A LADY IN BLACK

So spoke Mrs. Bonnington, the Vicar’s wife, laying down the law; a law indeed, which most English women are ready to take for granted. Mrs. Rose, a tall, thin, pale lady who had “nerves,” and who, on this bright April morning, wore a woollen shawl half off her shoulders as she sat in the warm sun by the dining-room window, assented readily.

“That’s what I always say. Especially a widow. I’m sure if anything were to happen to my husband,” went on Mrs. Rose euphemistically, “the last thing I should think about would be my dress. I should be far too unhappy to trouble myself about the fit of my dresses or the shape of my bonnets.”

Now this was perhaps true, as Mrs. Rose, though she spent as much money and as much thought upon her clothes as her compeers, never succeeded in looking as if her clothes had been made for her, or as if the subject of “fit” were of any importance.

Mrs. Bonnington shook her head with vague disquietude, and resumed her homily.

“I assure you the matter has caused me a good deal of anxiety. You know how solicitous both the Vicar and I are about the tone of the parish.”

“I do indeed,” murmured Mrs. Rose sympathetically.

“You know how hard we work to keep up a high standard. Why, everybody knows that it was through us that those objectionable people at Colwyn Lodge went away, and how we would do anything to rid the place of those terrible Solomons at Stone Court!”

At the other end of the room, a young face, with gray eyes full of mischief, was turned in the direction of Mrs. Bonnington with a satirical smile. Mabin Rose, the overgrown, awkward step-daughter of Mrs. Rose, who hated the Vicar’s wife, and called her a busybody and a gossip, brought her darning nearer to the table and dashed headlong into the fray.

“Papa wouldn’t thank you if you did drive the Solomons out of the parish, as you did the people at Colwyn Lodge, Mrs. Bonnington,” broke in the clear young voice that would be heard. “He says Mr. Solomon is the best tenant he ever had, and that he wishes that some of the Christians were like him.”

“Hush, Mabin. Go on with your work, and don’t interrupt with your rude remarks,” said Mrs. Rose sharply. “I am quite sure your father never said such a thing, except perhaps in fun,” she went on, turning apologetically to her visitor. “Nobody is more anxious about ‘tone’ and all those things than Mr. Rose, and he was saying only yesterday that he would rather I didn’t call upon this Mrs. Dale until something more was known about her.”

Again the young face at the other end of the table looked up mutinously; but this time Mabin controlled her inclination to protest. She looked down again, and began to darn furiously, to the relief of her feelings, but to the injury of the stocking.

Mrs. Bonnington went on:

“You were quite right. It’s not that I wish to be uncharitable.”

“Of course not,” assented Mrs. Rose with fervor.

“But a woman like yourself, with daughters to take care of, cannot be too careful. Young people are so easily led away; they think so much of the mere outside. They are so easily dazzled and taken in by appearances.”

Mabin grew red, perceiving that this little sermon by the way was directed at herself. Her step-sisters, Emily and Ethel, one of whom could be heard “practising” in the drawing-room, were not the sort of girls to be led away by anything.

“But why shouldn’t a nice face mean something nice?” put in the rash young woman again.

The fact was that Mabin had been charmed with the sweet pink-and-white face and blue eyes of Mrs. Dale, their new neighbor at “The Towers,” and was mentally comparing the widow’s childlike charms with the acidulated attractions of the Vicar’s dowdy wife.

“And why,” pursued Mabin, as both the elder ladies seemed to pause to gain strength to fall upon her together, “shouldn’t she be just as sorry for her husband’s death because she looks nice over it? It seemed to me, when she sat near us at church on Sunday, that she had the saddest face I had ever seen. And as for her corrupting us by her ‘tone,’ she won’t have anything to do with any of us. Mrs. Warren has called upon her, and the Miss Bradleys and Mrs. Peak and a lot more people, and she’s always ‘not at home.’ So even if she is wicked, I should think you might let her stay. Surely she can’t do us much harm just by having her frocks better made than the rest of us.”

When Mabin had finished this outrageous speech, there was an awful pause. Mrs. Rose hardly knew how to administer such a reproof as should be sufficiently scathing; while Mrs. Bonnington waited in solemn silence for the reproof to come. Mabin looked from her step-mother’s face to that of the Vicar’s wife, and thought she had better retire before the avalanche descended. So she gathered up her work hastily, running her darning-needle into her hand in her excitement, muttered an awkward apology and excuse for her disappearance at the same time, and shot out of the room in the ungainly way which had so often before caused her stepmother to shudder, as she did now.

When the door had closed upon the girl, closed, unfortunately, with a bang, Mrs. Bonnington sighed.

“I am afraid,” she said, unconsciously assuming still more of her usual clerical tone and accent, “that Mabin must be a great anxiety to you!”

Mrs. Rose sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, wearily.

“If you could realize how great an anxiety,” she murmured in a solemn tone, “you would pity me! If it were not that Mr. Rose gives his authority to support mine in dealing with her, she would be absolutely unmanageable, I assure you.”

“A froward spirit! And one singularly unsusceptible to good influences,” said the Vicar’s wife. “However, we must persevere with her, and hope for a future blessing on our labors, even if it should come too late for us to be witnesses of her regeneration.”

“I am sure I have always done my best for her, and treated her just as I have my own children. But you see with what different results! The seed is the same, but the soil is not. I don’t know whether you knew her mother? But I suppose Mabin must take after her. She is utterly unlike her father.”

“She is indeed. Mr. Rose is such a particularly judicious, upright man. The Vicar has the highest respect for him.”

Mrs. Bonnington paused, to give full effect to this noble encomium. Mrs. Rose acknowledged it by a graceful bend of the head, and went on:

“The great failing about poor Mabin is that she is not womanly. And that is the one thing above all that my husband asks of a woman. Let her only be womanly, he always says, and I will forgive everything else. Now my own girls are that, above everything.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Bonnington with decision; “but that is just the fault of our age, Mrs. Rose. Girls are no longer brought up to be contented to be girls. They must put themselves on the same footing with their brothers. Mabin is in the fashion. And no doubt that is all she desires. You see how this Mrs. Dale has caught hold of her imagination, by nothing but her fashionable clothes!”

Mrs. Rose put on a womanly air of absolute helplessness:

“Well, what can I do?” said she.

Mrs. Bonnington came a little nearer.

“In the case of this Mrs. Dale,” said she in a lower voice, “go on just as you have begun. Do not call upon her. Do not have anything to do with her. To tell you the truth, it was about her that I came to see you this morning. She has already brought mischief into our own peaceful home. She is a dangerous woman.”

“Dear me! You don’t mean that!” said Mrs. Rose with vivid interest.

“Unhappily I do. My son Rudolph came back from his ship only ten days ago, and already he can think of nothing but this Mrs. Dale.”

“After having had the unpardonable insolence to leave your call unreturned, she has got hold of your son?” gasped Mrs. Rose.

“Well, not exactly that, as far as I know,” admitted the Vicar’s wife. “He says he has never spoken to her. And the dear boy has never told me an untruth before.”

“But if this dreadful woman has entangled him, of course she might make him say anything!” cried Mrs. Rose in sympathetic agonies.

“I should not like to accuse a fellow-woman of doing that,” replied Mrs. Bonnington, severely; “but I think it is a bad and unnatural sign, when my son, who has never taken the least notice of any of the young girls in the neighborhood, becomes absorbed, in a few days, in the doings of a person who is a complete stranger to him and who calls herself a widow.”

“Then don’t you think,” purred Mrs. Rose, with the eagerness of one who scents a scandal, “that she is a widow?”

There was a pause. And Mrs. Bonnington spoke next, with the deliberation of one who has a great duty to perform.

“I should be very sorry to have it said of me that I was the first to start a rumor which might be thought unchristian or unkind,” she said with a deprecatory wave of the brown cotton gloves she wore in the mornings. “But I have thought it my duty to make inquiries, and I deeply regret to say that I have found out several things which lead me to the conclusion that this person has settled down in our midst under false pretences.”

“You don’t say so!”

“You shall judge for yourself. In the first place, although she calls herself Mrs. Dale, the initials on some of her linen are ‘D. M.’ Now M. does not stand for ‘Dale,’ does it?”

“Perhaps her maiden name began with M.,” suggested Mrs. Rose.

“My informant tells me,” went on Mrs. Bonnington, as if offended by the interruption, “that in her old books, school-books and work of that sort, there is written the name ‘Dorothy Leatham.’ So that she seems to have passed already by three different names. I leave it to your own common sense whether that is not a curious circumstance, considering that she is still young.”

“It is certainly curious, very curious. And—and—”

Mrs. Rose hardly liked to ask on what authority her visitor made these statements, which savored strongly of the back-stairs. She had hardly paused an instant before Mrs. Bonnington rushed into further details:

“And now here is another thing which is very strange: her servants have none of them been with her long. They were all engaged together, three months ago in London, not by Mrs. Dale herself, but by an old lady whose name nobody seems to know. Now isn’t that rather remarkable? They all came down here, and had the place ready for their mistress, before they so much as saw her.”

Mrs. Bonnington leaned back in her chair, and drew on her brown cotton gloves further. Mrs. Rose wondered again as to the source of this information. She felt a little ashamed of listening to all this gossip, and was less inclined than her friend to take a suspicious view of the case, strange though it was. So she contented herself with murmured interjections, to fill up the pause before Mrs. Bonnington went on again:

“However, I have got a clew to where she came from, for a van-load of furniture came down before she arrived, and it came from Todcaster.”

“Todcaster!” echoed Mrs. Rose. “Then we shall soon know something more about her. Mr. Rose’s old friend, Mrs. Haybrow, is coming down to see us early next month. She lived near Todcaster when she was a girl, and she often goes back to the old place, and keeps in touch with all the people about there.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bonnington, rising from her chair, and speaking in a rather more stilted tone than at first, with the consciousness that her news had hardly been received as she had expected, “I sincerely trust we may find we have been mistaken. No one will rejoice more unfeignedly than I if she proves to be indeed what she gives herself out to be. Indeed, if she had received me frankly at the outset, I would have shown her such Christian sympathy as one soul can give to another without asking any questions. And it is only in the interests of our young people that I lift up my voice now.”

The Vicar’s wife then took her leave, and went on her way to complete her morning rounds. She was rather a terrible person, this little, faded middle-aged woman with the curate’s voice and the curate’s manner, uniting, as she did, a desperate interest in other people’s affairs with a profound conviction that her interference in them could only be for good. But she had her good points. A devoted, submissive, and worshipful wife, she modified her worship by considering herself the Vicar’s guardian angel. A parish busybody and tyrant, she never spared herself and could show true womanly kindness to such of her husband’s parishioners as were not of “a froward spirit.”

Unluckily, she had not the power of conciliating, but had, on the contrary, a grand talent for raising up antagonism in unregenerate minds like those of the unfortunate Mabin.

The young girl had been both sorry and ashamed at her own loss of temper. Not that an outburst such as that she had indulged in was any unusual thing. Like many young girls of spirit under injudicious rule, Mabin was in a state of perpetual friction with those around her. Her step-mother was not intentionally unkind; but poor Mabin had to suffer from the constant comparison of her unruly and independent self with her quiet and insipid half-sisters.

And the worst of it was that her father was even less indulgent than his wife to her waywardness. A stiff, straight-laced, narrow-minded man, accustomed to be looked up to and deferred to by the female members of his household, he disapproved in the strongest manner both of the erratic moods of his eldest daughter, and of her longing for independence. It was from him, indeed, that Mabin chiefly suffered. She looked upon the cold, handsome, aquiline face of her father with something very much like horror, and the mere fact that he approved only of submissive “womanly” women seemed to goad her into the very rebelliousness and independence which shocked him so deeply.

At the same time that he disapproved of her, however, Mr. Rose did not hesitate to avail himself of his daughter’s bright wits; and if any task requiring a little thought or a little judgment presented itself, it was always upon Mabin’s shoulders that he put the burden.

He had even gone so far, protesting loudly the while against the “unfeminine” practice, as to allow Mabin to ride a bicycle; and it was on this machine that the girl was expected to go into Seagate two or three times a week, to fetch him his books and magazines from the local library.

As Mrs. Bonnington descended the steps of the big stone house, and, emerging from the portico, made her way down the broad gravel path to the gate, she met Mabin coming out by the side gate among the evergreens with her bicycle by her side.

Now if there was one thing more detestable in the eyes of the Vicar’s wife than another, it was a bicycle. But this detestation increased tenfold when the rider of the obnoxious machine was a woman. It was her one grievance against upright Mr. Rose that he allowed his nineteen-year-old daughter to “career about the country” on the abominable thing.

She uttered an involuntary “Ugh!” of disgust as the thing almost touched her uplifted skirts.

“I beg your pardon. I hope I didn’t run against you. I am so clumsy,” said Mabin with studied politeness.

“You can’t expect to be anything but clumsy while you use such a thing as that!” said Mrs. Bonnington severely. “I wish for your own sake it would get broken, that you might never be seen in an attitude so unbecoming to a gentlewoman again.”

“Is it you who tell your sons to throw stones at it when I am riding past the Vicarage?” said Mabin, trying to speak civilly, while the blood rose to her cheeks. “Walter struck the hind wheel two days ago, and now I have to walk as long as I am within stone’s-throw of your garden wall.”

“I have heard nothing about it,” said Mrs. Bonnington icily.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mabin, keeping her tone in check. “But I see Rudolph has taken to riding one too since he’s been back. So if they throw stones at me, I can have my revenge upon him,” she concluded darkly.

“If girls unsex themselves, they can’t expect to be treated with the chivalry they used to receive,” said Mrs. Bonnington, as, not caring to continue the encounter with the rebellious one, she turned her back, and went down the hill.

CHAPTER II.
A PENITENT.

Mabin looked at Mrs. Bonnington’s retreating figure, half regretfully and half resentfully. The regret was for her own incivility; the resentment was for the want of tact which had provoked it.

Mabin, like so many other young girls on the threshold of womanhood, lived in a constant state of warfare both with herself and her neighbors. Sensitive, affectionate, hasty tempered and wilful, she was at the same time almost morbidly modest and mistrustful of herself; so that she passed her time in alternate bursts of angry resentment against those who misunderstood her, and fits of remorse for her own shortcomings.

She now mounted her bicycle with the feeling that the Vicar’s wife had spoilt her morning’s ride for her. Not by any means a vain girl, she underrated her own attractions, which included a pretty, gray-eyed little flower-face, a fair skin, and short, soft, dark-brown hair. But she was keenly alive to the reproach of clumsiness, which had so often been cast at her. She had shot up, within the last three years, to a height which, together with the girlish leanness of her figure, had caused her to be called, even outside the family circle, “a lamp-post” and a “gawky creature.” And although she stubbornly refused to take to the long skirts which would have lent her the grace she wanted, she nourished a smouldering indignation against her traducers.

And chief among these were the boys of the Vicarage, against whom, as against their mother for her criticisms, and their father for his dull sermons, her spirit was always in arms.

The strife between the Bonningtons and the Roses had not always been so keen. Indeed, in the old days when they were children together, Mabin and Rudolph had got on well enough together, and had exchanged love-tokens of ends of slate pencil, lumps of chalk, and bird’s eggs. But with advancing years had come first coolness and then estrangement. So that it was now the correct thing among the Bonnington boys to laugh at Mabin for being “advanced,” “superior,” “a New Woman,” and a “fright;” while she, on her side, treated them with lofty contempt as “savages” and “boors.”

Mabin had not gone twenty yards, however, on her way up the slight ascent, when she saw something which diverted her thoughts from the Vicarage people. The gates at “The Towers” were wide open, and Mrs. Dale’s smart victoria, with its well-matched pair of small, dark-brown horses, came out so suddenly that Mabin had to jump off her bicycle to avoid a collision. Alone in the carriage sat a lady in deep mourning, who turned and looked out anxiously at the girl, and stopped the carriage to speak to her.

“I’m so sorry! I hope you didn’t hurt yourself, in having to jump off so quickly?” asked the lady in black, in a sweet, plaintive voice that struck some chord in Mabin’s heart, and made the girl gasp, and pause before she could answer.

“Oh no, oh no, thank you. One often has to do that,” stammered the girl, flushing, and speaking with a shy constraint which made her tone cold and almost rude.

And she knew it, poor child, and was miserable over it; miserable to think that now when she had an opportunity of speaking to the being who had excited in her an enthusiastic admiration, she was throwing her chance away.

A common and a most tragic experience with most young girls.

One thing, however, Mabin was able to do. In the shy look with which she returned Mrs. Dale’s kind gaze of inquiry, she took in a picture of a lovely woman which remained impressed on her mind ineffaceably.

Mrs. Dale was a lovely woman, lovelier than Mabin had thought when she only got glimpses of the lady’s profile from her seat in church, or peeps at her through a thick black veil. Mrs. Dale wore a black veil to-day, but in the open carriage, in the full glare of the sun, her beauty was evident enough.

A little woman, plump, pink, childlike in face and figure, with wavy fair hair, infantine blue eyes, and a red-lipped mouth which was all the more lovable, more attractive for not being on the strict lines of beauty, Mrs. Dale had, so Mabin felt, exactly the right features and the right expression for the sweet voice she had just heard. And through the beauty, and through the voice, the girl, inspired perhaps by the mourning dress, thought she detected a sadness which seemed to her the most pathetic thing in the world.

In two moments the interview was over; Mrs. Dale had smiled upon her sweetly, bidden her farewell merely with a bend of her head, and driven away, leaving Mabin to scold herself for her idiocy in throwing away an opportunity which she might never have again.

She did not try to overtake the carriage; she watched it down the open road, until the shining coil of silky fair hair under the black crape bonnet grew dim in the distance. And then, with a shrug of her shoulders and a murmur that “it was just like her,” Mabin turned defiantly into the road which led past the Vicarage.

However, nobody was about to throw stones at the bicycle on this occasion; and it was not until she had reached Seagate, changed her father’s books at the library, and matched a skein of cable silk for Emily, that she was reminded afresh of the existence of the Bonningtons by the sight of Rudolph, in his knickerbockers and gaiters, standing by his bicycle while he lit a cigarette.

Unconsciously Mabin frowned a little. And unluckily Rudolph saw the frown. She meant to pass him without appearing to notice him, but he foresaw the intention, and was nettled by it. For Rudolph, with his black eyes and curly black hair, and his sunbrowned face, was the handsomest fellow in the neighborhood when he was on shore, and was accustomed to a great deal of kindness and civility from Mabin’s sex. Her rudeness, which arose more from shyness than from the lofty contempt he supposed, puzzled the young fellow, and made him angry. He remembered their ancient comradeship, which she seemed to have forgotten; and most unwisely he let a spirit of “devilment” get the better of him, and addressed her as if they had been still on the old terms.

“Good-morning, Mabin,” said he.

She gave him a bend of the head, without looking at him, and was passing on to the place where her bicycle stood outside the door of a shop. But he would not let her escape so.

“Mayn’t I offer you a cigarette?”

To do him justice Rudolph had not noticed that a small boy with a basket stood near enough to hear. The boy burst into shrill laughter, and Mabin turned fiercely. For once she did not stoop.

“I’m afraid you have forgotten a great deal since you went to sea,” she said in a voice which she could not keep steady.

The young man was surprised, and rather shocked at the way in which he had been received. He had been anxious to heal the breach between her and himself, and he had thought that a dash into their old familiarity might avail where more carefully studied attempts had failed.

Before he could do more than begin to apologize, to appeal to their old friendship, Mabin had got on her bicycle and ridden away.

The sun was beating down fiercely by this time upon the white chalky roads; but Mabin rode on recklessly, at a higher speed than usual. She was well on her way back to Stone, when, turning her head to look along the road she had come by, she perceived that Rudolph was not far behind. She had forgiven his indiscretion by this time, and rather hoped that he was following quickly on purpose to “make it up.” So she went on her way through a group of straggling cottages, at a rather slower pace.

There was a sharp bend in the road at this point, and just as she sounded her bell in turning the corner, she saw Rudolph, who was now close behind, dismount and pick something up from the road. The next moment something struck the front wheel of her bicycle, and she and her machine were flung with violence down in the road.

She had time to utter a cry, no more, before the crash came.

Then she remembered nothing, knew nothing, until she heard somebody sobbing close to her ears; and opening her eyes, she saw the sweet face of Mrs. Dale, with the black veil thrown back, and with tears in the blue eyes, leaning over her tenderly.

Mrs. Dale uttered a cry of joy, and another voice, which Mabin recognized as Rudolph’s, said: “Thank God! she isn’t dead, at any rate.”

“Are you better, dear? Are you in any pain?” asked Mrs. Dale with so much solicitude that answering tears of sympathetic emotion started into the girl’s own eyes.

“I am quite well, quite well,” said Mabin. “Only—only—I think my foot hurts.”

Rudolph and Mrs. Dale exchanged glances.

“I thought so,” said he. “She’s broken her ankle.”

Mrs. Dale’s pretty eyes began to fill again.

“We must lift her into the carriage,” said she. “And you will go on and prepare her mother, and see that a doctor is sent for at once.”

And, in spite of the protests she feebly made, Mabin was gently raised from the ground by Rudolph’s strong arms, and helped into the victoria, where Mrs. Dale took her seat, and, telling the coachman to drive slowly, insisted on making her own plump little shoulder the pillow for the girl’s head.

But Mabin, having recovered her spirits, if not her walking powers, wanted to talk to the new friend she had so unexpectedly made.

“You are very good to me,” she said. “I have never had so much kindness from any one since my mother died. It was so strange; when I woke up just now I felt what I thought was my mother’s touch again. And yet I had forgotten all about that. For she has been dead fifteen years.”

“Poor child!” said Mrs. Dale. “I am glad of that, dear, that I reminded you of her,” she whispered gently.

“Of course I don’t mean that,” went on Mabin quickly, trying to sit up. “I don’t mean that you could be a mother to me now, as I am. That does sound ridiculous! You couldn’t be my mother when you are the same age as myself.”

As a matter of fact, Mabin looked older than her companion. But when the conversation thus turned to herself, Mrs. Dale’s pink face grew suddenly pale, and Mabin looked at her shyly, and flushed, feeling that she had said something wrong. But almost before she was conscious that she had touched some sensitive spot, Mrs. Dale said softly:

“Go on talking, dear, about your mother, or—or anything. I am lonely, you know; very lonely. And it is a treat to hear you talk.”

The girl flushed again, this time with surprise.

“You like to hear me talk! Ah, then you must be lonely indeed. For they say at home I never talk without saying the very last thing I ought to say.”

As she came to the end of her speech, Mabin found that her words insensibly began to run the one into the other, and that her voice died away. And, greatly to her own astonishment, she found her head falling heavily upon that of her new friend.

“Ah, child, it is selfish of me to make you talk!” cried Mrs. Dale. “You are faint, and must rest now. Come and talk to me some other time.”

Mabin overcame the faintness which had seized her, and quite suddenly raised her head again. The little excitement of the hope held out to her brought all her senses back.

“Come and see you! Oh, may I? I should like to so much!”

The girl almost nestled, as she spoke, against her new friend.

But over Mrs. Dale’s fair, childlike face there came at once a sort of shadow, as if a terrible remembrance had suddenly taken the power for all pleasurable emotion from her. It almost seemed to Mabin that the little hands made a movement as if to push her away.

And then there burst forth from the infantile red lips some words which struck terror into her young hearer, so bitter, so full of sadness, of biting remorse, were they:

“No, child, no. You must not come. I am too wicked!”

The girl was struck dumb. She wanted to comfort pretty Mrs. Dale; she wanted to laugh at her self-accusation, to express incredulity, amusement. But in the face of that look of anguish, of that inexpressibly mournful cry straight from the heart, she could not even open her lips. She knew that there was some grief here which no words of comfort could touch.

So deeply absorbed was she in the silent compassion which kept her with lowered eyelids and mute lips, that she was quite startled when Mrs. Dale’s voice, speaking in her ordinary tones, struck again upon her ear.

“That young fellow who picked you up is one of the Vicar’s sons, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” answered Mabin in a rather colder voice.

“He seems a very nice lad, and very much interested in—somebody?” suggested Mrs. Dale archly.

Mabin laughed.

“Yes, so he is. But it is not the ‘somebody’ you mean,” answered she. “Mrs. Bonnington, that’s his mother, says he can think about nothing but—Mrs. Dale!”

Again the sweet face changed; and it was in a low voice full of sadness that the lady in black said, slowly and deliberately:

“I hope with all my heart that she has made a mistake.” Then, with a rapid gesture, as if brushing away some thought which was full of untold terror, she added with a shudder: “Don’t let us talk about it. It is too horrible!”

CHAPTER III.
AN INVITATION AND A WARNING.

Mabin’s sprained ankle was a more serious affair than she had supposed. For a month she never left the house, and for another she went out in a wheel-chair, or hopped about on a pair of crutches.

And during all that time she caught no glimpse of the pretty neighbor who had done her such eminent service at the time of the accident. In vain she had hung about the road outside “The Towers” looking up at the west side of the house, which was built into the wall alongside the road, trying to distinguish the fair, blue-eyed face at one of the windows which peeped sombrely out of the ivy.

Dreary the place looked, Mabin thought, as she pondered over the mystery surrounding the lady in black. The lowest window visible from the road was about three feet above the girl’s head; and all she could see was a pair of crimson moreen curtains, which, she thought, harmonized ill with what she had seen of the tenant of the gloomy house. The house had long been “To let, Furnished.” But why had not dainty Mrs. Dale improved away those curtains?

Mabin did not usually trouble her head about such trifles as furniture; but she had enshrouded the figure of the pretty widow in romance; and she felt that her fairy queen was not living up to her proper standard in contenting herself with crimson moreen.

“What are you looking at so intently?”

Mabin, who, leaning on her crutches, was gazing up at that mysteriously interesting window, started violently as she saw a white hand, glistening with diamonds, thrust suddenly out through the ivy in the midst of a space which she had taken for blank wall.

And, parting the close-growing branches, Mrs. Dale peeped out, pink and fair and smiling, from a window at the same level as the one Mabin had been watching, but so thickly covered with ivy that the girl had not suspected its existence.

“I—I was looking for you. I was hoping to see you,” stammered Mabin.

“And now that you have seen me, won’t you please condescend to see a little more of me?” asked Mrs. Dale. “I won’t eat you up if you come into my den. Look, here is another inhabitant whom I have entrapped. But there are strawberries enough for three.”

Mabin hesitated; not from any scruples about the propriety of visiting the lady about whom so much gossip was talked, certainly, but because she was shy, and because the thought of a meeting and a talk with her ideal heroine and a stranger seemed rather formidable.

But Mrs. Dale would not allow her time to refuse.

“I will send the other inhabitant down to let you in,” said she.

And the ivy closed again, and Mabin could hear the lady’s voice giving some directions to some person within. She moved mechanically, on her crutches, toward the high closed gates. And by the time she reached them they were opening, and Rudolph was holding them back for her.

The girl could not repress a slight exclamation of astonishment. Rudolph reddened.

“You are surprised to see me,” said he, rather bashfully. “I hope you won’t refuse to come in because I am here? I will go away rather than that.”

Mabin hesitated. She was not very worldly-wise, but it seemed to her that there was something rather strange about his presence in the house where the rest of the Vicar’s family were not allowed to enter. And at the same moment she remembered Mrs. Dale’s apparent horror at the idea of the young fellow’s admiration for her.

Rudolph’s color deepened still more.

“Why are you always so rude to me, Mabin, or I suppose I ought to say—Miss Rose?” asked he quickly. “Doesn’t it seem rather unfair, when you come to think of it? We were great chums once, you know? Weren’t we?”

“When we were children, yes,” replied Mabin stiffly.

“And why not now?”

The blood rushed to the girl’s forehead.

“How can you ask?” she said, indignantly. “When I owe my lameness to you?”

Rudolph stared at her, as if uncertain whether he heard aright.

“To me?”

“Why, yes. Surely you don’t pretend it was not you who threw the stone which knocked my bicycle over?”

The stiff haughtiness with which she said this melted suddenly into apologetic alarm when she saw by the change to fierce indignation in Rudolph that she had made another, and most absurd blunder. At first he could only stare at her in speechless anger and amazement.

“Do you take me for a street-urchin?” he asked at last.

Mabin recovered herself a little, and refused to be withered up. “Your brothers do it,” she said below her breath.

“Then I’ll give the little beggars a good hiding the first time I catch them at it,” said Rudolph sharply. “But I should have thought you could distinguish the difference between a man and a schoolboy, and not have visited their sins upon me.”

Mabin felt miserable. She blushed, she stammered when she tried to speak; and the tears came into her eyes.

“I—I’m sorry!” she said in a constrained voice. “I—I see, I might have known. But you know—you were rude to me—that very day—when I saw you at Seagate!”

“Ah! I remember! I asked you to have a cigarette. It was injudicious, not rude. You should have made a distinction again.”

There was an awkward silence. Rudolph was still resentful; but when he saw the downcast eyes, and the tears which were beginning to fringe the long black lashes, he found himself softening. And, putting her hand too hastily into her pocket for the handkerchief to wipe away her tears, Mabin dropped one of her crutches.

“Let me help you along,” said he in a gentle voice, as he picked up the fallen crutch. “I don’t like to see a girl using those things.”

And, without waiting for her permission, he thrust the crutch under one arm, and insisted on supporting the unwilling girl with the other. And as they crossed the broad gravelled space to the portico, in the shade of the trees, Mabin felt a curious sensation of peace and of pleasure, and suddenly looked up at her companion with a frank smile.

“I’m very glad we’re friends again,” said she.

And he, smiling too, but with a little more malice, a little more guile, than she, answered readily:

“Why, so am I. But I must remind you that it is your fault, not mine, that we have ever been anything else.”

Mabin hung her head, feeling rather guilty, but with yet more enjoyment of the present reconciliation than remorse for the past estrangement. Instead of taking her straight in, Rudolph led her across the gravel to a flower-border, where, in a little open patch of sunlight, a rosebush grew. It was a “Mrs. John Lang,” and the huge pink blossoms were in their full beauty and fragrance.

“I’ve brought you here,” he said didactically, “to read you a moral lesson. Here we have a rose, full of beauty and sweetness to every one, but without any thorns. While some Roses I know——”

“Are all thorns to everybody, and are without any beauty,” finished Mabin for him, laughing, “and without any sweetness.”

“No, no, not at all. But they seldom let you come near enough to admire the beauty, and they are rather chary of their sweetness. Now I hope you’ll profit by this lesson.”

“To be sure I—shan’t!” replied Mabin with a rather doleful smile. “I do try to be less—less objectionable—sometimes,” she added with seriousness which made Rudolph smile. “But it doesn’t seem to be very successful. I think I’m going to give up the effort and accept the fate of ‘an awful example’ as serenely as I can.”

Rudolph tried not to let his smile grow too broad for politeness.

“You are an odd girl,” he said at last. “Or is it another insult to tell you so?”

Mabin shook her head.

“If it’s an insult,” answered she, “it is one that I’m used to.”

“One is almost as much afraid of saying anything complimentary to you as of giving you what you call insults,” he began cautiously. “Otherwise I would tell you that I like ‘odd’ people, people who don’t always say and do the right thing, that is.”

“Then you ought to appreciate me,” retorted Mabin quickly. “For everybody says I always do and say the wrong thing!”

“I do appreciate you.”

Mabin laughed and blushed.

“I only said that in fun,” she said awkwardly.

“Well, I said what I did in earnest.”

“Mrs. Dale will be wondering what has become of us,” said Mabin.

She was not at all anxious to go in; but the pleasure she felt in this talk with Rudolph had grown rather alarming to her reserve. She began to fear that she would spoil it all by one of her far-famed blunders of speech. And so she chose to cut short the enjoyment while it could remain a recollection of unalloyed delight.

Rudolph, on his side, was in no hurry to go in; although he took a step obediently toward the portico.

From a feeling of perversity which she could not have accounted for, Mabin chose to talk about Mrs. Dale as they went slowly toward the house.

“I have been longing to see her ever since my accident,” she said. “But although I have been always hovering about the place, wishing she would come out, to-day is the very first time I have caught sight of her.”

“That is exactly my own experience,” said Rudolph. “She seems to have given up driving about the place, and to have shut herself up in this dreary old house just like a nun.”

“Oh!” said Mabin, feeling quite relieved to hear that he had not, as she had supposed, been in the society of the beautiful widow constantly since the day of the accident.

“Yes,” he went on. “I was passing by only half an hour ago, when I glanced up at the windows, and Mrs. Dale stopped me to ask if I had heard how you were. And then she asked me in, saying she felt lonely. And so should I, so would any one, in that mouldy old house all alone.”

“Poor lady! I am so sorry for her!” said Mabin.

Rudolph looked at her quickly.

“Do you feel like that about her too?” said he earnestly. “All the other people one meets are either jealous of her beauty, or envious of her handsome turnout, or angry with her for not wanting to make their acquaintance.”

“I am very sorry for her,” answered the girl gravely. “I feel certain that she has had some very great sorrow—”

“Why, yes, her husband’s death,” suggested Rudolph.

“Oh, yes, that of course,” assented Mabin, surprised to find that the universal doubts whether Mrs. Dale really was a widow had infected her also. “But something even more than that, I should think. I have an idea that there is something tragic in her story, if one only knew it.”

Rudolph said nothing to this, but he looked at his companion with a quick glance of surprise, as if he himself shared her opinion, and was astonished to find it echoed.

They were under the portico now, and as their footsteps sounded on the stone, they saw through the open door into the dark hall and heard Mrs. Dale’s soft voice calling to them.

“It takes ever so much longer to get a thing done than to do it one’s self!” she exclaimed brightly, with a sigh, as she came out of the room on the left, and invited them to go in. “I could have brought Miss Rose in in half the time, even if she had fought to get away. Did she fight?” went on Mrs. Dale with arch innocence.

They were in the room by this time, and Mabin, coming in out of the glare of the sun, stood for a few seconds without seeing anything. Then her hands were gently taken, and she found herself pushed into a low chair.

“Bring her some strawberries, Mr. Bonnington,” said Mrs. Dale. “By the by, I may as well remark that I don’t intend to call you Mr. Bonnington very long. I shall drop into plain ‘Rudolph’ very soon, if only to give a fresh shock to the neighborhood, to whom I am Shocker in ordinary.”

“The sooner the better. I can’t understand anybody’s being Mr. Bonnington but my father. Now he looks equal to the dignity, while I don’t. I always feel that there is a syllable too many for me, and that people despise me in consequence.”

Mabin, who had recovered the use of her eyes, felt rather envious. The quick give and take of light talk like this was so different from the solemn conversations carried on at home, where her father laid down the law and everybody else agreed with him, that she felt this levity, while pleasant and amusing, to be something which would have caused the good folk at home to look askance.

“And how have you been, child, since that unhappy day when I saw you last?”

And Mrs. Dale came to the next chair, and piled sugar on the strawberries.

“Oh, I’ve been getting on all right, but it is tiresome not to be able to walk without those things. And it has made me in everybody’s way,” sighed Mabin.

“How is that?”

“Papa could have let the house to go abroad, as he wanted to, when the accident happened. Only I couldn’t well be moved then. And now that I could go, he has lost the house he had heard of at Geneva, and one which he could have now is too small for us. So that I feel I am in the way again.”

“Do you mean,” asked Mrs. Dale quite eagerly, “that they could go if only they could dispose of you?”

“Yes. There is one room short.”

Little Mrs. Dale sprang up, and the color in her cheeks grew pinker.

“Do you think,” she asked, after a moment’s pause, “that your parents would allow you to stay with me? If you would come?” she finished with a plaintive note of entreaty on the last words.

“Oh, I am sure they would, and I am sure I would!” cried Mabin, with undisguised delight.

And then quite suddenly the face of the black-robed lady grew ashy gray, and she sank down into her chair trembling from head to foot.

“No. I—I mustn’t ask you,” she said hoarsely.

And there was a silence, during which both her young hearers cast down their eyes, feeling that they dared not look at her. It was Mabin who spoke first. Putting her hand between the two white hands of Mrs. Dale, she said gently:

“Is it because you are lonely you want me to come?”

She did venture to look up then, startled by the shiver which convulsed Mrs. Dale as she spoke. And in the blue eyes she saw a look of terror which she never forgot.

“Lonely! Oh, child, you will never know how lonely!” burst from her pale lips.

“Then I will come,” said Mabin. “I should like to come.”

There was another silence. Mrs. Dale had evidently to put strong constraint upon herself to check an outburst of emotional gratitude. Rudolph, moved himself by the little scene, was looking out of the window. The lady in black presently spoke again, very gravely:

“I don’t think you will be very much bored, dear, and you will be doing a great kindness to a fellow-creature. And yet—I hardly like—I don’t feel that I ought——”

“But I feel that I must and shall,” said Mabin brightly. “You don’t know how beautiful it would be for me to feel that at last, for a little while, I shouldn’t be in the way!”

And the overgrown girl, who was snubbed at home, had tears in her eyes at the remembrance of the kind touch which she had felt on the day of her accident. Mrs. Dale was too much moved to say much more, but it was agreed between the ladies that the suggestion should be formally made by the tenant of “The Towers” to the heads of the household at “Stone House” without delay, that Mabin should stay with her new friend during the absence abroad of the rest of the Rose family.

Mabin did notice, while they talked, that Rudolph remained not only silent but somewhat constrained; but it was not until she took her leave of Mrs. Dale, and he followed her out, that the young girl attached any importance to his reserve.

Once out of hearing of Mrs. Dale, who stood on the stone steps to bid them good-by, Rudolph asked her abruptly:

“Do you think they’ll let you come?”

“Oh, yes, they’ll only be too glad to get rid of me. Why do you ask in that tone?”

“Well, there is something I think I ought to tell you, if you are thinking of staying with Mrs. Dale.”

“Well, what is it?”

“It is that she is being watched.”

“Watched!”

“Yes, by a stranger, a man whom I have never seen in the place before. He hovers about this place, keeping out of range of possible eyes in the house, at all hours of the day and even of the night.”

“But how do you know this?”

The words slipped out of her mouth, and it was not until she saw Rudolph redden that she saw that she was too inquisitive.

“I am sure of what I say, anyhow,” said he quietly.

Mabin looked thoughtful.

“I don’t care!” she said at last.

“I thought you wouldn’t.”

“And I shan’t tell anybody anything about it.”

“I was sure you wouldn’t.”

“But I shall tell Mrs. Dale.”

Rudolph stopped and looked at her.

“I think you had better not do that,” he said.

“But why should a person watch her, except with the intention of trying to do her some harm?”

“Well, I don’t know. But I think if you do tell her, knowing how highly nervous she is, you will do her more harm than ever the mysterious watcher would. Perhaps you would even drive her out of the place, in which case most assuredly the watcher would go after her, while if we keep her here perhaps we may manage to draw his fangs.”

Mabin felt frightened. Then, being a matter-of-fact girl, she got the better of this feeling quickly, and looked up keenly at her companion.

“What do you exactly mean by that?” she asked.

“Only that I will get hold of the man quietly and find out what his little game is. Though I can guess.”

“Well, you can tell me what your guess is?”

“Why, debt, of course. One can see she is inclined to be extravagant, and very likely she has run up bills somewhere. Don’t you think that seems likely?”

His tone was rather anxious, Mabin thought. But she answered indignantly:

“No, I don’t. It would be very dishonorable to run away without paying one’s debts, and I don’t think you much of a friend to poor Mrs. Dale to suggest such a thing!”

Rudolph looked not guilty, but grave.

“Well” said he, “people don’t hang about a place, at the risk of getting taken up ‘on suspicion of loitering, for the purpose of committing a felony,’ without some reason.”

“Why,” cried Mabin triumphantly, “that is the reason! Mrs. Dale has some lovely diamond rings, and the loitering gentleman wants to steal them!”

“Well, perhaps you are right,” said Rudolph doubtfully.

“I am sure of it!” retorted Mabin resolutely. And she held out her hand. “Good-by, and thank you for your help.”

“And you will remember my parable about the Roses?” said he, as he took her hand and thought he liked gray eyes after all better than blue ones.

“Perhaps,” said Mabin cautiously, as she hopped away on her crutches.

CHAPTER IV.
WAS IT A RECOGNITION?

While Mabin was still talking to Rudolph in the road between “The Towers” and “Stone House,” a tall parlormaid, in snow-white French cap and ends, passed them, on her way from the former to the latter house, bearing a letter in her hand.

And when Mabin reached home, she found that the Powers had already received Mrs. Dale’s invitation to Mabin.

In truth it had put both husband and wife into a position of some difficulty. For while, on the one hand, they were delighted at this opportunity of getting “the one too many” off their hands for a time, yet there were the opinions of their neighbors to be considered; and the tide of public feeling had set in strongly against the lady in black.

If her hair had been dark instead of fair, it would have made all the difference. The beauty which goes with brown hair and a more or less dark complexion is not so startling, not so sensational, as the loveliness of pink and white and gold which made Mrs. Dale so conspicuous. If again, she had not been in mourning, and such pretty mourning, they would have been readier to make allowance for her eccentricities. But the knowing ones had begun to discover that there were discrepancies in her attire, that her mourning was either too deep for diamond rings to be permissible, or not deep enough for the heavy black veil she wore.

So that, in short, it was now almost universally admitted that this person with the too showy carriage and horses, and the dangerously pretty face, was an individual to be avoided, and it was decided that her reluctance to enter the best society of the place, when that society had held out its uninviting arms to her, arose from a wholesome fear that the wise women of the place would “find her out.”

Mr. Rose read Mrs. Dale’s note twice through, very slowly, as if trying to discover hidden meanings in its simple words. Then he looked at his wife, who was watching him rather anxiously.

“Well, my dear, and what do you think?” asked he.

It pleased him to ask her opinion thus on most things, not that he ever had any intention of heeding her wishes in preference to his own, but in the hope that she would express some modest inclination one way or the other, to give him an impetus in the opposite direction.

“I think, dear, that it would hardly do,” murmured the lady, hoping that for once her husband would fall in with her views. “You must have heard the way in which people talk about this Mrs. Dale, so that it would be thought very strange if we let Mabin stay with her. Don’t you think it was rather underhand of her to get hold of the child this afternoon?”

“Underhand! Certainly not,” replied Mr. Rose with decision. “The most natural thing in the world, considering how kind she was to the girl at the time of her accident. And as for the talk of the place, why, if you listened to all the old women say you would never go outside your door for fear your neighbors should think you were going to steal their hens!”

There was a pause. She would not irritate him by another remark. So he presently went on:

“I suppose you think the Vicar’s wife would scold you?”

A lady in black

A LADY IN BLACK

[COPYRIGHT.]

CONTENTS.

A LADY IN BLACK.

CHAPTER I.A MYSTERY SOMEWHERE.

CHAPTER II.A PENITENT.

CHAPTER III.AN INVITATION AND A WARNING.

CHAPTER IV.WAS IT A RECOGNITION?

CHAPTER I.
A MYSTERY SOMEWHERE.

CHAPTER II.
A PENITENT.

CHAPTER III.
AN INVITATION AND A WARNING.

CHAPTER IV.
WAS IT A RECOGNITION?