Two, by Tricks: A Novel

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(Harvard University Library) Routledge 1893

TWO, BY TRICKS.

TWO, BY TRICKS

A Novel

By EDMUND YATES

AUTHOR OF
'BROKEN TO HARNESS,' 'BLACK SHEEP,' 'THE YELLOW FLAG,' ETC.

'Still, for all slips of hers,
One of Eve's family'

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK

Cordially Inscribed
TO
JOSEPH CHARLES PARKINSON.

TWO, BY TRICKS

[CHAPTER I.]

ON THE GRAND TIER.

It was the week after Ascot, and town was full. Society, which had been amusing itself with the cancans of the season--such as how the Duke of Pimlico, who had been hitherto regarded as the greatest screw in the world, buying his coats from Hyam's, and his hats from the peripatetic Israelites in the streets, dining off a fried sole and half a pint of Hungarian wine, and driving a horse so starved and weak that even Lord ---- would have spared it, had suddenly taken to giving splendid banquets to Royalty, and lighting up the ancestral hall with more wax candles than his grace's father-in-law, the eminent tallow-chandler, had ever sold in a week; how the slim and good-looking Charles Bedford, while playing whist at the Tattenham, had been discovered, not merely with two aces on his lap, but, like the heathen Chinee, with twenty-four packs secreted on various portions of his person; how the noble Master of the Buckhounds had given one of the best boxes at Ascot to pretty Mrs. Delamere, whose husband was away on a scientific expedition inspecting the Fauna and Flora of Central Asia,--society had discussed all these matters, and wanted something new to talk about. It was going to have it.

It was hot everywhere in London that night, but hottest of all at the Opera. Outside, the air was thick and heavy, tainted by vegetable refuse from the neighbouring market, laden with fetid odours from the surrounding coffee-shops, taverns, and crapulous dens; inside, the eye was distracted by the constant fluttering of the fans in the boxes and from the area of the stalls, and the ear tortured by the stifled groan of the obese foreigners who line the outer ring of the pit, sweltering terribly.

There were many foreigners present that night: slim, olive-skinned, black-muzzled Spaniards, with close blue-black hair growing low down on their foreheads, and with their forefingers stained by constant contact with the cigarette; plethoric pudgy Germans, long-bearded and bald-headed, beating time with dumpy hands, ring-bedecked, and not too clean; lively volatile Italians, musical fanatics, who winced at a false note, and shrieked out 'Sh--sh!' in shrillest anger when any of their neighbours attempted conversation. Other foreigners in the boxes--ambassadors these. The Turk, with his crimson fez, in such contrast with his dead-white face; the Russian, who sits with sated eyes and palled ears, looking at indeed, but not regarding, what is going on before him, and thinking of the days when Taglioni danced and Malibran sang; the Frenchman, smiling and chattering with the full knowledge that his own recall is imminent, and that the members of the government which he served might be at any moment displaced, and would be only too thankful if they escaped massacre. A subscription night this, with Patti in the Barbiere, with royal highnesses and a serene transparency on a visit for a few weeks, in the royal box; with Philippa Marchioness of Mont-Serrat, with her luxuriant ringlets, looking like a vignette from the Book of Beauty of the year '42, on the grand tier; and with Tom Lydyeard in the fifth row of the stalls, yawning as though his head were coming off.

This is Tom Lydyeard, the tall well-bred-looking man with the red beard turning silver at the roots, and the fair hair in which the parting is rather broader than it used to be. Not so young or so active as on that cheerless April morning when he marched across Waterloo-bridge with his regiment on their way to join the troops in the Crimea; but a handsome fellow yet, with a well-preserved figure and a keen eye. Tom has preserved his figure better than his temper, which, on occasions, is apt to be remarkably short; 'Hansom and Growler' is the nickname which this combination of good looks and bad temper has obtained for poor Tom from some of the junior members of the Rag, where he grumbles about the wine and the cooking, snaps at the waiters, and requires all the cajolery of St. Kevin, pleasantest of Irish army-doctors, to keep him within bounds.

Tom is evidently not best pleased at the present moment. The man in the stall next to his is a very stout Italian, with lustreless black gloves on his hands and a square diamond brooch in the middle of his plaited shirt-front, who is mopping himself with a purple-silk handkerchief, and with whom Tom Lydyeard is horribly disgusted.

'Can't think what they let such brutes into the place for!' he says to himself, looking over rather than at his dripping neighbour. 'Gad, what a comfort he would have been in the Row this morning when the dust was blowing! I can't imagine what has come to this place; one scarcely ever sees a soul one knows--a lot of foreigners and City people; not like the old stamp of men whom one could always rely upon finding in the stalls, or in the omnibus-box at the old house when the curtain for the ballet went up. They were a better style, those fellows; what they call the "old school,"--vieille école, bonne école,--and that sort of thing. Men go now to that reeking Alhambra, and think they enjoy it. What a queer thing it is to think that so few of the old set are left! There is one of them though, by Jove!' he muttered with a start. 'I haven't seen him for twenty years, but I'd lay my life that's Uffington.'

The man by whom he was attracted looked up at the same instant, and their eyes met. The stranger's cheeks flushed, and for a moment he made as if he would turn away; but when he saw that Tom Lydyeard had left his stall he stopped, and the next moment they were shaking hands with more effusion than is usually shown in present society.

He was a man of middle height, with small regular features, keen black eyes, thick black hair and moustache, small hands and feet, and a youthful, almost a boyish, figure. At a distance you might have guessed him five-and-twenty; and it was only when you looked closely at him that you noticed the lines round the eyes and deep indented furrows stretching from the nostrils to the corner of the mouth, which, like the ground-swell on the shore, told of the storms that had been. In the year '51 Nugent Uffington was looked upon as one of the likeliest young fellows in town, though he had nothing in the world beyond his handsome face, some two hundred a year, and his commission in the Grenadiers. Every one, however, was kind to the cheery good-looking lad; men lent him money and horses, women smiled upon him, and manoeuvring mothers, when they had no more daughters of their own to provide for, enlisted themselves in Nugent's service, and actually tried to procure for him some of the season's prizes. It was said at one time that he might have married Miss Amelia M'Craw, the prettier of the twin Scotch heiresses, who in their marriage gave up to the peerage what was meant for themselves. Good-natured Mrs. Waddledot Hepburn gave three dances (at the command of the Marchioness of Melton) in order that the young people might be thrown together; and old Waddledot himself used to lean across the railings by Apsley House regarding them caracoling in the distant Row with a 'Bless-you,-my-children!' kind of aspect. But, as fate would have it, in the month of June that year Mr. Mudge, whose father and grandfather had made an enormous fortune by converting old rags into shoddy-cloth in the village of Batley, Yorkshire, came to town to see the Great Exhibition, bringing with him his wife and letters of introduction to the members for the county and several leading spirits among the commercial magnates who were just beginning to colonise the now plutocratic region of Tyburnia. The people who asked them out to dinner did not think much of Mr. Mudge, who was a fat, stupid, good-looking man of a common type, but they (the male portion at least) found Mrs. Mudge very charming. She was a Canadian blonde, very pretty and piquante, whom Alfred Mudge had met when on a business excursion to Montreal, had a captivating way of saying saucy things with a tinge of French accent, and was sometimes full of sentiment, at others full of raillery, but always coquettish in the highest degree.

After Nugent Uffington had seen Julie Mudge once or twice, he left off thinking about Miss M'Craw and her hundred thousand pounds, though, indeed, that heavily-ingoted lady had never occupied many of his thoughts; after he had met Julie half a dozen times, he thought of no one else. Julie was very much taken by the appearance and manners of Captain Uffington, who belonged to quite a different world from any which she had known. She did not care for Alfred Mudge; but she had no intention of doing him any harm; that was all Nugent Uffington could get out of her after assailing her with more numerous and more delicate temptations than ever beset St. Antony. This continued for three weeks, and Nugent, who had never given so much attention to any matter before, and who was becoming exhausted, thought of retiring from the pursuit, when one night after Alfred had started off to dine with the Bellowsmenders' Company in the City, and Julie had announced to him her intention of going to bed at eight o'clock as some compensation for unwonted dissipation, a note came from Lady Rosemount saying that she had stalls at the French plays, where M. Levassor was then giving his delightful entertainment, and nothing would so please her as that her dear Mrs. Mudge should keep her company. Julie pondered for an instant. She knew that Lady Rosemount was a great friend of Nugent Uffington's, and would probably arrange for his attendance; but she wanted to see M. Levassor, and as Alfred had deserted her for the Bellowsmenders, she could see no reason why she could not accept such innocent amusement. Lady Rosemount called for her at half-past eight. They found Nugent Uffington on escort duty at the theatre-door, and as they walked up the stairs they were stopped by an altercation between the checktaker and a lady and gentleman immediately preceding them, as to the number of a certain box. The lady was gorgeously dressed in a cerise-coloured satin and a voluminous crinoline, as was the fashion in those days, very much decollétée, with diamonds on her neck and in her ears, and a liberal allowance of rouge and bismuth on her cheeks and chin. The gentleman who was with her seemed very angry at not being permitted immediate access to the theatre; but reference had to be made to another official, and in the mean time he stepped by to let the Rosemount party pass; in doing so he presented under the bright flare of the gaslight his full face, the full face of Mr. Alfred Mudge, who, instead of carousing with carnival Bellowsmenders, was acting as escort to the notorious Miss Leggat of the Theatre Royal, Hatton-garden.

The next day Mrs. Mudge, accompanied by her maid and Captain Uffington, crossed the Channel and proceeded by long stages to Switzerland. At the Hôtel Beau Rivage at Ouchy they remained during the summer and autumn months, and only left it to settle down into a pretty quaint old châlet in the neighbourhood of Lausanne. There was the usual three-days' scandal in town, where some laughed, some shrugged their shoulders, and all had a secret delight that Nugent Uffington, of whom, as a popular man, they had naturally been envious, had come to grief. Mr. Alfred Mudge brought an action in the Divorce Court, which he would probably have gained but for the intervention of the Queen's Proctor, who had heard of the petitioner's intimacy with Miss Leggat, an intimacy which had cost Mr. Mudge two or three thousand pounds, which the lady had duly divided with her complacent husband, Mr. Tapps, the leader of the orchestra.

For ten years Julie and Nugent lived in the little Swiss châlet, a guilty life of course, but a thoroughly happy one. They were rich enough to satisfy all their wants, for, in addition to his small income and the price of his commission, she had five hundred a year, and they were devoted to each other. No boy and girl in their first delicious dream, which is never to be renewed, though its every detail haunts our latest memories; no sharers of that bliss beyond all which the minstrel has told; no two who were linked in one heavenly tie--were more all in all to each other than this pair of sinners. The ex-Guardsman was never dull; occasionally he had cheery letters from friends in England telling him of what was going on there; but he knew that on the day of his flight with Julie he had renounced all his old life, and his chief amusement was in shooting and in fishing, of which at most seasons of the year there was abundance in the neighbourhood.

Well-regulated people will be pleased to hear that Nemesis, which is always supposed to await such evil-doers, came down upon them at last. One autumn night, as they were crossing the lake after dining at the Beau Rivage with an American gentleman and his family, a sudden storm swept down and overset their little boat. Nugent came to the surface at once, and, being a splendid swimmer, struck out, swimming round and round in search of Julie. The night was very dark, and it is probable, encumbered by the weight of her clothing, she never rose; it is certain that Nugent never saw her again, and that his own life was only saved by his being dragged on to the bottom of the boat, when half-dead with exhaustion, by the servant, who had already found a refuge there.

When Nugent Uffington recovered from the illness consequent upon the cold and exhaustion, he broke up the little establishment at the châlet and disappeared, no one knew where. Letters were occasionally read from men who thought they had seen him, but they were from such diverse latitudes that no reliance could be placed upon them; and when his nephew Sir Mark Uffington died, the lawyers did not know where to write to Nugent to tell him of his succession. That was the key-note struck by Tom Lydyeard in their conversation.

'Heard you were lost, my dear boy, and scarcely a possible chance of ever seeing you again; private detectives, and all that kind of thing, hunting for you all over the globe--been to Australia after you, some one said, and didn't find you there.'

'No,' said Uffington, with a slight smile. 'I had been in Australia, but when the agent went out there to search for me I was living in a little place in Brittany, where there was wonderful sport, but where I never saw an English newspaper, not even Galignani; and even if I had seen the announcement of poor young Mark's death, I doubt whether I should have felt any impulse to hurry over here and claim his place.'

'Do you act upon impulse?' asked Tom Lydyeard.

'Always,' said Langton quickly. 'Three weeks ago the impulse seized me, and I came over here; and,' he added, shrugging his shoulders drearily, 'it looks as if in a very short time it would seize me again, and send me off to the uttermost ends of the earth.'

'You don't know many people here?' said Tom Lydyeard, observing his friend's eyes wandering round the house.

'Beyond yourself not a soul,' said Uffington; 'tell me who they are.'

'Gad,' said Tom Lydyeard, 'you have given me a pretty difficult task, though I have scarcely missed a London season since--since you went away. I haven't much acquaintance with the Jews, Turks, and infidels of whom this audience seems to be composed.'

'There seems to be an undue proportion of the tribes scattered about the house,' said Uffington, after another look round, 'and, as you say, of foreigners generally. Who are these people, and how do they get here?'

'Who are they?--diamond merchants, owners of newspapers, riggers of stock, promoters and projectors, which is modern English for swindlers and thieves. How do they get here?--through the money they have made. Look round the grand tier, and you will scarcely see half a dozen English faces, and certainly not two with any high-bred look about them. Don't you remember how different it was in the old time under Lumley's management, when you used to wait regularly every night to see Carlotta and Perrot dance the Truandaise?'

'Don't mention those times!' muttered Uffington, shrinking as though he had been struck. Then, as though to change the conversation, he said: 'There is a pretty woman--very pretty and distinguée-looking too--in the fourth box from the stage; who is she?'

'That,' said Tom Lydyeard, after looking through his glass, 'is Lady Forestfield; she is a daughter of Lord Stortford's, and married Forestfield about two years ago.'

'I recollect Lady Stortford,' said Uffington; 'she was our contemporary, a very sweet woman. Is she alive?'

'No; she died last year,' said Tom Lydyeard. Then added under his breath, 'Thank God!'

Uffington heard the words and looked sharply round, but Tom Lydyeard's eyes were hidden by his glass, and his uplifted hands covered that tell-tale of any emotion--the mouth.

Nugent Uffington then made a long inspection of the box, and at its conclusion said, I can now recognise many traces of her mother in Lady Forestfield. She is the same [Greek: Boôpis `'Eze], and seems to have the same splendid hair. What is her husband like?'

'Forestfield is a cool cynical sensualist, the type of a race very common in the present day, who is always very quiet and apparently unimpassioned, and yet I believe that a wickeder little wretch does not walk.'

'He doesn't treat his wife well, then?'

'My dear fellow, no one treats his wife well nowadays; it isn't the fashion. I suppose, if anything, Forestfield may be looked upon as rather an exemplary person, as he doesn't care to beat his wife or afficher his infidelities as many of these youths do; but he is notoriously unfaithful for all that, and I have sometimes seen my lady looking very sad indeed.'

'She cares for him, then?'

'She--well, she did; most people would say she does--but I have my own ideas on that point.'

'Poor child!' said Uffington, with a sigh; then added quickly, 'Who is that just come into the box?'

Tom Lydyeard looked up, and saw a gentlemanly-looking young man, with fair curling hair, fresh complexion, blue eyes, and white teeth, talking to Lady Forestfield's companion, the Duchess of Melrose.

After his inspection, Lydyeard put down his glass, and commencing with 'Gad,' given with a peculiarly rich smack, continued, 'that's Gustave de Tournefort, a young Frenchman of good birth, who has been over here, off and on, for the last two years; he sings well, and that sort of thing, and, what is odd for a Frenchman, rides very straight to hounds. He had rooms at Leamington last winter near Forestfield's place, and they say his going was very good indeed.'

'Poor child!' repeated Uffington, with his glasses still upon Lady Forestfield.

'Yes, quite; isn't he?' said Tom Lydyeard, who only caught the last word. 'They call him "l'enfant terrible," and say, for all that mild and innocent look of his, that he is the very mischief when he takes a fancy. See! this is Forestfield coming this way.'

As he spoke there advanced towards them a small slight man, with delicate effeminate features, sunken eyes, and a hard cruel mouth. He nodded to Lydyeard and stared rather insolently at Uffington as he passed.

'I don't like that man's looks,' said Uffington. 'I have studied physiognomy a good deal in the course of my wanderings, and I scarcely ever saw a more secretive, untrustworthy face. I should think that poor girl yonder must sooner or later have a bad time with such a man.'

* * * * * *

Nugent Uffington would not have said differently had he seen and heard what was passing in the box on the grand tier. M. de Tournefort chatted very pleasantly with the Duchess of Melrose, who had been accustomed to admiration for thirty years, and who still enjoyed it; but when another gentleman came into the box, the Frenchman ceded the chair by her grace's side, and, taking advantage of an opportunity when the duchess and the new-comer were in animated conversation about the diamonds of the ambassadress opposite, managed to whisper in Lady Forestfield's ear,

'We have been watched, and Forestfield knows all!'

A bright flush mantled over her neck and mounted to the roots of her hair; then faded away, leaving her whiter than before. The hand holding her glass trembled, and her lips twitched convulsively; but after a minute she managed to regain her self-control, and without looking at him, she said, in a voice which he alone could hear, the one word, 'Go!'

[CHAPTER II.]

LADY FORESTFIELD AT HOME.

'We have been watched, and Forestfield knows all!' Those words seemed to have crept into Lady Forestfield's heart, deadening its action and stupefying her brain. She sat perfectly motionless until just before the curtain fell, then rose, accompanied by the duchess and attended by the two gentlemen who had subsequently come into the box, and sought her carriage. While waiting in the crush-room, in reply to a question put, she scarcely knew by whom, she pleaded a severe headache, and excused herself from seeing any more of her friends that night. The after-theatre suppers at Lady Forestfield's house in Seamore-place were renowned, and the Duchess of Melrose, who had come to that sensible time of life when eating is regarded as something more than the mere swallowing of food, and both the attendant sprites who wanted to fill up a couple of hours before going to Pratt's, were disappointed; but Lady Forestfield's look was so dazed and colourless and helpless, that it was evident that her plea was no pretence, and the duchess took advantage of an opportunity to ask her in a whisper if anything had happened.

'Nothing,' she replied in a flat tuneless tone, 'nothing.'

'I thought, my dear, from your looks, that a hawk might have dropped down into the dovecot; but you are very young and very sensitive, my poor child; in a few years you will learn to treat any little temporary storms with proper unconcern.' And then the carriages were signalled, and the ladies took their departure.

On reaching home, Lady Forestfield, with a passing glance into the dining-room, where the table was set out for supper, went straight to her room, and dismissing her maid as soon as possible, threw herself in her peignoir into a low chair near the window overlooking the Park, and gave herself up to thought.

'Forestfield knows all!' Those words were her social death-knell, ringing out farewell to friends, to position, to hope, almost to life; for what would life be to her without the surroundings in which she had revelled, and which were about to be ruthlessly cut away? Was there the remotest chance of escape? Could there be any possible motive by which her husband, cognisant of her crime, would consent to condone it? Of his own irregularities since their marriage, common and manifold as they were, she had long since been made aware, and had suffered them in silence. Might not he, in simplest justice to her, do likewise? He knew all; but none else, save the creatures in his employ, whose silence was as easily purchased as their espionage. He had been with her but five minutes before De Tournefort had told her the fatal news, and his manner, as ordinarily, was cold and cynically polite. She had seen him very different at times when she had unwittingly given him trivial cause for offence, when he had cursed and sworn, and once seized her arm and wrenched it round so violently that for weeks she had borne the blue impress of his fingers. Surely De Tournefort must have been misinformed. Surely, if Richard knew his disgrace, he would have avoided her in public; and when they met in private would have wreaked his wrath upon her, as he had done for far more venial matters.

From thinking of her husband she turned to thinking of herself, wondering how and why she had fallen; patiently, but in a vague dreamy kind of manner, analysing her feelings towards the man who had wrought her ruin, and for whose gratification she had imperilled her social status and her soul. For his gratification, not for hers! In her self-examination she did not find one grain of love for Gustave de Tournefort; she had not even had a caprice, a passion for him, and had only listened to his oft-urged suit when completely worn out with solitude, loneliness, and neglect. Love, passion--she had known them but once, in the early days of her marriage, when she thought that there had never lived on this earth a man comparable to her husband; none so handsome, none with such an easy bearing, such biting wit, such delicious insolence. She had sat down and worshipped him with all her soul and strength, heedless of her father's good-humoured raillery, heedless of her mother's tearful entreaties and solemn warnings; she had set up her idol and bowed down before it, only to find after a little time that it was a very ordinary kind of fetish indeed.

Those feelings were played out now, but at one time they had been all-powerful, and the mere recollection of them had a softening and humanising effect upon the wretched girl as she sat, her elbows resting on her knees, the lower part of her face buried in her hands, looking out across the road dotted with lamps and echoing the rattle of an occasional carriage, to the park beyond, where the big trees bent whisperingly to each other, and beckoned solemnly like dim gigantic spectres.

Suddenly a terror seized her. What Gustave had said must be true; he would never have dared to trifle with her on such a subject. They had been watched, and her husband knew all! Her husband would come home--he was on his way thither at that moment perhaps--and in his wild ungovernable fury he might murder her. Even if her life were spared it would be rendered desolate; she would be driven forth from her home, and left to fight her way in the world alone, without friends or resources.

Then there arose suddenly in her mind a scene which she had witnessed during the previous autumn, when she and Lord Forestfield were travelling in Germany. They were travelling from Ischl to Salzburg, and at the driver's request halted midway that he might bait his horses. A kermesse was being held in the little village, and amongst the numerous carts gathered together before the inn-door was a travelling-carriage, from which the horses had been removed. It was, however, still occupied, and nestled into one corner under the hood May Forestfield had made out the dim outline of a female form. The courier attached to this carriage, of course making friends and drinking with the Forestfields' courier, told him that the lady whom he was taking to Ischl was an Englishwoman, and very ill, so ill that the baths and waters of Ischl had been prescribed for her as a last resource. Lady Forestfield, hearing this from her maid, inquired the name of the lady, which in the courier's mouth was unintelligible; but May, learning that the invalid was alone, and all but unattended, acting under the kindly impulsive wish to be of some use, she scarcely knew how, made her way to the side of the carriage, and in her sweet tone spoke a few words of sympathy. The invalid, who had been lying huddled in the corner, turned quickly at the sound of the voice; and worn and ghastly as was her face, Lady Forestfield recognised her in an instant as Fanny Erle, an intimate acquaintance, who two years before had fled from her husband's roof, and had since been divorced. Some one else had recognised her at the same moment--Lord Forestfield, who, following his wife, had a look over her shoulder and instantly divined what had taken place. Mrs. Erle, on whose pale cheeks two bright red spots suddenly appeared, would have spoken; but Lord Forestfield, seizing his wife by the shoulder, hurried her away, and peremptorily insisted on her making no farther attempt to see the wretched woman again, speaking of her crime with the bitterest reprobation, and of the punishment which had fallen upon her with genuine contemptuous approbation.

Before Lady Forestfield's eyes, which were apparently fixed on the dim and distant park, rose this scene in all its minutest details: she heard the noisy laughter of the peasants; the jingle of the horses' bells and the rattle of their rope harness; the shouts and cries of the vendors in the kermesse; she saw the little square in which the inn stood, with the quaint gabled houses opposite, the loiterers round the carriage, the two couriers drinking beer on the steps of the inn; and above all, she saw the miserable look which Fanny Erle gave when Lord Forestfield hurried her away, and heard the moan of despair with which the wretched woman fell back into the corner of the carriage.

Was she to be like that, a leprous object, a pariah, from the contemplation of which people would turn in disgust? God forbid! And yet the sin of Fanny Erle was hers; why should she not incur the penalty?

Wearied and heart-sore, she at last made her way to bed, and fell into a heavy slumber, from which she did not wake till noon. Her first care was to inquire after her husband's movements. Her maid learned from the valet that his lordship had gone out early in a cab which had been fetched for him; the valet could not recollect the directions given to the driver, but had an idea it was to somewhere in the City; his lordship had said nothing as to when he should be back.

There was a respite, then. No man, May Forestfield thought, having sinister intentions would act in such a manner; he would either have blazed out at her in a personal interview, when murder might have been done, or he would have written her a cutting letter, stating the discovery he had made, and his consequent intention of getting rid of her. It was plain to Lady Forestfield that Gustave had been misinformed, and that her husband knew nothing. Though a constant attendant at afternoon service at All Saints', and quite familiar with as much of the liturgy as is then and there intoned, May Forestfield was not in the habit of putting much heart into her supplications; but in the belief that a great and deserved punishment had been averted from her, she knelt down and implored the Divine forgiveness for her past crime, and pledged herself to sin no more.

As usual there was a little luncheon party in Seamore-place, to which came Mrs. Ingram and Lady Northaw--of course, unaccompanied by their husbands--and Captain Seaver, of the Blues, and Sir Wolfrey Delapryme. Kate Ingram was a tiny blonde, with pretty fair hair and blue eyes, a creamy complexion, and the wee-est imaginable hands and feet. She was very spirituelle, and better educated than most of her class, spoke French and German to perfection, and acted and sang admirably. Théo herself, whom she much resembled, could not have given more unmistakable point and colour to a chansonette grivoise than did Mrs. Ingram, who was the daughter of a Church dignitary, and the wife of a director of the Bank of England. Her father, long since in his grave, would have been very much astonished at a display of the accomplishments by which his daughter had made herself attractive in the highest quarters; but her husband, like Gallio, 'cared for none of these things.' Lady Northaw was a brunette, with regular features, sleepy black eyes, and blue-black hair; a tall imperial Juno-like woman, with full bust and rounded arms, and a grand way of carrying herself. It is scarcely necessary to say that every rickety little knock-kneed subaltern in the Guards worshipped her. Both ladies were intimate friends of May Forestfield, both were very liberal in all their notions, and both spoke the argot of the day with perfect fluency.

There were three vacant places at the round table where M. de Tournefort usually found himself at two o'clock; this day, however, he was an absentee; but one of the places soon after the meal commenced was occupied by Lord Forestfield, who came in with a smiling salutation, which included the company, and an apology for being late, having been detained on business.

'Business?' growled Sir Wolfrey Delapryme, deep in investigating the recesses of a pie; 'nice man of business you are! What was it--horse-chaunting or rigging the market that you have been up to?'

'Don't speak with your mouth full, Wolfrey, and never talk of things you don't understand,' said Lord Forestfield. 'I assure you I have been on important business to the City.'

'I wish I had a pal who would put me up to something good in the City,' murmured Mrs. Ingram plaintively. 'I don't see the good of having a Bank director for one's husband if he can't help himself to coin.'

'Plain enough he cannot do that,' said Captain Seaver, 'or he would get himself a new hat; never saw such a confounded bad hat as Ingram wears in all my life.'

'He has to have it made large,' growled Sir Wolfrey to Lady Northaw; 'particularly over the forehead.'

'Hush!' said her ladyship with a deprecatory smile; then added aloud: 'Are any of you going to Lady Paribole's? I understand all the smart people in London are to be there.'

'I lay odds that one who thinks herself very smart won't show up,' said Mrs. Ingram; 'because I happen to know that a "distinguished person," as the newspapers say, sent for the list and ran his pen through her name.'

'Whom do you mean?' asked Lady Forestfield.

'Why, that horrible old Mrs. Van Groot, who, because she is hideous and common-looking, is always going about saying atrocious things of everybody nice.'

'I don't care much about Mrs. Van Groot myself,' said Sir Wolfrey; 'but it's enough to make a woman rear and plunge a bit when she has to run in double harness with such an unmitigated cad as Van Groot. The little Dutch pug is always getting up in the House, whelping and snarling at his betters.'

'I don't think it makes much matter what sort of a husband a woman may happen to have,' said Lord Forestfield, speaking deliberately, and looking round with his cold cynical smile. 'If she is naturally wicked, the vice is sure to show itself, no matter what treatment she may receive.'

May Forestfield struggled hard but ineffectually to repress her rising colour, and the other ladies bit their lips in silence. Ugly topics such as crime (when called up for punishment), duty, and death were habitually testily ignored by them.

Captain Seaver struck in to the rescue. 'I suppose you will be going away about the beginning of next month, Lady Forestfield?' he said. 'You generally stay at your place in Sussex--I forget its name--first, don't you?'

'You mean Woodburn?' said May, whose voice exhibited traces of the emotion under which she was suffering.

'Ay, Woodburn,' said the Captain; 'handy for Goodwood, isn't it, Dick?'

'Very handy, and a pleasant place,' said Lord Forestfield quietly. 'I am going down there this afternoon.'

'To tell the people to get it all in readiness,' said Mrs. Ingram. 'What a delightful man to take such trouble off one's hands!'

'I hope you will manage to take Snubs with you, Lady Forestfield,' said Sir Wolfrey. 'He has always been accustomed to go out of town, and he would feel it horribly if he were left behind.'

'And the cat, May, your lovely cat,' said Lady Northaw.

'I am afraid she would not stay,' said May.

'Probably not,' said Lord Forestfield; 'cats are like statesmen--they prefer places to persons. Now I must go to catch my train;' and with a smile and a general bow he left the room.

There was little reticence in that company, and so, as soon as the door was closed, Captain Seaver said, 'I wonder what Dick has got in hand now! I always notice that peculiar expression on his face just before he is going to land some great coup. He looked just like that when he won at Stockbridge last year.'

'He is uncommonly wide awake,' said Sir Wolfrey; 'though what can he be going down to Woodburn for just now? Have you any notion, Lady Forestfield?'

'Not the faintest,' said May, whose courage by this time had pretty well returned. 'One can never account for Dick or his ways. He has the habit of running off when one least expects it, and never gives one a notion of when he will return.'

'That must be very inconvenient,' said Mrs. Ingram.

'I was hearing his praises sung the other night,' said Lady Northaw. 'Mrs. Rouge-croix says there is no man in the world so well able to put one up to a wrinkle or two.'

'That is not necessary in her case,' growled Sir Wolfrey, 'for she has quite enough of her own.'

'Well,' said Mrs. Ingram, rising, 'I cannot wait, even to hear the glorification of Lord Forestfield, as I have some calls to make. Recollect, May; you come to my box at the French plays, and we can afterwards go on to Lady Paribole's.'

When her guests were gone, Lady Forestfield went to her boudoir, and seated herself at her little writing-table. Not that she had any intention of writing; her hand toyed with the pen, and wandered idly among the nicknacks with which the table was covered, as she thought of the occurrences of the morning, and tried to find a clue to the future in anything her husband had said or done. There had been nothing extraordinary, she thought; he had been quiet and reticent in his usual cool cynical way; and though she had winced at his speech about wifely duties and wifely sins, it was probably merely a conscience smart, as the observation was not pointedly addressed to her. Not another word had she heard from Gustave, who, had he found his suspicions correct, would undoubtedly have found some means of giving her farther warning. He must have been deceived; a man of Lord Forestfield's temper, with such knowledge rankling in his breast, could not have come quietly home, taken his luncheon with her in the presence of friends, and gone off to the country, as was his frequent custom, without making any sign. The danger was over, she thought; but the vow of resistance to temptation which she had made that morning should be steadfastly kept.

The door opened, and a servant presented her with a card. It bore the words, 'Mr. Bristow, 96 Bedford-row.' She knew the name to be that of the family solicitor, a gentleman enjoying an exceptionally confidential position, and who was in the habit of dining with them once or twice in the season; and she gave orders for his admission.

Mr. Bristow, a tall, white-haired, white-whiskered man, scrupulously clean and very neatly attired, appeared in the doorway, and made a grave bow.

'How do you do, Mr. Bristow?' said Lady Forestfield, rising from her chair. 'It is seldom you give us the pleasure of a visit, but I am very glad to see you.'

'I am come, Lady Forestfield,' said Mr. Bristow, 'on peculiarly painful business.'

'Painful business!' she echoed, with a sudden sinking at her heart.

'Very painful business,' he repeated. 'I have,' he added, drawing a paper from his pocket, 'to serve this paper upon you.'

'What is it?' she added, shrinking back.

'It is a citation from the Divorce Court,' said Mr. Bristow, 'which I serve upon you on behalf of Lord Forestfield. Be good enough to sit down and read it.'

She took the paper tremblingly, and glancing at it saw her name. Then she let it drop to the ground. 'What does it mean?'

'It means,' said Mr. Bristow, 'that Lord Forestfield is about to divorce your ladyship on the ground of adultery with Monsieur Gustave de Tournefort.'

'Good God!' cried May, 'why does Lord Forestfield not come to me?'

'Your ladyship will never see him again,' said Mr. Bristow quietly.

'Never see him again!' she cried. 'Why, he was here an hour ago! He has only gone down to Woodburn, and he will be back tomorrow.'

'Lord Forestfield has not left town,' said Mr. Bristow; 'nor has he any intention of leaving it at present.'

'But I must see him!' cried May.

'It is perfectly impossible,' said Mr. Bristow. 'I have now discharged my very painful duty, and all that is left for me is to express a hope on Lord Forestfield's part that your ladyship will employ a respectable solicitor.' Then turning to the door he said, 'You can come in;' and four persons entered, his own clerks and her servants, which or what May never clearly knew. 'You are witnesses that I have served this citation from the Divorce Court upon Lady Forestfield.' Then with a grave bow he left the room, and in the last glimpse he had of May Forestfield, she was standing like a statue, dumb, motionless, with the paper on the ground at her feet.

[CHAPTER III.]

WAITING.

Podbury-street, a small and narrow street of unimportant houses, in the south-western postal district of London, has seen various mutations of fortune. Twenty years ago, it was Podbury-street, Pimlico, and the unimportant houses were for the most part occupied by persons who contented themselves with the basement floor, and let the rest of the rooms in lodgings. The tenants of these lodgings were generally young men who were engaged in qualifying themselves for the medical profession by 'walking' the near-lying St. George's Hospital; young men of convivial temperament, who attended lectures with regular irregularity, and never thought of giving up to study or sleep the hours which they apparently imagined should be devoted to comic singing. It was the perpetual presence of these gentlemen, no doubt, which caused the private residences of Podbury-street to be dotted here and there with public-houses and tobacconists' shops. A procession of slatternly maids-of-all-work, with the door-key in one hand, and a jug either dependent from the finger or firmly grasped by the other hand, was perpetually filing through Podbury-street; and the drivers of the Royal Blue omnibuses, which at that time used it as a thoroughfare, were, from the altitude of the box, enabled to peer into the drawing-room floors, or to gaze down into the parlours, in both of which localities the same spectacle of a table covered with pewter vessels, and flanked by half-a-dozen gentlemen in their shirt-sleeves, who, using it as a leg-rest, lay back in their armchairs with clay pipes in their mouths, invariably presented itself.

The lapse of time, and the enterprise of the late Mr. Cubitt, effected a wondrous change in the condition of Podbury-street. When its denizens saw themselves gradually surrounded by squares, terraces, and crescents of enormous mansions, which were each year springing up, and converting into a suburb of palaces what had recently been a dismal swamp, they unerringly perceived that the opportunity had arrived for changing the scale of their prices and the style of their lodgings. The medical students packed up their Lares and Penates, their preparations and tobacco-jars, and moved off with them to more distant quarters; the omnibuses went round another way; the beer-shops and tobacconists disappeared as the leases fell in; finally, the name of Pimlico became unsavoury in the nostrils of the neighbourhood, and the lodging-house letters had 'Podbury-street, Eaton-square,' imprinted on their cards; for they let lodgings still, but to a very different class of tenants. Gentlemen in the government offices, who invariably put on evening-dress even if they only dined at their club, who stuck the looking-glass full of the cards of invitation which they received from great people, and who smoked dainty Russian cigarettes, but would have fainted at the notion of anything so low as a pipe; managing mammas, who brought their marriageable daughters to London during the season; rich valetudinarians, who came up to town to consult famous physicians,--such were the persons of gentility who now found a temporary abode in Podbury-street. No slatternly maids-of-all-work were to be seen now; nearly every house boasted a page, a youth whose waiting at table would have been more pleasant had he been able to rid himself of the scent of the blacking which hung around him from his early domestic duties; and during the season, when some of the managing mammas gave little dinners or small musical evenings in return for the hospitality which they had experienced, and in the hope of making a special coup for their marriageable daughters, the little passage, called by courtesy the 'hall,' would be so filled up by two footmen, that the other attendant giants in plush would have to cool their calves in the open air.

In a drawing-room floor in Podbury-street, Lady Forestfield had taken up her abode, and was living in seclusion, awaiting the result of her husband's application to the Divorce Court. After the scene with Mr. Bristow, and the degradation which she had suffered before her own servants, she felt it impossible to stay on in Seamore-place, and accordingly the next day, as soon as she was able to contemplate the immediate future with some degree of calmness, and to make up her mind as to the course she should best pursue, she had removed to these lodgings, accompanied only by a young girl who had been a housemaid at Seamore-place, had always shown a strong attachment for her mistress, and now refused to be separated from her. This girl's mother, a respectable woman, was the landlady of the house in Podbury-street, and everything was done as far as possible to insure Lady Forestfield's comfort.

As far as possible indeed, but, under the circumstances, worthy Mrs. Wilson's possible went but a little way. For the first fortnight of her tenancy, May Forestfield scarcely tasted food, scarcely lifted her head from the pillow, but lay there passing the bygone days of her life in review before her, and silently bemoaning her hard fate. The loss of wealth and position--the position, that is, which her rank had given her--affected her but little; she took no heed of them, she had no time to give them a thought, nor did she trouble herself in regard to the future; her whole time was occupied in thinking over the details of her early acquaintance with her husband, and in wondering at the infatuation which had induced her to prefer the other man to him. Not that she ignored or attempted to deceive herself in regard to his heartless cynicism and savage brutality. Every bitter word seemed burnt into her brain, each cruel deed seemed to rise before her fresh as at the time of its perpetration; and yet in her present mood she found excuses for them all, and ascribed to herself the provocation of epithets which a 'beggar in his drink' would not have fouled his mouth with.

Do you wonder at this conduct? I take it, it is common enough. May Forestfield was no peculiar character, and in some things had a certain clearness of sense and strength of mind; but she was a woman, and consequently when she found she had been deprived of something which up to this point she did not value, but which it was impossible to regain, she set about grieving after and bewailing its loss with all her strength. Never even in the early days of her acquaintance with Lord Forestfield, when uncertainty of his regard for her rendered her doubly keen in the chase, had she felt that worship, that hungering after him which now beset her.

While she was lying in this state she received the following letter, dated from Spa:

'You will have been surprised at my silence and apparent desertion of you, but I waited until I could learn what steps that scoundrel who calls himself your husband was about to take. I knew him to be too great a coward to ask satisfaction of me, but I doubted whether, knowing with what a character he himself must come into court, he would venture to claim the aid of the law. I learn now that he has done so, and that in a short time you are likely to be free. His plots were too skilfully concocted, his spies too carefully trained, to allow of there being any doubt in the matter; the court will pronounce for the divorce, and he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.

'Blinded by my passion for you, I have done you a grievous wrong, for which there is but one reparation. That reparation I offer you now. One line from you will bring me at once to your feet, and I swear on my honour and my name that so soon as the decree of the court is pronounced I will make you my wife.

'GUSTAVE DE TOURNEFORT.'

Two short weeks ago May would have welcomed this letter with eagerness, and would have accepted the proposal it contained with avidity; when the blow dealt her by her husband through Mr. Bristow's agency had fallen upon her with crushing force she would have welcomed almost any means to free herself from the thraldom which even the retention of his name seemed to imply. She felt most deeply the baseness of his conduct in continuing semi-amicable relations with her, relations such as for a long time had existed between them, up to the last moment of his leaving her for ever, and when he had planned and matured the design of casting her forth and holding her up to the reprobation of the world. Her caprice, passion, call it what you will, for Gustave de Tournefort had never been sufficiently strong to ennoble him in her eyes, or to prevent her from recognising him for what he really was--a careless libertine; but suffering as she had suffered at first, she would have been glad of any escape from the tortures of shame, degradation, and abandonment, and would have accepted his proffered hand, though knowing perfectly that what he called his heart would have no part in the alliance.

Now, however, all was changed. In the strange reaction which she had undergone under the revulsion of feeling which made her long to see her husband once again, she looked upon this letter from De Tournefort as little less than an insult. It was not a voluntary offer, she thought on reperusing it; it had been wrung from him by his yet remaining faint adhesion to that code of honour which even such men as he were bound to obey, and it was made, not from any love for her, but in order that he might stand well in the eyes of that world in which he still doubtless hoped to play many a similar part. He had 'done her a grievous wrong,' and he offered her 'reparation;' that was the keynote of the whole affair, his reading of that odious word 'duty,' which throughout her life she had always found put forward as an excuse. Had it been otherwise, had this offer been prompted by any feeling of liking or even of regard for what had occurred, it would have been made long since. He must have heard, for all that world in which he moved knew it perfectly, that she had left her home; and had there been the least spark of chivalrous feeling in him, he would have come to her at once. Her mind was speedily made up; she would not demean herself by accepting a proposition which was merely made to her out of charity, and M. de Tournefort's letter should remain unanswered.

O, the weary, weary days in Podbury-street! The getting-up, protracted until a late hour, in order to get over as much of the day as possible; the wretched little breakfast, with London eggs from fowls who lived in an area, and London milk from a cow which had not seen a green field for years; the long mornings, spent in reading in the newspaper the chronicled doings of that world in which she had once played so conspicuous a part,--records of dinners, balls, and fetes, with guest lists containing the names of persons her intimacy with whom she could scarcely even then imagine to be broken,--gossip of forthcoming arrangements at Goodwood and Cowes, in both of which places she had always held her court. The journal would drop from her hand as memory brought before her the ducal lawn, dotted all over with loveliest dresses, and ringing with merriest laughter from happily improvised luncheon parties; or a covered bit of sea-walk in front of the club-house at Cowes, where on the night of the last regatta-ball she had met De Tournefort, and listened to his impassioned pleading. Her thoughts were far away, busy with the memories of these once-happy times, but her eyes were gazing idly before her on the tradespeople flitting about from house to house, the flirtations of the stalwart and greasy young butcher with grinning Molly the cook, the heavily-laden postmen steadily pursuing their rounds, the loitering cabmen looking round for fares, and all the panorama of morning life in the great city.

In the afternoon, when the carriages were rolling about, and the little street was sonorous with the echoing double-knocks dealt on its tiny doors by huge footmen, May would sit behind the window-curtain watching all that was passing, and ever and anon drawing farther back into the shadow, as though fearful of being recognised. She had little cause for such anxiety, poor child, though in the course of the day she would see many of those with whom but a short time ago she used to be in constant association: the Duchess of Melrose, leaning back in her luxurious carriage, and surveying mankind superciliously, though not without interest, through her double glasses; Sir Wolfrey Delapryme in his mail phaeton, tooling his roan cobs; Captain Seaver on his neat hack; and Mrs. Ingram in her victoria. Mrs. Ingram had stopped in Podbury-street, and had come up to see May; it being her maxim, she said, that 'when any one had come to grief her pals should stick by her.' Kate Ingram's sympathy, however well meant, was not put in a very acceptable manner; she said that no doubt May had had a 'facer,' but that it was 'no use crying over spilt milk.' She spoke of De Tournefort as that 'foreign sportsman,' said she considered him a 'snob' and a 'cad,' and that May had done quite rightly in refusing to have anything more to say to him. She proposed to make up a little Sunday river-party of people who 'wouldn't mind, don't you know,' and to invite May to it, but she was rather pleased than otherwise when she found May quietly but firmly declined; and shortly after took her leave, promising to come again soon; a promise which she would not keep.

Once May saw her husband. Lord Forestfield drove through Podbury-street in a hansom cab, sitting well back, with his arms crossed and a pleasant smile upon his face. With her renewed feeling for him, May would rather not have seen that smile; it showed that he was happy and careless, while she was suffering such acute misery. In the eyes of the world she was the guilty one, and had to bear the consequences of her guilt; but in his own inmost mind he must know that he had been at least equally criminal, and that if it had not been for his neglect and desertion of her she would never have committed the crime for which he was now exacting so fearful a penalty.

And as she pondered over this a horrible idea flashed across her; a passage in De Tournefort's letter recurred to her mind, in which, speaking of Lord Forestfield, he had said, 'he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.' What could that mean? What but that her husband had determined on divorcing her, with the view of marrying some one else to whom he had been long attached. Of marrying some one else! The fact that he himself was married had had no effect in preventing his forming other connections, but marriage while she lived undivorced was for him impossible; it was in that view, then, that he had determined on pursuing his vengeance to the bitter end.

The thought drove her nearly mad. She felt that she could not support it in silence, that she must go to him at once and make one final appeal. She rose and looked in the glass. Her beauty had suffered but little from what she had undergone; she was perhaps a trifle paler than usual, but Lord Forestfield had always expressed his dislike of blooming hoydens, and there was no doubt that at one time he admired her deeply and was greatly influenced by her beauty. Would he be so again? She would see.

The next day the maid, who had been sent to see her former fellow-servants in Seamore-place, returned with the information that Lord Forestfield had gone down to Woodburn. May looked upon this as a happy chance, and determined on following him there at once. She could see him more readily, could speak to him more freely, in the seclusion of Woodburn than if he had remained in town; she would go down there that very afternoon. In pursuance of this determination she set out, accompanied only by her maid, and dressed in a common gown and bonnet in order to escape any recognition. After a two hours' railway journey they arrived at Crawley, the station from which Lord Forestfield's seat was reached, and taking a fly were driven over to the gates of Woodburn Park. There they halted, leaving the vehicle to await their return. The maid, who was known to the lodge-keeper, went forward; and after learning that his lordship was there and alone, easily obtained admission for herself and friend to pass through the gates. Up the long avenue, the scene of her great reception by her husband's tenants on her return home after her marriage, May Forestfield now crept with trembling limbs and a desperate sinking at heart, her humble companion endeavouring to sustain her by well-meant though ill-chosen exhortation. Far away in the distance glimmered the house, a long low stone building, from one window of which a light was shining. So far as May could make out, this proceeded from the library, a room immediately on the left hand of the porch, to which access was perfectly easy. The thought of seeing her husband and completely humbling herself before him, and of begging, not indeed to be placed back in her old position in the eyes of the world--that she scarcely dared to wish, much more to hope--but for restoration to his favour and his love, for permission at least to pass some portion of her life in his society,--the thought of this nerved her with fresh strength, and enabled her to reach the end of the avenue. There she and her companion halted for a moment and looked around them. So far as they could make out through the deepening dusk the hall-door was open. It was May's intention to creep in there, and enter the library immediately, to throw herself at her husband's feet. By the aid of the lamp which burned on the writing-table, she could discern through the open window the dim outline of Lord Forestfield's figure bending over some papers. From time to time he looked up, and it was necessary for her to watch the moment of his absorption in order to effect her entrance unobserved.

The opportunity offered itself, and May stole quietly towards the porch. Just at that moment Lord Forestfield walked to the window and peered out into the gloom.

'Who is there?' he cried, as he observed the shrinking figure.

May was silent.

'Who is there?' he repeated. 'I insist upon an answer.'

'Richard,' faltered May, spreading her hands towards him, 'I--'

'I thought it was you,' he said, in a harsh low tone. 'I shall discharge the lodge-keeper to-morrow for having permitted you to pass the gate. Now be off!' he cried, waving his hand; 'I should be sorry to have to ring for the servants to turn you away. Be off, do you hear?'

But May heard nothing. She had sunk in a fainting state on the steps.

Lord Forestfield then turned to the maid, who was hastening to her mistress's assistance. 'Take this woman away,' he cried; 'and if you value your own liberty, never bring her here again.' Then he violently closed the window and returned to his papers.

[CHAPTER IV.]

THIS LOT TO BE SOLD.

May Forestfield was brought back to her lodgings in Podbury-street--how she never knew. The maid, whose devotion had brought such obloquy upon her, half helped, half carried her mistress down the avenue, and at the lodge they found the fly which had brought them from Crawley. All the way to the station, and in the railway carriage up to town, May lay in a half-comatose, half-hysterical state; and when she had reached her lodging, and was once more installed in her clean and pretty, if not luxurious, bedroom, it was plain to the maid and to Mrs. Wilson that Lady Forestfield was 'in for an illness' of some kind or other. Their predictions were speedily verified. When the maid visited her mistress next morning, she found her in a burning fever, so far advanced that her utterances were already half delirious. The girl, who was tolerably bright, as well as thoroughly devoted, remembered that in one or two cases of slight illness, under which Lady Forestfield had suffered in Seamore-place, a fashionable physician, Dr. Chenoweth, had been called in to attend her. By the aid of the Blue-Book his address was obtained, and the maid started off in a cab to beg an immediate visit from him.

Dr. Chenoweth was something more than a fashionable physician; he was, like most of his brethren with whom the present writer is acquainted, a gentleman, kind-hearted, self-sacrificing, and benevolent to a rare degree. He knew all about the story of Lord and Lady Forestfield. There were few scandals of any kind which did not come to his ears, to be listened to generally with a smile and a shrug, to be repeated sometimes--for there are certain patients to whom gossip is better than medicine, and to whom the sound of the doctor's cheery voice is of more service than his learned prescriptions--but never to be allowed to militate in his mind against those who were the subjects of them. Dr. Chenoweth thought it not at all improbable that in visiting Lady Forestfield he might affront some of his most important patients; for the affair had been much discussed, and it is needless to say that few partisans ranged themselves on poor May's side. He knew nothing of the pecuniary circumstances in which Lady Forestfield was then placed, and would not have been surprised had they been such as possibly to preclude the payment of his fees; he only recollected May Dunmow, the pretty child whom he remembered riding with her father Lord Stortford in the Row, and at whose wedding at St. Andrew's, Wells-street, he, an old and intimate friend of the family, had been present. Dr. Chenoweth accordingly bade his servant tell the messenger that his first visit that day would be to Podbury-street.

May Forestfield had a very sharp attack; indeed, for more than a fortnight she lay between life and death. Dr. Chenoweth's earliest and latest visits were paid to her, and two professional nurses, hospital sisters--skilled and attentive women who have succeeded to the Gamp and Prig creatures--relieved each other in daily and nightly watch at her bedside. When, however, one morning in the beginning of the third week of her illness, May opened her weary eyes, and for the first time was able to recognise things around her, her glance fell, not upon any hired attendant, but upon the upturned face of a pretty girl; a delicate, pensive face surrounded with shining fair hair, a face which, though half strange to her, seemed to bring back pleasantly familiar recollections of long ago.

The girl's attention was at once attracted by the movement of the patient, and she rose from her seat and placed herself quietly by the bedside.

'It is Eleanor,' murmured May, raising her hand to shade her eyes; 'it must be Eleanor, and yet how can she be here? My head throbs, and I feel as though I were yet in a dream. Speak to me and say whether you are really there.'

'It is Eleanor,' said the girl, bending over the bed and smoothing the rumpled pillow; 'it is Eleanor, and you are in no dream, dear Lady Forestfield; but I must implore you not to talk now. Dr. Chenoweth has left the strictest orders that you should have no excitement, and, for your own sake, I must see that he is obeyed.'

May made no resistance; the mere effort of speech had completely exhausted her; and she sank back into a slumber, during which, as her gentle nurse noted with pleasure, her breathing was regular and her whole manner devoid of the feverish restlessness which had characterised her slumbers during her illness. When, after a couple of hours' peaceful repose, May again opened her eyes, she recognised her companion in an instant, and in a clearer and firmer voice spoke to her at once.

'I know you now, Eleanor,' she said, 'but even now I cannot account for your presence here. I know perfectly well I am at Mrs. Wilson's lodgings in Podbury-street, but that knowledge does not account for your presence. My head is heavy and my limbs horribly weak and languid. I feel as though I had gone through an illness.'

'You have gone through a very severe illness, dear Lady Forestfield,' said the girl, fanning the patient's face with a huge palm-leaf, on which she had previously sprinkled some drops of scent, 'and even now, though I am delighted to see you recognise me, and to hear your own well-remembered voice once again, I must warn you that you are only in the very earliest stage of convalescence. It will be brave news for Dr. Chenoweth when he comes to-night, for though he anticipated your recovery, he did not think it would commence so soon.'

'Have I, then, been so very ill?' asked May.

'For more than a fortnight you have lain here so completely prostrated with fever that the doctor would not answer for you from day to day. Now, however, thank God, we may think that all danger is passed.'

May buried her face in the pillow and was silent for some minutes. When she looked up again there were traces of tears upon her cheeks.

'And during all that time,' she whispered, stretching out her thin wan hand, 'you, dear Eleanor, have been my nurse.'

'I have been here off and on for the last ten days,' said the girl. 'I did not hear of your illness until some little time after you had been attacked, or, of course, I should have been with you before.'

'And how did you hear of it?' asked May.

'In a very curious way,' said the girl. 'It appears that in your delirium--you must not mind my mentioning it, dear Lady Forestfield--you talked about all kinds of curious things, declared that you were destitute, and that your only means of supporting yourself would be by painting pictures for your livelihood. In connection with this you mentioned the name of your old drawing-master, Mr. Irvine, who, you said, could speak as to your capability in art. Your frequent repetition of this name attracted the attention of Dr. Chenoweth, who was an old friend of my poor father, and who still keeps up his acquaintance with my sister, Mrs. Chadwick. He knew I was staying at their house, and one day, when he was calling there, he took me aside before my sister came down, and told me how very ill you were; told me, moreover, that while you were carefully and assiduously attended by the good people in this house, he thought that when you came to yourself--a period which he anticipated, but for which he could fix no date--it would be a comfort to you if your eyes could fall upon a face which you had known in--in happier times, and of which you had nothing but pleasant reminiscences. I understood him at once. I told him I thought I could say there had been no cloud upon the friendship with which you had once honoured me; and I came here that day with a letter from the doctor, which secured me a pleasant reception from Mrs. Wilson.'

May's heart was too full to speak. She pressed the young girl's hand and fell back dreamily on the pillow, grateful to the Providence which, in the midst of her complete abandonment, by those who in her prosperity she had imagined were devoted to her, had sent her one friend to prove that the old-fashioned sentiment called gratitude, mocked at and ignored nowadays, yet existed.

It was a strange history, that of the friendship between these two young women, so different in birth and surroundings. Eleanor's father, Angus Irvine, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had at an early age evinced such artistic talent as to attract the attention of the old Lord Stortford, the great landowner of the district, who purchased two or three of the young lad's early sketches, and better still, furnished him with the means of establishing himself for two or three years as an art student in Rome. The good which the young man here did for himself (on his first arrival his tastes and sympathies, quickened by the ever-present daily surroundings, so fired his eye and nerved his hand that old Roman colonists, whose judgment had been tempered by time and experience, predicted the greatest things of him) was not without a certain counterbalance of evil. The loose life led by many of his Bohemian companions, the gatherings at the Caffè Greco, the soirées intimes of men and women at which he was a constant guest, had a baleful effect on the hitherto strictly-kept Scottish youth, and his name was scarcely known in the art circles of Rome before a rumour ran round that Angus Irvine was following in the footsteps of so many other young men of promise, and was becoming dissipated, not to say drunken. The rumour was harsh and exaggerated, and it had an exaggerated and harsh effect. He was a mere boy after all, this gaunt beardless youth of two or three and twenty, and a few glasses of wine had unwonted power on one who, in the seclusion of his mountain home, had been brought up a strict abstainer; and had the censorious left him in peace, it is probable that, so far as the drink was concerned, he would soon have got the better of his newly-acquired freedom, and settled down to a steady plodding life. As it was, when he learned--as he did speedily--that his conduct had become the subject of conversation amongst a certain set, he received the news with an outbreak of wrath, which, cooling down, was supplanted by a sturdy Scotch obstinacy, under which he determined to 'gang his ain gait,' and to treat the animadversion of his detractors with contempt. He laboured fitfully thenceforward, turning out now brilliant work, now pictures which, though undeniaSSTAVEbly possessing genius, were hurried and scamped; his doing of that which he ought not to have done was more regular, while his drinking was harder than ever.

Suddenly there came a change. Angus Irvine received a letter from Lord Stortford intimating a desire that he should come to London, it being the old lord's wish to see his protégé settled and striving for the honours of the Academy before he died. Irvine was sensible enough to know that this was the turning-point of his fate, and that if he neglected such an opportunity he would have no other chance. He was aware of his lamentable failing, and was determined to seize on and overcome it there and then; and being a man of great power of will and determination, he was able to carry out his intention. He started for England within a few weeks, and immediately on his arrival paid a visit to his patron. The old nobleman was delighted with the modest demeanour and brilliant conversational powers of the young artist; he introduced him to his son, Mr. Dunmow, a young man of about Angus's own age, who had already made a brilliant figure in Parliament, and who was about to be married to a charming girl, to whom Angus was also made known. He presented him to the leading art critics and connoisseurs of the day, from some of whom the young Scotchman received valuable commissions; and when, in the course of a couple of years, Lord Stortford heard from Angus of his approaching marriage with a young lady, the daughter of a brother artist, the old nobleman was scarcely less happy than he had been at his own son's wedding, which had taken place a year previously, and he bestowed a substantial mark of his regard upon the bride and bridegroom.

Years went on, and after a lapse of some sixteen or seventeen of them, the two pretty girls who had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Irvine were growing into young women, and Angus Irvine himself, his constitution undermined by excesses of all kinds, was rapidly lapsing into a broken elderly man; for within a very few years of his marriage, so soon as the joys of domesticity were beginning to pall upon him, he found delight in the loose and brilliant society only too ready to welcome him; the old desire for drink came upon him, and he yielded to it with scarcely a struggle. All the young fellows about town were delighted to have the company of Angus Irvine, who talked so brilliantly, and sung the homely Scotch ditties with such exquisite pathos; who could brew a bowl of punch as quickly and as deftly as he could sketch a delicious caricature, and who never minded to what hour of the morning he sat up. Nor did this cheery convivialist confine himself to men's society, or blush to be seen driving in the carriages or seated in the opera-boxes of some of the most noted improprieties of the time. Old Lord Stortford was dead; but his son and his son's wife, and the friends to whom they had introduced their northern protégé, shook their heads dismally, prophesied Angus's ruin, and wondered what Mrs. Irvine would do.

Mrs. Irvine settled that question within a very few months. She was a meek little woman, devoted to her Angus, with a sweet temper and a bad constitution; and when she found that she was deserted by her husband, and that the establishment generally was going to ruin, she thought the best thing she could do was to die--and she did it off-hand. The shock of her death sobered the poor wretch for a time. He had long since given up all hope of selling, or indeed of painting, any more pictures; his muddled brain and unsteady hand forbade that; but Lord Stortford and a few other gentlemen who had known him in better times had engaged him as drawing-master to their children, more for the sake of bestowing a small annuity on him than from the idea of any good to be obtained from his instruction, and he now saw his way to a new method of money-making.

His elder daughter, Fanny, who was eighteen years of age, inherited from him a remarkably sweet voice, and sung Scotch ballads with all the taste and pathos which had been so much applauded in her father. This was a talent which it struck Angus should be cultivated, and accordingly, by Lord Stortford's aid, he procured her entrée as a pupil at the Academy of Music, and, after a few years' instruction, she made her début as a concert-singer with considerable success. The talent of one daughter having been thus utilised, Angus Irvine thought it time that the younger, Eleanor, should take her turn at bread-winning. What to do with her was the crux. Eleanor had a good speaking voice, but no ear and no musical talent; neither of the children had inherited her father's artistic ability, and the education which they had received, though fair enough, was not sufficient to qualify them to act as governesses in the present day, when ladies, possessed of every possible accomplishment and willing to accept next to nothing, are advertising for situations.

What occurred to him as a happy thought at length flashed into Angus Irvine's brain--he would make his girl an actress! She was really good-looking--much handsomer than many of those women whom he used to know in the old time, and who drew large salaries. He could get her taught to speak by a professional elocutionist, and she would soon be able to contribute to the household expenses.

When this plan was mooted to Eleanor, her horror was extreme. She implored her father not to attempt to carry it out, declared her readiness to undertake any kind of service, no matter how menial, but spoke in such piteous terms of the degradation she should feel in having to appear before the public, that the Angus Irvine of a few years before would not have required her to speak twice on the subject. Now, however, drink and misfortune had rendered him callous; he released himself from his daughter's weeping embrace, and bade her make up her mind to what he had decided. In an agony of terror and fright, the girl rushed off to the one person in London whom she knew to be a true and influential friend of her father's, Lord Stortford, and told him all, imploring his interference on her behalf. Lord Stortford was greatly touched at the girl's entreaties, and after a consultation with his wife, he called on Angus Irvine, and, without hinting at his interview with Eleanor, said that he had a plan to which he requested Mr. Irvine's sanction. This was that Eleanor should come to and live in Grosvenor-square as companion to his daughter May. This proposition suited Angus Irvine very well. He would be rid of the very moderate expense entailed upon him by Eleanor, who would hand over to him the liberal salary she was to receive in consideration of her services; so that he made no objection, and the next week saw Eleanor installed as May's companion in Grosvenor-square, where, a great friendship having grown up between the girls, she remained for eighteen months, until May's marriage with Lord Forestfield.

Later in the afternoon of the first day of her convalescence, May renewed her conversation with her friend.

'You must have thought it very unkind of me, dear,' she said, placing her hand in Eleanor's, 'that notwithstanding our great intimacy, and the love and affection I had from you in Grosvenor-square, I have scarcely taken any notice of you since my marriage.'

'Not at all, dear Lady Forestfield,' said Eleanor. 'I never imagined that that intimacy, pleasant as it was to me, could be kept up. You were not out during the most part of the time I was with you, you must remember, and after your marriage I knew that you would take up your position in society, which involved innumerable claims upon you, and would form your own circle of friends.'

'From which circle,' said May, with a sigh, 'I omitted you, the very best of them, the only one who has remembered me in my time of trouble. I think you said you were staying with your sister? Where is Mr. Irvine?'

'Papa has been dead for nearly a twelvemonth,' said Eleanor, glancing down at her black dress. 'He was ill, if you recollect, just before your marriage, and he never recovered, but faded gradually away.'

'I wish my poor papa had been alive to help him,' said May; 'he would have seen that his old friend wanted for nothing.'

'I am sure of that,' said Eleanor; 'but, fortunately, my sister was enabled to take care of her father in his last illness. She was married a few months before his death to a very rich man.'

'Indeed!' said May. 'Who is he?'

'His name is Chadwick,' said Eleanor. 'I suppose he would be called a tradesman, for he is the senior member of a firm which employs hundreds of men in making boilers and engines for steam vessels. He attends to business himself, and is every day at his works, which are down the river somewhere; but they live in a splendid house in Fairfax-gardens, and Fanny now receives and goes into a great deal of what I suppose is called excellent society.'

'I recollect having heard of Mrs. Chadwick's parties, now you mention the name,' said May, 'and of their having some specialty, but what it is I cannot remember.'

'They are very grand, very hot, and, I believe, considered very splendid,' said Eleanor; 'but I do not know that there is anything particular about them, unless it be the presence of a large number of artists of different kinds--painters and musical people I mean. Fanny always takes occasion to say that she never forgets the class of which she was once a member, but I am bound to say her recognition of them is something too like patronage for my taste.'

'And you live with Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick, Eleanor? and you are happy?'

'Yes,' said Eleanor, 'I suppose so.'

'That was but a half-hearted answer,' said May. 'Are you really happy? You, used to speak frankly to me in the old days; are you frank now?'

'I never could be otherwise with you, dear Lady Forestfield, and I will tell you plainly that just now I have some cause for discomfort. The general life at Fairfax-gardens is not particularly suited to my taste; but everybody is especially kind to me, and I should make no complaint, were it not that recently Fanny seems to have made up her mind to carry out a project with which I am greatly concerned, and to which I have a strong objection.'

'This project is, of course, to marry you,' said May, 'to some friend of her own?'

'Not particularly a friend of hers,' said Eleanor, 'but a man of fashion, and for the matter of that, a celebrity, a connection with whom would, she thinks, be advantageous.'

'And you don't care for him?' asked May.

'Not in the faintest degree,' replied Eleanor. 'He is very clever, very agreeable, and particularly polished and courteous in his manner towards women; a little too polished perhaps,' she added.

'May I ask his name?' said Lady Forestfield. 'Certainly,' said Eleanor, with a smile. 'It is a curious one, but his mother or grandmother--I do not know which--was originally Greek: his name is Spiridion Pratt.'

Lady Forestfield started. 'Spiridion Pratt!' she echoed; 'I think I know him; there could not be two men of that name.'

'O, he knows you,' said Eleanor; 'he has been to your house; he was taken there by Mrs. Hamblin.'

'Exactly,' said Lady Forestfield; 'I remember now.'

'Do you dislike him?' asked Eleanor, looking up astonished at her friend's evident embarrassment.

'I know--I know very little of Mr. Pratt. And it is to him that your sister wishes to marry you?'

'Yes,' said Eleanor. 'And from what little you do know of him, you think I am right in objecting, do you not?'

'I don't say that, dear,' said May, 'but I certainly do not think you are wrong.'

[CHAPTER V.]

NOUVEAUX RICHES.

Eleanor Irvine spoke with perfect truth when she said that her brother-in-law, Mr. Chadwick, was a very rich man. Boiler-making and engine-supplying, when you have secured almost a monopoly of the business, are very paying concerns; and very few of the large steam-shipping companies, not only in England but on the Continent, did not procure their propelling apparatus from Chadwick and Co. In the United States, too, the firm was well known and largely employed. Some of the largest grain elevators in Chicago had been supplied by them, and the lifts which convey you to your bedroom on the tenth story at the Jefferson House, Saratoga, or the Great Atlantic Hotel, Newport, N.J., bear the familiar name. This preëminence in his trade had all been achieved by Mr. Chadwick himself. He was a very poor boy, with but a smattering of education, when he first went in as an apprentice to the drawing-office of the works at Newcastle, the manager having taken him on out of friendship for his father, then recently dead; but he went through the whole routine of that establishment, from the hardest hand-labour to the highest head-work, until he emerged from it as its owner, and now held it as a kind of adjunct to his larger and more important establishment on the Thames. Mr. Chadwick was not a speculative man, and was never tempted to put out any of his capital with the perspective hope of large interests in Baratarian loans or investments in the enormous silver mines of Grass Valley, Colorado. He held a certain number of shares, just sufficient to make the directors regard it as good policy to keep well with him, in such steam-shipping companies as he supplied with engines, but he found that the profits derived from his legitimate undertaking brought him in income sufficient to satisfy all his wants.

This income enabled him to maintain a handsome residence in Fairfax-gardens; to entertain company constantly, and with more than ordinary hospitality; to allow his wife to commit any extravagances she pleased at the milliner's and the jeweller's, and to have all the carriages and horses she chose. It gave him a villa on the Thames, and a shooting-box in Aberdeenshire; and if it did not make him happy, there were plenty of people who said it ought to have done so, and who passed their lives in envying him and wishing to be in his place.

On the whole, however, Mr. Chadwick is a happy man. He has an imperturbably good temper, which no amount of business worry can upset, and he is very proud of his wife. There were plenty of men of birth and breeding whom Mr. Chadwick had met in business, and who, knowing his wealth and the value of a connection with him, would have been only too glad to introduce the rich boiler-maker to their sisters and daughters, and to use all their influence to induce those female members of their family to secure his hand. But Mr. Chadwick, in his own frank phraseology, 'did not go in for swells;' and though in later days he was pleased to see a large number of smart people at his house, and to read their names and titles duly set forth in the next morning's paper, it was because he knew this gave pleasure to his wife, whose every wish he delighted in forestalling. When Mr. Chadwick first saw Miss Irvine, with a rose in her hair and a piece of music in her hand, in front of the orchestra at the St. James's Hall, and heard her warble 'Coming through the Rye,' he determined that, if possible, she should be his wife. The difficulty was not great; the young lady was ambitious, her father was mercenary; and from the day on which they were married, 'my Fan' was Mr. Chadwick's first consideration, ranking even before 'the works,' which up to that time had held possession of his mind, to the exclusion almost of any other subject.

Mrs. Chadwick was what is called 'an elegant-looking woman,' with dark complexion, regular features, and a slight figure; her manners were good, she spoke French and Italian with fluency, had sufficient shrewdness to catch the pervading tone, and was altogether quite presentable in society. She had been ambitious when she was only a concert-singer, and dependent on her own resources. Now that she had a large income at her command she determined to make her mark; to be talked of, renowned, the object of curiosity, and the subject of gossip, was her dearest wish. She could have obtained the notoriety she wanted in one season, by entering into a desperate flirtation--for there would have been no lack of men willing to flirt to any extent with her, some for mere fun, and others in the hope of making a good thing of it--and there are always plenty of persons ready to spread scandal and slander. But Mrs. Chadwick had no intention of entering upon any flirtation, even of the mildest kind; she said she was 'not naturally given that way,' and moreover she had seen quite enough of poverty and precarious existence to prevent her from compromising the very excellent position which fate had assigned her; so she sat herself calmly down at the foot of the social ladder, determined to scale it by entertainments given to the best people whom she could induce to accept her invitations. She began by inviting the wives of the baronets and members of parliament with whom Mr. Chadwick was concerned in various business matters; and though these ladies, who were for the most part intensely respectable, at first hung back, having heard rumours of Mrs. Chadwick's ante-nuptial professional experiences, and having a vague idea that she had been 'on the stage,' their husbands, to whom the business connection with Mr. Chadwick was valuable, insisted on their not merely accepting the invitation, but on their behaving themselves without the stiffness and frigidity which they delighted to display whenever they thought they could safely do so.

The step thus made was satisfactory, but the society obtained by it was rather poor. It began to improve when some of the younger members of the House, and the private secretaries of ministers whom Mr. Chadwick had now and then occasion to wait upon, found out and appreciated the excellence of the cuisine and the cellar in Fairfax-gardens, and not only came themselves when asked, but brought their friends--guardsmen, Foreign-office clerks, and men about town of various ages and degrees. So far as the men were concerned, this was all very well; but Mrs. Chadwick saw with regret that, with the ladies she had made very little way. The extremely proper and generally plain-headed wives of the commercial baronets and M.P.s turned up their eyes at each other in horror at some of the male company, whose loose living was notorious, and whom they saw dancing attendance in Fairfax-gardens; dear Lord George never brought dear Lady George, the Marquis never so much as mentioned the Marchioness, although Mrs. Chadwick gave him frequent opportunities for doing so; and though several of the private secretaries chattered volubly enough about their sisters, no cards from those ladies were ever delivered in Fairfax-gardens.

Mrs. Chadwick suffered deeply under this social ban; she could not see the way to fight against it herself, and at last took Charley Ormerod, one of the private secretaries, and the best leader of a cotillon in London, into her confidence. Charley was very frank in deed upon the point. 'If you want to get hold of this sort of people, my dear Mrs. Chadwick,' said he, 'and 'pon my word I don't see why--you being so very charming yourself, and all that sort of thing--you will find it uncommonly difficult. There is so much going on in their own set, that they won't go anywhere, don't you know, unless it is to meet some particular person or to see some particular thing. Now your cook is first class, and Chadwick has some dry champagne that is really A1, and if there were nothing so good elsewhere in both those ways, they would come for that; but there is, and so they won't. You will ask how it is that Madame Schottenberger and Mrs. Stutterheim go into society when their position is no better than yours, and their houses, I think, nothing like so nice; but then, you see, both Schottenberger and Stutterheim are in the City, and they are able, don't you know, to give these people what one may call a leg-up in the way of making a little premium on shares. Mr. Chadwick is not in that line; he is the last man who would think of doing anything of that sort if he were. Now if you could only give them some specialty. There is that fine billiard-room at the back; what do you say to turning it into a theatre, having a stage at the end, and that sort of thing? And there are lots of amateurs who would be only too delighted to come and act; or you could get up tableaux, don't you know, with pretty girls, and have Eardley or some of those fellows to pose them, and then supper, don't you know, and that sort of thing; if you could do one, and just get it talked about, everybody would be wild to come to the next.'

Mrs. Chadwick ponders over this idea, but is afraid it will not do, at least so far as dramatic representation is concerned. The tableaux might be managed quietly at some future time; but Mr. Chadwick, whose childhood was passed among strict dissenters in the North, has a strong objection to theatrical entertainments, and his wife thinks best to give him no cause for complaint. Nevertheless, the attempt to secure superior society must be made; and it is first made with concerts. Mrs. Chadwick drives round to some of those whom she used to know in her professional days; old Sir Gottlieb Moto, the famous music-master, who smiles and rubs his hands, and will give her all the assistance in his power, and Mr. Bluck, the well-known entrepreneur of the Ante-Chamber Concerts, who every year produces such a wonderful prospectus, and who knows far too much about music to attempt to play or sing. By the aid of these gentlemen a very excellent concert was given, at which all the noted singers of the day were present, and were exceptionally treated in being asked to remain after their labours were over, and mingle with the company. Mrs. Chadwick made a great point of this, and went about murmuring to the wives and daughters of the baronets and M.P.s that she did not forget the time when she herself was in a similar position, and that she would always be glad to welcome her brothers and sisters in art; at which the wives and daughters muttered 'How charming!' to her face, and shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyebrows to each other when her back was turned.

All those who were present congratulated Mrs. Chadwick on her delightful concert, but she was shrewd enough to see that she was no nearer the end she had proposed to herself--the entertainment of a better class of society; so Charley Ormerod was again called into consultation, with the result that the tableaux were determined upon, and set about in earnest. There was no difficulty in finding good-looking young people to volunteer for the different characters so soon as the idea was promulgated, and it was understood that the thing was to be carried out without reference to expense. The sisters of two or three of the private secretaries, who knew the fascination of dishevelled hair and bare arms, and who saw their way to Andromache lamenting over the dead body of Hector, or Jephtha's daughter in her solitude amongst the mountain fastnesses, induced their brothers to propose them at once; and amongst Mr. Chadwick's plutocratic Tyburnian connection there were many pretty girls only too glad to be utilised. The committee of management was composed of men of the highest artistic repute in London. Old Mr. Tabardy, who passed his early life in writing burlesques, and whose latter days are spent in even a more comic way in the manufacture of pedigrees and the search for coats-of-arms for parvenus, came up from the Heralds' College, bearing two elaborate books of costume pictures; Mr. Eardley, R.A., who looks like Glaucus the Athenian, was there to superintend the embodiment of one of his own dreamy sensuous creations; and Mr. Gurth, who would be Eardley's shadow if he had not a large body and capable brain of his own, was of course there also. Mogg, R.A., came (of course in his worsted comforter, though the month was June), and gave excellent advice and assistance in preparing a tableau of the days of Charles II.; and Ghoule, the great tragedian, who was never before seen in the daylight, 'made up' the gentleman who was to portray the dead body of Hector in the most approved charnel-house fashion. Each tableau was to be ushered in by music, and the choice of that music and its direction was left to Mr. Shamus O'Voca, who is as popular in society as he is clever in his art. Auguste and Nathan were nearly worried out of their lives; and in addition to them, by favour of the managers, various theatrical tailors were busily engaged in the preparation of costumes. All this preparation began to be talked of in those circles amongst which Mrs. Chadwick most wanted it made known; faint wishes for invitations were heard, which, after the full-dress rehearsal carefully arranged for by Charley Ormerod and duly notified in the newspapers, grew into furious desire. Under Charley's advice, Mrs. Chadwick at first stood firm, and issued very few cards to persons whom she had not previously known. 'There would be another representation later on,' she said to those asking on behalf of their friends, 'and they could come then.' This reply, of course, fanned the flame--they must come the first time, nothing could prevent them; and eventually, by what Charley called 'jockey-ship' And Mrs. Chadwick 'diplomacy,' the boilermaker's wife had the pleasure of receiving one duchess, two marchionesses, four countesses, and a great number of lords and ladies at the first representation of her tableaux.

From that time forth Mrs. Chadwick's course was easy. After her second season, now just concluded, she was honoured by the presence of royalty at her tableaux, and a garden-party which she gave at the villa on the Thames was pronounced the most perfect fête seen for many years; the description of it and of the company assembled filled a column of the Sluice, a journal not generally given to reporting such matters; and old Lord Quoch wrote a poem about it, which was made to do duty as letter-press to a fanciful river-side illustration, and published in the Albert-gate Magazine. By this means Mrs. Chadwick was fully established as one of the personages of the day, and her movements were duly chronicled among the 'fashionable arrangements' advertised by the fashionable journal.

With all her frivolity and her hankering after great society, the woman was kindhearted, as she had proved by her treatment of her sister. When in the days gone by it was proposed by Mr. Irvine that Eleanor should be sent upon the stage, the plan was rather approved of than otherwise by Fanny, who thought it time that her sister should be earning her own livelihood, and saw nothing to be complained of in the means by which it was proposed she should do so. After her marriage, indeed, while enlarging on her own experiences in the concert-rooms, she would aver it to be a very different arena from the stage, would shake her head at the mention of ladies of the theatrical profession, of whom not more than two (who were supposed to have certificates of character from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Editor of Punch) were admitted into Mrs. Chadwick's society. But formerly, when there had seemed to be a chance of thirty shillings a week being added to the general income, Fanny not merely had felt no scruple at Eleanor's following this despised profession, but had rated her sister soundly when the girl expressed her horror at the career in store for her; nor while she was still toiling in concert-rooms was she best pleased that Eleanor should be leading a comparatively easy life in that very society to which she, Fanny, had always aspired. After her marriage, however, all was very different. Mrs. Chadwick then thought it scarcely right that her sister should be 'dependent on a fine lady,' more especially a fine lady who could not be induced to take any notice of Mrs. Chadwick, although that worthy woman had what children call 'spelled' for it in every possible way; and when Mr. Irvine died, Fanny took her sister from her father's poor lodging, to which she had returned after May Dunmow's marriage, and bade her be happy at Fairfax-gardens until she should possess a home of her own.

At Fairfax-gardens Eleanor lived happily enough until this question of her marriage arose to cause her annoyance. Occasions of difference between the sisters had previously been slight and few, for Eleanor was in the habit of giving way to her sister's whims, and save when she was requested to give up her black dress at the end of six months--a period which Mrs. Chadwick thought quite long enough to show any outward signs of lamentation for her deceased father--she had but little difficulty in doing so. On that point, however, she was firm; and as it would have been impossible for her in her mourning attire to take part in the festivities which commenced so soon as the prescribed time was over, Eleanor did not mix with the general society, but only saw those who were intimate friends at the house. Amongst the latter was Mr. Spiridion Pratt, a dilettante gentleman of five or six and thirty, who, having an excellent fortune and a cultivated taste, chose to pass the 'fallow leisure of his life' with painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and actors, and to attempt himself to shine a little in each of those vocations in which his friends were proficient. Poems signed 'S.P.' were not uncommon in the pages of the fashionable magazines; the President of the Royal Academy (remembering a commission which he had received and executed for painting an equestrian portrait of the late Mr. Pratt for presentation to the Muffletubbe Hunt, of which he had been M.F.H.) had made a very graceful allusion at one of the annual banquets to 'an amateur contribution of great merit which graces our walls,' and all the R.A.s of Spiridion's acquaintance, who were in the habit of dining with him very often, tried to catch his downcast eyes, and in their after-dinner perambulations through the room nudged each other as they pointed out a rather gloomy canvas representing a Rhenish wineglass, a bunch of grapes, half a cut orange, and two boiled prawns, which, under the title of 'Still Life,' had been S.P.'s contribution to the exhibition. It is needless to say that 'Ballads of the Blighted,' words and music by Spiridion Pratt, Esq., are on every piano, and that two of them, 'My Muffineer' and 'Take, O take the toast away,' have achieved an unparalleled success.

With all these social advantages, and with a certain amount of good looks of the black-eyed, straight-nosed, hairdresser's-dummy style, Mr. Pratt was naturally a favourite with the ladies, and certain affaires with which his name was mixed up had been freely discussed in society. These affaires Mrs. Chadwick professed to look upon as mere trifles, though one of them had lasted for a considerable time, and was supposed to be even then in existence. Any discreditable connection of the kind, however, could not possibly be known to a lady of Mrs. Chadwick's virtue, and wholly ignoring it, she laid plans for making a match between her sister and the accomplished Spiridion. Eleanor, as we have seen, was by no means pleased at the idea; but Mr. Pratt was not merely much struck by the girl's beauty, but thought it would be very delightful to have the moulding of such a young and ingenuous creature, and to undertake the formation of her character on a plan peculiarly his own. The already existing connection threatened to prove an obstacle; but that connection must be broken at some time or other, and Spiridion thought he would have little chance of finding a better excuse than Eleanor Irvine.

Such was the state of affairs at the time when Eleanor was paying her stolen visits to Lady Forestfield; necessarily stolen, because Mrs. Chadwick imagined that all connection between Eleanor and her quondam patroness had ceased, and would have been horribly scandalised at the notion that her sister was in the habit of seeing one 'who had so painfully forgotten herself.' Fanny had never had any liking for Lord Stortford's family, and the fact that her younger sister had been preferred to her for adoption in the Grosvenor-square household had never ceased to rankle in her mind. When, therefore, the story of Lady Forestfield's disgrace became known, Mrs. Chadwick made it the theme of many bitter discourses, with which she improved the occasion, and inflicted the deepest pain on her sister when kindness was needed.

When she left Podbury-street after the conversation recorded in the last

, Eleanor found herself suffering from unusual depression. Something in Lady Forestfield's manner when speaking about Spiridion Pratt convinced the girl that May knew more than she was willing to tell. So far as Mr. Pratt himself was concerned Eleanor had no feeling in the matter, and had she regarded him in the light of a common acquaintance she would have pronounced him to be a gentleman, but rather a vain and silly man. She knew, however, that Mrs. Chadwick's project had not been lightly conceived, and would not be easily departed from, and objectionable as the idea of, marriage with Mr. Pratt had been before, since she had discussed it with her friend the vague dread with which May Forestfield's words had inspired her made her regard it with increased aversion. On her arrival at Fairfax-gardens she found her sister just returned from her drive, and looking through the cards which had been left during her absence.

'"P.P.C." on nearly all of them,' said Mrs. Chadwick, looking up. 'There was quite a thin Park, and there is not the smallest doubt that everybody is leaving town; and it was only this morning that James told me there was no possibility of our getting away for another month. That won't matter to you, Eleanor, I suppose,' she said as she seated herself; 'for you don't seem to me to care whether it is the season or not--indeed, I think you are rather happier when nobody comes.'

'I am sure of it,' said Eleanor quietly.

'Well, my dear child, you really must get out of these moping ways,' said Fanny. 'As I have told you so many times, you should leave off your mourning and come out with me; a drive in the Park would have done you infinitely more good than sitting with that invalid schoolfellow of yours; for I suppose that is where you have been all the day?'

'Yes,' said Eleanor, with a slight blush; 'that is where I have been.'

'I can't understand it; for my part,' said Mrs. Chadwick, 'I don't believe I should be alive if I did not have a drive every day, and I was just looking forward to Scotland to revive me. However, I daresay we shall do tolerably well; there are sure to be some people left in town, and we shall be more thrown together with them than is possible when all the world has to be attended to. It is time to dress now, dear; and will you please make yourself look particularly nice?'

'Why?' asked Eleanor.

'For my sake,' said Fanny. Then stepping to her sister she said, in what she intended to be an arch voice, but what was really a somewhat angular manner, 'Spiridion Pratt is coming to dinner.'

[CHAPTER VI.]

A LITTLE DINNER.

Mrs. Chadwick was in the drawing-room when Eleanor came down, and looked up as her sister entered the room to see whether Eleanor had adopted her suggestion as to her dress. A plain black-silk gown with simple muslin frilling such as Eleanor wore was not much to Mrs. Chadwick's taste, for it was her custom to attire herself in bright colours made in the extremest fashion, and to wear about her head and shoulders so many flowers and trinkets as to make her look like a combination of a florist's shop and a jeweller's window. This was done partly in accordance with her own rather vulgar taste, and partly out of desire to please Mr. Chadwick, who, all generous as he was, liked to see what he called 'his money's worth.' For this reason, though a great patron of art, he never bought specimens of the old masters, arguing that there was 'nothing to look at in them;' never gave still champagne; and on the occasion of his entertainments liked to have as few of the blinds drawn as possible, in order that the outside world might see what was going on. But Mrs. Chadwick, who was in no way jealous of her sister, could not help admitting to herself that she had never seen Eleanor more to advantage; and the gentleman who was sitting by her roused up at once from the somewhat indolent manner in which he had been carrying on conversation and awoke to life. A somewhat romantic-looking gentleman this--rather like a Velasquez portrait--with long dark hair parted in the middle and taken off behind the ears, dark eyes, regular features, peaked beard, and sallow complexion. He wore tiny mosaic studs in his shirt, and a large antique cameo on his little finger; had the finest line of coral links for a watch-chain; and during his talk with Mrs. Chadwick had been engaged in contemplating with great admiration his little feet, which were incased in black-silk socks and shoes with silver buckles. This was Mr. Spiridion Pratt, who rose to greet Miss Irvine, and to express his delight at finding her still in town.

'I was just saying to Mrs. Chadwick,' he murmured, 'that, delighted as I have always been to find myself a guest at this house, I never found it so delightful as now, when it is positively an oasis in this desert of London.'

'We may think ourselves lucky in securing you, Mr. Pratt,' said Eleanor. 'I should have thought that you, who are so essentially a portion of the world, would have been with the world.'

'Where should I go to, my dear Miss Irvine?' said Spiridion plaintively. 'To Goodwood, to sit on the burnt lawn in a broiling sun, with a hundred wretches bawling their wagers in my ears; to Cowes, to sit on the damp deck of a yacht with my knees up to my chin, to have to move perpetually while the men shift their horrible sails, and to get my fingers covered with pitch and tar? That's what the world is doing just now, I believe, and I confess it has no attraction in my eyes.'

'Mrs. Hamblin is still in town, is she not?' asked Mrs. Chadwick, looking fixedly at him.

'Yes, I believe she is,' said Spiridion, with the faintest trace of colour appearing in his cheeks; 'Mr. Hamblin's official position prevents his getting away just yet, and--and--'

'Exactly,' said Mrs. Chadwick. 'Where will they go when Mr. Hamblin can get away?'

'I have no idea for certain,' said Spiridion, who was growing uncomfortable under Mrs. Chadwick's gaze. 'I don't think, however, that they will leave town till October, and then I heard something of their going to Italy.'

'You had yourself some idea of wintering in Rome, had you not?' asked his unswerving questioner.

'I had at one time, but that was before you--I mean to say that I have given up that notion, and I am now by no means certain of my plans.'

To relieve him from his confusion, Mr. Spiridion Pratt was only too glad to welcome the entrance of Mr. Chadwick; a big, burly, broad-shouldered man of about fifty, with a bald head fringed with crisp iron-gray hair, clean-shaved ruddy face, merry gray eyes, and a manner redeemed from vulgarity by its hearty geniality.

'Glad to see you, Mr. Pratt,' said he, seizing Spiridion's little hand in a tight grip, which printed off an impression of the cameo on his other finger. 'How d'ye do? Nell, you were off early this morning, young lady; I thought to see you at breakfast, but they told me you had gone out.'

'To see her sick schoolfellow, you know,' said Mrs. Chadwick. Then turning towards Spiridion Pratt, she whispered, 'She has such a tender heart.'

'Quite right,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'always look after those who are down on their luck, Nelly. I recollect when I was a youngster being laid by the heels with typhus fever down at Jarrow, when I would have given anything for the sight of a kindly woman's face at my bedside; but I never saw anybody except the pitman's wife who kept the cottage where I lodged, and the doctor attached to the works, who had to attend to about two hundred of us for thirty pounds a year. I pulled through somehow, though.'

'Thanks to our blessed Nature,' said Spiridion, with a side-glance at Eleanor, to see if she were looking at him. 'What beneficent wonders does she not work when left to herself!'

'She has worked the beneficent wonder of giving me a rare appetite this evening,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'not that that is a wonder though, when I come to think of it, as I have it pretty nigh every day about this time. My Fan, shall I ring for dinner, or do you expect any more swells?'

Mrs. Chadwick crimsoned as the objectionable word--of the perpetual use of which she had tried so hard to break her husband--struck upon her ear; but seeing that Mr. Pratt, being engaged in conversation with Eleanor, evidently had not heard it, she merely said, 'I am waiting for Mr. Eardley, my dear James, and a friend of his whom he has promised to bring with him.'

'Any friend of his will be welcome,' said Mr. Chadwick. 'I like Eardley, and I like his pictures, though I don't quite understand them; but he puts in plenty of colour; and though I wish he wouldn't paint so many people without their clothes, I--'

'James!' whispered his wife; and at that moment the door was thrown open, and the butler announced Mr. Eardley and Mr. Huff. It was not, however, under that name that Mr. Eardley introduced his friend to the hostess. 'Let me present to you Sir Nugent Uffington, my dear Mrs. Chadwick,' said he; 'a friend whose acquaintance I made under strange circumstances in a wild place several years ago, and to whose kindness and attention I owe my life.'

'Pray don't believe a word of this, Mrs. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a somewhat cynical smile; 'our friend Eardley carries that romantic spirit which is so invaluable to him in his painting into his daily life, and unconsciously allows it to colour his utterances. His recovery was due rather to my medicine-chest than to my exertions, and there was nothing wonderful about it.'

'You say that out of courtesy, Sir Nugent, but I have heard Mr. Eardley speak of it before,' said Mrs. Chadwick, with her most gracious smile. 'Let me introduce you to my husband--Sir Nugent Uffington.'

'Glad to know you, sir,' said Mr. Chadwick, putting out his hand--'glad to know any friend of Mr. Eardley's. Are you in this line?' pointing to the pictures on the walls.

'Not I, Mr. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a laugh. 'I wish I were anything as useful. I have the misfortune to do nothing, to have been doing it all my life, and,' he added in rather a lower tone, 'to have made a singularly bad job of it.'

And then dinner was announced, and the conversation stopped.

Charley Ormerod was quite right when he spoke with such high praise of the quality of the dinners and the wines in Fairfax-gardens. Mr. Chadwick looked after these himself. He had a natural taste for good living, and though in his early days he had been quite content with a chump of coarse-grained meat broiled by himself over the furnace fire, and washed down by some cold weak tea out of a soda-water bottle, as soon as he could provide himself with better fare he took care to have it. 'A man is like an engine,' he used to say; 'his bearings get hot, and the whole thing goes crank and stiff, unless his works have been properly greased. Half my planning and thinking is done at night, after a good dinner and a bottle of fizz, when my Fan's in bed, and all these chattering servants are out of the way, and I sit up in the library and put down all I have got in my head. It's no good to attempt to plan anything up in the North, for there they have their heavy meal in the middle of the day, and after that I am good for nothing but to go to sleep, or to see what I have ordered is carried out; but here, after a filly dy sole and a bottle of Irroy, I am as clear as a bell and as fresh as a two-year-old.'

The dinner on this occasion was especially good, for it was the host's boast that, whatever kudos he might have gained in the world for his 'large spreads,' his 'little feeds,' or, as Mrs. Chadwick called them, their dinners 'en petit comité,' were really much better. Spiridion Pratt, who was a gourmet, revelled in the various dishes, and the rare wines brought a slight flush into Uffington's usually pale cheeks.

'Like that sherry, Sir Nugent?' cried the host, beaming from his side of the round table. 'That's some of the Emperor's wine from the Tooleries. I was in Paris at the time of the sale, and when I tasted, I determined to have some. This is the real stuff, I know, because I took care to have it put aside and brought over at once. But, lor bless you, at some of the houses where my Fan and me dine--you know the parties I am alluding to, Eardley--they have got some stuff which passes for the Emperor's wine that old Nap would never have put his beak into.'

'My dear James!' murmured Mrs. Chadwick.

'Fact, Fan,' said her husband, who misunderstood the gist of the hint--'never put his beak into; though I daresay the Swassers--what a fellow I am! there I have been and let the name out!--well, I daresay the Swassers paid a long figure for it, and believed it was old Nap's own tipple. Poor old Nap! fancy him gone, and Ujaney left alone!'

'Were you ever at the imperial court?' asked Spiridion.

'O yes,' replied the host. 'We supplied a set of engines for the imperial yacht Leagle, I think it was called--the Eagle--very like English, ain't it? And there was some talk about our building a new vessel for him, and I was sent for to see the Emperor about it. I shall never forget. Just before I started, I was talking to some funny fellows I knew then who wrote in the newspapers, and when I told them I was going to see the Emperor, one of them, named Rupert Robinson, said, "Well, then, just have the kindness to ask him for the eighteenpence he owes me." "Eighteenpence!" says I. "How can he owe you eighteenpence?" "Why," he says, "I often used to see him in the old days at Lady Blessington's, at Gore House, on a Sunday night; and one night we came home together in a cab, and he asked me to pay his share as well as my own, as he had no change, and he would pay me next time he saw me. Next time I saw him," Robinson said, "he was driving in his carriage, with an escort riding beside him, and I thought that was a bad time to ask him for the eighteenpence; so he owes it me still."'

'I suppose you did not ask the Emperor for it?' said Spiridion.

'Not I,' said Mr. Chadwick, with a laugh. 'I had enough to do to mind my own business. Our friend Eardley here tells me that you have been a great traveller, Sir Nugent?'

'Yes, I have knocked about a good deal, Mr. Chadwick,' said Uffington, turning towards him. 'I have been and done and suffered as much as most men.'

'Quite like a dear old verb, isn't he?' said Eardley, shaking back his clustering locks and smiling at Eleanor.

'I had a great notion of travelling once myself,' said Mr. Chadwick. 'When I was first apprentice, at the Jarrow works, I thought I would like to see the world, and I was very nearly running off to be a cabin-boy.'

'My dear James!' murmured Mrs. Chadwick. Then turning to Spiridion with a sweet smile, 'You too, Mr. Pratt, have been a great traveller; only the other day I was reading to Eleanor that delightful description of your being stopped by the brigands in Greece.'

'The description, I imagine, was a good deal pleasanter than the reality,' murmured Eardley. 'They kept dear old Prattikins on very short commons, and wouldn't let him have a comb to do his back hair with.'

'Well, I'm a queer kind of John Bull, I suppose, in my notions,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'but I don't hold much with all this travelling abroad and intercourse with foreign nations. It's all very well so far as business is concerned--gives us an outlet for our goods, and enables us to pick up a good many wrinkles in matters in which these fellows beat us hollow--but I don't think we have gained much by being so hand and glove with these chaps, having them at our houses, and that sort of thing.'

'Ungrateful monster,' laughed Eardley, 'to say such things when the work of the French stranger within your gates has scarcely left the table! Could any one but a Frenchman have made that bonne femme soup? Is there a British hand light enough to have turned out that soufflet?'

'I wasn't talking about cooking,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'there they're A1, and no mistake. When I was a lad we used to think that all Frenchmen were either cooks or dancing-masters; and I imagined all French boys were brought up in the belief that Englishmen were either sailors or grooms. No; what I meant to say,' he continued, looking a little more serious, 'is, that I don't think we are quite so respectable since we have mixed so freely with foreigners.'

'You are not alluding to ourselves, James, I suppose,' interposed Mrs. Chadwick. 'I am sure that--'

'No, no, my dear Fan,' said her husband; 'I mean English people generally. It don't appear to me that we are so strong in temperance, soberness, and chastity--those three virtues which the Catechism tells us to look sharp after--as we were before the days of excursions abroad and cheap tourists' tickets.'

'I don't see that anything could possibly be more temperate than the French and the Italian gentlemen who come to this house, James. Some of the Germans are large eaters, we know, but seem to be even more so than they are from the manner in which they handle their knives and forks and swallow their food.'

'I rather think that it is to a falling off in the other virtues named to which Mr. Chadwick is making special allusion,' said Spiridion Pratt, with a smile. 'Some of our continental visitors have recently proved themselves rather destructive to the peace of families.'

'Are you speaking generally, or alluding to any special case?' asked Uffington.

'I was speaking generally,' said Spiridion; 'but there are doubtless special cases which would point the--immoral.'

'There is one, a very flagrant case, which quite bears out what my husband says,' observed Mrs. Chadwick, drawing herself up and looking as virtuous as the mother of the Gracchi. 'I understand that you have only just returned to England, Sir Nugent Uffington, and therefore, perhaps, you have not heard of it--the scandal about Lady Forestfield.'

Uffington bowed coldly. He had heard some mention of that sad story, he said.

'A sad story indeed, and a great disgrace to our English nobility, of which we are naturally so proud,' said Mrs. Chadwick. 'Anything worse than the conduct of Lady Forestfield could not well be imagined.'

Eleanor Irvine, who had been endeavouring to hide her agitation as this conversation proceeded, could restrain herself no longer. 'Surely Lady Forestfield is not entirely to blame, Fanny!' she cried. 'Surely some excuse is to be made for one who was cruelly treated and almost wholly deserted by her husband, whose sole recognition of her was to throw dust in the world's eyes!'

'Eleanor,' cried Mrs. Chadwick, bridling up, 'I cannot understand what you mean.' Then, seeing that the sharpness of her tone had been remarked by the company, she changed her voice, and said, with affected gaiety, 'You must allow me, as an old married woman, to be a much better judge of such matters than you. It is not to be surprised at,' she said, turning to Spiridion Pratt, 'that Eleanor, who has the sweetest nature in the world, should feel a strong compassion for Lady Forestfield, for they were brought up together, and in their childhood were quite like sisters, though Lady Forestfield is two or three years the elder of the two. I admire her generosity,' she added, in a lower tone; 'but of course it is my duty, in my position as elder sister and married woman, to rebuke the expression of such sentiments.'

'Gad, I don't see that,' returned Spiridion in the same undertone. 'She seems to me perfectly charming, and it is, we are told, the duty of angels to plead for the fallen.'

'You asked me if I had heard anything of this wretched case,' said Uffington to Mrs. Chadwick. 'What has been mentioned to me is, that for some time before their separation Lord Forestfield had been in the habit of treating his wife with systematic rudeness and even cruelty. If that be the case, he has himself to thank for all that has subsequently happened to him.'

'It is as bad a case against him as could possibly be,' said Eardley, turning to Uffington, who was his neighbour, and speaking quietly. 'Both before and after the birth of her child he worried her so savagely, that the baby, naturally small and weak, only lived a few months. She was desperately fond of this infant, and from the time of its death, which she attributed entirely to her husband's misconduct, she has been scarcely accountable for her actions.'

'That, I suppose, Mr. Eardley,' said Mrs. Chadwick, who caught the last words, 'will be the excuse for Lady Forestfield taking up with such people as Mrs. Ingram and Lady Northaw, and declining to associate with others who, though they cannot boast of being fast, have at least a reputation, and are visited by some of the best people.'

'I don't think,' said Mr. Chadwick, who had been silent for some time, 'that we ought to lay the blame wholly upon one or the other of these unfortunate young people. I don't quite agree with my Fan that Lady F.'s the party in fault, though I daresay she was flighty, and didn't keep herself as strict as she would have done had she lived half a century two ago; and I don't think Lord F. is to be entirely blamed, though from what I have seen of him in one or two matters of business he is a roughish customer. My verdict should be against the third person in the case; the man who, in the guise of a friend, comes into a house where, to all outward appearance at least, and for anything that he could tell, things were going on quite smoothly, and takes advantage of the opportunities of his intimacy to bring ruin upon one and misery upon both. Upon both, I say. Don't tell me--whatever sort of man this Lord Forestfield may be, however glad he may be now to be freed from his wife, he will not be able to give up all thought of her. He may get rid of her, as of course he will; and he may marry again, as they say he wants to; but he cannot get rid of the memory of her, let him be as happy as he may. Years hence he will find himself thinking about her, wondering what has become of her, what she may be like then--thinking of the early days of their courtship, when she was a pretty girl and he a likely young fellow, when their lines lay in pleasant places and all that the world held good seemed to be in store for them. Lord, Lord, they will be wretched enough then! The crime in a case of this kind belongs to the seducer. Don't you think so, Sir Nugent Uffington?'

Uffington started for an instant, as did Eardley, to whom his story was known. Then he said quietly, 'No doubt; but it brings its own punishment with it sooner or later, as he will find.'

The conversation then turned into another channel, and soon afterwards the ladies retired.

Uffington, who had been much struck with Eleanor's outburst in defence of Lady Forestfield, made up his mind to have some farther talk with her; but when they reached the drawing-room they found Mrs. Chadwick alone.

'Eleanor had a headache,' the hostess explained to Spiridion Pratt; 'and though I did all I could to persuade her, I found it impossible to make her await your coming.'

'She was right,' Uffington muttered to himself, pondering over this as he walked home. 'Headache or no headache, she is far too sensible a girl to waste her time on such a donkey as that man Pratt. There must be something more in Lady Forestfield than I imagined to enlist the sympathies of such a girl as this. For the first time for years I really begin to feel interested in something.'

[CHAPTER VII.]

THE MORNING AFTER.

When Sir Nugent Uffington woke the next morning, instead of, according to his usual custom, yawning and composing himself for another nap, he roused up at once. It is for a psychologist to explain how it is that the subject uppermost in our minds invariably flashes across our thoughts at the first instant of shaking off our slumbers, and that we go to the pleasure or business of the day with a light or heavy heart, according to our impressions on waking. That acceptance which has so nearly run out; that confoundedly incautious letter which, on the spur of the moment, we wrote to a man who is now doubtless making use of it; that awkward dilemma in which, without any serious intentions, we placed ourselves with Smith's wife--all these things rise before us with as much but not more certainty than the recollections of our successful after-dinner speech, of thrilling tones and touches at that special interview on the previous evening, or of the assurance from our attorney that the long-protracted lawsuit was coming to an end at last, and that the judgment could not fail to be in our favour. Through the Gate of Ivory and through the Gate of Horn come dreams and thoughts to sleeping man, who is acted upon by them in his waking moments.

Nugent Uffington had been so long unaccustomed to anything like the smallest excitement, his life for so many years past had gone on slowly and monotonously, that he could not at first understand what it was that caused him to rouse up briskly, and with a certain hitherto unwonted feeling of interest. A little reflection brought before him the events of the previous evening, and he lay lazily back on his pillow, thinking them through and making his comments upon them.

'It is a curious thing,' he said to himself 'that a man of my age and experience should find himself suddenly intrigué about the affairs of a set of people, some of whom I never saw till Wednesday, and one of whom I could scarcely be said to have seen at all. And yet undoubtedly I was much amused, and something more than that, at the proceedings of those queer people with whom Eardley took me to dine last night. There was an honesty and a sense of right about that genial rough fellow, the host, which was to me infinitely pleasanter and more refreshing than the fade nonsense talked by people who are far better educated, and who are supposed to be better mannered; though unintentionally, in his great blundering way, he came down hot and heavy upon me, and sent his blade through the joints in my harness. I wonder how I looked under the infliction? I must ask Eardley, whose glance I caught at the moment; but I have a notion that to him, at least, I must have shown that the hit had gone home. Strange that after all these years anything which in the slightest degree resembles or hinges upon my life with Julie should have such an effect upon me. All the time that that good honest fellow was droning away about the impossibility of Forestfield's being able to shake off the memory of this wife whom he has just deserted--and I think Chadwick was right there, it is impossible to lay such ghosts--I was thinking of that day, when I first induced her to meet me at the Great Exhibition, when we were hidden away in the Machinery Court amongst all kinds of wonderful engines, as much to ourselves as if we had been in a palm-grove in Africa. At this instant I can see her in the thin muslin dress which she wore, the bright gold chain round her neck, the tiny parasol swinging open over her shoulders; can distinguish that soft violet perfume, which seemed to be a portion of herself, and--I imagined I had cured myself even of thinking of these things! "The crime in a case of this sort belongs to the seducer--don't you think so, Sir Nugent Uffington?" It was a home thrust. I wonder whether I turned red or white, or betrayed myself in any way to the rest of the party? The man never meant to sting me--he hadn't made his money in those days, and such a story was not likely to penetrate to Newcastle, though Manchester and its neighbourhood must have heard enough of the wrongs of the injured husband, and Mrs. Chadwick must have been a mere child at the time. That man Pratt may have heard something about it, but, donkey that he is, he is decently behaved, and made no sign. I don't think I should quite like that young girl, Mrs. Chadwick's sister, to have Mr. Pratt's version of the affair though, for I don't think he would make the best case for any one else, and I am rather interested in Miss Eleanor Irvine; not for her beaux yeux, God knows, for I am past any attraction from that kind of thing; I don't know what for, unless it is for the manner in which she spoke up for her friend, Lady Forestfield. How the girl's eyes flashed, and what ringing scorn and defiance there was in her tone as she defended her absent friend! Men do not do that sort of thing if any of their particular acquaintances is attacked; they content themselves with a very mild protest; but this girl plainly meant to hit hard, and was all too many for that conventional moralist, her sister, who made a bad retreat of it. Those two women do not pull well together, it is impossible they should; for one is all natural fire, and the other all artificial ice. Mrs. Chadwick is evidently bent upon throwing this pretty girl at the head of Mr. Pratt, who is graciously condescending to spread out his palms to catch her; but Miss Eleanor, I imagine, does not intend to allow herself to be tossed about for her sister's amusement or advantage, and she will hold to her friend whom the worldly-wise Mrs. Chadwick so roundly denounces. Both these women, each in her own way, evidently feel strongly about that matter. There must have been a further discussion about it in the drawing-room, in which the married lady must have carried the day and reduced her sister to tears, or she would not have quitted the room for the mere sake of shirking a further interview with Spiridion Pratt. I am actually curious to see more of those people and to watch the progress of affairs there; for an idle than with all his time to fill up it will afford at all events occupation, and perhaps amusement. Moreover, I may in some way or other--one can never tell how--be able to lighten the burden which this poor deserted woman seems to have brought upon herself, which, as a voluntary act on the part of the "seducer," may perhaps be looked upon as some expiation of his "crime."'

And with a shrug, Nugent Uffington rang for his valet and turned out of bed. He was pretending to eat his breakfast, dallying with his toast and grumbling over the newsless newspaper, when Mr. Eardley was announced.

Nothing could be more unlike the conventional idea of an artist than Mr. Eardley's appearance, so far as dress was concerned. His classical profile and hyacinthine locks were all that could be looked for in those Greek heroes whom he loved to paint; indeed, it was said, and not without truth, that his looking-glass supplied him with the best models. But in his costume he not merely despised the velvet shooting-coat and general looseness of garb which are supposed to be characteristic of his calling, but affected a neatness and precision which were in strong contrast with the prevailing loudness of taste. He was a man of excellent education and information, who had taken up the profession of a painter simply because it was the first that came to his hand, and who had continued it because he saw his way to large prices and high social position, but who had talent and pluck enough to have succeeded in several other callings had he felt so disposed. Mr. Eardley's talent was, moreover, of a very different kind from that of Spiridion Pratt, and although the latter was always putting himself forward, whilst the former never made any public appearance outside his adopted art, Mr. Eardley's self-contained reticence was regarded as evidence of much more power than Mr. Pratt's perpetual attempts. There were few men to whom the world had shown so much of its sunny side, fewer still who would have been so little spoiled by the indulgence. Dick Tinto and Jack Whitewash, with their tobacco-smelling beards, their paint-bedaubed jackets, and their dirty hands, and their companions of the Palette Club, used to revile Frank Eardley, calling him swell and stuck-up beast; but when the first lay ill for six weeks with the fever, it was Frank's purse which induced the doctor to come in and the broker's man to go out; and when Jack Whitewash swaggered about the good position awarded to his picture at the Academy, he little knew that it was owing to Frank's interposition with the council. Eardley mixed but little with men of his own profession, though he took much interest in all its charitable and social institutions at the periodical gatherings, where he spoke with great readiness and fluency; and though he went a great deal into society he had but very few intimates. For Nugent Uffington, Eardley entertained a great liking; the kindness shown to him by Nugent at their first meeting had touched him very deeply, and there was something in Uffington's solitude and isolation--which was even more noticeable now in the midst of the London world than it had been in the wild and uncivilised regions where they first formed acquaintance--that called forth his pity and admiration. Since Nugent's return, a day seldom passed without the friends meeting. Uffington would sit for hours in Eardley's studio, smoking countless cigarettes and watching his friend at work; their talk was always of the frankest and most open character, and Nugent's one wish seemed to be that Frank, with all the world at his feet, should shun the social snares and pitfalls into which he himself had fallen at the outset of his career.

'You will wonder what brings me to you at such an early hour,' said Eardley, 'more especially after our settling that you should come round and give me your opinion of the Niobe; but when I got home last night, I found a letter from Dossetor, asking me to look at some blue Chelsea china at one o'clock. So I thought I would make an idle morning of it, and inflict my company on you.'

'I am very glad to see you--more glad than I usually should be at this hour; but to-day I happen to be awake--not a very frequent occurrence with me--at eleven o'clock.'

'And in Albania you were always ready to start on our excursions at five,' said Eardley, with a laugh.

'Exactly, my dear Frank; but Albania and the Albany, though almost synonymous, are very different places. It was worth while getting up at any absurd hour for the wild-fowl, shooting there; but there is nothing to shoot at here, unless I were to pot the beadle, or a fellow-lodger shaving at the opposite window. Recollect, too, the air and the silence and all the other enjoyable things.'

'Silence!' cried Eardley. 'If you call that enjoyable, you surely have got enough of it here. I never could understand how people lived in these chambers, with nothing ever to wake the echoes except the occasional footfalls in that melancholy long covered walk.'

'You have that idea because you are never here of an evening, my dear Frank,' said Uffington, 'and have never heard the shrieks of laughter and the very unbridled mirth which floats out upon the evening air when the opposite windows are open, and little Mr. Pincushion, of the Stock Exchange, is entertaining his female friends from the Varieties and the Parthenon. By the way, that was a very good dinner you took me to last night.'