By E. F. BENSON.

An Act in a Backwater.
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Scarlet and Hyssop.
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The Luck of the Vails.
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Mammon and Co. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

Dodo.
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The Rubicon.
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D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.

An Act in a Backwater

By
E. F. BENSON
Author of
“Dodo,” “Scarlet and Hyssop,” etc.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMIII

Copyright, 1903, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Published November, 1903

AN ACT IN A BACKWATER

CHAPTER I

It was approaching half-past five on a June afternoon, and in consequence Colonel Raymond was approaching the Wroxton County Club. He was a man of method, and a retired Colonel of Volunteers, and thus he left his house (christened Lammermoor by his wife) with great regularity at a quarter past five in summer, and a quarter past four in winter, and marched rather than walked with an inflated chest and a gallant bearing. The Colonel, even at the age of fifty-six, remained one of those harmless idiots who draw themselves up and try to look interesting whenever a pretty woman passes them; indeed, he went further, for, being a little short-sighted, he drew himself up and tried to look interesting when he saw any female figure approaching, on the chance that at nearer range she might prove to be pretty. He had a somewhat flaming face, and a long mustache “silver sabled.” In very hot weather he was liable to touches of liver, and when thus afflicted, sometimes alluded, when only comparative strangers were present, to the trying climate of India, a country in which, as his intimate acquaintances knew, he had never set foot. But to the uninitiate the combination of the title of Colonel and the climate of India led to the deduction that he had seen service, and the Colonel did not put himself to the pains of correcting this. He would even encourage it further by sometimes talking of lunch as “tiffin.”

Now Colonel Raymond’s manner was so radically bluff and straightforward that it would be absurd to argue any want of sincerity from such trifles. Every man he met was either “the best fellow on this earth,” or “a blackguard, sir, a low Radical blackguard!” Shades and fine distinctions did not exist for him; there was no nonsense about him, he would say. But there was very little sense.

The Colonel had his idols. Dizzy, “old Dizzy,” was one of them, and this full measure of his approbation was conferred on the Queen when old Dizzy was created an Earl, for the aristocracy was another. His wife’s sister had married a man whose sister had married Lord Avesham, and had this fortunate peer known it, he must have often been gratified to have heard himself alluded to by the Colonel as “my noble relative.” His noble relative was President of the Wroxton County Club, toward which the Colonel was now marching; but on the few occasions on which his lordship had set foot in that establishment, the Colonel, if there, had speedily effaced himself, only to come in half an hour afterward with the avowed object of looking for him, and much regret at having missed him. He had once even gone so far as to address a note to Lord Avesham, with a few formal lines inside and his own name very large on the left-hand corner of the envelope. This he left conspicuously in the rack which held members’ letters, with “To await arrival” in the corner. But from some reason or other (Lord Avesham had been seen in Wroxton several times that week) the Colonel surreptitiously removed it the day after. Perhaps he thought that he would certainly meet his noble relative in the street, and could ask him to tiffin then.

On this particular afternoon the Colonel had drawn himself up and looked interesting quite a number of times—indeed, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he had not looked dull for thirty seconds together during the second and more populous part of his walk. The day had been hot, and the inhabitants of Wroxton were streaming out for a walk in the cool of the evening. Once, a fine instance of the innate kindliness of the Colonel, he had gone so far as to help a nursery-maid over a crossing with her perambulator, for the strong should always assist the weak, and there was a butcher’s cart standing only a few doors off, which might have driven rapidly in her direction without warning. Then he had passed the younger Miss Clifford on her bicycle, and, though the younger Miss Clifford was forty-three and as plain as a biscuit, the gallant Colonel had fired some piece of robust wit at her on the subject of country lanes and chance meetings.

The smoking-room of the club was rapidly filling when the Colonel entered. Captain Johnson and Major Daltry were on the point of going to the billiard-room, and as they both played a game more slow than sure, the table would be occupied for the next hour. Colonel Raymond, with all his gallantry and romantic bearing where the other sex was concerned, did not trouble to stand on his manners when among what he called “old cronies,” and when he found that Mr. Hewson, who completed his regular four at whist, had not arrived, he was not pleased. Among his old cronies, in fact, he gave the impression of being always in a rage. At whist he certainly was, particularly with his partner. However, as he had to wait, he took up the evening paper until Mr. Hewson should appear, and, standing in front of the fireplace, read out scraps of news with loud, explosive comments.

“Perfectly childish and suicidal,” he said, hitting the paper angrily with his hand. “I have always said so, and I shall always say so. Our foreign policy is perfectly childish and suicidal. I don’t know what we are about. Why don’t we turn those blackguards out of Constantinople, and hang the Sultan, and make an end of the whole business in the good old English fashion. Old Dizzy would have done it long ago. I’m ashamed, positively ashamed to be English. Eh, what?”

And he turned fiercely on Mr. Newbolt, a gentle solicitor with mutton-chop whiskers, who had not spoken.

“I didn’t say anything, Colonel,” he remarked.

“No, sir,” retorted the Colonel, “there is nothing to be said. There is no justification possible for our policy. Childish and suicidal I call it, because I am a man who doesn’t mince matters, and isn’t afraid of speaking his mind. Bring me a whisky and soda, waiter. Ah, here is Hewson. Now perhaps we shall get a game of whist at last.”

“I am not late, Colonel,” he said. “It is only just the half hour.”

“Let us lose no more time in getting to our whist,” repeated Colonel Raymond.

Mr. Newbolt had furtively picked up the paper which the Colonel had dropped on Mr. Hewson’s entry.

“Hullo, here is news for you,” said he; “Lord Avesham is dead.”

“God bless my soul!” cried the Colonel, wheeling suddenly round. “Dead? My noble relative dead? Pooh, I don’t believe a word of it. It’s some lie of that infernal Radical paper of yours. Why, it was only the other day that—Let’s look.”

He took the paper out of Mr. Newbolt’s unresisting hand.

“Expired at nine o’clock this morning at his residence in Prince’s Gate,” he read. “Yes, Number Seventeen, that’s quite right. Seems to be true. Very shocking, indeed. Poor Avesham, poor fellow. Family all there—I must send a wire. No, I’ll send it after our whist, or to-morrow morning first thing. Dear me, dear, dear me! Waiter, am I going to wait all night for that whisky and soda? Bring it to the card-room, and look sharp.”

“He seems to have been ill some time,” said Mr. Newbolt, in quiet, precise tones. “I suppose you expected it, Colonel?”

“No, sir, I did not,” he replied. “The report of his illness was greatly exaggerated. It’s a blow to me, a blow.”

And the Colonel strutted out of the room, followed by the three others, as if Lord Avesham’s death had brought him within a life or two of the title.

Colonel Raymond’s whist was as explosive as his manner among his old cronies, and was conducted on principles founded crookedly on Cavendish. The rule there inculcated to retain command of a suit, he interpreted by readings of his own, and thus it not infrequently happened that a perfect spate of kings and aces would burst from his hand after his adversaries had begun to rough the suit. His unhappy partner had to cower beneath the rain of winning cards and censure when this happened.

“You should have drawn the trumps, sir,” the Colonel would say; “a baby in arms would have drawn the trumps. You could see I was keeping command of the ordinary suits, and if you had only had the sense to draw the trumps they would all have made. My deal, I think; cut again, please, I hate a slovenly cut. Let’s see, that’s a treble. We pay dear for your mistake. Honours? Two against us by honours. One of the instances, as Cavendish says, where a weak hand could have been turned into a winning hand by a little judgment and forethought.”

His partner, if discreet, would not reply, but sometimes, goaded to frenzy, if the same sort of thing had happened before that evening, he would point out with perfect justice that he had positively had no opportunity of taking a trick, as the Colonel held all the winning cards, and that being the case he might have played one of them, and opened trumps for himself.

That was what Colonel Raymond was waiting for.

“And weaken my own suit, sir,” he would cry, “and spoil all chance of what I was playing for. What would have been the use of that? You fail to understand the elementary laws of the game. You will spend an hour with Cavendish now and then, as I’m not ashamed to do, if you take my advice. It will save you many rubbers.”

But his partner, if wise, would say nothing, possessing his soul in a show, at any rate, of patience until the Colonel revoked. Sometimes he revoked early, sometimes late, but one revoke in an evening might be confidently looked for. It cost three tricks, it is true, but peace at any price was the motto of the Colonel’s partner, for after the revoke occurred the Colonel ceased to be a man of war, and let his kings die like men under the stroke of the ace. At other times he would cover his mistakes with humorous gallantry.

“I ought to have played the queen, sir, and I acknowledge it,” he would be so kind as to say; “but I couldn’t bear that that knave of a king—knave of a king, ha, ha!—should take her from me. The fair sex, sir, the fair sex.”

Morton Hall, the country-seat of the Colonel’s noble relative, was only a few miles out of Wroxton, and when he returned home that evening to dinner, after breaking the news of Lord Avesham’s death to Mrs. Raymond and his daughters, he held a loud, overbearing discussion across the table (for at home, as among his old cronies, his gallantry was relaxed) as to whether the eldest son of his deceased relative would be able to keep it open. The family was poor, and the Colonel asserted angrily, as if he had been personally affronted, that the death duties would be so heavy that they would have to let it.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, sipping his soup with a sound of many waters, though nobody had told him anything. “Don’t tell me. They are as poor as rats. Pepper, give me the pepper. I’d sooner wash my hands in this soup, Constance, than drink it. Simple water, simple warm water. As poor as rats. Poorer. It’s all that infernal Radical government. We are the best blood in England—the Aveshams are the best blood in England, and have served their king and country for five hundred years. There ought to be a government grant. Take away the soup.”

Mrs. Raymond was a resigned and feeble woman, with a thin, vague face which it was impossible to remember. Ten years of married life with her husband had made a phantom of her. She had the wreck of long-departed prettiness about her, but that had been sunk, becoming, as it were, a total loss, leaving her face devoid of any qualities. Her mind was destitute of hopes, aims, and regrets; she was as intangible to description as a moonbeam.

“It would be impossible to provide for all the families of all the poor peers in England, Robert,” she suggested.

“Impossible? Yes, if you have a government of Atheists and Socialists, who are afraid of the Sultan, and wish to abolish the House of Lords—God bless it! That is where the fault lies. England is going to the dogs. I wish, Constance, you would sometimes get hold of fish that is eatable. Worcester sauce. Give me the Worcester sauce. Venison—my fish is venison. Going to the dogs. Why, in the good old days it was sufficient for a man to be connected with a bishop or a peer to make sure of a government office. The apotheosis of the brewer, that’s what I call the England of to-day. Take away the fish. What else is there for dinner?”

“It is very hard to get good fish in this weather,” said Mrs. Raymond. “It is next to impossible to keep it.”

“Impossible? Nonsense. You women have no method. You’ve only got to keep it cool. No method at all. You keep fish all day in a hot kitchen, and then expect it to be good in the evening.”

“The fish was only sent in at half past six this evening,” said his wife, in a low, monotonous voice. “It was so late I thought it would not be here in time for dinner.”

“And a good thing if it hadn’t been,” retorted the Colonel; “I’d sooner have no fish at all than fish like that—uneatable, perfectly uneatable.”

Mrs. Raymond was silent, and the meal proceeded to the noise only of knives and forks.

“Arthur Avesham, too,” broke out the Colonel again. “He’ll have to make his way in the world alone now. What’s to happen to him and Jeannie? Tell me that. Some ignoramus said the other day that his father had bought him a place in Dalton’s brewery here. I don’t believe a word of it, not a word of it. Even if it’s true, what then? Eh?”

“Perhaps he’ll go on living at Morton, if it’s true,” said Mrs. Raymond, “or perhaps he’ll take a house at Wroxton.”

“Take a house in Wroxton?” cried her husband, again insulted. “Sheer nonsense. There’s not a house in the town to live in beside our own. And as for Morton, I tell you that they’ll have to shut it up. They’re as poor as rats.”

“If it’s true about his place in Dalton’s,” said Mrs. Raymond, “I suppose he will have a few hundred a year. His father cannot have left him nothing.”

“A few hundred a year!” said Colonel Raymond. “If I were to say that his income was a hundred and fifty all told, I should be overstating it. And what’s that to a young fellow who has been brought up with every luxury that wealth and rank can supply? Eh?”

“I thought you said they were as poor as rats,” remarked Mrs. Raymond, in the same even, colourless voice.

The argument—or, rather, the string of assertions—was not worth continuing, and Colonel Raymond only snorted contemptuously in reply. The three daughters had long been fidgeting on their seats and struggling against the twitchings of sleepiness. They were not yet of an age to dine with their parents, but Colonel Raymond insisted on their presence at dinner till bedtime came. Sometimes they were regaled with a grape or two, but usually they had to sit silent and unoccupied. Their father said he saw so little of them during the day, which was not surprising, since the first rule of the house was that he must never be disturbed. Occasionally he took them out for a walk, and then he might be seen stalking over the downs outside the town, stopping occasionally to revile them for lagging behind, followed by a string of small figures in various stages of labour and distress, panting and trotting after him. These nightmare excursions were part of Colonel Raymond’s system. A good, quick walk he considered the panacea of all childish ailments, particularly tiredness, which was synonymous with laziness, and he did not approve of coddling. Consequently their mother coddled them in private, and their father walked them off their legs in public. The happy mean did not result from this treatment, and they were growing up peaked and thin, and their father had to confess that even the best blood in England had a tendency to run to seed.

It was the habit of Mrs. Raymond to retire early, and on the entry of the tray with whisky and soda at ten o’clock she usually went to bed, leaving her husband to console himself for her absence by a drink of that invigorating mixture, another cigar, and his own thoughts. These latter were as straightforward as himself, and he usually ran over in his mind his gains and losses at whist, and, twirling his mustache, lived over again the moments in which he had assumed an interesting appearance. It must be understood that we are following the Colonel into the innermost sanctum of his being, and are recording what he scarcely recorded consciously himself. Probably he did not know how much he was absorbed in these two subjects, but the truth of the matter is he thought about little else except them and the aristocracy. To-night, however, the aristocracy held a dominating place in his reflections, and the quality of his meditations was not agreeable. That in-a-propos remark of his wife, in fact, returned again and again to his mind, and he could not help thinking that if Arthur Avesham came to live in Wroxton his habitual conversation about his noble relative, Arthur’s father, would have to be curtailed or, still worse, corrected.

CHAPTER II

In spite of the Colonel’s settled belief to the contrary, it was perfectly true that, only a few months before his noble relative’s death, Lord Avesham had bought for Arthur, his second and youngest son, a share in Dalton’s brewery in Wroxton, and he was to enter it the following September. Arthur had only just left Oxford, where he had shown an almost remarkable distaste for study and indoor pursuits, and a notable tendency not to get through examinations, and he had welcomed the brewing prospect with alacrity. The diplomatic service, for which he had been intended, had been closed to him through a couple of complete and graceful failures to compete successfully with other candidates, and he had dreaded that the gradual closing of other careers would eventually land him, as it had landed so many others at that terrific faute de mieux, the bar. But he was a very long way from being stupid, or, rather, his stupidity was of most limited range—of the range, in fact, which only comprises dates, idioms, and fractions, a small part of life. But when this is joined to an incapacity for continued application amounting almost to paralysis, parents and guardians would be wise to reconcile themselves to the fact that those they love will never distinguish themselves in examinations. As long, however, as that immemorial fiction is held up before the young that the object of education is to enable them to rise triumphant over examinations, so long dateless and unidiomatic children will continue to feel that they are disappointing their parents.

Arthur had felt this at times acutely, but he had accepted the inevitable with such success that Lord Avesham had written him down indifferent as well as stupid, and what was in him only great sweetness of disposition was credited as insouciance. This, too, he bore with equanimity.

Harry, his elder brother, his sister Jeannie, and himself had come down to Morton with their mother’s sister, Miss Fortescue, for the funeral of Lord Avesham, and were going to stop there for the present. Family councils had to be held about the disposition of affairs, and one was in progress on a morning in July about a fortnight after Lord Avesham’s death. They were certainly a remarkably handsome family, and it was to be conjectured that their good looks were a heritage—perhaps the most valuable he had bequeathed them—from their father, for the most that could be said about Miss Fortescue was that she had a very intellectual expression. Harry was sitting at a desk with some papers before him, and Miss Fortescue was sitting opposite him. Jeannie lounged in the window-seat, and Arthur was resting in a chair so long and low that all that could be seen of him was one knee and a great length of shin. The position of his head was vaguely indicated by a series of smoke-rings which floated upward at regular intervals. There had been silence for a few moments. Miss Fortescue’s baritone voice broke it.

“Well, what does the black sheep say?” she demanded.

There was a pause in the smoke-rings, and a voice asked:

“Do you mean me, Aunt Em?”

“Yes, dear. Whom else?”

“I thought you must mean me, but it was best to ask,” said the voice. “I’m not a black sheep, though; I’m only a sheep.”

Harry looked up, half impatient, half amused.

“Oh, Arthur, don’t be so trying,” he said. “It really rests with you.”

“I’d much sooner somebody settled for me,” said Arthur.

“But they won’t; speak, sheep,” said Miss Fortescue.

The chair in which Arthur sat creaked, and he struggled to his feet.

“I’m not good at speaking,” he said; “but if you insist—well, it’s just this. Harry, you’re a brick to suggest that we should all live here, but I think you’re wrong about it. In the first place, we’re poor, and if you keep Morton open we shall be all tied here, and we sha’n’t be able to fill the house with people, and we shall not be able to keep up the shooting; and here we shall be with this great shell over our heads, like bluebottles or some other mean insect which lives in palaces. In the second place, you will probably marry, and that will cramp you still further. In the third—this is from my own point of view, purely—if I live here, I know perfectly well that, with the best intentions in the world, on wet mornings when I don’t want to go out, and on fine ones when I do, I shall persuade myself that I am far from well, and not go to Wroxton and the brewery. Fourthly, you yourself will miss not being in London horribly. You’d bore yourself to death here. But you’re a brick for suggesting it. And—and that’s all.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“So the sheep has spoken,” said Jeannie. “Well done, sheep. But I thought you said you were wholly indifferent?”

“I know I did. But you drove me into a corner.”

Miss Fortescue looked at Arthur approvingly.

“For so stupid a boy, you have glimmerings of sense,” she said.

“Oh, I’m a sharp fellow,” said Arthur.

“Really, Arthur, I think you are,” said Harry. “Mind, my offer holds perfectly good, but I do think there is something in what you say.”

Arthur stood looking from one to the other, with his head a little on one side, like a dog who has done its trick. Unlike Jeannie and his brother, he was fair, with blue eyes and an extraordinarily pleasant face.

“Well, them’s my sentiments,” he said. “Your turn, Jeannie.”

“I know it is,” said Jeannie. “And what’s to happen to me, Arthur?” she demanded.

Arthur groaned slightly.

“I’ve done all that can be expected of me,” he said. “My turn is over.”

Jeannie jumped up.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’ll come and keep house for you in Wroxton, Arthur, and Harry shall come down to stay with us from Saturday till Monday, and we’ll go up to stay with him from—from Monday till Saturday.”

“A lot of beer shall I brew,” remarked Arthur. “Why, you could swim in it.”

“I don’t much see you living at Wroxton, Jeannie,” said Harry.

“Why not? I should enjoy it. I really should. And we’ll give high teas to the Canons.”

“I think you’d loathe it before a month was out,” repeated Harry.

“Indeed I shouldn’t.”

“We’re all so terribly unselfish, and that’s what is the matter with us,” said Arthur. “First Harry wants to let us all live with him, and then I want to live in that funny little town in order to attend to my work, and then Jeannie wants to live with me. Aunt Em, give us a contribution, and try, oh, try to be selfish; I’m sure you can.”

“Well, I think Jeannie is right,” said Miss Fortescue. “You would hate not living in London, Harry, and I think the best thing you can do is to have a flat there, quite small, so that one or two of us could very kindly come to stay with you, and let Jeannie and Arthur live in Wroxton. Then shut Morton up, or let it. You’d better let it, if possible. It’s only for a year or two, till you’ve paid these iniquitous Radical taxes. And then when you open it again you can order your beer from Arthur.”

Arthur gave a sigh of relief.

“Well, that’s settled,” he said. “Jeannie, let’s go into Wroxton this afternoon and see the householders or the house-agents. Oh, Aunt Em, what is going to happen to you?”

“You are all so unselfish,” said Miss Fortescue, “that I thought one of you might have considered that. But I was wrong.”

A general shout went up of “Come and live with me,” and the meeting was adjourned for the time being.

Miss Fortescue, who has hitherto been distinguished from the Aveshams generally by the fact of her not being at all good-looking, had her compensations. She was, in the first place, exceedingly musical, and had about as much wits as two generations of Aveshams put together. She was a woman of very pronounced opinions, and though you might accidentally hit upon a subject on which she had neither opinion nor knowledge, she would be happy to pronounce an opinion on it offhand with such conviction as to lead you to suppose she knew something about it. If you could induce her to argue about the said subject, though you might suspect that she knew nothing whatever of it, yet you would find it difficult to bring her ignorance home to her. She would glean facts from her opponent as she went along, and use them against him with telling effect. But it was next to impossible to make her argue; if you disagreed with her she would raise her eyes to the ceiling as if commending you and your benighted condition to the hands of Providence. Like most clever people, she was sublimely inconsistent, and though she genuinely abhorred the idea of the death of any living creature, she would eat flesh meals without any qualms whatever. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that she hated fads as much as the death of innocent animals, and it was her dislike of vegetarians rather than of a vegetable diet which led to so sturdy an inconsistency. The same contradictions appeared in her views about horses and dogs, and she would rather walk to the station, though hating bodily exercise, than have out a horse which was bursting with condition and make it pull her. The same misplaced tenderness applied to her treatment of dogs, and her own pug was an object-lesson of unwholesome overfeeding.

Miss Fortescue on this particular morning had been glad, by her last ungenerous speech, to shift the responsibility of her future on to other shoulders, or, at any rate, to delay her own decision. She wanted, in the main, to determine what she wanted to do, and she could not quite make up her mind. She had lived with the Aveshams since her sister’s death some eight years ago, and they all took it for granted (herself included) that she would continue to go on living with them. For herself, she would have much preferred to have gone on living at Morton, but she saw and admitted at once the reasonableness of Arthur’s view. Her own income, with the exception of a hundred a year for dress and travelling (she dressed with notable cheapness, and never travelled), she was prepared to give into the household coffers of whatever branch of the family she decided to live with, and as Jeannie and Arthur had only six hundred a year between them, the extra five hundred she could give constituted an additional reason for joining them. As far as the advantages of town and country were to be considered, she had no great choice, for she felt no thrill in the stir and noise of streets, and the sweet silence of the country could not appreciably add to her habitual tranquility. She hardly ever went out unless she was obliged, and on those occasions she took short walks very slowly, and it was something of a mystery, even to those who knew her best, as to what she did with the hours. She would always disappear soon after breakfast, and if asked at lunch what she had been doing, she would say, “Working.” Then, if pressed further as to what her work had been, she would only raise her eyes to the ceiling, and the incident would close. This raising of the eyes had long been a danger-signal to the Aveshams. It implied that Miss Fortescue was unwilling to say more on this particular subject, and any further questions would only evoke severe remarks on their inquisitiveness.

Jeannie and Arthur rode into Wroxton that afternoon and made the house-agent an unhappy man. The house they required had to be near the brewery, and also at the top of the hill, which, to begin with, was impossible, as the brewery was at the very bottom of the town. Then it had to have a good smoking-room, two nice sitting-rooms—one for Jeannie and one for Miss Fortescue, in case she decided to join them—a drawing-room and a dining-room (the size of these was really important), and four excellent bed-rooms away from the street. To be away from the street implied a garden, which must be private, sunny, and extensive. That red brick should be the material of the house was desirable, but not absolutely essential. The offices, Miss Fortescue insisted, should be really good, for they made all the difference to servants, whom one was bound to consider before one’s self. A small stable only, but well-aired and dry, was required, and the rent of the whole must be exceedingly low.

The only point which presented no difficulty were the offices. Jeannie and Arthur were both quite vague as to what offices meant, but in the half dozen houses they saw that afternoon there was always some other radical defect. In one they found that an apartment described as a sitting-room was more probably intended to be a house-maid’s cupboard; in another they disgraced themselves by thinking that the kitchen was the scullery. A third case was more complicated, for Jeannie remembered about a still-room, and had to explain to an antiquated caretaker what a still-room was. What made the afternoon more bewildering was that they both fell in love with every house they saw, and thought it would do excellently with a little alteration. Then came the question of rents: they had hoped to find something for about a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and the only consolation, as Arthur said, was that at corresponding prices, if Morton was let, it ought to bring to Harry an income of about fifty thousand a year, which certainly seemed a satisfactory sum.

“Why, if it would let for that,” he exclaimed, with a sudden splendid thought, “we should be rich enough to live in it ourselves, and not let it at all!” But the mention of Morton roused the house-agent to rather greater interest in his impracticable clients. It appeared that there were other houses which might also be had, and, if the gentleman would give his card, he had no doubt that the owner of 8 Bolton Street would let them look at it. He had long been thinking of letting it, though it was not exactly in the market. It had a garden, it was built of red brick, and the offices, as usual, were quite palatial.

“A different stamp of house, sir, quite a different stamp of house.”

“And a different stamp of rent?” asked Arthur.

“The gentleman is very anxious to get desirable tenants,” was the hopeful reply.

“Come, Jeannie,” said Arthur, “it will end in our taking Buckingham Palace, but no matter!”

The house in question was not exactly Buckingham Palace, but within a few days they had taken it. Miss Fortescue drove in to see it, after bargaining that the horses should not be used again the whole of the next day, and made up her mind to stay at any rate with Jeannie and Arthur for a week or two. As she also indicated which room she would like, and chose a paper for it, it may be supposed that her “week or two” did not mean less than a week or two. The rent was not prohibitive, the garden was charming, and the house stood in a side street where traffic was scanty, and looked out behind over the Cathedral, and Canons, as Jeannie said, really hung on their garden wall like ripe plums.

A day or two later rumours began to spread through Wroxton that the Aveshams were coming to live there, and discussion raged. The Colonel knew they were not.

“I should think, sir, if my cousins were coming, I should not be the last to be informed of it. Just gossip, sir, mere gossip—I wonder at you for paying any attention to it.”

He scarcely even believed the assurance of the owner of 8 Bolton Street that he had actually let it to them, for as soon as Mr. Hanby had left the room he burst out:

“A mere ruse, sir, to send up the value of the house, by making people think that the aristocracy want to take it. Transparent, transparent!”

But he did not feel quite easy about it in the depths of his gallant heart, and he thought again how awkward it would be if it were true.

CHAPTER III

A fortnight later Jeannie, Miss Fortescue, and Arthur were all staying at the Black Eagle Hotel, employed in settling in. Morton had been let, but let unfurnished, and in order to avoid the expense of storing, it was laid upon them that they should cram as much furniture into 8 Bolton Street as it would possibly hold. Thus from morning to night the greater part of the street was congested with Pantechnicon vans, and Jeannie and Arthur might be seen many hours a day measuring wardrobes, and finding for the most part that they would not go into any of the rooms. Miss Fortescue sat in a large chair in the middle of the street and made scathing comments on the appearance and behaviour of the others.

“I little thought,” said this magisterial lady one day, “that the time would come when I should see my nephew in his shirt-sleeves wrestling with towel-horses in the Queen’s highway.”

“No, dear Aunt,” said Arthur, “and if you will look round you will see a distressed bicyclist who wants to pass. You must move.”

Miss Clifford, in fact, was approaching. She did not ride with any overpowering command over her machine, and from the desire to avoid Miss Fortescue was making a beeline for her. A collision was just avoided by Miss Fortescue’s extreme agility in removing herself and her chair.

A wardrobe was just blocking the front door, and Arthur threw himself down in another unoccupied chair for a moment’s rest. Jeannie’s voice sounded in passionate appeal from inside the hall, but till the wardrobe had been passed it was impossible to go to her aid.

“Oh, it is hot!” he said. “Why on earth did we move in this broiling weather? Aunt Em, dear, I’m going to send for some beer from that wine-merchant’s opposite, and if you don’t like to see me drink it in the Queen’s highway you must look in the other direction.”

“The Aveshams have no sense of dignity,” said Miss Fortescue, sweepingly.

“No, but it doesn’t matter; they’ll think that I’m not me, but the footman.”

“You’re much too badly dressed for any footman,” said Aunt Em.

“Well, they’ll think you are the cook and I’m your young man,” said Arthur.

Arthur sent one of the Pantechnicon men to get some beer, and while he was gone:

“They told me there was so little traffic here,” he said, “and the street is crowded with vans. Oh, there’s that man again! He has passed and repassed a dozen times this morning, besides standing at the corner for ever so long. Is he a friend of yours, Aunt Em?”

The man in question was Colonel Raymond, no less, strutting and swelling down the other side of the street, and bursting with uneasy curiosity. He had, as Arthur said, passed and repassed a dozen times, longing to speak to one of them, and manage to introduce himself in some way. Once he had given a hand to one of the van-men with a bookcase, but as ill-luck would have it, all three of the house-party, as he called it, were inside at the moment, and when the danger of the bookcase falling on a washing-stand was over there was no excuse for lingering. On another occasion he had waited a full two minutes while the foot-path was congested, and on it being made possible for him to pass, he had raised his hat with a gallant flourish to Jeannie, who stood at the door. But she had appeared quite unconscious of his salute, and the Colonel was working himself into a fever of impatience. It was one thing to be able to say at the club that he had spent his morning in Bolton Street, where his cousins had taken Number 8, but it was another to have them definitely established in Wroxton, not knowing him from Adam. The trying climate of India was nothing compared to the sultriness which loomed over his prospects.

The amiable and kindly interest in the minutest dealings of others, which is known as curiosity, was not wanting in the town of Wroxton. Miss Clifford had hardly passed on her bicycle when she realized that it was idle to struggle with so overmastering an emotion, and dismounted at the end of the street, for she was no adept at turning round, and rode straight back again. She would have done so if only to get another look at the furniture which was being unloaded, though, as they had got on to a bed-room layer of it, it might not have seemed engrossing to the ordinary mind; but this was not all. She would get another look at the lady who sat in the middle of the road, and at the young man in his shirt-sleeves. She might even, if lucky, catch a glimpse of Miss Avesham herself, whom she had not yet seen.

So she rode slowly back, and when about thirty yards distant saw Arthur drinking out of a pewter mug. The disappointment was intense, for he might even have been Lord Avesham himself, come to help his brother and sister in the settling in. But this beer-drinking in public made it impossible. It could only be the foreman of the Pantechnicon, or perhaps—this would be better than nothing—the footman or a valet of peers. But as she passed she distinctly heard him say, “Do have some beer, Aunt Em.”

Miss Clifford rode on towards the High Street, away from the direction of her home, lost and stupefied in a whirl of conjecture and perplexity. If he was the footman, what was his Aunt Em doing there, unless—and this was just possible—his Aunt Em was the cook? If, on the other hand, he was the foreman, the presence of his aunt was still more difficult, for that foremen of furniture companies should bring their aunts with them to superintend seemed a proposition which might almost be negatived offhand. Could it be—No, it was not possible, and Miss Clifford, by this time having reached the High Street, dismounted again and determined to go home without more delay. The shortest way home lay down Bolton Street—at least to go down Bolton Street was so little longer that the excellence of the road quite made up for it—and a minute afterward she was again opposite the house. No very great change had taken place since she saw it last. The possible footman was still standing in the doorway with the pewter pot in his hand, and his Aunt Em was sitting on a low black oak chest, which suggested to Miss Clifford’s romantic mind all sorts of secret drawers and unsuspected wills, confessions of crime, and proofs of innocence. As a matter of fact, it contained Jeannie’s boot-trees and a knife-board, but Miss Clifford did not know this. But her perseverance had its reward. Even as she passed, a voice of lamentation sounded from the inside of the house.

“Oh, Arthur,” it wailed, “you said it was only four foot six, and it’s four foot nine, and won’t go in. Do come here.”

And the possible footman put his pewter pot on the black oak chest and went inside.

The chain of evidence was growing massive. Supposing, as before, Aunt Em was the cook and Arthur’s aunt, whose was the wailing voice inside? Could it be the lady’s-maid’s or the house-maid’s? Miss Clifford’s masculine intellect decided that it scarcely could. Again, had not she and her sister spent an hour last night in following the history of the Avesham family in Debrett’s Peerage into all its ramifications and collateral branches? “Sons living, Hon. Arthur John Talbot, b. 1873, ed. at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford”—how was it possible for a person of intelligence not to connect the subject of that entry with the person called Arthur who lounged with a pewter pot? The coincidence was too glaring to be overlooked. One thing would settle it, and Miss Clifford cursed her defective memory. If either Lord Avesham or his wife had a “sister living called Emma or Emmaline, that must be the Aunt Em” who had sat so truculently in the highway and been offered beer. Miss Clifford turned quite cold at the thought that she had perhaps been within an ace of running into a sister or a sister-in-law of a peer. What would her mother have said if she had been alive to see such a day?

Miss Clifford wasted no more time, but went home like a positive race-horse, arriving in a breathing heat. She went straight to the room called by her and her sister “the libry,” and took the Peerage from its shelf.

No, the late Lord Avesham had only one sister living, who was called Lucy, which could not possibly be abbreviated into Em, but he married Frances Mary Fortescue, second daughter of late Mr. John Fortescue. It was but the work of a moment to turn to the Fs in the landed gentry and find John Lewis Fortescue, Esq., son of late John Fortescue, Esq., who had one sister living, Emma Caroline. The thing was as good as proved, and Miss Clifford was practically face to face with the fact that peers (at any rate, the brothers of peers) drank beer in shirts, and that she had nearly run down the sister of a peeress. It had been a most exciting morning, and she waited with weary impatience for the return of her sister, who was out, to pour into her horror-struck ears these revelations about the aristocracy. “No wonder many people turn Radical,” she said to herself.

Colonel Raymond’s temper at lunch that day bordered on the diabolical, and when he savagely announced that he should take the children for a walk afterward, the hearts of those unfortunate infants sank in their shoes. They well knew what kind of an afternoon was in store for them. While on the level they would be able to keep up, but they knew from experience that when their father was in the state of mind which Mrs. Raymond referred to in their presence as “looking worried” that their way would be dark and slippery, and that their father would march up the steep sides of the downs as if he was storming a breach. Long before the most active of them was half-way up he would be there, and he would revile them with marrowy and freezing expressions. Then as soon as their aching legs had scaled the summit he would be off again, and ten minutes later the same scene would be re-enacted with the same trembling and breathless mutes. Occasionally, on the worst days, he would take one by the hand and—“he called it helping”—drag her along in a grasp of iron.

Poor Mrs. Raymond always looked more than usually insignificant when her husband was looking worried, but when things were very bad indeed sometimes a strange sort of recklessness came over her. If you can imagine a mouse or some soft feathered bird in a reckless humour, you will have some picture of Mrs. Raymond when the Colonel was looking worried. She had asked him some question about where he had been this morning, and had been treated to a reply of this kind:

“Where have I been? Did you ask where I have been, Constance? You are devoured by curiosity—devoured; and it would be better if you tried to check it sometimes. But I’ll tell you—oh, I’ll tell you. I’ve been hanging about Bolton Street all morning, and not one of those infernal aristocrats had a word to say to me.”

“Do you mean the Aveshams, Robert?” asked his wife.

“Yes, I mean the Aveshams, and why shouldn’t I mean the Aveshams? Eh?”

“I don’t suppose they recognised you.”

“Not recognised me? I tell you, they cut me. Cut me, Constance. Blood is thicker than water—thicker than water—and it’s a motto that I’ve always stuck to myself, and it would be a good thing if others did the same.”

Then Mrs. Raymond began to be reckless.

“You’re not a very near relative, Robert,” she said, in her meaningless voice.

“Not a near relation?” stormed her husband. “Do you mean to put me in my place? Confound it all, your brother-in-law’s sister, your sister-in-law in fact, indeed my sister-in-law, was the late Lady Avesham. If we don’t hang together it’s the ruin of England!”

Mrs. Raymond’s recklessness increased.

“If I were you I shouldn’t go about talking of the Aveshams as your relatives, particularly now they’ve come to live in the town,” she said; “it will only make people laugh.”

The Colonel glared at her a moment; he could literally not find words.

“Anything else, madam, anything else?” he asked at length.

The fit of recklessness was passed.

“No, that is all, Robert,” she said, listlessly; “I didn’t mean to make you worried.”

“I shall call there this afternoon,” he said, “and you will go with me.”

Mrs. Raymond brightened.

“Then you won’t take the children out?” she asked, with a ray of hope in her voice.

“Certainly I shall take them out,” he said, “and—and they shall come and call, too. Go and get your things on, all of you.”

“You won’t go far then, if you are to be back in time to call?” asked his wife.

“We shall go a good brisk walk,” he said, grimly, “and we shall be home by four. Now, am I to wait all day?”

Dismal, faltering feet came down the passage outside, and the three little victims appeared in the doorway.

“Now then, march,” said the Colonel.

It was some little while after four when the hot and jaded expedition returned. The walk had been more severe than usual, and even the Colonel flung himself with an air of fatigue into a chair.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said; “I shall not go near the house. Not go near it. At least, I sha’n’t go to-day. Tea—isn’t tea ready? Let it be brought.”

Even the friends of the Colonel might have felt inclined to accuse him of a slight duplicity for his action on this occasion. He had returned by way of Bolton Street, like the burned moth to the candle, and sending the children on with instructions to go home after waiting for five minutes at the end of the street, he had rung the bell, which was opened by a surprised maid. The hall was full of miscellaneous furniture, and the maid had to go warily among pictures and stools to the drawing-room, bearing his card. Jeannie’s voice was what is known as “carrying,” and she did not reflect how near the front door was to the drawing-room, where an agonizing measurement of a carpet was going on. Her words were distinctly audible.

“Colonel who? Colonel Raymond. I never heard of him. Fancy calling when we are in this state! Tell him we are all out. Did you say fifteen foot six or fifteen foot eight, Arthur? It makes just the whole difference.”

Then somebody said “Hush!” and Jeannie’s voice said “Oh!”

A moment afterward the maid came out of the drawing-room, shutting the door carefully after her.

“Not at home, sir,” she said, without a blush or a tremor in her voice.

The children did not have to wait long at the corner. The pace home was perfectly appalling.

CHAPTER IV

One evening, about a fortnight after the attack of congestion in Bolton Street, Canon and Mrs. Collingwood were sitting in their dining-room lingering over their dessert. The butler had filled their claret-glasses to the brim with water, and had left the room. It was a warm night in mid-July, and the French window opening on to the garden was flung wide, admitting breaths of soft and flower-scented air. The dusk was not yet passed the bounding line between day and night, and the eye was led over a cool, spacious square of grass, framed in flower-beds in which colour still lingered, to a red brick wall at the end of the garden over which rose the gray pinnacle of the Cathedral. It was still near enough to midsummer to dine without candles if your dinner-hour was 7.45, and the absence of them and decanters gave to the table a certain virginal and ascetic air. Both the Canon and his wife were teetotalers, she of the kind which we may call intemperate—that is to say, she regarded alcohol not only as poison, but as an essentially immoral thing. Mrs. Collingwood was a woman of strong will, and ruled her husband; and though his own inclination would have been to set wine before his guests when they were entertaining, her detestation of fermented liquids overruled hospitality, and, unless one particular person was dining with them, you would no more see a decanter on the table than you would see a roulette board. But the exception was made in favour of their Bishop, who was under doctor’s orders to drink the abominable thing, and on these occasions a half bottle of Burgundy blushed before Mrs. Collingwood’s eyes. How exactly it is possible to conceive of a natural and lifeless product as being in itself wicked is a problem at which the ordinary mind stumbles. But Mrs. Collingwood had solved it, and we should show a more becoming modesty if we lamented our mediocrity of grasp and silently envied Mrs. Collingwood’s extraordinary powers of conception, than if we called her point of view unreasonable. It is possible also that if a guest had produced a doctor’s certificate that he must drink wine, he would have been accorded some of the Bishop’s Burgundy, but his wine would be understood to be of the nature of medicine, which custom has ordained that we shall not indulge in at the dinner-table.

Now it was not the habit of Canon Collingwood or his wife to linger over the pleasures of the table, but they were discussing a subject which had probably been discussed at thirty or forty other tables that evening, namely, the advent of Jeannie and Arthur to Wroxton.

“I don’t feel certain that she will be helpful,” said Mrs. Collingwood; “to me she seemed not in earnest. There was no depth about her.”

And she put a hard piece of gingerbread into her rather wide mouth.

Canon Collingwood stroked his beard for a moment in silence.

“She is young,” he said, doubtfully.

“One can never be too young to be in earnest,” said his wife. “And I did not like the look of the drawing-room. There were several books on the table which I should never allow in my house, and there was an organ in the hall.”

Canon Collingwood had been married many years, but even now his wife occasionally puzzled him.

“Why not, my dear?” he said.

“Because an organ should only be used for sacred music,” said Mrs. Collingwood, “and I have no doubt that they use it for other pieces. Indeed, I saw some opera of Wagner’s standing open on it.”

“Did you call there to-day?” he asked.

“Yes, I paid a long call there. I tried to interest Miss Avesham in various things, but I had to begin at the beginning. She did not even know what G. F. S. meant. It is very strange how unreal life must be to some people.”

“Is not their aunt staying with them?”

Mrs. Collingwood could not reply for a moment, for the gingerbread was very hard.

“Yes, she is living with them for the present,” she said. “I am bound to say that Miss Fortescue baffled me. I could make nothing whatever out of her. She seemed to me at first most keenly interested in the prevention of cruelty to animals, but when I spoke of the prevention of cruelty to children—much more important, of course—she did not seem to pay the slightest attention. And later, when we were speaking of household matters, she urged Miss Avesham to see that the mulberries from their tree in the garden were picked for making mulberry gin. She asked me if I did not think it was delicious.”

“She could not know how you felt about such matters,” said the Canon, apologetically.

“I should have thought that gin was not a subject usually mentioned,” said Mrs. Collingwood. “No one can be ignorant of how terrible a curse it is to so many households.”

Canon Collingwood sighed.

“I met Miss Avesham a day or two ago at the Lindsays’,” he said. “She seemed to me a nice, pleasant girl, and very full of life.”

Mrs. Collingwood folded her napkin up in silence. Her husband’s remark seemed to her fatuous. Either a person was earnest and helpful or not. Any other quality, particularly that very dangerous quality known as “life,” was only trimming, and a possible temptation. Earnestness and helpfulness were to be rated by the desire to aid in good works. But as she rose she made a great concession.

“If you mean energy by life, William,” she said, “I agree with you that it is admirable as an instrument if properly used. You have not said grace.”

To do her justice, Mrs. Collingwood’s time was spent in good works, and her thoughts (when not thus occupied) in passing judgments on other people. Her favourite text, the text by which her life was conducted, was, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” In her youth she must have been remarkably handsome, but she had got over that, which was lucky, since she now tended to consider that good looks, if not actually the invention of the evil one, were an open door by which he entered, bringing with him pride, vanity, and self-esteem. Like alcohol and tobacco, she regarded them as almost more than dangerous, as something in themselves not right. But with what might be hastily considered as inconsistent, she thought it her duty to admire the beauties of nature when not exhibited in human beings. The green of forest trees, the level lines of the sunset, the Gothic architecture, particularly when seen from a Cathedral close, and thus, as it were, chastely framed, she thought were meant to lead one’s aspirations heavenward. These things (the trees and light, at any rate) had been at the Creation pronounced good, and that was enough for Mrs. Collingwood, who, if she could pin a text on to any conclusion, put it away in a drawer as proved. Her drawers were full of such. Similarly, man had fallen, and his face was the face of a fallen thing.

Thus this evening, when she and her husband left the dining-room, and he retired to his study to finish his sermon for the next day, she stood a full minute at the open window of the drawing-room looking at the view. Then she sat down at her davenport to finish writing a paper on the Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction, which she was to read at a meeting of the Wroxton Ladies’ Literary Union next week. She proposed to deal more particularly with novels which discuss theological problems, and were so upsetting to the faith of the weaker, for what is known as the Higher Criticism seemed to Mrs. Collingwood to be synonymous with the temptation of the devil. But she was a just woman, and one of her sentences began, “What a very clever book we all feel this to be, but how immoral!” Mrs. Collingwood found literary composition presented no difficulties, and she looked upon it, provided the motive of it was earnest and helpful, as an agreeable relaxation. Her style was conversational, and there was a good deal of “dear friends” in it.

The view on which she so resolutely turned her back in order to give this timely warning to the literary ladies of Wroxton against theological, or rather infidel, novels, justified her minute’s contemplation. The lawn, a cool, restful space of sober green, sloped down to a prattling tributary of the chalk stream which ran through the town, and in the dusk the flower-beds (the Canon’s hobby was gardening) glowed with subdued and darkening colour. The scent of the tobacco-plant (like Adam and Eve, still in its garden innocence) came floating in through the window, dominating all other perfumes. Thrushes still called to each other from the bushes, or crossed the lawn with quick, scudding steps, and an owl floated by with a flute-like note. To the right rose the gray piled mass of the Cathedral in all the dignity and sobriety of Norman work, set there, it might seem, like the rainbow, a pledge to the benignity of the circling seasons, serene and steadfast with centuries of service. From here, too, for the drawing-room was on the second floor, it was possible to see over the bounding garden-wall, and westward the river lay in sheets and pools of cloud-reflected crimson. Patches of light mist lay like clothes to dry over the water-meadows through which it ran, but beyond the great chalk down lay clear and naked. The sky at the horizon was cloudless, and the evening star hung like a jewel on blue velvet. Peaceful, protected stability was the keynote of the scene.

Canon Collingwood had been at Wroxton for twenty mildly useful but not glorious years. From the years between the ages of twenty and forty he had lived entirely at Cambridge as Fellow and subsequently classical tutor of his college. The effect, if not the object, of his life had been uneventfulness, and twenty years of looking over pieces of Latin verse and prose had been succeeded by twenty years of busy indolence as Canon of Wroxton. To keep one’s hands and heart moderately clean in this random business of life is a sufficient task for the most of mankind, and if Canon Collingwood had not experienced the braver joys of adventure, or even the rapture of mere living, it is not to be assumed that his life was useless. He set an admirable pattern of unruffled serenity and complete inoffensiveness, and though he could never set the smallest stream on fire, his passage through the world was bordered with content. At Wroxton, apart from the merely animal needs of sleep and exercise, his time was fairly equally divided between hardy annuals and an extensive though not profound study of patristic literature. Eight times in the year he delivered a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and never failed to give careful preparation to it. In the summer he and his wife always spent a month at the lakes, but otherwise they seldom slept a night outside their own house. He got up every morning at half past seven, and breakfasted at a quarter past eight. He attended Cathedral service at ten, and read or wrote in his study till a quarter past one. Three-quarters of an hour brought him to lunch-time, and a walk along one of three roads or two hours among his flowers prepared him for tea. His dinner he earned by two hours’ more reading, and his rest at night was the natural sequel to this wholesomely spent day, rounded off by three-quarters of an hour’s Patience in the drawing-room, or, if the game proved very exciting, it sometimes extended to a full hour.

Mrs. Collingwood, as has been stated, was somewhat given to passing judgment on other people, but these judgments were never of a gossipy or malicious nature, and she judged without being in any way critical. Her judgments were straightforward decisions, of the jury rather than the judge, as to whether the prisoner at the bar was guilty or not guilty. To be not guilty, it need hardly be indicated, meant to be earnest and helpful. Now, whether she could, with her hand on her heart, say that her husband was earnest or helpful is doubtful, but no decision was necessary, and for this reason: Though he took no part in her good works, nor even organized Christian associations, he was a Canon. To be a Canon implied to live in a close, and to live in a close (if we run Mrs. Collingwood to ground) meant to be not guilty. Furthermore, in what we may call her more Bohemian moments, she would have acknowledged that life could be looked at from more than one point of view. She would even have allowed that it might be possible to live otherwise than she lived, and yet be saved at the last. Yet some people had been known to think her narrow!

Mrs. Collingwood, it must be considered, was not ill content with living. Her aims were too definite, and her devotion to them too complete to allow her to indulge in any vague dissatisfactions. She could lament the wickedness of the world, yet find the antidote for the sorrow the thought had caused in efforts to remedy it. Further, in the sphere of inevitable and intimate things, she and her husband had perhaps only one weak spot, so to speak, in the armour in which they met the world. She, at any rate, went armed like a dragoon through the routine of life, armed against danger and difficulty and snares of the evil one. But this weak spot was in a vital place. She had a son, now some twenty-five years old, who did not live in a close, or anywhere near one. He was an artist—not a landscape painter, for Mrs. Collingwood could have borne that—but a painter of men and women, a recorder of human beauty. That he was rising and successful in his profession was no consolation to his mother, but rather the reverse, and she had before now hesitated whether the text, “I also have seen the wicked in great prosperity,” was not to be pinned to him, for that he was essentially sober and straight in his life she could scarcely believe. He seldom came to Wroxton, for his profession, at which he worked very hard, naturally kept him in London, but he was going to spend a week or two with them in September, after their return from the lakes, and she always found his visits trying. In the first place, it was quite certain that, though he did not smoke in the house out of deference to his mother’s abhorrence of the act, he did smoke in the garden; and in the second, though he never alluded to wine at lunch or dinner, a half-empty bottle of whisky had been found in his bed-room after he had gone. It often seemed cruel to Mrs. Collingwood that she should have had such a son, and in her own mind she was disposed to regard him as but a dubious gift, partaking more of the nature of a cross than of a crown.

Jeannie Avesham that afternoon had spoken of him to his mother, saying that, though she did not know him personally, he had been at Oxford with her brother, and the mention of those Oxford days had roused terrible memories in the mind of Mrs. Collingwood, and made her attack on modern fiction bitter and incisive. For he had gone to Oxford with the object of reading theology, and eventually of taking orders, but a day came when he wrote to his father saying he could not do so. He wanted to talk it all over with him, but he feared his decision was irrevocable.

Now it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that his mother would sooner have seen him in his coffin than that he should have written such a letter. It was a complete break-up of her hopes. Her world, hard and narrow as it might be, was all the world she had, and it was overturned. The last straw had been added when he decided to become an artist, and on that occasion she had said to her husband, and had meant it, “He will go to the devil.”

Time, of course, had done something to heal the wound, and in the five years which had passed since then Mrs. Collingwood had in a way grown used to it. But she was naturally rigid and incapable of adapting herself, for any change meant a change in her principles. She prayed for him with her accustomed fervour, but as long as he did not give up his profession she was forced to believe that her prayers, if answered, were answered in a way beyond her comprehension.

By half past nine she had finished her warning against infidel novels, and her husband had finished his sermon for the next day. He read prayers in the dining-room, and afterward they went up together to the drawing-room again, and he played Patience till half past ten. The town was already settling itself to sleep, and only a faint hum of living came in through the windows. They talked for a few minutes on indifferent subjects, and by eleven the house was dark.

CHAPTER V

“A little military society is so pleasant, is it not?” said Miss Clifford. “That you will find is one of the great advantages of Wroxton, Miss Avesham. We have so many factors in our little world. It is quite a miniature capital. There is the close, there is the town, there is the garrison, and there is the county.”

Miss Clifford spoke in a very quiet voice, and glowed gently as she spoke, turning for approval to her sister Clara, who rode the bicycle a fortnight before up and down Bolton Street.

Clara was forty-two, and her sister a year or two older. They lived in Montrose Villa and they were calling on Jeannie Avesham.

Jeannie gave a little rippling laugh, and pushed back her hair from her forehead. She had been out in the garden with Aunt Em when her callers were announced, and as the drawing-room windows commanded the mulberry-tree under which they had been sitting, she had not been able to go upstairs to brush her hair, as she was aware of the four mild eyes of the two Miss Cliffords raking her from the windows. Aunt Em had altogether refused to come in, leaving Jeannie to entertain the callers alone. She had expressed a wish, however, that a cup of tea should be sent out to her in the garden, which Jeannie had flatly refused to do. “If you won’t come and help me, you sha’n’t have your tea,” she had said.

But the Miss Cliffords were so refreshing that she was almost glad Aunt Em had not come. She thought she could enjoy them more alone.

“It all sounds delightful,” she said. “You know I have never lived in a country town before; we were either at Morton or in London, and it is all quite new to me. But I love new things.”

“I think you will find the charm of Wroxton grow,” said Miss Clara. “Certainly we all find that it grows on us. My sister and I are always glad to get back after our summer holiday to all our work and interests. We are very fond of our little centre.”

“I am sure I shall find it charming,” said Jeannie. “Do tell me more. Tell me about the people here. What do you all do?”

“We have charming neighbours,” said Miss Phœbe. “One of them is a relation of yours, is he not—Colonel Raymond?”

“Colonel Raymond?” asked Jeannie. “I don’t know him, I think. What relation is he to us? You see, my mother had so many brothers and sisters. I am really very ignorant about my cousins.”

“He is related through his wife, I think,” said Miss Phœbe. “His wife’s sister, I think, married a Mr. Fortescue.”

Jeannie laughed again.

“Well, I’m not so much to blame,” she said, “for the relationship is not very close. In fact, one is more nearly related to his wife. What is Mrs. Raymond like?”

“A very quiet, sweet woman,” said Miss Clara, “and very unlike her husband. He is a very dashing, military sort of man.”

Jeannie pondered a moment.

“Oh, now I remember,” she said. “I’m sure he called here, while we were settling in. But Arthur and I were undoing the drawing-room carpet, so I had to say we were out. Do tell me some more. What do you all do?”

Miss Clifford looked puzzled.

“We find our days very full,” she said. “Household duties take up a good deal of our time, and then we have our relaxations. My sister’s great hobby is literary work.”

“Oh, Phœbe!” ejaculated Miss Clara, blushing.

“Oh, but how delightful!” put in Jeannie. “Do you write much?”

“Clara has had fourteen poems in the Wroxton Chronicle,” said Miss Phœbe, with proper pride, “and another appears next week.”

“I must get it,” said Jeannie.

“Perhaps, if you are so kind as to take an interest in what I do,” said Miss Clara, “you would allow me, Miss Avesham, to send you a copy. It would be a great pleasure. The editor always sends me half a dozen copies.”

“That would be very nice of you,” said Jeannie. “And what is your hobby, Miss Clifford?”

“My sister plays the mandolin beautifully,” said Miss Clara. “She was a pupil of Professor Rimanez.”

“Why, how charming!” said Jeannie. “Do bring it round here some day, Miss Clifford, and we will have duets. I, too, play a little.”

“It would be a great pleasure,” said Miss Clifford, “but I am only a very poor performer.”

The two Miss Cliffords were thawing like icicles in June. They hardly remembered that they were having tea alone with the daughter and sister of a peer.

“Then there is the Ladies’ Literary Union,” said Miss Clara. “We meet every fortnight, and very improving and sometimes entertaining pieces are read.”

“All the members read papers in turn, I suppose,” said Jeannie.

“Yes, and then we discuss the paper. Next week we have a great treat. Mrs. Collingwood is going to read us a paper on The Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction. I got the notice this morning. Mrs. Collingwood is a great critic, but rather severe, so my sister and I think.”

“Mrs. Collingwood?” asked Jeannie. “Oh, yes, I remember her; she called the other day. I thought she was rather severe, too. I am afraid she was very much shocked at my not knowing what the Girls’ Friendly Society was. But how should I know? I don’t think there is one in London. Oh, yes, she must be a teetotaler—so my aunt and I thought. Is that so?”

Miss Clifford looked solemn. It was difficult to conceive of any one not knowing that Mrs. Collingwood was a teetotaler.

“Indeed, she is,” she replied. “Would it be inquisitive if I asked what occurred?”

“Not in the least,” said Jeannie. “My aunt only asked me to tell the cook to see that the mulberries were gathered to make mulberry gin. I said I would be sure to remember.”

“Yes, Mrs. Collingwood is very strict,” said Clara. “But she is so practical and so much in earnest. She says that so many books have a tendency to upset people’s faith, and that is very shocking if she is right about it. A friend of hers, she told me, the other day had had her faith very much shaken by reading a free-thinking novel.”

“A free-thinking novel?” said Jeannie. “I don’t think I ever saw one.”

“Well, there is Robert Elsmere,” said Miss Clifford. “I have never read it, but Mrs. Collingwood says that it is terribly upsetting.”

“Of course there is some discussion about theological questions in those books,” said Jeannie, “though I never finished Robert Elsmere. But don’t you think it may have been the fault of Mrs. Collingwood’s friend that her faith was shaken?”

Miss Clifford looked grave.

“Surely not,” she said. “The responsibility must lie with the author. If the book had never been written, no one’s faith would ever have been upset. Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps you are right,” said Jeannie. “I never really thought about it. Don’t you think we look wonderfully settled in, considering how short a time we have been here?”

Miss Clara clasped her hands.

“It is all quite beautiful,” she said. “And what a lovely garden you have.”

“Yes, it is pretty,” said Jeannie. “And there is a fountain with a basin round it, in which are water-lilies. Arthur says we must give a water picnic there.”

“I had no idea you had so extensive a piece of water,” said Miss Phœbe, gravely.

“Oh, it’s only a joke,” said Jeannie, “and a very small one. Must you be going?”

“We must, indeed,” said Miss Phœbe. “Come, Clara, you would linger here forever unless I tore you away. We have already far exceeded our time, and taken up far too much of Miss Avesham’s.”

The Miss Cliffords walked some little way in silence.

“There is quite an air about the house,” said Miss Clara, at length. “It is quite different from even Colonel Raymond’s, and Mrs. Raymond’s drawing-room always seemed to us so refined.”

“Yes, it was quite different,” said Phœbe, “and I don’t know how it was produced. The piano I saw was just at the same angle from the wall as ours. I am glad we have got that right, Clara.”

“I think we have too many little things about,” said Clara; “there must be ten vases on our chimneypiece, if there’s one, and I noticed there was only a clock and two candlesticks on Miss Avesham’s. Yet it looked ever so much more furnished than ours. Let us aim at a greater simplicity, Phœbe.”

The two Miss Cliffords lived in what is known as a “highly desirable detached mansion,” and its desirability was much enhanced by its being known as Montrose Villa. It is probable that the owner took his hint from Mrs. Raymond’s happy thought of calling her house “Lammermoor,” but the Miss Cliffords had gone one better, for the last six months they had dated all their letters “Villa Montrose,” and were even thinking of having a die made for their paper and envelopes. “Villa Montrose” sounded much more delightful, and gave, as Miss Clara said, while hanging a reproduction of Carlo Dolci in the front hall, “quite an Italian air to the place.” To the ordinary eye the Villa Montrose was a plain gray house, covered with stucco, but if (as the Miss Cliffords did even when alone) you called stucco, stookko, a perfectly different effect is produced. Similarly, a dwarf fir-tree which stood in the back garden was, rightly considered, a stone-pine, and visions of Tuscan valleys (the Miss Cliffords’ father had once been English chaplain at Florence) rose to the inward eye, with hardly any sense of their being pumped up from a distance. Miss Clara, in fact, got at the kernel of the matter when she said that the atmosphere with which the imagination can invest a place is wholly independent of the materials on which it works.

On the ground floor were four rooms, a drawing-room and dining-room looking out over the room, and at the back two small apartments, known as “the libry” and the studio. The walls of the studio were decorated with quite a quantity of oil pictures by the Miss Cliffords’ father, and an unfinished sketch of his stood on an easel. There was a tiger’s-skin rug on the floor, rather moth-eaten, and some low chairs. The only drawback to the room was that, as there was no fire-place, it was too cold to sit in in winter, and in summer, as it was exposed to the southern sun, and had a large sky-light, you might as well, as Miss Phœbe once remarked with a certain acrimony, make your sitting-room of an oven. But in the more temperate rays of April and September nothing could be more delightful than its temperature, and, even when it was untenantable, there was a pleasure in referring to “the studio.”

The “libry” was simply one mass of books, chiefly consisting of the theological collection of the Miss Cliffords’ father. Here Miss Clara worked every morning from nine till one, and it was in itself an inspiration to be surrounded by books, although she seldom took one from its shelf. When it is said that thirteen of the fourteen original poems by her which had appeared in the Wroxton Chronicle were produced in this room (the fourteenth was produced during an attack of influenza in bed, and was called Depression) it will be seen at once that the actual area of the “libry,” which measured eight feet by ten, was no index to its potentialities, for even Shakespeare’s house at Stratford-on-Avon is no palace, and Miss Clara, it is hardly necessary to say, was the president of the Ladies’ Literary Union, and was considered rather Bohemian.

Her elder sister, Miss Phœbe, was, as Clara had told Jeannie, musical. She had no sitting-room, for, like Martha, she was cumbered with much serving, and she knew, and was proud to know, that Clara was the genius. But some half of the drawing-room, which would hold five people easily, was known as Phœbe’s corner, and in Phœbe’s corner was a cottage piano and mandolin, and always a vase of flowers. A cabinet photograph of the mandolin teacher, Professor Rimanez, signed “Rimanez,” no less, in the Professor’s own hand, hung on the wall. Phœbe’s corner was full.

The two sisters lived a regular and most harmonious life. Since they never sat idle, they were right in considering that they were busy, and when Miss Phœbe had spent two or three hours every morning in washing the china they had used for breakfast, ordering dinner, and marching through every room in the house, examining towels to see if they required darning, soap to see if it wanted renewing, and smelling the water in the bed-room bottles, she was glad to seek refreshment about half past twelve by throwing herself into a chair in her corner and playing a Neapolitan air on her mandolin, or, with the soft pedal down for fear of disturbing Clara, trying over a song by Tosti or Pinsuti about “Life of my life, and soul of my soul.”

The tragedy of growing old, in fact, consists, if we look at it more closely, not in growing old, but in remaining young, and their irredeemable youthfulness was the pathetic fact in the lives of the Misses Clifford. The banjo-playing and the writing of youthful lyrics was a true symptom of the age they felt themselves to be, and the streaks of gray in their hair and the wrinkles in their faces were a travesty of their spirits. Since childhood they had led a perfectly serene and untroubled existence, and it was their bodies, the sheaths, and not the sword, which was rusting. They had floated slowly round and round in a backwater of life, and the adventure and romance of living swept by them, making them feel as if they and not the great stream was moving, and if they had been told that it was the stream that hurried by them in turmoil and charmed bewilderment, while they were standing still, they would scarcely have credited it. This is a malady most incident to country towns.

But it would be giving a totally erroneous picture of them if the impression was left that they were unhappy or unsatisfied. Herein lay the tragedy of it to the onlooker, but to them the tragedy would begin when they became aware of it. They had aged and narrowed without knowing it. They lived the life they had lived twenty years ago, among those whose days had been distinguished by a similar uniformity, without knowing that twenty years had made a difference in them. Clara always thought that Phœbe was a girl yet, and Phœbe constantly considered that Clara was still a little flighty. Meantime they scored their little successes. Clara was congratulated on her last poem in the Wroxton Chronicle, and Phœbe sang Pinsuti in a quavering voice to the cottage piano. Then when the afternoon party was over (they gave teas at Villa Montrose), Clara would start for a reckless ride on her bicycle, and Phœbe hungered for her return.

Their father had been the rector of a country village near Wroxton, and their great-uncle—a grocer—the mayor of the town. Thus Villa Montrose had a double halo round it; the grocery was sunk in the civil dignitary, and the poverty of the clergyman in the honour of his office. “My father, the rector,” “My great-uncle, the Mayor,” were notable subjects of conversation.

But this evening Miss Phœbe felt more disturbed than she had felt for many years. For many years no fresh friend and no fresh interest had touched the lives of herself and her sister, and the call they had paid on Jeannie, though they talked only on trivial subjects, and looked out on to the familiar spires of the Cathedral, had been strangely exhilarating. The impression had been conveyed to her in some subtle manner that Jeannie’s whole attitude toward life was utterly different to any she had known before. How it had been conveyed to her she could not have told you, but Jeannie’s every word and gesture she saw to be the product of a wholly new idea of life. Her hair had been untidy, yet Miss Clifford knew how different would have been the effect if it had been her own hair which wanted brushing; she lounged in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other, an attitude which Miss Clifford knew from her earliest childhood to be most unladylike, and though her manner had been utterly unstudied, and she did not, as Miss Clifford always did, press her guests to stay when they said they must be going, she gave you the impression that you were welcome.

These thoughts hovered round Miss Clifford’s head as she lay awake that night. Jeannie was so much fresher and vivacious even than Clara, who often talked and laughed more than her elder sister quite liked. How was it that Clara looked rather old and tired beside Jeannie? Could it be because she was so? And Miss Clifford, for her own peace of mind, fell asleep without solving the question.

CHAPTER VI

Jack Collingwood came to pay his expected visit to Wroxton early in September, as soon as his father and mother were back from their annual trip to the English Lakes. Canon Collingwood had much enjoyed their time there, and had brought back several tin boxes full of roots of wild marsh-growing plants which he intended to cultivate on the edge of the chalk-stream which ran at the bottom of the garden. He did this every year, and the plants never grew, which did not in the least stand in the way of his doing it again. He had also, as usual, preached an old sermon in Grasmere church, and had written three new ones. His life, indeed, at the Lakes was not less regular than his life at Wroxton; he had been out of doors more and had spent only two hours a day over the study of patristic literature, but he had been out at the same hours, and in at the same hours, and was quite unaltered. He had worn the same straw-hat at the Lakes that he always wore, and on returning home put it on the top shelf of his mahogany wardrobe, where it reposed for eleven months out of the twelve.

It would be giving a false impression to say that Mrs. Collingwood had enjoyed herself. She took a holiday like medicine, with a view to its after-effects, in order to enable her to return with renewed vigour to the battle with immoral books and people who were not helpful and did not live in closes. In order to attain this end as fully as possible she had spent all her time out of doors, taking long strolls from breakfast till lunch, and a walk with her husband from lunch till tea, on the recognised plan that the best rest for a tired mind is to strenuously overtire the body also. She had continually looked at the beauties of nature also as part of the prescription, and had read a little Wordsworth as she would read a guide-book in a foreign town. In the evening, and sometimes if it was exceedingly wet, she would work, and had produced three G. F. S. leaflets, one of which embodied her lecture on the Downward Tendencies of Modern Fiction. Another was called No Parleyings with the Enemy. In fact, when she and her husband returned, she might be said to be a match for anything.

Jack arrived on a brilliant September afternoon, and, sending his luggage on, walked himself. The old, quaint town seemed to his brisker London eye to be dozing on as peacefully as ever, in a sort of tranquil mediæval drowsiness. From the station, which was on a hill, he could see across the cup-shaped hollow in which lay the red-tiled town. There were no new houses on the way down, and the names above all the old ones were the same. The man who had cut his hair when he was a child stood, as he had always stood, at his door, looking on to the street, with a pair of scissors stuck into the pocket of his white apron, neither balder nor stouter than he used to be. It had always been a matter of wonder to Jack how a man with so bald a head dare have his windows filled full of infallible hair-preservers, but perhaps he was a cynic, and traded with amusement on the fathomless credulity of man. The very slope of the high street seemed designed for a leisurely folk; it was too steep for a horse to trot either up or down, and the foot-passengers ascended softly like bubbles arising through water, and descended with the same equable motion like pebbles sinking in the sea. Half-way down he branched off through a covered passage leading under a house into the close, and there, too, time seemed to have stood still. A few nursery-maids wheeled contented babies up and down its paths, and children were playing among the grave-stones; the gray pinnacled west front seemed the incarnation of stability. As always, the place asserted its instant charm over him; for the moment as he passed through the grave-yard into the close he would have asked nothing better than to say an eternal good-bye to the froth and bubble of the world and turn the key on his ambitions. It would be necessary, he reflected, to be rid of them, else in a week or two he would be tingling for wider things again and chafing at the slow passage of ungrudged hours. Like all healthily minded young men, he knew he was going to overtop the world, and the air here was opiate. But for the moment he was in love with tranquility.

Both his father and mother were out when he arrived at the house, and, with the spell of soothing still on him, he sauntered off again, meaning to return home for tea, and leaving the town, struck into a foot-path that led through the water-meadows by the river. It has been stated how his mother regretted that, if he was to be a painter at all, he had not been a landscape-painter, and this afternoon the regret was his also. Portrait-painting, he told himself, was an inspiration which might or might not be at one’s command. For every hundred faces he looked at he only saw one or two that suggested anything. Before now he had caused offence, when given an order for a portrait, by insisting on seeing his sitter before he promised anything, and then declining the task. It was not beauty he looked for in a face, nor was it exactly intelligence. The quality, whatever it was, might be altogether absent in the most admired features, and present in every line of the face when there were, so to speak, no features at all. It was this eternal search for this, the refusal to paint where he did not find it, and a magical brush when he did, that had already given him a somewhat unusual standing among the younger painters of the day. His pictures were few, but, as a natural consequence of the integrity and honesty of his art, his refusal to paint without the conviction that his subject was for him, there was nothing in any of them to show a want of grasp. That everything was proper material for art he did not deny, but he emphatically affirmed that everything was not proper material for each artist.

But, compared to the portrait-painter who thus limited himself, how fortunate, he thought, was the landscape-painter. All trees were paintable if you could paint a tree at all; all clear and running water was beautiful, all clouds “composed.” This green bank on which he wandered, the lower grasses of which waved in the suck of the brilliant stream, the stretch of meadow beyond, tall with loose-strife and the hundred herbs of watery places, the great austern downs beyond with the clump or two of pines, the remnants of the great southern forests of England—what landscape-painter could fail to find his subject in any of these?

He paused on the edge of the stream where the water was running in steadfast haste toward a mill which stood a hundred yards below, and looked long into that translucent coolness. Subaqueous plantations of green weed undulated backward and forward in the thrust of the water like the tail of a poised fish, alternating with bare spaces pebble-sown, but the pebbles were glorified to topaz and amber. Here and there tall tufts of pithy rushes stood breast-high in the water, making strange movements of twitching as the current struck them, causing the smooth crystal to be broken with a sudden dimple. Over the surface from time to time there would run like a wreath of mist a darker line, as if some finger had traced on the stream a letter which the water was trying to efface; then the mark would change from a circle to a half-circle, straighten itself out for a moment, and then be broken. From below came the gush of the mill mixed with the bourdon note of the machinery, and Jack could see the rush of water coming out of the dark passage in torrents of white foam, a soda-water of bubbles. There, he knew, the weeds would be altogether different; they would be close as velvet, or moss on a tree, offering little surface to the flood, and not like thick, branching forests, which would be torn away in the mill-race.

He had waited so long looking into the water that he saw it was nearly time to go back, but the attraction of the stream held him by cords, and he could not but go on, just to look at the jubilant water escaping from the prison of the mill and perhaps extend his wandering to a pool he knew of a hundred yards below where the water deepened suddenly and resumed again its sedater going. A plank bridge crossed at the head of this, just below a red brick wall which bounded the garden belonging to the mill. He would go as far as that corner, cross the stream, and return to Wroxton by the path on the other side of the meadows.

So on he went: the channel below the mill was all it should be, and the sun, for his delight, caught the white spray of the plunging river and hung a broken rainbow on it. This Jack felt was a gift thrown in; he had not anticipated it, and it gave him a thrill of pleasure. Yet, even as he looked, he shook his head. The need of the artist for expression was on him, and he could only tell himself that this was all beautiful, and he wished he was a landscape-painter. And, thinking thus, he turned the corner of the red wall, and stopped.

In the centre of the plank bridge by which he intended to cross was standing a girl opposite him, with a face full of laughter and anxiety, and with her parasol she kept at bay a small retriever puppy who had just left the water, and, still dripping, was evidently coming to his mistress in order to shake himself and receive her congratulations on his having had a swim. Even as Jack turned the corner the puppy began his shake, and to his trained, quick eye the whole scene was as complete and as faithful as an instantaneous photograph. The puppy’s head was already shaken, and down to his shoulders he was black and curly set in a halo of spray, but the shake had not yet touched his back and tail, the hair of which was still shining and close. The girl was also dressed in black; with one hand she drew her skirts away from the dog, with the other she held out her open parasol so that the puppy should be compelled to keep his distance, for the bridge was narrow, and he could hardly pass. Her face, with its wide, laughing eyes set in an expression of agonized dismay, which her smiling mouth contradicted, was a moment’s miracle. Obviously every nerve of her body, every cell, however secret, in her brain was taken up and lost in the amused fear that the puppy would wet her. She had no hat on, and the perfect oval of her face was crowned with the most glorious black hair. And Jack gave a quick-drawn breath. A moment before he had lamented that he was not a landscape-painter; now, for all he cared, the world might be made of Portland cement, if only that girl would laugh and that puppy would shake itself.

The infinite moment was soon over. Even while he stared, oblivious of all else, the puppy had grown curly from nose to tail, the anxiety had faded like a breath from the girl’s face, and she looked up and saw him. She turned and retraced her steps over the plank, and stepped into the meadow, where, only a few yards off, was sitting an oldish lady reading a book. The girl’s hat was lying by her, and there was a tea-basket out, the silver of which twinkled pleasantly in the sun. Jack walked straight past them, and did not look again. He had recorded in his brain all he wanted, and to stop and stare would be not only rude but, what in his present frame of mind was more important, unnecessary. He did not even look round when he heard short, scuffling steps behind him, and impatient barkings, and a voice said, “Toby, come here at once.”

He knew instinctively that it was the girl who had spoken, and not the elder lady, for the voice had the timbre which belonged to that face. Who she was he did not know, and really he did not care. She had given him a vision, and she might disappear again. He would have liked, he longed, in fact, to paint her, but no more, and, except as a sitter, she was nothing to him. He could even, on reflection, have thought twice about that, for his one moment had been so complete and was so indelible. Perhaps she was a poseuse, startled for once into a genuine emotion, though on so small a matter as the wetting of her gown. It was more than possible that she would never serve him again, though she sat to him for a score of years, as she had served him at that moment. She did not concern him as long as the puppy was not shaking itself close to her, and in that regard she was his already. And as he walked back along the water-meadows he thought no more about the amber pavement of the stream, and envied not any mood of the landscape-painter, for whom a water-meadow held no such exquisite surprises. But the girl was to him no more than a subject, and though the puppy was an essential factor in the scene, he valued it not on the principle of “Love me, love my dog.”

All the way home his vision remained vivid, and in his mind he settled the composition of it. The girl should stand facing full, with the dog almost straight in front of her, cutting the canvas in two by a long black line. Behind should be the green meadow, with a narrow strip of broken ground just indicating the stream bank, and the moment should be when the dog had shaken its head curly again, while the rest of it was still drowned and sleek. And in the joy of creation he laughed aloud and let his pipe go out.

He found his father and mother had both come in, and was told they were having tea in the garden. Canon Collingwood welcomed him warmly, and his mother evidently remembered she was his mother. These first moments were always a little awkward, for Jack was apt to forget how few subjects they had in common, and would pour himself out in matters that were near his life before perceiving that what he said was, if not distasteful to his mother, at any rate alien to her. He did so on this occasion.

“I walked down by the river as I saw you were not in,” he said, “and I was in luck. Just as I turned the corner by the mill I came upon a finished picture. A girl standing on the bridge, keeping off a wet puppy with her parasol. You should have seen her face, beautiful to begin with, laughing in every line. I never saw anything so complete. I wonder who she was?”

“Some young woman from the town probably,” said his mother, in tones that would have frozen the mercury in a thermometer.

“I wish I had spoken to her now,” continued the unfortunate Jack, “though I didn’t want to at the moment. Anyhow, I remember her face pretty well. Besides, she looked a lady—it might have been awkward.”

“Very awkward,” said his mother.

This time he heard, and the vivacity was struck from his face. But he went on without a pause.

“And did you enjoy your time at the Lakes, father?” he said; “I never answered your letter, I know, but I really was tremendously busy, though that is no excuse. I was painting Mrs. Napier; do you know her, mother? She has a sort of Lady Hamilton face.”

Now Lady Hamilton was not a person whom Mrs. Collingwood desired to have mentioned, and she felt it her duty to change the subject.

“There will be a beautiful sunset,” she said.

Now this was kind. Though torture and chains should not make her allude to any one who even resembled that notorious woman, yet she was willing to talk about subjects in the domain of art, provided only that they were innocent, and might without profanation be mentioned under the shadow of the Cathedral. But as a Christian woman she drew the line at Lady Hamilton.

Canon Collingwood plunged to the rescue.

“Exquisite, quite exquisite,” he said; “that rose-colour is so—so beautiful, and the contrast of it with the blue above is quite—quite beautiful.”

And, exhausted by the effort of making this discerning criticism, he took another cup of tea. Whether conversation could have languished further is unknown, for at the moment the butler came out of the house, followed by Miss Clara Clifford. Mrs. Collingwood welcomed her with a worker’s smile.

“So pleasant to see you,” she said; “you know my son, I think. We were all enjoying the lovely sunset.”

“Beautiful, is it not?” said Miss Clara, staring at the east. She was always a little nervous about coming to call without her sister, but Phœbe had the tooth-ache, and Villa Montrose smelt as if it were built of creosote. She took a sip of her tea, and laid hands upon her courage.

“And talking of sunset,” she said, “reminds me of what I wanted to say to you, Mrs. Collingwood. May we add your name to our list of patronesses this year for our Annual Art Exhibition? You have been so kind as to permit it before.”

“I shall be delighted,” said Mrs. Collingwood, “for I have always found that the Wroxton Exhibition was so delightful. You must exercise a strict censorship over what you exhibit, and I am sure you do. I remember very clearly seven or eight pictures of Switzerland and several of the Lakes. Surely you remember the picture of Grasmere, William, which was shown last year? I pointed out the original to you when we were there.”

It was one of Mrs. Collingwood’s chiefest pleasures in the artistic line to be able to see the “original” of a picture she had noticed, or to recognise in a picture an “original” she knew. She cared, in fact, more for the fact that a picture represented a place she knew than she did for its merits. She always bought a catalogue when she went to a picture exhibition, and always marked with a cross the pictures which had pleased her most. These would be found to be representations of places she knew. Occasionally, when she knew a place very well, she would have given the picture two crosses, but two crosses in Mrs. Collingwood’s catalogue were as rare as double stars in Baedeker. Any part of Wroxton Cathedral would receive one, and Grasmere had a chance.

This favourable reception of her first request made Miss Clara even bolder. She was afraid that Phœbe might consider her conduct unladylike, but Phœbe was not there. She turned to Jack.

“We should be so much honoured,” she said, “if you could lend us a sketch, a mere sketch. It would be the greatest pleasure, and I would be responsible for its being well hung.”

“I have nothing with me here,” said Jack, “but”—and a thought struck him—“but when must the pictures be sent in by?”