Imprudence

F.E. Mills Young

"Imprudence"

Chapter One.

“Now came still evening on.” The fading light, warm and faintly glowing from the last rays of the May sun, lay with a lingering mellowness upon the fields, upon the light green of leafing trees, upon a white froth of late blackthorn blossoming in the hedges, upon the straggling township nestling in the hollow, and upon the tall red-brick chimneys dominating Wortheton—dominating the souls sheltering beneath the clustering roofs—dominating and subjugating brain and mind and body by the might of their crushing omnipotence, by the strength of wealth and industry and established order—gaunt chimneys, rising out of the green mist of the trees, grotesque, symbolic landmarks—index fingers witnessing in obelisk-like ugliness to the power and importance of successful commercial enterprise, to the dignity of capital and the drab necessity of labour, to, in short, the disproportionate values in most existing things.

In the evening light, between the lengthening shadows flung by the hedges along the dusty road that leads to Wortheton, a girl walked listlessly, a girl whose youth was marred by a look of world-weary wisdom, as much at variance with the young face as the tall brick chimneys with the harmonious beauty of the landscape. But for that look, and the sullen expression in the brown eyes, the girl would have been beautiful, as the scene was beautiful, and the soft primrose light upon the uplands; but the buoyant elasticity, the hope, and the freshness of youth, these were lacking; there remained only the pitiful fact that in years the girl was in the springtime of life and in experience more matured.

As she walked, her sullen gaze shifted furtively from the township below to the fair open country, growing momentarily dimmer and greyer as the light in the sky paled. A gap in the hedge revealed a narrow path between giant elms, and a cool shadowed coppice where the bracken fronds rose stiff and closely curled, and dark ivy twined thickly about the tree trunks. The girl turned aside into the coppice and, with the fugitive instinct of hiding from the light, penetrated its shaded depths, and paused and leaned her arms against the gnarled trunk of a sheltering beech tree, and rested her head upon her arms in dry-eyed tragic sorrow.

In a fork of the leafy branches overhead a bird had its nest, sitting in brooding satisfaction upon its delicate speckled eggs. The intrusion startled it from slumber: the round eyes betrayed a suspicious uneasiness, and the soft warm body nestled closer over the eggs it protected. Quaint thing of feathers and bright-eyed watchfulness and maternal instinct, with no sense of anything beyond the supreme importance of hatching those little speckled eggs—drawing its unconscious comparison by the pride of elemental right to the disproportion in values in this as in other matters, happy in its prospective motherhood, peering timorously through the green tracery sheltering it, home at the unhappy prospective human mothers with resentful eyes lifted curiously to observe its brooding content.

So still the girl remained, gazing upward into the deepening shadows that the little feathered mother lost her fear; the sharp anxiety faded from the round bright eyes, which never relaxed their unwavering vigilance even when the shadows, gathering closer, enveloped the still figure of the girl and wrapped her about with a hazy indistinctness that made her one with the landscape, a thing of indefinite outline and colouring, breathing, sentient nature in harmony with inanimate nature, immovable and silent as the tree against which she leaned.

So night settled silently over Wortheton, and a wanderer stole home in its kindly shade.

Chapter Two.

In the big ugly morning-room at Court Heatherleigh six people sat engaged with different degrees of interest on six ugly pieces of coarse material which were being fashioned into serviceable garments for the poor. The poor were an institution in Wortheton and so was charity: both, like the big chimneys dominating the town, were things of usage; all were in a sense interdependent, and had their headquarters at Court Heatherleigh, which was the big house and belonged to the owner of the big chimneys—the owner of most things in Wortheton, from the ugly brick cottages in which his employees dwelt to, one might say, the employees themselves. The Trades Unions had not penetrated the select privacy of Wortheton as yet. If occasionally a voice was uplifted in discontent and hinted at these things, it was speedily silenced; and life flowed on tranquilly as it had before the grumbler raised his foolish protest; and his place knew him no more. But each whisper was as a small stone flung in a mill stream; and stones follow the law of aggregation till eventually they dam the stream.

The six busy workers in Court Heatherleigh morning-room were the six daughters of Mr Graynor, and their ages ranged from somewhere about fifty to eighteen. Besides the daughters, two sons had swelled the family. The younger of these had married indiscreetly, and died indiscreetly with his wife somewhere abroad, bequeathing an indiscreet son to his father because he had nothing else to leave behind him, having departed from the family tradition that the end and aim of life is to acquire wealth. He had acquired nothing beyond a wife and son; but he had loved both these, and been beloved in turn, so that, according to his views, he had prospered well: according to his brother William’s views, he had been a fool.

William carried on the family traditions, and would eventually succeed his father as owner of the big chimneys, the family mansion, and the guardianship of his numerous sisters. He was not married. No one expected him to marry; he did not expect it of himself. No woman worthy of William’s attention had ever adventured across his path.

Of the sisters, Miss Agatha Graynor, who was the eldest of the family by several years, took the lead in all things, social and domestic, and ruled the household with a despotism that not even old Mr Graynor had been known to question; though his wives—he had married twice—had never been permitted such absolute authority. In his youth he had been as despotic as Agatha; but he was an old man now, and weary; and his daughter overawed him. The one being to whom he clung was his young daughter. Prudence, the only child of his second wife; and after Prudence, his scapegrace grandson, Bobby, then at college, held possibly the strongest place in his tired affections.

They were two very human young people, Prudence and Bobby, with a contempt for the Graynor traditions, and lacking the Graynor pride and self-complacency, and all the other creditable characteristics of an old, influential, commercial stock that had owned the greater part of Wortheton for generations, and had come to regard themselves by reason of local homage as personages of high importance in the land.

Prudence made one of the working party from a matter of compulsion; charity of that nature bored her, and she hated sewing. Since leaving school, where her happiest years had been spent, Miss Agatha had imposed many irksome duties as a corrective for idleness: a healthy youthful desire for pleasure and recreation affronted her; if she had experienced such desires in her own youth she had forgotten them: possibly she had not experienced them; people are born deficient in various respects and in different degrees. Miss Agatha had always been Good: her young half-sister was lacking in piety, and suffered from warm human impulses which not infrequently led her into trouble and subsequent disgrace. Also Prudence was pretty; the other five Miss Graynors were plain.

The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pass through the coarse material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence. Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke.

“Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning.”

She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and passed it down the line to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence’s blue eyes snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn, dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game, thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to assert, why his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a visitor, and Prudence’s delinquencies were forgotten in the business of welcoming the arrival.

“My dear Mrs North!” Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose hastily and shook hands with the vicar’s wife, who, warm and a little flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves—all save Prudence; she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the first favourable moment.

“Such an astonishing thing has happened,” Mrs North was saying breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied needles. “That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in her mother’s house.”

Miss Agatha’s thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes.

“Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, and Prudence, leave the room,” she said.

Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence’s more alert retreat. When they had passed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha turned apologetically to her friend.

“Of course,” she explained earnestly, “I couldn’t discuss that subject in front of the girls.”

Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously acquiesced.

“It was a little indiscreet of me,” she allowed. “But I was never so astounded in my life. And the girl’s mother actually defends her. She talks about ‘her own flesh and blood.’ ... As though that makes any difference! I knew you would be shocked. It’s such a scandal in the place. And to come back... where every one knows!”

“She can’t stay,” said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as it passed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked fixedly at the vicar’s wife. “We can’t tolerate such a scandal in Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of thing... it... We must set our faces against it.”

“Of course,” Mrs North agreed doubtfully. “That’s why I came to you.”

Every one came to Miss Agatha when an unpleasant situation had to be faced: she faced it so resolutely, with the inflexibility of justice untempered with mercy. Sin was sin. There were no intermediate shades between black and white. Sin had to be uprooted. The moral prestige of Wortheton demanded that all which was “not nice” must be eliminated from its community.

And in a dingy room in a dingy little house in a dingier side street, a girl with a beautiful face was thinking in her passionate discontent how good it was to be a bird—a small feathered thing in a nest among the branches of a fine old tree—anything rather than a human being.

Chapter Three.

Prudence leaned with her arms on the sill of her bedroom window, looking out on the night-shadowed garden and the white line of the road beyond its shrub-hidden walls. This was the best hour in the twenty-four—the hour when she could be alone; for the bedroom, which once had been a nursery, was all her own. The other Miss Graynors, with the exception of Agatha, shared rooms; but the little half-sister who had occupied the nursery alone for so many years was permitted to regard this haven as still hers: no one sought to dispossess her, though the room was large and had a south aspect, while Miss Agatha’s room faced north. But Miss Agatha was not averse from a northern aspect; and the room had the advantage of commanding a view of the servants’ quarters, so that she was enabled to watch the coming in and, which was still more important, the going forth of these dependants, whose seemly conduct she made her particular care.

Many people besides the poet have discovered that the pleasantest place in the house is leaning out of the window. Prudence knew that. From early spring to late autumn, and occasionally on fine frosty nights, she leaned from her window and thought, and felt, and dreamed dreams of romance and beauty, and of a life that was fuller than the life of Wortheton, a life beyond the seclusion of the walled garden, beyond the white winding road, the tall chimneys, and the dull succession of busy dreary days—days which commenced with morning prayers at seven-thirty, followed by breakfast at eight, by work, by an hour’s walk before lunch, a little district visiting, the receiving and returning of calls, tea at five, a dull formal dinner at seven, and family prayers at half-past eight. Then nine o’clock and merciful release, and that good hour, sometimes longer, when she was supposed to be in bed and which she spent leaning out of the window, dreaming her girlish dreams. We all know those dreams of youth, though some of us forget them. They are just dreams, nothing more; but none of life’s realities are half as good as those inspiring idle fancies which illumine the drabbest lives in the imaginative days of youth. The dreams of youth are worth all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages; and when they arise, as Prudence’s arose, out of a spirit of dissatisfaction with existing things, they do not necessarily add to the dissatisfaction, but catch one away from realities in a flight of golden thought.

To-night, however, Prudence’s mind was not concerned so much with personal matters as with the story of the girl of whose return she had heard that morning, the girl who was not good, and who was to be banished from Wortheton for fear that her example might contaminate others. Prudence wondered whether Wortheton were more susceptible to contamination than most places; otherwise the sending forth of the black sheep, who after all belonged to Wortheton, were to inflict an injustice on some equally respectable town. Black sheep cannot be banished to the nether world; they have to reside somewhere.

The details of the girl’s case were known to Prudence. All the secrecy and silence of Miss Agatha’s careful guardianship availed little against an inquiring and sympathetic mind and somewhat unusual powers of observation. Prudence at eighteen was not ignorant. To attempt to keep an intelligent person ignorant is to attempt the impossible. Miss Agatha did not shrink from impossible effort: furthermore she confused the terms ignorance and innocence, and in her furtive avoidances contrived to throw a suggestion of indelicacy upon the most simple of elemental things. Many well-meaning persons bring disrepute in this way on things which should be sacred, and utterly confuse the mind in matters of morality with the disastrous result that, bewildered and impatient, the individual not infrequently breaks away from conventional caution and adopts a line of indifference in regard to decent restraints. Life cannot be run on lines of suppression any more successfully than on the broader gauge of a too liberal tolerance. Restraint has to be practised; and it is the right of the individual to be taught to recognise the necessity for this with the encouragement of the practice.

Miss Agatha’s narrow creed proclaimed that the girl had sinned, and must therefore be thrust forth; Prudence, in her impulsive youth, felt this decree to be ungenerous, and, had she dared, would have championed the sinner’s cause before all Wortheton. She did not fear Wortheton, but she was afraid of Agatha—Agatha, who, at the time of Prudence’s birth, was older than Prudence’s mother, and who had domineered over her mother and herself until the former’s death, which sad event occurred when Prudence was five years old. She remembered her mother only dimly, but she hated Miss Agatha on her mother’s account as she would not have hated her on her own. The mop of golden curls which, with the wide blue eyes, lent to Prudence’s face a guileless and childlike expression, covered a shrewd little brain. It was no strain on the owner’s intelligence to discern that Agatha was jealous of her, had been jealous of her mother before her, on account of their father’s preference; and it occasioned her much inward satisfaction to reflect that not even Agatha had the power to lessen his love for her: she was the child of his old age and the light of his eyes.

“I’ve half a mind,” she said to herself, and rested her dimpled chin on her hands and stared into the shadowy distance, “to tell him about Bessie. If I asked him to interfere and let her remain, he—might.”

She did not feel very positive on that head; Mr Graynor was after all a male edition of Agatha. Nevertheless, she would at least make her appeal.

“I wonder...” she mused, and thought awhile.

“I suppose she was very much in love,” was the outcome of these reflections. “I wonder what it feels like to be very much in love.”

Prudence’s world had not brought any of these experiences into her life. She never met any men, save her father’s friends and William’s, none of whom were calculated to awaken sentiment in the breast of a girl of eighteen. The youngest of these was a man of forty, a nice kind old thing, who brought her chocolates, and pulled her curls before she put her hair up. Since the hair had gone up he had ceased to pull it, and he did not bring her chocolates so often; his kindliness had become more formal; but she liked him rather better on that account; the teasing had sometimes annoyed her.

Like most girls, Prudence allowed her mind at times to dwell on the subject of love and marriage. The older girls at school had discussed these subjects freely: one of them had professed an undying passion for the drawing-master, who was married, and had asseverated before an admiring audience in the playing-field that she would cheerfully ignore the wife and run away with him if he asked her. He had not asked her. He had indeed been entirely unaware of her devotion, and had regarded her as a rather dull pupil. Prudence had considered her silly. Also she held a belief that emotional excitement was not love. She was not very clear in her thoughts what the term love expressed exactly; but she believed that when it did come love would be a big thing. She did not consider it in relation with marriage: marriage was a contract, often a convenience. She would have been glad herself to marry, merely to escape from Agatha and Wortheton. When a girl was married she could at least fashion her own life. And Prudence loved children. She envied Bessie Clapp her coming motherhood more than she pitied her on account of the social ostracism entailed thereby. Prudence’s ideas on morality, never having been wisely directed, inclined to exalt the beauty of motherhood and to ignore the baser aspect of crude and illicit passions selfishly indulged. It is not the maternal woman who brings children into the world with a selfish disregard for the shame of their nameless birth.

While Prudence leaned from her window and thought of love and motherhood, she became abruptly and amazedly aware of a figure in the road beyond the high wall—a man’s figure, tall and straight in the moonlight—walking with a purposeful air down the hill towards the town. The man glanced up at the lighted window in which the girlish form was brightly framed, and broke off abruptly in the middle of a bar he was whistling softly, paused for the fraction of a second, and then went swinging on down the hill. He was a stranger; Prudence recognised that; there were no young men, except the factory employees and the tradesmen, in Wortheton.

“I wonder,” she murmured to herself, and leaned further out to look after the vanishing figure, “what it feels like to be in love...”

A sudden sense of chill touched her. The moon vanished behind a cloud, and a little cold breeze sprang up and played on her bare neck and arms. The garden showed dark with the white light withdrawn, dark and deserted. A shadowed loneliness had fallen on the spirit of the night.

Chapter Four.

“I want,” Prudence said in her soft appealing voice, “the sum of fifty pounds.”

Mr Graynor looked not unnaturally amazed. Prudence’s wants had never assumed such extravagant proportions before: it puzzled him to understand what she could possibly require to necessitate the demand for so large a sum, and, because he had only a few hours earlier refused to listen to another outrageous request of hers and told her a little harshly that there were matters with which she should not concern herself, he hoped, despite a general reluctance to part with money, that this further demand was one he could treat more generously. He put a large shaky hand on her curls and tilted her head back and smiled into the wide blue eyes.

“Fifty pounds, eh?” he said. “That’s a big sum, Prue.”

“You’ll let me have it?” she asked, and clasped her hands round his arm.

“That depends,” he answered, “on what you want it for.”

“I’d rather not tell that,” she said slowly.

Mr Graynor removed his hand. Secrecy savoured of a want of candour; he could not allow that.

“I can’t give you a cheque without knowing what you purpose spending the money on,” he said firmly. “It’s a big sum for a little girl—even for finery. You mustn’t develop extravagance.”

Prudence braced herself and faced him a little defiantly.

“It’s not for me,” she said. “I don’t need anything. But you are sending the Clapps away, and they’ve nowhere to go and no money. That isn’t just; it’s—wicked.”

His face hardened while he listened to this sweeping indictment, and he turned away from her with an air of sharp annoyance.

“You are extremely foolish, Prudence,” he said. “Leave these matters which you are not able to understand to your elders. I forbid you to mention this subject again.”

Prudence was defeated but not subdued. She accepted the defeat, but she had her retort ready.

“Very well,” she said, as she moved towards the door. “Then I’ll just pray hard night and morning that God will befriend Bessie Clapp. When you see me kneeling I hope you will remember.”

Then she was gone; and the old man, staring with his dim eyes at the closed door, reflected uncomfortably that Prudence was growing strangely annoying. She was, as he also recognised, growing extraordinarily like her mother. Of course, he told himself, unconsciously self-deceiving, he had always intended to see that these people were sufficiently provided for. It was not necessary for his youngest daughter to point out his duty to him.

So Prudence was not really defeated; though she was denied the satisfaction of knowing of her victory. Mr Graynor’s subsequent generosity amazed the recipients no more than it amazed his eldest daughter and William, both of whom entirely disapproved of a munificence they deemed unnecessary and an encouragement in wrong-doing. But old Mr Graynor, furtively watching Prudence’s golden head bowed over her clasped hands during the evening prayers, bowed in almost aggressive supplication, knew that he could not view it thus night and morning with a deaf ear turned to her appeal for succour for the friendless. The good-night kiss he gave her was, had she but known it, an answer to her prayer.

Prudence retired to her room that night in a state of antagonism towards every one. She knew herself to be in disgrace. Agatha treated her with chill disapproval, and William ignored her. It was William’s invariable rule to show his displeasure by treating the object thereof as though she did not exist. Prudence had been ignored before: she did not resent this; it amused her. William, when he attempted to be dignified, was altogether ridiculous.

He maintained the dignified rôle throughout the next day, and laboured under the delusion that his pompous disregard was impressing his young sister with a proper sense of the enormity of her indiscretion; a belief which suffered a rude awakening at luncheon, when Prudence threw off her ill-humour and emerged from the large silences in which she had enwrapped herself to participate in the unenlivening talk carried on fragmentally by the various members of the family. She had watched brother William, who was a big man and corpulent of build, as she had watched him for many years, with an amazed dumb criticism in her look, unfasten with big deliberate fingers the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat and the top button of his trousers on sitting down to lunch for his greater convenience and the more thorough enjoyment of his food. He performed this office regularly, with the formal solemnity of an important rite. Prudence had come to regard it as William’s grace before meals. She sometimes wondered what ran through the serious minds of the portly whiskered butler and the elderly parlourmaid, who ministered to the family needs under his direction, daily privileged to witness this public tribute of respect to the good things of life. Perhaps they regarded these manifestations of epicurean nicety, as Agatha regarded them, as becoming in William as a man and the prospective head of the house of Graynor. It was an inconsistency in Agatha’s prudish nature to consider that men might do things which could not be tolerated in the other sex, and that whatever William did must of necessity be seemly. In Prudence’s opinion, William’s table manners were gluttonous and disgusting.

“A man called on me at the works this morning,” William observed, addressing his father, who latterly stayed much at home and left the control and worry of business largely to his son. “He had a letter of introduction from Morgan. I asked him to call at the house this afternoon in time for tea. His name’s Steele.”

“You should have asked him to dine,” Mr Graynor said.

“Time enough for that after you have seen him,” William returned, and for some reason, which he would have been at a loss to explain, his gaze travelled in Prudence’s direction and rested for the space of a second on her listening, eager face.

“I’ve seen him,” Prudence said. “He’s quite young.”

William raised his eyebrows; Miss Agatha’s head came round with a jerk; several other heads jerked round likewise, and every one looked at Prudence.

“I saw him from my window,” Prudence explained, unabashed by the general interest, “striding down the hill. His back looked nice.”

William sought to ignore the interruption and the interrupter, and addressed himself exclusively to his father. But it was useless. Prudence, having broken her silence, refused to be excluded from the conversation, and expressed the flippant desire to see the face belonging to the nice-looking back.

Had it been possible to banish her young sister to her bedroom, Agatha would have done so; but Prudence lately had shown a growing tendency to break away from control, and she was wise enough not to put a further strain on the weakening strands of her already frayed authority. Therefore Prudence was in the drawing-room when the stranger called—indeed, she was the only person present so far as he was concerned. He paid her far more attention than Miss Agatha deemed necessary or in good taste. The manners of youth, as each generation which has left youth behind unfailingly recognises, are sadly deteriorating.

As for Prudence, she admired the front view as greatly as she had admired the back. Mr Philip Steele was eminently well-favoured. Prudence considered him handsome. She had met so few men that anyone who escaped middle-age and stoutness appeared to her in the guise of masculine perfection, provided only that his face was strong. Steele’s face matched with his name, sharp, clear-cut, firm of jaw. And he was clean-shaven. William wore a beard. Hair on a man’s face was patriarchal.

Tea was brought in by the butler and deposited on a table in front of Miss Agatha; and the young man, seizing the opportunity when his hostess’ attention was thus engaged, demanded of Prudence in a confidential undertone:

“I say, wasn’t it you I saw leaning from a window two nights ago?”

“Yes.” Prudence looked at him with a frank laugh in her blue eyes. “I saw you pass. It must have been gorgeous, walking down there in the moonlight.”

“It was pleasant,” he said without enthusiasm, and added with a return smile: “I was thinking how jolly it must be up there where you were, looking out on the quiet fragrance of the night.”

And then they both laughed happily, though there was manifestly nothing to laugh at. Miss Agatha, disapproving of this mutual enjoyment, called Prudence away to make the tea; whereupon the young man followed her to the tea-table and hovered over it, wishful to be of use.

“One teaspoonful for each person and one for the teapot,” Miss Agatha directed precisely; and the visitor wondered with resentment why on earth the old girl didn’t make the brew herself.

“I hope you’ll like our tea,” she said, when, having handed round the various cups, Steele returned to the table for his own. “We give eighteenpence a pound for it. We drink it for an example.”

She did not explain why, nor for whom, the example was deemed necessary. Steele sipped his tea, and tried not to looked amazed, and assured her that it was jolly good. Then he wandered back to Prudence’s side, openly curious as to her relationship in regard to the others.

“I say,” he murmured—“don’t think me rude—but where do you come in?”

Prudence scrutinised him for a perplexed moment, at a loss for his meaning; whereupon he suggested with a smile:

“Niece, perhaps?”

“Oh!” The gay little laugh, which so irritated Miss Agatha’s ears, broke from her lips once more. “I see. No. I’m Mr Graynor’s youngest daughter... by his second marriage,” she added, with just a hint of malice in her voice.

The young man grasped the position.

“I’m getting hold of it,” he said, a sympathetic light in his eyes. “The thing puzzled me. I couldn’t place you. You don’t seem to fit in.” Then he said with a kind of inspiration, as though the idea had suddenly presented itself to him: “You don’t fit in, you know. Your place rightly is leaning out of a window. That’s how I shall always picture you.”

It was an extraordinary talk, and altogether delightful. Prudence enjoyed his visit tremendously. But when he left, Miss Agatha reproved her sharply for pushing herself forward and monopolising the visitor.

“He monopolised me,” Prudence contended. “I retired into corners, and he followed.”

“You made yourself conspicuous,” Miss Agatha said, “and behaved altogether in a forward and unseemly manner.”

Prudence had occasion later to regret this success in which she had triumphed at the time; Mr Philip Steele had not succeeded in winning general favour, and so never received the invitation to dine. He did not possess sufficient nerve to present himself at the house uninvited, or he would have called again for the pleasure of meeting Prudence. He did meet her, but the encounter was accidental. It was all the more enjoyable on that account. They met where there were neither walls nor interruptions, where they could talk without reserve and laugh unrestrainedly, with only the mating birds to hear them, and the soft wind to catch up and echo their mirth in the tall trees overhead—a joyous meeting, with the springtime harmony about them, and the springtime gladness in their hearts and eyes.

Chapter Five.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Steele, when he vaulted a stile and came upon her, picking primroses from the hedge. “This is a piece of luck!”

Prudence looked up from her occupation. The sunlight was in her surprised blue eyes, in her hair; it shone on her white dress, and on the pale wilting flowers in her hand. The effect of her was dazzling—a white shining thing of milk and roses against the soft greens of the bank. He had sprung upon her unawares, and it took her a little while to recover from her astonishment. And yet she had been thinking of him—thinking how agreeable it would be if the event which was now realised could only befall. She had been guilty of loitering, of watching the field-path furtively, and wishing she knew which direction he took when he walked abroad. And now he stood before her, gay, and unmistakably pleased, with a laugh in his grey eyes which expressed his satisfaction. He had been thinking about her as she had been thinking of him, and wishing that he had made better use of his time that afternoon, and discovered her favourite haunts. It was all right now; they had found one another. That was good, because on the morrow he was going away.

“You’d never guess how hard I’ve been wishing I might happen upon you this morning,” he said as they shook hands. “It looks as though wishing had brought its reward. I’m rather a believer in telepathy. Something of what has been in my mind must unconsciously have transmitted itself to yours. Have you given me any thought, I wonder? I’ve given you so many,” he added, observing her blush.

“I was thinking of you at the moment you appeared,” Prudence answered with audacious candour. “You see, William mentioned at breakfast that you were leaving to-morrow. I wondered why you came? So few people come here—except commercial travellers.”

“There are one or two at the hotel,” he said, laughing. “Save that they possess enormous appetites, I haven’t observed them particularly. The landlady informed me that they are very exclusive. I came on the firm’s business—Morgan Bros. We’re woollen too, you know.”

“Yes I know. Mr Morgan stays with us sometimes.”

She regarded him with renewed interest. It was a little disappointing to discover that he followed the same occupation as William; she had placed him in her thoughts amid more romantic surroundings. The factory, despite its financial magnificence, struck her as rather sordid. He became aware of the criticism in her eyes and smiled in some amusement.

“I’m just a paid man,” he volunteered. “Nothing very gorgeous about my position.”

“But that’s an advantage,” she said, and smiled in sympathy. “At least, you can leave.”

“True. I never thought of it like that. My principal concern has been to evade leaving; it has loomed so very imminent at times. I say, let’s sit on this stile in the shade of that jolly elm and talk. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

“No,” answered Prudence, who knew that she ought to be at home sewing in the morning-room, knew also that she had not the smallest intention of going back now. “I’m not in any hurry. It’s—pleasant here.”

“Yes, isn’t it? I don’t think I have ever seen prettier country than this. You were gathering primroses?”

“Just a few late ones.” She held the bunch up and surveyed their drooping beauty. “It’s almost a pity; they looked so sweet in the hedge.”

“They look sweeter where they are,” he said quite sincerely, though obviously without sufficient reason for the comparison; the primroses were so unmistakably dying. “Put one in my button-hole, will you? It will recall a pleasant morning.”

She complied without hesitation, laughing when the task was accomplished because the flower drooped its head.

“A bit shy,” he commented. “It is going to raise its face and smile at me when I put it in water, later.”

“Will you really do that?” she asked.

“Why, of course. You don’t suppose I would allow a gift of yours to fade into a memory?”

“But it will fade,” she insisted, “in spite of your efforts. All these pleasant things fade so swiftly.”

He turned more directly towards her and looked into her eyes. She had taken off her hat, and sat with her shoulders against the tree and looked steadily back at him.

“Yes,” he admitted; “that’s uncomfortably true. But something remains.”

“Something?” Her eyes questioned him, wide childlike eyes with a hint of womanhood lurking in their blue depths. He drew a little nearer to her.

“Something,” he repeated—“subtle, intangible—an emotion, a memory... Call it what you will... Some recurring brightness which is to the human soul what the sunlight is to the earth—a thousand harmonies spring from the one source. My primrose will fade, but for me it can’t die; nor will the kind hand that gathered it and placed it where it is be forgotten either. There are things one doesn’t forget.”

“I suppose there are,” acquiesced Prudence, her thoughts by some odd twist reverting to William’s table manners. “Sometimes one would like to forget.”

“I shouldn’t,” he averred—“not this, at least.”

She roused herself with a laugh.

“I was thinking of other things—I don’t know why—horrid things. Are you one of a large family?”

“No,” he answered, surprised. “I’m an only son—and rather a bad investment. Why?”

“There are eight of us,” said Prudence—“counting Bobby.”

“Who is Bobby?”

“He’s a dear,” she answered, as though that explained Bobby. “He’s at college: when he leaves he will have to go into the factory; and he hates it so. But there isn’t any help for it. He is the only Graynor to carry on.”

“I don’t think his case calls for sympathy exactly,” he remarked dryly, with a contemplative eye on the tall red chimneys, an eye that travelled slowly over the wide spring-clad countryside and came back to her face and rested there in quiet enjoyment.

“You don’t know,” she returned seriously, “how the kind of life we lead here stifles an imaginative person.”

“You find it dull?” he said. “I suppose it may be. Most country towns are dull.”

“The country isn’t to blame,” she explained; “it’s the routine of dull business, dull duties, dull pleasures, and duller people. You’ve no idea... How should you know? Virtue, as practised in Wortheton, is a quality without smiles, and enjoyment is sinful. Instead of idling happily here I ought to be at home sewing garments for the poor, like the others are doing. I shall be reproved for flaying truant... and I don’t care.”

She laughed joyously. Steele, ignoring the larger part of her communications, leaned towards her, intent on bringing her back to a particular phrase that stuck in his memory.

“Are you happy sitting here—with me?” he asked.

“I’m always happy,” Prudence replied calmly, “when I’ve some one to talk to who isn’t Wortheton.”

“Oh!” he said, a little damped. “So that’s it? Well, I’m happy sitting here talking with some one who is Wortheton.”

“I’m not up to sample,” she said, amused. “If you want local colour, call at the Vicarage—or take William as a specimen. Wortheton is earnest in woof.”

She looked so pretty and so impish as she drew her invidious comparisons that Steele was unable to suppress a smile of sympathy. Her criticism of her brother was wanting in loyalty; but he could find in his heart no blame for her: he did not like William, possibly because William had so pointedly refrained from extending further hospitality to him. The young man had counted on an extension, and was disappointed.

“You’ll shake the dust off your feet some day,” he hazarded, and thought how agreeable it would be to assist in the escape. Visions of scorching across country in a motor with her beside him floated pleasantly through his brain.

“Some day,” she returned a little vaguely, and looked pensively into the distance. “Yes, I’ll do that... But it’s so difficult to find a way.”

“Time will solve that difficulty, I expect,” he said.

She glanced towards him brightly, a look of expectant eagerness shining in her eyes. He felt that when the opportunity offered she would not be slow in seizing it, and was unreasonably angry at the thought of his own uncertain prospects, which offered not the faintest hope of his ever being able to hire, much less own, the necessary car in which to scorch across country with anyone.

“You say such nice, encouraging things,” she observed. “I hope time won’t be long in solving the difficulty. It would be horrid to be forced to live here until I am middle-aged.”

“I’m afraid you will be disappointed when you get out into the world,” he said. “Life is pretty much the same elsewhere as here, I take it. It is what we make it—largely.”

“It is what other people make it for us—largely,” she mimicked him. “I could have quite a good time if I was allowed to. When Bobby is home we do contrive a little fun, but it generally ends in disaster. They sent him back to school a week before term commenced once. Agatha managed that. It is always Bobby who reaps the blame; I am punished vicariously.”

“I call that vindictive,” Steele said.

“We called it that—and other things.” She smiled reminiscently. “It’s odd how these little things stick in the memory. I never sew without recalling that exasperating week when I broke needles maliciously six days in succession. I break them occasionally now—in memoriam.”

He laughed aloud.

“I don’t fancy Miss Graynor gets it all her own way,” he said.

Prudence swung her hat by the brim and gazed up at a patch of blue sky between the trees. A little frown puckered her brow. She had ceased to think of Agatha; her mind was intent on the man beside her, the man who was merely a new acquaintance and yet seemed already a tried and sympathetic friend. She liked him. She wished he were staying longer in Wortheton. She wished William had invited him to spend his last evening at Court Heatherleigh. Strictly speaking, courtesy demanded it; but William was not always courteous. She held a well-founded belief that William sought to punish her by this omission; and it pleased her to reflect that she was in a sense getting even with him through the present informal meeting. She promised herself the satisfaction of relating her morning’s experience at lunch for his and Agatha’s delectation. They so entirely disapproved of such harmless pleasures.

“If you’ve really nothing to do,” she said, “let us go for a stroll in the woods. It’s lovely there; and we can talk... I feel like a recluse enjoying an unexpected holiday: I want to make the most of it. And I love to talk.”

“So do I—with some people,” he returned in his level, pleasant voice, and lent her a hand to assist her down from the stile. “It’s as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, don’t you think? Why not enlarge on the idea? I know a shop where we can procure quite edible pasties. If you are agreeable, I could fetch provisions, and we can picnic in the woods.”

“But that’s a capital idea,” said Prudence, with a careless disregard for developments, which further evidenced the emancipation Miss Agatha already foresaw.

“There’ll be such a row,” she said cheerfully, as they walked across the fields side by side. “It was just such another excursion that Bobby was sent back to school for.”

“For a little thing like that!” He laughed. “Well, they can’t send me back to school anyhow, and I have a comfortable feeling in my mind that you’ll be able to keep your end up. Miss Graynor would be wise to recognise that her day is done. I’ll return with you and take my share of the censuring. With luck I might be asked to stay to tea.”

This audacity amused them both. There was gladness in the spring day, the gladness of irresponsible youth, the gladness of life in its promise with the hope of its fruition unfulfilled and undaunted. The two gay young hearts, in their mutual pleasure in one another, were in tune with the brightness of the May morning; and the two gay young voices rang out in clear enjoyment and awoke the echoes in the shady woods.

Chapter Six.

It detracted somewhat from Prudence’s enjoyment when, having lunched delightfully off viands which would have met with less favour eaten off a plate from an ordinary dining-table, having subsequently strolled about the woods, engaged in botanical and other research, it abruptly occurred to her that it was time to return home. The thought of going home was less pleasant with the prospect so imminent. Picnicking in the woods with a comparative stranger was, she felt now, a sufficiently unusual proceeding to make explanation difficult. Neither Agatha nor her father would view the matter in the light in which she saw it—simply as a pleasant excursion breaking the monotony of dull days. The necessity to account for her absence at all annoyed her.

“The drawback to stolen pleasure,” she announced, regarding the young man with serious eyes in which a shade of anxiety was faintly reflected, “lies in the aftermath of nettles; while not dangerous, they sting.”

“By Jove! yes,” he agreed. “The little matter of going back has been sitting on my mind for the last ten minutes. The thing loses its humour when no longer in the background. I’m really horribly afraid of Miss Graynor.”

“You need not come,” said Prudence generously.

“Oh! I’m not so mean a coward as to back out,” he said. “It’s up to me to see it through with you. After all, the excursion was at my suggestion. And it was worth being stung for by all the nettles that ever grew. Besides, I want my tea.”

“You’ll be lucky if you get it,” she returned.

“Come now!” he urged. “Let us take a charitable view, and decide that they will dispense generous hospitality. Upon my soul, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be charmed to receive us. The Prodigal, you know, got an amazing reception.”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I think possibly we’ll get an amazing reception too. Please, if you don’t mind, I would rather you took that dead flower out of your coat.”

“They would never suspect you of putting it there,” he protested, with a feeling of strong reluctance to do what she proposed.

But Prudence insisted. She knew that when William’s eye fell on that withered memento her guilty conscience would give him the clue to its history.

“In any case,” she added diplomatically, “it adds a look of untidiness.”

And so the primrose never had the opportunity of lifting its head in water. Before discarding it, Steele was seized with the idea of placing it between the leaves in his pocket-book; but after a glance at the pretty, serious face of his companion he decided against this and left the dead flower lying in the bracken at their feet.

“The first brush against the nettles,” he remarked, and smiled at her regretfully. “I’m braced now. That first sting hurt more than any other can.”

The further stings proved embarrassing rather than hurtful. When Steele entered the drawing-room at Court Heatherleigh with Prudence he was made uncomfortably aware of the surprised gaze of five pairs of curious feminine eyes all focussed upon himself, and, advancing under this raking fire, felt his amiable smile of greeting fade before Miss Agatha’s blank stare of cold inquiry; her reluctantly extended hand, its chill response to his clasp, reduced him to a state of abject humility. He found himself stammering an apologetic explanation of his presence.

“I just looked in to say good-bye,” he began awkwardly. “I had the good luck to meet Miss Graynor this morning—”

“I presume you mean that you encountered my sister, Prudence?” Miss Graynor interrupted him frigidly.

He flushed, and felt savage with himself for being betrayed into the weakness.

“I met Miss Prudence—yes, and persuaded her to show me the woods. You have some very beautiful scenery about here; it seemed a pity to miss the best of it, and this was my last opportunity. I made the most of it,” he added with a touch of audacity which Miss Agatha inwardly resented.

“We’ve had a delightful time,” Prudence interposed defiantly, and turned as her father entered the room and forestalled his reproaches with a light kiss on his unresponsive lips. “I’ve been picnicking in the woods, daddy,” she said brightly. “And now we’ve come back—for tea.”

She made this announcement in the tone of a person who does not intend to be denied. Miss Agatha remarked tartly that it was not the hour for tea, and Mr Graynor, ignoring the hospitable suggestion, reproved her for her long absence.

“You caused me considerable anxiety,” he said.

Prudence expressed her contrition. Steele added his apologies, although in his heart he felt there was nothing in the adventure to apologise for.

“I am afraid the fault was mine,” he said. “The suggestion originated with me. I was thoughtless enough to overlook the fact that you might be worried.”

“The thoughtlessness was on my daughter’s side,” Mr Graynor answered. “She is fully aware that her absence from luncheon would cause anxiety. She should have invited you to return with her instead.”

Prudence flashed a surprised smile at him. To have done what he proposed was the last thing she would have dared to do. Had she given the invitation she would have been reproved quite as severely for taking the liberty as for absenting herself without permission. The privilege of independent action involving promiscuous hospitality was vested solely in Agatha and William.

Matters appeared to have reached a deadlock. Steele had nothing to say! Prudence had nothing to say! Miss Agatha had no desire to help the situation by bridging the silence; and Mr Graynor had nothing further to add to his reproof. He seated himself. Since Miss Agatha remained standing Steele had no option but to do the same: he felt increasingly awkward, and wished he had taken advantage of Prudence’s permission and remained out of it.

“Sit down, sit down,” exclaimed Mr Graynor suddenly, with an accession of ill-humour as he became aware of the general strain. “Why is every one standing?”

His intervention scarcely relieved matters. Steele said he thought he must be going, and murmured something about an early start on the morrow; he had merely called to make his adieux. Miss Agatha’s prompt acceptance of this explanation for the brevity of his visit was not flattering; but Mr Graynor, awakening tardily to a sense of the lack of cordiality, protested against his leaving so hurriedly.

“William will be in presently,” he said. “You had better wait and see him. And we’ll have tea. I see no object in deferring tea, Agatha, until a given hour.”

“Prudence,” Agatha commanded, “ring the bell, please.”

Steele attempted to forestall the girl; their hands touched as each reached out to press the button.

“Oh, Lord!” he murmured under his breath, and caught her eye and smiled dryly. “It will require something more efficacious than dock leaves to counteract these nettles.”

She drew back without replying, but her face was charged with meaning, and he detected the hidden laughter in her eyes. It was well for her, he decided, that she could find anything to laugh at in the dismal situation; for himself he would gladly have escaped and sacrificed the tea; a whisky and soda would have suited him better at the moment.

The tea, when it came, caused little unbending, but it provided a legitimate excuse for moving from Miss Agatha’s side, and it gave him an opportunity for a few minutes’ talk with Prudence, a disjointed, embarrassed talk under the close observation of the rest. Steele was conscious of those watchful eyes, of the listening hang in the conversation when he approached the girl. Prudence also was conscious of this silent manifestation of vigilant criticism on the part of her family; but she had reached a stage of recklessness which moved her to openly disregard the condemnation in Agatha’s eyes when Steele, having handed the cake to her, remained beside her for a few minutes, and held her in conversation.

“I have been reconsidering what you said in the wood,” he observed, “about the influence of others in regard to the enjoyment of life. You were entirely right.”

“Given the opportunity, I knew I could prove my case,” she answered with the same amount of caution in her tones as he had used. “But you mustn’t talk to me now, please; I’m in disgrace.”

“So am I,” he replied. “I wonder if you will be looking out of a window to-night?”

“I expect so.”

“I prowl about most nights,” he said, and scrutinised her face intently to observe the effect of his words.

“I know. I’ve seen you.”

“It is regrettable,” he remarked, “that the upper story of a private house is usually inaccessible. Won’t you have another piece of cake? No! Miss Matilda, may I fetch you some tea?”

The maidenly breasts of the four Miss Graynors, who were pale reflections of their eldest sister, were pleasantly stirred by Steele’s punctilious courtesy. They were envious of their young half-sister, whose temerity had led her into the indiscretion of spending an entire morning in the society of a member of the opposite sex. It does not follow that a life which has known no romance is innocent of romantic aspirations. Miss Matilda, spare and prim and slightly grey, experienced a vague sense of loss and of resentment against her single state when she met Steele’s smiling, youthful eyes, and reflected that no man’s glance had ever rested upon herself with that look of pleased interest which she observed in Steele’s face whenever it was turned in Prudence’s direction. Prudence, of course, was pretty and young. Miss Matilda’s girlhood lay behind her, but it had known none of the delights that her virgin heart longed for in the secret chamber which she seldom unlocked even for her own inspection. The emotions that lay concealed there were unbecoming in a modest woman whose function it was to be pious and dutiful in the acceptance of her lot.

It was possibly due to these hidden emotions that Steele found Miss Matilda’s society less depressing than her sister’s, and he clung to it tenaciously until the entrance of brother William assigned him as by right to the position of audience to the ponderous conversation of this man of limited intelligence and no humour. William would have failed to understand that a man, even when young, would rather talk with a woman than be talked to by himself. The manner in which his sisters effaced themselves in his presence was a tribute to, as well as a recognition of, his masculine superiority. It was the want of a proper appreciation on his youngest sister’s part in this respect that so frequently made it necessary for him to assert his dignity before her. He was angry with her now, and he passed her with his face averted, righteous indignation in his frown and in the set of his shoulders. Steele felt that it would be a pleasure to kick him; but when he detected the mischievous wickedness in Prudence’s eyes, William’s dignity became a matter for amusement rather than annoyance; the man was so obviously an ass.

“The weather,” William observed, as he took his tea, waited on by two of his sisters despite Steele’s efforts to relieve them, “shows signs of breaking. The barometer has fallen.”

“The country needs rain,” Miss Agatha remarked in tones of satisfaction.

And for the next few minutes the advantages of a good downpour and the benefit therefrom to the garden as well as to the farmers, was discussed in detail: the watering of the borders, it transpired, fully occupied the gardener’s time each evening as a result of the dry spell.

Bored beyond measure, Steele took an abrupt leave, and declining William’s invitation to take a stroll round the grounds in his company, seized his hat and fled.

“She’ll never stick it,” he reflected, as he banged the gate and hurried away down the road like a man pursued. “She can’t. She’ll do a bunk, one day. I would in her place.”

And Prudence, defenceless in the drawing-room, meeting the brunt of William’s anger, and the reproaches of the others, determined in her rebellious soul that if release did not come in some legitimate form before she was twenty-one, she would on acquiring that age obtain it for herself.

Chapter Seven.

The moonlight fell softly on Prudence’s bright hair, touching the curls lovingly with a wan brilliance that, paling their shining gold, added a purer sheen to replace the beauty stolen by the night. Its light was reflected in the blue depths of her eyes, eyes which took on the misty darkness of the night sky so that the moonbeams felt at home therein and lingered there confidingly. She leaned far out of the window, and the fragrance of some early gloire de Dijon roses was wafted towards her on the night breeze. A scent besides that of the roses stole up to her out of the shadows—the scent of cigarette smoke, too close under her window to suggest that the smoker was beyond the wall that shut off the garden from the road. Prudence had watched the smoker enter the garden; she watched him now throw away his cigarette among the flowers in one of the borders as he advanced, and she heard his voice speaking softly to her out of the gloom.

“Can’t you come down?” he asked.

“Not unless you have come provided with a rope ladder,” she replied as softly.

“By Jove! I never thought of that. But you aren’t locked in?”

“Not in the sense you mean. But locked doors would be trifles compared with the opposition I should encounter if I attempted to join you. I’d love to come out; but it’s impossible.”

“Is there any likelihood of our being overheard?” he asked with caution.

Prudence laughed quietly.

“Every likelihood,” she answered. “I don’t think I mind.”

Steele stood under cover of the wall of the house. There were no lights in the windows on that side; he had observed that on former occasions; the library, where Mr Graynor sat every evening with William, faced the other way.

“Then I’m going to run the risk and stay and talk with you,” he said.

There was a strange intimacy in the situation that appealed to Prudence. The adventure of the morning was as nothing compared with this stolen interview. The insufficient light of the moon, and the distance which divided them, added a touch of romance which she found pleasantly exciting. To gaze down upon his upturned face and the uncertain outline of his form below stirred her imagination; and the necessity for caution, occasioning them to lower their voices to whispers, gave to the utterance of the most trivial speech the flavour of intimate things. She leaned down nearer to him.

“It’s rather like Romeo and Juliet, isn’t it?” she said.

“That ended rottenly,” he replied, and laughed.

“So will this probably. What made you venture inside?”

“Isn’t the reason obvious?” he returned. “I thought I had prepared you for my visit at tea. It wasn’t possible for us to say good-bye like that. I’m sorry I got you into that mess.”

“You didn’t,” Prudence assured him gently. “I knew how it would be. I’m not regretting—anything. Stinging nettles cease to hurt when the rash subsides. William is furious. We don’t speak.”

“That must be rather a relief for you.”

She dimpled suddenly.

“He doesn’t think so. When I apologise I am to be taken into favour again. So, if he keeps to that, it is likely to be many years before we interchange remarks.”

“What an egregious ass he is,” Steele commented. “Never mind that now. We don’t want to discuss him. I came to-night to beg a favour. Will you write to me sometimes? ... and may I write? I don’t want to lose touch altogether.”

“I can’t promise that,” she said, and fingered a rosebud below her window, snapping its stem in nervous preoccupation. “All our letters go into a box at the post office and are sorted before we receive them. They would not allow me to correspond with you.”

“Could we not arrange a little deception,” he suggested, “by means of which you could collect your own letters from the post office?”

But this idea did not commend itself to Prudence. She might be a rebel, but she was honest, as courageous people usually are; anything in the nature of deceit repelled her. “I should not care to do that,” she said. Her answer pleased Steele, although it defeated his purpose. He had hoped to follow up this pleasant friendship begun under such unusual and difficult conditions. It was the quality of conspiracy and quick intimacy which made the acquaintance so extraordinarily attractive to him. He was more than half in love with her already; and it galled him to reflect that with his present uncertain prospects he was no match for this daughter of a wealthy man. He could not have afforded to marry had other conditions proved favourable, which they did not: Mr Graynor would scarcely have welcomed a son-in-law with a salary of under two hundred a year.

“I am afraid that settles it,” he said in tones compounded of a mixture of emotions. “I wonder if ever I’ll have the good luck to meet you again?”

This remark pulled Prudence up sharply. She had never considered the question of his going out of her life; the suggestion thus forced on her unwilling attention hurt. Abruptly the knowledge came to her that she did not wish to lose his friendship. She had not considered the matter of his going away seriously: she had taken it for granted that the business that had brought him to Wortheton would bring him again; no doubt had crossed her mind as to a further meeting—now that the doubt was implanted a vague distress seized her, bringing with it a sense of desolation. She realised that when he was gone she would miss him, would feel doubly lonely by comparison with this bright break in the monotony of her life.

“You’ll come again?” she said quickly.

“It’s possible,” he answered, “but not in the least likely. It was just a chance that brought me this time. The firm sends a more important man as a rule. If I come again you will soon know of it. I shall make my first appearance under your window. In the meanwhile you will quite possibly have forgotten my existence.”

“Amid the distractions of Wortheton!” Prudence retorted. “That’s very probable, isn’t it?”

He laughed.

“I won’t hear a word against Wortheton if it keeps your memory green,” he returned.

“It fossilises memory,” she answered. “Every little event that has ever befallen is stamped on my mind in indelible colours—drab colours for the unpleasant event, and brighter tints for the pleasant in comparison with their different degrees of agreeableness.”

“And this event?” he questioned. “These stolen moments? In what colour is this event painted?”

“I’ll tell you that when we meet again—perhaps,” she answered.

“Oh please!” he persisted. “I want to know now.”

Prudence laughed softly. He detected a slight nervousness in her mirth, a quality of shyness that gratified his eager curiosity, conveying as it did that the girl was not insensible of his influence and his unspoken homage.

“You see,” she said, and blushed warmly in the darkness as she leaned down towards him, “it is all a confusion of splashes of moonlight and brighter splashes of sunshine. There aren’t any colours on the canvas at all.”

“I’m contented with that,” he said... “a luminous impression! Your fancy pleases me. My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall—just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that—inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward.”

This extravagance led to further admissions. He managed very clearly to convey to his silent listener that his feeling for her was of quite an unusual quality, that he cared immensely, that he had no intention of letting her drop out of his life. He wanted to see more of her and was fully determined to do so. He made her realise that unless she disclaimed a reciprocal liking he intended taking her silence for acquiescence. He spoke so rapidly, and with so much concentrated passion in his lowered tones, that Prudence only vaguely comprehended all that his eager words attempted to convey. She was apprehensive of discovery, and, rendered doubly nervous by this clandestine love-making and the fear of interruption, could find no words in which to reply. She wanted time to think: the whole situation flurried her; and her heart was beating with a rapidity that made articulation difficult.

“Oh!” she said... “Oh! I didn’t know... I didn’t understand...”

“Well, you understand now,” he answered. “Prudence, give me one word—one kind word to carry away with me... dear!”

There followed a pause, during which her face showed dimly above him, with eyes shadowed darkly in the wan light. She leaned towards him.

“Ssh! Good-bye—dear!” she called back softly. And the next thing he realised, even as her words floated faintly down to his eager ears, was that he was standing alone in the darkness, gazing up at the place where she had stood and from whence she had vanished with startling and unaccountable suddenness.

Later Steele walked back to the quaint little hotel where he was staying, confused by the hurried sweetness of her farewell as she withdrew from her position at the window with a caution that suggested unseen interruption. He had stepped forward with noiseless haste to secure a rose which fell from her window, and carrying it with him, made his way silently out of the garden. He was never certain whether the falling of the rose had been accidental, or whether Prudence had dropped it for him as a token and a reminder; but because her hand had gathered it, he lifted it in the moonlight and touched its cool fragrance reverently with his lips. The act made him consciously her lover. The rose became a symbol—a bond between him and her. Just so long as he kept it he knew that her influence would dominate his life, and his memory of her retain its warm and vital quality, so that she would remain a beautiful inspiration amid the sordid worries of uncongenial things.

Chapter Eight.

“I heard you,” Miss Matilda said in tones of immense reserve to her youngest sister on the following morning when they met on the landing at the top of the stairs, “talking from your window last night.”

Prudence blushed brightly.

“Then it was you who came to my door?”

“Yes.” Miss Matilda kept her maidenly gaze lowered to the carpet. Her expression was guilty, so that one might have supposed that she, and not the defiant young woman whom she accosted in this unexpected way, had engaged in clandestine whisperings overnight. “I was afraid Mary might wake. You were a little imprudent, I think.”

Prudence laughed. The gently spoken reproof sounded like a play on her name.

“You are a dear,” she said, and felt more kindly towards this sister whom she so little understood.

Had Miss Matilda proved less pliant to Miss Graynor’s moulding she might have developed into an ordinary human being; but she had gone down under Miss Agatha’s training, had imbibed the family traditions until she became saturated with the Graynor ideals and lost her own individuality. In her heart she sympathised with her sister’s indiscretions; but her mind condemned this conduct as unseemly and unbecoming in a girl of refinement.

She went downstairs in advance of Prudence, and throughout the reading of the morning prayers her pink distressed face witnessed to its owner’s shame in being a partner to this flagrant deception. She was shielding her sister against her conscience: no accessory to a criminal offence could have felt more wickedly implicated. And Prudence did not care. She was so utterly reckless that she had not bargained even with Miss Matilda for her silence. It had not occurred to Prudence that anyone could be mean enough to inform against her.

With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off trimming a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably.

“It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds,” Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window.

Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was “tramps.”

“In that case,” she said with decision, “it is a matter for the police.”

The smile in Prudence’s eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda’s downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarrassment which follows upon duplicity.

Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele.

“I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning,” he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his buttons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. “I hope Morgan won’t send a man like that again.”

“Edward Morgan usually comes himself,” Mr Graynor observed. “But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble.”

“Well, of course,” said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, “he is getting old.”

Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty.

“Don’t be absurd,” interposed Miss Agatha sharply. “Mr Morgan is in the prime of life.”

Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence’s existence, was compelled to let the remark pass unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appetite, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the scrappy conversation to which she paid no attention.

At the finish of the meal Miss Agatha created a diversion by requesting William to call at the police station to report that tramps had been loitering on the premises and had made havoc of the flowers in the borders. William required to be shown the borders, which he inspected with an air of pompous vexation, describing the damage as scandalous and an outrage, to the secret amusement of his youngest sister, who observed him critically from the French window of the drawing-room, which looked upon the borders in question. William was aware of her presence and of the smiling impertinence of her glance. It may have been the sight of her standing there in her scornful indifferent youth that accounted for the connecting thought which caused him to lift his eyes with swift suspicion to the window above the despoiled bed. Prudence, intercepting the upward glance, felt her cheeks suddenly aglow. For the first time since their disagreement he looked her fully in the face; then, with a change of expression that was a studied insult, he looked away.

“I don’t think it is the work of a tramp,” he said. “But I will inform the police. If anyone is caught loafing about the premises I’ll run him in.”

And Prudence, gazing upon the outraged dignity of his retreating back, laughed with considerable enjoyment.

“If only he could see how ridiculous he looks!” she mused, and stepped out upon the path, and gathered a wallflower head, which with an air of bravado she pinned in the front of her dress.

She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele’s visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow’s head. Bobby’s incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence’s horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence’s frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt. There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence. For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle’s lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented. That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circumstances.

When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele’s visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly.

“Oh, that!” she said. “That’s ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background.”

“The new curate!” suggested Bobby, grinning. “The chap who is fluttering the dovecots on account of his being unmarried. You devoted several letters to him, I remember. What’s he like?”

“He’s a little man in a big coat and a big hat,” she answered. “What can be seen of him is quite nice, but it isn’t much. There must be a brain of sorts under the hat, but it’s little too. His chief idiosyncrasy is that he fancies himself all brain. Mrs North is trying to marry her daughter to him.”

“And he prefers you,” commented Bobby... “naturally.”

Prudence smiled wickedly.

“He says it is the duty of a curate with only his stipend to depend upon to marry a woman of independent means. I think myself he will marry Matilda. He would like to belong to the family; the factory attracts him.”

“Money-grubbing little worm!” said Bobby, who was barely a year younger than Prudence and presumed on that account to set aside her more responsible relationship. “I wish he would marry Aunt Agatha. That would be something of a lark.”

“Poor little man!” said Prudence. “He’s not so impossible as all that. And he is horribly afraid of her. She makes him stammer.”

Bobby laughed outright.

“We’re all horribly afraid of her. That’s the funny part of it. And yet, you know, if one turned round and cheeked her she’d crumple up. I’ll do it one day.”

Prudence regarded him with increased respect.

“I hope I’ll be there,” was all she said.

Chapter Nine.

Bobby made the acquaintance of the curate very soon after that talk. They met for the first time at the vicarage garden party, which, according to an invariable rule, was held on Mrs North’s birthday. This enabled the vicar’s wife to display her birthday gifts, exciting by their numerical strength rather than their quality envy in the breasts of those guests less favoured in the matter of tokens of esteem on the important day which by right of precedent we appropriate to ourselves, and causing embarrassment to the more neglectful of her visitors by this reminder of a custom ignored.

She made little self-depreciatory remarks in displaying these absurd articles, which wore in most instances an appearance of having come from some bazaar stall and a dejected air of expectation that eventually they would return thither by reason of their uselessness, and be sold and resold at extortionate prices for charitable ends.

When one tired of viewing the gifts one wandered about the garden and admired the flowers, and a few of the younger people played tennis. The vicar hovered on the outskirts and smiled with remote affability upon every one. He discussed eighteenth century art with anyone who would listen to him. He claimed to be an authority on eighteenth century art, and possessed a few pictures which he had dug out of second-hand dealers’ shops and bought for a trifle on account of their doubtful authenticity. He led the way triumphantly to his study where these treasures were hung, and discoursed learnedly on Humphreys, and other artists of that period, while he showed his canvasses to a listless, uninterested, and uninformed audience, who had seen most of them before. One crude portrait, that resembled a bad imitation of the Hamilton, he pronounced to be a Romney. No one believed him. It is doubtful whether he believed it himself; the dealer who had sold it to him had lied without conviction. But the possession of even a questionable Romney afforded him a sense of artistic importance. His collection was, he asserted, very valuable. He had insured it for a figure which would have tempted many people to the mean crime of arson: there were moments, when the vicar was harassed and the Easter offering had proved disappointing, when he gazed upon this comfortable asset lining his walls and decided that if Providence saw fit to raze his dwelling to the ground he would bear his loss with Christian fortitude and take a holiday abroad on the proceeds.

Bobby, as one of the younger guests, enjoying also the doubtful privilege of being one of the two bachelors of the party—the other being the curate—was spared a review of the pictures and carried off to the tennis court by Mable North and several middle-aged spinsters, who cheated themselves into the deception that because romance had not been met in their youth, youth lay before instead of behind them, and saw in every unattached male a suppliant for their favour or an object for their womanly sympathy. Why country parishes beget these women remains an unsolved problem, but that they do beget them is very certain—women who cherish sickly sentimentality beyond the time for its decent interment and who look down on their sturdier sisters of a busier atmosphere as unsexed for putting the impossible aside and seeking a justification for their existence in an independence apart from these things.

Bobby played several sets of tennis with various partners of doubtful efficiency, opposed to the curate with a similar inadequate support who beseeched him plaintively to take her balls whenever they pitched a yard from her racket. And then the two young men insisted upon a rest, and sat on a bench a little apart from the feminine element and took stock of one another. Prudence and a dispirited-looking woman of uncertain age played a set against Mable North and the Sunday-school lady superintendent, who was stout and forty and of a practical turn of mind. She rather preferred playing in a feminine foursome. The curate had eyes only for Prudence. It is doubtful whether he knew who else was on the court.

“Your cousin is so graceful,” he remarked to Bobby in an undertone. And Bobby, interrupted in the business of observing the curate’s infatuated glances, brought himself up sharply and allowed his surprised gaze to follow his companion’s.

“My—Oh! my aunt. Yes, she’s ripping, isn’t she?”

“The relationship seems so absurd,” the curate said, with his eyes on Bobby’s long legs. “I always confuse it.”

“Yes,” Bobby agreed. “I might as well be a grandfather as she my aunt. There’s not a year’s difference between us.”

He offered his cigarette case to the curate, who declined the invitation to smoke.

“It is such a mistake to drug the brain,” he said.

“It’s so difficult,” Bobby returned cheerfully, “to know whether one has a brain to drug.”

“Oh! I don’t think anyone can have any doubt about that,” the curate returned seriously.

“No,” Bobby agreed. “It is generally the other people who entertain doubts.”

He lighted himself a cigarette and slipped the case into his pocket.

“Prudence smokes—like a furnace,” he added—“whenever she gets the chance.”

Smokes! and surreptitiously! The curate was horrified.

“You are joking surely?” he said.

“Not much of a joke, when I have to supply the fags.” Bobby looked amused. “We have to be mighty close about it. I am not allowed to smoke in the Presence.” So he designated Miss Agatha.

“But we moon about the garden at night and enjoy ourselves.”

“Well played!” cried the curate enthusiastically, and ignored Bobby’s confidence in his warm admiration for Prudence’s spirited return. “That was very neatly placed indeed,” he said.

“Prudence is a very deceptive player. She always scores through trickery,” Bobby observed, and watched the effect of this remark on his disapproving listener. “Nothing very brilliant about her play, you may note; but she wins all the time.”

“She is so very graceful,” the curate said again, as though this quality was accounted a virtue in his estimation, as probably it was.

“He’s an awful ass, Prue,” Bobby confided to her later. “And I’ve spoilt your matrimonial chances by telling him you smoke.”

Whereupon Prudence laughed sceptically.

“As though I couldn’t counteract that by allowing him to convert me from the evil practice,” she said.

“I think you are an abandoned little wretch,” Bobby said, and dismissed the subject. It was so very evident that the curate as a rival for Prudence’s favour was a negligible quantity.

“Pretty tame, these old tabby meetings,” Bobby remarked presently. “Why don’t they do something in this benighted hole?”

“That’s what I am always wondering. I am looking to you to come home and wake the place up.”

“Paint it red?” he suggested, grinning.

“Paint it any colour, save the drab hues which at present disfigure it. There isn’t any earthly reason why people should remain satisfied to be so dull. What are you going to do when you come home to settle?”

“Well, the first thing I shall do will be to marry—in order to get away from the Court,” he replied with decision. “I refuse to be aunt-pecked any longer than necessity demands.”

“Does that include me?” Prudence inquired with irony.

“You! Oh Lord!” He threw back his head and laughed. “You can come along and share my emancipation.”

“Thank you.” Prudence’s small chin was elevated, her lip curled disdainfully. “I shall contrive my own emancipation,” she said.

“How?” he asked, suddenly interested.

“By marriage also,” she answered, and laughed and broke from his detaining hand and fled indoors.

Bobby looked after her in perplexity.

“By Jove! I had forgotten that chap,” he reflected, and recalled her earlier confidences with suddenly awakened suspicion and a mind not a little disturbed. He had been joking. Possibly Prudence had been joking also. But Wortheton without her would be a drear hole, he decided; and Wortheton and the factory were his ultimate and inevitable lot.

And yet he did not wish her to remain unmarried. His five spinster aunts and the unmarried women he had met that afternoon, hovering hungrily about the little curate, sickened him. Prudence had no place in that gallery. She was altogether too fine and too clever to be wasted in the narrow seclusion of this life which she led with such evident distaste. Of course she would marry and go away. That was the chief point; she would go away. It didn’t after all seem to matter who the fellow was, so long as he was a decent sort of chap and could provide for her an appreciate her qualities of beauty and intellect. If he didn’t appreciate her—so Bobby philosophised—it would be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire; but whoever it was got into the flames, the young man felt comfortably assured it would not be Prudence. She would contrive her emancipation more thoroughly than that.

“I wish I had asked her more about that fellow,” he mused.

But he recognised that the time for asking questions was past.

Chapter Ten.

“I’ve been thinking,” Bobby remarked one evening to Prudence, when they strolled up the road together in the dusk, “about our talk the other afternoon; and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of the place, it’s our own fault, that we find life dull. One place is much like another. Either we want too much, or else we are dull in ourselves and can’t get the enjoyment out of life that is there for our taking. That’s what I make of it anyhow.”

Prudence considered this.

“Possibly I want too much—I think I do,” she said after a while. “And so do you. We are the children of our age, Bobby; we’ve learnt to think for ourselves; when one begins to think one ceases to accept things unquestioningly. I’m alive to my finger tips. I want to enjoy. I am not satisfied merely to exist; a worm does that. I want to experience life to the full. Don’t you?”

“I suppose I do,” Bobby agreed—“when you put it that way.”

Prudence was triumphant.

“There you are, you see. It’s just the way a thing is put. For the moment you almost convinced me that the discontent lay in myself, and now I convince you that there is substantial ground for discontent. No one should remain quiet under dissatisfying conditions; we should each strive for individual liberty. Youth is the time in which to do things, and youth passes quickly. When we are old we cease to strive because the spirit of adventure leaves us; but the hunger for the things which we have missed remains. And that makes us bitter.”

“How do you know?” demanded Bobby, with a cynical smile for her youth.

“Know!” she repeated, and faced him, her eyes alight and scornful. “One has only to look around and note the disappointed, dull, sour people one meets; people who have had their chance and missed it, because they reasoned as you do; people who have not possessed courage or initiative, but in whose blood the desire for enjoyment has worked as surely as it works in ours. Do you suppose Agatha has never wanted to marry and manage a man and a home of her own? Do you suppose Matilda doesn’t hunger for children, and Mary for a lover? Didn’t daddy desire love? He married twice, and the second time at least was not merely a matter of expediency. I’m colder perhaps, harder anyway. I don’t want anything but just to get away from Wortheton and live my own life independently, and order my days as I please.”

Bobby stared at her open-mouthed, bereft in his astonishment of the power of speech. Prudence suddenly laughed.

“You old thing!” she cried. “I’ve properly scandalised you. Why do you set my thoughts working along these lines? You are just a boy.”

“Oh, shut it!” he ejaculated. “You aren’t much older.”

“A girl is a lot older than a boy,” she said. “She apprehends life more fully; your sex, until you are a responsible age, is just out for fun. But there’s a time limit to one’s capacity for enjoyment. In a few years I shall settle down to the routine, whatever it is that offers; and if I haven’t had my good time, I’ll just be a discontented dull reflection of the others. I know. And I’m going to guard against that.”

“But how?” he persisted. “What do you mean to do?”

“I haven’t thought that out,” Prudence answered after a moment for reflection. “I don’t know that I should confide in you if I had.”

He smiled at that, and stopped and lighted himself a cigarette.

“I don’t care what you do,” he said, and added cheerfully: “I only hope you will have a good time. You know you’re awfully pretty, Prue, and—and interesting, and all that.”

“Am I?” Prudence laughed again, and there was a note of satisfaction in her mirth. “I thank Providence that I am pretty; it makes things easier. But if I were plain I should still insist on my good time. It doesn’t necessarily include the homage of man. That’s a side issue. It is sometimes a means to an end, but the end is the thing which matters. I want my own individual life.”

“I don’t want any own individual life like that,” Bobby confessed in thoughtful seriousness. “I want a home of my own, of course, and—a wife, and all those jolly things.”

“At seventeen?” she scoffed.

And then he confided to her that he had met the divinity he hoped to marry at the home of a school chum. She was nearly as old as he was, and she was quite prepared to marry him as soon as circumstances permitted. She was a ripping good sort and very high spirited.

“You had better invite her to stay at Wortheton before the ceremony,” Prudence advised him. “If that doesn’t put her off, you’ll be sure of her genuine affection anyway.”

“I’m sure of that now,” he returned confidently.

“You’ve made good use of your time,” was all she said.

His words, the ring in his young voice, called up a mental picture of a strong clear-cut face looking up at her in the uncertain light of a moonlit night in May. She felt that somehow Bobby had outdistanced her.

“Here we are,” she exclaimed abruptly, “you and I, mooning, as we’ve mooned for years whenever the vacation came round. When we were children we mooned along and talked of splendid things—the things we meant to do, the positions we could create for ourselves in a world that was open and defenceless to our attacks; and now we moon sentimentally and talk of love instead.”

“But that’s splendid too,” he affirmed with young enthusiasm.

“Is it? ... I wonder. I think perhaps it’s just a little disappointing also... moonshine, like the rest.”

“Rot!” said Bobby elegantly. “Something’s changed you, Prue—or some one... Which?”

“The curate perhaps,” Prudence returned flippantly. “Marriage with him would not be moonshine exactly, but it would be a trifle dull—just the distractions which the parish offered, and on Sundays his sermons to listen to.”

“There would be stimulation in the way of jealousy,” Bobby suggested helpfully. “Think of all those women who work braces for him and lounge slippers. You’d have to compete, you know.”

“They cease all that when the curates marry,” Prudence returned with disgust. “If they only kept it up there would be some excitement offering; but they don’t.”

She turned and began to retrace her steps.

“Goodness knows how we got on this topic! Your brain is love-sick, Bobby, and you’re infecting me. If my memory serves me, there have been three ideal girls in your life already—and one of them was Mabel North.”

“Oh! that,” said Bobby, colouring, “was all rot. This is the real thing.”

“It’s always the real thing till the newer attraction comes along. You needn’t resent that; it’s true not only in your case. We are unstable as the waters which start from infinitesimal raindrops and run down in flood to the sea.”

Bobby chuckled.

“Your image doesn’t apply aptly to every one,” he said. “One can’t think of Uncle William in connexion with all that broiling strife.”

“Oh!” Prudence made a gesture which conveyed fairly adequately her contempt for the person referred to. “Some raindrops form into puddles, and the puddles cheat themselves into believing that they are the sea, and ridicule the idea of any expansion beyond their own muddy limits. William’s is a complete little destiny in itself. And he never suspects the mud at the bottom because he never stirs it up.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Bobby inquired. “You are taking it too much for granted that the old boy’s life is lived on the surface. He takes his annual holiday.”

“Well!” said Prudence, and turned her head and surveyed his grinning countenance with mixed emotions. “That’s the most evil suggestion I’ve heard from you. I’m not fond of brother William, but I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He only laughed.

“There’s a bit of the old Adam in him as well as in the rest of us, I imagine,” he said, and drew her hand within his arm affectionately.

Thus, walking closely, they pursued their way along the dim country road which their childish feet had trodden and made familiar in its every aspect; which knew too the steadier tramp of their adolescent youth, and which in the near future was to know but seldom the lighter tread of the girl, whose feet stirred the unconscious dust that in the years ahead would lie undisturbed by her passing, when, in the pursuance of her destiny, the confined vista of her childhood, with its sense of security and dulness, should have become an elusive memory of drab and peaceful things.

Chapter Eleven.

With Bobby’s return to college, life for Prudence reverted to the old dreary routine of ceaseless exasperating duties and increasingly curtailed liberty. She had a strong suspicion that the sisterly supervision which she was conscious was being exercised was carried out at brother William’s suggestion. Although there was no one, with the exception of the curate, to tempt her to indiscreet behaviour it was very obvious that she was not trusted to venture abroad without one of her sisters to chaperon her.

Prudence found this irksome at first, and set herself, sometimes successfully, to evade their united vigilance; but after one or two apparently accidental encounters with the curate, who appeared astonishingly in the most unexpected places and joined her on her stolen walks, she accepted the new development with a meekness which agreeably surprised her family, and discomfited the curate.

It was the curate’s quietly resolved manner, his air of exaggerated conspiracy, that drove Prudence to this unusual submissiveness. She knew quite well that the little man was making up his mind to propose to her, and she did not wish to give him the opportunity. Her decision was taken abruptly, after meeting him one day on the high road along which she was walking briskly with her back to the tall chimneys and her face to the wind and the little village which lay half-way between Wortheton and the junction town which connected it with the busier world from which it held aloof. The curate was cycling from the opposite direction. He was due to attend a meeting within the half-hour and had barely time to arrive at the appointed place; but when he came face to face with Prudence he alighted nimbly from his machine, and, pulling off a heather mixture glove, extended an eager hand. For a moment she allowed him to hold hers in his grip, and found herself wondering while she faced him which of his admirers had knitted the gloves for him. Then she withdrew her hand and remarked, for the lack of something more interesting to say, that the wind was boisterous.

“Yes,” he said; “you have it against you. Why not face about? It’s a great help at one’s back.”

This suggestion Prudence considered artful without being brilliant. She had no desire for his company on the return journey.

“I love to feel it in my face,” she said. “And since you prefer it behind it is well we are travelling in opposite directions.”

But the curate was not to be disposed of so easily. He turned his cycle and fell into step beside her. Prudence was taller than he; he was obliged to look up from under the wide brim of his hat when regarding her, a reversal of the usual order which occasioned him secret vexation.

“One so seldom gets a chance of seeing you alone,” he said. “I suppose it is because you are so much younger that your sisters make so much of you. They care for you tremendously. It is beautiful to observe their devotion.”

This view of her family’s watchful mistrust as a manifest sign of their devotion was new to Prudence and afforded her amusement. She wondered whether he was altogether sincere in what he said, or if he were indulging in unsuspected satire.

“I find it a little trying sometimes to be the family pet,” she returned demurely. “The position is rather like that of the cat of the house which gets called indoors when it would prefer to remain in the garden. I wonder myself at times why the cat obeys the summons.”

He experienced a little difficulty in following her train of thought.

“It’s thinking of the milk, I suppose,” he suggested, whereat Prudence laughed.

“I dare say that explains it—economic dependence explains many uncomfortable things. I haven’t much sympathy with the domesticated cat,” she added. “She should ignore the call, and remain in the garden and eat birds.”

“Surely,” he said, a little pained, “you wouldn’t wish it to do that? It’s so cruel.”

“So is eating mutton,” she answered flippantly; “but we all do it.”

He digested this for a moment, found no adequate answer, and turned the conversation.

“I was thinking of you as I rode,” he said, in tones into which he threw an inflection of tenderness which she could not fail to detect. “I scarcely dared to expect so much happiness as to meet you like this. You are a tremendous walker. Do you realise how far you are from home?”

He still hoped to induce her to turn and walk back with him. He would be late for his meeting in any case. He was too mentally flurried to decide how he should explain the defection: he was not very ready at invention; but the sight of Prudence’s fair indifferent face drove him to the verge of recklessness; no consideration at the moment was strong enough to tear him from her side.

“The farther the better,” Prudence answered. “I am walking into the sunset.” She turned her face to the westering sun and the warm glow in the sky that lit its declining glory. “When I turn about I see only the chimneys; they blot out everything for me.”

“But one can’t see them from this distance,” he insisted, and paused and looked back to verify his statement.

Prudence smiled faintly.

“I can,” she said. “I see them even in my dreams.”

“I think myself they look rather fine,” he said. “The red bricks against the trees are arresting.”

“Yes,” she agreed, and smiled at him more directly. He felt that he had struck a happy note and was unnecessarily elated.

“All great industries appeal to me,” he continued as they walked on again. “I’m tremendously interested in the factory—and in the workpeople. They are so human and yet simple. I enjoy working among them. And Mr Graynor is so generous. The workpeople think very highly of him. I have been very happy in my labours since coming here.”

Prudence, missing the guile in this, looked at him in astonishment.

“Really!” she said. “You are easily pleased.”

“You think so?” He drew a little nearer to her; his disengaged hand, hanging at his side, brushed lightly against hers. “I don’t think that myself. But you see I have met much kindness here, and—forgive my saying so—it is such a happiness in itself to know you. I doubt whether you understand what a priceless pleasure that is to me.”

“It is very flattering of you to say so,” Prudence broke in hastily, and not so much turned the conversation as jerked it into an impersonal channel. “Look at that gorgeous splash of red on those clouds. Isn’t it just as though they were catching fire?”

“Yes,” he said in a flattened voice, feeling the rebuff; “it’s very fine.”

“Isn’t it? And that warm light on the trees... You can see it spreading along the branches. They’re all aglow. If it could only last!”

“‘The light of the whole world dies when day is done,’” quoted the curate sentimentally, and gazed in rapt admiration upon her face which was all aglow too, but owed nothing of its colour to the sunset. “You look like one inspired,” he added. “I wish I could sketch you as I see you now.”

Prudence made an impatient movement.

“I don’t believe you care a bit for beautiful scenery,” she said.

“I do,” he assured her eagerly. “I admire everything beautiful. I... Never mind the sunset now. I’m thinking of you. I can’t think of anything else. I want to—”

“Oh!” she interrupted, with a note of sharp relief in her voice, and turned an embarrassed face in the direction of a solitary pedestrian, who appeared opportunely round a bend in the road, and slowly advanced, bearing a bundle in her arms, which at first the girl failed to recognise for an infant, wrapped in an old shawl. “There’s some one I want to speak to,” she said, and blessed Bessie Clapp for her timely appearance—“some one I know.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, still resolute though considerably ruffled at the interruption.

Prudence regarded him frowningly.

“No,” she insisted, “you mustn’t wait. I want to see her alone. I shall walk back with her.”

“That isn’t altogether kind,” he said—“to dismiss me. But I may see you another time?”

He held out his hand and waited. If he expected a direct answer to his tentative suggestion, he was disappointed. Prudence shook hands hurriedly, murmured a breathless good-bye, and left him to mount his cycle and ride in unclerical mood to his neglected meeting, where he accounted for his unpunctuality by confessing to a puncture which he omitted to explain was caused by a thorn which he had painstakingly placed in the road and ridden over when a quarter of a mile from the town. Which proves what an amount of trouble a conscientious person will take in the insincere evasion of a direct lie.

Prudence meanwhile advanced to meet the girl in the road. As the distance between them decreased she discovered that what the other carried in her arms was not an inanimate bundle, as she had supposed, but a little child. Instantly her interest quickened. The unexpected appearance of Bessie Clapp had seemed to her merely opportune at a moment when any diversion would have been welcome, but the sight of Bessie with a baby in her arms—presumably her own baby—caught her attention away from her immediate concerns and brought the other’s affairs into greater prominence. She had always believed that this girl had been hardly dealt by, and no one had ever considered it worth while to enlighten her. Prudence’s sense of justice was in arms, and her liking for Bessie, whom she had known from childhood, awoke anew at sight of the beautiful tragic face with its look of passionate antagonism. She halted in the girl’s path and accosted her with disarming friendliness.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said. “I thought you had left this neighbourhood altogether.”

“There are some as would like to make me leave,” said Bessie Clapp, her dark unsmiling gaze on the fair tranquillity of the younger, happier face. “I’ve been badgered enough. We’m living in the little village down over the hill.”

“Just five miles away! And I never knew.” Prudence bent suddenly over the bundle in her arms. “Is this your child?” she asked.

“Yes; he’s mine.”

There was proprietorship but no pride in the admission. It was Prudence’s hand which pulled the covering away from the tiny face.

“Oh!” she said, and half drew back, and then bent again compassionately over the ugly little mottled piece of humanity in the beautiful young mother’s arms. “I’ve never seen so young a baby before. What do you call him?”

“He isn’t christened,” the sullen voice responded. “I’ve no patience with those silly customs.”

“But,” began Prudence, and looked perplexed, “he’ll have to have a name of his own some time.”

“We call ’im William,” the young mother volunteered. “There’s no need for cold water splashing over that. If ’e don’t like ’is name later on, ’e can change it.”

Prudence, steering away from the subject, replaced the shawl over the little face and impulsively held out her arms.

“Let me carry him,” she said. “I’d love to; and you are tired. Where were you taking him?”

“To the farm yonder, among the trees. I get milk for ’im there. ’E’s been weaned these three weeks.”

The exchange from the girl-mother’s arms to the younger arms extended eagerly to receive their burden was effected silently. Prudence walked on proudly, bearing her unaccustomed charge with a sense of new responsibility suddenly acquired. She loved the feel of the little warm body against her heart; the nestling pressure of this soft helpless thing, which lay so confidingly within the shelter of her arms, roused in her the strong protective maternal instinct which is every woman’s heritage. In her pity for its puny helplessness she forgot the sense of shock which the first glimpse of the repellently ugly wrinkled face had occasioned her, forgot the circumstances of its unfortunate birth, and the more recent revelation that it had not been received into the Church, was not in any sense of the term a Christian; she realised only that she held in her arms that most wonderful of all things, a new generation; and felt in her heart the warm glow of protective love for this weak little morsel of humanity, born into an unwelcoming world—a love child who was denied love. The unfair conditions of the child’s birth awoke her utmost compassion. She felt resentful against its unknown father, against the injustice of the world’s judgment, which throws discredit on maternity rather than on illicit love. The greatest crime of this unwedded mother, Prudence recognised, lay in the fact that she had brought a child into the world.

“He must be a great comfort to you,” she said gently. “A baby makes up for a lot.”

Bessie Clapp laughed harshly.

“Ban’t many as think like you,” she said. “They wouldn’t agree with you at Court Heatherleigh.”

And Prudence, thinking of Agatha, and Matilda’s pink shocked face, of brother William’s austere principles, and her father’s cold disapproval at the mere mention of Bessie’s name, could not contradict this. They would have been scandalised, and she knew it, could they have seen her walking with this outcast, and carrying the outcast’s baby in her strong young arms.

Chapter Twelve.

The meeting with Bessie Clapp set Prudence’s mind working in new directions. She realised, with an immense pity and a growing wonder for the complexities of human emotions, that this girl, whose motherhood had come to her in circumstances which the world surrounds with contumely and disgrace, had no love for the child of her unlawful passion. She had allowed Prudence to discover that. But for the fear of consequent punishment, she had admitted with bitterness that she would do away with the baby. She confessed too to a hatred of its father.

Prudence wondered whether this unnatural dislike for her own offspring resulted from the shame with which its birth had covered her, or was the inevitable consequence of the revulsion of feeling which had swept from her heart every kindly emotion which must have drawn her once towards the man she now professed aversion for. The man who had injured her had a lot to answer for. If ever it lay in her power to hurt him in return it was fairly certain that she would not hesitate to use her opportunity. The silence which she maintained in regard to his name was no guarantee of a wish to shield him; it suggested rather a caution which awaited its hour to strike.

The meeting left Prudence with a feeling of depression. It did not decrease her pity, but it lessened her liking for the girl to discover her attitude of bitter resentment against the helpless mite she had brought into the world. And it set her thinking about marriage in a new light. Was it possible to cease to love a man one had loved once passionately? And could a woman grow to hate the children of a loveless marriage? If these matters were beyond the control of human will power, it seemed that it might be so. Here was an example of it anyway, though it might be a bad example. Until that talk with Bessie Clapp it had never occurred to Prudence that a woman could dislike her own child. It was one of the inexplicable problems of life.

Prudence reached home to discover that she was late. Miss Agatha met her in the hall, already dressed for the evening meal, which was the most important function of the day, and at which no one was expected to put in a tardy appearance. Miss Agatha glanced from the warning face of the great clock at the foot of the staircase to the sweet flushed face of her young sister, and from thence to her dust-soiled shoes.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “Don’t you see the time?”

“I’ll hurry,” Prudence answered. “It won’t take me three minutes to change. I’ve been for a tramp.”

“You have a deceitful habit,” Miss Agatha admonished her, “of slipping away from the house without informing anyone. If you were less selfish it might occur to you that your sisters would like to accompany you occasionally. I can’t understand why you prefer to walk alone.”

“I shall be late,” Prudence said, with her foot on the stair, “if I stay to go into that now.”

And with a rebellious face she ran upstairs, leaving Miss Agatha, aghast and indignant, looking up from the foot of the staircase after her vanishing figure. Prudence was getting altogether out of hand.

“She tramps the country,” William affirmed on learning the trouble, “like a factory girl. I won’t have my sister making herself so noticeable—mooning about the lanes and hanging over stiles. It—it isn’t respectable.”

“I wish,” Miss Agatha said, meanly shifting responsibility, “that you would put your foot down. If you were firm she might possibly respect your wishes. I can do nothing with her.”

“M’m!” William coughed gently, and assumed an expression which he hoped conveyed the air of inflexibility he deemed suited to the responsible position thus conferred on him. “I’ll see to it,” he said; and felt relieved when the gong sounded in advance of Prudence’s entry, and so deferred the moment for exercising his authority.

He was less confident than Agatha that firmness on his part would produce the result desired. He had in mind the occasion when he had insisted upon an apology before the resumption of fraternal relations with his young sister. He had maintained a dignified silence until the thing threatened to become ridiculous, and still the apology had not been forthcoming: he had been forced to capitulate; and the memory of that defeat rankled. But the lesson had been salutary in so far that it discouraged him from straining his authority to a point whence it aggravated to open revolt. Defiance was a quality which defeated William’s statesmanship.

Prudence came running down the stairs as the rest of the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining-room.

“You ran it pretty close, Prue,” her father said, as she took the last couple of stairs at a jump and landed laughing beside him. He patted the little hand she slipped within his arm.

“You are precisely two minutes late,” Miss Agatha observed. “I think you might have made a greater effort to be punctual.”

“I might, of course, have slid down the banisters,” Prudence retorted.

“Tut, tut!” Mr Graynor patted the small hand again in gentle reproof. “You are tomboy enough without scandalising us to that extent.”

Save that he held his head a little higher on passing behind her to his seat at table, William disregarded her presence, a sign by which Prudence recognised that she was once again in disgrace. It occasioned her therefore something of a shock when William approached her later during the evening and requested a few minutes of her time. He had something of importance, he announced, which he wished to say. This request in its unexpectedness deprived her for the moment of breath. She was attracted by his speech and puzzled. She found herself wondering amazedly what kind of confidence William intended to repose in her. William found her silence embarrassing; he had expected her to give him a cue. He cleared his throat, nervously fingering the arrangement of his tie. Prudence began to feel sympathetic. She believed he was about to confess to some romantic attachment, although there was not, so far as she knew, any woman of their acquaintance likely to inspire sentiment in him. If William were in love, that might account for his preoccupation during dinner.

“Please give me your whole attention,” he said, which was a superfluous remark even for a commencement; it was so obvious that he was receiving what he asked for. “It is a little difficult for me, a little—ahem!—embarrassing to say what I wish to say in view of your inexperience.”

This confirmed Prudence’s suspicion. She smiled at him encouragingly.

“Oh! I expect I’ll understand,” she said kindly. “It’s nice of you to tell me, anyhow.”

He was taken aback, and he showed it. He had never known Prudence so amenable before; her attitude discountenanced him slightly.

“I am glad you take so sensible a tone,” he returned; “it makes my task easier. I do not wish to find fault; your conduct is indiscreet rather than blameworthy. You ought to realise that it is not seemly for a young girl in your position to tear about the country as you do. I am not sure that in a factory town it is altogether safe. In any case it gets you talked about. It distresses your sisters; it distresses me. It lays you open to misapprehension. Why should you wander about the roads alone?”

“Oh! Is that all?” Prudence’s smile had changed in quality; kindliness made way for irony. “How do you know I do wander alone?” William reddened angrily.

“I should be sorry to insult you by supposing the contrary,” he replied with restrained annoyance. “No one in this house credits you with being other than thoughtless. Your behaviour shows a great want of consideration for your family.”

“It wasn’t until to-day that I realised you were all so devoted to me,” Prudence returned with suspicious meekness. “I have yet to get accustomed to that idea. So much family affection is embarrassing.”

“If you are going to adopt that outrageous tone,” William observed with a resumption of dignity, “I have nothing further to say.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Prudence reassured him. “You haven’t left much unsaid. You have filled my mind with a lot of new ideas that make it feel like a rubbish heap. If the roads are not safe for a girl to walk along, it is time some one saw to it that they were made so. As for being talked about, no one with a decent mind would make matter for talk where there was none. Are you quite sure, William, that your own mind doesn’t need a little tidying up? Your workpeople at least are your responsibility. If you have any dubious characters among them, turn them away—as you turned away Bessie Clapp.”

William’s face was crimson. He rose and stood looking down at her with the look of a man who feels himself deeply insulted.

“You forget yourself,” he said. “How dare you mention that woman’s name to me?”

“I have held that woman’s child in my arms to-day,” she answered quietly. “I think perhaps that gives me the courage.”

He bent swiftly and caught her by the shoulder.

“So that’s how you spend your time?” he said, staring into her steady eyes. He emitted an ugly laugh and pushed her roughly from him. “A decent-minded girl would shrink from such contact.”

She smiled coldly.

“It is only the decent mind that does not fear these things,” she answered, and turned away from the look in his eyes, which was not good to see.

It was by a great effort at control that he refrained from striking her. He spluttered for words. Confronted with her cool disdain, anger overcame him. He felt himself at an immense disadvantage.

“You are impossible!” was all he could find to say.

Prudence, thinking over the scene later, while leaning from her window with the night wind cooling her heated face, wondered what was wrong with herself that this spirit of antagonism should flame forth at the slightest provocation. Why could she not endure William, and suffer his little homilies with patience? Why should Agatha’s constant fault-finding irritate her to the verge of desperation? If she were possessed of a vein of humour, she told herself, these things would merely afford amusement. But they did not amuse. They were slowly souring a naturally sweet disposition.

Big tears welled in the blue eyes, hung for a space on her lashes, and fell like silver dew upon the rose-leaves beneath the sill—hot tears that sprang from the well of discontent which had its source in a vain longing for unattainable things.

Chapter Thirteen.

The troubles of youth are none the less real because to riper age they appear trivial in the retrospect. In the constant fret against the irksome restrictions of her life Prudence’s sunny nature fought under unequal conditions, with the result that the sun suffered many an eclipse. In one of these depressed moods she wrote to Bobby to the effect that she felt unequal to holding out until he came home for good, and that if matters did not improve the desperation of the situation would drive her to elope with the curate.

“The sole consideration which deters me,” she added, “is that Jones is such an impossible name.”

“What’s in a name?” Bobby wrote back airily. “You’re safe, old girl, if you jib at a little thing like that.”

The curate, failing to meet Prudence alone and wearying of being fenced with, took a mean advantage of her at the annual Sunday-school treat, and secluding her in a corner of the playing-field with her class of infants, set the infants running races and came rather abruptly to his point.

“I love to watch you with little children,” he remarked with disconcerting suddenness. “You have such a wonderful sympathy with them.”

“I like children,” she answered guardedly; and tried to gather the babies about her; but the curate was throwing sweets for them, and they preferred scrambling for these to clinging to teacher’s hands. There is a time for everything.

“So do I,” he said, attentively scrutinising her averted face, and admiring the fine colour in her cheeks which a new quality in his voice had brought there. “Children in the home make home beautiful.”

He swept the field with his glance, and decided that his chance was short-lived and might not come again. He plunged desperately.

“I want to marry,” he said, hurriedly, and threw a further quantity of sweets to the children and turned more directly towards her. “I have been waiting so long for an opportunity of saying this to you that you will forgive me if I seem a little abrupt and choose my time inopportunely. I never see you alone now. You cannot have failed to observe how deeply in love I am. You are so sweet and gentle that I feel you will be kind. I want a little encouragement.” He paused expectantly. “I may go on?” he asked, when she took no advantage of his hesitation. “You will give me a little hope?”

Prudence turned her face and met his eyes fully. There was no possibility of mistaking his meaning.

“No, please don’t,” she said. “I don’t want you to say any more. I hoped you would see it wasn’t any use. I’m sorry.”

The curate although a vain man, had never felt very confident of winning her. He wanted her quite urgently; but he was not so deeply in love with Prudence as he was with himself, and the certainty of defeat wounded his pride more than it wounded his feelings. He had no intention of giving her the satisfaction of being in a position to say that she had refused him. He dissembled meanly, congratulating himself on the clever ambiguity with which he had worded his proposal.

“I am sorry you have formed that opinion,” he said, trying to keep the chagrin he felt from betraying itself in his voice. “You are so much with her that I believed you would enjoy her entire confidence, and I was vain enough to expect a little encouragement. But I am not going to accept your opinion as final. I shall make my appeal to her. Perhaps I ought to have done so in the first instance; but a man feels naturally diffident at these times.”

The play of expression on Prudence’s face while she listened to his stilted sentences was remarkable. He would have been very obtuse if he believed that he succeeded in deceiving her. It was very evident that she apprehended him very clearly. A little smile hovered about her mouth when she replied to him.

“If it is Matilda you allude to,” she said, with an ambiguity equal to his own, “I wish you all the success you deserve.”

He raised his hat gravely and left her, carrying the bag of sweets with him, to the manifest disgust of the staring infants; and Prudence, watching his hurrying little figure making its purposeful way through the different groups in search of his unconscious quarry, laughed quietly and without malice, despite his ungenerous effort to humiliate her.

“Now I shall have a new enemy in my brother-in-law,” she reflected. “He is marrying the chimneys. But Matilda will be too grateful to him to resent that.”

Matilda was grateful. She was sufficiently overcome with the honour thus conferred on her to satisfy even Mr Jones’ colossal vanity. Mr Jones accepted his triumph with becoming condescension; to describe his air as elated would be misleading. His manner towards his affianced wife, who was several years his senior, and had never been handsome, was benevolently patronising. His courtship was business-like, and free from those affectations of silly sentiment so unsuited to his calling. If Miss Matilda regretted the lack of lover-like attentions, she concealed her disappointment, clinging insistently to the belief that everything that Ernest did was right and dignified. It would have been unbecoming in a clergyman to be demonstrative.

“I used to think,” she confessed to Prudence in a moment of rare confidence, “that it was you he admired. You remember how he used to persist in accompanying us on our walks, and how he talked principally with you? All the while he was thinking of me. He told me so. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“He has the sense,” Prudence answered, and kissed the flushed face kindly, “to realise that you will make the best wife in the world for a clergyman.”

And she thought of Bobby’s epithet, “money-grubbing little worm,” and decided that it aptly fitted Ernest.

Bobby chaffed her about the curate, affecting to believe she had suffered a disappointment.

Prudence did not confide in him the tale of the curate’s duplicity; loyalty to Matilda kept her silent on that subject. But her wrathful disgust was roused on the day of Matilda’s wedding, when Mr Jones, claiming the privilege of a brother, caught her unprepared in the hall and kissed her unsuspecting lips.

“If you ever take such a liberty with me again,” she said, white and angry, “I will make you the laughing-stock of Wortheton.”

He assumed an air of dignity while conscious of looking ridiculous. Her words, her tone in uttering them, lashed him into a rage of hatred that cured him finally of any tender thought he had cherished in regard to her. He spoke of her later to his wife as ill-mannered and ungentle of temper, a description which, while holding it to be ungenerous, occasioned Matilda considerable comfort. She had felt uneasily jealous of Prudence at times, even during the days of her brief engagement. Mr Jones had shown such predilection for the society of the younger sister that Matilda, like Leah, was made to realise the humiliating position of the substitute. Her faith in his uprightness did not allow of disbelief; besides which his ill-natured criticism of her young sister carried conviction; his tone expressed cordial dislike.

“Fuller acquaintance with her reveals her more objectionable qualities,” he said. “I believed her to be a nice, simple girl, but she is certainly not that.”

“Prudence is very warm-hearted,” Matilda said weakly in defence of the absent. “But father spoils her a little.”

“He makes a fool of her,” was the bridegroom’s unclerical retort.

Thus Matilda left the home of her childhood, seated beside her husband in the carriage which was to take them to the junction, and to the back of which Bobby, with a sense of the eternal unfitness of things, had tied one of Matilda’s discarded shoes. Not even the thought of the comfortable dowry which went with the gentle Matilda had the power to lighten Mr Jones’ lowering countenance during the long drive to the station, and Mr Graynor had behaved with quite surprising generosity in the matter of settlements. The hard ring in Prudence’s voice, when she had threatened to make a laughing-stock of him, the expression of disgust on her white face, hit his pride hard. And he dared not offend her further from the wholly unnecessary fear that she would put her threat into execution. He knew that he had paid her marked attention, and that Wortheton was aware of his preference. If she chose to spread tales about him they would not lack credence.

His frown deepened when he felt his wife’s gloved hand timidly feeling for his; then he roused himself with an effort and responded to the gentle pressure of her fingers.

“It’s nervous work getting married,” he said, with an uneasy laugh. “The fuss and the crowd... every one staring. Phew!”

Matilda sympathised with him; she had felt nervous also.

“I’m glad it’s over—oh! so very glad—and happy, dear.”

“Blithering ass, isn’t he?” was Bobby’s cheerful comment, when, turning from watching the vanishing carriage, he found Prudence beside him, looking unusually tall and womanly in her bridesmaid’s dress of soft blue, with a hat with cornflowers in it shading her face. “Come along, and drink to their connubial bliss in another bumper of champagne.”

He filled her glass for her and one for himself.

“Cheer up,” he cried, and raising his glass, grinned at her over the brim. “There are more Joneses than one in the sea. You needn’t sport the willow so openly. It’s indecent. Here’s to their health, wealth, and happiness! It will be wealth for him, anyway—cute little beast!”

Prudence became aware of her father surveying them from the doorway with a tired smile on his bored and worried face. He had slipped away from his guests, who lingered aimlessly on the lawn, and followed them indoors. She persuaded him to take a seat beside her and drink a glass of his own very excellent champagne.

“It’s jolly good stuff. You did them awfully well, sir,” said Bobby enthusiastically approving. “We’ve given Wortheton something to think about. It’ll be Prue’s turn next.”

“There’s plenty of time for Prudence,” Mr Graynor said—“plenty of time.”

He found himself looking at her in her unfamiliar dress, surprised, as Bobby had been, by the womanliness he realised for the first time. It disconcerted him.

“Weddings are a nuisance; they upset the household,” he said. “I wish all these people would go.”

“They are like the wasps,” said Bobby; “they’ll hang about so long as the grub’s there. I’ll go out and clear them off.”

He left the room by the window. Mr Graynor looked after him, and meeting Prudence’s eye, exchanged a smile with her.

“The assurance of youth!” he remarked. “You and I, we’ve had enough of them, Prue.” He regarded her again more attentively. “That blue dress is very becoming to you, my dear.”

Prudence flushed warmly. His appreciation recalled to her mind the light of admiration in the curate’s eyes, his quick hungry swoop towards her, the eager furtiveness of his kiss—the first time that a man’s lips had touched hers, other than the members of her family. But he belonged to the family in a sense—a wretched little hanger-on, catching at the overflow from the Graynor pockets.

“If it is becoming, I don’t believe you like it very well,” she said.

“It makes you look old—perhaps that’s why,” he answered, and thought with regret of the little girl who had given place to this tall and gracious young woman.

Chapter Fourteen.

Matilda’s departure from the family circle made strangely little difference. She had made no particular place for herself in the home which she had occupied for thirty years, had established no claim on any member of her family. If anyone missed her, it was Prudence: Matilda had been the most amiable of her elder sisters; but she had never been in any sense of the word a companion. The first Mrs Graynor’s family, with the exception of the younger son, were none of them companionable; they were self-contained and reserved, and lacking in those qualities of individuality and initiative which make for the breaking away from tradition and the following a line of one’s own. Matilda was naturally submissive. She had submitted uncomplainingly to Agatha’s rule all her life; and she left one submission for another, and, in accordance with the dictates of the marriage service, which Prudence considered degrading and Matilda thought beautiful, became subject willingly to the dominating and not particularly chivalrous authority of her husband. Had Mr Jones succeeded in winning the sister whom he had coveted, he would have found this comfortable arrangement of relationship reversed. There was no aptitude for submission in Prudence.

On one point after Matilda’s marriage Prudence was firm: she refused to be chaperoned on her walks by one of the remaining sisters. Matilda’s presence she had suffered as a protection against the curate’s advances; since these advances were no longer to be dreaded, she refused to be shadowed in future, and in order to escape from the annoyance took to cycling, a form of exercise which none of the elder Miss Greynors would attempt.

Her cycling took her far afield, and brought many new pleasures into her life. Miss Agatha tried to veto the idea; but Prudence, backed by her father’s permission, and in possession of a fine new machine which he bought for her, defied opposition and rode forth whenever the weather permitted in quest of new experiences. Sometimes she met with adventures, and got into unexpected and informal conversations with strangers encountered surprisingly in little outlying villages where she dismounted to rest and quench her thirst. Cycling in its early stages is very thirsty work. She never mentioned those experiences at home; not that she was naturally secretive, but she held a strong conviction that such harmless amusement would meet with disapproval; and life had taught her that it is wisest to avoid unpleasantness.

And once she met with an accident. That had to be admitted because it could not by any means be suppressed.

It was a silly sort of accident, which an experienced rider might have averted; and it left her injured in temper as much as physically hurt. The bicycle suffered the greater damage. She was free-wheeling down hill with a broad open road ahead and nothing more formidable to pass than a leisurely farm cart, crawling up the steep incline, accompanied by an amiable sheep-dog which, until the cycle came abreast with it, was ambling comfortably within the shade at the back of the cart. Apparently the sight of the girl on the cycle excited it. It rushed forward unexpectedly and, barking vociferously, got in front of her wheel. Prudence swerved violently in order to avoid it, overbalanced herself, and, before she quite realised what was happening, found herself in the road inextricably mixed up with her crumpled machine. The dog, its feet planted deeply in the white dust, barked in enjoyment of this new kind of game.

The farmer pulled up his horse, and looked down upon their grouping with an expression of stolid amiability.

“’E won’t ’urt ’ee,” he called out reassuringly, and whistled to the dog, which, disregarding its owner, continued to bark gleefully at the débris.

Prudence lifted a face pale with indignation to the speaker.

“’E won’t ’urt ’ee,” he repeated, and in case she needed further reassurance, added comfortably: “’E’s done it afore. ’E’s that friendly. But you needn’t be afraid; ’e won’t hurt.”

“Afraid!” she ejaculated, and sat up and looked around for her hat. “He’s done all the mischief he can. Get down, please, and wheel my machine as far as the cottage. I’ll have to rest.”

It dawning upon the man for the first time that the lady was annoyed with him, he proceeded to obey her instructions, curiously little resentful of her anger. While Prudence painfully regained her feet he righted the disabled cycle, and, after a glance at his horse to assure himself of his intention to stand, half-wheeled half-carried the machine to a cottage at the bottom of the hill, and propped it against the wall of the house.

“’E’s that friendly,” he reiterated, gently admonishing the dog which accompanied them delightedly. “’E always runs up to folk like that. ’E’s done it afore. But ’e wouldn’t ’urt anyone. It’s just friendliness.”

Prudence found nothing to say. She was already ashamed of her heat; but the man’s amiable indifference exasperated her. This was due, not to any want of consideration, but to rustic obtuseness. He was urgently anxious to reassure her in regard to the dog; ladies were scared as a rule of dogs; he was also desirous of returning to his cart, the horse having views of its own about standing. He knocked on the cottage door, quite unnecessarily; two girls, who had witnessed the accident, having already appeared in the entrance. One of them was laughing immoderately, as though she considered the affair a huge joke, enacted for her special amusement; the other, and older girl, favoured her with a reproving look.

“Young lady’s met with a accident,” the man explained. “The dog done it; ’e’s that friendly. She wants to rest a bit.”

He left it at that, and hurried back to his cart. The elder girl invited the stranger to come inside, and the younger, following them, stood in the doorway, laughing. Prudence showed her annoyance.

“It wasn’t so funny as you seem to think,” she said, surveying her from a chair in indignant surprise.

“I know,” the girl replied, her laughter trailing off into spasmodic giggles. “I don’t know what makes me keep laughing. But it was funny seeing you in the road, an’ the bicycle an’ all. It made me fair screech. I’m glad you’re not hurt.”

“You’d like a glass of water, I expect?” said the older girl; and the younger, as if desirous of atoning for her misplaced merriment, hurried away to fetch it.

“I don’t know how I shall get home,” said Prudence, who was more concerned with this difficulty than with her bruises, although these were more considerable than she had thought at first. She had wrenched her ankle badly. “I’m ten miles from Wortheton, and my machine is twisted hopelessly—even if I could ride it, which at present I don’t feel equal to doing. Could I get a conveyance near here?”

“No,” answered the girl. “There’s nothing but that cart that’s gone on. I don’t know what you’ll do.”

They were not very helpful people, and there was no other house within sight. Prudence began to fear that she would be hung up there for the night. She wondered whether for a consideration the girl who had laughed so immoderately would walk to the nearest village and secure some sort of conveyance. She regretted that she had not commandeered the cart of the man whose dog was responsible for the mishap, but events had been too hurried to allow her time to realise the difficulties of getting home in her damaged condition. She appealed to the girl, who still stood surveying her with a wide grin of amusement, and who seemed by no means eager to undertake the mission. She looked out along the dusty road and up the steep hill, down which Prudence had sped to her undoing, and hesitated; then she picked up a hat which was lying on a chair and remarked that she would go up the road a bit and see if anyone were about.

Prudence sat on in the room, waiting in the company of the sister, with a blank feeling of hopelessness for the next event. This when it befell was so altogether unexpected that at the moment when she first caught sight of a motor, with the girl who had set forth on her reluctant search seated in the back, she almost discredited her senses. But the motor came to a stop in the roadway before the house, and the other girl, springing up and going to the window, remarked explanatorily over her shoulder:

“It’s Major Stotford in his car. That’s a rare bit of luck for you. I suppose Lizzie stopped him. She’s got a cheek. He’s lord of the manor over to Liscombe. It’s all his property about here.”

Lizzie burst in in great excitement.

“It’s all right,” she cried; “the Major’ll drive you. Only you must be quick; he hates to be kept waiting.”

She ran out again, and stood in the road staring admiringly at the rather heavy, handsome man who remained at the steering wheel, and only looked round when Prudence, walking with an unmistakable limp, emerged from the house, with the other girl behind her, and approached the car. With his first casual glance at her the look of indifference gave immediate place to an expression of very real interest. What he had expected he hardly knew, certainly not what he saw. He raised his cap, and with an alertness he had not yet displayed, left the wheel and opening the door of the car stepped into the road.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” said Prudence. “It’s most awfully kind of you to come to the assistance of a stranger. I fear it will trespass on your time. I live at Wortheton; that’s ten miles from here.”

“Wortheton!” he said, and smiled charmingly. “My time is not so valuable that so heavy a call upon it need worry you. I’ll sprint you home under the half-hour.”

He held the door for her and helped her up. Lizzie had occupied the back seat, but plainly he preferred to have Prudence beside him.

“Is that your cycle?” he asked. “You have had a spill.”

“Yes. It will need to visit the doctor before I can ride it again,” she said, and turned a look of regret on the damaged machine.

“So will you, by the look of things,” he remarked, and scrutinised her more closely.

Prudence leaned down to take her farewell of, and recompense the sisters, who, sober enough now, watched the proceedings with interest.

“I’ll send out for the cycle to-morrow,” she said.

But Major Stotford saw no necessity for leaving the cycle behind.

“It will go in the back all right. We might as well take it along,” he said, and lifted it into the car.

Lizzie, considerably more obliging than heretofore, lent a hand. When he had settled the machine he took his seat beside Prudence.

“Anyone we pass will conclude that I’ve run you down, and that I’m taking home the pieces,” he said, smiling at her with curious intimacy, as the car took the long hill, and the girl leaned back white and weary against the cushions. He drew a flask from his pocket and handed it to her. “Don’t look so horrified. If you could see the colour of your face you would realise as surely as I do that this is what you need. Take a good pull at it and you’ll feel better.”

“I begin to believe that the lamp on my bicycle must once have belonged to Aladdin,” Prudence said with a quiet little laugh of enjoyment. “I rubbed it to some purpose in the dust of the road. Whatever I require appears.”

Major Stotford laughed with her. The thought in his mind, which he was careful not to express in words, was that she carried the magic within her. He leaned forward and altered the pace of the car, which had been running at top speed.

Chapter Fifteen.

“And now,” Major Stotford remarked, as he turned in at the gates of Court Heatherleigh and drove slowly along the smooth gravelled path which led to the house, “for explanations. Beastly things, explanations, eh? Can’t see the necessity for them myself.”

He scrutinised the white face which, even in its pallor, and despite the worried expression which he observed settled upon it as they drew near her home, looked extraordinarily fresh and sweet. He had enjoyed the ten mile drive exceedingly. Had he not believed that his companion was enduring more discomfort than she would allow, he could have wished that the distance had been greater. He was a man who appreciated feminine society, and he had derived considerable pleasure as the result of an act of careless good-nature from which he had not anticipated enjoyment. It had been a new and agreeable experience. He determined that he would see her again. The slight service he had been able to render her gave him that much right at least, he decided.

The door was flung wide, and the butler came down the steps with concern written large on his discreet features. He opened the door of the car. Major Stotford alighted, shouldered the man authoritatively out of the way, and assisted Prudence to the ground. She leaned on his arm heavily, and he saw her blue eyes darken with a look of pain.

“I’m sorry; my ankle hurts.”

She turned from him to the waiting servant; but Major Stotford, anticipating her request, lifted her in his arms and carried her easily up the steps and into the hall.

The butler, following quickly, got ahead of this intrusive stranger whose proceedings he did not altogether approve of, and threw open the drawing-room door. Major Stotford entered with his burden, and after one swift comprehensive glance which took in the fact that the room was untenanted, and located the sofa at the same moment, carried Prudence to it and laid her gently down among its cushions. He stood over her inquiringly, anxiety in his look and the hint of a smile in his eyes.

“Come now! We’re all right, eh?” he said, and felt in his pocket for his flask, thought better of it and withdrew his hand again empty.

Prudence made an effort to sit up and laughed nervously.

“It’s so stupid,” she said, “A little thing like that! It’s nothing really.”

She was immensely relieved that no one save Graves had witnessed their arrival. It would have alarmed her father, and scandalised Agatha, to have seen her carried in like a baby. Major Stotford’s helpfulness had been in excess of what was necessary, she felt; with the aid of a strong arm she could have accomplished the journey herself.

“I’ve given you a lot of trouble. You’ve been awfully kind to me,” she said.

Before he could reply, Mr Graynor entered, concerned and fussy, followed by Agatha, who wore an expression of protest, and suggested frigid disapproval in the very rustle of her skirts.

“I always knew how it would end,” she exclaimed. “This doesn’t in the least surprise me.”

“Oh! it isn’t the end,” Major Stotford put in with a twinkling of amusement. “These little annoyances happen at the beginning. I don’t think there are any bones broken.”

Mr Graynor bent anxiously over Prudence and laid a hand on her hair.

“You’ve had an accident. Are you much hurt?” he asked.

“It’s nothing really,” she said, ashamed at the general fuss in front of a stranger. “I had a spill—a silly little spill which jarred my ankle. Major Stotford very kindly motored me home.”

Mr Graynor glanced swiftly at the person referred to. His anxiety partially relieved, he found time to give attention to the man who had not only brought his daughter home, but was, he imagined, responsible for the accident. Major Stotford, taking advantage of the pause, set about correcting this impression, which he had foreseen as likely to follow his share in the proceedings.

“I was fortunately near the spot,” he said. “Miss Graynor rode over a dog in the roadway, and unluckily it was not the dog which got hurt. It seldom is on these occasions. I brought home the wreckage.”

“I am sure I am very much obliged to you,” Mr Graynor said, but with such a lack of graciousness in his manner as to cause Prudence surprise and distress. Major Stotford’s helpfulness had been more valuable than he realised. She glanced at her new acquaintance with a quick bright flush.

“I know I am. If it had not been for Major Stotford’s kindness I should have been stranded for the night with no possibility of communicating with you at a wretched wayside cottage ten miles away. I’ve trespassed enormously on his time, and given quite a lot of trouble. But I enjoyed the ride.”

He laughed pleasantly.

“I enjoyed it too. And you make too much of my services. They were nothing. I trust the foot will soon be well, and that the injuries are as light as you would so bravely have us believe.” He addressed himself to Mr Graynor. “If you like I’ll leave word at the doctor’s on my way back. You’ll want to call him in, I expect.”

“Thank you, there is no need to trouble you further,” Mr Graynor returned stiffly. “I can send.”

“I have already sent,” Miss Agatha interposed; and Major Stotford turned to look in her direction, as if recalling the presence of one he had temporarily forgotten.

“Then that’s finished,” he said; “and it only remains to unload the car.”

He spoke with a certain cold hostility in his voice which did not escape Prudence’s ear. It hurt her. She could have wept with vexation at her father’s want of gratitude and courtesy to this man who had proved so good a friend to her in her need: she felt that she wanted to apologise to him for the rudeness of her family. Then she became aware of her father speaking again in the same politely distant tones as before, thanking the other man coldly for the trouble he had been put to, and assuring him that the bicycle had been removed by the servants.

“You should not have burdened yourself with that too,” he added. “You place me under a heavy obligation to you which will leave me always indebted.”

“My dear sir,” Major Stotford interrupted, “you are in no sense under an obligation to me; please disabuse your mind of that idea.”

He cut short further expressions of gratitude by advancing to the sofa and shaking hands with Prudence, who, as if desirous of atoning for the general lack of warmth, gave him both her hands on a simple girlish impulse. He took and held them with no show of surprise.

“Thank you so much,” she said, a soft appeal in eyes and voice which he was quick to note. “I just want to say how much I enjoyed the drive and your kind care of me. I’m very grateful to you.”

“You are setting such a premium on ordinary courtesy that I begin to believe it must be a rare quality in these parts,” he said jestingly, with what sounded to Prudence a faintly sarcastic humour. He had assuredly not been given particular evidence of the quality beneath that roof. “But if you insist on regarding my small service so graciously I do not feel inclined to quarrel with you on that score. I can only repeat that I am glad I happened to be on the spot. Good-bye. Take care of the ankle. It will tax your patience, I expect.”

Mr Graynor accompanied him into the hall, and invited him into the library for refreshment, which he declined. Prudence listened to their voices outside, listened to the motor drive away, and turned with a face pale with indignation, when her father re-entered the room, and reproached him with having displayed so little gratitude to a man who had acted with such ready kindliness towards her.

“I felt ashamed,” she said. “You were barely civil.”

“You forget yourself, Prudence,” Agatha said. “Father was quite civil. There was no need to gush—you did that.”

“And if I did,” Prudence cried, exasperated, “you two forced me into doing so.”

Mr Graynor had crossed to the window, where he remained with his back towards the room, paying little heed to their wrangling.

“I wish it had not been Major Stotford who rendered you the service,” he said presently, and faced about and approached the sofa with an expression of worried annoyance on his face. “I am sorry this has happened.”

“Why?” Prudence sat up straighter and punched the cushions viciously. “Why?” she repeated aggressively.

“Because—”

“Do you think it necessary to explain these matters to a child?” Agatha interrupted tartly.

Prudence laughed angrily.

“I’m not a child,” she said. “You can’t keep my mind for ever on a leading string.”

“I think you are unnecessarily excited,” Mr Graynor said in displeased tones. “I doubt whether that is good for you in your present condition.”

“Being thwarted is not good for me in my present condition,” Prudence retorted, but with greater calmness. “You aren’t being fair to me. Why should it be a matter for regret to you that Major Stotford should do me a service? He hadn’t much choice. No man, who wasn’t a brute, could have acted otherwise in the circumstances.”

“No,” Mr Graynor admitted. “It was simply unfortunate. Major Stotford is a man whom I do not care to have in my house, whom I would not choose as an associate for my daughters. He has an evil reputation.”

“Evil!” Prudence sounded a note of incredulity. “In what sense?” she asked.

“There is no need to soil your ears with his history,” Mr Graynor replied. “His wife divorced him two years ago. I understood he was abroad.”

“Oh!” said Prudence, and felt oddly chilled by this revelation.

She had liked the man, had hoped that the acquaintance so informally begun would develop pleasantly on ordinary lines, a hope which she realised very certainly could never be fulfilled. Further intercourse would be forbidden her. Though had the road been open to a pursuance of the acquaintance Prudence herself would no longer have wished to follow it up. The colour had gone out of the pleasure and left a neutral-toned picture in its stead, a picture of life in its least lovely aspect, with the sordid streak of self-indulgence trailing its disfiguring smudges across the canvas. Was nothing that was pleasant altogether fine? In this complex meandering of human destinies was this mean streak, which spoilt the fine grain of the wood, discoverable in each separate individual?

Prudence lay back against the cushions feeling utterly weary and unable to cope with the rush of swift emotions which flooded her mind. Reaction followed upon the period of excitement. She was conscious only of the pain in her foot. No one had thought of removing her shoe. She had loosened it in the car; but the foot had swollen and felt too big for its covering. She made an effort now to remove the shoe, whereupon Agatha, capable but unsympathetic, came to her assistance.

“You ought to have done that before,” she complained petulantly, and to her own surprise, as well as to her sister’s, broke down and cried weakly.

Chapter Sixteen.

Though not serious, Prudence’s injuries confined her to the house for some time. It proved an irksome time for the members of her family as well as for herself. She was not patient, and it exasperated her to be compelled to lie on the sofa, unequal to rising from it and running away when her sisters, from a sense of duty, installed themselves near her couch with the sociable intention of keeping her company. They insisted on her occupying herself with some sewing as a relief to the tedium of enforced inaction. Prudence hated sewing, and made a demand for books; whereupon her sisters in turn read aloud to her the works of Miss Nouchette Carey, which were familiar to Prudence from childhood, and bored her exceedingly. She wanted something more stimulating; something which did not depict Wortheton ideals and sentiment. But the more modern writers were banned as unwholesome, and the poets were discredited on account of an erotic tendency to idealise passion and adorn sensuousness with an exalted language better suited to more spiritual qualities. Or so Miss Agatha thought.

“The merit of a book,” she affirmed, “depends upon whether it stands the test of being read aloud without causing embarrassment to the reader and to the audience.”

“Books never embarrass me,” Prudence said, “but occasionally they bore me. I don’t care to read about people who lead the stodgy kind of life we lead.”

“Life is not stodgy,” Agatha reproved her. “And it is the same everywhere.”

“God forbid!” ejaculated Prudence, and thereby brought a storm of horrified reproach upon her head.

On occasions Matilda arrived and spent an afternoon or morning with her, such an altered Matilda that she appeared to Prudence in the guise of a stranger. Matilda had emerged since her marriage, and from being a mild reflection of her eldest sister, reflected now Mr Jones quite brightly and unconsciously. She echoed him in a feminine note, and quoted him with unintentional inaccuracy, but with sufficient likeness to recall the original with unpleasant vividness to Prudence’s mind. Usually Mr Jones was too busy to accompany her.

“The vicar leaves so much to him,” Mrs Jones explained. “Ernest hopes to move from Wortheton shortly.”

“I understood that he was greatly attached to his work here,” Prudence said. “He likes the factory and the people.”

“He has hopes of a living,” Matilda confided, lowering her voice.

“Oh, a living! That’s another matter. You’ll be quite important.”

Matilda looked a little doubtful.

“It’s a very poor living,” she confessed, “even if he succeeds in obtaining it. No clergyman without private means could accept it.”

“I see.” Prudence did see, very clearly. She smiled suddenly. “How grateful he must feel to you,” she added.

Matilda resented this very much in the manner Prudence decided in which Mr Jones would have resented it.

“That matters only in regard to this particular living,” she said. “Ernest would succeed in any case; he is so clever.”

Prudence’s accident, with the unfortunate complication which had effected Major Stotford’s entry upon the scene, was used by Agatha, backed by brother William, as a sufficient reason against future cycling. Agatha went to an immense amount of trouble in her efforts to gain her father’s veto against Prudence riding again. She persuaded him to get rid of the bicycle as the surest means of avoiding fresh misadventures; and rendered him so nervous with her gloomy forebodings that he did consent to part with the bicycle; but he reserved his veto against riding until he saw how Prudence viewed a possible prohibition. He could not deny her pleasure merely because the idea of her riding made him nervous. Bobby had met with accidents when he first cycled; but it never had been suggested that Bobby should give up riding from a fear he might break his neck.

The damaged cycle was disposed of; William saw to that. Agatha undertook to inform her sister; she also sought to prevail with her to give up the exercise. She enlarged upon her father’s anxiety, so injurious in the case of a man of his years, and pointed out to Prudence that duty demanded this sacrifice of her pleasure to his anxious love.

Prudence heard her out in silence, a stony silence which betrayed nothing of the rage that burned within her breast. With the finish of the oration her chin tilted aggressively.

“This is your doing,” she said.

“It is father’s wish,” Agatha replied. “The bicycle was sold by his orders.”

“Oh!” Prudence exclaimed, with a gesture of impatience. “I know. What’s the good of talking? I am sick of all this pretence of anxiety. You hate me to have any enjoyment. You never rest—you never have rested, from seeking to make my life colourless and dull. You are satisfied only when you keep me sewing, or working in the parish. Well, I won’t sew any more—for fear I prick my fingers, and I won’t work in the parish either from a nervous dread of having my morals contaminated. If I can’t do the things I like, I won’t do the things I don’t like either.”

Miss Agatha’s anger, if more controlled, was every whit as great as Prudence’s. She gazed down upon her sister where she lay upon the sofa with eyes of cold dislike. Always they had been antagonistic. She had resented her father’s second marriage bitterly, and had disliked his young wife: the earlier resentment, and the dislike for Prudence’s mother, influenced her largely in her antagonism towards the child of the marriage, the child who was dearer to their father than any of his other children, and who was so unlike the rest. But she had, according to her own view, conscientiously done her duty by her young sister: the accusation of jealous injustice stung her; she felt that she had not merited that.

“You are wicked and ungrateful,” she said. “You display a great want of control, and an unchristian spirit. I hope that later, when you have given yourself time to reflect, you will regret what you have said. I confess I don’t understand you.”

“No,” Prudence rejoined. “You never have understood me. I don’t suppose you ever will.”

“You are not,” Miss Agatha answered shortly, “so complex as you imagine.”

Having nothing further to say, and feeling irritated by the laugh with which her rebuke was received, she closed the interview by leaving the room.

But the matter was not ended. Prudence had no intention of allowing it to rest there. She meant to have it out with her father. He had given the bicycle to her; he had no right to dispose of it without consulting her. The business of having it out with him in private was not easy of accomplishment; she seldom saw him alone, and pride restrained her from broaching the subject before the others. Matters were complicated by the arrival of Mr Edward Morgan, who, to Prudence’s secret disappointment, came himself on his firm’s business instead of sending a subordinate. Prudence had very vividly in her memory that former occasion when Steele visited Wortheton. She recalled their different meetings, few in number but strangely pleasant and familiar; recalled too the stolen interview with Steele under her window. She longed to speak of him to Mr Morgan; but self-consciousness tied her tongue and made mention of his name too difficult. She waited in the hope that Mr Morgan would allude to the young man’s visit. But Mr Morgan was not accommodating. He had as a matter of fact almost forgotten Steele’s existence, had entirely forgotten that visit of Steele’s to Wortheton over a year ago. Steele had left Morgan Bros, shortly afterwards and gone abroad: that, so far as Edward Morgan’s interest in him was concerned, was the finish.

It became plain to Prudence, and to the members of Prudence’s family, as the days passed and Mr Morgan showed no haste to depart, that he was becoming more than ordinarily interested in herself. He had known her for years. As a child she had delighted him; as a girl he had found her amusing; but the woman in her came as a startling revelation, and carried this middle-aged and rather serious-minded business man out of his immense abstractions and his rather cumbersome habit of reserve.

He became surprisingly alert and attentive to Prudence’s whims. He was quick to lend a hand when she left her sofa; and he sat beside the sofa in the evenings, and played chess with her, and taught her card games. William’s amiable efforts to draw him into conversation with himself, or to entice him into the library, met with no encouragement.

“It’s dull for your sister, not being able to get about,” he explained. “We’ve got to amuse her.”

He did amuse her; and he earned her gratitude at the same time. It was a new and agreeable experience to be considered first and consulted deferentially and made to feel oneself of some importance. He bought her chocolates and books, books such as Miss Agatha did not approve of, and which Prudence read with avidity. She shared her chocolates, but she kept the books to herself.

“If you only knew what pleasure you give me,” she said, on receiving a volume. And Mr Morgan, looking pleased, answered quietly:

“That’s what I want to give you—pleasure.”

The next day he gave her another book.

“I don’t read novels myself,” he explained. “But I demand the best, and place myself unreservedly in the bookseller’s hands. Generally they know what is worth reading.”

Prudence confided in him her trouble over the cycling veto, anticipating sympathy, and was disappointed in him because he sided with the family in their objection to her riding. He did not approve of cycling for ladies, he said. That struck her as a very antiquated prejudice. Cycling for women was so general until motoring became more popular.

“If father would give me a car,” she said, “I should prefer it.”

“Better have a pony carriage,” he advised, “if you intend driving it yourself. Safer and pleasanter, really.”

“How stodgy!” she said, and laughed. “That’s much too slow.”

It was regrettable, she reflected, that he was so elderly; and she wondered what he had been like as a young man, and why he had never married.

The answer to that question was that, until he met her as a woman, he had never known love. He knew it now. And he recognised it for the one passion of his life—a disturbing passion on account of the disparity in their ages. This disparity he recognised as a barrier, but a barrier which might be overcome. It is a barrier which many people surmount and not always unsuccessfully. None the less the undertaking is attended with risks, and the risks are worthy of consideration. The ideal marriage is based on equality in essential things. Contemporaneous ideas and sentiments lend themselves most readily to sympathy. Without sympathy and understanding a perfect relationship cannot exist. The individual of forty who fails to recognise this fact deserves no compassion when he strikes the rocks ahead.

Chapter Seventeen.

Edward Morgan came into Prudence’s life again at a time when the dulness and restriction of her home were peculiarly galling, when her spirit was in fierce revolt against the petty tyranny of Agatha’s rule, supported by William’s influence and strengthened by their animosity towards her, which seemed to her daily to increase and to make anything like amicable relations impossible. Before this powerful bond of opposition Mr Graynor, old and incapable of sustained effort, gave way against his volition, slowly but surely deputing his authority in domestic affairs as he had deputed his business authority to his son, and retiring more and more within himself, content, if not harassed with a knowledge of unpleasantness to leave to his family the arrangement of their affairs. That in this way he treated his young daughter unfairly did not occur to him. He had no idea that Prudence was unhappy. Yet, had he reflected he must have recognised that it was a powerful combination arrayed against her, a combination which he himself felt unequal to opposing. But he belonged to a past generation. When the autumn leaves cling to the tree beyond their time they hang sear and useless before the push of the new verdure: and he had hung on till it seemed that the seasons had forgotten him and time refused to detach him from the bough. He was a little weary of hanging there overlooked and forgotten while another generation ripened to decay. He saw his children entering upon their autumn, and almost forgot the time when they, like Prudence, were in the springtime of life. When one reaches the winter of life one realises life’s sadness; for the hope of spring, and the contentment of summer belong to the days that are numbered. One lives necessarily in the present and looks back upon the past; the future belongs solely to youth. In Edward Morgan’s love for Prudence was repeated his own middle-aged romance. His married life with his young wife had been too brief to prove its unsuitability. He only remembered that that short time had been a happy time for him. And he liked Morgan; he would be satisfied to accept him for a son-in-law. Prudence was young for him, he recognised that; but, he argued, middle-aged men frequently married young girls, and such marriages were not always unsuccessful. The middle-aged suitor seldom pauses to reflect that if a younger man appeared upon the scene his matured experience would stand him in no good stead; a girl does not often marry a man many years her senior from any happier reason than that nothing better offers. To a girl a man of forty appears elderly. This is natural. Age, like everything else, is relative in either sex.

Prudence was flattered by Mr Morgan’s attentions and grateful for his consideration. She did not love him. She had a very clear idea what type of man could inspire love in her. It was an entirely different type from Mr Morgan. But marriage with Mr Morgan opened a way of escape from uncongenial surroundings. If she missed this opening it was very possible that an opportunity might not occur again. She made up her mind, as Steele had known she would do, to seize it when the moment offered.

She made one final attempt, however, to gain news of Steele. One day when she was alone with Mr Morgan she summoned all her courage and inquired after Steele.

Mr Morgan showed surprise at her question, and paused a moment for reflection before he was able clearly to recall the facts about the man to whom she referred. It seemed to be a matter of astonishment to him that she should be acquainted with Steele. Steele had left Morgan Bros, a year ago, he told her. He had gone abroad, to Africa, he believed. He revealed an uncertainty as to his movements and a lack of interest in them which exasperated Prudence.

“So many young men emigrate to the Colonies nowadays,” he said. “New countries attract them. They don’t settle down in England.”

“There are better openings in new countries, I suppose,” she said in a dispirited voice, which she strove to render indifferent. “A man with enterprise ought to get ahead in the Colonies.”

“A man with enterprise possibly might get ahead,” Mr Morgan allowed; “a man with capital assuredly would.”

“Don’t brains reckon as capital in new countries?” she asked.

“Brains are an asset in every country,” he answered; “but credit at one’s bank is the surest passport to success anywhere. So far as I remember, Steele was unfortunate. He did not leave us under any cloud; but there was a default in his department, and he had to make good. I imagine he emigrated with only the necessary means for landing.”

“Oh!” said Prudence, and regarded Mr Morgan, who was reputed to be a millionaire, with a diminution of respect. He could better have afforded to lose the money. To have allowed a man who, while responsible, was not culpable in the matter of the deficit to make good was ungenerous. “I wish you had not told me that.”

He looked astonished.

“You could have borne the loss,” she said.

“Business cannot be run on quixotic lines,” he answered. “Besides, every man of honour accepts his responsibilities.”

He was quite right; she knew that; all he said was perfectly just. But a woman seldom reasons on lines of strict justice. She would have liked Edward Morgan better had he been generous rather than just. Instead she went to bed feeling angry with him and compassionate towards Steele. Why, she wondered, had she forbidden Steele to write? And why had he obeyed her so implicitly? He might in any case have sent her a line of farewell before sailing. She would not have cared had the whole family seen it if only she had received that small assurance that he remembered.

Perhaps he did not remember. Perhaps when he left Wortheton he had put her out of his thoughts. There was no reason why he should continue to bear her in mind when circumstances had taken him out of her life and separated them so widely. There were fresh interests now, new scenes, to engage and distract his attention. The Wortheton episode had played an unimportant part in his life. Such episodes, she knew, were frequent in most men’s lives, and stood for no more than they were, pleasant interludes breaking the monotony of everyday things.

Then her thoughts strayed reminiscently to that stolen interview under her window; and she recalled things Steele had said to her and the manner of their utterance; and it seemed to her by the light of those half-forgotten memories that he had acted disloyally in going out of her life so completely. He had betrayed an interest in her. And he had stirred up a corresponding interest in her breast. He had no right to do that and then to pass on and forget.

Two days later Edward Morgan returned to Derbyshire. It had been his intention to propose to Prudence before returning. He had had an interview with Mr Graynor, and had ascertained that his suit was viewed favourably by her father; but Prudence herself was a little difficult during those last two days; and Mr Morgan did not feel sufficiently confident of success with her to put his happiness to the test. Her variable moods disconcerted him. It did not occur to him to seek an explanation of her decreased kindliness in anything that had passed between them; and so he failed to trace his fall in her esteem to the information he had given her in regard to Steele. That unfortunate relation had opened up a wider gulf than he would have believed possible, as a more generous account would, while raising him in her esteem, have decreased the influence of the absent Steele. Now the balance weighed in Steele’s favour; and Mr Morgan was made uncomfortably conscious of a lack of response to his tenderness from the girl he hoped to marry.

On the evening before he left he had an interview with her alone.

It was a matter for amusement with Prudence to note the frequency of these private audiences. Hitherto the family had relegated her to the background; now, with an amazing discernment for matters calling for their united supervision, they withdrew from the drawing-room, melting away with such tactful unobtrusiveness that Mr Morgan firmly believed in those numerous domestic obligations which engaged so much of their time, and very willingly submitted to be entertained by the sister whose accident incapacitated her from taking an active share in their doings. On the whole he was well satisfied; and he approved of the doctor’s prescription of rest as the only cure for the damaged ankle.

“I’ll send you some more literature when I get back,” he said, sitting facing her in the dusk, with what remained of the daylight falling on his broad strong face. “I expect the sofa will see a good deal of you for a week or so longer. The trouble of these matters is the disproportionately long time they take to mend. On the next occasion when I visit Wortheton I shall hope to see you walking about with the best.”

“I should hope so,” Prudence said, and laughed.

“Oh! I don’t mean to absent myself for a specially long period,” he said, and looked at her with the light of a steady purpose in his eyes. “I’m wanting you to say that you will be glad to see me again. I should have liked to have heard you express some regret at my going now.”

He paused, but Prudence, who was nervously playing with a flower which he had brought in from the garden for her, did not immediately reply. She was not sure what might follow an expression of regret from her. She did not feel regret; and she had a very definite desire in her mind to avert a direct proposal.

“I shall be very pleased to see you when you come again,” she said at last.

Mr Morgan smiled faintly.

“I suppose I shall have to rest content with that,” he said. He put out a hand and laid it over her hand—the hand which held the flower. “Do I seem old to you?” he asked.

Prudence looked up at him with wide surprised eyes. He was looking back at her with a steady kindly smile that made her nervous.

“Not so very old,” she answered; and felt her cheeks flaming as she saw the quick colour stain his face.

He sighed.

“A little fatherly, eh?” he said, the smile returning. And he wondered whether she would ever learn to her distress how cruelly youth can hurt. “Well, I’m not young. I’m forty-two. I want you to accustom yourself to that knowledge before I come again. When I come again I shall have another lesson to teach you.”

He spoke lightly; and with the lessening of his earnestness and the removal of his hand, both of which Prudence had found embarrassing, she felt relieved and was able to smile back at him with something of the old frankness.

“If you teach then as kindly as you have to-day,” she said, “I shall prove a dull pupil if I do not learn it readily.”

“You give me hope,” he said.

He scrutinised her for a moment very closely, made as though he would speak, surprised a startled apprehension in her eyes which nearly resembled fear, and thought better of it. He got up rather suddenly and walked to the fireplace and stood staring unseeingly into the empty grate.

“I’ll be patient,” he said. “Perhaps you will have prepared your mind a little to receive that lesson by the time I return.”

Chapter Eighteen.

It was the wisest thing which Edward Morgan could have done to go away and leave what he had it in his mind to say unsaid. Prudence missed him after he left, missed his kindly attentions, the quick thought for her comfort which forestalled her wishes, his pleasant companionship. He was a man who, if somewhat earnest, perhaps because of this earnestness, talked well on most subjects. He was neither brilliant nor very ready of speech. The quality Prudence liked best in him was his habit of treating her as an equal; he did not pursue the tactic of talking down to her. The latter was one of William’s unamiable eccentricities, and it annoyed Prudence the more because William at his wisest was never so profound as to be beyond the comprehension of the most ordinary intelligence.

In Mr Morgan’s presence William’s attitude towards her changed considerably; following Mr Morgan’s departure the increased deference of his manner moderated slightly since no definite proposal had resulted. William suspected that his sister’s chances were not so secure as he had believed. She was foolish enough, he decided, to lose this excellent opportunity of making a brilliant marriage. William was not so anxious to see his sister married as he was desirous of forming an alliance with the house of Morgan Bros. If she brought the matter off she would win his approbation and his unbounded respect. Something of what he felt on this head he managed to convey to her in an indirect manner which he considered tactful. He felt that his approval would have considerable weight with her.

“Morgan appears to have enjoyed his visit,” he remarked to her; “he was sorry to go. He is an uncommonly good fellow. I like him.”

“He’s a kind old thing,” said Prudence with a gleam of mischief in her eyes.

“Old! Nonsense!” William squared his heavy shoulders and regarded himself complacently in the overmantel. “He’s a younger man than I.”

“Well, yes.” Prudence surveyed William’s grey hairs with uncomplimentary attentiveness, surveyed his corpulent figure, and smiled. “He’s forty-two. I have his own word for that.”

“A man isn’t old at forty-two,” he said.

“He looks old though.”

“When a man has passed his first youth,” William observed sententiously, “he is—ahem!—more interesting, more reliable. He knows what he wants. I confess that Morgan inspires in me both confidence and liking. One can respect a man who has proved his worth.”

“He has proved an aptitude for making money,” Prudence allowed.

“Isn’t that proof of worth?”

“It suggests sound business acumen.”

“With industry and perseverance,” he insisted.

“Generosity is finer than these qualities.” She was thinking of the unfortunate confidence relating to Steele.

“You at least have not found him lacking in that quality,” he said, surprised. “He has showered gifts on you.”

“He has been very generous to me,” she admitted, and laughed with a ring of scorn in the mirth. “There is small merit in being generous when it pleases one to be so.”

He stared at her in amazement.

“I think you are strangely wanting in gratitude,” he said. “Few people with the very sufficient grounds which you have for recognising a man’s generosity would display so grudging an acknowledgment. Morgan was most appreciative in his praise of you. He revealed a very deep—regard for you.”

William surveyed his half-sister with the doubtful scrutiny of a man who failed to discover what it was in her which attracted other men: beyond her looks he could discern no particular charm; and her looks were not in his opinion remarkable.

“I have heard more impassioned avowals,” she returned.

“From whom?” he demanded instantly.

“Perhaps I have only imagined them,—or,” and she patted the cover of one of Mr Morgan’s gifts and laughed, “met with them in books.”

“There is a lot of pernicious trash written,” observed William. “It puts ideas in girls’ heads.”

“You wouldn’t wish even a girl’s head empty of ideas, would you?”

“I would wish it empty of nonsense,” he answered sharply. “A woman should be satisfied to look after her home, and—all that.”

This being non-committal and liberal of interpretation, Prudence let it pass unchallenged. She was so familiar with William’s ideas about woman and her place in the scheme of things, and appreciated his opinion so little that she was satisfied to leave him to the undisputed enjoyment of his views. It was William’s own misfortune that he could never emerge from the rut into which he had floundered. He had long ago persuaded himself into the belief that his rut was the open road.

Feeling that he had said sufficient to add the weight of his approval to the balance in favour of Mr Morgan, William left his sister to digest his words; and subsequently informed his father that he entertained small doubt that if Edward Morgan did Prudence the honour of asking her to be his wife she would accept him. He believed she would appreciate the compliment of such an offer.

Prudence herself was less confident. She was indeed so undecided that the respite allowed her came as a relief. It gave her time for consideration of the matter. She did not love Edward Morgan; but he held open the door of freedom, and she feared that if she missed this opportunity of passing through, it might never open for her again.

There followed a period of waiting and uncertainty and general boredom, during which the ankle grew well and she was able to leave the sofa and walk in the garden. It was then that the loss of her cycle became once more a source of acute annoyance.

“You had no right to sell it, daddy,” she complained; “it was mine. You’ll have to buy me a new one.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t care to ride any more, Prue,” he returned evasively. “It isn’t safe. You may break your neck next time.”

“I may, of course. I stand a greater chance of doing so if you won’t buy me a machine, because I shall hire; and hired cycles aren’t reliable. Of course I shall ride again. Your advice is as preposterous as telling a child who has learnt to walk that it must revert to sedentary habits. It wouldn’t, you know, however nice a child it might be.”

She drew him towards her by the lapels of his coat and kissed him on either cheek.

“You’ll get me a new cycle, daddy?—just like the last?”

Mr Graynor yielded. When Prudence coaxed, looking at him with that light in her blue eyes, she recalled her mother so vividly to his mind that he could not resist her. It were easier to vex Agatha than to disappoint Prue.

Chapter Nineteen.

Summer was on the wane and autumn was busy early colouring the leaves. Edward Morgan had intended returning to Wortheton before the finish of the warm weather; but many things prevented him from carrying out his wish; and the weeks went by without any sign from him, save the regular arrival of the monthly parcel of books, which Prudence as regularly acknowledged, writing a frank girlish letter of thanks, which took longer to compose than the subject matter warranted. The difficulty of writing those letters increased with each repetition of the performance. He never wrote to her. He did not even address the parcels; they came direct from the bookseller. Had he sent a few friendly lines with his gifts it would have made the task of acknowledgment easier.

Each time that he received one of these brief inconsequent epistles Mr Morgan opened it eagerly and hastily read it in the always vain hope of finding the wish expressed therein that he would fulfil his promise to revisit Wortheton. But Prudence made no mention of this matter. And he locked the letters away in a private drawer and waited in patient hopefulness for the next. The next letter invariably roused similar emotions and brought further disappointment on perusal. Mr Morgan proved of his own experience that being in love is not a happy condition of mind.

On the whole Prudence enjoyed the possession of an undeclared suitor: it gave her a sense of importance, a sense too of future security. She could regard with indifference the acid rigour of Agatha’s authority and brother William’s pompous displeasure. William had been extremely annoyed by the arrival of the new bicycle, and had made unpleasant observations about Prudence’s roaming habits and her propensity for making casual and undesirable acquaintances. It was very evident that William considered that his sister rode abroad in quest of these adventures. His insinuations exasperated her, but they did not shake her determination to ride when and where she pleased.

It was soon after the arrival of the new cycle, when she was enjoying her first long rides after the accident, that she met again the man whose kindness to her lingered pleasantly in her memory, despite the shock of disillusion which had eclipsed much of the brightness of the recollection. The encounter sprung upon her unaware. She had neither expected nor wished to meet Major Stotford again. But when he overtook her in his car, and stopped the car a few yards ahead of her and waited for her to come up with it, there was no doubt in Prudence’s mind as to what she ought to do. She ceased peddling and alighted. Major Stotford, who was alone, opened the door of the car and stepped into the road beside her.

“A piece of good luck!” he said, shaking hands. “I’ve often wondered about you. There is no need to ask if you have quite recovered. So they let you ride again?”

“They didn’t want to; it was a fight,” Prudence said, and laughed.

“Yes!” he said, smiling too. “I imagined you would have difficulty. I’m glad you won. They didn’t tell you, I suppose, that I called to inquire a few days after our adventure?”

“No; they didn’t tell me,” she replied, and flushed slightly. “It was very kind of you. I didn’t know.”

“I thought possibly it might not get to your knowledge,” he said coolly, and surveyed her flushed face with keen appreciation. “I was not allowed to see you, but was privileged to interview your brother instead. I have never approved of substitutes, and discovered on that occasion no good reason for reconsidering my prejudice. I’m delighted to meet you again anyhow.”

His frankness embarrassed Prudence; but she recalled his kindness and the service he had done her, and felt further vexation with her family.

“I’m glad too,” she said, playing nervously with the little bell on her handle-bar. He took hold of the handle-bar also and became immensely interested in the machine.

“It’s a new one, isn’t it?” he said. “Surely the other wasn’t past repairing?”

“I don’t know. They got rid of it.”

“I see.” His eyes twinkled. “And you compelled them to make good. They have done it quite handsomely. Your persuasive powers must be considerably greater than mine.”

“I threatened to hire,” said Prudence, and immediately realised on hearing him laugh that this admission was disloyal to the family. She lifted her eyes with a flash of pride in them to his smiling face. “Father is always generous,” she said. “He wouldn’t trust the old cycle again, though the spill was entirely my fault. I’m cautious in regard to dogs now.”

“Yes,” he agreed, the smile deepening. “Caution is a quality which the wise cultivate. Possibly had I not considerably neglected it I should have been more successful—socially. But these things are so dull.”

He took his hand off the handle-bar and straightened himself and looked down at her with a quick resolve in his face.

“We managed to find room for the old cycle,” he said. “I don’t see why there need be any difficulty in stowing this away. What do you say? Will you drive with me?”

For the fraction of a second Prudence hesitated. She did not want to drive with him. She knew that if she agreed she could not speak of it at home: there was something a little shameful in doing what must of necessity be done secretly. But the memory of that former occasion on which she had been glad enough to make use of his car was in her mind, and made a refusal to accept the present invitation appear pointedly ungracious.

“You would rather not?” he said reproachfully.

Prudence made up her mind on the instant.

“Thank you, I should like it. But couldn’t we leave the bicycle somewhere and pick it up on our return?”

“We could,” he said. “That’s not a bad idea. There’s an inn a quarter of a mile along the road. I’ll drive on so that you shan’t be smothered in dust, and you follow; then we’ll house the bicycle and go for a joy ride.”

He re-entered the car and drove off; while Prudence, waiting for the cloud of dust which he raised to subside, stood beside her machine, dismayed at the realisation of what she had consented to do, and considering whether it would not be wiser to head her cycle in the opposite direction and ride home. But reflection showed her the impossibility of acting in so ungracious a manner. She should have declined his invitation in the first instance; to evade the engagement now was unthinkable.

When she arrived at the inn it was to discover that Major Stotford had made the necessary arrangements; it only remained for her to relinquish her cycle to the man who stood ready to take it, and climb to her seat in the car. Despite a determination to enjoy herself and banish disquieting thoughts, Prudence was conscious of feeling not entirely at her ease with her companion. She could not have explained this sense of mistrust. There was nothing in Major Stotford’s manner to arouse it; she decided that possibly it resulted from what she had learned in regard to his private life. That ugly story coloured all her thoughts of him, and revealed him in an unfavourable light. She had not met this type of man before.

Nevertheless he interested her. He talked well. And he was so manifestly enjoying himself and showed such eagerness to please her that Prudence made an effort to shake off her uneasiness and share his pleasure in the excursion. But when he stopped at a little village some miles further on and took her into a place where they catered for tourists, the old disquieting feeling came back intensified; and she knew that she was not enjoying herself, that she shrank from appearing in public with a man whose acquaintance she had been forbidden. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that she had acted indiscreetly.

“I would rather go on,” she said. “I don’t want tea, and I mustn’t be late.”

“We shan’t be here many minutes,” he replied. “And you must have something. Rushing through the air gives me an appetite. I’ll get you back in good time, if I have to exceed the speed limit. We’ve been doing that already.”

He carried his point and led her within. They were shown into a little room where a table was laid for tea. There was no one else in the room, though from across the passage voices were audible and the sound of clinking china in proof that other travellers were taking refreshment. Major Stotford looked about him critically, flung his gloves on a chair, and advised Prudence to sit down and rest.

“I’ll go and order something to eat,” he said.

Prudence, who was standing near the window, looking out on a regiment of tall hollyhocks and a group of flaming dahlias blooming in the little garden, made no response; and he left the room, closing the door behind him.

With the closing of the door she faced about, feeling extraordinarily like a person trapped. It was absurd of course; but her heart beat with uncomfortable rapidity, and excitement flushed her face and lent a brightness to her eyes. She moved about the room restlessly examining the gaudy prints on the walls and the hideous design of the Brussels carpet; but was unable to fix her attention on anything, and wandered back to the window again.

There was a flavour of wrong-doing in this adventure which troubled her. The fear of being found out loomed with ugly insistence in the foreground of her ideas. She wished he had been satisfied simply to drive with her. This unforeseen development with its intimate suggestion of confidential relations vexed her. Intuition told her that in the circumstances he should have refrained from taking this step.

Then the door opened again to admit him. He came in, confident and smiling, and joined her where she stood at the window.

Chapter Twenty.

Prudence poured out the tea while Major Stotford sat with his back to the light, attentively observant of her actions, causing her considerable confusion by the intensity of his regard, and by the fact that he had fallen upon a quite unusual silence and seemed content simply to sit and watch her.

“We must hurry,” she said, handing him a cup. “If I cause them anxiety at home through being late they will make such a fuss about my cycling in future.”

“Oh, Lord!” he murmured. “What a nuisance a family can become. I wish you were an orphan.” He stirred his tea slowly, and smiled at her. “You are living up to your name. Do you know, when I first heard it, I thought it strangely unsuited.”

“I suppose you think me imprudent?” she said, without looking at him.

“No; not that,” he hastened to assure her. “But Prudence is such a Puritanic appellation. It suggests a nun. I’m not sure on the whole that I don’t prefer Imprudence. It’s purely a matter of taste.”

“Never mind my name,” she said, and looked vexed. “You are not the first to discover its unsuitability. Will you have another cup of tea?”

“I haven’t started on my first cup yet,” he answered, and lifted it to his lips to conceal his amusement. “You are in a hurry. See here!” He placed a gun-metal watch on the table beside his plate. “We’ll give it ten minutes. If you attempt to finish under you will ruin your digestion. I would, if permitted a choice, allow half an hour for tea and another half-hour for digestion; but since that doesn’t fit in with your wishes, I sacrifice mine. Try this plum cake; it’s rather good. The woman who runs this place was formerly a servant of mine, and her plum cakes are excellent.”

He cut the cake into generous slices. Prudence took a slice and pronounced it as good as he had promised. Although she had declared that she was not hungry, with the food before her she discovered a very healthy appetite. Her spirits began to revive. After all, it was rather jolly having tea in this quaint place, with the autumn sunshine streaming in through the little window and falling brightly across the tea-table, till the honey in its glass pot shone like liquid amber, and the dahlias, which Major Stotford had removed from the centre of the table because they obstructed his view, were ruby red against the snowy cloth. The sunlight fell too upon the man’s dark hair and showed it thinning on the top and about the temples. Prudence noted these things with interest. She wondered what his age was, and decided that he was older than he appeared. She began to feel more at ease with him. He ate surprising quantities of cake in the limited time at his disposal, and dispatched several cups of tea. At the expiration of the ten minutes he returned the watch to his pocket and rose briskly.

“Time’s up,” he said, coming round to her seat and standing over her with his hand on the back of her chair. “I think I deserve thanks for my self-sacrifice, don’t you?”

Prudence would have risen too, but it was impossible to do so without coming into collision with him. She wished he would not stand so close.

“I can’t see where the self-sacrifice comes in,” she replied. “You made an excellent tea.”

He laughed and leant over her chair, so that their faces were on a level. The expression in his eyes startled her. She jerked back her chair quickly and stood up, but immediately his hand slipped to her arm and held her.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think you are a little afraid of me.”

“Let me go—please!” She was thoroughly alarmed now. The old uneasiness gripped her. She experienced again the sensation of being trapped. And his eyes frightened her. They held hers with strangely compelling force, and there was a look in them such as she had never seen in a man’s eyes before—such as she had never imagined human eyes could express. “I wish you—wouldn’t look at me—like that.”

The grip on her arm tightened. He drew her close to him, and his other hand came to rest on her shoulder, slipped round her shoulders and held her.

“Look into my eyes,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. There is nothing to be frightened about.”

“Oh, please!” said Prudence, near to tears. “Let me go.”

“In a minute,” he returned softly. “I’ve something to say first. You shy child, what are you afraid of? I’ve a great affection for you. You are the dearest, sweetest little girl I have met for many a long year. I want to be friends—now and for ever. And I’m going to seal the compact right here.”

Swiftly with the words his clasp of her became vicelike. It was useless for Prudence to struggle against him. Her resistance served only to strengthen his resolve. He crushed her to him, set his lips to hers, and kissed her—kissed her with a passion that was as a flame which burned into her soul. Then he released her; and she fell back with a gasp of anger, her face white, her eyes ablaze with rage and mortification. She leaned with her clenched hand upon the tablecloth, panting and inarticulate. He turned to give her time to recover, picked his cap up from a chair, and faced round again deliberately.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said; “you were so sweet. I’ve been wanting to do that all the time. Don’t look so tragic. I won’t offend again.”

“How dare you?” she breathed; and with difficulty he forced back the smile that threatened to break over his features. That was exactly what he had expected her to say, what he had known she would say, as soon as she found any voice to speak with.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Upon my soul, I don’t know how it happened. I’m sorry—to have annoyed you. I’m not sorry about anything else. I had to kiss you.”

“I want,” Prudence said, with a faint sob in her voice, “to go home.”

“You aren’t angry with me?” he said, and became suddenly humble. “You aren’t going to punish me? I’m really ashamed of my roughness. Forgive me. Say you forgive me. I will not offend again. Please...”

“I will never willingly speak to you again,” Prudence said. “If I had any means at all of getting back without you I wouldn’t drive with you now. Please don’t say any more. Let us start at once.”

“You are as hard as a piece of flint,” he said, “for all your sweetness. I didn’t think you could be so unkind. Come then!”

He opened the door for her and followed her into the passage. From across the passage the sound of merry voices broke upon their ears. Major Stotford glanced in the direction from whence the sounds came, and then glanced curiously at Prudence. She walked on, very erect and quiet, with a white chilled face, and a hurt look in her eyes, seeming to notice nothing.

Once during the drive back he broke the silence which up to that moment had endured between them since they had taken their seats in the car. He had been driving at top speed; but they were nearing the inn where they had left the bicycle, and he slowed the car down and turned his face towards his quiet companion.

“Prudence,” he said, “you aren’t for keeping it up, are you? I’ve apologised. I’m really awfully sorry. Let bygones be bygones, won’t you? I wish I hadn’t made such an ass of myself. You surprised and delighted me. I didn’t think you’d take it like that.”

“Major Stotford,” Prudence returned with her face averted, “I have never given you permission to use my name.”

He reddened angrily, turned his attention to the steering and made no response. Nothing further passed between them. He let the car out, taking, with a recklessness that at another time would have made the girl nervous, the sharp curves of the winding road. Had they met any traffic along the road his driving would have caused an accident, as it was he nearly ran down a cyclist whom they overtook, and who saved himself and his machine by riding into the hedge.

Prudence’s heart stood still on perceiving the cyclist. She had taken one swift look at him as they rushed past, had met his eyes fully, eyes in which indignation yielded to amazement and a most unflattering criticism as they rested upon her face, which from white flamed swiftly to a shamed distressed crimson in the moment of mutual recognition.

The Rev. Ernest Jones extricated himself and his bicycle from the hedge and pursued the racing car. Why he pursued it he could not have explained; he had certainly no hope of overtaking it, and he had no idea that the car would come to a standstill shortly after passing him. He discovered it half a mile further on at the bottom of the hill, with Major Stotford standing beside it, and Prudence in the road, holding her bicycle which the man at the inn had brought out for her. These proceedings were nothing short of astounding. Mr Jones felt they needed explaining. He put on a fresh spurt, and in a cloud of dust rode almost into Prudence, and alighted.

Major Stotford uttered an exclamation of disgust and started to beat the dust from his clothes, while Prudence silently regarded her brother-in-law, and he in turn surveyed the general grouping with manifest disfavour in his curious eyes.

“You are riding home,” he said to Prudence, not in the manner of a question, but simply stating a fact. “I will accompany you—when you are ready.”

“I am ready now,” she answered, and led her bicycle into the middle of the road.

Major Stotford, still beating the dust from his clothes, did not look round. Mr Jones held his bicycle ready; he had no intention of mounting until he had seen Prudence in the saddle. Instantly with the placing of her foot on the pedal, Major Stotford swung round and approached her. He held out his hand to her.

“Just for appearances,” he said in an undertone. “You must... It’s too silly... parting like that—before him.”

She shook hands gravely. He put his hand to his cap and stepped back.

“Good-bye,” he called after her. “Sorry you couldn’t come for a longer spin. I’m off to-morrow.”

He paid no attention to Mr Jones, who was already in pursuit of Prudence, and ringing his bell fussily; he turned his back on him and went into the inn for the purpose of washing some of the curate’s dust from his throat, reflecting while he did so that, had Prudence been more reasonable, she would have avoided the parson. Despite the fact that he felt annoyed with her, he regretted the complication of the meeting which he foresaw would create new difficulties for her.

“He’ll tell of course,” he mused. “He’s the sneaking sort of little cad who feels it his special mission in life to use the lash where he can. Well, she ran into it, poor little Imprudence!”

Chapter Twenty One.

Mr Jones was spared the necessity of describing the conditions under which he had met Prudence by Prudence’s own frank confession immediately on her arrival at the house. She was either too proud to appeal to Mr Jones’ generosity, or she did not credit him with the possession of this quality. He had quite expected an appeal from her, urging him to secrecy in the matter, and was a little uncertain as to the attitude he should adopt. But he was fully determined to improve the occasion with spiritual advice and a little brotherly reproof; also he intended that she should thoroughly appreciate his magnanimity in shielding her from the consequences of her very indiscreet behaviour. And she spoilt his pleasing rôle by refusing to give him the cue. This annoyed him, and showed him plainly that his first duty was to his father-in-law, who had every right to be informed of his daughter’s indiscretions. He followed Prudence into the drawing-room, the sense of responsibility sitting heavily upon him, and was received by Mr Graynor and by his sisters-in-law with marked cordiality.

“You should have arrived earlier,” Agatha said. “The tea is cold. Where is Matilda?”

“I didn’t come from home,” he answered. “I’ve just cycled in from Hatchett. I’ve had tea, thanks.”

And then Prudence’s bombshell was delivered.

“So have I,” she said. “I met Major Stotford, and we had tea at a Cyclists’ Rest.”

“You did what?”

On any other occasion the scandalised horror in Agatha’s voice would have roused Prudence to a defiant retort; but the afternoon’s experience had subdued her spirit; she felt too crushed and miserable to resent her sister’s amazed anger, or to heed the exchange of significant glances between the others. She was dimly aware that her father rose and approached her, but the pained displeasure of his look left her unmoved. It did not seem to her to matter particularly what happened, or what they thought of her; she was past caring about such things.

“I thought I had given you quite clearly to understand that I did not wish you to pursue the acquaintance with Major Stotford,” Mr Graynor said. Prudence’s eyes fell. “I believed I could trust you,” he added reproachfully; “and you don’t even respect my wishes.”

“I will in future,” she answered with unusual meekness. “It seemed ungracious to refuse after his kindness.”

“More particularly when it was against your own inclination,” broke in Agatha.

Mr Graynor raised a protesting hand.

“Not now,” he said. “We will speak of this later.”

And with a word of apology to Mr Jones, he left the room. Prudence followed him into the hall.

“Daddy, I’m sorry,” she said, and caught at his sleeve; but, for the first time within her memory, he repulsed her.

“I don’t want to hear any more,” he said. “You have annoyed me exceedingly.”

He went on, leaving Prudence to realise the enormity of her conduct, and the hopelessness of expecting forgiveness in this quarter. She had offended him deeply. She ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom and sought relief from tears.

The exasperating part of the affair lay in the wholly unnecessary attitude of inflexible veto adopted by her family. Prudence was not likely to repeat her mistake. Experience teaches its own lessons, and her experience had been sufficiently humiliating without any additional disgrace. She bore for a time with this state of affairs: when the general hostility became insupportable she set her mind to work to discover a remedy. As a result of this mental activity, Mr Edward Morgan received one morning the letter for which he had so long and so patiently waited.

Mr Morgan read the letter in the privacy of his office, smiled, re-read it, examined it from all angles, and promptly proceeded to answer it, a light of satisfaction illumining his features as he wrote.

And yet there was in the briefly worded note not much that a man could have twisted into any meaning conveying particular encouragement; nevertheless, the invitation for which he had waited had come at last; that sufficed for Mr Morgan.

“It is so dull,” Prudence had written. “When are you coming to pay your promised visit?”

His answer read:

“My dear Miss Prudence,—

“I was delighted to get your letter. It would be selfish on my part to say that I am rejoiced to know you feel dull; but at least I cannot express sincere regret since the admission is followed by what I have been hoping for ever since we parted—your permission to visit you again. I am coming immediately. I was only waiting for just this dear little letter.

“Yours very truly,—

“Edward Morgan.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Prudence when she read this letter, and bit her lip in vexation, her face aflame at the thought that she had taken the irrevocable step, and brought very close the moment for the great decision of her life.

She knew that he would ask her to marry him, that he would take her consent for granted; and, although in sending the letter she had decided upon taking this step, now that the thing was upon her she felt reluctant and afraid.

“You’ve done it now,” she told herself, for the purpose of stiffening her resolution. “You ought to have realised your doubts sooner. It is impossible to draw back.”

Impossible to draw back! The finality of the phrase gripped her imagination with the startled sensation of a lost cause. She had burnt her boats. The prospect ahead was not entirely lacking in fascination; but she wished none the less that some kind of raft might discover itself on which she could retreat conveniently if the alternative proved very distasteful. The thought of being kissed by Mr Morgan, as Major Stotford had kissed her, the idea of giving any man the right to so kiss her, filled her with sick apprehension. The whole process of love-making thrilled her with disgust.

She leaned from her window and looked out upon the glistening darkness of the wet November night, and her thoughts became detached from present complexities, and attuned themselves to memories that were becoming old. They were nearly two years old, but they wore the stark vividness of very recent things. She allowed her fancy to riot unchecked around these bitter-sweet memories of a romance which had started from slumber only to fall back again into sleep, a sleep no longer sound and reposeful but disturbed by haunting dreams, dreams that were elusive and disconnected, and which belonged to the might-have-been. There was no shrinking from these dreams; they floated before her mind arrayed in the gracious beauty of simple and sincere emotions. The thought of love, of passion even, in this connection, had no qualm of revulsion in it. To be held in strong arms a willing captive, to be kissed by lips to which her own responded, that was a different matter. There would be no sense of shame in that, only a great wonder and a vast content.

“Dreams! dreams!” Prudence murmured, and listened to the falling of the rain without—wet darkness everywhere, the dismal darkness of a winter world sodden with the sky’s incessant weeping.

She clenched her hands upon the wet sill, and felt the rain drops on her hair.

“He is out there in the sunshine,” she thought; “and I’m here in the dark and the rain alone. It is easy to forget when the sun shines always.”

Abruptly she drew back and closed the window and turned up the lights in the room.

“I wish he wasn’t coming quite so soon,” she said, crouching down by the dying fire, a shivering, shrinking figure, with rain-wet hair, and eyes which were wet also, but not with rain.

The memories were shut out with the rain-washed night. She was back in the present again, with the disturbing reflection that the morrow, the last day of sad November, would see the arrival of Edward Morgan and the end of her girlish dreams.

Chapter Twenty Two.

Mr Edward Morgan arrived on the following afternoon. Prudence watched him from the window disentangling himself from the carriage rugs, and fussing with the muffler which he wore wound carefully about his throat. The wind was in the north-east, and he was subject to bronchitis.

Swathed in wraps he did not cut a romantic figure: he looked what he was, a prosperous, middle-aged man who valued his health and refrained from taking liberties with it. Prudence told herself that he was wise to be cautious, at the same time she wished that he was of an age at which such caution was unnecessary.

He mounted the steps, and was welcomed in the hall by Mr Graynor and taken to the library for purposes of refreshment stronger than tea after his cold and tedious journey. Later, he made his appearance in the drawing-room, divested of his outdoor wear and improved on that account. A subtle blending of whisky and cigar smoke emanated from his person, of which Prudence was critically aware as she shook hands and replied to his inquiries as to her health. He was in immense spirits, as became a successful lover; also he was a little shy and nervously anxious to please.

He talked about his journey and discussed politics and business and the weather; and Prudence listened, taking no part in the conversation, and feeling grateful to him for refraining from addressing her directly. He was, while intensely alive to her presence, seemingly unmindful of it. He credited her, not without reason, with sharing his shyness; and was anxious to give her time to get used to him and feel her way back to their former easy relations. Miss Agatha received the greater part of his attention, and in return pressed the hot scones on him hospitably. He refused these on the plea that they gave him indigestion; but he accepted cake, and a cup of the eighteenpenny tea, which he pronounced excellent.

“Mrs Morgan is well, I hope?” Miss Agatha inquired conversationally, filling in one of those abrupt, unaccountable, and disconcerting pauses in the talk, which flowed with even dulness between the hitches.

“Thank you, yes. My mother enjoys excellent health. Henry’s wife has been laid up; they had to operate for appendicitis. She’s about again now. Henry and the boys are flourishing.”

There followed polite expressions of regret for Mrs Henry Morgan’s indisposition, broken into by the arrival of William, whose greeting of Mr Morgan overflowed with cordiality.

“Been looking to see you in these parts for months,” he said. “Beastly weather for travelling; the wind is cutting. Are those hot scones, Prudence?”

William was so accustomed to being waited upon by the different members of his family that it never occurred to him to attend to his own needs. He did not observe the flush of annoyance that overspread Prudence’s face, nor the reluctance with which she rose to fetch the scones in question; Mr Morgan observed it, however, and was before her in reaching the fireplace where the scones lay on a hot plate inside the fender. He stooped for the plate; and the stiffness of his movements, while apparent to Prudence, passed uncriticised on this occasion. William protested loudly.

“Oh, come!” he said. “You shouldn’t do that. I can’t allow a visitor to wait on me. One of the girls will do it.”

Mr Morgan disregarded the remonstrance, refusing to relinquish the dish of scones.

“My mother brought me up to wait upon her,” he said, smiling. “It comes natural to me.”

Prudence felt pleased; but she had no faith in the lesson proving beneficial to William; he would assuredly miss the point.

“Well, you’re a younger man than I,” said William jocularly. “I shouldn’t show such energy after a long journey.”

Which speech, delivered for Prudence’s benefit, William considered particularly tactful. He had in mind his sister’s reflections on Mr Morgan’s age. But Mr Morgan was not helpful.

“I’m forty-three to-day,” he acknowledged, with, in William’s opinion, quite unnecessary candour. “I decided on this date for making the journey from sentimental reasons; it occurred to me as an altogether agreeable way of celebrating the occasion.”

He did not look in Prudence’s direction while he spoke, for which consideration she was obliged to him: she felt the eyes of the rest focussed upon herself, and guessed what was in their thoughts in connection with these confidences. It did not in the least surprise her to hear William playfully observe that they would have to contrive something special in the way of entertainment to mark the event and make this birthday a memorable one. He looked meaningly at Prudence, and slyly at Mr Morgan, and remarked that birthdays conferred peculiar privileges and gave a right to indulgence. But Mr Morgan repudiated this.

“At my age one doesn’t insist on those prerogatives,” he said. “The only advantage I take of the day is to give myself pleasure. I have done that.”

From which Prudence gathered to her relief that he did not intend to press his suit that day. Nor did he. He rather skilfully evaded the tête-à-têtes with her, which every member of the household seemed in conspiracy to bring about. He was giving her time to commit to heart the lesson which he had told her he wanted her to learn. It was a lesson which she could not master with him for teacher; but she came to feel a very warm friendship for him, which in lieu of anything better seemed not insufficient to begin with.

Mr Morgan had been at Court Heatherleigh a week before he broached the question of marriage with her; and Prudence, lulled into a sense of security by his avoidance of the subject, doubted whether he intended to propose to her, and was divided between a state of mortification and relief. The proposal when it came startled her the more by reason of this adaptation of Mr Morgan from the rôle he had been cast for to the less romantic rôle of friend. It found her immensely unprepared, as the delayed falling of anything long expected is apt to do when launched suddenly and with irrelevant haste. She was altogether unaware of what was in his mind at the moment when he sprung the thing upon her.

They were playing billiards together after dinner, with Mary acting as marker and making a third in the conversation that confined itself almost exclusively to the game. Prudence, in the interest of making a brake, did not observe when Mary left the room; she became aware of her absence for the first time on looking round to call the score. Mr Morgan marked for her. When he approached the table, instead of playing, he laid his cue on the cloth and took Prudence’s hand.

“Come and sit down,” he said, drawing her to the settee. “We’ll finish the game presently.”

Prudence relinquished her cue to him and sat down. He put the cue away in the rack and seated himself beside her.

“I’ve been a long time coming to my point,” he said, coming to it rather abruptly now that he was once started; “but I think you must have understood my reason for delay. I did not want to hurry you. You know why I came down... Prudence, will you marry me?”

Prudence gave a little sigh, and sat perfectly still, staring with amazed eyes at the neglected balls on the green cloth. Oddly, the thought which struck her at the moment was that it was unnecessary to break off in the middle of a game to ask her that. There was no need to make opportunities; they were thrust at him.

“Let me think,” she said. “Give me time. You—startled me.”

“But you knew that I meant to ask you that question?” He took her hand again and pressed it gently. “When you sent that letter, wasn’t it intended for permission to speak? I interpreted it that way.”

“I—don’t—know.” She was still for a moment; then she turned to him and looked him uncertainly in the eyes. “I was very miserable when I wrote that letter. Yes; I suppose that was what I meant—then.”

She broke off, and her gaze wandered away and came to rest again on the balls.

“It’s silly of me,” she said, speaking very low. “I feel a little afraid.”

“Just shyness,” he said reassuringly, stroking the hand which lay limply in his. “I am old for you; but you will find me the more gentle, possibly the more understanding, on that account. My darling, I love you very dearly. You are so young—you don’t know yet what love is. I did not know either until recently. I come to it rather late. But my feeling for you is very deep. Prudence, my dear, I want you. I love you. If you give yourself to me I will do everything in my power to make your life happy. Will you marry me, dear?”

It seemed to Prudence that there was only one possible answer. She had understood when she invited him to come down the significance of what she did. She had no right to encourage him to hope and then fail in her part. He was too good a man to play with. She kept her face averted while she answered him, staring fixedly at the shining balls, lying where her last stroke had left them placed conveniently, she realised with grim appreciation of her mistake, for him to score off.

“I want to be quite frank with you,” she said, her breathing fast through sheer nervousness, an earnest expression on her face, which he thought very modest and gentle. “I don’t love you, Mr Morgan,—not in that way—not, I mean, as you love me. I’ve thought—I should like to marry you. I think that still—only I’m afraid sometimes,—afraid that you’ll find me disappointing.”

He placed his arm very gently round her shoulders and held her so without attempting any warmer caress. He smiled into her troubled eyes.

“There is only one thing that could possibly disappoint me,” he said, “and that is if I fail to make you happy. Trust me, and all will be well.”

And so Prudence secured her passage through the door which it seemed he alone could open for her into those wider spaces where she imagined freedom was to be found. But emerging with Edward Morgan at her side, it gradually became clear to her that she was doubly fettered. In blindly groping for her freedom she had given herself to a new and more complete bondage. She would leave the old tyranny behind her, only to pass to another condition of fresh and more pressing obligations. The certainty of these things came to her with the realisation of her distaste for her new responsibility.

Chapter Twenty Three.

Prudence insisted upon a long engagement.

That was the first hitch in the amicable relations between her and her fiancé. Mr Morgan could see no reason why they should not marry immediately. He had less time than she to waste, and he was impatient of delay. But Prudence remained firm. She held out for a six months’ engagement; and Mr Graynor from purely selfish reasons ranged himself on her side. He was glad that her choice had fallen so wisely on this trusty friend of long standing. He could hand her over to the care of Edward Morgan with no anxiety for her future well-being; but he did not want to part with her too soon. When she was married the opportunities for seeing her would be few, and he dreaded the separation.

“Six months is not so very long,” he told the exasperated Mr Morgan. “And Prudence is only twenty.”

“If I were twenty,” Mr Morgan retorted, “I might see the matter in that light. Unfortunately I am not that age. But I shall have to exercise patience, I suppose.”

He bought his fiancée a magnificent half hoop of diamonds, and slipped it on her fingers, where it looked, Prudence considered, oddly out of place. It was altogether too valuable for constant wear. She did not tell him so for fear of hurting his feelings; but she wished that he would buy her less extravagant gifts. Whenever he gave her anything it was of the costliest description that he could procure. It seemed to give him peculiar satisfaction to surround her with expensive things. And he was amazingly kind and considerate for her unexpressed wishes. Prudence never knew how much it cost him in self-restraint in those early days of their engagement to keep under the ardour of his love for her, and school his passionate desire to take her in his arms and kiss madly her cool unresponding lips. He was wise, this mature lover. He knew that he had to foster her kindly affection for him; that he would need to tend and cherish it a long time before he could look to see it blossom into love. But he did not despair. He believed that she would give him eventually a full and willing response.

The engagement brought unforeseen consequences in the form of affectionate and intimate letters from the different members of Mr Morgan’s family. All these people were unknown to Prudence; yet they wrote to her as though the prospective relationship admitted them to terms of confidential familiarity.

Old Mrs Morgan wrote approving her son’s choice, and congratulating Prudence on having won so excellent a husband. She was glad, she added, that Prudence was young; she liked young people about her. She looked forward to having Prudence on a visit, when she would instruct her in regard to Edward’s likes and dislikes, the care of his health, and other matters of similar importance.

Mrs Henry Morgan’s letter was gushing and insincere in tone. As a matter of fact Mr Morgan’s sister-in-law was not very pleased to hear of his engagement. She had come to regard him as a confirmed bachelor, and her two sons, for whom she was very ambitious as quite certain of inheriting their uncle’s immense wealth. She had mapped out a brilliant future for them in which Morgan Bros, played no part; and she considered it indelicate on Edward’s side to upset her plans by marrying—at his time of life.

“You are a brave little person,” ran one passage in her letter; “a man past forty is not adaptable. But I’ll give you all sorts of wrinkles how to manage him. And of course his mother will live with you. She and I don’t get on.”

“Of course his mother won’t live with us,” Prudence told herself.

But she learned later that Mrs Henry’s statement was correct. Old Mrs Morgan had managed Edward’s house always, and would continue to do so.

“You will love her,” he assured Prudence; “and most certainly she will love you.”

An invitation to spend Christmas in Derbyshire followed; but Prudence, panic-stricken at the thought of meeting these people, insisted on spending her last Christmas at home; and it was finally settled that the visit should be deferred till the spring, when Mr Morgan promised himself the pleasure of fetching her to spend a fortnight with his mother, and of bringing her home again at the finish of the visit. There was little likelihood of seeing much of her in the interval; but she promised to write to him regularly once a week, setting aside his tentative suggestion that a daily correspondence would be welcome by frankly admitting that she would find nothing to say. He was disappointed. The ink on his own pen would not have dried from a dearth of ideas. At forty-three a man’s passion is no whit less ardent than that of a boy of twenty; but the man knows how to practise restraint. It was this knowledge which helped Edward Morgan over the difficulties of his courtship with a girl whose heart he had yet to win, and to whom passion was an unknown quantity.

Prudence was rather sexless in those days. The realities of love and marriage were mysteries to her. Marriage meant no more than the solution of a problem that had occupied her attention on and off for years. She saw no other way of obtaining her emancipation. And he was very unexacting in his devotion, and patient and kind.

The kindly attentions of Mr Morgan, the cessation of general hostilities, and the patronising approval of brother William, effected a wonderful clearance in the domestic atmosphere. Prudence was once more in favour, and the indiscretions of the past were tacitly overlooked. She discovered also that by virtue of her engagement she had achieved a new importance in Wortheton social life. People called to offer their congratulations; and the vicar talked affably of the imitative tendency of marriage, seeming to ascribe Prudence’s good fortune to the example set by her sister. He informed Mr Morgan rather unnecessarily that he was rich in this world’s goods.

Amid the general rejoicings Bobby alone stood aloof, critical and disapproving and altogether unimpressed with the splendour of the match.

“You don’t need to marry money,” he wrote. “There’s more than enough of the beastly commodity in the family as it is. And Morgan! ... Of course he’s all right in himself, and a good fellow; but he’s more than double your age. Imagine what you would say if I wanted to marry a woman old enough to be my mother! Break it off, Prue. I’ll be home shortly, and I’ll stand by you.”

Prudence shed a few surreptitious tears over this letter, though it moved her to mirth as well; it was so characteristic of the writer. But, save for glimpses during the holidays, Bobby had no idea of the flatness of life at Court Heatherleigh, its repression, its sneaking pose—there was no other term for it—of pious superiority which crushed the spirit and the natural honesty of those upon whom its influence was exerted. She was not marrying Mr Morgan for his wealth; she was not marrying him for love. Her reasons, when she came to analyse them, occurred to her singularly inadequate. She felt very doubtful as to the wisdom of the step she had taken. The idea of a triangular household, with a mother-in-law in supreme command, seemed to her rather like a repetition of the unsatisfactory home conditions. She felt that Edward Morgan owed it to her to set up a separate establishment, and even ventured to suggest this rearrangement to him. He heard her in pained surprise.

“My mother will not intrude on us,” he said. “Morningside has been her home always. I could not agree to her living elsewhere.”

“Couldn’t we live elsewhere?” Prudence insisted. “I should like a house of my own.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, with his hands on her shoulders, and his grave eyes looking tenderly down upon her. “Home for my mother is where I am.”

He stooped and kissed her as a sort of act of forgiveness for the want of consideration she had shown.

Chapter Twenty Four.

On the morning that Edward Morgan left Wortheton it was arranged that Prudence should drive with him to the junction and see the train off. It was never clear to Prudence with whom the idea originated; it certainly did not emanate from her own brain. She was even a little embarrassed at the thought of the four-mile drive with her heavily coated and bemuffled fiancé, and the prospective ordeal of standing by the door of his compartment during those exasperating, interminable minutes before the starting of the train.

She came downstairs into the hall dressed for the drive in a navy costume which accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure to discover Mr Morgan winding his many wraps about him, and talking cheerfully with her father and sisters, who were gathered together to see him off.

He paused in the business of buttoning his coat to inquire anxiously if she were sufficiently warmly clad for the day, which was bright and cold, with a touch of December frost in the air. She replied carelessly that she did not feel cold; and Mr Graynor, with his arm about her shoulders, remarked thoughtlessly:

“Young blood, Morgan, defies the weather.”

“I think Prudence should wear a fur about her throat,” Agatha said. “It would look more suitable.”

Mary was despatched forthwith to fetch the unwanted addition, which, when it appeared, Mr Morgan insisted on placing round her shoulders. Prudence took her seat in the carriage, feeling oppressed with the warmth of the sable and the confined heated atmosphere of the artificially warmed brougham, with its windows carefully closed against the cold clear air. She dragged at the fur impatiently.

“I must take it off,” she said. “I feel stifled.”

“All right,” he acquiesced, and passed his arm round her waist in a clumsy caress. “I’ll keep you warm. Comfy, eh?”

She smiled at him a little nervously.

“You are just a mountain of clothes,” she said.

During the long drive Mr Morgan kept his arm about her, and held her so closely that Prudence felt suffocated. She proposed letting down the window part way; but Mr Morgan showed such alarm at the idea that she did not persist.

“You don’t understand the risk,” he said. “This winter travelling... It’s how people contract pneumonia, risking chills through open windows. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. It’s time I took a hand at it. I’m going to take great care of you, little girl,—all my life. Open windows!—no! This open-air craze is the cause of most of the ills of life.”

Prudence laughed.

“I understood it was the cure for them,” she replied. “I live in the open air—and sleep in it.”

“Sleep in it!” he ejaculated in horrified accents.

“Well, not actually that,” she said; “but with the bedroom window wide—always.”

He stared at her. He had never supposed that any one, save those undergoing the outrageous experiment of the new-fangled open-air cure, which he considered stark madness, slept with open windows in the winter. His own windows were always carefully secured and heavily curtained. Occasionally, during the very warm summer months, he allowed an inch at the top to remain open for purposes of ventilation.

“You will grow wiser as you grow older,” he said, and determined that on that point anyhow he would have his own way.

It was a relief to Prudence when they arrived at the station. She walked on to the platform, declining to accompany Mr Morgan to the booking-office while he procured his ticket. She wanted to fill her lungs with fresh air before the further ordeal of final leave-taking; and she wanted for a few minutes to be rid of his kindly presence, and the necessity of responding to his lover-like advances. It was all so dull and irksome; there was only one word which occurred to her as applicable to the situation, and that was stodgy. The stodginess of it was getting on her nerves.

When finally the big over-coated figure emerged upon the platform and came towards her Prudence felt a touch of compunction because she could not return the smiling gladness of his look with eyes which expressed a like pleasure at his approach; her own gaze was critical and entirely matter-of-fact.

His train was in. She opened the door of an empty compartment and stood beside it. He joined her, waited until the porter had placed his luggage on the rack, and dismissed him handsomely; then he motioned Prudence to get into the compartment, and followed her quickly and closed the door upon themselves.

“We’ve just time,” he said, “for a last good-bye.” And took her in his arms.

She had never felt so embarrassed in his presence before, perhaps because he had never before assumed so lover-like and determined an attitude. He tilted back her face and kissed her lips, and continued to hold and kiss her in this extravagant manner, despite the fact that people passed the carriage at intervals and stared in as they passed. Mr Morgan was indifferent to this manifest curiosity in his doings, and his broad figure blocked the middle window and screened Prudence from intrusive eyes.

“Oh!” she said, and attempted to withdraw from his embrace. “The train will be starting immediately. I had better get out.”

“Shy little girl!” he returned, and laughed joyously. “You’ve never been very free with your kisses, Prudence; and it will be a long time before I see you again. All right! You shall get out now. One good kiss before I let you go.”

He fairly hugged her. Prudence gave him a cool hasty peck on the cheek, slipped from his hold, and was out on the platform as soon as he opened the door. He closed the door and fastened it and leaned from the window to talk to her, holding her hand until the guard’s flag waved the signal for her release.

“Good-bye, my darling,” he called to her.

Prudence stood back and waved her hand to him, waved it gaily with a glad sense of relief. The last she saw of him as the train began to move out of the station was his grave face regarding her mournfully as he pulled up the window before settling down in his corner.

Prudence hurried out to the waiting carriage with her thoughts in a whirl. This business of being engaged was an altogether perplexing affair. She had not expected things to be like this somehow. She did not know quite what she had expected; but she had never imagined that the stolid Edward Morgan could assume the rôle of lover and confidently look for a similar response from her; she had believed he would maintain the more dignified attitude of a warm and affectionate friendliness throughout their engagement; and she felt vexed and cheated because he had disappointed her in this belief.

“It’s absurd,” she told herself, with her hot face turned to the sharp crisp air which came through the open window, “for him to imagine I am going to let him make love to me when I only want him to be nice and kind always.”

But she began dimly to apprehend that the absurdity was likely to go on.

Bobby came home for the Christmas holidays and talked to her seriously of the mistake she was making. He did not look forward to the prospect of coming home finally to find Prudence gone; and the next term at school was his last.

“Beastly rotten it will be here without you,” he remarked. “You might have waited, Prue, a little longer. You don’t love old Morgan, do you?”

That was a poser for Prudence.

“I’m fond of him,” she answered guardedly. “He’s kind, and generous. When I am married I shall be able to do as I like.”

“Rot!” he retorted. “It will mean simply exchanging one dulness for another. Then you’ll vary the dullness by falling in love with some one else, and there’ll be a scandal. I know you. You’ll never settle down to a stick-in-the-mud existence with old Morgan. And serve him jolly well right for being such an ass.”

Prudence regarded him with newly awakened interest, her expression slightly aggrieved.

“I had no idea you held such a low opinion of me,” she said.

He laughed.

“That’s human nature, old girl. If you intend to remain faithful to old Morgan you’ll not have to look at another man, because when the right man comes along you’ll know it; all the wedding rings in the world won’t keep you blind to facts. You chuck the silly old geyser,” he counselled in the inelegant phraseology he affected, “before you tie your life into a hopeless knot.”

She shook her head.

“It’s not so easy,” she said.

“They’d be down on you, of course. But I’d stand by you. We’d worry through.”

“I didn’t mean that.” She attempted explanations. “He’s so good and kind. You don’t understand. I’d feel the meanest thing on the face of the earth if I hurt him deliberately like that. And there isn’t any need. I want to marry him.”

“There’s no accounting for tastes, of course,” he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust.

The whole business of Prudence’s engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal space over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly.

The regular arrival of Mr Morgan’s weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William’s part, and a show of sly surreptitiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand.

The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as “Do we behold a billet doux?” or the murmured misquotation: “He sent a letter to his love.” And the bulky envelope would be passed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circumstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room.

“I can’t think how you stand it,” Bobby said once, when they were alone together. “If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I’d hit him.”

“I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me,” she answered. “William would vulgarise the most sacred thing.”