Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

DR. PAULL’S THEORY
A ROMANCE

BY

MRS. A. M. DIEHL

AUTHOR OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN, ETC.

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1893

Copyright, 1893,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Electrotyped and Printed

at the Appleton Press, U. S. A.

DEDICATED TO

HENRY IRVING, Esq.

CONTENTS.

DR. PAULL’S THEORY.

CHAPTER I.
FATE.

Hugh Paull, house-surgeon to a great City hospital, was seated at his writing-desk. During his spare time he was working at a treatise on nervous disease, the special subject which attracted him. It was a day when a certain public event was disturbing the usual City routine. The thoroughfares near to the hospital were blocked, and his room was quieter than usual. He had almost forgotten that he was liable to be disturbed, when a tap came at his door.

“Wanted, sir. Accident just brought in.”

The porter spoke, standing in the doorway.

Hugh laid down his pen with a sigh.

“Has Mr. Hamley taken the case?”

“Yes, sir. They are getting him into the ward. Old gentleman—carriage accident. Horse frightened and bolted. Two bobbies brought him in.”

“All right, I’ll come.”

He put aside his manuscript, and went down to the accident ward. The “sister” of the ward, two nurses, and young Hamley, a dresser, were standing round the recumbent figure of a fine old man, who lay on his narrow bed still as death, his pale features composed, his grey hair tossed upon the pillow. It was a grand face—a model for a painter.

As Paull neared the group the two nurses moved away to bring forward and unfold a screen.

“Take it away,” he said.

“I think he’s gone, or nearly so,” said the dresser, a fair young man, his face flushing. He had asked for the screen, usually drawn around the dying or dead.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Hugh. He felt the patient’s pulse, listened at his heart, opened the closed eyelids, placed his hand lightly on his brow, which was cold and clammy, then ordered him to be undressed, himself assisting the nurses to rip up the coat-sleeves.

There were no injuries. It was a case of concussion of the brain. The groom was having his slight wounds dressed in the out-patients’ department; and Hugh learned from him that his master, whom he appeared to hold greatly in awe, was Sir Roderick Pym, one of the partners in the well-known banking firm of Pym, Clithero and Pym. He had a town house in a West-end square, and a country house in Surrey, where he mostly lived. He was staying in town for a few days, and had insisted on driving towards the City to-day, in spite of the warning issued by the police to the public. Moreover, he insisted on driving a thoroughbred mare, who no sooner got among quite a small assemblage of roughs than she kicked up her heels and was off. The groom stuck to the tilbury till the final crash, but his master fell out shortly before. That was all he knew (or chose to tell). He was a town groom. He never went into the country. He would return home and tell Sir Roderick’s housekeeper. She would come round and see about their master.

Hugh went thoughtfully back to the ward, and standing at the foot of the bed gazed at the solemn, set face of the unconscious man. He was interested—unusually so. This old man’s aquiline, grave face was full of expression. Peaceful and composed as it was now, it was the countenance of one who had suffered, and suffered deeply.

“His eyelids quivered a little when the ice-bag was applied, sir,” said the nurse who was watching the patient.

Hugh was once more gravely examining the case, when the stout, matronly personage, in a high cap and huge white apron, who was called the “sister” of the ward, came from the little room at its end, through the square window of which she could see all that was going on in the long room with the rows of beds.

“I thought I would give you these, Mr. Paull. I would rather not have anything to do with them,” she said, handing Hugh a massive gold watch and chain, a purse, and some letters and papers.

“I will see to them, sister,” he said.

Giving directions as to the immediate treatment of Sir Roderick, he returned to his room to lock them away in a small iron safe, where certain of the hospital books and cases of instruments were kept. The watch was a hunter. It struck him that the glass might be broken. It was. He shook out the fragments; then, seeing a locket attached to the chain, he opened that.

The glass of this was intact, and covered the coloured photograph of a woman’s face—sweet, bright, fair, with smiling lips and dark eyes, that even on lifeless paper looked mischief and pretty defiance.

He shut up the locket in a hurry—he had not meant prying—and placing the contents of Sir Roderick’s pockets in a corner of the safe, turned the key upon them.

“This is my quiet day’s work,” he thought, with a sigh. It was useless to sit down to a scientific treatise, for which the most complete abstraction was an absolute necessity, when at any moment he might be summoned to this unexpected and important case; so he put the scattered sheets of manuscript together, and re-arranged the books of reference that he had piled on chairs by his writing-table in their rightful places on the book-shelves. Then he sat down in his American chair, and stared at the fire.

“A strange old face,” he was thinking, “massive, thoughtful. Quite a Rembrandt head. I wonder how old he is—whether he will get over it? Nasty shock, anyhow. Must have fallen on a soft bit of road; if it had been the kerb, or cobbles even, it might have been all over with him.”

It seemed to Paull that he must have seen that face before. Yet this could scarcely be. He had come to the hospital from his country home. He was the only son of the Rector of Kilby, in Derbyshire, and had seldom gone out, except to the museums and to scientific lectures; his ambition kept him chained to its object—his profession.

“The sort of face one sometimes dreams of,” he concluded. “I thought I was past nonsense of this sort. This latest thing in accidents has upset me as if I were a girl.”

Presently, the “gentleman’s housekeeper” was announced, and a portly dame, handsomely dressed in dark silk and a fur-trimmed cloak, entered. At once Hugh banished all idea of the locket and Mrs. Naylor having the faintest connecting link.

Sir Roderick’s housekeeper was comely, and good-looking in her buxom way. But although there was anxiety in her enquiries, and evident relief in her manner when Paull gave her hopes that her employer might recover, the ruddiness did not forsake her cheeks, nor was she in the least flurried.

“I feared something might happen, that I did,” she said, accepting a chair. “The groom, David, he didn’t half like going behind that mare. Sir Roderick’s a first-rate driver; they do say at both riding and driving he can manage anything in the way of a horse. But there, I’ve seen that Kitty in the stable, and I know she’s that bad-tempered—but, lor! no one daren’t say one word to Sir Roderick.”

Paull asked if there were no near relations who might be sent for, or informed of her master’s condition.

“Mr. Edmund—that’s Sir Roderick’s next eldest brother—had dinner with him last night,” she answered, doubtfully, “But he’s taken his family to see the procession. Mr. Pym—that’s the eldest, the head of the firm—isn’t on what you might call good terms with Sir Roderick, who has nothing to do with the bank now.”

“Were those all?” asked Hugh.

Mrs. Naylor could not suggest anyone else. Sir Roderick—well, he was one of those gentlemen that you didn’t know how to take. You might offend him mortally, and you wouldn’t know it except by his never having anything to do with you afterwards.

“You would rather not take any responsibility in the matter then, Mrs. Naylor?” asked Hugh, slightly amused.

The character of that strange man, lying for the present dead to the world without, was being unexpectedly revealed to him.

“I certainly would rather not, sir,” said Mrs. Naylor, briskly.

“But you will not object to give me his brother’s address?”

Mrs. Naylor being quite ready to give Mr. Edmund Pym’s address, Hugh wrote it down. Then he offered to take Mrs. Naylor to see her master.

From this she seemed to shrink; and it was only after being adjured that it was her duty to remain, at all events, in the hospital, until someone else belonging to Sir Roderick came—that she consented to visit the ward.

Mr. Edmund Pym arrived to visit his brother about nine in the evening: a singularly impassive personage, who showed no emotion whatever of any kind, and who departed as soon as possible.

Mrs. Naylor, evidently greatly relieved, slipped away after she had had a short interview with her master’s brother.

At ten o’clock the old man still lay on the hospital bed—breathing, living, but apparently dead to all around him.

“What do you think of him, Mr. Paull?” asked the Sister, as Hugh went his last round—at least the round which was usually his last.

“Think of him?” repeated Hugh, absently. “Oh—well—Dr. Fairlight will be here in the morning. He will take the case. Tell the night nurse I shall be down in an hour.”

“You’re not going to sit up, Mr. Paull?”

“I think I shall.”

The Sister looked from patient to doctor, as Hugh went striding out of the ward, and back again to the livid, solemn face on the pillow.

“That young cabman’s case last week was a good deal worse than this,” she mused, “and he didn’t sit up. I suppose the old gentleman’s age makes him anxious.”

Hugh Paull, with his odd attractiveness, his scrupulous fidelity to his duties, and his learning, which was acknowledged by the great men who were appointed to the hospital, as well as by his fellow-workers, was the hero of the resident staff, both doctors and nurses; and it did not enter the good Sister’s head to dream that any other motive but that of devotion to duty led to this sacrifice of a night’s rest, and singular departure from ordinary hospital routine.

Yet when Hugh took up his position at the patient’s bedside with some books as the possible companions of his vigil, he smiled to himself with a cynical wonder.

“Why am I doing this?” he asked himself. Why, indeed? He could have been summoned if any change took place. He could have ordered an extra night nurse for Sir Roderick. Why should he go out of his way for a strange man? Because this old man’s brother and the housekeeper had behaved so coolly, and his sense of humanity was aroused? Because this human windfall in the accident ward was Sir Roderick Pym, of Pym, Clithero & Pym? No! for neither of these reasons. Hugh Paull was in the habit of self-interrogation. His dissatisfaction with ordinary life as ordinary people took it had made him desperately in earnest; and being desperately in earnest, had made—

“To thine own self be true,

Thou canst not then be false to any man,”

one of his governing mottoes. As he settled himself to his night watch he grimly told himself that he was here for the sole reason that he knew he could not without a struggle have kept away. Sir Roderick Pym attracted him like a magnet. Why, he had still to learn.

Alternately watching the slightest movement of the patient, and reading, the night wore on. There was silence in the long ward. The rows of beds loomed whitely in the distance. The fire crackled. Now and then there was a sigh or a weary moan. The distant clatter of cab-wheels, the howl of a restless dog, or the slow rumbling of the market-waggons, were the only signs that not all in London slept, as did these victims of carelessness or misadventure within the quiet stone building.

Between one and two o’clock, Sir Roderick gave signs of returning consciousness. As the night nurse glided from bed to bed, administering medicine to those patients for whom it had been ordered, he opened his eyes, and muttered something. Then he moved his head on his pillow, turned, and gradually subsided into natural sleep.

After Hugh was completely satisfied that this was real slumber—“tired Nature’s sweet restorer,” indeed—he might safely have sought “balmy sleep” for his own solace; but by this time he was so wide awake, and his brain so fit for study, that he remained. Sir Roderick slept for hours as placidly as an infant, while Hugh studied with all his might and strength.

At six o’clock the night nurse brought him a cup of tea, and congratulated him on the changed appearance of the patient.

“Yes; he’ll do now, I think,” said Hugh, contentedly.

The clatter of the spoon in the saucer, or the whispering, or both, aroused Sir Roderick. He opened his eyes, and stared at Hugh, first wildly, then with an amazed expression.

“Kemble, in Hamlet,” he muttered. Then, as Hugh bit his lip to restrain a smile—a shaken brain must not be irritated—he frowned and stared, stared and frowned, then jerked his head away as from an unpleasant object.

Since the old man had been resolutely driving into the City, against much warning and advice, all had been a blank. Now he was awakening amid the most unpleasant sensations: his limbs heavy as lead, his head curiously light. At first he squinted at the strange objects around him, struggling to focus them aright, like a semi-conscious infant. As his sight adjusted itself, he found that there were really many beds—a row of beds. He began to count them, but before he had reached two figures he felt sick and faint, and instinctively turned back for help.

A lithe strong arm was round him, a glass with some cordial was at his lips. He swallowed the draught, and helplessly subsided.

As he revived he began to think.

“This is real,” was his first thought. “What has happened to me?”

After the thought had hummed about in his mind like a spinning-top, it subsided, tottered, and tumbled. He, as it were, picked it up.

“Who am I?” he stammered, suddenly, to Hugh, who was sitting near, his eyes alert. He had not meant that, but it came out higgledy-piggledy, somehow, and he listened to his own voice wonderingly.

“You are quite safe, Sir Roderick Pym,” said Hugh, gently. “A few hours ago you were thrown out of your carriage, and were brought here. You have been slightly—faint—but you will soon be all right again, and able to go home.”

“A—hospital!” Sir Roderick looked round with evident disgust. “Who—knows?” he added, with a glance of alarm.

Hugh hastened to relate details, slowly, clearly, while the nurse administered some light nourishment.

Sir Roderick listened attentively. The only question he asked was if his mare, Kitty, had suffered.

“I wouldn’t have had anything happen to Kitty,” he began, emphatically. Then, as he glanced up at Hugh from under his shaggy grey eyebrows, he seemed to remember that he was speaking to a stranger, and stopping short, sank wearily back.

“I took you for a vision of ‘Hamlet,’” he said, with a short laugh. “You looked like it—all black against the light, bending over your books.”

“My black clothes?” said Hugh. “I am just in mourning for my mother. I am house-surgeon here.”

Sir Roderick looked at him less coldly, and murmured some thanks. Then he asked the time.

“I want to telegraph. I was expected home—in the country—to-day,” he said. “Perhaps—I could go this afternoon.”

Hugh convinced him that this would be, if not impossible, the height of imprudence.

Sir Roderick listened to reason, but bargained that he should write a telegram now, at once, while he was able.

So excitedly did he plead, that Hugh reluctantly fetched a telegram form from the secretary’s room, and propped his troublesome patient up in the bed, that he might fill it in himself.

But the pencil fell from Sir Roderick’s fingers, the effort made him feel faint.

Not till an hour after was the telegram despatched, and then it was Hugh who had written it at Sir Roderick’s dictation:—

“To L. Pym, The Pinewood,

“Near F——, Surrey.

“Am detained by important business. Will return as soon as possible. Keep all letters, and do not see visitors.

Roderick Pym.”

“To his wife, presumably,” thought Hugh, as he left his patient to the day nurse, who was fresh from her night’s rest; and as he thought this he sneered: “Younger than her lord and master; very much under his thumb, too, evidently. Married him for his money, of course! The original of the portrait in the locket, doubtless. Fancy the jealous prudence of the old fox! Wouldn’t write ‘Lady Pym,’ only put ‘L.’ I wondered why he hesitated so long before yielding up the name. Poor old fellow! A young wife, with that mischievous face! Why didn’t the housekeeper mention her?”

Hugh went about his day’s work strangely dissatisfied, and had never felt more annoyed with anyone in his life than with the Sister of the accident ward when she told Dr. Fairlight that he had kindly remained all night by Sir Roderick’s bedside.

CHAPTER II.
AN INITIAL LETTER.

Sir Roderick decidedly improved on acquaintance. During the next two days his health promised to return. He declined the offer of a private ward.

“I like to watch what goes on,” he said to Hugh. “Of course there is a good deal to see that is painful. But I may not have such an opportunity of realising certain conditions of human nature again.”

Then he descanted upon the different cases, upon the various characteristics of the maimed and injured men who were either inmates, or who were brought in, upon the method and patient quietude of the nurses, &c.

“You are a practised observer,” said Hugh. Upon which they began a conversation that partially showed Hugh there was a bond of sympathy between them. Both were dissatisfied with life generally, and with certain matters particularly. Both were prompted to study deeply, and ponder much on the great problems which have puzzled philosophers from Thales to Schopenhauer; and although Sir Roderick was a materialist and pessimist, and Hugh had taken refuge in a high ideal optimism which was to a certain extent original, they met on the common ground of mental disquietude.

Seen thus, Sir Roderick seemed another man. Weak though he still was, his eyes sparkled, his face was brightened by an almost youthful animation. Hugh was about to end the interview, fearing overfatigue for his patient, when Sir Roderick stopped short. His countenance changed. His brother, Mr. Edmund Pym, came into the ward with the secretary of the hospital.

Edmund Pym was a short, wizened little man, with pinched features and blinking eyes, scant white hair and smooth shaven face. Greater opposites in personal appearance than these two brothers could hardly be.

He glanced at Hugh through his eye-glass, nodded, somewhat awkwardly asked the invalid how he was getting on, then stood fidgeting at the bedside.

Hugh offered him a chair, but Sir Roderick gave him such a look that he would have retired precipitately but for his patient’s apologetic—

“Pray don’t go, Mr. Paull, I want to speak to you. My brother cannot stay long.”

“No, I cannot stay long,” said Mr. Edmund, uncomfortably. “I only came in to see how you were getting on, and to tell you how sorry Mary and the girls are about this. Mary will come and see you, if you like?”

“But I don’t like,” interrupted Sir Roderick, pettishly. “Tell her—anything you please. I don’t mind Mary and the girls when I am well. But they can’t come here. If they do, I sha’n’t see them.”

Mr. Pym nervously assured his brother that “Mary and the girls” would not dream of doing anything to displease him. They were most anxious to show their solicitude and sympathy, that was all.

“Tell them that as long as they hold their tongues and don’t gossip about my infernal accident, they may do what they please,” said Sir Roderick, surlily. “And if they must chatter about it, tell them to pray for me. Yes, tell them that. They’ll think the black sheep is coming into the fold at last. It’ll please them, and won’t do me any harm.”

Mr. Edmund Pym was evidently embarrassed, and did not stay long. Hugh pitied him, and accompanying him to the end of the ward apologised for the irascibility of the patient, which was not only natural after the shock, but was, if anything, a favorable symptom, &c.

“Oh! I am accustomed to my brother, Mr. Paull,” he said, with a gentleness that touched the young house-surgeon. “He is naturally irritable. We take it for what it is worth. He has had a great deal of trouble in his life, and it has soured him. And he is quite a recluse. But he has a good heart, a wonderfully kind heart.”

Then he thanked Hugh for his attention to the patient and hurried off, evidently relieved that the visit was over.

“H’m!” muttered Hugh to himself, as he slowly returned to the patient. “H’m! It strikes me that my pessimistic friend is, like most pessimists, a bit of a Tartar.”

Sir Roderick welcomed him with a forced smile.

“I daresay you think me ungracious?” he said, his long, withered hand nervously fingering the bedclothes. “I’m not—at least, not exactly. I can put up with my brother when I’m well, but just now I can’t. The fact is, he is one of the most woman-ridden men on the face of the earth. His wife is a bigot and a snob, and brings up her daughters bigots and snobs. And they rule him. Rule him? They sit upon him. They drive him, like the old donkey he is. He was always the same. At school they called him Neddy, because he took everything so meekly. It used to enrage me, youngster as I was. I used to say to him: ‘Man, why can’t you hold up your head?’ And I’ve gone on saying it to him all through life. If there’s one thing I despise, it’s a man who can’t hold up his head and defend himself.”

“Against the women?” suggested Hugh. He had seated himself in the chair he had offered Mr. Pym. His arms were folded. He saw that he must treat Sir Roderick boldly, if they were to be friends. And some inward feeling told him that Fate, or Providence, had brought them together—that at least they were to be well acquainted with each other, if nothing more. “I am afraid, sir, that you are a woman-hater.”

He half expected his patient to turn upon him somewhat after the manner in which he had snubbed his brother, in which case he would have left the old gentleman to himself, as far as conversation went, for the future. Instead, Sir Roderick smiled, and seemed gratified.

“No, Hamlet, my friend,” he said, with a sort of pleased chuckle, leaning back against his pillows. “You must excuse my calling you Hamlet, but with your serious speculative nature, the name seems to fit you exactly. No, I am no woman-hater. I know we can’t do without them. But I object to them out of their proper place, as I object to cats out of the kitchen, or mastiffs and Newfoundlands in the drawing-room. The drudge woman and the ornamental woman are necessary evils. When strictly kept under, they serve their purpose. But bowed down to and worshipped as my unfortunate brother fetishes his womankind, they are only fit for extermination—as if they were so many rats.” He spoke viciously. Then turning to Hugh, he said: “I suppose you consider me a barbarian? Like the rest, you adore a petticoat—eh?”

“No,” said Hugh. “But I can’t say I am with you in the extermination idea; I have not known any domineering women. My mother was soft, gentle—more a helpmeet than a companion to my father, who is a very studious man. She was his right hand. His is not a mind to require a second self. My sisters are like her.”

“I understand,” said Sir Roderick, in a depreciatory tone. “Good specimens of the domestic genus. But what about the lady-love, the ideal realised, the creature apart—eh?”

“I have so many, you see, Sir Roderick,” said Hugh. “Silent lassies, who only speak when spoken to, and wait patiently side by side for days, even weeks, till I throw the handkerchief. Their petticoats are half-calf—morocco—cloth, lettered—”

“Oh! your books,” said the old man. “Ah! well, your turn will come, your turn will come! And the longer you wait the worse it’ll be.”

“May your words not come true,” said Hugh, as he went off, amused, yet—when he thought of the portrait in the locket, and of the telegram sent to “L. Pym”—somewhat puzzled.

During the time that Sir Roderick remained in the hospital—between three and four days—the subject of the fair sex was mutually tabooed by doctor and patient. They had interesting conversations, and Sir Roderick expressing a wish to see Hugh’s treatise, the evening before the old gentleman left the hospital he supped in the house-surgeon’s room, and Hugh read him portions of the work, which he was pleased greatly to approve.

“You must come and see me in the country,” he said, when, after writing a check for a handsome donation to the hospital fund, and insisting upon Hugh’s acceptance of a ruby ring he had ordered to be sent from his town house, he was taking leave of those of the staff who had been good Samaritans to him in his weakness. “You must come and stay. They think me an unsociable old brute, do my neighbors and people round about. But they wouldn’t care for me if they knew me. We have nothing in common. My friends are men of about my own age, with similar tastes. I hope you and I will be friends. Although I am nearly old enough to be your grandfather—minds like yours don’t count by years.”

Hugh answered that he was grateful, obliged—hoped they would be friends, certainly, etcetera. But as Sir Roderick leaned forward and nodded gravely to him from his brougham window when the carriage drove off, he felt a strange sensation—was it an uneasy feeling of aversion for this peculiar patient who had occupied his time and his thoughts these few days? Was he relieved by his departure? He could not tell. The ruby ring on his finger almost annoyed him. He locked it away in his desk, and tried to lock away the recollection of Sir Roderick with it.

Then he went about his work with a strange oppression of mind and weariness of body. It was an operating day. A most interesting—in fact, a thrilling operation took place in the theatre—one which set all the students and surgical nurses talking. But at the most critical moment he seemed to see Sir Roderick’s face and to hear that short, cynical laugh. He felt as if he were haunted.

As the days and weeks went on, the sensation lessened. But when the post came in he generally remembered Sir Roderick. At least, for the first few weeks after the accident he looked for the large, crooked scrawl he had noticed on the cheque, among his correspondence. When no letter, no news came of the strange old man, he began to think of their short acquaintance as of one of those purposeless episodes which occur in the lives of most medical men.

As spring blossomed into summer, he began to forget. When he had his short holiday, and was once more in his childhood’s home among the fields and woods, with flowers scenting the summer air and the birds singing all around, the remembrance of the weird old Rembrandt face on the pillow in the hospital ward came back into his mind as might some curious dream. Alas! it would have been better for Hugh Paull if indeed it could have been but a dream.

Kilby was a picturesque village among the Derbyshire hills. A stream ran through the smiling little valley. It meandered through the rectory grounds. There was no regular village street. There were groups of cottages clustering together about the old inn, and around the church. The rectory was a grey stone, gabled house, in grounds that the Reverend John Paull had enlarged and improved each year since he “read himself in” twenty-seven years ago. In front of the house was a large, square lawn, with spreading beeches and straight conifers on either side. Opposite, a yew hedge divided the lawn from the beautiful flower garden with the masses of bloom bordering the winding paths. Then came the river, famous for its succulent trout, and beyond, grassy banks, a row of elms, and the sloping hills.

Although Hugh missed the genial presence of his sweet-faced little mother, his father seemed determined to be cheery during his visit, and his sisters Maud and Daisy had made up their minds to be bright in their brother’s presence, so only indulged in their inevitable fits of grief in private.

“Do not let—Hugh—miss me,” had been their mother’s constant exhortation during her last brief illness. “He is such a gloomy boy. Pray be cheerful with him.”

Mrs. Paull herself had lived cheerfully; and as she had lived, so she died—with a smile of encouragement to those around her on her lips. To her, life was merely one scene in the eternal drama of the human soul.

When the rector chose the words, “She is not dead, but sleepeth,” to be engraven on the stone at the head of her grave, he felt indeed that his Maggie was not, could not be dead. Dead? Sometimes he believed they were nearer and dearer to each other now than when for the first time he took his love into his arms and kissed her lips.

Thus it was hardly a house of mourning into which Hugh came. As soon as he became accustomed to the empty chair, the absence of the kindly voice, and the sombre garments of his sisters and the maids, he successfully fought low spirits.

The ordeal of the first visit to his mother’s grave over, he also struggled to be unselfish, and not to add to his father’s and sisters’ grief by a mournful presence. So he walked about the parish with the rector as usual, drove his sisters in the pony-chaise, and fished with them in the old haunts of the capricious trout, which sometimes suddenly and unaccountably changed their favourite lurking-places, and as suddenly and unaccountably returned to them again.

In the evenings, when the Rector glanced through the papers and the girls worked by the light of the shaded lamps, he told them stories of the hospital: the strange beings that came under his notice, the hard, cruel tales of some of their lives.

About a week after his arrival, he was reminded of Sir Roderick. In the weekly journal, Speculative Thought, there was a letter on some subject that bore upon certain theories he held in regard to animal magnetism. It was signed “R. Pym.” At dinner he inquired of his father whether he had noticed it. He had not. So, after dinner Hugh read it aloud.

“Why, I should have thought you had written that,” said his father. “That is a pet theory of yours, is it not?”

“The old thief!” said Hugh, half to himself, but with an amused smile. “At least, I have no right to say that. It is written by Sir Roderick Pym. Of that I have little or no doubt. We had a discussion on the subject. He defended the opposite view. Now, he is on my side. That is what I can’t make out.”

“You brought him round to your way of thinking, I suppose,” said the rector, with a satisfied glance at his son. “You certainly have the gift of persuasion. Many a time, in our walks and talks, you have staggered me. I have felt that your hypotheses were uncalled for and preposterous. But for the life of me I could not advance anything solid in the way of refutation.”

“You certainly haven’t got the gift of persuasion, papa,” said the fair-haired, round-faced Daisy. “Giles was drunk again last night. Mary Giles has a black eye to-day. I am sure I thought your sermon on Sunday week would do something. But old Brown went to the Arms just the same all last week, Mrs. Brown told me. I said, quite aghast: ‘What! after papa’s sermon?’ And she said: ‘Lawk, miss, Brown do go to church, I know, but he allers settles hisself for a good sleep while the sermon’s a-goin’ on.’”

“One man, single-handed, is powerless against alcohol,” said the rector, helplessly. “I’ve fought it these seven-and-twenty years, and haven’t scored a point. If they will drink, they will drink—an earthquake would not stop them.”

The conversation drifted away from Sir Roderick Pym. But next morning it drifted back again.

“There is a letter for you, Hugh; such a curious-looking letter,” said Maud, a tall, dark, handsome girl, who was pouring out the tea and coffee when her brother came down to breakfast. “A most original handwriting. You must tell me whose it is. I have been reading up graphology lately, and there seems to me a great deal of sense in it. At least, my friends’ handwritings correspond wonderfully with what I know of their characters.”

“I warn you, Maud is getting quite a dangerous person,” said Daisy, with wide-open eyes. “I found her reading one of your medical books the other day, Hugh.”

But Hugh did not hear, or heed her. He was turning over the square, grey envelope, with a big black P stamped on the flap. The first communication from Sir Roderick after ten weeks’ silence. There was no mistaking the large, crooked scrawl. The stamp was stuck on corner-ways. After turning over the closed letter once more, he replaced it by his plate and began his breakfast. He could not bring himself to open that letter in the presence of his sisters. Why, he could not have told.

“You are not going to open your letter?” asked Daisy, wonderingly, as she took her brother’s egg out of the egg-boiler.

He was saved the reply by the entrance of his father. After breakfast, he escaped into the garden; and there, by the river, among the flowers and in the sunshine, the first link of the terrible life-chain which was to crush his heart was forged. He opened the letter. If he could have guessed, have known, would he have cast it from him into the stream to be carried away—out of his reach and ken, for ever? In after days he asked himself this with untold bitterness of soul, but no answer came.

The contents of the envelope, which had been redirected and forwarded by the secretary of the hospital, were simple enough.

Sir Roderick wrote, dating from the Pinewood, near F——, Surrey, as follows:—

“My good young Friend,—It must be about time for you to claim a holiday. Let it be spent here. You will like the place; that it will be congenial I feel sure. Let me know day and hour, and the carriage will meet you at F—— Station.

“Yours, Roderick Pym.”

Hugh read it twice, thrice. At first, he had (so he thought) been full of self-gratulation that he had so complete an excuse to decline the invitation as this, that his furlough from hospital, spent in his own home, was nearly at an end. But, as he paced the garden walk, he wondered whether, in reality, he had won over Sir Roderick to his views upon the subject of that letter to the weekly journal Speculative Thought, or whether the baronet had written it in one of his sardonic humours as a sort of grim jest. He would like to know. Perhaps Sir Roderick had been laughing at him in his sleeve during those long talks in the hospital. Gruesome thought, not to be borne! But he would like to know.

“I should do no harm by running down for a day,” he thought. “I could even leave before the dinner hour, and not have to encounter Lady Pym.”

The portrait in the locket, no less than the silence on the subject of Sir Roderick’s young wife on the part of the housekeeper and Mr. Edmund Pym, had prejudiced Hugh greatly against the lady to whom he had indited that telegram. Sir Roderick’s contempt for women, too, induced the idea that L. Pym, however charming she might be, was not a woman to deserve either respect or love.

Seldom vacillating, to-day Hugh was as irresolute as any woman. One minute he resolved to accept the invitation, the next he told himself it would be better to let it stand over for the present. At last he got angry with himself, went into the house, asked Maud if he might use her davenport in the drawing-room, and presently posted a letter to Sir Roderick with his own hands, lest once more he should change his mind. In this he accepted the invitation to the Pinewood for the following Saturday morning.

Why he was reluctant to enlighten his family on this subject, he could not for the life of him make out. But whenever he neared it in conversation, he felt uncomfortable. The days passed. He told them all he should return to town the following Friday. But of the projected visit to the Pinewood he said not one word.

The sweet summer days came and went, one by one. Once more Hugh said good-bye, perhaps for months, to the old garden; had a farewell fish in the river, and after a reluctant parting with father and sisters, returned—to meet his strange fate.

CHAPTER III.
EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF HUGH PAULL.

July—, 18—.

Am I awake? Is my visit to the Pinewood a dream? No, no, it has all happened—one of the strangest experiences that ever befell mortal man.

It has been like a visit to some new world: the impressions have been so strong. It is the Pinewood which seems the reality, and this, my hospital life, a dream. To my horror, things are growing shadowy. I cannot concentrate my thoughts upon my cases; and when the fellows or the nurses ask me anything, I am not “all there.” At last the climax came this morning. An epileptic case came in, and Dr. Hildyard asked my opinion upon his diagnosis. My mind was a blank. Suddenly I could have sworn I heard a laugh—her laugh.

I will write it all down, that is what I will do; then perhaps I may forget.

I left London last Saturday week morning, in the full possession of my senses (of that I feel sure). I can remember everything—all the details of the journey down to F——, through the heathery moorland, the firwoods, the cornfields.

No one waiting at F—— station. Taking my bag, I was leaving, intending to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the Pinewood and to walk, when an old coachman, perched up on the driving-seat of a high dogcart, touched his hat and said:

“The gentleman for the Pinewood?”

“I am going to the Pinewood,” I said.

“The doctor, sir, what attended Sir Roderick in London?”

“Yes.”

I got up, and we drove off. The skittish bay (Reindeer) went like the wind at first along the smooth highroad, through snug villages, past outhouses, between hop-gardens, till we came to the hills covered with pine-forest.

“This is the Pinewood, sir,” said the old man; “as far as you can see a tree.”

That was much farther than I could see. The slopes were clad with the straight, tall trees, from slim saplings to lofty giants, until the dark green outlines of the hills melted into the lilac haze of the horizon.

Driving less quickly uphill, he told me something about his master and his habits.

“You must excuse my not believin’ in you at first sight, sir,” he said; “but so few gen’l’men comes here, and they’re not young gen’l’men, but them as pokes about after beetles or goes butterfly catching. Some goes out with a hammer, and knocks the stones about. And as for a lady—well, sir, I suppose you know Sir Roderick can’t abide the sight of a petticoat?”

I murmured something. I was certainly not going to discuss my host with one of his servants. Fortunately, we were now in the grounds.

What a dream of beauty!

Velvety, mosslike hillocks, among the stern clumps of pines; whole glades of bracken in narrow dells, fairy sporting grounds; then, an occasional oasis of garden, apparently growing spontaneously among the woodland. Here and there a flight of steps, leading to the shrubbery of high laurels and conifers, or a small white-stone temple; now and again a stone bench, flanked by cypresses and urns on pedestals—such a bench as one sees in the gardens in Italy.

Then, suddenly, a dip in the land to the right, disclosing a tiny park, with some beeches and elms, and in its centre a circular garden, surrounding a white-domed building.

“A chapel?” I asked.

“It was wonst,” my conductor told me; “but not in my time. We none of us knows nothink about wot’s inside. They do talk about that chapel, folks do. My opinion is, that there’s nothink in it; it just amuses Sir Roderick to tease their curiosity.”

Then a sharp turn and a short drive between thick firwoods brought us to a strange place.

A long, high wall—the wall of a solid building; for there was a porch, a door, and long, narrow windows on either side. If the whole façade had had windows it would have looked like a museum, for on the top there was a balustrade crowned at intervals with small, funereal-looking urns.

The place looked mouldy and dismal even on this glorious summer day.

“Well?” I said, for Thomas drew up before the door.

“Well, sir, if you just give that bell hanging to the right of the door a good pull, they’ll hear you.”

Did Sir Roderick’s eccentricity extend to his living in a semi-tomb? As I pulled the bell, and heard a distant, feeble clang, I looked somewhat disconsolately after the comfortable-looking dogcart driving away, remembering some of the ancient Greek philosophers’ predilections for doing their work among the tombs.

Out of perversity, I daresay, I felt utterly disinclined for philosophical disquisitions in this tomb-like place; in fact, I yearned for a real boyish holiday in those grounds with young, merry companions (I had better be truthful with myself).

What was my dismay when a solemn-looking old servitor in black (he had white hair and a “white choker,” and looked like a major-domo of State funerals) ushered me into a vault-like crypt. There were niches in the walls and more urns. He offered to take my bag. I clutched it tight, expecting some grim jest on the part of my host. When he said, “Will you please walk this way, sir,” and, opening a door, disclosed a long, vault-like passage, I hesitated; but he slouched off at such a rate, and the echo of his footsteps clattering on the stone pavement was so loud, I could not stop him, so I followed in silence—down a flight of stone steps, round a corner, down another darker and narrower staircase (all lighted dimly by tiny yellow-glass windows in the wall), until, when I was emerging into total darkness, I paused.

“I can’t see!” I shouted, really annoyed.

Sir Roderick could not be living underground—that was all nonsense. He was playing a trick upon me, and would think it fine fun.

“I will strike a match,” I added, crossly; but the old man pulled open a door.

The landing just below me was suddenly flooded with light. Stepping down, I turned and followed him into a large conservatory.

What a magical change! The blue clear light from the glass dome showed up each frond of the great tree-ferns, each grand leaf of the palms, each yellow orange and white-waxen blossom of the orange-trees. Huge crimson blooms hung upon the thick festoons of the sub-tropical creeping plants, and there was my friend the Cape jessamine strengthening the warm, intoxicating perfume of the gardenias, daphnes, and, above all, of the orange-blossom.

It was a relief to be out of the scented atmosphere and in an ordinary, square hall, which had a billiard-table in the centre.

My cicerone asked me to wait; but after opening various doors and exploring several rooms, he came to me with a rueful expression.

“They was here half-an-hour ago,” he said; “but they must be out now. Lor! why they’re on the lawn. Come along, sir!”

He must have caught sight of “them” through a window. He opened the hall-door, and I saw a lawn with spreading trees, under one of which Sir Roderick was seated in a basket-chair, smoking. At his feet lay a huge mastiff. By his side sat a lady, bending over a book, her face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat.

My conductor had shut the door, and left me to my fate. I walked across the lawn, thinking to myself that under that hat was the face I had seen in Sir Roderick’s locket.

No—as she suddenly looked up—it was not the same! What! that wild-rose, tender young face, with large grey eyes, the same as that saucy, imperious minx of the portrait? No relation, I could swear it.

“Well, Hamlet!” Sir Roderick was quite warm in his welcome.

“I didn’t look myself. No, unmistakably I did not. Overwork, of course; the foul atmosphere, too. Oh! I might say what I liked. Mine was a good hospital in its way, doubtless; but all the same, the atmosphere was a foul one. Else, why the disinfectants?”

“You mentioned some unheard-of sum that you annually spend in disinfectants, and you can’t deny it,” he said. “Well, here you will have Nature’s disinfectants—pure air, and the scent of the pines and the heather and the hay. But I have not introduced you. Lilia, this is Dr. Paull.”

The lovely girl, who wore white stuff with something red twisted round her waist, had been looking at me like children taken to the Zoo for the first time look at the wild beasts.

She did not bow to me. I felt the blood come to my face. What on earth was she staring at? Then she turned to him, and said slowly:

“Doctor Paull?”

It was not flattering, but I understood.

“You are right—not Doctor,” I said. “There is much work before me before I can claim that title. I am only a medical student—”

“Bosh!” interrupted Sir Roderick. “I know what Lilia means. I never have any young men here; she expected one of the old fogies. That’s it, isn’t it, child?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “But—do you care for butterflies or beetles? No? Dear me! Oh, you are a botanist!”

I hastened to disclaim the soft impeachments.

“Then”—she knit her brow, and looked like a child making up an old woman’s face—“then you like geology?”

I remembered Thomas’ mention of the visitors who went about with hammers, and responded gravely to my catechist.

“I prefer to look at Nature and to ask no questions,” I said.

Then there was some talk of the covered way from the road above, which my host informed me was built by his father.

“He had some peculiar pleasure in startling people,” he said. “He used to give out that he was a social hermit; and although he lived down here much like other people live, would go about in town strangely dressed and behave oddly. My poor father was very eccentric.”

He made the remark so innocently that I involuntarily glanced at his companion. She seemed unaware that there was anything naïf in those words, and met my eyes with a deep, enquiring look. I have never seen such child eyes in a woman’s face.

Then the luncheon bell rang, and I was conducted to my room by a blushing youth in livery. I was burning to know who “Lilia” was—for that brief introduction was all that I had had—but I could not ask the gauche young footman (evidently a “new hand”). So I washed my hands and wondered, as I gazed round the quaint old room. It must be an old house, although from the lawn it looked modern, and foreign, with its brilliantly white walls and bright green shutters. The flooring, though spotless, was old; the ceiling low. There was a fourposter of carved wood black with age, and the mahogany furniture, which shone like mirrors, was of an ancient pattern. White dimity hung about, and there was a fresh scent of lavender.

Going downstairs, I noticed that the shallow stairs were of old oak, likewise the balustrade; but the dining-room, to which Sir Roderick, who met me in the hall, escorted me, was of newer fashion—a square room with massive furniture, and hung with paintings.

“All Pyms,” said my host, following my eyes as, seated at “Lilia’s” right, I ate my soup. Then ensued some talk about the various dark visages that frowned down from the black canvases. To all appearance, misanthropy ran in the family. Most of these bilious-looking ancestors seemed to have done something strange; and the nearer they had drifted to contempt of social law, the more unctuously Sir Roderick related their exploits. Meanwhile the gentle Lilia listened with wide-open eyes and evident interest.

“But that? Surely that one is not a Pym!” I said, indicating a portrait in an oval Florentine frame that hung conspicuously over the mantelpiece—in fact, in solitary glory, while the other portraits were somewhat huddled together.

“And pray, why not?” asked my host dryly, after a moment’s pause.

I looked again. A sunbeam lighted up the laughing face of a fair young man, with large blue eyes and the very much-curved lips which always produce the effect of a sneer. To me they are painful, recalling the cruel risus sardonicus which I have never seen without distress.

“Why not?” I repeated, stupidly. “Oh! because he is so unlike all the others, I suppose.”

“Do you not see any likeness?” he quietly asked presently, after he had carved a fowl and insisted on giving me the breast.

I looked around.

“Oh, not to the pictures—to Lilia!” he cried, impatiently.

“No, I cannot say I do,” I said, glancing at my hostess.

I smiled; but I did not feel at all like smiling. My—was it dread?—to find so young a girl the wife of so old a man made me flinch at any suggestion which strengthened such a possibility.

“They are both Pyms!” he said, quite irritably. “You have evidently no eye for likenesses. Of course, there are dark Pyms and fair Pyms. The fair Pyms are upstairs in a corridor.”

“Women,” said the fair Lilia explanatorily to me. “Papa dislikes women so much, he won’t have their portraits about him.”

I had been on the point of calling the child Lady Pym, and she was his daughter! Fool that I had been!

“Because they simper and attitudinise,” said Sir Roderick. “If they behaved as sensibly as men I should like them as well.”

“That’s not saying very much,” said Lilia, with an amused look at me. “Papa is not enamoured of his fellow-men.”

“Do you want me to be hail-fellow well-met with Tom, Dick, and Harry?” he said, frowning at the daughter who was so unlike him that I began to think more charitably of my mistake.

“You know I don’t. I like you just as you are!” said his daughter, looking adorable with an infantine smile of love and trust brightening her sweet face.

It was like a personal sunshine. I felt it so, later, when she deigned to shine upon me; and every time it humbled me, and made me feel coarse, clumsy, unworthy, a very clod; and now it, or the memory of it, comes back here—it shines suddenly upon a poor sufferer’s face upon the pillow, and the patient vanishes and I see Lilia.

This won’t do. I must return to my statement.

After luncheon, Sir Roderick sent me out into the grounds with his daughter. From first to last he purposely threw us together. What his motive was I cannot imagine. Motive he has: I have seen enough to know that he never acts without one.

Lilia told me so much as we wandered, first about the Italian garden just outside the dining-room windows, then across the lawns into the pinewoods. It was so difficult to check her childish confidences, which she poured out as a little creature just finding the use of its tongue will babble as it trots along holding one’s hand. They treated me, all of them, at the Pinewood, except one, of whom more presently, with simple trust; even Nero, the old mastiff, slouched along at our heels with his big tongue out, panting, as if I were an old friend. I must never, even in thought, betray that trust. I must never forget that to aspire would be a breach of that sacred confidence—never, never! On this subject I pray, as the octogenarian said in Dickens’ Haunted Man, “Lord, keep my memory green!”

She talked of her father—well and good.

“Papa has no patience with frivolity,” she said. “He only has sympathy with people who do their duty. That is what every one ought to feel, is it not? Ah! I thought you would say ‘Yes.’ Of course, it is much nicer when you like doing your duty, isn’t it? Those old men who come here and beetle-hunt and botanise, or go poring over the books in the library, not only like what they have to do in life, they love it. I do envy them.”

“But you—you like your life, do you not?” I asked.

Just then we came to a clearing in the wood. A giant pine, lately felled, lay prone among the ferns and mosses. She stopped.

“Let us sit down a moment,” she said; “you take my breath away.”

She seated herself on the trunk, looking like the embodied spirit of the pinewood in her white gown. Nero stood for a few minutes watching me as I sat down beside her, then slouched up and lay down at his mistress’ feet, one eye fixed on me. Evidently this proceeding was new to him. The botanists and gentlemen of the hammer did not care to sit on felled trunks and talk with the daughter of the house.

“I said that,” she went on, “because it was just as if you knew how treasonable my thoughts have been lately. I have actually been wishing to travel, and see the world!”

I asked her what treason there was in that.

“Such an idea, in me, is treason itself!” she said, almost indignantly—“when my father despises the world, and would rather anything should happen than that I should go beyond the Pinewood.”

Then I was amazed by the disclosure that this sweet young creature had lived all her life shut up in the Pinewood, almost as much a prisoner as a princess in a fairy-tale immured in a high tower. Her only companions and friends had been her nurses, the clergyman and his wife, and her cousin Roderick, the fair young man with a sneer whose portrait I had said to be unlike the Pyms.

Without governesses or tutors, Lilia has managed to learn a great deal. Latin and Greek are not dead languages to her, and she and her father chatter away in Italian like natives. But in the ordinary affairs of life, poor dear child, how ignorant she is!

Sitting there with myself, still almost an absolute stranger, she spoke out her heart as if I were a dear old friend returned after a long separation, and actually asked my advice. Mine!

It seemed that she had mentioned this desire to see other places to her cousin Roderick, who was a favourite nephew of her father’s, although he would not have anything to do with his family. She and this Roderick had been brought up together like brother and sister playing and sympathising and bickering in the usual fashion. Only when she had confided her treasonable ideas to him had he shocked her by a supplementary suggestion, which seemed to have made a terrible impression upon her.

“We have quarrelled, and never, never can be the same again,” she told me in much agitation. “My father does not know it, and has asked Roderick to dinner to meet you. What shall I do?”

She was quite tragic. I could hardly help smiling. But seeing how sensitive she was—a natural sensibility greatly increased by a life of unnatural seclusion—I repressed a smile, and said:

“See your cousin before dinner, and ‘make it up,’ as the children say.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” she said, in distress. “He won’t make it up.”

“Then you have tried him?”

She nodded.

“It has been a dreadful shock to me,” she said. “If you knew, you would understand.”

After a little coaxing, she spoke, or rather blurted out:

“If you must know—he actually—asked me—to marry him!”

Nothing so very dreadful, I suppose; but, under the circumstances, rash, to say the least—for Lilia admitted that her father was in total ignorance.

“He would never look at Roderick again,” she assured me. “Don’t say ‘nonsense.’ I tell you he would not. I am never to marry!”

“Why not?” I asked, perversely.

She looked at me almost with indignation.

“Marriage means misery,” she said, oracularly.

“You mean, that Sir Roderick thinks it does,” I suggested.

“He knows it,” she said, with emphasis, below her breath.

I was silent with confusion. The next word, and Lilia might unbosom herself of secrets not her own—sacred to her father—not from any malice aforethought, but through the spontaneity to which she was bred by that very father. It behoved me to be cautious.

“I really should tell Sir Roderick if I were you,” I hazarded. “It is only what he would reasonably expect. Cousins often marry. The contingency must have occurred to him.”

At that moment I was inclined to think that such an issue might even have been planned by my self-sufficient host.

“I thought you knew him!” she cried, recoiling from me a little.

Nero got up and stood between us, looking suspiciously at me.

I explained, apologetically, that although Sir Roderick and I had talked over the questions of humanity in the abstract, we had not arrived at the domestic problems.

“The most important of all,” she said, somewhat pompously.

“Granted,” I said. “And problems that can, unfortunately, only be solved by individual experience.”

“Ah! you acknowledge that,” she said, with a sort of exultation. “You really uphold my father’s theory—that the risk is too great. He loves both Roderick and myself so well that he has preached the delights of celibacy to us ever since I can recollect.”

“His preaching has had more effect upon you than upon your cousin, evidently,” I suggested.

“I fear so,” she said, in a sorrowful tone which reproached me for my feeling this talk, so seriously in her estimation, almost absurd. “Poor, dear Roderick! I would rather do anything than ‘sneak,’ as he used to call it. But papa will be sure to notice something.”

“Cannot you act—pretend?” I hazarded.

She shook her head.

“I never tried,” she said; “it has never been necessary.”

“I daresay he will be equal to the occasion,” I said. “Your cousin is in the army, is he not? Oh! he is captain already? He has told you a good deal about life in camp, in barracks?”

“Lots,” she said.

(Doubtless lots, Captain Pym!)

“Well, you know, officers can be silent when necessary, and know how to veil their opinions and feelings.” (I yearned to say, “know how to tell lies,” but checked myself.) “If I were you, I should be just the same to him to-night: I should ignore his unlucky suggestion, and behave exactly as if he had never made it.”

Lilia resolved to take my advice, and we strolled in the gardens and into the enclosed park. I tried to find out something about the chapel in the circular garden, but she was evidently on guard.

I thought of her, dear child, while I was dressing. How few real friends she could have had! These Mervyns, the rector and his wife, seemed the only ones. I was anxious to see them. They had been invited for the evening. Lilia told me “they never would come to dinner; it was no use asking them.”

I went downstairs very soon after the second dressing bell rang. The drawing-room, which is all chocolate-colour, white, and gilding, struck me as like a picture I had recently seen. The room was lighted by short, thick wax-candles in wall candelabra. In the middle of the room an enormous china bowl of white roses on a round black table perfumed the air. The other object which attracted my attention was a huge grand piano in ebony.

I was just going round to ascertain the maker’s name, when someone jumped up from an easy-chair—Captain Roderick.

“Hulloa!” he said (he had a newspaper in his hand), “it’s Mr. Paull, isn’t it?”

I shook hands with him. A prodigiously good-looking fellow, this cousin, and good company. It was a lively dinner-table. Lilia, child as she is, soon cast aside the stately manner she had put on outside the drawing-room door when she came sailing in to interrupt our tête-à-tête; and she laughed and talked with us all till over dessert we none of us noticed how time fled, until the footman announced that “Mr. and Mrs. Mervyn were in the drawing-room, and coffee was served.”

Mr. Mervyn, the clergyman of the parish, is a tall, dark man with white hair and keen black eyes. His wife is one of those large, soft, fair women with gentle faces and sweet manners, who can nevertheless be stern and unflinching when there is a question of right and wrong—the very woman for a sick nurse.

While we men talked over our coffee, Roderick sat down to the piano and sang: little Italian folk-songs and German lieder. When he was singing, there was a simplicity about him that gave him a likeness to her. She hung over the piano, and seemed almost to forget where she was. When I remembered her confidences a few hours ago, I was puzzled.

Did she love him—or his music?

Presently, my question was answered. When he had sung half-a-dozen chansonnettes, he rose and came across to us.

“You like music, doctor?” he asked.

“I like yours,” I said emphatically.

“Has Lilia sung to you yet?” he asked.

“No, and I do not intend to,” said the young lady, jumping up from the sofa where she was sitting by Mrs. Mervyn, and joining us.

“And pray why not?” asked Sir Roderick.

She shook her head and turned aside. For a minute or two I naturally felt embarrassed. But I saw that Mrs. Mervyn was expostulating with her, and presently, after I had taken part in a conversation suddenly started by Mr. Mervyn on the strange vagaries of nervous diseases, apropos of an afflicted poor person he wished me to see, Lilia rose and came back, looking penitent.

“Can I speak?” she began, humbly, when a pause came. “Thanks! I will sing for you with pleasure, Mr. Paull.”

“Not unless you tell us the reason of your extraordinary caprice,” said Sir Roderick, half-bantering, half annoyed. “Come, out with it!”

“You insist, papa?” She spoke pleadingly.

“I do.”

“Mr. Paull reminds me of that dreadful time you were ill—away. I could not sing anything lively; I should choke.”

It was good to see the expression on that old man’s face. There was such a royal content on his fine old features as he looked up at his child.

“Sing one of your morbidities, then,” he said. “Ha! I know! Sing Hamlet that little Danish song. He ought to like that, naturally.” He was suddenly in high good humor.

She went obediently to the piano, took off her long mittens and bracelets (which she handed to Roderick as a matter of course), and sang a sweet, weird melody to Ophelia’s pitiful verses; sang it simply, with a clear, noble voice, the voice of a human being with a great soul.

It affected me, and I think that my emotion was the cause of my curious nervous condition that night.

We retired to our rooms pretty early. My old-looking chamber, with the blackened mahogany furniture, was flooded with moonlight. I had no intention of dreaming thoughts of the day over again all night long, as I have done when sleep has followed some hours’ concentration of thought on one subject; so I had borrowed a book from Sir Roderick—a treatise on “Somnambulism and other irregular manifestations of the Nervous Force,” translated from a work by some Dutch writer, name unknown, which he had spoken of.

Armed with this, I subsided into my feather-bed. (That feather-bed had something to do with what followed, I believe. I here vow myself to further the abolition of feather-beds; they should be taxed, and heavily.) I placed two candles on the little table by my bed, propped myself up against my pillows, and began to read.

The first chapters of the ponderous tome were soon dismissed. Exploded pathology and ancient fallacies filled Part I. of the Dutchman’s treatise. Had I felt at all sleepy, I should have laid down the book there and then, and have chaffed Sir Roderick next day for recommending me such old-fashioned stuff. But I felt absurdly wideawake. So I went on.

The introductory page to Part II. of the volume startled me somewhat. At first I doubted my eyesight. But there, sure enough, were the words—

“ON THE AGE OF SOULS.”

“What does he mean, the fool?” I thought, turning over. I soon knew.

The man, whoever he may have been, believed in that doctrine of transmigration, attributed in its raw state to Pythagoras, who is by some thought to have learnt it from the Egyptians; a fantastic notion which is still believed in by many Easterns, notably by the Buddhists.

This Dutchman spoke of the soul (the “breath of God”) as being born again and again, according to its moral progress; incarnations being its rule, until it should become sufficiently purified to be reabsorbed into the atmosphere of Divinity (something very like the Nirvana of Buddhism). I smiled, and thought that, judging by the people I had met, the world (according to the Dutchman) is likely to be well populated for a good many years to come.

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” wrote the Hollander, who was addicted to quotations, especially from Holy Writ. The good man, in enumerating the fatal signs of future reincarnation in individuals (whom he spoke of compassionately, for he evidently regarded human life as the greatest of ills), mentioned two particular signs, frivolity and self-absorption. Frivolity he seemed to hold in special abhorrence, as being so very far away from any attribute that might be termed eternal or divine.

This chapter “On the Age of Souls” was such diverting reading, that I grew wider and wider awake. At last, when two o’clock struck, I got up and dressed.

Looking out of window, the garden, bathed in moonlight, was such a ravishing sight that I thought—Why not go out for a stroll?

I would. I blew out my candles (I am certain I did), and opening my bedroom door as quietly as possible, crept downstairs, shoes in hand. Did ever stairs creak like those? Certainly not in my experience. Wondering where the dog Nero was, and whether he would be as amiably disposed towards a midnight marauder as he was towards his master’s guest in broad daylight, I gained the hall.

Then I remembered the bolts and bars. Should they be in as noisy a humour as the stairs, I should have to give up and go back—not to that hot feather-bed, but to my room.

Without in the least thinking it possible that the door to the garden would be unlocked, I tried the handle.

To my surprise, the door was unlocked. I was so astonished, that I stood there for a whole minute thinking how foolhardy was Sir Roderick, or how culpably careless were his servants. Open gates to the grounds, open doors to the house! It was positively inviting burglars to do their worst!

I thought of this as I walked along the white path, which crackled under my feet. I wanted to get out of sight and out of the hearing of any wakeful member of the household, so I went on and on, disregarding the tempting odour of the orange-blossoms in the Italian garden, the tempting sight of the terrace, with its white marble urns, benches, straight cypresses, and picturesque aloes, and was soon in the pinewood, among the gloomy trees.

It was gloomy. Standing still to listen, the silence was oppressive. Then, all of a sudden, there was a shrill skreel that made me start; and some bird, I suppose, came flapping out of the darkness and went fluttering away into the shadow. It must have been a bird, although it looked too big even to be a giant owl or a raven.

I laughed at my scared sensation, and walked briskly onward. Presently I came to a clearing where the grass was mown, and there was a bench against a clump of tall laurels.

I was going towards this with the intention of resting awhile, when I stopped short. A lady was seated in the corner, in the shadow.

Good heavens! It might be Lilia! She was just the girl to wander about out of doors on a hot night. I did not know whether I was glad or sorry when the being rose and came towards me. To my amazement, I saw a very graceful woman, in a white gown of some stuff which shimmered in the moonlight. A veil of black gauze or lace was about her head and neck.

“You are not—angry?” she said in a slow way; she had a foreign accent. “Come, I must speak.”

As she said the word “must,” she actually placed her hand on my arm in the most familiar way, and half led me across the grass plat.

“We will go to the terrace and talk,” she said presently, in quite an imperious manner.

I was so numbed by surprise, that I had gone passively with her some distance along the path that led away from the house or grounds before I had made up my mind what to do. She was no ghost. As she pressed close against my arm, I felt solidity and warmth. Then it flashed across me. She was dressed in quite queenly fashion. Of course! An escaped lunatic from a well-known private asylum in the neighbourhood. I stopped, withdrew her hand gently and respectfully, and suggested that she must be very tired.

“Allow me to take you home, princess,” I said, haphazard.

I had seemingly struck the right chord.

“Do not call me that any more!” she said, passionately. “I am less than you! Far less!”

Once more she took my arm, and hurried me along an uphill path I had not seen. To our left, below us, was the park, with the round chapel in the garden; to our right was a plateau, a long, wide, grassy avenue, with fine trees on either side.

My strange companion turned abruptly to the right, and almost dragged me along a grassy path that went straight to the end of the avenue, between beds of overgrown shrubs and tangled weeds. My wits were returning. I felt inclined to go through with the adventure. She was evidently a lady. There was no hidden danger, I felt that.

Half-way up this avenue there was a broken-down fountain. Around was a circular grass plat. As we reached this the lady relinquished my arm, stepped back, and began speaking rapidly in a language I have not yet heard. At the end, she seized my hand, and before I could snatch it away, kissed it.

I felt horribly unnerved. I begged her to let me take her home.

“It is by far too late for you to be here—alone,” I said.

“Late?” she cried, in English. “It is not late!”

“It must be three o’clock,” I said.

Then I took out my watch and tried to see it in the moonlight. Just as I did so, a clock struck three.

“You hear?” I said, turning round.

She was not there!

It gave me a shock. Then I remembered how swift and noiseless lunatics can be. There had been time enough for her to slip away under the trees. First, I listened. Not a sound; not the rustle of a falling leaf, not the crackle of a twig. Then I searched, and called; until a sudden uncanny sensation that I was the subject of some temporary delirium sent me, flying almost, towards the house.

I was thankful to see its white walls, to find the door open, and to gain my room.

As soon as I had done so, I felt such sudden fatigue that I got back into bed again as quickly as I could, and fell asleep directly.

I have set this down just as it seemed to me to be happening, neither more nor less.

Now comes the, to me, most curious part.

I was awakened by the footman bringing me the hot water. After he had gone out of the room, I turned to get up, when my attention was arrested by the china candlesticks on the table by the bed. The candles were burnt out, and the china rims were blackened.

“I put those out; I could have sworn it,” I said to myself. I remembered noticing the peculiar shape of one of the gutterings. It was like a monkey crawling up a stick. Could I have lit them on my return? I thought. No! I remembered throwing off my clothes in the moonlight, my eyelids weighed down by sudden drowsiness.

While I had my bath and dressed I pondered. No result came from my ponderings.

Then I heard fresh young voices, and hurried my dressing. Some feeling urged me to interrupt a bantering tête-à-tête between Roderick and Lilia. Going down, I found them in the hall: Lilia was standing against the billiard-table, frowning; Roderick was talking earnestly to her. He stopped speaking when I came in. She blushed.

Why blush? It was no business of mine, of course; but I did not wish to find that charming young creature utterly inconsistent. And any parleying from a lover point of view, with her cousin, after yesterday’s confidences, would prove her undeniably inconsistent.

But the blush faded, and she looked grave when she saw me.

“I am afraid you have had a bad night, Dr. Paull,” she said, kindly.

“Why?” I asked, nodding back good-morning to Captain Pym.

“You look so tired.”

I vouchsafed that I had an early morning stroll, and spoke of the unfastened door.

“The door into the garden?”

She looked amazed; and then walked to that door and tried it.

“It is locked and bolted now, whatever it was then,” she said.

I joined her, and sure enough it was.

“The omission must have been found out and rectified,” I said.

Indeed, I was absolutely certain on that point. That door was unchained and unbolted at two o’clock that morning.

She was concerned, and begged me as a favour not to mention the fact to her father. I did not. He just came into the hall then, and we went in to breakfast.

After breakfast, Captain Pym took leave, and started for the camp. Sir Roderick settled, in his dogmatic way, that after church (this was Sunday) Lilia should take me round the grounds. He seemed astonished that I should wish to accompany her to morning service.

“I thought you and I agreed on those subjects,” he said. “I had been looking forward to a pipe and a chat while Lilia was on her knees trying to propitiate her Fetishes.”

“Just as you please,” I said.

Glancing at Lilia, I fancied she looked disappointed. But Fancy seemed to have got me in a vice and to shake me like a dog shakes a rat, all the time I was at the Pinewood.

It was settled I should accompany her. Meanwhile I went into the study with Sir Roderick, and presently we got upon the subject of the Dutchman’s treatise.

“How did you like it?” he asked.

“It is hardly a question of liking,” I said. “The man is as illogical as Swedenborg, without the originality or the power.”

He looked surprised.

“How?” he said.

“That chapter ‘On the Age of Souls’ seems to me almost an absurdity,” I could not help saying.

“On what?” he said, taking his long pipe from his mouth, and staring curiously at me.

I repeated what I had said, adding comments on the extravagance of that part of the treatise.

He shook his head, puzzled.

“You must be dreaming,” he said. “I have no book in my library containing stuff of that sort. Where is it?”

I offered to fetch it, but he had already sounded his hand-gong, and James was sent for the volume.

He was absent but a minute, but the time seemed long to me. Sir Roderick puffed away at his pipe, with an amused smile which was peculiarly exasperating.

His hand went out for the volume as soon as James appeared, and of course the young man gave it to his master, who carefully looked it through, then handed it to me.

“I cannot find this redoubtable chapter,” he said; “perhaps you can. But I flattered myself I knew the book well.”

I began at the beginning, turning over the pages carefully one by one, and recognising what I had read overnight. By the time I had come to the end of the first chapter I felt more assured. But when I turned over to the second, it was totally unfamiliar. I had certainly never read a word of it before; and its heading was “On Ordinary Somnambulism.”

I went on turning the pages, feeling as if I was bewitched, until I came to the end; but there was no chapter that even alluded to any doctrine of transmigration, and certainly no heading bearing the faintest resemblance to that curious title, “On the Age of Souls.”

“It is most extraordinary!” I cried. “I could swear to having read what I told you about. I remember the very words and the quaint turning of the phrases.”

He asked me how I had read it; then laughed at me.

“I hit the mark when I said you were dreaming, Hamlet,” he said. “It has often happened to me to continue thinking after dropping asleep, and nice bathos the thoughts are!”

He dismissed the matter as a joke; but it was no joke to me. I was bewildered. When I think of it now the bewilderment is greater, the sense of confused perceptions more alarming.

During the talk which followed, I tried to gain a clue to the strange lady I met in the grounds. I casually alluded to the asylum in the neighbourhood, and asked if the authorities there were not almost lax in their vigilance.

“I cannot help thinking that I met an escaped madwoman, when I was taking a walk early this morning,” I said. “She looked, and I think must be, insane.”

“You could not have met a lady patient of Dr. Walters’, my dear Hamlet,” said Sir Roderick.

I asked, “Why not?”

“For a very good reason, the best of reasons,” he replied: “he hasn’t any. He only takes men. In which, I may add, he shows his wisdom, for female lunatics are the most disgusting creatures on earth. Pah! let us change the subject.”

I was only too glad. But I was not in the least fit for a scientific discussion with my host. I felt a dread gradually investing me—a dread lest I should find that the deserted spot the strange lady dragged me to last night actually existed in the grounds.

If I should come upon it just as it was, I should believe in my adventure as a fact. In that case, how about the missing chapter “On the Age of Souls”? For if my adventure actually happened, I was not asleep and dreaming immediately beforehand; at all events, it was extremely improbable that I was.

I was getting considerably strung up, when a tap came at the door, and Lilia came in, fresh, sweet in her muslin summer dress, like Dawn dispelling the dismal darkness of my thoughts.

“A quarter-past ten, and service begins at eleven,” she said.

“And it is about seven minutes’ walk to the church. Sit down, we are talking,” said Sir Roderick, dictatorially.

She looked wistfully at me.

“I thought you wanted to see the grounds,” she said.

“So I do, very much indeed,” I said.

My host did not look best pleased. He little knew what was in my mind.

Nor did she, sweet girl, as we started; and she would stop here and there to show me some choice foreign shrub or some new plant, or the view from this or that particular spot. All the time I was wondering how I should introduce the subject of the neglected plateau with the broken-down fountain.

The opportunity came.

“Your father does not allow any part of his shrubberies to run wild,” I said; “but I fancied I saw a wild-looking spot among the pines, where there were neglected flower-beds and the grass was unmown.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know of any place about like that,” she said, reflectively. “No! I am sure that none of the flower-beds have weeds. Papa hates weeds: and weeding gives employment to people who cannot do much else.”

I had hardly time to be reassured by this support of the theory that the events of last night meant nightmare and nothing else, when we suddenly came upon that clearing with the grass plat. That bench under the laurels, where the lady had been sitting, was there. It was the same spot I had seen by moonlight—the very same.

“I come here and read sometimes on summer afternoons,” said Lilia, looking up at me innocently. “Why, what is the matter, Mr. Paull? You are frowning.”

“I was thinking that this is rather a damp place,” I said, “and cheerless looking.”

“Not to me,” she said. “But I only come here on really sultry days. When it is simply mild, I prefer the terrace. You haven’t seen the terrace. Do come, it has a history.”

The terrace! The terrace with a history! So it was not a dream; no, something far more disagreeable. Then and there I began to wonder whether I had not hit upon a family mystery. As we strolled along the path I had walked over but a few hours since with an unknown lady hanging familiarly upon my arm, I was imagining a possible elucidation of my mystery. Lilia’s mother—of whom I had heard absolutely nothing—perhaps mentally afflicted, shut up in some cottage or house on the estate, and wandering by night? Other even more extravagant ideas occurred to me.

No! that idea was untenable, for my moonlight acquaintance was indisputably a very young woman, almost a girl.

At that moment we came to the upward path leading to the plateau. I recognised it at once. Below was the park, with the chapel.

But—yes, it was the plateau, but not as I had seen it. The trees were pruned, the grass-walks smooth as green velvet, the flower-beds brilliant with blossom.

“We often have tea here, papa and I,” said Lilia. “The story goes that this was the flower-garden of the old house two hundred years ago, and that they used to have afternoon gatherings here, like the garden-parties people have now.”

She must have thought me abnormally stupid that Sunday morning. When I saw a marble fountain, with water splashing into a basin where gold-fish were swimming, instead of the wrecked, broken-down object in my dream, I took refuge in silence; and as soon as I could, I left the uncanny spot. Whether I had dreamt of it, or of some place like it, of that I felt sure—the spot was uncanny.

While we walked through the wood towards the church, Lilia talked, but I heard little of what she said. She was telling me some story of a duel between the former proprietor of the Pinewood and a supposed friend, which had taken place on the terrace, and the chapel below was erected in memory of the event. If it was not exactly this, it was very much like it; and really I do not care. All that I want now is to find out whether my brain played me false that night, and whether I am likely to be the victim of brain disease if I go on working as hard as I have worked.

That darling girl! How good she was to me, how patient!

In spite of my inward anxiety, I shall always remember that Sunday with pleasure. The little whitewashed church, with the honest rustics singing hearty hymns to the quavering organ, while sunbeams came and went upon the walls, and the quivering foliage of an elm in the churchyard cast green lights upon my open prayer-book. The Mervyns are nice people. Mrs. Mervyn is a trifle too sharp, perhaps; I saw her eyes fixed upon me now and then with rather too scrutinising an expression. But it is very pretty, almost touching, to see her ways with that motherless girl. She loves her really, the good woman! When we were walking in the garden, Lilia and Mr. Mervyn strolling on in front of us, she was so good as to tell me she was glad I had come.

“Lilia knows so few young people, and no girls,” she said. “It is a law of her father’s, and always has been. Poor dear child! she is really not fit to face the world. She knows absolutely nothing of it.”

“Let us hope she may not be called upon to face the world,” I said.

[Here the written pages in a notebook of Hugh Paull’s abruptly ended.]

CHAPTER IV.
A MORAL DUEL.

“Dr. Hildyard wishes to see you, sir.”

“Where is the doctor?” Hugh asked, putting aside the notebook in which he was writing.

A short, square man, with shaggy grey hair and keen blue eyes, came bustling in.

“How are you, Paull? Want a few words with you on private business.”

“Certainly,” said Hugh, bringing up a chair; but the doctor impatiently waved his hand.

“No, no! I ought to be miles away as it is. Do you remember that case of Sir Roderick Pym?”

Did he remember it? But the doctor was utterly unconscious that he was ironical.

“Ah! Well, you pulled him round, and watched his progress so closely that I should be glad of your opinion in a case of mine, very like his.”

Dr. Hildyard detailed the case, which was one of concussion similar to Sir Roderick’s; and the next time Hugh was off duty he accompanied the well-known specialist to see his patient, a middle-aged lady, whose brougham had been overturned by collision with a dray-cart.

He felt the distinction of his opinion being sought by so great a man keenly, but kept this most unusual honour a secret, even when writing home. Meanwhile, he gave his opinion modestly, but firmly. That opinion was in favour of a different course of treatment to the one pursued by Dr. Hildyard.

Dr. Hildyard modified his treatment, and liked the young man all the more for speaking frankly. A frank, bold man himself, he hated sycophants.

When, a few weeks later, the patient died, he said:

“Perhaps, after all, Paull, your treatment might have brought her round.”

Events worked curiously in Hugh’s life from first to last. Sir Roderick’s accident had brought about his meeting with Lilia, of whom he constantly thought, although he had not written—after his first note to announce his safe return to Sir Roderick—and he had not received any communication from the Pinewood. It had also led to this special notice from Dr. Hildyard; and that special notice brought about a strange rencontre, which was destined to be of lasting import in his extraordinary life.

It had been an unusually busy time in the hospital. Still, he was so much haunted by thoughts and memories of the Pinewood, and his experiences there, that, to distract himself, he gave every spare hour to the treatise he was writing when Sir Roderick’s accident changed the current of his thoughts.

He was at his desk one morning, when a note was brought to him from Dr. Hildyard, asking him, as a special favour, to dine with him that evening (one of his “evenings off”).

Seven o’clock found him dining tête-à-tête with the genial specialist, in his house in B—— Street. The family were away.

The doctor, never at any time a lover of social ceremony, dismissed the servants as soon as possible, and then told Hugh what he wanted of him.

“I have a most interesting but puzzling case,” he said. “There are some nice people I know in the neighbourhood, the widow of a general practitioner and her two daughters, who add to a small income by letting lodgings. I generally send them patients of mine who come up from the country for treatment. The other day a doctor in Stainbury, an old friend of mine, wrote to me. A sad accident had occurred at the theatre there, during the performance of an opera by a travelling company. A scenic staircase, or tower, or something, had given way, and the young lady who was singing had a remarkably awkward fall. Her spine was not fatally injured, but the concussion had been followed by symptoms so new to him that he wished to send the case on to me, provided he could raise a subscription. The girl was poor and friendless, etcetera. Well, of course, I was only too glad to do what I could. I wrote back, if he would see to her removal here, and could get some of his rich friends and patients to help a bit, I would see to her for nothing, and her lodging could be paid out of a fund I keep going for poor patients. You see, Paull, sometimes matters go very well very unexpectedly with my special cases. (I was going to say our special cases, for I see you are doomed to nerve specialism.) Then the patient’s friends often get gushing. Some gush in words, but some wish to ‘give me some little token,’ as they call it. Then, when I know they can afford it, I bring out the account book of the poor patients’ fund, and get a handsome subscription or donation, or both. Well, the girl came up, and has been with Mrs. Draper for the last three weeks. They are very kind to her. She has a nurse, of course. But we make no progress. To-day I feared she was sinking.”

At first, Hugh excused himself, almost with a fear that Dr. Hildyard’s opinion of his ability was a hallucination.

Did some warning of the influence this incident was to have upon his future make him feel so strong a disinclination to meet the doctor’s wishes to-night, and visit his interesting patient with him? Oftentimes, in after years, he thought back, and asked himself that question, which none could answer.

It was bad enough to be called upon to pronounce on a case which had been a perplexing one to Dr. Hildyard.

It was only after further talk on the part of the doctor, who insisted on the fact of the peculiar insight Hugh had shown on various occasions being no credit to its owner—in fact, being perhaps somewhat of a drawback to the development of talents which were necessary to the making of a sound medical man, that the young surgeon gave way.

Almost as soon as he had reluctantly consented, the butler announced that the carriage was at the door.

“It is a mere stone’s-throw,” said Dr. Hildyard, as they drove through the lamplit streets. “We might have walked; but it is raining very fast now, and I promised to drive you back, if you remember.” Then he chatted away very fast till the brougham turned the corner and stopped before a tall house in a street leading out of a well-known West-end square.

“Here we are,” said the doctor. “How is Miss Morton to-night?” he asked of the neat parlourmaid, who opened the door. “Oh, there is nurse!”

A tall young lady, in the dark dress and picturesque cap and apron of a professional nurse, appeared on the first landing.

“Come up,” said Dr. Hildyard to Hugh, running up the stairs. “Nurse, this is the medical friend I spoke about this morning.”

Hugh followed the nurse and doctor, feeling as if in some strange dream. Truly, of late, his hitherto humdrum and monotonous life had changed—had utterly changed.

“As if Fate had overlooked me—poor insignificant unit—until now, and had pounced upon me with a vengeance, and intent to make up for lost time,” he thought.

They were conducted to a second-floor sitting-room—a comfortable room enough, with flowers and pretty knick-knacks about—while the nurse went into the next room, the sick chamber.

Coming back, “She is quite ready,” she said, addressing Dr. Hildyard.

“You see her,” he said, shortly, to Paull.

“Without you?” Hugh was astonished.

“Certainly.”

Dr. Hildyard sat down at the table and took up a newspaper that was lying there. There was a peremptoriness in his voice and manner which forbade Hugh’s further questioning. He paused a moment, then turned and followed the nurse into the next room.

It was large, bright, airy, and cheerful, with its light maple furniture and white hangings. Coloured engravings of pleasant subjects hung on the walls. After the bare wards of the hospital, Hugh felt that it would be almost a luxury to go through an illness here.

He changed his mind when he saw his patient. No face among the many he had watched lying on the hospital pillows had looked as pitiable as this. The girl was beautiful, even now that the pallor of her oval face was as the pallor of the dead, that her delicately-shaped nose was pinched and transparent in the light of the shaded lamp at her bedside; and her large, dark eyes had the solemn, wondering expression he had so often seen on the faces of the dying. In health she must have been—lovely, a “perfect woman, nobly planned.”

She made no remark when the nurse told her it was Dr. Hildyard’s wish that this gentleman should see her, but meekly submitted, answering Hugh’s questions in a clear though feeble voice. In about twenty minutes Hugh returned to Dr. Hildyard.

“Well?” said the doctor.

Hugh closed the door and came towards him. “I cannot find the slightest physical cause for this extraordinary debility,” he said. Then he was silent.

“And that is all you can say?” asked Dr. Hildyard.

“All—but—something very unscientific.”

Dr. Hildyard uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Well! but, my dear fellow, it is just your impressions that I want,” he said, almost impatiently. “I can form conclusions for myself. In fact, I want your medical instinct.”

“I—know,” said Hugh, deprecatingly. His eyes had the glaze of intense preoccupation. “Of—course—you—have formed scientific conclusions. I—only seem to—see. And I saw—a peculiarly delicate and sensitive temperament, with a deep, strong ego beneath. The girl has been deeply wounded, so deeply—I am speaking of her mental nature, not of her body—that, if I were you, I should think it cruel to keep her alive.”

They talked in subdued tones for some minutes. They continued the discussion while Dr. Hildyard accompanied Hugh to the hospital gates, which he entered, pledged to the physician to watch the case for the next few days.

The next day he appropriated the dining hour of the hospital staff to his visit to the sick girl. The nurse was reading to her when he entered the room. She was an intelligent, sweet-faced woman, and spoke quite tenderly of her charge when she followed Hugh into the sitting-room, after he had concluded his visit to the patient.

“I cannot understand the poor girl, Mr. Paull,” she said, confidentially. “She seems slowly sinking. The first animation she has shown was to-day, when I was trying to cheer her up a bit by telling her some little family anecdotes. I was just showing her the portrait of a scapegrace brother of mine, who ran away and enlisted, when she gave a start—a wild look at me—and fainted.”

Hugh asked to see the portrait. It was the photograph of a young man in uniform—an ugly likeness of the nurse’s, his sister. He was evidently quite young, and very uninteresting in appearance.

“He is not much like you,” said Hugh, cautiously. “I seem to know that uniform, though. What is his regiment?”

“The 45th Fusiliers,” she said. “They are at Aldershot now. My brother called here to see me the other day.”

“Can there—could there, by any possibility, be any acquaintance between your brother and our patient?” suggested Hugh.

Nurse Bryant completely negatived the idea. Her brother had enlisted in a huff. He had been very silly about his employer’s daughter, and there had been a family row, which was the actual cause of his taking the Queen’s shilling.

“Has she not confided in you—I mean about her family—her affairs?” asked Hugh. “Has she told you—nothing?”

“Not—one—word—not even a hint,” emphatically said the nurse.

Miss Bryant confessed herself more absolutely ignorant of the dying girl’s antecedents, as well as of her actual thoughts and feelings, than she had been of those of any patient up to the present time.

“Try and gain her confidence,” was Hugh’s urgent advice to the nurse. He returned to the hospital more than usually thoughtful.

Next day, when he visited her, he asked her whether she had any dread as to the termination of her illness.

A faint colour rose to her cheek. “Oh!” she said, clutching nervously at the sheet with her emaciated fingers, “do you think I shall die?”

It was the hopeful eagerness with which patients generally asked him, “Do you think I shall get well?” Hugh began to see light.

“You speak almost as if you did not wish to live,” he said gravely. “Surely that cannot be. You are young, and neither I nor Dr. Hildyard think that there is any real reason why you should not be restored to your old active life, and to your friends.”

Her eyelids drooped. “I have—no—friends,” she said, with effort. “I left my elder sister and brother, and went on the stage. They have not forgiven me. I have no parents. They are dead.”

“But——” Hugh hesitated a moment. “You know I have heard all about you,” he said. “You were making success after success in various provincial towns—you must have already had scores of admiring friends among the public when that unfortunate accident occurred.”

“Accident!” she said, scornfully. “That was no accident.”

“It could not possibly have been anything else,” said, Hugh, warmly. “No human being could have been so brutal——”

“No one—was—brutal,” she said; her breathing rapid with the fatigue and excitement of speaking. “I—did it—myself. I—flung myself down—and pulled the scene—with me. It came to me—suddenly. I felt I could not live—any—longer.”

Her great shining eyes were dry—but their agonising wistfulness was more piteous than tears. Hers was evidently some incurable grief. Hugh felt disinclined to probe further. Still, he spoke gently and comfortingly to the poor child—the friendless, motherless girl. He said, truly, that he felt no doubt but that her rash act was the consequence of overstrain. Were she to die now, or later on, she would not, in his opinion, be guilty of the frightful crime of self-murder. Then he asked her, seeing that her troubled expression remained, whether she would like to see a clergyman.

“Then you do believe I shall die?” she said, a sudden light crossing her face like a sunbeam. “Oh, thank God!”

Hugh nearly started up from his chair. Certainly the mental state of this poor young creature was a new experience. What should he say—or do? She saved any hesitation by seizing his hand in her burning fingers.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you will do something for me after I am dead.”

Once more Hugh hesitated. He would not promise anything, or bind himself to anything, until he knew the whole truth about that which he might undertake (he would even not say would undertake).

Then the truth came out. It was the old story—love, deception, and the inevitable parting of sinner and sinned against. Olive (that was his patient’s Christian name) had met her hero at a musical party. He had been interested in her singing, and had become a frequent visitor at her brother’s house. He persuaded her brother to allow her to live in London for a time, to study, and himself recommended persons who would, he said, care for her as their own daughter during that time.

She went to London, and saw her lover as often as he could contrive to come to town. She considered herself engaged to him; he even went so far as to fix their marriage. But all was to be kept secret. Her preparation for the stage was also kept secret, her future husband promising her marriage immediately after her first appearance. This she made at a theatre in Ireland. Her lover was present—but the next morning she received a letter from him telling her that all must be over between them. He found that their marriage would ruin his career, and he begged her, if she had any affection for him at all, never to see or write to him again, and, forgetting him, to accept the profession he had planned for her instead of a husband. Brokenhearted, she wrote a long letter to her sister, which was answered by her brother in the harshest terms, telling her she had made her own bed and must lie on it.

After that she roused herself, worked hard, and achieved many triumphs. Then came bitterness, desolation of soul, and the sudden fit of despairing frenzy during which she had attempted suicide on the stage.

She entreated Hugh to take charge of a sealed packet after her death. There would be no address on the outside—but she begged him, after breaking the seals, to send the packet, unopened, to the person to whom it was addressed on the inside envelope, and never, under any circumstances whatever, to mention her story to anyone.

Hugh promised. After all, it was little that she asked; and, as her exhausted brain became confused, she forgot to exact any further promises as to his future conduct in respect to the man who had treated her as unscrupulous men mostly treat loving, generous, and unprotected women. When the nurse, directed by her patient, found the sealed packet and placed it in Hugh Paull’s hands, the dying girl’s false-hearted lover was virtually at his mercy.

After a long and fatiguing evening—there had been more casualties in the district than usual—Hugh was leaning out of his bedroom window, smoking and gazing down upon the moonlit quadrangle, when there was a knock at his door.

It was a special messenger with this note from Dr. Hildyard:—

“Thursday, 9 p.m.

“Dear Paull,—Shortly after you left to-day our patient succumbed to syncope of the heart. I have given certificate of death. But, wiring to Dr. Bartlett, at Stainbury, he wires back that he knows nothing of her personally, and has no idea who she is. The theatrical manager, now in Liverpool, was wired to and returned similar reply. The nurse has informed me you have a sealed packet, and can doubtless give us clue to her identity. Messenger will wait for your reply.

“Yours always faithfully,

“Chas. Hildyard.”

Hugh conducted the man who had brought the letter to his sitting-room below, lit the gas, opened the safe, and took out the sealed packet. He turned it over with a strange reluctance. He felt he could not open it then and there, with strange eyes watching him; so, giving the man some newspapers to look at, he took it upstairs with him, and by the uncertain light of a flickering candle broke the many seals of the packet which contained the dead girl’s secret.

What was it? Was some demon mocking him? There, staring him in the face, were the words—distinctly written on the packet—

Captain Roderick Pym,

45th Fusiliers.

He mechanically whispered the name to himself as he sank into a chair, staring at the package.

“Captain—Roderick—Pym,” he repeated, as a horrified, stunned feeling brought cold sweat upon his forehead. “What—how—when?”

His eyes felt as if stiffening in his head. The candle seemed to burn a dull red; the bed, chairs, chest of drawers to tremble and swim in the moonlight.

“Come, come,” he said to himself. “This will never do. It is a coincidence, that is all. Society is made up of tiny circles. This is the most ordinary coincidence, such as happens to everyone at least once or twice in a lifetime.”

Pulling himself together, he forced himself to grasp the situation. The unidentified corpse lying, a burden to strangers, in a London lodging-house. Dr. Hildyard, overweighted with work and all sorts of responsibilities, awaiting the return of the messenger below before the dead girl could be coffined. And upon himself depended the clue that would make proceedings easy.

Roderick—Pym! Lilia’s cousin and possible future husband, Sir Roderick’s nephew and favourite, the dastard who ruined that fair young life? It was impossible. Utterly impossible—an idea untenable for a moment—he told himself, as he feverishly paced his room.

Roderick was possibly a mutual friend of the actors in that wretched little tragedy. He did not believe that the poor young creature who had shown no symptoms of anger, no suspicion of revenge, would trust the identity of the man whom she loved, although he had illtreated her, to a mere stranger—although she might to a mutual friend. No. Roderick Pym was most likely the confidant, the bosom friend—some evil feeling suggested the Mephistopheles—of the love story. At all events, he must not betray him in the affair. He must temporise.

By the time he had arrived at this conclusion, Hugh was more himself. He got out writing materials, and presently sent back Dr. Hildyard’s messenger with the following note:—

“Dear Dr. Hildyard,—It is true that your patient entrusted me with a sealed packet, but I am in honour bound only to confide the packet, secretly, to another person. All I can do is to communicate at once with that person. I hope the upshot will be that I may speedily assure you as to the identity of the deceased lady.

Yours most faithfully,

“Hugh Paull.

“I will write, or see you, as soon as I have any information.”

The messenger despatched, Hugh considered what was next to be done. His first impulse was to take the last train to Aldershot, and see Captain Pym. Second thoughts forbade this hasty move.

“I know little or nothing of these military men,” he thought.

His own code of morals and theirs must certainly differ. Still it was essential that he should gain some knowledge by means of that package, which most probably contained letters. After consideration, he resolved to surprise Roderick Pym into some admission. Unpleasant though it was to him to act, to use subterfuge, he told himself that his only course was to be diplomatic.

Looking at his watch, he saw that to telegraph to Aldershot that night he must seek some central office. Fortunately, there was one not very far distant, from which he despatched this message:—

“To Roderick Pym, Captain — Division,

“45th Fusiliers, The Camp, Aldershot.

“Can I see you here to-morrow on most important and serious business? If you cannot leave, I must go to you.

Hugh Paull,

“The S—— Hospital.”

“I think that will fetch him,” he thought, as he returned through the silent City streets. “He will think it is something connected with the state of his uncle’s health—with Lilia.” He smiled bitterly to himself. “Heavens! how dare I suspect him of being that villain?” he thought. “Yet, would not any ordinary person do so? Can he be a near relation of that poor girl’s? I must not think of it all! Come what may, I must keep my head clear.”

Next morning the return telegram came:—

“Will be at your place about ten. Must be back here at three.”

It was well for Hugh that Friday was a busy morning, besides there being extra work on in consequence of yesterday’s influx of accidents; for, despite the close attention he must pay to his arduous occupation, his nervous agitation as ten o’clock struck from the tower above the entrance to the hospital was great.

At ten minutes past the hour he was fetched. “The gentleman” had arrived.

“He is ashamed of sending in his card,” thought Hugh. “Am I not good enough for him? Or has he an uneasy conscience?”

Captain Pym was in the hall, standing in an easy attitude, his hands behind him, swinging his cane, ostensibly studying the notices and regulations on the green-baize-covered board. He turned to meet Hugh with an amused smile.

“What laws of the Medes and Persians!” he said, airily, as he shook hands. “Ours in the service are mere child’s play in comparison! Well, what does the mysterious summons portend?”

His whole appearance—he wore a light shooting-coat and delicacies in ties and gloves—his flippant manner, just tinged with condescension—chilled Hugh, especially when he thought of that pale corpse, lying straight and still, whose poor thin hand had written the name of this human butterfly for the last time.

“If you will come to my room, I will explain,” he said, leading the way through the hall and up the stone staircase.

He had intended to suddenly produce the packet of letters and watch the effect upon Roderick. But, as he mounted the staircase, a better idea occurred to him.

“I suppose it is something about my uncle—poor old fellow,” said Captain Pym, as soon as they had fairly entered Hugh’s sitting-room, throwing himself into a chair. “Gad! How close it is to-day! Thunder about, I should say.”

“Very likely,” said Hugh, dryly, as he produced brandy and a siphon of seltzer, which seemed to suit his guest’s ideas, for he assumed a less patronising manner, even saying, “Thanks, old fellow,” quite familiarly as Hugh handed him the tall tumbler. “No, Captain Pym; I did not telegraph to you on the subject of Sir Roderick. The fact is, Dr. Hildyard has a patient who has had to do with the regiment—your regiment, I mean—and whom you can possibly identify.”

“Well——” Captain Pym paused, evidently annoyed. “Excuse me, Paull, if I say that I think that is about the coolest proceeding I ever heard of in my life! I am to be wired for because some fellow in the hospital wants identification! Why didn’t you write? I’d have sent up a non-com. to oblige you. But—really——”

“I think—that your friend—is an officer, Captain Pym.”

“Oh—well!”—Roderick tossed off his seltzer and brandy, and smiled somewhat sourly. “It was a curious thing to do—but you hospital fellows have ways of your own, I expect. Can’t be expected to know what’s what, of course. Where is the fellow? I don’t remember anyone I was particularly friendly with, by the way.”

“Your—acquaintance—is not here, Captain Pym,” said Hugh, hating the part he was playing—sickened as he felt by the young man’s manner, which was utterly different to that of the Roderick Pym he had met at the Pinewood. “The case is being privately nursed. If you would accompany me, a hansom will take us and bring us back within the hour.”

Roderick’s face brightened. He glanced at the clock.

“An hour!” he said. “I mean to make a holiday of what time I’ve got. You must lunch with me, Paull! We ought to be chums, you know, you being everybody at the Pinewood now. Why, my nose is quite out of joint. What a devil of a hurry you are in, man!” (Hugh had seized his hat, and had opened the door.) “The fellow, whoever it is, isn’t dying, I suppose?”

“No,” said Hugh, going rapidly downstairs and feeling that at least this was absolutely true.

Speeding along in a hansom, his volatile companion’s spirits rose; he laughed and chaffed and told anecdotes, rallying Hugh on his gravity.

“You medicos seem to me to think a lot more of death than we army fellows,” he said, as they neared the house with the lowered blinds. “I have a horror of killing: I acknowledge that. But as for death itself, what is a corpse, after all? A mere empty envelope. The likeness of the human being is the address; but the contents—the letter itself—is gone.”

Here Hugh shouted to the driver to stop, and without glancing at his companion, paid the fare and mounted the steps of No. 99. The sympathetic landlady had drawn down her blinds in respect to the dead girl, but Captain Pym did not notice this, he was looking after the departing hansom.

“You might have kept the fellow,” he said, discontentedly, as they entered the house.

Hugh muttered something about hansoms being plentiful in that fashionable quarter, and hurried upstairs, bidding Roderick follow.

The utter unsuspiciousness of Lilia’s cousin cut him to the quick. Yet, what was he to do? As he opened the door of the bedroom, he consoled himself by thinking how lightly Captain Pym had but a few minutes previously spoken of death.

Turning to hold open the door of the darkened room, he saw Roderick pause—his expression change. He looked sternly, distrustfully, at Hugh.

“What does this mean?” he said, entering and glancing from the bed, where a still, straight figure was visible under a sheet, to Paull. “The man, whoever he may be, is dead, and you must have known it.”

“I did know it,” said Hugh, calmly drawing up the blind of the window nearest the bed.

“Do you take me for a coward, then?” sneered Roderick.

“I will answer your questions presently,” said Hugh, watching Captain Pym closely, and throwing back the sheet to disclose the waxen, lovely face of the girl.

There was a calm about the large sunken eyelids, with their dark lashes blackly defined against the ivory cheek—about the pale forehead, surrounded by a glossy wreath of black plaits—about the arms, crossed upon her breast over sprays of white lilies; and upon the closely-shut, beautiful dead lips was the set, strange smile that seems to express: “Fear not—none can harm me, now.”

For one instant, Roderick swerved. He could not be said to shudder, or to start—he swerved, as if he had made a false step. Then, visibly paler, but perfectly composed, he leant forward, his arms upon the brass rail.

“You—recognize her?” asked Hugh.

Either this young man was the most accomplished and hardened hypocrite—or he was not the villain of the story. He felt puzzled.

“I—do,” said Roderick, straightening himself and looking Hugh full in the face. “But—excuse me—I cannot understand why it should have fallen upon me to identify her. Where are her friends?”

“The only person connected with her whose name we have—is yours, Captain Pym.”

Roderick shrugged his shoulders.

“It is a mystery,” he said. “I knew her brother and her sister. I knew her—also—slightly.”

Evidently he began to feel that this was a verbal duel. He spoke cautiously, choosing his words, and he kept his eyes fixed upon Hugh.

“Slightly?” asked Hugh, doubtfully. “Perhaps you will be so good as to explain?”

“You will be so good as to explain first, if you please, Mr. Paull. I cannot tell what this lady may have led you to understand. She was, as far as I can judge, impulsive and imaginative to a degree.”

“Do not asperse the dead, Captain Pym,” said Hugh, contemptuously. “A corpse is but a poor shield for a man’s conduct. To shorten matters, let me tell you that this young lady has told me—all.”

“All?” said Roderick, raising his eyebrows. “Allow me to congratulate you on your knowledge, then. I have not seen her for nearly a year—since which she may doubtless have had an interesting history of which I am absolutely ignorant. The last time I saw her she was acting and singing in an Irish theatre, and I was one of the audience.”

“And wrote her a merciless letter next morning,” said Hugh, confronting him and speaking in a low, stern voice. “You—under promise of marriage—oh, do not lose your temper, Captain Pym; you cannot frighten me! Under promise of marriage you persuaded this unhappy girl to leave her home and study, secretly, for the stage; you assisted her to make the appearance on the stage which separated her from her family forever—and then—you left her to her fate!”

“I admire your romance—I mean, the romance,” said Roderick, calmly, turning his back upon the bed. “I am sorry you should be so credulous, Mr. Paull; that is all I feel upon the subject. I will give you any information I can. Meanwhile, as I have never given the lie to a living woman, it is scarcely likely I shall do so to a dead one. Cannot we end our discussion in another room? Such talk is scarcely seemly here.”

“I will come,” said Hugh, wrathfully. “But, once more, do not insult the dead, Captain Pym. Your—letters—to this—lady—are in my possession.”

Roderick’s pallor assumed a greenish yellow.

“After you, Mr. Paull,” he said, bowing slightly, and casting an ironical glance at the sweet young corpse. “I cannot blame you. Only I hope you may never be dragged into committing yourself out of foolish good nature, as I appear to have done.” And replacing his hat, he walked towards the door.

“Good God—what a fiend!” thought Hugh, with a pitying glance towards the corpse. “Poor—unhappy—child!”

He had often been deeply touched by the innocent trustfulness of young children about to undergo terrible operations that meant kill or cure; he had frequently been shamed for his own impatience by the cheerful resignation of the sick and dying poor. But he had never felt such chivalrous sympathy as that which made him stoop—before he reverently re-covered that solemn, smiling dead face—and gently touch one thin cold hand with his lips.

Though he was neither kith nor kin to her—not even an acquaintance—her honour was safe with him, and he felt he would have staked his very life upon her truth.

He motioned Roderick to follow him, took him into the little sitting-room, closed the door, and faced him with righteous indignation.

“You are in my hands, Captain Pym, and at my mercy,” he said, harshly. “Only the truth can save you from exposure. It lies with Dr. Hildyard and myself whether there shall be an inquest or no; the cause of the patient’s death is sufficiently obscure to warrant legal investigation. As you know, every scrap of evidence must then be brought forward. Your letters will be produced. You will find yourself in an awkward position.”

This last blow, given literally in the dark, went home. Roderick bit his lip and looked dangerously at Hugh. For a full quarter of a minute the men’s eyes met, unflinching, then Roderick began to pace the room.

“One would think you had tampered with the woman yourself—at least, I might think so—only I happen to know you have succumbed to the fascinations of my cousin,” he said, sneeringly. “It is to this, I suppose, I owe your zeal on behalf of this young person.”

“Let us keep ladies’ names out of the conversation, Captain Pym,” said Hugh, who had flinched at the bare mention of Lilia. “Tell me the truth, like a man, and I will restore you your letters and bid you good-morning. But one condition will I make.”

Roderick paused, and looked full in his antagonist’s face.

“And that?” he said.

“You will entirely renounce all idea of marrying your cousin,” said Hugh.

It was his turn to pale to an ashen tint.

“Upon my word!” Roderick threw himself into a chair, and gave a scornful laugh. “By what right do you forbid the banns?”

“While I live, Captain Pym, she shall not marry you.”

“Then my promises are scarcely necessary, are they?” he asked, looking mockingly up and tilting his chair. “You have only to tell your wonderful tale to my uncle, and shew him your beautiful documents. Do so, and go to the devil!”

“As you please,” said Hugh, somewhat astonished. “Unfortunately, in telling the news to Sir Roderick, it must be told to the world, and your family name dragged through the mud.”

Captain Pym had risen to go. He paused.

“What do you want me to say?” he said, savagely. “Tell me what you accuse me of, and I will answer.”

“That is by far more sensible,” said Hugh, seating himself at the table, and drawing an inkstand and blotting-case nearer to him. “Now that you are inclined to listen to reason, the affair assumes a different aspect. You will find that, if you confide in me, I will hold my peace, while you hold the scheme of marriage with your cousin Lilia Pym in abeyance. Think! Can you give me your word?”

Roderick gazed gloomily at the one window. A canary was busily pecking at a morsel of sugar between the bars of its cage; below, in a mews, a man was whistling while he swept the pavement with a bass broom.

What, thought Hugh, was passing in that mind? Was it possible for some good to be left in that careless, cruel nature?

“I will give you my word,” said Roderick at last, somewhat sullenly. “You give me my letters, and I will not advance a step in the matter of marriage with Lilia. Heavens! do you doubt my word?”

“I will not,” said Hugh. “I will hope for better things than to find you utterly unworthy.”

At least, the young man had no depth of cunning; for it was he himself who had informed Hugh that he had written compromising letters to the dead girl.

“Come,” said Paull, more cheerfully, “tell me her name?”

“Her name is Olivia Fenton,” said Roderick. “Her parents are dead. I met her when I was at the Curragh. Her brother holds a living near there. She had a fine voice, and yearned to make use of it; but her brother and sister were against any idea of the sort. She appealed to me, and I helped her to come to London, and got people to look after her. During the time she was studying she, unfortunately, took a fancy to me. I liked and admired her; but as to marrying her, I knew such a thing was utterly out of the question. When I found that that was what she expected of me, I was horrified. She was on the eve of going on the stage, and I thought better to leave matters as they were until after her debût. She was successful, fortunately, and then I cut the whole thing.”

“As you ought to have done before,” said Hugh, sternly. “The old story—shut the stable door when the steed is stolen.”

“You did not gather that from my letters!” he cried, the blood rushing to his face. “The treacherous puss——”

“Hush! We are speaking of the dead,” said Hugh.

He was firm, composed. He knew as much now as it was necessary to know. He obtained the address of the brother and sister, pocketed it, and they left the house.

The sun was shining. In the full light of day Roderick looked ghastly. He stared vacantly at the life of the busy streets, and mechanically followed his companion. During their rapid drive back to the hospital [Hugh had chosen a hansom with a good horse, who covered the ground about as quickly as it could be done] Captain Pym said not one word.

Arrived, Hugh found himself demanded on all sides. The matron, coming out of the accident ward, met him with a disgusted frown; one of the ward Sisters, seeing him pass, hurried out, “Oh, Mr. Paull!” The dispenser was waiting outside his room door with a bundle of papers. He waved them all away. “He would be with them in a minute.” Then shutting himself in with Roderick, he unlocked his safe, and took out the packet of letters entrusted to him by Olivia Fenton.

“Before I give you these,” he said, earnestly to Roderick, “you must pledge yourself to give up all thoughts of marriage with your cousin. Oh! I exact no formal oath. A man’s word should be as good as his bond! Did I not still trust you to this extent, I should act very differently.”

Roderick held out his hand.

“I promise,” he said, with some show of emotion; then he eyed the letters greedily.

For one moment Hugh faltered in his determination. His fingers closed upon the packet; then he fulfilled his promise to his dead patient, and handed them to the man she had so fatally loved.

The captain glanced at the superscription, then at the seal; then he turned upon Hugh, his blue eyes aflame with anger.

“Good God! you have been lying!” he cried, wrathfully. “This is her seal—I know it—unbroken, and you said you had read the letters!”

He positively trembled with rage, and gnawed his fair moustache as he pushed the packet down into the inner breast-pocket of his coat.

“I made no such statement, Captain Pym,” said Hugh, calmly, leaning up against the mantelpiece and watching the young man’s ignoble exhibition of feeling. “I inferred that you might be the writer of them—that was all. The cap fitted, and you yourself voluntarily acknowledged their contents.”

“If you had been straightforward,” said Roderick, fiercely, “I should have been so, also. Now, look to yourself! This is my last word to you;” and seizing his hat, he hurried from the room.

CHAPTER V.
A STARTLING PROPOSAL.

Whether some feeling of remorse prompted Roderick to a tardy act of justice, Hugh could only conjecture. In any case, Olivia Fenton’s brother-in-law appeared and claimed the remains of his wife’s sister. There was no inquest, and the unfortunate girl was quietly buried in Woking Cemetery.

After those few days of excitement, Hugh’s life fell back into the daily humdrum. His thoughts were concentrated upon his work, now augmented by the final preparation for the coming examination for an important degree, so that the memory of Lilia, and that peculiar feeling, half pleasure, half pain, when he thought back upon his visit to the Pinewood, ceased to trouble him so much.

Weeks of quiet study, of unbroken hospital routine: then came two startling days, two startling visits.

It was a gusty autumn morning. Hugh was coming out of one ward and just about to enter another, when the hall-porter brought him word that the Rev. Mr. Paull was below and wished to speak with him.

He hurried downstairs and found his father, who informed him that he was paying a flying visit to town, and must have a serious talk with him on important business.

“It is quite clear we cannot talk here and now,” said Hugh.

“No, no, my boy; of course not.”

The old gentleman, who looked overwhelmed with some weighty affair or another, asked his son to dine with him at his hotel.

“And now for the serious talk,” said Hugh, who had been slightly amused at his father’s portentous manner and evident preoccupation during their dinner in a private room at a quiet hotel near Piccadilly, “I can see that something has happened. What is it?”

“Well, it is Daisy,” said Mr. Paull.

“Daisy! What is wrong?”

“Oh, there is nothing exactly wrong. But I shall know better presently. She is thinking of getting married.”

“Daisy married!”

Hugh smiled.

“Why not?”

“Somehow I can’t realise the idea of Daisy married. Who is the man?”

“Ah!” Mr. Paull drew up his chair and stirred the fire. It was a chill autumnal evening. “Do you remember the Danvers?” he asked.

“Of course.” (Mr. Danvers was a neighbouring clergyman, and his wife was a stout lady of much amiability, who, childless herself, had been fond of entertaining children.) “If I remember rightly,” said Hugh, “one of her juvenile parties brought about my first bilious attack.”

“I daresay. Well, you remember they went away for his health when you were at school, leaving a curate in charge. Since you came down last time, they have returned. At their house Daisy met this young man. I suppose you know that Mrs. Danvers was a Miss Clithero?”

“Clithero?”

Hugh gave a visible start.

“Yes; the sister of the Clithero who is partner of the Pyms. Oh! it is hard upon a man, Hugh, left alone as I am, when his girls begin to have love affairs.”

“It is,” said Hugh. “But whatever I can do, dad, shall be done. You know that.”

The old man was touched. For a few moments he gazed steadily at the fire. Then he said:

“I do; and I feel sure that you will tell me if there is any truth in the shocking stories about those Pyms.”

“The Pyms! What have they got to do with it?”

“The man who wants to marry Daisy is a son of the head of the firm.”

“Not Captain Pym?”

Hugh spoke almost fiercely.

“Why not?”

Mr. Paull looked at him curiously.

“Never mind. Tell me all—everything.”

It seemed that when Daisy Paull was staying at Mrs. Danvers’ house for a week, there had been also staying there a newly-ordained young clergyman, Herbert Pym, third son of Mr. Pym, the reputed millionaire. At the end of the week he had offered himself to Daisy.

“He is a nice young fellow,” added Mr. Paull. “Frank, no nonsense about him. He has expectations: will share equally with his eldest brother. He told me that his brother Roderick (the Captain Pym you mentioned) is to inherit nothing from his father, having been adopted by his uncle, Sir Roderick, who will leave him his whole fortune.”

“That is, to put it mildly, a mistake,” said Hugh. “You know that I stayed at the Pinewood, Sir Roderick’s place in Surrey, for a couple of days. Captain Pym is a favourite nephew, but is not an adopted son. Sir Roderick is wrapped up in his daughter.”

“His daughter? Now, Hugh, what is the mystery about that daughter? Is she an idiot? Don’t get angry! I have heard such queer tales.”

“Why did you listen to them?” said Hugh, disdainfully. “I thought you were above listening to gossip.”

“I was compelled, in Daisy’s interests, to investigate the matter,” said Mr. Paull, with a dignity which recalled Hugh to a sense of propriety his anxiety was tempting him to forget. “Mrs. Danvers hinted to me that, although Herbert was the nicest young man she knew, the family were eccentric. She had heard all sorts of things about them—untrue, doubtless; still, there seldom was so much smoke without some fire. Mr. Bullock, the banker, knew how much or how little there was in the stories. Now, Bullock being my banker, I called upon him.”

“Bullock,” said Hugh, thoughtfully. “He always seemed an honest, matter-of-fact sort of man. What did he say?”

“He said much,” said Mr. Paull. “There is a painful family story. What sort of a girl is this daughter?”

“Simple, innocent, good,” said Hugh, shortly, and in as matter-of-fact a manner as he could assume in his perturbation.

“Dear me! How strange that bad women so often have good children!” sighed his father.

“Is Lady Pym alive?” asked Hugh.

“I will tell you exactly what Bullock told me. Sir Roderick was quite different from that which I understand him to be now, when he was young. A roistering ‘young blood,’ as they termed fast young fellows then. There was a handsome girl who was one of the Society beauties. No one noticed Sir Roderick’s admiration. The young lady disappeared one season. Her disappearance caused quite a talk, especially as her relations were reticent on the subject. About two years afterwards, when she is almost forgotten, she reappears as Sir Roderick’s wife. When, how, and where they were married—why, and for what reason the affair was kept dark—no one has ever known.”

“But the child?”

“The girl seems to have been a young infant when they returned. Well, it appears that Sir Roderick was quite Eastern in his ideas of how a wife should be treated. He took that lively young creature to that place of his, the Pinewood, and shut her up. She saw no one but some of his relations.”

“Jealous, doubtless,” said Hugh, thinking back upon the pretty, mutinous face, miniatured in Sir Roderick’s locket. “Well?”

“Well, now comes the sad part. Mr. Pym, the brother, who was already a husband and the father of several children, had then, as I daresay you know he still has, an estate about twenty miles distant from Sir Roderick’s. He seems to have divided his time between the two houses. No one knows what took place there. But there was a serious family quarrel. Sir Roderick withdrew from the firm of Pym, Clithero, and Pym, and shut his doors against his whole family. The beautiful Lady Pym no one saw again. Some say she ran away and hid herself abroad: at least, hid herself from everyone but the object of her husband’s jealousy, Mr. Pym. The other rumour is that Sir Roderick shut her up more closely than ever, and that she died and was buried at the Pinewood.”

Hugh thought of the chapel in the grounds.

“That last story is more likely to be true than the other,” he said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Paull; “if, indeed, there is any fact in the gossip at all. Bullock said he felt positive that if Sir Roderick suspected his brother of wronging him in regard to Lady Pym, his suspicion had been utterly groundless. He knows Mr. Pym. He said that no doubt he pitied his young sister-in-law for being immured in so un-English a fashion, and did his best to brighten her life; but that this was all his part in the affair. That Sir Roderick has come to believe so too, is, I should think, proved by his love for his brother’s son.”

An idea came into Hugh’s mind which took away his breath for a moment. He unconsciously rose from his chair and straightened himself.

“How does anyone know that he is really fond of Captain Pym?” he suggested. “His statement that he is his heir may have been made in revenge, to spoil the young man, to place him in an unnatural position in his own family circle, and to leave him stranded and befooled at the last.”

“Impossible, Hugh! No human being could be so mean!”

“Nothing is impossible in Sir Roderick, father. Think back on what you have told me of his conduct to his wife! His brain is unbalanced. He is clever enough, kind enough, in a way; but he is extravagantly eccentric. For instance, I am sure he adores that daughter of his as far as he is capable of adoration; yet he keeps her as much shut up as he did her mother.”

“Poor child!” said Mr. Paull, sympathetically. “What a good thing it would be for her to know Maud and Daisy.”

“To return to Daisy’s affair,” said Hugh. “It does not seem a very bright specimen of a family to marry into.”

“My dear boy, all families have their skeletons in the cupboard,” said the rector, somewhat nervously. (Hugh was seemingly getting into one of his stern humours, which would be bad for poor Daisy.) “Find me the family that has not.”

“Ours,” said Hugh.

“I daresay, if the truth were known, our ancestors had their foibles.”

“Madness has, unfortunately, the habit of going obliquely, father; it often attacks the nephew or niece, rather than the son or daughter. This Herbert Pym may develop into a Sir Roderick.”

“Madness may do that, Hugh; but surely not eccentricity.”

Hugh paced the room and thought deeply. He had felt there was some mystery connected with Sir Roderick’s wife, Lilia’s mother. But that any scandal was attached to her name he had not believed. For himself, he would not care. But when his sister was in question, he felt it behoved him to be uncompromisingly judicial.

“I do not think mother would have liked Daisy’s marrying this young man, father,” he said at last.

“If you say that, you cannot have understood her, Hugh,” said the rector, warmly. “She was the largest-hearted woman on earth. Scandal was her greatest horror. When young Pym came to me and asked for Daisy, I felt she would have liked him. It was just that which influenced me.”

“Well, you know best, father. Shall I see him and talk to him? Perhaps I might say things to him that you could scarcely say.”

“I wish you would see him,” said his father, reassured.

Hugh left him with the understanding that whenever it suited the Rev. Herbert Pym to make an appointment he was ready to receive him as his probable brother-in-law.

But the meeting was destined to be postponed. Next morning, just before noon, the porter came again.

“You are wanted, sir. A lady, this time.”

“I am engaged, you know that,” said Hugh, annoyed, for a dresser he had had occasion to reprove was just passing, and he saw the young man grin. “You should have asked her name.”

“I did, sir. But she said it didn’t matter, she would not keep you a minute. I took her into the board-room, sir.”

She, whoever she was, had evidently known the passport to the porter’s goodwill, thought Hugh, running downstairs. What lady could it be? If it were Daisy, he would give her a scolding she would remember.

Entering the board-room he was met by Mrs. Mervyn, pale, agitated.

“Oh, Mr. Paull! How could you forsake us so?” she said, almost indignantly.

Then she broke down, turned away, and hid her face in her handkerchief.

Hugh was so taken aback that for a moment or two he stood and stared. Then he felt that something must have happened—he hardly dared think what.

“I—forsaken you?” he said, as Mrs. Mervyn conquered her emotion and sat down. “I have not heard one word from the Pinewood since I spent those two days there.”

“You have had a letter and two telegrams,” said Mrs. Mervyn. “Sir Roderick was taken ill a week ago. Lilia wrote and asked your advice. No answer came. She telegraphed. No answer. Captain Pym offered to go to town to fetch Dr. Beard, the physician our doctor asked for. Mr. Mervyn wired to you,—silence. Captain Pym said he called here, but finding that you had been in the hospital all the time, and that therefore you evidently did not want to be bothered with us, or you would have taken some notice of the letter and telegrams, he did not trouble you in the matter.”

Hugh repressed his impulse to anathematise Captain Pym as a liar. “My time will come; I will bide my time,” he thought. Then he turned to Mrs. Mervyn, and said, gently:

“There has been some mistake. It does not matter now. How is he?”

“Dying.”

Mrs. Mervyn gave an account of the last trying seven days: the attention of Dr. Beard, who gave no hope from the first; Lilia’s repressed anguish; the goodness of the two sick nurses; the summoning of the great Sir Edward Debenham yesterday (a mere matter of form, to state that death had proved himself conqueror, that nothing could be done to reverse the sentence). Then she was about to add something further, when Hugh asked, suddenly, hoarsely:

“If this be so, why have you come?”

“He asked for you—he wants you,” said Mrs. Mervyn. “He will not be pacified.”

“Did he know I was sent for?”

“Yes; and he knew no answer came. But it was he who said the messages could not have reached you. I would not be the one to suggest anything else.”

“You thought me a wretch, Mrs. Mervyn?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“What does it matter now?” she said, in agitation. “Let us go by the next train, if we can.”

Hugh procured a time-table. There was time to catch a fast train to F——. He saw the secretary, arranged for a deputy, and before he hardly realised the situation London was left far back in the distance in its purple veil of smoke, and they were rushing through brilliant autumnal scenes, under a breezy October sky.

They could not talk during the journey; they had fellow-passengers. It was painful for Hugh to think that Mrs. Mervyn had doubted him, and still more painful to remember Lilia. Of course the non-arrival of the letter and telegrams meant—Roderick.

Mr. Mervyn was on the platform, looking careworn and eager. At the sight of Hugh he brightened. He grasped his hand.

“I knew you would come,” he said. Then, drawing him aside, he said: “You did not get my telegram? I thought not. Say as little as you can, will you? and be as unfathomable as a sphinx. I will explain later.”

Evidently he knew more, in one respect, than Hugh did.

A light dogcart was awaiting Hugh, and presently he was speeding along the lanes between the devastated hop-gardens behind Reindeer, who was going at full speed, while Mrs. Mervyn was following in the brougham with her husband.

During the uphill slackening of Reindeer’s pace, Hugh gathered that Sir Roderick was still alive, though his death was, according to the doctors, imminent; that none of his servants were surprised—they had seen so great a change in their master since his accident; and that, since he had sent for his brother, Mr. Pym, even Miss Lilia had given up hope.

“Miss Lilia couldn’t have believed he was agoing to die like other folks, I don’t believe, sir, if it hadn’t ha’ been for that,” said the sagacious Thomas. “They said as when she heard that the captain was to fetch his father, at Sir Roderick’s wish, she fainted dead away. They haven’t been friends, you see, sir, for many a long year; and Sir Roderick, when he makes up his mind—well, it isn’t easy to turn him. So I expect Miss Lilia knew, when he sent for Mr. Pym, that there wasn’t what you might call a straw left to cling to.”

“She is better now?” asked Hugh.

“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure.”

It was hard work to obey Mr. Mervyn’s recommendation to be sphinx-like. But as the dogcart jogged down the steep incline leading to the garden entrance of the house, Hugh rallied himself, and determined to put aside all personal feeling, all emotions and passions, to follow no impulse, and to bear in mind that he was here on duty, as a species of death-bed sentinel—silent, motionless, except to salute the passing soul.

The house looked the same, as houses will, happen what may. There was even a greater gaiety about the place. A windy autumn day, when the cloudlets sail joyously across the luminous blue sky, and the red and golden trees are shaken by the fresh breezes, has a liveliness of its own, as if Nature were at play after the hard work of the spring and summer before the night of winter sets in, when she herself falls asleep. And within these four walls? As Hugh alighted at the garden door, and walked in without ringing the bell (all bells had been muffled by the doctors’ orders), he did not think with any pleasurable anticipation of the possible scene within.

But he miscalculated the influence of the young girl who was so soon to be left alone in the world.

As he entered the hall by one door, Lilia came in by another. She looked pale and thinner in her clinging grey gown; but she was calm, and met him with a half-smile and clinging clasp of the hand.

“You know?” she asked, in a hushed voice.

“That he is doomed by the doctors, and that a letter and two telegrams were not sent to me? Yes,” he said, dryly.

“I trusted——” She hesitated, and looked round.

“Explanations afterwards,” she added, with a hopeless, bitter meaning in her tones and manner. “Now we must only think of him. Will you have some refreshment, or see him now?”

“Now, at once,” said Hugh.

Then he followed her in silence up the old oaken staircase, wondering at her power of self-control—she, so sensitive and emotional a creature! Until now, she had drawn his sympathies by her gift of fascination; thus, she seized and held his respect.

At a tap from Lilia, a nurse opened the door.

“Mr. Paull,” whispered Lilia, gliding away.

“I am thankful you have come,” said the nurse, who looked worn and harassed. “There are two of us, but he has been dreadful. You are a doctor. You will not let him over-excite himself? We are to leave you alone.”

Hugh satisfied the nurse, as they stood by the door behind the screen. They whispered, but the hearing of the dying man was sharpened.

“Who’s—that?” Hugh heard, in reedy, querulous tones he hardly recognised.

“You must come at once,” said the nurse.

Then her worn, anxious expression suddenly changed to the placid, cheerful smile that is as necessary an adjunct in the case of a sick-room attendant as in a danseuse before the public.

Hugh, following her, saw a yellowish-white face on the pillows of a big bed hung with dark green. The change was at hand. Sir Roderick’s aquiline features were pinched and shrunken; the great bluish circles round his dark eyes intensified the fixedness of his gaze; there was the heaviness of death in his arms, stretched motionless at his sides.

“Hamlet!” he said, in a far-away voice, and his pallid lips drew aside in the faint mockery of a dying smile. “Come here—close. You two women, go.”

There was a slight suggestion of the living Sir Roderick in the irritable peremptoriness of that abrupt dismissal of his faithful nurses; in his “What on earth are they doing? Why don’t they go?” as they arranged bottles, glasses, and gong on a table at Hugh’s elbow; and in his “Are they gone?” when the door shut upon them so softly that he could not hear it.

“Of course they are gone.” Hugh bent over his former patient with a new, real tenderness. “I am here to do everything you wish me to do, Sir Roderick,” he said; “you have only to command.”

“Everything!” said the invalid, hoarsely, with a searching look.

“Everything that my conscience will allow me to do, Sir Roderick!”

The old man laughed, or tried to laugh; but it was a curious rattling sound, at which Hugh involuntarily bit his lip.

“That’s a dying laugh. Funny sound, isn’t it?” said Sir Roderick. Speech was evidently becoming more and more difficult. “Ugly sound; nasty feeling; choked feeling, too. I shall soon cast my chrysalis, Hamlet. I sha’n’t come to an end. No. I hope I shall be a poisonous serpent. Don’t look shocked. I want to sting human beings. They are worse than devils, if there were those fables. Yes, worse than devils,” he muttered, his eyes dimming with, Hugh feared, approaching coma. “Devils would be good if they could; men can be good, and won’t. I’m not dying, or going to sleep, Hamlet, so don’t look like that,” he suddenly said, in a voice so like his own, and with such reviving animation, that Hugh almost hoped that death was not imminent, despite appearances. “You clergyman’s son, you would like me to believe in devils, wouldn’t you? Well, I do. In human devils. And you must help me to punish them.”

The last words were said dispassionately, gravely. What did he mean? The old man groped for Hugh’s hand, which was resting on the bed near to his own. Hugh clasped the icy, clammy fingers in his warm, living grasp.

“Did you ever wonder why I wanted you here?”

It was a question, sudden, and to the point. With those dying eyes riveted upon him, Hugh must answer with bare fact.

“I did,” he acknowledged.

“I can’t waste my minutes palavering,” said Sir Roderick, irritable as he recognised his utter helplessness. “I read you like a book. I wanted you for Lilia.”

Hugh started, and flushed. The room seemed to sway and reel; he hardly knew whether he was shocked, hurt, delighted, or horrified. The possession of Lilia had been, so to say, hinted to him by his inclinations as something he might possibly dare to aspire to in the future. To have his ideal, as it were, snatched at, pounded together, and shot at him in this fashion was like being physically assaulted. He felt mentally wounded, but did not realise how or where.

“I see you know what I mean,” went on the dying man. “You blush like a girl. Love is nonsense. But you have a passion for her——”

“I love her!” interrupted Hugh. “I would not have dared—if you had not spoken.”

A dreadful chuckle from the sick man seemed to freeze Hugh. If Sir Roderick would only refrain from that ghastly, rattling laugh!

“You say you love her, but that you would not have dared—what bosh! Hamlet, you would be a bad witness. Never mind. The question is—to be, or not to be? Will you marry Lilia, or not?”

What a position! He was utterly unprepared, too. For some moments he hardly knew what to do or say; then he felt he must fight Sir Roderick’s eccentricity for her sake.

“What would your daughter say?” he asked, gently. “You must not dispose of her. No one has a right to dispose of another. Of course, I would ask her to marry me, if I thought she wished it.”

“Of course she wishes it!” gasped Sir Roderick.

His eyes shone with excitement; cold beads were on his pale forehead.

“How can you tell?” suggested Hugh, in desperation.

The sick man had a fit of gasping. Hugh supported him, fearing that the end was come. But after he had swallowed a stimulating draught, he revived somewhat, and asked that his brother, Mr. Pym, his nephew, Roderick, and Lilia might be summoned.

Feeling a certain dread and a thorough reluctance, Hugh fetched the nurses, one of whom was despatched to bring in Mr. and Captain Pym and Lilia.

“Hold me,” said Sir Roderick. “Sit by me. Yes, that’s right; and hold me. Goodness! why ever there are women nurses I can’t make out! They can’t hold one like that!”

It took all Hugh’s strength to support his host’s dead weight. Sir Roderick’s cunning had evidently not left him. In Hugh’s position, as prop to a dying man, he could hardly assert himself if called upon to do so.

The first to enter the sick chamber was Mr. Pym, a slight old man of middle height, with a long thin face and small keen eyes. His manner was quiet and self-contained. He accepted a chair from the nurse as calmly as he would had she been one of his clerks and he in his own office. “An emotionless man of business,” was Hugh’s mental comment. “The hero of a scandal? Never!”

Then came Roderick—pale, handsome. He inclined his head haughtily to Hugh, then bent over his uncle.

“You are not worse, uncle, I hope?” he said.

“Better, according to religious people, like your father,” sneered Sir Roderick. “You feel better every Sunday, don’t you, William? Nearer heaven? I’m dying, so of course I’m better, nearer heaven.”

Mr. Pym reddened. At that moment Lilia entered. Mr. Pym rose and offered her his chair. She was declining it, and going to the bedside, when her father querulously said, “No, no; take it!” and she accordingly seated herself.

“I wanted you together,” began Sir Roderick, “to tell you a few truths. I once believed in honest men.” He looked from one to the other; then gave a chuckle, and choked. When he recovered, he added, meaningly: “You, William, put an end to that. You made me wiser, much wiser.”

Lilia’s pale face flushed. Hugh met her glance of appeal, and turned away. What could he do?

Mr. Pym looked gravely at his brother; then, half-turning to the others, said:

“Pray, say what pleases you, Roderick; it will not hurt me.”

“You made a Diogenes of me,” went on Sir Roderick. “Well, at last, I found a man. This is the man—the rock I am leaning against to die!”

There was silence. Whatever Roderick or his father may have felt, they were silent; nor did they betray any emotion by glance or movement. But Lilia knelt down and kissed the cold hand lying on the bed. At that little spontaneous action Sir Roderick smiled, and Hugh began to believe that Lilia’s heart was his.

“I knew I was done for after the accident,” he went on; “but as I had found an honest man I didn’t mind. Where’s Mervyn?”

He roused himself, and struggled into a sitting posture.

“Don’t kneel there; fetch Mervyn, can’t you?” he said to Lilia, querulously.

“Fetch him,” said Hugh, pleadingly.

He felt overwhelmed by this sudden and unexpected crisis in his life. He pitied himself and each one of them for being, as it were, called to arms without hint or warning of war. And Lilia—he felt almost as if her holiest feelings were to be outraged. Yet, without troubling the dying man, he could do nothing to protect her.

There was a hush in the sick chamber. Roderick stood leaning against a wardrobe; Mr. Pym remained quietly seated as if he were on the magisterial bench, or in his pew in church. Presently the door opened, and Lilia came in, followed by Mr. Mervyn.

At the sight of him Sir Roderick gave a sort of grunt of satisfaction.

“You know what I want you for,” he said.

Mr. Mervyn’s pale face flushed, and he glanced uneasily round. Then he went up to the bed and laid his hand kindly on Sir Roderick’s.

“Not exactly,” he said, cheerily. “You must tell me, for you said so many things. I do not know which one of them you allude to.”

With evident difficulty, Sir Roderick raised his hand and pointed from Hugh to Lilia.

“Marry them!” he gasped. “Here, now, at once!”

Mr. Mervyn looked helplessly at Hugh.

“What am I to do, Mr. Paull?” he said. “Lilia!”

Lilia had evidently not heard, or hearing, had not understood.

“What is it he wants?” she asked, coming to the bedside.

“Will you marry her now?” asked Sir Roderick, struggling away from Hugh, so that he could look up into his face.

“If she consents,” said Hugh, looking fixedly at Lilia. But her eyes were cast down: she was red as a rose—the picture of shame.

Mr. Pym jumped up, as if suddenly awakened from a stupor of astonishment.

“I—I protest against this—this mad notion—this insult to my niece!” he began, evidently angered beyond power of self-control.

Once more Sir Roderick chuckled.

“You protest against her money being her own, eh?” he said. “You would like your handsome son to spend it on his women, eh? Stand back!” he said, solemnly, raising his hand warningly as Roderick stepped forward, white with passion. “Mervyn, marry them! Do you hear?”

“I cannot, my dear old friend; it is impossible. Think, I have no license. To read any service would be mere waste of words——”

His speech was interrupted by a hoarse cry, as the dying man turned up his glazing eyes and fell back into Hugh’s arms.

“Take them all away, and send the nurses,” said Hugh, peremptorily.

Mr. Pym and his son instantly retired, but Lilia pleaded to remain.

“Have mercy on me, and let me stay!” she said, turning from Mr. Mervyn to Hugh with a piteous expression in her distended eyes.

“You shall stay,” said Hugh, tenderly; “only wait just a minute. Nurse!”

Mr. Mervyn took her to the window, and said all he could think of to comfort her. He, like Hugh, sorry though he was, felt almost thankful to Death for putting an end to the embarrassing position. But all he could think of saying was nothing to the poor child in her agony, he saw that.

When the nurses had arranged the now unconscious man, under Hugh’s direction, Hugh came across to the window.

“Coma has set in,” he said to them; “all pain and suffering are over for him. But as this state remains somewhat of a mystery to us doctors—I myself believe there may sometimes remain a super-conscious state we know nothing about—will you come quite close to him, Lilia? Hold his hand; let your head rest by him. We never know, it might comfort him!”

Lilia put out her hand, and, guided by him, reached the bed. Presently the dying father and the living child were lying side by side, as motionless as if both were dead. The nurses sat near, watching and waiting. Mr. Mervyn and Hugh sat silently at the window, with plenty to occupy their thoughts. The minutes were slowly ticked off by the old clock outside the sick-room door, which presently, after some wheezing sounds, struck one, hoarsely, in a cracked, aged tone.

One of the nurses rose with a warning “Mr. Paull.”

Hugh knew then what was before him. He went to the bedside, gently roused Lilia, who seemed half-asleep, half-stupefied. Then followed the feeling of the dead man’s pulse, the listening to the silent heart, the mirror held over the blue lips—all in vain.

“Kiss him, dear,” said Hugh, tenderly, to Lilia.

She looked up at him with a wan, bewildered look—the look of a lost child; then she flung her arms round her father, and the touch of his icy face told her that she was an orphan.

She flung herself back with a shriek.

“You have let him die!” she cried, frantically, to Hugh. “How dared you? Why did you? Oh father! come back, come back!”

“Lilia! you forget,” said Hugh, firmly, seizing her wrist. “Remember, we cannot dictate to God!”

He threw all the will he was capable of into those words. To his relief, he felt that he had some influence over his future wife. She recoiled, he felt her stiffen; then she slowly turned her head towards him.

“He is gone? There is no hope?” she asked, quietly.

“No hope—here” said Hugh. “Now, you will be good, be worthy of him? You will come away with me, me (he trusted me, you know, dear), for a little while? We will come back very, very soon!”

Like a child she held out her arms, and allowed him to assist her from the bed, and to half-support, half-carry her from the room and downstairs to the drawing-room, where, like a tired child, she sobbed herself into calm, then sleep.

When she was soundly asleep upon the sofa, Hugh fetched Mrs. Mervyn.

“It is best as it is, is it not?” she asked him, somewhat timidly, by which Hugh gathered that the proposed death-bed marriage was no secret.

“I hope so,” he said, ambiguously. Then, outwardly calm, inwardly racked with mingled emotions, he turned to face his life under the new conditions.

CHAPTER VI.
THE LOCKET.

“Where is Mr. Pym?” asked Hugh, meeting James in the hall.

“Captain Pym is gone, sir. Rode off in a hurry about half-an-hour since. If you mean the old gentleman, he’s in the library with Mr. Mervyn.”

Sir Roderick’s brother was evidently unknown to and of little account in Sir Roderick’s household. Hugh felt that his first duty was to show every deference to a man who had been, whether justifiably or not, cruelly insulted by the dying man. He knocked at the library door. It was Mr. Mervyn who called out, “Come in.”

The fitful sunshine and the leaping flames on the old-fashioned hearth were brightening the room. Mr. Pym had unwittingly seated himself in Sir Roderick’s own particular arm-chair. Mr. Mervyn stood on the hearthrug.

“That’s right, Paull,” he said, evidently relieved. “She is better? Had a good cry? She’ll do, then. Mr. Pym and I have had a talk, and I am glad you should understand each other before he returns home. I have assured him, in your behalf, that Sir Roderick’s wishes on the subject of yourself and Lilia were more of a surprise to you than to myself.”

“I am not a thief, Mr. Mervyn,” said Hugh, warmly. “If coming here as Sir Roderick’s medical attendant I had even thought of Miss Pym as a possible future wife, I should have been as much a thief as a common burglar—aye, more so.”

Mr. Pym’s long upper lip curved a little with more a sneer than a smile.

“These young men now-a-days are so strangely romantic,” he said, turning to Mr. Mervyn. “It has, I assure you, been a great difficulty in my way in the matter of my clerks. My partner, Mr. Clithero, invariably defers to me in the affair of our staff. This tendency has been a great stumbling-block to me. I will not have a person in my employ who uses tall talk.”

Hugh bit his lip, but remembered that this man who wished to show him that he classed him with his bank clerks, with the despised majority, the bread-winning non-capitalists, was not only Lilia’s uncle, but possibly his sister Daisy’s father-in-law.

“I have assured Mr. Pym that Lilia, also, was more surprised than I was,” said Mr. Mervyn, admiring Hugh’s self-control; for Mr. Pym’s cold, measured tones were far more subtly insulting than his words. “This I have learnt from Mrs. Mervyn, who at the same time assured me that the child had a great regard for you, Paull—quite sufficient to render her obedient to her father’s wishes, when called upon.”

“That is all very well, Mr. Mervyn,” said Mr. Pym, dictatorially. “But, as you are aware, until quite lately, my unfortunate brother’s pet whim was to leave his fortune to Roderick, on the condition that he and my niece would marry.”

“Of that, sir, I know nothing,” said Mr. Mervyn, deferentially.

“But you were always in the house, I understand?” said Mr. Pym, haughtily. “My brother’s almost adoption of my son cannot have escaped your notice.”

Mr. Mervyn cleared his throat; and looking down at his boots, brushed some invisible dust from the skirt of his coat.

“I have known Sir Roderick change his mind before now; that is all I can say, Mr. Pym,” he said.

“Yes—when he had a mind to change,” said the banker. “The question is, if the accident which brought about concussion of the brain did not so seriously affect his mind as to invalidate his opinions from that moment.”

Hugh was about to speak, but Mr. Mervyn silenced him with a warning glance.

“It may be treason to my dead friend; I don’t know; I certainly hope not,” he said, “but, if there is to be discussion or law-making on the subject of his fortune, I must tell the truth—he had no particular fortune to leave.”

Hugh felt as if a heavy weight were uplifted from his heart. “Thank God for that!” he said.

The exclamation was so undoubtedly genuine, that Mr. Mervyn smiled—almost laughed—but recollecting the dread presence in the house, checked himself. Mr. Pym settled his eyeglasses on his nose, looked curiously at Hugh as at some new specimen of unclassed animal, then dropped his glasses.

“Excuse me, if I think you are mistaken, Mr. Mervyn,” he said, politely. “My brother can scarcely have dissipated so large a capital as that which he withdrew from us when we dissolved partnership.”

Mr. Mervyn shrugged his shoulders.

“The reading of the Will will doubtless tend to explain matters,” he said. “At present, we are even in the dark as to Sir Roderick’s wishes in regard to his burial.”

A minute’s silence, then Mr. Pym rose.

“Understand, Mr. Mervyn,” he said, stiffly and pompously, and with evident intention turning his back upon Hugh, “until I, as her nearest male relative, have had several interviews with my niece, I cannot countenance any arrangement for her future which may have been made by my unfortunate brother when in an unsound state of mind.”

Hugh’s impulse to resent was suddenly and strongly quelled by a strange, almost occult, sensation. He seemed, as it were, suddenly to feel, personally, the emotions that old Mr. Pym was enduring. These were goodwill towards the brother who had persistently misunderstood and quarrelled with him; an almost despair at that death-bed insult; an irritable questioning of the motives and intentions of himself and Mr. Mervyn, strangers except by hearsay; a yearning tenderness towards his orphaned niece.

“Mr. Pym!” he said, impetuously, going to the old man as he was quitting the room, “excuse me for detaining you one moment, but I must tell you how much your niece’s grief is increased by her father’s treatment of you; it was harder to console her for that than for the fact that Sir Roderick is dead!”

At first, a slight redness flushing Mr. Pym’s withered cheeks encouraged Hugh to fancy that his feelings were touched. But whatever transient emotion had caused that flush, it was but transient.

“I am sure I am very much obliged to you,” he coldly said, with a nod such as he might have given to a saluting servant; “but really I do not think that you, sir, and I need go into these questions. If you will direct me to the stables, I will find my carriage.”

Mr. Mervyn at once came to the rescue.

“You wait here for me,” he said confidentially to Hugh. “I’ll see him off, and come back.”

Hugh’s sensations when left alone were scarcely pleasant. “I am an interloper,” he thought. “Yet I love her! and if I were to wriggle out of the situation, Roderick would step in. Roderick! No. I must deal with the facts as they are, the best way I can.”

At least, he thought, as Mr. Mervyn cordially held out his hand to him as he returned to the room, Lilia’s guardian and trustee did not misunderstand him.

“It is a sad time for congratulations,” said Mr. Mervyn; “still, I cannot help congratulating you. Lilia is a sweet girl, with the making of a real woman in her. I was right when I said that Sir Roderick’s wish you two should be married took you by surprise, eh?”

“It was more than a surprise, Mr. Mervyn.”

“Not an unpleasant one? No, I thought not. Mrs. Mervyn assured me that you and Lilia liked each other weeks ago. Women are pretty reliable judges in these matters. Still, when Sir Roderick told me at the beginning of this last illness that he had invited you here, hoping that the child would take a fancy to you, I was surprised, I own.”

“What could his idea have been, Mr. Mervyn?”

“He liked you. When Sir Roderick liked anyone, he trusted that person blindly, I may say foolishly. Then he had just been disenchanted, awakened to the fact that his nephew Roderick is—what I have always thought him—a scamp.”

“How was he enlightened?” asked Hugh, drawing a long breath of relief.

“Oh! you know how curiously things get about. He was not a man to listen to gossip. But since the 45th were quartered at Aldershot rumours of Roderick’s looseness of conduct were in the air somehow.”

“Do you think he intended those two for each other?” asked Hugh.

“I cannot make out,” said the clergyman, slowly. “He made a fool of that lad; sometimes so much so that I felt uncomfortable, as if it were unreal, a cruel joke he was enjoying all to himself. You see, he hated the father.”

“I thought so,” said Hugh. Then he detailed the bitter speeches of the dying man, before Mr. Mervyn was fetched by Lilia.

“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Mervyn. “It is not to be wondered at that the old man’s back was up just now. Curious old man, that. A bit of a Pharisee, I fear. But not as guilty as his brother thought him, I believe.”

“Were you here then, Mr. Mervyn? When that affair of Lady Pym happened?”

“Who told you of the family scandal, eh, young man?”

Hugh recounted his father’s visit and its object.

“Do you know anything of this clergyman son who wants to marry my sister?” he asked.

“I met him once or twice, and thought him a prig,” said Mr. Mervyn. “But better a prig, than like his brother Roderick.”

“You knew Lady Pym?” asked Hugh.

“I did,” said Mr. Mervyn. “A lovely, winsome young creature; wretchedly unhappy. She was made for society and a lightsome life, and Sir Roderick literally imprisoned her. If she clung to her brother-in-law—if they were more affectionate to each other than in strict justice to him they should have been,—I, for one, cannot cast the first stone. It was piteous to see that poor girl. When the row came, and she disappeared, I felt inclined to give up the living. My one attempt to interfere was met with coldness; I could not try again. If it had not been for my wife, who was devoted to the poor baby, and literally went on her knees to me to stay, I should not be here talking to you now. It is this—with other things—that makes it impossible for me to regret Sir Roderick’s death, though he has been very kind to me, and to my wife too.”

“And to the poor?”

“No,” said Mr. Mervyn, energetically. “He has been their worst enemy. Your work is cut out for you, Mr. Paull, to undo his doings. But you are the man to do it.”

“But—I thought—you said—he left no fortune?”

Hugh’s ambition was certainly not to waste his energies in remedying Sir Roderick’s mistakes.

“No fortune, as Mr. Pym considers fortune. But you had better see Turner and Moffatt, the solicitors, Paull, you really had,” added Mr. Mervyn, lapsing into the familiar and confidential. “Someone must take up a position of authority; and you are the person to do it, as matters stand.”

Hugh wrote off to the hospital authorities for further leave; and next day, hearing from Mrs. Mervyn, who was acting as mistress of the house pro tem., that Lilia would not come down till after luncheon, he drove over to the quiet little town where “Messrs. Turner and Moffatt, solicitors,” was engraved large upon a brilliant brass plate on the door of an old red-brick house.

This house was in a wide, quiet street of the silent country town, where the grass sprouted about the cobbles in the roads. A parlourmaid conducted Hugh into a prim library, where he was almost immediately joined by a little man, dressed with extreme neatness, and wearing thick glass spectacles, who met him with repeated little bows.

“A friend of my late client,” he said, insisting upon Hugh’s seating himself in a huge arm-chair, like a dentist’s. “Yes, yes.” (He referred to Hugh’s card that he was holding between his finger and thumb.) “My name is Moffatt. I have always acted for Sir Roderick. Dear me! Very sad, very sad! I only heard of his death this morning.”

He sat down and looked at Hugh through his spectacles with an inquiring, owl-like gaze.

“I have good reason to suppose that my client has spoken of you to me as having treated him very successfully after his accident,” he next said, taking off his spectacles and absently polishing them with his handkerchief. “Quite in a friendly way—Sir Roderick was very friendly with us; indeed he has often honoured Mrs. Moffatt by taking a bit of luncheon with us. And how is the poor young lady?”

To Hugh’s surprise, he found that Mr. Moffatt had never seen Lilia.

“Our poor friend—my late client, I should say—was slightly eccentric, you see,” said the lawyer exculpatingly, after which Hugh found it easier to make a clean breast of affairs as they stood.

“Mr. Mervyn advised me to come to you to tell me exactly what to do,” he said.

“Certainly, certainly, Mr. Paull, anything that we can do.”

The little gentleman, who had been mentally casting up Hugh, of whose position in Sir Roderick’s will he was well aware, was so far satisfied with his new client. The reluctance Hugh showed, during their ensuing interview, to accept the situation, he thought foolish. Still, he liked the young man for it.

Hugh left him in a more uncertain mood than when he sought him.

He did not see Lilia till next morning. Mrs. Mervyn was kind, even tender in her manner to him when they dined tête-à-tête, but they both tacitly ignored the position of affairs. Mrs. Mervyn recalled and recounted little anecdotes which showed Sir Roderick at his best, but nothing further was discussed. Even on the subject of Lilia they were equally on guard.

“This is the most uncomfortable position a man could possibly be placed in,” Hugh told himself, as he breakfasted alone in the dining-room next morning, stared at by the painted eyes of the pictured effigies of bygone Pyms. “Why will she not see me?” for by Mrs. Mervyn’s message of excuse, that she would breakfast upstairs with Lilia, he augured that Lilia would not face him.

“What am I to do?” he thought, pacing the room in gloomy discomfort. “Of course! I see it. I have been forced upon her. As a loving daughter, she was ready to sacrifice herself to please her dying father. If he had asked to be burnt like an Indian and she to lie down among the flames in suttee fashion, she would have carried out his whim. She shall not be made miserable for life. I must insist upon her accepting her release. Of course the Mervyns and lawyer Moffatt think it best that Sir Roderick’s ideas should be carried out. My duty plainly is, to fight for her good, and hers only.”

While he was hotly arguing against himself Lilia was hanging despairingly about Mrs. Mervyn in her darkened room.

“My dear, I assure you he loves you, and would have wished to marry you even against your father’s wish,” Mrs. Mervyn was assuring the unhappy girl for the hundredth time. “If you only see him, you will be convinced that I am right. You will, indeed!”

Then Lilia said, brokenly, that she could not. If he would only go away, she would write to him.

“Let him take everything, and go,” she said for about the hundred-and-first time. “Life is over for me.”

Then once more Mrs. Mervyn said, this time somewhat indignantly, for she was losing patience, that such a suggestion to Mr. Paull savoured of insult.

“You are cowardly in your grief, Lilia,” she said, sharply. “At least tell the young man your ideas yourself, instead of saying them over and over again to poor me, who can do nothing.”

Perhaps it was this speech which brought about the following:—

Hugh, impatiently pacing the dining-room, did not hear the door open, and when once he suddenly turned round as he reached the hearthrug, he started back in alarm at finding himself confronted by a ghostly figure.

It was Lilia, Magdalen-like, with her hair dishevelled and hanging about over her white dressing-gown, with her head drooping, her swollen eyelids cast down, her arms crossed under her loose sleeves.

“Miss Pym!” he said. Then he placed a chair for her, and set a guard upon his emotions.

She sat down on the edge of the chair as if she were on sufferance. Indeed, she felt as if nothing in the world was her own now, except her grief.

“What can I do for you?” he said, as gently and tenderly as he could. “Anything, anything that you wish, I will try to do.”

She glanced up, at this.

“Will you—go?” she said, timidly. “And forget all about us—about him, and me? And I will write to you about everything.”

Her head drooped again. He stood looking at her in silence for a few moments, wondering what prompted that speech—what, indeed, she really felt. Then he said, very gently:

“Am I to understand that you really wish me to go?”

She murmured “Yes.”

“I will, then,” he said. “But you must give me your true reason for sending me away.”

“For your—happiness,” she said, with a sigh.

“My—happiness?” he repeated, bitterly. “Even though you may hate me because your father wished—that—I would rather stay near you, even though you would not look at me, or speak to me—than go away—now.”

He hoped his earnestness might have some effect in eliciting the truth. But she still sat there dumbly, miserably. After a pause:

“You are—very kind—he used to say so,” she murmured, with a sob.

He felt somewhat exasperated.

“I am not kind,” he said. “And I never say anything I do not mean and feel. Don’t you believe me?”

“Really kind people do not know when they are kind,” she said, raising her grieved eyes and speaking more firmly. “Make no mistake, Mr. Paull. I understand your motives, which seem good to you. But they are not the best, or even good, for you or for me. I am positively certain of this.”

“My motives?” he said, scornfully. “Then, I have none! I only know—that I love you!” he added, passionately.

She fastened, as if in perversity, on the first half of his speech.

“If you have no motives, I have motives,” she said, slowly. “Therefore I am the one to see clearly. And I plainly see, that the best thing for both of us is—that you should go away.”

“But—why?” cried Hugh. (In his life, he had never felt more inclined to swear.) “That is all I ask you to tell me! Why?”

“I gave you my reason,” she said. “For your happiness!”

“My happiness! What do you know—or care—about my happiness?” he said, scornfully.

“More than you care for mine!” she said, rousing a little. “Or you would go, without asking why!”

“No, that I certainly should not,” he returned. “Oh, what waste of time this beating about the bush is! Lilia, I plainly see what all this means. You cannot love me!”

He began pacing the room again. She, poor child, worn out by sleepless nights fighting against her inclinations—as she thought, for the welfare of this man whom she passionately loved—gazed sadly at him, a pathetic gaze of renunciation, which, if he had seen, might have enlightened him.

But he did not see.

“Well?” he said, at last, almost fiercely, halting opposite to her. “Your answer?”

“I forget—what you asked,” she said, timidly.

“That is answer enough!” he retorted sadly. “Poor, poor child! You shall not be sacrificed.” (Love him, and forget his question? The two things were incompatible. He was answered, he considered, and completely.)

With a swelling heart she held out her limp, cold hand to him.

“Be my brother,” she said, with a catching at her breath. “Remember—how alone—I am!”

He stooped and lightly touched her hand with his lips.

“If I were your brother, I should stay,” he said, gravely.

“If you were my brother, you would do as you like without asking me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. “Do as you like.”

At that moment there was a tap at the door, and the older of the two nurses peeped in.

“Might I trouble you one moment, Mr. Paull?”

He went outside. The nurse handed him a small sealed packet.

“A locket and chain from the patient’s neck,” she said. “Mrs. Mervyn would not take it.”

“I will give it to Miss Pym,” he said, wondering how much or how little Lilia knew of her father’s personal affairs.

“Nurse came to bring me this,” he said, returning to Lilia. “She says it contains a locket and chain she found around—his—neck.”

“A locket—round—his—neck? It must be a mistake,” said Lilia, confidently. “He never wore any jewellery—except, of course, his watchchain. He did not approve of men decking themselves out with ornaments.”

“Well, you can soon find out if it is a mistake,” he said, handing her the packet.

She hesitated, took the package, then laid it down on the table as if the touch of it had scorched her.

“I cannot!” she said, with a sob. “It seems—such prying, such desecration! You open it.”

There was something so childish in her change of voice as she pushed the packet towards him, that instinctively Hugh felt comforted. All the preceding palaver might have been partly the masquerading of a child, suddenly called upon to act the woman.

For a moment he hesitated; then he broke the seal, and handing her the locket which had been in his custody at the hospital, said:

“I have seen this before, I think.”

“You?” she asked, recoiling. “How? When?”

“In the hospital—your father wore it then. If I am not mistaken, the locket contains a portrait.”

“I have never been photographed,” she said, evidently believing that no portrait save of herself could be so honoured. “It is not—a portrait—of Roderick?”

“Look and see for yourself,” suggested Hugh.

Her fingers trembled as she opened the locket, then she stared in amazement at the miniature.

“I have never seen that person in my life!” she cried. “Have you? Did he tell you anything about it? Oh, it is impossible, impossible!”

She was roused, almost excited. She tossed the locket away from her, then clutched at it again and devoured the portrait with her eyes.

“Surely the face must recall some one to your mind—there must be some—family—likeness?” he suggested, gravely.

“I never saw any one in the least like that!” she said, with withering contempt. “It is a horrid face!”

Could she speak thus if the slightest suspicion that the portrait was that of her unhappy mother had crossed her mind? Hugh thought not.

“You once—had—a mother,” he said, not without emotion that he, a stranger, should be called upon to remind this fatherless young creature of the fact.

“I know it,” she said, coldly. “Please do not allude to that—again.”

“What is to be done with this, then?” he asked, chilled by her unwomanliness. And he picked up the locket and once more looked at the pretty, defiant little face pictured therein.

“I do not see what one thing has to do with the other,” she said.

“I feel certain that this is the portrait of your mother,” he said. “And, that being so, what is to be done with it?”

She glanced at him with a curious light in her grey eyes that made her look more witchlike than angelic.

“I will show you,” she said; and going to the hearth she stirred the logs into a blaze, and detaching the locket from its slender chain she dropped it into the glowing heart of the fire.

“I will keep this,” she said, showing him the chain. “It touched his neck. You are answered.”

The horrified expression on Hugh’s pale features somewhat quieted her passion. He was surprised and shocked. Was her rage pure jealousy, or what? He stood there, pondering, with his face averted from her.

“Now you know me!” she said, recklessly. “No—not quite. But I will tell you. I hate the woman who dared to marry my father without loving him, and so, poisoned his life and broke his heart!”

Somehow Sir Roderick as Hugh had known him was scarcely to be recognised as a man with a poisoned life and a broken heart.

“As you have given me a brother’s privilege, I shall use it and tell you the truth,” he said, seriously, to the young creature who was, he could see, all panting and as it were aflame with long-repressed emotion. “You have no right to judge another whom you have neither seen nor known, least of all in the case of your mother, to whom you owe your life.”

“And—my misery!” she said, passionately. “If she had not spoiled his life, he would have been a happy man—he might be alive, now!”

“This is a very onesided way of arguing,” he said. “Had your parents been happy together in the ordinary way, they might have had a large family of troublesome sons and daughters, who would have broken your father’s heart, as you call it, a dozen times over.”

“She was—a wretch, a wretch!” said Lilia.

In her passion she forgot her new shyness of Hugh. She had seated herself on the corner of the table—gracefully enough, she was always graceful—but she was swinging her little foot impatiently, and thrust away the breakfast things, not yet removed, with evident carelessness whether they were broken or not.

“Did it ever occur to you—that if we continue the mistakes those beloved dead of ours made here on earth, we might possibly be injuring their souls?” said Hugh, gravely. “It seems to me that real grief for the dead should show itself in continuing the good they have done—and, perhaps, in rectifying those mistakes.”

“My father never made mistakes,” said Lilia, obstinately.

“He seems to have made one, at least,” he said, somewhat bitterly—“in thinking that you and I wished—or would consent—to marry each other!”

She blushed and hung her head.

“You were speaking of souls,” she said, presently, in a somewhat defiant tone. “What do you mean by souls?”