His darling sin

HIS DARLING SIN

BY

M.E. BRADDON

Author of "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET." Etc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright in the United States
of America, 1899

London

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON,
KENT & CO. Ltd.

Stationers' Hall Court

Printed for the Author by
Wm. Clowes & Sons, Ltd.
London and Beccles.

HIS DARLING SIN.

CHAPTER I.

"That small, small, imperceptible
Small talk! that cuts like powdered glass
Ground in Tophana,—who can tell
Where lurks the power the poison has?"

There is the desolation of riches as well as the desolation of poverty—the empty splendour of a large house in which there is no going and coming of family life, no sound of light footsteps and youthful laughter—only spacious rooms and fine furniture, and one solitary figure moving silently amidst the vacant grandeur. This sense of desolation, of a melancholy silence and emptiness, came upon Lady Perivale on her return to the mansion in Grosvenor Square, which was among the numerous good things of this world that had fallen into her lap, seven years ago, when she made one of the best matches of the season.

She had not sold herself to an unloved suitor. She had been sincerely attached to Sir Hector Perivale, and had sincerely mourned him when, after two years of domestic happiness, he died suddenly, in the prime of life, from the consequences of a chill caught on his grouse moor in Argyleshire, where he and his young wife, and a few chosen pals, made life a perpetual picnic, and knew no enemy but foul weather.

This time the enemy was Death. A neglected cold turned to pneumonia, and Grace Perivale was a widow.

"It does seem hard lines," whispered Hector, when he knew that he was doomed. "We have had such a good time, Grace; and it's rough on me to leave you."

No child had been born of that happy union, and Grace found herself alone in the world at one and twenty, in full possession of her husband's fortune, which was princely, even according to the modern standard by which incomes are measured—a fortune lying chiefly underground, in Durham coalfields, secure from change as the earth itself, and only subject to temporary diminution from strikes, or bad times. She needed a steady brain to deal with such large responsibilities, for she had not been born or reared among the affluent classes. In her father's East Anglian Rectory the main philosophy of life had been to do without things.

Her husband had none but distant relations, whom he had kept at a distance; so there were no interfering brothers or sisters, no prying aunts or officious uncles to worry her with good advice. She stood alone, with a castle on the Scottish border, round whose turrets the seamews wheeled, and at whose base the German Ocean rolled in menacing grandeur, one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, and an income that was described by her friends and the gossiping Press at anything you like between twenty and fifty thousand a year.

So rich, so much alone, Lady Perivale was naturally capricious. One of her caprices was to hate her castle in Northumberland, and to love a hill-side villa on the Italian Riviera, two or three miles from a small seaport, little known to travellers, save as a ragged line of dilapidated white houses straggling along the sea front, past which the Mediterranean express carried them, indifferent and unobservant, on their journey between Marseilles and Genoa.

It was Lady Perivale's whim to spend her winters in a spot unknown to Rumpelmeyer and fashion—a spot where smart frocks were out of place; where royalty-worship was impossible, since not the smallest princeling had ever been heard of there; and where for the joy of life one had only the sapphire sea and the silvery grey of the olive woods, perpetual roses, a lawn carpeted with anemones, sloping banks covered with carnations, palms, and aloes, orange and lemon trees, hedges of pale pink geranium, walls tapestried with the dark crimson of the Bougainvilliers, the delicate mauve of the wistaria; and balmy winds which brought the scent of the flowers and the breath of the sea through the open windows.

Lady Perivale came back to London in April, when the flower-girls were selling bunches of purple lilac, and Bond Street seemed as full of lemon-coloured carriages and picture-hats as if it were June. It was the pleasant season after Easter, the season of warm sunshine and cold winds, when some people wore sables and others wore lace, the season of bals blancs and friendly dinners, before the May Drawing Room and the first State concert, before the great entertainments which were to be landmarks in the history of the year.

How empty the three drawing-rooms looked, in a perspective of white and gold; how black and dismal the trees in the square, as Grace Perivale stood at one of the front windows, looking out at the smooth lawns and well-kept shrubbery, in the pale English sunlight. She thought of the ineffable blue of the Mediterranean, the grey and green and gold and purple of the olive wood, and the orange and lemon grove sloping down to the sea from her verandah, where the Safrano roses hung like a curtain of pale yellow blossom over the rustic roof.

"And yet there are people who like London better than Italy," she thought.

Two footmen came in with the tables for tea.

"In the little drawing-room," she said, waving them away from the accustomed spot.

The spaciousness of the room chilled her. The Louis Seize furniture was all white and gold and silvery blue—not too much gold. An adept in the furniture art had made the scheme of colour, had chosen the pale blues and greys of the Aubusson carpet, the silvery sheen of the satin curtains and sofa-covers. It was all pale and delicate, and intensely cold.

"My letters?" she asked, when the men were retiring.

She had slept at Dover, and had come to London by an afternoon train. She liked even the hotel at Dover better than this great house in Grosvenor Square. There she had at least the sea to look at, and not this splendid loneliness.

"Well," she thought, with a long-drawn sigh, "I must plunge into the vortex again, another mill-round of lunches and dinners, theatres and dances, park and Princes', Ranelagh and Hurlingham—the same things over and over and over and over again. But, after all, I enjoy the nonsense while I am in it, enjoy it just as much as the other people do. We all go dancing round the fashionable maypole, in and out, left hand here, right hand there, smiling, smiling, smiling, and quite satisfied while it lasts. We only pretend to be bored."

The little drawing-room—twenty feet by fifteen—looked almost comfortable. There was a bright fire in the low grate, reflected dazzlingly in turquoise tiles, and the old-fashioned bow window was filled with a bank of flowers, which shut out the view of the chimneys and the great glass roof over the stable-yard.

Lady Perivale sank into one of her favourite chairs, and poured out a cup of tea.

"Toujours cet azur banal," she said to herself, as she looked at the pale blue china, remembering a line of Coppée's. "Poor Hector chose this turquoise because he thought it suited my complexion, but how ghastly it will make me look when I am old—to be surrounded by a child-like prettiness—vouée au bleu, like a good little French Catholic!"

The butler came in with her letters. Three, on a silver salver that looked much too large for them.

"These cannot possibly be all, Johnson," she said; "Mrs. Barnes must have the rest."

"Mrs. Barnes says these are all the letters, my lady."

"All! There must be some mistake. You had better ask the other servants."

Her butler and her maid had been with her in Italy—no one else; the butler, elderly and devoted, a man who had grown up in the Perivale family; her maid, also devoted, a native of her father's parish, whom she had taught as a child in the Sunday school, when scarcely more than a child herself, not a very accomplished attendant for a woman of fashion, but for a parson's daughter, who wore her own hair and her own eyebrows, the country-bred girl was handy enough, nature having gifted her with brains and fingers that enabled her to cope with the complicated fastenings of modern frocks, changing every season.

Lady Perivale's letters had been accumulating for nearly a fortnight, and her intended arrival in London had been announced in the Times and a score of papers. She expected a mountain of letters and invitations, such as had always greeted her return to civilization.

Of the three letters, two were circulars from fashionable milliners. The third was from her old friend and singing mistress, Susan Rodney:—

"So glad you are coming back to town, my dear Grace. I shall call in Grosvenor Square on Wednesday afternoon on the chance of finding you.

"Ever yours affectionately,
"Sue."

Miss Rodney answered every correspondent by return of post, and never wrote a long letter.

Wednesday was Lady Perivale's afternoon at home, and this was Wednesday. A double knock resounded through the silence of the hall and staircase; and three minutes later the butler announced Miss Rodney.

"My sweet old Sue," cried Grace, "now this is really too good of you. Words can't say how glad I am to see you."

They kissed each other like sisters, and then Susan seated herself opposite her friend, and looked at her with a countenance that expressed some strong feeling, affection mingled with sorrow—or was it pity?

She was Grace's senior by more than ten years. She was good-looking in her strong and rather masculine way—her complexion of a healthy darkness, unsophisticated by pearl-powder, her features rugged, but not ugly, her eyes bright and shrewd, but capable of tenderness, her gown and hat just the right gown and hat for a woman who walked, or rode in an omnibus or a hansom.

"Well, Sue, what's the news?" asked Grace, pouring out her visitor's tea. "Is it a particularly dull season? Is nobody entertaining?"

"Oh, much as usual, I believe. I can only answer for my own friends and patronesses—mostly Bayswater way—who are as anxious as ever to get a little after-dinner music for nothing. They have to ask me to dinner, though. No nonsense about that!"

"It isn't the songs only, Sue. They want an agreeable woman who can talk well."

"Oh, I can chatter about most things; but I don't pretend to talk. I can keep the ball rolling."

"Do you know, Sue, you find me in a state of profound mystification. I never was so puzzled in my life. When I was leaving Italy I wired to my people to keep back all my letters. I was ten days on the way home; and instead of the usual accumulation of cards and things I find one letter—yours."

"People don't know you are in town," Sue suggested slowly.

"Oh, but they do; for I sent the announcement to the Times and the Post a fortnight ago. I really meant to be back sooner, but the weather was too lovely. I stopped a couple of days at Bordighera and at St. Raphael, and I was three days in Paris buying frocks. Not a single invitation—not so much as a caller's card. One would think London was asleep. Isn't it strange?"

"Yes," answered Sue, looking at her with an earnest, yet somewhat furtive, scrutiny, "it is—very—strange."

"Well, dear, don't let us be solemn about it. No doubt the invitations will come pouring in now I am at home. People have been too busy to notice my name in the papers. There are always new women for the town to run after. Wives of diamond men from Africa or oil men from America. One cannot expect to keep one's place."

"No," assented Sue. "Society is disgustingly fickle."

"But I am not afraid of being forgotten by the people I like—the really nice people, the pretty girls I have cultivated, and who make a goddess of me, the clever women, worldly but large-minded—all the people I like. I am not afraid of African competitors there. They will stick to me," said Grace, with emphasis.

Her friend could see that she was troubled, though she affected to take the matter easily. There was trouble in both faces, as the friends sat opposite each other, with only the spindle-legged Louis Seize tea-table between them; but the trouble in Susan Rodney's face was graver than in Lady Perivale's.

"Tell me about your winter," said Grace, after a pause, during which tea-cups had been refilled, and dainty cakelets offered and declined.

"Oh, the usual dull mechanic round; plenty of pupils, mostly suburban; and one duchess, five and fifty, who thinks she has discovered a magnificent contralto voice of which she was unaware till quite lately, and desires me to develop it. We bawl the grand duet from Norma till we are both hoarse, and then my duchess makes me stop and lunch with her, and tells me her troubles."

"What are they?"

"I should have put it in the singular. When she talks of her troubles she means her husband."

"Sue, you're trying to be vivacious; but there's something on your mind. If it's any bother of your own, do tell me, dear, and let me help you if I can."

"My tender-hearted Grace! You always wanted to help people. I remember your coming to me with all your little pocket-money that dreadful morning at the Rectory when I had a wire to say my mother was dying, and had to rush back to town. And my dear Gracie thought I should be hard up, and wanted to help me. That's nearly ten years ago. Well, well! Such things live in one's memory. And your father, how kind, how courteous he always was to the holiday music-mistress, and what a happy time my summer holidays were in the dear old Rectory!"

"And what a lucky girl I was to get such a teacher and such a dear friend for nothing!"

"Do you call bed and board, lavender-scented linen, cream à discrétion, pony-cart, lawn tennis, luncheon parties, dinner at the Squire's, a dance at the market town—do you call that nothing? Well, the bargain suited us both, I think, and it was a pleasure to train one of the finest mezzo-sopranos I know. And now, Gracie," slowly, hesitatingly even, "what about your winter?"

"Five months of books, music, and idleness. My lotus land was never lovelier. But for a January storm, that tore my roses and spoilt a Bougainvilliers that covers half the house, I should hardly have known it was winter."

"And were you quite alone all the time? No visitors?"

"Not a mortal! You know I go to my villa to read and think. When I am tired of my own thoughts and other people's—one does tire occasionally even of Browning, even of Shakespeare—I turn to my piano, and find a higher range of thought in Beethoven. You know I go the pace all through the London season, never shirk a dance, do three cotillons a week, go everywhere, see everything."

"Yes, I know you have gone the pace, since your three years' mourning."

"After Cowes comes the reaction, a month or so in Northumberland, just to show myself to my people, and see that the gardeners are doing their duty; and then when the leaves begin to fall, away to my olive woods and their perpetual grey. For half the year I revel in solitude. If you would spend a winter with me I should be charmed, for you like the life I like, and it would be a solitude à deux. But the common herd are only good in cities. I come back to London to be sociable and amused."

Miss Rodney rose and put on her mantle.

"Can't you stop and dine? I'll send you snugly home in my brougham."

Home was a villa facing Regent's Park.

"Alas! dear, it's impossible! I am due in Cadogan Square at half-past six—Islington and Chelsea 'bus from Regent-circus."

"A lesson?"

"Two lessons—sisters, and not an iota of voice between them. But I shall make them sing. Give me a scrap of intelligence, and I can always manage that. Good-bye, Grace. Ask me to dinner some other night, when you are alone."

"Come to-morrow night, or the night after. I have no engagement, as you know. Let us see a lot of each other before the rush begins."

"Friday night, then. Good-bye."

They kissed again. Lady Perivale rang the bell, and then followed her friend towards the drawing-room door; but on her way there Miss Rodney stopped suddenly, and burst into tears.

"Sue, Sue, what is it? I knew you had something on your mind. If it's a money trouble, dear, make light of it, for it needn't plague you another minute. I have more money than I know what to do with."

"No, no, no, dear; it's not money," sobbed Sue. "Oh, what a fool I am—what a weak-minded, foolish fool!"

A footman opened the door, and looked with vacant countenance at the agitated group. Early initiation in his superiors' domestic troubles had taught him to compose his features when storms were raging.

"The door, James—presently," his mistress said, confusedly, watching him leave the room with that incredible slowness with which such persons appear to move when we want to get rid of them.

"Very foolish, if you won't trust your old friend Gracie!" she said, making Sue sit down, and seating herself beside her, and then in caressing tones, "Now, dear, tell me all your troubles. You know there is no sorrow of yours—no difficulty—no complication—which would find me unsympathetic. What is it?"

"Oh, Gracie, Gracie, my darling girl, it's not my trouble. It's yours."

"Mine?" with intense surprise.

"Yes, dear. I meant to have kept silence. I thought it was the only course, in such a delicate matter. I meant to leave things alone—and let you find out for yourself."

"Find out! What?"

"The scandal, Grace—a scandal that touches you."

"What scandal can touch me? Scandal! Why, I have never done anything in my life that the most malignant gossip in London could turn to my disadvantage."

Her indignant eyes, her full, strong voice, answered for her truth.

"Oh, Grace, I knew, I knew there couldn't be anything in it. A wicked lie, a cowardly attack upon a pure-minded woman—a woman of spotless character; the last woman upon this earth to give ground for such a story."

"Oh, Sue, if you love me, be coherent! What is the story? Who is the slanderer?"

"Heaven knows how it began! My Duchess told me. I spoke of you the other day at our tête-à-tête luncheon. I told her about your lovely voice, your passion for music. She nodded her old wig in a supercilious way. 'I have heard her sing,' she said curtly. She waited till the servants left the room, and then asked me if it was possible I had not heard the scandal about Lady Perivale."

"What scandal? Oh, for pity's sake come to that, Sue. Never mind your Duchess."

"Well, I'll tell you in the most brutal way. It seems that three or four people, whose names I haven't discovered, declare they met you in Algiers, and in Corsica and Sardinia, travelling with Colonel Rannock—travelling with Colonel Rannock—passing as his wife, under a nom de guerre—Mr. and Mrs. Randall."

"How utterly disgusting and absurd! But what on earth can have made them imagine such a thing?"

"People say you were seen—seen and recognized—by different people who knew you, in one or the other of those places."

"Travelling with Colonel Rannock, as his wife! My God! A man I refused three times. Three times," laughing hysterically. "Why, I have had him on his knees in this room; kneeling, Sue, like a lover in an old comedy; and I only laughed at him."

"That's rather a dangerous thing to do, Grace, with some men."

"Oh, Colonel Rannock is not the kind of man to start a vendetta for a woman's laughter. He is a laughing philosopher himself, and takes everything lightly."

"Does he? One never knows what there is behind that lightness. What if Colonel Rannock has set this scandal on foot with a view to proposing a fourth time, and getting himself accepted?"

"How could he make people swear they saw me—me!—at Algiers, when I was in Italy? It is all nonsense Sue; an absurd malentendu; my name substituted for some other woman's. Now I am in London, the matter will be put straight in an hour. People have only to see me again to be sure I am not that kind of woman. As for Colonel Rannock, he may be dissipated, and a spendthrift; but he is well-born, and he ought to be a gentleman."

"Who said he was ill-born? Surely, you know that there are good races and bad. Who can tell when the bad blood came in, and the character of the race began to degenerate? Under the Plantagenets, perhaps. Colonel Rannock comes of a bad race—everybody knows that. His grandfather, Lord Kirkmichael, was notorious in the Regency. He left his memoirs, don't you know, to be published fifty years after his death—an awful book—that had a succès de scandale six or seven years ago. He was bosom friend of Lord Hertford, and that set."

"I did not trouble myself about his grandfather."

"Ah! but you ought! A man's family history is the man. Lord Kirkmichael's grandson would be capable of anything infamous."

"The whole thing is too preposterous for consideration," Lady Perivale said angrily. "I wonder at your taking it tragically."

And then, recalling that empty salver instead of the usual pile of letters and cards, she cried, distractedly—

"It is shameful—atrocious—that any one upon earth could believe such a thing of me. It makes me hate the human race. Yes, and I shall always hate those horrid wretches I called friends, however they may try to make amends for this insolent neglect."

There was no question of taking the matter lightly now, for Grace Perivale burst into a passion of sobs, and was quite as tragic as her friend.

"My dearest Grace, pray, pray be calm! Don't stay in this odious London, where people have no hearts. Why not go to your Northern castle, and live there quietly till the mystery clears itself, as no doubt it will soon?"

"Go?" cried Lady Perivale, starting up out of the drooping attitude in which she had given way to her distress. "Beat a retreat? Why, if Grosvenor Square were a fiery furnace I would stay and face those wretches—those false, false friends—till I made them know the kind of woman I am!"

"Well, dear, perhaps that is best—if you can stand it," Susan answered, rather sadly.

"But where is Colonel Rannock? Surely he has not been dumb! It is his business to bring the slanderers to book!"

"That's what I told the Duchess. But Rannock has not been seen in London since the autumn, and is said to be shooting something in the Rockies. And now, I must rush off to my lessons. Good-bye, again, dear. Don't forget that I am to dine with you on Friday!"

"Shall I invite a party of twenty to meet you—an impromptu party, asked by telegraph, such as I had last year to welcome me home?" Grace asked, bitterly. "Go, dear! Don't be too sorry for me. I shall weather the storm. I ought to be more amused than distressed by such nonsense."

Miss Rodney dried her tearful eyes, and composed her agitated features, on her way downstairs. The footman stood ready to open the door, stifling a yawn behind his hand. Miss Rodney gave a quick glance round the hall, taking in all its spaciousness and splendour, the marble group at the foot of the double staircase, the bronze and ormolu candelabra, the crimson carpets, softer than forest moss.

"Rich beyond the dreams of avarice—and so unhappy!" she thought, as she hurried off to catch the Chelsea 'bus.

CHAPTER II.

"How blest he names, in love's familiar tone,
The kind fair friend by nature marked his own;
And, in the waveless mirror of his mind,
Views the fleet years of pleasure left behind,
Since when her empire o'er his heart began—
Since first he called her his before the holy man."

It was not often in the London season that Lady Perivale could taste the pleasures of solitude, a long evening by her own fireside, unbroken by letters, messages, telegrams, sudden inroads of friends breaking in upon her at eleven o'clock, between a dinner and a dance, wanting to know why she had not been at the dinner, and whether she was going to the dance, or dances, of the evening, what accident or caprice had eclipsed their star. But on this night of her return the visitor's bell sounded no more after Susan Rodney left her. The quiet of her house was so strange a thing that it almost scared her.

"I begin to understand what a leper must feel in his cavern in the wilderness," she said to herself with a laugh. "The thing is almost tragic, and yet so utterly absurd. It is tragic to discover what society friendships are made of—ropes of sand that fly away with the first wind that blows unkindly."

She pretended to dine, for the servants might have heard of the scandal, and she did not want them to think her crushed by unmerited slights. They, of course, knew the truth, since she had two witnesses among them to prove an alibi, Johnson the butler, and her devoted maid, Emily Scott.

She did not know that the first footman and the cook had both laughed off Johnson's indignant statement that his mistress had never left Porto Maurizio.

"You're not the man to give her away if she had gone off for a bit of a scamper. You and Miss Scott would look the other way when her boxes were being labelled."

"And she'd take a courier maid instead of Emily," said the cook. "After all, it's only finn der seecle."

"Why don't she marry him, and ha' done with it?" said the footman.

Butler and maid were goaded into a fury by talk of this kind, and it was only the force of esprit de corps, and the fact that James was six foot one, and a first rate plate-cleaner, that prevented Mr. Johnson sacking him on the instant.

"Did you ever know me tell a lie?" he asked indignantly.

"Or me?" sobbed Emily.

"Not on your own account," said the cook; "but you'd tell a good big one to screen your mistress."

"And so I might perhaps," said the girl, "if she wanted screening; but she don't, and, what's more, she never will."

"Well, all I can say is it's all over London," said James, "and it's made it very unpleasant for me at the Feathers, for, of course, I stand up for my lady in public, and swear it's a pack of lies. But here we're tiled in, and I'm free to confess I don't believe in smoke without fire."

They went on wrangling till bedtime, while Grace sat by the fire in the little drawing-room with her brown poodle lying on the lace flounces of her tea-gown, and tried to read.

She tried book after book, Meredith, Hardy, Browning, Anatole France, taking the volumes at random from a whirligig book-stand, twisting the stand about impatiently to find a book that would calm her agitation, and beguile her thoughts into a new channel. But literature was no use to her tonight.

"I see it is only happy people who can read," she thought. She opened no more books, and let her mind work as it would. There had been sorrows in her life, deep and lasting sorrow, in the early death of a husband to whom she had been fondly attached, and in the previous loss of a father she had adored. But in spite of these losses, which had darkened her sky for a long time, her life had been happy; she had a happy disposition, the capacity for enjoyment, the love of all that was bright and beautiful in the world, art, music, flowers, scenery, horses, dogs—and even people. She loved travelling, she loved the gaiety of a London season, she loved the quiet of her Italian villa. Her childhood had been spent in a rustic solitude, and all her girlish pleasures had been of the simplest. The only child of a father who had done with the world when he read the burial service over his young wife, and who had lived in almost unbroken retirement in an East Anglian Rectory. He was a student, and could afford a curate to take the burden of parish work, in a sparsely populated parish, where distance, not numbers, had to be considered. He kept good horses, mounted his curate, and drove or rode about among his flock, and was beloved even by the roughest of them.

That girl-child was the one human thing he had to love, and he lavished love upon her. He taught her, trained her to appreciate all that is best in literature, yet kept her simple as a child, and thought of her as if she were still a child after her eighteenth birthday, and so was taken by surprise when Sir Hector Perivale, who had met her at friendly parties in the neighbourhood, came to him at the end of the shooting season, and asked to be accepted as her future husband.

He had offered himself to Grace, and Grace had not said no. Grace had allowed him to call upon the rector.

Mr. Mallandine looked up from his book like a man in a dream.

"Marry my Grace!" he cried. "Why, she has hardly done with her dolls. It seems only yesterday she was sitting on the carpet over there"—pointing to a corner of his library—"playing with her doll's-house."

"Indeed, rector, she is a woman, and a very clever woman. She gave me excellent advice the other day when we were threatened with a strike in the north. She has a better head for business than I have."

"That may be," said Mr. Mallandine, smiling at him. "But she is not old enough to be married."

"She will be nineteen on her next birthday, sir."

"What a pertinacious young man you are. Her next birthday is nearly a year off. She shall not take the cares of a husband and a household until she is twenty."

"That means two years, rector. What am I to do with myself all that time?" Sir Hector asked ruefully.

"Do as other young men do. Isn't there sport enough and travel enough for such as you? Go to Canada, to the North Pole, to the Pamirs, over the roof of the world. I thought no young man of spirit was satisfied till he had crossed the Pamirs, or shot lions in Bechuanaland."

"I have left off caring for such things since I have known Grace."

"Well, you'll have to possess your soul in patience. My daughter's girlhood belongs to me. Two years hence she will be a woman, and able to know whether she loves you well enough to live and die with you, or whether she only wants to be called my lady. It will be hard enough for me to part with her then."

"You shall not part with her, rector. You will have a son as well as a daughter. That will be the only difference."

"All prospective sons-in-law say the same thing. Come, Sir Hector, I don't want to be selfish. Grace has been the sunshine of my life ever since she and I were left alone in the world together. I want to see her happily married before I lay me down for the long sweet sleep; but I will not have her marry till she has had time to fall in love and out of love a good many times with the man who is to have the charge of her destiny."

There was no choice but to submit, since Grace thought as her father thought, so Sir Hector reconciled himself to a two years' engagement, but could but smile as he thought how brief need have been his probation had his choice fallen in the Mayfair marriage market.

Fate was on his side, after all. For a little more than half a year Grace and he were betrothed lovers, meeting under restrictions; and the rector had leisure to study his future son-in-law's character.

He found no evil in Hector Perivale, and he found much good—a warm heart, an honest, open disposition, pluck such as should go with good blood. It was quite true that Grace was the cleverer of the two, and could even give good advice in the difficulties between capital and labour, always in favour of concessions, yet always counselling a firm attitude when labour put on the aspect of an enemy, and refused to hear reason.

Then, one day, when it was least expected of him, the rector held out his hand to Sir Hector over their evening wine, and said—

"I believe you are a good fellow, Hector, and that you will make my Grace happy. Marry her as soon as you and she like—the sooner the better for me!"

"Oh, sir, this is indeed generous."

"No; it is only prudent. I told you I wanted to see my daughter happily married before I die. Well, when I was in London the other day I saw a specialist—at the advice of Ringston, here—and he told me my life is not quite so good as I thought."

"Oh, sir, I hope he was wrong."

"So do I, Hector. But I shall act as if I was sure he was right. There is nothing certain about his verdict—a man and a mortal disease may jog on for years together—so not a word to alarm Grace. I would not have the bright morning of her life clouded by fears about me. You can tell her that I admire your character so much that I want to secure you at once as my son-in-law. I shall only tell her to set about her trousseau."

Grace required a great deal of talking to, on her father's part and on Hector's, before she was reconciled to a speedy marriage. She was sure her father wanted her. He had not been looking well lately. He had left off those early morning rides which had been so delightful, and which she had often shared with him—those long scampers on the broad margins of greensward on the edge of the pine-woods, in the freshness of the new day. He let his groom drive for him, even his favourite cob, whose mouth no hand but his own had been allowed to control till lately.

Her father laughed off her fears.

"Did you think I was never going to be an old man, Gracie?"

"Not yet, father! Oh, not yet for a score of years. Why, it was only last summer everybody was telling me how young you looked—growing younger instead of older."

"That was last summer, Gracie. Où sont les neiges d'antan? Don't you know that when Time has seemed to stand still for ever so long, he seems to move on very fast all of a sudden? It is all only seeming. The sands are always falling, and the scythe is always moving—slow and sure, my love, slow and very sure. But I shall be a happy old man when I see my darling married to the man of her choice."

"If you call yourself an old man, I won't marry him," Grace said almost angrily. "If you are an old man, you want a spinster daughter to take care of you—and in that case I shall never marry."

He smiled at her with a touch of mournfulness. She would not have long to wait, perhaps, if she insisted on staying to the end.

After this he was careful to talk in a cheerful strain, and played his part so well that she left him for an Italian honeymoon without the faintest apprehension of evil—left him a gay and happy bride, going out into a beautiful world of which she knew nothing but East Anglia.

The whole of May was spent on the lakes—first Maggiore, and then Como. They stayed at Baveno, lived most of their life on the lake, and visited the three islands till they knew them by heart—the gardens, the palaces, the fishermen's huts, the caffes, the people, old and young, crones, children, boatmen, priests. Those island gardens in their glory of Maytime made a region of enchantment that even Grace's dreams over Rogers's Italy had never equalled. The facilities of travel, repetition, the crowding of tourists, may have cheapened these exquisite scenes; but to each of us on that first Italian journey they offer the same magic philter, the same revelation of a loveliness beyond our power of dreaming.

Then came Bellagio, Cadenabbia, Varenna, a leisurely tour of that still lovelier lake; and then, when June began and the days waxed hot, a quiet week at Promontogno, roaming in chestnut woods, driving up the hill to Soglio. Then to the cool breezes of the Engadine.

It was at Pontresina that a telegram came—one of those fatal messages that are opened so lightly, expectant of some trivial intelligence, and which bring despair—

"The Rector dangerously ill. Pray come home immediately.—Mary."

Mary was Mr. Mallandine's cook and housekeeper, an admirable person, not without considerable dignity, and a black silk gown for Sundays; but who had risen from the ranks, and was still only "Mary," as she had been when she was a kitchen-maid at seven pounds a year.

That hurried journey through the long June days was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Sir Hector planned everything, so that not a minute should be lost. They left Pontresina at two in the morning in a carriage and four, and halted only to change horses; reached Coire in time for the express, and halted no more till they were at Victoria. Then across London to Liverpool Street, and then to the grey quiet of the Suffolk Rectory, in the second evening of their journey.

Grace was not too late. Her father lingered for nearly a month after her return, and all the consolation that last hours and fond words, mutual prayers, tears, and kisses, can give in the after time, were given to her. She never forgot those solemn hours, that sweet communion and confession of faith, her education for eternity. Never, perhaps, until those sad hours had she known how true a Christian her father was, or realized the perfect beauty of the Christian life and the Christian death.

She had further evidence of his goodness in the grief of his parishioners, to whom his bounty had been limited only by his means, life at the Rectory being planned with a Spartan simplicity, so as to leave the wider margin for the poor.

When all was over Sir Hector took his wife back to Switzerland; but not to the scenes where those evil tidings had found her. He was all the world to her now, and his heart was a fountain of tenderness. The bond between husband and wife was strengthened by Grace's sorrow. They lived alone in the loveliest places of the earth for more than a year, and then it was for Hector's sake that Grace took up the burden of life, and began her new duties as mistress of the house in Grosvenor Square, and the Castle in Northumberland. The town house had been refurnished while they were on their travels. All the ponderous early Victorian rosewood and mahogany had been swept into the limbo of things that were once thought beautiful. The chairs with curved backs and Brussels sprouts upon their gouty legs, the acres of looking glass framed in cabbage leaves, the loo-tables, and heavy valances shutting out the top-light of every window, all the draperies making for darkness, disappeared under the ruthless hand of improvement; and from the dust and shadow of a lumber-room filled by past generations, mirrors crowned with golden eagles, chairs with shield-shaped backs and wheatsheaf carving, were brought out into the light of day, and were deemed worthy.

"I wonder whether anybody will ever want the loo-tables and Victorian sideboards back again?" Grace said; but the upholsterer had provided against that contingency by carrying everything away, to be sold for firewood, he told Sir Hector, and a very small item on the credit side of his account was supposed to represent their value in that capacity.

Then began Grace Perivale's new phase of existence—a life of luxury that was as much a revelation as the loveliness of lakes and mountains, the blue of an Italian sky. She was only twenty, and she found herself almost a personage, one of the recognized beauties, who could not move without a paragraph. Her appearance on a tiara night at the opera, her diamonds, her frocks, her parties, her poodles were written about. All the lady journalists followed her movements with unflagging pens. She could not take up a newspaper, at least among those of the frivolous order, without seeing her name in it.

She laughed, was inclined to be disgusted, and made mock of the papers, but was not actually displeased. Even in East Anglia, after a round of tennis-parties in the gardens of neighbouring squarsons, in a district where almost everybody was a parson, and most of the parsons were land-owners and rich—even in those rural scenes she had discovered that people admired her; and then Sir Hector had come with his adulation, taking fire at her beauty as at a flame, and declaring that she was the loveliest girl in England. And at twenty to be called—even by irresponsible young women—a queen of Society, has its intoxication.

She plunged into the world of pleasure. Her husband was a member of all the pleasure clubs—Hurlingham, Sandown, and the rest. Had there been a hundred he would have belonged to them all. He was popular, and had scores of friends, and if Grace had been much less attractive, she would have been well received for Sir Hector's sake.

She caught the knack of entertaining, and her parties were pronounced right from the outset. She was open to advice from old hands, but had ideas of her own, and thought out the subject thoroughly. She imparted a touch of originality to the commonest things. Her dinner-table surprised with some flower that nobody else had thought of.

"I expect to see ferns and green frogs at your next dinner," said Mr. George Howard, famous in literature and politics, ultra Liberal scion of a Liberal house, and a great admirer of Lady Perivale's. "I don't think you can find anything new—short of frogs. They must have tiny gold chains to fasten them to the épergne, like the turtle that swim about under the jetty at Nice."

It was by the pleasantness and number of her parties that Grace established herself as an entertainer, rather than by their splendour. Who can be splendid in an age of African millionaires, of Americans with inexhaustible oil-springs? She did not vie with the oil and diamond people. She left them their proper element—the colossal. Her métier was to give small parties, and to bring nice people together. She studied every invitation as carefully as a move at chess. Her queen, her knights, her bishops—she knew exactly how to place them. The knights—those choicest pieces that move anyway—were her wits and brilliant talkers, the men whom everybody wants to meet, and who always say the right thing. Her queens were of every type; first the beauties, then the clever women, then the great ladies, dowagers or otherwise, the women whose social status is in itself an attraction.

She smiled when people praised her tact and savoir faire.

"I have so little to think about," she said; "no child, no near relations. And Hector spoils me. He encourages me to care for trivial things."

"Because he cares for them himself—if you call the pleasantness of life trivial. I don't. I call it the one thing worth thinking about. I could name a score of women in London who have all the essentials of happiness and yet their houses are intolerable."

Thus Mr. Howard, her self-appointed mentor. He went about praising her. Everybody wondered that a girl of twenty, who had been reared in a rural parsonage, could commit so few gaucheries.

"Few!" cried Howard, indignantly. "She has never been gauche. She is incapable of the kind of blunder Frenchmen call a gaffe. Some women are born with a feeling for society, as others are born with a feeling for art."

In Northumberland, as in London, Lady Perivale's success was unquestionable. Sir Hector's old chums—the shooting and hunting and fishing men—were delighted with his choice, and Sir Hector himself was in a seventh heaven of wedded bliss. One only blessing was denied him. Grace and her husband longed for a child on whom to lavish the overplus of love in two affectionate natures. But no child had come to them.

A child might have brought consolation in that dark season when, after three days and nights of acute anxiety, Grace Perivale found herself a widow, and more lonely in her wealth and station than women often are in that sad hour of bereavement.

Her father had been the last of an old Norfolk family in which only children were hereditary. She had neither uncles nor aunts. She had heard of remote cousinships, but her father had held but scantiest communion with those distant kindred, most of whom were distant in locality as well as in blood.

CHAPTER III.

"I see him furnished forth for his career,
On starting from the life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help:
Body and mind in balance, a sound frame,
A solid intellect: the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
Oh, and much drawback! What were earth without?"

Now began the third phase of Lady Perivale's existence. She spent the next three years, not in utter loneliness, but in complete retirement from worldly pleasures. It was in this time of bereavement that her devoted Sue was of most use to her. She persuaded Sue to travel with her during her first year of widowhood, at the risk of losing that to which Miss Rodney had been a slave—her connection. Grace insisted on her friend accepting a salary to cover that jeopardized connection; and, when they went back to London, it was Grace's care to find new pupils to fill the gaps. When West Kensington or Balham had fallen away, Lady Perivale sent recruits from Mayfair and Belgravia. She had a host of girl-friends—her court, her "Queen's Maries"—and she could order them to have lessons from her dearest Sue. In some cases she went further than this, and paid for the lessons—girl-friends being often impecunious—but this her friend never knew. But she may have been near guessing the truth later, for, after that one Italian winter, Miss Rodney would travel no more.

"I am one of the working bees, Grace," she said; "and you are trying to make a drone of me."

"No, dear, that could never be; but I want you to have your butterfly season."

It was while she was with her friend that they came upon the villa above Porto Maurizio. Grace fell in love with the spot because, although near the high-road to Genoa, it lay off the beaten track, and was purely Italian—no Swiss-German hotel, no English tourists. The villa was out of repair, and by no means beautiful; but some extent of land went with it—olive woods, lemon groves, old, old mulberry trees, festooned with vines that were looped from tree to tree, banks of carnations, a wilderness of roses.

Lady Perivale sent for the owner's agent, and bought land and villa as easily as she would have bought a bonnet. The agent saw her child-like eagerness for a new toy, and only asked twice as much as the reserve price.

"It is a place that can be made anything in the hands of an owner of taste and means," he said; "and if you find the land a burden you can always let it on the métairie system."

"But I mean to keep the land, and employ people—to have my own olive woods, my own oranges and lemons."

She smiled, remembering a nursery game of her childhood. Oranges and lemons! Never had she thought to see them growing on sunlit heights, sloping upward from a sapphire sea, to that dark line where the olives cease and the pines begin, darker and darker, till they touch the rugged edge of far-off snow-peaks.

It was three years before Lady Perivale went back to the world in which everybody's business—barring the few who live for politics or philanthropy—is to cram the utmost amusement into the shortest space of time. The briefer the season the faster the pace. Three balls a night. Mrs. A.'s concert jostling with Mrs. B.'s private theatricals, and both of them crushed under the Juggernaut car of her Grace's fancy ball. The longer the invitation the worse chance of a dull party: for those duchesses and marchionesses can spring a great entertainment on the town at a fortnight's notice, and empty meaner people's dancing-rooms, and leave the Coldstreams or the Hungarians fiddling to twenty couples in a house where there is breathing space everywhere.

Lady Perivale felt as if she were awaking from a long dream of beautiful places and tranquil hours, awaking in the din and riot of a crowded fair. But she opened her own little booth with a proper dignity. She was almost glad to see old faces, and to be made a prodigious fuss about.

She was the rage in that season of her return. There was hardly a bachelor in town who did not want to marry her, though many were too wise to pursue the charming prey. Her girl-friends who had married, and her girl-friends who were still single, flocked round her, and her house was the rendezvous of all the pretty people in London. Her dinners, her luncheons, her little musical afternoons—a single artist, perhaps, or at most two, and a room only half full—but, most of all, her suppers after the play or the opera were the top of the mode.

"She spends her money on the things that are best worth having," Mr. Howard said of her, "and that alone is genius. She breakfasts on an egg, and dines on a cutlet, but she has taken the trouble to secure an incomparable cook, and she gives him carte blanche. She drinks nothing stronger than salutaris, but she lets me order her wine, and gives me a free hand, as she does Herr Ganz when he organizes her concerts. Such a woman knows how to live."

It was in this year of her return to the world of pleasure, when all things seemed more dazzling by contrast, that she made the acquaintance of two men whom she had not known during her married life. One was Arthur Haldane, a man of letters, who had leapt at once into renown by the success of a first novel—a work of fire and flame, which had startled the novel-reading world, and surprised even the critics, in an age when all stories have been told, and when genius means an original mind dealing with old familiar things. Since that success Mr. Haldane had devoted himself to more solid and serious works, and he was now a personage in the literary world. The other was Colonel Rannock, a Scotchman of old family, grandson of the Earl of Kirkmichael, and late of the Lanarkshire regiment, the man who was destined to bring trouble into Grace Perivale's smooth and prosperous life. He was a reprobate, a man who had long been banished from the holy of holies in the temple of society, but who contrived to whirl in the vortex, nevertheless, by the indulgence of old friends and allies of his house, who would not cast him off utterly so long as he was only suspected and had never been found out. He was known to have ruined other men, callow subalterns who had admired and trusted him; he was known to have lived in the company of vicious women, to have said to evil, "Be thou my good"; and he was even suspected of having cheated at cards, though that is a common suspicion of every Captain Rook who keeps company with pigeons.

But against all this there was the man's personal charm—that subtle, indescribable charm of a high-bred Scotchman who has lived in the best Continental society, and is also a cosmopolitan. "A charm that no woman could resist." That was what men who knew him well said of him.

It was this man that in an evil hour Grace Perivale admitted to her friendship. She had not known him a week before she had been lectured about him, assured solemnly that he ought not to cross her threshold. Her friendly mentor, Mr. Howard, was the most importunate.

"I am old enough to be your father, Lady Perivale," he began; but she stopped him with a laugh.

"If you say that I know something horrid is coming; though my dear father never said a disagreeable thing to me in his life."

"Ah, but you were safe then—a little boat chained to a pier—and now you are a fast sailing schooner racing through unknown waters. I know the chart, and where there are shoals. You must not let Colonel Rannock visit you."

"Why he, too, is old enough to be my father."

"No; I am ten years older than he, and thirty years more trustworthy."

"I don't care about the trustworthiness of a casual acquaintance."

"Rannock will not remain your casual acquaintance. He will make himself your friend, whether you like it or not, unless you put him in his place at once, or, in plain words, tell your butler you are never to be at home to him."

"I am not going to shut my door against the most amusing man I have met for a long time."

"Ah, that is how he begins. He amuses. It is the thin end of the wedge. Then he interests—then—and then—— But I need not pursue the subject. He will never reach those later stages. You will find him out before then. But in the mean time he——"

"Why do you stop short like that?"

Howard had been nearly saying, "He will compromise you," but would not for worlds have made an insulting suggestion to a woman he so thoroughly believed in.

"Come, my dear Mr. Howard, you must credit me with some knowledge of human nature, and believe that if I find Colonel Rannock unworthy of my acquaintance, I shall know how to dismiss him. I want to be amused. I have had two great sorrows in my life—the loss of a father I adored, and of the best of husbands. Perhaps you don't know how sad life is when one is always looking back."

"Do I not? I, who have lived nearly half a century!"

"Ah, no doubt you too have your griefs. But you are a sportsman and an explorer, a politician and a philanthropist. You have so many ways of forgetting. I have only a woman's distractions, dawdling about the Continent, or steeping myself in London gaieties."

Mr. Howard did not pursue the argument, and he never recurred to it. He was too proud a man to hazard a second repulse. If she made so light of his counsel she should be troubled with no more of it. He admired and esteemed her, and there may have been some touch of deeper feeling, which, at his sober age, he would scarcely confess to himself, though Lafontaine's sad question often found an echo in his breast—"Ai-je passé le temps d'aimer?"

Lady Perivale lived in a crowd all that season, but Colonel Rannock was a prominent figure in the crowd, and people were kinder to him than they had been, on her account. It was thought that she would marry him, and he would shine forth rehabilitated, rich, and a power in society; and the clever, pushing, second-rate people who had cut him last season began to think they had been precipitate and ill-advised. The end of the season came in a moment, as it seemed, after Goodwood. Everybody was going or gone, and the Park was a Sahara sprinkled with nurse-maids and perambulators. Lady Perivale made up her house-party for her Border Castle, but Colonel Rannock was not of the party. She let him haunt her footsteps in London, but she would not admit him to the intimacy of a house-guest. So much evil had George Howard's warning done him. He tried hard for an invitation, and was irritated at failing.

"You will have no music in your villeggiatura, and what a dull set you have chosen. Your women are nice enough, young and bright, and pretty, and only wanting to be amused; but your men are hopeless. Frank Lawford—a quarterly review in breeches, Canon Millighan—a Jesuit in disguise, and Captain Grant, Sir Henry Bolton, Jack Scudamore, who live only to fill game-bags."

"They were my husband's friends, and I am very glad for them to shoot his birds. Poor Hector! I always think of the birds and the moor as his still—the cruel moor that cost him his life."

Her eyes clouded as she spoke of her husband. Commonplace and kindly, a homely figure in the drama of life, he had been her first and only lover, her faithful and devoted husband, and, after three years of mourning, regret was not lessened. Colonel Rannock talked again of her house-party. He was going to Iceland to shoot things, and to live under canvas in unconceivable roughness and discomfort. He spoke with bitterness of a joyless holiday, and then, as if on the impulse of the moment, confessed his passion, his jealous rage at the thought of her surrounded by other men, and asked her to be his wife.

This was his first throw of the dice. She rejected him with a kindly firmness which she thought would settle the question for ever. He promised that it should be so. He would be content to know himself her friend, and so he went off to Iceland without further murmuring.

History repeated itself next season, when people were beginning to wonder why she did not marry him—nay, even to say that she ought to marry him. Mr. Howard was in China, on a diplomatic mission, so there was no prophet in Israel to warn her of coming evil. In this year Colonel Rannock offered himself to her twice, and was twice refused; but even after the third disappointment, he declared himself still her friend, and the concertante duets, and the dinners and suppers, at which he was her most brilliant talker, went on. And people said, "Dear Lady Perivale is so very unconventional."

CHAPTER IV.

"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble."

Susan Rodney and her friend dined tête-à-tête, in a solemn splendour of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale's sitting-room on the second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books, her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her marron poodle's favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown, and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold-hearted, accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him marron glacé.

Lady Perivale glanced at the drawing-rooms, and turned away with a faint shiver. Their spacious emptiness glittered with a pale brilliancy in the electric light.

"We shall be cosier in my den, Sue," she said; and they went upstairs together, and seated themselves in low, luxurious chairs, by tables loaded with roses and lilies of the valley.

A wood fire flamed and crackled on the amber-tiled hearth, and the varied colouring of exquisitely bound books, the brightness of rose-bud chintz, and satin pillows heaped on low sofas, gave an air of life and cheerfulness which was wanting in the sumptuous spaciousness below.

"Why, what has happened to your photographs?" cried Sue, looking round the room, where one attractive feature had been a collection of panel, promenade, and other portraits of handsome and fashionable women, in court gowns, in ball gowns, in tea gowns, in riding habits, in fancy dress, nay, even in bathing dress, at Trouville or Dieppe, each in the costume the sitter thought most becoming—photographs framed in silver, in gold, in tortoiseshell, in ivory, in brocade, in Dresden china, in every kind of frame that ingenious manufacturers devise for people with expensive tastes. They had filled a long shelf at the top of the dado. They had been stuck up in every available corner, when Sue was last in the room; and, behold, there was not one of them left!

"Oh, I put the horrid things away," Grace said impatiently; "I wonder I didn't burn them. Who would wish to be surrounded by lying smiles—false friends?"

Sue said nothing; and even here, within four walls, the conversation was still about impersonal matters, the books the friends had read in the last half-year—a subject which both were fond of discussing—the authors they loved, the authors they hated, the successes they wondered at.

After an hour's talk Miss Rodney persuaded her friend to sing, but Lady Perivale was not in voice. She sang "There was a King in Thule" with less than her usual power, and then played desultory bits of Schumann and Schubert, while Sue turned over a pile of new magazines.

They parted without any allusion to the scandal, except that angry remark about the photographs.

"Good night, dear; it has been so sweet to spend a quiet evening with you."

"Come again very soon, Sue. Come to luncheon or dinner, whenever you can spare an hour or two."

The week wore itself out. Lady Perivale received plenty of letters, but they were almost all of them appeals to her purse—programmes of concerts, applications from hospitals, tradesmen's circulars; not a single letter or card of invitation from anybody of mark.

She was not without visitors on Wednesday afternoon; but they made a vastly different appearance in her drawing-rooms to her visitors of last year, and there were no yellow barouches and French victorias waiting in the square. A gushing widow with two rather tawdry daughters, whom she had met only at charity bazaars and an occasional omnium gatherum, and had severely kept at a distance, came sailing and simpering in, followed by two bushy fringes, pert retroussé noses, and suspiciously rosy lips, under picture hats of a cheap smartness, scintillating with mock diamonds.

"Dear Lady Perivale, I know you are at home on Wednesday, so I thought I would take my courage in my two hands, and call on you, in the hope of interesting you in the bazaar at the Riding School. The cause is such a good one—providing bicycles for daily governesses of small means. I think you know my girls, Flora and Nora?"

Grace was coldly civil. She promised to think about the bicycles, and she began to pour out tea, which had just been brought in.

"My girls" composed themselves upon low chairs, whisking the rose-coloured flounces under their pale-green frocks into due prominence, unconscious of a slightly draggled effect in skirts that had done church parade on three Sundays. They scanned the spacious drawing-rooms with eyes accustomed to the band-box limitations of a flat in West Kensington, where, if a sudden gust blew, one could shut the window with one hand, and the door with the other.

How vast and splendid the rooms were, and yet Lady Perivale was only a country parson's daughter! They appraised her beauty, and wondered at her good luck. They took in every detail of her pale lavender frock—softest silk, tucked, and frilled, and ruched, and pleated, by a fashionable dressmaker, until, by sheer needle-work, twenty yards of China silk were made to look worth forty guineas. There was more work in that little visiting-gown than in six of Nora's frocks, although she spent most of her morning hours at her sewing machine.

"How delicious it must be to be so rich," thought Flora. "And what can a trumpery scandal matter to a woman with a house in Grosvenor Square and powdered footmen? It's ridiculous of mother to be 'poor thing-ing' her."

"Flora and Nora are helping Lady de Green at the tea-stall," Mrs. Wilfred explained. "They mean to have a quite original tea, don't you know; Japanese cups and saucers, and tiny brown and white sandwiches."

"Nora has a German friend who can make thirty kinds of sandwiches," said Flora. "I believe sandwich cutting ranks before Wagner's music as an accomplishment in Berlin."

Three young men straggled in while the tea was circulating. They were men whom Lady Perivale knew very well, but they were not in the best set, not the men with highly placed mothers and sisters, whose presence gives a cachet. She thought them a shade too empressé in their satisfaction at her return to town. They hoped she was going to give some of her delightful parties, and that she was not going to waste time before she sent out her cards.

"The season is so short nowadays. Everybody rushes off to some German cure before July is half over," said Mr. Mordaunt, a clerk at the Admiralty.

Nobody asked Lady Perivale where she had spent the winter. She hated them for their reticence, hated them for finding her in the emptiness of her three drawing-rooms, with only that detestable Mrs. Wilfred, and still more hateful Flora and Nora. It was so much worse than being quite alone. But she had sworn to herself to stay in Grosvenor Square, and could not deny herself to detrimentals. Nobody stopped long. Mrs. Wilfred did not feel her visit a success, and the men saw that Lady Perivale was bored.

Captain Marduke, of the Blues, outstayed the others, and put on a certain familiarity of tone. It was the faintest shade of difference, but Lady Perivale was aware of it, and froze him out in five minutes by her distant manner.

He met Mordaunt at his club before dinner.

"Wasn't it awful in Grosvenor Square, Tommy?" said his friend.

"Ghastly. Don't you think she was a fool to show herself in London after her escapade?" returned Marduke, who had been christened Reginald Stuart Ponsonby, and was Tommy to his friends and the Society papers.

"I can't understand it," said Mordaunt, chalking his cue slowly, and looking at the tip with a puzzled expression, as if the mystery were there. "Such a good woman I always thought her. The very last, don't you know, to pitch her cap over the mill. And the way she looked at us this afternoon, through and through, with such proud, steady eyes! It's damn perplexing."

"So it is, Bill. Your shot."

"But are people sure of the story? Is there no mistake, do you think?" asked Mordaunt, missing an easy cannon.

"Oh! people are sure enough. It isn't one man's word, you see. Brander met them at Ajaccio, saw her stepping into a carriage in front of the hotel, met him face to face in the coffee-room, knew by his confused manner that there was something up, questioned the manager, and found they had been living there a fortnight as Mr. and Mrs. Randall. Jack Dane saw them in Sardinia. The Willoughby Parkers came upon them in Algiers, staying at a second-rate hotel in the town, saw them sitting under a palm-tree, taking their coffee, as they drove by, and met them driving in the environs. No mistaking her—as handsome a woman as you'd see in a day's journey; no mistaking him—a wrong 'un, but a damn good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire."

"Only the wrong sort of women, I think," said Mordaunt, resuming his cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers, and made a break of twenty while he talked. "I can't understand such a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that kind—least of all for such a man as Rannock. Thoroughly bad style!"

"Women don't know bad style from good in our sex; they only know their own by the clothes."

"If she cared for the man, why not marry him?"

"Not much! She is a rich woman, and doesn't want a husband who would spend every shillin' in two or three years."

"Oh! but nowadays a woman can take care of her money. The law will protect her!"

"Not from a spendthrift that she's fond of. And nowadays the clever women have free and easy ideas of the marriage tie. They've been educated up to it by novels and newspapers. Well, it isn't a nice story, anyhow you look at it; but I thought it was friendly to call."

"So did I," said Mordaunt. "But I'm afraid she'd rather not have seen us. I hope she'll go to her place in the north, and cut the whole boiling."

"Not much left for her to cut, poor soul, if people have given her the cold shoulder."

"She can cut Mrs. Wilfred and her girls," said Mordaunt. "I should think she'd enjoy doing it."

Lady Perivale drove in the park three or four afternoons a week at the fashionable hour, when carriages had to move slowly, and mounted policemen were keeping the way clear for the passing of royal personages. Some of her women friends bowed to her coldly, and she returned the salute with the same distance. The men lounging by the railings were on the alert to acknowledge a bow from her; but she had a way of not seeing them that they could hardly call offensive. The more strait-laced among the women looked at her with unrecognizing eyes; and she gave them back the same blank stare. Young, very handsome, exquisitely dressed by the faiseuse at the top of the mode, and seated in a victoria whose every detail, from the blood horses to the men's gloves and collars, was perfection, she drove to and fro, knowing herself under a dark cloud of undeserved disgrace. Anger was her strongest feeling. Her heart beat fast, and her cheek flushed as she drove past those treacherous women whom she had called friends. She had not cultivated sentimental friendships in the fashionable world. She had no alter ego, no bosom friend, in society. But she had liked people, and had believed they liked her; and it was difficult to think they could insult her by giving credence to such a preposterous story as some idiots had set on foot.

She sought no society, sent out no invitations to the intimates of old, the girls who had made her little court of adorers, her Queen's Maries, whose hats and gloves had so often figured in her milliner's bills, since if a nice girl were assisting at her own choice of head-gear, and cast longing looks upon some sparkling vision of roses and leghorn, or ostrich feathers and spangled lace, what more natural than to insist upon buying the things for her, in spite of all protests. She had scattered such gifts with lavish hands, forgetting all about them till surprised by the total of her milliner's bill.

"Can I have spent so much on finery in a single season? Ah, by-the-by, I gave Kate Holloway a hat, and Emily Dashwood an ostrich fan, and Laura Vane had an ostrich boa, and a dozen long gloves. There are ever so many things I had forgotten." And now the Lauras and Emilys and Kates had other patronesses to eke out the paternal allowance, and they went gaily down the stream with the people who thought evil of Lady Perivale.

"We never were really intimate with her, don't you know?" they explained, to acquaintance who had seen them in her barouche or in her opera-box three or four times a week.

Her opera-box had been one of her chief splendours, a large box on the grand tier. Music was her delight, and, except for a scratch performance of Il Trovatore or La Traviata, she had seldom been absent from her place. It was at the opera that Colonel Rannock had been most remarkable in his attendance upon her. She liked him to be there, for it was pleasant to have the sympathy of a fine musician, whose critical faculty made him a delightful guide through the labyrinth of a Wagnerian opera. Their heads had been often seen bending over the score, he explaining, she listening as if enthralled. To the unmusical, that study of Wagner's orchestration seemed the thinnest pretext for confidential whispers, for lips hovering too near perfumed tresses and jewelled throat.

"No need to inquire for the Leit-motif, there," said the men in the stalls; and it was generally supposed that Lady Perivale meant to marry Colonel Rannock, in spite of all that the world had to say against him.

"If she hadn't carried on desperately with him last year one might hardly believe the story," said the people who had accepted the truth of the rumour without a moment's hesitation.

She occupied her opera-box this year, resplendent in satin and diamonds, radiating light on a tiara night from the circlet of stars and roses that trembled on their delicate wires as she turned her head from the stage to the auditorium. She had her visitors as of old: attachés, ambassadors even, literary men, musical men, painters, politicians. Coldly as she received them, she could not snub them, she could not keep them at bay altogether; and, after all, she had no grudge against the foreigners, and her box scintillated with stars on a gala night. It pleased her to face her detractors in that public arena, conspicuous by her beauty and her jewels.

There were waverers who would have liked to go to her, to hold out the hand of friendship, to laugh off the story of her infamy; but the fiat had gone forth, and she was taboo. The bellwether had scrambled up the bank and passed through the gap in the hedge, and all the other sheep must follow in that leading animal's steps. Life is too short for individual choice in a case of this kind.

She had half a mind to go to the May Drawing-room, and had no fear of repulse from Court officials, who are ever slow to condemn; but, on reflection, she decided against that act of self-assertion. She would not seem to appeal against the sentence that had been pronounced against her by confronting her traducers before the face of royalty. The card for the Marlborough House garden-party came in due course, but she made an excuse for being absent. She would not hazard an appearance which might cause annoyance to the Princess, who would perhaps have been told afterwards that Lady Perivale ought not to have been asked, and that it was an act of insolence in such a person to have written her name in the sacred book when she came to London.

But June had not come yet, and the royal garden-party was still a thing of the future.

As yet Lady Perivale had taken no trouble to discover how the slanderous story had been circulated, or who the people were who pretended to have met her. She could not bring herself to search out the details of a scandal that so outraged all her feelings—her pride, her self-respect, her belief in friendship and human kindness.

She had made no attempt to justify herself. She had accepted the situation in a spirit of dogged resentment, and she faced her little world with head erect, and eyes that gave scorn for scorn, and the only sign of feeling was the fever spot that burnt on her cheek sometimes, when she passed the friends of last year.

She had been living in Grosvenor Square more than a month, and her drawing-room windows were wide open on a balcony full of May flowers, when the butler announced—

"Lady Morningside," and a stout, comfortable-looking matron, in a grey satin pelisse and an early victorian bonnet, rolled in upon her solitude.

"My dear, I am so glad to find you at home and alone," said Lady Morningside, shaking hands in her hearty fashion, and seating herself in a capacious grandfather chair. "I have come for a confidential talk. I only came to London three days ago. I have been at Wiesbaden about these wretched eyes of mine. He can't do much," name understood, "but he does something, and that keeps my spirits up."

"I am so sorry you have been suffering."

"Oh, it wasn't very bad. An excuse for being away."

"You have been at Wiesbaden, Marchioness? Then you haven't heard——-"

"What? How handsome you are lookin'. But a little too pale."

"You haven't heard that I am shunned like an influenza patient, on account of a miserable slander that I am utterly unable to focus or to refute."

"Don't say that, dear Lady Perivale. You will have to refute the scandal, and show these people that they were fools to swallow it. Yes, I have heard the story—insisted upon as if it were gospel truth; and I don't believe a word of it. The man was seen, I dare say, and there was a woman with him; but the woman wasn't you."

"Not unless a woman could be in Italy and Algiers at the same time, Lady Morningside. I was living from November to April at my villa in the olive woods above Porto Maurizio."

"And you had English visitors comin' and goin', no doubt?"

"Not a living creature from England. I use up all my vitality in a London season, and I go to Italy to be alone with my spirit friends, the choicest, the dearest—Mozart, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Browning. I think one can hardly feel Browning's poetry out of Italy."

"That's a pity. I don't mean about Browning, though I do take half a page of his rigmarole sometimes with my early cup of tea, my only time for reading—but it's a pity that you hadn't some gossiping visitors who could go about tellin' everybody they were with you in Italy."

"I have my old servants, who travelled with me, and never had me out of their sight."

"Very useful if you wanted their evidence in a court of law; but you can't send them to fight your battle at tea-parties, as you could any woman friend—that clever Susan Rodney, for instance. You and she are such pals! Why wasn't she with you part of the time?"

"She cannot leave her pupils."

"Poor creature! Well, it's a hard case."

"It is less hard since I know there's one great lady who believes in me," said Grace, holding out her hand to the Marchioness in a gush of gratitude.

"My dear, I never believe any scandal—even against a woman I detest, and when I want to believe it—until I have had mathematical proof of it. And I don't believe this of you, even if twenty people are going about London who swore they met you honeymooning with that wretch."

"Twenty people! Oh, Lady Morningside! Susan Rodney spoke of three or four."

"That was some time ago, perhaps. There are at least twenty now who declare they saw you—saw you—in Algiers—Sardinia—on board the Messageries steamer—Lord knows where. And they all swear that they thought you one of the nicest women in London—only they can't go on knowing you, on account of their daughters—their daughters, who read Zola, and Anatole France, and Gabriele d'Annunzio, and talk about 'em to the men who take them in to dinner, and borrow money of their dressmakers? I have only one daughter, and I'm never afraid of shocking her. She has worked for a year in an East-end hospital, and she knows twice as much about human wickedness as I do."

"And you don't believe a word of this story, Marchioness?"

"Not a syllable. But I know that Rannock is the kind of man my husband calls a bad egg; and I think you were not very wise in having him about you so much last season."

"You see, he wanted to marry me—for the sake of my money, no doubt—they are so much more persevering when it's for one's money—and I refused him three times—and he took my refusal so nicely——"

"One of the worst-tempered men in London?"

"And said, 'Since we are not to be lovers, let us at least be pals.' And the man is clever—likes the books I like, and the music I like, and plays the 'cello wonderfully, for an amateur."

"Oh, I know the wretch is clever. A fine manner, the well-born Scotchman, polished on the Continent, what women call a magnetic man."

"I liked him, and thought people were hard upon him—and I had been warned that he was dangerous."

"Oh, that was enough! To tell a young woman that a man is a villain is the surest way to awaken her interest in him. It is only at my age that one comes to understand that the man everybody abuses is no better than the common herd."

"And I let him come and go in quite an easy way, as if he had been a cousin, and we played concertante duets sometimes, in wet weather."

"And people found him here, and saw him with you out-of-doors, and they were talking about you last season, though you didn't know it. You are too handsome and too rich to escape. The women envy you your looks; the men envy you your income."

"You are not to suppose I ever cared about Colonel Rannock. I liked his playing, and his conversation amused me—and the more people told me that the Rannocks were unprincipled and disreputable, the more determined I was to be civil to him. One gets so tired of the good people who have never done wrong; and one doesn't take much account of a man's morals when he's only an acquaintance."

"That's just what my daughter would say. Goodness and badness with her are only differences in the measurement of the cerebrum. She'd consort with an escaped murderer if she thought him clever. Well, my dear child, you must come to my ball on the fifteenth of June. I am told it will be the event of the season, though there's to be no ruinous fancy-dress nonsense, not even powdered heads, only a white frock and all your diamonds. I am asking everybody to wear white, and I shall have a mass of vivid colour in the decorations, banks of gloxinias, every shade of purple and crimson, and orange-coloured Chinese lanterns, like that picture of Sargent's that we once raved about. You will all look like sylphs."

"Dear Marchioness, it will be a delicious ball. I know how you do things. But I can cross no one's threshold till my character is cleared. My character! Good Heavens, that I should live to talk of my character, like a housemaid!"

"Won't you come—in a white frock—and all your diamonds? They would cringe to you. I know what they are—the silly sheep! You see, they are good enough to call me a leader, and when they see you at my party, and Morningside walking about with you, they'll know what fools they've been."

"Dear Marchioness, you have a heart of gold! But I must right myself. I must do it off my own bat, as the men say."

"You're a pig-headed puss! Perhaps you'll think better of it between now and the fifteenth—nearly a month. I want to have all the pretty people. And you are a prime favourite of my husband's. If duelling weren't out of date I should fear for his life. I'm sure he'd be for shootin' somebody on your account."

We are weak mortals, when we are civilized, and live in the best society, and that visit of Lady Morningside's, that hearty kindness from a motherly woman who had fashion and influence, exercised a soothing and a stimulating effect on Grace Perivale.

"I am a fool to sit quiet under such an atrocious calumny," she thought. "There must be some way of letting the world know that I was spending my winter alone in my Italian villa, while some short-sighted fools thought they saw me in Africa. It ought not to be difficult. I must get some one to help me, somebody who knows the world. Oh, how I wish I could go to law with somebody!"

That word "law" reminded her of the man whose wisdom Sir Hector had believed infallible, and whose advice he had taken in all business matters, the management of his estate, the form of his new investments. Mr. Harding, the old family lawyer, was Hector's idea of incarnate caution, "a long-headed fellow," the essence of truth and honesty, and as rich as Crœsus.

"Why didn't I think of him before?" Lady Perivale wondered. "Of course he is the proper person to help me."

She sent a groom with a note to Mr. Harding's office in Bedford Row, begging him to call upon her before he went home; but it was past five o'clock when the man arrived at the office, and Mr. Harding had left at four.

He had a sumptuous modern Queen Anne house at Beckenham, moved in the best—Beckenham and Bickley—society, and amused himself by the cultivation of orchids, in a mild way. He did not affect specimens that cost £200 a piece and required a gardener to sit up all night with them. He talked of his orchids deprecatingly as poor things, which he chose for their prettiness, not for their rarity. He liked to potter about from hothouse to hothouse, in the long summer afternoons, and to feel that out of parchment and foolscap and ferret he had created this suburban paradise.

Lady Perivale had a telegram from him before eleven o'clock next morning.

"I shall do myself the pleasure of calling at 4.30. Impossible earlier.—Joseph Harding."

There was another Harding, a younger brother, in the firm, and a certain Peterson, who had his own clients, and his own walk in life, which took him mostly to Basinghall Street; but Joseph Harding was the man of weight, family solicitor and conveyancer, learned in the laws of real property, the oracle whom landed proprietors and titled personages consulted.

CHAPTER V.

"For thee I'll lock up all the gates of love,
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,
To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,
And never shall it more be gracious.
O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again."

Grace Perivale could hardly live through the day, while she was waiting for the appearance of the family solicitor. Since Lady Morningside's visit she had been on fire with impatience to do something, wise or foolish, futile or useful, towards clearing her character. She had been all the more eager, perhaps, because in her morning ride she had seen a man whose scorn—or that grave distance which she took for scorn—pained her more than the apostasy of all her other friends.

She had ridden in the park with "the liver brigade" three or four mornings a week, since her return from Italy, and she had found some trouble in keeping the men she knew at a distance. They all wanted to be talkative and friendly, praised her mount, hung at her side till she froze them by her brief answers, warned them that her horse hated company, that her mare was inclined to kick other horses, and then, with a light touch of her whip, cantered sharply off, and left the officious acquaintance planted.

"One can't expect her to be amiable when our wives and daughters are so d——d uncivil to her," mused one of her admirers.

Some among the husbands and brothers of her friends had taken sides for her, and argued that the story of her intrigue with Rannock was not proven; but the women had heard it too often and from too many quarters to doubt. They sighed, and shook their heads, and deplored that it was impossible to go on knowing a woman of whom such a story was told.

They might not have believed it, they argued, had she not obviously been head over ears in love with Rannock last season. They had always been about together—at Ascot, Goodwood, at all the classical concerts, at the opera. True, she had seldom been alone with him. There had generally been other women and other men of the party; but Rannock had undoubtedly been the man.

That one man whose opinion Grace cared for, whose good word might have been balm in Gilead, was not a man of fashion. Arthur Haldane was a student, and he only appeared occasionally in the haunts of the frivolous, where he was not above taking his recreation, now and then, after the busy solitude of his working days and nights. He was a Balliol man, had known and been cherished by Jowett in his undergraduate days, and had taken a first in classics. He might have had a fellowship had he desired it, but he wanted a more stirring part in life than the learned leisure of a college. He was a barrister by profession, but he had not loved the law, nor the law him; and, having an income that allowed him not to work for daily bread, after about a dozen briefs spaced over a year and a half, he had taken to literature, which had been always his natural bent, and the realm of letters had received him with acclaim. His rivals ascribed his success to luck, and to a certain lofty aloofness which kept his work original. He never wrote with an eye to the market, never followed another man's lead, nor tried to repeat his own successes, and never considered whether the thing he wrote was wanted or not, would or would not pay.

He was a prodigious reader, but a reader who dwelt in the past, and who read the books he loved again and again, till all that was finest in the master-minds of old was woven into the fabric of his brain. He seldom looked at a new book, except when he was asked to review one for a certain Quarterly to which he had contributed since the beginning of his career. He was the most conscientious of reviewers; if he loved the book, the most sympathetic; if he hated it, the most unmerciful.

One only work of fiction, published before he was thirty, had marked him as a writer of original power. It was a love story, supposed to be told by the man who had lived it, the story of a man who had found a creature of perfect loveliness and absolute purity in one of the darkest spots on earth, had snatched her unstained from the midst of pollution, had placed her in the fairest environment, watched the growth of her mind with the tenderest interest, looked forward to the blissful day when he could make her his wife, and then, when she had ripened into a perfect woman, had seen her ruin and untimely death, the innocent victim of a relentless seducer.

The tragic story—which involved a close study of two strongly contrasted characters, the deep-thinking and ambitious man, and the child of nature whose every thought was poetry, whose every word was music—had stirred the hearts of novel-readers, and had placed Arthur Haldane in the front rank of contemporary novelists; but he had produced no second novel, and many of his feminine admirers declared that the story was the tragedy of his own life, and that, although he dined out two or three times a week in the season, he was a broken-hearted man.

Perhaps it was this idea that had first interested Lady Perivale. She saw in Arthur Haldane the man of one book and one fatal love. She longed to question him about his Egeria of the slums, the girl of fourteen, exquisitely beautiful, whom he had torn from the clutches of a profligate mother, while her father was in a convict prison. She was quite ready to accept the fiction as sober truth, beguiled by that stern realism from which the writer had never departed, but through which there ran a vein of deep poetic feeling.

She was surprised to find no trace of melancholy in his conversation. He did not wear his broken heart upon his sleeve. His manner was grave, and he liked talking of serious things—books, politics, the agitated theology of the day—but he had a keen sense of humour, and could see the mockery of life. He was not as handsome as Rannock was, even in his decadence, but his strongly marked features had the stamp of intellectual power, and his rare smile lightened the thoughtful face like sudden sunshine. He was tall and well set up, had thrown the hammer in his Oxford days, and had rowed in the Balliol boat.

Lady Perivale had liked to talk to him, and had invited him to her best dinners, the smaller parties of chosen spirits, so difficult to bring together, as they were mostly the busiest people, so delightful when caught. It was at one of these little dinners, a party of six, that she beguiled Haldane into talking of the origin of his novel. The company was sympathetic, including a well-known cosmopolitan novelist, a painter of manners and phases of feeling, and all the intricacies of modern life, the fine-drawn, the hypercivilized life that creates its perplexities and cultivates its sorrows.

"The average reader will give a story-spinner credit for anything in the world except imagination," he said. "I am sure Mr. Williams knows that"—with a smiling glance across the table at the novelist of many countries. "They will have it that every story is a page torn out of a life, and the more improbable the story the more determined are they that it should be real flesh and blood. Yet there is often a central fact in the web of fancy, an infinitesimal point, but the point from which all the lines radiate."

"And there was such a germ in your story?" Lady Perivale asked eagerly.

"Yes; there was one solid fact—a child—a poor little half-starved girl-child. I was passing through a wretched alley between the Temple and Holborn, when a dishevelled brat rushed out of a house and almost fell into my arms. A man had been beating her—a child of nine years old—beating her unmercifully with a leather strap. I went into the house, and caught him red-handed. He was her uncle. There was an aunt somewhere, out upon the drink, the man said, as if it was a profession. I didn't want to go through tedious proceedings—call in the aid of this or that society. The man swore the child was a bad lot, a thief, a liar. I bought her of him for a sovereign, bought her as if she had been a terrier pup, and before night I had her comfortably lodged in a cottage at Slough, with a woman who promised to be kind to her, and to bring her up respectably."

"Was she very pretty?" Lady Perivale asked, deeply interested.

"Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for herself—she was an ugly child, and has grown into a plain girl; but she is as frank and honest as the daylight, and she is doing well as scullery-maid in a good family. My Slough cottager did her duty. That, Lady Perivale, is the nucleus of my story. I imagined circumstances more romantic—dazzling beauty, a poetic temperament, a fatal love—and my child of the slums grew into a heroine."

"And that is the way novels are manufactured," said Mr. Williams; "but Haldane ought not to be so ready to tell the tricks of our trade."

Grace Perivale and Arthur Haldane had been friends, but nothing more. There had been no suggestion of any deeper feeling, though when their friendship began, two seasons ago, it had seemed to her as if there might be something more. She looked back at last year, and saw that Colonel Rannock and his 'cello had kept this more valued friend at a distance. She remembered Haldane calling upon her one afternoon when she and Rannock were playing a duet, and how quickly he had gone, with apologies for having interrupted their music.

She had met him three or four times of late among the morning riders, and he had neither courted nor avoided her recognition which had been cold and formal. She did not take the initiative in cutting people, for that would have looked as if she had something to be ashamed of. She only made all salutations as distant as possible.

She stayed at home all day playing, reading, walking about her room, looking at the flowers, sitting in the balcony, which she had shaded with a striped awning, trying to make it like Italy. She was too eager for the old lawyer's visit to apply her mind seriously to anything.

The poodle, who followed all her movements with a tepid interest, wondered at her restlessness, and was glad when the maid came to take him for his afternoon airing in the park, where he ran on the flower-beds, and was regarded as an enemy by the park-keepers.

Half-past four came at last, and Mr. Harding was announced on the stroke of the half-hour. Lady Perivale received him in her largest drawing-room. She did not want him to see all the frivolities—jardinières, book-stands, easels, eccentric work-baskets, and fantastical china monsters—of her den, lest he should think lightly of her. The Louis Seize drawing-rooms, with their large buhl cabinets, holding treasures of old Sèvres and Dresden, were serious enough for the reception-rooms of a Lord Chief Justice or an Archbishop. Even her dress was severe, a blue cloth gown, with only a little bullion embroidery on the primrose satin waistcoat. Her dark auburn hair was brushed back from the broad brow, and her hazel eyes, with golden lights in them, looked grave and anxious, as she shook hands with the family counsellor.

"Please choose a comfortable chair, Mr. Harding," she said. "I have a long story to tell you. But perhaps you have heard it already?"

Mr. Harding looked mystified. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about sixty, with a massive brow and a benevolent head, and a countenance that had acquired dignity since his sandy hair and foxy beard had turned to silver.

"Indeed, Lady Perivale, I have heard nothing involving your interests."

"Well, then, I shall have to begin at the beginning. It is a horrid business, but so preposterous that one could almost laugh at it."

She proceeded to tell him how her friends had treated her, and the story that had been going about London. He listened gravely, and looked shocked and pained.

"And you have really heard nothing?"

"Not a syllable. My wife and I only visit among our country neighbours, and I suppose Beckenham people know very little of what is being talked about in London society. Our conversation is chiefly local, or about church matters. I never speak of my clients, so no one would know of my interest in your welfare."

"And my good name, which is more than my welfare. Now, Mr. Harding, advise me. What am I to do?"

The lawyer looked deeply concerned, but with the air of a man who saw no light.

"It is a very difficult case," he said, after a pause. "Has there been anything in the newspapers, any insolent paragraph in those columns which are devoted to trivial personalities? I don't mean to imply that this is trivial."

"No, I have heard of nothing in the newspapers—and I have a friend who is always out and about, and who would have been sure to hear of such a thing."

Mr. Harding was silent for some moments, pulling his beard with his large white hand in a meditative way.

"Have you seen Colonel Rannock since this story got about?" he asked.

"No. Colonel Rannock is in the Rocky Mountains. Ought I to see him if he were in London?"

"Certainly not, Lady Perivale; but I think if he were within reach you should send a friend—myself, for instance, as your legal adviser—to call upon him to contradict this story, and to assure your common friends in a quiet way, that you were not the companion of his travels. He could not refuse to do that, though, of course, it would be an unpleasant thing to do as involving the reputation of the person who was with him, and to whom," added the lawyer, after a pause, "he might consider himself especially accountable."

"Oh, no doubt all his chivalry would be for her," said Grace, bitterly. "I would give the world to know who the creature is—so like me that three or four different people declare they saw me—me—in three or four different places."

"You know of no one—you have no double in your own set?"

"No, I can recall no one who was ever considered very like me."

The lawyer looked at her with a grave smile. No, there were not many women made in that mould. The splendid hazel eyes—les yeux d'or—the burnished gold in the dark-brown hair, the perfect eyelids and long auburn lashes, the delicate aquiline nose and short upper lip with its little look of hauteur, the beautifully-modelled chin with a dimple in it, and the marble white of a throat such as sculptors love—no, that kind of woman is not to be matched as easily as a skein of silk.

"I think, Lady Perivale, the first and most important step is to discover the identity of this person who has been mistaken for you," Mr. Harding said gravely.

"Yes, yes, of course!" she cried eagerly. "Will you—will your firm—do that for me?"

"Well, no, it is hardly in our line. But in delicate matters of this kind I have occasionally—I may say frequently—employed a very clever man, whom I can conscientiously recommend to you; and if you will explain the circumstances to him, as you have to me, and tell him all you can about this Colonel Rannock, family surroundings, tastes, habits——"

"Yes, yes, if you are sure he is to be trusted. Is he a lawyer?"

"Lawyers do not do these things. Mr. Faunce is a detective, who retired from the Criminal Investigation Department some years ago, and who occasionally employs himself in private cases. I have known him give most valuable service in family matters of exceeding delicacy. I believe he would work your case con amore. It is the kind of thing that would appeal to him."

"Pray let me see him—this evening. There is not an hour to be lost."

"I will telegraph to him when I leave you. But he may be away from London. His business takes him to the Continent very often. You may have to wait some time before he is free to work for you."

"Not long, I hope. I am devoured with impatience. But can you—can the law of the land—do nothing for me? Can't I bring an action against somebody?"

"Not under the present aspect of affairs. If you were in a different walk of life—a governess, for instance, or a domestic servant, and you were refused a situation on account of something specific that had been said against you—an action might lie, you might claim damages. It would be a case for a jury. But in your position, the slander being unwritten, a floating rumour, it would hardly be possible to focus your wrongs, from a legal point of view."

"Then the law is very one-sided," said Grace, pettishly, "if a housemaid can get redress and I can't."

Mr. Harding did not argue the point.

"When you have seen Faunce, and he has worked up the case, we may be able to hit upon something in Bedford Row, Lady Perivale," he said blandly, as he rose and took up his highly respectable hat, whose shape had undergone no change for a quarter of a century.

There was a new hat of the old shape always ready for him in the little shop in St. James's Street, and the shopman could have put his hand upon the hatbox in the dark.

CHAPTER VI.

"Love is by fancy led about,
From hope to fear, from joy to doubt."

It was a week before John Faunce appeared upon the troubled scene of Grace Perivale's life. He had been in Vienna, and he called in Grosvenor Square at half-past nine o'clock on the evening of his return, in answer to three urgent letters from her ladyship which he found on his office table in Essex Street.

Susan Rodney had been dining with her friend, and they were taking their coffee in the morning-room when Faunce was announced.

"Bring the gentleman here," Lady Perivale told the servant, and then turned to Miss Rodney.

"You don't mind, do you, Sue? If you have never seen a detective, it may be rather interesting."

"Mind? No! I am as keen as you are about this business. What a fool I was not to suggest a detective at the beginning. I shall love to see and talk with a detective. I have been longing to meet one all my life. Unberufen," added Miss Rodney, rapping the table.

"Mr. Faunce," said the butler; and a serious-looking, middle-aged man, of medium height and strong frame, with broad, high forehead, kindly black eyes, and short, close-cut black whiskers, came into the room.

There was a pleasant shrewdness in his countenance, and his manner was easy without being familiar.

"Pray be seated, Mr. Faunce," said Lady Perivale. "I am very glad to see you. This lady is Miss Rodney, my particular friend, from whom I have no secrets."

Faunce bowed to Miss Rodney, before seating himself very composedly outside the circle of light under the big lamp-shade.

"I must apologize for coming so late in the evening, madam; but I only arrived at my office, from Dover, an hour ago; and, as your letters seemed somewhat urgent——"

"It is not a moment too late. I would have seen you at midnight. But—perhaps you have not had time to dine. We have only just left the dining-room. Will you let them get you some dinner there before we begin our business?"

"Your ladyship is too good. I dined on the boat—a saving of time—and am quite at your service."

Lady Perivale told her story, Faunce watching her all the time with those tranquil eyes of his, never very keen, never restless. They were absorbent eyes, that took hold of things and held them tight; and behind the eyes there was a memory that never failed.

He watched and listened. He had heard such stories before—stories of mistaken identity. They were somewhat common in divorce court business, and he very seldom believed them, or found that they would hold water. Nor had he a high opinion of women of fashion—women who lived in rooms like this, where a reckless outlay was the chief characteristic, where choicest flowers bloomed for a day, and delicate satin pillows were tossed about the carpet for dogs to lie upon, and toys of gold and silver, jewelled watches, and valuable miniatures, were crowded upon tables to invite larceny. Yet it seemed to him that Lady Perivale's voice rang true, or else that she was a more accomplished actress than those other women.

"Mr. Harding was right, madam," he said, when he had heard her to the end, and had questioned her closely upon some details. "We must find out who your double is."

"And that will be difficult, I'm afraid."

"It may take time and patience."

"And it will be costly no doubt; but you need not be afraid of spending money. I have no father or brother to take my part; no man-friend who cares enough for me——" She stopped, with something like a sob in her voice. "I have nothing but my money."

"That is not a bad thing to begin the battle with, Lady Perivale," answered Faunce, with his shrewd smile; "but money is not quite such an important factor in my operations as most people think. If things cannot be found out in a fairly cheap manner they cannot be found out at all. When a detective tells you he has to offer large bribes to get information, you may take it from me that he is either a fool or a cheat. Common sense is the thing we have most use for, and a capacity for putting two and two together and making the result equal a hundred."

"And when you have found this shameless creature what are we to do? Mr. Harding says I can't bring an action for slander, because I am not a housemaid, and loss of character doesn't mean loss of my daily bread."

"There are other kinds of actions."

"What—what action that I could bring? I should like to go to law with every friend I ever had. I think I shall spend the rest of my days in the law courts, pleading my own cause, like that pretty lady whose name I forget."

"You might bring an action for libel, if you had a case."

"But I have not been libelled—a libel must be written and published, must it not?"

"That is the meaning of the word, madam—'a little book.'"

"Oh that my enemy would write a book about me!"

"Are you sure there has been no offensive allusion to this rumour in any of the newspapers?"

"How can I tell? I have not been watching the papers."

"I should advise you to send a guinea to Messrs. Rosset and Son, the Press agents, who will search the papers for your name, and save you trouble."

Lady Perivale made a hurried note of Messrs. Rosset's address.

"An action for libel, if any one libelled me—what would that mean?"

"It would mean a thorough sifting of your case before a jury, by two of the cleverest counsel we could get. It would mean bringing your double into the witness-box, if possible, and making her declare herself Colonel Rannock's companion in those places where you are said to have been seen with him."

"Yes, yes; that would be conclusive. And all those cold-hearted creatures, whom I once called friends, would be sorry—sorry and ashamed of themselves. But if there is no libel—if people go on talking and talking, and nobody ever publishes the slander——"

"Make your mind easy, Lady Perivale. When we are ready for it there will be a libel."

"I don't understand."

"You may safely leave the matter in my hands, madam, and in Mr. Harding's. If I succeed in finding the lady who resembles you, the rest will not be difficult."

"And you think you will find her?"

"I mean to try. I shall start for Algiers to-morrow morning."

"May I give you a cheque for travelling expenses?" Lady Perivale asked, eagerly.

"That is as you please, madam. You may leave my account to be settled by Mr. Harding, if you like."

"No, no," she said, going to her davenport. "In spite of what you say about money, I want you to have plenty of cash in hand, to feel that you have no occasion to stint outlay."

"That is what I never do, when character is at stake."

She handed him a hastily written cheque for five hundred pounds.

"This is a high figure, madam, to start with," said Faunce, as he slipped the cheque into his letter-case.

"Oh, it's only a trifle on account. Call upon me for whatever sums you require. I would rather beggar myself than exist under this odious imputation."

"There is one thing more I must ask for, madam."

"What is that?"

"Your photograph, if you will be so good as to trust me with it."

"My photograph?" wonderingly, and with a touch of hauteur.

"It will help me to identify your double."

"Yes, of course! I understand."

She opened a drawer and took out a cabinet photograph of herself, choosing the severest dress and simplest attitude.

Faunce promised to report progress from Algiers. If he drew blank there, he would go on to Corsica and Sardinia. He would have bowed himself out of the room, with a respectful distance, but Grace held out her hand to him.

"You believe in me, don't you, Mr. Faunce?" she said, as they shook hands.

"With all my heart, madam."

"And you don't always believe in your clients, I think?"

Faunce smiled an enigmatic smile.

"I have some queer clients now and then," he said.

He had taken up his hat, and Lady Perivale's hand was upon the bell, when Susan broke in suddenly, exclaiming—

"Don't ring, Grace. Pray don't go, Mr. Faunce, unless you are in a desperate hurry."

"I am in no hurry, madam."

"Then pray sit down again, and let us have a little talk with you—now that we have done with Lady Perivale's business. Do you know that, ever since I read the 'Moonstone'—and I was little more than a child when I read that most enthralling book—I have been longing to meet a detective—a real detective?"

"I feel honoured, madam, for my profession. People are apt to think unkindly of our trade, though they can't do without us."

He was still standing with his hat in his hand, waiting for some sign from Lady Perivale.

"The world is full of injustice," she said. "Pray sit down, Mr. Faunce, and gratify my friend's curiosity about the mysteries of your art."

"I am flattered, madam, to find a lady interested in such dry work."

"Dry!" cried Susan; "why, it is the quintessence of fiction and the drama. And now, Mr. Faunce, tell me, to begin with, how you ever contrive to track people down when once they have got a fair start?"

"Well, you see, as we don't do it by following them about, the start doesn't much matter, provided we can pick up a trace of them somewhere."

"Ah, but that's where the wonder is! How do you pick up the first trace?"

"Ah, that's a secret!" Faunce answered gravely; and then, after a pause, smiling at Susan Rodney's eager face, all aglow in the lamplight, he added, "We generally have to leave that to the chapter of accidents."

"Then it is only a fluke when you run a man down?" asked Susan.

Lady Perivale was sitting on the sofa, caressing the irresponsive poodle, and too deep in thought about her own case to be greatly concerned in the secrets of Mr. Faunce's calling. She was glad for her friend to be amused, and that was all.

"Well, not quite a fluke," replied Faunce. "We expect a fugitive to do something foolish, something that puzzles some thick-headed person, who communicates with the police. A great deal of our information comes from the outside public, you see, madam. It's often good for nothing; but there's a little gold among the quartz."

"But if the fugitive is too clever for you?"

"Well, even if our man plays the game, we are on the look out for his moves. You see, my lady," turning to Lady Perivale, whose obvious indifference piqued him, "an old hand like me has a good many friends scattered up and down the world. I am able to put a good thing in the way of my friends every now and then. Consequently they are anxious to help me if they can, and they keep their eyes open."

"What sort of people are these friends of yours, Mr. Faunce?" asked Lady Perivale, feeling that the detective's shrewd eyes were upon her face, and that he wanted her to be interested in his discourse.

"That's another secret, a secret of the trade. I can only answer questions about myself, not about my friends. But I might suggest that the porter of a large Metropolitan hotel, anywhere on the main stream of travel, would be a useful ally for a man like me. Then there are people who have retired from the French or English police, who are fond of their old work, and not too proud to undertake an odd job."

"And these people help you?" asked Susan.

"Yes, Miss Rodney"—the name clearly spoken; no mumbled substitute for a name imperfectly heard, or forgotten as soon as heard. John Faunce's educated memory registered every name at the first hearing.

"Experience has taught me never to task them beyond their power. That's the keystone of my business. Only the other day, my lady"—addressing himself pointedly to Lady Perivale, in whom he saw signs of flagging attention, "I nearly let some one slip through my fingers by over-taxing the ability of one of my agents. I had great confidence in the man—a first-rate watcher! Tell him to look out for a particular person at a particular place, and, sure as that person came to that place, my man would spot him, and most likely would find out where he went. Well, I gave the fellow a little job last week that required delicate handling—a good many discreet questions had to be put to a certain person's domestics, and no alarm raised in their minds that might communicate itself to their master."

"And did your man prove a failure?" Miss Rodney asked eagerly.

"He did, madam. He overdid the part—gave himself away, as the Yankees say. The bird was scared off the nest, took wing for foreign parts, and I might have lost him altogether. But it wasn't my man's fault. He is quite reliable at his own work—watching. It was my own fault. I ought to have done the thing myself."

"Then you do things yourself sometimes?" Lady Perivale asked, her interest re-awakened, since she wanted the man to give her case his individual attention.

"Yes, madam, often. I am going to Algiers, for instance, to hunt down Colonel Rannock's travelling companion. I would not trust that task to the best of my agents. I may say that, for the higher class of inquiry, I have never found any one whom I could trust absolutely. The fact is, no one can be sufficiently keen who hasn't the whole game in sight."

"And are you not afraid of your agents turning rogues and trying to make money out of your clients' secrets?" asked Susan.

"No, Miss Rodney—because I never tell them my clients' secrets. They have to ferret out certain facts, to watch certain people; but they never know the why and the wherefore. Human nature is weak. I know my people. They wouldn't attempt blackmail: that's the rock ahead in our business, Lady Perivale. But they might talk, and I am not sure that isn't worse sometimes."

"I dare say it is," said Susan; "for the blackmailer doesn't want to peach upon his victim. It's only a question of hard cash."

"I see you understand the business, madam. I have been at the game a good many years, and there are things I can do that would puzzle a younger hand. Ah, Miss Rodney," said Faunce, attracted by her keen and animated expression, "I could tell you incidents in my professional career that would make your hair stand on end."

"Oh, pray do. I adore stories of that kind."

"But it is nearly eleven o'clock!" glancing at the Sèvres timepiece opposite him, "and I have already trespassed too long on Lady Perivale's patience. And I have to catch a train for Putney, where I live when I am at home. I haven't seen my wife for ten days, and I shall start for Marseilles at nine o'clock to-morrow morning."

"You are not often at home, I suppose?"

"No, madam. A good deal of my life is spent like Satan's, 'Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it;' and then I have my pied à terre in Essex Street, where I am generally to be found for business purposes when I am in London. I used to live in Bloomsbury, where I was always on the spot, ready for contingencies; but when I left the Force some years ago, I took a cottage at Putney—a pretty little place enough—where my wife lives, and where I go when I have a little leisure, and where I am supposed to be very fond of the garden."

"And don't you love your garden? It must be such a relief after your exciting work."

"Oh yes, I like the garden. I find the slugs particularly interesting."

"The slugs!"

"Oh, there's more in a slug than most people think. His capacity has been very much under-rated. Of course he's not a patch upon the spider. The subtle villainy of the spider is worth a life-long study. I know nothing but a sixty per cent. money-lender that can touch him. And the ant—well, he's a thorough-going Philistine, always moves in a grove, and doesn't so much appeal to my fancy. But again, I am encroaching," said Faunce, standing up straight and stiff, in an attitude reminiscent of "the Force." "I wish you good night, ladies, and I hope your ladyship will pardon me for having prosed all this time."

"I am greatly obliged to you for having given us so much interesting information."

"And some day you will tell us one of your blood-curdling stories?" said Susan Rodney, shaking hands with him.

"I like that man!" exclaimed Susan, when the door closed upon him. "I have always wanted to know a detective, like Bucket, the beloved of my childhood; or Mr. Cuff, the idol of my riper years. You must invite Mr. Faunce to a quiet little luncheon some day. There is no question of class distinction with a clever man like that."

Lady Perivale smiled. She was accustomed to her friend's enthusiasms and ultra-Liberal ideas.

"It's time for me to go home, Grace. I asked Johnson to order a cab at eleven. Oh, by-the-by, it is ages since you took a cup of tea in my cottage. I wish you'd come at five o'clock next Saturday. I have picked up an old print or two—genuine Bartolozzis—rural subjects—that I am dying to show you."

"I should love to go to you, Sue. But you may have people."

"No, no; Friday is my day. I never expect any one on Saturday."

"Then I'll come. It will seem like old times—like last year, when I had nothing on my mind."

"Oh, but that business is on Mr. Faunce's mind now, and off yours. You are going to be in good spirits again; and I shall come and make music with you once or twice a week, if you'll have me. There is that little German, who fiddles so beautifully, Herr Kloster. You heard him at my party, last year. I'll bring him to play duets with you."

"It would be delightful; but I doubt if I shall be in spirits for music."

"Oh, I am not going to let you mope. What a fool I was not to suggest a detective the day you came home. Good night, dear. Saturday next, as soon as you like after half-past four."

Miss Rodney lived in a pretty little house facing Regent's Park, the kind of house that agents describe as a bijou residence, and which rarely contains more than two habitable bedrooms. It was a picturesque little house, with a white front, a verandah below, and a balcony above, and a tiny pretence of a garden, and the rent was higher than Susan could afford when she set up in London as a teacher of singing and the pianoforte, leaving her three sisters to vegetate in the paternal home, a great red-brick house in a Midland market town, where their father was everybody's family solicitor.

During the earlier years of her London career, Susan had worked hard for her house, and for her pretty furniture, her bits of genuine Sheraton and Chippendale, picked up cheaply in back streets and out-of-the-way corners, her chintz curtains and chair-covers and delicate carpets. Her own maintenance, and her one devoted servant, who did all the work of the house, yet always looked a parlourmaid, cost so little; and, after helping the girls at home with handsome additions to their pocket-money, Miss Rodney could afford to dress well, and keep her house in exquisite order, every now and then adding some artistic gem to that temple of beauty.

The view from her windows, her old prints, her little bits of Lowestoft china, her small but choice collection of books, were the delight of her solitary existence; and, perhaps, there were few happier women in London than Susan Rodney, who worked six days in the week, and rarely for less than an eight hours' day, and who had long ago made up her mind that for some women there is nothing better in life than freedom from masculine control and a congenial avocation.

The afternoon sunshine was shining full upon the house-front when Lady Perivale was announced; so the sliding venetian shutters had been drawn across the two French windows, and Miss Rodney's drawing-room was in shadow. Coming in out of the vivid out-of-door light, Grace did not, on the instant, recognize a gentleman, who rose hurriedly and took up his hat as she entered the room. But a second glance showed her that the visitor was Arthur Haldane.

She shot an angry glance at Susan. Was it chance, or some mischievous plan of hers that brought him here? They bowed to each other coldly, and neither held out the hand of friendship.

"You are not going, Mr. Haldane?" said Susan. "Tea will be in directly. You must have some tea. You know I am rather proud of my tea. It is the only thing a pauper with one servant can be proud of."

"I—I have an engagement in the City," Haldane answered rather vaguely, moving towards the door, but with his eyes on Grace Perivale's pale face.

"The City? Why, the City will be dead asleep before you can get there."

"True. You are very kind. I know how good your tea is." He put down his hat, and dropped into a chair near the sofa where Lady Perivale had seated herself.

"I hope you are not one of those horrid men who make believe to like tea, and then go about reviling one for offering it to them," said Susan, who foresaw a dead silence.

"Oh no; I am a genuine tea-drinker. The male tea-drinker is by no means a rare animal."

"When are you going to write another novel, Mr. Haldane?" asked Susan, while the inimitable parlourmaid, in a Parisian cap, was bringing in the tea-tray.

"You have been good enough to make that inquiry two or three times a year, for the last five years. I know you think it flatters my vanity."

"And I shall go on asking the same question. When? When? When?" handing him a cup and saucer, which he carried, with the cream-jug, to Lady Perivale, without relaxing the stiffness that had come over his manner when she entered the room.

But the moment had come when he must speak to her, or seem absolutely uncivil.

"Don't you think there are novelists enough between Central Europe and London without my pushing into the field, Lady Perivale?" he asked.

"Oh, but you have been in the field, and have won your battle. I think everybody would like another story from the author of 'Mary Deane.'"

"You do not consider how easily people forget," he said.

"Oh yes, I do," she answered, moved by that faint tremor in his voice which a less interested hearer might not have observed. "You yourself are an instance. It is just a year since you called upon me one afternoon—when Colonel Rannock and I were playing a duet. I suppose our music frightened you, for you stayed hardly five minutes, and you have been unconscious of my existence ever since."

She was determined to speak of Rannock, to let him see that the name was not difficult of utterance; but she could not help the sudden flame-spot that flew into her cheeks as she spoke it.

"Perhaps I had an idea that you did not want me," he said; and then his heart sickened at the thought that this woman, whom he had honoured and admired, whose face had haunted his solitary hours, whose beauty still attracted him with a disquieting charm, was possibly a woman of lost character, whom no self-respecting man could ever dream of as a wife.

He took two or three sips out of the Swansea tea-cup which Susan handed him, put it down hurriedly, snatched his hat, shook hands with his hostess, bowed to Lady Perivale, and had left the house before even the most alert of parlour-maids could fly to her post in the hall.

"Well, Susan," said Grace, when the door had closed upon him. "Don't you think you have done a vastly clever thing?"

"Anyhow, I would rather have done it than left it undone!" her friend answered savagely, furious at Haldane's conduct.

"What on earth possessed you to bring that man and me together?"

"I wanted you to meet. I know you like him, and I know he worships you."

"Worships! And he would scarcely hand me a cup of tea—did it as if he were carrying food to a leper! Worship, forsooth! When it's evident he believes the worst people say of me."

"Perhaps he takes the scandal more to heart than another man would, because you have been his bright particular star."

"Nonsense! I know he used to like coming to my house—he used to jump at my invitations. I thought it was because I always had pretty people about me, or that it was on account of my chef. But as for anything more——"

"Well, there was something more. He was deeply in love with you."

"Did he tell you so?"

"He is not that kind of man. But he and I have been pals ever since I came to London. I taught a sister of his when his people lived in Onslow Square—a sister he adored. She married a soldier, and died in India a year after her marriage, and Arthur likes to talk to me about her. She was very fond of me, poor girl. And then, last year, I found that he liked to talk about you—and I know the inside of people's minds well enough to know most of the things they don't tell me."

"If he cared for me last year why didn't he ask me to marry him?"

"Because he is, comparatively speaking, a poor man, and you are rich."

"It's all nonsense, Sue. If he cared for me—in that way—he could never condemn me upon an idle rumour."

"You allow nothing for jealousy. He thought you were encouraging Rannock, and that you meant to marry him."

"And I had refused the wretch three times," said Grace, despairingly.

"What was the good of refusing him if you let him hang about you—lunch at your house twice a week—dance attendance upon you at Ascot and Henley?"

"Yes, it was foolish, I suppose. Everybody can tell me so, now it is too late. Good-bye, Sue. Don't lay any more traps for me, please. Your diplomacy doesn't answer."

"I'm sorry he behaved like a bear; but I am glad you have met, in spite of his coldness. I know he loves you."

"And you think that an ostracized person like me ought to be grateful for any man's regard?"

"No, Grace; but I think Arthur Haldane is just the one man whose affection you value."

"I have never said as much to you."

"There was no necessity. Don't be down-hearted, dear. Things will right themselves sooner than you think."

"I am not down-hearted. I am only angry. Good-bye. Come to lunch to-morrow, if you want me to forgive you."

"I'll be there. I believe I am more appreciative of your chef than Arthur Haldane ever was."

CHAPTER VII.

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest;
And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest:
And this woman says, 'My days were sunless and my nights were moonless,
Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's heart's outbreak tuneless,
If you loved me not!' And I, who—(ah, for words of flame!) adore her!
Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her."

Lady Perivale's victoria was standing at Miss Rodney's gate, but before she could step into it her path was intercepted by the last person she expected to see at that moment, though he had so recently left her. It was Haldane, who had been pacing the avenue in front of Miss Rodney's windows, and who crossed the road hurriedly as Grace came out of the gate.

"Will you let your carriage wait while you walk with me for a few minutes in the Park, Lady Perivale?" he asked gravely. "I have something to say to you—that—that I want very much to say," he concluded feebly, the man whose distinction of style the critics praised finding himself suddenly at a loss for the commonest forms of speech.

Grace was too surprised to refuse. She gave a tacit assent, and they crossed the road side by side, and went into the Park, by a turnstile nearly opposite Miss Rodney's house. They walked along the quiet pathway between two rows of limes that were just beginning to flower, and through whose leafy boughs the evening light showed golden. They walked slowly, in a troubled silence, neither of them venturing to look at the other, yet both of them feeling the charm of the hour, and that more subtle charm of being in each other's company.

"Lady Perivale, when I left Miss Rodney's drawing-room just now, my mind was so overwhelmed with trouble that I wanted to be alone—wanted time to think. I have been pacing this pathway ever since, not long, perhaps, in actual moments, but an age in thought, and—and—the end of it all is that, in the most profound humility and self-contempt, I have to implore your pardon for having suffered my thoughts to wrong you. My judgment has been to blame—not my heart. That has never wavered."

"Oh, Mr. Haldane, was it worth while to apologize? You have acted like all my other society friends—except one. People who have known me ever since my marriage choose to believe that I have made myself unworthy of their acquaintance. I cannot call it friendship, for no friend could believe the story that has been told of me."

"You cut me to the heart. No friend, you say! And I—I who have so honoured you in the past, I was fool enough to believe the slander that was dinned into my ear, chapter and verse, with damning iteration. I struggled against that belief—struggled and succumbed—because people were so sure of their facts, and because—well, I confess, I believed the story. But I thought there might have been a marriage—that for some reason of your own you wanted to keep it dark. I could not think of you as other people thought, but I believed that you were lost to me for ever. I had seen Rannock at your house, seen him about with you—and—and I thought you cared for him."

"You were mistaken. I know now that I was foolish in receiving him upon such a friendly footing."

"Only because the man is unworthy of any woman's confidence or regard. Lady Perivale, I think last year you must have had some suspicion that I was fighting a battle with my own heart."

"I don't quite follow you."

"I must be a better actor than I fancy myself if you did not know that I loved you."

"I can see no reason for fighting battles—if—if that were so."

"Can you not? You don't know—or you did not know then—how malevolent the world can be—this modern world, which measures everything in life by its money value. You are rich, and I have just enough to live upon comfortably without watching my bank-book. From the society point of view I am a pauper."

"What would other people's opinion matter if I knew you were sincere?"

"Yes, that is the question. That was why I kept silence. My pride could not endure that you should rank me with such men as Rannock. And there were others of the class pursuing you—ruined spendthrifts, to whom your fortune would mean a new lease of profligate pleasures. I saw Rannock favoured by you——"

"He was never favoured. I liked his society because he was unlike the rest of the world. I was sorry for him, for his disappointment, his lost opportunities. I thought him a broken-hearted man."

"Broken-hearted? Yes, that is the reprobate's last card; and unfortunately it often wins the game. Broken-hearted!—as if that battered heart could break! A man who has lived only to do mischief, a man whose friendship meant ruin for younger and better men."

"Women know so little of men's lives."

"Not such women as you."

"I confess that he interested me. He seemed a creature of whim and fancy, fluctuating between wild fun and deepest melancholy. I thought him generous and large-minded; since he showed no unkindly feeling when I refused to marry him, as other men had done whom I once thought my friends."

"Rannock looks longer ahead than other men. Be sure he did not love you for your refusal, and that he hung on in the hope you would change your mind. No man of that stamp was ever a woman's friend."

"Don't let us talk of him. I hate the sound of his name."

"Yet you pronounced it so bravely just now in Miss Rodney's drawing-room, and looked me in the face, as if you defied me to think ill of you."

"Well, it was something like a challenge perhaps. And did that convince you?"

"You convinced me. I rushed from the house in a tumult of wonder and doubt. But I had seen you, and could not go on doubting. Your eyes, your voice, the pride in your glance, the pride of wounded innocence, defiant, yet pathetic! Who that had seen you could go on doubting? Lady Perivale—Grace—can you forgive a jealous fool who made his love for you a rod to scourge him, whose thoughts have been cruel to you, but, God knows, how much more cruel to himself?"

"I am glad you are beginning to think better of me," she answered quietly.

"Beginning! I have not the shadow of a thought that wrongs you. I am humbled in the dust under your feet. I ask for nothing but to be forgiven, to be restored to your friendship, to help you as a friend, brother, father might help you, in any difficulty, in any trouble."

"Thank you," she said quietly, holding out her hand to him; and their hands met in a firm and lingering grasp, which meant something more than everyday friendliness.

"I am very glad you trust me, in the face of that odious rumour," she said. "I confess that I felt your unkindness—for it was unkind to hold yourself aloof like other people whose friendship I had never particularly valued. As to their preposterous story about me, it would be easy to answer it with an alibi, since I was at my villa on the Italian Riviera from November to April, and have not seen Colonel Rannock since the last Goodwood, when we were both in Lady Carlaverock's house party."

They walked up and down the little avenue of limes till the golden light took a rosier glow and shone upon a lower level, and until Lady Perivale's servants thought she had gone home in somebody else's carriage, and forgotten that her own was waiting for her.

She told Haldane all that had happened to her since her return to London—her indignation, her contempt for her false friends, Lady Morningside's kindness, her engagement of Faunce, the detective, and her hope that she would be able to refute the slander in a court of law.

"Everybody in London has seen my disgrace, and everybody in London must know of my rehabilitation," she said; and then, in a contemptuous tone, "Is it not absurd that I must take all this trouble simply because another woman happens to be like me?"

"And because a man happens to be a villain. I believe the thing was a deep-laid scheme of Rannock's."

"But why should he do such a vile thing?"

"Because he wanted to be even with you—that would be his expression—for your refusing to marry him."

"Oh, surely no man could be capable of anything so diabolical."

"I know a good deal about Rannock's antecedents, and I believe he could."

"But, even if he were capable of such baseness, how could he plan the thing so as to be met by people who know me?"

"That was not difficult. He had only to watch the papers, and throw himself in people's way. He knew that wherever he went there would be travellers who knew you. He chose Algiers, Corsica, Sardinia, as less public than Cannes or Nice, and so affected an air of avoiding the rush of tourists. God forgive me, if I wrong the man—I hate him too much to reason fairly about him, but the fact of his absence from London this season counts against him. It looks as if, having fired his shot, he kept himself clear of the consequences."

"Nobody would have cut him if he had been in London!" Lady Perivale said scornfully.

"Not more than usual. He was not liked—by the best people!"

"No! But he was so clever, so amusing, played the 'cello divinely—and he flattered me by telling me his troubles, and how hardly the world had used him. I thought him a victim. Oh, what an idiot I have been!"

"No, no. You have only been not quite a woman of the world."

"And I thought I was one. I thought I had learnt everything in my half-dozen years of society, and that the pristine simplicity of my father's parsonage was a thing of the past. And I suffered myself to be talked about, my name bandied about."

"Give me the privilege of your friendship till you think me worthy of a dearer bond, and I will protect you from all the errors of unworldliness. I would not have you one jot more of a worldling than you are. I have worldly wisdom enough for both of us—the wisdom of Mayfair and Belgravia, which the angels call folly."

He took her to her carriage, but he did not ask to be allowed to call upon her.

"I shall be leaving town shortly," he said, "but I hope we may meet in the autumn."

"Are you going abroad?"

"I think so, but I have not determined the direction. I will write to you from—wherever I am—if you will allow me."

"I shall be pleased to hear from you," she answered gently. "I am very glad we are friends again."

On this they clasped hands and parted, lovers half avowed.

Grace went home radiant. She had always liked him. It might be that she had always loved him. His coldness had cut her to the heart, yet now that he was at her feet again, she respected him for having held himself aloof while there was a shadow of doubt in his mind. The fortune-hunter would have taken advantage of her isolation, and pursued her all the more ardently while she was under a cloud. And she was touched by his surrendering at once to her personal influence, to the eyes and voice that he loved. He could not meet her face to face, and go on doubting her.

CHAPTER VIII.

"All we that are called women, know as well
As men, it were a far more noble thing
To grace where we are graced, and give respect
There, where we are respected: yet we practise
A wilder course, and never bend our eyes
On men with pleasure, till they find the way
To give us a neglect; then we, too late,
Perceive the loss of what we might have had,
And dote to death."

Mr. Faunce's profession, more especially since he left Scotland Yard, had lain for the most part among the upper classes. He had been employed in delicate investigations that had brought him in touch with some of the mightiest in the land, and he knew his peerage almost as well as if his own name had been recorded in that golden book. His aristocratic clients found him as kindly and sympathetic as he was shrewd and trustworthy. He never made the galled jade wince by a tactless allusion. He always took an indulgent view of the darkest case when he discussed it with the delinquent's family. He could turn a father's wrath to pity by his shrewd excuses for a son's misconduct, making forgery appear only a youthful ebullition, proceeding rather from want of thought than want of honesty. But he was always on the side of the angels, and always urged generous dealing when a woman was in question. If wrongs had to be righted, a breach of promise case quashed, Faunce was always the victim's advocate. His tactfulness soothed the offended parent's pride, the betrayed husband's self-respect. People liked him and trusted him; and the family skeleton was brought out of the cupboard, and submitted freely to his inspection.

He knew a good deal of the lives of men about town; and among the baser specimens of this trivial race he knew Richard Rannock, late of the Lanarkshire Regiment. When he left Grosvenor Square, with Lady Perivale's case neatly engraved upon the tablet of his brain, needing no shorthand note to assist his memory, he was prepared to find that the slander from which the lady suffered had been brought about by some deliberate perfidy on the part of her rejected suitor. He knew of cruel things, and dastardly things, that Rannock had done in the course of his chequered career, mostly in the relation of hawk to pigeon; he knew the man's financial affairs to have been desperate for the last ten years; and that although he had contrived to live among young men of means and position, with the reputation of being an open-hearted, wild kind of fellow, he had lived like the buzzard and the kite, and the cruel eye had been ever on the watch, and the hungry beak ever ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting quarry.

Faunce's first business was to find the woman. When he had marked her down, he would turn his attention to the man. He was in Algiers as soon as train and boat could take him there, and being as much at his ease in Africa as at Charing Cross, sauntered slowly under the meridian sun along the dazzling street from the steamer to the hotel, chose his room amidst the echoing emptiness of the corridors, where the hum of the mosquito was the only sound, made his expeditious toilet, and, with clean-shaved chin, spotless shirt, and well-brushed alpaca coat, lounged into the French manager's bureau.

The manager knew Mr. Faunce, who had spent a week at the hotel during the previous autumn, in the interests of a wronged husband, whose high-born wife had danced away from the marital mansion with a favourite partner, as gaily as if an elopement were only a new figure in the cotillon. Faunce had run the poor little lady to earth in this very hotel, hidden in an armoire, among perfumed silk petticoats and lace flounces. He had found her, and had taken her straight home to her husband, tearful and ashamed, but only guilty of such a girlish escapade as husbands can forgive.

She had parted with her lover at Marseilles. He was to cross in a different steamer, to throw pursuers off the scent. And his steamer had been delayed, and she was alone at the hotel in Algiers, frightened out of her wits, when Faunce retrieved her.

The manager was delighted to see the English detective, offered his cigar-case, proposed drinks. Faunce never refused a cigar, and rarely accepted a drink.

"Merci, mon ami, I had breakfast on the steamer half an hour ago," and then Faunce unfolded his business.

He affected no secrecy with M. Louis, the manager, who was bon zig, and the essence of discretion.

Such and such a man—here followed a graphic description of Colonel Rannock—had been at the hotel in the last tourist season—date unknown. It might have been before Christmas, or it might have been any time before April. He had come from Sardinia or Corsica, or he was going to one of those islands. He had a lady with him, young and handsome, and he was supposed to be travelling under an alias, and not under his own name—Rannock.

The manager looked puzzled. The most minute description will hardly conjure up the distinct image of one particular man. There are generally a dozen men in any prosperous hotel who would fit Faunce's description of Colonel Rannock—tall, dark, an aquiline nose, a heavy moustache, eyes rather too near together, forehead prominent over the eyes, receding sharply above the perceptive ridge, hands and feet small, air thoroughbred.

"Que diable," said the manager, "we had a very good season. Les messieurs de cette espèce fourmillaient dans l'hôtel. I could count one such on every finger."

"Could you count ten such women as that?" asked Faunce, taking Lady Perivale's photograph from his letter-case and laying it on the manager's desk.

"Sapristi!" said M. Louis, looking at Lady Perivale's photograph. "Yes, I remember her. Elle était une drôlesse."

If Faunce's mind had harboured any lingering doubt of Lady Perivale's innocence, that phrase would have dispelled it. In no circumstances could the woman he had seen in Grosvenor Square have so conducted herself as to merit such a description.

"Look at it a little closer," said Faunce, "and tell me pour sûr that you know the lady."

"No, I don't know her. Your photograph is uncommonly like her, but not the very woman—unless it was taken some years ago. This lady is younger than the woman who was here last February, by at least half a dozen years."

"The photograph was taken recently, as you can see by the dress," said Faunce; "and now tell me about the woman who was here."

"You are looking for her?"

"Yes!"

"Forgery, or"—and the manager's eyes opened wider, and his nostrils quivered with excitement—"murder?"

"Neither. I want the lady in the witness-box, not in the dock. Her evidence is required in the interests of a client of mine, and I am prepared to pay handsomely for any information that will help me to find her."

"Monsieur Faunce has always the good sense. Well, what do you want to know about her?"

"Everything that you or any of your personnel can tell me."

"She was here for a little over a fortnight, with her husband—now that I think of him, just the man you describe—tall, dark, hook-nose, prominent brow, eyes near together, heavy moustache, drank a good deal, chiefly Cognac, the lady preferred champagne; spent every night at the club, seldom came home till the hotel was shut; the night porter would tell you his hours; quarrelled with the lady, tried to beat her, and got the worst of it; came to the déjeuner with a black eye and a scratched cheek. My faith, but they were a pretty couple! They would have made a pretty scandal if they had stayed much longer."

"Was he able to pay his bill?"

"Oh yes; he would always be able. There were two young Americans—what is it you others call your richards? Les oiseaux d'ouf. They went to the club with him every night, they played piquet in his salon of an afternoon, they brought flowers and gloves and chocolates for the lady. The poor children! How they were played! And there was a diamond merchant from the Transvaal. He, too, admired Madame, and he, too, played piquet in the salon."

"And Madame; was she very civil to these gentlemen?"

"Civil? She treated them like the dirt under her feet. She laughed at them to their noses. Elle faisait ses farces sur tout le monde. Ah! but she had a droll of tongue. Quel esprit, quelle blague, quel chic! But it was a festival to listen to her."

"Had she the air of a woman who had been a lady, and who had dégringolé?"

"Pas le moins du monde. She was franchement canaille. Elle n'avait pas dégringolé. She had rather risen in the world. Some little grisette, perhaps; some little rat of the Opera—but jolie à croquer—tall, proud, with an air of queen!"

"You often had a chat with her, I dare say, Monsieur Louis, as she went in and out of the hotel?"

"Mais, oui. She would come into the bureau, to ask questions, to order a carriage, and would stop to put on her gloves—she had no femme de chambre—and though her clothes were handsome, she was a slovenly dresser, and wore the same gown every day, which is not the mark of a lady."

"In these casual conversations did you find out who she is, where she lives, in London or elsewhere?"

"From her conversation I would say she lives nowhere—a nomad, drifting about the world, drinking her bottle of champagne with her dinner, crunching pralines all the afternoon, smoking nine or ten cigarettes after every meal, and costing pas mal d'argent to the person who has to pay for her caprices. She talked of London, she talked of Rome, of Vienna—she knows every theatre and restaurant in Paris, but not half a dozen sentences of French."

"A free lance," said Faunce. "Now for the name of this lady and gentleman."

The name had escaped Monsieur Louis. He had to find the page in his ledger.

"Mr. and Mrs. Randall, numbers 11 and 12, first floor, from February 7th to February 25th."

Randall! The name that Miss Rodney's Duchess had told her, and which Lady Perivale had told Faunce.

"And the lady's Christian name? Can you remember that? You must have heard her pseudo-husband call her by it."

Louis tapped his forehead smartly, as if he were knocking at the door of memory.

"Tiens, tiens, tiens! I heard it often—it was some term of endearment. Tiens! It was Pig!"

"Pig!—Pigs are for good luck. I wonder what kind of luck this one will bring Colonel——Randall. And what did she call him? Another term of endearment?"

"She called him sometimes Dick, but the most often Ranny. When they were good friends, bien entendu. There were days when she would not address him the word. Elle savait comment se faire valoir!"

"They generally do know that, when they spring from the gutter," said Faunce.

He had learnt a good deal. Such a woman—with such beauty, dash, devilry—ought to be traceable in London, Paris, or New York, anywhere. He told himself that it might take him a long time to find her—or time that would be long for him, an adept in rapid action—but he felt very sure that he could find her, and that when he found her he could mould her to his will.

There was only one thing, Faunce thought, that would make her difficult—a genuine attachment to Rannock. If she really loved him, as such women can love, it might be hard work to induce her to betray him, even though no fatal consequences to him hung upon her secrecy. He knew the dogged fidelity which worthless women sometimes give to worthless men.

The hotel was almost empty, so after a prolonged siesta Mr. Faunce dined with the manager in the restaurant, which they had to themselves, while half a dozen tourists made a disconsolate little group in the desolation of the spacious dining-room.

Faunce did not pursue the subject of the Randalls and their behaviour during the social meal, for he knew that the manager's mind having been set going in that direction he would talk about them of his own accord, a surmise which proved correct, for M. Louis talked of nothing else; but there were no vital facts elicited over the bottle of Pommery which Mr. Faunce ordered.

"The lady was something of a slattern, you say?" said Faunce. "In that case she would be likely to leave things—odd gloves, old letters, trinkets—behind her. Now, in my work things are often of the last importance. Trifles light as air, mon ami, are sign-posts and guiding stars for the detective. You may remember Müller's hat—his murdered victim's, with the crown cut down—thriftiness that cost the German youth dear. I could recall innumerable instances. Now, did not this lady leave some trifling trail, some litter of gloves, fans, letters, which your gallantry would treasure as a souvenir?"

"If you come to that, her room was a pig-sty."

"To correspond with her pet name."

"But the hotel was full, and I set the chambermaids at work ten minutes after the Randalls drove to the boat. We had people coming into the rooms that afternoon."

"And you had neither leisure nor curiosity to seek for relics of the lovely creature?"

Monsieur Louis shrugged his shoulders.

"Is my room on the same floor?"

"Mais oui."

"And I have the same chambermaid?"

"Yes. She is the oldest servant we have, and she stays in the hotel all the summer; while most of our staff are in Switzerland."

This was enough for Faunce. He retired to his room early, after smoking a couple of cigarettes under the palm trees in front of the hotel, in the sultry hush of the summer night. The scene around him was all very modern, all very French—a café-concert on the right, a café-concert on the left—and it needed an occasional Arab stalking by in a long white mantle to remind him that he was in Africa. He meant to start on his return journey to London by the next boat. He was not going to Corsica or Sardinia in search of new facts. He trusted to his professional acumen to run the lady to ground in London or Paris.

He shut the window against insect life, lighted his candles, and seated himself at the table, with his writing-case open before him, and then rang the dual summons which brings the hotel chambermaid.

"Be so good as to get me some ink," he said.

The chambermaid, who was elderly and sour-visaged, told him that ink was the waiter's business, not hers. He should have rung once, not twice, for ink.

"Never mind the ink, Marie," he said, in French. "I want something more valuable even than ink. I want information, and I think you can give it to me. Do you remember Monsieur and Madame Randall, who had rooms on this floor before Easter?"

Yes, she remembered them; but what then?

"When Madame Randall left she was in a hurry, was she not?"

"She was always in a hurry when she had to go anywhere—unless she was sulky and would not budge. She would sit like a stone figure if she had one of her tempers," the chambermaid answered, with many contemptuous shrugs.

"She left hurriedly, and she left her room in a litter—left all sorts of things behind her?" suggested Faunce, with an insinuating smile.

The chambermaid's sharp black eyes flashed angrily, and the chambermaid tossed her head in scorn. And then she held out a skinny forefinger almost under Faunce's nose.

"She has not left so much as that," she said, striking the finger on the first joint with the corresponding finger of the other hand. "Not so much as that!" and from her vehemence Faunce suspected that she had reaped a harvest of small wares, soiled gloves and lace-bordered handkerchiefs, silk stockings with ravelled heels.

"What a pity," he said in his quietest voice, "for I should have been glad to have given you a couple of napoleons for any old letters or other documents that you might have found among the rubbish when you swept the rooms."

"For letters, they were all in the fireplace, torn to shreds," said the chambermaid; "but there was something—something that I picked up, and kept, in case the lady should come back, when I could return it to her."

"There is always something," said Faunce. "Well, Marie, what is it?"

"A photograph."

"Of the lady?"

"No, Monsieur, of a young man—pas grand' chose. But if Monsieur values the portrait at forty francs it is at his disposition, and I will hazard the anger of Madame should she return and ask me for it."

"Pas de danger! She will not return. She belongs to the wandering tribes, the people who never come back. Since the portrait is not of the lady herself, and may be worth nothing to me, we will say twenty francs, ma belle."

The chambermaid was inclined to haggle, but when Faunce shrugged his shoulders, laid a twenty-franc piece upon the table, and declined further argument, she pocketed the coin, and went to fetch the photograph.

It was the least possible thing in the way of portraits, of the kind called "midget," a full-length portrait of a young man, faded and dirty, in a little morocco case that had once been red, but was soiled to blackness.

"By Jove!" muttered Faunce, "I ought to know that face."

He told himself that he ought to know it, for it was a familiar face, a face that spoke to him out of the long ago; but he could not place it in the record of his professional experiences. He took the photo out of the case, and looked at the back, where he found what he expected. There is always something written upon that kind of photograph by that kind of woman.

"San Remo,
"Poor old Tony. November 22th, '88."

The 22th, the uneducated penmanship sprawling over the little card, alike indicated the style of the writer.

"Poor old Tony!" mused Faunce, slowly puffing his last cigarette, with the midget stuck up in front of him, between the two candles. "Who is Tony? A swell, by the cut of his clothes, and that—well, the good-bred ones have an air of their own, an air that one can no more deny than one can describe it. Poor old Tony! At San Remo—condemned by the doctors. There's death in every line of the face and figure. A consumptive, most likely. The last sentence has been passed on you, poor beggar! Poor old Tony! And that woman was with you at San Remo, the companion of a doomed man, dying by inches. And she must have been in the flower of her beauty then, a splendid creature. Was she very fond of you, I wonder, honestly, sincerely attached to you? I think she was, for her hand trembled when she wrote those words! Poor old Tony! And there is a smudge across the date, that might indicate a tear. Well, if I fail in running her to earth in London, I could trace some part of her past life at San Remo, and get at her that way. But who was Tony? I'm positive I know the face. Perhaps the reflex action of the brain will help me," concluded Faunce.

The reflex action did nothing for Mr. Faunce, in the profound slumber which followed upon the fatigue of a long journey. No suggestion as to the original of the photograph had occurred to him when he put it in his letter-case next morning. It was hours afterwards, when he was lying in his berth in the steamer, "rocked in the cradle of the deep," wakeful, but with his brain in an idle, unoccupied state, that Tony's identity flashed upon him.

"Sir Hubert Withernsea," he said to himself, sitting up in his berth, and clapping his hand upon his forehead. "That's the man! I remember him about town ten years ago—a Yorkshire baronet with large estates in the West Riding—a weak-kneed youth with a passion for the Fancy, always heard of at prize-fights, and entertaining fighting men, putting up money for private glove-fights; a poor creature, born to be the prey of swindlers and loose women."

Faunce looked back to that period of ten years ago, which seemed strangely remote, more by reason of the changes in ideas and fashions, whim and folly, than by the lapse of time. He searched his mind for the name of any one woman in particular with whom Sir Hubert Withernsea had been associated, but here memory failed him. He had never had business relations with the young man, and though his ears were always open to the gossip of the town, he kept no record of trivial things outside the affairs of his clients. One young fool more or less travelling along the primrose path made no impression upon him. But with the knowledge of this former episode in the pseudo-Mrs. Randall's career, it ought to be easy for him to find out all about her in London, that focus of the world's intelligence, where he almost invariably searched for information before drawing any foreign capital.

CHAPTER IX.

"What begins now?"
"Happiness
Such as the world contains not."

Faunce wrote to Lady Perivale on his arrival in town, and told her the result of his journey briefly, and without detail. She might make her mind easy. The woman who resembled her would be found. He was on her track, and success was only a question of time.

Grace read the letter to Susan Rodney, who was dining with her that evening. She had been in much better spirits of late, and Sue rejoiced in the change, but did not suspect the cause. She had gone to her own den at the back of her house when Grace left her, and had not seen the carriage standing by the park gate, nor had the interview in the park come to her knowledge. Her friend, who confided most things to her, was reticent here. She attributed Lady Perivale's cheerfulness to a blind faith in Faunce the detective.

The season was drawing towards its close. Lady Morningside's white ball had been a success, all the prettiest people looking their prettiest in white frocks, and the banks of gloxinias in the hall and staircase and supper-rooms being a thing to rave about. The London season was waning. The Homburg people and the Marienbad people were going or gone. The yachting people were rushing about buying stores, or smart clothes for Cowes. The shooting people were beginning to talk about their grouse moors.

"Sue, we must positively go somewhere," Grace said. "Even you must be able to take a holiday within an hour of London; and you may be sure I shan't go far while I have this business on hand. You will come with me, won't you, Sue? I am beginning to sicken of solitude."

"I shall love to come, if you are near enough for me to run up to town once or twice a week. I have three or four pig-headed pupils who won't go away when I want them; but most of my suburbans are packing their golf clubs for Sandwich, Cromer, or North Berwick."

"You will come! That's capital! I shall take a house on the river between Windsor and Goring."

"Make it as near London as you can."

"If you are good it shall be below Windsor, even if the river is not so pretty there as it is at Wargrave or Taplow. I want to be near London, for Mr. Faunce's convenience. I hope he will have news to bring me. I wrote to beg him to call to-morrow morning—I want to know what discoveries he made in Algiers."

People who have twenty thousand a year, more or less, seldom have to wait for things. Lady Perivale drove to a fashionable agent in Mount Street next morning, and stated her wishes; and the appearance of her victoria and servants, and the fact that she made no mention of price, indicated that she was a client worth having. The agent knew of a charming house on a lovely reach of the river near Runnymede—gardens perfection, stables admirable, boat-house spacious, and well provided with boats at the tenant's disposal. Unluckily, he had let it the day before; but he hoped that little difficulty might be got over. He would offer his client a villa further up the river. He would write to Lady Perivale next morning.

The little difficulty was got over. The client, actual or fictitious, was mollified, and Lady Perivale took the house for a month at two hundred guineas, on the strength of a water-colour sketch. She sent some of her servants to prepare for her coming, and she and Susan Rodney were installed there at the end of the week.

The house and gardens were almost as pretty as they looked in water-colour, though the river was not quite so blue, and the roses were not quite so much like summer cabbages as the artist had made them. There were a punt and a couple of good skiffs in the boat-house; and Lady Perivale and her friend, who could both row, spent half their days on the river, where Grace met some of those quondam friends whom she had passed so often in the park; met and passed them with unalterable disdain, though sometimes she thought she saw a little look of regret, an almost appealing expression in their faces, as if they were beginning to think they might have been too hasty in their conclusions about her.

One friend she met on the river whom she did not pretend to scorn. On the second Saturday afternoon a skiff flashed past her through the July sunshine, and her eyes were quick to recognize the rower. It was Arthur Haldane. She gave an involuntary cry of surprise, and he turned his light craft, and brought it beside the roomy boat in which she and Sue were sitting, with books and work, and the marron poodle, as in a floating parlour.

"Are you staying near here, Lady Perivale?" he asked, when greetings had been exchanged.

"We are living close by, Miss Rodney and I, at Runnymede Grange. I hope you won't laugh at our rowing. Our idea of a boat is only a movable summer-house. We dawdle up and down for an hour or two, and then creep into a backwater, and talk, and work, and read, all the afternoon, and one of the servants comes to us at five o'clock, and makes tea on the bank with a gipsy kettle."

"You might ask him to one of our gipsy teas, Grace," suggested Susan.

"With pleasure. Will you come this afternoon? We shall be in the little creek—the first you come to after passing Runnymede Grange, which you will know by the Italian terrace and sundial."

"I shall come and help your footman to boil the kettle."

He looked radiant. He had seen Lady Perivale's happy look when his boat neared hers, and his heart danced for joy. All the restraint he had set upon himself was flung to the winds. If she loved him, what did anything matter? It was not the world's mistrust he dreaded, or the world's contempt. His only fear had been that she should doubt him, misread his motives, rank him with the fortune-hunters who had pursued her.

"Are you staying near here?" asked Susan.

"I come up the river for a day or two now and then. There is a cottage at Staines kept by a nice old spinster, whose rooms are the pink of cleanliness, and who can cook a mutton chop. I keep a quire or two of foolscap in her garden parlour, and go there sometimes to do my work. Her garden goes down to the water, and there is a roomy arbour of hops that I share with the caterpillars, a kind of berceau, from which I can see the river and the boats going by, through the leafy screen, while nobody can see me. It is the quietest place I know of near London. The rackety people seldom come below Maidenhead."

He spent the hours between tea-time and sunset with Grace and her friend, in a summer idleness, while the poodle, who found himself receiving less attention from his mistress than usual, roamed up and down, scratching holes in the bank, and pretending to hunt rats among the sedges, evidently oppressed with ennui. Of those three friends there were two who knew not the lapse of time, and were surprised to see the great golden disc sink below the rosy water where the river curved westward, and the sombre shadows steal over keep and battlements yonder where the Royal fortress barred the evening sky.

"How short the days are getting," Grace said naively.

They two had found so much to talk about after having lived a year without meeting. All the books they had read, all the plays they had seen, the music they had heard—everything made a subject for discussion; and then it was so sweet to be there, in the full confidence of friendship, spell-bound in a present happiness, and in vague dreams of the future, sure that nothing could ever again come between them and their trust in each other.

"The days are shortening by a cock's step or so," said Sue, looking up from an afternoon tea-cloth, which she was decorating with an elaborate design in silk and gold thread, and which she had been seen engaged upon for the last ten years.

It was known as "Sue's work." It went everywhere with her, and was criticized and admired everywhere, and everybody knew that it would never be finished.

"The days are shortening, no doubt," repeated Sue; "they must begin, or we should never get to the long winter evenings, but I haven't perceived any difference yet, and I don't think there's anything odd in the sun going down at eight o'clock."

"Eight o'clock! Nonsense, Sue!" cried Lady Perivale, flinging down a volume of "The Ring and the Book," which she had been nursing all the afternoon.

"And as we are supposed to dine at eight, I think we ought to go home and put on our tea-gowns," pursued Sue, sedately.

Can there be such happiness in life; bliss that annihilates thought and time? Grace blushed crimson, ashamed of having been so happy.

Mr. Haldane bade them good night at the bottom of the garden steps, where his outrigger was waiting for him. It would have been so easy to ask him to dinner, so easy to keep him till midnight, so easy to prolong the sweetness of golden hours. But Grace was discreet. They were not lovers, only friends. She wanted to spin to its finest thread this season of sweet uncertainty, these exquisite hours on the threshold of Paradise. And then Sue might think him a bore. Sue was not overfond of masculine society. She liked to put her feet on a chair after dinner, and she sometimes liked a cigarette.

"I never smoke before men," she told Grace. "They think we do it to please, or to shock them."

CHAPTER X.

"True as steel, boys!
That knows all chases, and can watch all hours."

In the course of that summer afternoon's talk with Grace Perivale, Arthur Haldane had explained the change in his plans since their meeting in Regent's Park.

The business which would have taken him away from England for some time had hung fire, and his journey was postponed indefinitely. He did not tell her that his contemplated journey was solely in her interests, that he had thought of going to America in quest of Colonel Rannock, with the idea that he, the man with whose name Lady Perivale's had been associated, should himself set her right before that little world which had condemned her. He knew not by what machinery that rehabilitation could be accomplished; but his first impulse was to find the man whose acquaintance had brought this trouble upon her.

Two days after that golden sunset in which he and Lady Perivale had parted, with clasped hands that vowed life-long fidelity, while yet no word had been spoken, Mr. Haldane called upon John Faunce at his pied à terre in Essex Street.

He had written for an appointment on business connected with Lady Perivale's case, and Faunce had replied asking him to call at his rooms in Essex Street at ten o'clock next morning. An early hour, which denoted the man whose every hour was valuable.

He found the house one of the oldest in the old-world street, next door to a nest of prosperous solicitors, but itself of a somewhat shabby and retiring aspect. The bell was answered by a bright-eyed servant girl, clean and fresh looking, but with an accent that suggested the Irish Town Limerick, rather than a London slum—a much pleasanter accent to Haldane's ear.

To the inquiry if Mr. Faunce lived there, she answered with a note of interrogation.

"Mr. Wh-hat?"

"Mr. Faunce."

"Yes, he does. Any message?"

"Is he at home?"

"I don't know. I'll go and see. Wh-hat name?"

A quick-eyed scrutiny of the visitor's spotless holland waistcoat, the neat dark stripes of the straight-knee'd trousers falling in a graceful curve over the irreproachable boots, and the sheen of a silk-faced coat, had assured her of his respectability before she committed herself even so far as that.

But when this well-groomed gentleman, who was far too quietly dressed to be a member of the swell-mob, produced an immaculate card out of a silver case, she grasped it and dashed up the steep stairs.

"Will I tell 'um you want to see 'um?"

"Thanks."

"I shall!" and she vanished round the first landing.

She was back again and leaning over the same spot on the bannister rail in half a minute.

"You're to be good enough to step up, if ye plaze, surr."

Mr. Faunce occupied the second floor, front and back, as sitting-room and bedroom; the busy nature and uncertain hours of his avocations during the last few years having made his rural retreat at Putney impossible for him except in the chance intervals of his serious work, or from Friday to Monday, when that work was slack. It was not that he loved wife and home less, but that he loved duty more.

He emerged from the bedroom as Haldane entered the sitting-room, in the act of fixing a collar to his grey flannel shirt, and welcomed his visitor cordially, with apologies for not being dressed. He had been late overnight, and had been slower than usual at his toilet, as he was suffering from a touch of rheumatism. His profession was betrayed by a pair of regulation high-waisted trousers of a thick blue-black material, over Blucher boots, which were also made to the sealed pattern of the Force. But his costume was rounded off by a pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket of workman-like cut.

There was no paltry pride about Mr. Faunce. Although a man of respectable parentage, good parts, and education, he was not in the least ashamed of having been for many years a respected member of the Police. In ordinary life he somewhat affected the get-up of a country parson with sporting tastes; but here, in his own den, and quite at his ease, he was nothing more or less than a retired police-officer.

His rheumatism had taken him in the arm, he explained, or he would have been at his table there writing up one of his cases.

"There is often as much in one of 'em as would make a three-volume novel, Mr. Haldane;" and then, with a polite wave of the hand—"in bulk," he added, disclaiming all literary pretentions, and at the same time motioning his guest to a chair.

This laborious penwork was perhaps the most remarkable feature in John Faunce's career. The hours of patient labour this supremely patient man employed in noting down every detail and every word concerning the case in hand, which may have come to the notice of himself or any of his numerous temporary assistants, in and out of the police-force, stamped him as the detective who is born, not made, or, in other words, the worker who loves his work.

The room reflected the man's mind. It was a perfectly arranged receptacle of a wonderful amount of precise information. It was like the sitting-room of an exceptionally methodical student preparing for a very stiff examination. The neat dwarf bookcase contained a goodly number of standard books of reference, and a lesser number of the most famous examples of modern fiction.

One corner of the room was occupied by a stack of japanned tin boxes that recalled a solicitor's office; but these boxes had no lettering upon them. A discreet little numeral was sufficient indication of their contents for Faunce, who was incapable of forgetting a fact once registered in the book of his mind.

"You must find papers accumulate rapidly in your work, Mr. Faunce," said Haldane.

"They would if I let them, sir; but I don't. When once a case is settled or withdrawn from my hands, I return all letters and other papers that may have reached me, and I burn my history of the case."

"You will have nothing left for your Reminiscences, then?"

"They are here, sir," the detective replied sharply, tapping his massive brow; "and one day—well, sir, one day I may let the reading world know that truth is stranger—and sometimes even more thrilling—than fiction. But I must have consummate cheek to talk of fiction to the author of 'Mary Deane.'"

Haldane started, half inclined to resent an impertinence; but a glance at the man's fine head and brilliant eye reminded him that the detective and the novelist might be upon the same intellectual plane, or that in sheer brain power the man from Scotland Yard might be his superior.

Faunce had seen the look, and smiled his quiet smile.

"It's one of the penalties of being famous, Mr. Haldane, that your inferiors may venture to admire you. I have your book among my favourites."

He pointed to the shelf, where Haldane saw the modest, dark-green cloth back of his one novel, between "Esmond" and "The Woman in White."

"And now to business, sir. And first allow me to say that I am glad to see any friend of Lady Perivale's."

"Thank you, Mr. Faunce. You must not suppose that Lady Perivale sent me here. She did not even know that I wanted to see you; and I must ask you not to mention my visit. I heard of what you were doing from a friend of Lady Perivale's, not from herself, and I am here to consult you on a matter that only indirectly affects her case."

"Well, sir, I am at your service."

"I shall be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Faunce. I believe a gentleman of your profession may be considered a kind of father confessor, that anything I say in this office will be—strictly Masonic."

"That is so."

"Well, then, I may tell you in the first place that Lady Perivale is the woman whom I admire and respect above all other women, and that it is my highest ambition to win her for my wife."

"I think that is a very natural ambition, sir, in any gentleman who—being free to choose—has the honour to know that lady," Faunce replied, with a touch of enthusiasm.

"I know something of Colonel Rannock's antecedents, and have met him in society, though he was never a friend of mine; and when I heard the scandal about Lady Perivale, it occurred to me that the best thing I could do, in her interest, was to find Rannock and call upon him to clear her name."

"A difficult thing for him to do, sir, even if he were willing to do it."

"I thought the way might be found, if the man were made to feel that it must be found. I have the worst possible opinion of Colonel Rannock; but a man of that character has generally a weak joint in his harness, and I thought I should be able to bring him to book."

"A very tough customer, I'm afraid, sir. A human armadillo."

"The first matter was to find him. He was said to be in the Rocky Mountains, and I was prepared to go there after him; only such an expedition seemed improbable at the time of year. I had heard of him in chambers in the Albany; but on inquiry there I found he gave up his chambers last March, sold lease and furniture, and that his present address, if he had one in London, was unknown."

"Then I take it, sir, not having my professional experience, you were baffled, and went no further."

"No; I wasn't beaten quite so easily. I think, Faunce, your profession has a certain fascination for every man. It is the hunter's instinct, common to mankind, from the Stone Age downwards. After a good deal of trouble I found Rannock's late body-servant, a shrewd fellow, now billiard-marker at the Sans-Souci Club; and from him I heard that Rannock's destination was not the Rockies, but Klondyke. He left London for New York by the American Line at the end of March, taking the money he got for his lease and furniture, and he was to join two other men—whose names his servant gave me—at San Francisco, on their way to Vancouver. He was to write to his servant about certain confidential matters as soon as he arrived in New York, and was to send him money if he prospered in his gold-digging, for certain special payments, and for wages in arrear. I had no interest in knowing more of these transactions than the man chose to tell me; but the one salient fact is that no communication of any kind has reached the servant since his master left him, and the man feels considerable anxiety on his account. He has written to an agent in San Francisco, whose address Rannock had given him, and the agent replied that no such person as Colonel Rannock had been at his office or had communicated with him."

"Well, sir, Colonel Rannock changed his mind at the eleventh hour; or he had a reason for pretending to go to one place and going to another," said Faunce, quietly, looking up from a writing-pad on which he had made two or three pencil-notes.

"That might be so. I cabled an inquiry to the agent, whose letter to the valet was six weeks old, and I asked the whereabouts of the two friends whose party Rannock was to join. The reply came this morning. No news of Rannock; the other men started for Vancouver on April 13th."

"Do you want me to pursue this inquiry further, Mr. Haldane?"

"Yes; I want to find Rannock. It may be a foolish idea on my part. But Lady Perivale has been cruelly injured by the association of her name with this man—possibly by no fault of his—possibly by some devilish device to punish her for having slighted him."

"That hardly seems likely. They may have done such things in the last century, sir, when duelling was in fashion, and when a fine gentleman thought it no disgrace to wager a thousand pounds against a lady's honour, and write his wager in the club books, if she happened to offend him. But it doesn't seem likely nowadays."

"I want you to find this man," pursued Haldane, surprised, and a little vexed, at Faunce's dilettante air.

He had not expected to find a detective who talked like an educated man, and he began to doubt the criminal investigator's professional skill, in spite of his tin boxes and reference books, and appearance of mental power.

"In Lady Perivale's interest?"

"Certainly."

"Don't you think, sir, you'd better let me solve the problem on my own lines? You are asking me to take up a tangled skein at the wrong end. I am travelling steadily along my own road, and you want me to go off at a tangent. I dare say I shall come to Colonel Rannock in good time, working my own way."

"If that is so, I won't interfere," Haldane said, with a troubled look. "All my anxiety is for Lady Perivale's rehabilitation, and every hour's delay irritates me."

"You may safely leave the matter to me, sir. Festina lente. These things can't be hurried. I shall give the case my utmost attention, and as much time as I can spare, consistently with my duty to other clients."

"You have other cases on your hands?"

Faunce smiled his grave, benign smile.

"Four years ago, when I retired from the C.I., I thought I was going to settle down in a cottage at Putney, with my good little wife, and enjoy my otium cum dignitate for the rest of my days," said Faunce, confidentially, "but, to tell you the truth, Mr. Haldane, I found the otium rather boring, and, one or two cases falling in my way, fortuitously, I took up the old business in a new form, and devoted myself to those curious cases which are of frequent occurrence in the best-regulated families, cases requiring very delicate handling, inexhaustible patience, and a highly-trained skill. Since then I have had more work brought me than I could possibly undertake; and I have been, so far, fortunate in giving my clients satisfaction. I hope I shall satisfy Lady Perivale."

There was a firmness in Faunce's present tone that pleased Haldane.

"At any rate, it was just as well that you should know the result of my search for Rannock," he said, taking up his hat and stick.

"Certainly, sir. Any information bearing on the case is of value, and I thank you for coming to me," answered Faunce, as he rose to escort his visitor to the door.

He did not attach any significance to the fact that Colonel Rannock had announced his intention of going to Klondyke, and had not gone there. He might have twenty reasons for throwing his servant off the scent; or he might have changed his mind. The new gold region is too near the North Pole to be attractive to a man of luxurious habits, accustomed to chambers in the Albany, and the run of half a dozen rowdy country houses, where the company was mixed and the play high.

Sport in Scotland and Ireland, sport in Norway, or even in Iceland, might inure a man to a hard life, but it would not bring him within measurable distance of the hazards and hardships in that white world beyond Dawson City.

John Faunce, seated in front of his empty fireplace, listened mechanically to a barrel-organ playing the "Washington Post," and meditated upon Arthur Haldane's statement.

He had not been idle since his return to London, and had made certain inquiries about Colonel Rannock among people who were likely to know. He had interviewed a fashionable gunmaker with whom Rannock had dealt for twenty years, and the secretary of a club which he had frequented for about the same period. The man was frankly Bohemian in his tastes, but had always kept a certain footing in society, and, in his own phrase, had never been "bowled out." He had been banished from no baccarat table, though he was not untainted with a suspicion of occasionally tampering with his stake. He played all the fashionable card games, and, like Dudley Smooth, though he did not cheat, he always won. He had plenty of followers among the callow youth who laughed at his jokes and almost died of his cigars; but he had no friends of his own age and station, and the great ladies of the land never admitted him within their intimate circle, though they might send him a card once or twice a year for a big party, out of friendly feeling for his mother—five-and-twenty years a widow, and for the greater part of her life attached to the Court.

Would such a man wheel a barrow and tramp the snow-bound shores of the Yukon River? Unlikely as the thing seemed, Faunce told himself that it was not impossible. Rannock had fought well in the Indian hill-country, had never been a feather-bed soldier, and had never affected the passing fashion of effeminacy. He had loved music with that inborn love which is like an instinct, and had made himself a fine player with very little trouble, considering the exacting nature of the 'cello; but he had never put on dilettante airs, or pretended that music was the only thing worth living for. He was as much at home with men who painted pictures as with composers and fiddlers. Versatility was the chief note in his character. The Scotch University, the Army school, the mess-room, the continental wanderings of later years, had made him an expert in most things that people care for. He was at home in the best and the worst society.

He was a soldier and a sportsman, tall, and strongly built, a remarkably handsome man in his best days, and handsome still in his moral and social decadence. There was no reason, Faunce thought, why such a man should shrink from the dangers and hardships of the Alaska goldfields, if the whim took him to try his luck there.

Again, there was no reason that he should not have changed his mind at the last hour, and gone to Ostend or Spa, to risk his capital in a more familiar way, at the gaming table instead of the goldfields. Faunce had allies at both places, and he wrote to each of these, bidding him find out if Rannock was, or had been, there. He was not a man who could appear anywhere without attracting notice.

The letters written, Faunce dismissed the subject for the time being. Colonel Rannock's proceedings seemed to him a matter of minor importance, since he doubted if Rannock could be made instrumental in Lady Perivale's rehabilitation. It was the woman he wanted, the woman whose likeness to his client was the source of evil.

Women had been the chief factors in Mr. Faunce's successful coups, and he had seldom failed in his management of that sensitive and impulsive sex.

He had to find out who the woman was, and her present whereabouts. He thought it highly probable that so handsome a woman had adorned the burlesque stage at some period of her career, as actress or chorus-girl. The theatre is the only arena where low-born beauty can win the recognition which every handsome girl believes her due; and the desire to tread the stage is almost an instinct in the town-bred girl's mind. She has heard of actresses and their triumphs ever since she can remember. She looks in her glass and sees that she is pretty. She picks up the music-hall tunes, and shrills them as she goes about the house-work, and is sure that she can sing. She skips and prances to the organ in the court, and thinks that she can dance. She discovers some acquaintance of her father's whose second cousin knows the stage-manager at the Thalia Theatre; and, armed with this introduction, her pretty face forces its way to the front row of the ballet, and her shrill voice pipes in unison with her sister cockneys in the chorus.

Such an apprenticeship to the Drama Faunce thought probable in the case of the lady known as Mrs. Randall; so he called upon two of the dramatic agents, most of whom had become known to him in his efforts to disentangle patrician youth from the snares of the theatrical syrens.

He went first to the agent of highest standing in his profession; but this gentleman was either too much a gentleman or too busy to help him. He glanced at Lady Perivale's photograph with a careless eye. Yes, a remarkably handsome woman! But he did not remember anybody in the theatrical world who resembled her. He remembered Sir Hubert Withernsea only as one of the wealthy young fools whom one heard of every season, and seldom heard of long, since they must either pull up or die.

"This young man died," said Faunce. "Now do you happen to remember any lady in your line to whom he attached himself?"

"No; I don't. With a young man of that kind it's generally a good many ladies in my line. He gives supper-parties, and chucks away his money, and nobody cares about him or remembers him when he's gone."

"Ah, but this one had a particular attachment, and the lady was like this," said Faunce, with his hand on the photograph.

"Non mi ricordo," said the agent, and Faunce went a little way farther east, to one of the smaller streets out of the Strand, not more than ten minutes' walk from his own office in Essex Street, and called upon agent number two, whose chief business lay among "the halls," a business that paid well and justified handsome offices, with a lady typist, and the best and newest development in type-writing machines.

Mr. Mordaunt was in the thick of the morning's business when Faunce entered the office, but the detective cultivated an air of never being in a hurry, and he seated himself near an open window in a retired spot, from which he could observe two lady clients who were engaging Mordaunt's attention, and one gentleman client in a white hat and a light-grey frock-coat, patent leather boots, and a gardenia buttonhole, a costume more suggestive of Ascot than of the Strand, who was looking at the innumerable photographs of lovely song-birds, skirt-dancers, lion-comiques, and famous acrobats, that covered the wall, and reading the programmes that hung here and there, lightly stirred by the summer air, and clouded with the summer dust.

The ladies were young, handsome, in a pearl-powdery and carmine-lipped fashion, and dressed in the top of the mode, with picture hats on the most commanding scale, piled with the greatest number of ostrich feathers and paste ornaments the human hat can carry.

"You must look slippy, and get me another turn, Mordy," urged the taller damsel, whose name appeared in the theatrical papers as "Vicky Vernon, the Wide World's Wonder." "Fact is, I ain't gettin' a livin' wage."

"Come, now; forty pound from one hall and thirty from another——"

"It ain't enough, Mordy; nothink under the century suits my book, and it didn't ought to suit yours, neither. You must get me another show—another thirty quid. You know you'll get your commission off it."

Yes, Mr. Mordaunt reckoned that he would get his ten per cent.

"But, you see, Vicky, there's ever so many ladies who can sing bet—nearly as well as you—walking about London, with their hands in their tailor-made pockets."

"Not one of 'em whose songs have ever caught on like my 'Rats' and 'The Demon of Drink.'"

"Those were two ripping songs, Vicky. But your new ones haven't hit as hard. They're mawkish, Vicky; too much milk-and-water, and not enough Tabasco. 'Rats' was a fine song—and you did the 'D.T.' first-class."

"The man who wrote 'Rats' is dead," said Miss Vernon, with a gloomy look. "He was a genius, poor devil. Could knock off a song like that in a day—if he could keep sober—band-parts and all."

"I wonder how much you gave him for 'Rats'?"

"Wouldn't you like to know? Well, then, not so much by ten touch-me's as I give for this sun-shade," said the charmer, with a winning laugh, flourishing her gold-handled parasol.

"You gave the poor devil a fiver for a song that has earned you five thou.," said the agent. "Oh, I know the ladies. They haven't got much head for figures, but they are closer——"

"Not closer than a music-hall agent, Mordy. They're the nailers. And what would have been the good of giving that poor feller twenty thick uns for a song he was glad to sell for five? He'd only have drunk himself into his coffin a little sooner."

Here the gentleman in the white hat, who was on too friendly terms with his professional sisters to think of removing that article of apparel, broke in upon the conversation.

"Business is business, Queen of my Soul," he said, "but, if you expect me to wait while you and Mordy indulge in casual patter, you don't know the kind of man I am. Come, old chap, I want your private ear for a little bit."

He took the agent by the buttonhole, and led him into a corner, where they conversed in whispers for a few minutes, while the two stars of the halls, the girl with fierce eyebrows and dark hair who sang "Rats," and the girl with flaxen fringe and pink cheeks, who sang baby-songs in a pinafore, walked about the room, or stood in front of a looking-glass twitching their veils, and correcting the slant of their hats, whistling softly the while with rosy, pursed-up lips.

"I say, Bill, are you going to stand Chippie and me a scrap of lunch?" inquired Miss Vernon, when the whispered interview was over.

"Nought o' t' sort, my angel; but I'll take you to a snug little Italian ristoranty near Leicester Square, where you'll get the best lunch in London, and I'll give you the inestimable advantage of my company while you eat it—but when it comes to 'lardishong,' it must be Yorkshire, my pretty ones, distinctly Yorkshire."

"There's a little too much Yorkshire about you, Bill. Hurry up! Ta, ta, Mordy. Skip the gutter!" wheeling sharply on her Louis heels, with an artful turn of her skirt that revealed the crisp flounces and lace ruchings of a cherry-coloured silk petticoat. "For surely you'll be your pint stoup, and surely I'll be mine?" shrilled the cantatrice, in a voice whose metallic timbre made the electric globes shiver.

The three professionals bounced out of the room, and Faunce heard the ladies' heels rattle down the stairs, and the hall door close behind them with a bang.

"Nice, quiet, refined style, Miss Vernon," he said, as he seated himself opposite the agent.

"Not quite what you'd like for a permanency; gets on your nerves after a bit—eh, Mr. Faunce?" commented Mordaunt. "But she knocks 'em at the halls with her 'Rats' and her 'Demon Drink.' She can make their blood run cold one minute, and make 'em roar with laughter the next. Her father died with the horrors, and she's a first-rate mimic. She got every trick of the thing from watching the old man. It ain't every girl of eighteen would have had the grit to do it. The song ain't a 'Ta-ra-ra,' but it has caught on, and she's making a pot of money. And now, my dear sir, what's up with you? Who are you lookin' for, and what's it all about?"

"I want you to throw your memory back ten years, Mordaunt. Do you remember Sir Hubert Withernsea? He was knocking about London at that time, I think."

"Of course I do. Yorkshire swell, regular oof-bird, and a born mug; ran through his money as if he had an unnatural curiosity to see the inside of a workhouse. But he was a good-natured bloke; and I've seen some first-class company at his Sunday dinners, in a house he had in the Abbey Road. He used to have a dinner-party every Sunday in May and June, and a game of cards after dinner, and one met some queer specimens there sometimes."

"Was there a lady at the head of his table?"

"Rather! There was Lady Withernsea—everybody called her Lady Withernsea in her own house, whatever they may have called her out of it. I knew her as Kate Delmaine, in the chorus at the Spectacular Theatre; but it isn't for me to say he hadn't married her. He was fool enough for anything, and he was awfully fond of her, and awfully jealous of every man who ventured to pay her attention."

"Did you ever meet a Colonel Rannock there?"

"Did I ever dine there without seeing him? Rannock was 'mine own familiar friend'—the Mephistopheles to Withernsea's Faust. I believe Rannock pouched more of his stuff than anybody else in the gang, though they were all blackguards. I never touched a card in his house; so I can talk of them with a clear conscience. A gang of well-bred swindlers, that's what I call them."

"The chorus-girl was handsome, I suppose?"

"Well, strange to say, she was. She was worth all the money Withernsea spent on her; and I suppose it's about the only bargain he ever made in which he wasn't had. She was one of the handsomest women that ever stepped upon the Spectacular stage; and while she was behind the footlights not a man in the stalls had eyes for anybody else."

"Was she anything like that?" asked Faunce, handing him Lady Perivale's photograph.

"She was. Ten years ago you might have passed that off for her photo. But she ain't up to that now."

"You've seen her lately."

"She was here the week before last, a wreck, looking ill and poor. I never knew a handsome woman go off so sudden. I saw her in a box at Drury Lane last Christmas, in fine form; but that's all over. She wanted me to get her an engagement—chorus again—she was never up to speaking parts, used to lose her head directly she had to utter. I couldn't do anything for her. We've no use for anything old and faded at the West End theatres. Managers won't consider it."

"Can you give me the lady's address?"

"I think I booked it," said the agent, "just to satisfy her, though I knew it was no use—at any rate not till the pantomime season, when I might get her an engagement for a Flora or a Juno at the back of the stage, or a Queen in a historical procession, perhaps. Yes, here it is: Mrs. Randall, Miss Kate Delmaine, 14, Selburne Street, Chelsea."

"Thank you, Mordaunt," replied Faunce, handing him a sovereign. "I don't want to waste your time for nothing."

"Well, Faunce, time is money, ain't it?" said Mordaunt, pocketing the coin with a pleasant smile.

CHAPTER XI.

"And the Abbé uncrossed his legs,
Took snuff, a reflective pinch.
Broke silence: 'The question begs
Much pondering ere I pronounce. Shall I flinch?
The love which to one and one only has reference
Seems terribly like what perhaps gains God's preference.'"

Faunce ate his modest luncheon at the immemorial Cock; and, after a quarter of an hour's rest and meditation, assisted by tobacco, took a hansom and drove to Selburne Street, which the cabman discovered, after some research, in a labyrinth of shabby streets between the King's Road and the Thames, to the west of the red-brick mansions of Cheyne Walk, and all the pleasantness of fashionable Chelsea—a wilderness of eight-roomed houses, slate roofs, narrow areas, steep steps, dirty windows, and gutters overcharged with small children: one of those depressing neighbourhoods which fill the stranger's mind with a despairing pity, but where, nevertheless, there exist worthy, hard-working people who contrive somehow to be happy, and even comfortable—people who have their Christmas puddings and their household affections, like the Cratchets, and who do not desire to curse God and die.

The houses in Selburne Street were of the same pattern as most of the other streets, and just as shabby, but a little larger. The door at No. 14 was opened by the landlady, who did not know, or apparently care, whether Mrs. Randall was at home or out, but who bade the visitor go up to the first-floor front and inquire.

"She's got her key," said this lady, "and I don't always hear her come in."

Faunce went upstairs and tapped politely at the door of the front room.

"Come in, whoever you are," said a voice, with a listless melancholy in its tone.

An odour of tobacco greeted Faunce as he opened the door, and a woman sitting by the window threw the end of a cigarette into the street.

"Is it you, Jim?" she asked drearily, with her face towards the window; then, turning, and seeing a stranger, she gave a cry of surprise that had a touch of fear in it.

"What do you want?" she cried sharply, and Faunce saw that her hand shook a little as she caught hold of a chair.

"Nerves gone. The usual thing," he thought; "drink or drugs; the usual resource when bad luck sets in."

"I have ventured to call upon you on a matter of business, Mrs. Randall," he said, "without writing to ask leave. But as it's a business that may be profitable—very profitable—to yourself, I hope you will pardon the liberty."

"Who are you?" she asked fiercely. "I don't want any of your gammon. Who are you?"

She was a wreck. The agent had been right so far. But she was a beautiful wreck. The brilliant colouring was faded, the cheeks were hollow, the eyes haggard, but the perfect lines of the face were there; and Faunce saw that she had been beautiful, and also that when she was at her best she must have been curiously like Lady Perivale. In height, in figure, in the poise of the head, the modelling of the throat, she resembled her as a sister might have done.

She must have fallen upon evil days since her visit to Algiers—very evil days. There was the pinch of poverty in her aspect, in her tawdry morning wrapper, in the shabbily-furnished sitting-room.

"Pray don't be alarmed, madam. My business is not of an unpleasant nature."

"I want to know who and what you are!" she said in the same tone, half fear, half fury; "and how you had the cheek to march into my room without sending up your name first. Do you think because I'm in cheap lodgings I ain't a lady?"

"Your landlady told me to come upstairs, or I should not have taken that liberty. That is my name," handing her a card, which she snatched impatiently and looked at with a scowling brow. "I am engaged in the interests of a lady whose social position has suffered by her resemblance to you."

"What do you mean?"

"You were in Algiers last February with Colonel Rannock."

Her face lost colour, and her breathing quickened, as she answered—

"Well, what then?"

"You were seen by friends of my client, and mistaken for her, and the result was a scandal which has seriously affected that lady. Now, in the event of a libel suit, which is very likely to arise out of that scandal, it will be in your power to put matters straight by stepping into the witness-box, and stating that you were Colonel Rannock's travelling companion in Algiers, and Corsica, and Sardinia last winter. The lady will be in court, and the likeness between you and her will explain the mistake."

"I'll see you and your lady client in—— first!" answered the termagant. "I wonder at your cheek in coming to ask a lady to give herself away like that. You just make yourself scarce, Mr. Faunce," looking at his card. "I haven't another word to say to you."

"Oh yes, you have, Mrs. Randall. You have got to ask me what recompense I am prepared to offer you for your assistance in this little matter."

"I don't believe a word of your story; and I want to see you outside that door."

"Come, come, madam. Is it reasonable to be so touchy with a man who comes to propose a very profitable transaction?"

"What do you mean by profitable?"

"I mean that in the event of the libel suit coming off, and your going into the witness-box and swearing that you were with Rannock from the beginning to the end of that little tour, I am prepared to pay you a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds for one morning's work. Not so bad, eh?"

Her colour had come back, and, after a long scrutiny of Faunce's amiable countenance, she seemed reassured.

"Sit down," she said, and seated herself opposite him, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

He noted the wedding-ring, and two or three trumpery turquoise and garnet rings on her left hand. Her day of splendour was past, and the spoils of her youth had vanished.

"A hundred ain't much, if your client is a rich woman," she said. "Of course, I can guess who she is—Lady Perivale. I've been told I'm like her. If it's her, she can afford to pay two hundred quid as easy as one. And I ain't going to stand up in court and tell my life and adventures for a lower figure."

"You are a hard one, Mrs. Randall."

"I'm a hard-up one, Mr. Faunce. There's no use denying it when you see me in such a beggarly hole as this. I ain't used to it. I've lived like a lady ever since I was eighteen years old, and this beastly lodging-house gets upon my nerves. That's why I was so nasty with you when you came in," she concluded, with a little laugh that didn't sound quite genuine.

"Well, Mrs. Randall, if you oblige my client I know she will deal generously with you."

"Two hundred quid paid down before I go into the box; not a penny less."

"We'll see about it. In the mean time, to show good faith, there's a trifle on account," said Faunce, handing her a ten-pound note.

He would have offered her more had he found her in better surroundings, but he reckoned the rooms she was in at ten shillings a week, and he thought she had come to her lowest stage.

"Thanks," she said, putting the note in a shabby porte-monnaie, whose contents Faunce's eye discovered in the instant of its opening—sixpence and a few coppers.

The door opened suddenly at this moment, and Faunce, who sat opposite, caught one brief glimpse of the man who opened it, and who, on seeing him, stepped back, shut it quickly, and ran downstairs. Faunce started up, and was at the window in time to see the visitor leave the house, and walk down the street. He was a big man, with broad shoulders and a bull neck, flashily dressed, and with a fox-terrier at his heels.

"I'm sorry I frightened your friend away," said Faunce.

"Oh, it don't matter. He can come another time if he wants to see me," Mrs. Randall answered carelessly.

That sensitive complexion of hers had paled at the interruption, just as at the mention of Rannock's name, and a gloomy look had come into her eyes. The visitor could hardly have been the bringer of pleasant things.

"An old friend of yours?" hazarded Faunce.

"Oh lord, yes; old enough! I've known him since I was a kid."

"But apparently not a favourite of yours?"

"I've got no favourites," she answered curtly. "All I want is to go my own way, and not to be bothered."

"Nobody can call that an unreasonable desire, madam. And now will you be so very kind as to oblige me with one of your photographs—one that, in your own opinion, does you most justice."

"Then it had better be one that wasn't taken yesterday," she said. "They wipe the wrinkles out, but they can't hide the lantern jaws. Oh, you can have a photo if you want one; I've got plenty. The photographers were the plague of my life when I was on the boards, and as long as I was about London, driving my carriage. But they've left off worrying now. There's new faces in the market."

"None handsomer than yours, madam."

She dragged open a reluctant drawer in an ill-made mahogany sideboard, and produced half a dozen cabinet photographs, from which Faunce selected two of the best, with polite acknowledgment of the favour.

"You have my address, Mrs. Randall," he said, rising, and taking up his hat; "let me know if you change your quarters."

"I shan't be able to do that—on a tenner," she said; "but it will keep me out of the workhouse for a week or two."

"By-the-by, can you tell me where Colonel Rannock is to be found at this present time?" Faunce asked, as he shook hands with her.

Her hand was in his when he asked the question, and he felt it grow cold. She was fond of Rannock, he thought—fond of him, and angry with him for abandoning her.

"No, I can't," she answered, looking at him steadily, but with the same pale change in her face that he had noted before.

"I'm told he went to San Francisco, viâ New York, on his way to the Alaska goldfields," he said.

"Yes, I believe he went to the goldfields."

"Do you know when he started?"

"Some time in March. I don't remember the date."

"Do you remember by what line he went—whether from Liverpool or Southampton?"

"I know nothing about him—after he left London."

"Well, Mrs. Randall, expect to hear from me soon. Good-bye."

Faunce left her, pleased with his success. Everything was now easy. There was nothing wanted but the audacious libel, which should afford ground for an action; and that, as Mr. Faunce told Lady Perivale, would be forthcoming.

He was satisfied, but he was also thoughtful. There had been something unaccountable in the woman's manner: that strange mixture of anger and apprehension, the sick, white look that came over her face when she spoke of Rannock. Something evil there was assuredly—some hidden thing in her mind which made that name a sound of fear.

He had studied the woman intently during the quarter of an hour's tête-à-tête, and he did not think that she was a bad woman, from the criminal point of view. He did not think she was treacherous or cruel. If any evil thing had befallen Rannock, the evil was not her doing. And, after all, her agitation might be only that of a woman of shattered nerves and quick feelings, who had loved intensely and been badly treated—cast off and left in poverty—by the man she loved. It might be that the perturbed look which he had taken for fear was not fear, but resentment.

He telegraphed to Lady Perivale, asking for an appointment, and presented himself at Runnymede Grange on the following afternoon. He had not seen his client since their first interview, and he was astonished at the change in her countenance and manner. On the former occasion she had been all gloom: to-day she was all brightness. The nervous irritability, the fiery indignation were gone. She treated the subject of her wrongs in a business-like tone, almost as a bagatelle.

"Something has happened since I saw her. Something that has changed the whole tenor of her life," thought Faunce.

He had a shrewd idea of what that "something" was a few minutes later, when Lady Perivale told him that she would like a friend, in whose judgment she had confidence, to hear his report; and when Arthur Haldane came into the room—

"This is Mr. Faunce," said Grace, in a tone that showed her friend had been told all about him; and the two men saluted each other politely, without any hint of their former meeting.

Faunce told Lady Perivale that he had found the woman who resembled her, and that her evidence would be ready when it was required.

"She will not shrink from standing up in court and acknowledging that she was with Colonel Rannock in Algiers?" asked Lady Perivale, wonderingly.

"No, she won't shrink—provided the reward is good enough. She is prepared to tell the truth—and—shame the devil—for two hundred pounds."

"Give her ten times as much if she wants it!" cried Lady Perivale. "But what are we to do if nobody libels me? Messrs. Rosset have sent me two or three newspaper paragraphs. They are very insolent, but I'm afraid one could hardly go to law about them."

At Faunce's request she produced the impertinent snippets, pasted on flimsy green paper.

From the Morning Intelligencer: "Lady Perivale, whose small dinners and suppers after the opera were so popular last season, has not done any entertaining this year. She is living in her house in Grosvenor Square, but is spending the summer in strict retirement. She may be seen in the morning riding with the 'liver brigade,' and she occasionally takes an afternoon drive in the Park; but she has joined in none of the season's festivities—a fact that has caused some gossip in the inner circles of the smart world."

From Miranda's "Crême de la Crême," in the Hesperus: "Among the beauties at Lady Morningside's ball, Lady Perivale was conspicuous by her absence, although last season she was so prominent a personage in the Morningside set. What can be the cause of this self-effacement on the part of a young and wealthy widow who had the ball of fashion at her feet last year?"

There were other paragraphs of the same calibre.

"You are right, Lady Perivale," Faunce said, after having gravely read them. "These are not good enough. We must wait for something better."

"And you think that somebody will libel me?"

"I am—almost—sure that you will be called upon to punish some very gross libel within the next few weeks."

"Then I hope I shall have the pleasure of horsewhipping the writer, and the editor who publishes it!" said Haldane, hotly.

"If you please, Mr. Haldane," cried Faunce, earnestly, "nothing of that kind! It is necessary that Lady Perivale should be publicly insulted, in order that she may be publicly justified. Nothing short of the appearance of the woman who was mistaken for her ladyship can give the lie direct to the scandal. I must beg, therefore, that the writer of the libel may be held secure from personal violence."

Haldane was silent. His fingers were itching for a stout malacca and for a scoundrel's back upon which to exercise it. He would have given so much to focus the malignant slander that had followed the woman he loved, and had made even him, her adoring lover, begin to doubt her, with a wavering faith of which he was now so deeply ashamed.

Oh, to have some one to punish with sharp physical pain, some craven hound to offer up as a sacrifice to his own remorse!

CHAPTER XII.

"In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there
Till green turned duskier and the moon
Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair."

The atmosphere of Grace Perivale's life was changed. John Faunce's keen eye for character had not erred in this particular case. Lady Perivale at Runnymede Grange was not the same woman the detective had conversed with in Grosvenor Square.

Happy love leaves no room for troubled thoughts in a woman's mind; and from the hour when Grace learnt that Arthur Haldane was her trusting and devoted lover, she began to forget the frivolous friends whose desertion she had so deeply resented. She forgot to be angry, because she had ceased to care. That outer world, the world of Mayfair and Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world in which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage's house, and everybody who wasn't accredited with millions was suspected of being on the brink of insolvency; that élite, over-civilized and decadent world—dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of decay—seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could not be worth thinking about.

Her world now lay within so narrow a circle. Her world began and ended in a poet, critic, and romancer, whose dreams, thoughts, opinions, and aspirations, filled her mind to overflowing. He was her world, Arthur Haldane, the man of letters, to whom she was to be married as soon as this preposterous scandal was swept into the world's great ragbag of forgotten things.

The words had been spoken at last, words that had been in his heart two years ago, when Grace Perivale's beauty first flashed like sudden sunshine into the level grey of his life, and when he discovered that behind the beauty there was a brain and a heart.

He had held himself in check then, had courted her society under a mask of indifference, for more than one reason. First, because she was rich, and a much-talked-of prize in the matrimonial market; next, because of his jealous fear that Rannock's showy accomplishments and charm of manner had won her heart.

"How could I hope to prevail—a dry-as-dust scribbler—against a man who had been called irresistible?" he asked, when Grace reproached him for his aloofness in that first year of their acquaintance.

"A dry-as-dust scribbler who had written the most pathetic story of the last half century. Every tear I shed over 'Mary Deane' was a link that bound me to the man who wrote the book. Of course I don't pretend that if the man had been fat and elderly—like Richardson—I should have fallen in love with him. But even then I should have valued him, as the young women of those days valued the fat little printer. I should have courted his society, and hung upon his words."

"It is not every novelist who is so lucky," said Haldane. "I think I am the first, since Balzac, whose book has won him the love that crowns a life."

What fairer Eden could there be than that reach of the Thames in a fine August? Other men were turning their faces northward with dogs and guns, ready for havoc on "the twelfth," or waiting impatiently for "the first." But Arthur Haldane, who was no mean shot, and had invitations to half a dozen country houses, behaved like a man who had never lifted a gun to his shoulder. The veriest cockney could not have been happier in that river idlesse, in which a punt-pole was his most strenuous exertion, and to boil a tea-kettle his most exciting sport. The summer days, the golden evenings were never too long, and the crimson of the sunset seemed always a surprise.

"I know you must be wanting to kill things," Grace said one evening; "and you must hate me keeping you dawdling here. I am glad you are not grouse-shooting, for I have always dreaded the moors since my poor Hector caught his death in the ceaseless downpour of one dreadful August day. But why do you not go to your Norfolk friends for the partridge-shooting?"

"You are very kind and thoughtful, but my Norfolk friends were always a trifle boring, and they would be intolerable now, if they kept me away from you."

"That is very flattering to my vanity. But I will not have you tied to my apron-string."

"I will tell you if ever the string galls. Come what may, I am not going to leave the neighbourhood of London till your lawsuit has been settled."

They hoped that everything would be over before the late autumn, so that they could start for Cairo at the right season; and from Cairo they might go on to India. They were of a humour to ramble over the world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a balloon, to find where the world leaves off.

Grace looked back, in many a happy reverie, and recalled that year before the beginning of the scandal, when the man who was now her impassioned lover had seemed to her cold and distant. Only by his seriousness in seeking her society, his grave pleasure in ministering to her love of books, and bringing her in touch with the choicest things in contemporary literature, could Lady Perivale discover that his friendship was any more than the admiring regard which every intelligent man must needs feel for a young and beautiful woman who is also intelligent. Much as Haldane admired beauty—from its spiritual essence in a picture by Burne-Jones, to its earthliest form in a Roman flower-girl on the steps below the Church of the Trinity—his affections would never have been taken captive by beauty allied with silliness. He was a man to whom community of thought was an essential element in love. And, in Grace Perivale, he had discovered mind and imagination in sympathy with his own thoughts and dreams; and he was completely happy in her company, happy to be her friend, yet hesitating to become her lover, till, in some future day, her intimate knowledge of his character might make it impossible for her to misread his motives.

And then had come the bitter blow, when he, who had tortured himself with jealous apprehensions of her liking for Colonel Rannock, heard the story of those chance meetings in the South.

He had been vehement in his denunciation of the slander. If the story were so far true that she was the person who had been seen with Rannock, could any one who knew her doubt for a moment that he had a legal right to her company, that they had been quietly married, and, for some reason of their own, chose to delay the publication of their marriage.

He was laughed at for his vehemence, and for his simplicity.

"Did you never hear of a woman throwing her cap over the mill?" asked his friend. "Have you lived so long in a civilized world, and don't you know that women are always doing the most unexpected things? Have you known no delicately-reared woman take to the gin-bottle and drink herself to death? Have you never heard of the household angel—the devoted wife and mother—who, after twenty years of honourable wedlock, went off with her daughter's Italian singing-master? And these rich women are the very sort who go wrong. Their opulence demoralizes them. They are petty Cleopatras, and pine for the fierce passion of a Cæsar or a Marc Antony."

There was not much stirring in London in the early part of that season, and the scandal about Lady Perivale was dinned into Haldane's ears wherever he went. Young women talked about it, in allusive speech, with a pretence of naïveté. What was the story? They pretended not to know what it all meant; but they knew their mothers were not going to call upon her ever again; so they opined that it must be something very dreadful, considering the sort of people their mothers went on visiting and entertaining season after season. It must be something worse than the things that were said about Lady Such-and-Such, or even about Mrs. So-and-So.

Haldane heard, and the iron entered into his soul; and he held himself aloof from the woman he loved, fearing, doubting, waiting.

"If that man appears upon the scene I shall know it's all over," he thought.

He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale's windows, steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings, and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone. No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. Susan Rodney appeared there once or twice a week, and he sometimes saw her driven away in a humble four-wheeler, on the stroke of eleven. But the figure he feared to see never crossed the threshold.

And then a man at his club told him that Rannock had not been in London that season. He had gone under. He was said to be in America, but that was as might be. He had come to the end of his tether.

It had been a time of agonizing doubt, expiated by almost as agonizing remorse. But it was over now, and life was a dream of bliss—a dream of the fast coming days when Grace Perivale would be his wife, when the evening shadows would bring no parting, the night no loneliness.

Susan Rodney was an ideal third for a pair of lovers, as she had plenty of interests and occupations of her own, spending all her leisure in the composition of a light opera which she had been engaged upon for years, with only a faint hope of ever getting it produced; perhaps in Brussels, perhaps in Frankfort, she dared hardly think of London.

Absorbed in the thrilling delight of a quintette, or a chorus, Sue only gave the lovers her company when they wanted it, which they very often did, as her bright and cheerful spirit harmonized with their own happiness. They both liked her, and were both very sure of her sympathy.

In one of their garden têtes-à-tête, their talk having drifted on to Haldane's famous novel, the one work of fiction which had made his reputation with the general reader, he confessed to having nearly finished a second story.

"I only began it in May," he said, "during a fit of insomnia. My mind was full of scorpions, like Macbeth's, and I think I should have gone mad if I had not summoned those shadows from the unseen world, and set myself to anatomize them. It is a bitter book, a story of Fate's worst irony; and in a better period of English literature—in the day of Scott, or Dickens and Thackeray—it would have stood no chance of being widely read. But we have changed all that. This is the day of cruel books. Most of us have turned our pens into scalpels. And I think this story of mine is cruel enough to hit the public taste."

"There is nothing that touches your life or mine in it?" Grace asked, with a touch of alarm.

"No, no, no; not one thought. I wrote it while I was trying to forget you—and trying still harder to forget myself. The shadows that move in it bear not the faintest resemblance to you or me. It is a sordid book, a study of human meanness, and the misery that dull minds make for themselves: pale-grey miseries that gradually draw to a focus and deepen to blood-red tragedy. But it has one redeeming feature—one really good man—a city missionary, humbly born, plain, self-educated, but a Christ-like character. I should have burnt the book unfinished but for him. He came to my relief when my story and I were sinking into a slough of despond."

"You talk as if the web were not of your weaving, as if you had no power over the figures that move in it."

"I have no such power, Grace. They come to me as mysteriously as the shadows in a dream, and their spell is strong. I cannot create them; and I cannot change them."

She wanted him to read his story to her before it was printed; but this was just the one thing he could not do. He could not imagine himself reading his own words.

"It would make me hate my work," he said. "Every clumsy phrase, every banal word, would leap out of the page and gibber at me as I read. I will bring you the first copy fresh from the press, and when you have read it you shall tell me afterwards whether I am ever to write another story."

"You shall write another, and another, and go on writing," she answered gaily. "You will give me a second world, a world peopled with strange or lovely creatures—villains as colossal as Milton's Satan, heroines as innocent as his Eve. My life in the world of your imagining will be almost as intense as your own. You will give me a second existence, better than the everyday world. You will tell me about your dream-people, won't you, Arthur, as they spring into life?"

"The fear is that I shan't be able to refrain from talking of them, to the other half of my soul."

"You cannot weary the other half by much talking."

"Do you think not? I can imagine a husband's art becoming an unspeakable bore to his wife."

"Not if she loves him and loves his art."

"Ah, there's the rub."

Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves to being carried about and not read.

"I thought I might venture to call without notice," said Faunce, "as I have some rather important news for your ladyship."

"Indeed!"

"A libel—a most audacious libel," said Faunce, taking a paper from his pocket.

"Where? where? What paper?" Grace and Sue exclaimed excitedly.

"Strange to say, in a society paper of most respectable character, though of a somewhat limited circulation," replied Faunce; "a paper which, to my knowledge, has never offended in this manner until now—the Bon Ton and Cricket Review, a journal printed at Kennington, and mostly circulated in the South of London."

He handed the paper to Lady Perivale, who turned the leaves hurriedly, too agitated to read a line for the first few minutes.

It was an eminently proper paper—a paper that told of dances at Tooting, private theatricals at Norwood, and At Homes at Tulse Hill, a paper that described dresses and millinery, and gave receipts for cornflower creams and jellies made without wine, for cleaning kid gloves and making golden hair-dye. Pages were devoted to the Oval, and other pages to school cricket. There was the usual short story of the ultra-smart world. There was a Denmark Hill celebrity at home. There was everything nice and proper that a Society paper should have; and there, amidst all this respectability—like a hideous wen upon a handsome face—appeared three atrocious paragraphs about Lady Perivale's tête-à-tête tour with Colonel Rannock; the first setting forth the surprise of the lady's friends on meeting her travelling alone with a man of dubious character; the second debating whether the freedom of fin-de-siècle manners would not permit of any lady travelling with any gentleman without causing scandal; the third, of a somewhat grosser tone, winding up with a couplet from Pope:

"Nor Cæsar's empress would I deign to prove,
No, make me mistress to the man I love."

"It's abominable!" cried Grace, flushing crimson, and throwing down the paper in a rage.

"And you tell me I'm not to horsewhip the scoundrel who wrote that!" said Haldane, who had read the paragraphs over her shoulder.

"I do—most decidedly," answered Faunce, edging away from him with an involuntary movement. "We wanted a libel—a gross libel—and we've got it. We are going to bring an action against the proprietor of the Bon Ton, but we are not going to put ourselves in the wrong by assaulting him first. No, sir, we shall proceed against the proprietor, editor, and printer of the Bon Ton, and we shall ask for exemplary damages."