CHRISTINA

BY

L. G. MOBERLY

Author of "Hope, My Wife," "That Preposterous Will," etc.

WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE & TORONTO
1912

Dedicated to
WINIFRED V. WALKER,
WITH MUCH LOVE.

CONTENTS

CHRISTINA.

CHAPTER I.

"THE LITTLE PRACTICAL JOKE."

"Don't be a silly ass, Layton. Do I look the sort of man to play such a fool's trick?"

"My dear fellow, there's no silly ass about it. You, a lonely bachelor, and not badly off—desirous of settling down into quiet, domestic life, would like to find a young lady of refined and cultured tastes who would meet you with—a view to matrimony. I'll take my oath you are as ready as this gentleman is, to swear you will make an excellent husband, kind, domesticated, and——"

Further speech was checked by a well-directed cushion, which descended plump upon the speaker's bronzed and grinning countenance, momentarily obliterating grin and countenance alike, whilst a shout of laughter went up from the other occupants of the smoking-room.

"Jack, my boy, Mernside wasn't far wrong when he defined you as a silly ass," drawled a man who leant against the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette, and looking with amused eyes at the squirming figure under the large cushion; "what unutterable drivel are you reading? Is the Sunday Recorder responsible for that silly rot?"

"The Sunday Recorder is responsible for what you are pleased to call silly rot," answered the young man, who had now flung aside the cushion, and sat upright, looking at his two elders with laughing eyes, whilst he clutched a newspaper in one hand, and tried to smooth his rumpled hair with the other. "The Sunday Recorder has a matrimonial column—and—knowing poor old Rupert to be a lonely bachelor, not badly off, and desirous of settling down into quiet domestic life, etc., etc.—see the printed page"—he waved the journal over his head—"I merely wished to recommend my respected cousin to insert an advertisement on these lines, in next Sunday's paper."

"Because some wretched bounders choose to advertise for wives in the Sunday papers, I don't see where I come in," said a quiet and singularly musical voice—that of the third man in the room—he who a moment before had flung the large cushion at young Layton. He was sitting in an armchair drawn close to the glowing fire, his hands clasped under his head, his face full of languid amusement, turned towards the grinning youth upon the sofa. Without being precisely a handsome man, Rupert Mernside's was a striking personality, and his face not one to be overlooked, even in a crowd. There was strength in his well-cut mouth and jaw; and the rather deeply-set grey eyes held humour, and a certain masterfulness, which dominated less powerful characters than his own.

In those eyes there was a charm which neutralised his somewhat severe and rugged features, but in Rupert Mernside's voice lay his greatest attraction; and a lady of his acquaintance had once been heard to say that with such a voice as his, he could induce anyone to follow him round the world.

Why he had remained so long a bachelor had long been matter for speculation, not only to the feminine portion of the community, but also to his men friends; but thirty-five still found Rupert Mernside unmarried, and the manoeuvres of match-making mothers, and of daughters trained to play up to their mothers' tactics, had hitherto failed to lead him in the desired direction.

"My dear Rupert," his young cousin said solemnly, after a pause, "you are a bachelor—the fact is painfully self-evident; you have enough money to—settle down and become domesticated. There are hundreds—no—thousands of young women in the world, who would 'meet you with a view to matrimony.' It seems a crying shame that you should waste your sweetness on the desert air—when you might be blooming in a fair lady's garden."

"You utter young rotter," Mernside ejaculated, laughing as he rose, and stretched himself, "if you are so keen on matrimonial advertisements, why not put one in on your own account?"

"Awful sport," Layton ejaculated; "think of the piles of letters you would get from every kind of marriageable woman—old and young. And you might arrange to meet any number of them at different places, and have no end of a ripping time. You only have to ask them to meet you with a view to matrimony; the matrimony needn't come off, unless both parties are satisfied."

"Silly ass!" Mernside exclaimed again, with a laugh that mitigated the words, "one of these days you'll find yourself in some unpleasantly tangled web, my boy, if you play the goat over matrimonial advertisements. Better leave well alone and come up to Handwell Manor with me. Cicely wants a message taken to the Dysons."

"Cicely's messages are like the poor—always with us," the younger man answered flippantly; "no, thank you, Rupert; on this genial and pleasant November afternoon, when you can't see half a mile ahead of you for the mist, and the country lanes are two feet deep in mud, I prefer the smoking-room fire. Besides, I have letters to write."

"I'll go with you, Mernside"; the man who had been lounging against the mantelpiece straightened himself, and flung away the end of his cigarette; "Cicely won't be down till tea-time; she is spending the afternoon in the nursery, looking after the small girl. Confounded nuisance for her that the nurse had to go off in a hurry like this, for my respected sister was not intended by nature for the care of children."

"Fortunate she has only one," Mernside answered; "what would she have done with a large family party?"

"Managed by hook or by crook to get a party of nurses and nurserymaids to mind them," laughed the other man; "she's the dearest little soul alive, but Cicely never ought to have been a mother, though I shouldn't say that, excepting to you two who are members of the family, and know of what stuff Cicely and I are made."

Mernside and Layton joined in the laughter, and the younger man said lazily:

"Cicely's just Cicely; you can't imagine her less perfect than she is, and you, Wilfrid, being merely her brother, are not entitled to give an opinion about her. Rupert and I, as cousins, see her in a truer perspective. Bless her sweet heart! She makes a perfect chatelaine for this delectable castle, and the small heiress couldn't have a sweeter guardian."

"Hear, hear," Mernside murmured, touching Layton's shoulder with a kindly, almost caressing touch, as he and his cousin, Lord Wilfrid Staynes, went out of the room, leaving the young man in sole possession.

Left alone, Layton stretched himself again, yawned, lighted a cigarette, and, strolling to the window, looked at the not very inviting prospect outside. Bramwell Castle stood on the slope of a hill, and on even moderately fine days, the view commanded, not only by the window of the smoking-room, but by every window on that side of the house, was one of the wildest, and most beautiful in the county. But, on this Sunday afternoon in November, nothing more was visible than the broad gravel terrace immediately below the house, and a grass lawn that sloped abruptly from the terrace, and was dotted with trees. Everything beyond the lawn was swallowed up in a white mist that drifted over the tree-tops, and clung to the dank grass, blotting out completely all trace of the park, that swept downwards from the lawn, and of the great landscape which stretched from the woodlands to the far-away hills. Park, woods, and hills were visible to Jack Layton only in the eyes of his imagination; he could see none of them, and, with a shiver and a shrug of the shoulders, he turned back into the warm fire-lit room.

Thanks to his close relationship to Lady Cicely Redesdale, the mistress of the house, to whom he had always been more of younger brother than cousin, he had carte blanche to be at the Castle whenever he chose, and to treat the house as if it were in reality, what he assuredly made of it—his actual home. Both to him—and to Cicely's other cousin, Rupert Mernside—the late John Redesdale, her husband, had extended the fullest and most warm hospitality; and since his death, it had still remained a recognised thing that the two cousins should spend their weekends at Bramwell, whenever Lady Cicely and her little daughter were there. The kindly millionaire who had married the lovely but impecunious Cicely Staynes, one of the numerous daughters of the Earl of Netherhall, possessed a host of hospitable instincts, and the Castle had opened its gates wide to Cicely's relations and friends. Only one reservation had been made by honest John Redesdale. No man or woman of doubtful reputation, or damaged character, was allowed to be the guest of his wife; and the shadier members of Society never set foot within any house of which the millionaire was master. Jack Layton, strolling idly now across the smoking-room, whose panelled walls and carved furniture had been Redesdale's pride and joy, glanced up at the mantelpiece, over which hung a portrait of the dead man.

"Poor old John," the young man reflected, as he kicked a coal back into its place in the fire; "he was one of the best chaps that ever lived—even if he hadn't many good looks with which to bless himself." He looked up again at the plain but kindly features of the man in the portrait, and a smile crossed his pleasant young face, as his eyes met the pictured eyes above him.

"It wasn't a love match, of course," his thoughts ran on; "at least, I don't suppose Cicely loved the dear old fellow. Well; he was thirty years her senior, so who could wonder? But they were jolly happy, for all that; John worshipped the ground her pretty feet walked upon, and he was her master, without ever letting her feel his hand through the glove. Cicely wants a master—all women do want a master," Jack wagged his head sagely, when his thoughts reached this point. Having attained to the ripe age of twenty-five, he felt he had plumbed the nature of woman to its lowest depths, "and Cicely was lucky to find a master who could give her a place like this." He sauntered away from the fireplace, and next surveyed the well-stocked bookcases, but although they contained every variety of literature, nothing he saw appealed to his fastidious taste of the moment—and, yawning afresh, he once more picked up the Sunday Recorder, which he had flung upon the floor.

That someone who is perennially ready to turn idle hands to account, was watching over this idle youth on that November afternoon, may, on the whole, be taken for granted, for as Jack's blue eyes ran down the columns of the paper, a sudden mischievous light sprang into them, a low laugh broke from his lips.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "What sport, what ripping sport. Why on earth didn't I think of it before? And—as I start for a four months' trip with Dundas on Saturday—I shan't have to pay the piper, so to speak, yet awhile. In fact, by the time I come back, good old Rupert may have forgotten the little practical joke." Whilst he soliloquized, he was making his way towards the writing-table, where, having seated himself, he drew towards him a blank sheet of paper—and began to write a letter, glancing frequently at the Sunday Recorder beside him. An expansive grin lightened his features as he wrote, and at intervals he chuckled softly to himself, murmuring under his breath:

"Poor old Rupert. If only I could be there when he gets the answers. But one can't have everything," he went on philosophically, whilst addressing an envelope to the Editor of the Sunday Recorder; "it will be pure joy to think of the dear soul's dismay, horror, and disgust. ''Tis a mad world, my masters'—and, oh! to see our Rupert's face when the letters pour in. For they will pour in." During this rapid soliloquy, he was writing a second letter, which gave him less trouble, and needed less thought, than the first. Indeed, it ran very briefly:

"DEAR SIR,—I am desired to ask if you will be good enough to forward all letters in response to the enclosed advertisement to R.M., c/o your newspaper, to 200, Termyn Street, S.W.—Yours faithfully,

"J. LAYTON."

With a final chuckle, the young man put both letters into an envelope, and having stamped it, went whistling from the house, and through the park to the village, to post the missive himself at the little village post office.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of good family and means, is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home, etc., etc., etc.," he murmured as he walked slowly back to the Castle through the dripping November mist. "Oh! what sport—what utterly ripping sport!"

CHAPTER II.

"MUMMY'S BABA—DAT'S ALL."

In the great Free Library of a crowded London district, the gas burnt dimly; the yellow fog of a November morning crept even into the big room, and the few readers shivered a little in its cold clamminess. At this early hour, for the building had only just opened its doors on a Monday morning, merely a scattered number of men and women were to be seen in the place, and those who were there clustered round the advertisement columns of the newspapers. Both men and women alike were a sorry-looking crew, and the sad words "out of work," were stamped upon them all. Their clothing bore the marks of much wear and tear; their faces were worn, and in the eyes of each of them was that strained expression, that rises from much looking for that which never comes. Old and young men were there, searching the long columns of the papers for work that might suit their pressing needs; old and young women were there, too—women whose faces gave eloquent testimony to their hard fight with fortune—whose eyes glanced hungrily along the printed lines, whose hands tremblingly wrote down this or that address, which might by some merciful chance give them, if not exactly what they wanted, at any rate that which would ensure their earning a pittance, however scanty. Almost every member of the forlorn group eyed every other member suspiciously, with furtive glances, that seemed to say: "If you are lucky enough to get a job out of those columns, then I shall fail to get one. We are cutting each other's throats here. Your success is my failure." And as each one finished jotting down the addresses that were likely to be of use, he or she moved silently away from the library, speaking no word to the rest—like cowering animals who, having received a bone, or the promise of a bone, slink away from their fellows, fearful lest even the small thing they have gained, should be snatched from them.

The greater number amongst the searchers for work, consisted of those who, for want of a better title, may be described as belonging to the middle classes. They were neither the very poor—in the recognised acceptation of the words, though heaven knows they were poor enough—neither could they be classed amongst artisans, or mechanics. Their appearance would lead an onlooker to suppose that the men were accustomed to office work of some description, and that the women were governesses, companions, or perhaps lady housekeepers—all respectable, all possessing certain ideals of life and propriety, all struggling to maintain the degree of gentility, which would keep them above the high-water mark of degradation. A girl who stood a little apart from the rest, looked round the dimly-lit room with pitiful eyes, and a shudder ran through her slight frame, as she watched the faces and forms of these women who were no longer young, but who were yet still engaged in this hand-to-hand fight with destitution. The girl was young; it was impossible to suppose that more than twenty years had gone over her head, though the deep shadows under her eyes, and the lines of anxiety, about her mouth, might have made a casual observer regard her as an older woman. Like the rest of her sex who scanned the advertisement columns, she was dressed in clothes which had plainly seen better days—much better days. But, whereas some of the other women had already begun to drift into untidiness, and into the slovenly ways which mark the first step along a downward road, this girl was exquisitely neat from head to foot. Her hat, in spite of its age, was well brushed; her threadbare coat and skirt were tidy, and showed no traces of dirt or grease; her gloves, though they were white at the tips, had no holes; and there was no sign of neglect or disorder in the arrangement of the dark hair, that showed in soft, dusky curls below her hat.

"Poor things! Oh! poor things!" was her thought, as she looked at the sad string of humanity filing its slow way to the door. "Some of them have been every day for weeks, and they are getting older every day. And the older one gets, the harder it is to find work. Some day I shall be like that, old, and tired, and worn out; and then—work will be more difficult to get than it is now—and I can't get it—even now—when I am young."

The thoughts that had begun in sheer pity for those other battlers with the waves of this troublesome world, ended in a shuddering realisation of her own position; and not only of her position for the moment, but of the future that stretched inimitably before her across the years. She, Christina Moore, was only twenty, and in all human probability another sixty years of life might be hers, for she dimly remembered hearing her mother say that both she and her husband belonged to long-lived families. That they two had been cut off in the prime of life by a virulent epidemic of typhoid fever that swept the village like a plague, did not alter the fact that they came of races famous for octogenarians; and Christina, the last of two long lines of ancestors, shivered anew at the thought of the weary, weary years of struggle that might still lie before her. It was seldom that she was assailed by such depressing reflections; her youth had a way, as youth has, of asserting itself, and rebounding from its own despair; and there was an abundance of pluck behind those queer, green eyes of hers, and no lack of resolution in her small square chin. But the fog outside, the chilly atmosphere of the big library, whose fires were barely alight, and the sight of the same unemployed men and women who for weeks past had, as it were, dogged her footsteps, all combined this morning, to send Christina's spirits down to zero. Matters had not been improved by the calculations over which she had busied herself before leaving her lodgings an hour earlier. Whilst eating her dry bread, and drinking tea without milk, because both milk and butter were luxuries she no longer dared to give herself, she had written out her pitiful accounts upon a half-sheet of paper; and the result of the reckoning had given her a terrible feeling of desperation. For two years since her parents' death, she had occupied the post of nursery governess in the family of a Mrs. Donaldson, to whom her mother had once shown some trifling kindness. But three months earlier these people had left England for Canada, and no longer required her services—and Christina, untrained to any profession, with a few pounds in hand, and with nothing but a strong personality, and an innate love for little children, to offer as her stock in trade, found herself amongst the hundreds of other unemployed—just a waif in a great city!

Relations, as far as she knew, she had none. Her father had been an only child. Her mother had cut herself off from her own people by marrying against their consent, and Christina was even unaware of who they were, or to what part of the country they belonged. Long ago, she had grasped the fact that she was alone in the world, and when the Donaldsons went away, she had no intimate friends in the old country—two years of life with them in a London suburb having effectually cut her off from the very few acquaintances she had left behind, in the Devonshire village, where her parents died.

Alone in the world, with no work, after nearly three months of fruitless search for it, and with her small stock of money growing beautifully less each day, it was no wonder that on this morning in November, Christina Moore's heart sank in despair.

Save for one or two men still busily engaged in extracting addresses from the papers, she was alone in the library, before she herself began her daily search along those monotonous columns, whose lines seemed to her tired eyes to run into one another, and become lost in an infinite haze. So many people appeared to require nursery governesses, companions, and mothers' helps; and yet, as bitter experience taught her, there were many more applicants for the posts than there were posts to fill; and it was with a half-hearted sense of intense discouragement that she noted down some of the addresses. She even wrote down some that she had hitherto despised—those who offered only a home and no salary in return for services; for, as she reflected despondently, "even to have a roof over one's head, and meals to eat, is better than to have no lodging, or food—and no money to pay for either."

Having glanced down the advertisements in the chief dailies, her hand idly turned the pages of one of the Sunday papers close by, and her eyes glanced down them, more with the idea of distracting her thoughts, than with any conception that she might find anything there, that would be of use to her. And her lips parted in a smile, as she read, in large print:

"MATRIMONIAL NEWS."

"How funny," she mused, whilst she read that a gentleman of means wished to find a lady of fortune who would take pity on his loneliness; or that a lady no longer young, but still handsome, wished to meet a gentleman with a moderate income, with a view to marriage.

"How funny—how very funny!" she mused again; then paused suddenly, her glance riveted to a sentence that caught and held her attention, almost against her will.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means," so the paragraph ran, "is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth, who needs a home. No fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon if both parties are mutually satisfied. Reply by letter to R.M., Box 40,004, Sunday Recorder Office, Fleet Street, E.C."

Over the girl's white face there slowly spread a stain of vivid colour; into her eyes crept an odd light. She drew the paper more closely into her hands, reading and re-reading the paragraph, until every word of it was imprinted upon her mind.

"Young lady—who needs a home—no fortune necessary," she murmured. "Oh! if only it didn't seem so cold-blooded and horrid, what a way out it might be! Only—it seems—so—so mercenary—and not what I always thought of when I was silly—and dreamt—things," her musings ran on. "Once—I dreamt about a fairy prince—who would—just come—and—make me love him—and he and I would—be—all the world—to each other. But—of course—one couldn't be all the world to a person one had arranged to meet through a newspaper."

Another smile broke over her face, and when she smiled, Christina's face was very sweet.

"It may be just some dreadful trap to catch a silly girl," she reflected sagely, "and if—if I did really think of answering it, I should have to be very careful what I said—and where I arranged to meet R.M. Of course I—shan't really answer it at all—only—if I did—and if he were nice—and if—it all came right—there wouldn't be any more of this dreadful struggle!"

She noted the address of this advertisement amongst the others in her little pocket-book, and then made her way out of the library and trudged homewards through the yellow murk, buttoning her very inadequate coat tightly about her and shiveringly speculating whether, if she really answered R.M.'s advertisement, there might be a chance of obtaining clothing more fitted to resist the penetrating chill of a November fog. Her own small room looked dingier than usual when she entered it, and it was so full of fog and damp, that she rolled a blanket round her before lighting a candle and seating herself at the tiny table, to answer some of the advertisements she had copied. The room was bare of all but the most necessary furniture. A camp bedstead stood against the wall, whose paper was of that indeterminate drabness affected by lodging-house keepers; a deal table occupied the centre of the room, with the common cane-chair on which Christina sat; and a painted chest of drawers nearly blocked up the one tiny window. There was no wash-hand stand; a cracked white basin and a still more cracked jug stood upon the top of the drawers, a looking-glass of ancient and battered appearance hung over the mantelpiece, and an open cupboard in the wall served Christina as sideboard and larder combined. Beside the bed was a narrow strip of much-faded carpet, but of comfort and homeliness the room showed no trace whatever, save in the tiny touches of home the girl had herself striven to impart to it, by hanging on the walls one or two sketches of the Devonshire village she loved, and by putting on the mantelpiece a few treasured photographs. But her best endeavours had failed to make the room other than a most dreary and dispiriting abode, and the view from the window, of the backs of other houses looming darkly through the fog, was not calculated to lift the cloud of despair that for the moment had settled heavily upon her. She felt listlessly disinclined to state her qualifications as nursery governess, or mother's help, to the various ladies who hankered after such commodities. Involuntarily, but continually, her thoughts returned to that paragraph from the Sunday Recorder, which was not only engraved upon her mind, but which she had actually copied also into her book.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth, who needs a home. No fortune is necessary." At that point in her reading, Christina paused.

"No fortune is necessary," she said aloud, in an oddly deprecating voice. "R.M., whoever he may be, only asks for a young lady of good birth, who needs a home. Well," she turned her eyes towards the foggy roofs just visible outside her dirty window-panes, "well, as far as I know I am of good birth, even though father only taught music; and some people seem to look down on musicians. And—I certainly need a home."

Her glance left the gloomy world without, and went ruefully round the scarcely less gloomy prospect within. "And if I suited R.M.—perhaps—perhaps, he would be good to me. Should I suit him, I wonder? I'm not pretty, and certainly not amusing, and I'm dreadfully shabby, and nearly as poor as it is possible to be. There is not one single thing to recommend me." She pushed back her chair; and, rising from the table, moved slowly to the mantel-piece, over which hung the tarnished glass whose powers of reflecting objects satisfactorily had long since departed. Into this unpromising mirror, poor little Christina, holding the candle far above her head, peered long and earnestly, her small white face looking all the whiter, because of the background of yellow fog; her eyes seeming more green than was their wont, because of the dark shadows that underlay them.

She had thrown off her hat, and the soft masses of her hair lay in curly confusion about her head. It was a shapely little head, and particularly well put on, but these were points of which Christina took no special account, being intent on finding beauties in her face, and failing to notice that there was anything admirable in the turn of her neck, in the poise of her firm chin, and in the straightforward glance of her eyes.

"If R.M. met me casually in the street, he wouldn't look at me twice—no man would," she exclaimed with a sigh, as she turned away from the glass, "I am horribly ordinary. The only thing is—if I could screw up my courage to answer him—and then to meet him—he might like to find a girl who didn't want anything but a quiet home; who would be satisfied to go without gaiety or amusement." She sighed again, and a wistful look crept into her eyes. "I haven't really ever had any fun, so I shouldn't miss it, and I could just try to make a happy home for R.M., if that is all he wants. And—after all," she went on, still speaking aloud, "there isn't any harm in answering his letter. It may all come to nothing; and yet—it might be worth while—and—it almost seems presidential that I just happened to see that paragraph in the Sunday Recorder."

The letter she sat down to write as the outcome of all these conflicting meditations, was the most difficult she had ever written in her young life; and before it was finished, and finally consigned to its envelope, she had torn up many sheets of paper, and allowed fully two hours of the morning to pass by. Twelve o'clock was chiming from all the clocks in the neighbourhood, when, with her answers to some of the other advertisements in her hand, she once more pinned on her hat, and ran downstairs to the post. The fog had thickened considerably during the morning, and Christina found the street lamps alight—tiny points of brightness set high above the prevailing gloom, and producing very little effect upon the darkness. Indeed, there was something almost bewildering about those far-off lights; they seemed to heighten, rather than diminish, the all-pervading blackness, which deepened every moment.

The girl walked slowly, feeling her way along the area railings, and guiding herself as far as possible by the rumble of traffic along the roadway, though the confusion of sounds made even this guidance a very uncertain one. Drivers shouted, horses slipped and stumbled; and the shrill voices of boys carrying flaring torches, added to the pandemonium. Earlier in the morning the fog had merely been of the familiar yellow variety known to every Londoner. It was now a black and total darkness that seemed to engulf the world. To cross the road to the pillar-box was a matter of no small difficulty, but Christina, with a dogged determination not to be outwitted by the elements, stepped off the kerb and into the seething mass of carts, cabs, and other vehicles, that jostled and struggled with one another in apparently inextricable confusion.

On the far side of the street she plunged into a comparatively quiet square, where the fog had lifted somewhat, and was no longer of such Cimmerian blackness, but merely a drifting and bewildering white mist.

The pillar-box at the corner loomed faintly through it, and Christina had just dropped her packet of letters into it, when there struck upon her ears the soft cry of a little child. There was such a note of fear, of lonely misery, in that soft cry, that Christina, a child-lover to the core of her being, paused, and listened intently. Everything about her was very still; the square was a quiet one, though separated only by a short street from a main thoroughfare; and, excepting for the distant noise of traffic and shouting, nothing was to be heard, until again the little whimpering cry became audible on Christina's right.

"What is it?" the girl said gently. "Don't be frightened, dear. I'll take care of you," and as she spoke, she heard a gasp of relief, and a shaking, childish voice exclaimed:

"Baba's most drefful fightened; please take Baba home."

"But where is Baba?" Christina was beginning cheerily, when, through the fog, she caught sight of a tiny figure coming quickly towards her, and, stooping down, she gathered close into her arms a little child, of perhaps three years old, a little child who clung to her with a desperate, terrified clutch, lifting a tear-stained face to hers.

"Take Baba home," the baby voice wailed again, and as the fog rolled back a little more, Christina saw that the child was no street waif, but obviously the daintily-clad darling of some great house. Her golden head was bare, and the tangle of curls was like a frame about the lovely little face, whose great blue eyes looked appealingly into Christina's own. A red woollen cloak hung over the child's shoulders, but as the cloak fell back, Christina saw that her frock was chiefly fashioned of exquisite filmy lace, and that a string of pearls was fastened round the little white throat.

"Where is Baba's home?" she questioned softly, lifting the child right into her arms, and kissing the flower-like face, on which the tears still lay like dewdrops in the heart of a rose. "Tell me where you live, sweetheart, and I will take you home."

"Baba doesn't know where she lives," the child shook her yellow curls, and her big eyes filled again with tears. "Baba's awful, drefful fightened. The door was open—and Baba did just run out to see the pretty horses—and then—it was all black—and Baba was lost."

"I don't think Baba ought to have come out by herself in a fog," Christina said, a gentle reproof in her tones; "and now we must try to find out where your home is, little girl. Tell me what your name is—besides Baba."

"Baba—Mummy's Baba—dat's all," the baby answered, with a conclusive shutting of her pretty mouth. "Baba's forgot her other name—she's only just Mummy's Baba."

"But Baba—what?" Christina said patiently, walking slowly along the square, the child in her arms. "Try to remember your other name, my sweet; then I can take you safe home to mummy and nurse."

"Baba hasn't got no nurse, nurse's gone away. Mummy minds Baba now, and Baba can't remember her other name. She's got a bone in her head," quoth the baby, smiling deliciously into Christina's troubled face, and evidently paraphrasing some former servant's excuses. "Baba likes you—pretty lady—come home with Baba!"

"I wish I could," Christina said gravely, feeling rather helpless, as she looked from the child in her arms to the stately houses in the square, and back again. "I wonder where you live, you queer mite; and how I am going to find out who are your belongings. They are probably moving heaven and earth at this moment to find you."

The baby laughed. She did not follow more than half Christina's words, but her infantile fancy had been caught by the girl's gentle manner and motherly ways, and she put two dimpled arms round her rescuer's neck, and rubbed her face confidently against Christina's white cheeks.

"Baba's not fightened any more," she murmured contentedly; "you just take Baba home—and we'll find mummy—and then Baba will be all right."

"Yes; it will be all right when we find home and mummy," Christina answered with a short laugh but her arm tightened round the soft little body, her lips pressed themselves against the tangled curls, and all the time she pursued her slow way along the square, hoping that so small a person could not have travelled very far, and that presently someone in pursuit of her would put in an appearance. They had gone the length of the square, and down the line of houses along one of its sides, when all at once the baby uttered a shout of triumph.

"There's James—over there," she exclaimed; "now Baba can see her own house. James—James!" she cried excitedly, and Christina saw that on the side of the square at right angles to them, a footman stood on the doorstep, looking distractedly to right and left of him. At the sound of the uplifted baby voice, he left his post at the door, and ran quickly up to Christina, who had paused to await his arrival.

"That's my dear James," the child cried; and, with the easy fickleness of her years, she unclasped her arms from Christina's neck, and held them out to the footman. "Baba was lost," she said to him confidingly. "This lady finded Baba, and brought her home."

The footman took the baby into his arms, and turned a scared face to Christina.

"She've just been missed," he said breathlessly; "must have run out when the door was open; and we was all in a taking. Where did you find her, miss? I'm sure it's very kind of you to have brought her home."

"She was on the far side of the square, and very frightened in the fog. I am so glad she is safe."

"Baba quite safe now; Baba going home with James; good-bye, pretty lady," and waving her hand to Christina, the small girl was carried away in the arms of the breathless James, who was still too distracted to reflect that his mistress might wish to thank the young lady who had brought back the child.

"What a dear wee thing!" Christina reflected, as she wended her way back to her lodgings. "I wonder who she is. Somebody important, if she lives here. I wish——" then she sighed and fell to wondering whether anything would result from all the answers to the advertisements she had just posted. "I'm glad I didn't post the one I wrote to R.M.," she said to herself; "now I can think over it all day long, and if I haven't changed my mind by then, perhaps I will re-write it and post it by the last post. But—I am not sure whether I shall be brave enough to do it."

CHAPTER III.

"ONE OF THE BEST THINGS LEFT."

The chambers in Jermyn Street occupied by Rupert Mernside, had a character which seemed to reflect their owner. Perhaps all rooms in a more or less degree are reflections of those who live in them: human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, stamp their personalities upon their surroundings, and create their distinctive atmospheres, even in hired lodgings. Rupert's rooms, filled as they were with the furniture he had from time to time picked up, the walls hung with pictures his fastidious taste had chosen, the bookcases filled with his own special collection of books, were, to those with eyes to see, a mirror of their master's nature. Simplicity was the keynote of the whole. There were no expensive hangings, no luxurious rugs or heavily upholstered chairs and couches; there was nothing of what Mernside himself would have described as "frippery," nothing effeminate or over-dainty. Matting, with here and there a soft-coloured rug, covered the floor of the sitting-room; the walls, tinted a pale apricot yellow, were hung with water-colour sketches, each one of which bore the mark of a master hand; the bookcases were of carved oak, as were the one or two tables, whilst the chairs, of a severely simple pattern, and even the few armchairs, spoke rather of solid comfort, than of any undue luxury. Upon the breakfast table, pushed near the window, stood a bowl of chrysanthemums, touched into jewelled beauty by a faint ray of November sunlight. Seeing the sunlight on the rich coloured blossoms, Rupert smiled, as he entered the sitting-room a week after his return from Bramwell Castle. It was not his habit to fill his rooms with flowers: he had a fancy that such a custom savoured of womanishness; but Cicely, his pretty little cousin, had rifled the greenhouse for him with her own hands, and Cicely's fashion of giving would have made even a dandelion a charming and acceptable gift.

Mernside was early that morning, and he had seated himself in front of the silver coffee-pot and covered dishes, before Courtfield, his irreproachable servant, brought in the letters.

"Good Lord, man!" his master exclaimed, as the salver was handed to him, "those letters can't possibly all be for me," and he eyed the huge pile with the disfavour of one who regards a letter merely as a rather tiresome piece of business, which must perforce be answered.

"Well, sir, I should gather they were all for you," Courtfield answered respectfully, whilst his master gathered the packet of envelopes into his two hands. "I thought myself at first that there must be some mistake, seeing that they are only addressed in initials. But the number is correct, sir."

"By Jove!" Mernside exclaimed, gazing with stupefied eyes at the unprecedented batch of correspondence, and observing that every letter bore the initials only, "R.M.," and had been forwarded to him from a newspaper office.

Courtfield noiselessly left the room, but his master's coffee remained in the pot, and his breakfast untasted, whilst he sat and stared with a petrified stare at the pile of unopened letters, with their extraordinarily unfamiliar address. A dusky flush mounted to his forehead, and he turned over one of the letters distastefully, as though its very touch were odious to him.

"I am not in the habit of being addressed by initials only," he muttered, "nor of corresponding through newspapers; the wretched things are probably not meant for me at all—unless it's some confounded hoax," he added, after a pause, at the same moment tearing open the top letter of the pile, one addressed in an untidy, uneducated handwriting.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, pushing back his chair, and staring down at the letter he unfolded, with the disgusted stare of one who sees something unexpectedly horrible, "is the woman mad? or am I mad?—or—what does it mean?"

His eyes travelled quickly down the written page, the large, sprawling writing imprinting itself upon his brain.

"DEAR SIR" (so the epistle ran),—

"Having seen your advertisement in yesterday's Sunday Recorder, I beg to say that I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you—with a view to meeting, etc. Am twenty-one, tall, and said to be elegant. Some call me pretty. Have large blue eyes, fair hair, and a good complexion. Am domesticated and sweet-tempered. Would send photograph if desired.

"Yours truly, ROSALIE."

"PS.—Should be pleased to cheer your loneliness."

Mernside read this effusion to the end; then one word only, and that a forcible one, broke from his lips, and with grimly-set mouth, and eyes grown suddenly steely, he began to open and read one after another of the other letters, his expression becoming sterner and more grim as he laid each one down in turn.

"My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence," he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one have believed there were so many silly women in the world—or so many plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty. Before he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind.

"Domesticated." "Would make a lonely man intensely happy." "Only long for a quiet home such as you suggest."

"Such as I suggest—I!" Mernside looked wildly round him. "Do I appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female? 'Am considered pretty'—oh, are you, my good young woman? You can't write a civilised letter, that's certain. 'I have a slender income of my own—amply sufficient for my modest wants—but I gather you do not require a fortune with the lady—only a companion for your loneliness.'

"A fortune with the lady? I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them, and flung them one by one upon the pile. "'I have been lonely for so long myself, that I can fully understand what a lonely man feels. I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart overflowing with tenderness. Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.'

"Pshaw—what tommy rot!

"'All my friends say I am cheerful. I have often been called a little ray of sunshine'"—Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with sudden laughter. "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'"

"Oh! Good lord! Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me? And what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs? I should like to burn the lot!—but oh! hang it all, the silly women have taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"—he paused, as though struck by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good round expletive.

"That young ass, Jack Layton! I'll take my oath he was at the bottom of this tomfoolery. Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out of—wait!—by Jove! it was the Sunday Recorder," and without more ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell.

"Get me a copy of the Sunday Recorder of the day before yesterday, at once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared. As soon as the man had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail.

There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more, he feverishly turned the pages of the Sunday Recorder, until his eyes fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau." Yes—there it was. The wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the ordinary print.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means, who is very lonely, is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home. No fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon, if both parties are mutually satisfied."

"Oh! may it indeed?" Mernside said scathingly, flinging the paper upon the floor. "A young lady of good birth!" His thoughts went back to the letters he had just been perusing, most of them ill-written, many mis-spelt, some genteel, some sentimental—but all bearing the unmistakable stamp of having been penned by the underbred and the vulgar.

"A young lady of good birth." Again he reflected grimly, continuing to eat his breakfast, and to open letter after letter mechanically, expending over their contents a force of language which would greatly have surprised the writers, could they have heard it. "Not one of these good women has the most elementary conception what the word 'lady' means. No lady would be likely to answer such an advertisement," his thoughts continued contemptuously, as he picked up the last letter of the pile, and glanced idly at the writing of the address. That writing held his attention; it was different from the others; yes, it was certainly different. It did not sprawl; it was not exaggerated or affected; it was merely a round, simple, girlish hand, with unmistakable character in the well-formed letters and clean strokes. And when he had drawn out the contents of the envelope, and read them slowly, some of the grim lines about his mouth faded away, a softer look came into his eyes.

"This is different," he said, "very different," and for the second time he read the terse phrases.

"c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,
"100, Cartney Street, S.W.

"DEAR SIR,—

"I should not have answered your advertisement, but that I cannot find work. I need a home very much. If I could make things better for somebody else who is lonely, I should be very pleased. I am not at all pretty or clever, but I can cook a little, and I can sew.

"Yours truly, C.M.

"I am twenty."

"Poor little girl," Rupert murmured, "if this is genuine, I am sorry for C.M. She is the only one of the lot who writes like a lady, and the only one who does not suggest a meeting, or actually appoint a meeting place. Those are points in her favour. But, had I ever any intention of marrying, I should not make my matrimonial arrangements through the medium of a newspaper!"

Each writer of the letters which had so disturbed Mernside at breakfast time, received a few hours later a short note, and the wording of all the notes was identical.

"DEAR MADAM,—

"I regret that both you and I should have been the victims of a hoax. The advertisement in the Sunday Recorder was inserted without my knowledge or consent. Regretting any annoyance this may cause you.

"Yours faithfully, R.M."

But when, having laboured through the mass of "Rosalies," "Violets," "Lilians," and "Hildas," he finally reached the little note signed "C.M.," Mernside paused.

"I—don't think I can let this little girl know she has been the victim of a hoax," he mused, a pitiful tenderness creeping about his heart as he thought of the girl who was without work or home; "the others are fairly tough-skinned, I am ready to swear. This one"—he looked again at the round, characteristic handwriting, the simple phrases—"this one—did not make up her mind to write such a letter, excepting under stress of circumstances, I am sure of that. This one—is different. And if that incorrigible young ass, Jack Layton, hadn't started on a yachting cruise last week, I—should jolly well like to give him a thrashing."

Feeling the need, as he himself expressed it, of a balloon full of fresh air after his distasteful occupation of the morning, Rupert went out at about eleven o'clock, taking with him the pile of letters he had to post.

"Can't leave them for Courtfield's inquisitive eyes," he muttered. "Good chap as he is, Courtfield would think I had gone raving mad, if he saw all these things addressed to Christian names and initials. I'll get rid of the horrors, and then see if Margaret can take the taste of them away from me."

The letters posted, he made his way briskly along Piccadilly, and across the Park, to a quiet road in Bayswater, where he stopped before a small detached house, standing a little back from the pavement, in its own garden. His ring at the bell brought to the door a middle-aged servant, whose plain but kindly face expanded into a smile when she saw him. He was evidently a frequent and welcome visitor, for to his cheery "Well, Elizabeth, how are things this morning?" she answered with another smile—

"We've had a bad two days, sir, but Mrs. Stanforth is better now. She is downstairs, sir," and, opening a door on the right of the tiny hall, she ushered Rupert into a long narrow room, whose windows at either end gave it an unusual look of brightness and sunshine. A piano took up a large share of one wall, and over the piano hung some fine photographs of Old Masters, chiefly of the Italian school. The fireplace was flanked by bookshelves, and drawn close to one of these was a couch, on which lay a woman of such rare and startling beauty, that Mernside, familiar as her face was to him, caught his breath as he entered, and for a moment stood still, looking silently down at her.

Her cheeks were very white, but it was the whiteness of a pure white rose, and gave one no sense of ill-health, although there was about her a certain air of fragility. Her hair, soft and dark, waved back from her forehead in dusky masses, that made just the right background for her exquisitely chiselled features, and for the eyes, that seemed to concentrate in themselves all the loveliness of her face. They were wonderful eyes—dark, deep, unfathomable—with a mystery in their depths that enhanced their strange fascination. Those dark eyes with their sweeping lashes, and the crimson line of her beautiful mouth, were the only points of colour in her face, and as she turned her head to greet the visitor, the gleam of light that shot into those eyes, might well have turned a stronger head than Rupert's. Meeting her glance, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes grew bright; but his voice was very quiet, very self-contained, as he said—

"I am three days too soon—I know it, you need not tell me. But—I had to come to-day."

She put one of her hands into his, but she did not move from her prostrate position on the couch, and her visitor seated himself on a low chair by her side, whilst she gently withdrew the hand he still held, and said softly—

"Why especially to-day? You must not break through the stipulation, Rupert. If there is a particular reason now—I—will forgive you—but—we must keep to our bargain."

Gentle as was the voice, gentle as was the look in her eyes, a look of almost maternal tenderness, there was evidence that behind the tenderness, lay a most unusual strength of character. The woman with the beautiful face, although she lay prone upon a sofa, and was obviously an invalid, showed in her personality no trace of weakness. Her eyes met the eyes of her visitor squarely and straightly, there was almost a hint of severity in the set of her lips.

"Why did you come to-day?" she repeated, when he stirred uneasily in his chair, and kicked away a footstool in front of him, with a touch of irritability.

"When I begin to put it into words, it sounds a babyish reason; but that jackanapes, Layton, has been playing an idiotic practical joke upon me, and I—was fool enough to mind it. I wanted soothing down; and—I wanted your advice about a girl."

"About—a girl—you!" A note of excitement was apparent in her accents; she looked at him narrowly. "Has it—come—at last, Rupert?" she questioned, and her quiet voice shook just a little.

"No—no—my God—no!" he exclaimed, "nothing of that sort is ever likely to come into my life—again"—he uttered the last words under his breath, and his eyes rested hungrily on her beautiful face—"there is no question of—my caring for any girl—only—young Jack Layton has made me responsible for what may make a perfectly innocent girl unhappy." And forthwith he plunged into a full description of the sheaf of letters received that morning, winding up with a mention of the terse little letter signed "C.M." His listener's eyes twinkled mischievously as he told the first part of his story in wrathful accents, and over some of his quotations from the letters that had reached him she laughed—a frank, delicious laugh that seemed oddly out of keeping with the tragic mystery of her eyes. But as he described that last letter, with its simple wording, her face grew grave again, and when his voice ceased, she uttered the precise words that had fallen from his own lips three hours earlier.

"Poor little girl—oh! poor little girl!"

"I am sorry for her," Mernside said impetuously, "and it doesn't seem fair that she should perhaps suffer for that idiotic young fool's love of practical jokes. Goodness knows what hopes she may have built upon this letter, and upon me. Of course, I can't give her a home, and I don't want to meet her—with a view to—anything. There is no place in my life for women, even as friends. There is no place in my life for more than—one woman," he ended vehemently.

"Hush!" she said softly. "Remember—you promised; and—if you break your promise, I can't ever let you come here again."

"I know—I know!" he cried, with an impetuosity very foreign to his usual self-control; "but, Margaret, is it to be like this always? Will a time never come when you—when I——"

She put out her hand and laid it over one of his, with a firm touch that had a curiously quieting effect upon him.

"You and I are great friends, as we have been for—longer than we care to think. But—there could not ever be an idea between us of anything else, not even the thought of such a thing. It is out of the question. It always has been out of the question. You know that as well as I do, and you must not come here at all, unless you can keep to our agreement in spirit as well as in letter."

"Is our friendship nothing to you?" he asked sullenly.

"It is—so much to me—that I will not risk spoiling it for ever," she said firmly; "but if you talk as you are talking now, I shall tell Elizabeth I cannot see you."

"And you are putting up this fence between us, when—I might be some comfort to you," he exclaimed, almost roughly, getting up as he spoke to lean against the mantelpiece, and glower threateningly down at her, "when every reasonable being would tell you that he——"

"Ah! hush!" she cried, and the sudden sharp anguish in her tones gave him pause; "don't let us go into it all over again. Whilst I feel—as I do feel—I must go on in the way I have marked out for myself, one can only follow the right as one sees it. Besides which——"

"Besides which—his little finger is more to you than——"

"Ah! don't—don't!" she interrupted him again, her eyes darkening and deepening with agony. "Rupert, I can't bear it; there are some things I am not strong enough to bear."

"I was a brute," he said, his rough tone changing all at once into caressing tenderness; "I let myself go—I was an utter brute. Forgive me, dear—and—try to forget."

He sat down beside her again, and his face, which had shown the same strong emotion that had rang in his words, resumed its quiet look of strength. A great relief swept over the woman's beautiful features, but she was shivering from head to foot, and in her eyes there still lay a haunting anguish. With an effort—how great an effort only she herself knew—she regained her self-control, and her voice, though still shaken, was very gentle again.

"Tell me now about the poor little girl, and the matrimonial letter. Can we put our heads together to devise any way of helping her?"

"I might conceivably get her some work," Rupert answered, "but people are a little chary of engaging employees recommended by bachelors like myself. Cicely might help her, but, first of all, I must find out if she is genuine. I couldn't impose a stranger, even on Cicely, good-natured, easy-going little soul that she is. And to find out anything about this girl will entail—meeting her!"

Margaret Stanforth smiled.

"Poor Rupert!"

"I am not by way of making rendezvous with young women," he said with sarcasm; "it is not a pastime in which I have ever indulged. At the same time, I don't want to let a fellow creature go empty away, if I could really help her."

"How would it be if you suggested her coming here? I could see her too, and—two heads being better than one—we might be able to do something really helpful. If the letter is sincere, it is obvious the girl is not a mere husband hunter; she is at her wits' end, and—I can't bear to think of any girl stranded in this great hungry London. I myself"—she pulled herself up short, leaving her sentence unfinished, then went on more quietly: "Write to C.M. and appoint a meeting here. Say this is the house of a lady of your acquaintance, ask her to come and see me—and incidentally to see you."

"It is like you to make such a suggestion about a total stranger," Rupert exclaimed, "but—she may turn out an entire fraud—an arrant adventuress—and I could not be responsible for bringing such a person here."

"Such a person! My dear Rupert, even if she were all the terrible things you describe, I don't think she could hurt me. I have seen—so much of the seamy side of life." For a moment Rupert looked at her silently. Long as he had known her, Margaret Stanforth was still largely an enigma to him, and it often seemed to him that the mysterious depths of her eyes veiled mysteries of her life which he had never fathomed.

"For my own sake, for this girl's sake, I should like to jump at your offer," he said, after that long, searching look into her face, "but——"

"There is no 'but,'" she put in gaily, a sudden smile momentarily chasing away the sadness of her face. "Write a civil, non-committal letter to C.M., and ask her, as I say, to come here. Surely, between us, we can do something for this poor little waif and stray. Why not fix to-morrow afternoon, at five o'clock? If the poor girl's need is urgent, we ought not to delay."

"And—you forgive me for all I ought not to have said this morning," Rupert said when, ten minutes later, he rose to depart. "I—have not hurt you?"

"No, you have not hurt me; but in future, you will remember—our bargain? And there are some things—I can't bear."

Rupert Mernside walked slowly away from the house, his brain and heart full of the woman he had just left, who, after his departure, lay back amongst the silken cushions on her sofa, with a look of profound exhaustion.

"There now, my dearie, you didn't ought to let him come and tire you this way; you get worn out with him coming worrying." The faithful Elizabeth had entered the room with a salver in her hand, and stood looking into her mistress's white face, with distress written all over her plain kindly features. Margaret opened her eyes, and smiled up into the loving ones fixed upon her.

"No, he doesn't worry me; he is—a comfort, he helps me. Don't scold, nursie dear; his friendship is one of the best things I have in life—one of the best things I have left out of all the wreckage; but to-day—he brought back some of the old memories, and—I—am so silly still. They hurt; sometimes it all feels—unbearable."

The ring of almost uncontrollable pain in her voice, brought a spasm of answering pain into the other's face, and she laid a work-roughened hand tenderly upon the dusky head against the cushions. "There, my dearie, there—there," she murmured, speaking as if her beautiful, stately mistress were a little child; "there's nothing so hard in this world but what it can be borne, if we look at it in the right way. The strength comes along with the sorrow, and 'tis all for the best."

"Is it?" Into the dark eyes there flashed for a second a look of bitterness, and then Margaret drew the other woman's hand down to her lips, and kissed it. "I wish I had your simple straightforward faith, dear old nurse of mine," she said wearily; "you are so sure things will come right, and that what hurts us is for our good. And I—I can't say, 'Thy will be done'; at least, I can't say it as if I meant it. But what did you bring in on that salver?" she asked, after a moment of silence, and with an effort at brightness.

"There, my pretty; I nearly forgot it after all. It came when I was speaking to the butcher on the doorstep, and Mr. Mernside was here, so I waited to bring it in till he was gone."

She had a purpose in lengthening her story, and chatting on garrulously whilst Margaret opened the orange envelope, for the faithful creature had seen the sudden dilation of her mistress's dark eyes, the whitening of her lips; had seen, too, how her hands shook as they unfolded the telegram.

"I don't understand it," Mrs. Stanforth whispered shakily, when her eyes had scanned the few words before her. "I don't know what it means—Elizabeth—but—I must go—I must go—at once."

The servant drew the flimsy paper from her trembling hands and read the message, shaking her head in bewilderment, as the sense of it penetrated to her brain.

"I'm sure I don't know what it means no more than you do, dearie," she said.

"Graystone.

"Come at once; prepare for surprise.

"MARION."

CHAPTER IV.

"I SUPPOSE IT WAS AN HOUR."

"Poor dear James is the worthiest soul, but he has no more brains than a pin—the small kind of pin that you get in change for a farthing!"

"James always seemed to me a good footman."

"Rupert! He is an admirable footman. I haven't a word to say against him in that capacity. He does his duties with the beautiful regularity of an automatic machine. But move James from his own dear little beaten track, and he is lost, hopelessly, irrevocably lost!"

"What beaten track has he left? and why is he rousing your ladyship's wrath?"

Lady Cicely Redesdale, lying back in the cosiest chair of her cosy boudoir, swung her pretty foot to and fro, and glanced up at her tall cousin with one of her gay little laughs. Rupert Mernside, the son of her mother's sister, had always been to her more of elder brother than cousin, and from their earliest youth there had existed between them a frank camaraderie which had never degenerated into flirtation, or drifted into any sentimental relationship. Cicely was in the habit of saying that Rupert was the person of all others from whom she would not only ask, but take, advice; because his judgment was so sound and he possessed a really well-balanced mind. This opinion of him had been endorsed by her late husband, who had only qualified it with one limitation.

"Rupert's got as sound and balanced a mind as any man could wish for, but once let the right woman get hold of him, and she will twist him round her little finger."

Those words of her husband recurred to Cicely now, as she lifted her eyes from their contemplation of her own dainty shoes and looked up into Rupert's rugged face.

"I should rather like to see a woman twist you round her little finger," she said irrelevantly.

"A woman—me? What on earth have a woman and I got to do with James's delinquencies?"

"There is method in my madness, but the lane that led from James to your little finger, and the not impossible she, is so long that I can't take you back along its windings. It all comes of the power of association. I shall have Baba taught everything by association. I am planning a scheme of education that——"

"Where does James come in to the plan for Baba's education?" Rupert contrived to ask, his grey eyes shining, a whimsical smile playing round his mouth.

"Oh! my dear boy, I had completely forgotten James, though talking of Baba would soon have reminded me of him—poor silly thing! Baba ran away two days ago in that appalling fog—and——"

"Baba ran away?"

"Well, the door was open; I suppose the outside world looked rather fascinating and mysterious, and she has no nurse just now, you know; so there was no one with her; and, of course, Jane, the nursery maid, was fetching something from the kitchen—and—well, the long and the short of it was that Baba ran out into the street, and was promptly swallowed up by the fog."

"My dear Cicely!"

"Providentially, as I now consider it, I was out. I had an early appointment with Mathilde."

"Your dressmaker?"

"My dressmaker. Wasn't it kind of luck, or whatever it is, to let it all happen when I wasn't there. Rupert, if I had been at home, and they told me Baba was lost, I should have gone straight off my head."

"That would have been an eminently useful and practical thing to do," was the dry retort.

"You have never been a mother; you don't know what a mother feels like about her only child," Cicely said with an attempt at dignity that sat quaintly upon her small person and drew an amused laugh from her cousin. "I believe it would kill me if anything really happened to Baba," she went on, more gravely; "you think I'm just a silly, frivolous thing, but—Baba is all the world to me."

"I know, dear; I know quite well," Rupert answered kindly; "and nobody could think you silly. But go on and tell me what happened two days ago. We haven't got to James's shortcomings yet."

"Baba ran out into the square, and nobody missed her at first. Then, when that goose of a Jane came back from her wanderings in the kitchen, she found the nurseries empty, and Baba nowhere to be found. There was a tremendous hue and cry; the servants seem to have been on the verge of distraction, and ran off in all directions like frightened hens, leaving James on guard at the door. And, after a few minutes, when the fog lifted, James caught sight of Baba in a strange girl's arms, evidently quite at home with her, and very happy. You know Baba's ducky way of making friends with everybody. James flew out, seized Baba, seems to have thanked her rescuer, and bustled back to the house with the child, without ever dreaming of asking the stranger her name."

"What sort of a person was she?"

"Oh! I don't know. When I asked James he could only say: 'Well, my lady, she seemed a nice respectable young person'; but heaven knows what James means by a young person. He further volunteered that she was rather shabbily dressed; and I can't bear to think that she went away with no thanks from me, and with no reward."

Rupert smiled down into his cousin's pretty, eager face.

"Perhaps the thought of reward never entered her head? There are still some disinterested people left in the world. And Baba is a very fetching little being to rescue from the dangers of a fog."

"She looked so fetching that morning, too. I came in just after she was brought back, and there she was, the little monkey, in her red cloak which she had found in the hall, where, needless to say, it ought not to have been; with no hat, and all her curls in a delicious tangle, her face so soft and pink, and her eyes shining. She looked a delectable baby, but, Rupert, she had on the most valuable lace frock, and pearls round her neck. Only think what might have happened if some horrible person had found her. My pretty baby," and Cicely's face grew suddenly white and grave, whilst she shivered at the picture conjured up by her own mind.

"I asked James why he hadn't told the 'young person' to give him her name and address, and he could only say feebly that 'it never crossed his mind.' Poor James, I don't believe he's got a mind."

"You could advertise for the young lady. If you really want to find her, an advertisement in some leading paper should unearth her for you. Perhaps, too, if she was shabbily dressed, a reward might be a god-send to her."

"Oh, Rupert! perhaps she's fearfully poor. Do, do advertise for me. I can't bear to think that a girl may be in difficulties when I have more money than I know what to do with. Will you advertise for me?"

"Yes; of course."

"I don't know what I should do without you," she continued, looking at him gravely, but with no hint of coquettishness in her glance. "I do miss John so dreadfully; I do want a man to help me and advise me."

"You can have me whenever you want me," her cousin answered with equal gravity, knowing that her words, which in another woman's mouth might have implied a desire to change their friendly relations for something more lover-like, on Cicely's lips held merely their surface meaning—no more.

"I always hope that some day you will marry again," Rupert went on with brotherly frankness; "you have been alone three years now. Your great property is a big handful for a woman to manage, and John would wish for your happiness above everything else in the world."

"John never thought of anything but my happiness," was the gentle answer. "I don't think any girl ever had a better, dearer husband. People thought, perhaps you thought so, too, that I just married him for his money. It wasn't true. At first—quite at first—when father showed me what a huge difference it would make to them all if I married a millionaire, I did think more of John's fortune than of himself. But, it was only quite at first. After that, I knew I would rather live in a cottage with him than in a palace with anybody else. I—don't think—I shall marry again—unless I find I am too weak and silly to manage Baba's fortune by myself."

Rupert looked silently down at her bent, bright head, a new reverence stirring within him for the little cousin. Hitherto, he had regarded her with the kindly affection of an elder brother for a small sister whom he considers scarcely more than a child; but this grave Cicely was showing him depths of whose existence he had never been even dimly aware.

"But that's enough of being solemn," Cicely exclaimed, shattering his new conception of her with characteristic suddenness; "talking of marriage, the thing I hanker for most in the whole world is to see you married, Rupert. You don't look a bit like a soured old bachelor, and yet—here you are, more than thirty-five, and not one single woman's name has ever been mentioned in connection with yours."

"For which mercy let us be humbly and devoutly thankful," her cousin answered, laughing, though how sincere was his thankfulness only his own heart knew, and into that heart there flashed as he spoke the vision of a white face and dark eyes, deep with unfathomable mystery; "if I don't want to marry, why hustle me into the holy estate? I believe the Prayer Book strongly urges us not to undertake it lightly or unadvisedly."

"Now, you are flippant. As if you would be marrying lightly or unadvisedly, if you wait until you are within five years of forty, before choosing a wife. When I think of the hundreds of really charming girls I've introduced you to, with——"

"With a view to matrimony," Rupert ended the sentence, punctuating his words with a laugh. "Let me recommend you to study the matrimonial columns of some of the papers. You will possibly find an eligible husband there for some of your charming girls."

"Rupert! don't be so incorrigibly low and horrid. As if any girl with a rag of decency or self-respect would answer one of those advertisements. Why, men who advertise for wives can only be seedy adventurers, the sort of person one reads of in books and never meets in real life."

"Seedy sort of adventurers," Rupert repeated slowly, turning, as if by chance, to survey his own reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece; "there are adventurers and adventurers. Perhaps some of those who advertise do it—for a joke."

"Just like a man if they do," his cousin answered vehemently; "and then some poor girl takes the wretched creature seriously, and thinks he means his stupid joke. I should despise a girl who answered such an advertisement, but I should much more despise the man who inserted it."

"Don't scorn them too much. Everybody has different ideals, and it takes all sorts to make a world. Your sort don't advertise for husbands and wives, but our section of society is not so faultless that we can afford to throw stones even at people who marry through a matrimonial bureau."

"It's so low. The sort of thing a shop girl might do."

"Not lower than displaying your daughters in the best market, as the Society mother does," Rupert answered sternly; "not lower than running a man to earth, as shoals of women do, and do it without an ounce of shame."

"But, answering an advertisement like that is almost asking a man to marry you."

"Perhaps, and when poor old Donkin lost his wife a year ago, a lot of women wrote and proposed to him. Yes, actually wrote and offered to marry him! He told me so himself, and those were women of your class, well born and well educated. Well, we have the consolation of knowing that he refused the lot."

"Horrid beasts! no wonder you men lose your respect for women, if you think we are all capable of doing that sort of thing."

"We don't think so," Rupert's contemptuous tones grew gentle again; "we know the difference between the womanly woman and the others. Thank God, there are plenty of the right sort left," and Rupert stooped suddenly and took his cousin's two small hands into his.

"You aren't going?" she exclaimed. "I wanted you to see Baba, and there are thousands of things I meant to say to you."

"So sorry, but the thousands of things must be postponed. I have an appointment at five, and I must keep it."

"You will advertise for the 'young person'?"

"Yes; I won't forget the 'young person'—and—by the way, Cicely," a slight trace of embarrassment showed on his face, "didn't you tell me you wanted to find a sort of nursery governess for Baba?"

"Certainly, I do; but, my dear boy, what do you know about nursery governesses?"

"I don't know anything about them," was the reply, but Cicely's quick eyes still noted embarrassment in both voice and manner, "but I heard the other day of a girl who—who might be wanting a post."

"A girl who might be wanting a post," Cicely exclaimed mockingly; "the person I engage for Baba, would have to be somebody much less vague than that, and she must have unimpeachable references."

"Unimpeachable references," Mernside reflected as he left his cousin's house; and, side by side with Cicely's words, other words tossed to and fro in his brain, words written in a clear, girlish hand that had an odd character of its own.

"I cannot find work, and I need a home very much."

"Probably she is quite impossible," his reflections ran on. "Cicely had a good deal of right on her side when she talked about shop girls and matrimonial advertisements. I daresay I shall find C.M. belongs to that class of girl, and if so, what am I going to do about her? Ah! well; Margaret will help."

It was this thought that buoyed him up during his walk across the park from the Redesdale's mansion in Eaton Square, to the small white house in Bayswater; but as he pushed open the familiar gate and walked up the garden path, a shock of surprise awaited him. The blinds of the room to the right of the front door were pulled down, and his repeated ringing of the bell brought no response from within. The bell clanged in the kitchen regions, its echoes dying away forlornly, but no footstep sounded in the hall, no hand lifted the latch of the door, and as he stepped back and looked up at the house, Rupert saw that no smoke was coming from the chimneys. A sick fear smote at his heart. What had happened? What could have happened? The day before, he had been here, sitting with Margaret in that very room over whose windows the blinds were now so closely drawn. She had seemed tired, it was true, but not more tired than he had often seen her, and he had no reason to suppose that she was more ill than usual. She was always fragile; he was accustomed to find her one week on the sofa, another week sufficiently strong to be moving about the room, and even going out of doors. But that her house should be barred and bolted against him was inexplicable. He felt as though the ground had been cut away from under his feet, as if the very foundations of his life had been shaken. Why! to-day was the day she had herself fixed for his interview in her house with the girl of the advertisement. Margaret had arranged the hour; it was by her suggestion that he had written to C.M., proposing a meeting at 100, Barford Road, and now he found the house locked up and apparently empty, with no word of explanation or apology. Could Margaret have been suddenly taken ill? If so, why had she not let him know? Yet, if she was ill, she would be in the house, and Elizabeth with her. Somebody would have answered his ringing, which had grown more and more imperative as each ring remained unanswered. Could she have gone away? Gone away without letting him have the slightest hint of her intended going? Was that more conceivable than his theory of sudden illness? Again, sick dismay knocked at the door of his heart, and with it came a wave of hot anger against Margaret. Surely his years of faithful devotion, of willing service, had entitled him to more consideration than this at her hands. He had made few demands upon her, but this sudden and unexplained disappearance was a strain which even the merest friendship should not be called upon to bear.

Once again he pealed the bell, and even knocked vigorously at the knocker, but neither sound produced the slightest effect, and he was perforce turning away, when the gate clicked and he saw a breathless personage of the charwoman class hurrying up the path.

"I'm sure I beg your parding, sir," she panted; "just like my luck to a' popped out for a minute twice in the afternoon, and each time somebody called."

"Are you in charge of this house?" Rupert asked, his own agitation making him speak more sternly than the occasion quite warranted.

"Yes, sir; and I'm truly sorry, sir," the woman whimpered, wiping her much-heated face with a grimy apron; "come here yesterday, I did, all of a sudden, Mrs. Stanforth and Miss Herring, her maid, going away unexpected, and me havin' a extra lot of washin' and all. But I says to Jem, my son, 'Jem,' I says——"

"Yes, yes," Rupert interrupted impatiently, "but where is Mrs. Stanforth? Did she leave any message? Any note? Did she tell you to say anything to people who called?"

"Lor', no, sir. Went off in a hurry and didn't leave no messages nor nothin'. And I'm sure I'm sorry I wasn't 'ere when you come, but I'd popped out for a minute, and let out the kitchen fire, too, and I just 'ad to see to my bit o' washin', and there, I run back a half an 'our ago, and there was a young lady in a rare takin' then, and so——"

"A young lady," Rupert again broke into her stream of words.

"Pore young thing, she did seem upset over it, too. Said she was expected, and she was to be 'ere at five, and all. There! I was sorry for 'er. Seemed to strike 'er all of an 'eap when she see the shut up 'ouse. She says quite 'urt like: 'Well, I s'pose it was an 'oax.' Them was 'er very words."

"I suppose you explained to her that the lady had gone away unexpectedly?" Rupert exclaimed with growing irritation; "you didn't let the young lady think she had been brought here for a joke?"

"Well, o' course, sir, I didn't know nothin' about it," was the offended retort; "if you ask me, I should say there was somethin' queer in tellin' somebody to come to an 'ouse at five o'clock, and then for the 'ouse to be shut up. Which I should say it was a pore joke meself. She says: 'Ain't Mr. Mernside 'ere?' and I says, 'I don't know nothin' about nobody o' that name,' and she looks as took aback as if I'd 'it 'er, and so——"

Rupert uttered a smothered oath, then mastered himself, and asked more quietly:

"And how long has the young lady been gone?"

"Best part of a quarter of a hour. Quiet young lady she was, too; dressed very plain; you might say shabby; and went orf lookin' fit to cry with disappointment. And I just popped out agin to git me bit o' relish for tea, and you come; lor', it do seem strange."

The good lady was left to address her rambling remarks to the shrubs in the garden, for Rupert, unable to bear more of her discursiveness, turned and fled, shutting the garden gate with a sharp clang behind him, and feeling that his world had all at once gone wrong, very wrong indeed.

CHAPTER V.

"I KNOW THIS IS WORTH A LOT OF MONEY."

"I suppose I was stupid to think it could be anything but a hoax. But the letter seemed so kind, not as if it were written by a horrid person who would want to play a practical joke."

Christina, having climbed the stairs to her room with weary, dragging footsteps, sat down on her one chair, feeling tired, depressed, and indignant. The dire necessity of saving her every penny, drove her to walk from Bayswater to her far-off lodgings in the S.W. district, and as a fine rain had begun to fall long before she was half-way across the park, she was not only worn out and miserable, but very wet as well. In their best days her serge coat and skirt had not been thick; much wear and tear had reduced them to a threadbare condition quite incapable of resistance to weather. The drizzling rain had penetrated her inadequate coat and thin blouse; her skirt hung limply about her legs; she felt, what she actually was, wet to the skin, and too tired even to exert herself to make some tea over her spirit-lamp.

"I expect it is true what Mrs. Jones says," she reflected; "she says men are all brutes, and you can't trust one of them. I used to think she only said it because Mr. Jones drank himself to death, and drank away her earnings first, and beat her. But, now, I don't know." With cold fingers she drew the hatpins from her sodden hat, threw off the wet coat that clung so chillily to her shivering form, and took from her pocket a letter addressed in a bold, masculine hand.

"C.M., c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,
"10, Cartney Street, S.W."

"It looks like the handwriting of a gentleman," the poor little girl's reflections ran on; "I shouldn't have thought a man who wrote like that could be a brute, and his letter isn't a brute's letter either," she added pathetically, drawing the letter from its envelope and reading the words, which were already engraved upon her mind.

"DEAR MADAM,

"I think perhaps I may be able to be of some use to you if you could make it convenient to call at 100, Barford Road, Bayswater, at five o'clock to-morrow (Wednesday). We might have a little talk. My friend to whom the house belongs, will be very glad to see you.

"Yours faithfully,
"R. MERNSIDE."

"And then I find the house shut up," Christina said shakily, and aloud, "and an old charwoman tells me she never heard of Mr. Mernside; and I suppose it was just all a mean practical joke." Two tears, tears of sheer fatigue and of bitter disappointment, welled up in the girl's eyes, and dropped slowly down her cheeks. She was so tired—so tired and cold and miserable—and she had built more hopes than she quite knew upon the answer to her timid little letter. The entire absence of any allusion to matrimonial prospects in Mr. Mernside's note had quieted her fears, and many hopes had mingled with the nervous doubts that had filled her soul as she set out that afternoon on her strange expedition. Some faint idea that this unknown Mr. Mernside might be instrumental in helping her to find work, sustained her through the long walk to Barford Road; she had been so sure, so very sure, that the writer of the terse, kindly letter, was a gentleman, and a good man to boot, that the sight of the shut-up house came to her with the force of an actual blow, whilst the caretaker's unfeigned ignorance of anybody of the name of Mernside, made Christina's theory of a hoax seem more than probable.

"And not one answer to all the letters I wrote about situations," she exclaimed wearily, pulling herself up from her chair, and taking the spirit-lamp from its place in the cupboard. "I wonder whether there are lots of other girls as poor as I am, and without any relations or friends. In another week, I shan't have enough money to pay my rent; and Mrs. Jones won't let it run; she's said so over and over again." Another shiver ran through her, and this time dread apprehension of the future was more responsible for the shiver than even the damp chilliness of her condition. "I don't know what I shall do when the money is all gone. Oh! I don't know what I shall do," and a little sob broke from her, as she took from the cupboard the materials for her tea. It was a meagre enough meal that her cold shaking fingers spread on the old deal table, and she was repeatedly forced to brush away the tears from her face, so fast did they run down it now that exhaustion and misery were at last finding an outlet. Her lunch had consisted of a glass of milk and a bun, bought at a neighbouring shop; since lunch-time she had walked some miles, had incidentally become wet through during the process, and her walk had been crowned by a cruel disappointment. It was not wonderful that the girl, plucky little soul though she was, should feel now as if the end were reached, and she could hope no more.

To add to her misery, everything seemed to go awry. The matches were only found after a prolonged hunt for them; for many minutes the lamp refused to light; and when, at last, a flame shot up, Christina thought that the water in the kettle boiled more slowly than water had ever boiled before. Dry bread had never tasted more unappetising; and milkless tea (though it was certainly warm, and in that respect carried a certain amount of comfort with it), tasted bitter and nauseating.

The girl longed, with an almost childish longing, for something more to eat and drink. Visions rose before her of the Donaldsons' cosy nursery, of a plate piled high with hot buttered toast, of a big home-made seed cake, that could be eaten as quickly as the nursery folks liked, without any dread of future want, and she pushed away her plate, and laid her head down upon the table, sobbing as though her heart would break. Hot buttered toast and seed cake are unromantic sounding things enough, no doubt, but when one is very hungry, and very heartsick, and only twenty into the bargain, the thoughts of past plenty make present poverty seem well nigh intolerable.

Good stuff must have gone to the making of little Christina, and whoever those ancestors on her mother's side had been, they had passed on to her a goodly heritage of courage and endurance. Her storm of sobs was of very brief duration. Giving herself a little shake both actually and metaphorically, she raised her head from the table, resolutely dried her eyes, choked back her sobs and forced herself to finish eating the dry morsels of bread, and drinking the nauseous draught of tea. Either the food itself, or the effort she had made to eat it, sent a tingling of new strength along her limbs, and she broke into a faint laugh over her own despair.

"You perfect goose," she said firmly, rising to wash up her tea things; "crying won't make anything better. Mr. Donaldson used to say, 'Don't look for your bridges before you come to them,' and so I won't look at the bridge. Mrs. Jones will put up for me about the rent, until I am really going to step right on to it. And before I give up every bit of hope, I ought—perhaps I ought to try and pawn the pendant, only I can't bear doing it. I can't bear it."

Mrs. Jones was not at all the pleasant and kindly landlady of fiction, who succours and helps her tenants, and plays the part of mother to them. The only part Mrs. Jones understood playing was that of the cruel stepmother of fairy legend, and Christina did not err in thinking that to allow rent to remain unpaid, was no part of her landlady's methods. Mrs. Jones's own life had been a hard one. Grinding work in her early girlhood, a brutal husband, and much grinding poverty during her married life, and in her widowhood an unending struggle to make two ends meet; these made up the sum of the landlady's existence, and she treated the world as she found herself treated by the world. She expected nothing from others, and she gave them nothing. She asked for no help from her fellow beings, and she most assuredly bestowed none.

She was lighting the gas jet in the hall, a hard-featured, tight-lipped woman, when, half an hour later, Christina went out again, a small brown paper parcel in her hand; and Mrs. Jones's thin lips tightened more than ever as her sharp eyes fell upon the parcel.

"Goin' out to pop somethin'," was her grim thought, and the thought was displeasing to her. Not that she particularly pitied her lodger. Pity was a virtue not cultivated by Mrs. Jones. But she instinctively dreaded the moment when her lodgers began to slip out stealthily with parcels under their arms, or in their hands. The significance of those parcels was well known to her, and she was fully aware that lodgers who once began to pawn their goods passed by easy stages to backwardness in paying their rent, and then followed eviction and new tenants. No; Mrs. Jones mistrusted brown paper parcels, just as much as she mistrusted the look, half-shy, half-frightened, which Christina cast at her in passing, and the flood of colour that dyed the girl's face, when she met the landlady's glance.

Some of her smarter clothes Christina had long ago sold to an old clothes' shop round the corner, but this was the first time she had visited a real pawnbroker, and her heart beat like a sledge-hammer, as she stood outside the window of a jeweller's shop, over which the three balls were displayed. She had shrunk from going into the establishment of Mr. Moss, the recognised pawnbroker of that squalid neighbourhood, and had gone further afield, thinking that from a jeweller, even though he engaged in pawnbroking as well, she would meet with more consideration, and perhaps receive a larger sum of money. But, looking through the glass doors at the two men who lounged behind the counter, her spirits sank to zero, and she allowed ten minutes to slip by before, taking her courage into her hands, she finally entered the shop.

Coming in out of the damp of the November evening, the pleasant warmth was grateful to her, but the brilliant gaslight dazzled her eyes, and sheer nervousness made her stumble hopelessly over the sentence she had been committing to memory, ever since she had left her lodgings.

"I called to ask whether this pendant was of any value," she had intended to say. But instead of that, she found herself stammering breathlessly, "I—I came—would you please tell me—if you can give me something on this," and she thrust her parcel into the hand indolently stretched out for it, by one of the young men behind the counter.

His eyes looked her up and down with an insolent stare that sent the blood flying over her face, and his smile gave her an impotent longing to strike his fat, sleek countenance.

"How much do you want for it, my dear, that's the question?" the man said jauntily, his eyes never leaving the girl's flushed face; "we are always pleased to accommodate a pretty young lady like you, eh, Tom?" with an odious leer he nudged the elbow of his companion, who emitted a hoarse guffaw, and winked facetiously, as Christina turned a distressed glance in his direction. Unfortunately for her, the master of the shop was absent, and she was at the mercy of two of those underbred, mean-spirited curs, who regard any defenceless woman as lawful prey, and take the same delight in baiting her, as their ignoble ancestors took in baiting an equally defenceless dumb animal.

"You tell us what you want, miss," the man called Tom struck in, leaning across the counter, and tapping the girl's hand; "anything you ask in reason we shall be pleased to oblige you with. Now, what's this thing, and this thing, and this very pretty thing?" he ended facetiously, whilst his fellow shopman unfastened Christina's parcel, and opened the cardboard box it contained.

"It is a pendant," Christina faltered, afraid to show the indignation she felt, lest the men should refuse to give her what she needed; "it has been a long time in my family—and—I know it is very valuable."

"Oh! you know it is very valuable, do you?" queried the first man, mocking her trembling accents; "now, it is for us to tell you its value; not for you to tell us, you know. Hum! old-fashioned thing," he ejaculated, holding up to the light the piece of jewellery he had drawn from its box; "this sort of antique article may have suited our grandmothers, but it doesn't go down nowadays!"

"That is not at all the case," Christina answered boldly; "everybody likes antique things now; and that pendant is worth a great deal, as you know."

Anger was beginning to conquer her nervous tremors, and the odious smile with which her remark was received by both young men, made her draw herself up proudly.

"Hoity, toity!" said the man called Tom; "as we know, indeed. If Mr. Franks, my excellent friend and colleague," he made an exaggerated bow to his companion, "considers the bauble old-fashioned and worthless, it certainly is worthless and old-fashioned."

"It is certainly nothing of the kind," Christina cried, anger driving away the last semblance of nervousness. "I should be much obliged if you would tell me at once how much you can advance me upon it. If you are unable to give me anything, I can take it elsewhere." As she spoke, she looked straight into the smiling, insolent faces before her, her own grown rigid and proud; and in spite of her shabby clothing and obvious poverty, she suddenly assumed a look of imperial dignity, which had an instantaneous effect upon her tormentors.

"Come, come, miss; don't talk like that," the man called Franks said sheepishly; "we were just having a bit of fun over it, that's all. And I'm sure we'll give you the best we can for the pendant."

Christina's threat of taking the jewel elsewhere, had brought the shopmen sharply to their senses, for it had needed no more than a cursory glance, to show them both that the jewel the girl had brought them was of no small value, and they were uncomfortably aware that the vials of their master's wrath would be emptied upon their heads, if they allowed such an article to be disposed of in another establishment.