Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

“Oh, father, don’t, don’t! You’ll hurt him.”—Frontispiece.

FORGE AND FURNACE

A Novel

BY
FLORENCE WARDEN

AUTHOR OF
“THE HOUSE ON THE MARSH,” “SCHEHERAZADE,” “A PRINCE
OF DARKNESS,” ETC.

New York
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
156 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1896,
BY
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY.

CONTENTS.

FORGE AND FURNACE;

THE ROMANCE OF A SHEFFIELD BLADE.

CHAPTER I. A PAIR OF BROWN EYES.

Thud, thud. Amidst a shower of hot, yellow sparks the steam hammer came down on the glowing steel, shaking the ground under the feet of the master of the works and his son, who stood just outside the shed. In the full blaze of the August sunshine, which was, however, tempered by such clouds of murky smoke as only Sheffield can boast, old Mr. Cornthwaite, acclimatized for many a year to heat and to coal dust, stood quite unconcerned.

Tall, thin, without an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, with a fresh-colored face which seemed to look the younger and the handsomer for the silver whiteness of his hair and of his long, silky moustache, Josiah Cornthwaite’s was a figure which would have arrested attention anywhere, but which was especially noticeable for the striking contrast he made to the rough-looking Yorkshiremen at work around him.

Like a swarm of demons on the shores of Styx, they moved about, haggard, gaunt, uncouth figures, silent amidst the roar of the furnaces and the whirr of the wheels, lifting the bars of red-hot steel with long iron rods as easily and unconcernedly as if they had been hot rolls baked in an infernal oven, heedless of the red-hot sparks which fell around them in showers as each blow of the steam hammer fell.

Mr. Cornthwaite, whose heart was in his furnaces, his huge revolving wheels, his rolling mills, and his gigantic presses, watched the work, familiar as it was to him, with fascinated eyes.

“What day was it last month that Biron turned up here?” he asked his son with a slight frown.

This frown often crossed old Mr. Cornthwaite’s face when he and his son were at the works together, for Christian by no means shared his father’s enthusiasm for the works, and was at small pains to hide the fact.

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t remember. How should I remember?” said he carelessly, as he looked down at his hands, and wondered how much more black coal dust there would be on them by the time the guv’nor would choose to let him go.

A young workman, with a long, thin, pale, intelligent face, out of which two deep-set, shrewd, gray eyes looked steadily, glanced up quickly at Mr. Cornthwaite. He had been standing near enough to hear the remarks exchanged between father and son.

“Well, Elshaw, what is it?” said the elder Mr. Cornthwaite with an encouraging smile. “Any more discoveries to-day?”

A little color came into the young man’s face.

“No, sir,” said he shyly in a deep, pleasant voice, speaking with a broad Yorkshire accent which was not in his mouth unpleasant to the ear. “Ah heard what you asked Mr. Christian, sir, and remember it was on the third of the month Mr. Biron came.”

“Thanks. Your memory is always to be trusted. I think you’ve got your head screwed on the right way, Elshaw.”

“Ah’m sure, Ah hope so, sir,” said the young fellow, smiling in return for his employer’s smile, and touching his cap as he moved away.

“Smart lad that Elshaw,” said Mr. Cornthwaite approvingly. “And steady. Never drinks, as so many of them do.”

“Can you wonder at their drinking?” broke out Christian with energy, “when they have to spend their lives at this infernal work? It parches my throat only to watch them, and I’m sure if I had to pass as many hours as they do in this awful, grimy hole I should never be sober.”

The elder Mr. Cornthwaite looked undecided whether to frown or to laugh at this tirade, which had at least the merit of being uttered in all sincerity by the very person who could least afford to utter it. He compromised by giving breath to a little sigh.

“It’s very disheartening to me to hear you say so, Chris, when it has been the aim of my life to bring you up to carry on and build up the business I have given my life to,” he said.

Christian Cornthwaite’s face was not an expressive one. He was extraordinarily unlike his father in almost every way, having prominent blue eyes, instead of his father’s piercing black ones, a fair complexion, while his father’s was dark, a figure shorter, broader, and less upright, and an easy, happy-go-lucky walk and manner, as different as possible from the erect, military bearing of the head of the firm.

What little expression he could throw into his big blue eyes he threw into them now, as he pulled his long, ragged, tawny moustache and echoed his father’s sigh.

“Well, isn’t it disheartening for me too, sir,” protested he good-humoredly, “to hear you constantly threatening to put me on bread and water for the rest of my life if I don’t settle down in this beastly hole and try to love it?”

“It ought to be natural to you to love what has brought you up in every comfort, educated you like a prince, and made of you——”

Josiah Cornthwaite paused, and a twinkle came into his black eyes.

“Made of you,” he went on thoughtfully, “a selfish, idle vagabond, with only wit enough to waste the money his father has made.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Chris, quite cheerfully. “If that’s the best the works have done for me, why should I love them?”

At that moment young Elshaw passed before his eyes again, and recalled Christian’s attention to a subject which would, he shrewdly thought, divert the current of his father’s thoughts from his own deficiencies.

“I wonder, sir,” he said, “that you don’t put Bram Elshaw into the office. He’s fit for something better than this sort of thing.”

And he waved his hand in the direction of the group in the middle of which stood Elshaw, rod in hand, with his lean, earnest face intent on his work.

Josiah Cornthwaite’s eyes rested on the young man. Bram was a little above the middle height, thin, sallow, with shoulders somewhat inclined to be narrow and sloping, but with a face which commanded attention. He had short, mouse-colored hair, high cheek bones, a short nose, a straight mouth, and a very long straight chin; altogether an assemblage of features which promised little in the way of attractiveness.

And yet attractive his face certainly was. Intelligence, strength of character, good humor, these were the qualities which even a casual observer could read in the countenance of Bram Elshaw.

But the lad had more in him than that. He had ambition, vague as yet, dogged tenacity of purpose, imagination, feeling, fire. There was the stuff; of a man of no common kind in the young workman.

Josiah Cornthwaite looked at him long and critically before answering his son’s remark.

“Yes,” said he at last slowly, “I daresay he’s fit for something better—indeed, I’m sure of it. But it doesn’t do to bring these young fellows on too fast. If he gets too much encouragement he will turn into an inventor (you know the sort of chap that’s the common pest of a manufacturing town, always worrying about some precious ‘invention’ that turns out to have been invented long ago, or to be utterly worthless), and never do a stroke of honest work again.”

“Now, I don’t think Elshaw’s that sort of chap,” said Chris, who looked upon Bram as in some sort his protégé, whose merit would be reflected on himself. “Anyhow, I think it would be worth your while to give him a trial, sir.”

“But he would never go back to this work afterwards if he proved a failure in the office.”

“Not here, certainly.”

“And we should lose a very good workman,” persisted Mr. Cornthwaite, who had conservative notions upon the subject of promotion from the ranks.

“Well, I believe it would turn out all right,” said Chris.

His father was about to reply when his attention was diverted by the sudden appearance, at the extreme end of the long avenue of sheds and workshops, of two persons who, to judge by the frown which instantly clouded his face, were very unwelcome.

“That old rascal again! That old rascal Theodore Biron! Come to borrow again, of course! But I won’t see him. I won’t——”

“But, Claire, don’t be too hard on the old sinner, for the girl’s sake, sir,” said Chris hastily, cutting short his protests.

Mr. Cornthwaite turned sharply upon his son.

“Yes, the old fox is artful enough for that. He uses his daughter to get himself received where he himself wouldn’t be tolerated for two minutes. And I’ve no doubt the little minx is up to every move on the board too.”

“Oh, come, sir, you’re too hard,” protested Chris with real warmth, and with more earnestness than he had shown on the subject either of his own career or of Bram’s. “I’d stake my head for what it’s worth, and I suppose you’d say that isn’t much, on the girl’s being all right.”

But this championship did not please his father at all. Josiah Cornthwaite’s bushy white eyebrows met over his black eyes, and his handsome, ruddy-complexioned face lost its color. Chris was astonished, and regretted his own warmth, as his father answered in the tones he could remember dreading when he was a small boy—

“Whether she’s all right or all wrong, I warn you not to trouble your head about her. You may rely upon my doing the best I can for her, on account of my relationship to her mother. But I would never countenance an alliance between the family of that old reprobate and mine.”

But to this Chris responded with convincing alacrity—

“An alliance! Good heavens, no, sir! We suffer quite enough at the hands of the old nuisance already. And I have no idea, I assure you, of throwing myself away.”

Josiah Cornthwaite still kept his shrewd black eyes fixed upon his son, and he seemed to be satisfied with what he read in the face of the latter, for he presently turned away with a nod of satisfaction as Theodore Biron and his daughter, who had perhaps been lingering a little until the great man’s first annoyance at the sight of them had blown over, came near enough for a meeting.

“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat this,” began the dapper little man airily as he held out a small, slender, and remarkably well-shaped hand with a flourish, and kept his eyes all the time upon the men at work in the nearest shed as if the sight had too much fascination for him to be able readily to withdraw his eyes. “This,” he went on, apparently not noticing that Mr. Cornthwaite’s handshake was none of the warmest, “of a whole community immersed in the noblest of all occupations, the turning of the innocent, lifeless substances of the earth into tool and wheel, ship and carriage! I must say that this place has a charm for me which I have never found in the fairest spots of Switzerland; that after seeing whatever was to be seen in California, the States, the Himalayas, Russia, and the rest of it, I have always been ready to say, not exactly with the poet, but with a full heart, ‘Give me Sheffield!’ And to-day, when I came to have a look at the works,” he wound up in a less lofty tone, “I thought I would bring my little Claire to have a peep too.”

“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat this.”—Page 10.

In spite of the absurdity of his harangue, Theodore Biron knew how to throw into his voice and manner so much fervor. He spoke, he gesticulated with so much buoyancy and effect, that his hearers were amused and interested in spite of themselves, and were carried away, for the time at least, into believing, or half-believing, that he was in earnest.

Josiah Cornthwaite, always accessible to flattery on the matter of “the works,” as the artful Theodore knew, suffered himself to smile a little as he turned to Claire.

“And so you have to be sacrificed, and must consent to be bored to please papa?”

“Oh, I shan’t be bored. I shall like it,” said Claire.

She spoke in a little thread of a musical, almost childish, voice, and very shyly. But as she did so, uttering only these simple words, a great change took place in her. Before she spoke no one would have said more of her than that she was a quiet, modest-looking, perhaps rather insignificant, little girl, and that her gray frock was neat and well-fitting.

But no sooner did she open her mouth to speak or to smile than the little olive-skinned face broke into all sorts of pretty dimples. The black eyes made up for what they lacked in size by their sparkle and brilliancy, and the two rows of little ivory teeth helped the dazzling effect.

Then Claire Biron was charming. Then even Josiah Cornthwaite forgot to ask himself whether she was not cunning. Then Chris stroked his mustache, and told himself with complacency that he had done a good deed in standing up for the poor, little thing.

But rough Bram Elshaw, whom Chris had beckoned to come forward, and who stood respectfully in the background, waiting to know for what he was wanted, felt as if he had received an electric shock.

Bram was held very unsusceptible to feminine influences. He was what the factory and shop lasses of the town called a hard nut to crack, a close-fisted customer, and other terms of a like opprobrious nature. Occupied with his books, those everlasting books, and with his vague dreams of something indefinite and as yet far out of his reach, he had, at this ripe age of twenty, looked down upon such members of the frivolous sex as came in his way, and dreamed of something fairer in the shape of womanhood, something to which a pretty young actress whom he had seen at one of the theatres in the part of “Lady Betty Noel,” had given more definite form.

And now quite suddenly, in the broad light of an August morning, with nothing more romantic than the rolling mill for a background, there had broken in upon his startled imagination the creature the sight of whom he seemed to have been waiting for. As he stood there motionless, his eyes riveted, his ears tingling with the very sound of her voice, he felt that a revelation had been made to him.

As if revealed in one magnetic flash, he saw in a moment what it was that woman meant to man; saw the attraction that the rough lads of his acquaintance found in the slovenly, noisy girls of their own courts and alleys; stood transfixed, coarse-handed son of toil that he was, under the spell of love.

The voice of Chris Cornthwaite close to his ear startled him out of a stupor of intoxication.

“What’s the matter with you, Bram? You look as if you’d been struck by lightning. You are to go round the works with Miss Biron and explain things, you know. And listen” (he might well have to recall Bram’s wandering attention, for this command had thrown the lad into a sort of frenzy, on which he found it difficult enough to suppress all outward signs), “I have something much more important to tell you than that.” But Bram’s face was a blank. “You are to come up to the Park next Thursday evening, and I think you’ll find my father has something to say to you that you’ll be glad to hear. And mind this, Bram, it was I who put him up to it. It’s me you’ve got to thank.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Bram, touching his cap respectfully, and trying to speak as if he felt grateful.

But he was not. He felt no emotion whatever. He was stupefied by the knowledge that he was to go round the works with Miss Biron.

CHAPTER II. CLAIRE.

Bram wondered how Mr. Christian could give up the pleasure of showing Miss Biron round the works himself. Christian’s partiality for feminine society was as great as his popularity with it, and as well known. The partiality, but not perhaps the popularity, was inherited from his father—at least, so folks said.

And Bram Elshaw, looking about for a reason for this extraordinary conduct on the part of the young master, and noting the wistfulness of that young man’s glances and the displeasure on the face of the elder Mr. Cornthwaite, came very near to a correct diagnosis of the case.

Bram was always the person chosen to carry messages between the works and Holme Park, the private residence of the Cornthwaites, and the household talk had filtered through to him about Theodore Biron, the undesirable relation of French extraction, who had settled down too near, and whose visits had become too frequent for his rich kinsman’s pleasure. And the theory of the servants was that these visits were always paid with the object of borrowing money.

Not that Theodore looked like an impecunious person. To Bram’s inexperienced eyes Mr Biron and his daughter looked like people of boundless wealth and great distinction. Theodore, indeed, was if anything better dressed than either of the Cornthwaites. His black morning coat fitted him perfectly; his driving gloves were new; his hat sat jauntily on his head. From his tall white collar to his tight new boots he was the picture of a trim, youthful-looking country gentleman of the smart and rather amateurish type.

He had a thin, small-featured face, light hair, light eyebrows, and the smallest of light moustaches; pale, surprised eyes, and the slimmest pair of feminine white hands that ever man had. Of these he was proud; and so his gloves kept their new appearance for a long time, as he generally carried them in his hand.

As for Claire, she not only looked better dressed than either Mrs. or Miss Cornthwaite, but better dressed than any of the ladies of the neighborhood. And this was not Bram’s fancy only; it was solid fact.

Claire Biron had never been in France, and her mother had been an Englishwoman of Yorkshire descent. But through her father she had inherited from her French ancestors just that touch of feminine genius which makes a woman neat without severity, and smart looking without extravagance.

In her plain gray frock and big yellow chip hat with the white gauze rosettes, the little slender, dark eyed girl looked as nice as no ordinary English girl would think of making herself except for some special occasion.

Bram had not the nicely critical faculty to enable him to discern things. All he knew, as he walked through the black dust with Miss Biron and pointed out to her the different processes which were going on, was that every glance she gave him in acknowledgment of the information he was obliged to bawl in her ear was intoxicating; that every insignificant comment she made rang in his very heart with a delicious thrill of pleasure he had never felt before.

And behind them followed the two older gentleman, Mr. Cornthwaite explaining, commenting, softening in spite of himself under the artful interest taken in every dryest detail by the airy Theodore, who trotted jauntily beside him; and grew enthusiastic over everything.

Before very long, however, Mr. Cornthwaite, who was getting excited against his will over that hobby of “the works” which Theodore managed so cleverly, drew his companion away to show him a new process which they were in course of testing; and for a moment Bram and Miss Claire were left alone together.

And then a strange thing, a thing which opened Bram’s eyes, happened. From some corner, some nook, sprang Chris, and, hooking his arm with affectionate familiarity within that of Miss Biron, he said—

“All right, Elshaw; I’ll show the rest. Come along, Claire.”

And in an instant he had whirled away with the young lady, who began to laugh and to protest, round the nearest corner.

Bram was left standing stupidly, with a feeling rising in his heart which he could not understand. What was this that had happened? Nothing but the most natural thing in the world; and the impulse of sullen resentment which stirred within him was ridiculous. There was, there could be, no rivalry possible between Mr. Christian Cornthwaite, the son of the owner of the works, and Bram Elshaw, a workman in his father’s employment. And Miss Biron was a lady as far above him (Bram) as the Queen was.

This was what Bram told himself as, with hard-set jaw and a lowering look of discontent on his face, he quietly went back to his work.

But the matter was not ended with him. As he went on mechanically with his task, as he bent over the great steel bar with his long rod, his thoughts were with the pair, the well-matched, handsome pair of lovers, as he supposed them to be, who had flitted off together as soon as papa’s back was turned.

Now what did that mean?

If it had been any other young lady Bram would not have given the matter a second thought. Christian Cornthwaite’s flirtations were as the sand of the sea for multitude, and he would bring half-a-dozen different girls in a week to “see over the works” when papa could be relied upon to be out of the way. Christian had the easy assurance, the engaging, irresponsible manners which always make their possessor a favorite with the unwise sex, and was reported to be able to win the favor of a prude in less time than it takes another man to gain the smiles of a coquette.

And so where was the wonder that this universal favorite should be a favorite with Miss Biron? Of course, there was nothing in the fact to be wondered at, but the infatuated Bram would have had this particular lady as different from other ladies in this respect as he held her superior in every other.

But then a fresh thought, which was like a dagger thrust on the one hand, yet which brought some bittersweet comfort for all that, came into his mind. Surely Miss Biron was not the sort of girl to allow such familiarity except from the man whom she had accepted for a husband. Surely, then, these two were engaged—without the consent, or even the knowledge, of Mr. Cornthwaite very likely, but promising themselves that they would get that consent some day.

And as he came to this decision Bram looked black.

And all the time that these fancies chased each other through his excited brain this lad of twenty retained a saner self which stood outside the other and smiled, and told him that he was an infatuated young fool, a moonstruck idiot, to tumble headlong into love with a girl of whom he knew nothing except that she was as far above him, and of all thought of him, as the stars are above the sea.

And he was right in thinking that there was not a man in all that crowd of his rough fellow-workmen who would not have jeered at him and looked down upon him as a hopeless ass if they had known what his thoughts and feelings were. But for all that there was the making in Bram Elshaw, with his dreams and his fancies, of a man who would rise to be master of them all.

Out of the heat of the furnace and the glowing iron Bram Elshaw presently passed into the heat of the sun, and stood for a moment, his long rod in his hand, and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. And before he could turn to go back again he heard a little sound behind him which was not a rustle, or a flutter, or anything he could describe, but which he knew to be the sound of a woman moving quickly in her skirts. And the next moment Miss Biron appeared a couple of feet away from him, smiling and growing a little pink as a young girl does when she feels herself slightly embarrassed by an unaccustomed situation.

Before she spoke Bram guessed by the position in which she held her little closed right hand that she was going to offer him money. And he drew himself up a little, and blushed a much deeper red than the girl—not with anger, for after all was it not just what he might have expected? But with a keener sense than ever of the difference between them.

Miss Biron had begun to speak, had got as far as “I wanted to thank you for explaining everything so nicely,” when something in his look caused her to stop and hesitate and look down.

She was suddenly struck with the fact that this was no common workman, this pale, grimy young Yorkshireman with the strong jaw and the clear, steady eyes, although he was dressed in an old shirt blackened by coal dust, and trousers packed with pieces of sacking tied round with string.

“Ah’m reeght glad to ha’ been of any service to yer, Miss,” said Bram in a very gentle tone.

There was a moment’s silence, during which Miss Biron finally made up her mind what to do. Looking up quickly, with the blush still in her face, she said, “Thank you very much. Good-morning,” and, to Bram’s great relief, turned away without offering him the money.

CHAPTER III. SOMETHING WRONG AT THE FARM.

It is certain that Bram Elshaw was still thinking more of Miss Biron than of the communication which Mr. Cornthwaite was to make to him when he presented himself at the back door of his employer’s residence on the following Thursday evening.

Holme Park was on the side of one of the hills which surround the city of Sheffield, and was a steep, charmingly-wooded piece of grass and from a small plateau in which the red brick house looked down at the rows of new red brick cottages, at the factory chimneys, and the smoke clouds of the hive below.

Bram had always taken his messages to the back door of the house, but he was shrewd enough to guess, from the altered manner of the servant who now let him in and conducted him at once to the library, that this was the last time he should have to enter by that way.

And he was right. Mr Cornthwaite was as precise in manner, as business-like as usual, but his tone was also a little different, as he told Bram that his obvious abilities were thrown away on his present occupation, and that he was willing to take him into his office, if he cared to come, without any premium.

Bram thanked him, and accepted the offer, but he showed no more than conventional gratitude. The shrewd young Yorkshireman was really more grateful than he seemed, but he saw that his employer was acting in his own interest rather than from benevolence, and, although he made no objections to the smallness of the salary he was to receive, he modestly but firmly refused to bind himself for any fixed period.

“Ah may be a failure, sir,” he objected quietly, “and Ah should like to be free to goa back to ma auld work if Ah was.”

So the bargain was struck on his own terms, and he retired respectfully just as a servant entered the library to announce that Miss Biron wished to see Mr. Cornthwaite. And at the same moment the young girl herself tripped into the room, with a worried and anxious look on her face.

Mr. Cornthwaite rose from his chair with a frown of annoyance.

“My dear Claire, your father really should not allow you to come this long way by yourself—at night, too. It is neither proper nor safe. By the time dinner is over it will be dark, and you have a long way to go.”

“Oh, but I am going back at once, as soon as you have read this,” said Claire, putting a little note fastened up into a cocked hat like a lady’s, into his unwilling hand. “And perhaps Christian would see me as far as the town, if you think I ought not to go alone.”

But this suggestion evidently met with no approval from Mr. Cornthwaite, who shook his head, signed to Bram to remain in the room and began to read the note, all at the same time.

“My dear,” said he shortly, as he finished reading and crumpled it up, “Christian is engaged at present. But young Elshaw here will show you into your tram, won’t you, Elshaw?”

“Certainly, sir.” Bram, who had the handle of the door in his hand, saluted his employer, and retreated into the hall before Claire, who had not recognized him in his best clothes, had time to look at him again.

“A most respectable young fellow, my dear, though a little rough. One of my clerks,” Bram heard Mr. Cornthwaite explain rapidly to Miss Biron as he shut himself out into the hall and waited.

Bram was divided between delight that he was to have the precious privilege of accompanying Miss Biron on her journey home, and a sense of humiliation caused by the shrewd suspicion that she would not like this arrangement.

But when a few minutes later Claire came out of the library all his thoughts were turned to compassion for the poor girl, who had evidently received a heavy blow, and who had difficulty in keeping back her tears. She dashed past him out of the house, and he followed at a distance, perceiving that she had forgotten him, and that his duty would be limited to seeing without her knowledge that she got safely home.

So when she got into a tram car at the bottom of the hill outside the park he got on the top. When she got out at St. Paul’s Church, and darted away through the crowded streets in the direction of the Corn Exchange, he followed. Treading through the crowds of people who filled the roadway as well as the pavement, she fled along at such a pace that Bram had difficulty in keeping her little figure in view. She drew away at last from the heart of the town, and began the ascent of one of the stony streets, lined with squalid, cold-looking cottages, that fringe the smoke-wreathed city on its north-eastern side.

Bram followed.

Once out of the town, and still going upwards, Claire Biron fled like a hare up a steep lane, turned sharply to the left, and plunged into a narrow passage, with a broken stone wall on each side, which ran between two open fields. This passage gave place to a rough footpath, and at this point the girl stood still, her gaze arrested by a strange sight on the higher ground on the right.

It was dark by this time, and the outline of the hill above, broken by a few cottages, a solitary tall chimney at the mouth of a disused coal pit, and a group of irregular farm buildings, was soft and blurred.

But the windows of the farmhouse were all ablaze with light. A long, plain stone building very near the summit of the hill, and holding a commanding situation above a sudden dip into green pasture land, the unpretending homestead dominated the landscape and blinked fiery eyes at Claire, who uttered a low cry, and then dashed away from the footpath by a short cut across the fields, making straight for the house.

All the blinds were up, and groups of candles could be seen on the tables within, all flickering in the draught, while the muslin curtains in the lower rooms were blown by the evening wind into dangerous proximity to the lights.

And in all the house there was not a trace of a living creature to be seen, although from where Bram stood he could see into every room.

He followed still, uneasy and curious, as Claire climbed the garden wall with the agility of a boy, and ran up to the house door.

It was locked. Nothing daunted, she mounted on the ledge of the nearest window, which was open only at the top, threw up the sash, and got into the room.

A moment later she had blown out all the candles. Then she ran from room to room, extinguishing the lights, all in full view of the wondering Bram, who stood watching her movements from the lawn, until the whole front of the house was in complete darkness.

Then she disappeared, and for a few minutes Bram could see nothing, hear nothing.

But presently from the back part of the rooms, there came to his listening ears a long, shrill cry.

CHAPTER IV. CLAIRE’S APOLOGY.

The effect of that cry upon Bram Elshaw was to set him tingling in every nerve.

The lawn which ran the length of the farmhouse was wide, and sloped down to a straggling hedge just inside the low stone wall which surrounded the garden and the orchard. Up and down this lawn Bram walked with hurried footsteps, uncertain what to do. For although he recognized Claire’s voice, the cry she had uttered seemed to him to indicate surprise and horror rather than pain, so that he did not feel justified in entering the house by the way she had done until he felt more sure that his assistance was wanted, or that his intrusion would be welcome.

In a very few moments, however, he heard her cry—“Don’t, don’t; oh, don’t! You frighten me!”

Bram, who was by this time close to the door, knocked at it loudly.

Waiting a few moments, on the alert for any fresh sounds, and hearing nothing, he then made his way round to the back of the house, leaping over the rough stone wall which divided the garden from the farmyard, and tried the handle of the back door.

This also was fastened on the inside.

But at the very moment that Bram lifted the latch and gave the door a rough shake he heard a sound like the clashing of steel upon stone, a scuffle, a suppressed cry, and upon that, without further hesitation, Bram put his sinewy knee against the old door, and at the second attempt burst the bolt off.

There was no light inside the house except that which came from the fire in an open range on the right; but by this Bram saw that he was in an enormous stone-paved kitchen, with open rafters above, a relic of the time when the farmer was not one of the gentlefolk, but dined with his family and his laborers at a huge deal table under the pendant hams and bunches of dried herbs which in the old days used to dangle from the rough-hewn beams.

Bram, however, noticed nothing but that a door on the opposite side of the kitchen was swinging back as if some one had just passed through, and he sprang across the stone flags and threw it open.

There was a little oil lamp on a bracket against the wall in the wide hall in which he found himself. Standing with his back to the solid oak panels of the front door, brandishing a naked cavalry sword of old-fashioned pattern, stood the airy Theodore Biron in dressing-gown and slippers, with his hair in disorder, his face very much flushed, and his little fair moustache twisted up into a fierce-looking point at each end.

On the lowest step of a wide oak staircase, which took up about twice the space it ought to have done in proportion to the size of the hall, stood little Claire, pale, trembling with fright, trying to keep her alarm out of her voice, as she coaxed her father to put down the sword and go to bed.

“Drunk! Mad drunk!” thought Bram as he took in the situation at a glance.

At sight of the intruder, whom she did not in the least recognize, Claire stopped short in the midst of her entreaties.

“What are you doing here? Who are you?” asked she, turning upon him fiercely.

The sudden appearance of the stranger, instead of further infuriating Mr. Biron, as might have been feared, struck him for an instant into decorum and quiescence. Lowering the point of the weapon he had been brandishing, he seemed for a moment to wait with curiosity for the answer to his daughter’s question.

When, however, Bram answered, in a respectful and shame-faced manner, that he had heard her call out and feared she might be in need of help, Theodore’s energy returned with full force, and he made a wild pass or two in the direction of the young man, with a recommendation to him to be prepared.

Claire’s terrors returned with full force.

“Oh, father, don’t, don’t! You’ll hurt him!” she cried piteously.

But the entreaty only served to whet Theodore’s appetite for blood.

“Hurt him! I mean to! I mean to have his life!” shouted he, while his light eyes seemed to be starting from his head.

And, indeed, it seemed as if he would proceed to carry out this threat, when Bram, to the terror of Claire and the evident astonishment of her father, rushed upon Theodore, and, cleverly avoiding the thrust which the latter made at him, seized the hilt of the sword, and wrested it from his grasp.

It was a bold act, and one which needed some address. Mr Biron was for the moment sobered by his amazement.

“Give me back my sword, you impudent rascal!” cried he, making as he spoke a vain attempt to regain possession of the weapon.

But Bram, who was a good deal stronger than he looked, kept him off easily with his right hand, while he retained a tight hold on the sword with his left.

“You shall have it back to-morrow reeght enough,” said Bram good-humoredly. “But maybe it’ll be safer outside t’house till ye feel more yerself like. Miss Claire yonder knaws it’s safe wi’ me.”

“Oh, yes; oh, yes,” panted Claire eagerly, though in truth she had not the least idea who this mysterious knight-errant was. “Let him have it, father; it’s perfectly safe with him.”

But this action of his daughter’s in siding with the enemy filled Mr Biron with disgust. With great dignity, supporting himself against the wall as he spoke, and gesticulating emphatically with his right hand, while with his left he fumbled about for his gold pince-nez, he said in solemn tones—

“I give this well-meaning but m-m-muddle-headed young man credit for the best intentions in the world. But same time I demand that he should give up my p-p-property, and that he should take himself off m-m-my premises without furth’ delay.”

“Certainly, sir. Good-evening,” said Bram.

And without waiting to hear any more of Mr Biron’s protests, or heeding his cries of “Stop thief!” Bram ran out as fast as he could by the way he had come, leaving the outer door, which he had damaged on his forcible entry, to slam behind him.

Once outside the farmyard, however, he found himself in a difficulty, being suddenly stopped by a farm laborer, in whom his rapid exit from the house had not unnaturally aroused suspicions, which were not allayed by the sight of the drawn sword in his hand.

“Eh, mon, who art ta? And where art agoin’?”

Bram pointed to the house.

“There’s a mon in yonder has gotten t’ jumps,” explained he simply, “and he was wa-aving this abaht’s head. So Ah took it away from ’un.”

The other man grinned, and nodded.

“T’ mester’s took that way sometimes,” said he. “But this sword’s none o’ tha property, anyway.”

Bram looked back at the house. Nobody had followed him out; even the damaged door had been left gaping open.

“Ah want a word wi’ t’ young lady,” said he. “She knaws me. I work for Mr. Cornthwaite down at t’ works in t’ town yonder.”

“Oh, ay; Ah’ve heard of ’un. He’s gotten t’ coin, and,” with a significant gesture in the direction of the farmhouse, “we haven’t.”

“You work on t’ farm here?” asked Bram.

The man answered in a tone and with a look which implied that affairs on the farm were in anything but a flourishing condition—

“Ay, Ah work on t’ farm.”

And, apparently satisfied of the honesty of Bram’s intentions, or else careless of the safety of his master’s property, the laborer nodded good-night, and walked up the hill towards a straggling row of cottages which bordered the higher side of the road near the summit.

Bram got back into the farmyard, and waited for the appearance at the broken door of some occupant of the house to whom he could make his excuses for the damage he had done. He had a shrewd suspicion who that occupant would be. Since all the noise and commotion he and Theodore Biron had made had not brought a single servant upon the scene, it was natural to infer that Mr. Biron and his daughter had the house to themselves.

And this idea filled Bram with wonder and compassion. What a life for a young girl, who had seemed to rough Bram the epitome of all womanly beauty and grace and charm, was this which accident had revealed to him. A life full of humiliations, of terrors, of anxieties which would have broken the heart and the spirit of many an older woman. Instead of being a spoilt young beauty, with every wish forestalled, every caprice gratified, his goddess was only a poor little girl who lived in an atmosphere of petty cares, petty worries, under the shadow of a great trouble, her father’s vice of drink.

And as he thought about the girl in this new aspect his new-born infatuation seemed to die away, the glamour and the glow faded, and he thought of her only as a poor little nestling which, deprived of its natural right of warmth and love and tenderness, lives a starved life, but bears its privations with a brave look.

And as he leaned against the yellow-washed wall he heard a slight noise, and started up.

Miss Biron, candlestick in hand, was examining the injuries done to her back door.

Bram opened his mouth to speak, but he stammered and uttered something unintelligible, taken aback as he was by the vast difference between the fancy picture he had been drawing of the young lady and the reality with which he was confronted.

For instead of the wan, white face, the streaming eyes, the anxious and weary look he had expected to see, he found himself face to face with a cheery little creature, brisk in movement, bright of eyes, who looked up with a start when he appeared before her, and said rather sharply—

“This is your doing, I suppose? And instead of being scolded for the mischief you have done you expect to be thanked and perhaps rewarded, no doubt?”

At first Bram could scarcely believe his ears.

“Ah’m sorry for t’ damage Ah’ve done, miss,” he said hurriedly. “And that’s what Ah’ve waited for to tell yer, nowt but that. But it’s not so bad as it looks. It’s nobbut t’ bolt sprung off and a scratch to the paint outside. If you can let me have a look into your tool-chest, Ah’ll set it reght at once. And for t’ paint, Ah’ll come up for that to-morrow neght.”

Miss Biron smiled graciously. The humble Bram had his sense of humor tickled by the airs she was giving herself now, as if she had forgotten altogether her helpless fright of only an hour before, and the relief with which she had hailed his disarming of her father.

“Well, that’s only fair, isn’t it?” said she with a bright smile, as she instantly acted upon his advice by disappearing into the house like a flash of lightning.

Bram heard the rattling of tools, and as it went on some time without apparent result, he stepped inside the door to see if he could be of any assistance.

Claire had thrown open the door of a cupboard to the left of the wide hearth, and was standing on a Windsor chair turning over the contents of a couple of biscuit tins on the top shelf. Bram, slow step by slow step, came nearer and nearer, fascinated by every rapid movement of this, the first feminine creature who had ever aroused his interest. How small her feet were! Bram looked at them, and then turned away his head, as if he had been guilty of something sacrilegious. And the movement of her arm as she turned over the odds and ends in the boxes, the bend of her dark head as she looked down, filled him afresh with that strange new sense of wonder and delight with which she had inspired him on his first sight of her at the works. Against the light of the candle, which she had placed on the shelf, he saw her profile in a new aspect, in which it looked prettier, more childlike than ever.

“Better give me t’ box, miss,” suggested Bram presently.

Miss Biron started, not knowing that he was so near.

“Very well,” said she. “You can look, but I am afraid you won’t find any proper tools here at all.”

She was right. But Bram was clever with his hands as well as with his head, and he could “make things do.” So that in a very few minutes he was at work upon the door, while Miss Biron held the light for him, and watched his nimble movements with interest.

And while she watched him it occurred to her, now that she felt quite sure he was no mere idler who had burst his way into the house from curiosity, that she had been by no means as grateful for his timely entrance as he had had a right to expect. And the candle began to shake in her hands as she glanced at him rather shyly, and wondered how, without casting blame upon her father, she could make amends to this methodical, quiet, and rather mysterious young Orson for the part he had taken in the whole affair.

“I’m really very much obliged to you,” she said at last, with a very great change in her manner from the rather haughty airs she had previously assumed. “I——”

She hesitated, and stopped. Bram had glanced quickly up at her, and then his eyes had flashed rapidly back to his work again.

“I seem to know your face,” said she with a manner in which sudden shyness struggled with a sense of the dignity it was necessary for her to maintain in these novel circumstances. “Where have I met you before? And what is your name?” she added quickly, as a fresh suspicion rushed into her mind.

“My name is Elshaw, miss. Bram Elshaw,” he answered, as he sat back on his heels and hunted again in the biscuit tin. “And I’ve seen you. I saw you t’ other day, last Tuesday, at Mr. Cornthwaite’s works. It was me showed you round, miss.”

“Oh!”

The bright little face of the girl was clouded with bewilderment.

“And then again Ah saw you to-neght up to Mr. Cornthwaite’s house, up at t’ Park. And he told me for to see you home, miss.”

“Oh!”

This time the exclamation was one of confusion, annoyance, almost of horror.

“I remember! He said—he said—he would send some one to see me home. But—er—er—I was in such a hurry—that—that I forgot. And I ran off by myself. And—and so you followed; you must have followed me!”

And Claire’s pretty face grew red as fire.

The truth was she had been angry with Mr. Cornthwaite for the manner of his reception, for the dry remarks he had made about her father, and for his manifest and most ungracious unwillingness to allow Christian to see her home. And she had made up her mind that no “respectable young man” of Mr. Cornthwaite’s choosing should accompany her if Chris might not. And so, dashing off through the park in the dusk by a short cut, she had thought to escape the ignominy which Mr. Cornthwaite had designed for her.

Bram, with a long, rusty nail between his teeth, grew redder than she. In an instant he understood what he had not understood before, that the young lady had taken the offer of his escort as a humiliation. She had wanted to go back with Christian, and Mr. Cornthwaite had wished to put her off with one of his workmen! Bram felt that her indignation was just, although he was scarcely stoical enough not to feel a pang.

“You see, miss,” he said apologetically, taking the nail out of his mouth, “Ah was bound to come this weay, and so Ah couldn’t help but follow you. And—and when Ah heard you call aht—why Ah couldn’t help but get in. Ah’m reght sorry if Ah seemed to be taking a liberty, miss.”

Again Claire was struck as she had been that day at the works by the innate superiority of the man to his social position, of his tone to his accent.

“It was very lucky for me—I am very glad, very grateful,” said she hurriedly, in evident distress, which was most touching to her hearer. “I don’t know what I should have done—I—I must explain to you. You must not think my father would have done me any harm,” she went on earnestly, with a great fear at her heart that Bram would report these occurrences to his employer, and furnish him with another excuse for slighting her father. “He gets like that sometimes, especially in the hot weather,” she went on quickly, and with so much intensity that it was difficult to doubt her faith in the story. “He was in the army once, and he had a sword-cut on the head when he was out in India. And it makes him excitable, very excitable. But it never lasts long. Now he is fast asleep, and to-morrow morning he will be quite himself, quite himself again. You won’t say anything about it to Mr. Cornthwaite, will you?” she wound up, with a sidelong look of entreaty, as Bram, having finished his task, rose to his feet and picked up the coat he had thrown off before setting to work.

“No, miss.”

There was something in his tone, in his look, as he said just those two words which inspired Claire with absolute confidence.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

And Bram understood that her gratitude covered the whole ground, and took in his forcible entrance, the time he had spent in mending the door, and his final promise.

“And Ah’ll look in to-morrow neght, miss,” said he as he turned in the doorway and noticed how sleepy her brown eyes were beginning to look, “and give a coat of paint to’t.”

“Oh, you need not. It’s very good of you.”

He touched his cap, and turned to go; but as he was turning, Claire, blushing very much, and conscious of this conflict between conventionality and her sense of what she owed to this dignified young workman, who could not be rewarded with a “tip,” thrust out her little hand.

Then Bram’s behavior was for the moment rather embarrassing. The privilege of touching her fingers, of holding the hand which had stirred in him so many strange reflections for a moment in his own, as if they had been friends, equals, was one which he could not accept with perfect equanimity. She saw that he started, and, blushing more than ever, she seemed in doubt as to whether she should withdraw her hand. But, seeing her hesitation, Bram mastered himself, took the hand she offered, wrung it in a strong grip, and walked quickly away towards the gate.

He felt as if he was in Heaven.

CHAPTER V. BRAM’S RISE IN LIFE.

What was there about this little brown-eyed girl that she should bewitch him like this? Bram, who flattered himself that he had his wits about him, who had kept himself haughtily free from love entanglements up to now, could not understand it. And the most amazing part of it all was that his feelings about her seemed to undergo an entire change every half-hour or so. At least a dozen times since his infatuation began he fancied himself quite cured, and able to laugh at himself and look down upon her. And then some fresh aspect of the little creature would strike him into fresh ecstasies, and he would find himself as much under the spell as ever.

Thus the first sight of her that evening in Mr. Cornthwaite’s study had thrilled him less than the announcement of her name. But, on the other hand, the touch of her hand so unexpectedly accorded, had quickened his feelings into a delicious frenzy, which lasted during the whole of his walk down into the town and out to the one small backroom in a grimy little red brick house where he lodged.

When Bram tried to think of Miss Biron soberly, to try to come to some sort of an estimate of her character, he was altogether at a loss. Her tears, her terrors, her smiles, her little airs, all seemed to succeed each other as rapidly as if she had been still a child. No emotion seemed to be able to endure in her volatile nature. He doubted, considering the matter in cold blood, whether this was a characteristic he admired; yet there it was, and his infatuation remained.

With all her limitations, whatever they might be; with all her faults, whatever they were, Miss Claire Biron had permanently taken her place in Bram’s narrow life as the nearest thing he had ever seen to an ideal woman, as the representative, for the time being at least, of that feminine creature, the necessity for whom he now began to understand, and who was to come straight into his heart and into his arms some day.

For, with all his ambitions, his reasonable hopes, Bram was as yet too modest to say to himself that this white-handed lady herself, this pearl among pebbles, was the prize for which he must strive; no, she only stood for that prize in his mind, in his heart, or so at least Bram told himself.

Bram thought about Miss Biron and her bibulous papa all night, for he scarcely slept, but with the morning light came fresh cares to occupy his thoughts.

It was his first day at his new employment in the office, and Bram, though he managed to hide all traces of what he felt under a stolid and matter-of-fact demeanor, felt by no means at his ease on his first entrance among the young gentlemen in Mr. Cornthwaite’s office.

He had put on his Sunday clothes, not without a pang at the extravagance in dress which his rise in life entailed. Nobody in the office seemed to have heard of his promotion, for the other clerks took no notice of him on his entrance, evidently supposing that he had been sent for, as was frequently the case, to take some message or to do some errand which required a trustworthy messenger.

When, after being called into the inner office, he came out again and took his place at a desk among the rest there was a burst of astonishment, amusement, and some contempt at his expense. And when the truth became known that he had come among them to stay, he straight from the coalyard and the mill and the shed outside, the feelings of all the young gentlemen found vent in “chaff” of a particularly merciless kind.

His accent, his speech, his dress, his look, his walk, his manner, all formed themes for the very easiest ridicule. Never before had they had such an opportunity, and they made the most of it. But if they thought to make life in the office unbearable for Bram they had reckoned without their host. Bram cased himself in an armor of stolid good humor, joined in the laugh against himself, and in affecting to try to assume their modes of speech and manner contrived to burlesque them at least as well as they had mimicked him.

And the end of it was that the fun languished all too soon for their wishes, and Bram when he left the office that afternoon, and wiped his face as he used to do after another sort of fiery ordeal, congratulated himself on having got through the day better than he had expected.

Christian Cornthwaite ran out after him, and slapped him on the back.

“Well, Elshaw,” cried he, “and how do you feel after it?”

“Much t’ same as Dan’l did when he’d come out of t’ den o’ lions, sir,” replied Bram grimly. “T’ young gentlemen in there,” and he pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, “doan’t find me grand enough for’em.”

“And so you want to go back to the works, Bram?”

“No fear, sir,” answered the new clerk dryly. “They’ll get used to me, or else maybe I shall get used to them. Or wi’ so many fine patterns round me maybe Ah shall be a polished gentleman myself presently.”

“No doubt of it, Bram. But you’ve been rather roughly treated. It ought to have been managed gradually, bit by bit, and then at last, when you took your place in the office, I ought to have sent you to my own tailor first, and had you properly rigged out.”

Bram looked down ruefully at his Sunday clothes.

“Ah felt a prince in these last evening,” he expostulated.

Christian laughed heartily.

“Well, they couldn’t beat you at the main things, Elshaw, at writing and spelling and calculating, eh?”

“No,” answered Bram complacently. “Ah could beat most of ’em there.”

As a matter of fact, Bram’s self-teaching, with the additional help of the night school in the winter, had so developed his natural capacity that he was as far ahead of his new companions intellectually as he was behind them in externals. Christian, who knew this, felt proud of his protégé.

“There are some more hints I want to give you,” said he, as he put his arm through that of his rough companion and walked with him up the street, with the good-natured familiarity which made him popular with everybody, but in the exercise of which he was very discriminating. “You will have to leave William Henry Street, or wherever it is you hang out, and take a room in a better neighborhood. And I will show you where you can go and dine. Look here,” he went on, stopping abruptly, “come up to me this evening, and we’ll have a talk over a pipe. You smoke, I suppose?”

“No, sir,” said Bram. “Ah don’t smoke. It’s too expensive. And Ah thank you kindly, but Ah’ve got a job out Hessel way this evening, and—”

Christian interrupted him with sudden interest.

“Out Hessel way? Why, that’s near Duke’s Farm. Will you take a note up for me to Miss Biron? She lives there. You can find the house easy enough.”

Bram, who had listened to these words with emotions he dared not express, agreed to take the note, but did not mention that it was to the farmhouse that his own errand took him.

All the happiness he had felt over the anticipated walk to Hessel evaporated as he watched Christian tear a leaf out of a note-book, scribble hastily on it in pencil, fold and addressed it to “Miss Claire Biron.”

But what a poor fool he was to be jealous? Could there be a question but that Mr. Christian Cornthwaite, with his good looks and his gayety, his position and his fortune, would make her a splendid mate?

Something like this Bram carefully dinned into himself as he took the note, and went home to his tea.

But for all that, he felt restless, dissatisfied, and unhappy as he set out after tea on his walk up to Hessel with that note from Christian Cornthwaite to Miss Biron in his pocket.

Although it was a hot evening, and the walk was uphill all the way, Bram got to the farm by half-past six, and came up to the door just as a woman, whom he decided must be the servant, came out of it.

She was about forty years of age, a little under the middle height, thickset of figure, and sallow of skin. But in her light gray eyes there was a shrewd but kindly twinkle; there was a promise of humor about her mouth and her sharply-pointed nose which made the countenance a decidedly attractive one.

She made no remark to Bram, but she turned and watched him as he approached the back door, and did not resume her walk until he had knocked and been admitted by Claire herself.

Miss Biron seemed to feel some slight embarrassment at the sight of him, and received his explanation that he had come to repaint her door with an assumption of surprise. The shrewd young man decided that the young lady had repented her unconventional friendliness of the preceding evening, and was inclined to look upon his visit as an intrusion. His manner, therefore, was studiously distant and respectful as he raised his cap from his head, gave the reason for his coming, and then said that he had brought a note for her from Mr. Christian Cornthwaite.

Claire blushed as she took it. Bram, who had brought his paint can and his brush, took off his coat, and began his task in silence, with just a sidelong look at the girl as she began to read the note.

At that moment the inner door of the kitchen opened, and Mr. Biron entered with a jaunty step, arranging a rosebud in his button-hole in quite a light comedy manner. Catching sight at once of Bram at work on the door, that young man observed that a slight frown crossed his face. After a momentary pause in his walk, he came on, however, as gayly as ever, and peeping over his daughter’s shoulder read the few words the note contained, and said at once—

“Well, you must go, dear; you must go.”

Claire blushed hotly, and crumpled up the note.

“I—I don’t want to. I would rather not,” said she in a low voice.

“Oh, but that’s nonsense,” retorted he good-humoredly. “Chris is a good fellow, a capital fellow. Put on your hat, and don’t be a goose. I’ll see that the young man at the door has his beer.”

Bram heard this, and his face tingled, but he said nothing. He perceived, indeed, from a certain somewhat feminine spitefulness in Mr. Biron’s tone, that the words were said with the intention of annoying him.

Claire appeared to hesitate a moment, then quickly making up her mind she said—“All right, father, I’ll go,” and disappeared through the inner door.

Theodore, without any remark to Bram, followed her.

In a few moments Bram heard a movement in the straw of the farmyard behind him, and looking round saw that Claire was standing behind him with her hat and gloves on, and was apparently debating in her own mind whether she would utter something which was in her thoughts. He saluted her respectfully with a stolid face. Then she began to speak, reddened, stammered, and finally made a dash for it.

“Where do you live?” she asked suddenly. “I mean—is it far from here?”

“No, miss; it’s over yon,” answered Bram mendaciously, nodding in the direction of the cottages on the brow of the hill.

“Then would you very much mind—” and Bram could see that her breast was heaving under the influence of some strong emotion, “keeping your eye upon this place until I come back? You know all about it,” she went on, with a burst of uneasy confidence, “so that it’s no use my minding that. And when my father’s left alone—well, well, you know,” said she, blushing crimson, and keeping her eyes down. “And Joan has to go home to her husband and children at night. And—and I’m afraid when he gets excited, you know, that he’ll set the place on fire. He nearly did last night. You see, my poor father has a great many worries, and a very little affects his head—since that sabre cut in India.”

The humility, nay, the humiliation in her tone, touched Bram to the quick. He promised at once that he would take care that Mr. Biron did no harm either to himself or to the house while she was away, and received her grateful, breathless, little whisper of “Thank you; oh, thank you,” with outward stolidity, but with considerable emotion.

Then she ran off, and he went quietly on with his work.

It took him a very short time to finish putting on the one coat of paint, which was all he could do that night; and then, as Mr. Biron had not appeared again, Bram thought he had better take a look round and see what that gentleman was doing. So he took up his paint-can, and, leaving the door open to dry, made his way round to the front of the house, and peeped cautiously in at the lower windows; and in one of them he saw a couple of empty champagne bottles, with the corks lying beside them, and an overturned glass on the table.

“T’owd rascal hasn’t wasted much time,” thought Bram to himself, as he stared at the evidences of Mr. Biron’s solitary dissipation, and looked about for the toper himself. But Theodore was not in the room. Neither was he in the room on the other side of the front door, as Bram hastened to ascertain. Perhaps he had had sense enough to make his way upstairs to his own room to sleep off the effects of the wine.

This seeming to be a probable explanation of his disappearance, Bram was inclined to trouble himself no further on that head, when a faint noise, which seemed to proceed from the bowels of the earth, attracted his attention. There was a grating under the window of the room which appeared to be the dining-room, and in the cellar which was thus dimly lighted some one appeared to be moving about.

Bram, in his character of sworn guardian of the house, thought it best to investigate, so he ran round to the back, entered by the open door, and found a trap-door in the hall just outside the kitchen door.

A strong smell of paraffin was the first thing he noticed as he looked down the ladder; the next was the sight of Mr. Biron calmly emptying a can of the oil upon the loose straw and firewood which the cellar contained.

Startled by the sudden light and noise above, Mr. Biron dropped the can as the trap-door opened, and then Bram saw that in his left hand he held a box of matches.

“Tha fool, tha drunken fool, coom up wi’ ye!” shouted Elshaw, as he stretched down a strong arm and pulled Theodore up by his coat collar.

Bram had expected his captive to stagger, and so he did. He had expected him to stammer and to stare; and he did these things also. But Bram had seen a good deal of drunkenness in his time, and he was not easy to deceive.

Suddenly holding the slender little man at arm’s length from him, and looking steadily into his eyes with a black frown on his own face, he shouted in a voice which might have roused the village—

“Why, you d——d old rascal, what villainy have you been up to? You’re as sober as I am!”

CHAPTER VI. MR. BIRON’S CONDESCENSION.

When Mr. Theodore Biron found himself pulled up the steps of his cellar, and roughly shaken by the very person who had disarmed him on the previous evening, his rage was such that he lost his usual airy self-possession completely, and betrayed himself in the most unworthy manner.

“Who are you, sir? And how dare you interfere with me in this way?” stammered he, as he tried in vain to release himself from the determined grasp of the young clerk.

“Coom up to t’ light, and then you’ll see who Ah am,” said Bram, as with a strong arm he dragged the little man up the steps, and, shutting the trap-door, folded his arms and turned to look at him.

“Do you dare to justify this outrage, this—this burglarious entry upon my premises? The second in two days? Do you dare to justify it?” said Theodore haughtily.

“Ay,” said Bram surlily, “Ah’m going to give information to t’ police. Ah’m goin’ to tell them to keep an eye upon you, Mr. Biron, and not to be surprised if t’ house is burnt down; since you’ve got odd ways of amusing yourself with matches and paraffin, and with candles left ablaze near light curtains. Ah suppose you’re insured, Mr. Biron?”

“Whatever you suppose has nothing to do with the question,” retorted Mr. Biron, whose little thin cheeks were pink with indignation, and whose light eyes were flashing with annoyance and malignity. “Nobody is likely to pay much attention to the statements of a man who is evidently a loafer and a thief.”

“A thief!” shouted Bram with a menacing gesture, which had the effect of sending Theodore promptly into the little dining-room behind him. “Well, we’ll see whether t’ word of t’ thief won’t be taken against yours, Mr. Biron.”

There was a pause. Theodore from behind the table in the little dining-room, where he was twirling his moustache with a trembling white hand, looked at him with apprehension, and presently laughed in an attempt to recover his usual light-hearted ease of manner.

“Come, come,” said he, “this is carrying a joke too far, for I suppose it was intended for a joke—this intrusion upon my premises—and that you never had any real thought of carrying anything away. I remember your face now; you are one of the workmen at my cousin’s place, Cornthwaite’s Iron-Works.”

Bram, who was not unwilling to make terms with Miss Biron’s father, stared at him sullenly.

“Ah’m not one of t’ workmen now. Ah’m in t’ office,” said he.

Mr. Biron raised his eyebrows; he did not seem pleased. It had in fact occurred to him that this young man was employed as a sort of spy by the Cornthwaites, with whom he himself was by no means an acceptable person.

He smiled disagreeably.

“One of the clerks, eh? One of the smart young men who nibble pens in the office?”

“Ay, but ma smartness isn’t outside, Mr. Biron.”

“I see. Great genius—disdains mere appearance and all that.”

Bram said nothing. Theodore’s sneers hurt him more than any he had ever been subjected to before. He felt, in spite of his contempt for the airy-mannered scoundrel, that he himself stood at a disadvantage, with his rough speech and awkward movements, with the dapper little man in front of him. The consciousness that he himself would be reckoned of no account compared to Theodore Biron by the very men who despised the latter and respected himself was the strongest spur he had ever felt towards self-improvement.

“And what brings a person of your intellectual calibre into our humble neighborhood?” pursued Theodore in the same tone.

“Ah’m looking for lodgings up this way,” answered Bram shortly.

The idea had come to him that evening that, since he had been told to change his lodgings, he would settle in the neighborhood of Hessel.

As he had expected, Mr. Biron did not look pleased.

“And you are making yourself at home in advance!” suggested he dryly.

“Well, sir, you needn’t see more of me than you feel inclined to,” retorted Bram.

And, with a curt salutation, he turned on his heel and went out of the house by the back way, through the kitchen and the still open outer door.

He went up the hill towards the row of cottages on the summit, and made inquiries which resulted in his finding the two modest rooms he wanted in the end house of all, within a stone’s throw of a ruin so strange-looking that Bram made a tour of inspection of the ramshackle old building before returning to the town.

This ruin had once been a country mansion of fair size and of some importance, but the traces of its architectural beauties were now few and far apart. Of the main building only one side wall retained enough of its old characteristics to claim attention; at the top of the massive stonework a Tudor chimney, of handsome proportions, rose in incongruous stateliness above the decaying roof which had been placed over a row of cottages, which, built up within the old wall, had grown ruinous in their turn, and were now shut up and deserted.

At the back of this heterogeneous pile and a little distance away from it, another long and massive stone wall, with a Tudor window out of which once Wolsey had looked, had now become the chief prop and mainstay of another row of buildings, one of which was a school, another a chapel, while a third was a now disused stable.

And in the shelter of these ruins and remains of greatness a tall chimney, a cluster of sheds, and a pile of grass-grown trucks marked the spot where a now disused coal mine added a touch of fantastic desolation to the scene.

Bram went all round the pit-mouth and surveyed the town of Sheffield, with its dead yellow lights and its patches of blackness, like an inky sea bearing a fleet of ill-lighted boats on its breast in a Stygian mist. He thought he should like this evening walk out of the smoke and the lick of the fiery tongues, even without the occasional peeps he should get at Miss Biron.

But he hardly knew, perhaps, how much the thought of her, of her dancing eyes, her rapid movements like the sweep of a bird’s wing, had to do with his feeling.

He went back round the pit’s mouth, making his way with some difficulty in the darkness over the rough stones with which the place was thickly strewn.

And as he came to the remains of the old mansion he heard the laugh of Christian Cornthwaite, a little subdued, but clearly recognizable, not very far from his ears.

Bram straightened himself with a nasty shock. By the direction from which the sound came, he knew that Christian was in the ruin itself; and that he was not there by himself was plain. Who then was with him? Bram did not want to find an answer to this question; at least he told himself that he did not. The dilapidated shell of the old mansion was not the place where a lady would meet her lover. Bram had peeped into one of the deserted cottages on his way to the pit’s mouth, and had seen that, boarded up as doors and windows were, there were ruinous crannies and spaces through which a tramp or vagrant could creep to a precarious shelter.

Christian, who loved an adventure, amorous or otherwise, was evidently pursuing one now.

Bram walked down the hill, passed the cottage where he had engaged his new rooms, whistling to himself, and telling himself persistently that he was not wondering where Miss Biron had gone to that evening. And then he became suddenly mute, for, turning his head at the sound of a light footstep behind him, he saw Claire herself coming down the hill at a breathless rate.

She passed him without seeing him. Her head was bent low, and her feet seemed to fly. Bram’s heart seemed to stop beating as he watched her.

But he would not allow that he suspected her of being the person who had been in the ruined building with Christian Cornthwaite. It was true that Christian had sent her a note in which he had evidently asked her to meet him; it was true that she had acceded to the request, at her father’s instigation.

But although Bram clenched his teeth in thinking of Theodore, and felt a sudden impulse of fierce indignation against that gentleman, he would not acknowledge to himself that it was possible to connect her with an act inconsistent with the modesty of a gentlewoman.

He was not far behind when Theodore, lively, bright, and entirely recovered from the discomposure into which Bram’s unseemly violence had thrown him, came forth from the farmyard to meet his daughter.

“My dear child, I was getting quite anxious about you. Where’s Chris? I thought he would have seen you back home.”

“I left him—at the top of the hill, papa,” answered Claire in a demure voice.

And she ran past Theodore into the house.

Then Theodore, whose eyes were sharp, recognized Bram. And there flashed through his brain, always active on his own behalf, the suspicion that this presumptuous young man might be spying not so much on his employer’s account, as upon his own. The idea struck Theodore as preposterously amusing; but at the same time he thought that something might be made out of the foolish fellow’s infatuation, if it indeed existed.

“Well, and how about the lodgings?” said he with cheerful condescension, as Bram came nearer.

“Ah’ve found some,” replied Bram shortly.

“And what brings you so far afield?” went on Theodore more urbanely than ever. “May I hazard the conjecture that there’s a lady in the case?”

The young man was quick to seize this suggestion, which he saw might be used most usefully hereafter.

“Ay, sir, that’s about reght,” said he. “But she doan’t live here,” he went on, making up his story with great deliberation as he spoke. “She lives miles away in t’ country; but Ah thought Ah’d better settle out of t’ town myself, before Ah went courting.”

Theodore was disappointed, but he did not show it.

“Well,” said he, “we shall see something of you now and then, I daresay.”

And he nodded good-bye in the most affable manner.

Bram saluted respectfully, but he was too shrewd to be much impressed, in the manner Theodore intended, by this change towards him.

Away from the glamour cast upon him by the fact of Claire’s presence in his vicinity, Bram had sense enough to reflect that the less he saw of Miss Biron and her shifty father the better it would be for him. He did not say this to himself in so many words; but the knowledge was borne strongly in upon him all the same. There were forces in those two persons, differently as he esteemed them, against which he felt that he had no defence ready. Theodore was cunning and grasping; his daughter was, as Bram knew, used by her father as a tool in his unscrupulous hands. Deep as Bram’s compassion for the charming girl was, and his admiration, he had the strength of mind to live for months in her neighborhood without making any attempt to speak to her.

He saw her, indeed, morning after morning, and evening after evening, on his way down to the works and on his way back. For the road from his lodgings lay past the farm, where Miss Biron was always busy with her poultry in the morning, and working in her garden at night.

It was not often that she saw Bram, but when she did she had always a smile and a nod for him; never more than that though, even when he lingered a little, in the hope that she would throw him a word.

Bram saw Theodore sometimes, lounging in a garden chair, with a cigarette in his mouth; and sometimes Chris Cornthwaite would be with him, or walking by Claire’s side round the lawn, chattering to her while she pottered about her late autumn flowers.

This sight always sent a sharp pang through Bram’s heart; for he had conceived the idea that Christian, nice fellow though he was, might be too volatile a person to value Claire’s affection as she deserved.

Claire, on her side, seemed to be happy enough with Christian. Her pretty laugh rang out gayly; and Bram, even while he laughed at himself for a sentimental folly, found himself praying that the poor child might not be deceived in her hopes of happiness with her volatile lover.

For Christian, amiable and devoted as he might be with Claire, had not, as Bram knew, given up his amiability and devotion to other girls; and after the second or third time that Bram had seen him at Hessel Farm, he mentioned casually to the newly promoted clerk that he did not want his father to hear of his visits there.

Whereat Bram looked grave, and foresaw trouble in the near future.

The March winds had begun to blow fiercely on the high ground above Hessel, when Theodore Biron at last discovered a use to which to put his young neighbor. Would Bram do some marketing for him in the town? Bram was rather surprised at the request, for an excuse for going into the town was what Theodore liked to have. But when he found that the task he was expected to undertake was the purchase of one pound’s worth of goods for the sum of five shillings, which was all the cash Theodore trusted him with, Bram, when Theodore had turned his back upon him, stood looking thoughtfully at the two half-crowns in his hand.

And while he was doing so Claire, who had seen the transaction from the window, ran out of the house and came up with him. As usual, the girl’s presence threw a spell upon him, and put to flight all the saner ideas he had conceived as to the desirability of trying to conquer his own infatuation. She came up smiling, but there was anxiety in her face.

“What has papa been saying to you?” she asked imperiously.

“He wants me to get some things for him in the town,” said Bram straightforwardly. “But Ah’m such a bad hand at marketing—that—that Ah’m afraid——”

Claire blushed, and interrupted him impatiently.

“He’s not given you money enough, of course. He never does. He doesn’t understand. Men never do. They think everything can be got for a few pence for the housekeeping, and that one is wasteful and extravagant. Give me the money; I’ll see about the things.”

“No, you won’t, Miss Claire,” said Bram composedly, as he put the two half-crowns in his pocket. “You’ve put me on my mettle. Ah’m going to see what Ah can do, and show you that the men can give the ladies a lesson in marketing, after all.”

But Claire did not reply in the same light tone. She looked up in his face with an expression of shame and alarm in her eyes, which touched him keenly. With a little catch in her breath, she tried to protest, to forbid. Then she read something in Bram’s eyes which stung her, some gleam of pity, of comprehension. She broke off short, burst into tears, and turned abruptly away.

Bram stood by the gate for a few seconds, with his head hung down, and a guilty, miserable look on his face. Then, as nobody came out to him, he slunk quietly away.

CHAPTER VII. BRAM’S DISMISSAL.

It was with some diffidence that Bram presented himself at the farmhouse door that evening. He went through the farmyard to the back door, and gave a modest knock. It was Joan, the servant, who opened the door to him, and Bram, as his own eyes met those of the middle-aged Yorkshire woman, had a strong sense that she read him, as he would have expressed it, “like a book.” Indeed Joan could read character in a face much more easily than she could read a printed page. Having been born long before the days of School Boards, she had been accustomed from her early youth to find her entertainment not in cheap fiction, but in the life around her; so that she was on the whole much better educated than women of her class are now, having stored her mind with the facts gained by experience and observation.

She looked at him not unkindly.

“Ah,” she began, with a nod of recognition, as if she had known him well for a year instead of now speaking to him for the first time, “Ah thowt it was you. Mister Christian he comes in by t’ front door.”

Bram did not like this comparison. It suggested, in the first place, that Joan had an instinct that there was some sort of rivalry between himself and Mr. Christian. It suggested also the basis on which they respectively stood.

“I’ve brought some things Miss Biron wanted,” he began, forgetting that he had been commissioned, not by the young lady, but by her father.

Joan smiled a broad smile of shrewd amusement. Bram wished she would mind her own business.

“Weel, here she be to see them hersen,” said she, as the inner door of the kitchen opened, and Claire came in.

“Oh, Joan, papa wants you to——” began she.

Then she saw Bram, and stopped.

“I’ve brought the things, Miss Claire,” said he in a shy voice.

Miss Biron had stopped short and changed color. She now came forward slowly, and passing Joan, held open the door for him to enter.

“Oh, please come in,” she said in a very demure voice, from which it was impossible to tell whether she was pleased or annoyed, grateful or the reverse, for his good offices.

Bram entered, and proceeded to place his enormous parcel on the deal table, and to cut the string. He was passing through the refining process very rapidly; and, already, in the clothes which he had chosen under Chris Cornthwaite’s eye, he looked too dignified a person to engage in the duties of a light porter.

Claire, more demure than ever, spoke as if she was much shocked.

“Oh, have you carried that heavy parcel? Oh, I’m so sorry. It is very, very kind of you, but——”

She stopped, stammering a little. Joan, who was standing with her hands on her hips, admiring the scene, laughed scornfully.

“Eh, but it’s a grand thing to be yoong! Ah can’t get no smart yoong gen’lemen to carry my parcels for me, not if they was to see me breakin’ ma back.”

“Why, you’ve got a husband to carry them for you,” said Claire quickly, and not very happily; for Joan laughed again.

“Ay, Miss Claire, but they doan’t do it after they’re married; so do you make t’ moast o’ your time.”

And Joan, with an easy nod which was meant to include both the young people, went through into the hall with leisurely steps.

As she had left behind her a slight feeling of awkward reserve, Claire felt bound to begin with an apology for her.

“She’s rather rough, but, oh, so good,” said she.

“Then if she’s good to you, I can forgive all her roughness,” said Bram.

And the next minute he wished he had not said it.

There was a momentary pause, during which Bram busied himself with the strings of his parcels. With a rapid eye, Miss Biron ran over the various things which the outer wrapper had contained. Then, with a bright flush in her face, she took her purse from her pocket.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked quickly. “Three boxes of candles, eighteenpence. Two boxes of sardines, two and sixpence. Box of figs, half-a-crown——”

Bram interrupted her hotly. “One and ninepence, the figs,” cried he, “and the sardines were only ninepence a tin.”

“Then they are not the best.”

“Yes, they are.”

This colloquy, short and simple as it was, had left the combatants, for such they seemed, panting with excitement. Miss Biron looked at the young man narrowly and proceeded in a tone of much haughtiness——

“I must beg you to tell me really what they cost, whatever my father said. He knows nothing about the price of things, but”—and the young lady gave him a look which was meant to impress him with her vast experience in these matters—“I do.”

Bram, afraid of offending her still further, and conscious of the delicate ground upon which he stood, began submissively to add up the various items, deducting a few pence where he dared, until the total of nineteen shillings and fourpence was reached. Miss Biron opened her purse rather nervously, and took out a small handful of silver, a very small handful, alas!

“Let me see. Papa gave you five shillings——”

“And then the ten he gave me as I went out by the gate after you’d gone up,” pursued Bram, imperturbably.

“Ten!” echoed Claire, sharply. “Papa gave you ten shillings more!”

“Half-a-sovereign, yes,” replied Bram, mendaciously. “You said he hadn’t given me enough, you know, so he gave me the ten shillings. You ask him.”

Claire shook her head.

“It’s no use asking papa anything,” she said with a sigh. Then she added, suddenly raising her head and flashing her eyes, “I must trust to your honor, Mr. Elshaw.”

The sound of his name uttered by her lips gave Bram a ridiculous thrill of pleasure. He had supposed she only knew him as “Bram,” and the thought that she had taken the trouble to inquire his name was a delicious one.

“Yes,” said he simply, in no wise troubled by the doubt she expressed. “Well, that’s fifteen shillings, and you owe me four shillings and fourpence.”

She gave him a quick glance of suspicion, and then counted out her poor little hoard of sixpences and coppers. She had only three shillings and sevenpence.

“I owe you,” said she, as she put the money into his hand, “ninepence, which I must pay you next week. But, please, I want you to promise,” she earnestly went on, “not to do any more shopping for papa. He is so extravagant,” and she tried to laugh merrily, “that I have to keep some check upon him, or we should soon be ruined.”

“All right, Miss Claire, I’ll do just as you wish, of course. But it’s a great pleasure to me to be able to do any little thing for you. You know, for one thing,” he added quickly, fancying that she might think this presumptuous, “that Mr. Christian was the person who got me moved up out of the works, so I am doubly glad to do anything for—for anybody he takes an interest in.”

Over Claire’s sensitive face there passed a shadow at the mention of Christian’s name.

“Christian Cornthwaite is my cousin, you know,” said she. “He often talks of you. He says you are very clever, and he is very proud of having discovered you, as he calls it.”

“It was very good of him,” said Bram. “I’m afraid I don’t do him much credit; I’m such a rough sort of chap.”

Miss Biron looked at him rather shyly, and laughed.

“Well, you were, just a little. But you are—are——”

“A little bit better now?” suggested Bram modestly.

“Well, I was going to say a great deal better, only I was afraid it sounded rather rude. What I meant was that—that——”

“Well, I should like to hear what it was you meant.”

“Well, that you speak differently, for one thing.”

“But I slip back sometimes,” said Bram, laughing and blushing, just as she laughed and blushed. “It’s so hard not to say ‘Ah’ when I ought to say ‘I.’ I’m getting on, I know, but it’s like walking on eggs all the time.”

Then they both laughed again, and at this point the door opened and Mr. Biron came in.

He was very amiable, and insisted on Bram’s coming into the dining-room with him. As Bram neither smoked nor drank, however, Theodore’s offer of whisky and cigars was thrown away. But Bram sat down and made a very good audience, laughing at his host’s stories and jokes, so that he found himself forced into accepting an invitation to come in again on the following evening.

By Theodore’s wish it became Bram’s frequent custom to spend an hour at the farmhouse in the evening; and the young man soon availed himself of the intimacy thus begun to make himself useful to Claire in a hundred ways. He would chop wood in the yard, mend broken furniture, fetch things from the town, and bargain for her for her poultry, suggest and help to carry out reformations in her management of the dairy—doing everything unobtrusively, but making his shrewd common sense manifest in a hundred practical ways.

And Claire was grateful, rather shy of taking advantage of his kindness, but giving him such reward of smiles and thanks as more than repaid him for labor which was pleasure indeed.

Sometimes Christian Cornthwaite would be at the farm, and on these occasions Bram saw little of Claire, who was always monopolized by her cousin. Christian was as devoted as Bram could have wished; but, if Theodore thought that the young man delayed his coming, he did not scruple to send his daughter on some excuse to call at Holme Park, always refusing Bram’s humble offers to take the message or to escort Claire.

The one thing Bram could have wished about Claire was that she should be less submissive to her unscrupulous father in matters like this. He would have had her refuse to go up to Holme Park, where she was always received, as Bram knew, with the coldness which ought to have been reserved for Theodore. And especially did Bram feel this now that he knew, from Theodore’s own lips, that the notes he sent by his daughter’s hand to Josiah Cornthwaite were seldom answered. It made Bram’s blood boil to know this, and that in the face of this fact Theodore continued to send his daughter up to his rich cousin’s house on begging errands.

Bram was in the big farm kitchen by himself one cool September evening, busily engaged in making a new dressing-table for Claire out of some old boxes. He had his coat off, and was sawing away, humming to himself as he did so, when, turning to look for something he wanted, he found, to his surprise, that Claire, whom he had not seen that evening, was sitting in the room.

She had taken her hat off, and was sitting with it in her lap, so silently, so sadly, that Bram, who was not used to this mood in the volatile girl, was struck with astonishment.

For a moment he stood, saw in hand, looking at her without speaking.

“Miss Claire!” exclaimed he at last.

“Well?”

“When did you come in? I never saw you come in!”

“No. I didn’t want you to see me. I don’t want any one to see me. So I can’t go in because papa has the door open, and he would catch me on the way upstairs.”

“What’s wrong with you, Miss Claire?”

Bram had come over to her and was leaning on the table and speaking with so much kindness in his voice that the girl’s eyes, after glancing up quickly and meeting his, filled with tears.

“Oh, everything. One feels like that sometimes. Everybody does, I suppose.”

Bram’s heart ached for the girl. He guessed that she had been to Holme Park on the usual errand, and that she had been coldly received. He could hear Theodore strumming on the piano in the drawing-room. The piano was so placed that the player had a good view of the open door, and Bram knew that Theodore had chosen this method of filling up the time till his daughter’s return. Apparently he had now caught with his sharp ears the sound of voices in the kitchen, for the playing ceased, and a moment later he presented himself at the door with a smiling face.

“Good-evening, Elshaw. Heard you sawing away, but didn’t like to disturb you till I heard another voice, and guessed that I might. Any answer to my note, Claire?”

For a moment he stood, saw in hand, looking at her without speaking.—Page 52.

“No, papa.”

Claire had risen from her chair, and was standing with her back turned to her father, pretending to be busy sticking the long, black-headed pins into her hat.

“No answer. Oh, well, there was hardly an answer needed. That’s all right.”

From his tone nobody would have guessed that Theodore cared more than his words implied; but Bram, who saw most things, noticed a frown of disappointment and anger on the airy Mr. Biron’s face. After a pause Theodore said—

“I think I shall go down the hill and have a game of billiards. That will fill up the time till you’ve finished your carpentering, Elshaw, and then we’ll finish up with a game of chess.”

And Theodore disappeared. A few moments later they heard him shut himself out by the front door.

Bram after a glance at Claire went on with his sawing, judging it wiser not to attempt to offer the sympathy with which his heart was bursting.

When he had been going on with his work for some minutes, however, Claire came and stood silently beside him. He looked up and smiled.

“Go on with your work,” said she gravely, “just for a few minutes. Then I’m going to send you away.”

“Send me away, Miss Claire? What for?”

“For your own good, Mr. Elshaw.”

Bram suddenly pulled himself upright, and then looked down at her in dismay.

“Mr. Elshaw! I’m getting on in the world then! I used to be only Bram.”

“That’s it,” said Claire in a low voice, looking at the fire. “You used to be only Bram; but you’ve got beyond that now.”

“But I don’t want to get beyond that with you, Miss Claire,” protested he.

“What you want doesn’t matter,” said she decidedly. “You can’t help yourself. I’ve heard something about you to-night. Oh, don’t look like that; it was nothing to your discredit, nothing at all. But you’ve got to give up your carpentering and wood chopping for us, Bram, and you’re not to come here again.” She spoke with much decision, but her sensitive face showed some strange conflict going on within her, in which some of the softer emotions were evidently engaged. Whatever it was that made her turn her humble and useful old friend away, the cause was not ingratitude.

Before he could put another question, being indeed too much moved to be able to frame one speedily, Bram was startled by a tapping at the door. Miss Biron started; Bram almost thought he saw her shiver. She pointed quickly to the inner door.

“Go at once,” said she in an imperious whisper, “and remember you are not to come back; you are never to come back.”

Bram took up his coat, slipped his arms into it, and obeyed without a word. But the look on his face, as Claire caught a glimpse of it, was one which cut her to the quick. She drew a deep breath, and threw out her hands towards him with a piteous cry. Bram stopped, shivered, made one step towards her, when the tap at the door was repeated more sharply.

Claire recovered herself at once, made a gesture to him to go, and opened the one door as he let himself out by the other.

Bram heard the voice of the newcomer. It was Christian Cornthwaite.

CHAPTER VIII. ANOTHER STEP UPWARD.

Bram left the farmhouse in a tumult of feeling. Why had he been dismissed so abruptly? Why had he been dismissed at all?

It was on Christian’s account apparently. But what objection could Christian have to his visits to the farm?

On the many occasions when the two young men had met there Bram had always been shunted into the background for Christian, and had been left at his modest occupations unheeded, while Claire gave all her attention to her cousin. Bram had looked upon this arrangement as quite natural, and had never so much as winced at it. The idea that Christian Cornthwaite might look upon him as a possible rival being out of the question, again Bram asked himself—What could be the reason of his dismissal?

He did not mean to take it quietly; he had conceit enough to think that Claire would be sorry if he did. He could flatter himself honestly that during the past six months he had become the young lady’s trusted friend, never obtrusive, never demonstrative, but trusted, perhaps appreciated, none the less on that account.

Bram had the excuse of Theodore’s invitation for hanging about the neighborhood until that gentleman’s return. But at the very moment when Mr. Biron’s gay voice, humming to himself as he came up the hill, struck upon Bram’s ear, Christian Cornthwaite came out through the farmyard gate.

“Hallo, Elshaw, is that you?” he asked, as he came out and passed his arm through Bram’s. “I wondered what had become of you when I did not find you in the house this evening. I’d begun to look upon you as one of the fixtures.”

“I was there this evening, Mr. Christian,” replied Bram soberly. “But I got turned out without much ceremony just before you came.”

“Turned out, eh? I didn’t think you ever did anything to deserve such treatment from any one.” And Chris looked curious. “You are what I call a model young man, if anything a little too much like the hero of a religious story for young ladies, written by a young lady.”

Bram was quite acute enough to understand that this was a sneer.

“You mean that I’m what you and your friends call a prig, Mr. Christian?” he said quite unaffectedly, and without any sign of shame or regret. “Well, I suppose I am. But you don’t allow for the difference between us at starting. To get up to where you stand from where I used to be, one must be a bit of a prig, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps so. I think you may be trusted to know your own business, Elshaw. You’re one of the men that get on. It won’t do you any harm on the way up if you leave off chopping firewood in your shirt-sleeves for people who don’t think any the better of you for it.”

Bram, who had let himself be led up the hill, stopped short.

“She doesn’t think any the worse of me for doing any little thing I can to help her,” said he in a muffled voice.

Christian began to laugh.

“She? You mean Claire. Oh, no, no, she does justice to everybody, bless her dear little heart! I was thinking of our rascally friend, her father. You know very well that he uses his daughter as a means for getting all he can out of everybody. I hope you’ve not been had by the old ruffian, Elshaw?”

“No, Mr. Christian; no, I haven’t,” answered Bram hastily. “That is, not to an extent that matters.”

“Ah, ha! That means you have been had for half-crowns, for instance?” As Bram moved uneasily, Chris laughed again. “Of course, it is no affair of mine; I’m quite sure you can see through our frivolous friend as well as anybody else. But if, as you say, you have been dismissed, why, I advise you not to try to get reinstated.”

Now, this advice troubled Bram exceedingly. It was excellent of its kind, no doubt; but he asked himself whether the man who was so keenly alive to the disadvantages of even an acquaintance with the Birons could really be ready to form an alliance which must bring the burden of the needy elderly gentleman upon him for life. His feelings upon the subject were so keen that they would not permit him to temporize and to choose his words and his opportunity. Quite suddenly he blurted out—

“You’re going to marry Miss Claire, aren’t you?”

Christian, who always took things more easily than his deeper-natured companion, looked at the earnest, strongly-cut face with something like amusement. Luckily, it was too dark for Bram to see the full significance of his companion’s expression.

“Marry her? Why, yes, to be sure I hope so. My father is very anxious for me ‘to settle down,’ as he calls it, though I would rather, for my own part, not settle down quite so far as matrimony just yet.”

There was a pause. Then Bram said in a dry voice—

“I can’t understand you, Mr. Christian. You seem just as nigh what a man ought to be as a man can be in lots of ways. And I can’t understand how a man like that, that is a man like you, shouldn’t be all on fire to make the girl he loves his wife as quick as he can. Is that a part of my priggishness, Mr. Christian, to wonder at that?”

Christian did not answer at once. They had reached the top of the hill, and were standing by the ruined cottages, which looked more desolate than ever in the darkness of the winter evening. The wind whistled through the broken walls and the decaying rafters.

Bram remembered the evening when he had heard Christian’s laugh in that very pile.

“I suppose it is, Bram,” said Chris at last. “But I rather like it in you, all the same. I can’t help laughing at you, but I think you’re rather a fine fellow. Now, listen to me. You may go on wondering at my behavior as much as you like, but you mustn’t yourself have anything more to do with the Birons. We’ll say I’m jealous, Bram, if you like. I really think it’s true, too,” he added with a flippancy which belied his words.

But Bram shook his head solemnly.

“No, Mr. Christian,” he answered; and in the excitement he felt the strong Yorkshire accent was heard again in his voice. “You’ve no call to be jealous of me, and you know that right well. If I were a gentleman born, like you——”

“Don’t use that expression,‘gentleman born,’ Elshaw,” interrupted Chris lightly. “It means nothing, for one thing. My great-grandfather was a mill hand, or something of that sort, and so were the great-grandfathers of half the men in the House of Lords. And it sounds odd from a man like you, who will be a big pot one of these days.”

“Well, Mr. Christian, if I’d been brought up in a big house, like you, and had had my face kept clean and my hair curled instead of being allowed to make mud-pies in the gutter——”

“I wanted to make mud-pies in the gutter!” interpolated Christian cheerfully.

“Well, you know what I mean, anyhow. If we’d stood just on the same ground——”

“We never should have stood on the same ground, Elshaw,” said Chris with a shrewd smile.

“——And if I hadn’t been beholden to you for the rise I’ve got, I’d have fought you for the place you’ve got with her very likely. But, as it is, I’m nowhere; I don’t count. And you know that, Mr. Christian.”

“Indeed, I’m very glad to hear it, for if there’s one man in the world I should less like to have for a rival than another, in love or in anything else, it’s you, Bram. I know you’re a lamb outside; but I can’t help suspecting that there’s a creature more like a tiger underneath.”

“I’m inclined to think myself, Mr. Christian, that the creature underneath’s more like an ass,” said Bram good-humoredly.

They were standing at the top of the hill; it was a damp, cold night, and Christian shivered.

“You mustn’t stand here talking, Mr. Christian,” said Bram. “You are not so used to strong breezes as me.”

“Well, good-night; I won’t take you any further. You live somewhere about here, I know. But, I say.” He called after Bram, who was turning back. “There’s one thing I want to tell you. Don’t say anything to the guv’nor about meeting me at the farm.”

Bram stared blankly, and Christian laughed.

“My dear fellow, don’t you know that these matters require to be conducted with a little diplomacy? When a man is dependent upon his father, as he always is if he’s a lazy beggar like me, that father has to be humored a little. I must prepare him gradually for the shock, if I’m ever to marry Claire.”

“All right, Mr. Christian. I’ll say nothing, of course. But I shall be glad to hear that matters are straight. It seems hard on the young lady, doesn’t it?”

“Ah, well, life isn’t all beer and skittles for any of us.”

Christian called out these words, turning his head as he walked rapidly away on the road to Holme Park.

Bram had made such astonishing progress in the office since his promotion, not much more than a year before, that nobody but himself was astonished when he was called into the private office of the elder Mr. Cornthwaite, about a fortnight after his talk with Christian, and was formally invited by that gentleman to dine at Holme Park in the course of the following week. Bram’s first impulse was to apologize for declining the invitation, but Mr. Cornthwaite insisted, and with such an air of authority that Bram felt there was no escape for him.

But, meeting Christian later in the day, Bram related the incident rather as if it were a grievance.

“You know, Mr. Christian, it’s not in my line, that sort of thing. Ah shall make a fool o’ myself, Ah know Ah shall.”

And, either accidentally or on purpose, he dropped again into the strong Yorkshire dialect, which since his elevation he had worked successfully to overcome.

But Christian only laughed at his excuses.

“You’d be a fool to refuse,” he said shortly. “I’ll take you round to my tailor’s again, and he’ll measure you for your war-paint.”

Bram’s face fell.

“No, Mr. Christian, no. I’m not going to dress myself up. Mr. Cornthwaite won’t expect it, and what would be the good of my wasting all that money on clothes you’ll never catch me wearing again? And the oaf I should look in ’em too! Why, you’d all be laughin’ at me, an’ not more than I should be laughin’ at myself.”

“Elshaw,” returned Chris gravely, “the one thing which distinguishes you above all the self-made men and born geniuses I’ve ever heard about is that you’ve got too broad a mind to despise trifles. While Sir George Milbrook, who began as a factory hand, and Jeremiah Montcombe of Gray’s Hall, and a lot of other men who’ve got on like them, make a point of dropping their H’s and clipping their words just as they used to do forty years ago, you’ve thought it worth your while to drop your Ah’s and your tha’s, till there’s very little trace of them left already, and there’ll be none in another year. Well, now, there are some more trifles to be mastered, and dressing for dinner is one of them. So buck up, old man, and come along. And by-the-by, as you’ll always take a hint from me, couldn’t you let yourself drop into slang sometimes? Your language is so dreadfully precise, and you use so many words that I have to look out in the dictionary.”

“Do I, Mr. Christian?” asked Bram, surprised. Then he laughed and shook his head. “No, I can’t trust myself as far as the slang yet. It wouldn’t come out right perhaps. I shouldn’t have discrimination enough to choose between the slang that was all right and the slang which would make the ladies look at each other.”

“Well, I suppose I must let you have a few months’ grace. But it’s only on condition that you smoke an occasional cigarette, and that you don’t stick so persistently to soda water and lemonade, when you’re asked to have a drink.”

“But, Mr. Christian, I’m not used to wine and spirits, not even to beer, and if I was to drink them they would get into my head. And as it takes me all my time to speak properly and behave so as to pass muster, as it is, you’d better leave pretty well alone, and let me keep to the soda water.”

“Oh, well, as long as you’re not moved by conscientious scruples I don’t so much mind. But teetotalism savors rather too much of the Sunday-school and the Anti-Tobacco League. Mind, I don’t want to make you an habitual drunkard, but I should like to feel sure that you understand there is a happy medium.”

“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Bram with a comical look; “but I wish I hadn’t to go up to the Park Thursday week all the same.”

Chris looked at him steadily, and played with his long, tawny moustache for a few moments in silence.

“So do I. I wish you hadn’t got to go too,” said he at last.

But he would not explain why; he turned the subject by remarking that they mustn’t forget the visit to the tailor’s.

CHAPTER IX. A CALL AND A DINNER PARTY.

It is not to be supposed that Bram had forgotten all about Claire Biron, or that he had not been tempted to break through the command she had imposed upon him. At first he had intended to present himself as usual at the farm on the evening after his summary dismissal, and to brave her possible displeasure. He felt so sure of her kind feeling toward himself that he had very little doubt of overcoming her scruples from whatever cause they arose.

On the very next morning, however, he had come suddenly upon her as he went down the hill towards the town; and Claire had cut him, actually cut him, passing him with her eyes on the ground, at a rapid pace.

Bram was so utterly overwhelmed by this action on her part that he stood stupidly staring at her figure as it went quickly upwards, uncertain what to do, until she turned into the farmyard and disappeared.

He went on to the office with a dull weight at his heart, hoping against hope that she would relent, that she would smile at him with her old friendliness when next they met, but unable to stifle the fear that the pleasant friendship which had been so much to him was now over.

As to her reasons for this new course of treatment he could make no guess which seemed to him at all likely to be the right one. She had heard something about him, that was her excuse, something not to his discredit, but which was, nevertheless, the cause of her sending him away. Now, Bram could think of nobody who was likely to be able to tell Claire the one fact which might have brought about his banishment conceivably, the fact that he loved her. He had kept his secret so well that he might well feel sure it was in his own power, so well that he sometimes honestly doubted whether it was a fact at all.

Besides, even if it had been possible for her to find this out, she would not have dismissed him in this curt, almost brutal, fashion.

The more Bram thought about his banishment, the farther he seemed to get from a sane conclusion; but he could not rest. He could not dismiss the matter from his mind. Full as his new life was of work, of interest, of ambitions, of hopes, the thought of Claire haunted him. He wondered how she was getting on without him, knowing that he had made himself useful to her in a hundred ways, and that if she did not miss him, she must at least miss the work he did for her.

And Christian—he had told Bram in so many words that he meant to marry his cousin; yet his visits had fallen off in frequency, and Bram had an idea that Claire looked unhappy and anxious.

Bram knew very well that he could get an invitation back to the farm at any moment by putting himself in the way of Theodore. But he would not do this; he would not go back without the invitation, or at least the consent of Claire herself.

So he avoided Theodore, and went up and down the hill with an outward air of placid unconcern until the evening before the day when he was to dine at Mr Cornthwaite’s.

It was a pleasant October evening; there was a touch of frost in the air, which was bracing and pleasant after the heavy atmosphere of the town. When he got close to the farmhouse, he saw Claire crossing the farmyard on her way to the kitchen door, with a heavy load of wood in her arms. It seemed to him that her face looked sad and worn, that odd little face which had so little prettiness in repose except for those who knew the possibilities for fun, for tenderness, that lay dormant in her bright brown eyes.

He hesitated a moment, and then went quickly through the gate.

“May I help you, Miss Claire?”

She did not start or pretend to be surprised. She had seen him coming.

She stopped.

“You know what I told you, that you were not to come here again,” she said severely.

But it was severity which did not frighten him.

“Well,” he began humbly, “I’ve kept away nearly a fortnight.”

“But I said you were never to come again.”

“I don’t think you can have meant it though. You would have given me some reason if you had.”

Claire frowned and tapped her little foot impatiently on the ground.

“Oh, you know, you must know. You are not stupid, Mr. Elshaw.”

“I’m beginning to think I am,” said Bram, as he began to take her load from her with gentle insistence.

It amused and touched him to note how glad she was, in spite of her assumed displeasure, to give her work up to him in the old way. He opened the kitchen door, and took the wood into the scullery, where Joan was at work, just as he used to do for her, and then went through the kitchen slowly on his way out again.

Claire was standing by the big deal table.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” said she.

But her tone was not so bright as usual; she was more subdued altogether—a quiet, demure, downcast little girl. Bram, making his way with leaden feet to the outer door, wanted to say something, but hardly knew what. He hoped that she would stop him before he reached the door, but he was disappointed. He put his hand upon the latch and paused. Still she said nothing. He opened the door, and glanced back at her. Although the look she gave him in return had nothing of invitation in it, he felt that there was something in her sad little face which made it impossible to leave her like that.

“Miss Claire,” said he, and he was surprised to find that his voice was husky and not so loud as he expected, “mayn’t I finish the dressing-table?”

“If you like.”

Her voice was as husky as his own.

Without another word he set about the work, found the saw, which, by-the-bye, was his own, the wood, and the rest of the things he wanted, and in less than ten minutes was at work in the old way, and Claire, fetching her needlework, was busy by the fire, just as she used to be. She was too proud to own it; but Bram saw quite plainly that this quiet re-establishment of the old situation made her almost as happy as it did him.

“Things going all right, Miss Claire?” asked he as he took up his plane.

“No, of course they’re not. They’re going all wrong, as usual. More wrong than usual. Johnson takes more advantage than ever of there being nobody to look after him properly.”

Johnson was the farm bailiff, and he had worked all the better for the suggestions sharp-sighted Bram had made to Claire. Since Bram’s banishment Johnson had been rampant again. Claire was quite conscious of this, and she turned to another subject, to allow him no opportunity of applying her comments.

“And you—at least I needn’t ask. You always get on all right, don’t you?”

“I shall come to grief to-morrow,” answered Bram soberly. “I’ve got to go up to the Park to dinner. What do you think of that, Miss Claire? And to wear a black coat and a stiff shirt-front, just like a gentleman! Won’t they all laugh at me when my back’s turned, and talk about daws’ and peacocks’ feathers? It’s all Mr. Christian’s fault, so I suppose you will say it’s all right?”

“It is all right, Bram,” said Claire gravely; “and they won’t laugh at you. They can’t. You’re too modest. And too clever besides.” She paused, dropped her work in her lap, and looked intently at the fire. “Is it true that you’re going to be married, Bram?” she presently asked abruptly.

“Married! Me! Lord, no. Who told you such a thing as that?” And Bram stood up and looked at her, letting his plane lie idle.

“Papa said he thought you were. He said you were engaged to a girl who lived in the country. You never told me about her.”

“And is that why you sent me away?”

At his tone of dismay Claire burst out laughing with her old hilarity.

“Oh, no, oh, no. I sent you away, if you must know, because I had heard that you were to go up and dine at Holme Park, and because I knew that it would be better for you to be able to say there that you didn’t visit us.”

“Is that what you call a reason?” asked Bram scornfully, angrily.

“Yes, that’s one reason.”

“Well, well, haven’t you any better ones?”

“Perhaps. But I shan’t tell you any more, so you need not ask me for them. I want to know something about this girl you’re engaged to.”

“Not engaged,” said Bram stolidly.

“Well, in love with then? I want to know something about her. I think it very strange that I never heard anything about her before. What is she like?”

“Well, she’s like other girls,” said Bram. “She is much like nine out of every ten girls you meet.”

“Really? I shouldn’t have thought you’d care for a girl like that, Bram.”

“You must care for what you can get in this world,” said Bram sententiously.

“Well, tell me something more. Is she tall or short, fair or dark? Has she blue eyes, or gray ones, or brown?”

Bram looked thoughtful.

“Well, she’s neither tall nor short. She’s not very dark, nor yet very fair. And her eyes are a sort of drab color, I think.”

“You don’t mean it, Bram? I suppose you think it’s no business of mine?”

“That’s it, Miss Claire.”

“I don’t believe in the existence of this girl with the drab-colored eyes, Bram.”

Claire had jumped up, and darted across to the table in her old impulsive way; and now she stood, her eyes dancing with suppressed mirth, just as she used to stand in the good old days before the rupture of her own making.

Bram was delighted at the change.

“Well, I won’t say whether she exists or not,” replied he with a smile lurking about his own mouth; “and I don’t choose to have my love affairs pried into by anybody, I don’t care who. How would you like people to pry into yours?”

She grew suddenly grave, and he wished he had not said it.

“There’s no concealment about mine, Bram,” she said quietly.

“You’re going to marry Mr. Christian?”

“I suppose so.”

Why did she speak so quietly, so wistfully? The question troubled Bram, who did not dare to say any more upon a subject which she seemed anxious to avoid as much as she could. And the talk languished until Claire heard her father’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Now go,” said she imperiously. “I don’t want you to meet papa. And you mustn’t come again. And you mustn’t tell them up at Holme Park that you were here this evening.”

Bram frowned.

“Miss Claire,” said he, “I am a deal prouder of coming here than I am of going up to t’ Park. And if I’m to choose between here and t’ Park, I choose to come here. But I shall be let to do as I please, I can promise you. But, of course, if you don’t want me here, I won’t come.”

“Good-night,” said she for answer.

And she hurried him out of the house, and shut the door upon him in time to prevent her father, who was in the passage outside, from meeting him.

Bram went up to the Park on the following evening in much better spirits than if he had not had that reassuring interview with Claire. He still felt rather troubled as to the prospects of the marriage between her and her cousin, but he hoped that he might hear something about it in the family circle at Holme Park.

The ordeal of the evening proved less trying than the promoted clerk had expected—up to the certain point.

With the ladies of the family he had already become acquainted. Mrs. Cornthwaite was a tiresome elderly lady of small mental capacity and extremely conservative notions, who alternately patronized Bram and betrayed her horror at the recollection of his former station. The good lady was a perpetual thorn in the side of her husband, whom she irritated by silly interruptions and sillier comments on his remarks, and to her daughter, who had to be ever on the alert to ward off the effects of her mother’s imbecility.

The daughter, Hester, was a thoroughly good creature, who had been worried into a pessimistic view of life, and into a belief that much “good” could be done in the world by speaking her mind with frank rudeness upon all occasions. The consequence of these peculiarities in the ladies of the household was that to spend an evening in their society was a torture from which all but the bravest shrank, although every one acknowledged that they were the best-intentioned people in the world.

The only guests besides Bram were Mr. and Mrs. Hibbs and their only daughter, whom Bram knew already by name and by sight.

Mr. Hibbs was a coal-owner, a man of large means, and a great light in evangelical circles. He was a tall, sallow man, with thin whiskers and a deliberate manner of speaking, as if he were always in the reading-desk, where on Sundays he often read the lessons for the day. His wife was a comfortable-looking creature, with a round face and a round figure, and a habit of gently nodding her head after any remark of her husband’s, as if to emphasize its wisdom.

As for Minnie, it struck Bram, as he made her the bow he had been practising, that she exactly answered to the description he had given Claire of the supposed lady of his heart. There was only this difference, that she was distinguished from most young women of her age by the exceedingly light color of her eyebrows and eyelashes. She appeared to have none until you had the opportunity for a very close inspection.

She had quite a reputation for saintliness, which had reached even Bram’s ears. Her whole delight was in Sunday-school work and in district visiting, and the dissipations connected with these occupations.

She was, however, very cheerful and talkative during dinner; and Bram was surprised to see how very attentive Christian, who sat by her side, was to this particularly unattractive young person, who was the antithesis of all he admired.

For Christian’s good nature did not generally go the length of making him more than barely civil to plain women.

Bram found Miss Cornthwaite kind and easy to get on with. She was a straightforward, practical woman, on the far side of thirty, and this grave, simple-mannered young man, with the observant gray eyes, interested and pleased her. She tried to intercept the glances of horror which Mrs. Cornthwaite occasionally threw at him, and the terrible explanations with which the elder lady condescendingly favored him.

Thus, when the Riviera was mentioned, Mrs. Cornthwaite threw him the good-natured aside, audible all over the room—

“The shore of the Mediterranean, you know, the sea that lies between France and Italy, and—and those places!”

And when some one used the word “bizarre,” Mrs. Cornthwaite smiled at Bram again, and again whispered loudly—

“Quaint, odd, you know. It’s a French word.”

“Mamma, you needn’t explain. Mr. Elshaw speaks better French than we do, I’m quite sure,” said Hester good-naturedly enough, though she had better have made no comment.

But Bram said at once, as if grateful to the old lady—

“No, Miss Cornthwaite, I can read and write French pretty well, but I can’t speak it. And when I hear a French word spoken I don’t at once catch its meaning.”

“There, you see, Hester, I was right. I knew Mr. Elshaw would be glad of a little help,” said Mrs. Cornthwaite triumphantly.

“Very glad, indeed,” assented Bram, quickly interposing as Hester was about to continue the argument with her mother.

It was not until the ladies had left the room, and Bram, with an amused glance at Christian, had taken a cigarette, that the real ordeal of the evening came for the young clerk in a shape he had never expected.

“I suppose you hardly know, Elshaw,” said Mr. Cornthwaite with a preliminary cough, as if to show that he was about to make an announcement of importance, “why I was so particularly anxious for you to dine with us this evening?” Bram looked interested, as, indeed, he felt. “You are aware, Elshaw, of the enormously high opinion of your talents which my son has always held. He now proposes that you should go to London to represent us in a rather delicate negotiation, in place of himself. And as the reason is that he will himself be occupied with pleasanter matters than those of dry business, I thought it would interest you to be present on the occasion of the first announcement of the pleasanter matter in question. It is not less than a wedding——”

“A wedding, sir?” Bram’s face clouded with perplexity.

“Yes, Elshaw. You have had the honor of being introduced to the young lady this evening. My son has been fortunate enough to obtain the heart and a promise of the hand of Miss Minnie Hibbs.”

Bram looked steadily at Christian. He dared not speak.

CHAPTER X. THE FINE EYES OF HER CASH-BOX.

Christian Cornthwaite pretended to be occupied in conversation with his future father-in-law, while Mr. Cornthwaite, senior, in his blandest and most good-humored tones, made the announcement of his son’s intended marriage to the astonished Bram.

But Christian’s attention was not so deeply engaged that he could not take note of what was happening, and he noticed the dead silence with which Bram received the announcement, and presently stole a furtive look at the face of the young clerk.

Bram caught the look, and replied to it with a steady stare. Chris turned his eyes away, but that look of Bram’s fascinated him, worried him. In truth, it had been his fear of what Elshaw would say, even more than his own disinclination, which had kept him hovering on the brink of his engagement with Miss Hibbs for so long.

And now he felt that he would have preferred some outbreak on Bram’s part to this stony silence.

“A wedding, Sir?” Bram’s face clouded with perplexity.—Page 70.

Even Josiah Cornthwaite was puzzled by Bram’s reception of the news. The young man seemed absolutely unmoved by the fresh proof of his employer’s confidence given in the information that he was to be sent to London on important business. He grew even uneasy as Bram’s silence continued, or was broken only by the briefest and coldest of answers. He looked from his son to Bram, and perceived that there was some understanding between them. And his fears grew apace. He shortened the stay in the dining-room, therefore, and letting Mr. Hibbs and Chris enter the drawing-room together, he took Bram up the stairs, with the excuse of showing him the view of the town from one of the windows.

Bram was shrewd enough to guess that he was to be “pumped.”

“This news about my son’s intended marriage seems to have taken you by surprise, Elshaw,” said Mr. Cornthwaite as they stood together looking out on the blurred lights of the town below.

“Well, sir, it has,” admitted Bram briefly.

“But you know he is twenty-six, an age at which a young man who can afford it ought to be thinking of marrying.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You thought, perhaps, that such a volatile fellow would be scarcely likely to make such a sensible choice as he has done?” went on Josiah with an air of bland indulgence, but with some anxiety in his eyes.

There was a pause.

“That was what you thought, eh?” repeated Mr. Cornthwaite more sharply.

Bram Elshaw frowned.

“Sir, may I speak out?” asked he bluntly.

“Certainly.”

“Well, then, sir, I don’t think it is a wise choice—if it was his choice at all, and not yours, sir?”

Now, Mr. Cornthwaite, while giving his permission to speak out, had not expected such uncompromising frankness as this. He was taken aback. He stammered as he began to answer—

“Why, why, what do you mean? Could there be a more sensible choice than such a lady as Miss Hibbs? A good daughter, not frivolous, or vain, or flighty; a sensible, affectionate girl, devoted to her parents and to good works. Just such a girl, in fact, as can be depended upon to make a thoroughly good, devoted wife.”

“For some sort of men, sir. But not for a man like Mr. Christian,” returned Bram with decision.

His blood was up, and he spoke with as much firmness as, and with more fire than, he had ever before shown to his employer.

Mr. Cornthwaite, who had grounds for feeling uneasy, was lenient, patient, attentive, curious.

“Why, don’t you know, Elshaw,” said he sharply, “that a man should mate with his opposite if he wants to be happy? That grave and serious men like frivolous wives; but that your lively young fellow likes a sober-minded wife to keep his house in order?”

“Sir, if it’s Mr. Christian’s choice, there’s an end of it,” said Bram brusquely.

“Of course it’s his choice, none the less, but rather the more, that it meets not only with my approval, but with that of the ladies of my family,” said Mr. Cornthwaite pompously.

Yet still he was curious, still unsatisfied. And still Bram said nothing.

“Believe me,” Mr. Cornthwaite went on impressively, “a man is none the less amenable to the influence of a good wife for having sown his wild oats first. With a wife like the one I—no, I mean he has chosen,” a faint smile flickered over Bram’s mouth at this correction, “my son will settle down into a model husband and father. You want the two elements, seriousness on the one side, good-humored gayety on the other, to make a happy marriage. Why, I ought to know, for these are exactly the principles on which I married myself.”

Mr. Cornthwaite uttered these words with an air of bland assurance, which, he thought, must carry conviction. But his young hearer, unfortunately, had heard enough about the domestic life at Holme Park to know that the “sensible marriage” on which Mr. Cornthwaite prided himself had by no means resulted in domestic peace. The bickerings of the ill-matched pair were, in fact, a constant source of misery to all the household, and were used freely by Chris as an excuse for his neglect of home.

Bram, therefore, received this information with courtesy, but without comment. Mr. Cornthwaite kept his eyes steadily fixed upon the young man, and found himself at last obliged to put a direct question.

“You had, I suppose, expected him to make a different sort of choice?”

“Very different, sir.”

“Some one, perhaps, whom you would have considered better suited to him?”

“Much better suited, sir.”

Mr. Cornthwaite’s face clouded.

“Whom do you mean?”

Bram only hesitated a moment. He could do Christian no harm now by telling the truth; and he had a lingering hope that he might bring old Mr. Cornthwaite to see the matter with his own eyes.

“Sir,” said he, “have you never suspected your son of any attachment, any serious attachment, to a lady as good as Miss Hibbs is said to be, and a great deal more attractive?”

Bram felt as he said this that he had lapsed into the copybook style of conversation which Chris had pointed out as one of his besetting sins. But he could not help it. He felt the need of some dignity in speaking words which he felt to be momentous.

Mr. Cornthwaite looked deeply annoyed.

“I have not,” said he shortly. And again he asked—“Whom do you mean?”

“Miss Claire Biron, sir,” answered Bram.

Mr. Cornthwaite’s face darkened still more.

“What!” cried he in agitation which belied his words. “You believe that my son ever gave that girl a serious thought? And that the daughter of such a father could be a proper match for my son? Absurd! Absurd! Of course, you are a very young man; you have no knowledge of the world. But I should have thought your native shrewdness would have prevented your falling into such a mistake as that.”

Bram said nothing. Mr. Cornthwaite, in spite of the scornful tone he had used, was evidently more anxious than ever to learn whatever Bram had to tell on the subject. After a short silence, therefore, he asked in a quieter tone—

“How came you to get such a notion into your head, Elshaw?”

“I knew that they were fond of each other, sir; and I knew that Miss Biron was a young lady of character, and what you call tact.”

“Tact! Humbug!” said Mr. Cornthwaite shortly. “She is an artful, designing girl, and she and her father have done all in their power to entangle my son. But I foresaw his danger, and now I flatter myself I have saved him. You, I see, have been taken in by the girl’s little mincing ways, just as my son was in danger of being. But I warn you not to have anything to do with them. They are an artful, scheming pair, both father and daughter, and it would be ruin for any man to become connected with them—ruin, I say.”

And he stared anxiously into Bram’s face.

“Has she led you on too?” he asked presently, with great abruptness.

Bram’s face flushed.

“No, sir. She has forbidden me to come to her father’s house.”

“Ah! A ruse, a trick to encourage my son!” cried the old gentleman fiercely. “I wish he were safely married. I shall do all in my power to hurry it on. How often have you seen him about there? You live near, I believe?” said he curtly.

“I have seen him now and then, not so very often lately,” answered Bram.

“Ah, well, you won’t see him there much longer. Miss Hibbs will see to that.”

“Sir, you are wrong,” cried Bram, whose head and heart were on fire at these accusations against Claire. “Miss Hibbs may be a good girl, as girls go. I don’t know” (Bram’s English gave way here) “nothing against her. But I do know you don’t give your son a chance when you make him marry a sack o’ meal like that, and him loving a flesh-and-blood woman like Miss Biron! Why, sir, ask yourself whether it’s in nature that he should settle down to the psalm-singing that would suit her, so as to be happy and satisfied to give up his wild ways? Put it to him point blank, sir, which he’d do of his own free will, and see what answer you’ll get from him!”

“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Cornthwaite hastily, “and I’m exceedingly sorry to find you so much more gullible than I had expected, Elshaw. Is it possible you didn’t observe how this young woman ran after my son? Coming to this house on every possible occasion with some excuse or other?”

“That was her father’s fault, sir,” retorted Bram hotly.

“Probably he had something to do with it; but she fell in with his wishes with remarkable readiness, readiness which no modest girl would have shown in the circumstances. She must have seen she was not welcomed with any warmth by the heads of the household at least.”

The blood rushed to Bram’s forehead. The idea of poor little Claire creeping unwillingly to the great house on one of her father’s miserable errands, only to be snubbed and coldly received by every one, struck him like a stab.

“Surely, sir, there was no place in the world where she had so good a right to expect to be well received as here?” said he, with difficulty controlling the emotion he felt. “A young girl, doing her best to fulfil every duty, with no friends, no mother, no father worthy of the name. And you are her relations; here there were women, ladies, who knew all about her, and who might be expected to sympathize with her difficulties and her troubles!”

Bram, who spoke slowly, deliberately, choosing his words with nice care, but uttering them with deep feeling, paused, and looked straight into Mr. Cornthwaite’s face. But there was no mercy in the fiery black eyes, or about the cold, handsome mouth.

“They would have shown her every sympathy,” said he coldly, “if she had not abused the privilege of intimacy by trying to ensnare my son.”

“Mr. Cornthwaite,” interrupted Bram scornfully, “do you really think Mr. Christian ever waited for a girl to run after him? Why, for every time Miss Biron’s been up here—sent here by her father, mind—he’s been three or four or five times down at the farm!”

Mr. Cornthwaite’s eyes blazed. By a quick movement he betrayed that this was just what he had wanted to know. His face clouded more than before.

“Ah!” said he shortly, “that’s what I’ve been told. Well, it’s the girl’s own doing. If she’s got herself into a scrape, she has no one but herself to thank for it, no one. Shall we join the ladies in the drawing-room?”

He led the way downstairs, and Bram followed in dead silence.

A horrible, sickly fear had seized his heart; he could not but understand the imputation Mr. Cornthwaite had made, accompanied as it was by a look, the significance of which there was no mistaking.

Claire, poor little helpless Claire, the cherished idol of his imagination and of his heart, lay under the most cruel suspicion which can assail a woman, the suspicion of having held her honor too lightly.

Bram, shocked beyond measure, recoiled at the bare mention of this suspicion in connection with the girl he worshipped. The next moment he cast the thought behind him as utterly base, and felt that he had disgraced himself and her by the momentary harboring of it.

But as for Mr. Cornthwaite, Bram felt that he hated the smug, elderly gentleman, who troubled himself not in the least about the helpless, friendless girl who loved his son, and whose only thought was to hurry his son into a heartless marriage in order to “save him from” the danger of his repairing his supposed error.

In these circumstances, Bram lost all self-consciousness, all remembrance of his unaccustomed dress, of his attitudes, of his awkwardness, and entered the drawing-room utterly absorbed in thoughts of Claire. Old Mrs. Cornthwaite, who was fumbling about with a lapful of feminine trifles, smelling-bottle, handkerchief, spectacle-case, dropped one of them, and he hastened to pick it up.

“Thank you,” said she, with a gracious, good-humored smile, “you are more attentive than any of the grand folk.”

“Mamma,” cried Hester in fidgety exasperation. And good-naturedly fearing that he might have been hurt by her mother’s lack of tact, she opened the old-fashioned, but not unhelpful, album of photographs, which lay on a table near her, and asked him if he cared for pictures of Swiss scenery.

“Not much, Miss Hester,” said Bram.

But he went up to the table, encouraged by her kind manners, by the honest look in her eyes, in the hope that he might find a supporter in her of the cause he had at heart.

“But I should like to see some photographs of you and Mr. Christian, if you have any.”

She opened another album, smiling as she did so, and offering him a chair near her, which he immediately took.

“I never show these unless I am asked,” she said. “Family photographs I always think uninteresting, except to the family.”

“And to those interested in the family,” amended Bram. “You see, Miss Hester, there’s hardly another thing in the world I care about so much. That’s only natural, isn’t it, after what I’ve been treated like at their hands.”

He was conscious that his English was getting doubtful under the influence of the emotion which he could not master. But Miss Cornthwaite seemed, of course, not to notice this. She was extremely well disposed towards this frank young man with the earnest eyes, the heavy, obstinate mouth, and the long, straight chin, which gave so much character to his pale face.

“Christian always speaks of you with such boyish delight, as if he had discovered you bound hand and foot in the midst of cannibals who wanted to eat you,” said she laughing.

“So he did, Miss Hester,” answered Bram gravely, almost harshly.

He could not speak, could not think of Chris just now without betraying something of the emotion the name aroused in him. And he glanced angrily across to the corner where Chris was sitting beside prim little Miss Hibbs, who was giggling gently at his remarks, but clasping her hands tightly together, and keeping her arms pinned closely to her sides, as if she felt that she was unbending more than was meet, and that she must atone for a little surface hilarity by this penitential attitude.

Hester Cornthwaite noticed the glance thrown by Bram, and felt curious.

“I am very glad he is going to be married,” she said quickly, with an intuition that he would not agree with her. Bram looked her full in the face in a sudden and aggressive manner.

“Why are you glad?” he asked abruptly.

She was rather disconcerted for a moment.

“Why? Oh, because I think it will be good for him, that he will be happier, that he will settle down,” she answered with a little confusion.

Surely he must know as well as she did that there were many reasons for wishing Chris to grow more steady. A little prim suggestion of this feeling was noticeable in her tone.

“I don’t think he would settle down, if so he was to marry a girl he didn’t care for,” said Bram bluntly. “And I should have thought you would agree with me, understanding Mr. Christian as you do, Miss Hester.”

Miss Cornthwaite drew her lips rather primly together.

“He does care for her, of course,” said she rather tartly, “else why should he marry her?”

Bram smiled, and gave her a glance of something like scorn.

“There are a good many reasons why he should marry to please Mr. Cornthwaite, your father, when he can’t marry to please himself.”

“Why can’t he? Who does he want to marry?” asked Miss Cornthwaite quickly.

“Why, Miss Biron, Miss Claire Biron, of Duke’s Farm,” replied honest Bram promptly.

Hester’s thin and rather wizened face flushed. She frowned; she looked annoyed. “Dear me! I never heard anything about it,” she said testily. “And I can hardly think he would wish to do anything so very unwise. Christian isn’t stupid, though he’s rather volatile.”

“Stupid! No, indeed. That he should want to marry Miss Biron is no proof of stupidity. Where could he find a nicer wife? How could you expect him to sit and look contentedly at Miss Hibbs when there is such a girl as Miss Biron within ten miles?”

Hester looked more prim than ever.

“You seem very enthusiastic, Mr. Elshaw. Pray, what have you to say about Mr. Biron?”

“Well, Mr. Christian wouldn’t have to marry him.”

“That is just what he would have to do,” retorted she quickly. “Mr. Biron would take good care of that. Christian would never be able to shake him off.”

“Well,” said Bram, “he can’t shake him off now, can he? So he would be no worse off.”

“Now, seriously, Mr. Elshaw, would you like to have such a father-in-law yourself?”

Bram’s heart leapt up. But he did not tell the young lady that he only wished he had the chance. Instead of that, he answered in a particularly grave and judicial tone—

“If I had, I’d soon bring him to reason. He’s not stupid either, you see. I’d make an arrangement with him, and I’d make him keep to it. And if he didn’t keep to it——”

“And he certainly wouldn’t. What then?”

“Well, then perhaps I’d get rid of him some way, Miss Hester.”

“I certainly shouldn’t advise my brother to run the risk of having to do that, and all for a girl much too volatile to make him a good wife. Why, she is nearly half French.”

Bram looked at her quickly.

“Surely, Miss Hester, you who have travelled and been about the world, don’t think the worse of a lady for that?”

Miss Cornthwaite reddened, but she stuck to her guns.

“I hope I am above any silly insular prejudice,” she said coldly. “But I certainly think the French character too frivolous for an Englishman’s wife. Why, when Claire comes here, though she will sob as if her heart was breaking one moment at the humiliations her father exposes her to, she will be laughing heartily the next.”

“Poor child, poor child! Thank heaven she can,” said Bram with solemn tenderness which made Miss Cornthwaite just a little ashamed of herself. “And don’t you think a temper like that would come in handy for Mr. Christian’s wife, as well as for Mr. Biron’s daughter?”

“Oh, perhaps,” said Miss Cornthwaite very frigidly, as she stretched out her hand quickly for a fresh book to show him.

Poor Claire had no partisan here.

CHAPTER XI. BRAM SHOWS HIMSELF IN A NEW LIGHT.

Now, Christian felt throughout the evening that Bram was avoiding his eyes, saving himself up, as it were, for an attack of eye and tongue, a combat in which Chris would have all he could do to hold his own.

Christian was fond of Bram, fonder even, perhaps, than Bram, with his honest admiration and indulgence, was of him. The steady, earnest character of the sturdy man of the people, with his straightforward simplicity, his shrewdness, and his blunt outspokenness when his opinion was asked, had constant attraction for the less simple, but more amiable, son of the owner of the works. He wanted to put himself right with Bram, and to do it in such a way as to put Bram in the wrong.

He tried to get an opportunity of a chat with the sullen-looking young clerk, who, however, avoided this chance more cleverly than Chris sought it.

At the close of the evening, when Bram had reeled off without a mistake the elaborate speech of thanks to Mrs. Cornthwaite which he had prepared beforehand, he contrived very cleverly to slip out of the house while Chris was occupied with the perfunctory attentions demanded by his fiancée. And with the start he thus obtained, he contrived to reach the foot of Hassel Hill before he became aware that he was being followed.

“Hallo!” cried out a bright voice, which he knew to be that of Chris. “Hallo!”

Bram did not answer, did not slacken his pace, but went straight on up the hill, leaving Chris to follow or not as he pleased.

He had reached the outer gate of Duke’s Farm before Chris came in sight, toiling up the steep road in silence after him. Then the pursuer called out again. Somebody besides Bram recognized the voice, for a minute later Bram saw a light struck in an upper window of the farm. The window was thrown up, and somebody looked out. Bram, however, stalked upwards in silence still.

He had reached the first of the row of cottages on the top of the hill, when Chris, making a last spurt, overtook him, and seized him by the arm.

“Bram, Bram, what’s the matter with you? I’ve been panting and puffing after you for a thousand miles, and I can’t get you to turn that wooden head of yours. Come, I know what’s wrong with you, and I mean to have it out with you at once, and have done with it. So come along.”

He had already hooked his arm within that of the unwilling Bram, who held himself stiffly, stubbornly, with an air which seemed to say—“Well, if you want it, you can have it.”

And so, the one eager, defiant, impetuous, the other stolid and taciturn, the two men walked past the rows of mean cottages, past Bram’s own lodgings, and up to the very summit of the hill, where the ruined, patched-up, and re-ruined mansion was, and the disused coal shaft with its towering chimney.

“And now,” cried Chris, suddenly stopping and swinging Bram round to face him in the darkness, “we are coming to an understanding.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Now, don’t ‘sir’ me, but tell me if you’re not ashamed of yourself——”

“Me ashamed of myself! I like that!” cried Bram with a short laugh. “But that’s the way with you gentlemen. If you please, we’ll not have any talk about this, because honor and honesty don’t mean the same thing to you as to me.”

“That’s a nasty one,” retorted Chris in his usual airy tone. “Now, look here, Bram, although you’re so entirely unreasonable that you don’t deserve it, I’m going to condescend to argue with you, and to prove to you the absurdity of your conduct in treating me like this.”

“Like what, Mr Christian?”

“Oh, you know. Don’t let’s waste time. You are angry because I’m marrying Miss Hibbs——”

“No,” said Bram obstinately. “I’m not angry with you for marrying Miss Hibbs. I’m angry because you’re not marrying the girl you love, the girl you’ve taught to love you.”

“Same thing, Bram. I can’t marry them both, you know.”

Bram shook his arm free angrily.

“Mr. Christian, we won’t talk about this no more,” said he in a voice which was hoarse, and strained, and unlike his own. “I might say things I shouldn’t like to. Let me go, sir; let me go home, and do you go home and leave me alone.”

“No, I won’t leave you till we’ve threshed the matter out. Be reasonable, Bram. You know as well as I do that I’m dependent on my father——”

“You knew that all along. But you said, you told me——”

“I told you that I wanted to marry my cousin Claire. Well, so I did. But my father wouldn’t hear of it; apart from the objection he has to the marriage of cousins——”

“That’s new, that is,” put in Bram shortly.

“Apart from that, I say, he wouldn’t have anything to say to the match for a dozen reasons. You know that. And, knowing how I’m placed, it is highly ridiculous of you to make all this fuss, especially as you, no doubt, intend to use the opportunity to cut in yourself.”

His tone changed, and Bram detected real pique, real jealousy in these last words.

Bram heard this in dead silence.

“You do, eh?” went on Chris more sharply.

“No, Mr. Christian, I do not. I couldn’t come after you in a girl’s heart.”

“Why not? You are too modest, Bram.”

Perhaps Chris flattered himself that he spoke in his usual tone; but an unpleasant, jeering note was clearly discernible to Bram Elshaw’s ears. Christian went on in a more jarring tone than ever.

“Or have you been so far penetrated with the maxims of the Sunday-school that you would not allow a girl a little harmless flirtation?”

“Flirtation!” echoed Bram angrily. “It was more than that, Mr. Christian, more than that—to her!”

“It was nothing more than that,” said Chris emphatically. “I have done the girl no harm.”

Before the words were out of his mouth Bram had sprung forward with the savagery of a wild animal. In the obscurity of the cloudy night his eyes gleamed, and with set teeth and clenched fists he came close to Christian, staring into his eyes, stammering in his vehemence.

“If you had,” whispered he almost inaudibly, but with passion which infected Christian and awed him into silence, “If you had done her—any—harm, I’d ha’ strangled you, Mr. Christian. I’d ha’ gone down to t’ works, when you was there, and I’d ha’ taken one o’ t’ leather bands o’ t’ wheels, and I’d ha’ twisted it round your neck, Mr. Christian, and I’d ha’ pulled, and pulled, till I saw t’ eyes start out o’ your head, and t’ blood come bursting out o’ your mouth. And I’d ha’ held you, and tightened it, and tightened it till the breath was out o’ your body!”

When he had finished, Bram still stood close to Christian, glaring at him with wild, bloodshot eyes. Christian tried to laugh, but he turned suddenly away, almost staggering. He felt sick and faint. It was Bram who recovered himself first. He confronted Chris quickly, looking ashamed, penitent, abashed.

“Ah shouldn’t ha’ said what Ah did,” said he, just in his old voice, as if he had been again a mere hand at the works. “It was not for me to say it, owing what Ah do to you, Mr. Christian. But—by—I meant it all the same.” And again the strange new Bram flashed out for a moment. “And I’m thinking, Mr. Christian,” he went on, resuming the more refined tones of his later development, “that it will be best for me to leave the works altogether, for it can never be the same for you and me after to-night. You can’t forgive me for what I’ve said, and—well, I feel I should be more comfortable away, if it’s the same to you.”

There was a pause, hardly lasting more than a few seconds, and then Chris spoke, with a hoarse and altered voice, but in nearly his ordinary tones—

“But it’s not the same to me or to us, not at all the same, Bram. My delinquencies, real or imaginary, cannot be allowed to come between my father and the best clerk he ever had, the man who is to make up for my business shortcomings. So—so if you please, Elshaw, I’ll take my chance of the strangling, though, mind you, I should have thought you might have discovered some more refined mode of making away with me, something just as effective, and—and nicer to look at.”

His voice was tremulous, and he did not look at Bram, though he succeeded pretty well in maintaining a light tone. Bram laughed shortly.

“My refinement’s only skin deep, you see, Mr. Christian. I told you so. The raw Sheffielder’s very near the top. And in these fine clothes, too!”

He glanced down rather scornfully at the brand-new overcoat, and at the glazed expanse of unaccustomed shirt-front which showed underneath.

There was another pause. Both the young men were trembling violently, and found it pretty hard to keep up talk at this placid level of commonplace. Quite suddenly Chris said—“Well, good-night, Elshaw,” and started on his way back to Holme Park at a good pace.

Bram drew a long breath. He had just gone through an experience so hideous, so horrible, that he felt as if he had been seared, branded with a hot iron. For the first time he realized now what he had been simple enough not to suspect before, that Christian had never for a moment seriously entertained the idea of marrying Claire.

And yet he was in love with her! Bram, loving Claire himself, was clear-sighted and not to be deceived on this point. Christian loved her still enough to be jealous of any other man’s feelings for her. He had betrayed this fact in every word, in every tone. If, then, he loved her and did not mean to marry her, he, the irresistible, the spoilt child of the sex, what right had he to love her, to make her love him? What motive had he in passing so much of his time at Duke’s Farm?

And there darted into poor Bram’s heart a jealous, mad fear that was like a poison in his blood. He clenched his teeth, he shook his fists in the air; again the wild, fierce passion which had swept over him at Christian’s stabbing words seized him and possessed him.

He turned quickly, as if to start in pursuit of Chris, when a low sound, a cry, stopped him, turned him as if into stone.

For, at a little distance from him, between where he stood and the retreating figure half-way down the hill, stood Claire.

An exclamation escaped his lips. She ran panting towards him.

CHAPTER XII. A MODEL FATHER.

Dark as the night was, the moon being so thickly obscured by clouds that she never showed her face except through a flying film of vapor, Claire seemed to detect something alarming in Bram’s attitude, something which caused her to pause as she was running up the hill towards him.

At last she stopped altogether, and they stood looking each at the figure of the other, motionless, and without speaking.

As for Bram, he felt that if he tried to utter a single word he should choke. He could not understand or analyze his own feeling; he did not well know whether his faith in her innocence and purity remained intact. All he knew, all he felt, as he looked at the little creature who seemed so pitifully small and slight as she stood alone on the hillside, wrapt tightly in a long cloak, but shivering in the night air, was that his whole heart was sore for her, that he ached for pity and distress, that he did not know what he should say, what he could do, to comfort and console her.

At last she seemed to take courage, and came a few steps nearer.

“Mr. Elshaw!”

“Yes, Miss Claire.”

She started, and no wonder. For his voice was as much changed as were the sentiments he felt for her.

An exclamation escaped his lips. She ran panting towards him.—Page 86.

She came a little nearer still, with hesitating feet, before she spoke again.

“Was that—wasn’t that my cousin, Christian Cornthwaite, who went away when he saw me?”

It was Bram’s turn to start. So that was the reason of the sudden flight of Chris! He had seen and recognized the figure of Claire as she came up the hill behind Bram.

“Yes, Miss Claire.”

Another pause. She was near enough now to peer up into his face with some chance of discerning the expression he wore. It was one of anxiety, of tenderness. She drew back a little.

“I—I heard him call—I heard a voice call out ‘Hallo!’” she explained, “and I jumped up, and looked out of the window, and I saw you, and I saw my cousin following you. And you would not answer him. But he still went on. And—and I was frightened; I thought something dreadful had happened, that you had quarrelled; so I got up and came up after you. And I saw——”

She stopped. Bram said nothing. But he turned his head away, unable to look at her. Her voice, now that she spoke under the influence of some strong emotion, played upon his heartstrings like the wind upon an Æolian harp. He made a movement as if to bid her go on with her story.

“I saw,” she added in a lower voice, “I saw you spring upon him as if you were going to knock him down. You had been quarrelling. I’m sure you had. And I was frightened. I screamed out, but you didn’t hear me, either of you; you were too full of what you were saying to each other. And it was about me; I know it was about me. Now, wasn’t it?”

Bram was astonished.

“What makes you think that, Miss Claire? Did you hear anything?”

“Ah!” cried she quickly. “That’s a confession. It was about me you were quarreling. Can’t you tell me all about it at once?”

But Bram did not dare. He moved restlessly from the one foot to the other, and suddenly said—

“You’re cold; you’re shivering. You’ll catch an awful chill if you stay up here. Just go down back to the farm, Miss Claire, like a good girl”—and unconsciously his tone assumed the caressing accents one uses to a favorite child—“and you shall hear all you want to know in the morning.”

But she stood her ground, making an impatient movement with one foot.

“No, Bram, you must tell me now. What was it all about?”

He hesitated. Even if he were able to put her off now, which seemed unlikely, she must hear the truth some day. It was only selfishness, the horror of himself giving her pain, which urged him to be reticent now. So he said to himself, doggedly preparing for his avowal. His anger against the Cornthwaites, his fear of hurting her, combined to make his tone sullen and almost fierce as he answered—

“Well, Miss Claire, I was angry wi’ him because I thought he hadn’t behaved as he ought.”

There was a pause. It seemed to Bram that she guessed, with feminine quickness, what was coming. She spoke, after another of the short pauses with which their conversation was broken up, in a very low and studiously-restrained tone—

“How? To whom, Bram?”

“To—to you, Miss Claire,” answered Bram with blunt desperation.

Another silence.

“Why, what has he done to me?” asked she at last.

“He has gone and got engaged—to be married—to somebody else; that’s what he’s done, there!”

Bram was fiercer than ever.

“Well, and what of that?”

He could not see her face, and her tone was one of careless bravado. But Bram was not deceived. He clenched his fists till the nails went deep into his flesh. It cut him in the heart to have to tell her this news, to feel what she must be suffering. He answered as quietly as he could.

“Nothing, but that I think he ought—he ought——”

“You think he ought to have told me. Oh, I guessed, I guessed what was going to happen,” replied Claire rapidly in an off-hand tone. “I should have heard it from himself to-morrow. Who—who is it?”

“A Miss Hibbs.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I might have known.”

But her voice trembled, and Bram, turning quickly, saw that the tears were running down her cheeks. She was angry at being thus caught, and she dashed them away impatiently.

“D—— him!” roared Bram, clenching his fists and his teeth.

“Hush, Bram, hush! I’m surprised. I’m ashamed of you! And, besides, what does it matter to you or to me either whom Mr. Cornthwaite marries?”

“It does matter. He ought to have married you, and taken you away out of the place, and away from the life you have to live with that old rascal——”

Bram was beside himself; he did not know what he was saying. Claire stopped him, but very gently, saying—

“Hush, Bram. He’s my father.”

“Well, I know that, but he’s a rascal all the same,” said Bram bluntly. “And Mr. Christian knows it, and he had ought to be glad to have the chance of taking you away, and making you happier. He’s behaved like a fool, too, for the girl his father’s found for him will never get on with him, never make him happy, like you would have done, Miss Claire. He is just made a rod for his own back, and it serves him jolly well right!”

Claire did not interrupt him; she was crying quietly, every tear she let fall increasing Bram’s rage, and throwing fuel on the fire of his indignation. Perhaps his anger soothed her a little, for it was in a very subdued little voice that she presently said—

“Oh, Bram, I don’t think that! I do wish him to be happy! Indeed, indeed I do. And if it wasn’t for one thing I should be very, very glad he’s going to marry somebody else—very, very glad, really!”

Bram had come a little nearer to her; he spoke earnestly, tenderly, with a voice that trembled.

“You’re fond of him?” said he, quickly, imperiously.

“Yes, I’m very fond of him. He’s my cousin, and he’s always been kind to me. But I didn’t want to marry him. Oh, I didn’t want to marry him!”

Bram was astonished, incredulous. He spoke brusquely, almost harshly.

“He thought you did. He thought you cared for him. So did I, so did everybody.”

“Yes. I know that. He’s so popular that people take it for granted one must care for him. But I didn’t—in the way you mean.”

Bram was still dubious.

“Then, why,” said he suddenly, “do you take this so much to heart?”

Claire made a valiant attempt to dry her eyes and steady her voice.

“Because,” said she in a hesitating voice, “because of—of—because of papa! He wanted me to marry him; he counted on it; and now—oh, dear, I don’t know what he will do, what he will say. Well, it can’t be helped. I must go back; I must go home. Good-bye; good-night!”

Before Bram could do more than babble out “Good-night, Miss Claire,” she had flown like the wind down the hill towards the farm.

Bram went back to his lodging in a sort of delirium. Was it possible that Claire had spoken the truth to him? That she really cared not a straw for her cousin except in a cousinly way; that all she was troubled about was her father’s displeasure at having missed such a chance of a connection with the family of the long purse.

Bram understood very little about the nature of women. But he had, of course, acquired the usual vague notions concerning the reticence, the ruses of girls in love, and he could not help feeling that in Claire’s denial there was matter for distrust. How, indeed, should she, this little friendless girl who had no other lovers, fail to respond to the affection of a man as attractive, both to men and women, as Chris Cornthwaite? And did not the behavior of Chris himself confirm this view? If Claire had not cared for him, why should he have received Bram’s frowns, his angry reproaches, with something which was almost meekness, if he had felt them to be absolutely undeserved? The more he considered this, the more impossible it seemed that Claire’s lame explanation of her tears, of her distress, could be the true one. It seemed to Bram that Theo Biron, with his shrewdness and his cunning, must have been the very person to feel most sure that Josiah Cornthwaite would never allow the marriage of Chris with Claire.

Again, why, if she had not felt a most deep interest in Chris had she taken such a bold step as to follow him up the hill that night? Surely it must have been in the hope of speaking with him, perhaps of reassuring herself from his own lips on the subject of the rumors of his approaching marriage, which must have reached her? If, too, Chris had had nothing to reproach himself with on her account, why had he fled so quickly, so abruptly, at the first sight of her?

More and more gloomy grew Bram Elshaw’s thoughts as he approached the cottage where he lodged, passed through the little bit of cramped garden, and let himself in. Entering his little sitting-room, and striking a light, he found a note addressed to himself lying on the table. The writing of the envelope was unknown to him, and he opened it with some curiosity. The letter was stamped with this heading—“The Vicarage, East Grindley.”

“Grindley! East Grindley!” thought Bram to himself. “Why, that’s where my father’s people came from!”

And he read the letter with some interest. It was this:

“Dear Sir,—I am sorry to inform you that Mr. Abraham Elshaw, who is some relation of yours, though he hardly seems himself to know in what degree, is very ill, and not expected to live many days. He has desired me to write and ask you if you will make an effort to come and see him without delay. I may tell you that I understand Mr. Elshaw has heard of the rapid manner in which you are getting on in the world; he has, in fact, often spoken of you to us with much pride, and he is anxious to see you about the disposal of the little property of which he is possessed. I need not ask you under the circumstances to come with as little delay as possible.—Yours very truly,

“Bernard G. Thorpe.

“P.S.—Mr Elshaw has been a member of my congregation for many years, and he chose me rather than one of his own relations to open communication with you. I should have preferred his choosing one of them, but he refused, saying they were unknown to you, so that I could not refuse to fulfil his wishes.”

Bram put down the letter with a rather grim smile. He had never seen this namesake of his, but he had heard a good deal about him. An eccentric old fellow, not a rich man by any means, he had saved a few hundred pounds in trade of the smallest and most pettifogging kind, on the strength of which he had given himself great airs for the last quarter of a century among the pit hands and mill hands and grinders who formed his family and acquaintance. A sturdy, stubborn, miserly old man, of whose hard-fistedness and petty money-grabbing Bram had heard many tales. But the family was proud of him, though it loved him not. Bram remembered clearly how, when he was a very small child, his father had gone out on a strike with his mates, and his poor mother, at her wits’ end for a meal, had applied to the great Abraham for a small loan, and how it had been curtly and contemptuously refused.

This was just the man, this hard-fisted, self-helping old saver of halfpence, to bestow upon the successful and prosperous young relation the money of which he would not have lent him a cent if he had been starving. Bram told himself that he must go, of course: and he resolved to do his best with the old man for those unknown relations who might be more in want of the money than he himself was. For he was shrewd enough to foresee that old Abraham’s intention was to make his prosperous young relation heir to what little he possessed. He resolved to ask next morning for a day off, and to go at once to East Grindley.

Bram got the required permission easily enough, and went on the very next day to see his reputed wealthy namesake. East Grindley was a good many miles north of Sheffield and it was late in the day before he returned.

Throughout the whole of the day he had been haunted by thoughts of Claire; and no sooner had he had his tea than he determined to go to the farm, with the excuse of asking if she had caught cold the night before.

He was in a fever of doubt, anxiety, and only half-acknowledged hope. He had wished, honestly wished, when he believed Claire to be as fond of Chris as Chris was of her, that the cousins should marry, that little Claire should be taken right out of her troubles and her difficulties, and set down in a palace of peace and content, of luxury and beauty, with the man of her heart. But if those words of Claire’s uttered to him the night before were really true, might there not be a chance that he might win her himself? That he might be the lucky man who should build her a palace, and lift her from misery into happiness?

Bram knew that Claire liked him; knew that the distance between himself and her, which had seemed immeasurable thirteen months before, had diminished, and was every day diminishing. If, indeed she did not care, had never cared for her cousin with the love Bram wanted, who had a better chance with her than himself, whom she knew so well, and trusted so completely?

Bram with all his humility, was proud in his own way, and exceedingly jealous. If Claire had loved her cousin passionately, and had been jilted by him, as Bram had believed to be the case, he did not feel that he should even have wished to take the vacant place in her heart. No doubt the wish would have come in time, but not at once. If, however, it were true that she had not cared for Chris in the only way of which Bram would have been jealous, why, then, indeed, there was hope of the most brilliant kind.

Bram, on his way to the farm, began to see in his heart such visions as love only can build and paint, love, too, that has not taken the edge off itself, frittered itself away, on the innumerable flirtations with which his daily companions at the office beguiled the dead monotony of existence.

In his new life, as in his old, it was Bram’s lot to be “chaffed” daily on his unimpressionability, on the stolid, matter-of-fact way in which he went about his daily work, “as if,” as the other clerks said, “his eyes could see nothing better in the world than paper and ink, print and figures.”

Bram on these occasions was accustomed to put on an air of extra stolidity, and to shake his head, and declare that he had no time to think of anything but his work. And all the time he wondered to himself at the ease with which they could chatter of their affection for this girl and that, and enjoy the jokes which were levelled at them, and wear their heart upon their sleeve with ill-concealed delight.

And he smiled to himself at their mistake, and went on nourishing his heart with its own chosen food in secret, with raptures that nobody guessed.

And now the thought that his dreamy hopes might grow into realities brought the color to his pale cheeks and new lustre to his steady gray eyes, as he walked soberly down the hill, and entered the farmyard in the yellow sunlight of the end of a fine day in September.

He knocked at the kitchen door, and nobody answered. He knocked more loudly, fancying that he heard voices inside the house. But again without result. So he opened the door, and peeped in. A small fire was burning in the big grate, but there was nobody in the room. With the door open, however, the voices he had faintly heard became louder, and he became aware that an altercation was going on between Claire and her father in the front part of the house.

He was on the point of retiring, therefore, with a sigh for the poor little girl, when a cry, uttered by her in a wailing tone, reached his ears, and acted upon his startled senses like flaming pitch on tow.

“Oh, papa, don’t, don’t hurt me!”

The next moment Bram had burst the opposite door open, and saw Theodore, his little, mean face wrinkled up with malice, strike Claire’s face sharply with his open hand. This was in the hall, outside the dining-room door.

No sooner was the blow given than Bram seized Theodore, lifted him into the air, and flung him down against the door of the dining-room with such force that it burst open, and Mr. Biron lay sprawling just inside the room.

Claire, her cheek still white from the blow, her eyes full of tears of shame, rushed forward, ready to champion her father.

“Go away,” she said in a strangled, breathless voice. “Go away. How dare you hurt my father? You have no right to come here. Go away.”

She tried to speak severely, harshly, but the tears were running down her face; she was heart-broken, miserable, full of such deep humiliation that she could scarcely meet his eyes. But Bram did not heed her, did not hear her perhaps. He was himself trembling with emotion, and his eyes shone with that liquid lustre, that yearning of long-repressed passion, which no words can explain away, no eyewitness can mistake.

He stretched out his hand, without a single word, and took both hers in one strong clasp. And the moment she felt his touch her voice failed, died away; she bent down her head, and burst into a fit of weeping more passionate than ever.

“Hush, my dear; hush! Don’t cry. Remember, it’s only me; it’s only Bram.”

He had bent his head too, and was leaning over her with such tender yearning, such undisguised affection, in look, manner, voice, that no girl could have doubted what feeling it was which animated him. With his disengaged hand he softly touched her hair, every nerve in his own body thrilling with a sensation he had never known before.

“Hush, hush!”

The whisper was a confession. It seemed to tell what love he had cherished for her during all these months; a love which gave him now not only the duty, but the right of comforting her, of soothing the poor little bruised heart, of calming the weary spirit.

“Hush, dear, hush!”

Whether it was a minute, whether it was an hour, that they stood like this in the little stone-flagged hall in the cool light of the dying September evening, Bram did not know. He was intoxicated, mad. It was only by strong self-control that he refrained from pressing her to his breast. He had to tell himself that he must not take advantage of her weakness, he must not extort from her while she was crushed, broken, a word, a promise, an assurance, which her stronger, her real self would shudder at or regret. She must feel, she must know, that he, Bram, was her comforter, the tender guardian who asked no price, who was ready to soothe, to champion, and to wait.

Meanwhile the strong man found in his own sensation reward enough and to spare. Here, with her heart beating very near his, was the only woman who had ever lit in him the fiery light of passion; her little hands trembled in his, the tender flesh pressing his own hard palm with a convulsive touch which set his veins tingling. The scent of her hair was an intoxicating perfume in his nostrils. Every sobbing breath she drew seemed to sound a new note of sweetest music in his heart.

At last, when he had been silent for some seconds, she suddenly drew herself back, with a face red with shame; with eyes which dared not meet his. Reluctantly he let her drag her hands away from him, and watched her wipe her wet eyes.

“Papa! Where is he?” asked she quickly.

Staggering, unsteady, hardly knowing where he went, or what he did, Bram crossed the hall, and looked into the dining-room. But the lively Theodore was not there. He turned and came face to face with Claire, who was redder than ever, the place where her father had struck her glowing with vivid crimson which put the other cheek to shame.

She moved back a step, looking about also. Then she went quickly out of the room, and recrossed the hall to the drawing-room. But her father was not there either. Back in the hall again, she met Bram, and they glanced shyly each into the face of the other.

Both felt that the fact of their having let Mr. Biron disappear without having noticed him was a mutual confession. Claire looked troubled, frightened.

“I wonder,” said she in a low voice, “where he has gone?”

But Bram did not share her anxiety. There was no fear that Mr. Biron would let either rage or despair carry him to the point of doing anything rash or dangerous to himself.

“He’ll turn up presently,” said he, with a scornful movement of the head, “never fear, Miss Claire. Have you got anything for me to do this evening? You’re running short of wood, I think.”

He walked back into the kitchen, which, being the least frequented by the fastidious Theodore, was Bram’s favorite part of the house. In a few moments Claire came softly in after him. She seemed rather constrained, rather stiff, and this made Bram very careful, very subdued. But there was a delicious peace, a new hope in his own heart; she had rested within the shelter of his arms; she had been comforted there.

“You ought not to have come this evening, Bram,” she said with studied primness. “You know, I told you that before. It only makes things worse for me, it does really.”

“Now, how can you make that out?” asked Bram bluntly.

“Why, papa will be all the angrier with me afterwards. As for—for what you saw him do, I don’t care a bit. It makes me angry for the time, and just gives me spirit enough to hold out when he wants me to do anything I won’t do, I can’t do.”

“What was it he wanted you to do?” asked Bram, grinding his teeth.

Claire hesitated. She grew crimson again, and the tears rushed once more to her eyes.

“I’d rather not tell you.” Then as she noticed the expression on Bram’s face grow darker and more menacing, she went on quickly—“Well, it was only that he wanted me to go up to Holme Park again to-night—with a note—the usual note. And that I can’t—now!”

Bram’s heart sank. Of course, she meant that it was the engagement of Chris which made this difference. But why should this be, if she did not care for him? Bram came nearer to her, leaned on the table, and looked into her face. What an endless fascination the little features had for him. When she looked down, as she did now, he never knew what would be the expression of her brown eyes when she looked up, whether they would dance with fun, or touch him by a queer, dreamy, expression, or whether there would be in them such infinite sadness that he would be forced into silent sympathy. Bram waited impatiently for her to look up.

As he came nearer and nearer, she still looking down, but conscious of his approach, a new thought came into his mind, a cruel, a bitter thought. Suddenly he stood up, still leaning over the corner of the table.

“Are you what they call a coquette, Miss Claire?” he asked with blunt earnestness.

She looked up quickly then, with a restless, defiant sparkle in her eyes.

“Perhaps I am. French people, French women, are all supposed to be, aren’t they? And my grandmother was French. Why do you ask me?”

“Because I don’t understand you,” answered Bram in a low, thick voice. “Because you tell me you don’t care for Mr. Christian, and I should like to believe you. But you tell me to keep away, and yet—and yet—whenever I come you make me think you want me to come again, though you tell me to go. But surely, surely, you wouldn’t play with me; you wouldn’t condescend to do that, would you? Now, would you?”

She looked up again, stepping back a little as she did so; and there was in her eyes such a look of beautiful confidence, of kindness, of sweet, girlish affection, that Bram’s heart leapt up. He had promptly sat down again on the table, and was bending towards her with passion in his eyes, when there stole round the half-open door the little, mean, fair face of Theodore.

Bram sprang up, and stood at once in an attitude of angry defiance.

But Theodore, quite unabashed, was in the room in half a second, holding out his pretty white hand with a smile which was meant to be frankness itself.

“Mr. Elshaw,” said he, “we must shake hands. I won’t allow you to refuse. I owe you no grudge for the way you treated me a short time ago; on the contrary, I thank you for it. I thank you——”

“Papa!” cried poor Claire.

He waved her into silence.

“I thank you,” he persisted obstinately, “for reminding me that I was treating my darling daughter too harshly, much too harshly. Claire, I am sorry. You will forgive me, won’t you?”

And he put his hand on her shoulder, and imprinted delicately on her forehead a butterfly kiss. Claire said nothing at all. She had become quite pale, and stood with a face of cold gravity, with her eyes cast down, while her father talked.

Bram felt that he should have liked to kick him. Instead of that he had to give his reluctant hand to the airy Mr. Biron, an act which he performed with the worst possible grace.

“You must stay to supper,” said Theodore. “Oh, yes; I want a talk with you. About this marriage of my young kinsman, Chris Cornthwaite. Frankly, I think the match a most ill-chosen one. He would have done much better to marry my little girl here——”

“Papa!” cried Claire angrily, impatiently.

“Only, unfortunately for him, she didn’t care enough about him.”

Claire drew a long breath. Bram looked up. Theodore, in his hurry to secure for his daughter another eligible suitor whom he saw to be well disposed for the position, was showing his hand a trifle too plainly. Bram grew restless. Claire said sharply that they could not ask Mr. Elshaw to supper, as she had nothing to offer him. She was almost rude; but Bram, whose heart ached for the poor child, gave her a glance which was forgiveness, tenderness itself. He said he could not stay, and explained that he had been out all day on an errand, which had tired him. To fill up a pause, he told the story of his eccentric kinsman.

“And he means to leave me all his money, whatever it is,” went on Bram. “He showed me the box he keeps it in, and told me in so many words that it would be mine within a few days. And all because he thinks I’ve got on. If I’d been still a hand at the works down there, and hard up for the price of a pair of boots, I shouldn’t have had a penny.”

“Ah, well, it will be none the less welcome when it comes,” said Mr. Biron brightly. “What is the amount of your fortune? Something handsome, I hope.”

“I don’t know yet, Mr. Biron. Not enough to call a fortune, I expect.”

“Well, you must come and tell us about it when it’s all settled. There’s nobody who takes more interest in you and your affairs than my daughter and I—eh, Claire?”

But Claire affected to be too busy to hear; she was engaged in making the fire burn up, and at the first opportunity she stole out of the room, unseen by her father. So that Bram, who soon after took his departure, did not see her again.

He went back to his lodging in a fever. This new turn of affairs, this anxiety of Theodore’s to make him come forward in the place of Christian, filled him with dismay. On the very first signs of this disposition in her father Claire had shrunk back into herself and had refused to give him so much as another look. But then that was only the natural resentment of a modest girl; it proved, it disproved nothing but that she refused to be thrown at any man’s head. That look she had given him just before her father’s entrance, on the other hand, had been eloquent enough to set him on fire with something more definite than dreamy hope. If it had not betrayed the very love and trust for which he was longing, it had expressed something very near akin to that feeling. Bram lived that night in alternate states of fever and frost.

He dared not, however, for fear of giving pain to Claire, go to the farm again for the next fortnight. He would linger about the farmyard gate, and sometimes he would catch sight of Claire. But on these occasions she turned her back upon him with so cold and decided a snub that it was impossible for him to advance in face of a repulse so marked. And even when Theodore lay in wait for him, and tried to induce him to go home with him, Bram had to refuse for the sake of the very girl he was longing to see.

Meanwhile the date of Christian’s marriage with Miss Hibbs was rapidly approaching. Chris maintained an easy demeanor with Bram, but that young man was stiff, reserved, and shy, and received the confidences, real or pretended, of the other without comment or sympathy. When Chris lamented that he could not make a match to please himself, Bram looked in front of him, and said nothing. When he made attempts to sound Bram on the subject of Claire, the young clerk parried his questions with perfect stolidity.

The day of the wedding was a holiday at the works, and Bram, who dared not spend the day at the farm, as he would have liked to do, and who had refused to take any part in the festivities, paid another visit to old Abraham Elshaw at East Grindley as an excuse for staying away.

He returned, however, early in the evening, and was on his way up the hill by way of the fields, when, to his unbounded amazement, he saw a side-gate in the wall of the farmhouse garden open quickly, and a man steal out, and run hurriedly down across the grass in the direction of the town.

Bram felt sure that there was something wrong, but he had hardly gone a few steps with the intention of intercepting the man, when he stopped short. Something in the man’s walk, even at this distance, struck him. In another moment, in spite of the fact that the stealthy visitor wore a travelling cap well over his eyes, Bram recognized Chris Cornthwaite.

Stupefied with dread, Bram glanced back, and saw Claire standing at the little gate, watching Chris as he ran. Shading her eyes with her hand, for the glare of the setting sun came full upon her face, she waited until he was out of sight behind a stone wall which separated the last of the fields he crossed from the road. Then she shut the gate, locked it, and went indoors.

Bram stared at the farmhouse, the windows of which were shining like jewels in the setting sun. He felt sick and cold.

What was the meaning of this secret visit of Chris Cornthwaite to Claire on his wedding day?

CHAPTER XIII. AN ILL-MATCHED PAIR.

Nobody but simple-hearted Bram Elshaw, perhaps, would have been able to doubt any longer after what he had seen that there was something stronger than cousinly affection between Christian Cornthwaite and Claire. But even this wild visit of Chris to his cousin on his very wedding day did not create more than a momentary doubt, a flying suspicion, in the heart of the devoted Bram.

Had he not looked into her dark eyes not many days before, and read there every virtue and every quality which can make womanhood sweet and noble and dear?

Unluckily, Chris had been seen on this mysterious visit by others besides Bram.

It was not long after the wedding day that Josiah Cornthwaite found occasion, when Bram was alone with him in his office, to break out into invective against the girl who, so he said, was trying to destroy every chance of happiness for his son. Bram, who could not help knowing to what girl he referred, made no comment, but waited stolidly for the information which he saw that Mr. Cornthwaite was anxious to impart.

“I think even you, Elshaw, who advocated this young woman so warmly a little while ago, will have to alter your opinion now.” As Bram still looked blank, he went on impatiently—“Don’t pretend to misunderstand. You know very well whom I mean—Claire Biron, of Duke’s Farm.

“It has come to my ears that my son had a meeting with her on his wedding day——”

Bram’s countenance looked more blank than ever. Mr. Cornthwaite went on—

“I know what I am talking about, and I speak from the fullest information. She sent him a note that very morning; everybody knows about it; my daughter heard her say it was to be given to Mr. Christian at once, and that it was from his cousin Miss Biron. Is that evidence enough for you?”

Bram trembled.

“There must be some other explanation than the one you have put upon it, sir,” said he quietly but decidedly. “Miss Biron often had to write notes on behalf of her father,” he suggested respectfully.

“Pshaw! Would any message of that sort, a mere begging letter, an attempt to borrow money, have induced my son to take the singular, the unprecedented action that he did? Surprising, nay, insulting, his wife before she had been his wife two hours.”

Bram heard the story with tingling ears and downcast eyes. That there was some truth in it no one knew better than he. Had he not the confirmatory evidence of his own eyes? Yet still he persisted in doggedly doubting the inference Mr. Cornthwaite would have forced upon him. His employer was waiting in stony silence for some answer, some comment. So at last he looked up, and spoke out bravely the thoughts that were in his mind.

“Sir,” said he steadily, “the one thing this visit of Mr. Christian’s proves beyond any doubt is that he was in love with her at the time you made him marry another woman. It doesn’t prove anything against Miss Biron, until you have heard a great deal more than you have done so far, at least. You must excuse me, sir, for speaking so frankly, but you insisted on my telling you what I thought.”

Mr. Cornthwaite was displeased. But as he had, indeed, forced the young man to speak, he could not very well reproach him for obeying. Besides, he was used to Bram’s uncompromising bluntness, and was prepared to hear what he really thought from his lips.

“I can’t understand the young men of the present generation,” he said crossly, with a wave of the hand to intimate to Bram that he had done with him. “When I was between twenty and thirty, I looked for good looks in a girl, for a pair of fine eyes, for a fine figure, for a pair of rosy cheeks. Now it seems that women can dispense with all those attributes, and bowl the men over like ninepins with nothing but a little thread of a lisping voice and a trick of casting down a pair of eyes which are anything but what I should call fine. But I suppose I am old-fashioned.”

Bram retired respectfully without offering any suggestion as to the reason of this surprising change of taste.

He was in a tumult of secret anxiety. He felt that he could no longer keep away from the farm, that he must risk everything to try to get an explanation from Claire. If she would trust him with the truth, and he believed her confidence in himself to be great enough for this, he could, he thought, clear her name in the eyes of the angry Josiah. It was intolerable to him that the girl he worshipped as devotedly as ever should lie under a foul suspicion.