an unexplained person with a banjo, who treated him with distinction, calling him "Mr. Bones." Both were affecting an air of high courtesy, as of persons familiar with the Thrones and Chancelleries of Europe. The particulars of these conundrums were inaudible, from distance, but the scheme was clear. Bones offered several solutions, of a fine quality of wit, but wrong. He then produced a sharp click or snap, after his kind, and gave it up. His friend or patron then gave the true solution, whose transcendent humour was duly recognised by Europe, and moved Bones to an unearthly dance, dryly but decisively accompanied on his instrument. A sudden outburst of rhythmic banjo-thuds and song followed, about Old Joe, who kicked up behind and before, and a yellow girl, who kicked up behind Old Joe. Then the Company stopped abruptly and went home to possible soap and water. Silence was left for the lady and gentleman at No. 102 to speak to one another in undertones, and to wonder what o'clock it was.

"They ought to be back by now," says she. "I wonder they are so late. They are making quite a visitation of it."

Says he:—"Gwen is fascinated with the old prizefighter. Just like her! I don't care how long they stop; do you?"

"I don't think it matters," says she, "to a quarter of an hour. The sunset is going to be lovely." This is to depersonalise the position. A feeble attempt, under the circumstances.

It must have been past the end of that quarter of an hour, when—normal relations having been resumed, of course—Miss Dickenson interrupted a sub-vocal review of the growth of their acquaintance to say, "Come in!" The tap that was told to come in was Maggie. Was she to be making the tea? Was she to lay it? On the whole she might do both, as the delay of the absentees longer was in the nature of things impossible.

But, subject to the disposition of Mr. Pellew's elbows on the window-sill, they might go on looking out at the sunset and feel regles. Short of endearments, Maggie didn't matter.

The self-assertion of Helios was amazing. He made nothing of what one had thought would prove a cloud-veil—tore it up, brushed it aside. He made nothing, too, of the powers of eyesight of those whose gaze dwelt on him over boldly.

"It is them," said Miss Dickenson, referring to a half-recognised barouche that had turned the corner below. "But who on earth have they got with them? I can't see for my eyes."

"Only some friend they've picked up," said Mr. Pellew. But he rubbed his own eyes, to get rid of the sun. Recovered sight made him exclaim:—"But what are the people stopping for?... I say, something's up! Come along!" For, over and above a mysterious impression of the unusual that could hardly be set down to the bird's-eye view as its sole cause, it was clear that every passer-by was stopping, to look at the carriage. Moreover, there was confusion of voices—Gwen's dominant. Mr. Pellew did not wait to distinguish speech. He only repeated:—"Come along!" and was off downstairs as fast as he could go. Aunt Constance kept close behind him.

She was too bewildered to be quite sure, offhand, why Gwen looked so more than dishevelled, as she met them at the stairfoot, earnest with excitement. Not panic-struck at all—that was not her way—but at highest tension of word and look, as she made the decision of her voice heard:—"Oh, there you are, Mr. Pellew. Make yourself useful. Go out and bring her in. Never mind who! Make haste. And Maggie's to fetch the doctor." Mr. Pellew went promptly out, and Miss Dickenson was beginning:—"Why—what?..." But she had to stand inquiry over. For nothing was possible against Gwen's:—"Now, Aunt Connie dear, don't ask questions. You shall be told the whole story, all in good time! Let's get her upstairs and get the doctor." They both followed Mr. Pellew into the street, where a perceptible crowd, sprung from nowhere, was already offering services it was not qualified to give, in ignorance of the nature of the emergency that had to be met, and in defiance of a policeman.

Mr. Pellew had taken his instructions so quickly from Miss Grahame, still in the carriage, that he was already carrying the doctor's patient, whoever and whatever she was, but carefully as directed, into the house. At any rate it was not Miss Grahame herself, for that lady's voice was saying, collectedly:—"I don't think it's any use Maggie going, Gwen, because she doesn't know London. James must fetch him, in the carriage. Dr. Dalrymple, 65, Weymouth Street, James! Tell him he must come, at once! Say I said so." It was then that Aunt Constance perceived in the clear light of the street, that not only was the person Mr. Pellew was carrying into the house—whom she could only identify otherwise as having snow-white hair—covered with dust and soiled, but that Gwen and Miss Grahame were in a like plight, the latter in addition being embarrassed by a rent skirt, which she was fain to hold together as she crossed the doorstep. Once in the house she made short work of it, finishing the rip, and acquiescing in the publicity of a petticoat. It added to Aunt Constance's perplexity that the carriage and James appeared in as trim order as when they left the door three hours since. These hours had been eventful to her, and she was really feeling as if the whole thing must be a strange dream.

She got no explanation worth the name at the time of the incident. For Gwen's scattered information after the old snow-white head was safe on her own pillow—she insisted on this—and its owner had been guaranteed by Dr. Dalrymple, was really good for very little. The old lady was Cousin Clo's little boy's old Mrs. Picture, and she was the dearest old thing. There had been an accident at the house while they were there, and a man and a woman had been hurt, but no fatality. The man had not been taken to the Hospital, as his family had opposed his going on the ground of his invulnerability. The old prizefighter was uninjured, as well as those two nice children. They might have been killed. But as to the nature of the accident, it remained obscure, or perhaps the ever-present consciousness of her own experience prevented Aunt Constance getting a full grasp of its details. The communication, moreover, was crossed by that lady's exclamation:—"Oh dear, the events of this afternoon!" just at the point where the particulars of the mishap were due, to make things intelligible.

At which exclamation Gwen, suddenly alive to a restless conscious manner of Aunt Constance's, pointed at her as one she could convict without appeal, saying remorselessly:—"Mr. Pellew has proposed and you have accepted him while we were away, Aunt Connie! Don't deny it. You're engaged!"

"My dear Gwen," said Miss Dickenson, "if what you suggest were true, I should not dream for one moment of concealing it from you. But as for any engagement between us, I assure you there is no such thing. Beyond showing unequivocal signs of an attachment which...."

Gwen clapped the beautiful hands, still soiled with the dirt of Sapps Court, and shook its visible dust from her sleeve. Her laugh rang all through the House. "That's all right!" she cried. "He's shown unequivocal signs of an attachment which. Well—what more do you want? Oh, Aunt Connie, I'm so glad!"

All that followed had for Miss Dickenson the same dream-world character, but of a dream in which she retained presence of mind. It was needed to maintain the pretext of unruffled custom in her communications with her male visitor; the claim to be, before all things, normal, on the part of both, in the presence of at least one friend who certainly knew all about it, and another who may have known. Because there was no trusting Gwen. However, she got through it very well.

Regrets were expressed that Sir Somebody Something had not got his Quarterly after all; but it would do another time. Hence consolation. After Mr. Pellew had taken a farewell, which may easily have been a tender one, as nobody saw it, she heard particulars of the accident, which shall be told here also, in due course.

Some embarrassment resulted from Gwen's headstrong action in bringing the old lady away from the scene of this accident. She might have been provided for otherwise, but Gwen's beauty and positiveness, and her visible taking for granted that her every behest would be obeyed, had swept all obstacles away. As for her Cousin Clotilda, she was secretly chuckling all the while at the wayward young lady's reckless incurring of responsibilities towards Sapps Court.



CHAPTER XXX

THE LETTER GWEN WROTE TO MR. TORRENS, TO TELL OF IT. MATILDA, WHO PLAYED SCALES, BUT NOT "THE HARMONIOUS BLACKSMITH." THE OLD LADY'S JEALOUSY OF GRANNY MARROWBONE, AND DAVE'S FIDELITY TO BOTH. HOW BEHEMOTH HICCUPPED, AND DAVE WENT TO SEE WHAT WAS BROKEN. THE EARTHQUAKE AT PISA. IT WAS OWING TO THE REPAIRS. HOW PETER JACKSON APPEARED BY MAGIC. HOW MR. BARTLETT SHORED NO. 7 UP TEMPORY, AND THE TENANTS HAD TO MAKE THE BEST OF WHAT WAS LEFT OF IT. UNCLE MO's ENFORCED BACHELOR LIFE

If love-letters were not so full of their writers' mutual satisfaction with their position, what a resource amatory correspondence would be to history!

In the letters to her lover with which Gwen at this time filled every available minute, the amatory passages were kept in check by the hard condition that they had to be read aloud to their blind recipient. So much so that the account which she wrote to him of her visit to Sapps Court will be very little the shorter for their complete omission.

It begins with a suggestion of suppressed dithyrambics, the suppression to be laid to the door of Irene. But with sympathy for her, too—for how can she help it? It then gets to business. She is going to tell "the thing"—spoken of thus for the first time—in her own way, and to take her own time about it. It is not even to be read fast, but in a leisurely way; and, above all, Irene is not to look on ahead to see what is coming; or, at least, if she does she is not to tell. Quite enough for the present that he should know that she, Gwen, has escaped without a scratch, though dusty. She addresses her lover, most unfairly, as "Mr. Impatience," in a portion of the letter that seems devised expressly to excite its reader's curiosity to the utmost. The fact is that this young beauty, with all her inherent stability and strength of character, was apt to be run away with by impish proclivities, that any good, serious schoolgirl would have been ashamed of. This letter offered her a rare opportunity for indulging them. Let it tell its own tale, even though we begin on the fifth page.

"I must pause now to see what sort of a bed Lutwyche has managed to arrange for me, and ring Maggie up if it isn't comfortable. Not but what I am ready to rough it a little, rather than that the old lady should be moved. She is the dearest old thing that ever was seen, with the loveliest silver hair, and must have been surpassingly beautiful, I should say. She keeps on reminding me of someone, and I can't tell who. It may be Daphne Palliser's grandmother-in-law, or it may be old Madame Edelweissenstein, who's a chanoinesse. But the nice old lady on the farm I told you of keeps mixing herself up in it—and really all old ladies are very much alike. By-the-by, I haven't explained her yet. Don't be in such a hurry!... There now!—my bed's all right, and I needn't fidget. Clo says so. The old lady is asleep with a stayed pulse, says Dr. Dalrymple, who has just gone. And anything more beautiful than that silver hair in the moonlight I never saw. Now I really must begin at the beginning.

"Clo and I started on our pilgrimage to Sapps Court at half-past three, without the barest suspicion of anything pending, least of all what I'm going to tell. Go on. We left Mr. Percival Pellew on the doorstep, pretending he was going to leave a book for Aunt Constance, and go away. Such fun! He went upstairs and stopped two hours, and I do believe they've got to some sort of decorous trothplight. Only A. C. when accused, only says he has shown unmistakable evidence of something or other, I forget what. Why on earth need people be such fools? There they both are, and what more can they want? She admits, however, that there is 'no engagement'! When anybody says that, it means they've been kissing. You ask Irene if it doesn't. Any female, I mean. Now go on.

"A more secluded little corner of the world than Sapps Court I never saw! Clo's barouche shot us out at the head of the street it turns out of, and went to leave a letter at St. John's Wood and be back in half an hour. We had no idea of a visitation, then. Besides, Clo had to be at Down Street at half-past five. There is an arch you go in by, and we nearly stuck and could go neither way. I was sorry to find the houses looked so respectable, but Clo tells me she can take me to some much better ones near Drury Lane. Dave, the boy, and his Uncle and Aunt, and a little sister, Dolly, whom I nearly ate, live in the last house down the Court. When we arrived Dolly was watering a sunflower, almost religiously, in the front-garden eight feet deep. It would die vethy thoon, she said, if neglected. She told us a long screed, about Heaven knows what—I think it related to the sunflower, which a naughty boy had chopped froo wiv a knife, and Dave had tighted on, successfully.

"The old prizefighter is just like Dr. Johnson, and I thought he was going to hug Clo, he was so delighted to see her, and so affectionate. So was Aunt Maria, a good woman who has lost her looks, but who must have had some, twenty years ago. I got Dolly on my knee, and we did the hugging, Dolly telling me secrets deliciously, and tickling. She is four next birthday, a fact which Aunt Maria thought should have produced a sort of what the Maestro calls precisione. I preferred Dolly as she was, and we exchanged locks of hair.

"We had only been there a very short time when Uncle Moses suggested that Dave should fetch a letter he was writing, from 'Old Mrs. Prichard's Room' upstairs, and Dave—who is a dear little chap of six or seven or eight—rushed upstairs to get it. I forgot how much I told you about the family, but I know I said something in yesterday's letter. Anyhow, 'old Mrs. Prichard' was not new to me, and I was very curious to see her. So when more than five minutes had passed and no Dave reappeared, I proposed that Dolly and I should go up to look for him, and we went, Aunt Maria following in our wake, to cover contingencies. She went back, after introducing me to the very sweet old lady in a high-backed chair, who comes in as the explanation of the beginning of this illegible scrawl. How funny children are! I do believe Uncle Moses was right when he said that Dave, if anything, preferred his loves to be 'a bit elderly.' I am sure these babies see straight through wrinkles and decay and toothless gums to the burning soul the old shell imprisons, and love it. Do you recollect that picture in the Louvre we both had seen, and thought the same about?—the old man with the sweet face and the appalling excrescence on the nose, and the little boy's unflinching love as he looks up at him. Oh, that nose!!! However, there is nothing of that in old Mrs. Picture, as Dave called her, according to her own spelling. Her face is simply perfect.... There!—I went in to look at it again by the moonlight, and I was quite right. And as for her wonderful old white hair!... I could write for ever about her.

"I think our incursion must have frightened the old soul, because she had lived up there by herself, except for her woman-friend who is out all day, and Aunt Maria and the children now and then, since she came to the house; so that a perfect stranger rushing in lawlessly—well, can't you fancy? However, she really stood it very well, considering.

"'I have heard of you, ma'am, from Dave. He's told me all about your rings. Where is the boy?... Haven't you, Dave—told me all about the lady's rings?'

"Dave came from some absorbing interest at the window, to say:—'It wasn't her,' with a sweet, impressive candour. He went back immediately. Something was going on outside. I explained, as I was sharp enough to guess, that my mother was the lady with the rings. I got into conversation with the old lady, and we soon became friends. She was very curious about 'old Mrs. Marrable' in the country. Indeed, I believe Uncle Mo was not far wrong when he said she was as jealous as any schoolgirl. It is most amusing, the idea of these two octogenarians falling out over this small bone of contention!

"While we talked, Dave and Dolly looked out of the window, Dave constantly supplying bulletins of the something that was going on without. I could not make it out at first, and his interjections of 'Now she's took it off'—'Now she's put it on again'—made me think he was inspecting some lady who was 'trying on' in the opposite house. It appeared, however, that the thing that was taken off and put on was not a dress, but some sort of plaister or liniment applied to the face of a boy, the miscreant who had made a raid on Dave's garden that morning, and spoiled his sunflower (see ante). It was because Dave had become so engrossed in this that he had not come downstairs again with his letter.

"The old lady, I am happy to say, was most amiable, and took to me immensely. I couldn't undertake to say now exactly how we got on such good terms so quickly. We agreed about the wickedness of that boy, especially when Dave reported ingratitude on his part towards the sister, who was tending him, whom he smacked and whose hair he pulled. To think of his smacking that dear girl that played the piano so nicely all day! And pulling her back-tails so she called out when she was actually succouring his lacerated face. I gathered that her name may have been Matilda, and that she wore plaits.

"'I think her such a nice, dear girl,' said old Mrs. Picture—I like that name for her—'because she plays the piano all day long, and I sit here and listen, and think of old times.' I asked a question. 'Why, no, my dear!—I can't say she knows any tunes. But she plays her scales all day, very nicely, and makes me think of when my sister and I played scales—oh, so many years ago! But we played tunes too. I sometimes think I could teach her "The Harmonious Blacksmith," if only we was a bit nearer.' I could see in her old face that she was back in the Past, listening to a memory. How I wished I had a piano to play 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' for her again!

"I got her somehow to talk of herself and her antecedents, but rather stingily. She married young and went abroad, but she seemed not to want to talk about this. I could not press her. She had come back home—from wherever she was—many years after her husband's death, with an only son, the survivor of a family of four children. He was a man, not a boy; at least, he married a year or so after. She 'could not say that he was dead.' Otherwise, she knew of no living relative. Her means of livelihood was an annuity 'bought by my poor son before....'—before something she either forgot to tell, or fought shy of—the last, I think. 'I'm very happy up here,' she said. 'Only I might not be, if I was one of those that wanted gaiety. Mrs. Burr she lives with me, and it costs her no rent, and she sees to me. And my children—I call 'em mine—come for company, 'most every day. Don't you, Dave?'

"Dave tore himself away from the pleasing spectacle of his enemy in hospital, and came to confirm this. 'Yorce!' said he, with emphasis. 'Me and Dolly!' He recited rapidly all the days of the week, an appointment being imputed to each. But he weakened the force of his rhetoric by adding:—'Only not some of 'em always!' Mrs. Picture then said:—'But you love your old granny in the country better than you do me, don't you, Davy dear?' Whereupon Dave shouted with all his voice:—'I doesn't!' and flushed quite red, indignantly.

"The old lady then said, most unfairly:—'Then which do you love best, dear child? Because you must love one best, you know!' I thought Dave's answer ingenious:—'I loves whichever it is, best.' If only all young men were as candid about their loves, wouldn't they say the same?

"Dolly had picked up the recitation of the days of the week for her own private use, and was repeating it ad libitum in a melodious undertone, always becoming louder on Flyday, Tackyday, Tunday. She was hanging over the window-sill watching the surgical case opposite. How glad I am now when I recollect my impulse to catch the little maid and keep her on my knee! Dolly's good Angel prompted this, and had a hand in my inspiration to tell the story of Cinderella, with occasional refrains of song which I do believe old Mrs. Picture enjoyed as much as the two smalls. I shudder as I think what it would have been if they had still been at the window when it came—the thing I have been so long postponing.

"It came without any warning that it would have been possible to act upon. We might certainly have shouted to those below to stand clear, if we had ourselves understood. But how could we? You can have no idea how bewildering it was.

"When something you can't explain portends Heavens-know-what, what on earth can you do? Pretend it's ghosts, and very curious and interesting? I think I might have done so this time, when an alarming noise set all our nerves on the jar. It was not a noise capable of description—something like Behemoth hiccuping goes nearest. Only I didn't want to frighten the babies, so I said nothing about the ghosts. Dolly said it wasn't her—an obvious truth. Old Mrs. Picture said it must have been her chair—an obvious fallacy. She then deserted her theory and suggested that Dave should 'go down and see if anything was broken,' which Dave immediately started to do, much excited.

"I felt very uncomfortable and creepy, for it recalled the shock of earthquake Papa and I were in at Pisa two years ago—it is a feeling one never gets over, that terremotitis, as Papa called it. I believe I was more alarmed than Dolly, and as for Dave, I am sure that so far he thought the whole thing the best fun imaginable. Picture to yourself, as he slams the door behind him and shouts his message to the world below, that I remain seated facing the light, while Dolly on my knee listens to a postscript of Cinderella. My eyes are fixed on the beauty of the old side-face I see against the light. Get this image clear, and then I will tell you what followed.

"Even as I sat looking at the old lady, that noise came again, and plaster came tumbling down from the ceiling, obscuring the window behind. As I fixed my eyes upon it, falling, I saw beyond it what really made me think at first that I was taking leave of my senses. The houses opposite seemed to shoot straight up into the air, as though they were reflections in a mirror which had fallen forward. An instant after, I saw what had happened. It was the window that was moving, not the houses.

"It was so odd! I had time to see all this and change my mind, before the great crash came to explain what had happened. For until the roar of a cataract of disintegrated brickwork, followed by a cloud of choking dust, showed that the wall of the room had fallen outwards, leaving the world clear cut and visible under a glorious afternoon sky until that dust-cloud came and veiled it, I could not have said what the thing was, or why. There seemed to be time—good solid time!—between the sudden day-blaze and the crash below, and I took advantage of it to wonder what on earth was happening.

"Then I knew it all in an instant, and saw in another instant that the ceiling was sagging down; for aught I knew, under the weight of a falling roof.

"Old Mrs. Picture was not frightened at all. 'You get this little Dolly safe, my dear,' said she to me. 'I can get myself as far as the landing. But don't you fret about me. I'm near my time.' She seemed quite alive to the fact that the house was falling, but at eighty, what did that matter? She added quite quietly:—'It's owing to the repairs.' Dolly suddenly began to weep, panic-struck.

"I saw that Mrs. Picture could not rise from her chair, though she tried. But what could I do? Any attempt of mine to pick her up and carry her would only have led to delay. I saw it would be quicker to get help, and ran for it, overtaking Dave on the stairs.

"Below was chaos. The kitchen where I had left my cousin talking with Uncle Mo and Aunt Maria was all but darkened, and the place was a cloud of dust. I could see that Uncle Mo was wrenching open the street-door, which seemed to have stuck, and then that it opened, letting in an avalanche of rubbish, and some light. Cries came from outside, and Aunt Maria called out that it was Mrs. Burr. Thereon Uncle Mo, crying 'Stand clear, all!' began flinging the rubbish back into the room with marvellous alacrity for a man of his years, and no consideration at all for glass or crockery. I felt sick, you may fancy, when it came home to me that someone was crying aloud with pain, buried under that heap of fallen brickwork.

"But we could be of no use yet a while, so I told Clo and Aunt Maria to come upstairs and help to get the old lady down. They did as they were bid, being, in fact, terrified out of their wits, and quite unable to make suggestions. A male voice came from within the room where I had just left Mrs. Picture by herself. I took it quite as a matter of course.

"'You keep out on that landing, some of you, till I tell you to come in. This here floor won't carry more than my weight.' This was what I heard a man say, speaking from where the window had been, mysteriously. I was aware that he had stepped from some ladder on to the floor of the room, jumping on it recklessly as though to test its bearing power. Then that he had gathered up my old new acquaintance in a bundle, carefully made in a few seconds, and had said:—'Come along down!' to all whom it might concern. He shepherded us, all three women and the two children, into a back-bedroom below, and went away, leaving his bundle on the bed; saying, after glancing round at the cornice:—'You'll be safe enough here for a bit, just till we can see our way.' He had a peculiar hat or cap, and I saw that he was a fireman. I did not know that firemen held any intercourse with human creatures. It appears that they do occasionally, under reserves.

"Then it was that I became alarmed about my old lady. Her face had lost what colour it had, and her finger-tips had become blue and lifeless. But she spoke, faintly enough, although quite clearly, always urging us to go to a safer place, and leave her to her luck. This was, of course, nonsense. Nor was there any safer place to go to, so far as I understood the position. Aunt Maria went down to find brandy, if possible, in the heart of the confusion below. She found half a wineglassful somewhere, and brought back with it a report of progress. They had to be cautious in removing the rubbish, so that no worse should come to the sufferer it had half buried. We kept it from the old lady that this was her fellow-lodger, Mrs. Burr, and made her take some brandy, whether she liked it or no. I then went down to see for myself, and Clo came too.

"The police had taken prompt possession of the Court, and only a limited force of volunteers were allowed to share in the removal of the rubbish. Uncle Mo and the fireman, who seemed to be a personal friend, were attacking the ruin from within, throwing the loose bricks back into the kitchen, and working for the dear life.

"As we came in they halted, in obedience to, 'Easy a minute, you inside there. Gently does it,' from the spontaneous leading mind, whoever he was, without. Uncle Mo, streaming with perspiration, and forgetful of social niceties, turned to me saying:—'You go back, my dear, you go back! 'Tain't for you to see. You go back!' I replied:—'Nonsense, Mr. Wardle! What do you take me for?' For had I not stood beside you, my darling, when you lay dead in the Park?

"I could see what had taken place. The woman had been just about to knock at the door when the wall fell from above. Nothing had struck her direct, else she would almost surely have been killed. The ruin had fallen far enough from the house to avoid this, but the recoil of its disintegration (I'm so proud of that expression) had jammed her against the wall and choked the door.... I'm so sleepy I can't write another word."

* * * * *

No doubt the sequel described how Mrs. Burr, rescued alive, but insensible, was borne away on a stretcher to the Hospital, and how the party were released from the house, whose complete collapse must have presented itself to their excited imaginations as more than a possibility. No doubt also obscure points were made plain; as, for instance, the one which is prominent in the short newspaper report, which runs as follows:—"A singular fall of brickwork, the consequences of which might easily have proved fatal, occurred on Thursday last at Sapps Court, Marylebone, when the greater part of the front-wall of No. 7 fell forward into the street, blocking the main entrance and causing for a time the greatest alarm to the inhabitants, who, however, were all ultimately rescued uninjured. A remarkable circumstance was that the cloud of dust raised by the shower of loose brickwork was taken for smoke and was sufficient to cause an alarm of fire; as a matter of fact, two engines had arrived before the circumstances were explained. The mistake was not altogether unfortunate, as an escape ladder which was passing at the time was of use in reaching the upper floors, whose tenants were at one time in considerable danger. A sempstress, Mrs. Susan Burr, living upstairs, was returning home at the moment of the calamity, and was severely injured by the falling brickwork, but no serious result is anticipated. A costermonger of the name of Rackstraw also received some severe contusions, but if we may trust the report of his son, an intelligent lad of thirteen, he is very little the worse by his misadventure."

Although "no serious result was anticipated" in Mrs. Burr's case—in the newspaper sense of the words, which referred to the Coroner—the results were serious enough to Mrs. Burr. She was disabled from work indefinitely, and was too much damaged to hope to leave the Hospital, for weeks at any rate. A relative was found, ready to take charge of her when that time should arrive, but apparently not ready to disclose her own name. For, so far as can be ascertained, she was never spoken of at Sapps Court otherwise than as "Mrs. Burr's married niece."

Mr. Bartlett was on the spot, within an hour, taking measures for the immediate safety of the inmates, and his own ultimate pecuniary advantage. He pointed out it was quite unnecessary for anyone to turn out of the rooms below, although he admitted that the open air had got through the top story. His immediate resources were quite equal to a temporary arrangement practicable in a couple of hours or so. A contrivance of inconceivable slightness, involving no drawbacks whatever to families occupying the premises it was engendered in, was necessary to hold the roof up tempory, for fear it should come with a run. It was really a'most nothing in the manner of speaking. You just shoved a len'th of quartering into each room, all down the house to the bottom, with a short scaffold-board top and bottom to distribute out the weight, and tapped 'em across with a 'ammer, and there you were! The top one ketched the roof coming down, and you had no need to be apprehensive, because it would take a tidy weight—double what Mr. Bartlett was going to put upon it.

This was a security against a complete collapse of the roof and upper floor, but if it come on heavy rain, what would keep Aunt M'riar's room dry? She and Dolly could not sleep in a puddle. Mr. Bartlett, however, pledged himself to make all that good with a few yards of tarpauling, and Aunt M'riar and Dolly went to bed, with sore misgivings as to whether they would wake alive next day. Dolly woke in the night and screamed with terror at what she conceived was a spectre from the grave, but which was really nothing but a short length of scaffold-pole standing upright at the foot of her bed.

This was bad enough, but it further appeared next day that a new floor would be de rigueur overhead in Mrs. Prichard's room. Not only were sundry timber balks shoved up against the house outside so they couldn't constitoot a hindrance to anyone—so Mr. Bartlett said when he giv' in a price for the job—but the street-door wouldn't above half shet to, and all the windows had to be seen to. Add to this afflictions from tarpaulings that would keep you bone-dry even if there come a thunderstorm—or perhaps, properly speaking, that would have done so only they were just a trifle wore at critical points—and smells of damp plaster that quite took away the relish from your food, and you will form some idea what remaining in the house during the repairs meant to Uncle Mo and his belongings.

Not that Dolly and Dave took their sufferings to heart much. The novelties of the position went far to compensate them for its drawbacks. One supreme grief there was for them, certainly. The avalanche of brickwork had destroyed, utterly and irrevocably, that cherished sunflower. They had clung to a lingering hope that, as soon as the claims of humanity had been discharged by the rescue of the victims of the catastrophe, the attention of the rescuers would be directed to carefully removing the debris from above their buried treasure. They were shocked at the callous indifference shown to its fate. It was an early revelation of the heartlessness of mankind. Nevertheless, the shattered sunflower was recovered in the end, and Dolly took it to bed with her, and cried herself to sleep over it.

* * * * *

So it seemed impossible for Dave and Dolly, and their uncle and aunt, all to remain on in the half-wrecked house. But then—where had they to go to? It was clear that Dolly and her aunt would have to turn out, and the only resource seemed to be that they should go away for a while to her grandmother's, an old lady at Ealing, who existed, but went no further. She had never entered Sapps Court, but her daughters, Aunt M'riar and Dolly's mother, had paid her dutiful visits. There was no ill-feeling—none whatever! So to Ealing Aunt M'riar went, two or three days later, and Dave went too, although he was convinced Uncle Mo couldn't do without him.

The old boy himself remained in residence, being fed by The Rising Sun; which sounds like poetry, but relates to chops and sausages and a half-a-pint, a monotonous dietary on which he subsisted until his family returned a month later to a reinstated mansion. He lived a good deal at The Sun during this period, relying on the society of his host and his friend Jerry. His retrospective chats with the latter recorded his impressions of the event which had deprived him of his household, and left him a childless wanderer on the surface of Marylebone.

"Red-nosed Tommy," said he, referring to Mr. Bartlett, "he wouldn't have put in that bit of bressemer to ketch up those rotten joists over M'riar's room if I hadn't told him. We should just have had the floor come through and p'r'aps my little maid and M'riar squashed dead right off. You see, they would have took it all atop, and no mistake. Pore Susan got it bad enough, but it wasn't a dead squelch in her case. It come sideways." Uncle Mo emptied his pipe on the table, and thoughtfully made the ash do duty first for Mrs. Burr, and then for Aunt M'riar and Dolly, by means of a side-push and a top-squash with his finger. He looked at the last result sadly as he refilled his pipe—a hypothetically bereaved man. Dolly might have been as flat as that!

"How's Susan Burr getting on?" asked Mr. Alibone.

"That's according to how much money you're inclined to put on the doctors. Going by looks only—what M'riar says—she don't give the idea of coming to time. Only then, there's Sister Nora—Miss Grahame they call her now; very nice lady—she's on the doctor's side, and says Mrs. Burr means to pull round. Hope so!"

"How's Carrots—Carrots senior—young Radishes' dad?"

"Oh—him? He's all right. He ain't the sort to take to bein' doctored. He's getting about again."

"I thought a bit of wall came down on him."

"Came down bodily, he says. But it don't foller that it did, because he says so. Anyhow, he got a hard corner of his nut against it. He ain't delicate. He says he'll have it out of the landlord—action for damages—wilful neglect—'sorlt and battery—that kind o' thing!"

"Won't Mrs. Burr?"

"Couldn't say—don't know if a woman counts. But it don't matter. Sister Nora, she'll see to her. Goes to see her every day. She or the other one. I say, Jerry!..."

"What say, old Mo?"

"You haven't seen the other one."

"Oh, that's it, is it?" Mr. Jerry spoke perceptively, appreciatively. For Uncle Mo, by partly closing one eye, and slightly varying the expression of his lips, had contrived somehow to convey the idea that he was speaking of dazzling beauty, not by any means unadorned.

"I tell you this, Jerry, and you can believe me or not, as you like. If I was a young feller, I'd hang about Hy' Park all day long only to get a squint at her. My word!—there's nothing to come anigh her—ever I saw! And there she was, a-kissing our little Dolly, like e'er a one of us!"

"What do you make out her name to be?" said Mr. Jerry.

"Sister Nora called her Gwen," replied Mo, speaking the name mechanically but firmly. "But what the long for that may be, I couldn't say. 'Tain't Gwenjamin, anyhow." He stopped to light his pipe.

"It was this young ladyship that carried off old Prichard in a two-horse carriage, I take it."

Uncle Mo nodded. "Round to Sister Nora's—in Cavendish Square—with a black Statute stood upright—behind palin's. M'riar she's been round to see the old lady there, being told to. And seemin'ly this here young Countess"—Uncle Mo seemed to object to using this word—"she's a-going to carry the old lady off to the Towels, where she lives when she's at home...."

"The Towels? Are you sure it isn't Towers? Much more likely!"

Uncle Mo made a mental note about Jerry, that he was tainted with John Bull's love of a lord. How could anything but a reverent study of Debrett have given such an insight into the names of Nobs' houses? "It don't make any odds, that I can see!" was his comment. The correction, however, resulted in an incumbrance to his speech, as he was only half prepared to concede the point. He continued:—"She's a-going, as I understand from M'riar, to pack off Mrs. Prichard to this here Towels, or Towers, accordin' as we call it. And, as I make it out, she'll keep her there till so be as Mr. Bartlett gets through the repairs. Or she'll send her back to a lodgin'; or not, as may be. Either, or eye-ther." Having thus, as it were, saturated his speech with freedom of alternative, Uncle Mo dismissed the subject, in favour of Gwen's beauty. "But—to look at her!" said he. The old man was quite in love.

Mr. Jerry disturbed his contemplation of the image Gwen had left him. "How long does Bartlett mean to be over the job?" he asked.

"He means to complete in a month. If you trust his word. I can't say I do."

"When will he complete, Mo? That's the question. What's the answer?"

"The Lord alone knows." Uncle Mo shook his head solemnly. But he recalled his words. "No—He don't! Even the Devil don't know. I tell you this, Jerry—there never was a buildin' job finished at any time spoke of aforehand. It's always after any such a time. And if you jump on for to catch it up, it's afterer."

"Best to hold one's tongue about it, eh? Anyway, the old lady's got a berth for a time. Rum story! She'd have been put to it if it hadn't been for the turn things took. When's she to go?"

"To these here Towels, or Towers, whichever you call 'em? M'riar didn't spot that. When she's took back, I suppose. When the young lady goes."

"What'll your young customer say to Mrs. Prichard being gone, when his aunt brings him back?"

Uncle Mo seemed to cogitate over this. He had not perhaps been fully alive to the disappointment in store for Dave when he came back and found no Mrs. Picture at Sapps Court. Poor little man! The old prizefighter's tender heart was touched on his boy's behalf. But after all there would be worse trials than this on the rough road of life for Dave. "He'll have to lump it, I expect, Jerry," said he. "Besides, Mrs. P., she'll come back as soon as the new plaster's dry. She's not going to stop at the Towels—Towers—whatever they are!—for a thousand years."



CHAPTER XXXI

HOW GWEN GOT AT MRS. PRICHARD's HISTORY, OR SOME OF IT. ONE CRIME MORE OF HER SON'S. THE WALLS OF TROY, AND THOSE OF SAPPS COURT. AUNT M'RIAR'S VISIT OF INSPECTION. HOW SHE CALLED ON MRS. RAGSTROAR, WHO SENT HER SECRETIVE SON ROUND. HIS MESSAGE FROM MR. WIX. WHO WAS COMING TO SEE HIS MOTHER, UNLESS SHE WAS SOMEBODY ELSE. A MESSAGE TO MR. WIX, UNDERTAKEN BY MICHAEL. UNCLE MO's JOY AT THE PROSPECT OF DAVE AND DOLLY

How very improbable the Actual would sometimes feel, were it not for our knowledge of the events which led up to it!

Nothing could have been more improbable per se than that old Mrs. Prichard, upstairs at No. 7, down Sapps Court, should become the guest of the Earl and Countess of Ancester, at The Towers in Rocestershire. But a number of improbable antecedent events combined to make it possible, and once its possibility was established, it only needed one more good substantial improbability to make it actual. Gwen's individuality was more than enough to supply this. But just think what a succession of coincidences and strange events had preceded the demand for it!

To our thinking the New Mud wanted for Dave's barrage was responsible for the whole of it. But for that New Mud, Dave would not have gone to the Hospital. But for the Hospital, he would never have excited a tender passion in the breast of Sister Nora; would never have visited Granny Marrowbone; would never have been sought for by The Aristocracy at his residence in Sapps Court. Some may say that at this point nothing else would have occurred but for the collapse of Mr. Bartlett's brickwork, and that therefore the rarity of sound bricks in that conglomerate was the vera causa of the events that followed. But why not equally the imperfection of old Stephen's aim at Achilles? If he had killed Achilles, it is ten to one Gwen would have gone abroad with her mother, instead of being spirited away to Cavendish Square by her cousin in order that she should thereby become entangled in slums. Or for that matter, why not the death of the Macganister More? Had he been living still, Cousin Clo would never have visited Ancester Towers at all.

No—no! Depend upon it, it was the New Mud. But then, Predestination would have been dreadfully put out of temper if, instead of imperious impulsive Gwen, ruling the roast and the boiled, and the turbot with mayonnaise, and everything else for that matter, some young woman who could be pulverised by a reproof for Quixotism had been her understudy for the part, and she herself had had mumps or bubonic plague at the time of the accident. In that case Predestination would hardly have known which way to turn, to get at some sort of compromise or accommodation that would square matters. For there can be no reasonable doubt that what did take place was quite in order, and that—broadly speaking—everyone had signed his name over the pencil marks, and filled in his witness's name and residence, in the Book of Fate. If Gwen's understudy had been called on, there would have been—to borrow a favourite expression of Uncle Mo's—a pretty how-do-you-do, on the part of Predestination.

Fortunately no such thing occurred, and Predestination's powers of evasion were not put to the test. The Decrees of Fate were fulfilled as usual, and History travelled on the line of least resistance, to the great gratification of The Thoughtful Observer. In the case of lines of compliance with the will of Gwen, there was no resistance at all. Is there ever any, when a spoiled young beauty is ready to kiss the Arbiters of Destiny as a bribe, rather than give way about a whim, reasonable or unreasonable?