AT THE RELTON ARMS

BY EVELYN SHARP

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS., 1895
LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST.

Copyright, 1895,
By Roberts Brothers.

University Press.
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge U. S. A.

AT THE RELTON ARMS.

CHAPTER I.

It was towards the end of a crowded reception in the musician's studio. Most of the people who had come from a sense of social obligation, and they were chiefly the mothers of his fashionable pupils, had left when the musician began to play his own compositions; and those who remained behind, and occupied the position of the Greek chorus with regard to his remarks, were his own chosen disciples, who were of course privileged to stay much longer than ordinary acquaintances. The musician, perhaps, had no effectual means of suggesting their departure; but neither was their homage, being very womanly and obvious, unpleasing to him; and when the well-dressed Philistines had driven away in their carriages, he abandoned the attitude of the debonair host and took up that of the prophet instead, which at once gave a serious turn to the conversation. He then propounded his own theories, or somebody else's, at great length, and the chorus assented with a gentle murmur of approbation whenever there was a pause. Occasionally one of the elect would ask for some music, and the musician would single out a pupil whom he considered qualified to interpret what he had composed; and in the applause which invariably followed, the performer would be entirely eclipsed by the greater importance of what she had performed.

"Isn't it a beautiful thing? Such depth," said Mrs. Reginald Routh, moving away from the piano where she had just been singing the musician's last song. It was an uncomfortable habit she had of always anticipating what the other people would have said if she had only given them time to speak; and she had acquired it from living many years with an unmusical though wealthy husband, who only acknowledged his wife's musical talents by sending large checks annually to the musician. On this occasion she caught the eye of some one who had just arrived, and repeated her remark emphatically; for the new-comer was a stranger who had unscrupulously interrupted the last verse of her song, and was now absorbed in prolonging the existence of a modicum of bitter tea, one sugar-plum, and a preserved cherry.

"Is it?" she answered hastily, seeing she was expected to say something. "I suppose it is quite good, of course. Who is it by? I suppose you can't say, though, without looking; and I haven't really the least desire to know. Talking of music," she continued blandly, chasing the sugar-plum round the saucer, "I have really had a treat this afternoon at St. James's Hall. Of course you have often heard Sapolienski? Don't ask me how to pronounce him; I think another of the horrors added to modern composers is the length of their names. But I'm ashamed to say I have never heard him before; I have been abroad, you see, and I am not a bit musical either. I enjoyed it much more than I expected though, and you should have seen the ovation he received at the end, ladies crowding on to the platform and throwing their rings at him! Oh, no, I am clearly not musical. But still, as he is the greatest musician of the day...."

Here Mrs. Reginald Routh found her opportunity, and used it.

"Oh, indeed? I have never heard of a player of that name, but really there are so many third-rate 'eskis' now that we cannot be expected to know them all. I dislike all kinds of sentimental effusion, and society lions, especially when they are musical ones, are singularly unpleasing to me. There can be no flattery where true genius exists, and if we were to reserve our praise for real hidden talent," she paused as the musician came within hearing and repeated her last words in a louder tone, "real hidden talent, music would at last find her rightful place of honor among us. Do you not think so, Mr. Digby?"

Mrs. Reginald maintained a superb air of possession over music by making it always of the feminine gender, just as she did over the musician by calling him by his first name.

Mr. Digby Raleigh, thus intercepted in his passage across the room, turned on his heel and ran his fingers through his hair as he launched out on his favorite theme with enthusiasm. For besides being an interesting musician with a studio in the West End, he had views on metaphysics and Socialism as well, and although his warm discussions of these and other modern subjects conveyed little but confused notions to the minds of his feminine hearers, yet his enthusiasm only lent him a more potent charm in their eyes.

"Not yet, Mrs. Routh, no, no, not yet," he exclaimed earnestly, "we are not ready, not fit for it yet. Socialism has to come first; the people must be taught the meaning of life and humanity before they can be made ready for music. Music is the end and aim of every intelligent Socialist. The people must suffer first, as we have all had to suffer, we who do understand and are waiting for the light which cannot shine because of the materialists who do not even feel the need of it. Life is a problem, but we at least are happiest who see that it is so, and seek for the solution with our—with our heart's blood."

The end was not quite so eloquent as the beginning of his speech, but the musician had also caught the eye of the latest comer as she stirred the grounds of her tea mechanically and looked across the room at him, and he became suddenly conscious that there was somebody in the room who was actually inclined to laugh at him. So he stumbled slightly over his last words, and blushed a little at his own emotion; but the other ladies were glancing at one another with much sympathy as if to show that they thoroughly understood all he meant and felt, and they evidently expected some more to follow. So he ran his fingers through his hair again, and looked at Mrs. Reginald Routh, and tried to forget the gray-eyed girl in the warmth of his cause.

"It is not Parliamentary reform, it is not any revolution, or series of revolutions, that will bring Socialism. It is we ourselves who must give it birth after much pain and sorrow, even as a mother—" here the exclusive nature of the audience struck him, and he paused abruptly, until he remembered that he was a prophet, and might use any questionable metaphor he pleased without impropriety—"even as a mother brings forth the child who is to become her joy and her comfort. It is the spirit of altruism that has to be diffused among us, and when we have once realized that the 'will to live' as Schopenhauer puts it, is the one to be controlled, and that the finest of all things is to die,—that is, of course, to live,—to live for the good of the Commonwealth, then shall we be prepared for the enjoyment of perfect art, and then shall the musician,—that is, of course, the art of the musician,—be allowed to exist without such sordid considerations as bread and butter and a roof. I use art in its highest, its only real sense, as meaning music only; such imitative branches as literature and painting will not then be practised. I—I beg your pardon?"

"Please don't stop," urged the gray-eyed girl, who had painted certain hot sunsets and purple mists during her travels on the Continent, and had shown in her face what she thought of the musician's last words, "I would not interrupt for the world. I don't know anything about Socialism, or any of the other things you mention except painting, which is evidently doomed. So pray go on, I find it most entertaining."

And a laugh, in which derision was plainly discernible, rang out to bear testimony to her words. She evidently did not realize the serious nature of the assemblage in which she found herself, and Mrs. Reginald acquired a distinct antipathy for her when she leaned back in her chair carelessly, and proceeded to argue with Digby as though he were any ordinary young man, with no ideas, and no studio, and no deep and hidden tragedy in his life which could be alluded to darkly whenever the topic of conversation required it. And no one in the room could forgive her when the musician threw himself on the chair at her side, and condescended to parry her objections as though he thoroughly enjoyed the attack she was daring to make upon his favorite principles.

"Do you not see that the language of painting is limited?" he cried. "It has told us all it had to tell; it is not adapted to modern needs and modern craving, though the impressionists have made a fine attempt, a noble attempt, to make it express more than it can. Do you not see that while music is purely spiritual, purely intellectual, painting is a mere imitation of the common objects of nature?"

"Man and woman being among the common objects?" murmured the girl. But he did not heed her tiresomely obvious remark, and plunged onwards.

"Is not art finer, ten times finer than nature? You cannot see below the surface, you painters who copy nature, poor ignorant nature, who is only on the threshold of knowledge herself. You say you can paint a tree; but when it is done, what is it? A tree!"

"No, it is not only the tree," objected the other, "it is the picture in the artist's mind that the tree makes. When you and I look at a tree we see two different things,—apparently; and as I live in the country most of the year, I am thankful I am not a musician. Voilà tout!"

"But even then? You can put into your picture none of the workings of the human mind, none of the aspirations of the human soul. When you have a great happiness or a great sorrow, does it help you to paint your pictures? No, no, your painting is apart from your existence, your mind has no place there. In the future we shall have but one art, and that art will be music!"

"Oh, Mr. Raleigh!" laughed the girl, "you are making a world for one kind of people. What will happen to the poor luckless ones like myself who are not musical? I suppose there will have to be some in your world?"

"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité," said the musician, relaxing into a laugh too; but Mrs. Routh, who had never read Voltaire, thought it was quite time to interfere when she could not even understand what they were saying, and she dropped her parasol. Digby stooped to pick it up, and she asked him promptly to play something.

The spell was broken, and the chorus round the room echoed the request. The musician smiled in a forced manner, and said he would play the thirty-seven variations of Beethoven.

"Oh, no, something of your own," begged the chorus.

"Yes, please, Mr. Raleigh, something full of the workings of the human mind and the aspirations of the human soul," said the girl, merrily; and as the musician sat down and began to play, she again shocked everybody by walking round the room and examining the photographs.

"How exquisite, how emotional!" cried the easily moved Mrs. Reginald when he had finished.

"Is he not bound to get on?" said the other upholders of altruism. But the musician did not seem to hear them, for he crossed over to the girl by the bookshelves.

"Now tell me," she said, hardly lowering her voice, "is it possible to compose anything that would express the aspirations of Mrs. Reginald Routh's soul? That is she, is it not, the one in the black silk who glares at me and is so maternal to you? Oh, I shall never understand the language of music; I wonder if you find the language of painting as difficult, and if that is why you have acquired such an unflattering opinion of it?"

"May it not be because I have as yet seen none of your sketches?" he said gallantly; but she shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

"What stacks of photographs you have. Cleverly arranged too, I see: pupils in evening dress from twenty to twenty-five on the piano; pupils with long hair and pinafores on the mantelshelf with the pipe-racks; mammas in velvet and fur behind the fern-pots. Ah, the workings of the musical mind are most subtle. Good-bye; I suppose I shall see you down at the Manor on Saturday?"

"I hope to run down for the week end; I have not seen my people for months. And perhaps I may have an opportunity of converting you yet! Is your carriage here?"

"Who is she?" asked some one, when the musician had followed her into the hall.

"Don't ask me, dear," said Mrs. Reginald, with her habitual smile, "I am quite unacquainted with the person."

"Poor Mr. Raleigh, I quite felt for him," said another; "but how chivalrous he is! No one would have suspected how much her impertinence was torturing his sensitive nature."

"I should not call her impertinent myself," said Mrs. Reginald, charitably, "I think it is merely want of breeding. Provincial, I should say. Some friend of the family perhaps; I have heard—that is to say, Mr. Digby has often talked to me of his home in the country. Strange that so many of our greatest men should have come up from the provinces. Take—take Händel, for instance, or even Charlotte Brontë."

"What a pretty girl, Mr. Raleigh; who is she?" asked the first speaker, when the musician returned, with rather a conscious look on his face.

"Ah, yes, charming, isn't she? She is Lady Joan Relton, the Relton Court family, you know; came into the title unexpectedly through the death of a great-uncle. Not much wealth, I believe; no doubt, all the money has been squandered by her worthless and immoral ancestors," he added, remembering his prophet's mantle in time to justify his momentary interest in the aristocracy. "Will you give us another song, Mrs. Routh?"

And, the room having been cleared, as it were, of the heretical element, the atmosphere of music once more settled down solidly on that studio in the West End.

CHAPTER II.

Squire Raleigh was a philanthropist. But philanthropy in town is a costly amusement, and Squire Raleigh had a large family, whose claims could not comfortably be ignored in favor of charitable institutions, although a philanthropist with a love for mankind cannot be expected to do as much for his own children as an ordinary domesticated egoist. Nevertheless, after the endowment of an orphan asylum, and the failure of a Liberal newspaper speculation, and the gift of a public park to the people had been followed by the reduction of his income to one-third of its original value, the vigorous reformer yielded to the persuasions of his sons and his lawyers and retired to his country estate, with a knighthood, a troublesome liver, and a firm resolve to get to the bottom of the land question.

At Murville Manor, an old Georgian house standing near a quaint little village in one of the home counties, Sir Marcus Raleigh once more tried to forget the disagreeable facts of an income with decreasing resources and a family of increasing claims, and plunged into fresh philanthropic schemes, this time relating to small holdings, and the growth of potatoes for the million, and the advancement in general of the agricultural laborer. Such energy naturally brought the enthusiast into collision with his own farming tenants, who liked to preserve the monopoly of grumbling to themselves, and although not hesitating to complain of the difficulties of making their land pay, yet objected strongly to having small portions of it wrested from them and given to their own laborers instead, who throve upon them straightway. It likewise bred strained relations between the Squire and the old rector, who in his own way of Sunday-schools, and coal clubs, and relief funds, was a philanthropist of an old world form, and could not understand why the traditional supporter of church charities should prefer to invent charities of his own and allow the church to fall into debt meanwhile. His family also, who had not inherited philanthropic tendencies, failed to appreciate the unselfishness of their father in this direction, and complained with the grossest individualism of the want of pocket money. They complained, too, of being forced to exchange a town life, where they could at least sink their father's personality in the oblivion of society, for a country one, where it was impossible to remain unknown for miles round, where philanthropy was cheap and therefore more rife than before, and where a large staff of men-servants was replaced by a so-called handy man. The handy man, by the way, in spite of advertising himself in the county paper as competent to look after "pony, cart, garden, boots, knives, fifteen shillings a week, Sundays, and beer," had as yet shown no decided talent in any of these particulars, except in the last-mentioned one.

Among a mass of other inconsistencies, which almost likened him to a schoolboy who is having a romp through life instead of playing the game seriously, the Squire, while considering his children in the light of impedimenta, yet cherished a passionate affection for the least worthy of them all, for the one to whom nature had decreed that he should bequeath, with a liberality he had shown his children in no other respect, the largest share of his own failings. Jack Raleigh was handsome, fascinating, improvident to a degree, with no fixed code of morality and no definite powers of reasoning, ruling himself and his actions entirely by a kind of blind instinct such as we find in healthy animals or in children. His love, like his antipathy, was of an elementary character; if he found himself in a complicated situation, which was not rare, he would merely choose the most pleasant course open to him, without giving it a moment's consideration, and would follow it gayly until another obstacle arose which would have to be treated in a similar manner. Whether he was the happier for feeling nothing deeply, belongs to those questions which are argued by thousands of lives every day without a conclusive answer being found to them. That his temperament was the sunnier for it and that his misdeeds were less harmful, is most certain; and since the God whom he believed in, if he believed in one at all, was a kind of inexhaustible Being who could offer him as many fresh opportunities as he had squandered already, and seemed to be the cause, in some indirect way that Jack never attempted to fathom, of occasional magnificent music in churches and cathedrals, his religion as well as his excellent digestion saved him from the fits of depression that usually accompany the sanguine disposition. He had discovered before he was out of his teens that England was not the place for one so restless as he, and he had been sent out to more than one colony "to try his luck," as the Squire said, in a vague hope of shifting his uneasy responsibility for his son's actions on to fortune. But fortune, although not philanthropic in her tendencies, and having no nobler vocation to distract her from her plain duty of looking after her prodigal sons, refused to help him, and he inevitably returned home with more debts, more friends, more anecdotes, but no more stability than before.

It was on a dull morning in July, at breakfast time, that Jack caused his father for the hundredth time to recognize his existence in an unpleasant manner. It was an unfortunate time for his letter to arrive, for there was a mist that day, and as Sir Marcus was profoundly ignorant both of meteorology and the crops, and pretended to be an authority on both, he chose to feel injured because Helen assured him that it was not going to rain, and that his hay was not going to be spoiled. To which the Squire, who never could endure the plain truths of his eldest daughter, replied testily that the mist did mean rain, that his hay was going to be spoiled as it always was, and that he himself was a ruined man; he then sat down at the now silent table and sighed in a dejected manner. Presently, finding that no one was looking at him, he roused himself partially, and made a hearty breakfast behind his newspaper; and when the conversation around him was once more in full swing he condescended to look at his letters. He opened Jack's first, as he always did. It was the old story, told in the boy's usual careless manner: Canada had grown too small for him, he was feeling homesick, and was about to sail for England, and would be with his father almost as soon as his letter, to which effect he was his loving son Jack.

It was not the first letter of the kind that the Squire had received from the same source, and he knew what this one meant: Jack would be back again before the week was out, with an accumulation of debts and not a dollar in his pocket, Jack, with his sunny smile, and his nonchalance, and his utter unconsciousness of offence. Jack meant money, family meant money, and Sir Marcus was close upon overdrawing his banking account already, and had promised a large subscription only the day before to the building fund of the village reading-room. If there had been no stranger present he would have relieved his feelings by a characteristic outburst; but Lady Joan sat opposite to him and saw as much as she wished to see without raising her eyes from her plate, and he felt instinctively that he might merely succeed in making himself ridiculous if he spoke before the opportunity occurred; and, impetuous man as he was, something he could not define restrained him from creating a situation just then which should not be dignified. So he read the letter over again, and he listened mechanically to the conversation of his offending children, without heeding what they said.

"After all," Digby was saying, with a gravity which the subject hardly merited, for in the heart of his own family, although he still remained the prophet, yet he refrained from provoking the serious discussions which were only fitting within the sacred walls of the studio, "after all, it does not matter how bad a fellow is, if he is only artistically so, I mean if he will only be thorough over it."

"It does not matter how wicked we all are, so long as we can see the humor of sin. To be able to laugh at ourselves is the great thing," murmured Lady Joan.

"There is nothing so depressing," continued the musician, without heeding the interruption, "as the spectacle of a man who will not face his own wickedness—or even his own goodness. It is a sign of the age, this wretched spirit of compromise; we don't live in town because it is unhealthy, and the fogs are so bad—"

"My dear, that was not the reason," Lady Raleigh murmured—also unheeded.

"—and we don't live in the country because it is too far to come up to the concerts; so we live at Crouch End or Putney, where an exasperating local railway lies between us and St. James's Hall, and where the ends of the fogs hang about for days. We haven't the pluck to say yea or nay; we leave all our decisions to the gods, who throw them back upon us again, or to—to fate, who only plays with us at will; we would do anything to shirk the responsibility of the ego. Look at Helen, now; the bent of her character is towards religion, yet she hesitates to go into a convent. Therefore her religion does not make her picturesque."

"Digby! How can you argue at breakfast time? And I think you might keep your horrid atheistical notions to yourself before the children," cried Helen, crossly. She had not recovered from her passage of arms with the Squire.

Digby plodded on with his breakfast and his theory.

"We are all the same, as a family. Take the father: he would lay down his life for the working-man, or he thinks so; and yet he is afraid to go in for Socialism, which offers the only solution to the labor question. It is an age of compromise; we are all cowards."

"Digby is so fond of taking his own particular failings and generalizing them," said the still ruffled Helen to nobody in particular.

"People with decided opinions, picturesque people, as you call them, are people with fads; and I hate people with fads," said Lady Joan, "they are ten times more uninteresting than the weathercock sort of people who make compromises. Why should you always behave as if you went by clockwork? It is far too much trouble when, after all, nothing matters. And why do you want to be quarrelling with the age perpetually? It seems a nice comfortable sort of age to me; I suppose it has a different aspect for musical people."

Digby's end of the table was always the most popular whenever he was at home, which was not often enough to spoil his reputation,—more popular at all events than the other end, where Lady Raleigh insisted on making the tea, and made it very badly, and where the Squire opened his letters and found they were mostly bills. If his eldest son had not been monopolizing the conversation on this morning in particular, the efforts of Sir Marcus to make a sensation by sighing deeply and rustling the letter in his hand might have succeeded in attracting some notice; but as it was, he was quite unheeded, and his wife went on spilling the milk behind the urn, and filling up the teapot with water which had boiled half an hour ago, while the noisy chatter was carried on uninterruptedly round Digby and Lady Joan.

"Of all forms of self-indulgence, unintelligent self-sacrifice is the most degrading. Somebody says that the time of the clever people is taken up in undoing the harm done by the good people."

"By the stupid people," objected Helen brusquely.

"That is just the point," began Digby, vigorously; but his mother's complaining voice broke in upon the conversation.

"What is to be done, Helen? Have you heard, my dear? Mrs. Bates says she cannot let me have more than three pounds of butter a week. Did you ever know anything more provoking? Oh, the difficulty of getting dairy produce in the country! Why did we ever leave Cadogan Square?"

Perhaps country life was more trying to Lady Raleigh than to any other member of her family; for, with the inconsequence of woman, she could not forgive her husband for selling their London house, although herself the first instigator of the scheme. To remind him continually of the fact that the place did not agree with her, she refused to trust herself to the handy man's whip, and never walked further than the garden gate, by which means she preserved her constitution admirably, and ruined her nervous system; and in this unhealthy condition of mind she shut herself up in Murville Manor, where her sole occupations became the mismanagement of her household, and the perusal of the illustrated papers.

Her last remark caught the Squire's ear, and gave him the opportunity he wanted.

"Why did we leave Cadogan Square, Lettice?" he shouted, wheeling round upon her suddenly. "I will tell you why, if you can't see for yourself by merely looking down the table. Because I am a poor man, Lettice; because I have a large family that would swallow up any income; because it is money, money, all day long, until I feel I can't give a shilling to a poor laboring man to—to improve his mind and—and his position, without feeling, without feeling extravagant, in short."—The Squire always found that his philanthropic sentiments did not sound nearly so effective in his own home as when thundered forth from a rickety platform in the village schoolroom; the family circle is at all times a great leveller, and his constant terror of the ridiculous brought him swiftly back to the present actual grievance: "Do you ask me why, when I receive a letter like this from the son I have loved and educated and denied myself for? I will tell you why, if you like, Lettice. Because I am not a millionnaire, Lettice; because I have four sons doing nothing but spend money; because Jack, confound the fellow, is in England at the present moment, and may be here to-day—"

Lady Raleigh gave a little scream, and possessed herself of the offending letter. The children began to ask innumerable questions in hushed voices, the elder ones looked dejected, and Lady Joan sipped her coffee with an exaggerated look of unconcern on her face, and a twinkle in the gray eyes which all the powers of dissimulation that she possessed could not quite conceal.

"He does not say he is in debt," said Lady Raleigh, through a mist of joyful tears.

Sir Marcus twisted his napkin into a tangle and threw it on the floor.

"Say?" he cried, striding towards the door; "don't I know what he means, the rascal? I tell you I've done with him for once and for always; he shall enter my house no more; and if he comes here with his intolerable impudence, I shall show him the door. It is right that I should make an example of him, whatever it costs me to do it; and though he is my own son I will harden my heart and do it. Not a penny more shall he get out of me; I wash my hands of him and his debts; it is my—my duty as a father to—to do it, in short, and you may tell him so when he comes, the young scapegrace!"

And with a sense almost of relief at having found a justifiable reason for avoiding this fresh trouble, and moreover a lurking suspicion that any such reason was wholly ineffectual to prevent Jack from coming home, Sir Marcus flung himself out of the room and banged the door.

"Jack ought to be ashamed of himself; how can he expect papa to do any more for him?" said the implacable Helen. There is a kind of religious woman who, although she is a woman and although she is religious, is a slave to her own ideal of justice.

"Helen, don't be unjust," complained her mother, wiping her tears, and alive to half-a-dozen sensations at the same instant; "the dear boy cannot help being fond of his home, so sweet and affectionate of him. Dear Lady Joan, you must pay no heed to what Sir Marcus said just now; he does not mean all he says, you know, and he was just a little startled by the suddenness of dear Jack's decision; it is my husband's way of hiding his real emotion. I'm sure I don't know why he should make so much fuss over a trifle when we have so many real troubles to bear.—Now, my dear Digby, you know I do not allow smoking in the dining-room; how can you be so unkind as to add wilfully to all my worries? I shall have a headache for certain, now.—Tom, darling, open the window, and try to get the horrid smell out; I feel distracted! And has any one seen my key-basket?"

"When will Jack be here, I wonder?" observed Digby, holding the offending cigarette out of the window, and trying to hide by a supreme indifference his consciousness at that moment that a prophet is without honor in his own country. Lady Joan, from a studied attitude on the wide old window seat, was not in the least deceived by his manner, and laughed clearly and mockingly.

"Oh, the dear boy," said Lady Raleigh, in a restored and cheerful tone, "to think that he may come at any moment, and there is no ale in the house. Helen, you must write at once, and, dear me! we must watch for every footstep all day; and there are the sheets too,—where is Nurse? Dear Lady Joan, you must forgive the emotions of a foolish old mother; I assure you I am never flurried like this; but even the best of housekeepers would be disturbed by such a sudden event. And he really must not have damp sheets; he has slept in a blanket for two years, he tells me, and damp sheets are so dangerous; but he shall have them to-night, bless him! Oh, children! look, look! who is that coming along behind the hedge? Move out of the way, Digby, and don't make so much noise, everybody. Why can't I make myself heard in my own house? Is it—can it—oh, tell me who it is!"

A moment's breathless silence was followed by a shout of laughter as the unmistakable corduroys of the handy man came into view.

"George, George, come here," exclaimed Lady Raleigh; "you must not leave this spot all day long, as Master Jack may be here at any minute. Do you understand? So go into the field at once and get the pony in, and you had better have him harnessed, all ready to go to the station. And will you go now to the post-office and see if there is a telegram? You might wait there on the chance, or at all events be in readiness. But don't go beyond the grounds, whatever you do. Dear boy, how I love him!"

And perfectly happy in the certainty of everything being properly arranged now that she had given her own orders, Lady Raleigh swept away to arrange a royal feast for the prodigal.

"Please, Mr. Digby, be I to stop here till Master Jack comes?" asked the bewildered George.

Digby laughed quietly, and re-lighted his cigarette.

"If you take my advice, George, do your work as usual, and don't bother about Master Jack. When he does come he won't dream of sending a telegram to say so. That is not Jack's way."

"Will he walk from the station?" asked Lady Joan, carelessly. The others had all strolled away; and, in the presence of the maid who was clearing away the breakfast things, she felt it incumbent upon her to say something commonplace. Digby, who, being a man, felt no such necessity, looked at the pretty little foot that was swinging backwards and forwards, and wondered why she wanted to know.

"Not he! That is not Jack's way either. He will drive up in a coach and four when we have given up expecting him, and want to know why we did not all go down to the station in a body to meet him. Then there will be a hubbub, and Jack will be king of the house again."

"And you will be dethroned?" she asked maliciously.

He heard the question, and did not notice the malice in it.

"Only until he begins to say why he has come, and the rain has spoiled the hay," he said, with another laugh.

CHAPTER III.

With the peculiar good fortune which has attended the oracle of all ages, Digby's prediction came true, and Jack did come home that evening when every one had stopped talking about him, and there was a universal tendency among his brothers and sisters to avoid the topic of his arrival. It was tea-time, and the Squire was standing in the middle of the drawing-room and allowing himself to be coaxed on to his favorite subjects by certain methods known only to his children; though Lady Joan, with her accustomed shrewdness, and partly from a desire to fall into the spirit of her surroundings, however dull they might be, also lent her aid in drawing him out, and Sir Marcus became a willing and unconscious victim.

"Interested in duck-breeding, did you say?" he exclaimed eagerly; "then you shall see something you can't see in Pont Street or any of your swell West End places," forgetting for the moment his envy of Lady Joan's charming house in town. "You shall come over one of our famous duckeries, and see what you've been eating with green peas all the season, and learn how we breed ducks in Murville. It isn't every one who gets the opportunity of coming to the very centre of the most important village industry in the home counties, and it is quite time you saw how the laboring man is kept from starvation by a little help and a little encouragement. Why, let me tell you, though I am a modest man, God knows, and it is not I who should say it, that if it had not been for my letters to the papers, the duck interest would have completely died out in Murville long ago. And where would the working-man have been then? Do you know, my dear young lady, that I, that is, Murville, or rather, I should say, my letter to the county paper has been quoted in the 'Daily Liberal'? There's fame for you! You didn't know you had come to such a world-renowned place, eh? Ah, we are not so hidden in Murville, after all; that is, the—the cause of the elevation of the laborer has its opportunities even in a small village like this."

"Even a duck has its portion in the scheme of Providence," murmured Lady Joan into her tea-cup; "I wish I could find out all these wonderful things for myself, they are so improving. For instance, I shall never mind paying a guinea a couple in February, now that I know I shall be doing a great national good by buying them."

"You have got hold of quite the wrong idea," interrupted Digby, "a most anti-socialistic idea, of which I could not believe even you to be capable. As if the luxury of the rich could be of the least avail—"

A jaded expression crept over the visage of Helen at this point, and his younger brothers irreverently urging him to "play lightly, as they had heard that old wheeze before," the derided prophet merely regretted the absence of bears, and smiled sadly. His father gladly filled up the breach.

"Eh, what? Socialism, did you say? Of course it is Socialism in its noblest form, when—when we get a notice in the 'Daily Liberal,' and without paying for it too! It was none of your cooked-up jobs, carried through with bribery and corruption, let me tell you, it was all fair and above board; Editor's a personal friend of mine, don't you see, and he wouldn't have quoted from my letter if he hadn't thoroughly appreciated it. You can't get over facts with any amount of Socialism; give me facts, that's what I always say," concluded Sir Marcus, happily innocent that all his life his one aim had been to avoid facts and the unpleasant truths they had forced upon him.

"I can hear wheels," said Lady Raleigh, suddenly. As she had made the same remark at intervals during the day, no one paid her any particular attention except Helen, who put out a protecting hand to the tea-table, as if she anticipated a rush. This time, however, there was undoubtedly a carriage coming up the drive; and Lady Raleigh rose to her feet unsteadily, and became melodramatic.

"I can feel it is my boy," she said, winding her shawl tightly round her; "come to him, Marcus, come to our long-lost child."

"Don't make a fool of yourself," growled Sir Marcus, bluntly; he had suddenly resigned his position in the middle of the room, and was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa instead; "he's only been away two years, and there's no more chance of his being lost than there is of your going on a five-mile walk."

He felt he had fired a double shot by his remark; but there came a yell from the children on the doorstep, and his wife swept out of the room with theatrical movements, and Sir Marcus felt more uncomfortable than before.

"Leave him to me, children; let me have my boy's first kiss," cried Lady Raleigh, in the hall.

"Just look," said the practical Helen, from the window: "he has hired Bunce's best trap, and we haven't paid his bill for two quarters."

Lady Joan sat, and turned over the leaves of a magazine with her eyes discreetly lowered, and wished that the means of escape were not so completely cut off, and that she could get into the garden. Family jars were intensely amusing to her critical nature; but after a whole day of them she felt that she could reasonably dispense with any more just now, and, from the Squire's attitude, another storm was evidently brewing.

"Hadn't you better come out, sir?" suggested Digby.

"No, sir, I will not come out," answered Sir Marcus, with a show of determination. "Have I not already told you that I have done with the rascal forever? I meant what I said, sir, and I will not see him nor speak to him; he—he can go to some one else to pay his debts!"

And, unconscious that he had put more feeling into the end of his speech than into anything else he had said, the Squire looked at his son and his daughter as if vaguely imploring them to support him in the step he had taken. In his most impetuous actions Sir Marcus always looked for a supporter. Yet, much as Digby admitted the justice of his father's anger, and much as Helen might censure the prodigal herself, there was too much of the esprit de corps in them that ran through the blood of all the Raleighs and made them a formidable enemy to the outsider, to allow them to acquiesce in the Squire's resentment; and he shifted his ground a little and tried another stratagem.

"Don't you see the trouble and the misery that is coming upon me through the extravagance of this young scamp? How is it you are so short-sighted, so dense about it? I tell you he is ruining me, this Jack you are all so fond of; and in ruining me he is taking the bread out of your own mouths, and out of the mouths of your brothers and sisters. Hey? Do you see now?"

And finding that mercenary argument did not produce the effect he wanted, Sir Marcus fled from the sound of voices coming dangerously near, and beat a sheepish retreat into his library on the opposite side of the hall.

"It is curious," said Digby, in his oratorical way, "how the father can forgive anything but want of solid success. He doesn't care a hang that Jack has been the most popular fellow in the colony, but if he had made his pile and had something to show for his popularity, then he would proclaim it on the housetops. What a curious age it is, and how we love to judge by results! By the way, Jack will have a warm time if the father keeps it up, won't he?"

Even the prophet has to drop into the colloquial sometimes.

"Good thing too, it's what he wants," said the inconsistent Helen; and they both glanced at the expressionless face of Lady Joan as she scanned the article on "Chinese architecture," and they left her to go and join the throng in the porch.

In the library on the other side of the hall stood Sir Marcus, his back to the door and his feet set very square on the hearthrug, trying to drown the noise of welcome in the porch by rustling the newspaper in his hands loudly, while he kept his eyes obstinately fixed on the Premier's speech on fruit-growing for the million.

"Capital speech, capital speech," he said out loud, beginning it vaguely for the third time; "what I have always said myself in fact, but I never could get anybody to listen to me. Why—why the devil are they making such a row in the garden?"—as the window became darkened by the passing of many figures—"coming into the hall, are they? Let them come into the hall by all means, I can't stop them, it's no longer my own house, I suppose; but they sha'n't come in here anyhow; I hope I have a remnant of authority left—and—eh, what? is that the beggar laughing? bless him!—that is, confound his impudence! what right has he to laugh when I don't mean to forgive him? I—I've been a weak fool all my life, but I'm not going to give in this time; it—it's a duty I owe to the younger ones to make an example of him, whatever it costs me to do it; not that it costs me anything, of course, not anything at all, of course; he—he has forfeited my love, the—the rascal, and I won't give in this time. Why—why the devil don't they stop his laughing when I mean to cast him off? Pack of women and children, with no sense of the responsibilities of life!—" the columns began to vanish into mist, and the hall seemed filled with one shout of laughter; the Squire gasped and recovered himself—"It's my duty as a father to withhold my forgiveness; what else is a poor man to do when he has such an enormous family? A mountain of debts at his back, I'll be bound, and he thinks he is going to get round me to pay them all—as if I wouldn't help him if I could, bless his—hang his improvidence! but when there are eleven of them—such absurdity on the part of Lettice, always told her it was an unnecessary thing to have such a tribe of them; but there! no one ever has listened to me, and now they must bear the consequences among them. Wh—what? who's that at the door? There's no one in here, I tell you, the—the room's empty, and I don't mean to see you—I'm not going to be made a fool of when I've kept it up all day—why doesn't he go away, eh?"

The Squire's voice had sunk into a whisper, and the "Daily Liberal" shook like a leaf in the breeze.

"And the dear old guv, where is he? Why doesn't he come out as he always does? Hasn't any one told him I am here?"

"I tell you this is my room; it isn't much that belongs to me, except five sons doing nothing, and six unmarried daughters, but—but this room is my property, and I won't have any one in, I tell you—what a fool I was not to lock the door—eh, what? who's that, eh? Damn the looking-glass!"

There was a mirror over the fireplace, and the fireplace was opposite the door. It was too much for Sir Marcus; if the boy had shown the least sign of shame, of nervousness at meeting him, it would have been easier to keep up a semblance of anger; but, as usual, Jack's bluntness of vision saved him where finer instincts would have been his ruin.

"Hullo, father, here I am! All right, father? I say, isn't it awfully jolly to be together again, eh, father?"

The premier's speech on fruit-growing for the million fluttered down into the coal scuttle; and the Squire wiped his spectacles violently, and gave in to the fascination of the single man who never worked. And when Digby strolled in ten minutes later, he found the prodigal filling his father's pipe with Canadian tobacco, and telling him American anecdotes, while the little room resounded with their laughter.

"Come in, Digby, and listen to this fellow," said Sir Marcus, jovially; "did you ever know such a fellow as Jack? It's a pity you don't try America, Digby, it would do you a world of good, man!"

Digby accepted the situation and his eviction with a laugh, not only because, as he had said to Lady Joan, he knew he would be received back into favor again on the morrow when the fascination of the prodigal would have exhausted itself for the time, but also from a lurking hope that he would at last have some chance of talking to their fair guest, whom the Squire had as yet entirely monopolized, in the way he usually monopolized any stranger who would lend a willing and fresh ear to his hobbies. But the musician did not get his chance that evening, though he tried very hard for it. Jack's return proved but a doubtful assistance to him: to begin with, it caused an alteration in the dinner-table, by which he found himself out of the range of her conversation; it also made the conversation in the drawing-room afterwards more hopelessly general than ever, for they all sat round in a circle and listened to the American anecdotes, and when the American anecdotes flagged for a moment Digby had to go to the piano and play the returned wanderer's favorite airs, while the hero himself took the opportunity of opening a desperate flirtation with Lady Joan under cover of the crashing chords of his eldest brother.

The musician was full thirty years old, and had been in love almost as many times as he had photos in his West End studio; like his father, it was only the trifling circumstances of life, or its visions, that seemed to him to be worthy of serious consideration, and like his father he had retained his boyish temperament past the age when such a temperament is sufficient for the demands of circumstance. From the first his connection with Lady Joan had been unusual. She had not begun by fascinating him, and he had not begun by giving her singing-lessons. She was one of the few people of his acquaintance who knew of that secret marriage of his which had left him a widower three years ago, with a baby son whom Sir Marcus would not acknowledge, and who did not regard it either as a boyish entanglement from which his wife's death had luckily released him, or as a reason for abstaining from future marriage altogether. Not that she had any definite views on the subject of boyish entanglements or second marriages, for Lady Joan never had definite views on anything, they were too much trouble to defend, and she would not have taken up any position which would not lend itself to modification on occasion; but she was unconventional, and she knew it, and in spite of her boast that she was a woman of the world, there was enough of the school-girl in her to give her an exquisite delight in shocking other people who were not unconventional. So hers was the only hand that was held out to Digby when he came to Relton after his wife's death, in search of a home for his child; and it was she who braved the many-tongued slander of an idle country town, and helped him to find what he wanted in the motherly landlady of the "Relton Arms," with whom he could leave the boy in safety. The arrangement necessarily brought him constantly to Relton, when he was naturally prompted by gratitude and courtesy to leave his card at the Hall; but it was some time before she began to have any real interest for him. It was true that she was a beautiful woman, but her beauty and her wit were of a subtle kind, unlike the obvious and doll-like charms that usually attracted him in women; she showed him that she found him interesting, but she did not adore him like his other lady friends, and she disputed his dicta, and she did not understand his music. After a time these very differences drew them together, and they passed into the desperately dangerous stage of friendship, in which the man had to confess to himself that he was again in love, and the woman had to ask herself if he meant anything, and whether she was to continue to be natural and pleasant to him, or whether the time had come for her in the eyes of society to avoid him and pretend she did not care for him. Lady Joan, hating the laws of society, and dreading still more the chain of another man's will, broke the connection at this point and went abroad for a year, and was away long enough for Digby to fall in and out of another hot love affair, and returned on the day of his reception in the studio to find him rather more interesting than before, and herself made weaker in her resolution by a year's sojourn with a lady companion. Digby on his part was persuading himself that her return to England had caused the revival of his old love, and that this attachment which had begun so coldly and forced itself into his heart by the most estimable instincts of gratitude and friendship, was superior to all the other attachments of his life, which had begun with infatuation and ended with indifference, and was therefore to be cherished as the only real feeling he had ever had for any woman.

"I'm not the sort of man to be a bachelor," he said to himself earnestly, somewhere about midnight that evening, as he leaned out of his bedroom window and smoked a cigarette meditatively. "Some fellows ought never to marry; I told Dick Stephens so when he got engaged, and he was separated from his wife within a year of their marriage. But I am not like Dick Stephens. I am really a most domesticated sort of man, and it is time I settled down. I am tired of being a Bohemian; every wretched little pygmy who writes ballads and lets his hair grow and doesn't wash, is a Bohemian. And there is the boy, too; he ought to have a mother of course, poor little chap: we both want a woman about us, don't we, Sonny? Yes, there is no doubt that it is my duty to Sonny to marry very soon."

In the room above, among the cushions on the sofa, lay Lady Joan with her hair down and a fan in her hand, opposite a full-length mirror; in her most secret moments Lady Joan liked to assure herself that she played the part picturesquely.

"I like him. He is fresh, and original, and amusing. He doesn't bore me, and I can flirt with him—safely. He has no theories about things, and he does not want to upset creation, and he doesn't take life so desperately seriously. It is such a blessing to meet some one who is content with the age as it is—bah! what a smell of tobacco smoke!"

And she rose, shut the window with a bang, and went to bed, where she slept soundly till the morning.

"It is curious," murmured the musician, lighting another cigarette, "how Fate seems to have propelled her towards me at every crisis of my life; just after Mary died, for instance, and again before I met Norah!—poor little Norah! and then again the other day, when I really had made up my mind to go to Africa, and she came back from the Continent in time to prevent me. And now—ah, I believe I could write that song now."

And he went to the writing-table and tried to set some impassioned words of Swinburne to music; but although the situation demanded that he should have been specially inspired, he found himself incapable of writing a note, and had to give up the task in despair.

"My brain is overwrought; I am not going to sleep to-night," he said, and put the bromide by his bedside.

After that he also shut the window and went to bed, where he likewise slept soundly till the morning.

CHAPTER IV.

The "Relton Arms" had the reputation of being the most respectable inn in the little country town of Relton. It had no particular right to this title, being smaller and more shabby than the "Red Lion" down the street, which was a modern innovation run by a speculator from the neighboring market-town, and promised particular advantages to cyclists which they never quite seemed to reap; but it had outlived generations of Reltons up at the old Court, and it bore their family escutcheon on its sign-board, and all the club dinners were held in its oak-panelled parlor; and the frequent presence of the rector on occasions when alcohol was banished from the table had naturally helped it to keep up its reputation. The fallacy was maintained equally strangely by the silence of its landlord, who only grew more taciturn as he grew more intoxicated, while the people who were fond of talking, notably his wife, made capital out of his silence and applauded him for it, so that he too became respectable in the eyes of Relton. And never having been known to contradict any one in his life, respectable he accordingly consented to remain.

It was on a sultry, still afternoon towards the end of the summer that Roger Brill, the comely rat-catcher of the town, raised the latch of the "Relton Arms" about tea-time.

"Mornin', missus," said he.

"And I'm sure it's mornin' to you, Muster Brill, notwithstandin' it's being arternoon by time o'sun, which be a foolish difference to make among old acquaintance; but there, there's a deal too much talkin' about trifles in my thinkin'. And be you ready for a cup of tea, lad, or be it the usual you'll be wantin'?"

Without waiting for the reply, which had been the same, like the question, for the last fifteen years, the bustling landlady hastened forward with a chair and sent her obedient husband for the beer. One of the most remarkable phases of a monotonous incident is the way in which some people contrive to give it the appearance of novelty. Mrs. Haxtell belonged to such a class, and it did not in the least disturb her method that her husband had usually filled the pewter pot before she had finished inviting her customer to have it. But old Peter was a man of deeds, not words, and he chose for his part to make the transaction a purely business one, though he allowed his wife to hide it with a veneer of hospitality if she would. And this she generally did in the most feminine and transparent manner possible, until the time for payment came, when she would meekly retire under cover of her sex, and leave her husband to battle with the creditor.

"Good sport to-day, lad?" asked Peter presently.

"Aye, for sure," answered Roger; and then, glancing professionally at the row of dead rats that hung from his waist, he added slowly, "more ways nor one."

"Eh," said Peter, with a slight access of emphasis.

They all knew something more was coming, and Mrs. Haxtell's knowledge of the rat-catcher's temperament sufficed to keep her breathlessly silent in view of coaxing him to tell his news; though, with the jealousy of the reformed thief who hates to see his brother continuing to thieve, she glanced imploringly at her husband and daughter, who had no intention of speaking, as if to silence them likewise.

"Lady Relton's Dick came down my way last night," began Roger, deliberately filling his pipe.

So far his news came within the ken of his audience, and they were quick to maintain a share in it.

"I saw him myself, I did," began Lily Eliza; but her mother promptly took up the tale.

"Lady Relton's Dick? Eh, but he come along nigh after sunset, he did, and he says to my man, he says, 'Seen Muster Brill?' he says. And my man told him, he did, as ye worn't long gone home, not to call it short neither, nor yet very long; leastways ye were gone along home, he said, didn't ye, Pete? Speak up, man, and say what ye know, and doan't sit starin' as though heavin and earth worn't big enough for your eyes to look into."

"Woman," said Peter, with unusual effort, "heaven and earth bain't big enough for your tongue to clapper in, nor yet they wouldn't be if t' other place was joined on too."

Here Roger struck in afresh.

"Lady Relton's Dick said the rats in the stable worn't worth their keep. Lady Relton told him she'd pay the corn for the horses, but the rats would have to go elsewhere if they wanted good grain, as she didn't intend for 'em to have hers. I said I'd go to-morrow, being promised to Farmer Wadsden's ricks to-day; but Dick, he says the world has to stop a turnin' round for my lady, he says, and she were in a taking along of them rats, so to-day I took the pup along and I went up to the Court."

"Ah," gasped the landlady; she had not meant to interrupt, but the approach of the pith of the story was too much for her, and with the desperate economy of the schoolboy, who leaves the biggest plum to the last, she again diverted the channel of conversation.

"Lady Relton's Dick fetched a gentleman from the station this mornin', and he took him back again an hour past. I knows he did, seeing as I was washing the precious baby's face, or was I hanging out Mrs. Walker's wash? when the dog-cart come by. Was it the gentleman as ye saw up at the Court, Muster Brill?"

Few sights are more melancholy than that of a man who has been robbed of his story by another; and good-natured Roger Brill pushed back his chair at this second interruption, and rose to his feet with something like offended dignity.

"If ye want to have the talkin' to yourself, missus, I be going to clear out. Cause why? It bain't reasonable to tell a body somethin' fresh when the body have heard it afore, and I ain't the man to spoil t' other body's tale, so good arternoon to ye."

But here Peter became peacemaker.

"Sit ye down, lad, and doan't heed her clapperin' tongue. I doan't, and it's clipper-clappered at me this twenty year."

With an effort of generosity the injured Roger recognized a grievance greater than his own, and by drinking the remainder of his beer standing he considered he had compromised his dignity sufficiently to resume his seat and his story.

"Lord, what rats they was!" he exclaimed, his eye kindling at the recollection. "I never could have thought so well of my lady as that she'd leave 'em to get to that pitch before calling me in. Why, Peter, man, if she'd called me in only a month ago she'd have spoilt the sport summat! but here they was, eaten to bustin' with corn, and no thought of the morrow, as the Holy Scripture says. Eh, but that was a mornin', that was; well, I reckon I'd laid out some dozen or more in the stable yard, when up comes Lady Relton and Mr. Jack." He paused to watch the effect of his superior knowledge on his hearers, chose to ignore the landlady's triumphant whisper, "That's him," and sighed deeply. "I doan't know no more than the dead what business it was of his to come hangin' round my lady, what's all unprotected and alone like, bless her!"

"Nay, indeed," echoed his hearers feelingly.

"More partickler," continued Roger, warmly, and striking his fist on the wooden table till the tea-cups rattled, "more partickler as Mr. Jack be Mr. Raleigh's own brother, and my lady belongs to Mr. Raleigh if ever she belonged to anybody; and no one can't deny as it's been my intention to put 'em together this four year come harvest time. No one can't deny it, no one."

"True, lad, true," grunted Peter sympathetically, while his wife cunningly seized the opportunity to interrupt again by appearing to enter warmly into the rat-catcher's disturbed feelings.

"And to think of his precious baby," sniffed Mrs. Haxtell, pouring herself out another cup of tea; "to think of the dear lamb, with no mother and not much father to speak of, passing of his innocent childhood without the woman's care his father ought to give him. I've no patience with such neglect, though I'm sure I hope I've done my best by the child, as I thought to myself only this mornin' when I saw him stuffin' his precious fat cheeks with green plums. It ain't every one would let a child do that!"

Lily Eliza became restive at this point.

"Tell about Mr. Jack, Muster Brill," she urged timidly.

"Daughter," said old Peter, sternly, "it ain't the part of a well-meanin', God-fearin' lass to ask such a question, and if you worn't your mother's own daughter you wouldn't have such sinful desires to ask 'em."

In her anxiety to hear the rest of the story, the landlady allowed this backhanded attack on her morals to pass unnoticed, and Roger began afresh. "Well, up they comes together, talkin' and laughin' quite friendly like, and my lady says to him, she says, 'Here's the rats you said I was to have killed,' she says, 'and isn't it a dear little dog?' she says. So I says to her, 'Aye, it be a good pup; it's killed fourteen since breakfast,' and I seemed to offend her like, for up she gets from where she'd been patting him, and she looks at Mr. Jack all in a blaze, and she says all angry like, 'That's what you call sport, is it?' she says. 'Mr. Digby wouldn't call it sport,' she says."

"No more he wouldn't," said both the women simultaneously.

"That's true enough," said Roger, slowly, "but Lady Relton, she bain't the smirking soft kind o' woman what likes to spare the rat and spoil the corn, and I can't rightly make out what's come over her to-day. She didn't seem herself to-day, not anyhow, and she seemed to take a pleasure in quarrelin' over everything Mr. Jack said, and then she laughed of him, she did. It worn't like my lady, it worn't, to talk soft stuff about killin' rats; that be more like t' other one what come after Mr. Raleigh last springtime, the one what had saucer eyes, and pretended to be fond of the child, with her nasty clingin', pretendin' ways."

The last words were said with biting contempt, and the women sat silent and sipped their tea approvingly. But old Peter had different views concerning the "other one" alluded to, and he again made the effort to interrupt.

"Eh, lad, but you be proper hard upon poor Miss Norah, proper hard you be, for sure. I wouldn't be saying as ye haven't your reasons for it, but she seemed a quiet sort of maiden enough, what didn't mean no harm to speak of, and what's suffered enough for her foolishness, I'll be bound."

"I hope she has, I hope she has," exclaimed Roger, vehemently. "Those as comes with their sneaking ways tryin' for to corrupt honest folk deserves to suffer for it. No one doan't know why she didn't come back when Mr. Raleigh sent that letter after her, and no one doan't know why she didn't even answer it; but you take my word for it, it was Providence as interposed and wouldn't have nothink to do with her, and it's Providence as opens the way now to Mr. Raleigh if he'd only see it, and not want Providence to come down from heaven and poke him into it, so to speak. Who be that coming across the street?"

"Why, that be Mr. Raleigh his own self, that be," exclaimed Lily Eliza, joyously, and then blushed for fear of another rebuke from her father. This time, however, she did not get it, for old Peter for business reasons was always anxious to propitiate the musician in the flying visits he paid them, and was far more concerned now in getting to the door in time to open it than in his daughter's back-slidings. Besides, he really liked the open-handed young fellow who paid up so regularly every quarter for the keep of his son without examining the items of the bill, who always came in with a smile and an outstretched hand, and was so inordinately grateful for the little they had done for the child.

"Well, Mrs. Haxtell, and how's the boy?" he cried with his cheery voice as he stood on the doorstep. "I've brought you a new kind of baccy to try, sir; hope the youngster has been behaving himself, eh? Ah, Roger, how does the world go with you? And where's my Sonny?"

"There, now, to think of his father coming so unfortunate like, and he that's never out at tea-time more than twice in a twelve-month," fussed the landlady, dusting three chairs in succession, and wondering how her back hair was bearing the exertion; "that do seem hard, that do; but there, Lady Relton she come down and asked so coaxing like for him to go that I couldn't find it in my heart to refuse her; but that be the first time I've let him out o' my sight this many weeks. And I'm sure I've been so doleful like all the time he's been gone that I won't never let him go again, that I won't; I kept on thinkin' somethin' was going to happen to the precious, and I wouldn't never see him again, and what would his father say then, when I'd promised to look after him like my own—there, Mr. Raleigh, I feel as if somethin' terrible might come to Master Sonny afore we set eyes on him again, that I do!"

"I hope not, Mrs. Haxtell, I hope not," said Digby, encouragingly, wondering if he were a hard-hearted parent because he had none of the landlady's nervous sensations concerning his son. "It would take a good deal to hurt Master Sonny, I fancy, and he will be in here directly turning everything upside down again to your heart's content. Are you off, Mr. Roger? Then I'll walk home with you, and have a pipe to get rid of the London smoke. Ah! London is not fit for a dog this weather! And will you send the boy down to the castle meadow when he comes in, Mrs. Haxtell? Thanks; let him come alone, and learn to be a man."

Only a few minutes later Lady Joan brought her piebald ponies to a standstill before the sign of the "Relton Arms," and threw the reins to her groom.

"Here we are, Mrs. Haxtell; did you think I was going to keep him altogether? I nearly did, he was so fascinating, and we had such a delightful flirtation together. He is the most charming little gentleman to flirt with, because he is never stupid enough to take it in for a moment. Look at him now," as the boy flew into the landlady's arms with a shout. "Oh, you ungrateful little beggar, after all the cake and the jam I have been giving you! Here, give me a kiss, Sonny, and I'll be off. What is it, Mrs. Haxtell? His father, did you say? Oh—yes—to be sure, his father—yes!"

Fortunately for her, the landlady was too much engaged with the stormy caresses of the child to notice her, as she walked to the window and looked at two hens quarrelling over a grain of corn in the yard.

"Aye, my lady, and the child was to go down to the castle meadow all along of himself to find his father, to learn to be a man, was what he said. I bain't one to make a fuss over trifles, but I don't like to let the child go quite, and yet—"

"What nonsense! of course not; how like a man," said Lady Joan, contemptuously, "besides, the child is much too tired to walk all that way. Now for my two kisses, Sonny; I will make it three if you don't give me them at once, sir! I will go and make it right with his father, Mrs. Haxtell, if you will tell Dick to take the ponies quietly home, please. And may I go across the orchard?"

"Eh, but she doan't care what the towns-folk say, do she?" reflected Mrs. Haxtell, admiringly, as she watched the tall figure disappearing among the trees.

"I wonder what made me come," thought Lady Joan to herself, as she climbed the stile into the castle meadow; and her courage half failed her when she caught sight of a man in a brown felt hat that she had seen before, sitting on a fragment of the old ruined wall by the side of the brook.

But he had already seen her, and was coming towards her; and with a recklessness which she evidenced at once by letting her skirt trail on the damp grass, she went on to meet him.

CHAPTER V.

"Then marry me," the musician was saying, half-an-hour later. It had not struck him before that she might not possibly want to do so.

"But I have already told you that I do not love you," persisted Lady Joan, who was enjoying herself immensely.

"What does that matter? It will come in time, it is sure to come. Besides, I love you; is not that enough?"

It would have been, to most of his lady friends; but Lady Joan only caught the humor of his words, and laughed derisively.

"You think you are going to put me off by pretending to laugh," he went on patiently; this was to show his superior knowledge of her character; "but the truth is that you dare not be serious, Lady Joan; why don't you give in to your real feelings and stop making a joke of life just this once?"

"I make a joke of life?" she cried; she was half in earnest now; "how is that possible unless one has realized its sadness? You enthusiasts who have never laughed at anything, and are always talking about taking life seriously, you have never gone deep enough to see that it is serious. If you had, you would only laugh for the rest of your life, because—it would be impossible after you had once realized that to keep serious and live."

For the first time in his life the musician did not want to argue.

"Don't you see that I love you as I have never loved any one before, as I could never love any one again?" he said humbly.

"How am I to believe that?" she retorted sharply, and he flushed slightly.

"Is that quite fair of you? Have I not been always perfectly open with you? I told you the story of my marriage the first time I ever met you, and I have told you to-day about poor little No—about Miss Bisley. Could any man do more?"

"No," she said carelessly, "but you might very well have done less,—I mean, the whole town told me about Miss Bisley directly I came home from abroad, though, except for the name, the two accounts do not tally in the least. But then, nothing in Relton shrinks in the washing."

The musician flinched, and tried another tactic.

"Then I suppose you merely think I am a brute who is taking advantage of your loneliness to profess an affection for you which he does not feel? A man has to pay a big penalty for your friendship, Lady Joan."

She would not have let him see it for the world, but she felt she had gone a little too far, and a rapid change came over her mood.

"It is not that; I am afraid of myself, I think," she said with a sigh, and she looked down at his boots.

His face lighted up.

"Then—" he began eagerly; but she put up her hand with a gesture of warning.

"No, no, you mistake me; I do not believe that it is in me to love anybody—for long. My friends say it is because I have never known a mother's love; but if my parents had lived they would simply have made me fight with them through their tiresome affection for me. Now, I know what you are going to say—that I am speaking with the spirit of the age, or some of that twaddle I have heard before. If I am, it is you who have taught it me, for I don't allow anybody else to mention the age to me; I am sick of it and the people who make their living out of abusing it. I could never love you, or anybody. That's the truth, and—don't you believe me?"

"Not quite," he said, and looked at her in an unpleasantly direct way.

"Besides," she said, rather awkwardly, catching at another loophole of escape, "there is this Norah Bisley: how am I to know that she will not come back?"

He shook his head, and she smiled at the guilelessness of his reply.

"I don't think it is possible. You see, I wrote three times—"

"The letters may have gone astray."

"The third one I sent by hand, and it was returned to me unopened. I can see now that it is only what I might have expected; she did not have a thought apart from her father, and her father never liked me well enough to look on me in the light of a son-in-law. He took her away directly he suspected our liking for one another, and when they got together and away from me he must have persuaded her to give me up. I wrote to him and I wrote to her, but, as you know, with no avail. She was a lovable little thing, spoiled by her weakness of will, poor little Norah!"

"Poor little Norah!" she echoed half mockingly, and crumbled some mortar off the broken wall and watched it splash into the water below. She was wondering how it was that she had been more fascinated in half-an-hour by handsome, empty-headed Jack Raleigh than she had been in three long years by this large-hearted musician, with the high forehead and the cavernous eyes, with his passion for metaphysics and Socialism, and his ardent desires to reform society and the world in his own lifetime. Yet she found him interesting sometimes, generally when he was not there and she was thinking about him, and she wondered again why he did not interest her more, and whether she would not have tumbled into a commonplace engagement with him if her parents had been alive and he had been asked to dine at the Court, like any ordinary young man, and she had been forbidden, like any ordinary young woman, to come down to the inn and play with his child. But she had no parents to impose conventionality upon her, and she had gloried in her liberty for twenty-five years, and she was loth to give it up now for the sake of a man who, she felt sure, would bore her in a week with his desperate enthusiasms, and whom she was not even sure that she loved. No, she could not marry him, she felt sure, and she looked up to say so, and met his restless eyes watching her with such a boy's eagerness that she again went off on a side issue.

"I am not livable with, that is the truth," she said rather weakly, and crumbled some more mortar off the wall, and wished he would not look at her so gloomily. He was thinking that the courtship was not going as smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not live without her for his wife.

"Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?"

"Both," she said, and laughed heartily, and became swiftly grave again, and came up to him and took both his hands, an unwonted action that brought the color to his cheeks; "don't you see, my dear friend, that if we were to marry I should plague your life out, and you would never write another note of music, and Mrs. Reginald Routh and all the others would point at me with invective? And you would bore me to the verge of extinction in a month! Of course if you didn't like me it might work better, because then I should have to make you fall in love with me, and that would prevent it from being such a deadly dull affair. Or if I hated you I might do it, because then we could live our separate lives, and there would be nothing to spoil. Don't you see how marriage always spoils things? It is never romantic; it is expedient, that's all. It does for people who are not fond of one another, or for people who do not feel such things; but for two people who are in love, and one of them a hypersensitive musician—bah! it would be madness! Not that I am in love, of course."

He chose to ignore the feminine way in which she concluded, and as she dropped his hands and swung away from him, he found himself feeling for his tobacco pouch, and he reflected that the courtship was not much more romantic than the married life she pictured.

"Then you believe in perpetual engagements?" he asked, for the sake of saying something.

"Not a bit of it," she replied gayly, leaning over the broken wall and watching the creatures in the water below; "engagements simply mean all the conventional drawbacks without the moral conveniences. No, there is only one way out of it, and that won't work when you come to examine it."

"And what is that?" he asked, like a man, rashly.

"To marry some one who doesn't matter, and be in love with some one else," she replied carelessly, and kept her face averted.

He rolled up his cigarette and lighted it, and wondered whether women ever discussed among themselves these subjects which they had no diffidence in approaching with men.

"No, it would hardly work, I am afraid," he said slowly. "Lady Joan, it is an absurdly old-fashioned thing to say, but do you know I fancy, after all, that marriage is the only way out of it?"

She turned round and faced him with hot cheeks and angry eyes.

"I think you are merely abusing your privilege as my friend," she cried; "I am not going to stay here for you to draw me out and then—then laugh at me. It is time we closed this—this absurd interview, and I wish—I wish I had known you were here before I started for my walk. Do you suppose that I would say anything to you that the whole world might not hear?"

He certainly did suppose so from quite recent experience, but he only apologized humbly for having his meaning mistaken, and allowed her to retrace her steps across the field without uttering any commonplace about meeting again as friends. Perhaps he knew quite well that when they did meet again she would be by far the most self-possessed of the two.

The musician walked back to the inn and tried to persuade himself that he was a disappointed man.

"My engagements never do seem to go right," he thought dejectedly, as he leaned out of the parlor window and looked vaguely among the fruit-trees. The door was pushed open from without, and a rush of red sunshine and childish footsteps came into the room.

"Here I are, daddy! Where is you, daddy? I've been a naughty boy, welly naughty Nanny says, 'cos I didn't say grace at tea-time. Why don't you never say grace, my daddy? When I are a big man I aren't never going to say grace no more! Nanny says I are to kiss you free times, and did you bring any sweets for me, daddy?"

"That will do, my son, yes," said Digby, nervously, as the boy clambered on his knee and proceeded to cover him with sticky embraces; "Nanny is always right, of course, but I think twice will be enough. Thanks. The sweets are in this pocket, so you need not turn out all the others. And you must not have any unless you stop jumping."

The musician was not fond of children, and he always imagined his own was going to break his neck or damage himself in some way every time he came into the room. Sonny on his part had his own views concerning this mysterious daddy who came and went so strangely, and who was always going to chastise him severely according to Mrs. Haxtell, but never did anything worse than bring him sweets, and hold him by his sash until he was nearly suffocated.

"And now for my story, daddy," he shouted, with his mouth full of sugar-plums. "Be quick please, my daddy; once upon a time—go on, daddy!"

"Once upon a time," began the musician vaguely, and his thoughts strayed away to the lithesome figure swaying to and fro on the broken wall, and he tried hard to realize his crestfallen condition now that she had refused him.

"Yes, daddy, yes; go on, please, my daddy: are you forgotten the end of my story, daddy dear?" pleaded the restless spirit in his arms.

"Oh, dear, once upon a time there was—there was—oh, confound it all, there was a beautiful lady, wasn't there?" he began wearily.

"A booful lady? Welly booful, daddy?"

"Very beautiful, my son."

"Oh," solemnly, "and what sort of daddy did she have?"

"Eh, what? Daddy? Oh—she didn't have one," said the musician, oblivious of morality; he was going through an eloquent speech in his mind which he might have said in the castle meadow if only he had not been so absurdly nervous.

"Oh," said the baby voice, growing shrill with interest, "didn't she never have no daddy at all?"

Of course, thought the musician, if he had said that to her instead of stuttering over a few commonplaces she would have found him irresistible at once.

"Daddy, dear," implored Sonny, tugging at his coat suggestively.

"Oh, the devil take the story!" shouted the musician; "didn't I tell you she never had a daddy? Don't ask so many questions, Sonny."

The big blue eyes became tearful at the unusual tone of anger and at the untimely end of the story, and Digby's conscience smote him a little.

"I aren't crying, only little girls cry," gasped the child between his hardly suppressed sobs. "I was only just thinking, daddy, what a welly funny booful lady she were, daddy."

"Yes, my son," said the musician, very much in the tone of respect he would have used to a man of his own age who was battling with some terrible grief, "yes, my son, she was a very funny beautiful lady, so funny that daddy could not understand her at all, although he loved her so much. And she laughed at daddy, and wouldn't be kind to him, though she was kind to the whole world besides."

The musician almost choked with his own emotion this time; but Sonny jumped up and down with glee at having at last discovered a human chord in the mythical beautiful lady.

"Oh, so she were a naughty booful lady, daddy? Then she won't have jam for tea next Sunday, will she, daddy dear?"

The wooden door that led into the yard creaked open again, and again the red light from the setting sun flooded the little room.

"Yes, Sonny, of course, she was a naughty beautiful lady, that's just what she was! But do you know I've come back to say that I won't be naughty any more just yet, at least if daddy lets me, and I'm going to be kind to him—at least, if daddy wants me. Daddy, do say something. May I be good for a change, and will you let me be kind to you? I've come to say I am sorry, like a good little girl; and—I may have jam for tea next Sunday, mayn't I? Oh, daddy, do say something, and don't look so doleful! Don't you understand? I was wrong, and you were right, and—oh, how stupid it all is! Why—daddy—I—I don't believe you want me now!"

And Lady Joan flung herself into the old high-backed wooden settle, and crossed her feet, and broke into her maddening, mocking laugh as if to hide something she was ashamed of showing. But the musician, who knew her better than she thought he did, in spite of his almost childish ignorance of woman's nature, went up to her and put the child on her lap, and smiled down into her upturned, laughing face.

"We both want our beautiful lady, don't we, Sonny? And may I make my confession too, Lady Joan? I was not sure that I did want you so desperately after you sent me away just now. But I found that I did directly you opened the door and the sunshine came in, and I can never do without you again. But it is better to understand one another at starting, isn't it?"

"Much better. And ideals are such bosh when we have grown out of our short frocks. So the understanding is quite complete; you don't know how much you love me, so we will call it desperately, and I don't know how much I love you, so we will call it desperately too. You have been in love shoals of times before, and I—well, I am capable of falling in love with some one else on my wedding-day. So neither of us will be disappointed if it does not answer, but we have agreed to try. Hey-day, what fun it is! The lonely lady at the Court marrying the musician at the inn; the lady has the establishment, and the musician has the money to keep it up: if you were truly modern you would have both, and be a risen cabinet-maker. Relton will have enough to talk about for a year. But you will not behave as if we were engaged, just yet, will you? I—I don't feel as if I could quite stand it; do you understand?"

He had never heard her voice falter like that before, and he nodded to show that he quite understood. But she sprang to her feet with one of her quick gestures before he had time to realize the intoxicating feeling of that moment, and he experienced a sensation of chill.

"What wickedness to keep this child up so late; come along, Sonny lad, I told Nanny that I would put you to bed for a treat, and daddy is going to stay here and smoke his pipe."

And she vanished up the primitive staircase which led straight from the parlor up to the room above; and daddy was left somewhat with the feeling of having consented to Lady Joan's suggestion of marriage without receiving the right to kiss her, and he sat by the window again and looked among the fruit-trees, and called himself the happiest man in the world, and felt that he would be able to write his Swinburne song when the house was quiet.

A third time the wooden door creaked, and a third time the red sunlight filled the room. But the musician did not notice it, for he was still looking out of the window into the orchard, and he was telling himself with a sense of profound relief that his engagement was at last going right.

There was the sound of a low, soft, glad cry in the little inn parlor, and something glided in noiselessly, hesitated for a moment, and then sped across the ray of light to where he sat by the window. And the musician turned his eyes away from the fruit-trees then, and fixed them on the apparition before him, and a look of dumb amazement began to creep slowly over his face.

"Digby, I've come at last. You said you would not mind waiting ten years for me, and it has only been one; yet, oh! such a weary long one to me, Digby! But it has not been my fault, it hasn't really, dear; they never told me, and papa stopped your two first letters, and Roger Brill—it was Roger, wasn't it?—never brought me the last one at all. It was all a mistake, I can't tell you now, but I found it out and gave them the slip, and came straight here. Oh, Digby, you are not angry with me, are you? I never meant to keep you waiting so, but I did not find it all out till yesterday, so I could not come before. Oh, it has been so sad, waiting for you. And I have been so ill too, Digby; they did not know what was the matter with me, but I knew all the time. It is all over now, though, and we are going to be happy at last, aren't we? And may I have my kiss now, the one you promised me? I think if you had kissed me before I went away I should never have been ill. But I am going to be happy now, so happy. Oh, Digby, I feel so greedy over my happiness that I am frightened of its slipping away again. Is it because I have startled you that you are so silent? Tell me you are not angry with me, Digby,—and—when may I have my kiss, please?"

He took her mechanically into his arms and kissed the mouth that was held up to him, and he experienced dully the sort of shock that an unconventional man feels when a woman he has always considered the type of purity does something which a woman of the world would know better than to risk her reputation by doing. Upstairs, in the room overhead, he could hear Lady Joan singing his child to sleep. He passed his hand across his brow and wondered in a vague sort of way how it was all going to end; it seemed years since Lady Joan had spoken to him.

"No, Norah child, of course I am not angry with you; how could any one be that? But—"

"I don't mind anything if you are not angry with me. Only, why are you so quiet? Have you been suffering too, Digby; haven't they been kind to you?"

"Who? the fates? No, I fancy they have not been kind to me. Did you come alone, childie?"

"I came with old nurse; she is at the station. Digby, tell me, have you been ill?"

"No, I have not been ill; I have been working rather hard, and perhaps worrying as well. Forgive me, dear; you must own it is all rather startling?"

She put her arms round him, and laughed her low, soft laugh; and he writhed at the contrast it made to Lady Joan's loud mocking one, which still rang in his ears.

"Of course it is; I feel as if I had begun to live all over again after being asleep in a cold, dark place ever since last year. Have you ever felt like that, Digby? Oh, I have never asked after Sonny; how is he? Has he gone to bed? May I go up and kiss him?"

"No, stay here," he said vehemently, and then bit his moustache savagely when she opened her great eyes at him; and he added in a quieter tone, "he is quite bonny, but we—we won't disturb him yet. There is a lady with him who—who has been kind to me, and—and she will be coming down perhaps—"

"A lady? Oh, I see," wonderingly. "I am glad she has been kind to you—very. Do you like her?"

Should he tell her then? It was not yet absolutely necessary.

"Yes, I like her," he said in a toneless voice, and he forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.

"I should like to see her, then. Hark, she is coming downstairs; how merry she is, your friend!" as the full healthy laugh came down the stairs.

If there had been any means, however desperate, of putting off the crisis for another ten seconds, the musician would have stooped to it. But he realized that there was none, and with the same flash of consciousness as he realized it he braced himself to meet the event as manfully as such a pitiful situation would allow.

"Norah," he said sternly, putting her off his knee and standing up in front of her, "I have something to say to you. Will you be brave and hear me? It may all come right, of course, but—this lady was kind to my boy—and to me, when no one else would hold out a hand to us; and I thought you had forgotten me, and so—I asked her to marry me. It was only this afternoon, and of course—"

The noisy peals of laughter came right into the room through the inner door, and Lady Joan stood in the dull glow which was all that remained of the sunlight.

"Oh, daddy, what do you think Sonny said? Why—who—what is it?"

Something white, and quivering, and small, had fallen with a thud across her feet, and again the low, long child's cry with the joy gone out of it sounded in the stillness of the summer evening.

The musician had sunk on a chair with his face in his hands.

CHAPTER VI.

"My engagements never do seem to go right," sighed the musician.

He was sitting in the little bedroom upstairs by the side of his sleeping son, with his thumb tightly clasped in a fat brown hand. But he was not thinking of Sonny, although the clasp of the tiny fingers was comforting, as betokening some one who still believed in him.

"There is a curse upon my love affairs," said the musician. "Why should those letters never reach her? And why did she choose that moment of all others to come back? Another man might do a dirty trick and not be found out. God knows I never wanted to harm a woman in my life, least of all those two; and yet I've blundered in and got engaged to both of them at once; and I've broken the heart of the purest and most innocent child—merciful heavens, what haven't I done? And here I am, left up here like a great fool, while they are tearing my character to ribbons downstairs. Was there ever such an unfortunate brute as myself?"

The musician's voice became husky, whether from self-pity, or from the recollection of the poor little scared face of the child who had found her happiness only to lose it again, it would be impossible to say.

"Women are such deuced odd things," continued the musician, complainingly; "they expect you to look on while they scratch one another's eyes out, and then if you touch a hair of their heads you have the whole lot of them against you. Bless her! I would give my life to undo what I have done to her to-day."

Which did he mean? Perhaps he hardly knew. But Lady Joan did all the while that she sat by Norah Bisley on the horse-hair sofa, downstairs in the oak-panelled parlor.

The child stirred in his sleep.

"Happy Sonny," murmured the musician, sentimentally, "your turn has yet to come. Why can't children always remain children? Norah ought never to have grown up; she was meant for eternal childhood. It was a mistake to make Lady Joan a child at all, she ought to have been born a full-grown woman. I ought never to have been born at all, of course. Who arranges these things?"

Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cushion, and the pale green glass pot with a lid, and the shining porcelain shepherdess with a chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever composed, to some words by George Meredith.

"Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much. The fates will help you out of a hole if you have been a clever sinner, but they will lay a pitfall for you if you are a blundering, good-intentioned sort of creature. The fact is, this world of ours was made for clever people, and the fools haven't a chance. That is why he has gone wrong."

"Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was broken.

"He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home; and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his friendship for me was love. That was how it was done. Perhaps I encouraged him too. He was interesting to me, and he was never in love with me, so I amused myself by trying to fascinate him. I can't help being a woman."

"Are women like that too?" thought the other, and she added out loud, "I am a woman too, but—" and left her sentence unfinished.

"No, you are not a woman, you are only a child," said Lady Joan; "the world is a place for you to play in. You were born to be happy, and you will never have to realize the things I have been telling you."

"I shall never be happy again," said the tired voice, with a sob.

"We all say that at eighteen; it comforts us sometimes to be the most miserable person in the world. Then we turn round a bit, and the sun comes out again, and some one gives us a tonic, and we endow a cot at the hospital, or give a farthing meal to five hundred brats in the East End, and then we go on again. You have never been in love before, of course?"

"Don't," moaned the other from the corner of the unsympathetic sofa.

The clear calm tones of her Mentor softened a little.

"I don't want to hurt you, Norah; I only mean that if you go in for loving once in a lifetime and that sort of thing, you really cannot properly understand the utter insouciance of an emotional man like Digby. He will love you more than ever now that you have come back, and you will be ten times happier than if you had been married straight off without any drawbacks. You have got rid of your ideals, to begin with, which most of them do not accomplish until after marriage, and that is always a risk. And you will find there is lots of time to be happy."

"Oh," said the other, in an altered tone, sitting upright, and speaking with startling emphasis, "and do you really mean to say that you think I should marry him now?"

Lady Joan did not turn a hair, vulgarly speaking; she felt she had done wonders already by getting rid of the battered, hopeless little voice, and she merely smiled to herself in the twilight in a triumphant, self-satisfied manner.

"You are to come home with me now, and I will send down for your maid, and you shall stay the night and get rested. I suppose you have eaten nothing for hours? Then how can you expect to take a proper view of things? Half the troubles of life come from a bad digestion; it's not romantic, but then I don't belong to your musical set."