Her fairy prince

HER FAIRY PRINCE

BY

Gertrude Warden

AUTHOR OF "THE HAUNTED HOUSE AT KEW," "AS A BIRD TO THE SNARE," ETC.

PHILADELPHIA

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

1895

Copyright, 1895,
by
J.B. Lippincott Company.

Electrotyped and Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A.

HER FAIRY PRINCE.

CHAPTER I.

"Hallo, Armstrong! Thought you were in Australia!"

"Hallo, Garth! Thought you were in gaol!"

Such were the greetings interchanged in Boulogne market-place on a hot August forenoon by two Englishmen who had not met for five years.

The first speaker, Mr., or Captain Garth, as he styled himself, was a man of medium height, inclined to stoutness and of florid complexion, with bloodshot blue eyes, plentiful prematurely-white hair, a heavy cavalry moustache, and a jovial swaggering manner. His clothes were carefully brushed and darned, his boots beautifully polished, and his chimney-pot hat, set rakishly on one side on his white curls, was suspiciously shiny in its surface. The Captain's red face, overhanging eyebrows, and ferocious moustache were wont to frighten children, of whom he was specially fond; but his features were well-cut and his manners plausible, and most women considered him a very good-looking man for his six-and-fifty years.

Of his companion's claims to personal beauty there could be no doubt, in spite of the air of drink, dissipation, and neglect which hung about him. Wallace Armstrong at six-and-twenty was intended by nature to be a splendid specimen of muscular manhood—tall, broad-shouldered, vigorous, and sinewy, looming enormous over the small French soldiers who slouched in twos and threes across the market-place, and followed where he walked by the admiring glances of the stalwart bare-footed fish-girls trooping up and down to and from the quay.

But already Wallace Armstrong had done his best to injure the heritage of vigour and manly beauty which had devolved upon him at birth. Under his eyes, of a brilliant bluish-gray colour shaded by thick black lashes, late hours and hard drinking had imprinted lines and shadows ill-suited to early manhood; his whole expression was sullen and defiant, as though he distrusted and despised his fellow men and was at little trouble to disguise his feelings towards them. His manner of greeting his old acquaintance was not only insolent as to words, but still more so in the tone he used the while he roughly shook Garth's detaining hand off his coat-sleeve.

"It's of no use to claim acquaintanceship with me now!" Armstrong remarked, harshly. "I'm broke, stone-broke—and, what's more, if I had any money, I know better now than to play cards with you for it!"

Captain Garth's red face grew a shade redder; but he was not sensitive as to snubs, and his tone was altogether friendly when he spoke again.

"We're all broke occasionally," he observed, soothingly; "even I do not absolutely wallow in gold at the present minute. Still, I've a little place up here in the High Town where I can put up a friend in difficulties until things blow over."

"Oh, I'm not wanted by the police, if that's what you mean!" the other interrupted, scornfully. "My early indiscretions have been whitewashed by a visit to Australia, which means that, having got into bad company in England, I was sent across the sea to get into worse company in Australia."

"Have you been back long?" Garth inquired, accommodating with difficulty his footsteps to the long strides of his companion.

"Long enough to spend in Paris the money which was to take me back to England! Look!" And he turned his empty pockets inside out for Garth's edification.

The elder man looked thoughtful, and walked on by his side for some seconds in silence.

"But your uncle?" he suggested at last. "Surely Alexander Wallace's credit should help his nephew in raising the 'needful'?"

"A lot of use when for four years the old skinflint has gone about denouncing me as a ne'er-do-weel, and proclaiming the fact that I shall never get another ha'penny from him. I've written to him from here—it was the only thing to be done; but it won't be any good. The picture I drew in my letter of my sick and starving young wife was enough to melt the heart of a stone! But it won't move Uncle Alec."

"Your wife?" Garth repeated, in surprise.

"Yes. The young, lovely, and pious orphan daughter of a clergyman, who fell in love with me on board ship and decided to take in hand my reformation. There never was such a perfect woman—if, indeed, she's alive still; but as, when I wrote, she'd had nothing to eat for three days—and I can swear she's had nothing since—she may very likely be dead by this time!"

Captain Garth was neither a good nor a scrupulous man, but he had the remnants of a heart about him, and his companion's words shocked and startled him.

"Are you mad or drunk, Armstrong?" he cried. "Do you really mean to tell me your wife is here in Boulogne starving?"

Armstrong turned and looked at him. Then he thrust his hands into his empty pockets and burst out laughing.

"Why, you old idiot," he exclaimed, "she's only my wife on paper! What in the world should I want to burden myself with a wife for? Uncle Alec has always been soft-hearted about women, probably because he's had very little to do with them and doesn't know what fools and plagues they are; so the idea came into my head to pitch this starving-wife story, and see whether that would move him. But I don't hope much from it."

"It would be rather awkward, though, if he took you at your word and asked you to produce her!"

"Nothing less likely. He has frequently stated in the letters of good advice he sent me at Melbourne that he never wished to set eyes on me again; and Heaven knows I am not hungering for a sight of the sanctimonious old bag of bones! My precious cousin is now the darling of his eye, the industrious apprentice and good boy, and all that sort of thing! He has been taken into the bank, and, no doubt, will get the old screw's money when he dies—if he ever will die, which I am beginning to doubt! He never would if I were his heir, for certain. Curse my luck!"

Clearly Armstrong was in a communicative mood as he strode along, every now and then savagely kicking the stones on the pathway. His last franc had been spent on a dose of fiery cognac, which, taken after long fasting, had mounted to his brain and brought on a talkative mood. All the time they conversed the two men were mounting the dusty white road which led to the High Town, Armstrong insensibly and Garth by design.

Captain Garth, as has been said before, was not wholly ill-natured. Five years before he had had some hand in the ruining of Wallace Armstrong, then a high-spirited lad of one-and-twenty, and known to be the favourite nephew of a wealthy Scotch banker. At that time Garth was the secret proprietor of a gambling club, and it was to meet the liabilities contracted there that young Armstrong forged his uncle's name, and was subsequently banished from his native country and his uncle's favour. The gambling club in question had been raided and dispersed long ago; but Garth had evaded the law and taken up his residence abroad. He was now really sorry to note the shabbiness and recklessness of his former dupe, and was casting about in his mind as to whether he could not assist him with possible profit to himself.

"Come up to my diggings!" he said, cheerily. "My little girl will cook us a cutlet and mix a French salad as well as any waiter in Paris!"

"Your little girl? I didn't know you had any family!"

"Mrs. Garth died in England three years ago," returned the Captain. "She was a very good woman, according to her lights; but—h'm—a little narrow, you know! Country rector's sister, kept house for him in a Sussex village, fell in love with a handsome blue-eyed young racing-man she saw in church. I like church—it's an institution that ought to be kept up. And eighteen years ago, Armstrong,—though I say it that shouldn't—there wasn't a better-looking fellow at Goodwood than Randolph Garth. I have always been weak—I own it—where a pretty woman is concerned; and the late Mrs. Garth was certainly pretty, though she was eight-and-twenty when I first met her, and had never had an offer. That sly old brother of hers drove would-be suitors away—wanted to keep her little pittance—just a beggarly life-interest in three hundred a year in the family, d'ye see? But she fell in love, as pretty women will, quarrelled with her family, ran away to London, and met and married me by appointment in an old church in the City. As to the little misunderstandings which followed, no doubt each of us was a little to blame; but Mrs. Garth was a lady, and never made scenes. Our methods of life didn't suit; so ten years ago we parted quite amicably, and my wife settled down with our little girl Laline in a cottage in the Lake district, where I visited them occasionally. Three years ago Mrs. Garth died very suddenly, and her income died with her. So my little girl had to come over and rough it in Boulogne with her father."

Such was the story of his marriage, detailed airily by Captain Garth—a story true in the main, but with many touches omitted which would have lent meaning and pathos to the whole. The story of a good and tender woman's mistake, of her gradual disillusion and growing hopelessness, and of the self-sacrifice by which, at last, she forfeited annually one-third of her little income to her worthless husband, in order that she might keep and educate her child far from the gambling, drinking, and unscrupulous set to which the man she had once so loved belonged.

Possibly, had Wallace Armstrong paid much attention to Garth's story, he might have read between the lines some of these truths; but he was at present too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble himself with the autobiography of a man whom he despised and mistrusted.

The Rue Planché, where Captain Garth's lodgings were situated, was a mean street in the High Town, composed of tumble-down ill-built little houses, painted in various tints of cream-and-mustard colour, one storey high, and furnished with green shutters and little back gardens liberally adorned with clothes to dry.

One worn step only divided No. 7, Rue Planché, from the street. The front door was open as the two men approached, showing a very narrow, brick-paved passage, and the linen-hung garden beyond, in which la mère Bénoîte, the Captain's landlady, was engaged in hanging up clothes. The Captain's rooms comprised a little salon on the right, and a little salle-à-manger on the left of the entrance, and up-stairs two tiny bedrooms; but before now Mr. Garth had put up a friend on the sofa of one of the ground-floor rooms, and he was prepared to offer a similar privilege to the nephew of Alexander Wallace.

The salon was the Captain's special den. Although the window was open, the scent of spirits and stale tobacco hung on the air, a few sporting prints adorned the walls, and the Captain's desk was littered by cuttings from sporting papers. A card-table stood in the middle of the room, and an empty bottle of cognac, half a dozen glasses, and a dirty well-thumbed pack of cards clearly showed the manner in which the Captain had spent the preceding evening. Nothing in this room was removed except by Garth's special permission; but when he caught sight of the sardonic expression on his visitor's face, he shut the door somewhat hastily, and inwardly regretted that he had not ordered the place to be put straight before leaving home that morning.

"At your old tricks, I see," Armstrong observed, an unpleasant smile curving his full lips under his heavy black moustache.

"Oh, just a game with the boys, to charm away homesickness in the evenings. But I must introduce you to my little girl. Laline," he cried, throwing open the door of the salle-à-manger, "I have brought a visitor—Mr. Wallace Armstrong!"

Even Armstrong's clouded senses understood at once the contrast offered by this apartment to the dirty and neglected-looking salon. Here the green shutters were wide open, letting the sunlight flood the shining deal flooring, stained and polished to resemble oak, and the cheap suite of dining-room furniture, which had been beautified in the same manner. An earthenware jug, filled with poppies, marguerites, and cornflowers, stood on the mantelpiece, and a bowl of poppies on the snowy well-darned cloth laid upon the table, which article of furniture was pushed back to allow full space for the gambols of a girl, a cat, and a kitten on the uncarpeted floor.

Laline's back was turned to the two men as they entered. She was kneeling, holding a small black-and-white Persian kitten high above her head, and the sunlight from the window seemed to concentrate and shimmer in the loose masses of her abundant auburn hair, from which a restraining black ribbon had slipped on to the floor. Her dress was a long, loose blouse of dark-blue linen, yoked at the neck and wrists, and falling straight to her ankles, and her slim feet, in blue cashmere stockings, were innocent of shoes, Laline having kicked off her little high-heeled slippers in school-girl fashion, the better to enjoy her game of "romps."

Immediately in front of her sat the mother-cat, watching the struggles of her squeaking kitten with attention, but with no apparent alarm. She was a matron of ripe experience, and was well assured that her young ones would come to no harm in the hands of Laline Garth. The girl was laughing as the door opened, a happy laugh of childish gaiety, which sounded wonderfully sweet to Wallace Armstrong's ears.

"Aren't you frightened, Nell? Aren't you afraid that I shall let your silly scratching little ball of fluff fall and kill itself? Oh, you unnatural mother!"

"Laline," said the Captain again, "here is a gentleman to see us."

She sprang to her feet and faced them, still holding the kitten—a lovely over-grown child, to all appearance, a bright rose-flush mantling in her sunburnt cheeks right up to the long, brown lashes of her hazel eyes. A very, very pretty child, too tall for her short skirts, too long in the arm for her short sleeves, from which her slender brown wrists were thrust out too far. There existed no trace of likeness between the girl and her father. From her mother Laline inherited her slender limbs, her bright hair, broad brow, level eyebrows, and a certain delicate grace which distinguished her even at this half-formed period from other girls of her age. Only one detail of her face suggested that she had experienced more of life's trials than her years warranted—two little perpendicular lines between her eyebrows became clearly marked as her father presented her to this handsome, ill-dressed, unshaved young man, with the loose mouth, square jaw, and singularly-attractive blue eyes.

"Won't you shake hands with me, Miss Laline?" Wallace asked, gently. "Or am I too dirty?"

She held out her small brown hand in silence, looking straight up into his face as she did so. And at the questioning gaze of her dreamy, dark eyes Armstrong's eyes fell. It was absurd, of course, as he told himself afterwards when he recalled this incident, and due to his nerves being in a bad order, but it seemed as though this child's look conveyed a reproach.

"I had no idea, Garth, that your little girl as you called her, would be such a tall, well-grown young lady," he said, turning to Garth to hide his sudden embarrassment. "She looks quite fourteen or fifteen."

"I am sixteen to-day," Laline said, in full, sweet tones.

Laline's voice was unlike any voice which Armstrong had ever heard, with a sound in it which constitutes what the French call une voix voilée, a low-pitched cooing inflection, peculiarly soothing to the ear.

"Have you had any nice presents?" he asked, determining instantly to go down to the town and buy the pretty child some sweets, until, with a hot flush of vexation, he remembered his empty pockets.

"I haven't had any presents," the girl answered; and then, with a little break in her voice, she added, "Papa had forgotten the date!"

"Not at all, my dear, not at all. The fact was I was on my way to choose you some pretty trifle when I met our friend here. And, as soon as you and the good Bénoîte have prepared us a little déjeuner, I will go down to the town and get you some little souvenir. But now a cutlet and a little salad will be acceptable; and here"—he fumbled in his pockets and produced at length a coin—"take this, my child, to Monsieur Desjardins, and bring a bottle of vin ordinaire. He'll let you take it for cash, though we have a little account there."

Laline took a wide-brimmed Zulu straw hat from a nail, slung a basket over her arm, and went pattering down the stone-paved street on the little wooden-heeled shoes, into which she had thrust her feet when disturbed at her play. Wallace Armstrong leaned his elbows on the window-sill and stared after the slim figure in blue with hair that shone gold in the bright sunlight.

"How in the world," he said to Garth, without looking round, "do you come to have a daughter like that? And what are you about letting her potter about dirty little wine-shops in Boulogne?"

"Monsieur Desjardins is our grocer—a most respectable person," returned Captain Garth, joining Armstrong at the window and lighting a cigarette. "Every one knows that Laline and I belong to the upper classes, although we're not very ready with our money just now."

"I'm sorry for the child," was his companion's only comment—"very sorry!"

CHAPTER II.

Laline, for her part, had almost forgotten the time when she had first flushed with indignation at the notion of running errands for her father.

One gets used to a great many things in three years, and it was three years since Laline, a forlorn little figure in deep mourning, had stood on the deck of a Folkestone steamer on her way to her widowed father and her motherless home. Of her father she knew very little indeed at that time, not having seen him for two years. England had become too hot to hold Mr. Garth about that period, and he had taken up his residence permanently in Boulogne; but for many years before he had been practically a stranger in that tiny household in Westmoreland. The late Mrs. Garth had been a gentle, dreamy-eyed lady, of refined but narrow mind, fond of poetry, fancywork, church-decoration, and district-visiting, easily shocked, and thoroughly orthodox in her views on all subjects. Her great aim with regard to her daughter, whom she loved devotedly, was to make of her a refined gentlewoman, and to guard her from all knowledge of, and contact with, the wickedness of the great world outside the hills of Westmoreland.

From this life of watchfulness, this sheltered, peaceful existence under the shadow of the little grey church in the valley, Laline was unexpectedly torn and transferred to an atmosphere of debt, neglect, and shiftlessness, the life of a ruined gamester, exiled from his native country, and earning by his wits a precarious subsistence in a back street of Boulogne.

Before her tears for her mother's loss were dry, Laline had begun to realise that Captain Garth fully intended that she should, in some measure, make up to him for the hundred a year which he had lost by his wife's death. He was kind to her in his manner, but he never for one moment understood her. When he tried to speak to her of her mother, she received his remarks in silence, watching him with great eyes full of wondering pain. His talk jarred on the girl, and it seemed a desecration to hear him discuss his dead wife in his favourite terms.

"A good woman, a very good woman, according to her lights! We didn't quite hit it off together; but I am not blaming her. And no doubt she has done her best with you; no doubt—— Why, my dear, what are you crying for?"

"I would so much rather that you did not talk to me about mother," the girl had said; and Captain Garth had respected her wish without in the least understanding it.

Then began a twofold existence for the dreamy, imaginative child. An indoor life of poverty and hard work—cooking, washing, tidying, dusting, and mending, under the superintendence of Bénoîte, until Laline could replace Aurélie the bonne and spare her father the latter's keep and wages, and an outdoor life of long rambles, sometimes by herself and sometimes in charge of the little Bertins' next door, up to the vallée or down to the sands and along the shore to the neighbouring seaside villages, with her friend the sea lapping the sands at her feet.

Day-dreams for ever filled her mind, sharing it with recollections of her happy childhood among the hills. Her soft, near-sighted eyes could never with bare vision perceive the coast of England; but the eldest Bertin boy possessed a telescope, by the aid of which she could distinguish with a bounding heart the white cliffs of her native land. All that she knew of joy and peace, of tender love and gentle sympathy, of refinement and of culture, came from her English experiences; her present life, half drudgery, half solitary wandering, was lonely and hard by comparison. In England she had been the one thought of her mother's mind, the vicar's favourite pupil, the village pet, "little Miss Garth," daughter of a lady known and honoured by all. Here, in the Rue Planché, she was "la p'tite Gart," who ran errands, begged for credit from tradespeople, and looked after the ménage with deaf and irascible old Bénoîte.

Of her beauty Laline was unconscious; a few artists had sketched her from memory, and she had seen the sketches, and wondered whether her hair really looked like that in the sunshine. But she had read Ivanhoe and other novels by Walter Scott, and her ideal of loveliness was the black-haired type with sloping shoulders, alabaster brow, eyes black as night, and the smallest possible mouth.

French romances, except some especially goody-goody stories avowedly intended for the very young, were altogether unknown to her. Captain Garth respected the child-like innocence of his daughter's mind and locked up his amusing paper-covered novels. Of her father's sporting and card-playing associates Laline knew but little. Captain Garth received visitors in his den, which the girl never entered unless her father was the sole occupant of the room. He would have wished to pose before her as a high-minded, hardworking, and honourable gentleman, driven from his country and his equals by the envious spite of a cabal and the undeserved blows of "outrageous fortune;" but when he vapoured to his little girl concerning his high principles and unrecognised genius, Laline said never a word, and contented herself with scanning him with soft eyes which saw outer things but dimly, but which seemed to have the gift at times of divining the hidden spirit beyond.

Walking down the rough stone-paved street on this particular midsummer day, Laline's thoughts busied themselves with the figure of Wallace Armstrong the tallest, handsomest Englishman to whom she had ever yet spoken. No self-consciousness touched her mind; she knew quite well that both Mr. Armstrong and her father regarded her as a child, and she had not the slightest wish to develop into a "young lady," fenced in with conventional proprieties. Captain Garth so seldom introduced any of his associates to her that that fact alone was sufficient to attract her notice; and then this powerfully-built young man with the black brows, drooping black moustache, brilliant eyes, and saturnine expression at once interested the girl from his resemblance to her ideal of the Templar in Ivanhoe.

Mr. Wallace Armstrong could not be very good, she decided. Her knowledge of evil was limited, but she opined that he played cards, and put money on horses and swore when they lost, and that he drank cognac, and perhaps did not pay his bills. His voice had sounded gentle enough in speaking to her, but rough and scornful when he addressed her father. Just so must Brian de Bois-Guilbert's voice have rung out, harsh and imperious, when he rated Rebecca's father. And yet Laline began to wonder at the fair Jewess's invincible dislike against the Templar. Meantime her little high-heeled feet had taken her to Monsieur Desjardins's, and the old man behind the counter, grumbling, took the money she proffered, and bade her remind her father that his little account had long been unsettled.

"La p'tite Gart is growing too tall for her short skirts," his wife remarked, as Laline left the shop. "She becomes une très-jolie fille, and will soon be wanting a nice little beau."

"Bah! It is a child!" responded her husband. "In England they do not think of love and marriage until they are old maids of five- or six-and-twenty. Mam'selle Laline has a good ten years yet."

Déjeuner at Rue Planché was a success that day. Laline cooked to perfection, and waited at table deftly. At the latter arrangement Wallace Armstrong demurred. He disliked to see so pretty a girl made into a household drudge; but Laline explained that Bénoîte's snuff-taking proclivities rendered her an undesirable waitress. She did not add that the household resources were at so low an ebb that cutlets at luncheon were a luxury she could not permit herself; she contented herself with assuring Mr. Armstrong that she had already partaken of luncheon, dignifying by that name a plate of thin vegetable soup and a piece of stale bread in the kitchen.

Eating made Wallace more hopeful. After all, as Captain Garth reminded him, he was six-and-twenty, and nephew to one of the richest men in London. No man was worthy the name, so the elder declared, who had not "sown his wild oats;" and the prodigal son, or prodigal nephew, as the case might be, was always the favourite in the end. Card-playing was not an exciting pastime between two men, neither of whom possessed any money or any immediate certainty of procuring any; but habit made them gamble away the sunny hours of a midsummer afternoon until five o'clock, when Armstrong suggested that they should stroll down to the hotel where he had been staying since his arrival in Boulogne three days before, and ascertain whether by chance there was any answer to his appeal to his uncle.

With characteristic improvidence, Wallace Armstrong had put up at an hotel which, although not specially dear as summer seaside prices go, was most certainly far beyond his means. Since his arrival at this establishment, which was under French management and faced the Museum in the Grand Rue, the big shabby young Englishman had consumed hardly any food, but a large amount of drinks, and the patron within the office in the hall eyed him askance as he approached and inquired for letters.

"Mais, oui, Monsieur; il y a bien une lettre."

Wallace seized it, and the blood rushed to his face. The address was in his uncle's handwriting, and the letter was registered!

"Come outside," he said, after he had signed the receipt, thrusting his hand within Garth's arm. "I don't want these prying foreigners to get wind of my affairs."

Standing under an awning in front of a shop, Wallace tore open his uncle's letter, and Garth, watching him furtively under his white eyebrows, noted the swift changes of expression which passed over his face. First astonishment, then amusement, and finally a baffled and angered look characterised his features as he thrust the letter into the hands of his companion.

"Read it," he said, "and see if your infernal cunning can get me out of the scrape! It beats me!"

Alexander Wallace's handwriting was small and cramped, but perfectly legible. His letter was written from his London office, and ran as follows,—

"Dear Nephew,—If it be true that a pious and virtuous lady has been so misguided as to link her fate with such an idle and dissipated ne'er-do-weel as I fear you have become, your wife has my heartiest sympathy. But I have a belief which is almost unlimited in the capability of a good woman for reforming a man, however deeply he be sunk in depravity, and I intend, for your wife's sake, to give you yet another chance. To this end I send you ten pounds to relieve your present necessities; and within a week, if your wife is strong enough to travel, I will forward the money wherewith you may at once make your way to my house in London. But understand—my future dealings with you will depend upon your absolute truthfulness and candour in the matter. If I find that Mrs. Wallace Armstrong is indeed what you describe—a gentle, high-minded, romantic, and unworldly young lady, your equal in birth, of truly Christian training, devoted to you, and believing in your higher capabilities, I will take both her and you into my house, which sadly needs the sweetening presence of a daughter for my old age. More than that; upon your arrival with your wife at my office—armed, of course, with all necessary credentials, such as your marriage-certificate and such papers as shall show your wife's position and home-training before you married her—I will provide you with immediate employment, and I will settle upon your wife, whose name, by-the-way, you do not mention, the sum of three hundred pounds a year, to be paid quarterly for her sole use and benefit, and to be increased in a given time to five hundred if I deem it expedient. On receipt of this letter and enclosure I must ask you to pay at once all that you owe at the hotel, to provide your wife with food and necessaries, and to send on to me full receipts for all amounts you may disburse from the enclosed ten pounds. Will you also tell me at what date I may expect you and your wife, and you shall receive by return the necessary sum for your fares and other expenses incidental on your journey. Remember, I had not meant, nor had I wished, to see your face again; but, if a good woman has been brought to believe in you, and to link her fate with yours, I will try to forget your past conduct, and will give you yet one more chance of attaining that position which, but for your follies and vices, should be yours already.

"Your uncle,
"Alexander Wallace."

Captain Garth read the letter twice through. Then he returned it to its owner and began pulling reflectively at his white moustache.

"My boy," he observed, "it is a poser—certainly a poser! But the chance is not one to let slip. Three hundred a year going begging for want of a wife. We must have a petit verre together at the nearest café out of this sunshine and think it over. Three hundred a year!"

Oddly enough, as he reflected, it was the exact amount of the late Mrs. Garth's life-interest, which had passed away on her death to her own family. A third of that had been his; and although two pounds a week was an absurd trifle for a gentleman of his taste and social position, yet, with only himself to keep, it had often sufficed in bad times to keep the wolf from the door. And times grew worse instead of better, and the three hundred would probably soon be increased to five—more than that, if once Wallace Armstrong was restored to his uncle's favour, the lion's share of old Wallace's wealth might well be his some day, since, of the banker's two nephews, he had undoubtedly at that time been the best-loved. Such a chance must by no means be allowed to slip from this young man's grasp.

It must not be supposed that Captain Garth's solicitude on Armstrong's behalf was wholly unselfish. At fifty-six Captain Garth was almost incapable of formulating any plan into which self-interest entered not, and he clearly wanted, in his own parlance, to "make a good thing out of" Wallace Armstrong. He set then to work drawing up a mental inventory of the potential brides with any one of whom, at the shortest possible notice, he might unite his young friend in matrimony.

"There is only one thing to be done, of course," he said, sipping the cognac Armstrong had ordered on the strength of his uncle's remittance, and jotting down names in pencil on his cuff under the awning of the café—"there is only one thing to be done. You must get married."

Wallace stared at him, and then laughed contemptuously.

"If that's all you've got to suggest," he observed, "I can dispense with your advice!"

"Now, my boy, be reasonable! With a wife you can get your fare to England at once advanced, return to the bosom of your family with everything forgotten and forgiven, enjoy the fatted calf, obtain in all probability a position in your uncle's bank, live in his house rent-free, pocket a tidy little income, and eventually succeed to the bulk of your uncle's property. Without a wife—well, I don't want to be too personal, but you know best the details of your present financial position."

"You talk as if getting married were as easy as putting on one's coat!" Armstrong broke out impatiently. "I've had a rough time of it lately, but, thank Heaven, I've never been dragged down by a nagging, whining woman. I've never yet met the woman who was worth spending half an hour's thought upon—an extravagant, capricious, vain, mercenary, hypocritical crew——"

"Perhaps your experiences have been unfortunate?" suggested Garth, soothingly. "There are plenty of nice girls about, plenty, if one knows where to find them."

"Nice girls," sneered Armstrong, "who would be ready at a moment's notice to marry a penniless scamp with scarcely a rag to his back who hasn't even the decency to pretend to be in love with them!"

"Nice girls," Garth repeated, imperturbably, "who are not very happy at home, and who would be glad enough to make a good wife to a fine handsome young fellow, nephew to old Alexander Wallace, who would provide them with a comfortable home and a liberal allowance of pocket-money."

"You mean that I can buy a wife with all the domestic virtues for this promised three hundred a year?" Armstrong inquired, harshly.

"Well, yes—that's one way of putting it, if you like!" returned Garth, his patience beginning to give way. "Great Scot, man! You can't expect to have sentiment thrown in, too, in matters of this kind! What do most girls marry for? Why, a comfortable home, of course. And when they marry for anything else, such as a fine figure or a twinkling eye or a handsome pair of moustaches, what is the result? When the tax-collector and the butcher's and baker's bills come in at the door, love flies out at the window. It's all a matter of money and expediency. They manage these things much better here in France."

"You forget," said Wallace, "that, when I wrote to my uncle a week ago, I described myself as already married. Even if this paragon of a bride can be discovered, there would be, I suppose, some necessary delay before the ceremony could be performed——"

"About three weeks."

"Just so. And my wily old uncle has requested me to bring my certificate with me."

"That might be arranged. A little mistake as to the date, and the necessary delay before your wife is strong enough to travel—remember, you said she was starving, and a girl doesn't get over that in a day."

"And, after all this, where is the girl?"

The Captain recommenced pulling his white moustache and glanced at the initials scrawled in pencil on his cuff.

"I have a friend in the town," he began again, after a few seconds' reflection. "Talented man—Oxford man—but down on his luck. His daughters are good-looking girls and very much admired. The younger one is really handsome, a big blonde, very fine girl indeed—Nanny Westbrook. I could take you round this evening and introduce you."

"How old is she?"

"Oh, ha—one can never tell a woman's age! Not more than thirty, and looks much less. A very good amateur actress, and could do all the parson's-orphan-daughter-business thoroughly well. A really jolly girl, full of fun, with no nonsense about her. The best waltzer in the town, too. Last carnival ball here she went as a Pierrette, and I assure you she was the belle of the room. Didn't look more than eighteen, on my honour."

"None of your carnival-ball hacks for me!" said Armstrong, in a tone of disgust. "I know the type, and I hate it! If I've got to put up with a wife at all, I'll have one who'll stay at home and behave decently and give me no trouble. I don't think they grow them among your Boulogne acquaintances."

Two Frenchmen, who were sipping coffee and absinthe at an adjoining table, broke at this moment into lively expressions of admiration at sight of a young girl coming up from the quay.

"Look well, Jules! Is she not ravishing, the little English girl? She is English assuredly; no French girl so pretty as that would be promenading about all alone. It is not often that the English have such pretty feet. But, sapristi, what a dress! It is rather like a blue-bag than a gown! These English girls have no coquetry!"

The object of their remarks was none other than Laline Garth, fresh from a long swim out to sea, her loose auburn hair drying on her shoulders in the sun, the low, level rays of which shone in her soft, dark eyes and lit up the bright tints of her cheeks and lips. Hers was the beauté du diable which nothing can spoil—not even shapeless gowns, ill-fitting silk-gloves, and a Zulu hat which cost fifty centimes—the sparkling evanescent loveliness of a child merging into a maiden.

Wallace Armstrong turned in his seat at the Frenchman's words and looked fixedly under his level, black brows at Laline as she climbed the hill with swift, springing steps.

"Garth," he said, suddenly, "I've made up my mind to take your advice. And I'll marry your daughter Laline."

CHAPTER III.

Captain Garth's second petit verre of cognac almost dropped from his fingers on its way to his lips in his astonishment at his young friend's proposition.

"Laline," he repeated, blankly—"you marry Laline? Why, man, she's a child—a baby!"

"She is sixteen," Armstrong repeated, coolly, "and she'd look older if you dressed her properly. French girls of all classes marry at sixteen."

"So do English-factory-hands!" Garth broke in, bluntly. "But the daughters of English gentlemen haven't left the schoolroom at that age."

"Your daughter has. What are you making of her? A household drudge—nothing more or less! It's no good coming any of the parental love-business with me, Garth. I've got to marry apparently, and my wife must be a pretty, young English girl of blameless reputation, connected with the clergy, and all that sort of thing. Well, from what you tell me of your little girl, her mother brought her up in a way that would be quite after my old psalm-singing uncle's heart. I don't pretend to be in love with her; but I've never seen a prettier or sweeter face than hers; and, even if she can't be a wife or a companion to me at first, we shall no doubt grow as fond of each other in due time as most married people. She has just the face and voice to get round Uncle Alec. I'm hanged if I can understand how she comes to be your daughter? She's not in the least like you, or, you may take my word for it, I shouldn't want to marry her! Of course I don't expect you to agree to anything that isn't to your own advantage. Your daughter can't be worse off than she is here; and I'm ready to offer you compensation for the loss of her services. Once she's married me, she's got to be an orphan, and you've got to be a dead clergyman; but, as you'll be paid something for keeping quiet, that won't matter."

Captain Garth glanced at his proposed son-in-law under his white eyebrows, and his expression was by no means friendly. A lifetime of snubs and shifts had not succeeded in destroying the man's conceit and self-importance, and only the thought of old Alexander Wallace's millions checked his desire to resent Mr. Armstrong's studied insolence of tone and words. Even now he would at once have rejected the young man's proposal from sheer personal dislike but for the fact that the little household in Rue Planché was financially in a very bad way indeed, and that the precarious living which the self-styled captain earned as bookmaker, gambler, speculator in antiques and curios, cicerone, and money-lender, had of late brought in less and less grist to the mill. Yet somewhere in Randolph Garth's tortuous mind there lurked an appreciation for what is good and pure, and he heartily wished that some other man's daughter and not his own could be sacrificed to Wallace Armstrong.

For it would be a sacrifice. Garth knew it, with his experience of the seamy side of life and the worst qualities of his fellow-men. He could read it in the fierceness and sullenness of Armstrong's expression, in the puffiness of the skin under his eyes and their bloodshot whites, in the shakiness of the strong brown hand which raised the glass to his lips, and in the lips themselves, over-full and sensual in outline, perpetually curving in an ugly sneer.

As if to emphasise the contrast between her and the man who had asked her hand in marriage, Laline herself stopped on the opposite side of the street and began talking and laughing with a group of French children, comprising the little Bertins and others of her neighbours. The little white-headed, brown-faced, toddling things pulled at her hands; evidently they all wished her to go down again to the sands with them, and she was as plainly pleading her household duties as her excuse.

"Voyons donc, Laline! Viens avec nous!"

Laline laughed and shook her head. Her small, regular teeth shone white as a child's between her parted red lips. The two Frenchmen beneath the café awning sat up, twirled their moustaches, and wasted many an ogle over the road, tributes to her beauty which Laline was too shortsighted to see, and which, if she had seen them, would have filled her with wonder.

The sight of his daughter seemed to trouble Garth's conscience. It was almost as though he heard the voice of her dead mother in his ear, begging him to remember his trust and to guard Laline against such men as the one who sat by his side.

"It is nonsense," he muttered, suddenly, "to talk of marrying a child like that! It is not as if she were even precocious—she has scarcely left off playing with her dolls. In a year or two's time it will be quite early enough for her to think of sweethearts. Besides, she wouldn't dream of leaving me and her home for a stranger; and the days of a stern parent coercing his child into a hated marriage are over, if they ever existed."

"Will you let me try and persuade her?" suggested Armstrong. "You don't see the best side of me; but then I have an old grudge against you. And I can be very nice when I choose."

Before Garth could answer, Armstrong had risen and crossed the sunny street to where the girl stood talking to the laughing children. His long shadow fell across Laline's face as she stooped to kiss the youngest Bertin, and a sudden silence came upon the erstwhile animated group.

"I wanted to know, Miss Garth," Wallace began, in a tone of genial kindness, "whether you and your young friends would like some sweets and pastry, because I am going to buy some myself at a certain fascinating shop at the corner of the Rue de la Paix, and, as I am certain to make myself ill if I go in all by myself, I propose that you should all come with me and protect me."

The children's shyness vanished at such a proposition; and very soon Captain Garth, from his seat before the café, saw a little procession pass down towards the quay; in front, two little Bertin boys and Maggie Royston, aged eleven, from No. 15, Rue Planché, and, a little way behind them, Laline, leading two smaller Bertins by the hand, while a younger Royston trotted contentedly by the side of the big shabbily-dressed young man with the blue eyes and the black moustache, and grasped his fingers confidingly.

After all, the Captain told himself, there must be a lot of good in a man so fond of children as Armstrong appeared to be. He was still little more than a boy, and would probably settle down now that he was given another chance, and become quite a respectable member of society. Reformed rakes proverbially make the best husbands; and it was not so easy nowadays to marry a girl without a penny to her name that she could afford to be over-particular as to the character of her suitors. Besides, what was there against Armstrong? A little over-partiality for cards, for drink, and for fast society, a little mistake as to a certain signature on a certain cheque; mere trifles these, such as could easily be lived down and forgotten by any man with a decent balance at his banker's. Laline would be kindly treated—Alexander Wallace would see to that. The old gentleman was clearly longing to fold a daughter to his heart; and, once Laline was installed in his house, there was little doubt but that she would soon become indispensable to his happiness.

"She's a good girl, an excellent little girl," the Captain said to himself; "and, 'pon my soul, I think it's the best thing I can do for her! She seems quite to take to the fellow. He's a gentleman, and may some day be worth his twenty-five thousand a year. She's getting too tall and too pretty for those childish pinafore frocks, and I can't afford to dress her well. I wonder how much he means to offer me? He's deucedly hard and sharp for a young man; but, if I let him marry Laline, he couldn't surely think of putting me off with less than three pounds a week, to be raised to two hundred a year later on. I must have it all down in black and white, though, for it's my belief he's a slippery customer. Curse his impudent airs!"

From which soliloquy it may be gathered that Captain Garth was gradually reconciling himself to the prospect of parting from his only child.

He did not attempt to join his daughter and her companions. If Armstrong really could contrive to impress Laline favourably, he should have a fair field and no favour; and, with this idea in his mind, the Captain presently betook himself to his favourite billiard-table in the town, where he talked largely to his customary acquaintances of his young friend Wallace Armstrong, godson and favourite nephew of old Alexander Wallace the banker, and certain heir to his vast fortune; and, on the strength of Armstrong's future wealth, he succeeded in borrowing five francs from one of the habitués of the table.

At a quarter to seven it occurred to him that Wallace Armstrong must stand him a dinner out of his uncle's cheque; so, putting down his billiard-cue, he thrust his fingers jauntily through his white curls before a looking-glass, set his hat a little on one side, and sallied forth on his young friend's track. He judged that Laline and the children had probably gone home, and was therefore greatly surprised at hearing his own name cried from a fiacre which was being driven through the principal street of the town with the rapid and zigzag course of the Gallic cabman. Within were seated Wallace Armstrong and Laline in the places of honour, and on Wallace's knee was placed the youngest Mademoiselle Bertin, hugging a new doll and eating sweets from a paper bag. Three more children with their backs to the horses, and the eldest Bertin boy on the box, all looked equally hot, tired, and happy, and laden with sweets and toys, while Laline's eyes shone like stars in her excitement and delight.

The toys and sweets had not cost very much, and even the enchanting drive was not an unreasonably-priced item. But this good fairy of a Mr. Armstrong had confided to Laline that he owed her father a great deal of money, and had been by him authorised to spend a part of it upon her. As a result, she was wearing her first beautiful shop-made hat of black open-work straw and black lace, with a wreath of small, pink rosebuds outlining her fresh, young face, and other rosebuds decorating the crown. Fifteen francs had been the price of this triumph of millinery; and in all her life afterwards Laline never again derived from any clothes the absolute joy the wearing of this first smart hat afforded her.

Sweets and cakes, too, she loved, as do all girls of sixteen; and, most of all, she enjoyed having her small friends about her to participate in these unexpected favours of fortune. Her frank gratitude made Wallace wince more than once; and, when she thanked him for his goodness, he interrupted her almost roughly.

"Don't, Miss Garth, please! I am not good, and I don't like it!"

At his tone a startled look came into her eyes, and, seeing it, he bent towards her, speaking very gently.

"The fact is, I am very fond of children—small ones like these, and grown-up ones like you."

"Oh, but you wouldn't call me grown up, even in this hat, would you?" she asked, with a happy little laugh. "I think I'm a tiresome sort of age—neither the one thing nor the other."

"And which would you rather be?"

"A child, if I could be a child as I used to be. I was so happy! But that seems a long time ago. I shouldn't like to be a child again as things are now!"

He noted the sadness of her tone, and instantly divined that she was thinking with regret of the old days when her mother was still alive. But he was too tactful to try to seek her confidence as yet.

"I suppose you don't often have treats, since such simple things please you?" he presently suggested.

"Oh, never!" she answered, promptly. "You see papa has to work very hard, and cannot afford it. But this has been a most beautiful birthday; and, thanks to you, Mr. Armstrong, I feel a regular Cinderella, and you are the good fairy."

"I would rather be the prince."

"Would you?"

"Yes. You see he married Cinderella."

His tone was so entirely playful that Laline attached no importance to his words, though she remembered them long afterwards. Her freedom from self-consciousness interested and pleased him. He began to feel regretful that he could not wait until this sweet, childish frankness developed into a maturer charm. This was a school-girl to pet and caress, not a woman to love as a wife. But, half-fledged bird as she was, she was yet the prettiest thing he had ever seen; and to Armstrong, who had no domestic tastes, the idea of an unworldly, unsuspicious little creature, who would obey implicitly, exact nothing in return, and contentedly spend her time alone with her needlework by her own fireside, was more agreeable than the prospect of the love and companionship of the wisest and the most helpful and devoted wife ever sent by Heaven to bless a lonely man's career.

CHAPTER IV.

That was a gala day in Laline's life, a day towards which, in after years, she often looked back with a swift pain at her heart.

How kind they had all seemed! Wallace Armstrong was gentleness itself, and there was in his manner towards her a blending of protecting care with playful admiration peculiarly flattering to a girl in her early teens. Her father, too, was unusually indulgent; and, when he got into the fiacre at Wallace's invitation, and drove back with them to the High Town and the Rue Planché, it was quite a triumphal journey, and the arrival at number seven created considerable sensation. Even Bénoîte was almost civil. Decidedly, she told herself, Monsieur le Capitaine had got hold of a rich and foolish young man, to whom gold was as dross—a riche Anglais eccentrique, who might very possibly be coaxed into paying the arrears of monsieur's rent. So that Bénoîte, like every one else, saw everything couleur de rose that evening. And when Laline at last went to bed, after a dinner—a real substantial dinner, with good red wine—her first dinner at a restaurant—and in her new hat, too, with her father and his friend—she laid her head upon her pillow, convinced of her mistake in supposing that Wallace Armstrong was a Brian de Bois-Guilbert, a morose and evil-minded Templar, when in reality he was a Prince Charming!

And, while Laline slept peacefully above, dreaming of triumphal drives, of marvellous new hats, and unlimited bonbons and toys for her friends the children, Mr. Wallace Armstrong and her father, in the shabby smoke-laden salon below, concocted between them the following letter for the delectation of Mr. Alexander Wallace in London,—

"My Dear Uncle Alec,—I can't tell you how grateful I felt at receiving your letter and enclosure. Things were at a pretty bad pass for me and my poor Laline when your unexpected help arrived. I say unexpected, because I know quite well I didn't deserve it; but you have given me another chance, and I mean to profit by it. Unfortunately, I fear that it will be quite a fortnight before my wife is fit to travel. You see, owing to my ill-luck, she has had a rough time of it lately, and she is young—very little more than a child, in fact—and un-used to privations. Happily the doctor, whom I at once fetched in on receiving your kindly help, declares her constitution to be so good that with rest and nourishing food she will be herself again in a very short time. But he strongly recommends me to defer our journey for a fortnight or ten days, at the least. My wife's maiden name was Laline Garth; her mother was a country rector's daughter, and she has been most carefully trained in all womanly virtues, besides being an excellent little cook and housekeeper. She is wonderfully pretty, although very thin, poor child! She is not yet eighteen, and knows next to nothing of the world. In short, she is much, very much too good for me! I am not sending you the receipts you ask for, as at every moment I find some new thing we are in need of. Poor Laline and I haven't even decent clothing yet. You may well say that under the circumstances it was madness to marry. I admit that perhaps it was; but such madness might well be inspired by such a girl as Laline. However, you must see her yourself and judge whether I have over-praised her, and whether among my many faults there may not be counted unto me the saving virtue of knowing and loving a good women when I see one.

"Always your affectionate nephew,
"Wallace Armstrong."

"The difficulty now is," observed Wallace, as he fastened the letter and addressed the envelope, after studying the contents with his mentor and friend, "to coach Miss Laline up in her part of the business. She seems somehow or other to possess a good deal of the awkward George Washington faculty. It will be a delicate matter to make her understand that you were an estimable clergyman, and that you are slumbering peaceful within the tomb."

"The best plan," advised the Captain, thoughtfully sipping at his cognac, "is to warn her that your uncle disapproves of all men connected with the turf, and to beg her to think of me as dead. Of course it is not a particularly pleasant experience for an affectionate father——"

"You are going to be paid for it!" Wallace interrupted, with his usual brutal directness. "It is not as though you were being asked to do anything for nothing!"

"And, by-the-bye, the sum was never fixed," said Garth, resting his elbows on the table and scanning his prospective son-in-law sharply. "I must have all that clearly settled before I make that call with you on the Consul to-morrow morning."

And here a difference of opinion was made manifest which seemed to threaten a serious breach between the worthy pair. Wallace Armstrong was inclined to dismiss his future father-in-law's pretensions with the offer of a pound a week for life, or so long as he should retain his uncle's favour. But Laline's father had prepared a fixed scale of charges, from which nothing would induce him to depart. He was making a great sacrifice, he declared; he was relinquishing the love, companionship, and services of his only living relative, the pride of his heart, the legacy of his lost wife, and, out of sheer kindness and compassion for an old friend in difficulties, he was giving her in marriage to a man who he greatly feared would never make her truly happy.

"And if you should grow tired of her or become unkind to her, where would the poor child fly but to me, her old father, whom she has been forced to consider dead, but who, in his old age, must at least be sufficiently well off to provide her with a home when all else fails her!"

Tears stood in Captain Garth's eyes at his own eloquence, to which the younger man listened quite unmoved.

Two pounds a week, to be paid quarterly from the date of the marriage, three pounds a week when the income allowed by Alexander Wallace should be raised to five hundred a year; and in the event of the banker dying and leaving a will favourable to Armstrong, an income for Garth of two hundred and fifty a year for the remainder of his life.

Until fully three o'clock the two men sat smoking and drinking cognac, while they quarrelled and haggled and finally out cards over the settlement of the elder man's allowance in the event of his giving his daughter in marriage to the ex-forger and family scapegrace before him. Not until the early sunrise forced its rays through the green shutters did they part, Randolph Garth having won all he demanded, and retiring to bed in high good humour; while Wallace, disdainfully refusing the offer of a "shake-up" in the salle-à-manger, took his way down to the town and his hotel, cursing his future father-in-law for a swindling old reprobate, and his uncle for a narrow-minded old skinflint and imbecile.

The bargain was effected, a bargain which was to transfer the charge of a girl—young, beautiful, innocent, and friendless—from an old scamp to a young one. Garth and Armstrong had arranged their visit to the English Consul after they had renovated their toilets with the remainder of Alexander Wallace's gift; and at the Consul's office due notice was given of the marriage between Laline Garth, aged seventeen, daughter of Randolph Garth, an English subject residing in Boulogne, and Wallace Armstrong, aged twenty-six, of no occupation, whose present address was the Hôtel Mendon, Boulogne.

The one part of the affair which both men appeared to shirk was breaking to Laline the news that she was to be married in three weeks' time. Captain Garth in some measure paved the way for the announcement by taking her into his confidence concerning his state of hopeless insolvency, a thing he had never before done. Laline sat on the window-sill opposite to him in the little salle-à-manger, listening very quietly to the tale of his embarrassments, her soft dark eyes fixed intently on his face. She knew quite well, to her bitter mortification, the ever-increasing amounts they owed to Bénoîte and to the tradespeople, whose patience was in several cases altogether exhausted. She herself ate little but bread and butter, and drank nothing but water; but her father was extremely fond of the pleasures of the table, and invariably spent his last franc on wine or tempting charcuterie for his own delectation.

At the end of his recital of his debts and difficulties, which were real enough, Laline looked up suddenly.

"Papa," she said, "I have an idea. It's not the first time it has come into my mind, but I didn't like to speak of it to you before! Why shouldn't I go out and earn some money as a nursery governess? I speak French as well as English, and I'm very fond of children. Then the money I earned would help to pay the bills."

"My dear child," her father began, rather nonplussed by her offer and by the earnestness of her tone, which taught him that this plan had become fixed in her mind, "do you look like a nursery governess? No one would engage you!"

"But Mr. Armstrong took me to Madame Caillard's shop yesterday and made me order a gray cashmere dress and be measured for it—a proper grown-up dress, touching the ground all around; he said he owed you money, and you had told him to buy me what I liked. You can't think how grown-up I shall look in it. And he told me to look in the hair-dresser's shops and notice how hair was dressed now, because I am growing too tall to wear my hair tied back with a ribbon. And I thought all the time of this nursery-governess idea, and was delighted, for I am longing to pay off the bills!"

"My dear little girl," put in her father, who had been listening with ill-concealed impatience, "if you had the least idea of a nursery-governess's duties and salary, you wouldn't entertain such a project for a moment. Nursery governesses are treated much worse than nursemaids, are worked about thirteen hours a day, and paid from fifteen to twenty pounds a year. You, at your age, and without experience, could not hope to receive more than about twelve or fourteen pounds a year to start with, and you would be simply a nurse-girl, a servant, to take your orders from some vulgar and domineering nurse. Even if by a miracle you received the highest possible salary for such a situation, of what use would twenty pounds a year be to me? Five hundred francs, out of which your washing and clothes must come—and we owe about eight thousand francs, at least. No, no, my dear, it's not to be thought of! They must come and carry off our poor little sticks, I suppose, as they have done before; and, if the very worst comes, they can put me in prison."

This conversation impressed and pained Laline deeply. She was greatly disappointed at the manner in which her father disparaged the possible help she was capable of affording him, and fell to wondering if there was no other way out of their difficulties. Down to the pier she wandered, late on a hot afternoon, to think over the subject that was troubling her. In appearance she was a little more sedate than she had been on her first introduction to Wallace Armstrong twelve days before. Her abundant hair was looped up, and her pink cotton frock, fashioned by her own hands, made some attempt to follow the lines of her slim figure. Wallace Armstrong had bought her a pair of long Suède gloves, of which she was extremely proud; so that, with these additions to her toilet, and her new black-lace hat with the rosebuds, she looked a very different being to "la p'tite Gart," with the flying hair and blue cotton blouse of a few days ago.

It was of Wallace the girl was thinking as she sat at the end of the pier, looking down into the shining green water. He seemed so rich and so kind; would he not help her father out of his difficulties, especially as he owed him money, on his own confession? She grew suddenly hot and unhappy when she thought of the many francs she had allowed Mr. Armstrong to waste over sweets and trifles to herself, while all the time there was such desperate need of money at home. Was it possible that her father was too proud to ask for help from his friend? But no; she at once dismissed that idea as unlikely. From her knowledge of her father she was not inclined to think that motives of delicacy would ever restrain him from borrowing money wherever he could. Laline was not in the least suspicious, but in her dreamy, half-childish, half-womanly nature there lurked a strange intuition, which illuminated more than any reasoning powers could the natures of those around her.

Of the mercenary plot by which she was to be made the means of supplying her father and Wallace Armstrong with money for their vices and extravagances by her marriage with the latter, she had not the slightest suspicion. More than once she had been startled by the troubled and remorseful expression which crept into Mr. Armstrong's face when she raised her clear eyes to his. The young man had the saving grace to realise the paltry part he was playing, and for three days now he had avoided Laline, and had spent his time in bars and billiard-rooms of the town. He was fully determined to marry her, and to play the part of a kindly and affectionate brother until she could grow to love him. That she would do this sooner or later he took as a foregone conclusion, sharing, as he did with most men, the idea that any woman married to him was bound in time to love him. But meanwhile he did not care to meet the long trustful gaze of her soft dark eyes; and it was almost with a feeling of vexation that this afternoon, as he strolled down the pier, smoking a cigar, with his hands in his pockets and his straw hat tilted over his eyes to protect them from the sun, he found himself face to face with Laline, and saw the look of pleasure on her face as she recognised him.

"We haven't seen you for three days," she said, as he took a seat by her side. "I began to think you must have left Boulogne."

"Without saying 'Good-bye' to you? Was that likely?"

He was to be married to this girl in ten days—they were to pass their future lives together. And yet, seated here by her side in the sunshine, Wallace Armstrong, ordinarily the most self-possessed of men, felt tongue-tied and abashed before her.

She was wonderfully pretty, but her very freshness and fairness became a reproach. He knew that he did not love her—knew, too, that her attraction for him lay chiefly in the utter dissimilarity between her and such women as he had heretofore chiefly noticed. The thought of his own unworthiness, while it failed to turn him from his purpose, served to render him morose and discontented. Laline saw his heavy black eyebrows contract into an ugly frown, and involuntarily drew back from him.

"Are you vexed with us in any way?" she asked, timidly. "With my father or myself, I mean?"

"Don't talk of your father in the same breath with yourself!" he said, harshly. "I never think of you as in any way akin."

Laline flushed painfully.

"Please remember," she said, in a low voice, "that he is my father."

"Do you love him for that, simply because you are told it is your duty?"

"I hope I do," she answered very low. "But I cannot love him as I loved her—my mother."

"Well, you will leave him some day, of course, and will find some one who will appreciate you better. Tell me, Miss Laline—have you any sweethearts in the town?"

She opened her dark eyes wide and laughed.

"Dear, no!" she answered, without the least hesitation. "How should I have time for such things? I am always busy, you know."

"Spoiling your pretty hands with rough housework!"

"Ah, but I remember what you said the other day, and am going to take great care of my nails. And mother always taught me to wear gloves in housework."

"Don't you sometimes want to go back to England?"

Such a transfiguration took place in her face at the words! Her eyes shone, her cheeks flushed, her lips quivered.

"Ah!" she whispered, "I try not to think how much I want to go back there!"

"Would you thank any one who would take you?"

"As a governess, do you mean? But it would put papa to such expense if I were to leave him. And I think—I think there is something or some one that prevents his ever going back there at all."

"But if, for your sake, some one came forward and paid all your father's debts, and provided for him comfortably, and then sailed away with you in one of those nice white-funnelled steamers, and gave you a beautiful home in England, and surrounded you with everything that money and forethought could provide, and all for love of you, what would you say?"

"Why, who would do such a thing?"

"Some one who is very fond of you. Some one not very good, but who believes you could make him better by your sweet influence. Some one whose home is very lonely without a bright-faced Laline to look after things, and to sing about the house as I have heard you sing at the Rue Planché. Some one who loves you, Laline."

She stared into his face with wondering eyes which betrayed no self-consciousness.

"It sounds like a fairy-tale," she said.

"It is true, all the same. You are Cinderella, and I am a degenerate Fairy Prince, Laline!"

CHAPTER V.

Thus far had Wallace Armstrong proceeded in his unique love-making, when the lady he meant to wed in a few days' time disconcerted him by bursting into a hearty peal of laughter.

"Look at my hand," she said, pulling off her glove and showing a soft pink palm. "I had my fortune told several months ago, and I am not to fall in love until I am years older than I am now."

"Give me your hand," he said. "I know something of palmistry, too."

This statement was absolutely untrue. But, as he meant to leave no means untried to gain his end, and could see that the girl half believed in the fortune told by her hand, he resolved to practise on her childish credulity and superstition. In truth, he did not know one line from another, and could only decide that it was a nice soft girl's hand and eminently kissable.

"Show me your line of fate!" he said, peremptorily.

Laline eagerly pointed it out.

"As I suspected," he said, crumpling her hand together to emphasise the lines and looking absorbed in the study of them; "very early in your career you fall under the influence of a man of far stronger will than yours. His line of fate and yours run side by side, and only death can separate them!"

He spoke with much solemnity, but, more than his words, the magnetism of his touch affected Laline's sensitive nature. She shivered and turned pale.

"Can you really read that in my hand?" she asked, fearfully.

"Clearly. This man will love you, and you will not be able to escape from him. Before you are seventeen you will be his wife."

"Oh, it's impossible!"

"Not at all. It's inevitable," he said—"written indelibly, for all who understand to read, here in the centre of your hand!"

And, as he spoke in slow impressive tones, he pointed his finger at random into her upturned palm. Looking up to see the effect of his prophecy, he found that she was leaning back in her seat, pale to the lips.

"What is the matter, child?" he exclaimed.

"You will laugh," she answered, in a low troubled tone, "but, as you held my hand and told me these things, something flashed into my head that you were right, and that there would be in my life a will against which I should fight in vain. The feeling terrified me, and I can't forget it!"

She raised her hands to her eyes, in which tears were shining, and pressed them close. Wallace Armstrong watched her, surprised and amused by what he considered her folly and weak-mindedness. In reality Laline was neither foolish nor specially weak-minded, only abnormally sensitive to influences to which a coarser nature would have been impervious. Looking into Wallace Armstrong's bold bright eyes, in the depths of which a scornful smile was lurking, the young girl seemed to read there, better than any fortune-teller could inform her, a will, selfish, resolute, and cruel, a nature attracted by and yet strongly antagonistic to her own, a personality she might grow to fear and even, it might be, to hate, but which she would never be able to regard with indifference.

Not in so many words did these convictions come upon her, but the sense of them grew as she gazed, her soft, near-sighted eyes, that had something of the wistfulness of a dumb animal, straining to realize what she saw.

At last Wallace broke the silence with a laugh.

"If we sit so still, staring at each other, people will think that I am mesmerising you," he said. "And, by-the-way, I believe I could."

"Please don't try!" she exclaimed, starting from her seat and pushing her hair from her forehead with a quick nervous gesture peculiar to her. "I must be getting back home now to see after papa's dinner."

"I will walk up with you," he said; "but you haven't yet told me whether you would like to go back to England, leaving your father comfortably settled here, provided for for life, and with all his bills paid."

"Why do you ask me such questions," she said, "when you know what you suggest is impossible?"

Then an inspiration seized Armstrong. In his pocket was another advance from his uncle to provide his niece Laline with medicines, new clothes, and other necessaries. Wallace directed his steps to the Rue Royale.

"Come and look in this jeweller's shop-window," he said, "and tell me whether you are fond of trinkets."

"Very fond," she answered, "and I often look in here."

"Don't you want to have some of the pretty things?"

"I should, I dare say, if I had any money. But I have never had any jewelry except my dear mother's gold watch and chain. I hope I shall never part with that; but I don't wear it, because it is a great deal out of repair, and I can't afford to have it put right."

"Come inside and look at the things," he said. "Oh, it's all right," he added, seeing that she hesitated; "I have to buy something for myself!"

Once within the jeweller's shop, Wallace approached the attendant and held towards him Laline's hand.

"I want a very pretty ring for this young lady," he said in French. "Take off your glove, Laline."

In her astonishment she did not notice that, for the first time, he called her by her name without any prefix. Before she could do more than stammer a few words of inquiry, Wallace had deftly unbuttoned her glove and drawn it off, and the smiling attendant was showing her a trayful of rings.

"Here is one suitable to mademoiselle," the man suggested, showing her two tiny pearl hearts intertwined with a true-lover's knot.

"They are all too large!" Wallace complained. "No—I can't wait for one to be altered. Have you nothing smaller?"

A turquoise heart, surrounded by very small diamonds, proved so small that, once it was thrust upon the girl's finger, it could hardly be withdrawn. Wallace beat the price down to a hundred francs, and paid the money over the counter before Laline could do more than gasp an astonished protest.

"Now that you are formally engaged to me," he said, "I may as well order the wedding-ring, too."

This he proceeded to do, and, having at length discovered one of suitable smallness, he slipped the little parcel into his pocket, after paying for it, and left the shop, drawing Laline's arm through his in an authoritative manner as he did so.

"We will fetch your father," he said, "and we will all dine in the town together to celebrate our engagement."

"But, Mr. Armstrong," gasped Laline, "you must be in fun! Do you know that I am only sixteen?"

"Well, plenty of your friends over here get married at sixteen," he returned, "and my own mother was married before her seventeenth birthday!"

"But I don't want to marry you!"

"Not to go to England, to live in a big, beautiful house under my care and that of my old uncle, one of the worthiest and kindest old gentlemen alive, who is simply longing to welcome you as his daughter, and writes to me about you nearly every day?"

"Why, what can you mean?" she was beginning, when he drew from his pocket the letter from his uncle which he had received that morning, and, carefully folding down one portion, held it before her eyes.

The lines which the girl read ran thus:—

"Give my love to Laline, and tell her how much I look forward to welcoming her in my house. If she is like your description, she must indeed be a sweet and womanly young creature. Be sure to buy her all that she requires. I want my niece to enter her new home in the style that befits a lady of gentle birth and careful training."

"I can't understand it!" exclaimed Laline, bewildered. "You never told me that you had been writing about me to your uncle. And what does he mean by calling me his niece?"

"I told him I hoped to marry you very shortly."

"But you never even asked me!"

"You are too young to know your own mind, so it had to be made up for you," he said, laughing. "Now listen, Laline dear. As soon as I saw you it went to my heart to think that you were wasting your youth and beauty and refinement among such coarse and sordid surroundings. An atmosphere of unpaid bills and greasy cards and cognac was not suited for so fresh and sweet a flower. I know your father thoroughly well. I won't talk about him lest I should hurt your feelings. But he is not the man to be entrusted with the care of a girl like you; and, had your dear mother lived to see you degraded into a half-starved kitchen drudge, friendless and neglected——"

"Don't—ah, don't!" cried Laline, passionately. "I can't bear it!"

By that outburst he understood how keenly the girl felt her position, and how well-timed had been his allusion to her lost mother. At once he followed up his advantage.

"You want a home, my dear little girl," he continued, drawing her hand through his arm and patting it affectionately. "This is not the place for you, and these are not the surroundings you ought to have. In my home you will enjoy what should be your position by right—that of an English lady! You will be petted and loved and cared for, you will have your own rooms and your own furniture, pocket-money to spend on pretty frocks and little presents for your friends, plenty of books to read, ample leisure and servants to wait upon you. My uncle, Alexander Wallace, is one of the richest bankers in London, and I am his favourite nephew and heir. You will have just what money you want now; and, later on, you will be an extremely rich woman, able to buy diamonds and horses and carriages and everything that you wish for in the world."

She turned her wondering eyes upon him.

"And what makes you offer me all these things?" she asked, simply.

"Because I love you," was the answer on the tip of his tongue; and he was angry with both her and himself because he could not speak it. Something in her absolute innocence and candour disarmed him. Almost for one moment he wished that he could tell her the whole truth in words of brutal frankness—"Because I am a ruined and dishonoured good-for-nothing, and my only hope of help consists in the immediate production of a wife at my rich uncle's house! I have chosen you because you are very pretty, and too young and ignorant of the world to disbelieve my lying statements. Also because you have a mercenary scamp of a father, who has sold you to me for my wife for a consideration! I don't pretend to love you; much of your society would bore me to death. But I don't intend to have much of your society; and you are just the good, sweet-faced, refined sort of a little girl to get round my uncle, and coax money out of him for my extravagances!"

This is what Wallace Armstrong longed for one brief moment to say. He felt that he should despise himself less than if he were successful in deceiving her. But he was not in the habit of following good impulses when they stood in the way of his interests; and he slipped again into lying, and cleverly affecting a kindly and tender interest in the girl, until Rue Planché was reached and they entered the street together.

Then suddenly Laline, who had been listening to him in silence, stopped. She had something she wished to say to him before she entered the house. Her tones were low and earnest, and her eyes were grave.

"It is all very strange and wonderful," she said, "that you, who have known me so short a time, and your uncle, who has never seen me, should love me and want me to be with you always. I don't deserve it, and I don't understand it! There must be so many beautiful girls who would be much more suitable to you than I can be. And—I can't understand why, and it seems dreadfully ungrateful—but all the time you are talking I seem to hear whispered in my ear, 'Don't listen; he does not mean what he says!' And though you are so kind, and though I long to go back to England, and cannot bear the life here, I—I am afraid of you!"

Although she half whispered the last words, there was no mistaking the startled look in her eyes. At that moment Armstrong positively disliked her, although her slight opposition only had the effect of making him more than ever determined to carry through his project.

What business had this ignorant child with intuitions warning her against him? Was it possible that under her demure and child-like exterior there lurked a spirit which would not easily be swayed and mastered by his own? Some hint of this flashed upon him as he watched her and listened to her faltering confession.

"You need never be afraid of me," he said, gently. "My ways are unpolished, I know. I have been knocking about in Australia for nearly five years, roughing it in the Bush and among miners. I wanted to see something of the world before marrying and settling down in England. But you shall cure my uncouth ways, and correct all my other defects, too, my dear Laline!"

Once in the house, and alone with Captain Garth in his den, Wallace's tone changed.

"For Heaven's sake give me a drop of brandy to wash out of my mouth the taste of all the lies I've been telling!" he cried, irritably. "It's my opinion, Garth, that little bread-and-butter prig of yours will be dear at the price!"

"She's a good child, and won't give you any trouble," Laline's father assured him, soothingly. "Have you broached the subject of the marriage to her yet?"

"Your fingers are itching to touch the two 'quid' a week, I see!" sneered Armstrong, as he tossed off a glass of neat cognac. "Oh, it's safe enough! She's delighted at the idea, which is more than I am. However, it's got to be gone through with. Unluckily, I've promised to take her and you to dine with me in the town this evening. Can't we put her off?"

Garth shook his head dubiously.

"Better not," he said. "If she's left alone, she'll get thinking—she's a great one for thinking and dreaming and fancying. Now that the thing's settled, she had better not be left alone this evening."

"As you like. But, mind, I've had enough of nursery courtship; and she mustn't expect to see much of me during the next few days. On the third, as soon as the ceremony is over, we will cross by the midday boat; and Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Armstrong will proceed to London and dine on fat veal, au Fils Prodigue! It will be time enough to tell Laline the day when her frocks are ready."

"Here's to your happy married life!" observed Garth, pouring himself out some brandy. "I hope you'll be kind to her, Armstrong, when I am not by to look after her!"

Up-stairs in her own room, Laline was kneeling before her little dressing-table of painted deal, gazing earnestly at her dead mother's portrait.

"Mother," she murmured, with tears in her eyes, "if you could only speak to me and advise me! Is it your voice which seems to tell me not to listen to Mr. Armstrong? And yet he seems so kind, and he is going to be so good and generous to papa! Such a fairy prince to such a poor little penniless Cinderella! How good it is of him to be so sorry for me—to sympathise with me so deeply about losing you, and to understand how much it would hurt you to know just how things have been since you left me! I remember how you once said to me, while I sat reading at your feet and you smoothed my hair, 'I hope and pray that my little girl may some day marry a good man, who will love her for herself, as a woman should be loved!' I have not remembered that speech until to-day. I wanted to wait for years before I thought of love and marriage for myself. There is no one to help me and advise me. Oh, mother, if you could only come back for one moment and tell me what to do!"

But the wills of two unscrupulous men were warring against the vague intuitions of an inexperienced girl; and every day the net was drawn more closely about Laline's feet, until the dawn of the thirtieth of August, her wedding-morning.

CHAPTER VI.

"Happy is the bride the sun shines on!"

Laline had heard the words somewhere, and remembered them as she woke very early on the thirtieth of August and saw the rain pouring in a steady flood upon the sun-dried earth.

She stood looking out on the mean little back street of St. Denis, commanded by her bedroom window. What outlook would there be from the windows of her new home? she wondered. Old Mr. Wallace's house was vast and dreary, situated over his banking-establishment in the Strand, London; from his nephew's brief description it was a paradise of luxury and comfort. Laline was all agog with excitement. She did not want to marry Wallace Armstrong; she was fascinated by and yet afraid of him. But she had become so convinced of his disinterested goodness to her, and she was so troubled by her father's debts and difficulties, that it seemed wicked to refuse his offer. And yet she had not said "Yes;" her "Yes" had been taken for granted, her father had effusively blessed her as the means of delivering him from his embarrassments, and Bénoîte and her few acquaintances could hardly shower enough congratulations upon her for her unique good fortune, which clearly astonished them.

"So rich a man, so handsome, so distinguished-looking, the heir to a millionaire, and nothing would content him but marrying la p'tite Gart! It was certainly very wonderful, although she had greatly improved in appearance since she had taken to long frocks and put her hair up."

Such were among the neighbours' comments; and every one seemed to envy Laline's good fortune. And yet this little beggar-maid could not subdue a secret fear of her King Cophetua; and as she stood now, looking very fair and saint-like in her long, white gown, with her bright hair floating about her shoulders, and the wistful look of her hazel eyes, a little quiver of dread passed over her as she thought of that unknown future to which the flying minutes were leading her.

Her wedding-dress, which was also to be her travelling-costume, lay on the bed, a plain blue serge of perfect fit and cut, in which she looked very tall and slim, a neat little blue straw hat, and a tweed travelling-cape. Laline had very little more real notion of love or of the responsibilities of a wife than the little Bertins next door; but her heart beat fast as she finished dressing and heard her future husband's voice as he entered the hall below.

"Don't I look grown-up?" she asked, as she ran down-stairs to greet him.

Wallace was in a bad temper that morning, having sat up until four o'clock losing money at cards. He kissed Laline's cheek without much effusion.

"I hope you are going to do your hair up," he observed. "You look about twelve with all that about your shoulders!"

"I haven't finished dressing it. It's all got to be coiled and twisted and pinned away. But I thought you would like to see me in my new gown."

"Well, don't waste time dressing! We have to be at the Consul's at ten; and the boat leaves at ten minutes past two o'clock. It's a beastly morning; I've got wet through coming over from the hotel!"

An hour later the three set forth in a closed fiacre, accompanied by an elderly sporting friend of Captain Garth, to whom the latter owed a good deal of money, and who went ostensibly as a witness, but in reality to make sure that Miss Garth's marriage with Alexander Wallace's nephew was not a creation of his friend and debtor's facile brain.

It was by no means a festive party. The bridegroom was morose and sullen, and did not once glance at the poor little bride, who sat in silence facing him, with a startled look in her eyes. Captain Garth was restless and voluble, striving, by his forced cheerfulness, to impart something like suitable brightness to the occasion; his friend Mr. Mitcham endeavoured to pay compliments to Laline, who received his well-meant efforts with a dreamy wonder that was not encouraging; the cab splashed through the muddy streets, the rain beat upon the windows, and at every yard traversed Laline's spirits sank to a low ebb, and her mind became more and more overshadowed by dismal forebodings of the future in store for her.

The Consul, a grey-haired fussy man, with a preoccupied manner, made short work of the ceremony; and to Laline, whose ideas of weddings were chiefly gained from those she had witnessed in the village church in Westmoreland, there was something bald and unmeaning in the total absence of any religious ceremony, something that savoured of a bargain made across a counter, and not of a holy sacrament to be honoured throughout a lifetime.

A few words spoken by an elderly gentleman in ordinary attire in the presence of his secretary, his clerk, Garth, Armstrong, Mitcham, and Laline, in a bare-looking office, a few statements made by a man and a woman, a few signatures and the payment of certain fees, and Laline Garth had become Laline Armstrong, wife of the tall, frowning young man who stood facing her with an aching head which had not yet recovered from the gambling and brandy-drinking of the preceding evening.

It was all startling, shocking, and painful to Laline. To the last they had not told her that hers was to be solely a civil marriage; to the last she had hoped that a clergyman might bless her in a holier name before she started on her new life. She was half a child still, but woman enough to feel deeply the inadequacy of such a ceremony as had just taken place to satisfy the requirements of her mind.

Almost as soon as the little party left the Consular residence the bridegroom announced his intention of going to his hotel, "to put his things together," a proposition which his father-in-law urgently combated.

"It isn't half-past ten yet!" growled Armstrong. "That Consul-fellow fixed the ceremony so infernally early! What in the world can one do with oneself in the Rue Planché on a pouring wet day like this?"

"There are plenty of little things to talk over," said Garth, slipping his arm through that of his son-in-law. "We have to drink success to your married life too," he added, insinuatingly.

"In that filthy brandy of yours? There's one good thing about going back to England, one can get something fit to drink there!"

With such bad grace Armstrong agreed to accompany his bride and her father home. Captain Garth was fully determined to keep Wallace securely under his eye until he saw the newly-married pair safely on board the boat bound for England. He had had some experience of the young man's moods, and knew that he was quite capable of getting extremely intoxicated in the town out of mere bravado, and in that condition presenting himself at the boat, or even, at the worst, of forgetting that appointment altogether.

"Poor little girl! She's caught a Tartar!" was Mitcham's mental comment, as he took leave of the bridal party, who, in another fiacre, splashed their way back to the High Town.

Here the little bride was dismissed to her room, to complete her packing. But, most unluckily for the plans of Messrs. Armstrong and Garth, it so chanced that almost as soon as Laline arrived up-stairs, and before she had even removed her hat, she remembered that she had left her keys in the salle-à-manger below, and forthwith she descended in search of them.

Nell the cat and her kitten were playing on the floor of the salle, and the little bride slipped on her knees beside them to bid them an affectionate and tearful farewell. Nell's kitten had an untidy habit of dragging any plaything it could find from one room to another about the house; as she caressed it, Laline remembered that her three keys on a little piece of string were among the kitten's favourite toys, which might account for the fact that they were at this present moment nowhere to be found.

On consulting Bénoîte, the latter declared that she had seen the "le p'tit chat" amusing itself with some keys on the floor of the salon that morning; but, as she never meddled with anything of Monsieur's, she had not rescued them. Clearly the salon was the place to search for the missing keys, and with that idea Laline turned the handle of her father's den.

The two men were sitting by Garth's desk with their heads bent over a paper; close at hand stood the cognac, a syphon, and two well-filled glasses. They seemed absorbed in the contents of the paper before them, and did not hear Laline's timid turning of the handle of the door. Before, however, she had opened it sufficiently wide to enable her to enter, some words, loudly spoken in her bridegroom's voice, arrested her attention, and made her suddenly stop as though turned to stone.

"You've only got to alter the date of the certificate from the thirtieth of August to the thirtieth of July, and the thing is done. I wrote to my uncle that I was married and that my wife was starving just twenty-four days ago. I didn't say how long I'd been married; and, as I landed at Marseilles in the middle of July on my way to Paris, I should have had plenty of time to get on here and through the ceremony by the thirtieth. Of course, Laline doesn't look as if she were starving, though I think you've kept her pretty short in the matter of food. But, if she's only sea-sick, she may look woebegone enough for the character!"

"Your difficulty will be," said Garth, "to persuade her to back you up in those few little necessary lies. For one thing, I have stated her age as seventeen; for another, she must be made to understand that she's been married a month, and has been starving in Boulogne for some days. But your toughest job will be to induce her to state that she's the orphan daughter of a clergyman, and that she met you coming home from Australia. It's almost a pity to have left all these very important details to the last moment."

"It's all the fault of that humbugging training of hers," growled Armstrong. "But I'm not going to let any whimpering school-girl spoil my prospects. Laline's my wife, and she's got to obey me. I shall impress upon her that my uncle, who is very particular, would never forgive me for marrying the daughter of such a man as you, ex-keeper of a gambling-club, where I got fleeced and ruined five years ago,—a man who daren't show his face in England; and I shall assure her that I invented this story of a dead parson-father in order to spare her natural feelings."

"Stop a bit!" exclaimed Garth, whose flesh-tints had deepened from crimson to purple while Armstrong was speaking. "I draw the line at that. It's bad enough to be deprived of my daughter's companionship; but I won't have her mind poisoned against me; understand that! You can tell her that I am connected with the turf, as I suggested before, and that your uncle has a Puritanical horror of horse-racing. But I won't have my memory blackened in the mind of the only kith-and-kin I have in the world!"

"I shall arrange it as I said!" said Armstrong obstinately, while he helped himself to more brandy. "You've sold me your daughter for a hundred a year, to be afterwards raised on two separate occasions. You wanted money, and so did I. Both of us were stone-broke. I wrote to my uncle, pretending I had a starving wife; he took me at my word, and promised to forgive me and provide for me if I would produce her. It was necessary to find a wife immediately, and desirable that she should be too young or too silly to ask questions. I settled on your daughter. The bargain was struck, and she passed from your keeping to mine, having filled her very proper mission of providing us both with money. But, now that she is mine, and I have saddled myself with a lanky, half-fledged school-girl, you have no more part in her, and I shall speak to her of you or of anybody else in just what terms I choose!"

"My daughter is my daughter until she leaves my roof, at least!" cried Garth his patience suddenly deserting him. "I'm sick of your bullying, blustering, hectoring ways! The settlement as to my future income is all signed and sealed and witnessed, and what is to prevent me from informing Laline of your true character before she leaves this house? What authority would you exercise over her if I told her your record? A gambler, a drunkard, a bully, and a forger, who has only escaped a felon's cell by the leniency of an uncle, who shipped him off to Australia in order to get rid of him!"

Captain Garth rose while he spoke, and made as though he were approaching the door, when, suddenly, Armstrong sprang from his seat with a smothered oath, and caught him roughly by the shoulder. Just for one moment Laline, gazing with distended eyes through the crack of the door, saw them, the faces of both excited and angry—Garth's with a red rage of indignation, and Armstrong's with a white cruelty which was infinitely more dangerous. Then, as the two men struggled, the sound of scuffling commenced, drowning Laline's flying footsteps, and enabling her to gain the staircase and her own apartment unseen and unheard.

One only idea filled her mind—to escape at that instant from both these men; and the strange lucidity of thought which comes to some emotional natures at moments of high tension seemed suddenly to make clear to her ways and means.

It was only a few minutes past eleven; she had heard the church-clocks chime the hour while she listened at the salon door. The Folkestone boat did not leave until ten minutes past two; if Armstrong and her father had their luncheon served to them at twelve, they would not think of her until past one. She would tell Bénoîte that she was going to call upon some friends before leaving Boulogne, and that she would be back in time for the boat; she would lock her bedroom-door and throw away the key in order to still further delay pursuit. But then—where was she to go?

All her thoughts and wishes pointed to England. And yet where in her native country was she to make her home until she could find means to earn her own living, as she had so long desired to?

Her uncle, the clergyman in Sussex, had held no communication with his sister since her marriage with Randolph Garth, and only as a last resource could Laline entertain the idea of seeking shelter under his roof. But there was a much-loved school-friend of the late Mrs. Garth, a widow named Melville, whose constant and affectionate letters had been much looked forward to by the little household in the Westmoreland village. Her messages to her old friend's little daughter had been of the kindest description. She kept a girls'-school in Norwood, and Laline remembered her address; but since her arrival in Boulogne she had had no communication with Mrs. Melville, who, Laline realised, would be shocked by the Bohemian mode of life in the Rue Planché.

Laline had not seen this lady since she was a very little child; but she remembered her as kind, and believed that, for her dead mother's sake, Mrs. Melville might be induced to help her, and to Mrs. Melville's protection Laline resolved to fly.

There was no time to be lost indeed. The girl could hear men's voices in angry discussion below. England must be reached as speedily as possible; and yet to travel by the Folkestone boat was clearly out of the question. The Calais route was shorter, if Laline could only get to Calais; and by that journey she would arrive in London more than hour before her pursuers, should they even guess that she had escaped thither.

Providentially, she recalled the fact that the train from Paris to Calais stopped at Boulogne for a few minutes before proceeding on its journey at a quarter to twelve o'clock. Laline's mind was at once made up; and in less time than it takes to tell it she had seized her cloak and gloves, locked her bedroom-door, slipped the key in her pocket, and astonished Bénoîte by darting into the kitchen and whispering a hurried message in her ear before leaving the house by the way into the Rue St. Denis.

Her entire worldly wealth consisted of one franc and fifty centimes; but her father's chronic impecuniosity had taught Laline the method by which the poor and improvident raise money, and, with a beating heart and a hot flush on her cheek, Laline stopped on her way to the station to change the two rings which Armstrong had given her, the turquoise and diamond engagement-ring, the hated wedding-ring, together with her much-loved mother's watch and chain, for money wherewith to buy her freedom.

For it seemed to Laline that she would be free of the horrible, loveless bargain which her marriage had been could she but tear from her finger the gold circlet which Wallace Armstrong had an hour ago placed there, could she but put the sea between herself and him, and, losing herself in the vastness of London, change her name and live out her life away from him and his evil influence.

Her heart was full of the most passionate indignation against both him and her father; of the latter, indeed, she hardly dared to think, so deeply did she resent his treatment of her; but of Armstrong she thought with a growing fear and horror, which dwelt upon the brutality of his speeches and the cruelty of his expression, until he seemed to her to be scarcely human. Rather death than a return to the care of either of those men! Terror lent wings to her feet, until, breathless, panting, but with a great sigh of relief, she jumped into the already moving train for Calais.

Fortune favoured the runaway. The passage was smooth enough under a gray, lowering sky, and Laline's heart leaped within her at sight of the white cliffs of her native land in the afternoon. Before six o'clock on that eventful day the Dover train steamed into Charing-Cross Station, and Laline Armstrong stepped out upon the platform, a slim, girlish figure, alone and friendless in the great city of London.

CHAPTER VII.

On a winter afternoon in London, rather more than four years after Laline's flight from Boulogne, a beautiful young woman stood in the ground-floor sitting-room of a London lodging-house, poring over the advertisements headed "Wanted" in a daily paper.

To the owner of the house, who was a relative of her old friend Mrs. Melville, of Norwood, this young lady was known as Miss Lina Grahame; but the reader has already made her acquaintance as Laline Garth, who, on a certain rainy morning in Boulogne, became the bride of Wallace Armstrong.

For four years Laline had earned her living in the girls'-school kept by her mother's old school-fellow—four well-occupied uneventful years, spent in the schoolroom, the dormitory, the Crystal Palace, and walks in the neighbourhood of Norwood, looking after the younger pupils, teaching French to the elder ones, preparing and correcting lessons and studying for examinations, with the duties of every hour in the day well-defined and clear, a healthy but monotonous life of gray routine and unchangeable discipline.

And now, at the age of forty-two, Mrs. Melville, Laline's employer and friend, had been carried off to Canada by a cousin and old sweetheart, who, finding himself at the age of forty-five a well-to-do widower, with four young children, had bethought him of that eminent instructress of youth, his widowed cousin, and in a very practical letter had proposed to come over to England, marry her, and take her back with him to Canada to look after his household and his children.

Such an offer, in the eyes of a buxom business-like woman of forty-two, was too advantageous to be refused. Mrs. Melville thought so; and, after speedily disposing of her house and selling the scholastic good-will and name to her senior teacher, she married her cousin with the utmost composure, and dutifully accompanied him to his Canadian home in order to undertake the mental and moral education of her four step-children.

To her junior governess, Miss Lina Grahame, Mrs. Melville gave on parting a travelling-clock, an ivory-bound prayer-book, and some excellent advice.

"I have only one fault to find with you, my dear," she had said, kindly—"you are too pretty. It grew to be quite awkward sending away the foreign masters because they made themselves silly about you, and the pupils noticed it. No—I don't tell you to cut your hair off or to wear blue spectacles; but I do say that I am not surprised that Miss Finch doesn't want to keep you on with the school, although you have such nice ways with the children and such a good French accent. I have myself been a very successful teacher—but then I have always been plain. Now, although it goes against the grain to say it, for a girl with your appearance I suppose that the most desirable profession is marriage."

Laline had suddenly flushed at Mrs. Melville's words, and then burst into a peal of laughter.

"Now, Mrs. Melville," she had cried, "that comes very oddly from you, who are just marrying for the second time! And I have often told you that it is useless to talk like that to me, as I shall never marry."

This parting conversation recurred to Laline as she turned over the advertisement-pages of the papers on this wintry afternoon in search of a suitable scholastic engagement.

"I wonder," she reflected, "that all those years I never let out that I was really married in talking to Mrs. Melville. I often felt strongly tempted to tell her, but that it seemed impossible that just a visit to a Consul's house, and some mumbled words, and a ring which I never wore, can mean a tie for life. It is not as if it had been in a church, and I had gone through a proper religious ceremony, with some kindly-faced clergyman to utter the beautiful words I know. I should have held that to be binding; but as to this, it all seems now like an incident in a half-forgotten dream. And yet I suppose that, if Wallace Armstrong is not dead, I really am his wife, and shall be as long as he and I both live. Yet if he saw me now he would not know me, and I think I should hardly recognise him. It seems absurd. Luckily I have never been the least little bit in love, and do not mean to be, except in day-dreams and with wholly imaginary persons. I never felt anything, I know, when Monsieur Marchand and Herr Pfeiffer got sentimental about me. I suppose they behaved like that just because I was what Mrs. Melville called pretty. She thinks my looks will stand in my way; she would have been amused at my impudence in answering yesterday this advertisement, which I see is inserted again to-day."

And, with her soft eyes sparkling with fun, Laline read over the somewhat remarkable insertion to which she had replied.

"Wanted, as companion and amanuensis to a lady, a well-educated young girl, refined and beautiful, of high character and gentle birth. Apply by letter, enclosing photograph, to Occult, Box 72,631, advertisement-office, Daily Post."

"Occult, whoever she may be, must be rather mad," Laline decided. "But I haven't a doubt that she will get dozens of answers. I wonder what she is like? There is an originality about the advertisement which is fascinating; and to be a companion and amanuensis sounds much nicer and more vague than to be teacher in a school."

At that identical moment the repeated double-knock of a telegraph-boy resounded through the hall. Then came a tap at the door of Laline's sitting-room, and a slatternly little servant entered and presented a telegram addressed to "Miss Grahame."

The message ran thus:—

"Re Occult's advertisement. Come at once to 21, Queen Mary Crescent, Kensington. Photograph and letter approved."

It was with excitement not unmingled with a curious sense of trepidation that Laline got out of a hansom cab, the driver of which had had considerable trouble in discovering the narrow cul-de-sac turning which led to St. Mary's Crescent—a row of old-fashioned houses, mellowed by age and smoke to a deep crimson colour. Near them waved the tall trees of Kensington Gardens, and before their narrow green-painted doors two steps led to a walk three feet wide and a stone-paved yard, over which the wheels of Laline's cab clattered noisily, awakening the protests of more than one pet-dog from the quiet houses into which the noise from the busy thoroughfare of the High Street came only as a distant and soothing murmur.

As Laline laid her hand on the knocker of number seven, she became suddenly embarrassed as to the name of its occupant. Could she ask for Miss or Mrs. Occult?

"I have come in answer to a telegram about an advertisement," she finally announced, as the door was opened by a neatly-dressed parlour-maid, and Laline found herself in a very small square hall dimly lighted by an oil-lamp, and furnished with tapestry-hangings and two oak settles of old-fashioned make.

The servant opened the door of a room to the right of the entrance, and asked the visitor to step inside. Almost at the same moment a young lady darted down the staircase into the hall, so swiftly and suddenly as to suggest the idea that she had been on the watch for the visitor, and joined Laline at the door of the room into which she was being shown.

"It is my aunt who has sent for you," the new-comer whispered confidentially to Laline, after carefully closing the door behind her; "and I do hope she will engage you! The moment I saw your face at the door I took such a fancy to you!"

The speaker was a girl of apparently Laline's own age, well developed, and of medium height, with curiously lithe feline movements. Her dress, of yellow-green serge, was loosely draped about her and caught here and there by silver buckles, her skin was white as paper and framed in an untidy halo of silky yellow-red hair. Regular features, oddly-gleaming green-gray eyes under pale-yellow lashes, and narrow curved red lips completed an ensemble which to Laline was at once repellent and attractive.

"If this was the niece, what would the aunt be?" she asked herself, fascinated by the strange brightness of the girl's eyes. But, as Laline gazed, her new acquaintance suddenly lowered her white eyelids, and the trick struck the other as affected and insincere.

The same cat-like quality which characterised her movements was shown also in her voice, which was marked by a purring and caressing intonation.

"Do you know who my aunt is?" she asked.

And then, as Laline shook her head, the red-haired girl enunciated her aunt's name with much impressiveness.

"She is Mrs. Vandeleur—Mrs. Sibyl Vandeleur."

The name meant nothing to Laline, but she saw that the red-haired girl expected her to be struck by it, and she hastened to explain her unmoved attitude.

"I know nothing of London celebrities," she said; "I have not lived in London since I was a child."

"Oh, that accounts for your not having heard of her!" said the other, evidently disappointed. "My aunt is extremely well known; and I should have thought that, to any one who reads the papers——"

"But I don't read the papers!" put in Laline. "I have never had time."

The other girl drew back her head, and appeared to be studying her.

"How delightful!" she murmured, sympathetically. "I should like to be like that—it leaves so many things to be found out. You have lived all your life at Norwood, haven't you?"

The question was asked with such point-blank directness, but, at the same time, with such an appearance of spontaneous simplicity, that Laline was a little taken aback. With the strange intuition which she had retained from her childish days, she already distrusted the apparent friendliness of this picturesque stranger, and she accordingly framed her answer in vague and reserved tones.

"I have lived for a part of my life at Norwood," she answered.

"At a girls'-school? That must be a dull life, but nice and restful for the nerves. Have you any nerves? This house is the worst possible place for you if you have."

The last words were uttered in a very low voice, after a quick glance round the room.

"I don't think I am particularly nervous," Laline replied.

"But you look nervous," remarked the red-haired girl. "Those delicate faces, with pale-pink skins and dark eyes and auburn hair, are always the nervous ones. Now I am colourless and lymphatic, so this house doesn't hurt me!"

"And why is it likely to hurt me?" inquired Laline, calmly.

"Hush—don't talk so loudly! I liked your face so much that I thought I ought to speak to you just to put you on your guard!"

She glanced round her again, and, drawing nearer to Laline, breathed rather than spoke in her ear—

"Are you afraid of ghosts?"

Before Laline could answer, a thin but silvery voice broke upon the silence, and caused the red-haired girl to start guiltily from her companion's side.

"Go to your room, Clare—I wish to speak to Miss Grahame alone!"

Without a word Clare stole away, leaving Laline tête-à-tête with a lady whom she rightly judged to be "Occult," otherwise Mrs. Sibyl Vandeleur.

Standing before the picturesque background of dark-red plush curtains which draped the folding-doors through which she had entered, Mrs. Vandeleur appeared to Laline one of the most picturesque figures she had ever seen. Rather under the medium height, and of extreme thinness and fragility, she looked more like a spirit than a woman, an effect heightened by her powdered hair, dressed loosely and high upon her head, her piercing, dark eyes, ivory-white skin, and the soft silvery-gray draperies swathed round her slender form. In her thin hand she held a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, the handle of which was thickly encrusted with turquoise and garnets in an old-fashioned gold setting, and through these she peered in a bird-like manner at Laline, with her head poised a little on one side.

"What is your name," she asked—"your full name, given you at baptism?"

The terms of the question rather disconcerted Laline, and there was a perceptible hesitation in her voice as she replied—

"I am called Lina Grahame."

"That is not your real name!"

"It is the one by which I am known."

"That means," said Mrs. Vandeleur, putting down her eye-glasses and tapping her thin fingers with them, "that you have reasons for concealing your identity?"

"I had at one time, Mrs. Vandeleur, and I have now got used to the names of Lina Grahame, to which I have some right!"

"The surname was a family name?"

"Yes!"

Grahame was indeed the maiden name of Laline's mother, and the girl was startled and interested by Mrs. Vandeleur's surmise.

"I was often called Lina as a child," she added, quickly, to forestall Mrs. Vandeleur's interrogatories.

"The mystery concerns a man," said the little lady in gray, peering again at Laline through her gold-rimmed glasses. "And yet your face——Take off your glove—no, the left hand—and let me look at your lines!"

Laline obeyed. As she did so, with startling distinctness there flashed back upon her memory a similar scene in which she had taken part more than four years ago. In her mind's eye she saw it all again—the hot stirless afternoon in mid-August, the sun's rays shining over a long stretch of gleaming sand and peeping under the straw hat-brim of a big black-haired Englishman with insolent, bright blue eyes. By his side sat a thin over-grown girl of sixteen, listening in rapt silence while he told her fortune by the lines of her hand, and prophesied that all her life through she would be haunted by the influence of a stronger will than hers, and that, before the age of seventeen, she would marry a man who would never cease to dominate her life until death should part them.

Half dreamily, with her thoughts elsewhere, she began to listen while Mrs. Vandeleur, in a level, monotonous voice, as though speaking words dictated to her rather than spontaneous utterances, began to repeat aloud what she professed to read in Laline's hand.

"Early in your life," she murmured, "you were subjected to strangely-opposing influences. Your career has been unlike that of girls of your age. Let me look at your eyes; the light is bad, and I am near-sighted but, before I see them, I will tell you their colour—it will be that of the darkest hazel-nut, a mossy green, with red-brown lights here and there. Do you dream much and vividly?"

"Constantly. And by day as well as by night, I am ashamed to say!" Laline answered, laughing. "I am a born dreamer."

"You are just the person I want!" exclaimed Mrs. Vandeleur, a touch of restless excitement showing itself in her voice and manner. "My niece Clare cannot dream. A dreamer—a day-dreamer—must have a pure white soul, must be untouched by the world, and far above all monetary considerations. What is your age? I could find out by your hands, but I know that I can believe your words."

"I was twenty last August."

"You look younger; you have not yet lost your child-mind. You have never been in love—oh, I know you haven't—you need not tell me!"

"I have certainly never been in love with any one alive."

"That means that you have had ideals, and have loved them in dreams and waking fancies?"

"Sometimes."

"Keep your ideals for your dreams, child, and love them there. In real life you will never meet them. There is but little ideality in end-of-the-century Englishmen. We read the old fairy-tale of the Briar-Rose Princess, and are glad that she awakes at the Prince's kiss. But she was much happier dreaming. In her dreams he and she would never grow old, would never fall sick, would never tire of loving, would never die: autumn winds would never blow down summer leaves, or spring flowers wither at the touch of frost. Life is full of sadness, full of disillusions! Only in dreams and fancies can true happiness be found!"

Something in the sadness of Mrs. Vandeleur's sweet voice brought the tears to Laline's eyes. This woman, with her fairy-like appearance and disconnected talk, her pretensions to sibylline magic, her ready intuition, quick observation, and random guesses at truths she could not know, possessed an undeniable fascination, to which older and more experienced brains than Laline's were wont to succumb. The girl felt that she had met a friend, and one wholly in sympathy with an especial side of her nature; and Mrs. Vandeleur, for her part, had discovered just such a personality as she required, sensitive, impressionable, yet maidenly, reserved, and proud.

"You will make your home here with me, of course," she said, patting Laline's hand. "Bring your things here directly; your room has been waiting for you a long time. Fifty pounds a year and all your expenses. You won't find it too much, for I shall want you always to be picturesquely dressed; but come to me when you require more, and you shall have it. No—I ask no references. Your face and your hand are sufficient references for me. I shall study your hand when I mean to know more. One thing I have learned from it already: in the troubled time before you will want me as a friend—you will come to me for counsel, and I will give it."

CHAPTER VIII.

Laline dined that evening with Clare Cavan, Mrs. Vandeleur's niece.

"Aunt Cissy never eats before people," the latter explained. "She thinks it's a great pity we have to eat at all. She's a dear sweet thing, and I quite agree with her that eating is very mundane; but we can't all of us live on air. Aunt Cissy tries to, but even she can't quite succeed. I call her Aunt Cissy when we are alone because her real name is Cecilia. But since she became celebrated she has taken the name of 'Sibyl,' which is more suggestive of mystery, you know."

There was a veiled sneer in the words which made Laline glance quickly across the table at Clare's face. But Miss Cavan was eating her dinner with a placid countenance untouched by sarcasm, her light-yellow eyelashes veiling her eyes.

"I am perfectly beside myself with delight that aunt has chosen you!" Clare presently remarked. "You have no idea what a number of answers she had to her advertisement. That was through putting in the word 'beautiful.' Such old bags sent their photographs, too, and answers and pictures are still pouring in by every post. Did Aunt Cecilia tell you anything about the nature of your duties?"

"No."

"That is just like her! She is always so vague. Perhaps, when you know all about this house, you won't stay. It's rather uncanny. The only servants aunt can keep are an old Scotch cook, who doesn't know what nerves mean, and the maid who opened the door to you. She stays because she's afraid to run away."

"Afraid?"

"Yes. Aunt Cecilia is a Devonshire woman, and can put a wish upon any one she's vexed with. She leaves the most valuable things about; but though at one time she was always changing her parlour-maids, no one has ever dared to steal anything from her private sitting-room up-stairs. You'll understand why when you've once been inside it."

Clare's white face grew, if possible, a shade whiter as she spoke, lowering her voice to a very subdued key.

"Are you afraid of your aunt too?" Laline asked.

Clare shivered and glanced towards the door.

"Horribly!" she replied, in a very low voice. Then she gave a little nervous laugh. "It sounds absurd to you, doesn't it? But Aunt Cecilia is a wonderful woman! I am an orphan, and she was my mother's younger sister. My mother often told me how Cissy used to terrify her as a child by prophesying things. Well, she has cultivated her powers in that direction until she almost forgets she has a body at all; she is all mind and spirit and that sort of thing, you know! Won't you have some more apple-pie? Aunt Cissy's cook makes such capital pastry, it's a pity to neglect it! As I was saying, my aunt, who isn't forty yet, in spite of her powdered hair, went in for spiritualism and all that sort of thing quite early. She was the seventh child of a Scotchwoman and a Devonshire man, and both my grandparents were dreadfully superstitious. Aunt Cissy was very pretty, my mother told me, in a sort of ethereal way—a figure like yours, I should say, only not so tall and a little thinner—you are so charmingly slender that I feel a great fat thing beside you!"

"I think you have a beautiful figure!" said Laline, simply.

"Oh, it's very sweet of you; but there are too many curves about me! I know I must appear very plump and earthly in Aunt Cissy's eyes. Men like curves, I know; but then I don't care about pleasing men a little bit—they simply bore me when they try to make love to me! Do you feel the same about them?"

"I don't know. No man has ever tried to make love to me."

And then Laline, although she had answered with perfect truthfulness, suddenly blushed, remembering that she was actually a married woman. Clare noted the blush and decided that her new friend was lying.

"I am so fond of women," she proceeded, with apparent enthusiasm. "Men are all very well in their way—I don't mind talking to them for a few minutes; but for a friend, a companion, a confidant, give me a woman. You and I ought to get on splendidly together. We are both orphans—at least, I am an orphan—and your parents are dead, are they not?"

Again Laline flushed deeply.

In truth she had neither seen nor heard anything of her father since that fateful thirtieth of August more than four years ago. But she was by no means inclined to confide in Miss Cavan, whom she admired but instinctively mistrusted; and she therefore contented herself by stating that her mother was dead, and that she had not seen her father for some years.

"How sad!" cooed Clare. "Well, to go back to Aunt Cissy. When she was five- or six-and-twenty she married Mr. Vandeleur, a distinguished man, a good deal older than herself, who held a good government post in India. Out there Aunt Cissy got friendly with Buddhist priests and jugglers and snake-charmers and all sorts of wonderful people, and picked up the most interesting things travelling about the country. After some years of study at occult subjects she found out that Mr. Vandeleur's soul didn't soar high enough to reach the rarified atmosphere she had herself attained, and that comparative solitude was essential to her. So she left him quite amicably in India and came and settled in Kensington, to pursue her studies undisturbed. I believe he had a liver, and was very fond of eating, and had most conservative and orthodox notions. So that altogether he must have been a trial to Aunt Cissy."

"And have you lived here with your aunt ever since?"

"Oh, no," returned Clare, opening her glittering green eyes; "I have only been with Aunt Cissy a few months, since my mother died in Dublin last summer and left me in her care. I am not in mourning, because Aunt Cissy objects to it. She doesn't believe in death, you know! That is one of her notions. She thinks that dead people are all about us in the air, and that, if we keep our spirits sufficiently clear, we are able to see and talk to them. It makes my flesh creep even to think of it!"

"Do you do any work for your aunt?" asked Laline, wondering greatly what the nature of her own duties would be.

"No. I wanted to, but she found me too 'earthly.' That means, I suppose, that I am not skinny enough to please her," Clare added, rather viciously—"at least," she corrected herself, glancing at Laline's slim figure, "I don't exactly mean skinny—I mean spiritual-looking."

Laline burst into a hearty laugh.

"I don't in the least mind being called skinny, I assure you," she said, good-humouredly.

The two girls offered a very marked contrast in appearance. Clare Cavan's startling fairness and pallor, her abundant hair, red by day, but converted by artificial light into a ripe gold, the voluptuous curves of her figure, her aquiline features, almost Egyptian in profile from the sharp outlines of the nose and chin and curled upper lip, her scarlet mouth that constantly smiled, her heavy white eyelids drooping over her brilliant eyes, and complexion "pale with the golden gleam of an eyelash dead on the cheek"—all these items combined to form a most picturesque and unique personality, and a type of beauty certain to provoke discussion and arouse in some keen admiration, and in others a feeling akin to repulsion.

In Laline Armstrong, or "Lina Grahame," as she now called herself, there was no element to provoke spontaneous dislike. A little above the medium height, her girlish slenderness made her appear taller than she really was; but her quick, graceful movements were rather those of a short than a tall person. Her habitual expression was alternately eager and dreamy. Her soft auburn hair, which had grown some shades darker within the past few years, was coiled neatly at the back of her shapely head, and rippled in natural waves above her broad brow. Her nose was short and straight, her mouth rather large than small, and full of charming curves, humorous and tender, her chin was round, and under her level dark eyebrows her eyes, of wonderful depth and darkness, looked out with a wistful intentness, accentuated by the comparative shortness of her vision. When Laline was amused she laughed outright, showing two rows of dazzling teeth; whereas Clare never passed beyond a smile, in spite of her native Irish humour.

In colouring, too, the girls offered a marked contrast. Laline's complexion was of a pinky fairness, varying from cream to a rose-flush in her cheeks, which came and went with the least excitement. Her voice was lower in pitch, and of a more contralto quality than that of Clare, who to the silvery sweetness of Mrs. Vandeleur's tones added a touch of caressing "Irish blarney" in her intonation.

"I should so very much like to help Aunt Cissy in her work!" resumed Miss Cavan. "And it seems rather hard that I can't just because I am rather plump, doesn't it? In evening-dress I am only twenty-two inches round the waist—and that isn't absolutely unwieldy, is it?"

"Not at all," said Laline.

She was beginning to wonder whether she herself would get discharged from her post if she grew any fatter; but she had already decided that in this household she must get used to surprising incidents and alarming statements, so she made no further comment at the time.

Clare was going to an evening "At home" at nine o'clock, she informed her new acquaintance.

"And I shall be so grateful if you will help me to dress and give me your opinion of my frock. It is a deep-red velvet, cut square. Rather daring with my red hair, isn't it? But I think the effect is nice."

Susan, the maid, entered at that moment with a message to the effect that Mrs. Vandeleur would be glad if Miss Grahame would come up-stairs to see her in her study.

"I can't come with you," said Clare—"I've got to dress; and, besides, aunt hasn't asked me. But I shall just pop my head in before I go. I hope she won't frighten you too much! She's dreadfully weird at times; and I believe she drove one of her secretaries into an asylum. Oh, you're not the first secretary she's had by at least a dozen! They've all been too mundane or too unimpressionable, or too illiterate or not beautiful enough, or else Aunt Cissy has sent them quite off their heads and they've been packed off to asylums! Of course she might have saved herself all the expense of a secretary by employing me—indeed, that was poor mamma's idea when she left me in Aunt Cissy's care, and my aunt's idea, too. But, as soon as she saw me, she wouldn't hear of my touching her precious papers and things! However, I am beginning to do her a great deal of good socially by going out and talking of my wonderful aunt, and making people want to consult her; so that I am worth having after all."

Laline was convinced by this speech that Miss Cavan deeply resented her aunt's refusal to employ her as her secretary, and that she cherished a keen jealousy against any other applicant for the post, and would not be loath to warn them away by exaggerating its difficulties and dangers. But Laline's life had taught her self-control, and it was with a firm step and composed manner that she proceeded to the room on the first floor, given up to Mrs. Vandeleur's "studies."

The apartment occupied the entire first floor of the house, which was by no means large. Folding-doors had once filled an archway in the middle of the room, but they were now replaced by hangings of tapestry. Dark oak panelling, mellowed by age, went up to within a few feet of the ceiling, across which the stars in their courses were painted upon a midnight sky, while a frieze of tapestry, which in faded colours and mediæval outlines pictured the "Dance of Death," completed the wall-decoration of the apartment.

The room was full of furniture, chiefly of oak and elaborately carved, and many curious old-fashioned cabinets and cupboards of various shapes and sizes were to be found in the corners and against the walls. A high carved oak mantelshelf was surmounted by a mystical picture, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, but which was named the "Awakening of the Spirit World;" and everywhere, scattered over the mantelpiece, on shelves, within glass-covered antique tables, and in the cabinets about the room, there was a multitude of curios, of old-fashioned charms and relics, of amulets, and metal images of roughly-beaten gold, ornaments from the East, fat little gods in soapstone and ivory, bead fetiches of North American Indians, and delicately-carved skulls and skeletons in German work of the Middle Ages—a heterogeneous collection, to which the superstitions of the entire world seemed to have each contributed their part.

In a deep arm-chair of dark oak, with a high-carved back, the little priestess of the room sat among cushions of Oriental brocade. The chair was so large and the little lady so small and fragile that she seemed to Laline to encamp rather than to sit in it; but the darkened wood formed a most effective background for her pale face and powdered hair. Mrs. Vandeleur was writing at a table littered with papers; but as Laline entered she laid down her pen and put her gold-rimmed spectacles on the table.

"Sit down, child," she said, pointing to a low-cushioned seat near the wide fireplace, furnished with red tiles and shining brass-dogs, upon which logs of wood were burning, it being one of Mrs. Vandeleur's principles to ignore the existence of gas and of coals alike—"sit down, and let me look at you! To-morrow morning you must come to me for money and buy something else to wear. I detest black, and black silk most of all!"

"What would you like me to wear?" asked Laline, smiling.

"White—white in soft folds. There should be no stiff outlines about you; your skin and hair supply the requisite colour."

"But white will get very dirty in London, surely!" Laline objected.

"Not if you have enough white dresses," returned her employer, loftily. "Go to-morrow and buy four, of creamy-white nun's veiling. I will make a sketch to show you how they must be made. Presently you shall have others. I should like to see you in white velvet," she concluded, gazing dreamily at Laline through her jewelled eye-glasses, which she invariably used in preference to her spectacles when not alone or not engaged in writing.

"White velvet would be very expensive, I am afraid," Laline was beginning, when Mrs. Vandeleur cut her short.

"Leave off thinking of money altogether!" she said. "What does money matter? If we can have the necessaries of life—and among them I count beautiful surroundings, which are essential to a woman of my nature—of what use is extra money? Look at my niece Clare. She is forever drawn this way and that by two mastering passions—love of men and their admiration and desire of money. The conflict will spoil her beauty. Already it is so marked in its results that her presence troubles me. The beings by whom in the spirit and the flesh I am surrounded must be without harrowing passions or disturbing longings. Tell me—how does this room affect you? Stand up, look about you, and speak out quite fearlessly."

Laline rose and looked about her. As she did so she became conscious of a singular perfume, faint but penetrating, which filled the air. This arose in part from the many sandal-wood ornaments and receptacles about the room, and also from Mrs. Vandeleur's practice of burning joss-sticks and pastilles.

As Laline afterwards learned, her employer was also much addicted to the use of Eastern perfumes, high in price and difficult to obtain, with which her hair, hands, and clothing were liberally sprinkled. The wood logs, too, seemed to emit a fragrant odour, and the mingled scents gave to the atmosphere a quality peculiar to that room, and with which Laline ever afterwards associated it.

A lamp of ruby glass, suspended by silver chains from the ceiling on the farther side of the tapestry-hangings, supplied light to the farther portion of the room, illuminating feebly the spacious bookcase, the low divans, the corner cupboards, and the tall brazier, which formed its chief furniture. The standing-lamp of Mrs. Vandeleur's writing-table was shaded by amber silk, and, with the two unlit wax-candles in silver stands on her table, gave, but for the dancing firelight, the sole means of illuminating the apartment.

Laline stood for a few seconds gazing about her at the crystal balls, the strange little ebony wands, the framed parchment-scrolls inscribed with cabalistic signs, the heavy volumes in moth-eaten covers, and the many other signs of abstruse and unwholesome studies into the unknown which met her eye. Then she turned slowly, fascinated by the piercing gaze of Mrs. Vandeleur; and, drawing insensibly a little nearer to her, she scanned that lady's face.

"The room is beautiful and interesting," she said, "but it affects me rather unpleasantly. I feel oppressed and stifled, as though a weight had been put upon my heart and I could not breathe. There are so many things about that I do not understand, and some that fascinate but half frighten me. I feel—"

She hesitated, blushed, then stopped outright.

"Go on!" said Mrs. Vandeleur, imperatively.

"Well, it sounds tactless and discourteous, but I feel as if I would rather be on a wide common, with the wind blowing a little rain into my face, than here, and that, if I passed much of my life here, I might grow into an idle, listless dreamer, with all the best side of my nature sent to sleep forever."

"Silly child!" said Mrs. Vandeleur, holding out her little hands and gently drawing the girl down on her knees beside her chair. "But yours is just the temperament I want. My secretary, my companion, who will take down my ideas and clothe them in suitable language, must not be a mere echo of myself. I am at present engaged on two great works. One is to be called Necromancy in the Nineteenth Century, and the other The Occult Vision. With a mind like yours, fresh and untainted by the world, to supplement my own, I can reach higher altitudes of thought. But for this purpose your mind and spirit must be as clear as a rivulet, in which I may read my changing fancies mirrored. While engaged with me on this work, no thoughts of either of those disturbing elements, love or money, must derange your spirit. I can read in your eyes that you are not mercenary; as to love—you have never loved, and yet you are keeping back some secret from the world and from me."

Looking closely into the girl's eyes, Mrs. Vandeleur softly smoothed her forehead with her fingers. Laline was conscious of a sudden and overpowering desire to confide in the weird little lady, which she rightly attributed to the magnetism of the latter's touch and gaze. Disengaging herself by a quick gesture, she rose to her feet, and spoke with ringing earnestness and unexpected decision.

"If I am to help you in your work, Mrs. Vandeleur," she said, "it is of no use to begin by trying to paralyse my will and make it subject to yours. On such terms I could not stay with you. I think your work is very interesting and fascinating, and that you are exceedingly kind. I know quite well that I am very easily influenced on one side of my character; but I have another side, too, or I should not be here now, nor should I have taken my life into my own hands as I did four years ago. As to money, I think as you do. As to love and marriage, they are not for me; they are shut out of my life altogether. I must not think of them either now or at any future time. If I have a secret, it is not one to be ashamed of. Why, then, try to force it from me?"

"I know your secret," said Mrs. Vandeleur, quietly—"you are already married!"

CHAPTER IX.

That night, when Clare Cavan returned at midnight from her reception, she thanked the yawning Susan for sitting up for her, and softly proceeded to the top floor, where were three bedrooms occupied respectively by Mrs. Vandeleur's two servants, and by her niece and her new secretary.

Laline was in bed but not asleep. She lay awake, thinking with interest of her new surroundings. Her work that evening had been writing at the dictation of Mrs. Vandeleur a long treatise concerning second sight. Part of it she had understood, and part had been wholly incomprehensible to her, as she was not yet accustomed to the semi-mystical jargon in which Mrs. Vandeleur clothed her ideas.

Very little more talk of a personal nature had passed between her and her employer. Laline had neither denied nor agreed to the latter's assertion that she was already married, nor had the little lady again alluded to the subject, contenting herself by warning her new secretary against placing any confidence in Clare Cavan, who, she declared, had been born under an opposing star to that of Laline.

It was all very new and fascinating to the imaginative young girl, coming as this experience did after the monotonous drudgery of a suburban day-school, and so much excited had she been by the incidents of the evening that she was fully awake when, at a little after twelve o'clock, a tap at her bedroom door heralded the entrance of Clare Cavan.

Mrs. Vandeleur's niece was shading her eyes with one hand from the light of a candle carried in the other. Her gown of crimson velvet was out very low in the square front, displaying to full advantage the startling whiteness and smooth texture of her skin, and by the candle-light her eyes sparkled like green topazes.

"Do wake up!" she whispered. "I've something most interesting and wonderful to tell you—I'm in love!"

Placing her candle on the dressing-table, she sat in a chair near, and, clasping her hands round her knees, proceeded to purr out her story.

"It was Lady Moreham's reception, as I told you. She goes in for artists and celebrities, and she has an immense belief in Aunt Cissy, and consults her about everything. Artists, you know, always rave about me; they have the bad taste to admire my horrid red hair! But, to explain really what happened last night, I must go back. It's lovely to have at last a girl of my own age to talk to and confide in! You must know that Aunt Cissy gets cards for all private views and that sort of thing; she seldom goes, except to quite the most exclusive; but I use her tickets. I simply adore pictures! Well, about two months ago, I was looking at a lovely fat Paris Bordone lady in an old-master exhibition. I didn't really mean to attract attention to myself, because the lady in the picture had my coloured hair. Do you know Paris Bordone's beauties? They are always fat and white-skinned, in clothes much too tight for them, with red-velvet dresses and pearls in their red hair. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me—a man's voice—say, 'By George, what colouring! The very replica of the picture! She's superb!' Of course, I never thought he could be talking of me; but I turned round and found the man who spoke looking full at me. Such a handsome man! Tall, with a splendid figure, a square jaw, black hair, blue eyes—an Irish combination that I love, though in this case I've learned he gets it from his Highland descent. He stared at me so hard that I could hardly get my eyes away; he was really looking at me so intently that I was quite fascinated. At last I felt I was blushing deeply, and he too flushed. His friend touched his arm, and that seemed to recall him to himself, for he moved away, and I saw him no more that day. It was the strangest thing, for I fell a good deal in love with him on the spot, and somehow felt certain that I should meet him again. So sure I was, that I had my new evening gown, the one I have on now, made just like the Paris Bordone picture simply because I felt convinced that some day he would see me in it. Aunt Cissy would be able to explain the meaning of that sort of feeling. I only know that I felt it."

"And did you never meet him again until to-night?" asked Laline, sitting up in bed, interested, as are all girls, in anything in the nature of a love-story.

"Once only. He was coming out of the South Kensington Museum late on a Saturday afternoon, and I had been shopping in the Brampton Road. He passed quite close to me, and knew me in a moment, as I could see, and I was so disappointed that he did not speak to me."

"How could he," exclaimed Laline, scandalised, "since you are a lady, and, I suppose, he is a gentleman? It would have been an insult which you would have resented."

Clare eyed her curiously under half-lowered white eyelids, and began taking the hairpins out of her hair.

"Of course I should!" she answered, after a slight pause. "But he didn't. Then I went to the South Kensington Museum constantly on nearly all the free days for more than a month, until I knew all the cases near the entrances by heart. But I never met him, and I began really to despair until to-night."

"And were you introduced to him?" asked Laline, much interested. Her notions of what was right and becoming in a young gentlewoman had been considerably startled by Clare's confessions; but she was a sympathetic listener all the same.

"As soon as I walked into the room I saw him," replied Clare, triumphantly. "He was watching me all the while I was shaking hands with Lady Moreham; and only a few moments after I could feel rather than see that he was being brought up to be introduced by Miss Moreham, who was helping her mother to receive. He had asked to be introduced to me, as I knew he would. And fancy! I had supposed all the time that he was only an artist, but I learned that he is in a very good position, and will have heaps of money some day. Isn't that delightful?"

"Why?"

"Why? Because I adore him! His eyes are perfectly lovely—they sparkle like blue stars! And he has a trick of listening very attentively when one is talking, and just drawing his black eyebrows together while he stares hard at one's face, which is irresistible!"

"And is he in love with you?"

"Of course he is! He fell in love with me the first moment he saw me."

"Did he tell you so?"

"Do you think one requires to be told that sort of thing?" inquired Clare, disdainfully. "He looked it—that was enough. Before I left, Miss Moreham contrived to compliment me on my conquest. She told me that he is next of kin to one of the richest men in London."

"And what will your aunt say?"

"Oh, there is nothing that aunt would like better than to see me safely married to somebody with money! That is why she buys me nice clothes, and sends me to 'At homes' and dances and private views. She wants to get me off her hands. In spite of her dreaminess, you'll find later on that there's a lot of the wisdom of the serpent about Aunt Cissy."

"Shall you tell her about this?"

"I shall have to, for he's going to call either to-day or the next day. He has heard a great deal about aunt, he said, and is very anxious to know her, as he is awfully interested in all about palmistry and divination and that sort of thing. It is my belief that he's going to consult her as to our future lives. Oh, I shall never sleep to-night! I feel so terribly excited! I love his voice; it's deep and sweet, with a certain firmness; and, when I gave him my hand in saying 'Good-bye,' he didn't give a conventional handshake, but held it tight a long time. I hadn't the heart to draw it away, as I dare say I should have done. It made me thrill all over. I shall simply count the minutes until I see him again!"

There was no doubt in Laline's mind as to her companion's sincerity. Clare's eyes shone with a tender, reflective light, which marvellously enhanced her beauty; and when at last she left off talking of her conquest and retired to her own room, it was with the avowed intention of dreaming of her new admirer.

Laline for her part lay awake for a long time after Clare's departure. Just the least little pang of regret, which, however, was far removed from envy, shot across the young girl's heart as she reflected that her position in life would always be that of confidant and never of principal in love-affairs. How short a time it had taken that journey in the fiacre in the rain to the house of the English Consul; and yet the effects of that one half-hour were to be stamped upon her entire life! Of her father she often thought, sometimes with anxiety not untouched by self-reproach. She did not wish ever to see him again, nor could she school herself to forgive the callous greed with which he had designed to make a bargain of his motherless child. But he was her father—her mother had once loved him; and Laline often wondered how he had weathered the rain-cloud of debts and difficulties which had gathered over his head.

But of the man whom that same fateful visit had made her lord and master Laline hardly ever thought at all. Her life at Norwood had been too busy to allow her to indulge either in recollections of the past or dreams of the future, and in the three short weeks that she had known Wallace Armstrong she had seen so little of him that it was not surprising if her memory of him had become blurred and indistinct. The fact that he too was bound for life to a lost mate had hardly ever occurred to her; the bond was of his own choosing, and a man who, according to her father's accusations, was a forger and a cheat, might well be expected to ignore any ties which brought no profit to him.

But to-night for the first time the idea of this detested husband, this man who, in order to secure for himself an income, had married an ignorant child, for whom he cared nothing, that a lie might be turned to a truth and a victim provided, haunted Laline's wakeful spirit. She was as yet too young and too entirely fancy-free to lament with any bitterness the lifelong loneliness which Wallace Armstrong's selfish action had entailed upon her. But something in Clare's joyous description of her new love-affair recalled with painful clearness to Laline the fact that she herself was set apart from all other girls, and that never to her ears would a man's lips murmur words of love.

"I can't understand Clare's nature," she said to herself, as she lay with wide-open eyes fixed upon the darkness. "Of course I must never let myself grow fond of any man, but if I were as free as she and really cared, I could not speak of it to a stranger, and especially a stranger I did not like! And I feel sure that Clare doesn't like me, in spite of her friendliness, and that she is very jealous of me with her aunt. Life in Queen Mary Crescent will be much more difficult and complicated than it was at Norwood. But this house is very quiet, at least, and no one will dream of seeking for Laline Garth in Mrs. Vandeleur's new secretary Lina Grahame."

With this soothing reflection, Laline fell to sleep, only to awaken in terror as early morning was breaking under the influence of a disquieting dream. It seemed to her that she was transported to the gates of an earthly paradise, a garden of enchanting beauty, where she wandered at will over mossy sward, breathing moss-laden air and listening to music of a more than earthly sweetness, music that seemed to whisper of love. Suddenly, as she was giving herself up to the full delights of the scene, a loud and brutal laugh sounded close behind her, her arms were seized and loaded with chains which cut into her flesh, and when she awoke and sprang up in bed with a stifled scream, weeping and trembling, she could still hear ringing in her ears the words of her captor—

"You belong to me! I am your husband!"

Too terrified to go to sleep again, Laline lay awake until the morning, and the unpleasant impression remained so strong that when she came down to breakfast her unusual pallor excited Clare's comments.

"You look as though you and not I had been up late last night," Miss Gavan said. "I am always white, so that I don't look any different to-day. You don't seem to have any appetite. What is the matter?"

"Nothing. I've only had a horrid dream!"

"Oh, you must tell Aunt Cissy! She is great on dreams, and knows what everything in them means. People come from tremendous distances to consult her about their dreams. What was yours all about?"

"Only silly fancies. This morning I want you to tell me where I ought to go shopping. You see I don't know London at all, and I have to order four gowns of white nun's veiling, and something white I must get to wear in the house this afternoon. I have only three dresses—a black silk, a blue serge, and a gray tweed; and your aunt says they all set her teeth on edge, they are so dark and stiff and plain."

"So aunt thinks white is your color?" observed Clare, glancing askance at Laline. "She evidently considers you very candid and unsophisticated."

The words suggested a sneer, but not so the tone; and that morning Clare proved herself invaluable in assisting Laline to make her purchases. She was the right guide on such an expedition, having excellent taste and the advantages of an extremely economical training; and when the girls returned home for luncheon they were both laden with parcels and brimful of good-humour and excitement.

Very early in the afternoon Mrs. Vandeleur drove off in a hired brougham on some mysterious errand connected with her divining powers, leaving a message for her secretary to the effect that she would return between three and four o'clock, and hoped to find Miss Grahame awaiting her in the study. Clare Cavan, in a flutter of anticipation over her admirer's visit, betook herself to her room to put the finishing touches to her hair and toilet, after impressing upon Susan the necessity of letting her know at once if a gentleman should call to see her; and Laline, in the waning light of a wintry afternoon, found herself in the room sacred to her employer's occult studies.

It was too early for lamplight, yet the shadows cast by the dancing flames from the logs looked strange and eerie in that room of spells and charms. Altogether in keeping with her surroundings was the slender form, draped in the soft folds of a tea-gown of creamy-white serge and silk, seated on a low chair by the fire gazing into the glowing wood. Laline felt very nervous that day. Whether it was the result of her dream or the influence of the room she could not tell; but gradually a presentiment gathered in her mind that some momentous crisis in her life was coming nearer and nearer to her at every breath she drew.

Oppressed and over-strung, divided between a longing to fly from the room and a quivering desire to know the meaning of the strange foreboding which hung upon her spirit, Laline rose and began restlessly moving about the room, lightly lifting and as quickly putting down various trifles which arrested her attention. The firelight, glancing here and there, centred and sparkled on a crystal ball which stood on Mrs. Vandeleur's desk. In the magic crystal, Laline's employer had gravely assured her, those of pure hearts and minds, when they knew its secret, could see mirrored the future and the past. Laline raised the crystal in her hands and pored into its depths.

Half mesmerised by so intent a gaze, the memory of last night's dream returned in force upon her mind, thrown out of balance by her agitated nerves and strange surroundings. Mistily, as she looked, she seemed to behold a face she once knew mirrored within the glistening depths of the crystal. But before she could do more than recognise the features of the man she had married, the study-door opened, and a voice, not from dreamland but from reality, spoke the name—

"Mr. Wallace Armstrong!"

CHAPTER X.

At the announcement by the servant "Mr. Wallace Armstrong" the crystal ball fell from Laline's relaxed fingers and rolled upon the floor.

She stood as though paralysed, with her back to the window, through which the last rays of a fast-fading sunset touched her bright hair, making a halo of gold round her shadowed face. Her eyes were lowered; she dared not lift them; dared not meet her husband's gaze; dared not speak lest he should recognise her voice.

Wallace Armstrong, for his part, coming into the dark room, could distinguish little but a tall, slender woman's figure in long white draperies, a figure that neither moved nor spoke when the servant announced him, but stood more like a wraith than a living thing between him and the light. Was it a trick of the celebrated Mrs. Vandeleur, he wondered, to receive strangers in this way? It was certainly original and striking, if hardly calculated to set visitors at their ease.

"Is it Mrs. Vandeleur?" he asked. "I am afraid you dropped something as I came in. May I find it for you?"

As he bent his head Laline looked down upon it, and remembered, with a little quiver of repulsion, how often at the Rue Planché she had noticed his thick curly black hair.

"Here it is!" he exclaimed, at that moment. "A crystal ball. It isn't broken or even chipped. Is it a magic crystal, like the one Rossetti wrote about?"

Still she did not answer, and found, to her horror, that he was looking at her in surprise. Raising her eyes to his in a sudden defiant impulse, she realised at once that Wallace had changed almost as much as she herself had done. For one thing, the heavy dark moustache, which four years ago had shaded his mouth, was close shaved; he wore his hair much shorter than before, and the look of brooding sullenness was gone from his brow. He was now to all appearance as perfectly "in condition," physically and mentally, as before at Boulogne he had been neglected and "run down." Under straight black eyebrows his brilliant blue eyes glanced in searching interested fashion upon the face of the still figure before him; but the old haggard insolence, the old defiance and distrust, seemed to have entirely disappeared from his voice, face, and bearing, and before she had even opened her lips to speak to him, Laline felt that the horror and the hatred of years had already begun to melt away within her heart.

"I hope you will forgive me, Mrs. Vandeleur," the visitor observed, after a short pause, "for my intrusion. But I know so many of your intimate friends very well indeed that I thought I might venture to call, on the strength of the letter from Lady Moreham, which I sent to you by messenger this morning. I hope, by the way, that you received it?"

It was necessary for Laline to speak at last, and in very low tones she informed Mr. Armstrong that Mrs. Vandeleur was out, and that she was her secretary.

Her heart beat so violently as she spoke that it seemed to choke her, and she almost feared that he would hear its throbbing. She had often been told that her speaking voice was one of unusual depth and sweetness, and she dreaded lest he should recognise its tones. But though he inclined his head a little in her direction, the better to catch her murmured words, Mr. Armstrong made no comment upon them, but broke at once into talk upon the different objects of interest about the room.

"May I wait here until Mrs. Vandeleur returns?" he asked; and, when she bowed her head in response, he went on at once with his remarks. "Like a page of old-world romance this room is. One might expect any wonder amid such surroundings. Are you versed in occult lore, may I ask? Miss Cavan, as I understand, admits that it has a kind of terrifying fascination for her."

A light seemed to flash upon Laline. This man, Wallace Armstrong, her husband, was none other than Clare Cavan's rich admirer, to whom she had been introduced on the preceding evening. Why had not some prescience taught her—Laline—who it was that Clare had described as tall and strong, blue-eyed, black-haired, of Highland descent, and next-of-kin to one of the richest men in London!

This man, then, had presented himself at Mrs. Vandeleur's house in the character of her niece's lover, disregarding altogether the ceremony which had bound him, more than four years ago, to a bride who had escaped from him.

As to his gentleness of manner, Laline knew better than to trust to that. Vividly, while he spoke, she recalled Wallace's good-humour and kindness to her friends the children, and the treats he had given them at the pastry-cook's, and afterwards in that memorable drive. All the experiences of those three weeks seemed to crowd back upon the girl's memory, the while Wallace, not unnaturally mistaking her awkward silence for shyness, strove by talking to put her at her ease.

If only Mrs. Vandeleur or Clare would come, she thought, and end this terrible tête-à-tête! She scarcely heeded the words he uttered, so concerned was she in listening for tones in his voice which she could recognise. She had never even asked him to sit down, nor did she dare to ring for lights. So that she was standing just where he had found her on entering the room, with her back to the window and her hands clasped before her, when the door opened noiselessly, and Clare Cavan crept towards them.

"Why, how dark it is!" she exclaimed. "And how stupid of Susan to have shown you up here, Mr. Armstrong! How are you? I must ring at once for the lamp. I had no idea that you were here."

"I think the servant was under the impression that your aunt had returned," said Wallace, as he turned to shake hands with Clare. In an instant Laline made a swift movement towards the door, hoping to escape before he had clearly seen her; but in this design she was circumvented by the sudden entry of Susan, who met her in the doorway, carrying in her hands the upper portion of the tall lamp which usually stood by the side of Mrs. Vandeleur's writing-table.

The light fell full on Laline's face, and quick as thought Wallace Armstrong turned and gazed upon her features thus revealed to him. As though to facilitate his inspection, Susan, lamp in hand, paused by the door to inform Miss Grahame of Mrs. Vandeleur's return; and Wallace Armstrong gazed his fill, and all his life remembered vividly just how her face looked then—the lovely flesh-tints paled with agitation and fear, the soft dark eyes distended, and between the level brown eyebrows two perpendicular lines indicative of worry and distress. Every curve of the parted red lips, of the firmly-modelled chin and long well-rounded throat, he learned by heart in those few seconds, and his eyes lingered with wondering admiration upon her small pink ear, set far back, and enhanced in beauty by the bright hair, almost yellow at this point, which half-veiled the upper portion of its curled outline.

Clare Cavan noted with astonishment and indignation the direction of Wallace's eyes—noted, too, the perceptible start he gave as he first beheld Laline's face in the full light, and the fixed intensity of his gaze. A keen stab of venomous jealousy shot through Clare's heart, and she mentally registered a vow to be even with Laline for having provoked Mr. Armstrong's attention.

Left alone with Clare, Wallace surprised her by making no reference to Laline. He began, on the contrary, at once to talk of the various persons whom they had met on the preceding evening—light desultory conversation, not at all after Miss Cavan's heart, which he continued until the entrance of Mrs. Vandeleur broke up their tête-à-tête.

Wallace Armstrong was a man of considerable determination and strength of character, as might be guessed by the squareness of his jaw and the firm lines of his handsome mouth. He had fully made up his mind this afternoon to please Mrs. Vandeleur, and he succeeded admirably. The genuine interest he took both in her personality and her pursuits made it easy work for him to please her, the more so as the little lady was greatly swayed by the outside appearance of those she met, and Mr. Armstrong's finely proportioned figure, handsome face, and frank and courteous manners were well calculated to satisfy the most exacting of women.

To him the experience was unique and delightful. This picturesque little old-young lady, with her powdered hair, her odd talk and pretensions to hidden powers, her shimmering gray-satin gown redolent of some faint Eastern perfume, her dainty lace frills and cuffs, her small fingers sparkling with diamonds, and her searching dark eyes peering at him from behind her jewelled eye-glasses, Wallace considered a most interesting and delightful personage; while, as offering a contrast to her rococo charm, Clare Cavan, in a tea-gown of sea-green cashmere and silk, her untidy yellow-red hair crowning her alluring white face, appeared to supply just the note of flesh-and-blood actuality which would otherwise have been wanting in the scene.

Clare made tea, and hovered near him as much as possible. Not once did Mr. Armstrong allude to his meeting with the secretary; but he questioned Mrs. Vandeleur closely as to the properties of the crystal which he had seen fall from Laline's hands when he entered the room.

"The story is that only certain special temperaments can discover anything in it, isn't it?" he asked, while he held the ball in his hands and examined it carefully.

"It is a gift," said Mrs. Vandeleur—"a gift given to few. Happily I have discovered a young girl whose mind is so finely tempered that in time she may go very far, very far indeed, in the study of the occult."

"Indeed! May I ask how you came across her?"

"Outsiders would tell you by accident; but my creed does not admit of accident. I put certain words in a public print, and directed them to one particular type of mind. I wanted that especial spirit; I appealed to that, and it came to me as surely as a needle comes to a magnet. That was all."

"But you had heaps and heaps of unsuitable replies as well, aunt," put in Clare, sweetly.

It was by such remarks as this that she daily alienated her aunt's liking more completely; but for reasons of her own Clare did not wish the conversation to turn upon Laline.

"They do not count," said Mrs. Vandeleur, loftily, though with a shade of annoyance on her brow. "The world will always be composed of the two or three who understand and the millions who do not. Suffice it that I found the temperament I required—a creature of perfect purity and truth, unsullied by thoughts of love or money."

"'Her soul was pure and true;
The good stars met in her horoscope,
Made her of spirit, fire, and dew,'"

quoted Wallace Armstrong, looking steadily in the fire, as though he saw some picture there—a picture, it might be, of a tall and slender maiden, in straight white draperies, with her sweet face lowered and the light making an aureole of her hair.

"Whose lines are those," asked Mrs. Vandeleur, much interested, "and why do you quote them?"

"They are from Browning's 'Evelyn Hope,' and they seemed appropriate to such a woman as you were describing."

"You have seen Miss Grahame, my aunt's secretary, of whom she is speaking, Mr. Armstrong," said Clare, hardly able to control her vexation, but speaking very sweetly. "She was here with you when I came in."

"There was a lady here when I entered, and I supposed that she was Mrs. Vandeleur at first," he answered, composedly; "but she hardly spoke, except to tell me of my mistake, and it was much too dark to see her face."

"I thought you saw her when the lamp came in," observed Clare, innocently. "She is such a nice girl, full of fun, and does so enjoy shopping! I hope you will like the tea-gown I got for her at Baker's this morning, aunt. Lina much prefers stiff tweed or serge tailor-built things; but I knew you insisted upon white dresses and flowing lines for her, so I coaxed her into having them. I don't think I ever saw anybody so fond of sweets; she is quite like a child in a grocer's shop!"

By this artfully-planned speech Clare hoped that she had spoiled the romantic effect of Laline's appearance. "Evelyn Hope" enjoying sweets in a grocer's shop, and with difficulty restrained from purchasing tweed tailor-made gowns, was surely sufficiently prosaic. Apparently Wallace thought so too, for he did not pursue the subject, and the talk presently drifted to palmistry.

"Some day you must tell my fortune, Mrs. Vandeleur," her visitor said.

"A good deal of it I can read in your face," said the little lady, promptly. "You have considerable self-control, but you are capable of going to the greatest lengths of what people would call folly for the sake of one you love. You like many people; you love very few. But where you love, it is a passion, a religion."

He flushed deeply, and then laughed.

"I don't think I am quite so fine a character as you are kind enough to suppose me," he said. "There are no deep tragedies in the daily routine of life at a bank for a rich man's nephew."

"Yet you have had some moving experiences," pursued Mrs. Vandeleur thoughtfully, still scanning him through her eye-glasses—"experiences involving much will-power and considerable self-sacrifice, and making their mark upon your after-life."

"Has Lady Moreham told you much about me?" he asked, quickly.

"I do not need to be told by others what I can read in your face. Give me your hand; now both hands."

She bent closely over first one and then the other for a moment, and then looked up.

"Another's life, another's career is strangely involved in yours," she said. "Your line of fate is hampered by another's. It is an association which will bring you nothing but harm. It still lies within your power to sever it."

Clare Cavan, watching curiously, saw the young man's healthy colour pale and a set look come into his mouth. But he did not speak, and Mrs. Vandeleur continued.

"Just at this point in your career the easy life you have led of late will be utterly changed. Your whole existence will be swerved from its ordinary course, for a new and most powerful element will enter it. From what I can judge, it will be love, the love of a woman."

A triumphant smile flashed into Clare's eyes. She was inclined to place implicit faith in her aunt's prophecies, and had little doubt but that a passion for herself would be the new element introduced into Wallace Armstrong's career. Apart from his monetary position, she was really very much in love with this extremely personable young man, who clearly admired her, and was desirous of getting into her aunt's good graces. Mrs. Vandeleur's Sibylline speeches about his future were therefore profoundly interesting to Clare, who sat supporting her chin on her hands in a picturesque attitude near the fire, listening with all her ears.

"Your love-affairs will bring you a great deal of trouble," pursued the little prophetess. "Or, rather, I should say, your love-affair, for you will have but one."

"Won't she return my affection, then?" asked Wallace, half laughing, but with a note of suppressed eagerness in his voice.

"There will be trouble and partings and evil wrought you by an enemy, until death severs a link and you are free."

Mrs. Vandeleur spoke slowly and oracularly on her last words; she dropped his hands, and, leaning back in her chair, passed her fingers wearily over her eyes.

"I am tired," she said. "But I foresee trouble before you, and I should like to warn you, for I take a great interest in you. Be very wary of your friends. False love and false friendship are Will-o'-the-wisps, to lead you to destruction. Now you must go. I have my work to attend to. But you must come and see me again often, very often, for I like you."

With an imperial graciousness she stretched out her hand, which Wallace lightly kissed, as he felt he was expected to do.

"I am really grateful for your kind forethought about my future," he said, "and I shall certainly come again."

He was not in the least superstitious, and Mrs. Vandeleur's pretensions to omniscience surprised and amused him; but he realised that she was at least sincere in her charlatanism, and that she believed in herself almost as much as she expected others to believe in her. Moreover, she had touched a sore and secret place in his heart in her rambling talk. No one knew better than he how the course of his life for the past few years had been overshadowed by an association of ill omen, so far as his own prospects were concerned, and Mrs. Vandeleur's intuition in this respect impressed him considerably.

Clare Cavan led him down the stairs and opened the street-door for him, looking strangely beautiful with the light from the ruby-coloured lamp in the hall falling on her shining hair and white face, and Wallace turned on the pavement to look back and bow again to her. But Miss Cavan had closed the door, not finding the north-east wind to her liking; and at the dining-room window, close pressed against the glass, watching his retreating figure, was the face of the secretary, Lina Grahame, wearing a look of unmistakable dislike and fear.

"That little old lady with the powdered hair is a witch!" Wallace said to himself, as he pursued his way. "I am already in love, and already in trouble over it."

CHAPTER XI.

That night Laline went to bed with her head in a whirl of emotion and perplexity.

All through the evening she had had to endure the comments of both Mrs. Vandeleur and her niece on the manners and appearance, the character, and the prospects of Wallace Armstrong, and had had to listen, to all appearance unmoved, while the possibilities of his falling in love and marrying were freely discussed.

And all the while she knew that she was his wife, sold by an impecunious father, bought by a penniless husband, unrecognised and forgotten, but his wife none the less in the eyes of the law and the sight of heaven.

She could have laughed aloud when Mrs. Vandeleur gravely stated that Wallace Armstrong was a man of "singular nobility of character, of fine artistic tastes, chivalrous instincts, and a high disregard of mercenary considerations." She could not even join in praise of his good looks.

"I think I have a prejudice against men with square jaws and black hair and light eyes," was all that she said.

But there was a marked constraint in her tone, and Mrs. Vandeleur glanced at her sharply.

"You seem to have taken a dislike against Mr. Armstrong," she said. "It is curious, for his is a nature which should blend perfectly with yours. I should certainly not have thought you had been born under opposing planets."

"I don't feel that I ever want to meet him again!" said Laline, emphatically.

"Above all, dear," exclaimed Mrs. Vandeleur, holding up a warning forefinger, "don't attempt to run counter to such an instinct as that! When your whole spirit seems to rise in arms against a personality, the feeling of repulsion is given you as a token to beware of them; and, if you feel as you say towards Mr. Armstrong, have nothing whatever to do with him!"

"I will take your advice," said Laline, dutifully.

But the oddest little prick of vexation came to her as she spoke. In spite of her dread of her husband, and her terror lest he should recognise in her the lost Laline, she had been strangely interested in him that afternoon. His gentleness and geniality she knew to be a sham, his agreeable manners merely things he assumed and dropped at will. None knew better than she that Wallace Armstrong was a man without honour, principle, or remorse—one who would lie and cheat and drink and swear, who would strike an old man and deceive a friendless girl—a creature in whom no truth was to be found. And yet, in spite of all this, and of the fact that he had entered Mrs. Vandaleur's house in the character of Clare Cavan's favoured admirer, Laline could not rid her mind of a secret hankering to see him again.

After all, he was her husband, although he did not know it. It would be her duty not to let his courtship of Clare go too far. Reveal herself she could not and would not; but she might at least contrive to learn from him news of her father. With such excuses she tried to blind herself to the fact that she wanted—greatly wanted, and yet as greatly feared—to meet Wallace Armstrong again.

The thought of him was ever present in her mind, although neither Mrs. Vandeleur nor Clare could contrive to draw from her another remark concerning him. Her brain was fully occupied with him as she put her head down on her pillow, and it was but natural that he should dominate her dreams, through the whole course of which she fancied herself alternately pursuing and fleeing from her husband.

Life at No. 21, Queen Mary Crescent was an entirely novel experience for Laline. Mrs. Vandeleur breakfasted in her bedroom—a small but cosy apartment on the ground floor, built out at the back of the house, and adjoining the dining- and drawing-rooms. By eleven o'clock she was visible, and Laline was required to read aloud to her, to copy or write at dictation, and to listen to long, rambling accounts of her employer's dreams, her opinions, or her psychic experiences. At half-past one the secretary was sent down-stairs to her luncheon; and from half-past three to half-past six or seven on four days a week Mrs. Vandeleur received visitors by appointment, and was by them consulted as to their past, present, and future.

There was no fixed rate of payment for these interviews; and, but for Clare's insidious suggestions, Laline would have thought that Mrs. Vandeleur cast horoscopes, read hands, and shuffled cards from pure love of necromantic lore. But on this point Miss Cavan undeceived her.

"Of course, dear Aunt Cissy doesn't make fixed charges," she purred, "because she knows its actionable. There's an absurd prejudice against fortune-telling and all that sort of thing, you know, though it's only really wicked when dirty old women do it at the back door! When ladies call on Aunt Cissy, after Susan has shown them into the drawing-room, and you have next gone in and taken stock of them and prepared aunt to receive them, they talk to her about themselves and their characters and their love-affairs, and ask her advice and so on, till she must be perfectly sick of them! And, although she likes the importance of it enormously, divination and all that sort of thing take it out of her dreadfully. So it's only fair that she should get paid well for it. People know that, and, when they go, they slip gold or a cheque under the blotting-book on the writing-table. I peeped in once just before a séance, and saw the ends of several cheques sticking out of the shark's-skin cover of the blotter, and several loose sovereigns on the table beside it, just to give visitors a hint, no doubt. Aunt Cissy only has a mean little allowance from her husband—nothing like enough to satisfy her desire for the beautiful. You can't surround yourself with old oak and old silver and china and curios, and wear the whitest diamonds and the finest lace on two hundred a year. Oh, Aunt Cissy's very rich indeed—or she would be if she didn't waste so much money on knick-knacks and lumber!"

More than once Laline asked herself if she was not tacitly condoning a fraud by accepting her position in the establishment. But it was so clear that Mrs. Vandeleur thoroughly believed in herself, and also so certain that her intuition was little short of marvellous and her advice generally excellent, that Laline could not esteem her less on account of her professional fortune-telling.

Only on very rare occasions was Laline present at the interviews between Mrs. Vandeleur and her clients. The secretary herself, slim and tall, in her straight, white draperies, was a fascinating addition to the little sibyl's household, her pure profile and dreamy dark eyes proving specially attractive to Mrs. Vandeleur's male visitors. Clare Cavan, listening to all that passed between Laline and these latter from behind the plush curtains between the dining- and drawing-rooms, clenched her fists with envy, and could scarcely repress her scorn for a girl who let slip such splendid opportunities of securing valuable presents and the possibility of a brilliant marriage.

"It's aunt's wicked jealousy which makes her forbid me to see anybody who calls on business," Miss Cavan told herself. "That fool Lina snubbed a Russian prince yesterday! If I had been in her place, and he had offered me jewelry, I wouldn't have let him off under a hundred-guinea bracelet. I know as well as she does how to take care of myself; but an offer like that deserves something better than a frigid 'I have no jewels, and I require none! I will tell Mrs. Vandeleur you wish to consult her on your domestic affairs, and will explain by whom you are introduced.' Lina is a prude, or else she is much deeper than I am."

Meantime Clare was somewhat concerned because a whole week had elapsed since Wallace Armstrong's visit. It was true that he had written to Mrs. Vandeleur, asking whether she and her niece and secretary would care to pay a visit to the ancient house over Alexander Wallace's bank, to take tea there with himself and his uncle; but the wording of his letter had been far from satisfactory to Miss Cavan.

"I know how much interested you are in all that is ancient and historical," he wrote, "and I feel sure that, with your vivid imagination and insight, you would people some of the old rooms with occupants long since dead. My uncle, who declares himself too old to pay visits, and who is indeed verging on seventy, is very desirous of making your acquaintance. His early Scotch training inclines him to especial interest in second sight and similar phenomena, and I am certain that you would have many subjects in common. He particularly loves to see bright young faces about him, and would, I know, be delighted to welcome those charming young ladies, Miss Cavan, and your secretary Miss Grahame, under his roof. So that I hope you will be able to fix an afternoon next week on which to honour the old house with a visit."

Mrs. Vandeleur had shown this letter to Clare, whose anger over one portion thereof had been extreme.

"Those charming young ladies, Miss Cavan and Miss Grahame," was the line that especially stuck in Clare's throat. By some means Lina Grahame must be kept away from this visit, which should be made to serve the very desirable purpose of introducing Clare to her future husband's uncle. That Alexander Wallace would take a great fancy to her Clare never doubted. Old men always admired her, her striking colouring and beautifully-rounded figure appealing even to the purblind. And she meant to be a very good niece to the wealthy banker, and a devoted wife to Wallace, so long as she should remain in love with him; and at the present time she did not foresee the possibility of her quick passion waning, as it had done on previous occasions. But Lina Grahame must not be present to spoil her plans; and Clare was greatly relieved when that young lady flatly refused the invitation as soon as it was announced to her.

"I shall ask Mrs. Vandeleur to let me stay at home," she said, while a deep flush spread over her face.

It was not only that she dreaded seeing more of her husband, in spite of the lurking fascination which he exercised over her, but that she felt unequal to the signal hypocrisy of meeting face to face that kindly-natured old Alexander Wallace, whose letter welcoming her as his niece she so well remembered reading in the streets of Boulogne more than four years ago. Naturally truthful and sincere, Laline felt that it would be impossible for her to grasp the old man by the hand and sit at his table, the while she was rewarding his hospitality and friendliness with mean deceit, and that she would be untrue to herself were she to submit to such an ordeal.

Clare understood none of the thoughts which flew through her companion's brain, but she could not fail to note the changes on Laline's face, the sudden blush and the agitated expression in her eyes.

"I think you are quite right not to go," she said, soothingly. "Of course aunt and I and the nicer sort of people one meets appreciate you thoroughly, and know that you are a lovely and charming and well-bred lady. But I have heard that dear Mr. Armstrong was at one time rather go-ahead, and men are so stupid about little social distinctions; they never seem to realise the difference between a secretary and a lady's-maid, especially if both are pretty!"

Laline knew by this time quite enough of Clare to understand that the latter wished her to remain at home, and she almost laughed outright at the idea that she must not meet her own husband, lest she might spoil another girl's chances of marrying him. But there was no thought of marriage yet, and there would be time enough to speak out before then. Laline felt that she had reached a point in her life when to look forward was impossible. Wallace himself knew that he was married, and surely that knowledge should be sufficient to deter him from creating false hopes within another girl's heart! But in Wallace's honour, as Laline knew well, but little reliance was to be placed, and a pang of pity went through her as she looked at Clare and noticed the eager brightness of her eyes.

"Are you really fond of this Wallace Armstrong?" she asked her.

"My dear, I simply adore him! Do you wonder? Oh, I forgot that you didn't admire him! But you must admit that he is handsome and fascinating."

"I dare say many people would think so. But you told me just now that he had been wild. Surely you could not love a man of really bad reputation!"

"Oh, he has sown his wild oats by this time, no doubt! I should think he is nearly thirty. Besides, all men go the pace a little—I'm sure I should if I were a man. It's really too bad that we women should have to be so very, very good! Besides, I didn't hear anything very bad—only that he'd gambled a little bit and got into debt and been sent abroad for a time to cool him down. You can't cut a man for that sort of thing, otherwise one would have to drop all one's male acquaintances except school-boys."

Laline said no more. It was obviously impossible under the circumstances to warn Clare. Sometimes the girl wondered whether she should confide in Mrs. Vandeleur; but again she hesitated. Might not that lady—who, if her niece spoke truly, was of the world-worldly—be inclined to advise her young secretary to leave off the difficult struggle for life of a penniless girl, and, by simply announcing her identity, become reconciled to an easy and prosperous existence with a wealthy husband, who to strangers' eyes appeared to be all that was handsome, well-bred, and charming?

The mere idea was horrible to Laline. Never so long as she lived would she forget that scene of which she had been an unsuspected witness on her wedding morning. At any moment she could close her eyes and recall her father's flushed face and the angry pallor of her husband, could see both men, excited by drink and hate, struggling within a few feet of where she stood. At any moment she could recall the callous tones in which her newly-made husband had spoken of her as a "lanky, half-fledged school-girl," who would be a "drag and a burden" on his life after having served his purpose by procuring for him his uncle's money and favour, and could hear again the sinister menace in his tones when he alluded to the possibility that she might refuse to tell lies to Alexander Wallace on his behalf.

That scene in the little salon of the Rue Planché had been the turning-point of Laline's career, and had suddenly transformed the dreamy, lonely child, super-sensitive to kindness and of grateful, docile nature, into a woman, alert and thoughtful beyond her years, and armed with self-control, with suspicion, and with reserve.

Her nature was not meant to tend towards independence and mistrust of others. Love had been a necessity to Laline as a child; she had loved her mother intensely, and had felt her loss as irreparable. Torn from the refined seclusion of her early home, she had tried to adapt herself to the impecunious Bohemianism of her father's house, and had tried also very hard indeed to love her father. Had Wallace Armstrong not shown himself in his true colours on his wedding morning, she would in all probability have grown much attached to him, in spite of his sullen temper and dissipated habits. Already he had appeared to her eyes as a hero, a fairy prince, who had come to rescue Cinderella from Bénoîte's back kitchen and eternal darning, cooking, and dish-washing. But when, by the half-open salon door, she had stood and heard her husband and father quarrelling over the terms of the sale by which she had become Wallace Armstrong's property to free him from his money difficulties, her child's heart broke within her breast; she seemed to see the very minds and souls of the two men, vicious, sordid, and cruel, and her pure spirit shrank in horror at the sight. The impression was one which neither time nor the wear and tear of life would ever efface; and even now, when Wallace Armstrong had again appeared within her life, to all appearance a reformed character, with little trace of his former self remaining between her and her thoughts of him, the black soul of the scoundrel who had married her seemed to rise in warning against the folly of trusting such a man.

It was on a Saturday that Clare had discussed with Laline the invitation to the bank, a day that Laline ever afterwards remembered, bleak and wintry, the sky a chill gray, deepening to saffron near the horizon. On Saturday and Wednesday afternoons Mrs. Vandeleur drove out, sometimes with her secretary and sometimes alone. On this particular day she was bidden to a conference between patrons of the "occult" and distinguished sceptics at the house of a well-known woman of title interested in every new craze. Before four o'clock Clare also left the house to go to one of the many "At homes" at which her beauty and liveliness rendered her a most popular guest; and Laline found herself for the first time since her arrival in London alone and free, with at least three hours at her own disposal.

Twenty-one Queen Mary Crescent was by no means a cheerful house after dusk, being full of creaking boards and a general "eeriness." Laline wanted to think, and had never lost her old love of wandering about alone in the open air. Within ten minutes of Clare's departure therefore she emerged from the house in her blue serge gown and a long fur-lined black cloak, and struck at once from the High Street into Kensington Gardens, her cheeks rosy under the touch of frosty air, and her heart beating with a strange excitement, which seemed to presage some unusual experience.

CHAPTER XII.

Laline met very few people in Kensington Gardens that afternoon.

The wind was keen, and every now and then drifting snowflakes told of the coming storm. The Round Pond was covered with a thin sheet of ice, and upon the green roof of Kensington Palace the snow was lightly strewn.

Laline walked fast, with eyes fixed steadfastly in front of her, absorbed in her own thoughts, holding her cloak together round her, and bending her supple frame to the wind.

It was her first walk unattended in the Gardens, and her errant footsteps led her to a long leafless avenue, through which she walked rapidly, listening to the wind in the branches above her head.

Suddenly mingling with the sound came a voice close behind her, upon hearing which she stopped with a smothered cry and turned a startled face towards the speaker.

Some instinct had told her that she would meet him, and it was to her own astonishment that she realised how glad she was to see him.

"Good-afternoon, Miss Grahame! Isn't it odd? Bad as the day is, I felt certain I should meet you here!"

"And I knew that I should meet you," she returned, quickly, before taking thought; then, seeing the gladness in his eyes, she added, hastily,—

"That is nothing! I have had those presentiments about people ever since I was a child. And they are not necessarily about people I know and like well, but also——"

"About people you dislike—such as I?"

"I was not going to say that, Mr. Armstrong," she said, rather coldly. "'About strangers,' I should have said, although I really think," she added, thoughtfully, "that there is a sympathy of dislike, if one can call it so."

"And so by your sympathy of dislike you knew I should be here, and by my sympathy of like I knew you would be here—and we have met."

This was flirting, of course. Even inexperienced Laline knew that quite well. There was, of course, no harm in flirting with one's own husband; but then he did not know he was that, and must be put in his place.

"I am not good at discussing abstract subjects with strangers," she said; "and, also, I must be getting back home now."

"Just a moment," he pleaded. "I know Mrs. Vandeleur will be at Lady Northlake's conversazione—so that she can spare you; and this keen wind is wonderfully invigorating. Don't you feel the benefit of it after the exotic atmosphere of Mrs. Vandeleur's study? Too much of that can't be good for any one, either physically or mentally; and especially," he added, glancing at her thin face and lustrous eyes—"especially bad for you."

"Why especially bad for me?"

"Because I should think you are exceptionally sensitive, Miss Grahame. What you said just now proved that—I mean about those presentiments."

"Are you exceptionally sensitive, then?" she asked, forcing a little laugh. "For, as I understand, you have presentiments, too."

"Perhaps I am," he answered, slowly, "where some people are concerned. I have an impression about you, Miss Grahame, which is very strong indeed, and about which I want to speak to you."

For a moment Laline's heart seemed to stand still. Was he going to tell her that he had recognised her, and to show himself at last in his true colours?

"Please don't tell me!" she cried, sharply, with an unmistakable tremor in her voice. "It is late, and I am going home. Good-afternoon, Mr. Armstrong!"

"Don't go yet! Just walk once more up the avenue."

"I have not been very much about the world," Laline said, icily, "but I do not think it is customary for young ladies to walk about with strangers."

"I am not a stranger!" he said, emphatically. "Why do you look so startled, Miss Grahame? I can't believe that you and I met for the first time a week ago. If we did, why did you drop that crystal ball in consternation as soon as I entered the room, and why did I feel, as soon as I saw the lamplight on your face, that I had beheld it before? Only my recollection of you is as a child, with long bright hair waving about your shoulders, and——"

"Fancies—mere fancies!" she interrupted. "Mine is not an unusual type of face in England."

"A most unusual type, I call it," he rejoined, earnestly, "and one that I am longing to commit to paper. My body, you must know, Miss Grahame, sits before a desk in a bank all day, but in my mind I am forever drawing and painting, committing lovely scenes and lovely faces very inadequately to canvas."

"I remember," she said, in constrained tones, "that you first met Miss Cavan in a picture-gallery."

"And I remember," he returned, composedly, "how like I thought her to a Paris Bordone. Miss Cavan's colouring is very fine, and there is altogether a Venetian opulence about her appearance. If you are at all interested in pictures, you will see some very good ones when you come, as I hope you will, with Mrs. Vandeleur to my uncle's house next week to tea."

"Thank you," she said, trying vainly to adopt an indifferent 'society' tone. "I am unfortunately engaged that day."

"But no day was fixed," he cried; "and it must be a day on which you are not engaged! I am most anxious that you should know my uncle. You must, I think, be quite his ideal."

"How can you possibly know," she asked, "what my character may be? You forget, Mr. Armstrong, that you know absolutely nothing about me."

"It seems impossible," he said, thoughtfully, "and yet I suppose it is true, as facts go, and that I must have seen that face so like yours, with floating hair, in my dreams. But facts are the least important things in this world, Miss Grahame. It is only by reading between the lines of the facts of his life that we really know any man. A bare summary of events teaches us nothing. We live outside, or, rather, inside of what happens to us."

"Now you are talking like Mrs. Vandeleur," said Laline, interested in spite of herself.

"But don't you agree with me? Here are you and I, as far apart as two fixed stars, each within a little world wherein the other cannot hope to tread, except, perhaps, sometimes in dreams. To show you how little value facts have—I met you, as you say, a week ago for the first time; you just spoke a few words, telling me Mrs. Vandeleur was out and would soon return. I spoke to you; I don't know what I talked about, for I was feeling your presence too deeply to be coherent even before I saw your face; then a light was brought, and I learned your features by heart, every turn of every line of them, before you left the room. And, as I went out of the house, fully an hour later, I saw your face again, pressed against the window, watching me with something in your eyes that looked like dislike and fear. To-day I meet you for the second time, and you speak to me with coldness and dislike in every note of your voice. All that is not much to go upon—is it?"

Although she hated and despised herself for it, her heart went out to him as her ear caught the ring of deep feeling in his voice.

"I don't know what you mean!" she faltered, lamely.

"I mean that such an acquaintance as ours would seem short and slight as mere facts go. And yet the thought of you has never once left my mind since I parted from you, and the moment I close my eyes in sleep you dominate my dreams. You come to me, and in just the voice you speak in now, only less hard and cold, you tell me that something stands between us and prevents you from liking me; and just as I am urging you to tell me what the barrier is, I awake, with my question unanswered."

"I am really not responsible for your dreams, Mr. Armstrong."

"Yet it is your influence which suggests them. Do you never dream yourself?"

"Yes; but I attach no importance to such disconnected nonsense as dreams always are!" she said, hastily, realising, to her intense discomfiture, that she was suddenly growing crimson.

"But tell me," he said, earnestly, "just for curiosity, as I know that you are interested in all psychic studies, whether you ever dream of strangers whom you dislike—of me, for instance?"

"It is beginning to snow," said Laline, staring up in the sky and ignoring his question, "and I have no umbrella."

"But I have. You must let me hold it over you."

And, almost before she guessed his intention, he had opened his umbrella and drawn her hand through his arm.

"You can't get wet now," he said.

"Would you like really to know what I think of you?" Laline asked, in a low and rather unsteady voice.

"Yes—even though I am sure it will hurt me!"

"I think," she said, with much deliberation, "that, in a very cruel and cowardly manner, you are taking advantage of the fact that I am a friendless dependant to treat me with a flirting familiarity which you would not dare to show towards a lady whom you considered your equal!"

He could feel that the hand on his arm was quivering, as was her whole frame, with excitement and anger.

"Is that what you think of me?" he asked, quietly.

"It is. And, if you wish me to retain any respect for you, or ever to speak to you when I am forced to meet you in my employer's house, you will leave me at once, Mr. Armstrong."

"Surely not in the snow, without an umbrella?" he suggested, still unmoved.

She withdrew her hand sharply from his arm, biting her lips with vexation.

"I cannot run away from you," she began.

"I should certainly run after you, and that would look absurd!" he put in.

"I shall be compelled to speak about you to Mrs. Vandeleur," Laline said, beginning to walk rapidly homewards.

"I hope and intend to speak of you to Mrs. Vandeleur very shortly," said Wallace Armstrong.

She turned and stared at him in surprise.

"You mean to speak to Mrs. Vandeleur about me? I don't understand you!"

"No; you don't in the least understand me, or you would never have spoken to me as you did just now! If you will only be good and come under the umbrella again and take my arm, I will explain. Miss Grahame, I force my attentions and my society upon you, and behave with what you call flirting familiarity, because I am not much used to courting, and it's the only method I know. Finding you here alone was far too good a chance to miss, so you must forgive me if I have hurried the pace a little. It may be a very long time before I have such an opportunity again."

"I have not the least notion of what you mean," she said, haughtily.

"Then I will speak more plainly. I have fallen in love with you, Miss Grahame. It seems to me that I have been in love with you for years; but, as you say that is impossible, I will only date it from last week. It was not only that I saw and spoke to you, but I heard your character described in a few words by Mrs. Vandeleur, who, for all her touch of charlatanism, understands the natures of those about her. Shall I tell you her words? She said you were 'a creature of perfect purity and truth, unsullied by thoughts of love or money.' Thoughts of love would only sweeten, and not sully, such a character; but let that pass. I love you, Miss Grahame, and I want in time to persuade you to love me. That is the explanation of what you call my cowardly and offensive conduct."

Laline stopped short in her walk and looked at him intently. It was past five o'clock, but the sky was lighter since the snowfall and she could see his face clearly, the broad forehead and straight nose, the square outline, firm jaw, and handsome mouth softened now into tenderness, the clear olive skin and crisply curling black hair. Every feature seemed refined and idealised from what she remembered of the man a few years before, at which time his mouth was hidden under a heavy moustache and his brow darkened by loosely-falling hair. Only the eyes were the same in shape and colour, a clear blue, under the unusual setting of jet-black lashes and eyebrows; but in Wallace Armstrong's eyes, as they now met those of Laline's, a soft light was shining, making them unlike any she had ever yet beheld. And, as she gazed, this proud and self-reliant maiden, who so much wished to convince herself that she could never forgive this man, experienced the most unaccountable desire to creep into his arms under the protecting umbrella and whisper in his ear that she was not in the least angry with him and was really his wife all the time.

This sudden impulse Laline strongly combated. What right had this man, who knew himself to be married, to go about making love to unsuspecting girls? she asked herself, steeling her heart against him and reminding herself that to Clare also he had in all probability made similar overtures.

"I will try to forget all the absurd things you have said, Mr. Armstrong," she was beginning very gravely, when again he interrupted her.

"That is just what I don't want you to do! I want you, on the contrary, to remember every word, and to think of me when you get home, and try to get used to the idea of me. Then when you come to tea next week at my uncle's house——"

"I cannot come, as I told you, Mr. Armstrong. Dependants are not in the habit of making social calls with their employers."

"If you so greatly resent being in a position of what you call dependance, surely you will not be unwilling to change it?" he suggested.

They were close to the gates at the corner of the Gardens now, and Laline held out her hand.

"Good-bye!" she said. "I prefer to walk to the Crescent alone."

"Good-bye!" he said, and held her hand close in his. "But I can't quite let you go like this," he added, deprecatingly, still retaining her hand. "You haven't even told me whether you mean to leave off disliking me."

"I have told you before that I much object to that flirting manner!" she said, severely.

"And I have told you," he retorted, "that it's the only manner I know—or that I dare employ!" he added, in a lower voice.

"If you wish to be a friend of mine——"

"I wish to be more than a friend."

"Really, Mr. Armstrong, this is absurd! Please let my hand go at once. I cannot stand here with you like——"

"Like lovers?"

"Like two people in a Christmas number."

"I can't let you go until you promise to try and like me."

"You tell me of your dreams and presentiments and fancies," she said, with sudden fire; "perhaps I, too, have fanciful ideas about people, and in my mind may have just as much reason for disliking you as you have for liking me!"

"Not liking—loving."

"Well, and not disliking—hating!" she cried, drawing her hand sharply away from his.

"I would rather you hated me than that you were indifferent—extremes meet. You will come to my uncle's, will you not, Miss Grahame?"

"Extremes meet, but we need not!" she returned, with a sudden school-girl pertness, which made him burst out laughing. Before he had recovered his gravity she had dashed past him through the park gate, and in a few minutes' time had arrived, breathless, before the doors of 21, Queen Mary Crescent.

Up to her own room she ran as soon as Susan opened the front door.

"I declare," she exclaimed, as she saw her blushing face in the glass, "I look like a jubilant nursemaid who has just parted from her 'young man'! And so I have, I suppose; but the odd part of it is that I don't seem to feel afraid of him now. I even have a sort of sneaking regard for him—almost a liking, it might be called, if I didn't know what a fearfully bad man he is. He must be a marvellously clever actor, for he doesn't look in the least cruel or callous, or like a forger or drunkard or bully. I remember I always thought that he was very handsome, and that he had the most beautiful blue eyes. I suppose he must have come right over to England when I disappeared, and persuaded his uncle to forgive him, and reformed. He half-recognised me as soon as he saw me; but he doesn't realise that growing up and putting my hair up have altered me just as shaving his moustache and having his hair out have altered him. He must know the truth sooner or later, I suppose, and then—will he be glad or sorry, I wonder? Now, of course, he makes love to any girl he pleases, knowing quite well that he is safely married, though nobody suspects it. But if I were to turn upon him in a majestic way and say, 'Sir, I am your wife already!' he wouldn't perhaps be quite so pleased. And, by-the-bye, in all his talk he never committed himself by mentioning marriage, which was very artful of him!"

CHAPTER XIII.

In spite of Wallace Armstrong's entreaties, Laline could not alter her arrangement not to make the acquaintance of Alexander Wallace; for when Mrs. Vandeleur fixed upon the following Wednesday as the afternoon on which she would call at the bank, the young secretary had already announced to her employer her wish to remain at home.

"You are very right," the little lady had observed, "to avoid Mr. Armstrong if his society is uncongenial to you. Those strong instincts of liking and of hating are given to us women as safeguards. Although to my mind Mr. Armstrong is wholly sympathetic, if a secret voice tells you to beware of him, it is that of some beneficent spirit of the so-called dead, who see with fleshless eyes through the fleshly veil into the soul, and know that this man's society would be in some way harmful to you."

Laline was growing accustomed by this time to Mrs. Vandeleur's singular methods of expression. A strong liking had grown up between them, although the elder woman was hardly sufficiently human in her ways of thought to constitute a true friend. But Laline dared not confide in her, for many reasons, so she let her statements pass without comment. So far from cherishing any sentiment of repulsion against Wallace Armstrong, she could hardly keep her thoughts from dwelling on the subject of his tender speeches and tenderer eyes; and it was only by constantly reminding herself of the mean and cowardly trick by which he had become her husband that she was enabled to preserve any lingering resentment against him.

On the Tuesday evening before Mrs. Vandeleur's promised visit to Mr. Wallace's house Laline received the first approach to a love letter she had ever had despatched to her. Dinner was over, and she was engaged in writing in the study at Mrs. Vandeleur's dictation, when the postman's knock preluded the tap at the door of Susan and her entrance with a salver, upon which were two letters, one for the mistress of the house, and the other for Miss Lina Grahame.

"A letter for you, my child," said the elder lady, peering at the address through her eye-glass—"the first you have received since your arrival."

Long before Laline had opened it or even glanced at the handwriting on the envelope, she knew that Wallace Armstrong was her correspondent, and felt herself blushing to the roots of her hair under Mrs. Vandeleur's critical scrutiny.

"Do you know the writing?" the latter asked; and Laline replied with perfect truth that she had never seen it before.

"My dear Miss Grahame," the letter began—"I am writing to entreat you to come with Mrs. Vandeleur to-morrow. Even if you don't like me you would most certainly like my uncle, who is one of the noblest and best of men, generous and forgiving to a fault, and one who, in spite of his wealth, has suffered many deep and bitter trials in what to him has been far more important than money, his domestic affection. He is very old and very lonely, though with his chivalrous kindness towards all women he is the very man who should by rights be surrounded by a happy family circle. I owe everything to him, and can hardly with a lifelong devotion repay his more than fatherly goodness. I am sure that you are gentle and pitiful as you are beautiful—'fair, kind, and true,' as Shakspere puts it. And, being all these things, won't you come, Miss Grahame, and, by giving yourself just a little trouble, and putting up for an hour or more with the presence of some one you hate, confer a great pleasure upon one of the best old men alive? I solemnly promise not to 'flirt,' as you call it. If I may not talk to you, I will console myself by talking of you to Mrs. Vandeleur, which is the next best thing. In my dream last night you promised to come. Be as sweet as your dream-prototype is the prayer of yours always devotedly,

"Wallace L. Armstrong."

This letter moved and interested Laline deeply. Since it was now impossible for her to accompany Mrs. Vandeleur and her niece, she felt that she must send a few words in answer, lest she might be thought too unfeeling. She was also very anxious to prevent Wallace from carrying out his threat of talking about her to Mrs. Vandeleur. The latter had guessed already that she was a married woman; and might she not be capable of hinting as much to Mr. Armstrong under the mistaken impression that his attentions would be disagreeable to her secretary?

Lost in thought, Laline bent over the letter which lay on her lap, ignoring the steady, curious gaze of Mrs. Vandeleur's keen, dark eyes. The fact that it was absolutely the first letter she had ever received from her husband excited her strangely, and she found herself fingering the paper with a touch that was almost affectionate. It seemed a little in the light of a confession that Wallace should expatiate so much upon his uncle's generous and forgiving nature and fatherly goodness, and on his lonely life and domestic troubles.

"I believe—I want to believe that Wallace has utterly changed," she said to herself, with flushed cheeks and moist eyes. "If he were anything like the man he was four years and a half ago, when he entered into that horrible bargain with my father, he could never have written this letter. His uncle's goodness must have changed him by gradually softening his heart. And then—my father was so much older that he may have led him into things, and Wallace was penniless—perhaps I have been too hard in my judgment on him all these years, although I am afraid if it were all to happen again I should act in just the same way."

"Have you any letters to write, dear child?" Mrs. Vandeleur's silvery tones broke in. "I shall be sending Susan to the post with mine within the next half-hour."

"There is just one I want to write, if you please," the secretary answered.

And Mrs. Vandeleur obligingly made room for her at the other end of her writing-table.

Laline took a pen between her fingers; but the letter was not so easily written. There was very much she wished to tell Wallace Armstrong, and very much again that she did not want him to know. She wanted to tell him that she would willingly come to see his uncle, since he so much desired it, but that, having once refused, she did not see her way to changing her mind without exciting comment. She would also have liked him to know that she by no means hated him, that she might even in time be induced to like him very much, but that if he wished to please her he must refrain from talking about her to Mrs. Vandeleur.

But she had no idea how to word her letter, and, even before writing it, she began to rack her brains in the vain endeavour to remember whether her husband possessed or had ever seen any of her handwriting.

Finally, having wasted more than ten minutes, she seized her pen and began the heading, "Dear Mr. Armstrong," hoping that other words would come.

A little laugh, like that of a mischievous fairy, made her start and drop the pen.

"'Dear Mr. Armstrong,' and nothing more?" Mrs. Vandeleur asked, mockingly. "That is not a very fluent love-letter for the poor young gentleman, is it?"

Laline looked at once astonished and confused. But Mrs. Vandeleur's prescience in this case was easily explained. She had recognised the writing on the envelope of Wallace's letter, and had watched Laline's fingers tracing three words, which she guessed to be those she quoted.

"You seem in a difficulty over your letter," the little lady suggested, in an insinuating tone. "Can I not help you in any way? I have some judgment, and my advice may be of value to you. What is it you want to say to Mr. Armstrong?"

Laline arose, agitated and nervous, and, tearing her letter across, dropped it in the fire.

"It isn't a bit necessary to send it at all," she said; "and that is what made it difficult to write. I met Mr. Armstrong in Kensington Gardens while you were out last Saturday afternoon, and I told him I did not wish to accompany you and Miss Gavan to tea at Mr. Alexander Wallace's. But he took it into his head to want me to go, and wrote to especially ask me. I wanted to write and say I couldn't change my mind—that is all."

"You mean that is all you are going to tell me?"

"I mean that is all that happened."

"Does Clare know?"

"Clare? Oh, no! Why should she?"

Mrs. Vandeleur shook her head.

"You know what I read in the cards about you yesterday," she said, mysteriously. "You must beware of the evil done by a red-haired woman and a black-haired man. Lina, tell me—is Wallace Armstrong in love with you?"

"How can he be when he has seen so little of me?" she asked, parrying the question, and partly vexed, partly glad to talk upon the subject.

Mrs. Vandeleur studied the girl's face through her eye-glasses. There was something about it which she did not understand and which she mistrusted. It was not yet the tremulous softness of love she read in the girl's lowered eyes and lips curved into a half-smile; but there was about her a look suggesting that she was secretly happy and amused over some knowledge she did not mean to share with others.

"You cannot love him, Lina," Mrs. Vandeleur reminded her, softly. "You are not free."

"No," Laline repeated—and her half-smile deepened—"I am not free. And now we won't talk about him, will we, dear Mrs. Vandeleur? And I sha'n't write the letter; I shall just stop away."

"Do you wish to go?"

Laline's lips were framing "No," when she stopped.

"I hardly know," she said, after a pause. "But I think I should like to go."

"I shall be strangely disappointed in you, Lina," said Mrs. Vandeleur, coldly, "if you encourage Mr. Armstrong to love you solely for vanity's sake."

The girl knelt down at Mrs. Vandeleur's feet and gazed earnestly up into her face.

"Trust me, dear Mrs. Vandeleur," she said, "for I shall never do that! But—but I heard a good deal about Mr. Armstrong before I came to your house at all, and there is much more about him that I want to find out."

"Does he know that you had any previous acquaintance with him?"

"He has no idea of it."

"He doesn't recognise you? That's strange! Was he at all in love with you before?"

"Oh, no!" the girl answered, with a very sad little smile. "If he had been——"

She did not finish her speech. In her own mind she was saying that, if Wallace Armstrong had indeed loved her at Boulogne, she would have been living by his side as his wife all these years in that very house to which she was hidden as a guest on the following day.

"Does Wallace Armstrong know your husband?" Mrs. Vandeleur asked, suddenly.

The blood swept over Laline's face as she answered,—

"Yes."

"And you want to find out about him?" pursued Mrs. Vandeleur. "Surely, if you detest and dread him so much, it would be wiser to restrain your curiosity."

"I want also to learn, if I can, whether my father is alive."

Mrs. Vandeleur threw up her little hands and sighed.

"Like all women," she murmured—"hankering after chains and slavery after being once freed from them. Our work together should absorb you, to the exclusion of such thoughts. But you shall go with me to-morrow, if you like. I knew that Wallace Armstrong's spirit was too fine to assimilate with that of Clare. Her destiny will lead her, late in life, to the arms of some stout and bald-headed stock-broker. When he is asleep, after dinner, she will flirt with his clerks or his partner, and be very happy; but you—life holds something very different in store for you. I suppose you must dree your weird. But remember, once you let love come into your life, trouble—terrible trouble—will come too!"

Secretly, Mrs. Vandeleur was very curious to see Laline and Wallace together. She interested herself readily in other people's affairs when these latter attracted her in any way—she liked to constitute herself a sort of deus ex machina in the lives of her friends, to pull the strings which moved their destinies; and the fact that both Laline and Wallace, whom she sincerely admired, declined to confide in her wholly, piqued her curiosity the more.

Against her niece Clare, on the other hand, Mrs. Vandeleur entertained a sentiment which was almost dislike; and she was annoyed to notice, on the following afternoon, when the two girls came down into the hall, ready dressed for their drive, that Clare, in a picturesque costume of red-brown cloth and beaver fur, appeared far more strikingly handsome at first sight than Laline, in the quietest of blue serge gowns and small black felt hat.

"Why have you those horrid, plain, masculine clothes on?" she inquired crossly of her secretary.

"They are my only walking things," Laline replied. "You know, dear Mrs. Vandeleur, I can't pay an afternoon call in those trailing white garments I wear in your room."

"Dear Lina would look like a ghost dropping into afternoon tea!" purred Clare, happy under the becoming framework of a red-brown velvet 'picture' hat and feathers. "I think she looks so sweet and neat in that dear little black felt hat and black cloth jacket!"

Mrs. Vandeleur snapped her glasses to and shut her mouth very hard. Then she ordered the girls into the brougham, and gave the coachman some order which they did not hear, but in consequence of which he drew up before a particularly smart millinery establishment on the way to the Strand.

Here Mrs. Vandeleur insisted that Laline should get out with her while Clare remained in the carriage, to which the little lady presently returned in triumph by the side of her secretary, in whose appearance a transformation had taken place by the substitution of a costly black velvet "picture" hat and graceful black velvet cape, trimmed with fur and lined with wine-coloured silk, for her former dowdy garments.

A flash of genuine anger passed into Clare's green eyes; but she was far too much afraid of her aunt to enter a protest, and declared, with apparent enthusiasm, that "dear Lina looked perfectly lovely; but then she looked that before!"

Wallace's Bank was a vast gloomy-looking building, of which a considerable frontage faced the Strand. It was built in a square, with a paved courtyard in the middle, which led from one portion of the Bank to the other. Alexander Wallace possessed many commodious houses in different parts of London, and notably a charming family mansion and estate at Hampstead. But he hated change and he hated moving a little more every year. His father and his grandfather had lived over the Bank, and what was good enough for them was good enough for him. His tastes were very simple, and in his personal expenses he was economical almost to miserliness; but his kindness of heart and generosity in cases of real distress were well known.

A sedate elderly man-servant opened the big doors which led into the private portion of the house, and the visitors found themselves in a small but very lofty hall, papered in old-fashioned unæsthetic drab, in which a fire was burning. Would the ladies mind coming up-stairs? the man asked, and proceeded to lead the way up several short flights of winding stairs and through a labyrinth of passages to a door, before which he paused.

"These are Mr. Armstrong's rooms," he explained, and forthwith showed the ladies into a good-sized apartment, distinguished by an appearance of extreme cosiness and bachelor comfort. The cheeriest of fires burned within the wide hearth, the furniture was of the saddle-bag order, roomy, and easy-giving, plush curtains drawn over the windows kept out all glimpse of the snowy night, and a multitude of clever water-colour sketches, chiefly of picturesque foreign scenery and of pretty girls, covered all the available wall space.

On a round table, set unfashionably in the centre of the room, a tempting array of cakes and sweets awaited the visitors; and the two occupants of the room—Wallace Armstrong and his uncle Alexander Wallace—rose at the visitors' entrance and advanced to greet them.

Laline's heart beat fast as she was formally introduced to the man who had long ago by letter welcomed her so warmly as a daughter. She felt she hardly dared to look up into his face lest he should read her secret in her eyes; but when she did at last summon up sufficient courage to do so, she was struck by the extreme benevolence of the old Scotchman's regard. Light gray eyes, at once keen and kind, looked out from his pale and deeply-furrowed face, which possessed but little of his nephew's beauty of outline. In spite of his great wealth, the banker's manner towards the three ladies was constrained and even shy, but full of a gentleness and consideration which won the heart of Laline.

"How kind a father he might have been to me all these years!" she thought.

CHAPTER XIV.

It seemed to Laline that Wallace Armstrong made no attempt to disguise the look of triumphant delight which spread over his face when she placed her hand in his.

"I was so afraid you wouldn't come!" he murmured.

"I was much pleased to accept your kind invitation," she returned, demurely, while Clare shot a quick glance of jealous inquiry from one to the other.

Miss Cavan could not, however, complain that the companion whose presence she so much objected to endeavoured in any way to outshine her in conversation. Laline scarcely spoke at all during tea, at which meal she presided behind the tea-urn, her manipulation of which filled Wallace with secret rapture. There was something so delightfully domestic in the sight of her slim wrists peeping from her neat blue-serge sleeves as she filled the cups, something so suggestive of honeymoon-breakfasts and little tête-à-tête meals on winter evenings, that it was as much as he could do to refrain from springing from his seat and proposing to her there and then, and prefacing his remarks with a kiss on each enchanting wrist.

Old Mr. Wallace sat stroking his silver-gray beard and gazing with much satisfaction on the assembled guests after they had taken their place round the tea-table. At length he turned to Mrs. Vandeleur, and addressed her in his usual slow tones, marked by a strong Scotch accent.

"I believe, madam," he said, "that I am very much behind the times. But I am an old man, and I live in a very old house and carry on a very old business, and that must be my excuse. My boy Wallace humours me; he knows I like a table to be where I'm used to seeing it—in the middle of the room—and the chairs drawn up round it, and so he puts it there. And now I am wondering whether the two charming young ladies you have brought with you to-day will humour me too?"

"In what, Mr. Armstrong?"

"Would they take off their hats while they are here?" he asked, with a wistful eagerness which touched Laline deeply. "You see," he added, apologetically, "this is not a fashionable call, and there are no fashionable people to meet you. And when I see young people about me without their hats it makes me feel for the time that they are not only visitors, but my own family."

Long before he had finished speaking Laline had removed her hat, much to Wallace's delight, and had confided it to him to place on one side for her, thus enabling him to feast his eyes upon her white brow and soft hair, waving in Madonna-like fashion over her temples and across the tips of her little pink ears.

"Have you no women-relations at all, then?" Mrs. Vandeleur inquired.

Alexander Wallace sighed and shook his head.

"None that I see now," he answered. "Of my twin-sisters, one, this boy's mother, is dead, and the other has married for the second time and lives in South America. Of my two nieces—this boy's sisters—one is dead, and the other married a German baron and lives with him in the Black Forest. I never see any of them. Once, more than four years ago, I expected a daughter to come into my house as my nephew's wife, a gentle and beautiful young girl, whom I longed to welcome to my heart. But it was not to be."

"Don't speak of that now, Uncle Alec," put in Wallace, quickly, throwing an uneasy glance in the direction of his guests; "it only makes you unhappy to recall that time!"

Laline watched both men with a fluttering heart. It was quite clear that Wallace wished to keep his uncle from the topic of the niece who never arrived, and as patent that the old gentleman was anxious to prose on the subject to sympathetic feminine listeners. The younger man at once strove to create a diversion by drawing Mrs. Vandeleur's attention to his sketches on the walls of the room; but old Mr. Wallace, who was very obstinate, returned to his former subject before the little lady had had time to express an opinion.

"This boy thinks of nothing but art and society, spelt with capital letters, you must know, Mrs. Vandeleur!" he broke in, testily. "I am fond of good pictures myself; but pictures won't fill an empty house with sunshine and laughter. That is what this house wants—young voices, music, and pattering feet to drive the ghosts away. My niece Laline would have been twenty-one by this time. I had prepared one entire floor for her at the Hampstead house, as well as three rooms here on the floor below this. Just what I thought a very young newly-married woman would like I put there—the newest novels, and fresh flowers, and pretty hangings, and cut-glass scent-bottles, and plenty of looking-glasses—all pretty girls like looking-glasses, and plain ones, too, for the matter of that. And I bought a canary for her, and a white Persian kitten, and a King Charles spaniel; that was the popular dog that year, and I know girls like pets and prefer them to be in the fashion. Then, when everything was prepared, and I was counting the hours until my nephew brought home his wife, I received a telegram to say that at the moment of starting she had been seized with typhoid fever and was already dangerously ill."

"How terribly sad!" ejaculated Mrs. Vandeleur, politely, while Clare yawned furtively, and Laline kept her eyes fixed on her plate lest they might betray her.

"You are making Mrs. Vandeleur quite miserable, Uncle Alec," put in Wallace, his black brows contracting into an impatient frown.

"My boy," observed his uncle, doggedly, "I am telling a story and I have not yet finished. As you know the end and do not appear to want to hear it again, I should advise you to make a tour of the room with the young ladies and show them your sketches!"

Clare rose with alacrity; but Laline declared that she preferred to listen to Mr. Wallace; so, much against his will, Mr. Armstrong had to pair off with Miss Gavan. Laline could see clearly how he tried to catch his uncle's words, even while conducting Clare round the walls and explaining to her his various drawings; but her interest was so centred in the story told by old Mr. Wallace that she had little attention to spare for his nephew.

"Constant telegrams were sent to me," the old gentleman proceeded, in great satisfaction at securing so absorbed a listener as Laline, "and I was making arrangements for going over to see for myself that the poor girl had the best of nursing, when I received a message telling me that my niece had succumbed to the disease and was already dead. Only seventeen, and a bride of a few weeks! It was indeed a cruel blow! But the part that especially grieved me, and of which I never think without the keenest self-reproach, is that when my nephew first arrived in Europe from the Colonies he was in dire straits for money and too proud to apply to me. His poor little bride had relatives in the town of Boulogne, and thither they made their way; but these relations were extremely poor and could do little for them. One of them, a Captain Garth, wrote me a most touching letter after the poor child's death—which I fear was hastened by the privations she had undergone—in which he detailed her last moments and her pitiful disappointment at not being able to see her beautiful English home. Poor little Laline! No one mourned her more sincerely than I. Her rooms in this house and at Hampstead have never been used since that time, and never will be until my nephew marries."

"You wish him to marry, then?" Mrs. Vandeleur suggested.

"Most earnestly I do. But, though I have nothing to complain of about him, and he is making amends to me in every way for the terrible trouble I have had, he seems strangely averse to settling down, and talks a great deal about failing to meet his ideal, and not being able to put up with any one else, and so on. Young men nowadays are too fond of talking about themselves and their feelings; and this boy is so popular, and gets invited out so much, that in the multitudes of fresh pretty faces he is constantly meeting he is in danger, I fear, of frittering his time away. Boating-parties in summer, perpetual racing and punting, riding, tennis, and golf, and in the winter balls and skating-parties—his time is so filled up that he doesn't have a moment left for love-making. With all that, he's an excellent man of business and invaluable to me at the Bank. Oh, I have nothing to complain of about the boy!"

To Laline's sensitive ears there was something a little disparaging in Alexander Wallace's praise of his nephew, some note which almost suggested that he regretted not being able to find fault with him. For her own part, the knowledge of her husband's deceitful treachery towards his over-indulgent uncle filled her with disgust, and she had been hardly able to restrain her indignation when Alexander Wallace alluded to Captain Garth's "pathetic letter" containing his "niece" Laline's last words. Unable to account for her disappearance, and unwilling to give themselves the trouble of searching for her, it was clear to Laline that her father and her husband had invented the story of her seizure and death by typhoid fever in order to extract further sympathy and further funds from the kind and credulous old banker, and she grew hot with shame to think that she should have almost allowed herself to pardon and to like a man so mercenary and deceitful as Wallace Armstrong must be.

"Would you like to look over the house, Miss Grahame? There are some rather interesting rooms, one especially, in which a great ball was given on the very day when that prodigious swindle, the South Sea Bubble, burst. It is called the 'South Sea Room,' and has a wonderful Chinese paper; I think it would interest you."

It was her husband's voice, and a little shiver of repulsion passed through Laline at the sound. Nevertheless she rose, and Alexander Wallace rose also. Adams, the discreet-looking man-servant, was summoned with his key, and the tour of the old house began.

Clare Cavan was inquisitive. Moreover, she fully intended, if that were possible, installing herself as mistress in this gloomy old mansion at some future date. She therefore peered and peeped about her, noting the size and number of the rooms, and perpetually asking questions in what seemed like overflowing girlish vivacity. Mr. Armstrong's suite of apartments comprised the sitting-room, in which tea had been served, a bedroom and dressing-room adjoining, and up another flight of stairs, a spacious studio, lighted entirely from above, and containing casts, clay models, canvases, easels, and innumerable sketches placed along the dado of the room, the walls of which were painted Indian-red. To this room, at Clare's urgent request, Wallace conducted the two girls, passing, as he did so, the closed door of another attic of equal dimensions.

"Is this another studio of yours?" Clare inquired, stopping before the closed door.

"It is a disused lumber-room," Wallace answered, "and kept locked, as you see," he added, shaking the handle of the door before leading the way into his studio adjoining.

Clare lingered behind the other two and bent to examine the keyhole.

"It may be locked," she said to herself, "but the key is on the inside. I wonder why Mr. Armstrong tried to deceive me? Is it some pretty model he is keeping here on the sly?"

Resolved to settle this point to her own satisfaction so soon as an opportunity should arise, Clare followed the others into the studio, and affected great admiration of Wallace's sketches, which were in truth far too fanciful and unconventional to arouse her interest.

"This is where my heart is," he said to Laline on her first introduction to the studio; "or, rather"—glancing quickly round and perceiving that Clare had not yet joined them—"this is where it was."

Laline glanced at him coldly and turned to examine some drawings. Nothing, she told herself, should ever induce her to forgive him; but his pictures interested her, and especially a pencil sketch, as yet uncompleted, of extreme delicacy and beauty, entitled "Evelyn Hope."

The figure of the dead girl, exquisitely youthful and pure in outline, lay stretched upon the bed, touched and glorified by two long rays of light that stole through the hinges of the close shutters. A dark-haired young man sat, with face averted from the spectator, gazing intently at the still white figure, into whose hand he was gently thrusting a single geranium leaf.

"'So hush—I will give you this leaf to keep!
See—I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There—that is our secret; go to sleep.
You will wake and remember and understand.'"

Wallace came behind Laline as she stood before the easel examining the picture, and softly quoted Browning's lines, which she had never heard before, and which touched her with a keen delight.

"I should like to read you the entire poem," he said.

"But who did you take for your heroine—I mean, who sat for it?"

"No one. It was a memory. I did it on my return from that walk in Kensington Gardens."

He spoke very low, so as not to be heard by Clare, who was at the farther end of the room turning over some sketches in a portfolio against the wall. Laline had already recognised her own profile in "Evelyn Hope," and was not ill-pleased by the dreamy loveliness which characterised the drawing.

She learned that Wallace frequently exhibited at the minor picture-shows, and, further, that he was a regular contributor of black-and-white drawings to more than one English and American magazine.

"You see I can't give the work the time I would like," he explained, "though luckily banking hours are not onerous. I sit down-stairs from ten until four, with a calculating-machine clicking away in my brain; but in the early summer mornings or the long winter evenings I bring my heart and mind up here."

At this point Clare, tired of a conversation which was no longer specially addressed to her, suggested a move to the South Sea Room, which she declared herself "dying to see;" and to the first floor they forthwith descended to a vast apartment, with floor of shining polished oak and an immense mantelpiece in carved and coloured marble, an apartment in which the electric-light, shining down from bosses in the elaborately-carved ceiling, seemed a glaring anachronism, and in which a few old-fashioned chairs and sofas, covered with moth-eaten brocade and set in far corners of the room, suggested ghostly dowagers and wall-flowers silently watching a rustling fleshless ball.

Mrs. Vandeleur was delighted, and went about with upraised eye-glasses, "sniffling the air for ghosts," as Clare irreverently whispered to Wallace Armstrong.

"You have done your very worst," the little lady observed with much severity to old Alexander, "with your odious glaring electric-light. And, as I perceive, some Vandal forefather of yours has gilded and whitened over all the lovely woodwork of the ceiling! As to your dreadful Chinese wall-paper, sticky with varnish and most inartistic and patchy in effect, I haven't a doubt that it is plastered all over the original beautiful oak-panelled walls, and that the spirits of the malevolent little pigtailed horrors who designed and executed it have driven away all the dear, charming, picturesque people in patches and powder and stiff brocade who used to congregate here a hundred years ago. I declare I can hardly hear a rustle of their silk petticoats or a tap of their high-heeled shoes!"

"If you hear as much as that, madam, you are cleverer than I," said the old Scotchman, drily.

"If I had my way with this room," pursued Mrs. Vandeleur, "I'd have all the paper and all the paint and varnish off, and take down your nasty electric-light and substitute wax candles. And I would have an old spinet in the corner and play it softly in the evenings, until I had reconstituted the entire scene. As it is, it hurts me to see a place so desecrated. Is there no corner in the entire house left sacred for the poor spirits to come back to and feel themselves at home?"

But here Adams, who had been listening, equally scared and scandalised, interposed to suggest that if the lady liked old things she might admire the banqueting-hall, which had never yet been "properly restored;" and thither he led the way, followed by Mrs. Vandeleur, still intent upon demonstrating to the old Scotchman his enormities and that of his predecessors in the arrangement of the old rooms.

Laline, who had been examining with interest the odd designs upon the walls, turned to follow her employer; but Clare had already gone out, and Wallace detained her as she tried to pass him.

"Don't go yet!" he whispered, quickly. "I must speak to you. Why are you so cold to me again to-day?"

"Nonsense, Mr. Armstrong! Remember, we are strangers."

"We are not! Feel my heart!"—and, suddenly seizing her hand, he pressed it against his heart, so that she felt its quick strong throbs. "Could a stranger make my heart beat like this? Miss Grahame—Lina——Oh, I don't mind if you are angry! You are Lina to me in my thoughts and dreams. Lina, why do you try so hard to hate me? For you are trying; I can see it in your eyes, which seek mine until you hastily avert them; I can feel it in your hand, which half returns my pressure before you snatch your fingers from me. Lina, why do you try to steel your heart against me? What have I done, dear, that you should refuse to follow your heart and love me as I love you?"

CHAPTER XV.

A sudden rage seized Laline against both Wallace and herself. She hated herself for tolerating and even liking him, and she hated him for what she regarded as his unparalleled duplicity.

"You are asking me a great many questions!" she said, turning a white, angry face upon him. "Now I want to question you! Tell me, if you have the slightest regard for truth—do you know of no tie, no responsibility, which should prevent you from making love to me?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, falling back a step and speaking in low troubled tones, quite unlike the passionate accents of his first love-avowal.

"You answer my question by asking another!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot impatiently. "What I want you to tell me is this—is there nothing and no one to stand between us—no barrier which should keep you and me apart?"

The flush of excitement faded from his dark face, which in a moment seemed to age and grow stern and sad. For the first time he averted his eyes from hers.

"What have you heard?" he asked, abruptly.

"Tell me the truth," she said, "and then I will tell you whether it is what I have heard."

He looked at her doubtfully.

"It is for you to decide," he said at last, in a very low voice. "If what you have learned about a tie, a responsibility, which I undertook more than four years ago, is sufficient to part us, I must bow to your decision. I cannot undo what I have done."

"You are not free!" she whispered, as he turned away.

"I am free to love you!" he cried, suddenly clasping her hands in his and drawing them up against his heart again. "Lina, we can't talk here, and I can see that we have both much to say. On Saturday your time is your own, is it not? Well, Saturday next I will come to you so soon as you are free. What time shall it be? Two o'clock or half-past two? Fix the time, or I shall burst in before you have finished luncheon!"

"You cannot come to the house for me," exclaimed Laline—"it is out of the question! What do you imagine you could say to Mrs. Vandeleur and her niece to explain such conduct—'If you please, ma'am, I understand it's your secretary's afternoon out, and I've come to take her out walking?' Do you really suppose that earning one's living quite destroys one's sense of what is due to the position of a lady?"

"Don't be angry, Lina," he was beginning, when she cut him short again.

"I will not permit you to call me by my Christian name, Mr. Armstrong!"

"As you like. At what time shall I call for you on Saturday?"

"Call for me? It is out of the question! I would not for the world let Mrs. Vandeleur know of your silly conduct!"

"Well, we'll keep her in the dark at present, if you wish it, although I would far rather go direct to her and tell her I fell in love with you at first sight. I feel sure she'd sympathise. I'll be waiting, then, just by the little gate that leads into the Gardens—the gate by which we came out last time. At two o'clock I will be there; and, if you are not there by the half-hour, I will go to the house and ask for you."

"This is persecution——"

"No—it is love! Lina, I hear footsteps on the stairs. There is no real barrier between us. In another moment we shall be interrupted. Kiss me, dear—just once first!"

"Mr. Armstrong, you are insulting!"

He bent his handsome, eager, dark face close down towards her own; and that ill-regulated little heart of hers began to tremble and flutter as though this man were not a heartless deceiver and an utterly worthless person.

After all he was her husband, and kissing one's husband is not considered a crime; added to which, she was almost afraid she loved him a little. Half insensibly her head inclined towards his, and in another moment their lips would have met, when Clare Cavan darted at astonishing speed into the room, and stood before them, wide-eyed and panting, her brilliant flesh-tints changed for a chalky pallor, and abject fear clearly marked in every line of her face.

"I've had a fright!" she faltered. "I—I wanted to have another look at these lovely sketches of yours, Mr. Armstrong; so I stole up-stairs to the top floor by myself, and—somehow I had forgotten—and I opened the wrong door!"

"The wrong door?" Wallace repeated, with a clearly startled expression in his eyes. "Do you mean that you went into the lumber-room? Wasn't the door locked?"

"Yes—no—that is to say, I fell over a box or something near the door, and slipped and hurt myself in the dark! And, being very absurdly nervous, it gave me such a shock!"

Laline glanced at Clare and then at Mr. Armstrong. It was clear that Clare was lying, and equally clear that he knew it. There was nothing for him to do, however, but to express his regret at her accident, and to suggest that a glass of wine or a little brandy might assist in restoring her nerves—a proposition to which Clare assented without much protest; and the three proceeded to the dining-room together.

Here they found Mrs. Vandeleur inspecting the choicest curiosity of the bank—a centenarian clerk, who had been employed there for over eighty-five years, and who invariably alluded to his septuagenarian employer as "Master Alec."

"I've been here, man and boy, for nigh on eighty-six years," he was piping, as Wallace and the young ladies entered, "and disgrace has only once come upon the bank since I entered it! That was Master Wallace, to be sure. Oh, he's quiet enough now—butter wouldn't melt in his mouth! But he's a rank bad 'un—a rank bad 'un; and so I've always told Master Alec! Never trust him is what I've always said. Wine or whiskey, women or money, he can't resist any of 'em, for all he looks so quiet. He's a bad man, sir—a bad man is Wallace Armstrong!"

Laline heard every word, and turned to look at Wallace. He flushed and lowered his eyes under her inquiring gaze. Presently, drawing her apart, he confided to her in a whisper that old Farquharson was "quite off his head, and hadn't a notion what he was talking about."

A little later the ladies left, after being pressed by old Mr. Wallace to fix an early date for another visit, and drove home through the snow-covered streets in the early gloom of a winter's evening.

Clare was unusually quiet on the return journey; and it was only after the girls had retired to their rooms that night that she crept into Laline's room, looking very ghostly in her loose white flannel dressing-gown, with her long reddish-gold hair falling about her shoulders.

"Aren't you longing to know about my ghost-fright this evening?" she asked. "Of course I didn't tell Mr. Armstrong the truth. The fact is he's got some one in that other room he's keeping quiet—some one who rushed out at me in the dark with a sort of curse, and threw me out of the room. It was a woman, of course, and I suppose she was jealous, and that would account for her savagery."

"Clare," exclaimed Laline, "are you inventing this? How can I tell that you are speaking the truth now?"

For answer Clare slipped off her dressing-grown, and, pushing up the sleeve of her night-dress, displayed four black bruises, as of finger-marks, on the dazzling whiteness of her shoulder.

Laline uttered an exclamation of dismay.

"Clare, why didn't you tell Mr. Armstrong?"

"I don't think he would much have relished that!" Clare answered, with a disagreeable smile. "I am afraid, Laline, that he is a dreadfully bad lot—too bad even for me! There were lots of little things I noticed. For one, that the keys of the wine and of the spirits also were kept in old Mr. Wallace's possession. He doesn't even trust his nephew with a bottle of wine; for, when the sideboard was opened in the sitting-room, where we had tea, I particularly noticed that there were no bottles there. That might not mean anything if I hadn't heard that Mr. Armstrong drinks terribly at times. I think that must be the reason for that sort of sad saturnine look he gets in his eyes sometimes. I've noticed it before in people who drink. And then you know what old Farquharson said about him, and he ought to know."

"He's so old that I think he's lost his wits," said Laline. "Anyhow, it's rather hard to suppose a man is a drunkard simply because there are no bottles about his rooms."

"Why, I thought you didn't like Mr. Armstrong," Clare exclaimed, innocently, "and here you are defending him! This is a change indeed! Was he so very agreeable to-day as to destroy your old prejudice, or did the sight of the house and the banking business soften your hard heart towards him?"

There was no mistaking the unkindness of the sneer in this instance. Clare was indeed so profoundly jealous at the kind of understanding which she thought she had detected between Laline and Wallace during the latter part of the afternoon that her ordinary sweetness of manner was for the time forgotten. But Laline was in no mood for quarrelling. She wanted to be left alone with her thoughts and plans; so she contented herself with observing that Mr. Armstrong certainly improved on acquaintance, but that he appeared to have acquired, rightly or wrongly, a bad reputation. Then she yawned, and asked Clare to put out the candle before she left the room, upon which hint to retire Miss Cavan in considerable indignation acted.

All through Thursday and Friday and the morning of Saturday, Laline was going over in her mind the conversation she meant to have with Wallace Armstrong when she joined him at the gate of the Gardens that afternoon.

Concerning the lumber-room incident, she hardly felt justified in questioning him, so little reliance did she place upon Clare's statements. There was no doubt that Miss Cavan had been violently ejected from a room which Wallace had declared to be empty; but even now Laline's keen susceptibilities taught her that Clare was concealing something. As to the rumour concerning Wallace's occasional excesses, that was to Laline a far more serious matter. Long ago Captain Garth had styled him a drunkard, and Laline well remembered the copious and constant draughts of cognac in which her husband had indulged at Boulogne. But of these excesses there seemed no trace in Wallace's present manner. Save for the sudden infatuation he had conceived for her, and for an occasionally dreamy and fanciful habit of speech, there was nothing about him to suggest that he was not the sanest and most well-conducted of athletic and art-loving young English gentlemen.

The more she thought about Wallace the less she understood him; and what puzzled her most of all was that, while he admitted the fact of a responsibility he had incurred more than four years ago, he should still continue to pay her his addresses, without apparently ever troubling his head with the consideration that he was a married man.

Saturday dawned in clear cold sunshine, an ideal winter's day. Most fortunately for Laline, Clare was engaged to lunch at a friend's house, and afterwards to accompany a skating-party on the Long Water. Mrs. Vandeleur was absent-minded and absorbed in taking notes to be used at an interview with a very celebrated American spiritualist who was to visit her that afternoon, and by two o'clock there was nothing in the world to prevent Laline from walking out of the house to fulfil her appointment.

For the first time in her life she felt inclined to linger before her looking-glass, arranging and rearranging the set of her new hat, wondering whether she would look prettier with a regular curled fringe instead of the natural waves of hair which shaded her brow, taking her veil on and off because she was not quite sure that it suited her, desperately anxious to look her best, and wholly dissatisfied with her appearance, in spite of the fact that she had never in her life looked half so handsome as she did now, with a bright light of excitement in her hazel eyes and the pink colour coming and going in her cheeks.

So beautiful indeed did she appear to the love-stricken Wallace, waiting for her by the gate, as arranged, that the sight of her almost took his breath away.

"By Jove, you are lovely!" he exclaimed, half under his breath, like a school-boy.

"That sounds genuine, at any rate!" she said, laughing. "But, please, Mr. Armstrong, don't stand staring at me like that. Since you began by being personal, I will follow suit and say what a lovely fur-lined coat you have! It is so gorgeous that you look quite like a duke!"

"Or an actor," he suggested, laughing. "Actors are very partial to fur-lined coats, and being clean shaved makes me look still more like one."

"You used to wear a moustache?" she said, more as a statement than a question.

"Yes; but it was such a bad one that I abolished it. The reason for this coat is that I thought it might be cold driving."

"Driving?" she repeated, in surprise.

"Yes. Don't you see my cart waiting? I've brought a warm fur rug for you; but I'm afraid you'll be cold about the shoulders. It's only a few minutes past two, however, and we shall be able to buy a cape or a boa or something in one of the shops in the High Street."

Stepping up to the groom, who was driving a handsome bay mare in the neatest of dog-carts, Wallace directed him to follow while he turned back with Laline in the direction of the shops.

"You must choose it yourself," he explained to Laline. "Something very warm in fur."

"What are you thinking of?" she exclaimed. "You cannot for one moment suppose that I would accept valuable presents from a stranger?"

She had stopped in her walk, and he stopped, too, and looked down for a moment into her face, his blue eyes shining with a soft light, the sight of which brought sudden blushes to her cheek.

"I had forgotten," he said. "There is something else we must buy first."

In an instant she knew what he meant. Had she not been through the same experience with him before, years ago? She could almost have laughed aloud as he hurried her into a jeweller's shop, and they stood together before the counter while Wallace asked again, as he had done in Boulogne, to be shown some engagement-rings, "to fit this lady's finger."

The man's half-smile was just the same as it had been years ago. Surely some faint recollection of that former scene would come back to Wallace now, as he stood by her side and gently drew off her glove, just as he had done before, to try the rings!

"Which one do you like best?" he asked; and, breaking into a hysterical laugh, Laline declared that she must have "a turquoise heart surrounded by small diamonds."

"The price will be one hundred francs," she said, and almost expected that Wallace would at once proceed to purchase, as before, the wedding-ring as well.

But he did not do so. He only looked rather surprised, and inquired of the jeweller whether he had a ring of the description given. The man answered in the negative; and Laline, blushing and confused, allowed a moonstone-and-diamond heart and lovers'-knot to be slipped on her finger, and declared herself to be perfectly satisfied with it. The price this time was twenty guineas instead of one hundred francs; and, being now for the second time formally engaged to her husband, as she expressed it in her thoughts, Mrs. Wallace Armstrong left the shop with him.

She was still so overwhelmed by the way in which her little outburst had fallen flat that she behaved with great docility, and hardly uttered a protest as Wallace took her into a fashionable millinery establishment and purchased for her a deep sable collar, which he at once proceeded to fasten round her neck over her velvet cape.

"Now you will be safe from cold," he said, triumphantly. "As soon as my dear old uncle heard that to-day I was coming courting, he simply lined my pockets with bank-notes."

"Did you tell him?"

"Of course I did! And he was in a state of the highest delight. 'Not the red-haired one, I hope—I didn't like her mouth,' was his only objection. When he heard that it was you I was in love with, it was all I could do to prevent him from coming with me to plead my cause."

"You seem to have been very confident," observes Laline, "and very sure of winning my consent."

"I knew I should get it sooner or later by dint of asking," he answered, as he helped her into the dog-cart and carefully wrapped a fur rug round her knees. "Ever since I saw the lamplight shine on your face that first evening at Mrs. Vandeleur's I knew that I should never have a moment's peace until I had made you my wife."

"You have never even asked me to marry you!" said Laline, her spirits rising under the strangeness of her surroundings. "You have only met me four times, and have talked a lot of sentiment and abstract love-making; then to-day, before I had time to think, you dragged me into a jeweller's shop and bought me a ring. But you have never proposed to me, and I have never accepted you. Consequently we cannot be engaged."

"Lina Grahame," he said bending his head to look in her face as he took his seat by her side, "will you be my wife?"

"Wallace Armstrong," she returned, in quick staccato utterance, "what has become of Laline Garth?"

CHAPTER XVI.

As soon as the words "Wallace Armstrong, what has become of Laline Garth?" had left her lips, Laline's heart sank within her. On Wallace's answer very much depended. And at first he did not answer, but only drew his level black brows near together and stared straight before him at his horse's head.

"I cannot imagine," he said at length, after a pause which seemed interminable to the girl by his side, "why you ask me that now. It is such a sad and painful subject, and I meant to-day to be so happy. What is the use of trying to revive a dead past?"

"Do you never think of it?" she asked.

"Never, if I can help it! I suppose you heard the whole affair from my uncle? Whether you blame me or not, I don't see that I could have acted otherwise."

"And you never think of her?"

"Never!" he answered, calmly. "Why should I? The poor child is long ago dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes. Surely my uncle told you that?"

"Yes—no—I don't remember. How do you know that she is dead?"

"I saw her grave. Why, how white you are, and how excited you seem! Why do you take such a strange interest in the girl?"

"I—I am sorry for her," faltered Laline.

She could not understand it. Was it some trick of her father's, she wondered—and did Wallace really believe her to be dead?

"What became of that Captain Garth who wrote the letter to your uncle?" she inquired, suddenly.

"Oh, that old sinner? He died of apoplexy two years ago, having enjoyed a handsome annuity from my soft-hearted uncle on the strength of the poor girl Laline having been his niece. But, dearest, if you knew how much I hate the subject, you would not, I am sure, compel me to discuss it."

"I will say no more about it now," she observed, quietly.

In spite of the quick drive through the keen air she was very pale. His news had strangely affected her, and the certainty that her father was dead moved her deeply. She tried to remember all that was good about him, and recalled on the instant many little acts of careless kindness which until then she had forgotten. All the Boulogne life came before her again in its sordid daily details, and she saw herself as Wallace had first seen her—an over-grown child in a short blue-cotton gown, with her long hair floating over her shoulders under her "Zulu" hat.

A barrier seemed suddenly to have arisen between her and Wallace. His belief that she was dead complicated things; and the fact that he clearly disliked all allusion to the events which occurred at Boulogne distressed Laline. Sooner or later she would have to enlighten him as to her identity; and might not this news go far to weaken his passion for her? Troubled with these thoughts, she sat still and silent, with big tears gathering in her eyes, hearing without listening to Wallace's light-hearted talk about indifferent subjects.

"Lina," he suddenly exclaimed, "you have tears in your eyes! What is the matter, darling?"

"I don't know. A fit of the blues, I suppose."

"You want exercise and amusement, that's what it is," he said, decisively. "My plan for to-day will do you all the good in the world. That room of Mrs. Vandeleur's isn't good for you. The mental atmosphere is unnatural; you are growing to look ghostlike yourself in it!"

"I am quite well," she said, rousing herself from her reverie. "But where are we? I don't know much about London yet, and I am very near-sighted, and have been thinking of something else. But surely this is a part of the world I haven't been in before?"

"This is Baker Street, and we are on our way to Regent's Park and Hampstead. We shall stop at my uncle's Hampstead house, the Homestead, and have some skating in the grounds; then Mrs. Sylvester the housekeeper will give us tea, and I will drive you back home in good time this evening."

"But it's just like an elopement!" she protested.

"Well, you must blame my uncle for that, and not me. It is he who arranged the whole thing, and telegraphed to Mrs. Sylvester that we were coming. I always run over to the Homestead once or twice a week to see that the horses aren't eating their heads off. I intended driving over this afternoon if I had not been going out with you; and it was my uncle who declared that you must see the place and judge whether you would like to live in it."

"To live in it!" she repeated, in astonishment. "You and your uncle," she added, "seemed to have settled everything between you in a very remarkable manner, without the preliminary formality of consulting me. Pray, when did you arrange these nice little plans together?"

"As soon as you had left the house last Wednesday. My uncle was already aware that I was in love with one of you two younger ladies, but did not know which, and he was overjoyed when he found it was you. You won his heart by listening to his long stories, even if he hadn't been charmed by your lovely face and voice."

"I always understood," Laline put in, demurely, "that you made your first visit to Mrs. Vandeleur's house in the character of Clare Cavan's admirer?"

"I did and do admire Miss Cavan very much," he answered, promptly. "I should like to paint her as Vivien charming Merlin, both of them in modern evening-dress, with Miss Cavan showing off her beautiful white neck and arms for a senile and rather Jewish-looking Merlin's edification. Miss Cavan represents a very attractive type, but not the type I should care to marry."

"You talk," she said, with a touch of impatience in her tone, "as though any girl would jump at the chance of marrying you!"

"I certainly don't mean to convey that impression," he retorted; "although I am sorry to say that many girls I meet would be delighted to marry Alexander Wallace's nephew, whatever he might be like—old, ugly, deformed, or hateful—just for the sake of Alexander Wallace's money!"

"And is it that belief," she asked, blushing hotly, "which made you so confident in my case?"

"Lina," he exclaimed, in reproachful tones, "why do you ask me such a question? It is neither fair to yourself nor to me."

"Well, I get annoyed when you show how sure you felt of winning me," she explained, apologetically.

"Of course," he said, flicking his horse's ears reflectively with his whip—"of course I knew that in time I should worry you into saying 'Yes.' But at first I own I was a good deal troubled by the strange look of repulsion and even a fear that came into your lovely eyes when you looked at me. You remember when, as I left the house after my first visit, I turned and looked back and caught you watching my departure from a window on the ground-floor?"

"I remember."

"Well, your look then was one of terror and dislike combined, which simply struck dismay into my soul. Tell me, Lina—why did you look at me like that?"

"You reminded me of some one whom I used to know and dislike four years and a half ago," she answered, faintly.

She half hoped that the date she gave would form a link in his mind; but her words evidently conveyed to him no hint of her intention, for he only laughed.

"Four years and a half ago you must have been such a very little girl that your prejudices were probably wholly unreasonable," he said, cheerfully. "How old are you now, Lina?"

"Twenty."

"As old as that? I thought you were fully two years younger. Well, Lina, there is just the right difference between us. What does Shakspere say?—

'Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband's heart.'

Our marriage will be ideal in every way."

"If I marry you."

"If! You won't be able to help yourself. How slowly this mare is going!"

"Slowly! We seem to me to be skimming over the ground!"

"Ah, but that's because you are not so anxious as I to get there!"

Laline glanced shyly up at him, and her heart began to suddenly beat quicker. She had never yet been made love to in her life, but she felt certain that Wallace was counting the moments until he could claim the kiss out of which Clare Cavan's sudden entrance had defrauded him on the preceding Wednesday. For the first time it became strongly borne in upon her mind that she was doing something altogether startling and unconventional in thus accompanying a young man, against whose character very serious accusations had been made, to his country-house without the necessary sacrifice to Mrs. Grundy provided by the presence of a chaperon. But, after all, was she not engaged to him, with his uncle's full sanction—and was he not by law her natural guardian and protector, being in very truth her husband?

Looking at him under the bright, clear light of a frosty winter sun, Laline could see in Wallace's face no signs at all of the vices and follies attributed to him. The study of his features, on the other hand, filled her with a secret delight and pride of possession which thrilled through her entire being. This was essentially a manly man, handsome, erect, full of life, strength, and vigour—a man whose mere outward appearance attracted long and admiring glances from women of all ranks as he drove along, and whose driving and perfectly neat and smart turn-out drew towards him looks of approbation from masculine equals and inferiors alike. And he was not only her husband, but in love with her—a man wealthy, popular, and much sought after, who had gone out of his way to implore her, a little penniless dependant, to be his wife.

They were driving up a steep hill by this time, not far from Hampstead Heath.

"That is the Homestead," Wallace said, indicating with his whip the tall stacks of chimneys of a large white house peering from among trees near the summit of the hill.

Laline felt glad of both Wallace's and Mrs. Vandeleur's recent additions to her wardrobe as she drove in the dog-cart through the lodge-gates of the Homestead. Clearly the rumour that the young master was bringing down his future bride had spread abroad, for the lodge-keeper came out to pull his forelock and smile, with his wife curtseying and smiling behind him.

At the house—a big rambling erection, decked with ivy and creepers, and wearing an air of homelike comfort—Mrs. Sylvester, a plump, middle-aged, gray-haired woman, came out in an evident flutter of excitement and her best silk dress and cape to welcome the visitors.

Mrs. Sylvester wanted nothing better than for the young master to marry and instal himself at the Homestead, to impart a little liveliness to the establishment, and prevent it from being let to strangers, and she was delighted with the appearance of Mr. Armstrong's fiancée.

"Quite the lady!" she confided afterwards to the cook, in discussing Laline's appearance. "As handsome as you may wish to see, though p'raps a bit too thin for some people's tastes; but that only makes her more elegant. A sweet face, cook, and dressed in the height of fashion. That sable collarette she was wearing must have cost thirty or forty pounds; and her black velvet hat and cape were quite the latest fashion. For my part, I like a young lady with some style about her."